The Cold Calling

‘You conducted weddings here before, Charlie?’

‘Actually, no.’ The reverend massaged one of the taller stones with both hands. ‘Weddings here tend to be of the pagan variety. Handfastings, that sort of thing. I’m here by way of a compromise. Friend of the family. And also just about the only ordained clergyman they could find willing to conduct an open-air wedding in a place this notorious.’

The last tourists, two spinsterish ladies in golfing-type checked trousers, walked out of the circle and didn’t look back.

Grayle said, ‘Notorious?’

‘Been some fairly unpleasant goings-on at the old Rollrights over the centuries.’ Charlie leaned against the stone. ‘Well, over this century, particularly. It’s because it’s so relatively accessible from Oxford and London.’

‘What kind of goings-on?’

‘Oh, you know, satanic rites. Sicko stuff. For instance, a spaniel was sacrificed here some years ago.’

‘That’s awful. What kind of people would do that?’

‘No-one I’d care to break bread with, Grayle, but these are difficult, desperate times. Everyone searching for a quick, cut-price spiritual fix. Could you help me with my altar?’

Charlie’s altar was a small wooden picnic table. They set it up at the far end of the circle, where the pine trees reared. It looked flimsy and lonely.

‘You have your church hereabouts, Charlie?’

‘Don’t have a church at all. I’m a sort of embarrassing Anglican mendicant. Travel around, begging for scraps. Wedding here, two-week locum post there. Few rock festivals in the summer. They’re great. Sunday morning worship … surprising how many crawl out of their tents for it, even if they’re too stoned to read the hymn sheets. No, poor as the proverbial, but then so was JC.’

Charlie took out a tin box, placed it on the altar and began to roll himself a cigarette.

Grayle said, ‘You think these are, uh, bad places, generally?’

‘Course not. Terrific places, some of them. Wild and spectacular, like Castlerigg in the Lake District. Awe- inspiring like Avebury. Just not awfully sure about this one. Feels polluted, somehow. But, then, these are the places we should be bringing a little light down on, don’t you think?’

‘You think they still have power?’

‘Absolutely. Why else would we have built most of our churches on the same sites? You can feel it while you’re working, you really can. When you stand in front of the altar in some tiny little country church and raise your arms … vroom!’

‘And maybe you see … things?’

Charlie’s eyes narrowed. He looked her up and down. After inspecting the other guests at the hotel in Chipping Norton — nothing formal, but lots of floaty stuff — she’d changed in the ladies’ room into a long print skirt and a scoop-neck blouse, thrown a woollen wrap around her shoulders.

‘What sort of things?’ Charlie said suspiciously.

‘Kind of … unexplained phenomena things?’ She pulled on the tassels of her wrap. ‘I think I may be a little crazy.’

The Reverend Charlie invited her to sit on his altar with him, offered a cigarette. ‘Good stuff. Only the best from a man of God.’

Grayle blinked. ‘Uh, not right now, thanks.’

He nodded. ‘You know, Grayle, it’s an odd thing, but I never saw a ghost. Problem with ghosts — and I believe in them, sure — they never seem to appear to people who really want to see one. Strange, eh?’

‘Oh, I always wanted to see one. Back home. When I had this New Age newspaper column. But when I came over here, to find Ersula, when I was really alone in a strange place, no I did not want to see anything I couldn’t explain.’

Grayle sighed and found herself secondary-smoking the reverend’s dope.

Andy had dozed for a couple of hours on the sofa. Woke up feeling lousy and gave herself some Reiki. Called Marcus back. Wouldn’t put it past the old sod to stay away a couple of hours and then return. Too meek, come to think of it, the way he’d accepted the idea of danger.

But no answer from Castle Farm, so she made herself some soup and got ready for work. Having agreed to call in on Tony Parker on the way. Dispense more laying on of hands.

She’d asked him could he not just call them off, these bad guys.

‘If somebody sent them,’ Tony Parker had said, ‘if … hypothetically, and from my limited knowledge of such matters … some operatives had been contracted … then the hirer would not expect to hear from them again until completion of the contract. That’s the way of it. As I understand it.’

‘I’ll leave you to your grief, then.’

His colour was improved, no question of that. Jesus God, Andy thought, the things we wind up doing.

‘Well, Sister, whatever it was, I appreciate it,’ Parker had said as she stood up. ‘And that offer stands.’

Had to admit she’d never treated anybody — or at least any man — more receptive. Mostly, they were a wee bit nervous, or trying too hard. Tony Parker, both emotionally drained and entirely confident that nobody would mess with him in his own office, had submitted totally, and so had realized immediate and immense benefit. Better than pills, clearly, and no side-effects. So he wanted more, and he thought he could buy it.

‘You flatter me, Tony. Only, private nursing’s no my thing. I prefer to put it about, you know?’

‘You’ll come around. And we didn’t have no conversation, mind.’ Suspicious now. Wondering if the treatment hadn’t been some form of hypnosis to promote indiscretion.

‘No,’ Andy had said. ‘We didn’t. Listen, I’ll come back tonight, on my way to work, see how y’are.’

He’d brightened at that. She pitied him. A hard-looking young guy had peeked in on them earlier. Parker would be surrounded with people like this and the older he got the less he’d be able to trust them. Half of him would have wanted to bring smart Em into the family business, the other half to keep her the hell away from it.

‘Sister,’ he’d said as she left, ‘I ain’t decided whether I believe what you say about Maiden, but I’ll do what I can to suspend things meantime. Just that other parties got to be consulted.’

This didn’t entirely make sense. Who? Riggs? She’d ask him about it again, after giving him another treatment. She was out of her depth. Felt useless. Needed to be hands-on again.

Parking the car on a pay-and-display up the street from Parker’s club, she contemplated ringing in sick and driving down to St Mary’s. Like, she’d go to work as normal, park at the hospital, vanish into the building then out through the ambulance doors and away to the border. She’d know if they were tailing her. Wouldn’t she?

‘Mr Parker, please,’ she told the girl in the office next to the Biarritz Club. It was five p.m.; she could spare him half an hour. ‘I have an appointment.’

The receptionist looked at her with recognition. ‘You’re a bit late, Sister,’ she said without much feeling either way. ‘Mr Parker collapsed at his desk this afternoon. We’ve just heard from the General he died a short time ago.’

Andy just stood there, and her healing hands felt like dead meat.

‘He hadn’t been a well man, anyway,’ the receptionist said. ‘But you’d know that.’

Cindy pulled out tape III, switched off.

‘Let’s give it a rest.’

Maiden had no argument with that. It was starting to make him feel sick. Tape III recounted a killing even Cindy hadn’t discovered in the papers. Victim was a seventy-year-old church verger, near Worcester. His skull smashed on the edge of the twelfth-century stone font. The Green Man had learned in a dream that the medieval font had begun its working life as a Druidic sacrificial stone.

‘Seems to me, Cindy, that his dreams have become increasingly literal.’

‘Yes. I had noticed.’

‘Does this happen much in your experience? Where you actually dream about the place you’re sleeping?’

‘Oh, yes. Site-specific imagery is quite common. You also have an increasing number of lucid dreams — that is, dreams where you know you are dreaming. And then you might gradually learn to control your dreams. Which is when it gets complicated. Where is the borderline between a dream and a self-induced fantasy?’