The Cold Calling

‘So he could be dreaming what he wants to dream. Or convincing himself when he wakes up that his dream was significant to whatever nastiness he’s got in mind. What I’m really asking is, what effect is the sleeping on powerful energy … points …’

‘Nodes. Energy nodes.’

‘Whatever. What effect is that going to have on the mind of a psychopath?’

Cindy urged the grumbling Morris Minor past a tractor and trailer.

‘That’s an interesting point, Bobby. And a most disturbing one. If we go back, see, to the first killing, poor Maria, in the New Forest, you’ll recall he’s operating almost instinctively. In killing Maria, he’s attempting to please the Earth, to get in tune, but he’s a little frustrated that he can’t have confirmation. He says something like, If only there was a way of speaking directly to the Earth and listening to Her instructions …’

‘So when he hears about this dreaming experiment …’

‘Which began, as I recall, in the eighties, with an earth-mysteries group called the Dragon Project Trust. If he read about this, he would try it for himself. It’s a free country. You can spend a night at virtually any prehistoric site you like, except Stonehenge. He would believe he had found it. A channel of communication with the Earth itself.’

‘And then, when he goes to work for Falconer, he introduces the idea. Which became very popular among the punters. Maybe he thinks they’re all going to start-’

‘God forbid! No, I think … I think he believes they will be educated. By the Earth …’

‘The University of the Earth.’

‘… into accepting the Old Ways.’

‘Seeing how he’s already influenced the great Falconer.’

‘Which I doubt the good professor would admit under torture. No, I don’t think he believes they will all become serial killers. He believes that to be a great honour. He is a chosen instrument. One of the Elect. You notice how he refers to himself-’

‘The Green Man “in his glory”, “in his majesty”.’

‘Exactly!’

‘It’s not untypical, Cindy. I’ve never heard of a modest, unassuming serial-killer. Delusions of superiority, uniqueness …’ Maiden leaned back as far as the seat would allow, which wasn’t far. He breathed out.

‘I think this is called assembling a psychological profile, is it not, Bobby?’

‘Yeah. Though what good it’s going to do … How far now?’

‘Tewkesbury and then the back road into the Cotswolds to Stow. Say an hour.’

‘And then what? What do we do when we get there?’

For a while, he’d felt like a copper again, the big jigsaw interlocking in his head. Yet the more he heard of the Green Man tapes, the less he felt up to it. Killers on this scale had absorbed CID teams from four, five divisions, heavy uniform back-up, incident rooms, the works. A damaged DI with a personal angle and an ageing actor- ventriloquist with dubious shamanic powers in a thirty-year-old Morris Minor for which sixty mph was a distant memory …

‘We find Grayle,’ Cindy said soberly. ‘If it’s not too late.’

‘I wonder what the bastard’s reaction was when he found out he’d killed the wrong woman.’

‘Bobby,’ Cindy said, ‘after the initial shock, I doubt if he’d consider your poor friend to have been the wrong woman after all. For him, everything is ordained. Collen Hall, on its energy node? However would he have been led to this magical place otherwise?’

‘In the end, the identity of the victim is not important?’

‘He believes the Earth will choose. This is underlined for him by the killing at Avebury, when he discovers his victim is a hairdresser, thus providing a link with the famous medieval Barber-Surgeon whose skeleton was found beneath one of the stones after, presumably, trying to damage it. A reverberation, through the ages. Vindication.’

‘You notice, how, although he might know his victim — Ersula … Grayle — as soon as he sets out to kill them, as soon as they become the quarry, he depersonalizes them. They become “the woman”. Like “the fox”, “the pheasant”. He’s not a murderer, he’s just a hunter.’

‘Not just a hunter, Bobby.’

‘Cindy, I’m going to have this cunt.’

‘Of course you are, lovely, of course you are.’

Marcus made himself a cheese sandwich and shut Malcolm in the kitchen with a bowl of water and four Bonios to keep him quiet.

He was a good dog, a brave dog. But very, very bad guys?

‘Stay,’ Marcus said.

He went out of the house and prowled the tumbledown buildings, in search of weapons. The best he could find was the head of a scythe, which he couldn’t hold without it biting into his hand, and a wooden-handled pitchfork with rusted tines, so badly eroded, in fact, that it was hard to tell if there was actually any metal beneath the rust.

Marcus straightened his bow tie and climbed over a short, broken wall to the remains of the only serviceable tower, the highest part of the castle. It was no more than about half of a sundered tower in the remains of the curtain wall. Possibly part of a gateway. Perhaps there’d been a portcullis here.

Could have used one now, all right.

Marcus climbed a treacherously narrow, dangerously worn spiral staircase inside the tower. Hadn’t done this in years; bloody steps would be beyond repair soon.

He turned a corner and came out in the sky. Always a surprise, the way the steps simply ended, broke off. A sycamore tree had grown up next to the tower, partly obscuring the view in high summer, but there was still quite an extensive vista of the Black Mountains, for once living ominously up to their name, filling the western horizon, like the massed tents of a dark army.

Once, raiders had come down from the mountains, from the poorer country into the lushness of the Golden Valley. The reason the castle had been built. But now the threat, presumably, was from the east. The only way to reach this place was by road from St Mary’s. From the tower, the road was visible for nearly half a mile before it dipped between the high hedges and the hills.

Marcus sat on the top step, adjusted his glasses and unwrapped his sandwich. Might as well go out on a full stomach. Joking, of course. Maiden and his urban thugs and his bent coppers. Nothing would happen.

The jagged walls of the castle sawed into a sky of sickly yellow, like tallow.

XLV

This was the tape Cindy had found himself dreading the most.

Ersula Underhill.

They’d been playing them at random. Realizing that, with perhaps six hours of Fraser-Hale’s boastful ramblings, there wasn’t going to be time to hear all of it before they reached Rollright. Snatching out a cassette if it didn’t appear to be going anywhere, opening another.

Ersula’s was, as he’d feared, the worst death of all. Worse than Maria, worse than Emma Curtis — that would have been terrifying for her, but it would also have been relatively quick; he was in a hurry that night, frantic almost.

With Ersula, he’d had time to plan.

When he goes to find the woman, he has already prepared her tomb.

And she is prepared for it.

She’s weary of her life and its limitations. Her dreams have shown her better. She has found a fulfilment in sleep … in sacred sleep and dreams surpassing, in their intensity, all her waking achievements. Which, in the superficial world of scholarship and academe, have been considerable.

But such so-called learning, lies passed from book to book, is nothing. A waste of life. Even