The Cold Calling

but not yet.

It came to him, as always now, in a dream. He dreamed of a green land of mounds and standing stones and gaily dressed people horse-trading, racing, making merry.

While, in the Earth, not far below the merrymaking, a woman screamed for all eternity.

Next day, in the university library, he found an account of a burial at a place called the Curragh, in County Kildare, where gypsies and tinkers traditionally gather for their fairs. In a henge there, about fifty years earlier, an oval grave was found, less than four feet deep and packed with gravel. In this grave was the skeleton of a young woman, on her back, facing towards the rising sun, the skull pressed hard down upon the chest and the arms tight against the sides of the grave. The bones were in a contorted and unnatural posture, suggestive of writhing.

In the hole, the woman whimpers, rolls onto her back and wiggles her fingers, in the throes of some hallucinatory semi-dream.

She seems to be beckoning.

It is the sign.

The Green Man loads his spade with good, red border soil, the flesh of Her body. The woman chokes as the soil enters her mouth and her eyes open — fear pushing through the psychic membrane of the drugs — to meet the second spadeful…

Cindy had to slam on the brakes and pull over onto the verge, and Bobby Maiden almost fell out of the car, rolled over in the grass, producing enormous dry heaves, mouth open fishlike and hands at his gut.

He’d be fine. Cindy watched him through the windscreen and the tape played on, the unbearable details only half registered. What did register was the tone of voice. On top of everything the Green Man remained the most insufferable prig.

After a minute, Bobby rolled over onto his back below the car’s weak, yellow headlights, and Cindy got out under a spreading fungus of dark brown clouds. It was a dull country lane, open fields and hedges, not a house nor a steeple in sight.

Cindy stood where Bobby had been. Nothing but dented grass. No evacuation. It had all come out last night. It was in an envelope. Nothing left other than what remained in Bobby’s head. And now it was in the manageable part of his mind, no longer buried deep.

Why then, bearing in mind the circumstances of its entry there, had his subconscious mind not seen it from Fraser-Hale’s side of things, letting him experience the perverse ecstasy of unspeakable, self-righteous cruelty? Because of what he was. He had experienced it only from the side of the victim.

Bobby held on to a signpost to pull himself to his feet. The sign pointed left to Long Compton and straight ahead to Great Rollright: two miles.

Which meant they were less than half a mile from the Rollright Stones.

Cindy thought of the day when, back home in the caravan in Pembrokeshire, he’d let the pendulum dangle over the map and asked the question: Where will it happen next? The pendulum had gone into a violent anti-clockwise spin not where it was expected to go, among the Black Mountains, but over the area where Oxfordshire met Gloucestershire and Warwickshire, and Cindy, hoping for the Welsh border, had dismissed it.

‘Sorry.’ Bobby produced a smile which contrived to be both bashful and bitter. ‘Something went down the wrong way.’

‘When we see Grayle,’ Cindy said, ‘don’t tell her, will you?’

‘You’re joking.’ Bobby brushed grass from his jacket.

‘For what it’s worth,’ Cindy said, as dispassionately as he could make it, ‘it was another of his failures. She was supposed to have been buried alive, like the woman in prehistoric Kildare. But when the soil went into her eyes, she came out of it and began to scream. At which, our man felt obliged to finish her off. With the spade. In her throat.’

‘He can’t get anything right, can he?’

Bobby’s face as rigid as a mask, his bad eye livid in the last, unhealthy light. Dealing with it now. He said, ‘I remember, in one dream, I saw his face shadowed by the spade. That is, the Green Man face. Twigs sprouting. And again, in a wreath in the front of a funeral parlour. And yet we don’t know what he looks like, do we? Except he’s a big lad with corn-coloured hair. Harmless-looking. And we don’t know if he has anything in mind for today. He can’t do much in front of an entire wedding party. Crowds aren’t his style, unless-’

‘Surely, Bobby, that’s the problem. Doesn’t have a style, does he? He responds to the location and the prevailing conditions. And he watches for a sign. Which could be anything. He’s pretty free with his interpretations.’

Bobby was looking up into the east, where the sky was darkest.

‘What is it, boy?’

He shook his head.

‘Tell me.’

Bobby shrugged, and Cindy listened without interruption as he described a painting by Turner, showing Stonehenge lit by a vivid storm.

‘Maybe another of your archetypal images,’ Bobby said. ‘But I just had the feeling that was the bolt that hit me. When I was dead. They’ve got a print of it at Cefn-y-bedd. Knocked me back, seeing it. Magda said that was his favourite painting. I assumed she meant Falconer.’

‘But that was Stonehenge?’

‘But the public isn’t allowed into Stonehenge any more. Security guards and everything. It’s the one place he can’t get to.’

‘No, indeed.’

‘There’re dead lambs in the picture,’ Bobby said. ‘And a dead shepherd. It’s like the storm’s been drawn to the circle. This break in the clouds, like the eye of the storm’s just opened over Stonehenge. It’s a scene of violent death and there’s a sense of inevitability about it. See, if I was him, and that was my favourite painting and I just happened to be in a stone circle during a thunderstorm, even I might see that as some kind of sign. You know?’

Cindy said, ‘Know much about meteorology, do you? How long, for instance, before this one arrives?’

‘Surprised we haven’t heard it already.’

Cindy looked into the hard, tight sky. ‘And how many dead lambs?’

XLVI

Marcus knew it was them by the speed the van was travelling.

You’d think the drivers who would race along these lanes would be those who knew them best, had negotiated them all their motoring lives, could anticipate the angle of every treacherous bend.

Not so. The locals knew, from bitter experience, that if they crashed it would be into a neighbour. Or a neighbour’s wife. Or a neighbour’s second cousin who was pregnant. Or the midwife on her way to deliver the second cousin’s child.

The locals knew that if they crashed and it was their fault and someone died, then the crash would live with them, even unto the third and fourth generation. No, the locals took it easy, pulled into the verge for oncoming tractors, exchanged polite waves.

So Marcus could tell by its reckless speed in the dusk — and because it was an anonymous white van and because it drove past the castle entrance and then returned the same way within a couple of minutes — that it was them.

He discovered that he had wedged himself against the highest, most concealing part of what now constituted the battlements of the tower. He found himself hunched up, his hands gripping his knees.

He recognized what fell onto the left sleeve of his tweed jacket as a droplet of sweat. Truth was, he hadn’t really expected anyone to come at all.