The Cold Calling Part 22

You're making it do that, he'd say scornfully. Even if you're not doing it consciously, something inside you wants it to happen.

Of all the extra-sensory disciplines, dowsing was the most widely accepted. It began with the practical skill of water-divining, but no-one knew where it ended, how deep it would go in its search for hidden truths. Sometimes, it seemed to be simply a way of communicating to your conscious mind something that you already subconsciously knew. Other times, as the great T. C. Lethbridge had first demonstrated, it could be your link with different levels of existence and, perhaps, with some great cosmic database from which information could be gathered.

Sometimes, as Cindy had found, the pendulum would spin like a propeller, a preliminary to shamanic flight ... as when he'd held it over the spot in the Elan Valley in mid-Wales where the barbed-wire trap had been laid.

On a whim, Cindy spread out the pagan and earthmagic magazines in a circular fan formation and held the pendulum over the table.

He closed his eyes. 'Now,' he said, 'tell me. Which one of these, if any, will guide me towards the person who killed Maria Capaldi?'

Emptying his mind, letting conscious thoughts blow away like leaves.

Knowing, before he opened his eyes, that the pendulum was spinning furiously.

But over The Phenomenologist?

Cindy was sceptical. He was fond of the archaic publication, although under the editorship of this man Bacton it had become a little political, even angry sometimes. Still, there was always some message to be gleaned from the action of the pendulum. Perhaps it was time to telephone Bacton.

But what about the big question? He collected up all the magazines, put them in a pile on the floor and opened up his map of Britain on the tabletop. He sat upright, a hand on each knee, the pendulum under his right hand. He rotated his head a few times to relax the neck muscles, did some brief tensing and relaxation on the arms and legs, stomach and back, and followed this with some chakra-breathing, three times round the seven points, until he felt light and separated and glowing.

Then he began to visualize the islands from afar. The sound of the sea and the gulls through the open window lifting him. Feeling the air currents under his wings.

Flying.

Over the New Forest to the glade where a girl lay impaled ...

... across the scrubbed mid-Wales hills to the flooded valleys, following the line of the oakwood, faster and faster, into the sudden whiplash snap and tw.a.n.g of barbed wire ...

... spinning back across the English border, the tension of Offa's d.y.k.e ... the flash of rivers, the bulging of hills, the bright, hot grille of the ley lines ...

... towards Clee Hill and the timber-framed market town ... above a cobbled street to a doorway, bloodied cardboard in the pink dawn ... and up again and down the border until he felt ...

... three twitches from Harold's Stones and the choking terror of a girl, thumbs in her larynx ...

... Across the Marlborough Downs, over old crop circles, feeling the magnetic, goose-pimpling pull of the still-pulsing Avebury henge, hovering over a field he did not know where a faceless man lay under a mask of blood ...

... and then ... and then ...

Cindy felt his hand rising from his knee and the weight of the pendulum as it began to swing over the map. He closed his eyes.

Now.

Where will it happen next?

Later, unnerved, Cindy telephoned Marcus Bacton, editor of The Phenomenologist.

'Marsh-what?'

'Mars-Lewis. We've never spoken before, but I pen the occasional piece for you under the name Cindy the Shaman.'

'Oh my G.o.d. Look here, Mrs, er, Lewis, we're a trifle old-fashioned at The Phenomenologist. Correspondents who wish to communicate with us tend to put it in writing.'

'Just wondering, I was, Mr Bacton, if you had perused my letter regarding the murders.'

'Oh, h.e.l.l, Look, er, Lewis. One doesn't want to bring down the heavy editorial hand, but much as we value your contributions on Celtic shaman practices this is not b.l.o.o.d.y True Crime Monthly.'

'No, indeed, I understand. But I have personal reasons for continuing my investigations and it has occurred to me that you may be able to help me.'

'Very much doubt that. Look, I'm rather up to the b.l.o.o.d.y eyes-'

'I suspect the person I'm looking for, see the murderer may well, at some point, have been in communication with your periodical.'

'Oh, right. You're saying one of our chaps is a b.l.o.o.d.y psycho. I see. Well, what about Miss Pinder, the ectoplasm lady from Chiswick? I can just imagine her striding across the Welsh moors with a fifty-foot roll of barbed wire ...'

'Always this receptive, are you, Mr Bacton?'

'What?'

'No wonder your circulation is sinking so rapidly.'

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l! Look, Lewis. I can do without this. Things are b.l.o.o.d.y fraught enough just at the moment. For a start, we've had a rather difficult death ...'

The phone seemed to freeze in Cindy's hand.

'Death?'

It took nearly twenty minutes and several attempts by Bacton to get him off the line, but when Cindy finally put down the phone he had learned how and where the housekeeper, Mrs Willis, had died. And that she had been a very good woman, a herbalist and a spiritual healer.

Cindy retired to bed with several back numbers of The Phenomenologist and Franklin and Job's Guide to Prehistoric Remains on the Welsh Borders.

He already had his suitcase packed.

XX.

Marcus Bacton raged quite a bit.

His way of dealing with grief, Bobby Maiden decided. Obviously a huge hole in Marcus's life now, and the farmhouse seemed as much of a sh.e.l.l as the castle outside. Yet he never spoke of Mrs Willis as anyone more than the woman who had kept his home together. And his only show of emotion was rage.

Maiden had kept well out of the way while the paramedics were around, leaving Andy as the sole official witness to the old woman's death.

If they hadn't taken her off the stone, it would have looked suspicious; as it was an experienced nurse with her when she died it was just another case of an elderly woman wandering away, the way some elderly women did, and collapsing from a stroke.

The day after Mrs Willis's death, Andy had gone back to Elham, telling Marcus she'd return for the funeral. Examining Maiden's eye one more time, ordering him to get a good night's sleep.

And he had. No dreams, no sweat.

And again. Two good nights. He wanted to believe he was coming out of it; he didn't dare. Death still hung over him but its shadow was less defined.

Andy had bathed and repatched his eye with more gauze and tape. The second day, a small parcel arrived containing a black plastic eyeshield.

Maiden put on the patch, laid low, blanked out. The holiday cottage was a good place for it, a former dairy with only three rooms and all the walls of whitewashed stone. There was a small kitchen with a hotplate and grill, and Andy had left bread and soup and fruit. He didn't see too much of Marcus, who was making funeral arrangements, raging at the vicar, who claimed his churchyard was full and Mrs Willis wasn't local anyway. 'Fat b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' Marcus fumed. 'Know where he's from? f.u.c.king Croydon.'

'Why don't you tell him who she was?'

'Because I don't know who she was. And that's official.'

Marcus shoved at him a letter from Mrs Willis's solicitors, in Hereford. She'd left him five thousand pounds and requested that he should make no inquiries into her past, nor in any way speculate publicly about her.

'b.l.o.o.d.y typical. Una.s.suming to an almost perverse degree. Didn't even like being called a healer. Less than a year ago, she cured Amy, at the pub, of b.l.o.o.d.y skin cancer. Amy knew what it was, the b.l.o.o.d.y doctors knew what it was ... Mrs Willis said it was just a rash. And you've heard about Anderson, of course. If you can't take the word of a trained nurse ...'

And me? Maiden wondered. Did she bring me back, by proxy?

Relaxed enough, now, to consider the possibility. Almost dispa.s.sionately. He felt sorry about Mrs Willis, of course he did, just like the last hundred deaths, the accidents, the suicides, the murders. But in the end, it wasn't his tragedy.

Or was it? Why had he urged Andy to get the old girl off the stone? He didn't know, then or now. Why had he felt so uncomfortable at the place you had to be careful, in front of Marcus, not to call Black Knoll?

'So no-one's going to know she was Annie Davies?'

Marcus held up the letter in frustration. 'b.a.s.t.a.r.ds,' he said.

Maiden wasn't quite sure who he meant. Perhaps he meant everybody.

Even though they'd agreed that he was Bobby Wilson, Marcus's nephew, over for the funeral of a woman he'd come to regard as a granny figure, Maiden never went down to the village. Instead, he took long, uneven walks among the hills around St Mary's, across this strange no man's land between England and Wales pink soil and stone, autumn fires on the fields under the dark mantelpiece of the mountains.

Lying down in the gra.s.s, a west wind on his face, he thought about the kind of things he wanted to respond to. He thought about painting again. And he thought about Emma Curtis.

The second night, Marcus banged on the cottage door to say Andy was on the phone for him. Police had been waiting for her at home. Wondering if she had any idea of the whereabouts of their missing colleague, about whom they were a little worried.

Also wondering where she'd been, perhaps.

Maiden took the call in Marcus's study. 'How did you handle it?'

'Told them Jesus G.o.d told 'em I'd spent the night wi' a man friend. Refusing to disclose his name on account of he was a doctor and married.'

'Nice one,' Maiden said.

'Aw, sure. Like they were gonny believe there was any doctor still young enough to work who'd take up wi' an old bat like me.'

'Or that you'd take up with a doctor, knowing how tired they always are.'

'Cheeky sod. You're sounding better, Bobby.'

'Two nights now.'

'Did I no tell you about the air? Anyway, I told this guy I had absolutely no idea where you might be and if they found you to bring you back at once, on account we hadn't yet given your head the all-clear.'

Maiden gazed into the flames jetting between flaking logs in Marcus's woodstove. 'Who was this?'

'CID guy. Sergeant. Said he was a friend of yours.'

'Mike Beattie?'

'Aye. Trust him at all?'

'No.'

'Well, I did say you'd been very mixed up and restless and it was no big surprise to learn you'd skipped out. That all right for you?'

'That's fine. Just one thing. Maybe you could avoid ringing here from home. Call boxes are best.'

'Aw, hey, come on ... they wouldnae-'

'They might,' Maiden said. 'They just might. I mean, if they already are doing, we're stuffed. But these things can take time to fiddle.'

Amid the clutter on Marcus's desk of beaten-up mahogany lay a new hardback book with a dark cover and big, silver lettering: Beyond Roswell: The Paranoid Decades.

'And maybe ... I don't like to ask this, but is there any way you could avoid coming down for the funeral?'

'They could follow me?'

'It's possible.'

'Well,' Andy said bitterly, 'if you explain to Marcus. Don't imagine I'd be missed. I'm no b.l.o.o.d.y good to her now, am I?'

When he put down the phone, Marcus was furiously polishing his gla.s.ses. He put them on and glared through them.

'Maiden, what kind of s.h.i.t have you got that woman into?'

Putting himself between Maiden and the stove. He had on what seemed to be his usual leisurewear, which included a long blue cardigan and a mustard bow tie. It had grown dark outside and the fire accounted for most of the light in the room.

'If you're going to use my house as some sort of bunker, you can at least tell me precisely why. Am I going to wake up to find the place surrounded by some f.u.c.king task force with loud hailers and automatic rifles?'

'I think we can rule out the armed response unit,' Maiden said. 'But that's probably all we can rule out.'

'Going to sit down, are we, Maiden?' Marcus smiled threateningly. 'Have a drink?'

'No thanks. No good for head injuries, apparently.'

He found a sofa. Marcus dragged a bottle of Teachers' whisky and a tumbler from his desk and slumped with them into an easy chair by the stove, white stuffing spurting out of the seat as though the chair was frothing at the mouth.