The Cold Calling Part 51

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?'

'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-'

'G.o.d 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, una.s.suming 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 a.s.sembling 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d'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 ident.i.ty 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 c.u.n.t.'

'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; b.l.o.o.d.y 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 ma.s.sed 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 gla.s.ses 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. s.n.a.t.c.hing out a ca.s.sette 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 surpa.s.sing, 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 pa.s.sed from book to book, is nothing. A waste of life. Even Falconer admits this now.

As a follower of the Green Man.

Falconer is a weak man with no original thoughts. She is his superior, but he has betrayed her, and she turns at last to the Green Man. When he enters her room at dusk, she is crying. And bitter.

She asks the Green Man to lie with her.

On the tape an owl hooted.

'Where's he recorded this one, do you think?' Bobby Maiden hit the stop b.u.t.ton.

'Same place as all the later ones. When I tire of his mock-heroic ramblings, I study the background. You notice that, although it's obviously exterior as shown by noises like that owl, there's also a hollow sound. A vault-like sound. We should have realized. It's High Knoll itself.'

'He wouldn't fit inside.'

'His tape recorder would. And his head and chest. I think he's lying in the entrance. So proud of this, he is, that he's giving his voice some resonance, making sure the Earth hears, telling it in Her temple. And he's letting the chamber absorb it too. Stone records, see.'

'Thinking, maybe, that one day some EVP enthusiast will capture remnants of the Green Man himself. That it?'

'Imprinting his life's work upon the great earth-memory. Been missing the obvious, we have, the final link. We hear him talking about a place, we a.s.sume that's where he is. But he isn't. The Knoll has become his psychic confessional. He's been bringing as much as he can back to the Knoll. Storing it all there, abomination upon abomination.'

'Like a database?'

'If you like. And also restoring a tradition, which he sees as having been damaged by the holy vision of Annie Davies. It's become a vaguely acknowledged "healing place". Which he would see as feeble and womanly. It needs to be reinstated as Black Knoll. Now let's hypothesize, Bobby, that he was dictating to the stones a chapter of his memoirs ... say this very chapter ... on the night of your death. He sleeps at the Knoll on the Knoll, laying himself out like those corpses of criminals night after night. He dreams of the time when it was a sacrificial stone, a hunter's stone. His dreams are running with blood and steaming with putrescence. And by now, see, he's developed a certain amount of control. He's conditioning his dreams. And, at the same time, consciously feeding into the Knoll his accounts of such blood and darkness as it has not known in many centuries. This ... all this ... the foul contents of the tapes ... is the black light perceived by Mrs Willis. This happens, Bobby, don't look unconvinced, these places have been, for thousands of years, the receptors of the Earth.'

She disgusts him. Once, he was attracted to her ... to the power of her spirit, the intensity of her longing to know. But now, as she lolls about on the edge of her bed, with her skirt plucked up to her thighs, he sees that underneath she's little more than the rest of modern womanhood, flawed and weak and unstable, a prey to lower desires.

She has been drinking. There is a brandy bottle on the dresser, three quarters of its contents consumed. She can hardly stay upright. She's repulsive, a disgusting mess.

'You want me,' she says, 'I know you want me. You've wanted me from the start. So go ahead. Have me. '

And yes, he thinks, yes, I will have you. In spite of it all, I'll help you. I'll free that deep and questing soul from the squalid desires of the sh.e.l.l. I'll free it to rise up and pursue its finer goals.

'I'll make some tea,' he tells her.

She giggles. 'How profoundly, G.o.dd.a.m.n English of you. '

'I'm proud to be English. '

'Well, listen to you. '

'Yes. You should. '

The Green Man puts the kettle on the electric ring. She giggles and lies back on the bed, her eyes closed and her skirt ridden up. The Green Man turns away in revulsion. From a pocket he takes a screw of paper containing the mixture he has prepared including the sedative herbs from the healthfood shop in Hereford and the psilocybin mushrooms he has picked at the foot of Black Knoll.

When the herbal tea is made, he sits on the bed and lifts her up to drink it, tolerating her sweating face against his shoulder. She grimaces. He tells her it will help her. Soon she is rambling. She insists that the Knoll is a place of utter, profound evil.

Talking nonsense.

'Magic mushrooms.'

'Britain's best natural hallucinogen. Used by generations of witches. Magic mushroom tea, with G.o.d knows what else in it. After all that drink.'

'A more merciful death than any of the others got.'

'It's not over yet, Bobby, I'm very much afraid.'

'Grayle! '

'Oh, hi.'

'Gosh, I'm delighted you came!' Matthew Lyall, to her surprise, wore a morning suit, with tails. Traditional English wedding outfit. OK, maybe the white T-shirt underneath was a mite irregular ...

'Compromise.' He fingered the white rose in his lapel. 'Everything's a compromise today. My parents are both here, with their respective spouses. And Janny's mother. They all wanted a traditional old church wedding, and we said, well, you won't find an older church than this one! And Charlie's the real thing, so where's the problem?'

The relatives, stiffly obvious, stood outside the circle, near the hut where you left your courtesy-donations to animal charities. In memory of the poor, sacrificed spaniel maybe.

Matthew said, 'Er, have you ... ?'

'No.'