The Cold Calling Part 6

Blood from left ear, left eye. Strong smell of whisky. Face ... Jesus G.o.d, face familiar.

'Monitor flat,' Jonathan said, drab-voiced, as if it was a formality. 'How long has he been-?'

'No more than a minute,' the driver said. 'Still going OK in the van. Going strong. Must've stopped on the way in. Shock catching up.'

While the tube was going down, before the ambi-bag went on, Andy fitted a history to the face on the end of the neck brace, images clacking in like colour slides: young copper sitting on a stool drinking cocoa in the winter dawn, uniform flecked with snow and someone else's vomit. Waiting for some a.s.sault victim to get patched up. Ten years ago? Twelve?

A dead flat line on the monitor. Andy holding his head as Jonathan got going with the paddles, everyone else standing back.

Come on, son.

More like fifteen years ago, maybe more. The wee nurses collecting like starlings, Andy shooing them away, but she could sympathize; he was a nice-looking boy was Bobby Maiden.

Young coppers: one of the first things they learned as probationers was where they could grab a hot cocoa on the cold nights. And a wee nurse for the night off.

Those days, Bobby looked too young to be out at night on his own. Made his cocoa last. Didn't want to go back, you could tell, and always looked apprehensive. But, still, cute and bright some nights ... and prey to Lizzie Turner. Clever, ambitious Lizzie. Not his type, but you never knew.

'Come on, Bobby.' Andy's hands either side of his head, fingers down the cold, mud-and-blood-flecked face. Backing off as the paddle threw another seismic shudder into his chest.

'We're not getting anywhere, Sister.'

'Go again, Jonathan.'

Lizzie Turner and, by then, Detective Constable Bobby Maiden. She'd missed the glittering wedding somebody had to hold the fort. Down the pan now, anyway, Lizzie working in some BUPA clinic in Shrewsbury, they said, and living with one of the suits. A better cut of suit in a BUPA clinic.

'Jesus G.o.d, Bobby.' Andy closed her eyes, the big light over the table making a warm orange globe inside her eyelids, like the sun at dawn. Like the morning when Marcus and Mrs Willis took her to Black Knoll, told her how the sun had come down for the wee girl after the First World War, Marcus saying craftily that it sounded like a cla.s.sic UFO encounter to him and Mrs Willis smacking him on the arm.

'We're wasting our time, Sister Andy,' Jonathan said. 'Three minutes gone? Three and a half?'

'Keep going!' Come on, Bobby, you cannae go out like this, son, covered in s.h.i.t, stinking of whisky. This was the routine that never became routine; each time it knocked you back like the bolts jolting the person having his death invaded.

Another electric punch. The shudders going up both of Andy's arms. It was a brutal business, but that was modern medicine: hit them with something mindless and powerful ... drugs and violence, this was the modern manpower-saving Health Service street-level stuff. Incredible she should be thinking like this, but Andy was remembering the laying-on of Mrs Willis's hands later that morning back at the farmhouse and for nine more days, on a diet of greens and windfall apples and water from the well. This was when, after thirty years faithfully wedded to a hospital, something came through that turned into an itch.

'Nothing.' Jonathan's voice as flat as the monitor. 'He's got to be over the vegetable threshold now anyway.'

'No. Don't stop, OK?' Taking it personally, as always, but tonight it was all the more intense because maybe there wouldn't be many more of them before Sister Andy dropped out to join the burgeoning ranks of the alternative healers, to dangle from the lunatic fringe, dispensing a laying-on of fragrant hands to well-heeled cranks who'd come to St Mary's because it was prettier than a rundown spare-part warehouse like this place. And what was the alternative health sector, what was it really, but another small business leeching off the soft in the head?

Jesus G.o.d, which is right?

'We've done all we can, Sister.' Jonathan's hands over Andy's, trying to detach them from Bobby's head. But the amber sun was rising behind her eyes and its heat rushing all the way down to her hands, to the tips of her fingers in the corpse's blood-stiffened hair.

'She's upset, Doctor.' Debbie Barnes sounding amazed at this, as if she was watching the t.i.tanic going down.

Cold. The boy was long gone.

And the sun in her head turned suddenly black and she shuddered, head to foot.

'No! ' Andy cried aloud, tears coming.

This was when the great roar went up.

IV.

Once, just after dawn, the sun had come down for Annie Davies.

This phenomenon occurred early in the last century, on Midsummer's Day, which happened to be her birthday.

It also took place on High Knoll.

Which was fair enough, as far as Marcus was concerned. Which actually, in fact, made perfect b.l.o.o.d.y sense.

However, what was upsetting was this: had it occurred almost anywhere else around the village, Annie Davies might, by now, have been some kind of saint. And the village a little Lourdes.

This was how Marcus Bacton saw it, anyway. Hoping, as he stepped out of the castle ruins and set off across the meadow, that the Knoll had a little inspiration to spare for him. That simply being there, in the energy of dawn, might somehow resolve the pressing question of what to do about Mrs Willis, his housekeeper, his best friend, his doctor.

Who, possibly, was dying.

Who might, in the end, require the nursing home she'd always sworn she'd never enter.

But who, if it came to it, he'd carry to the b.l.o.o.d.y Knoll.

It had taken Marcus years to piece together the story of young Annie Davies and the midsummer vision. Interesting, the way the village's collective memory had filed it away under Don't Quite Recall.

b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

'Come on then.' Marcus walked more quickly, afraid the sun was going to beat him to the top. Getting on for seven a.m., and there was already a blush on the hill where the mist was thinning.

'Come on. '

About twenty yards away, Malcolm, the brindle and white bull terrier cross, raised his bucket head briefly and went back to whatever dead and rotting item he was sniffing. A couple of sheep watched him uneasily.

'All right, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Get your b.a.l.l.s blown off, see if I care.'

Problem being that the Williams boy, who leased the grazing from the Jenkins brothers, could get difficult about dogs upsetting his flock. Even Malcolm, who despised sheep even more than he despised Marcus.

Eventually, the dog grudgingly ambled over and down they went, through the meadow and up the pitch towards the Knoll, until the already reddening field lay below them like a slice of toast tossed from the mountain.

And Marcus looked down, as he always did, and tried to see it as it must have looked to Annie Davies.

Wouldn't be able to, of course, because he was now sixty, and Annie had been thirteen by just a few hours on the morning of her vision, in a world still recovering from the Great War.

The unheralded marriage of Tommy Davies, a farmer well advanced in years, to the local schoolmistress, Edna Cadwallader, must have provided a year's worth of gossip for the drama-starved inhabitants of St Mary's.

Annie was Tommy and Edna's only child. Born 'prematurely', as they used to say in those days.

Amy Jenkins (related only by marriage to the Jenkins brothers, owners of the meadow, the Knoll and another hundred acres), who kept the oldest village pub, had told Marcus that her own mother used to say it was 'a bit of a funny family'. As schoolmistress, Edna had considered herself Village Intellectual. She was a parish councillor, too, and would spend most nights at one meeting or another, putting the community to rights. And so Annie had grown up closer to her aged father.

Marcus often imagined as if it had really happened this way a strange, still atmosphere on the night before the vision Annie brewing a pot of strong tea for her dad and the two of them taking a mug each and wandering companionably down to Great Meadow, watching the hayfield turn almost white in the deep blue dusk.

Thirteen, is it now? The cooling mug must have looked like a thimble in Tommy Davies's huge, bark-brown hands. Big age, that is, girl. Sure to be.

Annie's father probably didn't talk a great deal. He would have been as old as most of the other village children's grandfathers. So when he made a p.r.o.nouncement it would be charged, for Annie, with a glowing significance, like the words of an Old Testament prophet.

Thirteen. Marcus saw her grinning up at Tommy Davies, laying her mug on the gra.s.s and, with a rush of coltish energy, clambering over the wooden gate and dashing off down the track dividing Great Meadow, with the first breath of the night billowing her cotton frock almost over her head. The beginning of the parting, and Tommy too old and experienced not to accept it.

Perhaps the image of Annie had become inseparable now, for Marcus, with the last picture of his own daughter, Sally, who had died of leukaemia within months of her own thirteenth birthday. Perhaps this, in truth, was what had made him so determined to get Castle Farm: the feeling that something of Sally was here, too. That if he'd known about the vision when she was dying he would have brought her here. To the natural shrine which the Church had denied.

Soon, what seemed like all of south Herefordshire was at Marcus's feet, the crimson line of dawn drawn tight over the misty, wooded hills, cleft only by the stocky church tower of St Mary's.

The church was built on the site of a Celtic hermit's cell. It was probably older than the woods and the fields. For Marcus, the hills around the Golden Valley hid the lushest, richest, least-spoiled countryside in all of southern Britain. The villages had altered hardly at all, and St Mary's was probably not so very different from when Annie was here. In those days, it might even still have been known by its original Welsh name Llanfair-y-fynydd: St Mary's in the Mountains.

The village itself, viewed from above, seemed almost circular, in its nest of wooded slopes. From the churchyard, you could look up and see the long, dark ridge of the mountains, but the eye would always be drawn back towards a single promontory which seemed to punch the sky like a dark, gauntleted fist.

High Knoll. Or Black Knoll, as it was called in the village and now, to Marcus's disgust, even on the maps. When you got there, it wasn't so stark, although the gra.s.s was brown and rough around the stones.

The burial chamber on the Knoll was far older than the church and even older than the Celtic hermit's cell. Annie Davies would have been told (by her mother, at the village school) that it was where heathen folk once came to worship the sun. Ignorant people who thought the sun was a G.o.d.

Perhaps Annie had been dismayed. Perhaps, whenever she'd tried to imagine G.o.d, she, like Marcus, had thought at once of the sun, the brightest light in the sky. Wondering if that made her a heathen?

Perhaps, as she walked up to the big, broken table of stones, she'd decided that the prehistoric people couldn't have been so very ignorant if they could find such a perfect place to greet the day. And anyway, Jesus hadn't been born then, so how were they to know about the true G.o.d? They were worshipping the brightest light they knew; what was so wrong about that?

Tommy Davies, who wasn't well educated but was doubtless very wise, might have told her that the people who built the monument were his ancestors, the first farmers here. And that having the bits of old stones up there somehow kept the land in good heart.

The burial chamber had been partially collapsed for centuries. It was unlikely that even Annie would have been able to get inside. Perhaps, that morning, she had clambered on top of the chamber, the huge capstone, and turned to watch the daily miracle of the sun trickling out of the horizon. And lifted her face to the sky.

Was that when it had happened?

About a hundred yards from the Knoll, along the steepening track of stones and baked red mud, Marcus had his first tantalizing glimpse of the top of the capstone.

Just about make it in time for the dawn. Even more than three months after midsummer, the view of the dawn from High Knoll was never a disappointment.

And then he heard voices.

What?

On the Knoll? Voices on the Knoll? At dawn? Marcus felt violated. He stiffened, s.n.a.t.c.hed hold of Malcolm's collar, clamped a hand over his muzzle.

Accepting he had no right to feel like this. Wasn't Castle land any more, although it was Marcus's ambition if, for instance, there was a sudden upturn (ha!) in the fortunes of The Phenomenologist to buy it back one day. However, the elderly, reclusive Jenkins brothers, whose father had acquired the Knoll as part of a land package in the late 1940s, seemed to accept the footpath as a right of way, for the owners of the Castle, at least. On this understanding, Marcus laboured up here at dawn twice a week, summer and winter. And in all that time he'd never met a soul, except for the intense American girl that one occasion, and at least she'd had the b.l.o.o.d.y decency to consult him first.

Because, at the Knoll, the dawn was his time. His and Annie's and Sally's.

There was a clump of rowan below the summit, and Marcus crept between the trees, marching Malcolm ahead of him, and waited and listened. A man's voice was drawling in that rhythmic up and down way that told you he wasn't really talking to anyone he could see.

'Now, this is a fairly unexceptional chambered tomb, dating back over four thousand years. We can't get into the chamber any more because, as you can see, it's collapsed in the middle. Of course, what we're looking at here are merely the bones of the structure. Originally, all this would have been concealed by tons of earth, and all you'd have been able to see was a huge mound, with an opening ... just ... here. Now I say it's unexceptional ... except ... for one aspect. The location.'

There was silence for about half a minute. Marcus seethed.

'How was that, Patrick? We could run some music under the bit where we open up to the dawn spectacle. Do you think? What's that da da thing from 2001? Or is that a bit of a cliche?'

'No, it might work. Roger ... Just another thought. When I pull back, but before I open it out, if you were to stand fractionally to the left ...'

'How far? This?'

'And back a bit. Hold it there. Spot on. What I was thinking, if we time this right, do it just as it's breaking through, it'll look as if the sun's rising out of the top of your head. Nice effect. What do you think?'

'Hmm. Yes, OK. Why not? Worth a try.'

'Make a change,' Marcus said loudly, coming out of the trees, 'from it shining out of his f.u.c.king a.r.s.e.'

He hauled himself up onto the small plateau of the Knoll. Where there was hardly b.l.o.o.d.y room for him. The molten orb in the east turning five faces florid as they all spun at him.

Young Fraser-Hale looked startled but otherwise unperturbed. The haughty Magda Ring said, 'Oh for heaven's sake,' and slapped her clipboard like a tambourine. The cameraman swung round, aiming his lens at Marcus like an a.s.sa.s.sin with a rifle. The sound man resentfully s.n.a.t.c.hed off his headphones. And Falconer ...

Falconer just smiled.

'Marcus,' he said.

Falconer. In his fur-trimmed motorcycle jacket and his ridiculously tight jeans. Falconer who strode the hills with his ponytail swinging, followed by a string of adoring acolytes: the old ladies he charmed, the young ones who by all accounts he s.h.a.gged senseless.

'One realizes, old chap,' he said, 'how terribly fond you are of this place, but we are working and, as you see, s.p.a.ce is somewhat limited.'

Falconer, with his weekly television audience of an estimated six million.

Marcus with his ailing private-subscription magazine, circulation just under eight hundred and slipping.

His aversion to the man couldn't be as simple as that, surely?

'If I could just point out ...' the cameraman said, looking agitated, 'that we're going to have about four minutes, maximum, to get this shot before the sun goes behind a frigging cloud or something.'

'Don't worry,' Falconer said. 'Our friend just wandered up for a teensy snoop, and now he's leaving. Aren't you, Marcus? Old chap.'

Old chap. Always a slight emphasis on the old.

'As a matter of fact, no.' Marcus flicked back his heavy, grey hair and straightened his gla.s.ses. 'I don't think I am.'

Big problem was: most of the villagers seemed to love the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. The star-struck idiots on his d.a.m.ned courses taking all the rooms at the local hotels and pubs, filling up the holiday caravans on the mobile-home park; Jarman, the postmaster, claiming Falconer was the biggest boost to the local economy since they closed the b.l.o.o.d.y railway.

But look at the b.l.o.o.d.y damage he's doing, Marcus would protest, and they'd all stare at him, mystified. And Marcus would try to explain how the d.a.m.ned man was destroying the ancient sanct.i.ty. Because that was his thing: to demystify, unravel, explain, according to his own limited, prosaic criteria, the essentially inexplicable. Demolishing mythology, dispelling atmosphere, stealing the energy and giving nothing back.

Except money.