The Cold Calling Part 21

The Green Man feels the silence of the Old One. Who watched them build the church. Who stood here while the bones of the Barber-Surgeon were crushed beneath an Avebury megalith. Who thrived before Rufus died on Walter Tirel's bolt in the New Forest.

And still lives.

Awaiting, perhaps, his third millennium.

Because of its size, the oak is more honoured, but the yew has more mystery. It is often referred to as the Death Tree because of its ubiquity in and around graveyards. Few realize that the yews were here long before the graves ... that the churches were only built on these sites because they were already sacred, with the yew tree a symbol of that sanct.i.ty. Our oldest symbol of immortality.

The sign in this churchyard says, ALTHOUGH YEW TREES ARE DIFFICULT TO DATE, THIS VENERABLE SPECIMEN IS BELIEVED TO BE WELL OVER A THOUSAND YEARS OLD. THE WOODEN BENCH INSIDE THE HOLLOW TRUNK WILL SEAT UP TO TEN ADULTS SIDE BY SIDE.

Or one man sleeping.

It has been an experiment. How will a night in an ancient sacred tree differ from one atop a burial chamber or inside a circle of ritual stones?

The living yew might be expected to record stories, impressions and dreams in a different way from stone, and so it transpires. When he rises from the bench, the Green Man's dream is still alive and vibrating in colours in his head. He sees clearly what he must do, as if in a film. As if it has already taken place.

Not in or around the yew, but inside the church.

While many centuries younger than the yew, the church is medieval. It stands a hundred yards outside this Worcesters.h.i.+re village, screened from the nearest houses on an ugly council estate by a dense copse. He tried the two doors last night and found both locked.

Someone, at some time, will have to let him in.

No-one has pa.s.sed through in the night. No-one disturbed the Green Man where he lay, his back arched into the yew. He steps outside the tree now, stretches. Goes to release his morning water among the bushes.

And scarcely has he sheathed his tool than he hears the click of the wicket gate in the churchyard wall.

It is not yet seven a.m.

Never has a sacrifice been delivered so promptly.

The Green Man slides to his knees in the bushes. The visitor walks along the gravelled path and into his place in the Green Man's living dream.

He is elderly, perhaps in his seventies, and slight of build with a bald, bony head and spectacles. He does not appear to be a clergyman, perhaps a verger or s.e.xton. A ring of keys rattles loosely from his right hand.

Big keys. Church keys.

His keys to the afterlife.

The old man whistles as he enters the porch. The Green Man hears him fitting a key into the lock, jiggling it about.

He rises from the bushes.

He strides towards the porch, unarmed. No knife, no crossbow, no gun, no sharp-edged rock.

Just inside the porch is a stone baptismal font, the church's oldest artefact.

At the end of his living dream, the bowl of the font is glistening with blood and bone and brains.

The verger whistles a tune from some old musical as the church door swings open.

XIX.

Cindy Mars-Lewis made it three, possibly four, dead, plus one near-miss.

The near-miss was the boy motorcyclist in mid-Wales. The possible was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl found strangled, but not s.e.xually a.s.saulted, last January, in a bus shelter not far from Harold's Stones at Trellech in Monmouths.h.i.+re. This was still only a possible because the bus shelter, as Cindy had confirmed on a site visit, was on a very dubious alignment.

But, then Cindy watched a boat far out in St Bride's Bay there was no evidence this murderer was a perfectionist.

Take the killing of the Midlands businessman on a bird-watching weekend in Wilts.h.i.+re. The man had been savagely and inexplicably battered to death at the foot of a small hill, in the middle of field a couple of miles from Avebury.

He could almost sense them now, but it would be necessary to visit the actual murder site to be certain, and he was rather unwilling to do this so soon after the event, with police all over the place. Cindy had discovered he was not terribly popular with the police.

In particular, that mild-mannered family man, DCI Hatch, in Bournemouth. Cindy had telephoned Mrs Carlotta Capaldi from Liverpool where he was playing Third Witch in a rather downmarket touring production of the Scottish play, to discover that Hatch would appreciate a word with him.

'I've had an inquiry about you, Mr Lewis. From the West Mercia Regional Crime Squad.'

Suspecting something of the kind, Cindy had waited until he was home before telephoning Bournemouth CID on his mobile.

'What the holy h.e.l.l are you playing at?' Hatch demanded. 'You just won't take p.i.s.s off for an answer, will you? You know there's absolutely nothing to connect these killings nothing admissible, anyway and as for ringing b.l.o.o.d.y Crimewatch ...'

A mistake, Cindy would agree. But the TV programme had run such a detailed reconstruction of the killing of the poor homeless boy in a shop doorway, showing precisely the location of the shop, close to the ancient market cross, and ...

'An impulse, I'm afraid, Chief Inspector. They did appeal for anyone with information.'

'You didn't have information. You wasted police time with a crackpot, semi-mystical theory which even I can't entirely grasp, about so-called ley lines which I understand the experts say do not even exist linking a bunch of crimes which simply have nothing in common.'

'With all respect, Peter,' said Cindy, 'that's what they said about the Yorks.h.i.+re Ripper.'

'Not my area,' Hatch snapped.

'Oh, no, you don't want to talk about that, do you? Why Sutcliffe kept walking in and out of the police net because he didn't fit the profile? And because they were conned by a hoax tape into looking for the wrong type of man entirely.'

'I don't see where this-'

'Still several unsolved murders out there, that might be down to him. And why were they rejected by the Ripper squad? Because they weren't prost.i.tutes, and the profile said the Yorks.h.i.+re Ripper Only Kills Prost.i.tutes.'

'Mr Lewis, we are not looking for a serial killer.'

'Psychos make their own patterns, see. Sometimes, the police are just so simplistic.'

'That,' Hatch said icily, 'is because, at the end of the day, we have to make it stand up in court. Now look, Mr Lewis, I was very patient. I accepted your desire to do all you could for Mrs Capaldi and I answered your curious questions on three separate occasions. But public relations has its limits, and telling West Mercia you were a friend of mine has, quite frankly, done my career no good at all.'

'Is the file on Maria still open?'

There was a pause.

'You know it is,' Hatch said bitterly.

'There you are, then, lovely. Your ideas were no better than mine.'

'We'll get him, Mr Lewis, I promise you. Meanwhile, if I could give you a word of advice, some senior policemen get rather suspicious of people who hang around murder investigations. It isn't healthy, if you know what I mean.'

'No,' said Cindy, nettled. 'I do not.'

'Think about it. I know you're harmless, relatively speaking, and that your only crime is an attempt to generate some self-publicity to revive a flagging career, but less tolerant officers ...'

'How dare you!'

'Sorry,' said Hatch. 'That was probably uncalled for. But you would do well to remember that, while we welcome all the information we can get from the public, we do tend to prefer it if you leave the interpretation to us, because we've been there before.'

But had they? Had they been here before? Would Hatch have been able to say that when, for instance, his Hamps.h.i.+re colleagues had discovered, not so very long ago, that a particularly brutal stabbing was down to a twelve-year-old girl who received s.e.xual gratification from killing? The youngest potential serial murderer in history, dealt with at Winchester Crown Court in March.

The change of millennium was continually pus.h.i.+ng back the parameters of human experience.

The British police had simply never encountered a killer who walked the ancient tracks, in the footsteps of his prehistoric ancestors, and committed ritual murders he would perhaps regard them as sacrifices which were identifiable as such only by the nature of their locations. No connection at all, except to someone educated in the arcane mysteries of the landcape.

'There are more crimes in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, my friend.'

Cindy watched the clouds formation-dancing over the bay.

'Bananas, you are, Cindy.'

The eyes of Kelvyn Kite bulged from the shadows in his corner beside the sink.

'Why do you bother, you old fool?'

The bird had a point. Why did he bother?

Hatch's barb about self-publicity had stung only briefly. The stage was his career, but not his life. And he didn't need the money. His lifestyle was humble. He followed the work around Britain and returned periodically to this very pretty fairground caravan on a tiny plot, which he owned, in a sheltered spot on the most beautiful part of the Pembrokes.h.i.+re coast. His earthly life was neatly boxed, the corners of the box pleasantly scuffed and rounded.

As for his inner life ... Well, sometimes it seemed to be getting richer, more complex. One day, he would have to retire and embark upon the final stage of the great quest, in preparation for his transition. But that was probably years ahead. He couldn't help feeling there should be an interim stage. The idea that one should live one's spiritual life solely in preparation for what was to follow did seem unnecessarily self-indulgent. There ought to be a way of using the incidental abilities one inevitably acquired along the way for the greater good of the community at large.

To fight earthly evils?

Perhaps.

Cindy gathered all the press cuttings into a pile. On top was the one from the Shrops.h.i.+re Star he'd picked up last week, during the two nights the Transit Theatre Company's Macbeth had been playing the Ludlow a.s.sembly Rooms. It was the kind of news story which, for Hatch, would be a complete joke but, to Cindy, was confirmation. MURDER SHOP 'HAUNTED' CLAIM.

The story was written in a way that indicated n.o.body on the paper believed it either. It referred to the butchering of the homeless boy in the shop doorway, the case which had brought Cindy to the notice of the West Mercia CID. Now a local youth leader was claiming attendance at his club was falling off because youngsters didn't like to go past this particular shop at night.

'Two of the girls told me they had felt a sudden drop in the temperature as they pa.s.sed the doorway, and one is convinced she saw a trail of blood dripping from the step to the gutter.

'These are decent girls, not, in my view, the kind to be p.r.o.ne to fantasies,' said Mr Ruscoe, who is calling for the area to be exorcised.

However, the owner of the hardware shop, Chamber of Trade chairman Mr James Mills, has condemned the scare. 'This was a terrible incident, which most people in this town just want to try to forget,' he said.

'Fairy stories like this are not good for trade or local morale, and Ted Ruscoe should have more sense than to encourage them.'

'Fairy stories,' said Cindy scornfully. 'Fairy stories!'

The man would, of course, have to be the chairman of the Chamber of Trade. Cindy was continually amazed at the arrogance of small-time local officials, who considered their particular field of commercial endeavour to be of supreme importance in the great scheme of things.

The police, in most cases, were exactly the same. If you couldn't explain it to the Crown Prosecution Service they wouldn't even consider it.

Cindy swept the pile of press cuttings into a box file and went back to work on the magazines. Wherever he went, he sought out the local dealers in publications devoted to paganism and earth-magic, some of them, like Fortean Times, Kindred Spirit and Chalice, high-quality glossies; some, like The Ley Hunter, quite specialized, and others little more than photocopied pages stapled together. At least one of these, surely, was read and possibly contributed to by the killer. Cindy saw this individual as someone with very definite and fixed ideas ideas which he would want to disseminate. Also, like most killers, he would want his acts to be noticed.

The letters pages were a very likely source of clues. Cindy flicked open an issue of Pagan Quest.

Dear Sir, I have been a wors.h.i.+pper of Thor for over nine years and have recently moved to Basingstoke, where I am anxious to contact fellow pagans...

Most of them, unfortunately, were on this level. Cindy wondered if there were any submitted letters that the editors of these magazines considered too extreme for publication. He'd had no reply from Marcus Bacton at The Phenomenologist. But perhaps that had not been such a great idea. The journal only came out at three- monthly intervals, so even if its staid and ageing readers had any ideas, it might be Christmas before they appeared.

'Kelvyn, who was that boy we met in Gloucester who wanted to interview me? Long, red hair.'

'Jasper somebody, wasn't it?'

'His mag was called ... No, it wasn't Jasper, you stupid bird, it was Gareth, Gareth Milburn, and the mag was called Cauldron ... Crucible!'

Cindy leafed through a copy of a pagan magazine in which other, smaller pagan magazines tended to place small ads.

'Here we are, Kelvyn ... Crucible! Oh, and a phone number, there's unusual.'

Cindy prodded out the number on his mobile.

'Blessed be! You're through to Crucible. Leave a message and we'll get back to you ... one way or another, ha, ha, ha.'

'Gareth, it's Cindy Mars-Lewis, the humble thespian you were so determined to out as a pagan earlier this year ...'

Cindy hung up, unsatisfied, restless. There must be something else he could do.

'What's your hurry, old fool?'

'I don't know. I feel ...'

Cindy picked up his pendulum, slipped a middle finger through the loop.

'... I feel it's getting closer.'

When held over the maps at each of the murder spots, the pendulum reacted in exactly the same way: a furious anti-clockwise spin. What would Hatch say to that?