Crybbe (AKA Curfew)

by Unknown

  It clicked.

  'You're talking about Henry Kettle.'

  'Who?'

  'Henry Kettle. The dowser I interviewed yesterday morning.'

  'Oh God,' Canon Peters said. 'That's who it was. I'm sorry, Fay, I didn't connect, I. . .'

  'Never mind,' Fay said soothingly. Sometimes, on his good days, you were inclined to forget. Her father, who'd been about to sit down, was instantly back on his feet. 'Now look . . . It's got nothing to with Dr Alphonse sodding Alzheimer.'

  'Alois.'

  'What?'

  'Alois Alzheimer. Anyway, you haven't got Alzheimer's disease.'

  The Canon waved a dismissive hand. 'Alzheimer is easier to say than arteriosclerotic dementia, when you're going gaga.'

  He took off his pink cotton jacket. 'Nothing to do with that anyway. Always failed to make connections. Always putting my sodding foot in it.'

  'Yes, Dad.'

  'And stop being so bloody considerate.'

  'All right then. Belt up, you old bugger, while I finish this tape.'

  'That's better.' The Canon slung his jacket over the back of the armchair, slumped down, glared grimly at the Guardian.

  Fay labelled the tape and boxed it. She stood back and pulled down her T-shirt, pushed fingers through her tawny hair, asking him, 'Where was it, then? Where did it happen?'

  Canon Peters lowered his paper. 'Behind the old Court. You know the tumulus round the back, you can see it from the Ludlow road? Got a wall round it? That's what he hit.'

  'But - hang on - that wall's a bloody mile off the road.'

  'Couple of hundred yards, actually.'

  'But still . . . I mean, he'd have to drive across an entire field for Christ's sake.' When James Barlow had said something about Mr. Kettle crossing a field she'd imagined some kind of extended grass-verge. 'Somebody said maybe he'd had a heart attack, so I was thinking he'd just gone out of control, hit a wall not far off the road. Not, you know, embarked on a cross country endurance course.'

  'Perhaps,' speculated the Canon, 'he topped himself.'

  'Cobblers. I was with him yesterday morning, he was fine. Not the suicidal type, anyway. And if you're going to do yourself in, there have to be rather more foolproof ways than that.'

  'Nine out of ten suicides, somebody says that. There's always an easier way. He was probably just confused. I can sympathize.'

  'Any witnesses?' Above the tiled fireplace, opposite the window, was a mirror in a Victorian-style gilt frame. Fay inspected her face in it and decided that, for a walk to the studio, it would get by.

  Canon Peters said, 'Witnesses? In Crybbe?'

  'Sorry, I wasn't thinking.'

  'Wouldn't have known myself if I hadn't spotted all the police activity, so I grilled the newsagent. Apparently it must have happened last night, but he wasn't found until this morning.'

  'Oh God, there's no chance he might have been still alive, lying there all night . . . ?'

  'Shouldn't think so. Head took most of it, I gather, I didn't go to look. A local milkman, it was, who spotted the wreckage and presumably said to himself, "Well, well, what a mess," and then wondered if perhaps he ought not to call Wynford, the copper. No hurry, though, because . . .'

  'He wasn't local,' said Fay.

  'Precisely.'

  Fay said it for the second time this week. 'Why don't you get the hell out of this town, Dad? You're never going to feel you belong.'

  'I like it here.'

  'It irritates the hell out of you!'

  'I know, but it's rather interesting. In an anthropological sort of way.' His beard twitched. She knew she wasn't getting the whole story. What was he hiding, and why?

  Fay frowned, wondering if he'd seen the spoof FOR SALE notice she'd scribbled out during a ten-minute burst of depression last night. She said tentatively, 'Grace wouldn't want you to stay. You know that.'

  'Now look, young Fay,' Canon Peters leaned forward in the chair, a deceptive innocence in the wide blue eyes which had wowed widows in a dozen parishes. 'More to the point, there's absolutely no need for you to hang around. You know my methods. No problem at all to find some lonely old totty among the immigrant population to cater for my whims. In fact, you're probably cramping my style.'

  He raised the Guardian high so that all she could see was his fluffy while hair, like the bobble on an old-fashioned ski hat.

  'Anyway,' he mumbled. 'Early stages yet. Could be months before I'm a dribbling old cabbage.'

  'Dad, I'll . . . !' The phone rang. 'Yes, what . . . ? Oh, Mrs. Seagrove.'

  All she needed.

  'Serves you right,' rumbled the Canon from the depths of the Guardian.

  'I saw it again, Mrs Morrison. Last night. When the power was off.'

  'Oh,' Fay said, as kindly as she could manage. 'Did you?'

  'I can't bear it any more, Mrs Morrison.'

  Fay didn't bother to ask her how she could see a huge coal-black beast when all the lights were out; she'd say she just could. She was one of the aforementioned lonely old Midland immigrant widows in a pretty cottage on the edge of town. One of the people who rang local reporters because they needed someone to make a cup of tea for.

  'I'm at the end of my tether, Mrs Morrison. I'm going out of my mind. You wouldn't think anything as black as that could glow, would you? I'm shivering now, just remembering it.'

  In other places they rang the police for help. But in Crybbe the police was Sergeant Wynford Wiley and nobody wanted to make a cup of tea for him.

  'I've tried to explain, Mrs Seagrove. It's a fascinating . . .'

  'It's not fascinating, my love, it's terrifying. It's no joke. It's frightening me out of my mind. I can't sleep.'

  'But there's nothing I can do unless you're prepared to talk about it on tape. I only work for the radio, and unless we can hear your voice . . .'

  'Why can't you just say someone's seen it without saying who I am or where I live?'

  'Because . . . because that's not the way radio works. We have to hear a voice. Look,' Fay said, 'I really would like to do the story. Perhaps you could find someone else who's seen it and would be prepared to talk about it and have it recorded.'

  Mrs Seagrove said bitterly, They all know about it. Mrs Francis at the post office, Mr Preece. They won't admit it. They won't talk about it. I've tried telling the vicar, he just listens and he smiles, I don't think he even believes in God, that vicar. Perhaps if you came round this afternoon, we could . . .'

  'I'm sorry,' Fay said, 'I've got several jobs on the go at the moment.'

  'Ho, ho,' said the Guardian.

  'Look,' Fay said. 'Think about it. It's quite easy and informal, you know. Just me and a portable recorder, and if you make any fluffs we can keep doing it again until you've got it right.'

  'Well, perhaps if you came round we could . . .'

  'Not unless you're prepared to talk about it on tape,' Fay said firmly.

  'I'll think about it,' Mrs Seagrove said.

  Fay put the phone down. Of course she felt sorry for the lady. And ghost stories always went down well with producers, even if the eye-witnesses were dismissed as loonies. Local radio needed loonies; how else, for instance, could you sustain phone-in programmes in an area like this?

  But ghost stories where nobody would go on the record as having seen the apparition were non-starters. On that same basis, Fay thought ruefully, a lot of stories had been non-starters in Crybbe.

  CHAPTER II

  The windscreen was in splinters. There was blood on some of them, dried now. And there were other bits, pink and glistening like mince on a butcher's tray, which Max Goff didn't want to know about.

  'What are you saying here?' he demanded irritably. 'You're saying it's a fucking omen?'

  He looked up at the hills shouldering their way out of the morning mist, the sun still offstage, just.

  He turned and gazed at the Tump. A prosaic, lumpen word for the mystic mound, the branches of the trees on its summit still entwined with tendrils
of mist.

  A thing so ancient, so haunted, yet so benign. Yeah, well, he believed in omens, but. . .

  There was some kind of awful creaking, tearing sound as the breakdown truck hauled the car out of the wall. A heavy crump and a rattle as the VW's shattered front end came down on the turf, its radiator ripped off, car-intestines hanging out.

  Max Goff winced. Beside him, Rachel Wade, his personal assistant, was saying in her deep voice, 'Don't be silly.' Spreading out her hands in that superior, pained, half-pitying way she had. 'All I'm saying is it's not exactly an auspicious start, is it?'

  Goff stared coldly at Rachel in her shiny, new Barbour coat and a silk scarf. Knowing how much he'd depended on her judgement in the past, but knowing equally that this was an area where she was well out of her depth. A situation where the smooth bitch couldn't be relied upon to get it right. No way.

  She didn't, of course, want him to go through with it. Nobody whose opinion was worth more than shit had been exactly encouraging, but Rachel was subtler than most of them. She hadn't said a word about the nylon sheets in their room at the Cock. Had made no comment about the coffee at breakfast being instant, just sat there, languid and elegant and at ease, refusing everything they offered her with a professional smile. Yeah, OK, under normal circumstances Goff himself would have insisted on different sheets and ground coffee and some kind of muesli instead of Rice Krispies. But he might need the

  Cock again.

  Actually, he might need to buy it.

  He'd been pondering this possibility, deciding not to discuss it with Ms Wade just yet, when the local Plod had turned up, waiting respectfully in the lobby until he'd finished his Nescafe, then asking, 'Are you Mr Goff, sir? Mr Max Goff?' as if they didn't recognize him.

  The body had been taken away by the time they got to the scene. Max Goff only hoped the poor old bastard had at least one surviving relative. He didn't really feel like identifying the Kettle corpse in some seedy white-tiled mortuary where the atmosphere was heavy with obnoxious smells and bodily gases.

  If it came to that, Rachel could do it. She'd hired Kettle originally. And nothing ever fazed Rachel, just as nothing ever blew her mind - there was even something suspiciously nonchalant about her orgasms.

  'Right, Tom,' somebody shouted, and the breakdown truck started across the field, the broken car on its back, a smashed coffin on an open hearse.

  Then the truck stopped for some reason.

  And, in that moment, the sun came out of the mist and the land was suddenly aglow and throbbing with life force.

  And Goff remembered what day this was.

  He turned towards the light, head back, eyes closing and the palms of his hands opening outwards to receive the burgeoning energy.

  I am here. At the zenith of the year. I am in a state of total submission.

  'It's the solstice,' he whispered. 'I'd forgotten.'

  'Oh,' said the uncommitted Rachel Wade. 'Super.'

  As if guided. Max Goff turned back to the open field, opened his eyes and saw . . .

  . . . reflected, quite perfectly, in the rear window of Henry Kettle's smashed-up old Volkswagen on the back of the truck, he saw the venerable mound, the Tump at Crybbe Court, and the sun above it like a holy lamp.

  And the connection was formed.

  Revelation.

  The truck started up again, moved off towards the road.

  Goff pointed urgently at the mound, talking rapidly, forefinger stabbing at the air between him and Rachel. 'Listen, when they built these things, the old Bronze Age guys, they'd, you know, consecrate them, according to their religion, right?'

  Rachel Wade looked at him, expressionless.

  'What they'd do is, they'd sacrifice somebody. I mean, the remains have been found, sacrifices, not burials - they have ways of telling the difference, right?'

  Rachel freed a few strands of pale hair from the collar of her Barbour, flicked them back.

  'And sometimes, right,' Goff surged on, 'at very important sites, the high priest himself would be sacrificed. Without resistance. Willingly, yeah?'

  Rachel said, 'How would they know that?"

  'Know what?'

  '"a", that he died willingly. And "b", that the fragment of bones or whatever belonged to a high priest?'

  Goff was annoyed. 'Jeez, they know, OK? Doesn't matter how, I'm not a flaming archaeologist. But what it meant was the sacrifice would put the seal on the sanctity of the place. The dead priest would live on as its guardian. For all time, right?'

  A police sergeant came over, the same one who'd fetched them from the Cock. Big moon-faced guy, didn't strike Goff as being all that bright. 'We'd just like you to make a statement if you would, sir.'

  'Everything Max Goff does is a Statement,' Goff told him and grinned. 'Who was it wrote that?'

  'Time Out' said Rachel automatically and a little wearily. 'August 1990.'

  The police sergeant didn't get it. 'You appear to have been the last person to see Mr. Kettle alive, sir. You'll probably be called to give evidence to that effect at the inquest.'

  'Shit,' Goff said. 'How . .. ? No, that's OK. That's fine. I'll join you back at the house. Ten minutes, right?'

  'If you wouldn't mind, sir.'

  'Point I was making,' Goff said, impatiently turning his back on the departing Plod, 'is that Henry Kettle was about as close as you could find to a kind of high priest these days. Get in tune with the earth and its spirit, responding to its deeper impulses. Shamanic, yeah?' Closing his eyes, he felt the holy light of the solstice on his face. Carried on talking with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Talking to himself really, letting his thoughts unravel, the connections forming.

  'So Henry Kettle - how old was the guy? Eighty-five? How long did he have to go, anyway? So, OK, we have this old man, the shaman, homing in, a dead straight line across the field - straight at the mound, the Tump, right - and . . .'

  Goff opened his eyes suddenly and fully, and was dazzled by radiant blobs of orange and blue spinning from the top of the mound.

  '. . . and . . . whoomp!' He clapped his big hands violently together. Smiling hugely at Rachel Wade. 'Listen, what I'm saying, we're not looking at some bad omen here. It's a positive thing. Like the high priest going almost willingly to his death, sacrificing himself all over again to put his life energy into my project. Whoomp!'

  Rachel said, 'That's really sick. Max.' But Goff was looking up at the mound with a new pride, not listening.

  'I bet if we mark out those tyre-tracks across that field we'll find they correspond exactly to line B.'

  'Line B?'

  'The fucking ley-line, Rachel.'

  'Max, that's . . .'

  Goff looked hard at Rachel. She shut up.

  Jesus, she thought.

  Whoomp.

  CHAPTER III

  'Bit for level, Fay.'

  'OK, here we go . . .'

  Mr. Kettle said, '. . . All right then, we know there's got to be water yereabouts . . .'

  'OK, that's fine, Fay . . . I'm rolling. Go in five.'

  She wound back, set the tape running and took the cans off her ears, leaving them around her neck so she'd hear the engineer call out if he ran into problems.

  Leaning back in the metal-framed typist's chair, she thought, God, I've been shunted into some seedy sidings in my time, but this . . .

  . . . was the Crybbe Unattended Studio.

  Ten feet long and six feet wide. Walls that closed in on you like the sides of a packing case. A tape-machine on a metal stand. A square mahogany table with a microphone next to a small console with buttons that lit up. And the chair. And no windows, just a central light and two little red lights - one above the door outside to warn people to keep away in case whoever was inside happened to be broadcasting live to the scattered homesteads of the Welsh Marches.

  This studio used to be the gents' lavatories at the back of the Cock, before they'd built new ones inside the main building. Then some planning wizard at Offa's Dyke
Radio had presumably stuck a plastic marker into the map and said without great enthusiasm: Crybbe - well, yeah, OK, not much of a place, but it's almost exactly halfway up the border and within couple miles of the Dyke itself . . . about as central as we can get.'

  Then they'd have contacted the Marches Development Board, who'd have told them: No problem, we can offer you a purpose-built broadcasting centre on our new Kington Road Industrial Estate at an annual rent of only . . .

  At which point the planning wizard would have panicked and assured them that all that was required was a little room to accommodate reporters and interviewees (one at a time) and for sending tape down a land-line to Offa's Dyke main studios.

  All self-operated. No staff, no technicians. Very discreet: You walk in, you switch on, and a sound-engineer records your every word from fifty miles away.

  Which was how they'd ended up with the former gents' at the Cock. A tired, brick building with a worn slate roof, at the end of a narrow passageway past the dustbins.

  The original white tiles with worrying brown stains had gone now. Or at least were hidden behind the black acoustic screening which formed a little soundproof module inside the building.

  But sometimes, especially early in the morning, Fay would swear she could smell . . .

  'That's lovely, Fay, thanks very much.'

  Thanks, Barry,' Fay told the microphone on the desk. All engineers were called Barry.

  'It's Elton, actually,' he said. 'Hang on, Gavin's here, he'd like a word.'

  Elton. Jesus, nobody in this country who was called Elton could possibly be over twenty-one. Even the damned engineer at Offa's Dyke were fresh out of engineering school.

  Gavin Ashpole came on the line, the station's news editor, an undeveloped rasp, unsure of whether it was supposed to sound thrusting or laid-back. He wanted to know if Fay was any closer to an interview with Max Goff about his plans for Crybbe Court. Or at least some sort of statement. 'I mean, is it going to be a recording studio, or what? We going to have enormous rock stars helicoptering in? We need to know, and we need to know before we read about it in the bloody papers.'

  'No, listen, I told you, his PA insists he doesn't want any publicity yet, but . . .'