Crybbe (AKA Curfew)

by Unknown

  Tessa took her finger out of Warren's jeans, 'I waited for you.'

  'Had a job to do.'

  'What was so important?"

  'You'll find out,' Warren said.

  Tessa reached out and touched a white knuckle-bone.

  'Cold,' she said, it's nice and cold.'

  'It was cold in the river, too,' Warren said.

  Rachel lay in the brass bed. When he slid in gratefully beside her, she awoke.

  'J.M.?'

  'I couldn't put a light on. The power's off again.'

  He'd lit up Bell Street with the headlights, watching the small figure in bloodstained blue nylon walking to her door. When she was safely inside, he drove back into the lightless main street, where all the windows were blind eyes. Then down the hill and over the bridge. A tight right turn, and there was the perfect little riverside cottage. He'd almost expected it not to be there, like a dream cottage.

  The presence of Rachel in the bed reinforced a sense of home. Before she could ask, he told her where he'd been, poured it all out, the whole bizarre episode.

  'Arnold?' Rachel sat up in the darkness. 'Jonathon Preece shot Arnold?'

  He told her about the shotgun, how he'd come to pick it up from the grass.

  'I really wanted to kill him. I thought I had killed him at one point. I could feel myself pulling the triggers, both triggers, and then his chest ... It was as if time had skipped a beat, and I'd already shot him.'

  'You're overtired,' Rachel said.

  'Then the dog - Arnold - whimpered, and I was back in the second before I did it. Arnold was Henry Kettle's dog.'

  'I know.'

  'You don't know how badly I wanted to kill that guy.'

  'This doesn't seem like you, J.M.'

  'No,' Powys said, it didn't.'

  There was a window opposite the bed. Across the river, he saw a few sparse lights coming on, like candles on a cake.

  'Power's back.'

  'And you're a hero, J.M.,' Rachel said, moulding her body into his. 'Although you'll be a marked man in Crybbe if anyone finds out.'

  PART FIVE

  You won't need to worry and you won't have to cry

  Over in the old golden land.

  Robin Williamson

  From the album

  'Wee Tarn and the Big Huge'

  CHAPTER I

  No, don't move 'im yet, Gomer.'

  Jack Preece ambled across the field to where Gomer Parry and his nephew, Nev, were preparing to get the bulldozer back on the lorry.

  'Don't speak to me, Jack.' Gomer didn't turn round. 'Embarrassed? Humiliated, more like!'

  'Aye, well, I'm sorry, Gomer.'

  'Sorry? You bloody should be sorry, Jack Preece. Never before have Gomer Parry Plant Hire failed to carry out a contract. Never! I should 'ave told your dad where 'e could stick 'is . . .

  'Only, see, the district council's 'avin' a bit o' trouble on the new landfill site over Brynglas,' Jack Preece said. 'Need of an extra bulldozer, quickish, like. Three days' work, sure t'be.'

  Gomer Parry turned shrewd eyes on Jack Preece, standing in the damp old field, between downpours, his back to the Tump and the famous wall - still intact, except for the bits of masonry dislodged when old Kettle had his crash.

  'Reckon you can do it, Gomer?'

  Gomer shot him a penetrating took through his wire-rimmed glasses. 'Something goin' on yere, Jack. Don't know what it is, but there's something.'

  'Aye, well,' Jack Preece said, eyes averted. 'No need to worry about your reputation, Gomer, anyway. You'll be all right. We looks after our own, isn't it.'

  He started to walk away then turned back. You seen Jonathon about?'

  'Not lately,' Gomer said.

  'Boy didn't come 'ome last night.'

  'Likely 'avin' 'is end away somewhere,' said Gomer. 'Only young once, Jack.'

  'Aye,' said Jack. Sure t'be.'

  Powys drove back to Hereford, loaded up a couple of suitcases, a box of books, his Olivetti and two reams of A4.

  'Aha,' said Barry, the osteopath from upstairs. 'Ensnared. He's got you. I knew he would. What was the deciding factor Powys. The money?'

  Powys shook his head.

  The women?'

  Powys said, 'Just hold that door open for me, would you?'

  'I knew it! It's the Summer of Love in Crybbe. You always were a sucker for a cheesecloth cleavage.'

  'Barry,' said Powys, 'don't you have somebody's spine to trample on?'

  'Good luck, Joe,' Annie said wistfully.

  'What d'you mean "good luck''?' He'd noticed the crystals had been joined on the counter by a small display of astrological amulets in copper. Where the hell had she found those?

  'You're going back,' Annie said.

  'I am not "going back".'

  Annie and Barry smiled knowingly to each other.

  During the return drive it rained. It rained harder the nearer he got to Crybbe. Powys did some thinking, images wafting across his mind with the rhythm of the windscreen wipers.

  Seriously unseasonal rain was throwing the river over the banks like rumpled bedclothes. He saw an image of a shotgun getting slowly pushed downstream, its barrels clogged with corrosive silt. Unless Jonathon had managed to retrieve it. Would he ever find out? And would Jonathon report him to the police?

  Unlikely. He hoped. Well, it was a question of image: the farmer who let a townie in a suit pinch his gun and toss it in the river. They'd love that in the saloon bar of the Cock, it would go down in the folk history of the town.

  Rachel was spending the morning at the Court, organizing workmen putting finishing touches to the stable-block. He thought of going to see Mrs Seagrove.

  He carried his suitcases into the cottage. It was a good cottage, a better home than his flat. It had wonderful views over the river - slopping and frothing feverishly, after hours of heavy rain.

  He couldn't stay here for long though. Not on false pretences. There was no way he was going to write the New Age Gospel According to Goff.

  And the sequence by the river last night kept replaying itself. The feeling of the warm gun, the knowledge that he was not only capable of killing but wanted to kill. The bar of shadow across the grass and the river, all the way from the Tump, where Henry Kettle died.

  And Arnold, Henry Kettle's dog. A dowser's dog, Henry used to say, isn't like other dogs.

  It wasn't raining any more. Through the large window in the living-room, he saw the clouds had shifted like furniture pushed to the corners of the room, leaving a square of light. Fifty yards away, the river, denied its conquest of the meadow, slurped sulkily at its banks. On the other side of the river, in the semi-distant field - probably Goff's land - Powys saw two tiny figures, one holding a couple of tall poles.

  He thought, the dodmen. Alfred Watkins's term for the prehistoric surveyors who had planned out the leys, erecting standing stones and earthworks at strategic points. The surveyors would, Watkins imagined, have held up poles to find out where tall stones would be visible as waymarkers. Now modern dodmen were at work, recreating prehistoric Crybbe in precisely the way it was presumed to have been done four thousand or so years ago.

  From here, Powys couldn't even make out whether they were dodmen or dodwomen. But he was prepared to bet one of them would be Andy Boulton-Trow.

  Calm, laid-back, omniscient old Andy.

  I think Joe ought to present himself to the Earth Spirit in the time honoured fashion. . .

  . . . the very least you can do, mate . . .

  . . . think of it as a kind of appeasement.

  Now Andy was personally supervising the operation to open up the town of Crybbe to the Earth Spirit.

  On past experience of this irresponsible bastard, did that sound like good news?

  'I think,' Hereward Newsome said, almost shaking with triumph, 'that I've cracked it.'

  'You saw him?'

  'He's gone back to London. I saw Rachel Wade. She said go ahead.'

  Hereward took off
his jacket, hung it over the back of the antique-pine rocking-chair by the Aga, sat down and began to roll up his shirt-sleeves. 'But we need to move fast.'

  'Why?' If Jocasta wasn't as ecstatic as she might have been this was because Hereward's news had eclipsed her own small coup.

  'I mean a buying trip. To the West Country, I'd suggest and pronto. There's Ernest Wilding at Street, Devereux in Penzance, Sally Gold in Totnes, Melanie Dufort in . . . where is it now, some place near Frome? All specializing in megalith paintings - or they were. And there have to be more. What happened to the Ruralists? Where's Inshaw these days?"

  'Not far from here, I heard.'

  "Oh.' He stood up. 'Anyway, I'm going to make some calls now. Strike while Goff's hot. If we go down there this weekend fetch a few back to put in front of him on Tuesday when he comes back.'

  Hereward paced the kitchen. Any second now, Jocasta thought, he'll start rubbing his hands. Still, it was good news.

  'You ought to see his proposed exhibition hall. Rachel showed me this huge barn he's going to rebuild. It'll be a sort of interpretive centre for prehistoric Crybbe and the whole earth mysteries thing. He's looking for maybe seventy paintings. Seventy! Darling, if we can provide half of those we're talking . . . let's be vulgar, if we can get the kind of stuff he wants, we're talking megabucks.'

  'Why can't we go next weekend?"

  'Look ... so we close the gallery for a day. What have we got to lose, with Goff out of town? And the way things have been, can we afford to delay?'

  'Hereward!' God, he was so irritating. 'What about Emmanuel Walters?'

  'Oh.' Hereward sat down. 'It's Sunday, isn't it?'

  'Ye-es,' Jocasta said, exasperated, 'it is. And it's a bloody good job one of us is efficient.' Adding nonchalantly, 'I've even arranged a celebrity to open the exhibition.'

  'Oh yes?'

  Jocasta's lips cemented into a hard line. Even if it was a member of the Royal Family it wouldn't impress Hereward at the moment, still on his Max Goff high.

  'It's Guy Morrison.'

  'Oh. Er, super. Didn't he used to be . . . ?'

  'He's producing and presenting the documentary the BBC are doing on Max Goff and Crybbe. He seems very pleasant, he agreed at once. I think he's at rather a loose end. He's spending the weekend here, getting to know the town. Getting to know the people who count.'

  'Not much use coming to The Gallery, then.' Hereward guffawed insensitively.

  Jocasta scowled. That was it. 'I know,' she said, 'why don't you go to the West Country on your own? I'll stay behind and handle the private view.'

  'Yes, I suppose it makes sense.'

  Jocasta knew it made no sense at all. Good old Hereward, always anxious to be accepted by artists as a friend, someone who understood the creative process, would spend hundreds of pounds more than she would. But at least she'd get rid of him for a couple of days. Increasingly, Jocasta had been thinking back with nostalgia to the days when they'd had separate jobs and only met for a couple of hours in the evening . . .'

  Hereward said - a formality, she thought - Will you be all right on your own?'

  Just for a minute she thought about last right and those drawings and the sticky feeling on her hands which had proved, when the lights came on, to be no more than perspiration.

  'I shall be fine,' she said.

  Mrs Seagrove brought him tea in one of her best china cups - as distinct, she pointed out, from the mugs she took out to the lorry drivers in the layby.

  'I thought I'd seen the last of you, Joe. How's the doggie.

  'We think he's going to be OK.'

  'That's good.' She was wearing today a plaid skirt of different tartan. I'm not Scottish,' she said. 'Frank and I used to go up there every autumn, and we'd visit these woollen mills.'

  There was a picture of Frank on the sideboard. He was beaming and holding up a fish which might have been a trout.

  'He was thrilled when we got this place, so near the river. He joined the angling club. It was a shame. Turned out to be not a very good river for fishing. And the problem was, Joe, Frank could see the river, but I could only see that.'

  She sat with her back to the big, horizontal window with its panoramic view across the river to the woods and, of course the Tump.

  'About that . . .' Powys said.

  'I thought you'd come about that.' Mrs Seagrove held the teacup on her kilted knees, flat and steady as a good coffee table. 'Well, I'm glad somebody's interested. Mrs Morrison is always too busy. Unless I want to talk about it on the radio she says. Well, I said, would you make a spectacle of yourself on the wireless?'

  'Last night, you said something was coming at us. From the Tump?'

  'People are fascinated by these things. I'm not. Are you, Joe?'

  'Well, I used to be. Still am, in a way, but they worry me now.'

  'Quite right. I'm not interested, I've never been interested.

  'It nearly always happens to people who are not interested,' said Powys.

  'I think I know when it comes now, what time, so I draw the curtains and turn the telly up, but some nights I just have to go and look, just to get it out of the way. I'm scared to death, Joe, but I look, just to get it out of the way.'

  'And what time is it?'

  'Usually after nine o'clock and before they ring that bell in the church. Not always. It's early sometimes, almost full daylight - although it goes dark all of a sudden, kind of thing, like it's as if it's bringing its own darkness, do you know what I mean? And just once - it was that night the poor man crashed his car - just once, it was later, about half-tennish. Just that once.'

  Powys said, 'It's a dog, isn't it? A big, black dog.'

  'Yes, dear,' said Mrs Seagrove very' quietly. 'Yes, it is.'

  'How often have you . . . ?'

  'Seven or eight times, I've seen it. It always goes the same way. Coming from the . . . the mound thing.'

  'Down from the mound, or out of the mound?'

  'I couldn't honestly say, dear. One second it's not there, the next it is, kind of thing. I'm psychic, I suppose. I never wanted to be psychic, not like this.'

  'Is it - I'm sorry to ask all these questions - but is it obviously a dog? It couldn't be anything else?'

  'You ask as many questions as you like, dear. I've been finding out about you, I rang a friend of mine at the library in Dudley. No, that's an interesting point you make there - is it really a dog? Well, I like dogs. I wouldn't be frightened of a dog, would I? Even a ghost dog. Naturally, it'd be a shock, the first time you saw it, kind of thing, but no, I don't think I'd be frightened. Oh dear, I wish you hadn't asked me that now, it's disturbed me, that has, Joe.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'I don't want to stay here. I'd be off tomorrow, but how much would I get for this, even if I managed to sell it?'

  if you really wanted to go quickly,' Powys said, 'I think I could find you a buyer. You'd get a good price, too.'

  'Not you?'

  'Good God, no, not me. I couldn't afford it, even if. . . Look, leave it with me for a day or two.'

  'I don't know what to say, dear.' Mrs Seagrove's eyes were shining, in a way, I'd feel bad about somebody having this place. But they might not be psychic, mightn't they?'

  'Or they might be quite interested.'

  'Oh no,' she said. 'Nobody's interested in evil, are they?'

  CHAPTER II

  Guy dropped by.

  She opened the back door, thinking it was the milkman come for his money, as was usual on a Saturday.

  'Fay. Hi.'

  'Oh, my God.'

  She wouldn't have chosen to say that, but Guy seemed pleased at the reaction. Perhaps he saw it as an urgent suppression of instinctive desire.

  'Thought I'd drop by, as I had some time on my hands.' Incandescent smile. 'Spending the weekend here, getting acclimatized.'

  New crowns, Fay spotted. Good ones, of course.

  'Crew's gone back, but I've been invited to open some shitty art exhibition tomorrow
night. Must be a bit short on celebrities in these parts if they want me.' Guy laughed.

  Still a master of double-edged false modesty, Fay thought, wishing she'd changed, combed her hair, applied some rudimentary make-up.

  And then despising herself utterly for wishing all that.

  'Come in, Guy. Dad's gone for a walk; he'll be devastated to have missed you.'

  'How is he?' Guy stepped into the hall and looked closely at everything, simulating enormous interest in the chipped cream paintwork, the wallpaper with its faded autumn leaves, the nylon carpet beneath his hand-stitched, buffed, brown shoes.

  He wore a short, olive, leather jacket, soft as a very expensive wallet.

  'We used to have some fascinating chats, your father and I, when I was in Religious Programmes.'

  'I expect he learned quite a lot,' Fay said, going through to the kitchen.

  'That was how I swung the Crybbe thing, you know. It cut plenty of ice with Max Goff, me being an ex-religious-affairs producer. Indicated a certain sensitivity of touch and an essentially serious outlook. Nothing crude, no juvenile piss-taking.'

  'Tea or coffee?' Fay said. 'Why did you leave Religious Programmes, anyway? Seemed like a good, safe earner to me. Just about the only situation where you can work in television and still get to heaven.'

  'Well, you know, Fay, there came a time when it was clear that Guy Morrison had said all he needed to say about religion. Is it ground coffee or instant?'

  'Would I offer you instant coffee, Guy?'

  'I don't like to make presumptions about people's financial positions,' Guy said sensitively.

  'We're fine.'

  'I did tell you, didn't I, that I'd probably have brought you in as researcher, except for this J.M. Powys problem?'

  'Thanks, but I doubt I'd've had time, anyway. Pretty busy, really.' The handle came off the cup she was holding - that'd teach her to lie twice.

  'He was foisted on me, Fay. Nothing I could do.'

  'I met him last night. Seemed a nice bloke.'

  Just before lunch, J. M. Powys had phoned to ask how Arnold was. Comfortable, Fay had said, having been on the phone to the vet as early as was reasonable. Stable. As well as can be expected.