Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (11 page)

   
Come on, you old bastard. Ask
me
why
it's so flaming special.

   
Goff waited, keeping his cool.
Very commendably, he thought, under the circumstances. Then, after a while,
Jimmy Preece made his considered response.

   
'Well, well,' he said. And was
silent again.

   
Max Goff felt his nails penetrate
the brown vinyl chair-arms. 'I don't mean to be insulting here, Mr Mayor,' he
said loudly, with a big, wide, shiny smile - a 1961 Cadillac of a smile. 'But you
have to face the fact that this little town is in
deep shit
.'

   
He let the words - and the
smile - shimmer in the room.

   
'Terminally depressed,' he
said. 'Economically sterile.'

   
Still the Mayor said nothing.
But his eyes shifted sideways like the eyes of a ventriloquist's doll, and Goff
knew he was last getting through.

   
'OK.' He pulled on to his knee
a green canvas bag. 'I'm gonna lay it all down for you.'

   
Yeah, there it was. A hint of
anxiety.

   
'Even a century ago,' Goff
stared the old guy straight in the eyes, 'this town was home to over five
thousand people. How many's it got now?'

   
Mr Preece looked into the
fireplace. Breathed in as if about to answer, and then breathed out without a
word.

   
'I'll tell you. At the last census,
there were two thousand nine hundred and sixty-four. This is in the town
itself, I'm not including the outlying farms.'

   
From the canvas bag, Goff took
a pad of recycled paper opened it. Began to read the figures. 'Crybbe once had
a grammar school and two primary schools. It's now down to single primary and
the older kids get bussed to a secondary school eight miles away, yeah?'

   
Mr Preece nodded slowly and
then carried on nodding as his head was working loose.

   
'Even as recently as 1968,' Goff
said, 'there were four police men in Crybbe. How many now?'

   
Mr Preece's lips started to
shape a word and then went slack again as Goff zapped him with more statistics.
'Back in the fifties, there were three grocer's shops, two butcher's, a couple of
chemist's, and there was . . .'

   
Mr Preece almost yelled, 'Where
you gettin' all this from?'
   
But Goff was coming at him like a train
now, and there was no stopping him.

   
'. . . a regular assize court
earlier this century, and now what? Not even petty sessions any more. No
justices, no magistrates. Used to be a self-sufficient local authority,
covering wide area from Crybbe and employing over seventy people. Now there's
your town council. Not much more than a local advisory body that employs
precisely one person part-time, that's Mrs Byford, the clerk who lakes the
notes at your meetings.'

   
'Look, what . . . what's all
this about?' Jimmy Preece was shrinking back into his chair, Goff leaning
further towards him with every point he made, but deciding it was time to cool
things a little.

   
'Bottom line, Mr Mayor, is you
got a slowly ageing population and nothing to offer the young to keep them
here. Even the outsiders are mostly retired folk. Crybbe's already climbed into
its own coffin and it's just about to pull down the lid.'

   
Goff sat back, putting away his
papers, leaving Jimmy Preece, Mayor of Crybbe, looking as tired and wasted as
his town. 'Mr Mayor, how about you call a public meeting? Crybbe and me, we
need to talk.'

In the gallery itself -
her
place - Jocasta Newsome was starting to function. At last. God, she'd thought
it was never going to begin. She walked quickly across the quarry-tiled floor -
tap, tap, tap of the high heels, echoing from wall to wall in the high-roofed
former chapel, a smart brisk sound she loved.

   
'Look, let me show you this.
It's something actually quite special. '

   
'No, really,' The customer
raised a hand and a faint smile.
'This
is what I came for.'

   
'Oh, but . . .' Jocasta fell
silent, realizing that a £1,000 sale was about to go through without recourse
to the skills honed to a fine edge during her decade in International
Marketing. She pulled herself together, smiled and patted the hinged frame of
the triptych, it is rather super, though, isn't it?'

   
'Actually,' the customer said,
turning her back on the triple image of the Tump, I think it's absolutely
dreadful.'

   
'Oh.' Jocasta was genuinely thrown
by this, because the customer was undoubtedly the
right kind
: Barbour, silk scarf and that offhand, isn't-life-tedious
sort of poise she'd always rather envied.

   
The woman revived her faint
smile. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. My boss thinks it's wonderful, and
that's all that matters. I suppose it's the subject I'm not terribly taken with.
It's only a large heap of soil, after all."

   
Jocasta mentally adjusted the
woman's standing; she had a boss. Dare she ask who he was? 'I'll pa . . . I'll
have it packaged for you.'

   
'Oh, don't bother, I'll just toss
it in the back of the jeep. Haven't far to go.'
How
far exactly? Jocasta asked silently, directing a powerful ray
of naked curiosity at the woman. It usually worked.

The door closed behind him. Max Goff stood a moment on the sunlit step,
Crybbe laid out before him.

   
Jimmy Preece's retirement cottage
was a fitting place for the Mayor to live, at the entrance to the narrow road
off the little square, the one which led eventually 10 the Court - Jimmy Preece
being the head of the family which had lived at Court Farm since
sixteen-something at least.

   
It was fitting also for the
Mayor because it was at the top of the town, with the church of St Michael on
the right. And you could see the buildings - eighteenth, seventeenth century and
earlier - staggering, gently inebriated, down the hill to the river, with its
three-arched bridge.

   
From up here Goff could easily
discern the medieval street pattern - almost unchanged, he figured. The newer
buildings - the school, the council housing and the small industrial estate -
had been tacked on and could, no doubt, just as easily be flicked away.

   
It was bloody perfect.
   
Unspoiled.

   
And this was precisely
because
it was not a wealthy town,
because
it was down on its luck and had
been for a long, long time. Because it was not linked to the trunk roads
between Wales and the Midlands and was not convenient, never would be. No use
at all for commuting to anywhere.

   
And yet, beneath this town, the
dragon slumbered.

She was going to ring Darwyn Hall, the artist, immediately but Hereward
walked in, still wearing his artisan's outfit and carrying a mug of coffee. The
mug was one of the misshapen brown things they'd felt obliged to buy from the
Crybbe Pottery.

   
'Who was that?'

   
Jocasta was sitting at her desk
in a corner of the gallery, putting the cheque away. It was a customized
company cheque, the word
Epidemic
faded
across it like a watermark. 'A sale, of course,' she said nonchalantly.

   
'Good God.' Hereward looked
around to see which of the pictures had gone. 'Picking it up later, are they?'

   
'You should be looking in the
window.' Jocasta just couldn't hold her cool any longer and an awful smirk of
delight was spreading over her face like strawberry jam.

   
'You're joking,' Hereward said,
stunned. He strode to the window and threw back the shutters. 'Good grief!' He
turned back to Jocasta. 'Full price?'

   
'This is not a bloody discount
store, darling.'

   
'Stone me,' said Hereward. 'The
triptych. Just like that? I mean, who . . . ?'

   
Jocasta waited a second or two,
adjusted the Celtic brooch at her shoulder and then casually hit him with the
big one.
   
'Max Goff.'

   
'Gosh.' Hereward pit down his cup.
'So it's true, then. He
has
bought
the Court.'

   
'Sent his personal assistant to
collect it,' Jocasta said. 'Rachel Wade.'

   
'This is far from bad news,'
Hereward said slowly, 'in fact, this could be the turning point.'

Mrs Preece waited across the square with her shopping bag until she saw
the large man in the white suit stride out past the delphiniums. He didn't, she
noticed, close the garden gate behind him. She watched him get into his fancy
black car and didn't go across to the house until she couldn't even hear its noise
any more.

   
Jimmy was still sitting in the
parlour staring at the wall.

   
Mrs Preece put down her
shopping bag and reached over Jimmy to the top of the television set, where the
onion was sitting in its saucer.

   
'You'll be late for your
drink,' she said.

   
'I'm not going today. I 'ave to
talk to the clerk before she goes back to the library.'

   
'What was he after?' demanded
Mrs Preece, standing there holding the saucer with the onion on it.

   
'He wants us to call a public meeting.'

   
'Oh, he does, does he? And
who's he to ask for a public meeting?'

   
'An interferer," Jimmy
Preece said. 'That's what he is.'

   
Mrs Preece said nothing.

   
'I don't like interferers,'
Jimmy Preece said.

   
There was nothing his wife
could say to that. She walked through to the kitchen, holding the saucer before
her at arm's length as if what it had on it was not a peeled onion but a dead rat.

   
In the kitchen she got out a
meat skewer, a big one, nearly a foot long, and speared the onion, the sharp
point slipping easily into its soft, moist, white flesh.

   
Then she took it across to the
Rayburn and opened the door to the fire compartment. With a quick stab and a
shiver - partly f revulsion, partly satisfaction - she thrust the onion into
the flames and slammed the door, hard.

CHAPTER V

This may seem an odd question,' the vicar of Crybbe said after a good
deal of hesitation, 'but have you ever performed an exorcism?'
   
The question hung in the air for quite
a while.
   
Sunk into his armchair in Grace's
former sitting-room, Canon Alex Peters peered vaguely into the thick soup of
his past.
Had
he done an exorcism?
Buggered if he could remember.

   
The sun was so bright now - at
least
suggestive
of warmth - that
Alex had stripped down to his washed-out Kate Bush T-shirt, the letters in Bush
stretched to twice the size of those in Kate by the considerable belly he'd put
on since the doctor had ordered him to give up jogging. On his knees was a
fiendish-looking black tomcat which Grace had named after some famous Russian.
Chekhov? Dostoevsky? Buggered if he could remember that either.

   
'Ah, sorry, Murray. Yes,
exorcism. Mmm.'

   
What should he say? East
Anglia? Perhaps when he was in charge of one of those huge, terrifying, flint
churches in Suffolk . . . Needed to be a bit careful here.

   
'Ah! I'll tell you what it was,
Murray - going back a good many years this. Wasn't the full bell, book and
candle routine, as I remember. More of a quickie, bless-this-house operation.
Actually,
I think I made it up as I went along.'

   
The Revd Murray Beech raised an
eyebrow.

   
Alex said, 'Well, you know the
sort of thing ... "I have reason to believe there's an unquiet spirit on
the premises, so,
 
in the name of the
Management, I suggest you leave these decent folk alone and push off back where
you came from, there's a good chap." '

   
The Revd Murray Beech did not
smile.