Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (13 page)

   
But another animal was another
root in Crybbe.
And you don't want that,
Fay, you don't want any roots in Crybbe.

   
Bill Davies, the butcher, walked
past with fresh blood on his apron, and he stared at them.

   
Fay was fed up with this. She
stared back. Bill Davies looked away.

   
Maybe they were all afflicted
with this obsession about dogs fouling pavements. She'd have to buy one of
those poop-scoop things. On the other hand, did that kind of obsession really
seem like Crybbe, where apathy ruled?

   
'For God's sake, Arnie, make up
your mind.' They'd come to the square and he seemed to want to turn back. He
circled miserably around, dragging the clothes-line and winding it round the
legs of a woman bending over the tailgate of a Range Rover, shoving something
in the back.

   
'Oh hell, I'm really sorry. Look,
if you can stand still, I'll disentangle you. I'm very sorry.'

   
'No problem,' the woman said,
looking quite amused. She was the first person who hadn't stared at them, which
meant she must be from Off.

   
Of course she was - she was Max
Goff's PA, Ms Coolly Efficient.

   
'We're not used to each other,'
Fay explained, it's Henry Kettle's sheepdog, the poor chap who . . . I'm
looking after him.'

   
'Oh, yes.' Rachel Wade stepped
out of the loop of clothesline. 'You're from the radio.'

   
'We all have a living to make,'
Fay said and then, making the most of the encounter, 'Look, can I talk to you
some time? I'm being hassled by my boss to find out what's happening to the
Court.' That hurt, referring to Gavin Ashpole as a boss, which he wasn't and
was never going to be.

   
'Sure,' Rachel said, surprising
her.

   
'When?'

   
'Now if you like. We could go
over to the Court, Max is out seeing people.'
   
'Great.'

   
'Hop in then,' Rachel said. But
Arnold didn't want to. In the end Fay had to pick him up and dump him on the
back seat, where he flattened himself into the leather and panted and
trembled.

   
'Sorry about this.' Fay climbed
into the passenger seat. 'He's - not surprisingly - more than a bit paranoid.
He was in Henry's car when it . . . you know.'

   
'Oh dear, poor dog. I didn't
know about that.' Rachel started the engine, 'it's rather a mystery, isn't it.
About Mr Kettle. Do you think he'd been drinking?'

   
'I didn't know him very well. I
think a heart attack or stroke or something seems more likely, don't you?'

   
'He was a nice old man.' Rachel
swung the Range Rover off the square into the street that wriggled down past the
church, the graveyard on the right, a few cottages on the left. The street
narrowed and entered a wood, where the late afternoon sun was filtered away and
the colours faded almost to grey, 'I don't believe all that dowsing stuff. But
he was a nice old man.'

   
'Don't you? I thought . . .'

   
'Oh,
Max
does. Max believes it. Good God, yes. However, I don't get paid
to share his wilder obsessions. Well,
he
thinks I do . . .' Rachel exhaled a short, throaty laugh.

   
They came out of the wood. A
track to the left was barred by a gate with a metal sign. COURT FARM. Where the
Preece farmed. Jack, son of Jimmy, the Mayor, and Jack's two son She'd seen
Jack once, slinking almost furtively out of the church, his nightly duty accomplished.

   
'And what exactly is Mr Goff's
obsession with the Court?'

   
'I'll show you in a minute,'
Rachel said affably.

   
This was too easy. Fay was
suspicious. She watched Rachel Wade driving with a languid economy of movement,
like people drove in films, only you knew they weren't in real, moving vehicles.
This was the kind of woman who could change a wheel and make it look like a
ballet. Made you despair.

   
Rachel said, is that your
father, the old clergyman? Or your grandfather or something?'

   
'Father. You've met him?'

   
'In the Cock. We got into
conversation after my lighter fell off the bar and he picked it up.' Rachel
smiled, in fact, if he'd been considerably younger, I'd almost have thought . .
.'
   
Fay nodded wryly. 'The old
knocking-the-lighter-off-the-bar routine. Then he carries out a detailed survey
of your legs while he's picking it up. He's harmless. I think.'

   
'He's certainly a character.'
Rachel pulled up in a walled courtyard amid heaps of sand and builders' rubble.
Before them random grey-brown stones were settled around deepset
mullioned windows and a dusty oak door was half-open.

   
Fay took a breath.

   
'Crybbe Court,' Rachel said.
'But don't get too excited.' She snapped on the handbrake. 'Leave the dog in
the car, he won't like it. Nobody does, really, apart from historians, and even
they get depressed at the state of it.'

She wondered what had made her think it was going to be mellow and
warm-toned like a country house on a Christmas card.

   
'It's old,' she said.

   
'Elizabethan.'

   
She felt cold and folded her
bare arms. Outside, it was a fairly pleasant midsummer's day; in here, stark
and grim as dankest February.

   
Somehow, she'd imagined rich
drapes and tapestries and polished panelling. Probably because the only homes
of a similar period she'd visited had been stately homes or National Trust properties,
everything exuding the dull sheen of age and wealth, divided from the plebs by
brass railings and velvet ropes.

   
In Crybbe Court these days, it
seemed, only the rats were rich.

   
The room was large, stone-floored
and low-ceilinged, and apparently fortified against the sun. The only direct
light was from three small, high-set windows, not much more than slits. Bare
blue sky through crossed iron bars.

   
Fay said, 'I suppose it's logical
when you think about it, the period and everything, but I didn't imagine it
would be quite so . . .'

   
She became aware of a narrow, stone
staircase spiralling into a vagueness of cold light hanging from above like a
sheet draped over a banister.

   
'Ghastly,' Rachel said, 'is, I
think, the word you're groping for. Let's go upstairs. It's possibly a little
less oppressive.'

   
The spiral staircase opened
into a large chamber with mullioned windows set in two walls. Bars of dusty
sunshine fell short of meeting in the middle. It had originally been the main family
living-room, Rachel explained. 'Also, I'm told, the place where the local high
sheriff, a man named Wort, held out against the local populace who'd arrived to
lynch him. Have you heard that story?'

   
'I've heard the name, but not
the story.'

   
'Oh, well, he was a local
tyrant back in the sixteenth century. Known as Black Michael. Hanged men for
petty crimes after allowing their wives to appeal to his better nature, if you
see what I mean. Also said to have experimented on people before they died, in
much the same way as the Nazis did.'

   
'Charming.'

   
'In the end, the local people
decided they'd had enough.'

   
'What? The townsfolk of Crybbe
actually rebelled? What did they do, write "Wort Must Go" on the
lavatory wall?'

   
'Probably, for the first ten
years of atrocities. But in the end they really did come out to lynch him, all
gathered out there in the courtyard, threatening to burn the place down with
him in it if he didn't come out.'

   
'And did he?'

   
'No,' said Rachel. 'He went into
the attic and hanged himself from the same rafters from which he'd hanged his offenders.'

   
'And naturally,' Fay said, 'he
haunts the place.'

   
'Well, no,' Rachel said.
"He doesn't, actually. No stories to that effect anyway. And when Mr
Kettle toured the house, he said it was completely dead. As in vacant. Un-presenced,
or however you care to put it. Max was terribly disappointed. He had to console
himself with the thought of the hound bounding across his path one night.'

   
'What?'

   
'Black Michael's Hound. Nobody
ever sees Michael, but there is a legend about his dog. A big, black,
Baskerville-type creature said to haunt the lanes on the edge of town. It comes
down from the Tump.'

   
Fay thought at once of the old
lady who kept telephoning her, Mrs Seagrove. 'I didn't know about that.'

   
Rachel looked at her, as if
surprised anybody should want to know about it.

   
'When was it last seen?' Fay
asked.

   
'Who knows. The book Max found
the story in was published, I think, in the fifties. One of those "Legends
of the Border" collections. The more recent ones don't seem to have bothered
with it.'

   
Fay wondered if it would help
Mrs Seagrove to know about the legend. Probably scare her even more. Or maybe
Mrs Seagrove
did
know about it and had
either invented or imagined her own sighting, which would explain everything.
The problem with old ladies was you could never be quite sure of their state of
mind, especially the ones who lived alone.

   
She asked bravely, 'Are we
going up to the attic, then?'

   
'Certainly not,' Rachel said
firmly. 'For one thing, it's not terribly safe. The floor's pretty badly rotted
away up there and Max isn't insured against people breaking their necks. Unless
they've been hanged.'

   
Fay shivered and smiled and
looked around. 'Well,' she said. It could be wonderful, I suppose. If it was
done up.'

   
'With a million pounds or so
spent on it, perhaps.' Rachel prodded with a shoe and sent a piece of plaster
skating across
the dusty wooden floor, 'I can think of better things you could do with a
million pounds.'

   
'Has it been like this since -
you know - Tudor times?'

   
'Good God, no. At various times
... I mean, in the past century alone, it's been a private school, a hotel . .
. even an actual dwelling place again. If we had a torch you'd see bits of wiring
and the ruins of bathrooms. But nothing's ever lasted long. It was built as an Elizabethan
house, and that, in essence, is what it keeps reverting to.'

   
'And now?'

   
'No big secret. Max is a New Age
billionaire with a Dream.'
   
'You don't sound very impressed.'

   
Rachel stood in the centre of
the room and spread her hands. 'Oh God ... He wants to be King Arthur. He wants
to set up his Round Table with all kinds of dowsers and geomancers and spiritual
healers and other ghastly cranks. He's been quietly infiltrating them into the town
over the past year. And there'll be some kind of Max Goff Foundation, on a
drip-feed from Epidemic, hopefully with the blessing of the Charity Commissioners.
And people will get ludicrous grants to go off an search for their own pet Holy
Grails.'

   
'Sounds quite exciting,' said
Fay, but Rachel looked gloomy and rolled her eyes, her hands sunk deep into the
pockets of her Barbour.

   
'Money down the drain,' she
said.

   
'What's a ... a geomancer?'

   
'It's some sort of spiritual
chartered surveyor. Someone who works out where it's best to live to stay in
harmony with the Earth Spirit, whatever that is, to protect yourself and your
family against Evil Forces. Need I go on?'

   
There were passages leading off
the big room and Fay took one and found herself in a dark little bedchamber. It
was the first room she'd seen that was actually furnished. There was an old
chest under the pathetically inadequate window and a very small four-poster bed.

   
'Like a four-poster cot, isn't
it?' Rachel had drifted in after her. 'People were smaller in those days.'

   
It was no more than five feet
high and not much longer with very thick posts and an oak headboard with a
recessed ledge. On the ledge was a pewter candle-holder with a candle stub in
it. The drapes were some kind of cumbersome brocade thick as tarpaulin and
heavy with grease.