Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (31 page)

   
This morning, Fay had gone out
soon after dawn into intermittent drizzle. She'd followed a milkman, at whom no
dogs had barked no matter how carelessly he clanked his bottles. She'd followed
a postman, whose trousers were unfrayed and who whistled as he walked up garden
paths to drop letters through letter-boxes and on to doormats, where they lay
unmolested by dogs.

   
She'd walked down by the river,
where there was a small stretch of parkland with swings for the children and no
signs warning dog owners not to allow their non-existent pets to foul the play
area.

   
Finally, at around 8.15, she'd
approached a group of teenagers waiting for the bus to take them to the
secondary school nine miles away.

   
'Does any of you have a dog?'

   
The kids looked at each other.
Some of them grinned, some shrugged and some just looked stupid.

   
'You know me, I'm a reporter. I
work for Offa's Dyke Radio. I need to borrow a dog for an item I'm doing. Can
any of you help me?'

   
'What kind of dog you want?'

   
'Any kind of dog. Doberman . .
. Chihuahua . . . Giant wire-haired poodle.'

   
'My sister, she had a dog
once.'
   
'What happened to it?'
   
'Ran away, I think.'
   
'We 'ad a dog, we did.'
   
'Where's it now?"
   
'Ran off.'

   
'I was your dog,
I'd
run off,' another kid said and the
first kid punched him on the shoulder.

   
'Listen, what about farm dogs?
Mr Preece, has he got a sheepdog?'

   
'Got one of them Bobcats.'
   
'What?'

   
'Like a little go-kart thing
with four-wheel drive. Goes over hills. You got one of them, you don't need no
sheepdog.'
   
'Yes,' Fay had said. 'I think I see.'

   
She didn't see at all.

Powys left Crybbe before seven and was back before ten, a changed man.

   
He wore a suit which was
relatively uncreased. His shoes were polished, his hair brushed. He was freshly
shaven.

   
He parked his nine-year-old
Mini well out of sight, in the old cattle market behind the square, and walked
across to the Cock, carrying a plausible-looking black folder under his arm.
Taking Rachel's advice.

   
'Don't
let him see you like that.
You have to meet his image of J. M. Powys, so if you can't look older, at least
look smarter. Don't let him see the car, he mustn't think you need the money -
he's always suspicious of people who aren't rich. And you don't know anything
about his plans.'

   
'Isn't Humble, the New Age
minder, going to tell him he caught me nosing around?'
   
'I think not.'

   
He entered the low-ceilinged
lobby of the Cock, where all the furniture was varnished so thickly that you
could hardly tell one piece from another. It was like sitting in a tray of dark
chocolates left on a radiator. Powys wedged himself into what he assumed to be
an oak settle, to wait for Rachel.

   
Guy Morrison would be here,
she'd told him, starting work on a documentary. He'd once worked with Guy on a
series of three-minute silly-season items on Ancient Mysteries of the West for
a Bristol-based regional magazine programme - J. M. Powys hired as the regular
'expert interviewee'. His clearest memory was of the day he'd suggested they
look beyond the obvious. Taking Guy down to Dartmoor to see a newly discovered
stone row believed to be orientated to the rising moon. He remembered the TV
reporter looking down with disdain at the ragged line of stones, none more than
eighteen inches high, barely below the level of his hand-stitched hiking boots.
'Let's move on,' Guy had said, affronted. Tm not doing a piece to camera in
front of
that
.'

   
Presently, the Cock's taciturn
licensee, Denzil George emerged from some sanctum and glanced across. He
displayed no sign of recognition. Still been in bed, presumably, when Powys was
sliding out of a side door into the alley just after six-thirty this morning.

   
'. . .do for you?" Denzil
said heavily. Powys thought of some shambling medieval innkeeper, black-jowled,
scowling, lumpen-browed.

   
'Nothing at all, thanks, mate.
I'm waiting for . . . ah, this lady, I think.'

   
Rachel had appeared on the
stairs, sleek in a dark-blue business suit. 'Mr Powys?'

   
'Good morning. Am I too early?'

   
'Only a little. We're terribly
glad you were able to make it. Mr George, I'm taking Mr Powys along to the
Court, so if Mr Goff calls in, tell him we've gone on ahead, will you? And
lunch as arranged, OK?'

   
Rachel tossed a brilliant smile
at the licensee, and Denzil stumped back into his lair, where Powys imagined
him breakfasting on a whole loaf of bread without slicing it.

'Very svelte,' said Rachel, surveying Powys on the steps outside.

   
'You're surprised, aren't you?
You thought I probably hadn't worn a suit since the seventies. You thought it
was going to be the wide lapels and the kipper tie.'

   
'Had a momentary fear of
flares, then decided you were too young,' Rachel said flatteringly. 'Come
along, J.M.'

   
A few minutes later he was
admiring her thighs pistoning in and out of the dark skirt, as she drove the
Range Rover, impatiently pumping the clutch, long fingers carelessly crooked
around the wheel.

   
'We're going to the Court?'
   
'Couple of hours before they all
arrive. I thought you'd like to see the set-up, or lack of one.'

   
She drove directly across the
square and then thrust the vehicle into a narrow fork beside the church. Powys
remembered coming out of this lane last night in the same seat, nursing his
nose, feeling foolish.

   
The nose still hurt. But this
morning, he thought, with a kind of wonder, he was feeling more . . . well,
more focused than he had in years.

   
And he wanted to know more
about Rachel.

   
She swung the Range Rover between
stone gateposts, briefing him about today's lunch. 'Informal gathering of the
people at the core of the venture. New Age luminaries. A few supportive locals
- newcomers, mostly. And Max's advisers.'

   
'Andy Boulton-Trow?'

   
Rachel parked in the courtyard.
'Of course, you know him.'

   
'All earth-mysteries people
know each other. Andy - we were at an college together, which is where
The Old Golden Land
started. Both got
into mystical landscapes. Auras around stone circles, Samuel Palmer moons over
burial mounds on the Downs. Andy was a mature student, he'd already been to
university.'

   
'He seems a very deep guy.
Laid-back.'
   
'I suppose so,' said Powys.

   
Rachel parked outside the
stable-block. 'Max says Boulton-Trow's knowledge of stones and prehistoric shamanic
rituals is second to none.'

   
'Yeah, possibly.'

   
'But you wrote the book,'
Rachel said.
   
Powys smiled. 'Andy professes to
despise commercial books on earth mysteries. Comes from not needing the money.'
   
'Private income?'

   
'Inherited wealth. Something
like that. Never discussed it.'

   
Rachel said, 'And who's Rose
Hart?'

   
'She took the pictures for the
book,' Powys said quietly.

   
Rachel made no move to get out
of the vehicle.

   
'There were four of us,' Powys
said, looking straight through the windscreen. 'Sometimes five. Andy and me and
Rose, who was studying photography, and Ben Corby, who thought of the title -
comes from an old Incredible String Band song - and flogged the idea to a
publisher.'

   
He paused. 'Rose was my
girlfriend. She's dead.'

   
'Don't talk about it if you
don't want to,' Rachel said. 'Come and look at the crumbling pile before the
others arrive.'

   
Rachel had keys to the Court.
One was so big it made her bag bulge, 'watch where you're stepping when we go
in. It's dark.'

   
Not too dark to find Rachel's
lips.
   
'Thanks,' he said quietly.

   
Rachel didn't move. The house
was silent around them.

Back from the town, around mid-morning, Fay came in quietly through the
kitchen door; Arnold didn't bark. He was shut in the kitchen with Rasputin, who
was glaring at him from a chair. Arnold seemed glad to see her; he wagged his
tail and planted his front paws on her sweater.
   
'Good boy,' Fay said.

   
Then she heard the wailing. A
sound which clutched at her like pleading fingers.
   
Dad?

   
'Stay there,' she hissed.
'Stay.'

   
Wailing. The only word for it.
Not the sound of a man in physical pain, not illness, not injury.

   
She moved quietly into the
hallway. The office door, two yards away, was ajar. Little was visible through
the gap; the curtains were drawn, as they might be, she thought, in a room
where a corpse is laid out.

   
Her movements stiff with dread,
Fay removed her shoes, padded to the door, and peeped in.

   
In the office, in the dead
woman's sitting-room, the drawn curtains screening him from the street. Canon
Alex Peters was sobbing his old heart out.

   
He was on his knees, bent over
the slender wooden arm of the fireside chair in which Grace Legge had seemed to
materialize. His head was bowed in his arms and his ample shoulders trembled
like a clifftop before an avalanche.

   
Fay just stood there. She ought
to know what to do, how to react, but she didn't. She'd never known her dad cry
before.
When he'd displayed emotions, they were always healthy, masculine emotions.
Bluff, strong, kindly stuff.

   
In fact, not emotions at all
really. Because, most of the time Alex, like many clergymen, was an actor in a
lot of little one-man playlets put on for the sick, the bereaved and the
hopeless.

   
He'd be mortified if he thought
she'd seen him like this.

   
Fay crept back across the hall.
It was so unbearably sad. So sad and so crazy.

   
So unhealthy.

   
So desperately wrong.

   
She moved silently back into
the kitchen and attached Arnold's clothes-line to his collar. 'Let's go for a
walk,' she whispered. 'Come back in an hour and make a lot of noise.'

   
As she slowly turned the
back-door handle, a trailing moan echoed from the office.

   
'I will,' Alex sobbed. 'I'll
get rid of her. I'll make her go.'

   
His quavering voice rose and
swelled and seemed to fill the whole house. A voice that, if heard in church,
would freeze a congregation to its pews, cried out, 'Just - please - don't hurt
her!'

   
Fay walked away from this,
quickly.

CHAPTER II

This
really was a
rope dangling from the steepest part of the roof. Powys could just about reach
its frayed end. 'Careful,' Rachel warned. 'You'll fall into the pit.'
   
The rope felt dry and stiff. 'This is
a touch of black humour?'

   
'Well, it's obviously not the
original rope, J.M. Somebody probably put it there to hold on to, while doing
repairs or something. Creepy up here, though, isn't it?'

   
The attic was vast. There were
small stabs of blinding daylight here and there, signifying holes in the roof
or missing slates. Underfoot, jagged gaps through which you could see the
boarded floor of the room beneath.

   
'I don't know why I brought you
up here, really.' Rachel said, 'I usually avoid this bit -
not
that I'm superstitious.'