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.