Crybbe

CHAPTER IX

Grace's house was just an ordinary cottage in a terraced row which, for some reason, began in stone and ended in brick. Fay could pick it out easily because it was the only one in the row with a hanging basket over the front door. As hanging baskets went, this one wasn't subtle; she kept it bursting with large, vulgar blooms and watered them assiduously because this hanging basket was a symbol of something she was trying to say to Crybbe.

There was no light and no sound from inside, and she thought at first there must have been another blasted power cut. Then a light blinked on and off next door, and she heard a television from somewhere.

'He's gone to the pub,' she told Arnold. Most nights her dad would stroll over to the Cock for a couple of whiskies and one of their greasy bar-snacks.

She would wait up for him. Because tonight they were going to have this thing out. By the end of the week, no argument, there was going to be a 'For Sale' sign next to the hanging basket. And she would start work on the Goff documentary, which Radio Four were definitely going to commission. And Offa's Dyke Radio, the Voice of the Marches, could start looking for another stringer to justify the Crybbe Unattended.

But when Fay marched into the office, she found a note on her editing table informing her that Canon Alex Peters had escaped to bed.

Not feeling terrifically well, to be honest. Having an early night, OK? So if you must have that dog in the house, keep the bugger quiet!

Fay smiled – she knew he'd come around – then frowned at the postscript.

Oh yes, Guy rang. Wants you to ring him back.

Bloody Guy. Did she really need this on top of everything?

She turned the note over in case there was an addendum re Guy. Eight years ago, her dad had been the only person with the perception to warn her off, everyone else having congratulated her, in some kind of awe, before they'd even met Guy in the flesh – one friend (you never forgot remarks like this) saying, 'You… You and Guy Morrison'

Never mind. All in the past. Especially Guy.

No regrets?

You had to be kidding.

Except he would keep phoning. As if she were just another one of his contacts – Oh, hey, listen, I'm going to be in your part of the world next week. Buy you a drink?

Fay sat down at the editing table. Rachel had drunk most of the wine with no discernible effects, while Fay had consumed less than a third of the bottle and now the room was sliding about. In the light from the Anglepoise it still looked very Grace, this room: H-shaped tiled fireplace and, above it, an oval mirror in a thick gilt frame. On the mantelpiece was a clock with a glass case revealing a mechanism which looked like a pair of swinging testicles in brass.

This room – the whole house – was frozen in time, in a none-too-stylish era. Round about the time, in fact, when Fay's dad had split up with Grace and returned to her mother. It was as if Grace had given up after that – certainly she hadn't married until the Canon had come back into her life. She seemed to have lived quietly in Crybbe with her sister, until the sister died. Worked quietly in the library.

A quiet woman. A Crybbe woman. As Fay understood it, she'd been working in Hereford, for the diocese, when she'd had her fling with Alex.

'How could she come back here'' Fay said aloud, and picked up the phone to call Guy. Then put it back. She'd caught sight of Arnold, who was looking up at her in his unassuming way, one ear pricked, the other flopped over.

'Arnold, I'm sorry… What do you feel like for dinner?'

He may have wagged his tail, but she couldn't be sure, it was that kind of tail.

The kitchen had knotty-pine cupboards and pink-veined imitation-marble worktops, one of which bore her dad's beloved microwave. Arnold accepted stewed steak from a can, served on one of Grace's best china plates. When he'd finished. Fay let him out in the small back garden, where it was almost fully dark. There was no sign of Rasputin or Pushkin, his lieutenant. They'd be out hunting in the endless fields beyond the garden fence.

And in this pursuit they were obviously not alone. Somewhere out there a light-ball bobbed, possibly following the line of a hedge which was said to mark the old border between Wales and England. (Nobody in this town ever spoke of being English or Welsh because, at various times in its undistinguished history, Crybbe had been in both countries.)

Fay watched the light for several minutes, listening. Illegal badger-digging was, she'd heard, one of the less-publicized local recreations. Nasty, vicious, cruel. But nobody had ever been prosecuted locally. She'd often wondered how Sergeant Wynford Wiley would react if she rang him up one night and directed him to a spot where it was actually taking place: spurts of squealing, scuffling and snuffling as the terriers were sent into the soil to rip the badgers from their set. There was a man who kept a pack of terriers on a farm two or three miles away, ostensibly for hunting foxes. Fay wished she could nail the swine.

But she suspected that, even if it was three o'clock in the morning when she rang, Wynford would claim a prior appointment.

The countryside. Where so many pastimes were sour and furtive. And tolerated.

Arnold trotted in from the garden.

Fay was very tired. She laid out a thick mat under her editing table and folded an old blanket on top it. 'I don't know what you're used to, Arnold, but the management will listen sympathetically to any complaints in the morning.'

Arnold sat quietly next to the mat. Apart from the episode in the square, he hadn't seemed a very demonstrative dog.

Fay brought him a bowl of water. 'I'm going to shut you in, Arnold. Because of the cats. OK?'

She scribbled a note to pin on the door, telling her father not to go into the office, if, as happened occasionally, he couldn't sleep and came down. And don't let any CATS in there!

Then she went to bed.

She never put on the bedroom light; the room looked squalid enough by daylight. It was almost as claustrophobic as the Crybbe Unattended Studio, and its wallpaper had faded to brown. Fay would have redecorated the place, but she wasn't staying, was she?

They weren't staying.

The bathroom had been modernized, with characteristic taste. A bath, shower and washbasin in livid pink and black.

Fay washed.

She looked in the mirror as she wiped the face people had been amazed at Guy Morrison falling for.

Guy used to say she should spell her name F-e-y, because she looked like a naughty elf. It had seemed like a kind of compliment at the time – she used to be naive like that. Especially where Guy was concerned.

And she wasn't going to waste any time speculating about what Guy might want, because the answer was no.

Snapping off the bathroom light, she found her way back to bed by the diffused rays of the midsummer moon – very nearly full, but trapped like a big silver pickled onion in a cloud sandwich.

She lay awake for a long time in her single divan, thinking about the curfew and the furtive figure in the hedge, about Henry Kettle and Arnold and the wall. Splat.

Horrible.

How did it happen? There'd be a post-mortem, forensic tests and an inquest, but only Arnold would ever really know, and he was only a dog.

'… You'll get that dog out of yere… '

Very sympathetic people in Crybbe. Very caring. Wonderful, warm-hearted country folk.

Miserable bastards.

Eventually, Fay fell asleep with the moon in her eyes – she awoke briefly and saw it, all the clouds gone, and she remembered that sleeping with direct moonlight on your face was supposed to send you mad. She giggled at that and went back to sleep and dreamed a midsummer night's dream in which she was lying in bed and Arnold was howling downstairs.

Oh no!

Fay flung the covers aside and sat up in bed.

Arnold's howling seemed to filter up from below, like slivers of light coming up through the cracks in the floorboards. It probably would be even louder from the Canon's bedroom, which was directly over the office.

She got out of bed and crept to the top of the stairs, hissing, 'Shut it, Arnold, for God's sake!'

Bare-footed, Fay moved downstairs. It was bloody chilly for a midsummer's night, especially when you were wearing nothing but a long T-shirt with several holes in it.

At the bottom of the stairs she stopped and turned back, picking up what she hoped was the sound of her dad's snoring. She ran a hand over the wall in search of the light switch, but when she found it and pressed, nothing happened. Everything Hereward Newsome had ever said about those cretins at the electricity company was dead right.

When she opened the office door, Arnold shot out and she caught him and he leapt into her arms and licked her face. 'Don't try and get round me,' she whispered. 'You are not sleeping on my bed.'

But when she carried him back into the office, he whimpered and jumped out of her arms and she went back and found him standing by the front door, ears down, tail down, quivering.

'Oh, Arnold…'

Did dogs have nightmares? Had he been reliving last night: an almighty crunch, an explosion of glass, his master's head in a shower of blood?

'I know, Arnold.' Patting him. 'I know.' His coat felt matted, almost damp. Did dogs sweat?

Christ, he couldn't be bleeding, could he? She picked him up and lugged him back into the office, automatically tipping the light switch by the door.

Damn! Damn! Damn!

'Arnold!' He'd squirmed out of her arms again and run away into the hall.

Fay clutched helplessly at the air. Torch… Candle.. Anything. God, it was cold. Moonlight was sprinkled over the room, like frost. The light twinkled on the twisting testicular mechanism of the clock on the mantelpiece, fingered the mirror's ornate, gilt frame, quietly highlighting everything that was part of then, while the now things, the trestle editing table and the Revox were screened by shadow. As though in another dimension.

Everything was utterly still.

Get me, she thought, out of here. Out of this sad, forsaken house, out of this fossilized town.

Then a sudden, most unearthly sound uncurled from the fireplace. Like a baby's cry of joy, but also, she thought, startled and shivering, also like an owl descending delightedly on its prey.

It came again and it sang with an unholy pleasure and she saw Rasputin sitting massively in the hearth like an Egyptian temple cat on a sarcophagus.

Rasputin's emerald eyes suddenly flared, and he sprang.

Fay gasped and went backwards, clutching at the wall involuntarily closing her eyes against imagined flashing claws.

But the huge cat was not coming at her.

When she looked again, he'd landed solidly in a beam of pallid moonlight on the varnished mahogany arm of the fireside chair, and he was purring.

In the chair Grace Legge sat rigidly, her brittle teeth bared in a dead smile and eyes as white and cold as the moon.