Crybbe

CHAPTER IV

The police station was at the southern end of the town centre, just before the road sloped down to the three-arched river bridge. Attached to the station was the old police house. Murray Beech strode boldly to the front door and rapped loudly with the knocker, standing back and looking around for someone he might say hello to.

He very much wanted to be seen. Did not want anyone to think there was anything remotely surreptitious about this visit, indeed, he'd been hoping Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley would be visible through the police-station window so he could wave to him. But he was not. Nobody was there.

As a last resort Murray had been round to Alex Peters's house, hoping to persuade the old man lo come with him as adviser, witness and… well, chaperone. There'd been no sign of Alex or his daughter, no answer to his knocks.

But Murray didn't have to knock twice on the door of the old police house. She must have been waiting behind it.

'Good afternoon, Tessa,' he said loudly, putting on his most clergymanly voice.

Tessa Byford looked at him in silence. Eighteen. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-faced. Often seen leather-jacketed on street corners with the likes of Warren Preece.

But not an unintelligent girl. A talented artist, he'd heard. And more confident than most local girls. Born here, but brought up in Liverpool until her mother died and her father had dumped her on his parents in Crybbe so he could go back to sea.

Murray could understand why she'd never forgiven he father for this.

He thought: sullen, resentful and eighteen. Prime poltergeist fodder… if you accept the tenets of parapsychology.

About which Murray, of course, kept an open mind.

He smiled. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm here.'

Tessa Byford did not smile back. Without a word, she led him into a small, dark sitting-room, entirely dominated by an oppressive Victorian sideboard, ornate as a pulpit, with many stages, canopies and overhangs.

Murray felt it was dominating him, too. He was immediately uncomfortable. The room seemed overcrowded, with the sideboard and the two of them standing there awkwardly, an unmarried clergyman and a teenage girl. It hit him then, the folly of what he was doing. He should never have come.

She looked down over his dark suit.

'You've not brought any holy water, have you?'

Murray managed a weak smile. 'Let's see how we get on, shall we?'

It occurred to him that, while she might be an adult now, this was not actually her house. He'd allowed himself to be lured into somebody else's house.

'You should've brought holy water,' she said sulkily.

Murray tried to relax. His plan was merely to talk to the girl, say a helpful prayer and then leave. He found a straight-backed dining chair and sat on it squarely – always felt foolish sinking into someone's soft fireside furniture, felt it diminished him.

'I still wish your grandparents were here.'

'Gone shopping,' she said, still standing, 'in Hereford. Won't be back until tonight. I only stayed to wait for you. I was going to give you another five minutes. Wouldn't stay here on me own. Not any more.'

Why did he think she was lying?

'I wish you'd felt able to discuss this with them.'

She shook her head firmly. 'Can't. You just can't.' Her thin lips went tight, her deep-set eyes stoney with the certainty of it.

'Have you tried?'

Tessa's lips twisted. 'Me gran… says people who are daft enough to think they've seen a ghost ought to keep it to themselves.'

'So you have tried to talk to her about it.'

Tessa, grimacing, went through the motions of wiping something nasty off her hands.

Murray tried to understand but couldn't. Neither Mrs Byford nor her husband appeared to him to be particularly religious. They came to church, if not every week. He'd watched them praying, as he did all his parishioners from time to time, but detected no great piety there. Just going through the motions, lip movements, like the rest of them. A ritual as meaningless as Sunday lunch, and rather less palatable.

There was no Bible on the shelf, no books of any kind, just white china above a small television set. No pictures of Christ on the wall, no framed religious texts.

And yet the room itself stank of repression, as if the people who lived here were the narrowest type of religious fundamentalists.

Tessa was standing there expressionless, watching him. The next move was his. Because he was trying so hard not to be, he was painfully aware of her breasts under what, in his own teenage days, had been known as a tank top.

'I know what you're thinking,' she said, and Murray sucked in a sharp breath.

'But I'm not,' she said. 'I'm not imagining any of it. You don't imagine things being thrown at you in the bathroom, even if.. .'

Her lips clamped and she looked down at her feet.

'If what?' Murray said.

'Show you,' Tessa mumbled.

Murray felt sweat under his white clerical collar. He stood up, feeling suddenly out of his depth, and followed Tessa Byford into the hall and up the narrow stairs.

All right, Fay?'

'I don't know.'

She was going hot and cold. Maybe succumbing to one of those awful summer bugs.

All she needed.

'Give me a minute… Elton. I want to make a few adjustments to the script.'

'OK, no hurry. I've got a couple of pieces to top and tail. Come back to you in five minutes, OK?'

'Fine,' Fay said, 'fine.'

She took off the cans and leaned back in the studio chair, breathing in and out a couple of times. Outside it was still raining and not exactly warm; in here, she felt clammy, sticky, she pulled her T-shirt out of her jeans and flapped it about a bit.

The air in here was always stale. There should be air-conditioning. The Crybbe Unattended itself was probably a serious infringement of the Factories Act or whatever it was called these days.

And the walls of the studio seemed to be closer every time she came in.

That was psychological, of course. Hallucinatory, just like. .. She slammed a door in her mind on the icy Grace Legge smile, just as she'd slammed the office door last night before stumbling upstairs after the dog. She wondered how she was ever going to go into that room again after dark. She certainly wouldn't leave the dog in there again at night.

How primitive life had become.

'Fay!' A tinny voice rattling in the cans on the table. She put them on.

Ashpole.

'Fay, tell me again what he's doing…'

'Goff?'

She told him again about the New Age research centre, about the dowsers and the healers. She didn't mention the plan to reinstate the stones. She was going to hold that back – another day, another dollar.

'No rock stars, then.'

'What?'

'All a bit of a disappointment, isn't it, really,' Ashpole said.

'Is it?' Fay was gripping the edge of the table. Just let him start…

'Nutty stuff. New Age. Old hippies. Big yawn. Some people'll be interested, I suppose. When can we talk to the great man in person?'

'Goff? I'm working on it.'

That was a laugh. Some chance now. I'll ask my ex-husband – he owns all the broadcasting rights. God, God, God!

'Hmm,' Ashpole said, 'maybe we should…'

Without even a warning tremor. Fay erupted. 'Oh sure. Send a real reporter down to doorstep him! Why don't you do that? Get him to claim on tape that he's the son of God and he's going to save the fucking world!'

She tore off the cans and hurled them at the wall, stood up so violently she knocked the chair over. Stood with her back to the wall, panting, tears of outrage bubbling up.

What was happening to her?

'See that mirror?"

She was pointing at a cracked circular shaving mirror in metal frame.

'It flew off the window-ledge,' Tessa Byford said. 'That's how it got the crack. 'Course, they accused me of knocking it off.'

'How can you be sure you didn't?'

It was a very cramped bathroom. Murray moved up against the lavatory trying not to brush against the girl.

Ludicrous. He fell completely and utterly ludicrous; he was suffocating with embarrassment.

"Look,' she said, oblivious of his agony, 'I just opened the door and it flew off at me. And other things. Shaving brush, toothpaste. But it was the mirror that started it. I had to look in the mirror.'

'It could have been a draught, Tessa.' Appalled at how strangled his voice sounded.

'It wasn't a bloody draught!'

'All right, calm down. Please.'

'And when I picked it up, the mirror, there was blood in the crack.'

'Your blood?'

'No!'

'Whose, then?'

'The old man's.'

'Your grandfather?'

'No, the old man! He used to live here. I saw him. I could see him in the mirror.'

'You're saying he's dead, this old man?'

'What do you think?' Tessa said, losing patience with him. Tension rising. The girl was disturbed. This was not what the Church should be doing. This was psychiatric country.

'And you think you saw his face in the mirror.'

'And other mirrors.' She sighed. 'Always in mirrors.'

'Tessa, listen to me. When you first told me all about this you said you thought it was a poltergeist and you thought it was happening because you were at that age when… when… But you're eighteen. You're not an adolescent any more.'

'No.'

He saw something moving in her dark eyes, and there was a little dab of perspiration above her top lip. Murray began to feel soiled and sordid. She said softly – and almost euphorically, he thought later – 'His throat was cut. When I saw him in the mirror, he'd cut his throat. Put his razor through the artery. That was where the blood…'

Murray swallowed. There was an overpowering smell of bleach.

'Would you mind,' he said, 'if we went back downstairs?'

When the studio phone rang it was Gavin Ashpole being soft-spoken and understanding. They all knew these days that if a woman dared up uncharacteristically it had to be a spot of premenstrual tension. Tact and consideration called for.

'So, when you're ready, love,' Ashpole said amiably, 'just give us the fifty-second voice-piece. And then you can play it by ear with Goff. I mean, don't worry about it – long as nobody gets him first, I'll be happy. Must go, the other phone, thanks Fay.'

She shouldn't have exploded like that. Most unprofessional

Fay put on the cans, adjusted the mike on its stand.

'Ow!'

Bloody thing was hot.

Surely that wasn't possible with a microphone, even if there was an electrical fault. She didn't touch it again but looked round the back, following the flex to where it plugged into the console. Nothing amiss.

There was nothing to come unscrewed on this mike. It was a standard American-made Electro Voice, about six and a half inches long, gunmetal grey with a bulb bit enlarging the end, like…

Well, like a penis, actually.

Fay put out a finger, touched the tip, giggled.

Sex-starved cow. Pull yourself together.

'You ready now, Fay?'

'Oh yes. I'm ready, Elton. I really am.'

'Bit for level, then…'

She picked up the script, which would take up the story from the newsreader's link.

'It's widely known,' Fay enunciated clearly into the microphone, 'that Max Goff has been involved in setting up a charitable trust to…'

'Yeah, fine. Go in five.'

Fay composed herself. Not easy in this heat. The T-shirt was sticking to her again. Have to put in a complaint. Four, three, two. ..

'It's widely known that Max Goff has been involved in setting up a charitable trust to finance so-called "New Age" ventures – such as alternative healing techniques and the promotion of "Green" awareness.

'He's also interested in fringe science and the investigation of ley-lines, which are supposed to link standing stones, Bronze Age burial mounds and other ancient sites across the landscape…'

Most times, when you were putting in a voice-piece – especially if, like this, it wasn't live – you weren't really aware of the sense of it any more. Only the pattern of the words, the balance, the cadence and the flow. It was conversational and yet completely artificial. Automatic-pilot stuff after a while. Easy to see how some radio continuity announcers simply fell in love with their own voices.

'The project will be based at sixteenth-century Crybbe Court, for which Mr Goff is believed to have paid in excess of half a million pounds. It's expected to be a major boost to the local economy, with. ..'

'Whoah, whoah,' Elton shouted in the cans. 'What are you doing, Fay?'

'What?'

'You're distorting.'

'Huh?'

'How close are you to the mike?'

'I…'

Fay tasted metal.

'Oh…!'

Her eyes widened, a movement went through her, like an earth tremor along a fault line. Her hands thrust the microphone away, revolted.

The mike fell out of its stand and over the end of the table where it dangled on its flex. Fay sat there wiping the back of a hand over her lips.

'What the hell…?' said the voice in the cans. 'Fay? Fay, are you there?'

'Oh Lord, we humbly beseech you, look down upon us with compassion

…'

Eyes tensely closed, Murray was trying to concentrate. He could still smell bleach from the bathroom, although they were downstairs again now, in the sitting-room that was full of repressed emotions, deep-frozen. In the shadow of the pulpit-sideboard.

Churchlike. More churchlike, anyway, than a bathroom.

But the Church was not a building. He, in this dark little parlour, at this moment, was the Church.

Two feet away… an eighteen-year-old girl in holed jeans and a straining tank top. A girl he didn't think he liked very much any more. A girl with a glistening dab of sweat over her upper lip.)

And, because there was nothing to help him in The Book of Common Prayer, he must improvise.

'… look down with compassion, Lord, on our foolish fancies and fantasies. Lift from this house the burden of primitive superstition. Hold up your holy light and guide us away from the darkened recesses of our unconscious minds.,.'

His voice came back at him in a way he'd never experienced before in prayer. Not like in church, the words spinning away, over the congregation and up into the rafters. Or muted, behind bedside screens, against the chatter and rattle and bustle of a hospital ward.

Here, in a room too crowded with still, silent things for an echo, it all sounded as slick and as shallow as he rather suspected it was. He was stricken with isolation – feeling exposed and raw, as if his veneer of priestly strength was bubbling and melting like thin paint under a blowlamp.

Murray ran a damp finger around the inside of his clerical collar. He realized in horror that the only ghost under exorcism in this house was his own undefined, amorphous faith.

As if something was stealing that faith, feeding from it.

His collar felt like a shackle; he wanted to tear it off.

He knew he had to get out of here. Knowing this, while hearing his voice, intoning the meaningless litany.

'Bring us, Lord, safely from the captivity of our bodies and the more insidious snare of our baser thoughts. Lead us…'

Her voice sliced through his.

'I think it likes you. Vicar,' Tessa said sweetly.

His eyes opened to a white glare. The girl was holding the cracked shaving mirror at waist-level, like a spot lamp, and when she tilted the mirror, he saw in it the quivering, flickering image of a cowering man in a dark suit and a clerical collar – the man gazing down at his hands, clasping his rearing penis in helpless remorse, in a tortured parody of prayer.

Murray screamed and fled.

A few moments later, when he tumbled half-sobbing, half-retching into the street, he could hear her laughter. He stood with his back to a lamppost, sob-breathing through his mouth. He looked down and felt his fly; the zip was fully fastened.

He felt violated. Physically and spiritually naked and shamed.

A door slammed behind him, and he still thought he could hear her laughing. At intervals. As if whatever had got into her was sharing the fun.