Crybbe

CHAPTER IX

The women who had, in recent years, been powerfully attracted to Joe Powys had tended to wear long, hand-dyed skirts and shapeless woollies. Sometimes they had frizzy hair and sometimes long, tangled hair. Sometimes they were big-breasted earth-mother types and sometimes small-boned and delicate like Arthur Rackham fairies.

Sometimes, when Powys fantasized – which was worryingly rarely, these days – he imagined having, as he put it to himself, a bit of smooth. Someone scented. Someone who shaved her armpits. Someone who would actually refuse to trek across three miles of moorland to find some tiny, ruined stone circle you practically had to dig out of the heather. Someone you could never imagine standing in the middle of this half-submerged circle and breathing, 'Oh, I mean, gosh, can't you feel it… can't you feel that primal force?'

The woman facing him now, he could tell, was the kind who'd rather see Stonehenge itself as a blur in the window of a fast car heading towards a costly dinner in Salisbury.

But even if she'd been wearing a home-made ankle-length skirt with a hemline of mud, clumpy sandals and big wooden ear-rings, he would, at this moment, have been more than grateful to see her.

She said, 'I think you could let him go now, Humble. He really doesn't look very dangerous.'

'Find out who he is first,' said the hard-faced bastard with a grip like a monkey-wrench, the guy he'd first seen frowning at him through the window of a Land Rover when he was checking out the Tump.

He made Powys bend over the vehicle's high bonnet, which tossed another pain-ball into his stomach.

This man had punched him in the guts with a considered precision and such penetration that he was seriously worried about internal bleeding.

'Ta very much.' Deftly removing Powys's wallet from the inside pocket of his muddied jacket. Not a local accent; this was London.

'If this is a mugging,' Powys said awkwardly, face squashed into the bonnet, 'you could be…'

'Fucking shut it.' His nose crunched into the metal, Powys felt blood come.

'Don't even twitch, pal, OK?'

'Mmmph.'

'Right, then, I'm going to have a little butcher's through here, see what you got by way of ID, all right?'

'Humble, if you don't let him go I'm going to call the police.'

'Rachel, you do your job, I do mine. Our friend here don't want that. Ask him. Ask him what he was doing on private property. Ain't a poacher. Ain't got the bottle.'

He cringed, expecting Humble to tap him in the guts again to prove his point. But the pressure eased and he was allowed to stand. His nose felt wet, but he didn't think it was broken. He looked at the woman, who must be close to his own age, had light, mid-length hair and calm eyes. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Humble's used to dealing with the more urban type of trespasser.'

'Trespasser?' Powys wiped off some blood with the back of a hand. 'Now, look… You tell this bloody psycho…' He stopped. What could she tell him? He wondered where Andy Boulton-Trow had vanished to.

'All right now, are we?' Dipping into Powys's wallet, Humble smiled with the lower half of a face which had all the personality of a mousetrap. He pulled out a plastic-covered driving licence and handed it to the woman. She took it from him reluctantly. Opened it out. Gave a little gasp.

'Oh dear,' she said.

'Yeah, don't tell me. One of Max's bits of fluff.' Humble smirked, in which case, no problems, he'll have been enjoying himself.'

Rachel closed the licence and held out her hand for the wallet. Very carefully she put the licence back, then she handed the wallet to Powys.

'Not entirely accurate, Humble,' she said. 'And when he hears about this, Max, I suspect, is going to have you strung up by the balls.'

Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley was shaking his great turnip head. 'Mindless.'

'Mindless?' said Fay. 'You think it's mindless?'

'We always prided ourselves,' Wynford said, thick blue legs astride the wreckage. 'Never suffered from no vandalism in this town. Not to any great extent, anyhow.'

Only vandalism by neglect, Fay thought dully. She wondered why she'd bothered to call the police now. Wynford was just so sinister – like one of those mean-eyed, redneck police chiefs you saw in moody American movies set in semi-derelict, one-street, wooden towns in the Midwest.

'Think somebody would've seen 'em, though.' The gap narrowed between Wynford's little round eyes. ' 'Course, Mrs Lloyd next door, deaf as a post, see. Knock on the door, she don't answer. You got to put your face up to the window.'

Fay imagined Wynford's face, flattened by glass. Give the poor old girl a heart attack.

He said, 'Scene-of-crime boy'll be over later, with his box of tricks. I'll knock on a few doors along the street, see what I can turn up.'

He paused in the doorway, looked back at the wreckage. 'Mindless,' he said.

Fay turned to her dad for support, but Alex, gazing down his beard at the Revox ruins, had nothing to say.

'Doesn't it strike you as odd,' Fay said clinically, 'that this tornado of savagery appears somehow to have focused itself on one single item? I'm no criminologist, but I've witnessed my share of antisocial behaviour, and this, Sergeant, is not what I'd call mindless. Psychopathic, perhaps, but mindless in the sense of randomly destructive, no.'

Wynford's big, round face was changing colour. Nobody, she thought, contradicts Chief Wiley on his own manor.

'What you sayin' 'ere, then? Somebody wants to stop you broadcastin'? That it?'

'It's possible. Isn't it?

'And is it gonner stop you broadcastin'?'

'Well, no, as it happens. I.. I've got a portable tape recorder I do all my interviews on, and I can edit down at the studio in town, there's a machine there. But would they know that?'

'Listen.' Wynford was row wearing an expression which might have been intended to convey kindness. Fay shuddered. 'He – they – just came in and smashed up the most expensive thing they could find. Then, could be as 'e was disturbed – or, thought 'e was gonna be disturbed, maybe 'e yers somebody walkin' past…'

'Maybe he wasn't disturbed at all,' Fay said. 'Maybe he just left because he'd achieved what he set out to do.

'I think you're watchin' too much telly.'

'Can't very well watch too much TV in Crybbe. The power's never on for longer than three hours at a stretch.'

Wynford turned his back on her, opened the office door. Arnold walked in, saw Wynford and growled.

'See you've still got that dog Didn't leave 'im in the 'ouse, then, when you went out?'

'What? Oh. No, he came with us,' Fay said. 'What happened with the RSPCA, by the way? Does anybody want to claim him?'

'No. I reckon 'e's yours now. If 'e stays.'

'How do you mean?'

'Well. If 'e don't take off, like.'

He was wearing such a weird smile that Fay pursued him to the front door, 'I don't understand.'

Wynford shrugged awkwardly. 'Well, you might wake up one day, see, and…'e'll be… well, 'e won't be around any more.'

Fay felt menaced. 'Meaning what? Come on… what are you saying?'

Wynford's face went blank. 'I'll go and talk to some neighbours,' he said, and he went.

'Dad,' Fay said, 'I've said this before, but there's something very wrong with that guy.'

"Sorry, my dear?' Alex looked up. His eyes were like floss.

'Sit down. Dad, you've had a shock.'

'I'm fine,' Alex said. 'Fine. If there's nothing I can do here, I'll probably have an early night.'

Fay watched the policeman walk past the window, imagined him peering through it with his face squashed against the glass, like a robber in a stocking mask.

She recoiled, stared at the gutted hulk of the Revox, a bizarre idea growing in her head like a strange hybrid plant.

She turned to Arnold, who was standing placidly in the doorway gazing up, for some reason, at Alex, his tail well down.

'Christ,' Fay said.

Something had occurred to her that was so shatteringly preposterous that…

'Dad, I have to go out.'

'OK,' Alex said.

… if she didn't satisfy herself that it was completely crazy, she wasn't going to get any sleep tonight.

'You go and walk off your anger,' Alex said. 'You'll feel better.'

'Something…' Fay looked around for Arnold's plastic clothes-line. 'Dad, I've just got to check this out. I mean, it's so. ..' Fay shook her head helplessly. 'I'll be back, OK?'

She took J. M. Powys to her room at the Cock. The big room on the first floor that she shared with Max. But Max was in London.

The licensee, Denzil, watched them go up.]. M. Powys looked, to say the least, dishevelled, but Denzil made no comment. Rachel suspected that if she organized an orgy for thirty participants, Denzil would have no complaints as long as they all bought drinks in the bar to take up with them.

Rachel closed the bedroom door. The room was laden with dark beams and evening shadows. She switched a light on.

So this was J. M. Powys. Not what she'd imagined, not at all.

'Don't take this wrong, but I thought you'd be older.'

'I think I am older.' He tried to smile; it came out lop-sided. There was drying blood around his mouth. His curly hair was entirely grey.

'Er, is there a bathroom?'

'Across the passage,' Rachel said. 'The en-suite revolution hasn't happened in Crybbe yet. Possibly next century. Here, let me look… Take your jacket off.'

It was certainly an old jacket. The once-white T-shirt underneath it was stiff with mud and blood.

Gently, Rachel prised the T-shirt out of his jeans. The colours of his stomach were like a sky with a storm coming on. 'Nasty. That man is a liability.'

'I've never…' Powys winced, 'been beaten up by a New Age thug before. It doesn't feel a lot different, actually.'

Rachel said, 'Humble has his uses in London and New York, but

… Just move over to the light, would you… really don't like the way he's going native, I caught him laying snares the other day. Look, Mr Powys, I don't know what I can do for bruising, apart from apologize profusely and buy you dinner. Not that you'll thank me for that, unless you're into cholesterol in the basket.'

'I don't mind that. I had a Big Mac the other day.'

He sounded almost proud. Perhaps J. M. Powys was as loony as his book, after all.

Addressing the fireplace, Alex said, 'Why? You've always been so houseproud. Why do this?'

He mustn't touch anything. Fingerprints. Couldn't even tidy the place up a bit until they'd looked for fingerprints. Waste of time, all that. They wouldn't have Grace on their files.

Alex started to cry.

'Why can't you two get on together?'

A tangled ball of black, unspooled tape rustled as he caught it with his shoe. Like the tape, the thoughts in his head were in hopeless, flimsy coils and, like the tape, could never be rewound.

All the way up the High Street, Fay kept her eyes on the gutter. She saw half a dozen cigarette-ends. A crumpled crisp packet and a sweet-wrapper. Two ring-pulls from beer cans. And a bus ticket issued by Marches Motors, the only firm which ran through Crybbe – twice a week, if you were lucky.

But neither in the gutter nor up against the walls did she find what she was looking for.

When Arnold stopped to cock his leg up against a lamppost, Fay stopped, too, and examined the bottom of the post for old splash-marks.

There were none that she could see, and Arnold didn't hang around. He was off in a hurry, straining on the clothes-line as he always did on the street. She'd have to get him a lead tomorrow.

Now there was a point. Fay steered Arnold past Middle Marches Crafts and the worn sign of the Crybbe Pottery, which her dad said was about to close down. There was a hardware shop round the corner.

Hereward Newsome was emerging from The Gallery. 'Oh, hi, Fay. Out on a story?'.

'You're working late.'

'We're rearranging the main gallery. Making more picture space. Time to expand, I think, now the town's taking off.'

'Is it?'

'God, yes, you must have noticed that. Lots of new faces about. Whatever you think of Max Goff, he's going to put this place on the map at last. I've been talking to the marketing director of the Marches Development Board – they're terribly excited. I should have a word with him sometime, they're very keen to talk about it.'

'I will. Thanks. Hereward, look, you haven't got a dog, have you?'

'Mmm? No. Jocasta had it in mind to buy a Rottweiler once – she gets a little nervous at night. Be good deal more nervous with a Rottweiler around, I said. Hah. Managed to talk her out of that one, thank God.'

'Do you know anybody who has got one?'

'A Rottweiler?'

'No, any sort of dog.'

'Er… God, is that the time? No, it's not something I tend to notice, who has what kind of dog. Look, pop in sometime; there's a chap – artist – called Emmanuel Walters. Going to be very fashionable. You might like to do an interview with him about the exhibition we're planning. Couple of days before we open, would that be possible? Give you a ring, OK?'

She nodded and smiled wanly, and Hereward Newsome walked rapidly away along the shadowed street, long strides, shoulders back, confident.

Fay dragged Arnold round the corner to the hardware shop. Like all the other shops in Crybbe, there was never a light left on at night, but at least it had two big windows – through which, in turn, she peered, looking for one of those circular stands you always saw in shops like this, a carousel of dog leads, chains and collars.

There wasn't one.

No, of course there wasn't. Wouldn't be, would there? Nor would there be cans of dog food or bags of Bonios.

The streets were empty and silent. As they would be, coming up to curfew time, everybody paying lip-service to a tradition which had been meaningless for centuries. She was starting to work it out, why there was this artificial kind of tension in the air: nobody came out of anywhere for about three minutes either side of the curfew.

Except for the newcomers.

'Fay. Excuse me.'

Like Murray Beech.

Walking across the road from the church, one hand raised, collar gleaming in the dusk.

'Could I have a word?'

When he reached her, she was quite shocked at how gaunt he appeared. The normally neatly chiselled face looked suddenly jagged, the eyes seemed to glare. Maybe it was the light.

Fay reined Arnold in. There was a sense of unreality, of her and the dog and the vicar in a glass case in the town centre, public exhibits. And all the curtains parting behind the darkened windows.

Sod this. Sod it!

'Murray,' she said quite loudly, very deliberately, 'just answer me one question.'

He looked apprehensive. (In Crybbe, every question was a threat.)

Fay said, 'Do you know anybody with a dog?' The words resounded around the square.

The vicar stared at her and his head jerked back, as if she'd got him penned up in a corner with her microphone at his throat.

'Anybody,' Fay persisted. 'Any kind of dog. Anybody in Crybbe?'

'Look, it was about that I…'

'Because I've been scouring the gutters for dog turds and I can't find any.'

'You…'

'Not one. Not a single bloody dog turd. Surprise you that, does it? No dog turds in the streets of Crybbe?'

Fay became aware that she was coiling and uncoiling the clothes-line around her fingers, entwining them until the plastic flex bit into the skin. She must look as mad as Murray did. She felt her face was aflame and her hair standing on end. She felt she was burning up in the centre of Crybbe, spontaneous emotional combustion in the tense minutes before the curfew's clang.

'No dog turds, Murray. No dog leads in the shops. No…' The sensation of going publicly insane brought tears to her eyes. 'No rubber bones…'

Murray pulled himself together. Or perhaps, Fay thought, in comparison with me it just looks as though he's together.

'Go home. Fay,' he said.

'Yes,' Fay said, 'I will.'

With Arnold tight to her legs, she turned away and began to walk back in the direction she'd come along the silent street. It was nearly dark now, but there were no lights in any of the houses.

Because people would be watching at the windows. The woman, the vicar and the dog. A tableau. A little public drama.

She turned back. 'It's true, though, isn't it? Apart from Arnold here, there aren't any dogs in Crybbe.'

'I don't know,' Murray said. It was obvious the idea had never occurred to him. 'But… well, it's hardly likely, is it?' She couldn't see his face any more, only his white collar, luminous like a cyclist's armband.

'Oh yes,' Fay said, 'it's likely. Anything's likely in this town.'

'Yes, well… I'll just. -. I'll just say what I've been asked to say before… before you go.'

There came a heavy metallic creak from the church tower. The bell swinging back. and… Clangggg!

It had never sounded so Loud. The peal hit the street like a flash of hard, yellow light.

Arnold sat down in the road and his head went back.

Fay saw him and fell on her knees with both hands around his snout. As the first peal died, Murray Beech said, 'I've been asked… to tell you to keep the dog off the streets.'

'What?'

'Especially at… curfew time. People don't… they don't like it.'

Rage rippled through Fay. She looked up into the vicar's angular, desperate face.

'What?'

Her hands unclasped. She came slowly to her feet.

She watched as Arnold swallowed, shook his head once and then quivered with the vibration from the tower as the great bell swung back.

Clangggg!

Arnold's first howl seemed to rise and meet the peal in the air above the square with an awful chemistry.

'Who?' Fay said quietly.

'Go home!' the vicar hissed urgently. 'Take the thing away.'

'Who told you to tell me?'

There was a shiver in the night, the creak of the bell hauled back.

Fay shrieked, 'Who told you, you bastard?'

The bell pealed again, like sheet-lightning. Arnold howled. The old buildings seemed to clutch each other in the shadows.

And she was hearing the muffled clatter of his footsteps before she was aware that Murray Beech was running away across the square, as if Hell was about to be let loose in Crybbe.