Crybbe

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.