Crybbe

H. K.

They were standing in Crybbe's main street, just above the police station, looking down towards the bridge. Two of Andy's dodmen were making their way across, carrying white sighting-poles. Powys asked him how long it had been going on, all this planning and surveying and buying up of land.

'Months. Nearly a year, all told. But it's all come to a head very rapidly. In some curious way, I think Henry's death fired Max into orbit. Henry's done the leg-work, now it was down to Max to pull it all together. There are more than fifty workmen on the project now. Stables'll be finished by Monday, ready for a start on the Court itself next week. First half-dozen stones in place by tomorrow night. That's moving, Joe.'

'No, he doesn't piss about, does he?'

'All that remains is to persuade the remaining few die-hards either to sell their land or accept a stone on it. Hence Tuesday's public meeting. A formality, I'd guess. He'll have bought them off by then. Agent's out there now, negotiating. Farmers will do anything these days to stay afloat. Caravan sites, wind-farms, you name it. They take what comes. Most of them have no choice.'

Powys wondered if you could stop people planting a standing stone close to where you lived, perhaps diverting some kind of energy through your house? How would a court make a ruling on something which had never been proved to exist?

'It seems amazing,' he said, 'that there were so many stones around here and every single one of them's been ripped out.'

'Except for one Henry found. Little bent old stone under a hedge.'

'Do you think they destroyed them because they were superstitious?'

Andy shrugged.

'Because you'd think, if they were superstitious, they'd have been scared to pull them out, wouldn't you?'

'People in these parts,' Andy said, 'who knows how their minds work?'

Powys looked up the street towards the church tower.

'There's a major ley, isn't there, coming from the Tump, through the Court, then the church, right through the town to the hills?'

'Line one.' Andy held out the plan.

'I was up in the prospect chamber at the Court. It might have been constructed to sight along that ley.'

'Might have been?'

'You think it was?'

'Yes I think so.' Andy's black beard was making rapid progress, concealing the bones of his face. You couldn't tell what he was thinking any more.

'John Dee,' Powys said. 'John Dee was a friend of Michael Wort's, right? Or, at least, he seems to have known him. We know John Dee was investigating earth mysteries in the 1580s, or thereabouts. Is it possible Dee was educating Wort and that they built the prospect chamber as a sort of observatory?'

'To observe what?'

'I don't know. Whatever they believed happened along that ley.'

Two cars came out of the square at speed, one a police car. Obviously together, they passed over the bridge and turned right not far beyond Powys's cottage.

'Took their time.' Andy observed.

'What's happening?'

'Body found in the river,' Andy said with disinterest. 'That's why we had to stop work down there. They get very excited. Not many floaters in Crybbe. Yes, I think you could be close to it. But perhaps it was Wort who initiated Dee into the secret, have you considered that? He was a remarkable man, you know.'

But suddenly Powys was not too concerned about which of them had initiated the other.

It was quiet again in the street. The cars had vanished down a track leading to the riverbank.

Fay's fingers were weak and fumbling. For the first time, she had difficulty working the Uher's simple piano-key controls.

Nobody had even covered him up.

She'd expected screens of some kind, a police cordon like there always were in cities. She'd never seen a drowned man before, in all his sodden glory.

Nobody had even thrown a coat over him, or a blanket. They'd simply tossed him on the bank, limp and leaking. Skin blue – crimped, corrugated. Eyes wide open – dead as a cod on a slab. Livid tongue poking out of the froth around his lips and nostrils.

Tossed on the bank. Like somebody's catch.

Gomer's catch, in this case.

Gomer Parry, who'd found the body, was only too happy to give her what he described as an exclusive interview. He told her how he'd come to check on his bulldozer, which was over there in Jack Preece's field, awaiting its removal to the council's Brynglas landfill site on Monday, when he'd spotted this thing caught up in branches not far from the bank.

' 'E'd not been in long,' Gomer said knowledgeably. 'Several reasons I got for sayin' that. Number one – no bloatin'. Takes.,. oh, maybe a week for the ole gases to build up inside, and then out 'e comes, all blown up like a life-jacket. Also, see – point number two – if 'e'd been in there long… fishes woulder been at 'im.'

Gomer made obscene little pincer movements with clawed fingers and thumb and then pointed into the river, no longer in flood, but still brown and churning, bearing broken branches downstream.

They'd been frozen to the fringe of a silent group of local people on the wet riverbank. They were half a mile from the bridge, on the bend before the river moved across the Crybbe Court land, flowing within two hundred yards of the Tump.

'Current brings 'em in to the side yere, right on the bend, see,' Gomer said. 'Then they gets entangled in them ole branches and the floodwater goes down, and there 'e is, high an' dry. They've 'ad quite a few yere, over the years. Always the same spot.'

Gomer sat down on a damp tree stump, his back to the body, got out a battered square tin and began to roll himself a cigarette. 'Nibbled to the bone, some of 'em are,' he said, with unseemly relish. 'So I reckon, if I was to put a time on it, I'd say 'e's been in there less than a day.'

Fay thought she knew exactly how long he'd been in there. Approximately twenty hours. Oh God, this was dreadful. This was indescribably awful. Her fingers went rapidly up and down with the zip of her blue cagoule.

'Now, you notice that wrinkling on 'is face,' Gomer said. 'Well, see, that's what you calls the "washerwoman's 'ands" effect.'

'Gomer!' The colour of Sergeant Wynford Wiley's face was approaching magenta as he loomed over the little man in wire-framed glasses.

'When your wealth of forensic knowledge is required,' Wynford said, 'we shall send for you. Meanwhile, all this is totally sub joodicee until after the inquest. And you should know that,' he snapped at Fay.

'Look, Wynford,' Fay snapped back, to beat the tremor out of her voice. 'Sub judice applies to court cases, not inquests. Nobody's on trial at an inquest.'

Really know how to make friends, don't I? she thought as Wynford bent his face to hers. He didn't speak until he was sure he had her full attention. Then, very slowly and explicitly, he said, 'We don't like clever people round yere, Mrs Morrison.'

Then he straightened up, turned his back on her and walked away.

'Fat bastard.' Gomer bit on his skinny, hand-crafted cigarette. 'You got all that, what I said?'

'Yes,' Fay said. 'But he's right. I won't be able to use most of it, not because it's sub judice but because we don't go to town on the gruesome stuff. Especially when relatives might be listening.'

Christ, how could she go through the motions of reporting this story, knowing what she knew? Knowing, if not exactly how, then at least why it had happened.

There was a little crowd around the body, including its father, Jack Preece, and its younger brother, Warren Preece. Jack Preece's face was as grey as the clouds. He looked up from the corpse very steadily, as if he knew what he would see next and the significance of it.

And what he saw next was Fay. His tired, hopeless, brown eyes met hers and held them. It was harder to face than a curse.

She thought. He knows everything. And she dragged her gaze away and looked wildly around her, but there was nobody to run to for comfort and nowhere to hide from Jonathon Preece's dead eyes and the eyes of his father, which held the weight of a sorrow she knew she could only partly comprehend.