Crybbe

CHAPTER IX

Although her eyes were fully open, she wasn't looking at anything in the room, not even at the microphone suspended six inches above her lips. There was a sheen on her face, which might have been caused by the heat from the single TV light. The only other light in the draped and velvety room was a very dinky, Tiffany-shaded table-lamp in the corner behind Guy Morrison and the camera crew.

GRAHAM JARRETT: 'Can you describe your surroundings?

Can you tell me where you are?'

CATRIN JONES: 'I am in my bedchamber. In my bed.'

They understood she was called Jane. She only giggled when they asked for her second name. But strangely, after a few minutes, Guy Morrison had no difficulty in believing in her. She spoke, of course, with Catrin's voice, although the accent had softened as if a different accent was trying to impose itself, and the inflection was altered. This was not Catrin, not any Catrin he knew.

JARRETT: 'Is it night?'

CATRIN: 'It is dark.'

JARRETT: 'So why aren't you asleep?'

CATRIN: 'I ache so much.'

JARRRETT: 'Are you not well?'

CATRIN: 'I'm aching inside.'

JARRETT: 'You mean you're unhappy about something?'

CATRIN (sounding distressed): 'I'm aching inside… inside.

(Long pause and a mixture of wriggles, half-smiles and soft moans.) 'My sheriff's been to take his pleasure.'

Strewth. This really was not shrill, plump, chapel-raised Catrin, from Bangor.

Also, Guy realized, watching Catrin licking her lips suggestively, it was suddenly not useable footage.

CATRIN: 'He watches me. Sometimes he comes in the night and I can see him and he watches me. I awake.

The room… so cold… He is here… uurgh… he's.. His eyes. His eyes in the darkness. Only his… eyes… aglow.'

Catrin was rolling from side to side, breathing in snorts. The tartan rug slipped from her legs. She dragged her skirt up to her waist and spread her legs.

CATRIN (screaming): 'Is that what you've come to see?'

'Wonderful,' Alex murmured, 'I think this is the only thing I live for these days.'

The cool hands.

'You,' Jean Wendle said, 'are an old humbug.'

'That's Dr Chi's diagnosis, is it?'

'Shush.'

'Hmmph.'

After the treatment. Jean made coffee but refused to let Alex have any whisky in his. 'Time you took yourself in hand,' she said.

'No chance of you taking me in hand, I suppose?'

Jean smiled.

This dementia of yours,' she said, sitting next to him on the sofa. 'When I said the other night that you should relax and observe yourself, I think I was teaching my grandmother to suck eggs. I think you almost constantly observe yourself. I think you have a level of self-knowledge far beyond most of the so-called mystics in this town.'

'Oh, I'm just a bumbling old cleric,' Alex said modestly.

'This… condition. Unlike, say, Alzheimer's, it's far from a constant condition. Sometimes the blood flow to the brain is close to normal, is that right? I mean, like now, at this particular moment, there is no apparent problem.'

'I don't know about that," Alex said. 'Some people would say consulting someone who communes with a long-dead Chinese quack is a sure sign of advancing senility. Oh hell…

I'm sorry, Wendy, I've sheltered so long behind not taking anything seriously.'

'It's Jean.'

'Yes, of course. I… I want to say you've made a profound difference to me. I haven't felt so well in a long time. I feel I'm. .. part of things again. That make sense?'

'When precisely did you first suspect there was something wrong with your general health?'

'Oh… I suppose it would be not long after poor old Grace died. Feeling a bit sorry for myself. I'd had a spot of angina, nothing life-threatening, as they say, but my morale…'

'Because Grace had died?'

Alex sat back, said, 'You scare me, Wendy. Bit too perceptive for comfort. Yes, I was low because of the guilt I was feeling at being initially really rather relieved that she'd popped off.'

He paused for a reaction but didn't get one.

Jean stood up, went away and returned, looking resigned, with a bottle of Bell's whisky. 'Perhaps you can start taking yourself in hand tomorrow.'

'God bless you, my dear.' Alex diluted his coffee with a good half-inch of Scotch.

A silence. Alex thought he could hear a distant siren sound, like a police car or an ambulance.

'I gather you've been talking to my daughter.'

Jean rested a hand lightly on his thigh. 'I don't think she knows quite what to make of you.'

Alex looked at Jean's hand, not daring to hope. 'And what about you, Wendy? Do you…?'

The siren grew louder. Jean stood up and went across to the deep Georgian window.

She looked back at him over a shoulder, her little bum tight in pale-blue satin trousers. Coquettish? Dare he describe that look as coquettish?

'Oh, I think I can make something of you,' Jean said.

'Fire Service.'

'Hello, it's Fay Morrison from, er… from Offa's Dyke Radio. Can you tell me what's happening in Crybbe? Where's the fire?'

'You've been very quick, my girl. I don't think they've even got there yet. It isn't a fire. It's a tractor accident. Tractor turned over, one person trapped. The location is Top Meadow, Court Farm. One machine. No more details yet I'm afraid.'

'Court Farm? Bloody hell!' Fay reached for the Uher. 'Thanks a lot.' She put the phone down. 'What do you want to do, Arnie? You coming, or are you going to wait here for Dad?'

Thinking, what if he's here on his own when the curfew starts? Who's going to keep him quiet?

Arnold was lying under what used to be an editing table before somebody smashed the Revox. He was obviously finding it easier to be down than sit. He wagged his tail.

'OK, then, you can come. Need any help?'

Arnold stood up very carefully, shook himself and fell over. Stood up again, seemed to be grinning, like he often did.

Before leaving the office she forced herself, as she always did now, to look back from the doorway to the fireplace, the mantelpiece with its testicular clock, the armchair where the ghost of Grace Legge had materialized.

She tried to avoid this room now, after dark.

She wished she could talk to Joe Powys.

Preferably on the ground? Away from any windows?

Don't be stupid.

She looked at the clock and saw it was nearly nine and realized she was worried about Joe and had been for over an hour; that was why she was sitting over the phone.

She'd never once worried about Guy. Guy was always OK. In any difficult situation Guy would either find a way out or simply walk away from it as if it had never happened to him. Whereas Joe was vulnerable because, as anybody who'd read his book could deduce, he was a professional believer. Present him with a crackpot theory and he'd make it sound sensible – which was what made him so useful to Max Goff.

She hadn't heard from him since he'd told her he was going to look for Andy Boulton-Trow.

Joe was like a child in a dark bedroom where there's a monster in the wardrobe and a dwarf behind the dressing-table and the lampshade is a human head on a string and every deep shadow is alive, and he was out there now in a town full of deep, deep shadows.

JARRETT: 'Do you live in a house?'

CATRIN: 'At the inn. We all live at the inn. Me and my sisters and my father. My father is the…'

JARRETT: 'The licensee? The landlord?'

CATRIN (contemptuously): 'He'll never be a lord.'

JARRETT: 'And what's the name of the inn?'

CATRIN: 'The Bull. There's another inn called the Lamb, where Robert lived.'

JARRETT: 'Robert? Who is Robert?'

CATRIN: 'My man. He's hanged now. The Sheriff hanged him.'

JARRETT: 'Jane, can I ask you this? The Sheriff had your… Robert… hanged. And now he sleeps with you? Is that what you're saying?'

CATRIN (laughing, tears on her face): 'He doesn't sleep much!'

Guy was transfixed. Something astonishing was happening here. No way had Catrin the imagination to conjure stuff like this.

Unless Jarrett had broken through the inhibitions to a deeper layer of the girl… perhaps this was the real Catrin.

But what about all the Crybbe references? Was it even conceivable that his production assistant was the reincarnation of a woman who had lived in this same town in the reign of Elizabeth I?

Guy didn't understand; he was at a disadvantage; he hated that.

Approximately fifteen minutes later he began to hate the situation even more. Jarrett had brought the character, Jane, several years forward in an attempt to discover how long the Sheriff's exploitation of her had continued, and the responses were becoming garbled.

CATRIN: 'But I am the best of us all, he says, and he will never leave me, never… never. I'm stroking his beard, his hard, black beard. Never leave me. .. never, never, NEVER!'

JARRETT: 'Jane, please listen…'

CATRIN: 'I'll come down… I'll come down on you.'

Catrin began to giggle and to roll her head again. She started to ignore Jarrett's questions. He looked vaguely puzzled by this and left her alone to squirm about for a few minutes. Larry Ember took the opportunity to change the tape and his camera battery.

Then Catrin blinked, as if trying to focus on something, the giggling slowly drying up.

And her lips went into a pout.

CATRIN (with a new authority): 'Come here. I'm cold.'

Her voice had changed again. It was affected, now, and petulant. And very English.

CATRIN: 'Come on! For Christ's sake, Guy!'

Guy froze. Larry looked up from his viewfinder, the camera still rolling.

CATRIN: 'We are utterly alone and likely to remain so for two whole, wonderful days. How long have you got?

Inches and inches, if I'm any judge.'

A profound chill spread through Guy.

CATRIN: 'There's a bathroom directly facing you at the end of the passage.'

Catrin smiled. Guy thought he was going to scream.

CATRIN: 'Don't be long, will you?'

Guy Morrison strode erratically into shot, dragging a wire, nearly bringing the light down.

'Fucking hell, Guy,' Larry Ember yelled.

Guy ignored him, shook his shoe out of the lamp wire, clutched at Graham Jarrett's cardigan. 'Wake her up. For Christ's sake, man, wake her up!'