Crybbe aka Curfew

CHAPTER I

No, no… don't hold him like that. Not so tightly. You're like a nervous kiddy riding a bike.'

'Oh, sorry. Like this?'

'Better. Don't think of him as an implement – he's an extension of your arms. Be comfortable.'

'I think I've got it. What do I do now?'

'Just walk across towards the tree – and don't be so nervous, girl.'

'Well, I've never done it before, Henry. I'm a virgin.'

She thought, shall I leave that?

Nah. Maria will only chop it. She'll think I'm trying to be clever. Too clever for Offa's Dyke Radio, God forbid.

Fay marked it up with a white Chinagraph pencil, sliced and cut just over a foot of tape with a razorblade cutter, spliced the ends, ran the tape again.

Crunch, crunch. Rustle, rustle.

'All right, now, Fay, ask yourself the question.'

'Huh? Oh, er… is… Is There Any Water Under Here? I feel a bit daft, to be honest, Henry. And there's… nothing…happening. Obviously haven't got your natural aptitude, if that's the word.'

'Course you have, girl. Anybody can do it as really wants to. It's not magic. Look, shall I help you?'

'Yes please.'

'Right, now, we'll do it again. Like this.'

'Oh, you're putting your hands…'

'Over yours, yes. Now relax, and we'll walk the same path and ask ourselves the same question.'

'OK. Here we go. Is there any…? Fucking hell, Henry!'

Laughter.

'Caught you by surprise, did it?'

'You could say that.'

Pause.

'Look, Henry, do you think we could do that bit again, so I can moderate my response?'

Fay marked the tape. Fast forwarded until she heard her say, 'OK, Take Two', made another white mark after that and picked up the razorblade.

Shame really. Never as good second time around. All the spontaneity gone. 'Whoops' had been the best she could manage the second time, when the forked hazel twig had flipped up dramatically, almost turning a somersault in her hands, near dislodging the microphone from under her arm.

'Whoops'… not good enough. She started to splice the ends of the tape together, wondering if she had time to go into a field with the Uher and do a quick, 'Gosh, wow, good heaven I never expected that,' and splice it in at the appropriate point.

The phone rang.

'Yes, what?' The damn roll of editing tape was stuck to her hands and now the receiver.

'Fay Morrison?'

'Yes, sorry, you caught me…'

'This is James Barlow in the newsroom.'

'Which newsroom?' Fay demanded, being awkward because the voice somehow reminded her of her ex-husband, who always called people by their full names.

'Offa's Dyke Radio, Fay.' No, not really like Guy. Too young. A cynical, world-weary twenty-two or thereabouts. James Barlow, she hadn't dealt with him before.

'Sorry, I was editing a piece. I've got tape stuck to my fingers.'

'Fay, Maria says she commissioned a package from you about Henry Kettle, the water-diviner chap.'

'Dowser, yes.'

'Pardon?'

'Water-diviner, James, is not an adequate term for what he does. He divines all kinds of things. Electric cables, foundations of old buildings, dead bodies…'

'Yeah, well, he obviously wasn't much good at divining stone walls. Have you done the piece?'

'That's what I'm…'

"Cause, if you could let us have it this morning…'

'It's not for News,' Fay explained. 'It's a soft piece for Maria. For Alan Thingy's show. Six and a half minutes of me learning how to dowse.' Fay ripped the tape from the receiver and threw the roll on the editing table. 'What did you mean about stone walls?'

'Tut-tut. Don't you have police contacts, down there, Fay? Henry Kettle drove into one last night. Splat.'

The room seemed to shift as if it was on trestles like the editing table. The table and the Revox suddenly looked so incongruous here – the room out of the 1960s, grey-tiled fireplace, G-plan chairs, lumpy settee with satin covers. Still Grace Legge's room, still in mourning.

'What?' Fay said.

'Must've been well pissed,' said James Barlow, with relish, 'straight across a bloody field and into this massive wall. Splat, actually they're speculating, did he have a heart attack? So we're putting together a little piece on him, and your stuff…'

'Excuse me, James, but is he…?'

'… would go quite nicely. We'll stitch it together here, but you'll still get paid, obviously. Yes, he is. Oh, yes. Very much so, I'm told. Splat, you know?'

'Yes,' Fay said numbly.

'Can you send it from the Unattended, say by eleven?'

'Yes.'

'Send the lot, we'll chop out a suitable clip. Bye now.'

Fay switched the machine back on. Now it no longer mattered, Take Two didn't sound quite so naff.

'… whoops! Gosh, Henry, that's amazing, the twig's flipped right over. If your hands hadn't been there, I'd've…'

A dead man said, 'Dropped it, I reckon. Well, there you are then, Fay, you've found your first well. Can likely make yourself a bob or two now.'

'I don't think so, somehow. Tell me, what exactly was happening there? You must have given it some thought over the years.'

'Well… it's nothing to do with the rod, for a start. It's in you, see. You're letting yourself connect with what's out there and all the things that have ever been out there. I don't know, sounds a bit cranky. You're, how can I say… you're reminding your body that it's just part of everything else that's going on, you following me? Never been very good at explaining it, I just does it… You can mess about with this, can't you, Fay, make it sound sensible? Fellow from the BBC interviewed me once. He…'

'Yes, don't worry, it'll be fine. Now, what I think you're saying is that, in this hi-tech age, man no longer feels the need to be in tune with his environment.'

'Well, aye, that's about it. Life don't depend on it any more, do he?'

'I suppose not. But look, Henry, what if…?'

She stopped the tape, cut it off after 'Life don't depend on it any more.' Why give them the lot when they'd only use four seconds?

Anyway, the next bit wasn't usable. She'd asked him about this job he was doing for Max Goff and he'd stepped smartly back, waving his arms, motioning at her to switch the tape off. Saying that it would all come out sooner or later. 'Don't press me, girl, all right?'

Later, he'd said, 'Not being funny, see. Only it's not turned out as simple as I thought it was going to be. Something I don't quite understand. Not yet, anyway.'

She hadn't pressed him. Very unprofessional of her. She had, after all, only approached Henry Kettle about doing six minutes for the 'people with unusual hobbies' spot because she'd heard Max Goff had brought him to Crybbe and it was her job to find out what Goff himself was doing here.

But she'd ended up liking Henry Kettle and actually liking somebody was sometimes incompatible with the job. So now nobody would know what he'd been doing for Goff unless Goff himself chose to disclose it.

Fay sat down, she and the room both in mourning now. He'd been a great character, had Henry, he'd leave a gap.

But if you had to go, maybe Splat wasn't a bad exit line at the age of – what was he, eighty-seven? Still driving his own car, too. Fay thought about her dad and the sports cars he'd had. He'd prefer Splat to arterial strangulation anytime.

Talking of the devil, she caught sight of him then through the window, strolling back towards the cottage with the Guardian under his arm, looking at ladies' legs and beaming through his big, snowy beard at people on either side – even though, in Crybbe, people never seemed to beam back.

The cottage fronted directly on to the street, no garden. Canon Alex Peters pushed straight into the office. He wasn't beaming now. He was clearly annoyed about something.

'Don't they just bloody love it?'

'Love what?' Fay joined some red leader to the end of the tape, deliberately not looking up, determined not to be a congregation.

'A tragedy. Death, failure – 'specially if it's one of the dreaded People from Off.'

'What are you on about, Dad?'

'That's what they say, "From Off. Oh, he's from Off." I've calculated that "Off" means anywhere more than forty miles away. Anywhere nearer, they say, "Oh, he's from Leominster" or "He's from Llandrindod Wells". Which are places not near enough to be local, but not far enough away to be "Off".'

'You're bonkers, Dad.' Fay spun back the finished tape. 'Anyway, this poor sod was apparently from Kington or somewhere, which is the middle category. Not local but not "Off". So they're quite content that he's dead but not as happy as they'd be if he was from, say, Kent.'

It clicked.

'You're talking about Henry Kettle.'

'Who?'

'Henry Kettle. The dowser I interviewed yesterday morning.'

'Oh God,' Canon Peters said. 'That's who it was. I'm sorry, Fay, I didn't connect, I…'

'Never mind,' Fay said soothingly. Sometimes, on his good days, you were inclined to forget. Her father, who'd been about to sit down, was instantly back on his feet. 'Now look… It's got nothing to with Dr Alphonse sodding Alzheimer.'

'Alois.'

'What?'

'Alois Alzheimer. Anyway, you haven't got Alzheimer's disease.'

The Canon waved a dismissive hand. 'Alzheimer is easier to say than arteriosclerotic dementia, when you're going gaga.'

He took off his pink cotton jacket. 'Nothing to do with that anyway. Always failed to make connections. Always putting my sodding foot in it.'

'Yes, Dad.'

'And stop being so bloody considerate.'

'All right then. Belt up, you old bugger, while I finish this tape.'

'That's better.' The Canon slung his jacket over the back of the armchair, slumped down, glared grimly at the Guardian.

Fay labelled the tape and boxed it. She stood back and pulled down her T-shirt, pushed fingers through her tawny hair, asking him, 'Where was it, then? Where did it happen?'

Canon Peters lowered his paper. 'Behind the old Court. You know the tumulus round the back, you can see it from the Ludlow road? Got a wall round it? That's what he hit.'

'But – hang on – that wall's a bloody mile off the road.'

'Couple of hundred yards, actually.'

'But still… I mean, he'd have to drive across an entire field for Christ's sake.' When James Barlow had said something about Mr. Kettle crossing a field she'd imagined some kind of extended grass-verge. 'Somebody said maybe he'd had a heart attack, so I was thinking he'd just gone out of control, hit a wall not far off the road. Not, you know, embarked on a cross country endurance course.'

'Perhaps,' speculated the Canon, 'he topped himself.'

'Cobblers. I was with him yesterday morning, he was fine. Not the suicidal type, anyway. And if you're going to do yourself in, there have to be rather more foolproof ways than that.'

'Nine out of ten suicides, somebody says that. There's always an easier way. He was probably just confused. I can sympathize.'

'Any witnesses?' Above the tiled fireplace, opposite the window, was a mirror in a Victorian-style gilt frame. Fay inspected her face in it and decided that, for a walk to the studio, it would get by.

Canon Peters said, 'Witnesses? In Crybbe?'

'Sorry, I wasn't thinking.'

'Wouldn't have known myself if I hadn't spotted all the police activity, so I grilled the newsagent. Apparently it must have happened last night, but he wasn't found until this morning.'

'Oh God, there's no chance he might have been still alive, lying there all night…?'

'Shouldn't think so. Head took most of it, I gather, I didn't go to look. A local milkman, it was, who spotted the wreckage and presumably said to himself, "Well, well, what a mess," and then wondered if perhaps he ought not to call Wynford, the copper. No hurry, though, because…'

'He wasn't local,' said Fay.

'Precisely.'

Fay said it for the second time this week. 'Why don't you get the hell out of this town, Dad? You're never going to feel you belong.'

'I like it here.'

'It irritates the hell out of you!'

'I know, but it's rather interesting. In an anthropological sort of way.' His beard twitched. She knew she wasn't getting the whole story. What was he hiding, and why?

Fay frowned, wondering if he'd seen the spoof FOR SALE notice she'd scribbled out during a ten-minute burst of depression last night. She said tentatively, 'Grace wouldn't want you to stay. You know that.'

'Now look, young Fay,' Canon Peters leaned forward in the chair, a deceptive innocence in the wide blue eyes which had wowed widows in a dozen parishes. 'More to the point, there's absolutely no need for you to hang around. You know my methods. No problem at all to find some lonely old totty among the immigrant population to cater for my whims. In fact, you're probably cramping my style.'

He raised the Guardian high so that all she could see was his fluffy while hair, like the bobble on an old-fashioned ski hat.

'Anyway,' he mumbled. 'Early stages yet. Could be months before I'm a dribbling old cabbage.'

'Dad, I'll…!' The phone rang. 'Yes, what…? Oh, Mrs. Seagrove.'

All she needed.

'Serves you right,' rumbled the Canon from the depths of the Guardian.

'I saw it again, Mrs Morrison. Last night. When the power was off.'

'Oh,' Fay said, as kindly as she could manage. 'Did you?'

'I can't bear it any more, Mrs Morrison.'

Fay didn't bother to ask her how she could see a huge coal-black beast when all the lights were out; she'd say she just could. She was one of the aforementioned lonely old Midland immigrant widows in a pretty cottage on the edge of town. One of the people who rang local reporters because they needed someone to make a cup of tea for.

'I'm at the end of my tether, Mrs Morrison. I'm going out of my mind. You wouldn't think anything as black as that could glow, would you? I'm shivering now, just remembering it.'

In other places they rang the police for help. But in Crybbe the police was Sergeant Wynford Wiley and nobody wanted to make a cup of tea for him.

'I've tried to explain, Mrs Seagrove. It's a fascinating…'

'It's not fascinating, my love, it's terrifying. It's no joke. It's frightening me out of my mind. I can't sleep.'

'But there's nothing I can do unless you're prepared to talk about it on tape. I only work for the radio, and unless we can hear your voice…'

'Why can't you just say someone's seen it without saying who I am or where I live?'

'Because… because that's not the way radio works. We have to hear a voice. Look,' Fay said, 'I really would like to do the story. Perhaps you could find someone else who's seen it and would be prepared to talk about it and have it recorded.'

Mrs Seagrove said bitterly, They all know about it. Mrs Francis at the post office, Mr Preece. They won't admit it. They won't talk about it. I've tried telling the vicar, he just listens and he smiles, I don't think he even believes in God, that vicar. Perhaps if you came round this afternoon, we could…'

'I'm sorry,' Fay said, 'I've got several jobs on the go at the moment.'

'Ho, ho,' said the Guardian.

'Look,' Fay said. 'Think about it. It's quite easy and informal, you know. Just me and a portable recorder, and if you make any fluffs we can keep doing it again until you've got it right.'

'Well, perhaps if you came round we could…'

'Not unless you're prepared to talk about it on tape,' Fay said firmly.

'I'll think about it,' Mrs Seagrove said.

Fay put the phone down. Of course she felt sorry for the lady. And ghost stories always went down well with producers, even if the eye-witnesses were dismissed as loonies. Local radio needed loonies; how else, for instance, could you sustain phone-in programmes in an area like this?

But ghost stories where nobody would go on the record as having seen the apparition were non-starters. On that same basis, Fay thought ruefully, a lot of stories had been non-starters in Crybbe.

CHAPTER II

The windscreen was in splinters. There was blood on some of them, dried now. And there were other bits, pink and glistening like mince on a butcher's tray, which Max Goff didn't want to know about.

'What are you saying here?' he demanded irritably. 'You're saying it's a fucking omen?'

He looked up at the hills shouldering their way out of the morning mist, the sun still offstage, just.

He turned and gazed at the Tump. A prosaic, lumpen word for the mystic mound, the branches of the trees on its summit still entwined with tendrils of mist.

A thing so ancient, so haunted, yet so benign. Yeah, well, he believed in omens, but…

There was some kind of awful creaking, tearing sound as the breakdown truck hauled the car out of the wall. A heavy crump and a rattle as the VW's shattered front end came down on the turf, its radiator ripped off, car-intestines hanging out.

Max Goff winced. Beside him, Rachel Wade, his personal assistant, was saying in her deep voice, 'Don't be silly.' Spreading out her hands in that superior, pained, half-pitying way she had. 'All I'm saying is it's not exactly an auspicious start, is it?'

Goff stared coldly at Rachel in her shiny, new Barbour coat and a silk scarf. Knowing how much he'd depended on her judgement in the past, but knowing equally that this was an area where she was well out of her depth. A situation where the smooth bitch couldn't be relied upon to get it right. No way.

She didn't, of course, want him to go through with it. Nobody whose opinion was worth more than shit had been exactly encouraging, but Rachel was subtler than most of them. She hadn't said a word about the nylon sheets in their room at the Cock. Had made no comment about the coffee at breakfast being instant, just sat there, languid and elegant and at ease, refusing everything they offered her with a professional smile. Yeah, OK, under normal circumstances Goff himself would have insisted on different sheets and ground coffee and some kind of muesli instead of Rice Krispies. But he might need the

Cock again.

Actually, he might need to buy it.

He'd been pondering this possibility, deciding not to discuss it with Ms Wade just yet, when the local Plod had turned up, waiting respectfully in the lobby until he'd finished his Nescafe, then asking, 'Are you Mr Goff, sir? Mr Max Goff?' as if they didn't recognize him.

The body had been taken away by the time they got to the scene. Max Goff only hoped the poor old bastard had at least one surviving relative. He didn't really feel like identifying the Kettle corpse in some seedy white-tiled mortuary where the atmosphere was heavy with obnoxious smells and bodily gases.

If it came to that, Rachel could do it. She'd hired Kettle originally. And nothing ever fazed Rachel, just as nothing ever blew her mind – there was even something suspiciously nonchalant about her orgasms.

'Right, Tom,' somebody shouted, and the breakdown truck started across the field, the broken car on its back, a smashed coffin on an open hearse.

Then the truck stopped for some reason.

And, in that moment, the sun came out of the mist and the land was suddenly aglow and throbbing with life force.

And Goff remembered what day this was.

He turned towards the light, head back, eyes closing and the palms of his hands opening outwards to receive the burgeoning energy.

I am here. At the zenith of the year. I am in a state of total submission.

'It's the solstice,' he whispered. 'I'd forgotten.'

'Oh,' said the uncommitted Rachel Wade. 'Super.'

As if guided. Max Goff turned back to the open field, opened his eyes and saw…

… reflected, quite perfectly, in the rear window of Henry Kettle's smashed-up old Volkswagen on the back of the truck, he saw the venerable mound, the Tump at Crybbe Court, and the sun above it like a holy lamp.

And the connection was formed.

Revelation.

The truck started up again, moved off towards the road.

Goff pointed urgently at the mound, talking rapidly, forefinger stabbing at the air between him and Rachel. 'Listen, when they built these things, the old Bronze Age guys, they'd, you know, consecrate them, according to their religion, right?'

Rachel Wade looked at him, expressionless.

'What they'd do is, they'd sacrifice somebody. I mean, the remains have been found, sacrifices, not burials – they have ways of telling the difference, right?'

Rachel freed a few strands of pale hair from the collar of her Barbour, flicked them back.

'And sometimes, right,' Goff surged on, 'at very important sites, the high priest himself would be sacrificed. Without resistance. Willingly, yeah?'

Rachel said, 'How would they know that?"

'Know what?'

'"a", that he died willingly. And "b", that the fragment of bones or whatever belonged to a high priest?'

Goff was annoyed. 'Jeez, they know, OK? Doesn't matter how, I'm not a flaming archaeologist. But what it meant was the sacrifice would put the seal on the sanctity of the place. The dead priest would live on as its guardian. For all time, right?'

A police sergeant came over, the same one who'd fetched them from the Cock. Big moon-faced guy, didn't strike Goff as being all that bright. 'We'd just like you to make a statement if you would, sir.'

'Everything Max Goff does is a Statement,' Goff told him and grinned. 'Who was it wrote that?'

'Time Out' said Rachel automatically and a little wearily. 'August 1990.'

The police sergeant didn't get it. 'You appear to have been the last person to see Mr. Kettle alive, sir. You'll probably be called to give evidence to that effect at the inquest.'

'Shit,' Goff said. 'How…? No, that's OK. That's fine. I'll join you back at the house. Ten minutes, right?'

'If you wouldn't mind, sir.'

'Point I was making,' Goff said, impatiently turning his back on the departing Plod, 'is that Henry Kettle was about as close as you could find to a kind of high priest these days. Get in tune with the earth and its spirit, responding to its deeper impulses. Shamanic, yeah?' Closing his eyes, he felt the holy light of the solstice on his face. Carried on talking with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Talking to himself really, letting his thoughts unravel, the connections forming.

'So Henry Kettle – how old was the guy? Eighty-five? How long did he have to go, anyway? So, OK, we have this old man, the shaman, homing in, a dead straight line across the field – straight at the mound, the Tump, right – and…'

Goff opened his eyes suddenly and fully, and was dazzled by radiant blobs of orange and blue spinning from the top of the mound.

'… and… whoomp!' He clapped his big hands violently together. Smiling hugely at Rachel Wade. 'Listen, what I'm saying, we're not looking at some bad omen here. It's a positive thing. Like the high priest going almost willingly to his death, sacrificing himself all over again to put his life energy into my project. Whoomp!'

Rachel said, 'That's really sick. Max.' But Goff was looking up at the mound with a new pride, not listening.

'I bet if we mark out those tyre-tracks across that field we'll find they correspond exactly to line B.'

'Line B?'

'The fucking ley-line, Rachel.'

'Max, that's…'

Goff looked hard at Rachel. She shut up.

Jesus, she thought.

Whoomp.

CHAPTER III

'Bit for level, Fay.'

'OK, here we go…'

Mr. Kettle said, '… All right then, we know there's got to be water yereabouts…'

'OK, that's fine, Fay… I'm rolling. Go in five.'

She wound back, set the tape running and took the cans off her ears, leaving them around her neck so she'd hear the engineer call out if he ran into problems.

Leaning back in the metal-framed typist's chair, she thought, God, I've been shunted into some seedy sidings in my time, but this…

… was the Crybbe Unattended Studio.

Ten feet long and six feet wide. Walls that closed in on you like the sides of a packing case. A tape-machine on a metal stand. A square mahogany table with a microphone next to a small console with buttons that lit up. And the chair. And no windows, just a central light and two little red lights – one above the door outside to warn people to keep away in case whoever was inside happened to be broadcasting live to the scattered homesteads of the Welsh Marches.

This studio used to be the gents' lavatories at the back of the Cock, before they'd built new ones inside the main building. Then some planning wizard at Offa's Dyke Radio had presumably stuck a plastic marker into the map and said without great enthusiasm: Crybbe – well, yeah, OK, not much of a place, but it's almost exactly halfway up the border and within couple miles of the Dyke itself… about as central as we can get.'

Then they'd have contacted the Marches Development Board, who'd have told them: No problem, we can offer you a purpose-built broadcasting centre on our new Kington Road Industrial Estate at an annual rent of only…

At which point the planning wizard would have panicked and assured them that all that was required was a little room to accommodate reporters and interviewees (one at a time) and for sending tape down a land-line to Offa's Dyke main studios.

All self-operated. No staff, no technicians. Very discreet: You walk in, you switch on, and a sound-engineer records your every word from fifty miles away.

Which was how they'd ended up with the former gents' at the Cock. A tired, brick building with a worn slate roof, at the end of a narrow passageway past the dustbins.

The original white tiles with worrying brown stains had gone now. Or at least were hidden behind the black acoustic screening which formed a little soundproof module inside the building.

But sometimes, especially early in the morning, Fay would swear she could smell…

'That's lovely, Fay, thanks very much.'

Thanks, Barry,' Fay told the microphone on the desk. All engineers were called Barry.

'It's Elton, actually,' he said. 'Hang on, Gavin's here, he'd like a word.'

Elton. Jesus, nobody in this country who was called Elton could possibly be over twenty-one. Even the damned engineer at Offa's Dyke were fresh out of engineering school.

Gavin Ashpole came on the line, the station's news editor, an undeveloped rasp, unsure of whether it was supposed to sound thrusting or laid-back. He wanted to know if Fay was any closer to an interview with Max Goff about his plans for Crybbe Court. Or at least some sort of statement. 'I mean, is it going to be a recording studio, or what? We going to have enormous rock stars helicoptering in? We need to know, and we need to know before we read about it in the bloody papers.'

'No, listen, I told you, his PA insists he doesn't want any publicity yet, but…'

Calm down, woman, don't rise to it.

'But when he's got things together,' Fay finished lamely, he says they'll tell me first.

I… I've no reason to think she's bullshitting.'

'Why can't you doorstep him? Just turn up. Put the fucker on the spot.'

'Look, isn't it better to try and stay on the right side of the guy? There could be a lot of mileage in this one for us, in… in the future.' Hesitating because 'in the future' she wasn't going to be here, was she?

Absolutely no way she could tell him about the late Henry Kettle being hired by Goff to do some dowsing around the Court. Partly because she hadn't been able to persuade Mr. Kettle to tell her what he was supposed to be looking for. And partly because loony Gavin Ashpole would start wondering how he could implicate the famous Goff in Henry's death.

I don't know, Fay.' Ashpole switching to the Experienced News Editor's pensive drawl. 'I'm not into all this pussyfooting about. We're gonna lose out, here. Listen, try him again, yeah? If you don't get anywhere, we'll have to, you know, reconsider things.'

He meant if she didn't get him an interview soon they'd send in some flash kid from the newsroom to show her how it was done. Nasty little sod, Gavin Ashpole. All of twenty-four. Career to carve.

You've got to stop this, Fay warned herself, as the line went dead. You're becoming seriously obsessed with age. Good God, woman, you're not old.

Just older than almost everybody else connected with Offa's Dyke Radio. Which, OK, was not exactly old old, but…

What it is, she thought, your whole life's been out of synch, that's the problem. Goes back to having a father who was already into his fifties when you were conceived. Discovering your dad is slightly older than most other kids' granddads.

And yet, when you are not yet in your teens, it emerges that your mother is threatening to divorce your aged father because of his infidelity.

Fay shook her head, playing with the buttons on the studio tape-machine. He'd given up the other woman, narrowly escaping public disgrace. Eight years later he was a widower.

Fast forward over that. Too painful.

Whizz on through another never-mind-how-many years and there you are, recovering from your own misguided marriage to a grade-A dickhead, pursuing your first serious career – as a radio producer, in London – and, yes, almost starting to enjoy yourself… when, out of the blue, your old father rings to invite you to his wedding in…

'Sorry, where did you say…?'

'C-R-Y-B-B-E.'

'Where the hell is that. Dad? Also, more to the point, who the hell is Grace?'

And then – bloody hell! – before he can reply, you remember.

'Oh my God, Grace was the woman who'd have been cited in Mum's petition! Grace Legge. She must be…'

'Sixty-two. And not terribly well, I'm afraid, Fay. Moneywise, too, she's not in such a healthy position. So I'm doing the decent thing. Twenty years too late, you might say…'

'I might not say anything coherent for ages, Dad. I'm bloody speechless.'

'Anyway, I've sort of moved in with her. This little terraced cottage she's got in Crybbe, which is where she was born. You go to Hereford and then you sort of turn right and just, er, jus carry on, as it were.'

'And what about your own house? Who's taking care of that?

'Woodstock? Oh, I, er, I had to sell it. Didn't get a lot actually, the way the market is, but…'

'Just a minute, Dad. Am I really hearing this? You sold that bloody wonderful house? Are you going senile?'

Not an enormously tactful question, with hindsight.

'No option, my dear. Had to have the readies for… for private treatment for Grace and, er, things. Which goes – now, you don't have to tell me – goes against everything I've always stood for, so don't spread it around. But she's really not awfully well, and I feel sort of…'

'Sort of guilty as hell.'

'Yes, I suppose. Sort of. Fay, would you object awfully to drifting out here and giving me away, as it were? Very quiet, of course. Very discreet. No dog-collars.'

This is – when? – eleven months ago?

The wedding is not an entirely convivial occasion. At the time, Grace Legge, getting married in a wheelchair, has approximately four months to live, and she knows it.

When you return to a damp and leafless late-autumnal Crybbe for the funeral, you notice the changes in your dad. Changes which a brain-scan will reveal to be the onset of a form of dementia caused by hardening of the arteries. Sometimes insufficient blood is getting to his brain. The bottom line is that it's going to get worse.

The dementia is still intermittent, but he can hardly be left on his own. He won't come to London – 'Grace's cats and things, I promised.' And he won't have a housekeeper – 'Never had to pay a woman for washing my socks and I don't plan to start now. Wash my own.'

Fay sighed deeply. Cut to Controller's office, Christmas Eve. 'Fay, it's not rational. Why don't you take a week off and think about it? I know if it was my father he'd have to sell up and rent himself a flat in town if he was expecting me to keep an eye on him.'

'This is just it, he doesn't expect me to. He's an independent old sod.'

'All right. Let's say you do go to this place. How are you supposed to make a living?'

'Well, I've done a bit of scouting around. This new outfit, Offa's Dyke Radio…'

'Local radio? Independent local radio? Here today and… Oh, Fay, come on, don't do this to yourself.'

I thought maybe I could freelance for them on a bread-and-butter basis. They've got an unattended studio actually in Crybbe, which is a stroke of luck. And the local guy they had, he's moved on, and so they're on the look-out for a new contributor. I've had a chat with the editor there and he sounded quite enthusiastic'

'I bet he did.'

'And maybe I could do the odd programme for you, if freelancing for a local independent as well doesn't break some ancient BBC law.'

'I'm sure that's not an insurmountable problem, but…'

'I know, I know. I'm far too young to be retiring to the country.'

'And far too good, actually.'

'You've never said before.'

'You might have asked for more money.'

Typical bloody BBC.

Fay spun back the Henry Kettle tape – why couldn't you rewind your life like that? – and let herself out, throwing the studio into darkness with the master switch by the door. But the spools were still spinning in her head.

She locked up and set off with a forced briskness up the alley, an ancient passageway, smoked brick walls with a skeleton of years-blackened beams. Sometimes cobwebs hung down and got in your hair. She wasn't overfond of this alley. There were always used condoms underfoot; sometimes the concrete flags were slippery with them. In winter they were frozen, like milk ice-pops.

She emerged into the centre of Crybbe as the clock in the church tower was chiming eleven. Getting to eleven sounded like a big effort for the mechanism; you could hear the

strain.

There were lots of deep shadows, even though the sun was high, because the crooked brick and timbered building, slouched together, like down-and-outs sharing a cigarette. Picturesque and moody in the evening, sometimes. In the daytime, run-down, shabby.

People were shopping in the square, mainly for essentials, the shops in Crybbe specialized in the items families ran out in between weekly trips to the supermarkets in Hereford or Leominster. In Crybbe, prices were high and stocks low. These were long-established shops, run by local people: the grocer, the chemist, the hardware and farming suppliers.

Other long-established businesses had, like Henry Kettle, gone to the wall. And been replaced by a new type of store.

Like The Gallery, run by Hereward and Jocasta Newsome, from Surrey, specializing in the works of border landscape artists. In the window, Fay saw three linked watercolours of the Tump at different times of day, the ancient mound appearing to hover in the dawn mist, then solid in the sunlight and then dark and black against an orange sky. A buff card underneath lid, in careful copperplate

THE TUMP – a triptych, by Darwyn Hall.

Price: £975.

Wow. A snip. Fay wondered how they kept the place open, then walked on, past a little, scruffy pub, the Lamb, past Middle Marches Crafts, which seemed to be a greetings-card shop this week. And then the Crybbe Pottery, which specialized in chunky earthenware Gothic houses that lit up when you plugged them in but didn't give out enough light by which to do anything except look at them and despair.

'Morning, Mr. Preece,' she said to the Town Mayor, a small man with a face like a battered wallet, full of pouches and creases.

'Ow're you,' Mr. Preece intoned and walked on without a second glance.

It had been a couple of months before Fay had realized that 'How are you' was not, in these parts, a question and therefore did not require a reply on the lines of, 'I'm fine, Mr. Preece, Ow're you?' or, 'Quite honestly, Mr. Preece, since you ask, I'm becoming moderately pissed off with trying to communicate with the dead.'

Brain-dead, anyway, most of them in this town. Nobody ever seemed to get excited. Or to question anything. Nobody ever organized petitions to the council demanding children's playgrounds or leisure centres. Women never giggled together on street corners.

Fay stopped in the street, then, and had what amounted to a panic attack.

She saw the spools on the great tape-deck of life, and the one on the right was fat with tape and the one on the left was down to its last half inch. Another quarter of a century had wound past her eyes, and she saw a sprightly, red-faced little woman in sensible clothes returning from the Crybbe Unattended, another masterpiece gone down the line for the youngsters in the newsroom to chuckle over. Poor old Fay, all those years looking after her dad, feeding him by hand, constantly washing his underpants… Think we'd better send young Jason over to check this one out?

And the buildings in the town hunched a little deeper into their foundations and nodded their mottled roofs.

'Ow're you, they creaked. 'Ow're you.

Fay came out of the passageway shivering in the sun, tingling with an electric depression, and she thought she was hearing howling, and she thought that was in her head, too along with the insistent, urgent question: how am I going to persuade him to turn his back on this dismal, accepting little town, where Grace Legge has left him her cottage, her cats and a burden of guilt dating back twenty years? How can I reach him before he becomes impervious to rational argument?

Then she realized the howling was real. A dog, not too far away. A real snout-upturned, ears-back, baying-at-the-moon job.

Fay stopped. Even in the middle of a sunny morning it was a most unearthly sound.

She'd been about to turn away from the town centre into the huddle of streets where Grace's house was. Curious, she followed the howling instead and almost walked into the big blue back of Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley.

He was standing facing the police station and a woman, who was hissing at him. Who was half his size, sharp-faced, red-faced, sixtyish, back arched like a cornered cat.

'What you want me to do?' Wynford was yelling, face like an Edam cheese. 'Shoot 'im, is it?'

'I don't care what you do,' the woman screeched. 'But I'm telling you this… I don't like it.' She looked wildly and irrationally distressed. She was vibrating. 'You'll get it stopped!'

The dog howled again, an eerie spiral. The woman seized the policeman's arm as if she wanted to tear it off. Fay had never seen anyone so close to hysteria in Crybbe, where emotions were private, like bank accounts.

'Whose dog is it?' Fay said.

They both turned and stared at her and she thought, Sure, I know, none of my business, I'm from Off.

The ululation came again, and the sky seemed to shimmer in sympathy.

'I said, whose dog is it?'

CHAPTER IV

FROM A wicker basket in the pantry Mrs Preece took the fattest onion she could find. She crumbled away its brittle outer layer until the onion was pale green and moist in the palm of her hand.

She sat the onion in a saucer.

'Stuff and nonsense,' commented Jimmy Preece, the Mayor of Crybbe. The sort of thing most of the local men would say in such situations.

With a certain ceremony, as if it were a steaming Christmas pudding, Mrs Preece carried the onion on its saucer into the parlour, Jimmy following her.

She placed it on top of the television set. She said nothing. 'A funny woman, you are,' Jimmy Preece said gruffly, but not without affection.

Mrs Preece made no reply, her mouth set in a thin line, white hair pulled back and coiled tight.

They both heard the click of the garden gate, and Jimmy went to the window and peered through the gap in his delphiniums.

Mrs Preece spoke, 'Is it him?'

Jimmy Preece nodded.

'I'm going to the shop,' Mrs Preece said. 'I'll go out the back way. Likely he'll have gone when I gets back.'

What she meant was she wouldn't come back until he was good and gone.

Jocasta Newsome, a spiky lady, said in a parched and bitter voice, 'It isn't working, is it? Even you have to admit that now.'

'I don't know what you mean.' Her husband was pretending he didn't care. He was making a picture-frame in pine, the ends carefully locked into a wood-vice to form a corner. The truth was he cared desperately, about lots of things.

'You,' Jocasta said. 'Me. It. Everything.' She was wearing a black woollen dress and a heavy golden shawl fastened with a Celtic brooch at her shoulder.

'Go away.' Hereward started flicking sawdust from his tidy beard, 'if all you can be is negative, go away.'

On the workbench between them lay the immediate cause of this particular confrontation: the electricity bill. He'd let sawdust go all over that deliberately. 'We'll query it,' Hereward had stated masterfully. 'Yes,' Jocasta had replied, 'but what if it's correct? How long can we go on paying bills like that?'

The worst of it was, they couldn't even rely on a constant supply. He'd never known so many power cuts. 'One of the problems of living in a rural area, I'm afraid,' the electricity official had told him smugly, when he complained. 'Strong winds bring down the power lines, thunder and lightning, cows rubbing themselves against the posts, birds flying into…'

'I'm trying to run a business here!'

'So are the farmers, Mr, ah, Newsome. But they've seen the problems at first hand, up on the hills. So they, you see, they realize what we're up against.'

Oh yes, very clever. What he was saying to Hereward, recognizing his accent, was: 'You people, you come here expecting everything to be as smooth as Surrey. If you really want to be accepted in the countryside you'd better keep your head down and your mouth shut, got it?

Hereward growled and Jocasta, thinking he was growling at her, looked across at him in his new blue overalls, standing by his new wooden vice, and there was a glaze of contempt over her sulky eyes.

'The rural craftsman,' she observed acidly. 'At his bench. You're really rather pathetic.'

'I'm trying to rescue the situation,' Hereward snarled through clamped teeth, 'you stupid bitch.'

Jocasta looked away, walked out, slammed the studio door.

And in the vice, the newly constructed corner of Hereward's first frame fell symbolically apart.

Hereward sank to his knees.

Very deliberately, he picked up the two lengths of moulded wood and set about realigning them. He would not be beaten. He would not give up.

And he would not let her disdain get to him. If they couldn't sell enough original works of art they would, for a limited period, sell a number of selected prints at reasonable prices. And the prices would be kept reasonable because he would make the frames himself. Dammit, he did know what he was doing.

And he had recognized that there would be problems getting a new gallery accepted in a lesser known area. Obviously, places like Crybbe had fewer tourists – all right, far fewer. But those who came were the right sort of tourists. The intelligent, childless couples who didn't need beaches, and the cultured newly-retired people with time to construct the quality of life they'd always promised themselves.

Slowly but emphatically, The Gallery would build a reputation among the discerning. They would travel from as far away as Shrewsbury and Cheltenham and even Oxford and London. The Gallery would expand, and then other specialist dealers would join them, and pretty soon it would be Crybbe for fine art, the way it was Hay-on-Wye for books.

'Of course, it took time,' he would say at dinner parties. 'Good Lord, I remember, in the early days, when, to save money, one actually made one's own frames…'

'Festival, is it?,' Jimmy Preece's eyes were like screwheads countersunk into old mahogany. 'We never had no festival before.'

'Precisely the point, Mr Mayor.' Max Goff tried to smile sincerely and reassuringly, but he knew from hundreds of press photos that it always came out wide and flashy, like car radiators in the sixties.

'No.' Mr Preece shook his head slowly, as if they were discussing water-skiing or first-division football, things which, transparently, were not part of the Crybbe scene. 'Not round yere.'

Goff leaned forward. He'd given a lot of thought to how he'd sell this thing to the townsfolk. A festival. A celebration of natural potential. Except this festival would last all year round. This festival would absorb the whole town. It would recreate Crybbe.

'The point is, Mr Mayor… You got so much to be festive about.' Go on, ask me what the hell you got to be festive about.

The Mayor just nodded. Jeez.

'Let me explain, OK?' White-suited Goff was feeling well out of place in this cramped little parlour, where everything was brown and mottled and shrunken-looking, from the beams in the ceiling, to the carpet, to Jimmy Preece himself. But he had to crack this one; getting the Mayor on his side would save a hell of a lot of time.

'OK,' Goff said calmly. 'Let's start with the basics. How much you heard about me?'

Jimmy Preece smiled slyly down at his feet, encased in heavy, well-polished working boots with nearly as many ancient cracks as his face.

Goff flashed the teeth again. 'Never trust newspapers, Mr Mayor. The more money you make, the more the c… the more they're out to nail you. 'Specially if you've made it in a operation like mine. Which, as I'm sure you know, is the music business, the recording industry.'

I've heard that."

'Sex, drugs and rock and roll, eh?'

'I wouldn't know about those things.'

'Nor would I, Mr Mayor,' Goff lied. 'Only been on the business side. A business. Like any other. And I'm not denying it's been highly successful for me. I'm a rich man.'

Goff paused.

'And now I want to put something back. Into the world, if you like. But, more specifically… into Crybbe.'

Mr Preece didn't even blink.

'Because you have a very special town here, Mr Mayor. Only this town, it's forgotten just how special it is.'

Come on, you old bastard. Ask me why it's so flaming special.

Goff waited, keeping his cool. Very commendably, he thought, under the circumstances. Then, after a while, Jimmy Preece made his considered response.

'Well, well,' he said. And was silent again.

Max Goff felt his nails penetrate the brown vinyl chair-arms. 'I don't mean to be insulting here, Mr Mayor,' he said loudly, with a big, wide, shiny smile – a 1961 Cadillac of a smile. 'But you have to face the fact that this little town is in deep shit.'

He let the words – and the smile – shimmer in the room.

'Terminally depressed,' he said. 'Economically sterile.'

Still the Mayor said nothing. But his eyes shifted sideways like the eyes of a ventriloquist's doll, and Goff knew he was last getting through.

'OK.' He pulled on to his knee a green canvas bag. 'I'm gonna lay it all down for you.'

Yeah, there it was. A hint of anxiety.

'Even a century ago,' Goff stared the old guy straight in the eyes, 'this town was home to over five thousand people. How many's it got now?'

Mr Preece looked into the fireplace. Breathed in as if about to answer, and then breathed out without a word.

'I'll tell you. At the last census, there were two thousand nine hundred and sixty-four. This is in the town itself, I'm not including the outlying farms.'

From the canvas bag, Goff took a pad of recycled paper opened it. Began to read the figures. 'Crybbe once had a grammar school and two primary schools. It's now down to single primary and the older kids get bussed to a secondary school eight miles away, yeah?'

Mr Preece nodded slowly and then carried on nodding as his head was working loose.

'Even as recently as 1968,' Goff said, 'there were four police men in Crybbe. How many now?'

Mr Preece's lips started to shape a word and then went slack again as Goff zapped him with more statistics. 'Back in the fifties, there were three grocer's shops, two butcher's, a couple of chemist's, and there was…'

Mr Preece almost yelled, 'Where you gettin' all this from?'

But Goff was coming at him like a train now, and there was no stopping him.

'… a regular assize court earlier this century, and now what? Not even petty sessions any more. No justices, no magistrates. Used to be a self-sufficient local authority, covering wide area from Crybbe and employing over seventy people. Now there's your town council. Not much more than a local advisory body that employs precisely one person part-time, that's Mrs Byford, the clerk who lakes the notes at your meetings.'

'Look, what… what's all this about?' Jimmy Preece was shrinking back into his chair, Goff leaning further towards him with every point he made, but deciding it was time to cool

things a little.

'Bottom line, Mr Mayor, is you got a slowly ageing population and nothing to offer the young to keep them here. Even the outsiders are mostly retired folk. Crybbe's already climbed into its own coffin and it's just about to pull down the lid.'

Goff sat back, putting away his papers, leaving Jimmy Preece, Mayor of Crybbe, looking as tired and wasted as his town. 'Mr Mayor, how about you call a public meeting? Crybbe and me, we need to talk.'

In the gallery itself – her place – Jocasta Newsome was starting to function. At last. God, she'd thought it was never going to begin. She walked quickly across the quarry-tiled floor – tap, tap, tap of the high heels, echoing from wall to wall in the high-roofed former chapel, a smart brisk sound she loved.

'Look, let me show you this. It's something actually quite special. '

'No, really,' The customer raised a hand and a faint smile. 'This is what I came for.'

'Oh, but…' Jocasta fell silent, realizing that a £1,000 sale was about to go through without recourse to the skills honed to a fine edge during her decade in International Marketing. She pulled herself together, smiled and patted the hinged frame of the triptych, it is rather super, though, isn't it?'

'Actually,' the customer said, turning her back on the triple image of the Tump, I think it's absolutely dreadful.'

'Oh.' Jocasta was genuinely thrown by this, because the customer was undoubtedly the right kind: Barbour, silk scarf and that offhand, isn't-life-tedious sort of poise she'd always rather envied.

The woman revived her faint smile. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. My boss thinks it's wonderful, and that's all that matters. I suppose it's the subject I'm not terribly taken with. It's only a large heap of soil, after all."

Jocasta mentally adjusted the woman's standing; she had a boss. Dare she ask who he was? 'I'll pa… I'll have it packaged for you.'

'Oh, don't bother, I'll just toss it in the back of the jeep. Haven't far to go.' How far exactly? Jocasta asked silently, directing a powerful ray of naked curiosity at the woman. It usually worked.

The door closed behind him. Max Goff stood a moment on the sunlit step, Crybbe laid out before him.

Jimmy Preece's retirement cottage was a fitting place for the Mayor to live, at the entrance to the narrow road off the little square, the one which led eventually 10 the Court – Jimmy Preece being the head of the family which had lived at Court Farm since sixteen-something at least.

It was fitting also for the Mayor because it was at the top of the town, with the church of St Michael on the right. And you could see the buildings – eighteenth, seventeenth century and earlier – staggering, gently inebriated, down the hill to the river, with its three-arched bridge.

From up here Goff could easily discern the medieval street pattern – almost unchanged, he figured. The newer buildings – the school, the council housing and the small industrial estate – had been tacked on and could, no doubt, just as easily be flicked away.

It was bloody perfect.

Unspoiled.

And this was precisely because it was not a wealthy town, because it was down on its luck and had been for a long, long time. Because it was not linked to the trunk roads between Wales and the Midlands and was not convenient, never would be. No use at all for commuting to anywhere.

And yet, beneath this town, the dragon slumbered.

She was going to ring Darwyn Hall, the artist, immediately but Hereward walked in, still wearing his artisan's outfit and carrying a mug of coffee. The mug was one of the misshapen brown things they'd felt obliged to buy from the Crybbe Pottery.

'Who was that?'

Jocasta was sitting at her desk in a corner of the gallery, putting the cheque away. It was a customized company cheque, the word Epidemic faded across it like a watermark. 'A sale, of course,' she said nonchalantly.

'Good God.' Hereward looked around to see which of the pictures had gone. 'Picking it up later, are they?'

'You should be looking in the window.' Jocasta just couldn't hold her cool any longer and an awful smirk of delight was spreading over her face like strawberry jam.

'You're joking,' Hereward said, stunned. He strode to the window and threw back the shutters. 'Good grief!' He turned back to Jocasta. 'Full price?'

'This is not a bloody discount store, darling.'

'Stone me,' said Hereward. 'The triptych. Just like that? I mean, who…?'

Jocasta waited a second or two, adjusted the Celtic brooch at her shoulder and then casually hit him with the big one.

'Max Goff.'

'Gosh.' Hereward pit down his cup. 'So it's true, then. He has bought the Court.'

'Sent his personal assistant to collect it,' Jocasta said. 'Rachel Wade.'

'This is far from bad news,' Hereward said slowly, 'in fact, this could be the turning point.'

Mrs Preece waited across the square with her shopping bag until she saw the large man in the white suit stride out past the delphiniums. He didn't, she noticed, close the garden gate behind him. She watched him get into his fancy black car and didn't go across to the house until she couldn't even hear its noise any more.

Jimmy was still sitting in the parlour staring at the wall.

Mrs Preece put down her shopping bag and reached over Jimmy to the top of the television set, where the onion was sitting in its saucer.

'You'll be late for your drink,' she said.

'I'm not going today. I 'ave to talk to the clerk before she goes back to the library.'

'What was he after?' demanded Mrs Preece, standing there holding the saucer with the onion on it.

'He wants us to call a public meeting.'

'Oh, he does, does he? And who's he to ask for a public meeting?'

'An interferer," Jimmy Preece said. 'That's what he is.'

Mrs Preece said nothing.

'I don't like interferers,' Jimmy Preece said.

There was nothing his wife could say to that. She walked through to the kitchen, holding the saucer before her at arm's length as if what it had on it was not a peeled onion but a dead rat.

In the kitchen she got out a meat skewer, a big one, nearly a foot long, and speared the onion, the sharp point slipping easily into its soft, moist, white flesh.

Then she took it across to the Rayburn and opened the door to the fire compartment. With a quick stab and a shiver – partly f revulsion, partly satisfaction – she thrust the onion into the flames and slammed the door, hard.

CHAPTER V

This may seem an odd question,' the vicar of Crybbe said after a good deal of hesitation, 'but have you ever performed an exorcism?'

The question hung in the air for quite a while.

Sunk into his armchair in Grace's former sitting-room, Canon Alex Peters peered vaguely into the thick soup of his past. Had he done an exorcism? Buggered if he could remember.

The sun was so bright now – at least suggestive of warmth – that Alex had stripped down to his washed-out Kate Bush T-shirt, the letters in Bush stretched to twice the size of those in Kate by the considerable belly he'd put on since the doctor had ordered him to give up jogging. On his knees was a fiendish-looking black tomcat which Grace had named after some famous Russian. Chekhov? Dostoevsky? Buggered if he could remember that either.

'Ah, sorry, Murray. Yes, exorcism. Mmm.'

What should he say? East Anglia? Perhaps when he was in charge of one of those huge, terrifying, flint churches in Suffolk… Needed to be a bit careful here.

'Ah! I'll tell you what it was, Murray – going back a good many years this. Wasn't the full bell, book and candle routine, as I remember. More of a quickie, bless-this-house operation. Actually, I think I made it up as I went along.'

The Revd Murray Beech raised an eyebrow.

Alex said, 'Well, you know the sort of thing… "I have reason to believe there's an unquiet spirit on the premises, so, in the name of the Management, I suggest you leave these decent folk alone and push off back where you came from, there's a good chap." '

The Revd Murray Beech did not smile.

'Expect I dramatized it a bit,' Alex said. 'But that's what it boiled down to. Seemed to work, as I recall. Don't remember any come-backs, anyway. Why d'you ask?'

Although he wore the regulation-issue black shirt and clerical collar, rather than a Kate Bush T-shirt, young Murray Beech didn't seem like a real vicar to Alex. More like the ambitious deputy head of some inner-city comprehensive school. He was on the edge of one of Grace's G-plan dining chairs, looking vaguely unhappy about the can of lager Alex had put unceremoniously into his hand.

'You see, the way you put it then,' Murray said carefully, as though he were formulating a point at a conference, 'makes it seem as if… you knew at the time… that you were only going through the motions.'

'Well, that's probably true, old chap. But who knows what we do when we go through the motions?' A sunbeam stroked Alex's knees; the cat shifted a little to make the most of it. 'Do I understand, Murray, that someone has invited you to perform an exorcism?'

'This appears to be the general idea,' the vicar said uncomfortably. 'The central dilemma is, as you know, I'm not into sham. Too much of that in the church.'

'Absolutely, old chap.'

'You see, my problem is…'

'Oh, I think I know what your problem is.' Perhaps, Alex thought, it used to be my problem too, to an extent. How sure of our ground we are, when we're young ministers. 'For instance, Murray, if I were to ask you what you consider to be the biggest evils in the world today, you'd say…?'

'Inequality. Racism. Destruction of the planet due to unassuageable… I'm not going to say capitalism, let's call it greed.' He eyed the Guardian on Alex's chair-arm. 'Surely you'd agree with that?'

"Course, dear boy. Spot on. Look, Tolstoy, would you mind not sharpening your claws on my inner thigh, there's good cat. So who wants you to do this exorcism?'

'Difficult.' Murray smiled without humour. 'Difficult situation. It's a teenager. Lives with the grandparents. Think there's some sort of – his mouth pursed in distaste – 'disruptive

etheric intrusion. In the house.'

'Poltergeist, eh? What have the grandparents got to say?'

'That's the difficulty. I'm not supposed to speak to them. This… person is rather embarrassed about the whole thing. Having read somewhere that so-called poltergeists are often caused by, or attracted to, a disturbed adolescent. You know that theory?'

'Rampant hormones overflowing. Smart boy. In my day, of course, the vicar would just have told him to stop wanking and the thing would go away.'

Murray said, 'It's a girl.'

'Oh.'

'She wants me to go along when her grandparents are out and deal with this alleged presence.'

'Oh dear.' Alex opened his can of Heineken with a snap 'You're right, my boy, it is a difficult one. Erm…' He looked across at Murray, all cropped hair, tight mouth and steely

efficiency. 'Do you suppose this youngster might have something of a… crush on you?' Well, it wasn't entirely beyond the bounds of possibility; there were some pretty warped kids around these days.

'Oh, I don't think it's that, Alex. That would be comparatively easy to deal with.'

'Glad you think so. What have you said to her, then?'

'We had a long discussion about the problems and insecurities of the post-pubescent period. Made more difficult in this case because she has no parents to go to – mother dead, father in the merchant navy. You see, I don't want to fail the kid. Because, you know, so few people in this town ever actually come to me for help. Especially with anything of a non-material nature – i.e. anything that doesn't involve opening jumble sales. It's obvious most of them find me an institutional irrelevance most of the time.'

'Wouldn't say that, old chap.'

'Wouldn't you? Oh, certainly, they're always there on Sunday. Well, enough of them anyway. So no congregation problems, as such, but…'

'That's what it's all about, old son. That's the core of it, bums on pews.'

'Is it? Is that what you think?' The dining chair creaked as Murray hunched forward, chin thrusting. 'Have you ever looked out over your parishioners and seen all the animation, all the commitment, of a doctor's waiting room or a bus queue?'

Alex nodded. 'They're not expressive people in this town, I grant you. Perhaps a chap like you ought to be working in a more happening situation, as they say.'

Murray clearly thought so too. But Alex could see the difficulty. He'd been lucky to get a parish this size at his age, still in his twenties. Could be a key step on the way to the bishop's palace before he turned forty if he made the right impression…

They heard footsteps on the path, a key in the front door. Ah, here's Fay. Look, Murray, why don't we ask her about your problem? Used to be a teenage girl herself not awfully long ago.'

'No!' Murray Beech jerked on the edge of his dining chair. 'Not a word, if you don't mind, Alex. I don't want this turned into a joke on the radio.'

'Good God, Murray, I hardly think…'

'Please.'

'OK, if that's how you'd prefer it. I say, what's wrong with old Chekhov?'

The cat had leapt on to the chair-back next to Alex's shoulder, looking even less at ease than the vicar of Crybbe.

'Dad,' Fay called from the hall. 'You haven't got Rasputin in there, have you? If you have, just hold on to him.' There was a patter of paws. 'We may have a minor integration problem.'

The cat hissed in Alex's ear.

'I must go,' Murray Beech said, putting the unopened can of lager on top of Grace's little nest of tables.

The door opened and a dog came in, followed by Fay. The dog was straining on the end of a clothes-line. It was a rather bizarre dog. Black and white, the size of a sheepdog. But with a terrier's stance and enormous ears, like a donkey's.

The dog ignored Rasputin but sniffed suspiciously at Murray Beech, as the vicar came to his feet.

'Sorry about this, Dad,' Fay said. 'But you and Rasputin have to make allowances, show a little charity. Oh, hullo Murray, I'm quite glad you're here.'

The dog ambled over to Alex. 'He's had a bereavement,' Fay said. 'Listen, Murray, do you know Mrs Byford?'

Halfway to the door, the vicar stiffened. 'The Old Police House?'

'That's the one, yes. Is she all right?'

'I'm sorry… What do you mean, "all right"?'

Alex, patting the dog, observed how inhibited Murray Beech became when Fay was around. Partly, he thought, because of what she did for a living and partly, no doubt, because he couldn't help fancying the arse off her. Open to that kind of thing now, too, since his engagement had gone down the toilet

'This Mrs Byford,' Fay said, 'was throwing the most amazing wobbly. He' – looking at the dog – 'was howling in his cell at the nick, and Mrs Byford was reacting as if it was the four-minute warning or something. Really going for Wynford, the copper. "Get it stopped! I'm not having it! I don't like it!" Way over the top."

'Perhaps she simply feels she has a right to peace and quiet,' Murray said tightly.

'Living next to the cop-shop? Drunks getting hauled in on a Saturday night? What the hell does she know about peace and quiet?'

Murray shrugged. 'I'm sorry, I have to go. I'll talk to you again, Alex.'

'Yes, call in any time, old chap.'

When the vicar had gone. Fay said, 'Creep.'

'No, just a duck out of water,' Alex said, stroking the rigid Rasputin. 'He'd be far more at home in Birmingham, preaching peaceful coexistence with Islam. Who's your extraordinary

friend?'

'Um, yes. I'm sorry to spring him on you, but it all happened very quickly, what with this loopy woman – definitely something wrong with her.' Fay knelt down and detached the clothes-line from the dog's collar. 'He's called Arnold. He was Henry Kettle's dog. He seems to have been in the car when it crashed. Must have got out through a window afterwards. They found him this morning, sitting by the wreckage like the Greyfriars Bobby. Breaks your heart, doesn't it?'

Arnold rested his chin for just a moment on Alex's knee. There was a savage hiss from Rasputin. 'Poor old chap,' Alex said. He thought the dog had strangely kind eyes. 'But he can't stay here.'

Arnold glanced at Rasputin with disinterest then padded away. Fay said, 'I was afraid, to be honest, of what Wynford might have done to shut him up.'

'Oh, surely not.'

'I don't know, the police round here are… different. Wynford had him in this concrete coal shed kind of place. Hard door, no windows, no basket or anything. A metal bucket to

drink out of. Barbaric. So I thought, that's it, he's not staying here. Then Wynford and I had this terrific battle.'

'Oh dear,' Alex said. 'Poor chap.'

' "Oh, we has to let the RSPCA deal with it. We has to abide by the Procedures." "Bollocks,'' I said. "Send the RSPCA round to see me." '

'No contest,' Alex said.

'Listen, that guy is seriously weird. His features are too small for his head and they never alter. So I just opened the shed door and walked off, and the dog followed me. Wynford's left standing there, face getting redder and redder, like a pumpkin with a light inside on Hallowe'en.'

Arnold was pottering around the room, sniffing uncertainly, huge ears pricked.

'It's remarkable really, he doesn't seem to have been injured at all, though I don't suppose bruises would show up on a dog. Psychologically, though…'

'Yes, it's a damn shame. But Fay…'

'… psychologically, he could be in pieces.'

'But he can't stay here, Fay.' Alex sat up, trying to look authoritative. 'Grace would have a fit. She wasn't at all fond dogs. And neither's old Rasputin.'

'Dad' – Fay was wearing that expression – 'Grace is bloody dead. Anyway…' She squatted down beside Arnold, and cradled his black and white snout in her hands. Long black whiskers came out between her fingers. 'If he goes, I go too.'

Canon Alex Peters took a long swig of cold Heineken.

'Splendid,' he said.

CHAPTER VI

People kept looking at her.

This was not usual. Normally, on these streets, even if you were greeted – 'Ow're you' – you were not looked at. You were observed, your presence was noted, but you were not directly examined.

Maybe, she thought, it was the dog. Maybe they recognize the late Henry Kettle's dog. Or maybe they'd never before see a dog on the end of a thin, red, plastic-covered clothes-line that the person on the other end was now wishing she hadn't adapted because, every time the dog tugged at the makeshift lead, her right hand received what could turn out to be third-degree burns.

'Arnold, for Christ's sake…'

With Henry Kettle he'd appeared ultra-docile, really laid back. Now he was like some loony puppy, pulling in all directions, wanting to go nowhere, needing to go anywhere. And fast.

You had to make allowances. He was disoriented. He'd had a bereavement. In fact, the worst thing that could happen to a one-man dog had happened to Arnold. So allowances definitely were called for. And one of the people who was going to have to make them was Canon Alex Peters. In Fay's experience all this cat-and-dog incompatibility business was grossly exaggerated. Even Rasputin would, in time, come around.

But another animal was another root in Crybbe. And you don't want that, Fay, you don't want any roots in Crybbe.

Bill Davies, the butcher, walked past with fresh blood on his apron, and he stared at them.

Fay was fed up with this. She stared back. Bill Davies looked away.

Maybe they were all afflicted with this obsession about dogs fouling pavements. She'd have to buy one of those poop-scoop things. On the other hand, did that kind of obsession really seem like Crybbe, where apathy ruled?

'For God's sake, Arnie, make up your mind.' They'd come to the square and he seemed to want to turn back. He circled miserably around, dragging the clothes-line and winding it round the legs of a woman bending over the tailgate of a Range Rover, shoving something in the back.

'Oh hell, I'm really sorry. Look, if you can stand still, I'll disentangle you. I'm very sorry.'

'No problem,' the woman said, looking quite amused. She was the first person who hadn't stared at them, which meant she must be from Off.

Of course she was – she was Max Goff's PA, Ms Coolly Efficient.

'We're not used to each other,' Fay explained, it's Henry Kettle's sheepdog, the poor chap who… I'm looking after him.'

'Oh, yes.' Rachel Wade stepped out of the loop of clothesline. 'You're from the radio.'

'We all have a living to make,' Fay said and then, making the most of the encounter, 'Look, can I talk to you some time? I'm being hassled by my boss to find out what's happening to the Court.' That hurt, referring to Gavin Ashpole as a boss, which he wasn't and was never going to be.

'Sure,' Rachel said, surprising her.

'When?'

'Now if you like. We could go over to the Court, Max is out seeing people.'

'Great.'

'Hop in then,' Rachel said. But Arnold didn't want to. In the end Fay had to pick him up and dump him on the back seat, where he flattened himself into the leather and panted and

trembled.

'Sorry about this.' Fay climbed into the passenger seat. 'He's – not surprisingly – more than a bit paranoid. He was in Henry's car when it… you know.'

'Oh dear, poor dog. I didn't know about that.' Rachel started the engine, 'it's rather a mystery, isn't it. About Mr Kettle. Do you think he'd been drinking?'

'I didn't know him very well. I think a heart attack or stroke or something seems more likely, don't you?'

'He was a nice old man.' Rachel swung the Range Rover off the square into the street that wriggled down past the church, the graveyard on the right, a few cottages on the left. The street narrowed and entered a wood, where the late afternoon sun was filtered away and the colours faded almost to grey, 'I don't believe all that dowsing stuff. But he was a nice old man.'

'Don't you? I thought…'

'Oh, Max does. Max believes it. Good God, yes. However, I don't get paid to share his wilder obsessions. Well, he thinks I do…' Rachel exhaled a short, throaty laugh.

They came out of the wood. A track to the left was barred by a gate with a metal sign. COURT FARM. Where the Preece farmed. Jack, son of Jimmy, the Mayor, and Jack's two son She'd seen Jack once, slinking almost furtively out of the church, his nightly duty accomplished.

'And what exactly is Mr Goff's obsession with the Court?'

'I'll show you in a minute,' Rachel said affably.

This was too easy. Fay was suspicious. She watched Rachel Wade driving with a languid economy of movement, like people drove in films, only you knew they weren't in real, moving vehicles. This was the kind of woman who could change a wheel and make it look like a ballet. Made you despair.

Rachel said, is that your father, the old clergyman? Or your grandfather or something?'

'Father. You've met him?'

'In the Cock. We got into conversation after my lighter fell off the bar and he picked it up.' Rachel smiled, in fact, if he'd been considerably younger, I'd almost have thought…'

Fay nodded wryly. 'The old knocking-the-lighter-off-the-bar routine. Then he carries out a detailed survey of your legs while he's picking it up. He's harmless. I think.'

'He's certainly a character.' Rachel pulled up in a walled courtyard amid heaps of sand and builders' rubble. Before them random grey-brown stones were settled around deepset

mullioned windows and a dusty oak door was half-open.

Fay took a breath.

'Crybbe Court,' Rachel said. 'But don't get too excited.' She snapped on the handbrake. 'Leave the dog in the car, he won't like it. Nobody does, really, apart from historians, and even they get depressed at the state of it.'

She wondered what had made her think it was going to be mellow and warm-toned like a country house on a Christmas card.

'It's old,' she said.

'Elizabethan.'

She felt cold and folded her bare arms. Outside, it was a fairly pleasant midsummer's day; in here, stark and grim as dankest February.

Somehow, she'd imagined rich drapes and tapestries and polished panelling. Probably because the only homes of a similar period she'd visited had been stately homes or National Trust properties, everything exuding the dull sheen of age and wealth, divided from the plebs by brass railings and velvet ropes.

In Crybbe Court these days, it seemed, only the rats were rich.

The room was large, stone-floored and low-ceilinged, and apparently fortified against the sun. The only direct light was from three small, high-set windows, not much more than slits. Bare blue sky through crossed iron bars.

Fay said, 'I suppose it's logical when you think about it, the period and everything, but I didn't imagine it would be quite so…'

She became aware of a narrow, stone staircase spiralling into a vagueness of cold light hanging from above like a sheet draped over a banister.

'Ghastly,' Rachel said, 'is, I think, the word you're groping for. Let's go upstairs. It's possibly a little less oppressive.'

The spiral staircase opened into a large chamber with mullioned windows set in two walls. Bars of dusty sunshine fell short of meeting in the middle. It had originally been the main family living-room, Rachel explained. 'Also, I'm told, the place where the local high sheriff, a man named Wort, held out against the local populace who'd arrived to lynch him. Have you heard that story?'

'I've heard the name, but not the story.'

'Oh, well, he was a local tyrant back in the sixteenth century. Known as Black Michael. Hanged men for petty crimes after allowing their wives to appeal to his better nature, if you see what I mean. Also said to have experimented on people before they died, in much the same way as the Nazis did.'

'Charming.'

'In the end, the local people decided they'd had enough.'

'What? The townsfolk of Crybbe actually rebelled? What did they do, write "Wort Must Go" on the lavatory wall?'

'Probably, for the first ten years of atrocities. But in the end they really did come out to lynch him, all gathered out there in the courtyard, threatening to burn the place down with him in it if he didn't come out.'

'And did he?'

'No,' said Rachel. 'He went into the attic and hanged himself from the same rafters from which he'd hanged his offenders.'

'And naturally,' Fay said, 'he haunts the place.'

'Well, no,' Rachel said. "He doesn't, actually. No stories to that effect anyway. And when Mr Kettle toured the house, he said it was completely dead. As in vacant. Un-presenced, or however you care to put it. Max was terribly disappointed. He had to console himself with the thought of the hound bounding across his path one night.'

'What?'

'Black Michael's Hound. Nobody ever sees Michael, but there is a legend about his dog. A big, black, Baskerville-type creature said to haunt the lanes on the edge of town. It comes down from the Tump.'

Fay thought at once of the old lady who kept telephoning her, Mrs Seagrove. 'I didn't know about that.'

Rachel looked at her, as if surprised anybody should want to know about it.

'When was it last seen?' Fay asked.

'Who knows. The book Max found the story in was published, I think, in the fifties. One of those "Legends of the Border" collections. The more recent ones don't seem to have bothered with it.'

Fay wondered if it would help Mrs Seagrove to know about the legend. Probably scare her even more. Or maybe Mrs Seagrove did know about it and had either invented or imagined her own sighting, which would explain everything. The problem with old ladies was you could never be quite sure of their state of mind, especially the ones who lived alone.

She asked bravely, 'Are we going up to the attic, then?'

'Certainly not,' Rachel said firmly. 'For one thing, it's not terribly safe. The floor's pretty badly rotted away up there and Max isn't insured against people breaking their necks. Unless they've been hanged.'

Fay shivered and smiled and looked around. 'Well,' she said. It could be wonderful, I suppose. If it was done up.'

'With a million pounds or so spent on it, perhaps.' Rachel prodded with a shoe and sent a piece of plaster skating across

the dusty wooden floor, 'I can think of better things you could do with a million pounds.'

'Has it been like this since – you know – Tudor times?'

'Good God, no. At various times… I mean, in the past century alone, it's been a private school, a hotel… even an actual dwelling place again. If we had a torch you'd see bits of wiring and the ruins of bathrooms. But nothing's ever lasted long. It was built as an Elizabethan house, and that, in essence, is what it keeps reverting to.'

'And now?'

'No big secret. Max is a New Age billionaire with a Dream.'

'You don't sound very impressed.'

Rachel stood in the centre of the room and spread her hands. 'Oh God… He wants to be King Arthur. He wants to set up his Round Table with all kinds of dowsers and geomancers and spiritual healers and other ghastly cranks. He's been quietly infiltrating them into the town over the past year. And there'll be some kind of Max Goff Foundation, on a drip-feed from Epidemic, hopefully with the blessing of the Charity Commissioners. And people will get ludicrous grants to go off an search for their own pet Holy Grails.'

'Sounds quite exciting,' said Fay, but Rachel looked gloomy and rolled her eyes, her hands sunk deep into the pockets of her Barbour.

'Money down the drain,' she said.

'What's a… a geomancer?'

'It's some sort of spiritual chartered surveyor. Someone who works out where it's best to live to stay in harmony with the Earth Spirit, whatever that is, to protect yourself and your

family against Evil Forces. Need I go on?'

There were passages leading off the big room and Fay took one and found herself in a dark little bedchamber. It was the first room she'd seen that was actually furnished. There was an old chest under the pathetically inadequate window and a very small four-poster bed.

'Like a four-poster cot, isn't it?' Rachel had drifted in after her. 'People were smaller in those days.'

It was no more than five feet high and not much longer with very thick posts and an oak headboard with a recessed ledge. On the ledge was a pewter candle-holder with a candle stub in it. The drapes were some kind of cumbersome brocade thick as tarpaulin and heavy with grease.

'It seems they'd leap into bed,' Rachel said, 'and draw all the curtains tight. And then blow out their candle. Having first read a passage from the Bible – you see there's space on the ledge for a Bible. Because they just knew that on the other side of the curtains, the evil spirits would be hovering en masse. Cosy, isn't it?'

'Claustrophobic' Fay had never liked four-posters.

'However, if you want a real scare…' Rachel held out a box of matches,'… light the candle and look in the chest.'

She stood there holding the matchbox, not much more than another shadow in the dim, grimy bedchamber, only a crease of her Barbour at the elbow catching the light. The coat's dull waxen surface looked right for the period, and Fay had the alarming sensation that the dingy room was dragging them back into its own dark era. Was Rachel smiling? Fay couldn't see her face.

She found herself accepting the matchbox.

'Go on,' Rachel said. 'Light the candle.'

'OK.' She tried not to sound hesitant, asking herself. You aren't nervous, are you, Fay?

No, she decided. Just bloody cold. It might have occurred to me to wonder why she was wearing a Barbour on Midsummer Day. And she might have warned me about the temperature in this place.

She reached beyond the post at the bedhead and pulled the candle-holder from the recess. Struck a match. Saw the candle-tray was full of dead flies and bluebottles. Turned it upside down, but not all of them fell out.

Yuk. Fay lit the candle.

Shadows bounced.

'The chest under the window?'

She could see Rachel Wade's face now, in the candle-light, and it wasn't smiling. 'Look,' Rachel said, 'forget it. Come on. I was only joking.'

'No you weren't.' Fay smelled wax, from the candle and from Rachel's coat perhaps. 'I'd better open the blasted thing before this candle burns away.'

Rachel Wade shrugged. Fay crossed to the window which left only a smear of light across the top of the chest. Obviously not Elizabethan, this chest; it had black lettering stamped across its lid and was carelessly bound with green-painted metal strips.

Fay lifted the lid and lowered the candle.

She recoiled at once. 'Oh,' she said.

'Sorry.'

'What is it?'

Its eye-sockets were black and two upper teeth were thin and curved. A small cobweb hung between them. The mouth was stretched wide in a fossilized shriek.

'It's a cat, isn't it? A mummified cat?'

'Tiddles. Max calls it Tiddles.'

'Cute,' Fay said and shuddered.

'Not very. It was found in the rafters. It may have been walled up there alive.'

'God.'

'Practical geomancy,' Rachel said. 'The spirit of the cat acts apparently, as a guardian. They found half a horse behind the kitchen wall. Come on, let's go.

CHAPTER VII

Asleep in his armchair, Canon Alex Peters dreamed he was asleep in his armchair. Tucked up in a soft blanket of sunbeams, he awoke in time to watch the wall dissolve.

It began with the fireplace. He was aware that Grace's dreadful see-through clock and the gilt-framed mirror were fading, while the black, sooty hole of the fireplace itself was getting bigger.

Gradually, the hole took over, becoming darker and wider and then spreading up through the mantelpiece, almost as far as the ceiling, until the whole chimney breast dissolved into a black passageway.

There formed a filigree of yellowish light, and then, dimly at first, Grace appeared in the passageway. Standing there, quite still.

'What happened to your wheelchair?' Alex asked. He was glad, of course, to see her back on her feet.

'No you're not,' Grace said. Her lips did not move when she spoke but her body became brighter, as if the spider web of lights was inside her, like glowing veins. 'You were glad when I died, and you'll be glad to know I'm still dead.'

'That's not true,' protested Alex. But you couldn't lie to the dead, and he knew it.

Grace turned her back on him and began to walk away along the passage. Alex struggled to get up, desperate to explain.

But the chair wouldn't let him. He shouted to the spindly, diminishing figure. 'Grace, look, don't go, give me a hand, would you?'

The chair held him in a leathery grip.

'Grace!' Alex screamed. 'Grace, don't go! I want to explain!'

Just once, Grace glanced back at him over her shoulder, and there was a pitying smile on her face, with perhaps a shadow of malice.

Goff did not, of course, have any immediate plans to live in Crybbe Court itself, Rachel Wade said. Good God, no.

Well, perhaps one day. When it was fully restored.

'You mean,' Fay said as they walked out into the sunlight, restored to what it would've been like if the Elizabethans had had full central heating and ten-speaker stereos.'

'You're getting the general picture,' Rachel confirmed, and showed her the place where Max actually would be living within the next week or so.

It was an L-shaped stone stable-block behind the house. It already had been gutted, plumbed and wired and a giant plate-glass window had been inserted into a solid stone wall to open up a new and spectacular view of the hills from what would be the living-room.

At least, the view would have been spectacular if it hadn't been semi-obscured by a green mound, like an inverted pudding basin or a giant helmet.

'His beloved Tump,' Rachel said. And there wasn't much affection there, Fay thought, either for the mound or for Max Goff.

'Is it a burial mound or a – what d'you call it – castle mound… motte?'

'Probably both. Either way it's pretty unsightly, like an overgrown spoil-heap. And decidedly creepy by moonlight. I mean, who wants to stare out at a grave? Whoever built this place had the right idea, I think, by putting a blank stable wall in front so it wouldn't frighten the horses.'

Fay realized the Court itself was built in a hollow, and the Tump was on slightly higher ground, so that it seemed, from here, higher than it actually was. It loomed. The stone wall which surrounded it had partly fallen down on this side, revealing the mesh of dense bushes and brambles at the base of the mound.

'Poor Mr Kettle,' Fay said, reminded by the wall.

Rachel fingered a strand of pale hair, the nearest she'd come in Fay's presence, to a nervous gesture. 'The bitter irony is that Max plans to move that wall. He calls it a nineteenth-century abomination. Some experts think it's older than that and should be preserved, but he'll get his way, of course, in the end.'

Rachel stepped on a piece of soft plaster and ground it in the newly boarded floor.

'He always does,' she said.

It was clear now to Fay that this was not the same Rachel Wade who, a week ago, had briskly swept her down the steps of the Cock with vague promises of an interview with Goff

when his plans were in shape. Sure, on that occasion, she'd had a tape recorder over her shoulder. But even if she'd carried one today, she felt, Rachel's attitude would not have been markedly different.

Something had changed.

Fay said cautiously, 'So when is he going to talk to me? On tape.'

'Leave it with me,' Rachel said. 'I'll fix it.' She spread her arms to usher Fay back towards the wooden framework evidently destined to be a doorway.

'I hate having to ask this sort of question.' Fay stopped at the entrance. 'But he isn't going to be talking to anyone else, is he, first?'

'Not if I can help it. Listen, we've been walking around this place for the last forty-five minutes and I've forgotten your name.'

'Fay. Fay Morrison.'

'Would you like a job, Fay?'

'Huh?'

'Quite ludicrous salary. Seductively fast company car. Lots of foreign travel.'

Fay stared at her.

'Silly expenses,' Rachel said. 'Untold fringe benefits.' She'd turned her back on the big window. From the far end of the room, the hills had been squeezed out of the picture; the window was full of Tump.

'How long have you been doing this?' Fay asked. 'As Goff's PA.'

'Nearly four years now. I think I've done rather well on the whole. Although the physical demands are not too arduous, Max's bisexuality goes in alternating phases. During his DC periods he can leave you alone for months.'

The grey eyes were calm and candid.

'Jesus Christ,' Fay said.

'Oh, don't get me wrong – I don't mind that. I almost became an actress, anyway. And with Max, there's rarely anything terribly tiring. And never anything particularly bizarre. Well, except for the crystals, and he only ever tried that once. And anyway, one always has to weigh these things against the benefits. No, it's just…'

Rachel dug her fists deep into the pockets of her Barbour until Fay could see the knuckles outlined in the shiny, waxed fabric.

'.. It's just I don't think I can go through with it here,' Rachel said. 'Do you know what I mean?'

Grace Legge came here to die. Dad came to go slowly loopy, and I came to watch.

'Yes,' Fay said bleakly, 'I know exactly what you mean. I'm beginning to realize how hard it is to get anything positive to take off here.'

She'd read somewhere that nobody could say for certain where the name Crybbe came from. It was obviously a corruption of the Welsh, and there were two possible derivations:

crib – the crest of a hill (which seemed topographically unlikely, because the town was in a valley).

or

crybachu – to wither.

It appeals to him, you know,' Rachel said. 'The fact that failure is so deeply ingrained here. Brings out the crusader him. He's going to free the place from centuries of bucolic apathy.'

'The first story Offa's Dyke got me to cover,' Fay remembered, 'was the opening of a new factory on the industrial estate. Quite a lively little set-up producing chunky coloured sandals – in fact I'm wearing a pair, see? They were providing eight local jobs and the Marches Development Board were predicting it'd be twenty before the end of the year.'

'Closed down, didn't it? Was it last week?'

'I'd have ordered another pair if I'd known,' Fay said.

They stared at each other, almost comically glum, then Rachel tossed back her ash-blonde hair and strode determinedly through to the room which would soon be a kitchen.

'Come on, let's get out of here, he'll be back soon.' She picked up two tumblers from the draining surface next to the new sink, and Fay followed her outside, where she dug a bottle

of sparkling wine from the silt in the bottom of an old sheep trough – 'My private cellar.'

And then they collected a grateful Arnold from the Range Rover and wandered off across the field, down the valley to the river, where you could sit on the bank fifty yards from the three-arched bridge and probably not see the Court any more nor even the Tump.

On the way down the field Fay looked over her shoulder to watch the Tump disappearing and saw a man among the trees on its summit. He was quite still, obviously watching them.

'Rachel, who's that?'

'Where?'

'On the Tump. I don't think it's Goff.'

Rachel turned round and made no pretence of not staring.

'It's Humble,' she said. 'Max's minder. He loves it here. He used to be a gamekeeper. He prowls the woods all the time, supposedly organizing security. I think he snares rabbits and

things.'

'Very Green, I must say,' Fay said.

'Max's principles tend to get overlooked where Humble's concerned. I think he sometimes serves the need that occasionally arises in Max for, er, rough boys.'

'I think I'm sorry I asked,' said Fay.

Alex awoke.

There was pressure on his chest. When he was able to open his eyes just a little, with considerable difficulty, he looked into blackness.

Oh lord, he thought, I've actually entered the dark place, I'm in there with Grace.

Yet he was still in the armchair. The chair was refusing to let go of him. It had closed around him like an iron lung or something. He was a prisoner in the chair and in the dark and there was a pressure on his chest.

'Grace?' he said feebly. 'Grace?'

The darkness moved. The darkness was making a soft, rhythmic noise, like a motor boat in the distance.

Alex opened his eyes fully and stared into luminous amber-green, watchful eyes. He chuckled; the darkness was only a big, black cat.

'Ras… Ras…' he whispered weakly, trying to think of the creature's name.

The cat stood up on his chest.

'Rastus!' Alex said triumphantly. 'Hullo, Rastus. You know, for a minute, I thought… Oh, never mind, you wouldn't understand.'

He wondered if it was teatime yet. The clock said… what? Couldn't make out if it was four o'clock or five. Around four, Grace always liked a pot of tea and perhaps a small slice of Dundee cake. She'd be most annoyed if he'd slept through teatime.

Fay, on the other hand, preferred a late meal. Women were so contrary. It generally saved a lot of argument if he ate with them both.

Alex chuckled again. No wonder he was getting fat.

Rachel put the bottle in the river and took off her Barbour. 'I'll be thirty-six in January.'

'Happens to us all,' Fay said.

'I was… very much on top of the situation when I took the job. Nothing could touch me, you know? I was chief Press Officer at Virgin, and he head-hunted me. He said, you’re your price, so I doubled my salary and he said, OK, it's yours – can you believe that?'

She handed Fay the glasses, pulled the bottle out of the water and shot the cork at the bridge. It fell short and they watched it bobbing downstream. 'Does that count as pollution?' Rachel wondered.

'Why was Goff so attracted to Crybbe?'

Rachel poured wine until it fizzed to the brim of both tumblers. 'Magic'

'Magic?' Fay repeated in a flat voice.

'Earth magic.'

'You mean ley-lines?'

'You know what all that's about? I mean, don't be ashamed, it's all speculation anyway.'

'Tell me what it means in the Crybbe context.'

'OK, well, presumably you know about Alfred Watkins who came up with the theory back in the 1920s. Lived in Hereford and did most of his research in these hills. Had the notion, and set out to prove it, that prehistoric sacred monuments – standing stones, stone circles, burial mounds, all this – were arranged in straight lines. Just route markers, he thought originally, on straight roads.'

'I've got his book. The Old Straight Track.'

'Right. So you know that where four or five sites fell into a straight line, he'd call it a ley, apparently because a lot of the places where these configurations occurred had names ending in l-e-y, OK?'

'Like Crybbe?'

Rachel grinned. 'Well, he didn't know about Crybbe, or he'd probably have called them Crybbe-lines. You read through Watkins's book, you won't find a single mention of Crybbe.'

'I know. I looked. I was quite disappointed.'

'Because, apart from the Tump, there's nothing to see. However, it seems there used to be bloody dozens of standing stones and things around here at one time, which disappeared over the centuries. Farmers used to rip them out because they got in the way of ploughing and whatever else farmers do.'

Rachel waved a dismissive hand to emphasize the general tedium of agriculture. 'Anyway, there are places in Britain where lots of ley-lines converge, ancient sacred sites shooting off in all directions. Which, obviously, suggests these places were of some great sacred significance, or places of power.'

'Stonehenge?'

'Sure. And Glastonbury Tor. And Avebury. St Michael's Mount in Cornwall. And other places you've probably never heard of.'

'But not Crybbe. You're really not going to tell me Crybbe was ever sacred to anybody.'

Rachel swallowed a mouthful of wine and wiped her mouth with a deliberately graceless gesture before topping up her glass. Down on your knees, woman, I'm afraid you're on holy ground.'

The bridge carried the main road into town and behind it Fay could see chimneys and the church tower. Wooded hills – mixture of broadleaf and conifer – tumbled down on three

sides. From anywhere at a distance, Crybbe looked quite picturesque. And that was all.

'So how come there aren't bus-loads of pilgrims clogging the roads, then? How come this is close to being Britain's ultimate backwater?'

'Because the inhabitants are a bunch of hicks who can't recognize a good tourist gimmick when they get one on a plate, I mean, they did rip out the bloody stones in the first place, that's why Max brought in Henry Kettle. He had to know where the stones used to be.'

'Henry divines the spots?'

'Sure. He pinpoints the location, then what you do is stick pole in the ground at the exact spot. And if you're as rich and self-indulgent as Max Goff, what you do next is have lots of lovely new stones cut to size and planted out in the fields, prehistoric landscape-gardening on a grand scale.'

'Gosh.' Fay was picturing a huge, wild rock-garden, with daffodils growing around the standing stones in the spring. Crybbe suddenly a little town in a magic circle. 'I think that sounds rather a nice thing to do… don't you? I mean, bizarre, but nice, somehow.'

'Except it's not quite as easy as it sounds,' Rachel said. 'And it's going to cause trouble. Within a couple of weeks Kettle'd discovered the probable sites of nearly thirty prehistoric stones, a couple of burial mounds, not to mention a holy well.'

'Wow.'

'And fewer than a quarter of the sites are on the eight and a half acres of land which Max bought with the Court, so he's going to restore Stone Age Crybbe he's got to negotiate with a lot of farmers.'

'Ah. Mercenary devils, farmers.'

'And awkward sods, in many cases.'

'True. So how's he going to handle it?'

'He wants to hold a big public meeting to tell the people how he plans to revitalize their town. I mean, obviously you've got the considerable economic benefits of tourism – look how many foreign trippers flock to Avebury. But also – unwisely in my view – he's going to explain all the esoteric stuff. What ley lines are really all about, and what they can do for the town.'

'Energy lines,' Fay said. 'I've also read that other book, The Old Golden Land.'

'By J. M. Powys, distant descendant of the great mystical writer, John Cowper Powys. Max loves that book. Coincidentally – or not, perhaps – he's just bought the company which published it. So he owns it now, and he likes to think he owns J. M. Powys… for whom He Has Plans.'

'He's coming here?'

'If he knows what's good for him. He'll have plenty of like-minded idiots for company. There are already nine New Age people living in the town in properties craftily acquired by Max over the past few months. Alternative healers, herbalists, astrologers.'

'Can't say I've noticed them,' Fay admitted.

'That's because some of them look quite normal. Only they know they are the human transmitters of the New Energy about to flow into Crybbe.'

The idea being that ley-lines mark out some kind of force field, channels of energy, which Bronze Age people knew how tap into. Is that right?'

'The Great Life Force, Fay. And so, naturally, re-siting the stones will bring new life flowing back into Crybbe. Max reckons – well, he hasn't worked it out for himself, he's been told by lots of so-called experts – that Crybbe is only in the depressed state it is today because all the stones have gone. So if you put them back, it'll be like connecting the town for the first time to the national grid. The whole place will sort of light up.'

Fay thought about this. 'It sounds rather wonderful'

'If you like that kind of fairy-tale.'

'Is it?'

'Oh, well, sure, what does it matter if it's true or not, it'll bring in the crowds, be an economic boost, a psychological panacea, create a few jobs. But you see, Fay, I know this guy.'

Rachel held up the bottle, but Fay shook her head and Rachel poured what remained into her tumbler. 'I don't think I can stand to watch him being baronial at Crybbe Court, with his entourage of fringe scientists and magicians and minstrels and sundry jesters.'

'Is that the central point, at which all these ley-lines are supposed to meet? The Court. Or is it the church?'

'The Tump,' Rachel said, it's the Tump. It's not a centre, it's a sort of axis. The lines come off it in a fan shape. The Tump is like this great power station. Get the idea? I mean, really, isn't it just the biggest load of old rhubarb you ever heard?'

Rachel brought an arm from behind her head and lobbed the empty wine-bottle into the air. Arnold tensed, about to spring after it, until he saw where it was going.

There was a satisfying splash.

'Now surely,' Rachel said, 'that's got to be pollution.'

CHAPTER VIII

Fay walked back to the cottage, for Arnold's sake and to clear her head, although she hadn't drunk all that much wine – not compared to Rachel, anyway. Arnold, however, looked as if he'd been drinking heavily, veering from side to side on his tautened clothes-line. He was hopeless.

Goff had not returned when they arrived back at the Court. She'd left Rachel carrying the triptych into the stable-block where it was to be double-locked into a store-room. Nearly a thousand quid's worth of less-than-fine art. Hereward and Jocasta Newsome would, for once, have good reason to appear appallingly smug.

'Whichever way you look at it, Arnie,' Fay said reflectively, 'our friend Goff is making waves in Crybbe.'

No bad thing, either.

Could she understand the guy's obsession? Well, yes, she could. A man who'd made his first million marketing anarchic punk-rock records in the mid-seventies. Waking up in the nineties to find himself sitting on a heap of money in a wilderness of his own creation. All the cars and yachts and super-toys he'd ever want and nothing to nurture the soul.

Not exactly a quantum leap, was it, from there to the New Age dream?

And, the more she thought about it, the proposed mystical liberation of an obscure Welsh border town from years of economic decay was a story that deserved a bigger audience than it was ever going to reach through Offa's Dyke Radio.

In fact, this could be the moment to approach her old chums at the BBC. How about a forty-five-minute radio documentary chronicling Goff's scheme to turn Crybbe into a New Age Camelot? She could hear a sequence in her head, lots of echoey footsteps and tinkly music, the moaning of men and machinery as massive megaliths were manoeuvred into position. It sounded good.

On the other hand, she had an arrangement with Offa's Dyke, and the little shit Ashpole would want first bite at every snippet that came out of the Goff camp.

… or we'll have to, you know, reconsider things…

Little turd.

And while Radio Four was the interesting option, a chance to prove she could still make national-quality programmes, Offa's Dyke was bread and butter. Of course, if there was a

prospect of getting out of Crybbe and back to London or Manchester or Bristol in the foreseeable future, she could make the BBC programme and bollocks to O.D.

She passed the farm entrance and followed Arnold and the road into the wood, where the sudden darkness brought with it a wave of loneliness and resentment towards her dad. Why did the old bugger have to stay out here? All that cobblers about his having to sell the house in Woodstock to pay for Grace's treatment.

Somehow, Dad, Fay thought, all your money's gone down the pan. And tonight, the close of what appeared to have been one of his better days, seemed as good a time as any to make him tell her precisely how it had happened.

A bush moved.

It happened on the edge of her vision, just as she'd passed it, and she thought, it's the wind, then realized there was none.

Arnold growled.

Fay froze. 'Who's that?'

Bloody hell, the phantom flasher of Crybbe. Well, there had to be one. Fay laughed. Nervously.

There was also Black Michael's Hound.

You wouldn't think anything as black as that could glow, would you?

Thank you, Mrs Seagrove.

There was a snigger. An involuntary cry was snatched from Fay, and then he was off. She saw him vanish behind a tree then reappear, moving in a crouch, like a spider, up the field, in the direction of the farm, an unidentifiable shadow. Perhaps it was that man Humble, Goff's minder.

'Have a nice wank, did we?' Fay called after him. But it wasn't funny, and that was why her voice cracked. She was discovering that back alleys in the city, full of chip-wrapping and broken glass, could sometimes be less scary than a placid sylvan lane at sunset.

Because there was the feeling, somehow, that if it did happen here, it would be worse.

Hereward Newsome couldn't wait to get home to tell his wife what he'd learned in the Cock.

Hereward went off to what he described to visitors as 'my local hostelry' perhaps two nights a week and stayed for maybe an hour. He considered a local hostelry was one of those things a man ought to have when he lived in the country, if he was to communicate with the locals on their own level.

'Why bother?' demanded Jocasta, who made a point of never going with him to the Cock. 'Why on earth should I learn about sheep and pigs? Why can't the locals learn about fine art and communicate with us on our level?'

'Because it's their town,' Hereward had reasoned. 'Pigs and sheep have been their way of life for centuries, and now the industry is in crisis and they feel their whole raison d'etre is threatened. We should show them we understand.'

And he did his best. He'd started reading everything he could find in the Guardian about sheep subsidies and the Common Agricultural Policy so he could carry on a respectable discussion with the farmers in the public bar. He'd commiserate with them about the latest EC regulations and they'd say, 'Well, well,' or 'Sure t'be,' in their quiet, contemplative tones and permit him to buy them another couple of pints of Ansell's Bitter.

However, he was always happier if Colonel Croston was in there, or even old Canon Peters. He might not have much in common with either of them, but at least it would be a two-way conversation.

Tonight, however, he'd found common ground… in a big way.

Lights were coming on in the farmhouse as Hereward parked the 2CV neatly at the edge of the slice of rough grass he called 'the paddock'. There was a Volvo Estate in the garage, but he never took that into town unless there were paintings to be shifted.

'It's me, darling.' Hereward hammered on the stable door at the side of the farmhouse. He kept telling her there was no need to lock it; that was the beauty of the countryside. But every other week she'd point out something in the paper about some woman getting raped in her cottage or a bank manager held to ransom in his rural retreat. 'But not in this area, Hereward would say, looking pained.

Even though she'd have recognized his voice, Jocasta opened only the top half of the door so she could see his face and be sure he wasn't accompanied by some thug with a shotgun at his back.

'It is me,' Hereward said patiently, when his wife finally let him in. 'Listen, darling, what did I say about the turning point?'

'Coffee?' Jocasta said. Hereward frowned. When she was solicitous on his return from the pub it usually meant she'd just concluded an absurdly lengthy phone call to her sister in Normandy. Tonight, though, he'd let it pass.

'Sorry,' Jocasta said, plugging in the percolator. 'Turning point? You mean Goff?'

'You remember I told you about that guy Daniel Osborne, the homeopath? Who moved into a cottage in Bridge Street? With his wife, the acupuncturist? Now I learn that next door but one to him – this is quite extraordinary – there's a hypnotherapist who specializes in that… what d'you call it when they try to take people back into previous lives?'

'Regression.' Jocasta turned towards him. He thought she looked awfully alluring when her eyes were shining. He had her full attention.

'The fact is…' Hereward was smiling broadly. 'There're lots of them. And we didn't know it. All kinds of progressive, alternative practitioners and New Age experts. In Crybbe.'

'You're serious?'

'Look, I've just had this from Dan Osborne himself, they can talk about it now. Seems Max Goff's been secretly buying property in town for months and either selling it at a very reasonable price or renting it to, you know, the right people. What we're getting here are the seeds of a truly progressive alternative community. That is, no… no…'

'Riff-raff,' Jocasta said crisply. 'Hippies.'

'If you must. In fact, it's the sort of set-up that…well…the Prince of Wales would support.'

'There's got to be a catch,' Jocasta said, ever cautious, 'It seems remarkable that we haven't heard about it before.'

'Darling, everybody's been ultra discreet. I mean, they don't look any different from your ordinary incomers, and there's always been a big population turnover in this area. Look, here's an example. You remember the grey-haired woman, very neat very well-dressed, who was in The Gallery looking at paintings a couple of days ago. Who do you think that was?'

'Shirley MacLaine."

'Jean Wendle," said Hereward.

'Who?'

'The spiritual healer! She used to be a barrister or something and gave it up when she realized she had the gift.'

'Oh.' Jocasta digested this. 'Are you saying Crybbe's going to be known for this sort of thing? With lots of…'

'Tourists! Up-market thinking tourists! The kind that don't even like to be called tourists. It's going to be like Glastonbury here – only better. It'll be… internationally famous.'

'Well,' said Jocasta, 'if what you say is true, it's really quite annoying nobody told us. We might have sold up and moved out, not realizing. And it's still going to take time…'

'Darling,' Hereward said, 'if Goff can pull off something like this under our very noses, the man is a magician.'

The solemnity of the curfew bell lay over the shadowed square by the time Fay and Arnold came back into town, and she found herself counting the clangs, getting louder as they neared the church.

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine…

There was something faintly eerie about the curfew. Was she imagining it, or did people make a practice of staying off the streets while it was actually being rung, even if they came out afterwards? She stood staring at the steps in front of the clock, willing somebody to walk in or out to prove her wrong.

Nobody did. Nobody was walking on the street. There was no traffic. No children played. No dogs barked. Only the bell and the cawing of crows, like a distorted echo.

Seventy-three, seventy-four, seventy-five…

Every evening the curfew would begin at precisely ten o'clock. You could set your watch by it, and people often did.

How the custom had survived was not entirely inexplicable. There'd been a bequest by one Percy Weale, a local wool-merchant and do-gooder back in the sixteenth century. He'd left land and money to build Crybbe School and also a further twelve acres in trust to the Preece family and their descendants on condition that the curfew bell be rung nightly to safeguard the moral and spiritual welfare' of the townsfolk.

Should the Preece family die off or neglect the task, then the land must be rented out and the money used to pay a bell-ringer. But even in times of plague or war, it was said, the curfew bell had never been silenced.

Because hanging on to those twelve acres would be a matter of pride for the Preeces. Also economics. Fay was learning that farmers in these parts would do almost anything to hold what land they had and would lay in wait for neighbouring death or misfortune to grab more. When a farm was sold, the neighbours swooped like buzzards, snatching up acreage on every side, often leaving a lone farmhouse marooned in the middle, condemned either to dereliction or sumptuous restoration by city folk in search of a rural retreat. The Newsomes lived in one, with a quarter acre of their own surrounded on all sides by other people's property.

Ninety-eight, ninety-nine. One hundred. Although the sun's last lurid light was spread like orange marmalade across the hills, the town centre wore a sombre gown of deep shadows.

Fay noticed Arnold's clothes-line had gone slack.

He was sitting on the cracked cobbles, staring up at the church tower, now overhung with florid cloud. As Fay watched him, his nose went up and, with a mournful intensity, he began to howl.

As the howl rose, pure as the curfew's final peal, with whose dwindling it mingled in the twilit air, Fay was aware of doors opening in the houses between the shops' and the pubs on the little square.

No lights came on. Nobody came out. Arnold howled three times, then sat there, looking confusedly from side to side, as if unsure he'd been responsible for the disturbance.

Fay could feel the stares coming at her from inside the shadowed portals in the square, and the air seemed denser, as if focused hostility were some kind of thickening agent, clotting the atmosphere itself.

She felt she was being pressed backwards into the church wall by a powerful surge of heavy-duty disapproval.

Then someone, a female voice, screeched out, 'You'll get that dog out of yere''

And the doors began quietly to close, one by one, in muted clicks and snaps.

By which time Fay was down on her knees, clutching Arnold to her breast, squeezing his ridiculous ears, warming her bare arms in his fur.

Finding she was trembling.

Jack Preece came out of the church and walked away in the direction of the Cock, without looking at them.

CHAPTER IX

Grace's house was just an ordinary cottage in a terraced row which, for some reason, began in stone and ended in brick. Fay could pick it out easily because it was the only one in the row with a hanging basket over the front door. As hanging baskets went, this one wasn't subtle; she kept it bursting with large, vulgar blooms and watered them assiduously because this hanging basket was a symbol of something she was trying to say to Crybbe.

There was no light and no sound from inside, and she thought at first there must have been another blasted power cut. Then a light blinked on and off next door, and she heard a television from somewhere.

'He's gone to the pub,' she told Arnold. Most nights her dad would stroll over to the Cock for a couple of whiskies and one of their greasy bar-snacks.

She would wait up for him. Because tonight they were going to have this thing out. By the end of the week, no argument, there was going to be a 'For Sale' sign next to the hanging basket. And she would start work on the Goff documentary, which Radio Four were definitely going to commission. And Offa's Dyke Radio, the Voice of the Marches, could start looking for another stringer to justify the Crybbe Unattended.

But when Fay marched into the office, she found a note on her editing table informing her that Canon Alex Peters had escaped to bed.

Not feeling terrifically well, to be honest. Having an early

night, OK? So if you must have that dog in the house,

keep the bugger quiet!

Fay smiled – she knew he'd come around – then frowned at the postscript.

Oh yes, Guy rang. Wants you to ring him back.

Bloody Guy. Did she really need this on top of everything?

She turned the note over in case there was an addendum re Guy. Eight years ago, her dad had been the only person with the perception to warn her off, everyone else having congratulated her, in some kind of awe, before they'd even met Guy in the flesh – one friend (you never forgot remarks like this) saying, 'You… You and Guy Morrison'

Never mind. All in the past. Especially Guy.

No regrets?

You had to be kidding.

Except he would keep phoning. As if she were just another one of his contacts – Oh, hey, listen, I'm going to be in your part of the world next week. Buy you a drink?

Fay sat down at the editing table. Rachel had drunk most of the wine with no discernible effects, while Fay had consumed less than a third of the bottle and now the room was sliding about. In the light from the Anglepoise it still looked very Grace, this room: H-shaped tiled fireplace and, above it, an oval mirror in a thick gilt frame. On the mantelpiece was a clock with a glass case revealing a mechanism which looked like a pair of swinging testicles in brass.

This room – the whole house – was frozen in time, in a none-too-stylish era. Round about the time, in fact, when Fay's dad had split up with Grace and returned to her mother. It was as if Grace had given up after that – certainly she hadn't married until the Canon had come back into her life. She seemed to have lived quietly in Crybbe with her sister, until the sister died. Worked quietly in the library.

A quiet woman. A Crybbe woman. As Fay understood it, she'd been working in Hereford, for the diocese, when she'd had her fling with Alex.

'How could she come back here'' Fay said aloud, and picked up the phone to call Guy. Then put it back. She'd caught sight of Arnold, who was looking up at her in his unassuming way, one ear pricked, the other flopped over.

'Arnold, I'm sorry… What do you feel like for dinner?'

He may have wagged his tail, but she couldn't be sure, it was that kind of tail.

The kitchen had knotty-pine cupboards and pink-veined imitation-marble worktops, one of which bore her dad's beloved microwave. Arnold accepted stewed steak from a can, served on one of Grace's best china plates. When he'd finished. Fay let him out in the small back garden, where it was almost fully dark. There was no sign of Rasputin or Pushkin, his lieutenant. They'd be out hunting in the endless fields beyond the garden fence.

And in this pursuit they were obviously not alone. Somewhere out there a light-ball bobbed, possibly following the line of a hedge which was said to mark the old border between Wales and England. (Nobody in this town ever spoke of being English or Welsh because, at various times in its undistinguished history, Crybbe had been in both countries.)

Fay watched the light for several minutes, listening. Illegal badger-digging was, she'd heard, one of the less-publicized local recreations. Nasty, vicious, cruel. But nobody had ever been prosecuted locally. She'd often wondered how Sergeant Wynford Wiley would react if she rang him up one night and directed him to a spot where it was actually taking place: spurts of squealing, scuffling and snuffling as the terriers were sent into the soil to rip the badgers from their set. There was a man who kept a pack of terriers on a farm two or three miles away, ostensibly for hunting foxes. Fay wished she could nail the swine.

But she suspected that, even if it was three o'clock in the morning when she rang, Wynford would claim a prior appointment.

The countryside. Where so many pastimes were sour and furtive. And tolerated.

Arnold trotted in from the garden.

Fay was very tired. She laid out a thick mat under her editing table and folded an old blanket on top it. 'I don't know what you're used to, Arnold, but the management will listen sympathetically to any complaints in the morning.'

Arnold sat quietly next to the mat. Apart from the episode in the square, he hadn't seemed a very demonstrative dog.

Fay brought him a bowl of water. 'I'm going to shut you in, Arnold. Because of the cats. OK?'

She scribbled a note to pin on the door, telling her father not to go into the office, if, as happened occasionally, he couldn't sleep and came down. And don't let any CATS in there!

Then she went to bed.

She never put on the bedroom light; the room looked squalid enough by daylight. It was almost as claustrophobic as the Crybbe Unattended Studio, and its wallpaper had faded to brown. Fay would have redecorated the place, but she wasn't staying, was she?

They weren't staying.

The bathroom had been modernized, with characteristic taste. A bath, shower and washbasin in livid pink and black.

Fay washed.

She looked in the mirror as she wiped the face people had been amazed at Guy Morrison falling for.

Guy used to say she should spell her name F-e-y, because she looked like a naughty elf. It had seemed like a kind of compliment at the time – she used to be naive like that. Especially where Guy was concerned.

And she wasn't going to waste any time speculating about what Guy might want, because the answer was no.

Snapping off the bathroom light, she found her way back to bed by the diffused rays of the midsummer moon – very nearly full, but trapped like a big silver pickled onion in a cloud

sandwich.

She lay awake for a long time in her single divan, thinking about the curfew and the furtive figure in the hedge, about Henry Kettle and Arnold and the wall. Splat.

Horrible.

How did it happen? There'd be a post-mortem, forensic tests and an inquest, but only Arnold would ever really know, and he was only a dog.

'… You'll get that dog out of yere... '

Very sympathetic people in Crybbe. Very caring. Wonderful, warm-hearted country folk.

Miserable bastards.

Eventually, Fay fell asleep with the moon in her eyes – she awoke briefly and saw it, all the clouds gone, and she remembered that sleeping with direct moonlight on your face was supposed to send you mad. She giggled at that and went back to sleep and dreamed a midsummer night's dream in which she was lying in bed and Arnold was howling downstairs.

Oh no!

Fay flung the covers aside and sat up in bed.

Arnold's howling seemed to filter up from below, like slivers of light coming up through the cracks in the floorboards. It probably would be even louder from the Canon's bedroom, which was directly over the office.

She got out of bed and crept to the top of the stairs, hissing, 'Shut it, Arnold, for God's sake!'

Bare-footed, Fay moved downstairs. It was bloody chilly for a midsummer's night, especially when you were wearing nothing but a long T-shirt with several holes in it.

At the bottom of the stairs she stopped and turned back, picking up what she hoped was the sound of her dad's snoring. She ran a hand over the wall in search of the light switch, but when she found it and pressed, nothing happened. Everything Hereward Newsome had ever said about those cretins at the electricity company was dead right.

When she opened the office door, Arnold shot out and she caught him and he leapt into her arms and licked her face. 'Don't try and get round me,' she whispered. 'You are not

sleeping on my bed.'

But when she carried him back into the office, he whimpered and jumped out of her arms and she went back and found him standing by the front door, ears down, tail down, quivering.

'Oh, Arnold…'

Did dogs have nightmares? Had he been reliving last night: an almighty crunch, an explosion of glass, his master's head in a shower of blood?

'I know, Arnold.' Patting him. 'I know.' His coat felt matted, almost damp. Did dogs sweat?

Christ, he couldn't be bleeding, could he? She picked him up and lugged him back into the office, automatically tipping the light switch by the door.

Damn! Damn! Damn!

'Arnold!' He'd squirmed out of her arms again and run away into the hall.

Fay clutched helplessly at the air. Torch… Candle.. Anything. God, it was cold. Moonlight was sprinkled over the room, like frost. The light twinkled on the twisting testicular mechanism of the clock on the mantelpiece, fingered the mirror's ornate, gilt frame, quietly highlighting everything that was part of then, while the now things, the trestle editing table and the Revox were screened by shadow. As though in another dimension.

Everything was utterly still.

Get me, she thought, out of here. Out of this sad, forsaken house, out of this fossilized town.

Then a sudden, most unearthly sound uncurled from the fireplace. Like a baby's cry of joy, but also, she thought, startled and shivering, also like an owl descending delightedly on its prey.

It came again and it sang with an unholy pleasure and she saw Rasputin sitting massively in the hearth like an Egyptian temple cat on a sarcophagus.

Rasputin's emerald eyes suddenly flared, and he sprang.

Fay gasped and went backwards, clutching at the wall involuntarily closing her eyes against imagined flashing claws.

But the huge cat was not coming at her.

When she looked again, he'd landed solidly in a beam of pallid moonlight on the varnished mahogany arm of the fireside chair, and he was purring.

In the chair Grace Legge sat rigidly, her brittle teeth bared in a dead smile and eyes as white and cold as the moon.