Crybbe aka Curfew

CHAPTER I

Around mid-morning. Fay picked up the phone and sat there for several minutes, holding it to her ear, staring across the office, at nothing. The scene-of-crime man had just left, a young detective with a metal case. Lots of prints on the Revox and the desk, but they'd probably turn out to be her own and her father's, the SOCO had said cheerfully, fingerprinting them both. Everybody was a bit of a pro these days. He blamed television.

Fay held the phone at arm's length as it started making the continuous whine that told you you'd knocked it off its rest. She looked into the mouthpiece. The SOCO had fingerprinted that as well.

She tapped the button to get the dialling tone back. Could she really make this call?

… And what's the story. Fay?

It's very bizarre, Gavin. The fact is, I've discovered there are no dogs in Crybbe.

No dogs in Crybbe.

None at all. That is, except one.

Just the one.

Yes, mine. That's how I found out.

I see. And how come there are no dogs in Crybbe, Fay?

Because they howl at the curfew bell, Gavin. People don't like that.

That figures. But if there are no dogs in Crybbe, how do you know they howl at the curfew?

Well, I don't. I'm assuming that's the case, because Arnold howls at it. That's Arnold, my dog. Least, I think he's my dog.

Yes, well, thank you very much. Fay. Look, this illness your old man's got. This dementia. Anything hereditary there, by any chance?

'Oh God!'

Fay crashed the phone down.

Arnold lay at her feet, an ungainly black and white thing with monster ears and big, expressive eyes.

The only dog in Crybbe.

This morning, Fay had gone out soon after dawn into intermittent drizzle. She'd followed a milkman, at whom no dogs had barked no matter how carelessly he clanked his bottles. She'd followed a postman, whose trousers were unfrayed and who whistled as he walked up garden paths to drop letters through letter-boxes and on to doormats, where they lay unmolested by dogs.

She'd walked down by the river, where there was a small stretch of parkland with swings for the children and no signs warning dog owners not to allow their non-existent pets to foul the play area.

Finally, at around 8.15, she'd approached a group of teenagers waiting for the bus to take them to the secondary school nine miles away.

'Does any of you have a dog?'

The kids looked at each other. Some of them grinned, some shrugged and some just looked stupid.

'You know me, I'm a reporter. I work for Offa's Dyke Radio. I need to borrow a dog for an item I'm doing. Can any of you help me?'

'What kind of dog you want?'

'Any kind of dog. Doberman… Chihuahua… Giant wire-haired poodle.'

'My sister, she had a dog once.'

'What happened to it?'

'Ran away, I think.'

'We 'ad a dog, we did.'

'Where's it now?"

'Ran off.'

'I was your dog, I'd run off,' another kid said and the first kid punched him on the shoulder.

'Listen, what about farm dogs? Mr Preece, has he got a sheepdog?'

'Got one of them Bobcats.'

'What?'

'Like a little go-kart thing with four-wheel drive. Goes over hills. You got one of them, you don't need no sheepdog.'

'Yes,' Fay had said. 'I think I see.'

She didn't see at all.

Powys left Crybbe before seven and was back before ten, a changed man.

He wore a suit which was relatively uncreased. His shoes were polished, his hair brushed. He was freshly shaven.

He parked his nine-year-old Mini well out of sight, in the old cattle market behind the square, and walked across to the Cock, carrying a plausible-looking black folder under his arm. Taking Rachel's advice.

'Don't let him see you like that. You have to meet his image of J. M. Powys, so if you can't look older, at least look smarter. Don't let him see the car, he mustn't think you need the money – he's always suspicious of people who aren't rich. And you don't know anything about his plans.'

'Isn't Humble, the New Age minder, going to tell him he caught me nosing around?'

'I think not.'

He entered the low-ceilinged lobby of the Cock, where all the furniture was varnished so thickly that you could hardly tell one piece from another. It was like sitting in a tray of dark chocolates left on a radiator. Powys wedged himself into what he assumed to be an oak settle, to wait for Rachel.

Guy Morrison would be here, she'd told him, starting work on a documentary. He'd once worked with Guy on a series of three-minute silly-season items on Ancient Mysteries of the West for a Bristol-based regional magazine programme – J. M. Powys hired as the regular 'expert interviewee'. His clearest memory was of the day he'd suggested they look beyond the obvious. Taking Guy down to Dartmoor to see a newly discovered stone row believed to be orientated to the rising moon. He remembered the TV reporter looking down with disdain at the ragged line of stones, none more than eighteen inches high, barely below the level of his hand-stitched hiking boots. 'Let's move on,' Guy had said, affronted. Tm not doing a piece to camera in front of that.'

Presently, the Cock's taciturn licensee, Denzil George emerged from some sanctum and glanced across. He displayed no sign of recognition. Still been in bed, presumably, when Powys was sliding out of a side door into the alley just after six-thirty this morning.

'…do for you?" Denzil said heavily. Powys thought of some shambling medieval innkeeper, black-jowled, scowling, lumpen-browed.

'Nothing at all, thanks, mate. I'm waiting for… ah, this lady, I think.'

Rachel had appeared on the stairs, sleek in a dark-blue business suit. 'Mr Powys?'

'Good morning. Am I too early?'

'Only a little. We're terribly glad you were able to make it. Mr George, I'm taking Mr Powys along to the Court, so if Mr Goff calls in, tell him we've gone on ahead, will you? And lunch as arranged, OK?'

Rachel tossed a brilliant smile at the licensee, and Denzil stumped back into his lair, where Powys imagined him breakfasting on a whole loaf of bread without slicing it.

'Very svelte,' said Rachel, surveying Powys on the steps outside.

'You're surprised, aren't you? You thought I probably hadn't worn a suit since the seventies. You thought it was going to be the wide lapels and the kipper tie.'

'Had a momentary fear of flares, then decided you were too young,' Rachel said flatteringly. 'Come along, J.M.'

A few minutes later he was admiring her thighs pistoning in and out of the dark skirt, as she drove the Range Rover, impatiently pumping the clutch, long fingers carelessly crooked around the wheel.

'We're going to the Court?'

'Couple of hours before they all arrive. I thought you'd like to see the set-up, or lack of one.'

She drove directly across the square and then thrust the vehicle into a narrow fork beside the church. Powys remembered coming out of this lane last night in the same seat, nursing his nose, feeling foolish.

The nose still hurt. But this morning, he thought, with a kind of wonder, he was feeling more… well, more focused than he had in years.

And he wanted to know more about Rachel.

She swung the Range Rover between stone gateposts, briefing him about today's lunch. 'Informal gathering of the people at the core of the venture. New Age luminaries. A few supportive locals – newcomers, mostly. And Max's advisers.'

'Andy Boulton-Trow?'

Rachel parked in the courtyard. 'Of course, you know him.'

'All earth-mysteries people know each other. Andy – we were at an college together, which is where The Old Golden Land started. Both got into mystical landscapes. Auras around stone circles, Samuel Palmer moons over burial mounds on the Downs. Andy was a mature student, he'd already been to university.'

'He seems a very deep guy. Laid-back.'

'I suppose so,' said Powys.

Rachel parked outside the stable-block. 'Max says Boulton-Trow's knowledge of stones and prehistoric shamanic rituals is second to none.'

'Yeah, possibly.'

'But you wrote the book,' Rachel said.

Powys smiled. 'Andy professes to despise commercial books on earth mysteries. Comes from not needing the money.'

'Private income?'

'Inherited wealth. Something like that. Never discussed it.'

Rachel said, 'And who's Rose Hart?'

'She took the pictures for the book,' Powys said quietly.

Rachel made no move to get out of the vehicle.

'There were four of us,' Powys said, looking straight through the windscreen. 'Sometimes five. Andy and me and Rose, who was studying photography, and Ben Corby, who thought of the title – comes from an old Incredible String Band song – and flogged the idea to a publisher.'

He paused. 'Rose was my girlfriend. She's dead.'

'Don't talk about it if you don't want to,' Rachel said. 'Come and look at the crumbling pile before the others arrive.'

Rachel had keys to the Court. One was so big it made her bag bulge, 'watch where you're stepping when we go in. It's dark.'

Not too dark to find Rachel's lips.

'Thanks,' he said quietly.

Rachel didn't move. The house was silent around them.

Back from the town, around mid-morning, Fay came in quietly through the kitchen door; Arnold didn't bark. He was shut in the kitchen with Rasputin, who was glaring at him from a chair. Arnold seemed glad to see her; he wagged his tail and planted his front paws on her sweater.

'Good boy,' Fay said.

Then she heard the wailing. A sound which clutched at her like pleading fingers.

Dad?

'Stay there,' she hissed. 'Stay.'

Wailing. The only word for it. Not the sound of a man in physical pain, not illness, not injury.

She moved quietly into the hallway. The office door, two yards away, was ajar. Little was visible through the gap; the curtains were drawn, as they might be, she thought, in a room where a corpse is laid out.

Her movements stiff with dread, Fay removed her shoes, padded to the door, and peeped in.

In the office, in the dead woman's sitting-room, the drawn curtains screening him from the street. Canon Alex Peters was sobbing his old heart out.

He was on his knees, bent over the slender wooden arm of the fireside chair in which Grace Legge had seemed to materialize. His head was bowed in his arms and his ample shoulders trembled like a clifftop before an avalanche.

Fay just stood there. She ought to know what to do, how to react, but she didn't. She'd never known her dad cry before.

When he'd displayed emotions, they were always healthy, masculine emotions. Bluff, strong, kindly stuff.

In fact, not emotions at all really. Because, most of the time Alex, like many clergymen, was an actor in a lot of little one-man playlets put on for the sick, the bereaved and the hopeless.

He'd be mortified if he thought she'd seen him like this.

Fay crept back across the hall. It was so unbearably sad. So sad and so crazy.

So unhealthy.

So desperately wrong.

She moved silently back into the kitchen and attached Arnold's clothes-line to his collar. 'Let's go for a walk,' she whispered. 'Come back in an hour and make a lot of noise.'

As she slowly turned the back-door handle, a trailing moan echoed from the office.

'I will,' Alex sobbed. 'I'll get rid of her. I'll make her go.'

His quavering voice rose and swelled and seemed to fill the whole house. A voice that, if heard in church, would freeze a congregation to its pews, cried out, 'Just – please – don't hurt her!'

Fay walked away from this, quickly.

CHAPTER II

This really was a rope dangling from the steepest part of the roof. Powys could just about reach its frayed end. 'Careful,' Rachel warned. 'You'll fall into the pit.'

The rope felt dry and stiff. 'This is a touch of black humour?'

'Well, it's obviously not the original rope, J.M. Somebody probably put it there to hold on to, while doing repairs or something. Creepy up here, though, isn't it?'

The attic was vast. There were small stabs of blinding daylight here and there, signifying holes in the roof or missing slates. Underfoot, jagged gaps through which you could see the boarded floor of the room beneath.

'I don't know why I brought you up here, really.' Rachel said, 'I usually avoid this bit – not that I'm superstitious.'

She was spotlit by two thin beams from roof-gaps. He remembered her standing next to him, naked, in the window last night, pale, slim, silvery. She'd brought a small flashlight, and he shone it to the upper extremity of the rope, where it was tied around a beam.

'How many poor bastards did the Hanging Sheriff dispose of up here?'

'Hard to say, he was only sheriff for a year. But you could be hanged for most things in those days. Stealing cattle or sheep, picking your nose in church…'

That's how Wort got his rocks off, do you think? Watching people dangle?'

Rachel wrinkled her nose in distaste. 'They say he was obsessed with what you might call the mechanics of mortality, what happens the moment the spirit leaves the body. Him and his friend, John Dee.'

'Not the John Dee?'

'The guy who was Elizabeth I's astrologer. His old family home's along the valley.'

'Of course it is,' said Powys, remembering. 'It's a farm now. I went over there when 1 was doing Golden Land. Somebody told me Dee had been into ancient sites and dowsing.'

'Well, he must have been into hanging, too.' Rachel said. 'If he was a mate of Michael Wort's.'

A jet of wind flew across the attic with a thin whine like a distant baby crying. The rope started to sway, very slowly.

Powys said, 'He was certainly into magic, but back in the sixteenth century magic and science were filed in the same drawer.'

He put out a hand to stop the rope swinging. He didn't like this rope with its dangling strands – somehow more disturbing than if there'd been an actual noose on the end. A sense of something recently severed.

'Anyway,' said Rachel, 'the last hanging up here was Wort's own. There was some sort of peasants' revolt in the town, and one night they all gathered outside wielding flaming torches and threatening to burn the place down unless he came out.'

'We know you're in there…' Powys said flippantly, still holding the rope, not feeling at all flippant.

'So he shuffled up here and topped himself. That's one story. Another says there was a secret tunnel linking this place with Crybbe church and he escaped.'

'Where was he buried?'

'I don't know,' Rachel said. 'I never really thought about it. Probably at some crossroads with a stake through his heart, wouldn't you think? Naturally, they say he haunts the place – or rather his dog does.'

'This place?'

The town. The outskirts. The quiet lanes at sunset. Over the years, according to Max, people have claimed to come face to face with this big black dog with glowing eyes. And then they die, of course. Like in The Hound of the Baskervilles.'

Powys took his hand away from the rope, and it began to swing again, very gently.

'Rachel, luv,' he said, 'can you hear voices?'

'Shit.' Rachel moved to the stairs. 'Nobody was supposed to be here for another hour.'

She went swiftly down the steps, Powys following, not wanting to be left alone up here, where Rachel believed the only danger was the unstable floor. Blessed are the sceptics. For they shall be oblivious of the numinous layers, largely unaffected by the dreary density of places, unbowed by the dead-weight of ancient horror.

While people like me, he thought, would no more come up here alone than pop into a working abattoir to shelter from the rain.

Only a short way down the stairs, Rachel disappeared.

Powys shone the torch down the twisting stone steps. The beam just reached to the great oak door at the bottom.

'Rachel!' He felt panic in his throat, like sandpaper. There was a creak to his left; he spun round and the beam found a shadowed alcove he hadn't noticed on the way up here.

Suddenly, white light blasted him and he hid his eyes behind an arm.

'This,' Rachel said, from somewhere, 'is the only part of the house I really like.'

'What's known as a prospect chamber.'

The window directly facing them, almost floor to ceiling, was without glass. In fact, it wasn't really a window, simply a gap between two ivy-matted gables. A rusting iron bar was

cemented into the gap at chest-height.

The prospect chamber was tiny, too small for any furniture. But it had a view.

Powys's eyes widened.

He saw they were directly above the cobbled forecourt. Then there were the two gateposts and then the straight road through the wood. Over the tops of the trees he could see the weathercock on the church tower.

Without the wood, the town would be at his feet.

And everything – the gateway, the road, the church – was in a dead straight line.

He'd seen this view before.

In fact, if he turned and looked over his shoulder…

He did turn and looked only into blackness.

But if he could see through the walls of the house, what he would see behind him, following the same dead straight line… would be the Tump.

'Is this opening as old as the house?'

'I presume so,' Rachel said. 'Spectacular, isn't it?'

'Which means Wort had it built. Maybe this is why John Dee came here, nothing to do with the bloody hangings. Rachel, have you ever actually seen a ley-line?"

'This?'

'It's textbook. In fact…' He leaned across the iron bar, not pushing it because it didn't look too steady. This is the strongest evidence I've seen that the ley system was recognized in Elizabethan times. We know that John Dee occasionally came back to his old home and during those times he studied dowsing and investigated old churches and castle sites. He called it, in his records and his letters, treasure hunting. But what kind of treasure, Rachel? You know, what I think..

He stopped. There were the voices again.

'Humble,' Rachel said. 'And somebody else.'

Powys's stomach contracted painfully.

'I don't think Humble actually got round to apologizing to you, did he?' said Rachel.

'l owe him one.'

'Don't even contemplate it. He's a very nasty person. Ah, they were waiting for Max.'

The black Ferrari hit the gravel with an emphatic crunch. Humble stepped out and opened the driver's door. Andy Boulton-Trow was with him.

'I don't like the company he keeps either,' Powys said.

'Humble? Or Boulton-Trow?'

'Either.'

Rachel said, 'Is there something I don't know about you and Boulton-Trow?'

Joey goes round the Bottle Stone,

The Bottle Stone, the Bottle Stone,

Joey goes round the Bottle Stone,

Ana he goes round…

'Hold it!'

They all look at Andy.

'It's widdershins,' he says.

'What?' says Ben.

'Widdershins. Anticlockwise. You're going round the wrong way, Joe.'

'Why?'

'Because that's what you have to do. I was watching a bunch of kids. It's traditional. Widdershins, OK?'

You shrug, but you aren't entirely happy about this. Old Henry Kettle gets up, turns his back and walks off, down towards the river.

'OK,' Ben says. 'Start again.'

Sod it. Only a game You start to tramp slowly around the stone. There's a smile on your face because what you're thinking about is how much you love Rose and how glad you are that they managed to get her name on the cover.

And he goes round… ONCE.

When Guy came to the door, Fay simply pretended there was nobody in, knowing it had to be her ex-husband calling in on the way to his lunch date with Max Goff and his cohorts.

Knowing, also, that if Guy was in the mood he was arrogant enough to have lined her up as today's emergency standby leg-over. Fay, hi! (Long time, no bonk!)

Behind the bathroom door she clenched her fists.

There was a second ring.

Fay sat on the lavatory with the lid down. The lid was still topped by one of Grace's dinky little light-green candlewick loo-mats.

Grace. Her dad thought that Grace Legge, dead, had smashed the Revox. Somehow. It was insane. And there was no way they could talk about it.

There was no third ring.

Arnold sat at Fay's feet and wagged his tail. He never reacted to the doorbell.

Only the curfew bell.

'Arnold,' Fay said, 'do you want to talk about this?' Arnold looked at her with sorrowful eyes. Even when his tail was wagging his eyes were sorrowful.

She held his muzzle between her hands. She couldn't remember ever feeling so confused, so helpless. So completely wiped out.

The phone rang in the office. Fay drifted down to answer it, not in any hurry. She wished she'd put on the answering machine, but the thing had been disabled so many times by power cuts that she'd almost abandoned it.

'Hello.'

There was a hollow silence at the other end.

'Mrs Morrison?' A local accent. Male.

'Yes. Who's that?'

'Mrs Morrison, you been told.'

'Have I? Told what?'

'So this is your last warning, Mrs Morrison. You 'ave till weekend.'

'To do what?'

But, of course, she knew.

'And what if I don't?' Fay said grimly. 'What if I say I have no intention of even considering getting rid of the dog? Especially as nobody seems prepared to explain what the hell this is all about?'

'You been told,' the voice said. 'And that's it.'

Chapter III

Gomer Parry did plant hire.

He operated from an old wartime aircraft hangar up the valley, outside the village where he lived. In this hangar he had two lorries, the heaviest tractor in the county, a big JCB, a small JCB and these two bulldozers.

You didn't hire the equipment; what you hired was Gomer Parry, a tough little bloke with mad, grey hair and wire-rimmed glasses.

Been a farmer for nearly twenty years before the magic of plant hire had changed his life. sold most of his land to buy the old hangar and the machinery. Gomer Parry: sixty-four now, and he never looked back.

Gomer could knock buildings down and make new roads through the forestry. He could dig you a new septic tank and a soakaway that soaked away even in Radnorshire clay. And during bad winters the highways authority always hired him as a snow-plough.

This was the only time that other people recognised the truly heroic nature of his job. They'd pour out of their homes, dozens of them, as he busted through the last snowdrift to liberate some remote hamlet that'd been cut off for a fortnight. Big cheers. Mug of tea. Glass of Scotch. Good old Gomer.

But last winter had been a mild winter. Bugger-all snow anywhere. And only Gomer saw the heroic side of the other things he did.

A few months ago he'd done this broadcast about the perils of digging drainage ditches and such. Explaining it to that little girl from the local radio. How, for him, it was like a military exercise – although not modern military; more like in these epic films where the knight gets into his armour, which is so heavy he has to be winched on to his horse. It was in these terms that Gomer Parry spoke on the radio of his life at the controls of the JCB.

Probably gave the listeners a good laugh. Certainly didn't bring him any more work. He couldn't remember a worse year, the local farmers – his regular clients – tighter than ever. Constipated buggers sitting there waiting for a laxative from Brussels. Farmers wouldn't fart these days unless they got an EC grant for it.

So Gomer Parry, feeling the pinch, had been very near excited when he had a phone call from Edgar Humble.

He'd played darts with Edgar Humble in the public bar at the Lamb in Crybbe. Edgar didn't say much, which was unusual for a Londoner; he just kept beating you at darts. But Gomer knew who employed him, and that was why he was very near excited when he got the call, because from what he'd heard here was a bloke who was going to need plenty plant hire.

'Knock walls down, can you?' Edgar Humble asked.

'What kind of walls?'

'Stone wall. Victorian, I'd say. Thick, solid. Five, six feet high. Couple of feet thick in places. Too much for yer?'

Gomer had almost laughed down the phone. 'Put it this way,' he said, if I'd been in business round Jericho way, all those years ago, they wouldn't have needed no bloody trumpets.'

'Max,' Rachel said, 'this is J. M. Powys.'

Max Goff put on his Panama hat. Bizarre, Powys thought. Eccentric. But not crazy. Those are not crazy eyes.

Goff looked at Powys for a good while. He had a beard like red Velcro. 'How long you been here?'

'Since last night,' Powys said steadily. 'I stayed at the Cock.'

'Yeah? Shit hole, huh? I hope you put it on my tab.' Goff grinned at last and stuck out a stubby hand. 'Hi, J. M. Welcome to Crybbe. Welcome to the Old Golden Land.'

Powys took the hand. Goff's grip was flaccid. Powys said, 'You think this is the Old Golden Land?'

The countryside was colourless. Mist was still draped around the Court like grimy lace curtains.

'Not yet,' Goff said. 'But it will be. Listen, if I'd known you were here I'd've driven back last night.'

'That's OK. Ms Wade was looking after me.'

Rachel was standing behind Goff in the courtyard. Powys deliberately didn't look at her. Neither, he noticed, did her boss, the man who overpaid her for little extras.

Goff jerked his Velcro chin at the two men at his side. 'This is Edgar Humble, my head of security.'

'Mr Humble,' Powys said tightly.

'And Andy Boulton-Trow, who of course you know, yeah?'

Andy wore a white shirt and black jeans. Close up, he looked even thinner than he'd been twelve years ago. You could see the bones flexing in his face as he smiled. It was a quick, wide smile.

It made Powys feel cold.

'Joe.'

'Andy,' he said quietly.

'Long time, my friend.' Andy's hair, once shoulder-length, was shaven right to the skull, and he was growing a beard. It would be black.

They hadn't met since Rose's funeral.

Goff said, 'Now Henry Kettle's gone, Andy's my chief adviser in the Crybbe project. Andy knows stones.'

Chief adviser. Jesus.

There was a big difference between Andy Boulton-Trow and Henry Kettle. What it came down to was: Henry would have said, don't mess with electricity until you know what you're doing. Andy would say, sure, just hold these two wires and then bring them together when I give you the nod, OK?

'So you lost Henry,' Powys said.

Andy dropped the smile.

'Tragic,' Goff said. 'There's gonna be a Henry Kettle memorial.'

A memorial. Well, that was all right, then. That made up for everything.

'We haven't decided yet where it's gonna go.'

'But somewhere prominent,' Andy said.

Powys didn't say a thing.

'J.M.,' Goff said, 'we need to talk, you and I. At length. I have a proposition. Hell, we all know each other, I'll spell out the basics. I want you to write me a sequel to Golden Land for Dolmen. I want it to be the Crybbe story. The – hey, what about this? – The New Golden Land.'

Goff beamed and looked round, Powys thought, for applause.

'What I'm talking here, J. M., is a substantial advance and the quality republication in under a year's time of the original Golden Land, to pave the way. Revise it if you like. New pictures. In colour. Whatever.'

Sure. Scrap Rose's pictures, Powys thought dully. Get better ones.

'And there's a place for you here.'

'A place?'

'A place to live. A beautiful house with a view of the river. Part of the deal. Rachel will take you there after we eat.'

'Mr Goff…' He wondered why people kept giving him houses.

'Max.'

'I have a place already. I run a little shop in Hereford called Trackways, which…'

'I know,' said Goff.

'… which is more than a shop. Which is a kind of museum to Alfred Watkins as well, the only one of its kind in Hereford, which…

'But it doesn't need to be in Hereford,' Goff said. 'And it doesn't have to be a little shop. Come over here.'

He led Powys to a corner of the courtyard and pointed across the field behind the stables, about a hundred yards from the Tump, where the trees began to thicken into the wood.

'As befits the stature of the man, the Watkins Centre needs to be a major development in, let's say, an eighteenth-century barn.'

On the edge of the wood was a massive, tumbledown barn complex, beams and spars poking out of it like components of a badly assembled dinosaur skeleton.

'Place needs to be big enough to house a huge collection of Watkins's photographs and ley-maps, and scores of original paintings of ancient sites. And it needs to be here. In Crybbe.'

Powys felt like a cartoon character who'd been flattened by a steam-roller and become a one-dimensional mat.

Lowering his voice, Goff said, 'I know your situation, J.M. I know you put all the money from Golden Land into Trackways, and I know how difficult it must be keeping Trackways afloat."

He clapped Powys on the back. 'Think about it, yeah?'

Goff strolled back to the silent group of three standing next to the Ferrari. 'Rach, there's been a slight change of plan. We have lunch at two, we spend the afternoon in discussion groups then we assemble, early evening, at the Tump.'

Powys saw part of a cobweb from the attic floating free from a padded shoulder of Rachel's blue business suit.

'The Tump?'

'A ceremony,' Goff said. 'To launch the project. We're gonna knock down the wall around the Tump. Maybe that's where Mr Kettle's memorial should be. We're gonna finish what he began. We're gonna liberate the Tump.'

Andy Boulton-Trow nodded.

Goff grinned massively. 'It's the beginning,' he said. 'Come on, let's get back to the Cock, see who shows up.'

From the top of the farmyard there was a fine view of the river and the Welsh hills behind. But Jimmy Preece and his son Jack were looking, for once, the other way, up towards the Court. This was a view Jack had been conditioned, over the years, to avoid – as if, when he emerged from the farmyard gates, he was to wear an imaginary patch over his right eye.

This afternoon a great black cloud hung over the Tump.

Below it, the bulldozer was bright yellow.

'Gomer Parry's,' Jack said.

'Sure t'be," Jimmy said. 'And only one reason 'e's down there.'

'So what you gonner do, Father?'

'No choice, Jack. I shall 'ave to 'ave a word with 'im when 'e gets back.'

The two men stood in silence for over a minute.

Then Jack mumbled, almost to himself. 'Sometimes… sometimes I wonders, well, so what? What if 'e do come down, that ole wall? An' the ole bell… what if 'e don't get rung some nights?'

Jimmy Preece was too certain of his son even to reply. Jack was like him. Jonathon was like Jack. And Warren – well, Warren was only a second son, so it didn't matter, anyway, about Warren.

The Mayor was about to walk away, back into town, when he heard Jack saying, '… And the ole box. If the ole box is gone, do it matter?'

Jimmy Preece stopped and turned and walked back very slowly to where Jack stood, a bigger man than Jimmy, habitually in dark-green overalls.

'The ole box?'

'I don't know, Father, 'e's gone. Maybe. Might've gone. Hard to say, isn't it, without pulling the whole wall out?'

Jimmy Preece said, 'Can't 'ave gone, Jack. Sometimes them ole bricks subside. I told you, anyway, leave 'im alone, that old box. Keep 'im walled up. Tell Jonathon when 'e's thirty and married. Never tell Warren.'

'Found some bits of plaster and stuff in the fireplace,' Jack said. 'Poked about a bit and the bricks fell out the cavity.'

'Put 'em back, block 'em up.'

'That's what I was doin'. Cavity, though, see, cavity was empty, Father.'

'That case, you got a job to do, Jack. You get in there and find where the box's fallen to, then you put 'im back on the ledge and you seals the bugger up proper. And another thing, Jack, you get that dog seen to. Last night…'

'I know. Yeard 'im from the belfry even. I phoned 'er up. I give 'er till weekend.'

'This is the weekend,' said Jimmy Preece. 'Get Jonathon to do it.'

Jack Preece looked down at his boots. 'Gets to me sometimes, Father, that's all. Why us?'

He walked off without saying goodbye, because none of the Preeces ever said goodbye to each other; only 'Ow're you' on Christmas morning.

CHAPTER IV

The one time Rachel had seen Guy Morrison, at a preliminary meeting with Max in London, he'd been wearing a lightweight suit with sun-glasses in the breast pocket and carrying a briefcase and a mobile phone.

Today, Guy was in director mode. He wore denims and a leather pouch, like a holster, on his belt. He had blond hair and craggy features. A TV man from central casting, Rachel thought. At his shoulder stood a dumpy, stern-faced girl with straight black hair and a waterproof clipboard.

Hustling J.M. off to the Cock, Goff had told Rachel over his shoulder, 'Morrison wants to do a few exterior shots of the Court with nobody about. Stick around till he shows, Rach, keep an eye on him.'

'Who is this, Catrin?' Guy Morrison asked the black-haired girl in Rachel's hearing. 'Remind me.'

'Guy, this is Rachel Wade, Max's PA.' Catrin's accent had a clipped sibilance Rachel identified as north-west Wales.

'Of course, yes.'

Rachel offered him a languid hand. 'We've spoken on the phone.'

Guy Morrison look the hand and held it limply for an extra moment, looking steadily, unsmiling, into her eyes. 'You're almost everything your voice implied, Rachel Wade.'

'Good,' said Rachel, with a tight, tired smile.

Guy Morrison dropped Rachel's hand, stepped back, looked around the courtyard then up into the sky again, where clouds and mist still formed a damp canopy.

He frowned. 'I wanted some GVs today. Establishing shots. But this weather's not conducive. At all. So I've told the crew, Rachel Wade, to set up in that stable-place. Acceptable to you, yes?'

'Fine.'

'Because what I thought I'd do after lunch is bang off a brief opening interview with Max Goff. Background of sawing and rubble everywhere. Traces of sawdust on the white suit, emphasizing the hands-on approach. May not use it, but I'm not happy unless there's something in the can on Day One.'

'You'd better see how he feels about that.'

Guy Morrison nodded and turned away. She watched him pace the courtyard, looking up at the hills fading into mist and at the Court itself, grey and spectral in us small hollow, like an old galleon half-sunk into a mud-flat.

When they arrived back at the Cock, close to 1 p.m., a car was being parked on the square, close to the steps: a silver-grey Ford Escort with an Offa's Dyke Radio sticker on its windscreen.

The driver got out and came over.

'Rachel, is it? Could I just have a word?'

Guy Morrison, peering at the car-sticker and registering it was only local radio, went ahead, up the steps, with his assistant.

'I'm from Offa's Dyke Radio. We carried a report yesterday without checking the details with you.'

Rachel had never seen this person before He was a shortish, muscular man, about twenty-five, with a half-grown moustache.

'Word reached me you weren't happy about what went out, and I just want you to know I've looked into it. Gavin Ashpole, News Editor. You'll be seeing more of me.'

'Good,' said Rachel dismissively. 'Now if…'

'Problem is, we've been using a freelance. Fay Morrison, in Crybbe, but it hasn't been working out.'

'Apart from this one instance,' Rachel said, 'I don't think…'

'So, from now on, any major stories in this area, we're going to handle direct. What Mr Goff's doing amounts to a major story, naturally, so if there's anything you want to say, anything you want to get out on Offa's Dyke Radio, you call me direct. Here's my card.'

'Thank you.'

'In fact – this is off the record – we're considering putting a staff reporter into Crybbe. Especially if your thing takes off and the population starts to expand.'

'Really.'

'In which case' – Ashpole spread his hands, palms down in a flat, cutting movement – 'we'd simply stop using Morrison altogether.'

'I see,' Rachel said.

What an appalling little creep, she thought.

Over a bland buffet lunch – carnivores catered for, but strictly no smoking – Max Goff explained his plan to publish, in perhaps two years' time, The Book of Crybbe.

'Gonna be an illustrated record of the project,' said Goff. He paused and looked into his audience. 'And a blueprint for the Third Millennium.'

Warm applause. They'd needed extra tables in the dining room at the Cock.

Goff said, 'I've asked J. M. Powys to write the book. Because his work remains, to my mind, the most inspiring evocation of a country still able to make contact with its inner self.'

Powys smiled modestly. The magical, mystical J. M. Powys. Too old, he thought miserably, to become someone else. Too young not to want to.

About forty people were there, some from London and elsewhere, to hear about the project and consider getting involved. Thin, earnest men in clean jeans and trainers and women in long skirts and symbolic New Age jewellery. Powys didn't know most of them. But he felt, dispirited, that he'd met them all before.

There was a delicate-looking tarot-reader called Ivory with a wife old enough to be his mother and big enough to be his minder. A feminist astrologer called Oona Jopson, in whose charts, apparently, Virgo was a man. She had cropped hair and a small ring through her nose.

After Goff sat down, Powys listened idly to the chat. He heard an experimental hypnotist talking about regression. 'I've got an absolute queue of clients, mostly, you know, from London, but what I'd really like is to get more of the local people on the couch…'

Apart from Andy Boulton-Trow, the only person he'd actually encountered before was the spiritual healer, Jean Wendle, from Edinburgh, who was older than the rest, grey-haired with penetrating eyes.

'This really your scene, Jean?'

'This? Heaven forbid. Crybbe, though… Crybbe's interesting.'

'You reckon?'

'Well, goodness, Joe, you said it. If you hadn't revealed what a psychically charged area this was, none of us would be here at all, would we?'

'You're very cruel.'

She narrowed her eyes. 'Come round one night. We can discuss it. Anyway… She smiled at him. 'How are things now?'

He looked around the room for Rachel, couldn't see her.

'I think things are finally looking up,' he said.

Later, Goff took him into a corner of the dining-room and lowered his voice.

'Confidentially,' he said, 'I need somebody who understands these matters to make sure this arsehole Morrison doesn't screw it up. Part of the deal, he uses you as script consultant. No J. M. Powys, no documentary. J. M. Powys disagrees with anything, it doesn't go out.'

That'll be fun.'

Goff put a hand on Powys's arm. 'Hey, you know when I first knew I had to have you write the book?'

Powys smiled vacantly, beyond embarrassment.

'See, when I first came to Crybbe, the very first day I was here, I look around and suddenly I can see this about the border country being a spiritual departure lounge. I'm standing down by the river, looking over the town to the hills of England on one side and the hills of Wales on the other. And that other phrase of yours, about the Celtic Twilight Zone, I'm hearing that, and I'm thinking, yeah, this is it. The departure lounge. It just needs a refuel, right? You know what I'm getting at here? You can feel it in this room right now. All these people, all reaching out.'

'Maybe they're reaching out for different things.'

'Ah shit, J.M., it's all one thing. You know that. Down to generating energy and throwing it out. What you put out you get back, threefold. Jeez, pretty soon, this town is gonna glow'

'Seems to me there are things you need to work out, Joe,' Andy Boulton-Trow said. 'Maybe this is the place to do it.'

Those lazy, knowing, dark-brown eyes gazing into your head again, after all these years. I can see your inner self, and it's a mess, man.

Andy was probably Goff's role-model New Ager. He had the glow. Like he'd slowed his metabolism to the point where he was simply too laid-back to be affected by the ageing process.

'Let's talk,' Andy said, and they took their wine glasses into the small, shabby residents' lounge just off the dining-room.

Andy lounged back on a moth-eaten sofa, both feet on a battered coffee-table. Somehow, he made it look like the lotus position.

He said, 'Never got over it, did you?'

Powys rolled his wine-glass between his hands, looking down into it.

'I mean Rose,' Andy said.

'It was a long time ago. You get over everything in time.'

Andy shook his head. 'You're still full of shit, Joe, you know that?'

'Look,' Powys said reasonably, trying to be as cool as Andy. 'We both know I should never have gone round the Bottle Stone. And certainly not backwards.'

'Bottle Stone?' Andy said.

'And certainly not backwards. I should have told you to piss off.'

'I'm not getting you,' Andy said.

'What I saw was.. Powys felt pain like powdered glass behind his eyes. 'What I saw was happening to me, not Rose.'

'You had some kind of premonition? About Rose?'

'I told you about it.'

Andy shrugged. 'You had a premonition about Rose. But you didn't act on it, huh?'

'It was me.'

'You failed to interpret. That's a shame, Joe. You had a warning, you didn't react, and that's what's eating you up. Perhaps you've come here to find some manner of redemption.'

Andy shook his head with a kind of laid-back compassion.

If it was a big job, Gomer Parry worked with his nephew, Nev. Today Nev had just followed him up in the van and they'd got the smaller bulldozer down from the lorry, and then Nev had pushed off.

No need for a second man. Piece of piss, this one.

Unless, of course, they wanted him to take out the whole bloody mound.

Gomer chuckled. He could do that too, if it came to it.

He was sitting in the cab of the lorry, listening to Glen Miller on his Walkman. The bulldozer was in the field, fuelled up, waiting. Not far away was a van with a couple of loudspeakers on its roof, such as you saw on the street at election time. Funny job this. Had to be on site at one o'clock to receive his precise instructions. Seemed some middle bit had to come out first. Make a big thing of it, Edgar Humble had said. A spectacle. No complaints there; Gomer liked a bit of spectacle.

With the Walkman on, he didn't hear any banging on the cab door. It was the vibrations told him somebody was trying to attract his attention.

He took off the lightweight headphones, half-turned and saw an old checked cap with a square patch on the crown, where a tear had been mended. Gomer, who was a connoisseur of caps, recognized it at once and opened his door.

'Jim.'

'What you doin' yere, Gomer?' the Mayor, Jimmy Preece, asked him bluntly.

'I been hired by that Goff,' Gomer said proudly. 'He wants that bloody wall takin' out, he does.'

'Does he. Does he indeed.'

'Some'ing wrong with that, Jim? You puttin' a bid in for the stone? Want me to go careful, is it?'

Jimmy Preece took off his cap and scratched his head. Even though it was still drizzling, he didn't put the cap back on but rolled it up tighter and tighter with both hands.

'I don't want you doin' it at all, Gomer,' he said. 'I want that wall left up.'

'Oh aye?' Gomer said sarcastically. 'Belongs to you, that wall, is it?'

The Mayor's eyes were watery as raw eggs. 'You're not allowed, take it from me, Gomer, that's a fact. Been there for centuries, that wall. He'll have a protection order on 'im, sure to.'

'Balls,' said Gomer. 'I was told he was Victorian, no older'n that.'

'Well, you was told wrong, Gomer. See, I don't want no argument about this. No bad feeling. Just want you to know that we, that is me and Jack and several other prominent citizens of this area, includin' several farmers and civic leaders, would prefer it if the wall stayed up.'

Gomer couldn't believe it.

'Just 'ang on, Jim, so's I gets this right. You're sayin' if I falls that thing, then…'

Jimmy Preece tightened his old lips until his mouth looked like a complicated railway junction.

'You bloody well knowed why I was yere, di'n't you?' said Gomer. 'You knowed exac'ly.'

'I been invited,' the Mayor said sadly. 'That Goff, 'e phoned me up and invited me to watch. Silly bugger.'

'So what you're sayin', if I brings him down, that wall you'll…'

'I'm not sayin' nothin',' the Mayor said firmly. 'I got no authority to order you about, and I don't intend…'

'Oh no, Jim, you're only bloody threatenin' me! You'n sayin' if I starts workn' for Goff, then I don't get no work nowhere else around yere. Right?'

Gomer levelled a grimy forefinger at the Mayor. 'You bloody stay there! Don't you bloody move! I'll get a witness, an' you can say it again in front of 'im.'

The Mayor said calmly, 'You won't find no witnesses in this town as'll say I threatened you, Gomer, 'cause I 'aven't. You can do what the hell you likes for Mr Goff.'

' "Cept pull that wall down, eh?'

' "Cept pull that wall down,' the Mayor agreed.

CHAPTER V

What have you got to lose?' Rachel had asked him, and he wondered about this.

The cottage was on a little grassy ridge, overlooking the river. Rachel told him Max had been so taken with the little place he'd thought of spending nights here himself until work on the stable-block was finished. But, with extra builders, overtime, bonuses, it looked as if the stables would be habitable within the next few days. And Max had to spend a long weekend in London, anyway.

'So it's yours,' Rachel said, if you want it.'

It had only four rooms. Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and this small, square living-room, with a panoramic, double-glazed view downstream.

'A writer's dream,' Rachel said non-committally.

'Furnished, too,' Powys said.

'It was a second home. The first thing Max's agent did was acquire a list of local holiday homes and write to the owners offering disproportionate sums for a complete deal, basic furniture included. Just over a third of them said yes within two days – boredom setting in, wouldn't it be nice to have one in Cornwall instead? Then, out of the blue, here's Fairy Godfather Goff with a sack of cash.'

'And you say he's in London for the weekend?'

'That's the plan,' Rachel said. 'But – you may be glad to hear, or not – I'm staying.'

Powys kissed her.

'Mmm. I'm staying because there's a public meeting to organize for next week. The people of Crybbe come face to face with their saviour for the first time and learn what the New Age has to offer them.'

'Should be illuminating. You think any of them know what New Age means?'

'J.M., even I don't know what it means. Do you?'

'All I was thinking, if it involves having big stones planted in their gardens, country folk can be a tiny bit superstitious, especially stones their ancestors already got rid of once.'

Rachel perched on the edge of a little Jotul wood-burning stove. She licked a forefinger and made the motions of counting out paper money. 'Rarely fails,' she said. 'And if they're really superstitious, they can always move out and sell Max the farm for…'

'A suitably disproportionate sum,' said Powys. 'It's another world, isn't it? So, er, you'll be on your own this weekend.'

Rachel moved a hip. She was wearing tight wine-coloured jeans and a white blouse. Max suggests I move out of the Cock and into the stables.'

'But nobody'll be there to know one way or the other, will they?' Powys had been quite taken with the reproduction brass bed upstairs.

'There's Humble, in his caravan. He doesn't like me.'

'Does he like anybody?'

'Debatable,' said Rachel.

'I'm sure we can work something out. What's the rent on this place, by the way?'

'I think it's part of the advance against royalties. There'll be an agreement for you to sign. This gives you a small – small to Max, but not necessarily to you – lump sum as well. If you don't finish The Book of Crybbe he gets the cottage back. He also reserves the right to install standing stones or other ritual artefacts on your lawn.'

'Rachel, luv, help me. What do I do?'

'My advice? Take it, but ask for a bigger lump sum. He won't double-cross you. He's a very determined man. The town does not know what's hit it. Not yet. I'd feel better if you were here as some sort of fifth column. He'll listen to you.'

Powys shook his head, bemused.

Perhaps you've come here to find some manner of redemption.

Perhaps.

All he had to do was make one phone call and Annie would dive on the chance of taking over Trackways for an unspecified period. Just her and Alfred Watkins and an ever-broadening selection of New Age trivia. It might even start making a reasonable profit.

Rachel said, 'One more thing. If you'd like a word processor, please specify the make and model, to match your existing software.'

Powys thought about this, chin in hands, patched elbow on the pine dining-table. 'New ribbon for the Olivetti?'

When they reached the Tump, they split up, for the sake appearances. It was 7 p.m. The rain was holding off, but the evening was very still and close, the sky hanging low, looking for trouble.

Rachel looked around and saw quite a big semi-circle of people, many more than had been at the lunch.

Word had got around that something was going to happen. Word very soon got around in this town, she'd found.

'What's going on, Ms Wade?' Jocasta Newsome was posing dramatically against the lowering sky in a glistening new ankle-length Barbour, conspicuously more expensive than Rachel's.

'Max is going to get rid of the wall around the Tump.'

'Oh,' said Jocasta, disappointed. 'That's all?'

'It's a major symbolic gesture,' Rachel said patiently.

'Is that a television camera?'

'They're making a documentary about Max.'

'Oh.' Jocasta brightened. 'That's… er… oh, Guy Morrison, isn't it? I think he's rather good, don't you?'

'Yes, excellent,' Rachel said absently. 'Excuse me.'

She'd seen Fay on the edge of the field, with the dog still on the end of a clothes-line. Fay looked forlorn in a royal-blue cagoule that was too long for her. She wore no make-up and her hair was damp and flattened.

'I know,' she said. 'Don't tell me. He's here.'

'Do you mean Guy? Or the Offa's Dyke man?'

Fay raised both eyebrows. 'Surrounded, am I?'

'I'm sorry about this. Fay, I really am.'

'They rang me,' Fay said. 'Offa's Dyke rang and said, don't bother with it, we're covered. I think they're trying to edge me out.'

'Ashpole's a tedious little man.'

'Poisonous,' Fay said.

'Fay, look, perhaps there's something…' If she could somehow turn Max round, fix it so he'd only talk to Fay. Most unlikely.

'Not your problem, Rachel, if I can't function here. Tempted to blame it on the town, but that's the easy answer, isn't it?' Fay grinned, if you really want to do something, I suppose you could suggest Ashpole might get some terrific actuality of the wall coming down if he stood directly beneath it…'

She wound the end of the clothes-line more firmly around her hand. 'Come on, Arnold, we'll go down by the river.'

Max Goff was on the summit of the Tump. He had a microphone on a long lead. The dripping trees were gathered around him.

Crouched under a bush, Guy Morrison's cameraman was shooting Goff from a low angle. It would look very dramatic, this apparition in white against the deep-grey sky and the black trees. On his knees next to Goff, as if in worship, Guy's soundman held a two-foot boom mike encased in a windshield like a giant furry caterpillar.

There were two big speakers on the roof of a van at the foot of the mound.

'This has been a dramatic and tragic week,' said Goff.

'Yeah, not too bad for level,' the soundman said.

'It fucking better be, pal,' the assembly heard, 'I'm not saying it again.'

Behind the speaker van, Powys smiled.

Guy Morrison said, 'I'm not pleased with him, Joe. He dropped this on me without any warning at all. A spontaneous idea, he said. He's got to learn that if he wants spontaneity we have got to know about it in advance.'

I have always disliked the Tump for some reason.

Powys thought, What does the wall mean, Henry? Why is there a wall around it?

He scrambled across the field, away from the crowd, unable to shake the feeling that perhaps getting rid of the wall was not the best thing to do – but wondering whether this feeling had been conditioned by Henry's misgivings about the mound.

Halfway across the field he saw the hub-cap from Henry's Volkswagen, glinting in a bed of thistles. It reminded him that his own car was still parked in a layby alongside the road at the end of this field.

Henry's journal was in the car.

Bloody stupid thing to do. Anybody could have nicked the car, gone off with the journal.

Behind him Goff's voice boomed out of the speakers. 'I'm glad-ad that-at so many of you were able to come today-ay.'

Powys moved swiftly through wet grass towards the road. He reached it at a point about fifty yards from the layby. The white Mini was there; it looked OK.

'Is that your car?'

A lone bungalow of flesh-coloured bricks squatted next to the layby, and at the end of its short drive stood a stocky, elderly woman in a twinset and a tartan skirt, an ensemble which spelled out: incomer.

'Yes, it is,' Powys said, taking out his keys to prove it; unlocking the boot.

'You arrived just in time, dear, I was about to report it to the police.'

'Yes, I'm sorry, I got delayed.'

Actually, I was beaten up and then went to bed with a woman I'd never seen before but whose voice I'd heard on my answering machine, but you don't want to hear about all that.

Henry Kettle's journal lay where he'd left it, on top of the spare tyre.

'What's going on over there?' She had a Midlands accent.

'They're pulling down the wall around the mound.'

'Why are they doing that?'

Did she really want to know this? 'Well, because it's a bit ugly. And out of period with the Tump. That's what they say.'

'I'll tell you one thing, dear, that wall's never as ugly as the thing in the middle. I don't like that thing, I don't at all. My husband, he used to say, when he was alive, he used to say he'd seen prettier spoil-heaps.'

'He had a point,' Powys said, opening the driver's door.

'I'm on me own now, dear. It frightens me, the things that go on. I'd leave tomorrow, but I wouldn't anywhere near get our money back on this place, not the way the market is. It wouldn't buy me a maisonette in Dudley.'

Powys closed the car door and walked over.

'What did you mean, it frightens you?'

'You from the local paper, dear?'

'No, I'm…'

A shopkeeper.

'I'm a writer. My name's Joe Powys.'

'I've never heard of you, my love, but don't take it to heart. Mrs Seagrove, Minnie Seagrove. Would you like a cup of tea? I'm always making lea for people in that layby. Lorry drivers, all sorts.'

'I won't put you to that kind of trouble,' said Powys. 'But I would like to know what, specifically, frightens you about that mound?'

Mrs Seagrove smiled coyly. 'You'll think I'm daft. That girl from the local radio thinks I'm daft. I ring her sometimes, when it gets on top of me, the things that go on.'

'What things are those? I'll tell you honestly, Mrs Seagrove, I'm the last person who's going to think you're daft.'

Following the river. Fay walked Arnold down the field, towards the bridge, close to where she and Rachel had gone with the bottle of wine on a sunny afternoon that seemed like weeks and weeks ago.

It was one of Fay's 'thinking' walks. She wanted, as someone once said, to be alone.

Before leaving, she'd pored over some of the books in her small 'local' collection – Howse's History of Radnorshire, Ella Mary Leather's The Folklore of Herefordshire, Jacqueline Simpson's The Folklore of the Welsh Border. Not quite sure what she was looking for.

Anything to do with dogs, really. Dogs and bells.

There'd been separate entries on both. Two books referred to the Crybbe curfew, one of only a handful still sounded in British towns – purely tradition – with two of them along the Welsh border. There was all the usual stuff about the bequest of Percy Weale, wealthy sixteenth-century wool merchant, to safeguard the moral welfare of the town. One book briefly mentioned the Preece family as custodian of the tradition.

Fay untied Arnold's clothes-line. He snuffled around on the riverbank, going quite close to the water but never getting his paws wet. Interested in something. Perhaps there were otters. The river looked fat, well-fed by rain.

Not raining now, but it probably would before nightfall, the clouds moving in together like a street gang, heavy with menace.

It was only since coming to Crybbe that Fay had begun to regard intangibles like the sky, the atmosphere, climatic changes as… what? Manifestations of the earth's mood?

Or something more personal. Like when a mist seemed to cling to you, throwing out nebulous tentacles, as if you and it… as if it knew you.

And the atmosphere hereabouts – threatening or blandly indifferent – was not an expression of the earth's mood so much as… She stopped and stared across the darkening river at the huddle of Crybbe.

Not the earth's mood, but… the town's mood.

This thought came at the same moment as the shot.

Fay whirled.

The riverside field was empty, the clouds united overhead, thick and solid as a gravestone. There were no more shots and no echo, as if the atmosphere had absorbed the shock, like a cushion.

Everything still, the field unruffled, except for a patch of black and white – and now red – that pulsed and throbbed maybe twenty yards from Fay.

'Arnold?' she said faintly. 'Arnold?'

CHAPTER VI

From where Rachel was standing. Max Goff, arms folded, resembled an enormous white mushroom on the Tump.

In tones which, roughed by the speakers, didn't sound as reverent as they were perhaps intended to, Goff paid a brief tribute to Henry Kettle, said to be among the three finest dowsers in the country, killed when his car crashed into the obscene Victorian wall built around this very mound.

'No way we can know what went through Mr Kettle's head in those final moments. But I guess there was a kind of tragic poetry to his death.'

Rachel closed her eyes in anguish.

'And his death… began a minor but significant preliminary task which I intend to complete today.'

Max paused, looked down at his feet, looked up again. The cameraman could be seen zooming in tight on his face.

'The Victorians had scant respect for their heritage. They regarded our most ancient burial mounds as unsightly heaps which could be plundered at will in search of treasure. And to emphasize what they believed to be their dominance over the landscape and over history itself, they liked to build walls around things. Maybe they had a sense of the awesome terrestrial energy accumulating here. Maybe they felt threatened. Maybe they wanted to contain it.'

Or maybe they didn't fool themselves it even existed, Rachel thought cynically.

'But whatever their intention.' Goff began to raise his voice. 'This wall remains a denial. A denial of the Earth Spirit.'

He lifted an arm, fist clenched.

'And this wall has to come down as a first symbolic act in the regeneration of Crybbe.'

People clapped. That is, Rachel noticed, members of the New Age community clapped, raggedly.

'Only it won't be coming down today,' Humble said.

Rachel's eyes snapped open.

'We got a problem, Rachel. This is Mr Parry. The bulldozer man.'

A little man in wire-rimmed glasses stuck out a speckled brown hand. 'Gomer Parry' Plant Hire.'

'How do you do,' said Rachel suspiciously. 'Shouldn't you be down there with your machine?'

'Ah, well. Bit of a miscalculation, see,' said Gomer Parry. 'What it needs is a bigger bulldozer. See, even if I hits him high as I can reach, that wall, he'll crash back on me, sure to. Dangerous, see.'

'Dangerous,' Rachel repeated, unbelieving.

'Oh hell, aye.'

'OK. So if it needs a bigger bulldozer,' Rachel said carefully, 'then get a bigger bulldozer.'

'That,' said Gomer Parry, 'is, I'm afraid, the biggest one I got. Other thing is I got no insurance to cover all these people watchin'.'

Rachel said, very slowly, 'Oh…, shit.'

'Well, nobody said it was goin' to be a bloody circus,' said Gomer Parry.

Goff stood there, on the top of the Tump, still and white; monarch of the Old Golden Land.

He was waiting.

He came across the field in loose, easy strides, the twelve- bore under his arm, barrel pointing down. He wore a brown waterproof jacket and green Wellingtons.

It was darker now. Still a while from sundown, but the sun hadn't figured much around here in a long time.

'Sorry, miss.' Cursory as a traffic warden who'd just handed you a ticket. 'Shouldn't 'ave let 'im chase sheep, should you?'

'What?'

It was only afterwards she realized what he'd said. Fay, on her knees, blood on her jeans, from Arnold.

The dog lay in the grass, bleeding. He whined and twitched and throbbed.

'Move back, miss. Please.'

And she did. Thinking it had all been a horrible mistake and he was going to help her.

But when she shuffled back in the grass, almost overbalancing, he strolled across and stood over the dog, casually levelling his gun at the pulsating heap.

Fay gasped and threw herself forward, on top of Arnold, feeling herself trembling violently, like in a fever, and the dog hot, wet and sticky under her breasts.

'Now don't be silly, miss. 'E's done for, see. Move away, let me finish 'im off.'

'Go away!' Fay screamed. 'Fuck off!' Eyes squeezed closed, lying over Arnold. The dog gave a little cry and a wheeze, like a balloon going down.

'Oh no,' Fay sobbed. 'No, please…'

Lying across the dog, face in the grass, blind anger – hatred – rising.

They both saw the dog fall, not far from the river, a blur of blood. The woman running, collapsing to her knees. Then the man wandering casually across the field.

'The bastard. Who is he?'

'Jonathon Preece,' Mrs Seagrove said, white-faced, clinging to her gate. 'From Court Farm.'

'What the hell's he think he's doing?'

'I wish I could run,' Mrs Seagrove said, her voice quaking with rage and shock. 'I'd have that gun off him. Look…'

She clutched his arm. 'What's he doing now, Joe? He's going to shoot her, he's going to shoot the girl as well!'

Incredibly, it did look like it. She'd thrown herself over the dog. The man was standing over them, the gun pointing downwards.

'Do you know her?'

'Too far away to tell, Joe.' Mrs Seagrove began to wring her hands. 'Oh, I hate them. I hate them. They're primitive. They're a law unto themselves.'

'Right.' Powys was moving towards the field. Common land, he was thinking, common land.

'Shall I call the police?'

"Only if I don't come back,' Powys said, shocked at how this sounded. For real. Jesus.

He slipped and scrambled to his feet with yellow mud on his grey suit. 'Shit.' Called back, 'What did you say his name was?'

'For God's sake, be careful. Preece, Jonathon Preece.'

'Right. You stay there, Mrs Seagrove. Get ready to phone.' Jesus, he thought, realizing he was trembling, what kind of place is this?

Guy Morrison was about to tear his hair. This was a two-camera job and he only had one. How was he supposed to shoot Goff and the destruction of the wall with one camera?

What this needed was a shot of the bulldozer crashing through, with a shower of stone, and a cut-back to Goff's triumphant face as he savoured the moment from his eyrie on the Tump. It would be a meaningful sequence, close to the top of the first programme, maybe even under the titles.

But now was ne supposed to get that with one crew? If he'd known about this beforehand, he'd have hired a local news cameraman as back-up – Griggs, for instance. But he didn't know about it in advance because this arrogant, fat bastard was playing his cards too close to his chest.

At least the delay was a breathing space.

'Which you want to go for, then?' the cameraman, Larry Ember, asked him, pulling his tripod out of the mud close to the summit of the mound.

Guy pushed angry, stiffened fingers through his blond hair. 'Whichever we go for, it'll be wrong,' he said uncharacteristically. 'Look, if we set up next to Goff, how much of the bulldozer stuff do you reckon you can shoot from here?'

'Useless,' Larry Ember said. 'You're shooting a wall collapsing, you got to be under the thing, like it's tumbling towards you. Even then, with one camera, you're not going to get much.'

'Maybe we can fake it afterwards. Get the chap to knock down another section of wall round the back or something. We've got no choice, I need to get his reactions.'

'Could always ask him to fake it afterwards.'

'Perhaps not,' said Guy.

'Fucking cold up here,' Larry said. 'What kind of summer is this?'

A swirling breeze – well, more than a breeze – had set the trees rattling around them.

'Going to rain, too, in a minute.' Larry Ember looked up at a sky like the inside of a rotten potato. 'We should have had lights up here. I told you we needed a sparks, as well. You can't cut costs on a job like this.'

'I didn't know it was going to happen,' Guy hissed. 'Did I? I thought it was going to be a couple of talking heads and a few GVs'

Goff lurched over, white jacket flapping in the wind. 'Some flaming cock-up here. Switch that damn thing off for now, Guy, will you?'

'You the producer, or is he?' the cameraman wondered provocatively.

'Go along with him. For now.' Guy had gone red. His dumpy, serious-faced assistant, Catrin Jones, squeezed his arm encouragingly. Guy knew she'd been in love with him for some time.

Below them, the speakers on the van began to crackle. Goff's voice came out fractured. '… et… chel Wade…up here. Get Rach… ade… up here NOW.'

Catrin zipped up her fleecy body-warmer, 'It's a funny thing…'

'Nothing,' snapped Guy, 'about this is funny.'

'No, I mean it's so cold and windy up here and down there… nothing.' She waved a hand towards the crowd below – some people drifting away now. 'No wind at all, nobody's hair is blowing or anything.'

'OK.' Guy prodded Larry Ember's left shoulder, bellowed down his ear. 'Executive decision. Let's get down there. Take a chance, shoot it from below.'

"… ucking sticks gonna blow over.' Larry clutched his camera as the wind buffeted the tripod. The wind seemed to be coming from underneath. Catrin's clipboard was suddenly snatched from her hands and wafted upwards with a wild scattering of white paper, like a bird disturbed.

She squealed. 'Oh no!' Clawing frantically at the air.

'Leave it!' Guy said.

'It's the shot-list!'

'Just let it go!'

Five yards away, Goff was shrieking into the microphone, to no effect. The sound had gone completely.

'… king weird, this set-up.' Larry's words snatched into the swirling wind.

'One more shot!' Guy screaming down the cameraman's car again. 'Get Goff. Get him now!'

Goff's arms were flailing, the wide lapels of his white jacket whipped across his chin, the trees roaring around him, the sky black. He was out of control.

Guy wanted this.

Powys edged round the field, concealed – he hoped – by gorse-bushes and broom, then crossed it diagonally, approaching the man, Jonathon Preece, from behind, as quietly as he could. Feeling himself quivering: outrage and apprehension. He could see the woman lying not quite flat, spread across the dog, looking up now at Preece.

Heard her harsh whisper. '… done, you bastard?'

'I'm allowed,' Preece said with, Powys thought, surprising belligerence, the shotgun under his arm, barrel unbroken, if a dog's threatening sheep…'

'There are no bloody sheep!'

'There is in that next field,' he insisted. 'Up there, 'e was. I seen 'im before. We 'ad four lambs killed up there t'other week.'

'You're lying! This dog wasn't even here last week.'

'If a farmer got reason to think…' Waving his arms for emphasis, the gun moving about under one.

'You going to shoot me now?'

Jonathon Preece looked down at the gun under his arm and stepped back a pace or two. Powys froze, only three or four yards behind him now. Preece bent down, watching the woman all the time, and laid the shotgun on the grass to one side,.

'See. I put 'im down now, the ole gun. You go 'ome. Nothing you can do.' A bit defensive now. 'I'm within my legal rights, you ask Wynford Wiley. Can't be 'elped. No place for dogs, sheep country.'

The woman didn't move. Powys saw a tumble of tawny hair over a blue nylon cagoule.

A curious thing happened then. Although it was way past 9 p.m. and the sky was deep grey – no trace of sunlight for hours – a shadow fell across the field like an iron bar.

And down it, like a gust of breath through a blowpipe, came a harsh wind.

'What's he doing? What is he doing?'

Rachel couldn't believe it. Max was lumping up and down on the summit of the mound, his white jacket swirling around him, his white trousers flapping, as if he was trying to keep his balance, struggling to stay on his feet.

'Looks like 'e's been caught in a hurricane,' Gomer Parry observed.

But there was no wind. The trees behind Goff on the Tump appeared quite motionless, while Goff himself was dancing like a marionette with a hyperactive child wielding the strings.

He's just angry, Rachel thought. Out of his mind with rage because the wall isn't collapsing and the PA system's broken down. Teach him to hire local firms for a job like this.

She was aware, on the edge of her vision, of Andy Boulton-Trow in his white shirt and his tight, black jeans looking up at the dancing bear on the mound. Andy's beard-shadowed face was solemn and watchful, then it split into a grin and he started shaking his head.

He saw Jonathon Preece look up in sudden alarm as the shaft of wind made a channel of black water across the river, from bank to bank.

There was a strangled yelp from the woman or the dog or both, but he couldn't hear either of them clearly because of the wind.

It came like a hard gasp of breath.

Bad breath.

The wind smelled foul. And as Powys, choking, reeled away from it, his senses rebelled and the whole scene seemed to go into negative for a moment, so that the sky was white and the grass was red and the river gleamed a nauseous yellow.

He stumbled, eyes streaming, a roaring in his ears.

And when the noise faded and the halitosis wind died and his vision began to clear, Joe Powys found he was holding the twelve-bore shotgun.

It was heavier than he expected, and he stumbled, almost dropping it. He gripped it firmly in both hands, straightened up.

Jonathon Preece roared, 'Who the 'ell…?' Powys saw his face for the first time – raw pink checks. Age maybe twenty-two or three.

'Steady, pal.'

'You give me that gun, Mister!'

'Advise me, Jonathon.' Powys pointed the shotgun in the general direction of Jonathon Preece's groin. 'I've never used one of these before. Do I have to pull the two triggers to blow both your balls off, or is one enough?'

He was gratified to see fear flit, fast as an insect, across Jonathon Preece's eyes, 'I don't know who you are, mister, but this is none of your business.'

Powys felt himself grinning. In his right hand, the barrel of the twelve-bore was comfortably warm, like radiator pipes. The stock fitted into his armpit, firm as a crutch.

'You watch it. Mister. Ole thing'll go off.'

'Yes,' Powys said.

He raised the barrel, so that it was pointing into Jonathan's chest.

'You put 'im down. Be sensible!'

His finger under the trigger-guard, so firm. He thought, this man deserves what's coming to him. This man needs to die. He felt a hard thud of certainty in his chest. An acute satisfaction, the flexing of an unknown muscle.

He drank in the dusk like rough ale, closed his eyes and squeezed.

"Nnnn… oooo.'

Saw, in slow-motion, the chest of Jonathon Preece exploding, the air bright with blood, a butcher's shop cascade.

A tiny, feeble noise. He turned. The woman in the blue cagoule was up on her knees now, breathing hard. The tiny, feeble noise came out of the lump of sodden fur exposed on the grass.

'Arnie!' She looked up at Powys; he saw tear-stained, blood-blotched cheeks, clear green eyes and a lot of mud. 'Oh God, he's hanging on. Can you help me?'

Powys's mouth was so dry he couldn't speak.

Jonathon Preece screamed. 'You got no bloody sense? Gimme that gun!'

'I…'

'Please,' the woman begged.

'Gimme it!' The farmer took a step forward.

From out of the town's serrated silhouette came the first sonorous stroke of the curfew.

Powys looked down in horror at the gun. It felt suddenly very cold in his hands.

'Gimme…'

'Get it yourself,' Powys said, backing away, far enough away for Jonathon Preece, in this light, to remain unsure of what was happening until he heard the splash.

When the gun hit the water, Powys saw Mrs Seagrove hurrying down the bank towards them and then he saw Jonathon Preece's purpling face and became aware, for the first time, as the farmer advanced on him with bunched fists, that Jonathon Preece was bigger than he was. As well as being younger and fitter and, at this point, far angrier.

'You fuckin' done it now, Mister. Antique, that gun is. Three generations of my family 'ad that gun.'

Powys shrugged, palms up, backing off. He felt loose, very tired suddenly. 'Yeah, well… not too deep just there… Jonathon. Be OK. When it dries out.'

Preece's head swivelled – Mrs Seagrove coming quickly towards them, red-faced, out of breath – and he stopped, uncertain.

Mrs Seagrove stood there in her twinset and her plaid skirt, breathing hard, eventually managing to gasp, 'Did you see it? Did you?'

Powys looked at her, then at Jonathon Preece who'd turned to the river, was glaring out. The river looked stagnant. Preece hesitated, stared savagely into the drab water, started to say something and then didn't.

'Please,' the woman said from the grass.

It began to rain, big drops you could see individually against the hard sky.

Powys pulled off his jacket and knelt down. The dog's eyes were wide open, flanks pulsating. Powys didn't know what to do.

The dog squirmed, blood oozed.

Powys laid the jacket down. 'Put him on this.' He slid both hands beneath the dog. 'Gently. We'll get him to a vet. You… you never know your luck.'

In the river now, almost up to the tops of his Wellingtons, Jonathon Preece bellowed, 'I know your face, Mister. I'll 'ave you!'

'Oh, piss off,' Powys said, weary of him. He heard Mrs Seagrove wailing, 'You must've seen it. It was coming right at you. It went through you.'

CHAPTER VII

Jean Wendle was living in a narrow town house on the square. Inside, it was already quite dark. She put on a reading lamp. Its parchment shade made the room mellow.

Gold lettering on the book spines, the warm brass of a coal-scuttle in the hearth. It reminded Alex of his first curate's house in Oxfordshire, before he'd been promoted into an endless series of vast, unbeatable vicarages and rectories. She'd certainly brought the warmth of her personality into the place.

Jean Wendle made him sit in a smoker's bow chair, his back to the fireplace, with its Chinese screen, facing a plain, whitewashed wall.

'Some days,' Alex said, 'it seems fine. I mean there might be nothing wrong. Or perhaps that, in itself, is an illusion. Perhaps I think I'm all right and everybody else sees me as stark, staring…'

'Shush.' Touch of Scottish in her voice, he liked that. 'Don't tell me. Don't tell me anything about it. Let me find out for myself.'

Yes, he really rather fancied her. Sixtyish. Short, grey hair. Still quite a neat little body – pliable, no visible stiffening. Sort of retired gym-mistress look about her. And nice mobile lips.

Cool fingers on his forehead. Moving from side to side, finding the right spot. Then quite still.

Quite sexy. Would he have let himself in for this if he hadn't fancied her a bit?

Not a chance.

'Don't talk,' she said.

'I wasn't talking.'

'Well, don't think so loudly. Not for a moment or two. Just relax.'

Taken him a few days to arrive into the cool hands of Jean Wendle. Well, a few nights – tentative approaches in the pub. Not a word to Fay. Definitely not a word to Grace.

And why shouldn't he? What was there to lose? The GP in Crybbe was a miserable beggar – hadn't been much to poor old Grace, had he? Drugs. Always drugs. Drugs that made you sleepy, drugs that made you sick. And at the end of the day…

Gradually, he and reality would go their separate ways. Rather appealing in one sense – what did reality have to commend it these days? But not exactly a picnic for anyone looking after him. Alex knew what happened to people who lost their minds. It sometimes seemed that half his parishioners had been geriatrics. They remembered having a wash this morning, when it was really days ago. They peed in the wardrobe by mistake.

Fay, now – that child was suffering a severe case of misplaced loyalty. If he couldn't get rid of her, it was his solid intention to pop himself off while he could still count on getting the procedure right. She'd thank him for it one day. Better all round, though, if he could make it look like an accident. Fall off the bridge or something.

Would have been a pity though, with all these alternative healing characters swanning around, not to give it a try first. What was there to lose?

The first chap he'd been to, Osborne, had not been all that encouraging. Almost as depressing as the doc. Alex got the feeling old age was not what the New Age was about.

And all this 'like cures like' stuff. A drop of this, a drop of that. Little phials of colourless liquid, touch of the medieval apothecary.

'How long before it starts to work?'

'You mustn't expect dramatic results, Alex,' Osborne told him. 'You see, holistic medicine, by definition, is about improving the health of the whole person. Everything is interconnected. Obviously, the older one is, the more set in its ways the body is, therefore the longer…' He must have seen the expression in Alex's eyes. 'Look, my wife's an acupuncturist, perhaps that might be more what you…'

'All those bloody needles. No thanks.'

'It isn't painful, Alex."

'Pain? I don't mind pain!'

Just the image of himself lying there, an overstuffed pincushion.

This kind of healing was a good deal more dignified, if you concentrated on those cool hands and didn't think too hard about what was supposedly going on in the spirit world.

He'd grilled her, naturally.

'Dr Chi? Dr bloody Chi? You don't look like a nutter, Wendy. How can you seriously believe you're working under the supervision of some long-dead Chinky quack?'

'My name's Jean,' she'd corrected him softly.

'Dr Chi!' Alex draining his Scotch. 'God save us.'

'Do you really want to know about this, Alex, or are you just going to be superior, narrow-minded, chauvinistic and insulting?'

'Was I? Hmmph. Sorry. Old age. Senile dementia.'

'Are you really old enough to be senile, Alex? What are you, seventy?'

'I'm certainly way past flattery, Wendy. Way past eighty, too. Go on, tell me about this Peking pox-doctor from the Ming dynasty.'

He'd forced himself to listen patiently while she told him about Dr Chi, who, she said, she'd once actually seen – as a white, glowing, egg-shaped thing.

'The name is significant. Dr Chi. Chi is the oriental life force. Perhaps that's the name I've subconsciously given him. I don't know if I'm dealing with a doctor from the Ming dynasty, the T'ang dynasty or whenever. He doesn't speak to me all sing-song, like a waiter serving chicken chow mein. All I know is there's a healing force and I call him Dr Chi. Perhaps he never was a human doctor at all or perhaps he's something that last worked through a Chinese physician. I'm not clever enough to understand these things. I'm content to be a channel. Good gracious, don't you believe in miracles, Alex? Isn't that the orthodox Anglican way any more?'

Regarding the Anglican Church, he wasn't entirely sure what he believed any more.

Powys found the page, ran his finger down the column headed Veterinary Surgeons. 'OK, D. L. Harris. Crybbe three-nine-four.'

Mrs Seagrove dialled the number and handed him the phone.

The woman in the bloodstained blue cagoule sat in the hall. The dog lay on Powys's jacket on the woman's knee, panting.

'Have a cup of tea while you're waiting,' Mrs Seagrove said.

She shook her head. 'No. Thank you…We may have to take him somewhere.'

The number rang for nearly half a minute before a woman answered.

'Yes.'

'Mr Harris there, please?'

'What's it about?' Local accent.

'We've got a very badly injured dog. Could you tell me where to bring it?'

A silence.

'Dog, you say?' Shrill. As if he'd said giraffe or something.

'He's been shot.'

'I'm sorry,' the woman said flat-voiced. "But Mr Harris is out.'

'Will he be long? Is there another vet?'

'Sorry.' Cool, terse. 'We can't help you.'

A crackle, the line broke.

'I don't believe it,' Powys said. 'She said the vet was out, I asked when he'd be back or was there anyone else, and she said she couldn't help me. Can you believe that? This was a vet's, for God's sake.'

'Wrong,' Fay Morrison said bitterly. 'This was a Crybbe vet's,'

'What the fuck was happening up there?' Max Goff lay on his bed in his room at the Cock.

'You tell me,' said Andy Boulton-Trow.

'I never felt so high. Like, at first I was really angry, really furious at the inefficiency. Why weren't they bringing the flaming wall down, why was nothing happening, why was the sound failing?'

'And then?'

'Then I felt the power. The energy. I never felt anything so heavy before. It took off the top of my skull. That ever happen to you?'

'Once or twice,' Andy said.

'Come to London with me,' Goff said. 'Stay at my place.

'I have things to do here.'

'Then I'll stay here. We'll stay in this room. You got things to teach me, I realize this now. We'll stay here. I'll get rid of Ms Wade. I'll send her back to London.'

Andy placed a hand on Max's knee.

'You go back to London, Max. There's such a thing as too much too soon. You'll get there. You'll make it.'

Andy didn't move his hand. Max shivered.

'Took off the top of my skull. And then the curfew started.'

'Yes,' Andy said. 'The curfew.'

'I don't think I like that curfew,' Jean Wendle said, pouring Earl Grey, after the treatment. 'I don't know whether it's the bell or what it represents. I don't like restrictions.'

'Oh, quite,' Alex said. 'Couldn't stand it if it was a real curfew. But as a bit of picturesque traditional nonsense, it's all right, isn't it?'

'I think it is a real curfew, in some way,' Jean said, 'I don't know why I think that. Well, yes, I do – people do stay off the streets while it's being rung, have you noticed that? But I think there's something else. A hundred times a night is an awfully big tradition.'

'I suppose so.'

Alex would give her the benefit of the doubt on anything tonight. He didn't remember when he'd last felt so relaxed, so much at peace. And him a priest. Best not to go into the implications of all this.

'It's a very odd little town,' Jean said. She drew gold-dusted velvet curtains over a deep Georgian window.

'Aren't they all.'

'No, they aren't. This is. There are – how can I put it? – pockets of strange energy in this town. All over the place. People see things, too, although few will ever admit it.'

'See things?' Alex was wary.

'Manifestations. Light effects. Ghosts.'

'Hmm,' said Alex. 'Good cup of tea.'

'Being on the border is a lot to do with it. When we make a frontier… when we split something physically asunder in the landscape, especially when we build something like Offa's Dyke to emphasize it, we create an area of psychic disturbance that doesn't go away.'

Alex stirred his tea, wishing she'd talk about something else.

Jean said, 'Do you think they've taken on more than they can handle? Max Goff and the New Age people?'

'I thought you were one of them.'

'I like to keep a certain distance,' Jean said, 'I like to watch. Can they control it, I wonder? Or is it too volatile for them?'

'Oh, we can't control anything,' Alex said. 'That's something everybody learns sooner or later. Least of all control ourselves.'

It was well after midnight by the time they came out of the vet's.

Without Arnold.

'I couldn't stand the way he was looking at me,' Fay said, it's not been his week, has it? He's in a car crash, sees his master die. Saved from the clutches of the Crybbe constabulary, finds he's become a kind of pariah in the town. Then he gets shot.'

The Mini had been parked for over two hours on a double yellow line outside the vet's surgery in Leominster, fifteen miles from Crybbe. The nearest one from which they'd managed to get a response. The vet handling night-calls had been understanding but had made no comments either way about the wisdom of farmers shooting dogs alleged to be worrying sheep.

The vet had said Arnold would probably live. 'Just don't expect him to be as good as new with all that lead inside him.'

One of the back legs had taken most of it. Bones had been broken. The vet had seemed a bit despondent about that leg. Fay had spent half an hour holding Arnold at different angles while the vet examined what he could, removing shotgun pellets. He might have to operate, he said, and got Fay to sign a paper relating to responsibility if Arnold died under anaesthetic.

Now Fay and Powys were standing on the pavement, unwinding. It was very quiet in Leominster, the other side of midnight. No menace here. Fay thought.

J. M. Powys was shaking out his jacket. It was scarcely identifiable as a jacket any more. It looked as if someone had faced a firing squad in it.

'Oh God,' Fay said. 'I'm so sorry.'

J. M. Powys dangled the jacket from an index finger and looked quite amused. J. M. Powys. Bloody hell. 'It's hard to believe you're J. M. Powys. I thought you'd be…'

'Dead.'

'Well, not quite.'

'That lady, Mrs Seagrove. She called you Mrs Morrison. You're not Guy's wife, are you?'

'No,' Fay said. 'Not any more.'

She explained, leaning on an elderly Mini in a quiet street in Leominster, lights going out around them. Explained quite a few things. Talking too much, the way you did when you'd been through something traumatic. Only realizing she was shooting her mouth off, when she heard herself saying, 'I've got to get out of that place, or I'm going to implode. Or maybe I'll just kill somebody.'

She pulled both palms down her cheeks. Shook her hair, like a dog. 'What am I going on about? Not your problem. Thanks for everything you've done. I shall buy you a new jacket.'

'I don't want a new jacket.' Powys opened the car door. 'I like them full of patches and sewn-up bits.'

He drove carefully out of the town, dipping the headlights politely when they met another vehicle. They didn't meet many. The lights sometimes flashed briefly into the eyes of rabbits sitting in the hedgerows. Once, J. M. Powys had to brake for a badger scampering – that was really the word, she'd have expected badgers to lumber – across the road and into a wood.

Fay realized she hadn't phoned her dad. He'd be worried. Or he wouldn't, depending on his state of mind tonight. Too late now.

'Arnold!' Powys said suddenly, breaking five minutes of slightly sleepy silence.

'What?'

'Arnold. Not Henry Kettle's dog? You aren't the person who's looking after Henry's dog?'

'And not making an awfully good job of it, so far.'

'Stone me,' said Powys. 'Sometimes coincidence just seems to crowd you into corners.'

'Especially in Crybbe,' Fay said. She wished she was travelling through the night to somewhere else. Virtually anywhere else, actually.

The bones were very white in the torchlight. There were also some parchment-coloured bits, skin or sinew, gristle.

'Ah,' Tessa said, less than awed, 'I know what that is.'

Warren was miffed. How the fuck could she know anything about it?

'Yeah,' Warren said. 'It's a hand.'

'It's a Hand of Glory."

'What you on about?'

'A dead man's hand.'

'Well, that's bloody obvious, isn't it?'

A hanged man's hand,' Tessa said.

Warren squatted down next to her. The spade lay on the grass, next to a neat pile of earth and the square of turf, set carefully to one side so it could be replaced.

'Which means it's got magic powers,' Tessa said. Where'd you find it?'

'Around.'

'All right, don't tell me! What's that Stanley knife doing in there?'

'Well, I…' Buggered if he was going to tell her he'd been scared to put his hand in and take the knife out. 'I'm seeing what effect it 'as on it. You know, like you puts an old razorblade under a cardboard pyramid and it comes out sharp again. New Age, that.' Warren cackled. 'I'm learnin' all about this New Age, now, see. 'Ow'd you know that?'

'Know what?'

' 'Bout it being a hanged man's hand.'

'I think I'd like to draw it,' Tessa said. 'Maybe I'll come up here again.'

'No.' It was his hand. 'Keep diggin' it up, the ground'll get messed up and somebody else might find it.'

'They won't. Do you know why you brought it here, Warren?'

'Good a place as any.'

Tessa smiled.

'What you done with then other drawings, the old feller?'

'Got fed up with him,' Tessa said. 'Passed him on.'

'Who to?'

'Dunno where he might end up,' Tessa said mysteriously. 'Part of the fun.' She smiled and fitted a forefinger down the front of Warren's jeans and drew him towards her, across the old box.

'Let's do it here… do it… by the box. Leave it open, see what happens.'

'Prob'ly come crawlin' out an' pinch your bum,' Warren said slyly. 'Anyway, it's too late now, for that.'

Tessa took her finger out of Warren's jeans, 'I waited for you.'

'Had a job to do.'

'What was so important?"

'You'll find out,' Warren said.

Tessa reached out and touched a white knuckle-bone.

'Cold,' she said, it's nice and cold.'

'It was cold in the river, too,' Warren said.

Rachel lay in the brass bed. When he slid in gratefully beside her, she awoke.

'J.M.?'

'I couldn't put a light on. The power's off again.'

He'd lit up Bell Street with the headlights, watching the small figure in bloodstained blue nylon walking to her door. When she was safely inside, he drove back into the lightless main street, where all the windows were blind eyes. Then down the hill and over the bridge. A tight right turn, and there was the perfect little riverside cottage. He'd almost expected it not to be there, like a dream cottage.

The presence of Rachel in the bed reinforced a sense of home. Before she could ask, he told her where he'd been, poured it all out, the whole bizarre episode.

'Arnold?' Rachel sat up in the darkness. 'Jonathon Preece shot Arnold?'

He told her about the shotgun, how he'd come to pick it up from the grass.

'I really wanted to kill him. I thought I had killed him at one point. I could feel myself pulling the triggers, both triggers, and then his chest… It was as if time had skipped a beat, and I'd already shot him.'

'You're overtired,' Rachel said.

'Then the dog – Arnold – whimpered, and I was back in the second before I did it. Arnold was Henry Kettle's dog.'

'I know.'

'You don't know how badly I wanted to kill that guy.'

'This doesn't seem like you, J.M.'

'No,' Powys said, it didn't.'

There was a window opposite the bed. Across the river, he saw a few sparse lights coming on, like candles on a cake.

'Power's back.'

'And you're a hero, J.M.,' Rachel said, moulding her body into his. 'Although you'll be a marked man in Crybbe if anyone finds out.'