Crybbe aka Curfew

CHAPTER I

No, don't move 'im yet, Gomer.'

Jack Preece ambled across the field to where Gomer Parry and his nephew, Nev, were preparing to get the bulldozer back on the lorry.

'Don't speak to me, Jack.' Gomer didn't turn round. 'Embarrassed? Humiliated, more like!'

'Aye, well, I'm sorry, Gomer.'

'Sorry? You bloody should be sorry, Jack Preece. Never before have Gomer Parry Plant Hire failed to carry out a contract. Never! I should 'ave told your dad where 'e could stick 'is…

'Only, see, the district council's 'avin' a bit o' trouble on the new landfill site over Brynglas,' Jack Preece said. 'Need of an extra bulldozer, quickish, like. Three days' work, sure t'be.'

Gomer Parry turned shrewd eyes on Jack Preece, standing in the damp old field, between downpours, his back to the Tump and the famous wall – still intact, except for the bits of masonry dislodged when old Kettle had his crash.

'Reckon you can do it, Gomer?'

Gomer shot him a penetrating took through his wire-rimmed glasses. 'Something goin' on yere, Jack. Don't know what it is, but there's something.'

'Aye, well,' Jack Preece said, eyes averted. 'No need to worry about your reputation, Gomer, anyway. You'll be all right. We looks after our own, isn't it.'

He started to walk away then turned back. You seen Jonathon about?'

'Not lately,' Gomer said.

'Boy didn't come 'ome last night.'

'Likely 'avin' 'is end away somewhere,' said Gomer. 'Only young once, Jack.'

'Aye,' said Jack. Sure t'be.'

Powys drove back to Hereford, loaded up a couple of suitcases, a box of books, his Olivetti and two reams of A4.

'Aha,' said Barry, the osteopath from upstairs. 'Ensnared. He's got you. I knew he would. What was the deciding factor Powys. The money?'

Powys shook his head.

The women?'

Powys said, 'Just hold that door open for me, would you?'

'I knew it! It's the Summer of Love in Crybbe. You always were a sucker for a cheesecloth cleavage.'

'Barry,' said Powys, 'don't you have somebody's spine to trample on?'

'Good luck, Joe,' Annie said wistfully.

'What d'you mean "good luck''?' He'd noticed the crystals had been joined on the counter by a small display of astrological amulets in copper. Where the hell had she found those?

'You're going back,' Annie said.

'I am not "going back".'

Annie and Barry smiled knowingly to each other.

During the return drive it rained. It rained harder the nearer he got to Crybbe. Powys did some thinking, images wafting across his mind with the rhythm of the windscreen wipers.

Seriously unseasonal rain was throwing the river over the banks like rumpled bedclothes. He saw an image of a shotgun getting slowly pushed downstream, its barrels clogged with corrosive silt. Unless Jonathon had managed to retrieve it. Would he ever find out? And would Jonathon report him to the police?

Unlikely. He hoped. Well, it was a question of image: the farmer who let a townie in a suit pinch his gun and toss it in the river. They'd love that in the saloon bar of the Cock, it would go down in the folk history of the town.

Rachel was spending the morning at the Court, organizing workmen putting finishing touches to the stable-block. He thought of going to see Mrs Seagrove.

He carried his suitcases into the cottage. It was a good cottage, a better home than his flat. It had wonderful views over the river – slopping and frothing feverishly, after hours of heavy rain.

He couldn't stay here for long though. Not on false pretences. There was no way he was going to write the New Age Gospel According to Goff.

And the sequence by the river last night kept replaying itself. The feeling of the warm gun, the knowledge that he was not only capable of killing but wanted to kill. The bar of shadow across the grass and the river, all the way from the Tump, where Henry Kettle died.

And Arnold, Henry Kettle's dog. A dowser's dog, Henry used to say, isn't like other dogs.

It wasn't raining any more. Through the large window in the living-room, he saw the clouds had shifted like furniture pushed to the corners of the room, leaving a square of light. Fifty yards away, the river, denied its conquest of the meadow, slurped sulkily at its banks. On the other side of the river, in the semi-distant field – probably Goff's land – Powys saw two tiny figures, one holding a couple of tall poles.

He thought, the dodmen. Alfred Watkins's term for the prehistoric surveyors who had planned out the leys, erecting standing stones and earthworks at strategic points. The surveyors would, Watkins imagined, have held up poles to find out where tall stones would be visible as waymarkers. Now modern dodmen were at work, recreating prehistoric Crybbe in precisely the way it was presumed to have been done four thousand or so years ago.

From here, Powys couldn't even make out whether they were dodmen or dodwomen. But he was prepared to bet one of them would be Andy Boulton-Trow.

Calm, laid-back, omniscient old Andy.

I think Joe ought to present himself to the Earth Spirit in the time honoured fashion…

… the very least you can do, mate…

… think of it as a kind of appeasement.

Now Andy was personally supervising the operation to open up the town of Crybbe to the Earth Spirit.

On past experience of this irresponsible bastard, did that sound like good news?

'I think,' Hereward Newsome said, almost shaking with triumph, 'that I've cracked it.'

'You saw him?'

'He's gone back to London. I saw Rachel Wade. She said go ahead.'

Hereward took off his jacket, hung it over the back of the antique-pine rocking-chair by the Aga, sat down and began to roll up his shirt-sleeves. 'But we need to move fast.'

'Why?' If Jocasta wasn't as ecstatic as she might have been this was because Hereward's news had eclipsed her own small coup.

'I mean a buying trip. To the West Country, I'd suggest and pronto. There's Ernest Wilding at Street, Devereux in Penzance, Sally Gold in Totnes, Melanie Dufort in… where is it now, some place near Frome? All specializing in megalith paintings – or they were. And there have to be more. What happened to the Ruralists? Where's Inshaw these days?"

'Not far from here, I heard.'

"Oh.' He stood up. 'Anyway, I'm going to make some calls now. Strike while Goff's hot. If we go down there this weekend fetch a few back to put in front of him on Tuesday when he comes back.'

Hereward paced the kitchen. Any second now, Jocasta thought, he'll start rubbing his hands. Still, it was good news.

'You ought to see his proposed exhibition hall. Rachel showed me this huge barn he's going to rebuild. It'll be a sort of interpretive centre for prehistoric Crybbe and the whole earth mysteries thing. He's looking for maybe seventy paintings. Seventy! Darling, if we can provide half of those we're talking… let's be vulgar, if we can get the kind of stuff he wants, we're talking megabucks.'

'Why can't we go next weekend?"

'Look… so we close the gallery for a day. What have we got to lose, with Goff out of town? And the way things have been, can we afford to delay?'

'Hereward!' God, he was so irritating. 'What about Emmanuel Walters?'

'Oh.' Hereward sat down. 'It's Sunday, isn't it?'

'Ye-es,' Jocasta said, exasperated, 'it is. And it's a bloody good job one of us is efficient.' Adding nonchalantly, 'I've even arranged a celebrity to open the exhibition.'

'Oh yes?'

Jocasta's lips cemented into a hard line. Even if it was a member of the Royal Family it wouldn't impress Hereward at the moment, still on his Max Goff high.

'It's Guy Morrison.'

'Oh. Er, super. Didn't he used to be…?'

'He's producing and presenting the documentary the BBC are doing on Max Goff and Crybbe. He seems very pleasant, he agreed at once. I think he's at rather a loose end. He's spending the weekend here, getting to know the town. Getting to know the people who count.'

'Not much use coming to The Gallery, then.' Hereward guffawed insensitively.

Jocasta scowled. That was it. 'I know,' she said, 'why don't you go to the West Country on your own? I'll stay behind and handle the private view.'

'Yes, I suppose it makes sense.'

Jocasta knew it made no sense at all. Good old Hereward, always anxious to be accepted by artists as a friend, someone who understood the creative process, would spend hundreds of pounds more than she would. But at least she'd get rid of him for a couple of days. Increasingly, Jocasta had been thinking back with nostalgia to the days when they'd had separate jobs and only met for a couple of hours in the evening…'

Hereward said – a formality, she thought – Will you be all right on your own?'

Just for a minute she thought about last right and those drawings and the sticky feeling on her hands which had proved, when the lights came on, to be no more than perspiration.

'I shall be fine,' she said.

Mrs Seagrove brought him tea in one of her best china cups – as distinct, she pointed out, from the mugs she took out to the lorry drivers in the layby.

'I thought I'd seen the last of you, Joe. How's the doggie.

'We think he's going to be OK.'

'That's good.' She was wearing today a plaid skirt of different tartan. I'm not Scottish,' she said. 'Frank and I used to go up there every autumn, and we'd visit these woollen mills.'

There was a picture of Frank on the sideboard. He was beaming and holding up a fish which might have been a trout.

'He was thrilled when we got this place, so near the river. He joined the angling club. It was a shame. Turned out to be not a very good river for fishing. And the problem was, Joe, Frank could see the river, but I could only see that.'

She sat with her back to the big, horizontal window with its panoramic view across the river to the woods and, of course the Tump.

'About that…' Powys said.

'I thought you'd come about that.' Mrs Seagrove held the teacup on her kilted knees, flat and steady as a good coffee table. 'Well, I'm glad somebody's interested. Mrs Morrison is always too busy. Unless I want to talk about it on the radio she says. Well, I said, would you make a spectacle of yourself on the wireless?'

'Last night, you said something was coming at us. From the Tump?'

'People are fascinated by these things. I'm not. Are you, Joe?'

'Well, I used to be. Still am, in a way, but they worry me now.'

'Quite right. I'm not interested, I've never been interested.

'It nearly always happens to people who are not interested,' said Powys.

'I think I know when it comes now, what time, so I draw the curtains and turn the telly up, but some nights I just have to go and look, just to get it out of the way. I'm scared to death, Joe, but I look, just to get it out of the way.'

'And what time is it?'

'Usually after nine o'clock and before they ring that bell in the church. Not always. It's early sometimes, almost full daylight – although it goes dark all of a sudden, kind of thing, like it's as if it's bringing its own darkness, do you know what I mean? And just once – it was that night the poor man crashed his car – just once, it was later, about half-tennish. Just that once.'

Powys said, 'It's a dog, isn't it? A big, black dog.'

'Yes, dear,' said Mrs Seagrove very' quietly. 'Yes, it is.'

'How often have you…?'

'Seven or eight times, I've seen it. It always goes the same way. Coming from the… the mound thing.'

'Down from the mound, or out of the mound?'

'I couldn't honestly say, dear. One second it's not there, the next it is, kind of thing. I'm psychic, I suppose. I never wanted to be psychic, not like this.'

'Is it – I'm sorry to ask all these questions – but is it obviously a dog? It couldn't be anything else?'

'You ask as many questions as you like, dear. I've been finding out about you, I rang a friend of mine at the library in Dudley. No, that's an interesting point you make there – is it really a dog? Well, I like dogs. I wouldn't be frightened of a dog, would I? Even a ghost dog. Naturally, it'd be a shock, the first time you saw it, kind of thing, but no, I don't think I'd be frightened. Oh dear, I wish you hadn't asked me that now, it's disturbed me, that has, Joe.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I don't want to stay here. I'd be off tomorrow, but how much would I get for this, even if I managed to sell it?'

if you really wanted to go quickly,' Powys said, 'I think I could find you a buyer. You'd get a good price, too.'

'Not you?'

'Good God, no, not me. I couldn't afford it, even if… Look, leave it with me for a day or two.'

'I don't know what to say, dear.' Mrs Seagrove's eyes were shining, in a way, I'd feel bad about somebody having this place. But they might not be psychic, mightn't they?'

'Or they might be quite interested.'

'Oh no,' she said. 'Nobody's interested in evil, are they?'

CHAPTER II

Guy dropped by.

She opened the back door, thinking it was the milkman come for his money, as was usual on a Saturday.

'Fay. Hi.'

'Oh, my God.'

She wouldn't have chosen to say that, but Guy seemed pleased at the reaction. Perhaps he saw it as an urgent suppression of instinctive desire.

'Thought I'd drop by, as I had some time on my hands.' Incandescent smile. 'Spending the weekend here, getting acclimatized.'

New crowns, Fay spotted. Good ones, of course.

'Crew's gone back, but I've been invited to open some shitty art exhibition tomorrow night. Must be a bit short on celebrities in these parts if they want me.' Guy laughed.

Still a master of double-edged false modesty, Fay thought, wishing she'd changed, combed her hair, applied some rudimentary make-up.

And then despising herself utterly for wishing all that.

'Come in, Guy. Dad's gone for a walk; he'll be devastated to have missed you.'

'How is he?' Guy stepped into the hall and looked closely at everything, simulating enormous interest in the chipped cream paintwork, the wallpaper with its faded autumn leaves, the nylon carpet beneath his hand-stitched, buffed, brown shoes.

He wore a short, olive, leather jacket, soft as a very expensive wallet.

'We used to have some fascinating chats, your father and I, when I was in Religious Programmes.'

'I expect he learned quite a lot,' Fay said, going through to the kitchen.

'That was how I swung the Crybbe thing, you know. It cut plenty of ice with Max Goff, me being an ex-religious-affairs producer. Indicated a certain sensitivity of touch and an essentially serious outlook. Nothing crude, no juvenile piss-taking.'

'Tea or coffee?' Fay said. 'Why did you leave Religious Programmes, anyway? Seemed like a good, safe earner to me. Just about the only situation where you can work in television and still get to heaven.'

'Well, you know, Fay, there came a time when it was clear that Guy Morrison had said all he needed to say about religion. Is it ground coffee or instant?'

'Would I offer you instant coffee, Guy?'

'I don't like to make presumptions about people's financial positions,' Guy said sensitively.

'We're fine.'

'I did tell you, didn't I, that I'd probably have brought you in as researcher, except for this J.M. Powys problem?'

'Thanks, but I doubt I'd've had time, anyway. Pretty busy, really.' The handle came off the cup she was holding – that'd teach her to lie twice.

'He was foisted on me, Fay. Nothing I could do.'

'I met him last night. Seemed a nice bloke.'

Just before lunch, J. M. Powys had phoned to ask how Arnold was. Comfortable, Fay had said, having been on the phone to the vet as early as was reasonable. Stable. As well as can be expected.

Guy crinkled his mouth. 'One-book wonder, J. M. Powys. A spent force.'

Must be a nice bloke if Guy despises him, Fay thought. She began to filter the coffee in silence.

Eventually, Guy, sitting at the kitchen table, said, 'Long time since we met face to face, Fay. Three years? Four?'

'At least.' Physically, he'd hardly changed at all. Perhaps the odd characterful crease, like the superb-quality leather of his jacket. Pretty soon, she thought in dismay, he'll be looking too comparatively young ever to have been married to me.

Guy said, 'You're looking… er, good. Fay.'

What a bastard. She made a point of net replying in kind.

Guy said, 'Quite often, you know – increasingly, in fact – I find myself wondering why we ever split up.'

'Didn't it have something to do with you screwing your production assistant?'

Guy dismissed it. 'Trivial, trivial stuff. I was young, she threw herself at me. You know that. I'm essentially a pretty faithful sort of person. No, what we had…' He pushed Grace's G-plan dining chair away from the table and leaned back, throwing his left ankle over his right knee and catching it deftly with his right hand. He obviously couldn't quite remember what they'd had.

'I often wish we'd had children, Fay.'

Oh hell.

Guy's intermittent live-in girlfriend had apparently proved to be barren. Fay remembered him moaning about this to her one night on the phone. She remembered thinking at the time that infertility was a very useful attribute for an intermittent live-in girlfriend to have. But Guy was at the age when he wanted there to be little Morrisons.

'I'm at the Cock.'

'What?'

'The Cock Hotel,' Guy said, it's an appalling place.'

'Dreadful,' Fay said, pouring his coffee,

'I think I'm going to have to make other arrangements when we start shooting in earnest.'

'I should.'

'Can you think of anywhere?'

'Hasn't Goff offered you accommodation?'

'Nothing suitable, apparently. He says. Though we do have special requirements – meals at all hours.'

Sore point, obviously.

'Still,' Fay said cheerfully. 'I've heard he's going to buy the Cock, turn it into a New Age Holiday Inn or something.'

She brought her coffee and sat down opposite him. If anything, he was even more handsome these days. It had once been terribly flattering to be courted by Guy Morrison. And unexpectedly painless to become divorced from him.

'I've changed, you know, Fay.'

'Hardly at all, I'd've said.'

'Oh, looks… that's not what it's all about. Never was, was it?'

Of course not, she thought. However, in your case, what else is there to get excited about?

'And you're obviously just as arrogant,' she said brightly.

'Confidence, Fay,' he said patiently. 'Not arrogance. If you don't continually display confidence in this business, people think you're…'

'A "spent force". Like J. M. Powys?'

'Something like that. I should have held on to you,' he said softly, a frond of blond hair falling appealingly to an eyebrow. 'You kept me balanced. I was terribly insecure, you know, that's why…'

'Oh, for God's sake, Guy, you were never insecure in your life. This is me you're giving all this bullshit to. Let's drop this subject, shall we?'

He looked hurt. But not very hurt.

'How did you get on yesterday?' Fay asked him, to change direction. 'They never managed to pull the wall down, did they?'

'Don't ask,' Guy said, meaning 'ask'.

'All went wrong, then?' This was probably the reason Guy was here. He was in urgent need of consolation.

'I've just been looking at the rushes.'

'What, you've been back to Cardiff?'

'No, no, I sent Larry to a video shop in Leominster last night to transfer the stuff to VHS so I could whizz through it at the Cock. When he came back, he said, "You're not going to like this," and cleared off quick. I've just found out why. Good grief. Fay, talk about a wasted exercise. First, there's bloody Goff – plans a stunt like that and doesn't tell me until it's too late to hire a second crew and then…'

'But it didn't happen, anyway. The wall's still there.'

'I know, but I had what ought to have been terrific footage of Goff going apeshit on top of the Tump, when the sound system packed in and the bulldozer chap said he couldn't do it. But the light must've been worse than I thought or Larry hadn't done a white-balance or something – he denies that, of course, but he would, wouldn't he?'

'What, it didn't come out?' Fay, who'd never worked in television, knew next to nothing about the technicalities of it. 'I thought this Betacam stuff didn't need much light.'

'Probably something wrong with the camera, Larry claims. First this big black thing shoots across the frame, and then all the colour's haywire. By God, if there's any human error to blame in Cardiff, somebody's job could be on the line over this.'

'But not yours, of course' said Fay. 'Hold on a minute, Guy.' She was listening to a vague scraping noise, it's Dad. He can't get his key in the door.'

Fay dashed into the hall, closing the kitchen door behind her and opening the front door. The Canon almost fell over the threshold, poking his key at her eye.

'Thank God.' Fay caught his arm, whispered in his ear, 'Come and rescue me, Dad. Guy's here, and he's in a very maudlin mood.'

'Who?' He was out of breath.

'Guy, you remember Guy. We used to be married once. I've got this awful feeling he's working up to asking me to have his baby.'

A blurred film had set across the Canon's eyes. He shook his head, stood still a moment, breathing hard, then straightened up. 'Yes,' he said. 'Fay. Something you need to know.'

'Take your time.'

'Tape recorder. Get your tape recorder.' His eyes cleared, focused. 'There's been an accident. A death. Everybody's talking about it. I'll tell you where to go.'

'There'll be no delay,' the dodman said. 'We start tonight.'

'Don't you need planning permission?' Powys asked.

The dodman only smiled.

As expected, he'd turned out to be Andy Boulton-Trow with a mobile phone and a map in a transparent plastic folder.

'There are six we can put n immediately. Either on Max's land around the Court or on bits of ground he's been able to buy. Not a bad start. You're getting one, did you know that?'

'Thanks a bunch.'

'The top of your little acre, where it meets the road. See?' Andy held out his plastic-covered photocopy of Henry's map. 'Right there.'

It was a large-scale OS blow-up. The former location of each stone was marked by a dot inside a circle and the pencilled initials, H. K.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy shrugged.

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

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

Powys looked up the street towards the church tower.

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

'Line one.' Andy held out the plan.

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

'Might have been?'

'You think it was?'

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

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

'To observe what?'

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

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

'Took their time.' Andy observed.

'What's happening?'

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

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

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

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

Nobody had even covered him up.

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

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

Tossed on the bank. Like somebody's catch.

Gomer's catch, in this case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III

Not one person had appeared to recognize Guy Morrison. Twice today he'd circuited this dreary town, and nobody had done more than glance at him with, he was forced to admit, a barely cursory interest.

Guy liked to be recognized. He needed to be recognized. He was insecure, he readily admitted this. Everyone he knew in television was insecure; it was a deeply neurotic business. And it was a visual medium – so if people started to pass you in the street without a second, sidelong glance, without nudging their companions, then it wouldn't be too long before the Programme Controller failed to recognize you in the lift.

Altogether, a legitimate cause for anxiety.

And Fay had depressed him. Living like a spinster, watching her father coming unravelled, in the kind of conditions Guy remembered from his childhood – remembered only in black and white, like grainy old 405-line television. He couldn't understand why Fay had failed to throw herself at him, sobbing, 'Take me away from all this', instead of bustling off with her Uher over her shoulder in pursuit of a local news item that would be unlikely to make even a filler-paragraph in tomorrow's Sunday papers.

Guy, rather than attempt to construct a conversation with the Canon, had claimed to be overdue for another appointment, and thus had ended up making his second despondent tour the town centre.

Country towns were not supposed to be like this. Country towns were supposed to have teashops and flower stalls and Saturday markets from which fat, friendly Women's Institute ladies sold jars of home-made jam and chutney sealed by grease-proof paper and rubber bands.

Without a crew, without Catrin and her clipboard and without even a hint of recognition from the public, Guy felt a sudden sense of acute isolation. He'd never been anywhere quite like this before, a town which seemed to have had all the life sucked out of it, bloodless people walking past, sagging like puppets whose strings had been snipped.

He was almost inclined to cancel his room at the Cock and race back home to Cardiff.

Instead, in the gloomy late-afternoon, as it began to rain again, he found himself strolling incuriously into 'The Gallery' where he and Jocasta Newsome would soon recognize a mutual need.

Outside, Powys had found some logs for the Jotul stove. They were damp, but he managed to get the stove going and stacked a couple of dozen logs on each side of it to dry out.

He couldn't remember bleaker weather at the end of June.

His cases stood unpacked by the window. On the ledge, a blank sheet of A4 paper was wound into the Olivetti.

Life itself seemed very temporary tonight.

Just before seven, a grim-faced Rachel arrived, Barbour awash. She tossed the dripping coat on the floor.

'Coffee, J.M. I need coffee. With something in it.' She collapsed on to the hard, orange sofa, flung her head back, closing her eyes, 'I suppose you've heard?'

Powys said, They found a body in the river.'

Rachel said. 'What are you going to do, J.M.?'

'Do they know what happened?'

'I don't think so. They haven't questioned anyone except the father and Gomer Parry.'

Powys went into the little kitchen to look for coffee and called back, 'Have they found the gun?'

'Not so far as I know,' Rachel said. 'Perhaps Jonathon Preece didn't find it either. Perhaps the place where you threw it was deeper than you thought. Humble, who seems to know what he's talking about, says there are all kinds of unexpected pot-holes in the riverbed. He says nobody in their right mind would attempt to wade across, even in a dry summer, when the water level's low.'

'Humble?' Powys's voice had an edge of panic.

'He volunteered the information. In passing. I wasn't stupid enough to ask him. I feigned disinterest.'

Not a difficult act, he accepted, for Rachel.

He returned with two mugs and a bottle of Bell's whisky. 'I can't find any coffee, but I found this in a cupboard.' He poured whisky into a mug and handed it to Rachel. "Can't find any glasses either.'

Rachel drank deeply and didn't cough or choke.

Powys said, 'What do you think I ought to do?'

Rachel held the mug in both hands and stretched out her long legs to the stove in a vain quest for heat, 'I think we should wait for Fay. She's going to come here after she's filed her scrupulously objective story about the drowning tragedy at Crybbe.'

'That won't be easy. What's she going to say?'

'It seems,' said Rachel, 'that minor flooding at Crybbe has claimed its first victim.'

She looked tired. There were dark smudges on her narrow face. 'Just hope they don't find the gun. I don't know what water does to fingerprints, do you?'

As the second stroke of the curlew hit the reverberation of the first, clean and hard. Warren Preece tossed his used Durex, well-filled, into the alley and zipped up his jeans.

'Close,' he said. 'But I reckon I can improve on it if I puts my mind to it.'

Tessa Byford was leaning back against the brick wall of the Crybbe Unattended Studio, still panting a little. 'You're confident tonight.'

'Yeah.' The trick, he'd learned (he'd learned it from Tessa, but he'd allowed himself to forget this), was to time it so you came in the split second before the bell crashed. Tonight he'd lost his load a good five seconds before the first bong. Still near as buggery took the top of his head off, though – always did there – but it could be better.

Warren got a special kick out of thinking of his old man up the tower, waiting to pull on the rope while he, Warren, was in town here bonking his brains out. Dead on time again tonight: nothing would come between Jack Preece and that bell, not even his favourite son drying out in some police morgue.

'Ask not,' Warren intoned, 'for whom the ole bell tolls. It tolls tonight, ladies and gentlemen, for Jonathon Preece, of Crybbe.'

He giggled.

There was a snap of white – Tessa pulling up her knickers.

Warren said, 'I been feelin'- just lately, like – as I'm the only guy in this town, the only one who's really alive sorter thing. The only walkin' corpse in the graveyard. Bleeargh!"

Warren wiggled his hands and rolled his eyes.

Written two new songs, he had, in the past couple of days. Red-hot stuff, too. Didn't know he had it in him – how much he had in him. He reckoned Max Golf's tape would be ready in a couple of weeks. Goff was going to be real blown away by his next one.

'What would you have done, Warren, if that woman hadn't come out of the studio before we got started? Or if she'd come out in the middle?'

'Woulda made no difference. Or I coulda saved some for 'er, couldn't I? Takin' a chance, she is, comin' yere this time a' night. An' she wouldn't say a word, see, 'cause I seen what 'appened by the river, 'ow they killed poor Jonathon. Poor Jonathon.'

Warren started to grin. 'Oh, you should've seen 'im, Tess. Lying there with 'is tongue out. Just about as wet and slimy as what 'e was when 'e was alive. I couldn't 'ardly keep a straight face. And – you got to laugh, see – fuckin' 'Young Farmers'…

Warren did laugh. He placed both hands flat on the brick wall and almost beat his head into it with laughing.

'… fuckin' Young Farmers' needs a new chairman now, isn't it? Oh, shit, what a bloody crisis!'

'You going to volunteer, Warren?'

'No.' Warren wiped his streaming eyes with the back of a hand. 'I'm goin' into the Plant Hire business.' He went into another cackle. 'I'm gonna hot-wire me a bulldozer.'

She was the kind of woman who, in normal circumstances, he would have taken care to avoid, like sunstroke. She was vain, pretentious, snobbish and too bony in the places where one needed it least.

But these were not normal circumstances. On a wet Saturday evening in Crybbe, Jocasta Newsome was almost exotic.

Guy had her on the hearthrug, where damp logs spat the occasional spark into his buttocks.

She was tasty.

And grateful. Guy loved people to be grateful for him. She was voracious in a carefree sort of way, as if all kinds of pent-up emotions were being expelled. She laughed a lot; he made her laugh, even with comments and questions that were not intended to be funny.

Like, 'And your husband – is he an artist?'

Jocasta squealed in delight and ground a pelvic bone fully into his stomach.

Guy said, just checking, 'You're sure there's no chance he'll be back tonight?'

'Tonight,' said Jocasta, 'Hereward will be in one of those awful restaurants where the candles on the tables are stuck in wine-bottles and some unshaven student is hunched up in the corner fumbling with a guitar. He'll be holding forth at length to a bunch of artists about the beauty of Crybbe and how well in he is with the local yokels. He'll be telling them all about his close friend Max Goff and the wonderful experiment in which he, Hereward, is playing a pivotal role. The artists will drink bottle after bottle of disgusting plonk paid for. of course, by Hereward and they'll think, "What a sucker, what an absolutely God-sent wally." And they'll be mentally doubling their prices.'

Jocasta propped herself up on one arm, her nipples rather redder than the feebly smouldering logs in the grate.

'Oh yes,' she assured him. 'We are utterly alone and likely to remain so for two whole, wonderful days. How long have you got, Guy? Inches and inches, if I'm any judge. Oh my God, what am I saying, I must be demob happy.'

The thought of two whole days of Jocasta Newsome didn't lift Guy to quite the same heights. He reached for his trousers.

Dismay disfigured her. 'What are you doing? I didn't mean…'

'Just going to the loo, if you could direct me. Guy Morrison never goes anywhere without trousers. Not the kind of risk one takes.'

'Oh.' Jocasta relaxed. 'Yes. We're having a downstairs cloakroom made, but it isn't quite… Up the stairs, turn left and there's a bathroom directly facing you at the end of the passage. Don't be long, will you?'

Thankfully, she didn't qualify the final entreaty with another dreadful double entendre.

Guy slithered into his trousers and set off barefoot up the stairs, slightly worried now. Happily married women were fine. Unhappily married women were worse than unattached women. They clutched you as if you were a lifebelt. They were seldom afraid of word getting out about you and them. And while it might be all right for pop stars, scandal was rarely helpful to the careers of responsible producer-presenters in Features and Documentaries.

Bare-chested on the stairs, he shivered. The walls had been stripped to the stonework. Too rugged for Guy Morrison. He probably wouldn't come here again. He decided he'd open the exhibition tomorrow night and slide quietly away. A one-night stand was OK, but a two-night stand carried just a hint of commitment.

The lights went out.

'Oh, blast!' he heard from the drawing-room.

'What's happened?'

'Power cut,' Jocasta shouted. 'Happens all the time. Take it slowly and you'll be OK. When you get to the bathroom you'll find a torch on top of the cabinet.'

Guy stubbed his toe on the top banister-post and tried not to cry out.

But he found his way to the bathroom quite easily because of a certain greasy phosphorescence oozing out of the crack between the door and its frame.

'Funny sort of power cut,' he said, not thinking at all.

'Police say there are no suspicious circumstances, but they still can't explain how Mr Preece, whose family has been farming in the area for over four hundred years, came to be in the river.'

'That report,' the Offa's Dyke newsreader said, 'from Fay Morrison in Crybbe. Now sport, and for Hereford United…'

Fay switched off Powys's radio.

It was thirty-three minutes past ten and almost totally dark.

'Must've been awkward for you.' J. M. Powys rammed a freshly dried log into the Jotul and slammed the iron door on it.

Fay, in a black sweat-suit, was cross-legged on the hearth, by the stove.

'Not really,' she said, in cases like this you're not expected to probe too hard. If it had been a child, I'd be spending most of the night talking to worried mothers about why the council needed to fence off the river. Then tomorrow, this being Crybbe, I'd have to explain to Ashpole why the worried mothers were refusing to be interviewed on tape. But in a case like this, it's just assumed he killed himself. Be an open verdict. Unless…'

'Unless they find the gun.' Powys switched on a green-shaded table-lamp. Rachel drew the curtains against the night and the rain and the river.

Fay said, if anybody had any suspicions, we'd have heard from the police by now. All the same, Jack Preece…'

'His father,' Powys said.

'Yes. Jack Preece knows. I could see it in his eyes when we were down by the river, with the body.'

'Knows what?'

'I think he knows Jonathon had gone out to shoot Arnold.'

Rachel sat down on the sofa. 'What makes you…?'

'Just a minute. Hang on.' Powys stood up. 'You say Jonathon had gone out to shoot Arnold. You're saying he'd deliberately targeted Arnold?'

Fay nodded.

'Do I get the feeling there's a history to this?'

Fay swallowed, 'If I tell you this, you're going to switch to small talk for a few minutes and then look for an excuse to get rid of me. It's so weird.'

'Fay.' Powys spread his arms. 'I'm the bloke who wrote The Old Golden Land. Nothing's too weird.'

There was a longish silence. Then the green-shaded table-lamp went out.

'Bugger,' Rachel said.

'OK,' Fay said slowly. 'You can't see my face now, and I won't be able to see the incredulity on yours.'

She took a long breath. She told them about dogs in Crybbe.

'How long have you known this?' Powys asked.

'Only a day or so. I should be doing a story on it, shouldn't I? A town with no dogs' Jesus, it's not common, is it? But life here is so much like a bad dream, I'm sure if I sold it to the papers, when all the reporters arrived to check it out, there'd be dogs everywhere, shelves full of Chum at the grocer's, poop-scoops at the ironmonger's, posters for the Crybbe and District Annual Dog Show…'

She was glad they couldn't see the helpless tears in her eyes.

'I can't trust myself here,' Fay said, fighting to keep the tears out of her voice, I can't trust myself to perceive anything correctly. Too much has happened.'

'Have you thought about why it could be?' Powys asked, a soft, accepting voice in the darkness. 'Why no dogs?'

'Sure I've thought about it – in between thinking about my dad going bonkers, about holding on to my job, about somebody breaking in and smashing up my tape-machine, about being arrested for manslaughter, about living with a gho… about tons of things. I'm sorry, I'm not very rational tonight.

'So what you're saying is' – Rachel's very rational voice, 'that, because you wouldn't get rid of Arnold, Jonathon Preece deliberately set out to shoot him?'

'I had a phone call. An anonymous call. Get rid of him this weekend, or…'

'Or he'd be shot?'

'There was no specified threat. Just a warning. I think Jack Preece was the caller. Therefore it seems likely he sent Jonathon out with the gun.'

She heard Powys fumbling with the stove and its iron door was flung wide, letting a stuttering red and yellow firelight into the room.

His face looked much younger in the firelight. 'If this is right about no dogs – I'm sorry, Fay, if you say there are no dogs, I believe you – we could be looking at the key to something here.'

'You're the expert,' Fay said.

'There aren't any experts. This is the one area in which nobody's an expert.'

'If all dogs howl at the curfew,' Rachel said logically, 'why don't they just get rid of the curfew? It's not as if it's a major tourist attraction. Not as if they even draw attention to it. It just happens, it's just continued, without much being said. OK there's this story about the legacy of land to the Preeces, but is anybody really going to take that away if the curfew stops?'

'I don't think for one minute,' said Powys, 'that that's the real reason for the curfew.'

Fay sat up, interested. 'So what is the real reason?'

'If we knew that we'd know the secret of Crybbe.'

'You think there's something to know? You think there's good reason why the place is as miserable as sin?"

'There's something. Fay. how did you come to get Henry's dog. I mean, did you know him well?'

'Hardly at all. I'd done an interview with him on the day he died.'

'That's interesting. What sort of an interview? What was it about?'

'Er… dowsing. I wanted to know what he was doing in Crybbe, but it was obvious he didn't want to talk about that, so… Anyway, it was never used.'

'Have you still got the tape?'

'I imagine so. If you want to hear it, come down to the studio sometime. Up the covered alley behind the Cock.'

'Tomorrow morning?'

'Nine o'clock?'

'Fine.'

'And about Arnold, I got him from the police because it was obvious nobody else was going to. He was howling away in full daylight, and I'm pretty sure now that if I hadn't taken him, he'd have been dead. They'd have killed him. Before nightfall. Before the curfew.'

The torchlight shone in Jocasta's eyes.

'It's me,' Guy said. 'Look…'

'Yes, I know. Come here, I'm cold.'

'I haven't been,' said Guy. 'I couldn't go.'

'I don't understand – you've got the torch.'

'Jocasta,' Guy hissed urgently, closing the drawing-room door quietly behind him. 'For Christ's sake, why didn't you tell me we weren't alone?'

Jocasta felt very cold. She began to tremble, crawled to the Aga and scrabbled for her dress.

'Who is he?' Guy demanded. She couldn't see him, only the torch. Is he your father?'

Jocasta tried to speak and couldn't. She tried to stand up, tried to step into her dress, got her legs tangled, fell back on the rug.

'I waited,' Guy said. 'But he didn't come out.'

Jocasta, squatting on the rug in the torch circle, struggled vainly to zip up her dress. No eager fingers to help her now.

'What the hell's going on, Jocasta?'

She found her voice, but didn't recognize it. 'My father,' she said slowly, 'is in Chiswick. My husband, Hereward, is somewhere in Somerset. There is nobody here. Nobody here but us, Guy.'

A log shifted in the grate, sending up a yellow spark-shower, like a cheap firework.

'Then who the fuck was that old man in the bathroom? Having a shave, for crying out loud, with a… with a…' His voice faltered. 'With a cut-throat razor.'

The improbability of the scenario seemed to occur to him at last.

'How could I see him? How could I see him when all the lights…?'

Guy's voice went quiet. 'He was a strange kind of yellow,' he said unsteadily. 'A very feeble shade of yellow.'

The torchlight wavered as he advanced on the sofa. 'Where are my clothes? I'm getting out of here.'

'No!' Jocasta leapt at him, clutching the arm which held the torch. He dropped it. It lay on the floor, its beam directed into the fireplace. The logs looked dead and grey in the strong, white light.

'Don't go,' Jocasta implored. 'You can't go. You can't leave me. For God's sake, don't leave me here with… with…'

CHAPTER IV

The following morning, Sunday, just before 9 a.m., there was a sudden burst of sunlight, a splash of dripping yellow in a washed-out, watercolour sky.

The light looked to be directly over the Tump, the trees on its sides and summit massing menacingly around the watery orb. It was, Rachel thought, as if a green-gloved hand had reached out from the foliage, snatched the emergent sun and crunched it like an egg.

'I think we should call the police,' she said.

'Why?' said Humble. 'Whoever done it saved us a job.'

The Tump squatted under the sun, fat and smug. You could almost think the Tump was the culprit – as if the great mound had taken a deep breath, pulled in its girth and then let go, bellying out and crumbling the wall before it.

Then Rachel had seen the bulldozer, still wedged in the rubble.

'And there's Gomer Parry,' she said. 'What's he going to say?'

'Proves him wrong, dunnit? He reckoned the machine wouldn't go through the wall.'

'Without the wall collapsing on it. Which it has.'

A chunk of wall about fifteen feet wide had been smashed in or wrenched out and then the bulldozer plunged in again. Clearly an amateur job, but the spot had been well-chosen. It would leave a jagged gap directly under the huge picture- window in the stable-block.

'All we do about Gomer, we just pay him off,' Humble said. He was unshaven. He wore a black motorcycle jacket. Half an hour ago he'd rung J. M. Powys's riverside cottage. 'Put Rachel on.' She'd been quite shocked, didn't see how he could possibly have known about her and J.M.

It meant Max would know by now. Max would not be particularly annoyed that she was with J. M. Powys, but she'd done it without clearing it with him first – that was the serious offence.

Time to move on, Rachel decided abruptly. The facade's crumbling. Time to negotiate a settlement.

'I think the bulldozer's damaged,' she said. 'Look at the way the blade-thing is twisted.'

'Couple of thou' should see Gomer right. See, Rachel, you bring in the Old Bill, you're causing unnecessary hassle. Some f… body might get the idea we paid him to do it. Max would not like that.'

Him? You sound as if you know who did it.'

'Yeah, well, I got my suspicions.'

'Would you like to share them?'

'I keep my eyes open,' Humble said.

'Not much you don't know, is there, Humble?'

Humble smirked. 'Not much, Rachel. Not much.'

The metal plate on the door said. When red light is showing, do not attempt to enter.

The red light was on.

Not sure what to do, Powys walked around the dull, brick building which had once been a lavatory. When he arrived back at the door he was holding up a foot.

'Oh shit, what's this?'

Making a face, Powys scraped off the used condom against a corner of the wall.

She was watching him in some amusement from the studio door, open now, the red light still on.

'Sorry, should have warned you. You'll never pick up a dog turd in this town, but French letters… an all-too-common hazard. Especially just here.'

Powys looked around and counted five of the things, shrivelling into the gravel. 'Favourite place,' Fay said. 'The grunts and squeals can be quite disconcerting when you arrive here in the dark.'

'Maybe it's the red light gets them going.' Powys looked up at the sign. ' "Do not attempt to enter." Obviously nobody takes much notice of that.'

'Come in,' said Fay.

He followed her into the little building and looked around. 'Incredible. A radio studio in Crybbe.'

'Geographically convenient.' Fay was unpacking two reels of quarter-inch tape. It's certainly not a reflection of the importance of the town.'

She set the tape rolling. I won't waste time. This is one bit. Henry Kettle's dowsing masterclass.'

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

'Caught you by surprise, did it?'

Powys grinned. 'Bit like sex, isn't it. The first time. Did the earth move for you?'

'Certainly did when he put his hands over mine. The rod just sort of flipped over. I did wonder afterwards if he was making it happen. Just go get it over with, get me off his back. He was obviously very busy. But I can be quite persistent, I suppose.'

He thought she probably could. She looked very nice this morning, in a dark skin and a glittery kind of top.

She noticed him studying the ensemble, 'I'm going to church afterwards.' Pushing the buttons on the tape-machine and flipping the controls on the console. 'Then I've got to go and pick up Arnold from the vet's.'

He's OK?'

'Actually the vet said on the phone that I might get a bit of a shock when I saw him, but there was nothing to worry about. Have you ever been inside the church?'

He shook his head. 'But you're a regular churchgoer, I suppose. With your dad in the business.'

'Oh hell, nothing to do with that. And I'm not, actually. What it is, Dad tells me Murray – that's the vicar – is doing his sermon on the New Age Phenomenon In Our Midst. I'll probably get a story out of it. Murray's a very mixed-up person. The town's damaged him, I think.'

'You think this town damages people?'

'It's damaged me,' said Fay. 'Listen, this is the bit. Obviously, what I was really interested in was what Henry Kettle was doing for Goff, and at one point I asked him, straight out.'

'… So, tell me, Henry, you're obviously in the middle of a major dowsing operation here in Crybbe. What exactly does that involve?'

'Oh, I… Oh dear. Look, switch that thing off a minute, will you?'

'He was waving his arms about, the way people do when you ask them a question they can't answer.'

'And did you switch off?'

'I did, I'm afraid.' Fay said. 'Sometimes you flip the pause button a couple of times to make it look as if you have and then record the lot, but I was starting to like him. "Don't press me, girl," he kept saying.'

'Did he say anything to indicate he was bothered, or upset by what he was finding?'

'I think he did, and it must be on the other tape.' Fay spun all the way back and pulled the reel off the deck. 'Hold this a minute, would you, er… sorry, I don't actually know what

the J.M. stands for.'

'Joe.'

'Joe Powys. Mmm. It's a whole different person. Now, Joe Powys, some answers.' She had her fists on her hips, the second reel clutched in one. 'Who killed Henry Kettle?'

'Ah,' he said.

'You don't think it was an accident at all, do you?'

'Well,' he said, 'I don't think it's who killed him so much as what killed him. I'm sure nobody tampered with his brakes or anything.'

'So you think it might be something, shall we say… supernatural? And don't say it depends what I mean by supernatural.'

'How about you put the tape on, then we'll talk about it?'

'And you went to see Mrs Seagrove again, didn't you?'

'We loonies have to stick together.'

'So you did go to talk about the black dog… OK, OK, I'll put the tape on.'

She dragged the yellow leader tape past the heads, set it running on fast forward, stopped it. 'Somewhere around here, I think. I'd caught up with Henry in the wood between the Court and the church. I'd come straight from another job and I still had about half a tape left, so I just ran it off, walking along with Henry. When you're putting a package together you need lots of spare atmos and stuff.'

'Atmos?'

'Ambient sounds. Birdsong, wind in the trees. Also, I needed bits of him trudging along doing his dowsing bit. Radio's nearly as much of a fake as telly, you reshape it afterwards, rearrange sentences, manufacture pauses for effect in using spare ambience. So here's Henry in the wood. I hope.'

'That's curious. That is curious.'

'That's it. Hang on a minute, Joe, I'll find the start. OK, here we go…'

'… keep you a minute. Fay, just something I need to look at. Bear with me.'

'That's OK, Mr Kettle. Can I call you Henry during the interview? Makes it more informal.'

'You please yourself, girl. Call me a daft old bugger if you like.

Powys felt almost tearful. Every time someone like Henry died, the world faded a shade further into neutral.

'Well, bugger – don't mind me, Fay, talking to myself. That's curious. That is curious. If I didn't know better, I'd almost be inclined to think it wasn't an old stone at all. Funny old business… Just when you think you've come across everything you find something that don't… quite… add up. Come on then Fay, let's do your bit of radio, only we'll go somewhere else if you don't mind…'

Powys said, 'Can you just play that bit again.'

'… almost be inclined to think it wasn't an old stone at all…'

That's the bit.' There was a parallel here, something from Henry's journal. 'Fay, where was this, can you show me? Have you time before church?'

'We'll have to be a bit quick, Joe,' Fay said, rewinding.

Murray Beech watched his sermon rolling out of the printer with barely an hour to go before the service. Normally he worked at least three weeks in advance, storing the sermons on computer disk. This one had been completed only last night, at great personal risk – Murray had twice lost entire scripts due to power cuts.

But the electricity rarely failed in the morning, and the printer whizzed it out without interruption.

Certain claims have already been made for the effects of this so-called New Awakening…

Why am I doing this? he asked himself.

Because it's what they want to hear, he answered shamefully. Never imagined it would come to this. What harm were they causing, these innocent cranks with their ley-lines and their healing rays?

Ironically, Murray had come to Crybbe aware of the need for tolerance with country folk, their local customs, their herbal remedies. But it had proved to be a myth. Country people, real country people weren't like this, not in Crybbe anyway, where he'd never been offered a herbal remedy or even a pot of home-made jam. And where the only custom was the curfew, an unsmiling ritual, performed without comment.

On a metal bookshelf sat the three-volume set of Kilvert's Diary given to him by Kirsty when he told her he was leaving Brighton to become a vicar in the border country.

'Just like Kilvert!' She'd been thrilled. He'd never heard of Kilvert, so she'd bought him the collected diaries, the record (expressively written, if you liked that sort of thing) of a young Victorian clergyman's life, mainly in the village of Gyro, about twenty miles from Crybbe. Kilvert had found rich colours in nature and in the people around him. He'd also found warmth and friends, even if he did have a rather disturbing predilection for young girls.

Murray's stomach tightened; he was thinking of dark-eyed Tessa, a sweat dab over her lips.

Loneliness.

Loneliness had brought him to this.

I've no friends here.

Kirsty had spent a week in Crybbe, long enough to convince her this was not the border country beloved of Francis Kilvert.

'You once said you'd follow me anywhere my calling took me. Africa … South America…'

'But not Crybbe, Murray. I'd die. I'd wither.'

She'd given him Kilvert's diary for his birthday two years ago.

Exactly two years ago. Today was his birthday.

'Is there no chance of your finding a living down here, Murray?' his mother had asked this morning, on the phone.

They'd been proud, of course, as he had, when he'd been given Crybbe – such a large parish, such a young man.

Nobody else wanted it.

No home-made jam. No Women's Institute. No welcome at the primary school. No harvest-supper. No bell-ringers. No friends. No wife.

He could, of course, have betrayed the inert, moribund villagers by siding openly with the New Age community, who at least sought some kind of spirituality, albeit misguided. He could, perhaps, have made friends, of a sort, amongst them.

But he knew his role as priest was to support his parishioners, even if they did not support him, apart from token mute appearance at his services. Even if they did not deserve him.

Murray was disgusted with himself for thinking that.

Loneliness. Loneliness had brought him to this.

The only way either of them knew into the wood was through the Court grounds. When they arrived there in Fay's Fiesta, Rachel was outside the stables with one of the interior designers, a small, completely bald man she introduced as Simon.

'What this place is about,' Simon was saying, 'is drama. Drama and spectacle.'

Powys didn't even have to go inside to see what he meant. The original stable doors had been replaced with huge portals of plate-glass, through which you could look down into a kind of theatre, the kitchen and dining-room walled off from a single cavernous room, the length of the building, ending in a wide wooden desk, its back to the huge picture-window.

And the Tump.

When Max was sitting at his desk, he would be directly under the mound. From the top of the room it would look as if the great tumulus with its wavy trees was growing out of his head.

Especially now that…

'What happened to the wall?'

Rachel grimaced. 'Person or persons unknown came in the night to do Max a big favour, using Gomer Parry's bulldozer. I'm sure Humble knows who it was, he tends to be out there in the small hours, killing things. But Humble isn't saying.'

The attack on the wall, the opening up of the stable-block, with glass at either end… the formation of a conduit between the Tump and Crybbe.

Powys looked at it through Goff's eyes: a stream of healing energy – deep blue – surging through the stables, through the Court itself, through the wood to the church and then into the town.

Equally, though, you could see the Tump as a huge malignant tumour, assisted at last to spread its black cells and bring secondary cancers to Crybbe, a town already old and mouldering.

'Natural drama,' Simon, the designer, said. 'Great.'

In the centre of the wood was a huge hole, newly dug, around five feet deep.

'Must be destined for a big one,' Powys said. 'And they're making sure it's going to be visible.'

Fay looked around in horror. 'There was a bit of a clearing when I was here with Henry, but nothing… nothing like this.'

The immediate area was strewn with chainsaw carnage, stumps of slaughtered trees, heaps of wet ash where branches had been burned.

Looking back the way they'd come, Powys could see the roof of the Court. 'I reckon most of this wood's going to disappear. They want to open up the view from the prospect chamber, reconnect the town with the Court – and the Tump.'

'But you can't just chop down a whole wood!' Fay glared at Rachel, who backed off, holding up both hands.

'Listen, I know nothing about this. This is Boulton-Trow's province.'

'Aren't trees like this protected?'

'I should imagine so,' said Rachel. 'But it's hardly an imprisonable offence. You can take out injunctions to prevent people chopping down individual trees, but once they're gone, they're gone, and if you do it quietly, well…'

'Like starting from the middle and working outwards,' Powys said. 'I don't know how old this wood is, but the indication from the prospect chamber is that at the end of the sixteenth century it wasn't here at all. I reckon it was planted not to give the Court more privacy but so the townsfolk couldn't see the Court. So they could pretend it wasn't there. Just as the stable-block was put in to block the Court off from the Tump. They were scared of something.'

He was balancing on the edge of the hole, looking down. So, Fay, this is where Henry discovered there'd been a stone.'

'I think so. Must be.'

'And yet he had the feeling the stone that stood here wasn't an old stone.'

'That's what he seemed to be saying.' Fay was more concerned about the wholesale destruction of the wood. 'And they are supposed to be bloody New Age people!' She peered through what remained of the trees. 'Can I get to the church this way?'

'Sure,' Rachel said. 'Five minutes' walk. There's a footpath newly widened. Goes past a redbrick heap called Keeper Cottage, which is where Boulton-Trow's living.'

'He lives here?' Powys said, surprised. 'In the wood?'

'Yes, and rather him than me. Go past it, anyway. Fay, and you're in the churchyard in no time.'

'Thanks.' Fay pulled a bunch of keys from her bag. 'Do me a favour, Joe, I've got to catch Murray's blasted sermon. Could you bring my car round to the church when you've finished here. It's got the Uher in the back. I'll need to interview him afterwards.'

She vanished into the bushes. Like an elf, he thought.

'I came to a decision this morning,' Rachel said.

She sat down on a tree stump. 'I'm going to quit.'

'Good. I mean, that's terrific. You're wasted on that fat plonker.'

'I'm becoming peripheral anyway. Max doesn't listen to me any more. He's getting so fanatical I don't think there's anything you or I can do to stop him. Also, he's entering one of his DC phases. He's besotted with Boulton-Trow."

'Andy? Is it reciprocated?'

'You know the guy better than me. J.M.'

'He's an opportunist.'

'There you are, then.'

He watched her, pale and graceful in this arboreal charnel house. She brushed a stray hair out of one eye.

He said, 'When will you tell him?'

'Probably after his public meeting on Tuesday.'

'That's marvellous, Rachel. You won't regret it. Coming to church?'

Rachel stood up. 'Oh gosh, far too busy. Least I can do is make sure his stable-block's ready for him. Besides, I'm not a churchy person. I'm one of those who thinks it's a waste of a Sunday – what do you call that, an atheist or an agnostic?'

He put an arm around her waist. 'You call it a smug bitch.'

He grinned, happy for her.

CHAPTER V

And let's pray now,' Murray Beech said, head bowed, 'for the soul of our brother Jonathon Preece…'

Kneeling in a back pew, Fay tensed.

'… taken so suddenly from the heart of the agricultural community he served so energetically. Those of us who knew Jonathon – and can there be any here who did not? – will always remember his tireless commitment to the Young Farmers' movement and, through this, to the revival of an industry in which his family has laboured for over four hundred years.'

Powys slid the Uher into the empty pew next to Fay and stepped in after it. Fay kept on looking directly ahead, over the prayer-book ledge, seeing, near the front of the church, the heads of Jack Preece and Jimmy Preece. One of the few places you ever saw these heads uncapped.

'And we pray, too,' Murray intoned passionlessly, 'for the Preece family in its time of sorrow and loss…'

Fay saw young Warren Preece, head nodding rhythmically now and then, as if connected to some invisible Walkman.

Saw Mrs Preece, Jimmy's wife, hands clasped in prayer, expecting to see a damp tissue crumpled in her palm. But Mrs Preece, seen side-on, looked as dry-eyed and stern as her husband. They seemed to have their eyes open as they prayed – if indeed they were praying.

Looking around. Fay found that even-one's were open, everyone she could see.

Crybbe: a place where emotions were buried as deep as the dead.

Wisely, perhaps, Murray didn't make a big deal of it. He went into the Lord's Prayer and didn't mention Jonathon Preece again.

Fay relaxed.

What had she expected? A denunciation from the pulpit? All heads turned in mute accusation?

Whatever, she breathed again. And became aware of the significance of something she must surely have noticed already – the presence of her father, on the end of a pew two rows in front of her and Powys.

The Canon went to church every Sunday, sometimes attending both the morning and evening services. He sat near the front and sang loudly – 'Bit of moral support for young Murray – boy needs all the back-up he can get.'

So what was he doing further back, a couple of rows behind the nearest fully occupied pew? Could it be something to do with there being only one other person on Alex's pew and the person being at the same end of the pew as Alex? And being a woman?

'Bloody hell,' said Fay to herself. 'He's found a totty.'

Guy Morrison woke up into the greyness of… 5.a.m., 5.30?

He found his watch on the bedside table.

It told him the time was 11.15.

For crying out loud! He turned over and found he was alone in a king-size bed of antique pine, in a pink-washed room with large beams in the ceiling and a view, through small square panes, of misty hills. He'd never seen this view before.

Guy lay down again, regulating his breathing.

He saw a door then, and a glimpse of mauve tiles told him it led to an en suite bathroom, which put him in mind of another bathroom, full of seeping yellow.

With a momentary clenching of stomach muscles, everything came back.

He remembered peeing on his shoes in the dark paddock because she wouldn't let him return to that bathroom – not that he needed much persuading.

He remembered them staying in the kitchen for a long time, drinking coffee – him not talking much and not listening much either, after she'd been gushing like a broken fire-hydrant for an hour or so – until it was nearly light and she'd decided it was safe to go to bed. This bed. He remembered waking up periodically to find her hanging on to him in her fitful, unquiet sleep and wondering how he could ever have found her so attractive.

Guy pushed back the duvet to find he was naked, and he couldn't see his clothes anywhere. If he went downstairs like this it would be just his luck to find the vicar and the entire bloody Women's Institute having morning coffee in the drawing-room.

He went into the en suite bathroom, looked at himself in the mirror and was horrified at the state of his hair and the growth of his beard, detecting a distressing amount of grey and white stubble. He looked around for something to shave with – normally, he used a state-of-the-art rechargeable twice a day – and could find only a primitive kind of safely razor.

Remembering, at this point, the old man with the cut-throat razor in the other bathroom. And hours later in the well-lit kitchen, thrusting aside his fourth cup of coffee, asking her directly, 'Are you telling me it was a ghost?'

He'd once done a documentary about ghosts. They were, the programme had suggested, nature's holograms. Something like that. You might get images of the dead; you could just as easily have images of the living. When the phenomenon was eventually understood it would be no more frightening than a mirage.

This one was frightening, he supposed, only briefly, in retrospect. What had he really felt when he saw the glow around the door and then walked into the bathroom and the old man had looked up and met his eyes? Fear, or a kind of fascination?

Did this old man have eyes? He must have had. Guy couldn't recall his features. Only a figure bent over the wash-basin, shaving. The image, perhaps, of a man who had lived in this house for many years and perhaps shaved thousands of times in that very basin – well, perhaps not that actual basin, but certainly in the room. And this mundane, everyday ritual had imprinted itself on the atmosphere.

The apparition was frightening, Guy decided, because it happened at night during a power cut. Also, because he feeling a few misgivings about what he'd got himself into a was perhaps a little jittery anyway.

Guy shaved with the razor, his first wet-shave in years, and cut himself twice, quite noticeably – no pieces-to-camera for him for a couple of days. Perhaps this chap didn't have an electric shaver because he couldn't rely on one with all the power cuts they apparently had. Jocasta had gone on and on last night about the power cuts and the exorbitant electricity bills. How living in the country wasn't a simple life at all and certainly not cheap. How she couldn't get out of here fast enough. How her poor husband was weak and naive beyond comprehension.

Guy didn't like the sound of that bit at all, much preferred screwing happily married women whose only need was a touch of glamour in their lives.

The true horror of the night, now he thought about it, had been the hours he'd spent with a furrowed-faced Jocasta in the kitchen afterwards, listening to her whingeing on and on.

'Guy, where are you?'

He looked around the bathroom door and saw her standing by the bed. She wore a floor-length Japanese silk dressing-gown and fresh make-up. Facade fully restored. She must have spent an hour or so in here before he was awake.

'Good morning, Jocasta.' Guy stepped naked and smiling into the bedroom, forgetting about the two cuts on his face, staunched by small pieces of soft toilet tissue. Perhaps… Perhaps he could afford to give her just one more…

But she didn't look at him in any meaningful way. 'Please get dressed," Jocasta said crisply. 'I want to show you something.'

Guy's smile vanished.

'Your clothes are in Bedroom Two, across the passage. Coffee and croissants in ten minutes.'

And Jocasta swished away, leaving him most offended. Women did not turn their backs and swish away from Guy Morrison.

When he arrived in the kitchen nearly twenty minutes later, he was fully dressed, right up to his olive leather jacket, and fully aware again of who he was. He accepted coffee but declined a croissant. He must, he said, be off. Perhaps she would give him a time for the exhibition opening, keeping it as light as possible because he had quite a few people to see.

Jocasta pushed a large folder towards him across the kitchen table. 'I'd be glad,' she said, 'if you could take a look at these.'

'Look, I am rather pushed…'

'It won't take a minute.' She was very composed this morning, probably embarrassed as hell about last night's tearful sequence. He opened the folder in a deliberately cursory fashion. What the hell was all this about? Was he expected to buy something?

The drawing was pen-and-ink. The face was inspecting itself in a mirror. Every wrinkle on the face – and there were many – was deeply etched. The eyes were sunken, the cheeks hollow, the nose bulbous.

Guy inhaled sharply. He looked up at Jocasta in her Japanese dressing-gown, could tell she was working hard to hide her feelings, holding a mask over her anticipation. Anticipation and something else. Something altogether less healthy.

He looked down at the drawing again. He felt a deep suspicion and a growing alarm.

'Is this some son of joke?'

'Is it him?' Jocasta asked.

'I don't know what you mean. Who did these?'

'Is it him?'

Of course it was him. It was either him or Guy was going mad. His deep suspicion was suddenly drenched in cold confusion and a bitter, acrid dread.

'Look at the next one.'

All the sensation had left his fingers. He watched them, as if they were someone else's fingers, lifting the first drawing, laying it to one side, face-down on the table.

He didn't understand.

A moment earlier, he saw, the old man had slashed his throat. The open razor had fallen from one spasmed hand – it was drawn in mid-air, floating a fraction of an inch below a finger and thumb – while the fingers of the other hand we pushing into the opened throat itself, as if trying to hold the slit tubes together, to block the tunnels of blood.

The blood was black ink, blotch upon blotch, spread joyously, as if the pen nib was a substitute for the cut throat razor.

Guy thrust the drawing aside, came raggedly to his feet. He stumbled to the sink and threw up what seemed like half a gallon of sour coffee.

It was not the drawing, he thought as he retched. It was the knowledge of what, if he'd stayed a moment longer in the bathroom last night, he would have seen.

He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand, saw Jocasta watching him in distaste, knew exactly what she was thinking: that perhaps all men were as pathetic as her husband.

'I'm sorry,' Guy said. He washed his hands and his face, snatched a handful of kitchen towel to wipe them. No, dammit, he wasn't sorry at all.

'I think you owe me an explanation,' he said coldly.

Murray Beech leaned out of his pulpit, hands gripping its edges, as if he were sitting up in the bath.

'And what,' he demanded, 'is this so-called New Age? Can there be any true meaning in a concept quite so vague?'

He paused.

'The New Age,' he said heavily.

He glared out into the church – late-medieval and not much altered. 'Some of you may remember a popular song, "This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius".'

'He's going to knock it, then,' Powys whispered to Fay.

'Well, of course he's going to knock it,' Fay said, out of the side of her mouth. 'That's why I'm here.'

The Uher sat on the pew at her side, its spools turning, the microphone wedged between two prayer books on the ledge, she was recording the sermon for her own reference. She wouldn't get anything of broadcast quality at this range and she hadn't got permission anyway. She'd talk to him on tape afterwards, throw his own words back at him and see how he reacted.

'"Harmony and Understanding",' Murray quoted. "Sympathy and Trust Abounding".'

Alien concepts in Crybbe, Fay thought cynically. The vicar's words must be settling on this comatose congregation with all the weight of ash-flakes from a distant bonfire.

Caught in white light from a small Gothic window set high in the nave, Murray Beech – light-brown hair slicked flat, metallic features firmly set – was looking about fifteen years older than his age. A man with problems.

Fay's dad shuffled and coughed. He didn't know she was there.

Who was this woman, then? Slim and small-boned, she wore a wide-brimmed brown felt hat which concealed her hair and neck.

The Vicar announced there would be a public meeting in Crybbe on Tuesday night, when the members of this congregation would be asked to consider the merits of the New Age movement and decide to what extent they would allow it to infiltrate their lives.

Now, he had no wish to condemn the obviously sincere people who offered what appeared to be rather scenic shortcuts to their own idea of heaven. Indeed, it might be argued that any kind of spirituality was better than none at all.

The Canon coughed again; the woman next to him was very still. Almost… almost too still.

'We have a choice,' said Murray. 'We can pray for the strength and the will to confront the reality of a world defiled by starvation, injustice and inequality – a world crying out for basic Christian charity.

'Or,' he said, with the smallest twist of his lips, 'we can sidestep reality and amuse ourselves in what we might call the Cosmic Fairground."

Everyone alive moved a little, Fay thought, watching the woman. Even sleeping people moved.

No. Not here. You can't follow him here. Not into church.

Murray hauled himself further up in his pulpit, raised his voice.

'How appealing! How appealing it must seem to live in a little world where, if we're sick, we can pass off the health services and the medical advances of the past hundred years as irrelevant and call instead upon the power of… healing crystals.'

Powys smiled.

But Fay had stiffened, feeling the tiny hairs rising on her bare arms. Her father's face was turned towards the pulpit. He had never glanced at the woman by his side. Fay thought, I can see her, but can he?

'… a little world, where, if we feel we are suffering a certain starvation of the soul, we need not give up our Sunday mornings to come to church. Because all we need to do is to go for a stroll along the nearest ley line and expose ourselves to these famous cosmic rays.'

Fay heard him as if from afar. She was looking at her father. And at the woman. Neat, small-boned, wide-brimmed hat concealing her hair and neck. And unnaturally still.

The church was darkening around Fay. The muted colours had drained out of the congregation. Everything was black and white and grey Nobody moved. Murray Beech, flickering like an ancient movie, black and white in his surplice, was gesturing in the pulpit, but she couldn't hear him any more.

She stared hard, projecting her fear and – surprised at its strength – her uncontrollable resentment. Until she felt herself lifting from the pew, aware of a sudden concern in the eyes of Joe Powys, his hand reaching out for her from a long, long way away, but not touching. Fay rising on a malign wave while, at the same time, very slowly, the woman sitting next to her father began, for the first time, to move.

Began, very slowly, to turn her head.

And Fay was suddenly up on her feet in the silent church, shrieking aloud. 'How dare you? Get out! How dare you come in here!'

Gripping the prayer-book shelf so hard that it creaked.

'Why?' Fay screamed. 'Why can't you just get on with your death and leave him alone?'

Then everybody was turning round, but Fay was out of the church door, and running.

CHAPTER VI

When the Mercedes estate carrying Simon and his three young assistants had vanished into the lane, Rachel watched Andy Boulton-Trow, stripped to the waist, supervising the loading of three long stones into the back of a truck. There was a small digger m the back, too, one of those you could hire to landscape your own garden.

'Last ones,' Andy said, jibbing a thumb at the stones. He'd acquired, very rapidly, an impressive black beard, somehow hardening his narrow jaw.

Rachel said, 'The others are in?'

'The ones that are safe to put in, without arousing complaints from the landowners We've got a nice one here for your friend Joe.'

He didn't, she noticed, put any kind of stress on the words 'your friend'.

'And then I'm pushing off for a day or two,' Andy said, stretching.

'Is Max aware of this?'

'I really don't know, Rachel.'

She wondered if perhaps he was pushing off somewhere with Max. 'A very heavy guy,' Max had said once. 'He knows all the options.'

Whereas J.M. had implied that while Andy knew as much about earth mysteries as anybody could reasonably be expected to, it was unwise to trust him too far. 'He takes risks, especially when the potential fall guy is someone else.' The implication being that he, J. M. Powys, had once been the fall-guy. One day, away from here, he would tell her about this.

'What's going on over there?' Rachel had seen a cluster of men emerging from the rear entrance of the Court. Two of them carried a rotting plank which they hurled on a heap of rubbish in a corner of the courtyard.

'Big clean-out,' Andy said. 'Before the renovation proper begins. All the junk from upstairs – the detritus of the various attempts to modernize the Court, anything not in period has to go. Didn't Max tell you?'

'I think he mentioned something,' Rachel said uncomfortably. He hadn't, of course. Increasingly, things had been happening around her without any kind of consultation.

Like the appropriation of Gomer Parry's bulldozer in the night?

Max liked to live dangerously; she didn't. She was deeply glad to be leaving his employ.

'Make a good bonfire,' Andy Boulton-Trow said, nodding at the pile of rubbish. 'Maybe we should organize one for Lammas or something. A cleansing.'

He stretched his lithe body into the truck. 'Have fun,' he said.

Powys raced out of the church, clutching the Uher by its strap She'd left it there, on the pew, still recording, with a motor hum and a hiss of turning spools.

He scanned the churchyard, but she was gone. He ran to the gate, looked both ways, thought he could hear running footsteps, but there was nobody in sight. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a white-bearded, dog-collared old man in the church entrance, also looking from side to side.

Her father. Both of them looking for Fay.

Powys stabbed vaguely at the Uher's piano-key controls until the hum and hiss ceased with a final whirr. Then he slung the machine over his shoulder, stuck the microphone in his pocket and set off towards Bell Street. Or would she have gone to the studio?

Making an outburst in church was a clear sign of instability. People who made outbursts in church were usually basket-cases.

Except in Crybbe. Leaping up and screaming, Powys thought was surely a perfectly natural reaction to the miasma of almost-anaesthetized disinterest emanating from that congregation.

Bloody weird, though, what she'd said.

Why can't you just get on with your death and leave him alone?

Bloody weird.

As he came to the corner of Bell Street, he almost lost a foot to a familiar red Ford Fiesta, shrieking round the corner in low gear, crunching over the kerb.

The driver saw him, and the Fiesta squeaked and stalled. The passenger door flew open and bumped the Uher, and the driver called out, 'Get in!'

Powys climbed in and sat with the Uher on his knee. 'You left this in the church,' he said.

'Thanks.' Fay started the engine and the car spurted into the square.

'Your father…'

'Fuck my father,' she snapped, and she didn't speak again until they passed the town boundary and there were open hills all around and a rush of cold air through the side windows, the glass on both sides wound down to its limits.

Fay breathed out hard and thrust her small body back into the seat, the Fiesta going like a rocket down a lane originally created for horses.

'Got to be something awry,' she said remotely, 'when the most newsworthy item on the tape is the reporter having hysterics.'

Powys said, 'When's visiting time at the vet's, then?'

She turned towards him. 'You want to come?'

'I've got a choice? Watch the road, for Christ's sake!'

She said, 'You want me to talk about it, I suppose.'

'Up to you.'

'Well,' she said, 'I suppose if I can talk about it to anybody, I can talk about it to you. Don't suppose I'll be telling you anything you haven't heard before.'

'That's right,' Powys said. 'I'm an accredited crank. And I'll be a dead crank if you don't…'

'Yet so cynical.' Fay slowed down. 'You didn't used to be cynical. Unless that wide-eyed, wow-man-what-a mind-blower feel to The Old Golden Land was a put-on.'

'Well,' he said, 'the light-hearted element kind of dissipated.' He closed his eyes and the past tumbled down to him like a rock slide.

Joey goes round the Bottle Stone

And he goes round ONCE.

What's happening is you're developing a link with the stone, in an umbilical kind of way. You're feeling every step you take, bare feet connecting sensuously with the warm, grassy skin of the earth. And all the while the terrestrial magnetism – let's imagine it exists – is seeping up through the soles of your feet…

And he goes round TWICE.

Stop it.

He rubbed his eyes. 'That was your dad, was it, with the white beard? Rachel told me about him. She said he was, er. something of a fun guy for his age.'

'He was always fun,' Fay said. 'That was the problem. Clergymen aren't supposed to have that much fun.'

Powys watched her drive, not like Rachel. She bumped the gears, rode the clutch and went too fast round blind bends.

He tried to watch the landscape. 'Nothing like this where I grew up. Love at first sight, when I came down here.'

'Where was that? Where you came from.'

'Up north. Very industrialized part. A long bus-ride to the nearest cow. Every square yard, for as far as you could see, built on for about the fourth time. Where we lived they'd eradicated grass like a disease. It's quite nice now, if you like Georgian-style semis with concrete barbecue-pits.'

Fay said, 'I grew up in old vicarages and rectories, in little villages with thatched houses. And Oxford for a time.'

'Deprived childhood, huh?'

'There's more than one kind,' Fay said. 'Not many ley-lines where you came from, I suppose.'

'You just had to work harder to find them," Powys said, stiffening as Fay clipped the hedge to avoid an oncoming lorry.

'Bloody loony.'

Could she, he wondered, really be referring to the innocent lorry driver?

'How long has he known Jean Wendle?'

'Who?'

'Your dad. He was sitting next to Jean Wendle. In church.'

After a moment. Fay trod on the brakes. The Fiesta was almost in the middle of the road The driver of a BMW behind hem blasted his horn and revved in righteous rage.

'What?'

She didn't seem to notice the middle-aged, suit-and-tie-clad BMW driver thrusting up two furious fingers as he roared past.

'Jean Wendle,' Powys said. 'The healer.'

Fay gripped the wheel tightly with both hands, threw her head back and moaned.

'Oh God, Joe. That was Jean Wendle?'

'It was.'

Fay unclipped her seat-belt.

'Would you mind taking over, before I kill us both? I think I've made the most awful fool of myself.'

Alex had given Murray Beech the usual can of Heineken, and this time Murray had snapped it open and drunk silently and gratefully.

'You heard my sermon,' Murray said. They were in the living-room at the back of the house in Bell Street. The vicar was slumped in an armchair. He looked worn out.

'And you heard my daughter, I suppose,' Alex said.

'What was the matter with her?'

'You tell me, old boy.' Alex had once been chaplain to a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts; Murray reminded him of the new arrivals, lank-haired, grey-skinned, eyes like mud.

'What did you think of my sermon?'

'Good try,' Alex said. 'Full marks for effort. Couple of Brownie points, perhaps, from the town council. Then again, perhaps not. What d'you want me to say? You and I both know that this fellow Goff's congregation's going to be a bloody sight more dedicated than yours.'

'Sour grapes, eh?'

'You said it, old chap.'

'I don't know what to do,' Murray said, desolate.

Alex sighed.

'I could be good at this job,' Murray said. 'Anywhere else, I could be really good. I'm a good organizer, a good administrator. I like organizing things, running the parish affairs, setting up discussion groups, counselling sessions. I've got ideas. I can get things done.'

'Archdeacon material, if ever I saw it.'

'Don't laugh at me, Alex.'

'Sorry.'

'You see, I did what I thought was right in the context of my position in Crybbe. The sermon, I mean. I expected people to come up to me outside. You know… Well said, Vicar, all this. I thought I was echoing their own thoughts. I know they don't like what's happening at the Court.'

'How d'you know that?'

'Not from listening to them talk, that's for certain. They don't even seem to talk to each other. No chit-chit, no street-corner gossip. Do you think that's natural? Nobody said a word to me today. I was standing there holding out a hand, thanks for coming, nice to see you, hope you're feeling better now, the usual patter. And some of them were taking my hand limply, as if I was offering them a sandwich at the fete. Then they'd nod and trudge off without a word. No reaction in church either except for Fay's outburst and the boy, Warren Preece, who was staring at me with the most astonishing malevolence in his eyes.'

'Which boy's that?'

'Warren Preece? The Mayor's grandson, the younger brother of the chap who drowned in the river. Looking at me as if he blamed me for his brother's death.'

'Doesn't make much sense, Murray.'

'Didn't to me, either. I tried to ignore it. Perhaps it was nothing to do with his brother. He's a friend of the girl, Tessa Byford. You remember I asked you about exorcism.'

'Oh. Yes. How did that go?'

'You haven't heard anything, then?'

'Nothing at all, old chap. Didn't it go well?'

'You're sure you haven't heard anything? You wouldn't be trying to save my feelings?'

'Sod off, Murray, I'm a Christian.'

Murray said. 'That girl's seriously disturbed. Tessa Byford. The Old Police House. I think I'm talking about evil, Alex. I think I was in the presence of evil. I think she invited me in to flourish something m my face. As if to say, this is what you're up against, now what are you going to do?'

'And what did you do?'

'I ran away,' Murray said starkly. 'I got the hell out of there, and I haven't been back, and I'm scared stiff of meeting her in the street or a shop because I think I'd run away again.'

'Oh dear,' Alex said.

Murray leaned his head back into the chair and closed and opened his eyes twice, flexing his jaw.

Alex said, 'I seem to remember asking you what you thought were the world s greatest evils.'

'I expect I said inequality, the Tory government or something. Now I'd have to say I've seen real evil and it was in the eyes of a schoolgirl. And now, I don't know, in a boy of eighteen or nineteen. What does that say about me?'

'Perhaps it says you've grown up,' Alex said. 'Or that you've been watching those X-rated videos again. I don't know either. I've been fudging the bloody issue for years, and now I'm too old and clapped out to do anything about it. Perhaps, you know, this is one of those places where we meet it head-on.'

'Crybbe?'

'Just thinking of something Wendy said. May look like a haemorrhoid in the arsehole of the world, but the quiet places are often the real battlegrounds. Some of these New Age johnnies are actually not so far off-beam when you talk to them. You come across Wendy?'

Murray loosed blank.

'Strict Presbyterian upbringing,' Alex said. 'No nonsense. Yet she apparently cures people of cancer and shingles and things with the help of an egg-shaped oriental blob called Dr Chi. Now, I ask you… But it's all terminology, isn't it. Dr Chi, Jesus Christ, Allah, ET… There's a positive and a negative and whatever all this energy is, well, perhaps we can colour it with our hearts. Pass me another beer, Murray, I don't think I'm helping you at all.'

'I thought you weren't supposed to drink.'

'Sod that,' said Alex. 'Look at me. Do I seem sick? Do I seem irrational?'

'Far from it. In fact, if you don't mind my saying so, I've never known you so lucid.'

'Well, there you are, you see. Dr Chi. Little Chink's a bloody wonder. And there's you trying to drive his intermediary out of town. We think we're so smart. Murray, but we're just pupils in a spiritual kindergarten.'

'I think I'm cracking up,' Murray said.

'Perhaps you need to consult old Dr Chi as well. I can arrange an appointment.'

Murray stood up very quickly and headed for the door. 'Don't joke about this, Alex. Just don't joke.'

'Was I?' Alex asked him innocently. 'Was I joking do you think?'

CHAPTER VII

'But…'

Well, she couldn't say she hadn't been warned.

The vet, an elderly, stooping man in a cardigan, said there'd been quite a concentration of shotgun pellets in the dog's rear end.

'Fairly close range, you see. Must have been. If he'd moved a bit faster, the shot would have missed him altogether. I got some of them out, and some will work to the surface in time. But he'll always-be carrying a few around. Like an old soldier.'

Arnold was lying on a folded blanket, his huge ears fully extended. His tail bobbed when Fay and Joe appeared. His left haunch had been shaved to the base of the tail. The skin was vivid pink, the stitching bright blue.

'But he's only got three legs,' Fay said.

'I did try to save it, Mrs Morrison, but so much bone was smashed it would have been enormously complicated and left him in a lot of pain, probably for life. It's quite unusual for the damage to be so concentrated. But then, dogs that are shot are usually killed.'

'He's a survivor,' Fay said.

Arnold was not feeling sorry for himself, this was clear. He thumped his tail against his folded brown blanket and tried to get up. Fell down again, but he tried. Fay rushed to pat him to stop him trying again.

'Never discourage him from standing up,' the vet said. 'He'll be walking soon, after a fashion. Managed a few steps m the garden this morning. Falls over a lot, but he gets up again. He's young enough to handle it with aplomb, I think. Be cocking his stump against lampposts in no time. Need a lot of attention and careful supervision when he's outside, for a while. But he'll be fine. Some people can't cope with it, you know. They have the dog put down. It's kinder, they say. Kinder to them, they mean.'

With a stab of shame. Fay found herself thinking then about her father.

'And there's one thing,' the vet said. 'He won't be considered much of a danger to sheep now. I can't see this particular farmer coming after him again.'

'Most unlikely,' Powys agreed.

There must have been twenty or thirty people around the Court this afternoon, pulling things down, turning out buildings like drawers. And this was a Sunday; every one of them, no doubt, on double-time. Money- no object.

The Crybbe project seemed to have taken on a life of its own. Everything was happening unbelievably quickly, three or four months' work done inside a week. As if Max knew he had to seize the place, stage a coup before bureaucracy could be cranked into action against him.

And it was happening all around Rachel, as if she wasn't there. Had Max ordered her to stay behind here just to make this point?

Max's own energy seemed to be pumped entirely into his project, as if he didn't have an empire to run. Even from London, directing people and money to Crybbe.

Because, unknown to its hundreds of employees, this was now the spiritual centre of the Epidemic Group. Crybbe. The Court.

The Tump.

She'd caught sight of a specimen of his proposed new logo: a big green mound with trees on it. In Max's vision, all the power of Epidemic – the recording companies, the publishing houses, the high-street shops – would emanate from the Tump.

On a wall in the stable there was a map of the town with every building marked. The ones owned by Epidemic and now inhabited – or soon to be – by alternative people had been shaded red. She'd counted them; there were thirty-five properties, far more than Max was publicly admitting. Far more than even she had known about.

She tried to imagine the town as the alternative capital of Britain, with thousands of people flooding in to take part in seminars, follow the ley-lines with picnic lunches, consult mystics and healers. People in search of a spiritual recharge or a miracle cure.

A kind of New Age Lourdes.

Crybbe?

Rachel shook her head and wandered across the courtyard, head down, hands deep in the pockets of her Barbour. Couldn't wait to get rid of this greasy bloody Barbour for good.

She arrived at the burgeoning rubbish pile, which would soon consist of the entire non-Tudor contents of the Court. Leftovers from four centuries. Reminders of the times when the Court's other incarnations had been a private school (failed), a hotel (failed), even a billet, she'd been told, for American servicemen during World War II.

It was a shame; a lot of the stuff they were throwing out would be quite useful to some people and some of it valuable. A darkwood table, scratched but serviceable. A wardrobe which was probably Victorian and would sell, cleaned up, for several hundred quid in any antique shop. Peanuts to Max.

Money to burn. Hardly New Age What happened to recycling?

The pile was over twelve feet high. Filthy carpets which, unrolled, would probably turn out to be Indian. A rocking-chair. A couple of chests, one thick with varnish, the other newer, bound with green-painted metal strips, black lettering across its lid; you couldn't make out what it said.

Rachel looked hard at the second chest. Where had she seen it before?

Good Lord! She ran to the chest and pulled up its lid. They couldn't do this…

But they had.

Exposed to full daylight, Tiddles, the mummified cat, looked forlorn, a wisp of a thing, his eye-sockets full of dust, one of his sabre-teeth broken, probably in transit to the heap.

Tiddles, the guardian. Evicted.

She looked up at the Court, its lower windows mainly boarded up, the upper ones too small to give any indication of what was going on inside.

One thing she knew. Tiddles might not be Tudor – seventeenth century, somebody had suggested – but he was part of that place. He would have to go back.

Goes round FOUR times.

The earth force (assume it exists) rising up through the soles of your feet, a kind of liquid light. Up into your legs and then, into the body itself, the solar plexus, the first major energy centre. Feel it forming into a pulsing ball of warm, white light, while the chant goes on, the rhythmic clapping…

And he goes round FIVE times.

'Powys. I need to tell you…'

'Sorry?'

'Are you OK, Powys?'

'Yes, sorry, I was…'

Powys driving Fay's Fiesta through a delirium of damp trees, their foliage burgeoning over the road. Fay sitting in the passenger seat with Arnold on the blanket on her knee, fondling the dog's disproportionately large ears.

'Powys, I need to tell you why I went berserk in church.'

He said nothing. She seemed a good deal more relaxed now; something had obviously resolved itself.

'Have you ever seen a ghost?'

He shook his head. 'Terrible admission, isn't it? My belief in ghosts is founded entirely on hearsay.'

'Who exactly is Jean Wendle?'

'She's a spiritual healer. One of the more convincing ones. Nice woman. Used to be a lawyer. Barrister. Or an advocate, as they say in Scotland. Very high-octane. Then she found she could heal people, so she gave up the law to devote her life to it. They were about to make her a judge at the time. It caused… uproar in legal circles.'

'Oh!'

'You remember now?'

'Yes. It was in the papers, wasn't it? How long's she been in Crybbe?'

'As I understand it,' he said, 'she was one of the first of Goff's big-name signings. Rachel says Max wanted to put her into this old rectory he's bought, a couple of miles outside town. But she insisted on being at the heart of things, so she's living in a town house on the square.'

'I didn't know she knew my father.'

'Jean gets to know everybody. Unobtrusively.'

'She was sitting so still,' Fay said. 'In church. So very still.'

'She slows her breathing sometimes. She's a bit uncanny. She… intuits things. Absorbs atmospheres and interprets what's really going on. I'm impressed by Jean, Scares me a bit too, I must admit.'

'Scared me,' Fay said, 'in church. I thought I was seeing Dad's late wife.' She paused. 'Again,' she said.

They were coming into Crybbe. Powys slowed for the 10 m.p.h. speed limit.

'You said… late wife?'

'She was called Grace Legge The house we live in was hers. She died last year. I saw her last week.'

'Bloody hell, Fay."

'I'd never seen one before. You know how it is – you've read about ghosts, you've seen the films, you've interviewed people who swear they've seen one. But you don't…quite… believe they exist.'

'Except in people's minds,' he said.

'Yes.' Fay ran her fingers deep into Arnold's warm fur. 'I don't recommend the experience. You know what they say – about the flesh creeping? The spine feeling chilled? Grace was ghastly, dead. What's the time?'

'Ten past five.'

'We haven't eaten,' Fay remembered. 'No wonder I'm shooting my mouth off. Light-headed. You coming in for something, Powys? Omelette? Sandwich? I'm afraid Dad'll be there', so forget everything I said about Grace.'

'Thanks, but I ought to find Rachel.'

Powys pulled up at the bottom of Bell Street, took out the keys and passed them to Fay.

Arnold tried to stand up on Fay's knee. 'Hang on,' Powys said. He went round to open Fay's door and she handed Arnold to him while she got out and shook off the dog hairs.

As Powys handed Arnold back, as gently as he could, Fay looked him hard in the eyes. Serious, almost severe.

'If you've got any sense, Joe Powys,' she said, 'you'll piss off out of Crybbe pronto and take Rachel with you. She's gold. She's the only person I know around here who's got her act together. Come on, Arnie, I'm afraid we're home.'

'What about you? Strikes me you need to get out more urgently than any of us.'

'Why? Because I'm losing my marbles like Dad?'

And like me? he wondered, walking down the street towards the river.

And immediately twelve years fell away and he was going around the stone again.

Round and round. Mesmeric. Tribal.

Widdershins, widdershins… against the sun, against nature…

… And he goes round SEVEN times…

Powys stood on the bridge and threw up his hands, warding it off, wiping it away, but the atmosphere was thick with it. He could feel Memory's helicopter beating the air above his head with great sweeping, buffeting strokes. It had never been so powerful. He was standing upright on the bridge, but his mind was ducking and crouching, cowering. He looked around for somewhere to run to, but it was all around him.

…EIGHT times…

Fluidity of movement, breathing changing rhythm. Something else breathing for you, running beside you… widdershins, widdershins… and doing your breathing.

… NINE…

Can't stop. Can't stop.

Out of your hands now.

Widdershins, widdershins.

… TEN…

Below you, the tiny figure running around the stone.

Widdershins… all wrong.

Below. The stone and the running figure.

Widdershins.

All wrong.

…ELEVEN…

And the ball of light rising up hard, bright, glowing, pulsing… into the chest.

Widdershins.

Engulfing your heart, but it's no longer warm, and it's bursting, with a shocking rush into your head, where it's…

WIDDERSHINS!

He was inside the running figure now, pounding across the bridge and into the short gravel drive of the little black and white riverside cottage.

Powys flung himself en to the long-unmown lawn, soft and damp and full of buttercups and dandelions.

He lay on his stomach with his face into the grass, his eyes closed and the cool vegetation pressed into the sockets. Kept rubbing it in until it was a green mush and not so cool any more.

'You're going back,' Annie had said.

Back to the Old Golden Land. Back – he'd told himself – to find out what had happened to Henry Kettle. Back – they said behind his back – to find redemption.

The cold in his stomach told him he was back, but that there was no redemption to be found here.

He opened his eyes and blinked and then the screaming started to come out of him like aural vomit, for at the top edge of the little ridge on which the cottage stood, something black and alien thrust out of the grass.

The stone was only five feet tall but looked taller because of the prominence of its position.

Its base was fat and solidly planted in.he earth. It maintained its girth until, three feet above the ground, it tapered into a neck, presenting the illusion of a large black beer-bottle

CHAPTER VIII

Previously, the cardboard box had contained a new kind of foot-massaging sandal from Germany which Max was trying out on the advice of his reflexologist. As a coffin it was not entirely satisfactory.

She'd found the box in Max's bedroom, which was built into the eaves over the far end of the long room where his desk stood. The four-poster bed, facing the mound, had deep-grey drapes. Max had not spent a single night here yet, but it seemed to Rachel that the atmosphere in the room was already foetid with tension and a lingering sense of suffocated longing. Rachel thought of the nights of the Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman, and was sickened and ashamed. She'd snatched the shoe-box and fled.

The box was necessary. There was no way she could carry Tiddles's chest up to the attic on her own. As she knelt in the yard by the rubbish pile, she was worried the mummified cat would come apart or disintegrate while being transferred from the chest. He fell as light as wads of dust under an old sofa.

'Poor little devil,' Rachel said. 'You certainly haven't much energy left to put into Max's project.'

Returning Tiddles to his sentry post in the Court would, she decided, be her last meaningful task in Crybbe.

And she didn't want witnesses.

For over an hour Tiddles lay in his box on the kitchen table in the stables while Rachel waited for the workmen to finish clearing the Court. It was gone 7 p.m.; still she could hear them inside, while a van waited in the courtyard.

At nearly 8 p.m., she threw on her Barbour, picked up the shoe-box, marched purposefully across to the Court's main entrance and hauled open the dusty oak door.

There was a clang from above. A thump. The sound of a large piece of furniture being hurled to the floor.

What were they doing up there? And who exactly were they?

Not – judging by the quality of the stuff they'd tossed out – a knowledgeable antique dealer among them. Rachel decided it was time to throw them out.

Or time, at least, to establish the identity of the smart-arse who was deciding so arbitrarily which items of furniture to discard.

With the shoe-box under her arm, she went in.

'Hello… Excuse me!'

Her voice seemed to go nowhere, as if she was shouting into a wind-tunnel.

The Court was so full of noise. Ceiling-shaking bangs and crashes, as if the entire building was being torn apart. Yet no one had come out of here in at least a couple of hours and the rubbish pile was no higher than it had been when she'd found the cat's wooden chest.

'HELLO!'

She looked around. Half-light floated feebly through the nigh-level slits and barely reached the stone floor.

Rachel followed the sounds and stormed up the spiral stone stair case.

'Excuse me.' Calling out as she neared the first floor. 'I need to lock this place up for the night, so if you could give me some idea how long you're going to be…'

She stepped out into the main chamber, where families had lived and where the Hanging Sheriff, Sir Michael Wort, had held out against the rebel hordes.

'Oh,' Rachel said.

She was alone.

The weak evening light washed through two mullioned windows, but the shadows were taking over now.

Well, she certainly wasn't going to play hide-and-seek with a bunch of silly buggers getting paid well over the odds to clean the place out before morning. She had half a mind to lock them in. Except the keys were in her bag, in the stables.

There was a double crash from above and the sound of glass shattering.

'What the hell…?'

Rachel bounded angrily up the next spiral. Didn't they know how easily they could kill themselves up there, or bring half the ceiling down? Had nobody warned them about the state of the floor?

The heavy door to the attics was ajar. They'd been given keys, then. That bastard Max must have had another set made without even telling her. She thrust through the arched doorway, past the alcove concealing the entrance to the prospect chamber. Up towards the attics.

It was only when she was halfway up the steps that it occurred to her that among the bangs and the crashes there'd been no laughter, none of the usual banter of men working together, no shouted directions, no oaths, no…

No voices at all.

And now she was standing here, on the last stairway, far above her blades of light through broken slates, and it was absolutely silent.

'What,' Rachel demanded, 'is going on?'

What was more disquieting than this sudden inexplicable cessation of bangs and crashes was the hairline crack she detected in her own voice. She cleared her throat and gave it more vehemence.

'Come on, I haven't got all night. Where are you?'

Rachel did not remember ever being superstitious. She did not believe in good luck, bad luck, heaven, hell, psychic forces or the secret power of ley-lines. She found the whole New Age concept not only essentially unsound but, for the most part, very tedious indeed.

Yet – and for the first time – she found the place not just gloomy in a sad, uncared-for kind of way, but in the sense of being oppressive. And yes, OK, eerie. She admitted to herself that she didn't want to go so far into the attic that she might see the rope hanging from the ceiling, even though she knew it could not be a very old rope.

But this was a side issue. Something to be acknowledged and perhaps examined later with a raising of eyebrows and glass of whisky beside the Jotul stove in J.M. Powys's riverside retreat.

For here and for now, there was only one serious, legitimate fear: a fear of the kind of men who, on hearing a woman calling out to them and coming up the stairs, would stop what they were doing, slide into the shadows and keep very, very quiet.

Until this woman appeared at the top of the steps, with nothing to defend her except a dead cat in a shoe-box.

So no way was she going all the way to the top.

Rachel steadied her breathing, set her lips in a firm line, tossed back her hair and began to descend the spiral stairway. If the men in the attic were unaware of the instability of the floor and the danger to themselves, that was their business. They were presumably well-insured.

If they fell, they fell. She hadn't been hired as caretaker of Britain's least-stately home, and she wasn't prepared to tolerate being pissed around any longer. Tomorrow – perhaps even tonight – she would phone Max in London and inform him that she had quit. As of now.

As she descended the twisted stairway it began to grow darker. When she reached the bottom, she found out why. The door sealing off the prospect chamber and the attics must have swung closed behind her, cutting off the light from the first-floor living-hall.

She pushed it with the flat of her hand.

It didn't move.

She put the shoe-box on the stairs and pushed hard with both hands.

It was an oak door, four inches thick and it did not move.

Well, it might have jammed.

'Look, would somebody mind helping me with this door?'

No response.

Or – oh, God, can I really credit this? – the bastards might have locked her in.

It was important to hold on to her anger.

'When I get out of here,' Rachel said suddenly, icily, without thinking, 'you can consider yourselves officially fired.'

Which, on reflection, was a pretty stupid thing to say. They'd never let her out. She tried again.

'Now look, don't be stupid. It's very dangerous up here. The floor's full of holes, you know that. And I haven't got a torch.'

She threw her weight against the door, half-expecting somebody to have quietly unlocked it so that it opened suddenly and she went tumbling down the stairs. Such was the mentality people like this.

But all that happened was she hurt her shoulder.

'Look, would you mind letting me out?'

She stopped suddenly and leaned back against a wall, breathing hard, an awful thought occurring to her.

What if Humble was behind this?

Suppose, as she would normally have expected, the workmen had actually cleared off hours ago. Who, after all, really worked until 8 p.m. on a Sunday evening? Certainly not the kind of unskilled vandals who'd been let loose in here.

What, then, if it had been Humble who had come up here and made a lot of noise to lure her inside? He'd never liked her, and he knew she didn't like him. He might think she was putting the knife in for him with Max. Maybe Max had found out what Humble had done to J.M. that night. Maybe Humble's job was on the line, and he thought she was responsible.

But if Humble was behind this he would have needed an accomplice. One of them up here to make all the racket, one to lock the door after she'd gone through.

Which still meant that someone was up here with her now, on this side of the locked door. Keeping very, very quiet.

Rachel spun round.

It was so dark with the door closed that she could hardly see as far as the twist in the staircase which took it to the attic. Anything could be around that bend, not six feet away.

'Humble!'

Not much authority left in her voice, nor much anger. She was a woman alone in the darkness of a decaying old house, with a man who intended her harm.

Humble, listen… whichever side of the door you are… I don't know why you're doing this. I wish you'd tell me, so we can have it out. But if it's anything to do with what happened the other night with J. M. Powys, I want you to know that I haven't said anything to Max and I don't intend to. A mistake is a mistake. Humble, can you hear me?'

The door didn't have a handle, only a lock. She bent down and tried to look into the keyhole, to see if there was a key in the other side.

She couldn't tell one way or the other; it was too dark. Her own keys were in her bag, on the kitchen table.

'Humble, look, if you've heard what I said, just unlock the door and I'll give you time to get out of the building. I don't want any unpleasantness because…'

Oh, what the hell did it matter now?

'… because I'm handing in my notice tomorrow. I've got another job. In London. You won't have to deal with me again. Did you hear that? Do you understand what I'm saying? Humble!'

Rachel beat her fists on the oak door until she felt the skin break.

She had grown cold. She wrapped her Barbour around her and sat down on a stone stair next to the cardboard coffin and listened hard.

Nothing. She couldn't even hear the birds singing outside, where there was light.

But from the attic, clearly not far beyond the top of the spiral stairway came a single, sharp, triumphant bump.

CHAPTER IX

He remembered… TWELVE… spiralling down out of the sky, seeing the stone thickening and quivering and throbbing, the haze around it like a dense, toxic cloud. At which point Memory went into negative, the fields turned purple, the river black. Everything went black.

He didn't remember the scramble of feet, all four of them rushing the new author, J.M. Powys, picking him up, carrying him to the so-called fairy mound and dumping him face-down on its grassy funk with shrieks of laughter.

He was only able to construct this scene from what Ben Corby had told him years later.

From Ben's story, he'd tried to form an image of Rose, but he couldn't be sure whether she was laughing too or whether she'd stopped short, her face clouding, feeling premonition like a small tap on the shoulder from a cold, stiff hand.

Every time he pushed himself into replaying the scene in his head, he forced Rose to be laughing when they dumped him on the mound. He always put the laugh on freeze frame and then pulled the plug. So that he could climb out of it without breaking down.

Powys stood in the neutrality of a sunless summer evening and put both hands on the Bottle Stone – at its shoulders, when it began to taper into the neck – and pushed hard.

It was solid. A proper job, as Henry Kettle would have said. Probably several feet of the thing underground, the earth compressed around it, a few rocks in there maybe. Tufts of long grass embedded at the base. It might have been here for four thousand years. You could dig for three hours and it would still be erect.

It needed a JCB to get it out.

But first he had to force himself to touch it, to walk around it (only not widdershins, never widdershins). The stone, a cunningly hewn replica of something which had speared his dreams for twelve years.

He also reserves the right, Rachel had said, to install standing stones or other ritual artefacts on your lawn.

All down to Andy Boulton-Trow. He could imagine Andy's unholy delight at finding, among Goff's collection of newly quarried megaliths, one roughly (not roughly, exactly) the size and shape of the Bottle Stone.

Or maybe, knowing that Powys was coming to Crybbe, he'd actually had one cut to shape and then planted it in a spot that would emphasize the correlation of the stone and the river, recreating the fateful scene of twelve years ago.

Rough therapy? Or another of Andy's little experiments.

Fifty yards away, the brown river churned like a turbulence of worms towards the bridge.

The Canon was angry.

'And you didn't tell me. You didn't even tell me.'

They'd taken one of the big cushions from the sofa in what was now their living-room, at the rear of the house, and put it on the rug in front of the fire, and then put the three-legged dog on the cushion.

Arnold didn't object to this at all, but something in Alex had clearly snapped.

'It's got to stop, Fay. It isn't helping. In fact, it's making things a good deal worse.'

'I'm sorry. I didn't want to get you all worked up.'

'Well I am worked up. Even though it was young Preece and he's dead. Divine retribution, if you ask me.'

'That's not a very Christian thing to say, Dad.'

'Listen, my child.' Alex, kneeling on the rug, waved a menacing forefinger. 'Don't you ever presume to tell me what's Christian.'

He went down on his hands, face to face with Arnold. 'Poor little perisher. Shouldn't be allowed out with you, Fay, the way you get up people's noses.'

'Oh, I get up people's noses, do I?'

'If you got up noses for a living, you couldn't do a better job. Coming here with your superior Radio Four attitude – "Oh dear, have to work for the little local radio station, never mind, at least there's no need to take it seriously…" '

'Now just a minute, Dad…'

' "… Oh, God, how am I expected to do any decent interviews with people who're too thick to string three coherent sentences together?" '

The Canon clambered awkwardly to his feet and then dumped himself into an armchair he'd battered into shape over several months. He swung round, as if the chair was a gun-turret, training on her a hard, blue glare. A once-familiar glare under which she used to crumble.

'You,' he said, 'were never going to adapt to their way of life, because it was the wrong way to do things, because they keep their heads down and don't parade in front of the council offices with placards if they don't get their bins emptied.'

'Dad, I'm supposed to be a reporter…'

'And when this fat fellow – what's his name?… Goff – when this meddling lunatic arrives with his monumentally crazy scheme to turn the place on its head… Well, guess who can't get along with him either. Why, it's Miss Sophisticated Fay Peters, late of Radio Four! And she won't get back to London where she belongs…'

'Dad, you know bloody well…'

'… because she has this astonishing notion that her dilapidated old dad won't be able to manage without her! Jesus Christ!'

Alex slumped into silence.

Fay couldn't speak either. If this was Jean Wendle's doing, it was remarkable. Lucid, cogent, powerful, clear-eyed. He might have been ten years younger and in total control of himself.

She was shaken. He was right, of course, even if there was a lot he didn't know.

Or maybe there were things he did know.

When she did finally manage to utter something, it wasn't what she'd had it in mind to come out with at all.

'Dad,' she heard this pathetic little-girl voice saying, close to tears. 'Dad, why is Grace haunting us?'

Warren never even saw his grandad until the old bugger was upon him.

He was out by the Tump, thinking how much bigger it looked now from the side where the wall had been ripped out. Old thing could breathe now.

Big, fat mound. Like a giant tit.

Gomer'd carted his bulldozer away, moaning it'd cost over two thousand quid to repair it; Warren thought that was a load of old crap, Gomer trying it on. Who gave a shit, anyway? Standing here, Warren felt again the raw, wild power he'd first experienced the night he buried the old box. He would've been in town, up the alley, shagging the arse off Tessa, except she'd wanted to go to this poncy art exhibition, could you believe that?

He'd left the old man at home, drinking. Never used to drink at home. Gone to pieces since Jonathon drowned, the elder son, the heir.

Warren was the heir now. They'd have to give the bloody old farm to him. You had to laugh, sometimes.

Jonathon was being planted on Wednesday. An inquest could be opened tomorrow. Warren had wanted to go along with the old man, who had to give evidence that the stiff really was Jonathon Preece. But they said after he'd done that, it'd be adjourned for a few weeks, so they'd have a long wait before they heard all the interesting stuff from the pathologist who'd cut Jonathon up on the slab.

After the inquest had been opened, the body'd be released for burial, but the old man said they wouldn't be having it back at the house. Another disappointment for Warren, who'd planned to come down in the night and look under the shroud at all the stitches where the pathologist had put Jonathon's guts back.

From behind, the hand came down on Warren's shoulder like a bird's claw.

'What you doin' yere, boy?'

Warren would've turned round and nutted him, if he hadn't recognized the voice.

'Ow're you, Grandad?'

'I said, what you doin' yere?'

'I come for a walk, like. Free country, innit?'

'Come with me, boy, I want a word with you.'

'Sorry, Grandad, got no time, see. Got to meet somebody down the town.'

The old git looked real weird tonight. Skeletal. Skin hanging loose over his bones. Powerful grip he had, though, and he used it now- on Warren's arm, above the elbow, digging into the muscle.

'Ow! Bloody gedoff, you old… Where we goin'?'

Jimmy Preece pulled him all the way to the edge of the field, well away from the Tump and the hole where the wall had been – pointing at this gap now, saying in a hard, rough voice,

'You know anythin' about that, boy?'

'What you on about?'

'You know what I'm on about.' The old bugger's eyes were twin glow-worms, burrowed deep in his frazzled face, 'the feller as nicked Gomer's bulldozer and rammed it through the wall. You know him, boy?'

'I never… I swear to God!'

Next thing Warren knew, he was on his back in the grass half-stunned. The old git'd knocked him clean off his feet with one massive swipe across the face.

'Never use the name of God in sight of that thing again, you understand me, boy?'

Warren lay there, felt like his face was afire and his brains were loose. 'You mad ole… you got no right…'

His grandad put out a hand and helped him to his feet.

'Sorry, boy. Nerves is all shot, see, what with Jonathon and now this.'

Warren backed off. Stood with a hand over his blazing cheek.

'Warren, you and me got to talk.'

'That's what you calls it, is it?'

His grandad look his cap off, scratched his head, replaced the cap.

'Jonathon dyin', see, that changes things. With Jonathon around, didn't matter if you went through your life without knowin' nothin'. Your dad, 'e's the first Preece 'ad less than three children. Weren't 'is fault your mam left 'im, but that's besides the point. I only 'ad two sisters, but if anythin'd 'appened to me, they'd have done it, no arguments.'

'What you on about?'

'The bell, Warren.'

'Oh, that ole thing. Stuff that.'

'You what, boy?'

'Stuff it. I done some thinkin' about that. You can all get bloody stuffed, you think I'm ever gonna take over that bell from Dad. Jonathon might've been mug enough, but I couldn't give a fucking shit, you wanna know the truth, Grandad. My future's not round yere, see. I'm a musician.'

'Music?' The old feller spat hard, once. Gobbed right there on the grass. 'Music? Pah!'

Warren backed off, fell his face contorting. His finger was out and pointing at the old bastard's sucked-in face.

'You know nothin',' Warren snarled. 'You wanner know about my music, you ask Max Goff. 'E's gonner sign me, see. 'E's gonner sign the band. So you can do what you like. You can fuckin' disinherit me… you can keep your run-down farm. And you can take your bell and you can shove it, grandad. I couldn't care less.'

His grandad went quiet, standing there, face as grey as the stone.

'I shouldn't worry,' Warren sneered. 'One o' them newcomers'll take it on. That Colonel Croston, 'e's keen on bells.'

'No! The Preeces done it through plague and droughts and wartime when ringing bells was an offence. But we done it, boy, 'cause it's got to be done, see. Got to be.'

The old feller near desperation. Touch of the pleading there now. Stuff him.

'I don't wanner talk to you no more. Grandad. You're not all bloody there, you ask me.'

'Warren, there's things…'

'Oh yeah, there's things I don't know! Always, ever since I was so 'igh, people been tellin' me there's things I don't know, maybe I don't wanner know, maybe… What's up with you now?'

His grandad was looking past him at something that caused his mouth to open a crack, bit of dribble out the side, false teeth jiggling about. Disgusting.

He turned and began to walk back towards the road, towards the town. Warren slinking half a dozen paces behind. When the gap between them was wide enough, Warren turned and saw what looked like the sunset reflected in one of the top windows of the old house, just below the roof-line.

Except there wasn't any sun, so it couldn't be a sunset.

Warren shrugged.

CHAPTER X

The smell happened first.

It happened quite suddenly, as if in the cracking of a rotten egg. The smell and with it the light. Elements of the same change.

The smell was filthy. Sulphur, and something cess-pit putrid.

The light came in oily yellows, the yellow of candles made of animal fat and the yellow of pus from a wound gone bad. The light came from no particular direction but glistened on the stone walls like lard.

Rachel shrank from the walls, but she couldn't get away from the stairs. Where she crouched, it was no longer dry and dusty but wet, warm and slick, like phlegm. She touched a stone step just once, and something unpleasant came off on her fingers. She tried to wipe them on the oak door, but that also was coated with a thick, cheesy grease, gritty here and there with what felt like fly corpses.

Rachel pulled the hand away in disgust, wiped it on her Barbour, knowing she could no longer bring herself to beat on this door. Her fists were sore and peeling, anyway, and if there was anyone out there they weren't going to help her. Perhaps they were waiting for the cool, superior, professional woman to break down, to shriek and sob and plead.

'I can't stand this,' she said aloud. 'I shall be sick.'

Which couldn't make the atmosphere any more foetid.

But if I was a woman with any imagination, she thought, I would be very, very frightened.

For the Court, always so drab and dusty and derelict – gloomy, but no more menacing than an empty warehouse – had swollen into a basic sort of life.

Ludicrous. A grotesque self-delusion. But that was what it felt like. Flickerings of things. Presences in the shadows. The smell itself was like the house's own foul breath.

She began to breathe hard herself. Broke out in a coughing fit. Then tried to breathe slowly and selectively, keeping her mouth closed, because the air was so rancid that when she took it in, there gathered at the back of her throat a richly cloying, raw-meat taste like sweating, sweet salami. Rachel – suffocating, closing her mouth, closing her eyes, trying to close down all her senses; trying, above all, not to hear – thought, I need air. I need light. I need to walk up these few steps.

I need the prospect chamber.

Soft, fresh evening air. Gentle evening light.

The prospect chamber. Eight, ten steps away.

But I can't move from here. I can't move because of…

… those taunting sounds from the darkness above.

Sometimes soft, rustling like satin. Sometimes loud as a foundry overhead. And then stopping for a period of tense, luminous quiet – until it begins again, louder and closer. Then distant again. I am here. I am there, I can be anywhere I choose in an instant because I'm not hu…

Shut up! Shut up!

It's what he wants you to think.

Creaks. Thrustings. What might have been hollow footsteps on wood, flat footsteps on stone. On stone steps.

He's coming down!

Stopping just before the bend, not six feet away from where he crouched, holding her arms around herself, beginning to shiver.

Pull yourself together Someone is trying to terrify you. It's only another person. You can handle people; you always could, you are cool and controlled; you can be remote, haughty, offhand, intimidating. You are flexible. You can be dominant, or compliant, at will.

All you have to do is stride up there and face whoever it is.

Yes, but that's what he wants.

And what if you go up there and there's…

Nothing.

Nothing but the dark.

'Help me!' Rachel was screaming out seconds later, her voice, always so calm and deep, now parched and bitter with anger and despair. 'Hum… ble! Andy! Anybody! Please!'

Then, in a soft and aching whisper, she said, 'J.M.?'

And her eyes filled uncontrollably with tears. When I get out of here, I'm going to get us both away. Tonight. That's a promise.

If I get out of here. If I ever get to breathe the sweet night air.

God help me, Rachel thought, but I'm not going to scream any more. When she'd screamed, the scream had come up from her stomach, like bile.

When she looked down at herself she saw that her Barbour's waxy surface gleamed sickly yellow like the walls. She wanted to take it off, but she didn't like the cold. She'd never liked the cold.

She wanted to remove her shoes, so as to move more quietly up the stairs towards the prospect chamber, but the thought of that ooze between her toes.

She closed her eyes. Closed her eyes and opened them, and rose, picking up the cardboard box containing the dead cat guardian.

'Come on, Tiddles,' Rachel said, wiping the tears away.

She wished the appalling sounds would begin again, if only to muffle her footsteps.

They did not. Silence woven as thick as a tapestry hung over the stairs, which were visible only because of the phosphorescence which seemed to move with her, not so much lighting the way as holding her close, in a thick and stifling miasma.

When she looked back there was merely an oily blackness behind her, in the place near the door where she had crouched.

Rachel couldn't remember a nightmare this bad. She was sweating in the clammy Barbour which seemed to have become part of this place, as if the yellow light steaming from the walls was re-vaporizing on the wax of the coat in clusters of tiny bubbles.

She came to the bend in the stairs.

All she had to do was follow the spiral.

To her left would be the alcove concealing the door to the prospect chamber. Above her – how far above her she couldn't tell because there was no light and she could not remember – would be the attic.

Better not to think about the attic. Shut it out.

I don't go into the attics. I'm not superstitious, I just don't go into the attics…

Two steps.

Two steps to the alcove and the prospect chamber and light and air. She could stand in the opening and shout and scream and somebody would have to hear her.

Oh, please. Please don't let the door be locked.

Rachel made it to the second step and was about to fall into the alcove, throw herself at the door to the prospect chamber…

This is the only part of the house I like.

… when – to a shattering chorus of harsh clangs and grinding, strangled creaks, a malfunctioning clock-mechanism amplified a thousand times – the greasy darkness shredded before her like a rotting curtain, revealing the attic all lit up in bilious yellow, except for the quivering shadow of the rope hanging from the apex of the roof, turning slowly, stretched taut.

By something palely shining, the source of all the light, noosed and squirming.

It was not far off 10 p.m., the night sidling in, when Powys drove the Mini between the gateposts of the Court and became instantly aware of the Tump behind the house.

He could not see the Tump, but he saw for the first time that the trees towering over the Court from behind were the trees growing out of its summit.

Once you knew this you could almost see the shadow of the great mound outlined in the Elizabethan stonework of the Court itself; the Tump and house fused into a single…

… entity.

Even as he had that thought, something flared in the house and then went out, like a light-bulb which explodes the second it's switched on. He saw a momentary afterglow in one of the small windows immediately below the eaves.

Maybe Andy's in there. Maybe I can wait behind the door until he comes out. And then I'll start hitting him.

Powys accelerated, drove around the house to the courtyard, parked in front of the stable-block, next to the Range Rover – felt a pang of gratitude when he spotted that, longing to see Rachel again.

The stable door was unlocked; he went in.

'Rachel?'

The place was dim; although it probably faced west, there was little light left in the sky. From here, at the top of the long room, now sectionalized, you looked down towards the big picture-window and the grey and smoky Tump.

'Rachel, luv, you in there?'

Maybe the light, way up in the house, had been her, with a torch. I don't like that. It may not frighten her up there, but it scares the crap out of me.

And why had the torch gone out?

'Rachel!'

He looked around for light switches, found a panel of them behind the door, pressed everything. Concealed lighting came on everywhere without a blink.

On the kitchen table was a scattering of magazines. New Age stuff. And a black leather bag, open. Rachel's bag.

He went outside again, anxiety setting in with the dusk. He looked across at the Court. Soon the sky and the stone would meld and the house would be an amorphous thing balanced on the edge of the night.

Powys moved to the rear entrance, trying not to crunch gravel. He pushed the door, but it didn't give. Locked.

He didn't waste time with it, but followed the walls of the house around to the front and almost cried out when something big and black reared up in his path.

It didn't move. It was a massive rubbish pile, except many of the items on it didn't look like rubbish to Powys, even in his light. Near the top of the heap was an enormous double wardrobe, Victorian Gothic, its top corner projecting sharply out of the pile, as if in protest.

This time Powys tried the front door, and found that it too was locked.

He looked back along the dead straight drive into the wood, straining to the silence. No birds left to sing.

Directly above him, he knew, would be the prospect chamber, set into the highest eaves, the house's only orifice when the doors were locked and barred.

Powys stepped back from the door and shouted as loud as he could up in the direction of the chamber's hidden maw.

'Rachel!'

A moment in a void.

Then he saw a glowing filament of sporadic pale-yellow zig-zagging the length of the eaves, like very feeble lightning.

He heard a scream so high and wild it might have been an animal on the brink of violent death in the woods.

And then a chasm opened under all his senses.

You land with a breathtaking thump on the fairy mound, not hearing the laughter, only aware of the pit beneath you, an endless lift shaft. You're falling, down and down and down, faster and faster, a tiny point of white light far below you… a point of light, which gets no larger the further you fall because what it is… is the light reflecting from a spearhead, dirty and speckled with rust, as you can see quite clearly in the long moments before you feel the tearing agony, watching the spear's shaft disappearing into your stomach in in explosion of blood.

Noooooooooo!'

He staggered frantically but uselessly about, trying to position himself below her, as she plummeted from the prospect chamber like a shot bird, the Barbour billowing out, waxy wings against the leaden sky.

But she crashed down in the only place he could not hope to throw himself in her path, and he actually heard her neck break as it connected with the projecting corner of a Victorian Gothic wardrobe of old, dark wood.

Something came after her – a small, grey-brown wisp of a thing.