Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (27 page)

   
A woman in a cold miasma,
frigid, rigid, utterly still. Not breathing.
Past
breathing . . . long past.

   
She looked in the driving
mirror, and there was Arnold, the dog, sitting upright on the back seat; their
eyes met in the mirror.

   
You
saw her, Arnold. You saw
something
.
But did
I
?
   
Did I see the ghost of Grace Legge?

   
Ghost. Spirit of the dead. And
yet that image, the Grace thing, surely was without spirit. Static. Frozen. And
the white eyes and that horrible smile with those little, thin fish-teeth.

   
That was her. Her teeth. Tiny
little teeth, and lots of them, discoloured, brittle. The memory you always
carried away, of Grace's fixed smile, with all those little teeth.

   
She'd been nothing to Fay, just
Dad's Other Woman. No, not exactly nothing. Twenty years ago, she'd been
something on the negative side of nothing. Somebody Fay had blamed - to
herself, for she'd never spoken of it, not to anyone - for her mother's death. And
she'd blamed her father, too. Perhaps this was why, even now, she could not
quite love him - terrible admission.

   
She had, naturally, tried hard
for both of them when she came down for the wedding. Water under the bridge. An
old man's fumbling attempts to make amends and a very sick woman who deserved
what bit of happiness remained for her.

   
Perhaps her dad thought he'd
killed them both. Both his wives.

   
Compassion rising, Fay glanced
sideways at Alex, sitting there with his old green cardigan unbuttoned and ATE
USH in fading lettering across his chest.

   
What this was about -
had
to be - was that he, too, had seen
something in the night.

   
And what must that be like for
an old man who could no longer trust his own mind or even his memories? If she
wasn't sure what she'd seen - or even if she'd seen anything - what must it be
like for him?

   
Fay clinched the steering wheel
lightly, and goose pimples rippled up both arms.

   
That's
why you can't leave, Dad. You've seen something that none of
your clerical experience could ever prepare you for. You're afraid that somehow
she's still there, in the house you shared.

   
And you're not going to walk
out on her again.

Henry Kettle had written.

   
It is very peculiar that there should have been so many big
stones in such a small area.

   
Long after Andy and the other
man had walked away Powys still stood silently under the dripping trees,
staring in fascination at the recumbent stones in the corner of the courtyard.

   
Megaliths.

   
And Andy Boulton-Trow, whom
Powys hadn't seen for twelve years. Designer of the cover of
The Old Golden Land.
Painter of stones,
sculptor of stones, collector of stone-lore.

   
The stones lay there, gleaming
with fresh rain. Old stones,' or new stones? Did it matter; one stone was as
old as another.

   
Stones didn't speak to him the
way they spoke to Henry Kettle, but he was getting the idea. Max Goff,
presumably, intended to place new stones in the spots identified by Henry.

   
And the obvious man to select
and shape the stones - an act of love - was Andy Boulton-Trow, who knew more
about the nature of megaliths than anyone in Europe. Powys had met Andy at art
college, to which Andy had come
after
university to learn about painting and sculpture . . . with specific regard to
stone.

   
From beyond the courtyard, he
heard an engine start, a vehicle moving away.

   
Then all was quiet, even the
rain had ceased.

   
Powys slid from the trees and
made his way around the side of the stone stable-building to the comer of the
courtyard where the stones lay.

Fay drove into Crybbe from the Ludlow road. The windscreen wipers
squeaked as the rain eased off.

   
She thought. We're never going
to be able to talk about this, are we, Dad? Not for as long as you live.

   
She stopped in front of the
house to let him out. 'Thank you,' he said, not looking at her, it's been ... a
pleasant day, hasn't it?'

   
'I'll put the car away. You
stay here, Arnold.'

   
She backed the car into the
entry, a little tunnel affair in the terrace, parking too close to the wall;
there was only just room to squeeze out. 'Come on, Arnold.'

   
Alex was waiting for them at
the back door. His face was grave but his blue eyes were flecked - as they
often were now - with a flickering confusion.

   
'Got the tea on. Dad?'

   
'Fay . . '. I . .

   
He turned and walked into the
kitchen. The kettle was not even plugged in.
   
'Fay . . .'
   
'Dad?'

He walked through the kitchen, into the hall, Fay following, Arnold
trolling behind. At the door of the office, Grace's sitting-room, he stood to
one side to let her pass.

   
'I'm so sorry,' he said.

   
At first she couldn't see what
he meant. The clock was still clicking away on the mantelpiece, the fireside
chair still piled high with box files.

   
'The back door was open,' Alex
said. 'Forced.'
   
She saw.

   
They must have used a
sledgehammer or a heavy axe because it was a tough machine, with a metal top.

   
'Why?' Fay felt ravaged. Cold
and hollow and hurting like a rape victim. 'For God's sake,
why
?'

   
Her beloved Revox - night-time
comfort with its swishing spools and soft-glowing level-meters - had been
smashed to pieces, disembowelled.

   
A few hundred yards of tape had
been unspooled and mixed up with the innards, and the detritus was splattered
over the floor like a mound of spaghetti.

CHAPTER IX

The women who had, in recent years, been powerfully attracted to Joe
Powys had tended to wear long, hand-dyed skirts and shapeless woollies.
Sometimes they had frizzy hair and sometimes long, tangled hair. Sometimes they
were big-breasted earth-mother types and sometimes small-boned and delicate
like Arthur Rackham fairies.

   
Sometimes, when Powys
fantasized - which was worryingly rarely, these days - he imagined having, as
he put it to himself, a bit of smooth. Someone scented. Someone who shaved her
armpits. Someone who would actually refuse to trek across three miles of
moorland to find some tiny, ruined stone circle you practically had to dig out
of the heather. Someone you could never imagine standing in the middle of this half-submerged
circle and breathing, 'Oh, I mean, gosh, can't you feel it . . .can't you feel
that primal force?'

   
The woman facing him now, he
could tell, was the kind who'd rather see Stonehenge itself as a blur in the
window of a fast car heading towards a costly dinner in Salisbury.

   
But even if she'd been wearing
a home-made ankle-length skirt with a hemline of mud, clumpy sandals and big
wooden ear-rings, he would, at this moment, have been more than grateful to see
her.

   
She said, 'I think you could let
him go now, Humble. He really doesn't look very dangerous.'

   
'Find out who he is first,'
said the hard-faced bastard with a grip like a monkey-wrench, the guy he'd
first seen frowning at him through the window of a Land Rover when he was
checking out the Tump.

   
He made Powys bend over the
vehicle's high bonnet, which tossed another pain-ball into his stomach.

   
This man had punched him in the
guts with a considered precision and such penetration that he was seriously
worried about internal bleeding.

   
'Ta very much.' Deftly removing
Powys's wallet from the inside pocket of his muddied jacket. Not a local
accent; this was London.

   
'If this is a mugging,' Powys
said awkwardly, face squashed into the bonnet, 'you could be . . .'

   
'Fucking shut it.' His nose crunched
into the metal, Powys felt blood come.

   
'Don't even twitch, pal, OK?'
   
'Mmmph.'

   
'Right, then, I'm going to have
a little butcher's through here, see what you got by way of ID, all right?'

   
'Humble, if you don't let him
go I'm going to call the police.'

   
'Rachel, you do your job, I do
mine. Our friend here don't want that. Ask him. Ask him what he was doing on
private property. Ain't a poacher. Ain't got the bottle.'

   
He cringed, expecting Humble to
tap him in the guts again to prove his point. But the pressure eased and he was
allowed to stand. His nose felt wet, but he didn't think it was broken. He
looked at the woman, who must be close to his own age, had light, mid-length
hair and calm eyes. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Humble's used to dealing with the
more urban type of trespasser.'

   
'Trespasser?' Powys wiped off
some blood with the back of a hand. 'Now, look . . . You tell this bloody
psycho . . .' He stopped. What could she tell him? He wondered where Andy
Boulton-Trow had vanished to.

   
'All right now, are we?'
Dipping into Powys's wallet, Humble smiled with the lower half of a face which
had all the personality of a mousetrap. He pulled out a plastic-covered driving
licence and handed it to the woman. She took it from him reluctantly. Opened it
out. Gave a little gasp.

   
'Oh dear,' she said.

   
'Yeah, don't tell me. One of
Max's bits of fluff.' Humble smirked, in which case, no problems, he'll have
been enjoying himself.'

   
Rachel closed the licence and
held out her hand for the wallet. Very carefully she put the licence back, then
she handed the wallet to Powys.

   
'Not entirely accurate,
Humble,' she said. 'And when he hears about this, Max, I suspect, is going to
have you strung up by the balls.'

Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley was shaking his great turnip head.
'Mindless.'

   
'Mindless?' said Fay. 'You
think it's
mindless?
'

   
'We always prided ourselves,' Wynford
said, thick blue legs astride the wreckage. 'Never suffered from no vandalism
in this town. Not to any great extent, anyhow.'

   
Only vandalism by neglect, Fay
thought dully. She wondered why she'd bothered to call the police now. Wynford
was just so sinister - like one of those mean-eyed, redneck police chiefs you
saw in moody American movies set in semi-derelict, one-street, wooden towns in
the Midwest.

   
'Think somebody would've seen
'em, though.' The gap narrowed between Wynford's little round eyes. ' 'Course,
Mrs Lloyd next door, deaf as a post, see. Knock on the door, she don't answer.
You got to put your face up to the window.'

   
Fay imagined Wynford's face,
flattened by glass. Give the poor old girl a heart attack.

   
He said, 'Scene-of-crime boy'll
be over later, with his box of tricks. I'll knock on a few doors along the
street, see what I can turn up.'

   
He paused in the doorway,
looked back at the wreckage. 'Mindless,' he said.

   
Fay turned to her dad for
support, but Alex, gazing down his beard at the Revox ruins, had nothing to
say.

   
'Doesn't it strike you as odd,'
Fay said clinically, 'that this tornado of savagery appears somehow to have focused
itself on one single item? I'm no criminologist, but I've witnessed my share of
antisocial behaviour, and this, Sergeant, is not what I'd call mindless.
Psychopathic, perhaps, but mindless in the sense of randomly destructive, no.'

   
Wynford's big, round face was
changing colour. Nobody, she thought, contradicts Chief Wiley on his own manor.