Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (53 page)

   
No, it hadn't made any sense,
except in terms of the quantity of blood reaching her dad's brain, and Fay was
resigned to it. With a cold, damp apprehension, she'd accepted there would come
a time when it might be necessary to change the locks on the front door and
deprive him of a key so he wouldn't go out wandering the streets in the early
hours in search of a chip shop or a woman or something.

   
However, there were still times
- like last night - when it might almost be in remission.

   
But last night -
Dad, why is Grace haunting us?
- they'd
parted uncomfortably, Alex mumbling. 'Talk about it in the morning.' The
prospect of him remembering had seemed so remote that even Fay had expunged it
from her memory.

   
Then this morning, she'd come
down just before eight, and there was her dad fishing a slice of bread out of
the toaster with a bent fork and making unflattering observations about the
quality of Taiwanese workmanship.

   
'Been remiss,' he'd mumbled
'Shouldn't have tried to cover up.'

   
'So you burnt the toast again,'
Fay said. 'No big deal, Dad.'
   
'No -
Grace
, you stupid child. I'm trying to say I should have told you
about Grace.'
   
'Oh.'

   
And out it all came, for the
first time, as if the blood supply to his brain had suddenly tripled, making
him more cogent, more aware of his own defects than she could ever remember.
This Wendle woman . . . was it conceivable she'd pulled off some astonishing
medical
coup
here?

   
'Grace . . .' Alex said. 'This
lady with whom I'd had a small dalliance over twenty years earlier, she rather
more serious about it than I. I mean, she really wasn't my type at all, not
like your mother. Grace was a very proper sort of woman, prissy some might
say.'

   
'I never liked to say it
myself, Dad.'

   
'Such a sheltered life, you
see, here in Crybbe. And then the secretarial job with the diocese. I think -
God help me - I think she really believed that having an affair with a
clergyman was somewhat less sinful than having a less . . . er, less physical
relationship with a layman.'

   
'Nearer my God to thee,' Fay
said wryly.

   
'Quite. She was quite
unbearably
understanding when . . . when
your mother found out and threatened to get us all, via the divorce courts,
into the
News of the World
. Tricky
period. Things were quite hairy for a while. But, there we are, it ended
surprisingly amicably. Quite touching, really, at the time.'

   
Fay said, 'You mean she
accepted her martyrdom gracefully, as it were, to save your precious career.'

   
Alex lowered his eyebrows.
'Quite,' he said gruffly. 'Of course I felt sorry for Grace and we kept in
contact - in an entirely platonic way - for many years.'

   
'Even when Mum was alive?'

   
'Platonically, Fay,
platonically. Came back to Crybbe to live with her sister, as you know, then
she died, and Grace was alone, a very aloof, proper little spinster in a tidy
little house. Terribly sad. Do you think I might have another. . . ?'

   
'I'll pour it.'

   
'Thank you. And then, of
course, I had the letter from young Duncan Christie at the cathedral, just
happening to mention Grace was in a pretty depressed state. Not too well,
sister recently dead. Feeling pretty sorry for herself, and with reason. Never
been quite the same since. . . you know. Well . . .'

   
'You've told me this bit A
chance for you to make amends.'
   
'Nemesis, you see. I
had
ruined the poor woman's life, after
all.'

   
'That might be questionable.'

   
Alex shook his head, in a rare
hair-shirt mood. 'And, well, I just happen to turn up there one day, just
passing through, you know. And I just happened to stay. So, after all these
years, Miss Legge finally becomes Mrs Peters - or, as she liked to put it, Mrs
Canon
Peters. And Alex resigns himself
to a year or two of ministering to this rather severe elderly lady, incurably
ill and incurably set in her ways - odd, really, she seemed much older than me,
although she was twenty-odd years younger.'

   
'Yes, but . . .'

   
'I know. I'm coming to it.
Woodstock. Why didn't I sell this place when Grace died and go back to
Woodstock?'

   
'The very question I've been
trying to ask you for months, Dad.'

   
'Er . . . Yes.' Alex slurped
milk into his coffee. Fay looked up as hard rain spots hit the window. The
dried-blood bricks of the houses across the street gleamed drably.

   
'You see, there are things you
don't know about Woodstock. Like the fact that it.er ..well, it wasn't mine to
sell, actually.'

   
Fay closed her eyes.

   
'Still belonged to Charlie
Wharton. I may have conveyed the impression I'd bought it off him. Fact is, I
was only sort of keeping it warm for his retirement, and I was surviving rather
longer than either of us had envisaged. And they were about to boot him cut of
the bishop's palace, you see, so he was pretty anxious to have the place back.
In fact, I, er, well, I might have been facing a spot of legal action to remove
me if I hadn't cleared off when I did. To be honest.'

   
Might have guessed, Fay
thought. Might have bloody guessed.

   
'So what it comes down to,' she
said, smiling icily, 'is that you were rather more anxious to move in with
Grace than she was to have you.'

   
'Well. Until I, er, raised the
possibility of marriage.'
   
Fay nodded, still smiling.

   
'Problem is, as you know, money
and I have never got along terribly well together. Ladies, horses, unwise
investments . . .'

   
Alex stirred his coffee. The
rain came down harder. Fay noticed a damp patch near the kitchen ceiling. It
was getting bigger.

   
'Dad,' she said, 'you are a
total, unmitigated shit.'

   
Alex went on stirring his
coffee and didn't deny it.

   
Fay went to wash the breakfast
dishes, digesting the information and its significance: that her father was not
a wealthy man, that his total assets amounted to little more than a very small
terraced cottage in a back street in Crybbe. A cottage which, even if sold to,
say, Max Goff. would hardly pay a year's rent on a basement room in Battersea.

   
She wondered what kind of
pension he'd got. And if he had debts she knew nothing about.

   
So much to think about that it
seemed silly even to raise the issue. However . . .

   
'You've seen her, haven't you?
Since she died, you've been seeing her.'

   
'Oh, Fay.' Alex rubbed his
eyes. 'This part's so difficult. The past few months - such a blur. I don't
know what I've done, what I've seen. These past couple of days. . . It's as
though I'm waking up. Wendy perhaps, I don't know.'

   
'You know what I'm talking
about, though. Let's not piss about here, Dad. Grace's ghost.'

   
She shivered, just saying the
words, Grace's empty fish-smile in her mind.

   
'I . . . This really is hard.
Especially for me, as a priest. All my life ... so many anomalies. So many
things one can't encompass within the scriptural parameters. That business in Y
Groes a year or two ago. And now young Murray and his evil children.'

   
'You haven't told me about
that
.'

   
'Sworn to silence, child. And,
you see, there's always a rational explanation, always a psychological answer.
Murray rushing ahead with his career in the blissful certainty that a clergyman
can operate more effectively if he
doesn't
believe.'

   
'Sod Murray, Dad . . . Grace.'

   
'You don't, have to bring me
back to the bloody point. I'm not rambling.'
   
'Sorry.'

   
'All right. So I'm guilty of
whatever crime it might be to smooth things out for two elderly folk in a bit
of a mess. The problem is, when Grace popped her clogs rather sooner than
expected, my overwhelming reaction, I'm sorry to say, was one of relief. There
we are. Truth out. I'd got a roof over my head and she wasn't under it any
more. How's that for a Christian attitude?'

   
'Not so deplorable.'

   
'It may not seem deplorable to
you, wretched child, but I wanted to suffer. I
needed
to suffer. I'd been getting away with things all my life and
here I was again landing on my feet.'

   
Fay thought, Christ, what's he
saying? Is he saying that, in his dislocated mental condition, he
created
Grace's ghost, a resentful
avenging presence to remind him of his sins?

   
'And you,' Alex said. 'Why the
devil did you have to come back and look after me? I didn't want to inflict
myself on you. Prissy little Grace didn't want you in her house.'

   
The crux of it. He might be
able to project Grace, like a gruesome magic-lantern slide on his own dusty
mental screen.

   
But you can't make me see her, Dad. You can't do that.

   
How could she tell him what
she'd seen? (Did I really see it?
Did
I see it?) What would
that
do for his
remission?

   
'OK, Dad.' she said. 'Drink
your coffee. I understand. Look, I've missed the news now.'

   
Fay switched on the Panasonic
radio on the kitchen window ledge. She had indeed missed the news and had to
listen to a couple of minutes of sport before the headlines were repeated.

   
'And to recap on today's main story: in Crybbe, police are
investigating the death of a personal assistant to billionaire businessman Max
Goff. The dead woman, thirty-five-year-old Rachel Wade, appeared to have fallen
from a high, window in historic Crybbe Court This a Offa's Dyke Radio News.
Next bulletin: ten o'clock.'

   
For long, long seconds, Fay
didn't move at all. Stood frozen at the sink, a damp dishcloth hanging from one
hand.

   
The kitchen clock, two minutes
fast, said 9.17.

   
Alex, sliding his chair back,
getting to his feet, said, 'How come you didn't pick that one up, Fay?'

   
'I normally make the police
calls before you get up,' Fay said numbly. 'We had breakfast instead. Offa's
Dyke have an early duty reporter, in at half past five.'

   
'Ah.' Alex brought his coffee
cup to the sink. 'Expect you'll be off to find out what happened.' He looked
up, his beard pure white in the dull morning. 'You all right, Fay? How well did
you know this woman?'

   
'Fine, Dad,' said Fay. 'No, I
... I didn't know her very well. Excuse me.'

   
Arnold struggled to his feet to
follow her out of the room fell over again. Fay picked him up and carried him
into the office, her face buried in his fur.

   
As she put him down on the
fireside chair, she caught a glimpse of her own face in the gilt-framed mirror,
a face as pale as dead Grace.

   
Fay picked up the phone, called
the Information Room at Divisional HQ.

   
'Not much we can tell you, I'm
afraid.'

   
'It was an accident, though?'

   
'All I can say is, investigations
are proceeding.'

   
'You mean, it might
not
have been an accident?'

   
'Hang on a minute,' the police
voice said, then she heard, 'Yes, sir, it's Fay Morrison from Offa's Dyke.
Sure, just a sec. Mrs Morrison, the duty inspector would like a word.'

   
'Good morning, Mrs Morrison,
Inspector Waring here, if wonder if you'd be good enough to pop into the police
station at Crybbe, see the Chief Inspector.'

   
'Why?'

   
'Just a few things you might be
able to clear up for us.'
   
'Like what?'

   
'I think I'd rather the chief
told you that, if you don't mind.'