Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (26 page)

   
'Well, we can't stop him. Can't
block market forces, Grandad.'

   
'We can stop him takin' our
town off us to serve his whims!'

   
'And how're we supposed to do
that?'

   
'He wants a public meeting,
we'll give him one.'

   
'What are you savin' here.
Father? Give him a rough time? Let him know he isn't wanted?'

   
Behind the door, Warren began
to seethe. This was fucking typical. Here was Max Goff, biggest bloody
independent record producer in the country, on the verge of signing Fatal
Accident to Epidemic. And these stick-in-the-mud bastards were scheming to get
rid of him.

   
Jonathon was saying, 'See them
stones he had delivered? Bloody great stones, dozens of 'en.'
   
'Building stone?'

   
'No, just great big stones.
Huge buggers. Like Stonehenge, that kind.'

   
Things went quiet, then Warren
heard his grandad say, 'He's oversteppin' the mark. He's got to be stopped.'

   
Warren wanted to strangle the
old git. He wanted to strangle all three of them. Also that fucking radio woman
who'd let it all out and stirred things up. The one who shouted after him
through the hedge that night, called him a wanker.

Every pub they'd tried had stopped serving lunch at two o'clock - so
much for all-day opening - and so they'd wound up at this Little Chef, which
didn't please him. 'Bloody cooking by numbers. Two onion rings, thirty-seven
chips. All this and alcohol-free lager too. And these bloody girls invariably
saying, "Was it all right for you?" as if they're just putting their
knickers back on.'

   
'At least they're there when
you want them,' Fay said. getting back on the A49. 'Would you like to see
Ludlow?'
   
'Like to go home, actually.'
   
'God almighty! What is it about that
place?'
   
'Left my pills there.'

   
'I know you did. But luckily,
I
brought them. What's your next
excuse?'

   
Alex growled. 'Wish I'd had a
son.'

   
'Instead of me, huh?'

   
'Sons don't try to manage you.'

   
'Dad, I want to talk to you.'

   
'Oh God.'

   
'Was that the first time Guy
rang, the other night?'

   
'Hard to say, my dear. Once I
put the phone down I tend to forget all about him. He may have rung earlier.
Does it really matter?'

   
'I don't mean just that night.
Has he rung any other time when I've been out?'

   
'Can't remember. Suppose he
could have done. I didn't think you cared.'

   
'I don't. It's just Guy's
coming down to make a documentary about Max Goff, and I was wondering how he
found out there was something interesting going on. I know you tend to absorb
local gossip like a sponge and then somebody squeezes you a bit and it all comes
out, and then you forget it was ever there.'

   
'You think I told him?'

   
'Did you?'

   
'Did I? God knows. Say anything
to get rid of him. Does it matter?'

   
Fay glanced in her wing mirror
then trod on the brakes and pulled in violently to the side of the road. 'Of
course it bloody matters!'

   
'I think you're overwrought, my
child. You're young. You need a bit of excitement. Bit of stimulation. Country
life doesn't suit you.'

   
'
Crybbe
doesn't suit me.'

   
'So why not simply . . . ?'

   
She said carefully, 'Dad. You
may be right. There may be nothing at all wrong with Crybbe. But, yes, I think
it's time I left. And I think it's time
you
left. You've no reason to stay, you've no roots there, no real friends there.'
   
He said sadly, 'Oh, I have.'

   
He wasn't looking at her. He
was looking straight out at the A49, lorries chugging past.

   
'Who? Murray Beech? He'll be
off, first chance of a bigger parish. He's got nothing to thank Crybbe for -
his fiancée didn't hang around, did she?'

   
'No,' Alex said. 'Not Murray.'

   
'Who then?'

   
He didn't reply.

   
Fay fiddled with the keys in
the ignition. Alex talked to everybody, old vicars never changed. A friend to
everyone, essence of the job. But how many did he really know?

   
'What are you saying, Dad?'

   
'Grace,' he whispered, and Fay
saw the beginning of tears in his old blue eyes.
   
She put a hand on his arm. 'Dad?'

   
'Don't ask me about this. Fay,'
Alex said. 'Please. Just take me home.'

CHAPTER VIII

On top of the Tump it all came clear.
   
You could see over the roofs of the stables
and Crybbe Court itself, which was sunk into a shallow dip. And there, only
just showing above the trees, was the church tower. But then the trees hadn't
always been so high - or even here at all.

   
The church was at the high
point of the town, the main street sloping down to the river. From here you
couldn't see the street or the river - but you
could
see the fields on the opposite bank, rising into hills
thickened now with forestry. And, at one time, before the introduction of the
voracious Sitka Spruce from Alaska, that might have been bare hillside, and
there would have been other markers to pick up the line.

   
Joe Powys looked all around him
and saw how clearly the Tump had been positioned to dominate the town, even the
church, and draw in the landscape like the corners of a handkerchief.

   
That old feeling again, of
being inside an ancient mechanism. At the centre of the wheel.

   
Identifying the line took an
act of imagination because there were no markers any more. But Henry Kettle had
discovered where upright stones had once been aligned to guide the eye from the
Tump to the distant horizons.

   
But there was something about
it that Henry Kettle didn't like.

   
Powys moved away from the
highest point and stood next to a twisted hawthorn tree. The sky was a tense,
luminous grey, swollen like a great water-filled balloon, and he felt that if
it came down low enough to be pricked by the tree's topmost thorns, he'd be
drowned.

   
It was his own fault. Places
like this could ensnare your mind, and your thoughts became tangled up with the
most primitive instincts, old fears lying hidden in the undergrowth like
trailing brambles.

   
As quickly as he could, but
still very carefully, Powys came down from the Tump, climbed over the wall and
didn't look back until he was well into the field, heading towards the road,
where he'd left the Mini. Halfway across the field, there was a bumpy rise, and
it was here that he found the hub-cap.

   
He sat on a hummock with the
disc on his knee. It was muddy and badly rusted, but he could still make out
the symbol in the centre - two letters: VW.

   
'Still the same car. then,
Henry. How old is it now? Twenty-two, twenty-three?'

   
Holding Henry's hub-cap, Powys
looked back at the Tump.
   
I
have always disliked the Tump for some reason. Some places are naturally
negative.

   
Powys thought, sinister bloody
thing that must once have appeared as alien as a gasworks or a nuclear reactor.
He looked down at the wall, realizing that the section he'd climbed over was
just a few yards from the part where the stonework was so obviously scraped,
but hadn't collapsed because it was too hard for that. Harder than the rusting
heap of twenty-year-old tin Henry Kettle drove.

   
From the foot of the wall,
shards of broken glass glimmered like dew in the trodden-down grass.

   
Christ, Henry, how could this
happen?
   
Henry, can you hear me?

   
Although perhaps 'natural' is not the word I want. . . But I am
sure there is a good scientific explanation.

   
You misled us, Henry- nothing
psychic, you kept saying. We should have realized it was just a dirty word to
you, a word for phoney mediums and fortune-tellers at the end of the pier.
Ancient science was your term, because it didn't sound cranky.

   
He could see the tracks now,
grass flattened, lumps of turf wrenched out. The field was unfenced and the car
must have cut across it diagonally, ploughing straight on instead of following
a sharpish left-hand bend in the road.

   
Powys left the metal disc on
the hummock and scrambled up to the road, collecting a hard look from a man driving
a Land Rover pulling a trailer.

   
Now, if Henry was driving out
of town, he'd be pointing straight at the Tump, then the road curved away, then
it was directed towards the Tump again, very briefly, then came the left-hand
bend and you were away into the hills.

   
But Henry never made the
left-hand bend. The car left the road, taking him into the field. He might not
have noticed what he'd done at first, if it was dark. And then the field went
quite suddenly into this slope, and . . . crunch.

   
Not so far-fetched at alt,
really. There'd be an accidental death verdict and nobody would delve any
deeper. All the rest was folklore.

   
He went back into the field,
walked down towards the Tump, skirting its walled-in base, not knowing what he
was hoping for any more.

   
Come on, Henry. Give us a sign.

   
It began to rain. He ran to a
clump of trees to shelter and to watch the Tump, massive, ancient, glowering
through the downpour, as magnificently mysterious as the Great Pyramid.

   
Powys turned away and wandered
among the trees, emerging on the other side into a clearing beside a building
of grey-brown stone.

   
Crybbe Court?

   
No, not the Court itself, the
stable-block - now seriously renovated, he saw. There was an enormous oblong of
glass set in the wall - a huge picture-window, facing the Tump.

   
Behind the building he could
see the corner of a forecourt, where two men stood in the rain looking down on
four long, grey, jagged stones.

   
Powys stiffened.

   
One of the men was dark and
thin and was talking to the other man in a voice which, had he been able to
hear it, would probably have reminded him of a stroked cello.

'Least you can do, mate,'
Andy tells you. 'Look at all the money the book's going to make. Think of it as
a kind of appeasement of the Earth Spirit.'

   
Fiona claps her hands. 'Oh, go on, Joe. We'll all sit here and
chant and clap.'

   
'Bastards.' You look at Rose, who smiles sympathetically.
Reluctantly you stand up, and everybody cheers.

   
Well, everybody except Henry. 'Don't wanna play about with these
old things.' Quaint old Herefordshire countryman.

   
Andy leaning on an elbow. I thought you weren't superstitious,
Henry. Ancient science and all that. Nothing psychic.

   
'Aye, well, electricity's science too, but you wouldn't wanna go
sticking your fingers up a plug socket.'

   
Thankful for his advice, you make as if to sit down.

   
'Not got the bottle for it, Joe?'

   
Ben starts clapping very slowly, and the others - except Henry -
pick up the rhythm. 'Joey goes round the Bottle Stone, the Bottle Stone, the
Bottle Stone . . .'

Crybbe was forty-five minutes away. Minor roads all the once they'd left
the A49. Neither of them spoke; Fay thinking; hard, bringing something into
focus. Something utterly repellent that she hadn't, up to now, allowed herself
to contemplate for longer than a few seconds.