Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (58 page)

   
So I'm free. Fay thought
bitterly. Free as a bloody bird.

   
As if he were watching the same
movie, Powys said, 'If I killed her, why would I report it?'

   
'Why did you?'

   
'Had to get an ambulance. There
might have been a chance.
   
'Did she . . . ? Oh God, did she die
instantly?'
   
'I heard it, you know, snap. Her neck.'

   
She thought his voice was going
to snap too and tried not to react. 'What were you doing there, anyway? How
come you happened to be under the window when she fell?'

   
'Still don't know how much of
that was coincidence. Don't know if she saw me. If she was trying to attract my
attention and fell against the bar. But she didn't call out to me. She just
screamed. As if she was screaming at something inside the house.'

   
'And couldn't she get out? The
house was locked up with her in it?'

   
'It was locked when I tried the
doors. It wasn't when the police got there. So they say. Work that one out.'

   
'So she was killed by somebody
in the house . . .
If
she was killed.
Humble?'

   
'Well, they didn't like each
other. But that doesn't explain the light. Doesn't really explain the cat
either.'

   
'Maybe Rachel was holding the
cat, for some reason, and it took longer to reach the ground because there was
no weight left in it. Joe, I have to ask you this . . . What exactly were you
doing at the Court?'

   
'Told the cops I was looking
for Rachel. I think I was really looking for Andy. Oh God . . .' He sighed.
'What happened was he'd planted a stone outside the cottage, an exact replica
of a thing that's been hanging over me for years.'

   
'A stone?'

   
'The Bottle Stone. Do you want
to know this? It'll be the first time I've talked about it to anybody. Apart
from the people there.'

   
'Do you want to tell me?'

   
'I don't know . . . OK.
Yeah."

   
He fell silent.

   
'What do you want?" Fay
said. 'A drum roll?'

   
'Sorry. OK. It goes back over
twelve years. To the Moot.'

   
'The Moot," Fay said
solemnly.

   
'It's organized every year by
The Ley-Hunter
magazine. It's a
gathering of earth-mysteries freaks from all over the place. We meet every year
in a different town to discuss the latest theories and walk the local leys.'

   
'I bet you all have dowsing
rods and woolly hats.'
   
'You've been to one?'

   
Fay laughed. It sounded very
strange, laughter, today.

   
'This particular year,' Powys
said, 'it was in Hereford. Birthplace of Alfred Watkins. Everybody was amazed
there wasn't a statue - nothing at all in the town to commemorate him, which is
how I came to establish Trackways a couple of years later. But, anyway, all the
big names in earth mysteries were there. And we were all there too. Rose and
me. Andy. Ben Corby, who was at college with us, bit of a wheeler-dealer, the
guy who actually managed to sell
Golden
Land
to a publisher. And Henry Kettle, of course. We knew there was a deal
coming through, and on the Monday morning after the Moot, before we all set off
for home, Ben rang the publishers and learned they'd flogged the paperback
rights for ten thousand quid.'

   
Powys smiled. 'Bloody fortune.
Well, it was a nice day, so we decided, Rose and I, to invite the others - the
people who'd been in on the book from the beginning - to come out for a
celebratory picnic. We wondered where we could go within reach of Hereford.
Then Andy said, "Listen," he said, "I know this place . . .'

She looked out through the side window of the Mini. She didn't recognize
the country. One hill made a kind of plateau. She counted along the top - like
tiny ornaments on a green baize mantelpiece - three mounds, little tumps. A
thin river was woven into the wide valley bottom.

   
Powys was dizzily swivelling
his head. 'Somewhere here . . .'

   
The third mound had a cleft in
it, like an upturned vulva.
   
'Yes,' he said. 'Yes.' He hit the
brakes, pulled into the side of the road. 'It was down there.'
   
'The Bottle Stone?'
   
Powys nodded.

   
'Let me get this right,' Fay
said. 'This . . . legend, whatever it was . . .'

   
'It's a common enough ritual,
I've found out since. It can be a stone or a statue or even a tree - yew trees
are favourites for it. You walk around it, usually anticlockwise, a specific
number of times - thirteen isn't uncommon. And then you have an experience, a
vision or whatever. There's a church in south Herefordshire where, if you do
it, you're supposed to see the Devil.'

   
'But you didn't see anything
like that?'

   
'No, just this sensation of
plunging into a pit and becoming . . . impaled. And there was nothing ethereal
about it, I can feel it now, ripping through the tissue, blood spurting out. .
.'

   
'Yes, thank you, I get the
picture.'

   
'But it happened to
me
. That was the point. No indication of
any danger to Rose.'
   
'Was she unhappy?'

   
'Not at all. That day at the
Bottle Stone, she was very happy. That's what's so agonizing. I've had twelve
years to get over it ... I can't. If I could make sense of it . . . but I
can't.'

   
'And it was . . . how long,
before ... she fell?'

   
'Not quite two weeks. OK, thirteen
days.'

   
'Hmm.' Fay's fingers were
entwined in the fur around Arnold's ears. 'Was .. . was she unhappy at all
afterwards?
 
I mean, pregnant women . .
.'

   
'It was at a very early stage.
I don't even know if it had been officially confirmed.'

   
'She hadn't told you?'

   
Powys shook his head. 'The post
mortem report - that was the first I knew about it.'

   
'So this experience you had on
the so-called fairy mound . .
.
What are your feelings
about that? Do you feel you were being given a warning, that there was
something you should have realized?'

   
Powys said, 'You're
interviewing me, aren't you? I can spot the inflection.'

   
'Oh God, I'm sorry, Joe. Force
of habit. How about if I try and make the questions less articulate?'

   
'No, carry on. At least it's
more civilized than the cops. No, it didn't make any sense. Any more than the
average nightmare.'

   
'And you told Rose?'

   
'No.'

   
'Why not?'

   
'Because it had been such a
nice day up to then. Because the future looked so bright. Because I didn't want
to cast a pall. I just said when they dumped me on the mound I must have
fainted. I said I was very dizzy. I did tell Andy about it after . . . after
Rose died.'

   
'And what did he say?'
   
'He said I should have told Rose.'
   
'That was tactful of him.'

   
'And what do
you
think, Fay? What do you think I
should have done?'

   
'What about Henry Kettle. What
did
he
say?'

   
'He wanted nothing to do with
it. He used to say this kind of thing was like putting your fingers in a plug
socket.'

   
Fay glanced at him quickly,
uneasily, over Arnold's ears. Was it possible that Joe Powys was indeed insane?
Or, worse perhaps, was it possible he was
sane
?

   
He was hunched over the
steering wheel. 'Oh, Fay, how could I have killed Rachel?'

   
He looked at her. 'I'm not
saying I was in love with her. We'd only known each other a couple of days,
but. . .'

   
She looked up into the hills,
all the little tumps laid out neatly.

   
He said, 'Think Arnold can
manage a walk?'
   
Arnold struggled to his feet on Fay's
knee.
   
'He obviously thinks so,' Fay said.
'Come on, then. Let's go and find the Bottle Stone.'

Max began to breathe hard.

   
It was astonishing.

   
'Take me over again, Mel,' Max
said. 'Then maybe we'll get Guy Morrison and his crew to come up with you. We
have to have pictures of this. For the record.'

   
He leaned forward, thoughts of
Rachel's death blown away by all this magic.

   
Melvyn, his helicopter pilot,
took them over the town again making a wide sweep of the valley. Max counted
six standing stones - first time round he'd missed the one by J. M. Powys's
cottage near the river.

   
He couldn't believe it. A week
ago Crybbe was scattered . . . random, like somebody'd crapped it out and
walked away. Now it had form and subtle harmonies, like a crystal. It had been
earthed.

   
He could spot, clear as if it
had been blasted in with a giant aerosol paint-spray, the main line coming off
the Tump. It cut through the Court, cleaved a path through the woods until it
came to a small clearing, and in the centre of this clearing, surrounded by
tree stumps and chain-sawed branches, there was a tall stone, thin and sharp as
a nail from up here.

   
Lucky he owned the wood. Lucky,
also, that nobody in Crybbe seemed to give a shit about tree conservation.

   
Nice work, Andy.

   
Andy. Such a plain and simple
user-friendly name. But the thought of Andy made him shiver, and he liked to
shiver.

   
The line eased out of the wood,
across the graveyard and sliced into the church, clean down the centre of the
tower. Then it ploughed across the square and hit this building.

   
Which building?

   
Go in a bit, Mel.'

   
The helicopter banked, and Max
looked back. Shit, it was the Cock, he'd never realized the line cut through
the pub . . . the pub he'd known intuitively he had to buy. Maybe, sleeping
there in that crummy room, he'd picked up the flow. These things happened when
you were keyed into the system.

   
His thoughts came back to
Rachel. Who, for once, had not been keyed in. Who hadn't known how to handle
country people. Who hadn't believed in the Crybbe project, hadn't believed in
much.

   
Should he feel any kind of
guilt here? Leaving her to handle things while he was in London, knowing she
was out of sympathy with the whole deal?

   
'OK, Max?'

   
'Yeah, sure, Mel. Take us in.'

   
Thrown out on the fucking
rubbish heap - like the Court itself didn't want anybody in there hostile to
the project. Rough justice. Jeez.

   
Was this fanciful, or what?

   
What he'd do, he'd have some
kind of memorial to Rachel fashioned in stone. A plaque on a gate or a stile
along the ley-walk, well away from the Court. Couldn't have people staring up
at the prospect chamber - 'Yeah, this was where that woman took a dive, just
here.'

   
But accidents were bad news.
First thing, he'd need to have that cross-bar replaced, arrange things so the
whole room was sealed off until it was fully safe.

   
They cleared the river and
headed back over the town towards the Court. The other leys were not so obvious
as the big one down the middle; this was because fewer than half the new stones
were in place, several farmers refusing to give permission until after the
public meeting. Or, more likely, they were holding out to see how keen he was,
how much he was prepared to pay. Yeah, he could relate to that.

   
Cars in the courtyard. People
waiting for him. Press conference scheduled for 5 p.m.

   
He looked at his Rolex. It was
11.15. Time to find out precisely what had happened. Talk to the police before
he faced the newsmen and the TV crews, whose main question would be this: