Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (17 page)

   
And the doors began quietly to
close, one by one, in muted clicks and snaps.

   
By which time Fay was down on
her knees, clutching Arnold to her breast, squeezing his ridiculous ears,
warming her bare arms in his fur.

   
Finding she was trembling.

   
Jack Preece came out of the
church and walked away in the direction of the Cock, without looking at them.

CHAPTER IX

Grace's house was just an ordinary cottage in a terraced row which, for
some reason, began in stone and ended in brick. Fay could pick it out easily
because it was the only one in the row with a hanging basket over the front
door. As hanging baskets went, this one wasn't subtle; she kept it bursting
with large, vulgar blooms and watered them assiduously because this hanging basket
was a symbol of something she was trying to say to Crybbe.

   
There was no light and no sound
from inside, and she thought at first there must have been another blasted
power cut. Then a light blinked on and off next door, and she heard a television
from somewhere.

   
'He's gone to the pub,' she
told Arnold. Most nights her dad would stroll over to the Cock for a couple of
whiskies and one of their greasy bar-snacks.

   
She would wait up for him. Because
tonight they were going to have this thing out. By the end of the week, no
argument, there was going to be a 'For Sale' sign next to the hanging basket.
And she would start work on the Goff documentary, which Radio Four were
definitely
going to commission. And Offa's
Dyke Radio, the Voice of the Marches, could start looking for another stringer
to justify the Crybbe Unattended.

   
But when Fay marched into the
office, she found a note on her editing table informing her that Canon Alex
Peters had escaped to bed.

Not feeling terrifically
well, to be honest. Having an early
night, OK? So if you must have that dog in the house,
keep the bugger quiet!

   
Fay smiled - she knew he'd come
around - then frowned at the postscript.

Oh yes, Guy rang. Wants you
to ring him back.

   
Bloody Guy. Did she really need
this on top of everything?

   
She turned the note over in
case there was an addendum
re
Guy.
Eight years ago, her dad had been the only person with the perception to warn
her off, everyone else having congratulated her, in some kind of awe, before
they'd even met Guy in the flesh - one friend (you never forgot remarks like
this) saying, '
You
. . . You and
Guy Morrison
'

   
Never mind. All in the past. Especially
Guy.

   
No regrets?

   
You had to be kidding.

   
Except he
would
keep phoning. As if she were just another one of his contacts
-
Oh, hey, listen, I'm going to be in
your part of the world next week. Buy you a drink?

   
Fay sat down at the editing
table. Rachel had drunk most of the wine with no discernible effects, while Fay
had consumed less than a third of the bottle and now the room was sliding about.
In the light from the Anglepoise it still looked very Grace, this room: H-shaped
tiled fireplace and, above it, an oval mirror in a thick gilt frame. On the
mantelpiece was a clock with a glass case revealing a mechanism which looked
like a pair of swinging testicles in brass.

   
This room - the whole house -
was frozen in time, in a none-too-stylish era. Round about the time, in fact,
when Fay's dad had split up with Grace and returned to her mother. It was as if
Grace had given up after that - certainly she hadn't married until the Canon
had come back into her life. She seemed to have lived quietly in Crybbe with her
sister, until the sister died. Worked quietly in the library.

   
A quiet woman. A Crybbe woman.
As Fay understood it, she'd been working in Hereford, for the diocese, when
she'd had her fling with Alex.

   
'How could she come back here''
Fay said aloud, and picked up the phone to call Guy. Then put it back. She'd
caught sight of Arnold, who was looking up at her in his unassuming way, one
ear pricked, the other flopped over.

   
'Arnold, I'm sorry . . . What
do you feel like for dinner?'

   
He may have wagged his tail,
but she couldn't be sure, it was that kind of tail.

   
The kitchen had knotty-pine
cupboards and pink-veined imitation-marble worktops, one of which bore her
dad's beloved microwave. Arnold accepted stewed steak from a can, served on one
of Grace's best china plates. When he'd finished. Fay let him out in the small back
garden, where it was almost fully dark. There was no sign of Rasputin or
Pushkin, his lieutenant. They'd be out hunting in the endless fields beyond the
garden fence.

   
And in this pursuit they were
obviously not alone. Somewhere out there a light-ball bobbed, possibly
following the line of a hedge which was said to mark the old border between Wales
and England. (Nobody in this town ever spoke of being English or Welsh because,
at various times in its undistinguished history, Crybbe had been in both countries.)

   
Fay watched the light for
several minutes, listening. Illegal badger-digging was, she'd heard, one of the
less-publicized local recreations. Nasty, vicious, cruel. But nobody had ever
been prosecuted locally. She'd often wondered how Sergeant Wynford Wiley would react
if she rang him up one night and directed him to a spot where it was actually
taking place: spurts of squealing, scuffling and snuffling as the terriers were
sent into the soil to rip the badgers from their set. There was a man who kept
a pack of terriers on a farm two or three miles away, ostensibly for hunting
foxes. Fay wished she could nail the swine.

   
But she suspected that, even if
it was three o'clock in the morning when she rang, Wynford would claim a prior
appointment.

   
The countryside. Where so many
pastimes were sour and furtive. And tolerated.

   
Arnold trotted in from the
garden.

   
Fay was very tired. She laid
out a thick mat under her editing table and folded an old blanket on top it. 'I
don't know what you're used to, Arnold, but the management will listen sympathetically
to any complaints in the morning.'

   
Arnold sat quietly next to the
mat. Apart from the episode in the square, he hadn't seemed a very
demonstrative dog.

   
Fay brought him a bowl of
water. 'I'm going to shut you in, Arnold. Because of the cats. OK?'

   
She scribbled a note to pin on
the door, telling her father not to go into the office, if, as happened
occasionally, he couldn't sleep and came down.
And don't let any CATS in there!

   
Then she went to bed.

She never put on the bedroom light; the room looked squalid enough by
daylight. It was almost as claustrophobic as the Crybbe Unattended Studio, and
its wallpaper had faded to brown. Fay would have redecorated the place, but she
wasn't staying, was she?

   
They
weren't staying.

   
The bathroom had been
modernized, with characteristic taste. A bath, shower and washbasin in livid
pink and black.
   
Fay washed.

   
She looked in the mirror as she
wiped the face people had been amazed at Guy Morrison falling for.

   
Guy used to say she should
spell her name F-e-y, because she looked like a naughty elf. It had seemed like
a kind of compliment at the time - she used to be naive like that. Especially
where Guy was concerned.

   
And she wasn't going to waste
any time speculating about what Guy might want, because the answer was no.

   
Snapping off the bathroom
light, she found her way back to bed by the diffused rays of the midsummer moon
- very nearly full, but trapped like a big silver pickled onion in a cloud
sandwich.

   
She lay awake for a long time
in her single divan, thinking about the curfew and the furtive figure in the
hedge, about Henry Kettle and Arnold and the wall. Splat.

   
Horrible.

   
How did it happen? There'd be a
post-mortem, forensic tests and an inquest, but only Arnold would ever really
know, and he was only a dog.

   
' . . .
You'll get that dog out of yere . .
. '

   
Very sympathetic people in
Crybbe. Very caring. Wonderful, warm-hearted country folk.

   
Miserable bastards.

   
Eventually, Fay fell asleep with
the moon in her eyes - she awoke briefly and saw it, all the clouds gone, and
she remembered that sleeping with direct moonlight on your face was supposed to
send you mad. She giggled at that and went back to sleep and dreamed a midsummer
night's dream in which she was lying in bed and Arnold was howling downstairs.

Oh no!

   
Fay flung the covers aside and
sat up in bed.
   
Arnold's howling seemed to filter up
from below, like slivers of light coming up through the cracks in the
floorboards. It probably would be even louder from the Canon's bedroom, which
was directly over the office.

   
She got out of bed and crept to
the top of the stairs, hissing, 'Shut it, Arnold, for God's sake!'

   
Bare-footed, Fay moved downstairs.
It was bloody chilly for a midsummer's night, especially when you were wearing
nothing but a long T-shirt with several holes in it.

   
At the bottom of the stairs she
stopped and turned back, picking up what she hoped was the sound of her dad's
snoring. She ran a hand over the wall in search of the light switch, but when
she found it and pressed, nothing happened. Everything Hereward Newsome had ever
said about those cretins at the electricity company was dead right.

   
When she opened the office
door, Arnold shot out and she caught him and he leapt into her arms and licked
her face. 'Don't try and get round me,' she whispered. 'You are not
sleeping on my bed.'

   
But when she carried him back
into the office, he whimpered and jumped out of her arms and she went back and
found him standing by the front door, ears down, tail down, quivering.

   
'Oh, Arnold . . .'

   
Did dogs have nightmares? Had
he been reliving last night: an almighty crunch, an explosion of glass, his
master's head in a shower of blood?

   
'I know, Arnold.' Patting him.
'I know.' His coat felt matted, almost damp. Did dogs sweat?

   
Christ, he couldn't be
bleeding, could he? She picked him up and lugged him back into the office,
automatically tipping the light switch by the door.

   
Damn! Damn! Damn!

   
'Arnold!' He'd squirmed out of
her arms again and run away into the hall.

   
Fay clutched helplessly at the
air. Torch . . . Candle . . Anything. God, it was cold. Moonlight was sprinkled
over the room, like frost. The light twinkled on the twisting testicular mechanism
of the clock on the mantelpiece, fingered the mirror's ornate, gilt frame,
quietly highlighting everything that was part of
then,
while the now things, the trestle editing table and the Revox
were screened by shadow. As though in another dimension.

   
Everything was utterly still.

   
Get me, she thought, out of here.
Out of this sad, forsaken house, out of this fossilized town.

   
Then a sudden, most unearthly
sound uncurled from the fireplace. Like a baby's cry of joy, but also, she
thought, startled and shivering, also like an owl descending delightedly on its
prey.

   
It came again and it sang with
an unholy pleasure and she saw Rasputin sitting massively in the hearth like an
Egyptian temple cat on a sarcophagus.

   
Rasputin's emerald eyes
suddenly flared, and he sprang.

   
Fay gasped and went backwards,
clutching at the wall involuntarily closing her eyes against imagined flashing
claws.