Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (36 page)

   
'What's going on over there?'
She had a Midlands accent.
   
'They're pulling down the wall around
the mound.'
   
'Why are they doing that?'

   
Did she really want to know
this? 'Well, because it's a bit ugly. And out of period with the Tump. That's
what they say.'

   
'I'll tell you one thing, dear,
that wall's never as ugly as the thing in the middle. I don't like that thing,
I don't at all. My husband, he used to say, when he was alive, he used to say
he'd seen prettier spoil-heaps.'

   
'He had a point,' Powys said,
opening the driver's door.

   
'I'm on me own now, dear. It
frightens me, the things that go on. I'd leave tomorrow, but I wouldn't
anywhere near get our money back on this place, not the way the market is. It
wouldn't buy me a maisonette in Dudley.'

   
Powys closed the car door and
walked over.

   
'What did you mean, it
frightens you?'

   
'You from the local paper,
dear?'

   
'No, I'm . . .'

   
A shopkeeper.

   
'I'm a writer. My name's Joe
Powys.'

   
'I've never heard of you, my
love, but don't take it to heart. Mrs Seagrove, Minnie Seagrove. Would you like
a cup of tea? I'm always making lea for people in that layby. Lorry drivers,
all sorts.'

   
'I won't put you to that kind
of trouble,' said Powys. 'But I
would
like to know what, specifically, frightens you about that mound?'

   
Mrs Seagrove smiled coyly.
'You'll think I'm daft. That girl from the local radio thinks I'm daft. I ring
her sometimes, when it gets on top of me, the things that go on.'

   
'What things are those? I'll
tell you honestly, Mrs Seagrove, I'm the last person who's going to think
you're daft.'

Following the river. Fay walked Arnold down the field, towards the
bridge, close to where she and Rachel had gone with the bottle of wine on a
sunny afternoon that seemed like weeks and weeks ago.

   
It was one of Fay's 'thinking'
walks. She wanted, as someone once said, to be alone.

   
Before leaving, she'd pored
over some of the books in her small 'local' collection - Howse's
History of Radnorshire
, Ella Mary
Leather's
The Folklore of Herefordshire
,
Jacqueline Simpson's
The Folklore of the
Welsh Border
. Not quite sure what she was looking for.

   
Anything to do with dogs,
really. Dogs and bells.

   
There'd been separate entries
on both. Two books referred to the Crybbe curfew, one of only a handful still
sounded in British towns - purely tradition - with two of them along the Welsh
border. There was all the usual stuff about the bequest of Percy Weale, wealthy
sixteenth-century wool merchant, to safeguard the moral welfare of the town.
One book briefly mentioned the Preece family as custodian of the tradition.

   
Fay untied Arnold's clothes-line.
He snuffled around on the riverbank, going quite close to the water but never
getting his paws wet. Interested in something. Perhaps there were otters. The
river looked fat, well-fed by rain.

   
Not raining now, but it
probably would before nightfall, the clouds moving in together like a street
gang, heavy with menace.

   
It was only since coming to
Crybbe that Fay had begun to regard intangibles like the sky, the atmosphere,
climatic changes as . . . what? Manifestations of the earth's mood?

   
Or something more personal.
Like when a mist seemed to cling to you, throwing out nebulous tentacles, as if
you and it . . . as if it
knew
you.

   
And the atmosphere hereabouts -
threatening or blandly indifferent - was not an expression of the earth's mood
so much as . . . She stopped and stared across the darkening river at the
huddle of Crybbe.

   
Not the earth's mood, but . . .
the
town's
mood.

   
This thought came at the same
moment as the shot.

   
Fay whirled.

   
The riverside field was empty,
the clouds united overhead, thick and solid as a gravestone. There were no more
shots and no echo, as if the atmosphere had absorbed the shock, like a cushion.

   
Everything still, the field
unruffled, except for a patch of black and white - and now red - that pulsed
and throbbed maybe twenty yards from Fay.

   
'Arnold?' she said faintly.
'Arnold?'

CHAPTER VI

From where Rachel was standing. Max Goff, arms folded, resembled an
enormous white mushroom on the Tump.
   
In tones which, roughed by the
speakers, didn't sound as reverent as they were perhaps intended to, Goff paid
a brief tribute to Henry Kettle, said to be among the three finest dowsers in
the country, killed when his car crashed into the obscene Victorian wall built
around this very mound.

   
'No way we can know what went
through Mr Kettle's head in those final moments. But I guess there was a kind
of tragic poetry to his death.'

   
Rachel closed her eyes in
anguish.

   
'And his death . . . began a
minor but significant preliminary task which I intend to complete today.'

   
Max paused, looked down at his
feet, looked up again. The cameraman could be seen zooming in tight on his
face.

   
'The Victorians had scant
respect for their heritage. They regarded our most ancient burial mounds as
unsightly heaps which could be plundered at will in search of treasure. And to
emphasize what they believed to be their dominance over the landscape and over
history itself, they liked to build walls around things. Maybe they had a sense
of the awesome terrestrial energy accumulating here. Maybe they felt threatened.
Maybe they wanted to contain it.'

   
Or maybe they didn't fool
themselves it even existed, Rachel thought cynically.

   
'But whatever their intention.'
Goff began to raise his voice. 'This wall remains a denial. A denial of the
Earth Spirit.'

   
He lifted an arm, fist
clenched.

   
'And this wall has to come down
as a first symbolic act in the regeneration of Crybbe.'

   
People clapped. That is, Rachel
noticed, members of the New Age community clapped, raggedly.

   
'Only it won't be coming down
today,' Humble said.

   
Rachel's eyes snapped open.

   
'We got a problem, Rachel. This
is Mr Parry. The bulldozer man.'

   
A little man in wire-rimmed
glasses stuck out a speckled brown hand. 'Gomer Parry' Plant Hire.'

   
'How do you do,' said Rachel
suspiciously. 'Shouldn't you be down there with your machine?'

   
'Ah, well. Bit of a
miscalculation, see,' said Gomer Parry. 'What it needs is a bigger bulldozer.
See, even if I hits him high as I can reach, that wall, he'll crash back on me,
sure to. Dangerous, see.'

   
'Dangerous,' Rachel repeated,
unbelieving.
   
'Oh hell, aye.'

   
'OK. So if it needs a bigger
bulldozer,' Rachel said carefully, 'then get a bigger bulldozer.'

   
'That,' said Gomer Parry, 'is,
I'm afraid, the biggest one I got. Other thing is I got no insurance to cover
all these people watchin'.'

   
Rachel said, very slowly, 'Oh
.. , shit.'

   
'Well, nobody said it was goin'
to be a bloody circus,' said Gomer Parry.

   
Goff stood there, on the top of
the Tump, still and white; monarch of the Old Golden Land.
   
He was waiting.

He came across the field in loose, easy strides, the twelve- bore under
his arm, barrel pointing down. He wore a brown waterproof jacket and green
Wellingtons.

   
It was darker now. Still a
while from sundown, but the sun hadn't figured much around here in a long time.

   
'Sorry, miss.' Cursory as a
traffic warden who'd just handed you a ticket. 'Shouldn't 'ave let 'im chase
sheep, should you?'

   
'What?'

   
It was only afterwards she
realized what he'd said. Fay, on her knees, blood on her jeans, from Arnold.

   
The dog lay in the grass,
bleeding. He whined and twitched and throbbed.

   
'Move back, miss. Please.'

   
And she did. Thinking it had
all been a horrible mistake and he was going to help her.

   
But when she shuffled back in
the grass, almost overbalancing, he strolled across and stood over the dog,
casually levelling
      
his gun at the
pulsating heap.

   
Fay gasped and threw herself
forward, on top of Arnold, feeling herself trembling violently, like in a
fever, and the dog hot, wet and sticky under her breasts.

   
'Now don't be silly, miss. 'E's
done for, see. Move away, let me finish 'im off.'

   
'Go
away
!' Fay screamed. 'Fuck off!' Eyes squeezed closed, lying over
Arnold. The dog gave a little cry and a wheeze, like a balloon going down.

   
'Oh no,' Fay sobbed. 'No, please
. . .'

   
Lying across the dog, face in
the grass, blind anger -
hatred
-
rising.

They both saw the dog fall, not far from the river, a blur of blood. The
woman running, collapsing to her knees. Then the man wandering casually across
the field.
   
'The bastard. Who is he?'

   
'Jonathon Preece,' Mrs Seagrove
said, white-faced, clinging to her gate. 'From Court Farm.'

   
'What the hell's he think he's
doing?'

   
'I wish I could run,' Mrs
Seagrove said, her voice quaking with rage and shock. 'I'd have that gun off him.
Look . . .'
She clutched his arm. 'What's he doing now, Joe? He's going to shoot her, he's
going to shoot the girl as well!'

   
Incredibly, it did look like
it. She'd thrown herself over the dog. The man was standing over them, the gun
pointing downwards.

   
'Do you know her?'

   
'Too far away to tell, Joe.'
Mrs Seagrove began to wring her hands. 'Oh, I hate them. I hate them. They're
primitive. They're a law unto themselves.'

   
'Right.' Powys was moving
towards the field. Common land, he was thinking, common land.

   
'Shall I call the police?'

   
"Only if I don't come
back,' Powys said, shocked at how this sounded. For real. Jesus.

   
He slipped and scrambled to his
feet with yellow mud on his grey suit. 'Shit.' Called back, 'What did you say
his name was?'

   
'For God's sake, be careful.
Preece, Jonathon Preece.'

   
'Right. You stay there, Mrs
Seagrove. Get ready to phone.' Jesus, he thought, realizing he was trembling,
what kind of place is this?

Guy Morrison was about to tear his hair. This was a two-camera job and
he only had one. How was he supposed to shoot Goff
and
the destruction of the wall with one camera?

   
What this needed was a shot of
the bulldozer crashing through, with a shower of stone, and a cut-back to
Goff's triumphant face as he savoured the moment from his eyrie on the Tump. It
would be a meaningful sequence, close to the top of the first programme, maybe
even under the titles.

   
But now was ne supposed to get
that with one crew? If he'd known about this beforehand, he'd have hired a
local news cameraman as back-up - Griggs, for instance. But he
didn't
know about it in advance because
this arrogant, fat bastard was playing his cards too close to his chest.