Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (42 page)

   
'Yes I think so.' Andy's black
beard was making rapid progress, concealing the bones of his face. You couldn't
tell what he was thinking any more.

   
'John Dee,' Powys said. 'John
Dee was a friend of Michael Wort's, right? Or, at least, he seems to have known
him. We know John Dee was investigating earth mysteries in the 1580s, or
thereabouts. Is it possible Dee was educating Wort and that they built the
prospect chamber as a sort of observatory?'

   
'To observe what?'

   
'I don't know. Whatever they
believed happened along that ley.'

   
Two cars came out of the square
at speed, one a police car. Obviously together, they passed over the bridge and
turned right not far beyond Powys's cottage.

   
'Took their time.' Andy
observed.

   
'What's happening?'

   
'Body found in the river,' Andy
said with disinterest. 'That's why we had to stop work down there. They get very
excited. Not many floaters in Crybbe. Yes, I think you could be close to it. But
perhaps it was Wort who initiated Dee into the secret, have you considered
that? He was a remarkable man, you know.'

   
But suddenly Powys was not too
concerned about which of them had initiated the other.

   
It was quiet again in the street.
The cars had vanished down a track leading to the riverbank.

Fay's fingers were weak and fumbling. For the first time, she had
difficulty working the Uher's simple piano-key controls.

   
Nobody had even covered him up.

   
She'd expected screens of some
kind, a police cordon like there always were in cities. She'd never seen a
drowned man before, in all his sodden glory.

   
Nobody had even thrown a coat
over him, or a blanket. They'd simply tossed him on the bank, limp and leaking.
Skin blue - crimped, corrugated. Eyes wide open - dead as a cod on a slab.
Livid tongue poking out of the froth around his lips and nostrils.

   
Tossed on the bank. Like
somebody's catch.

   
Gomer's catch, in this case.

   
Gomer Parry, who'd found the
body, was only too happy to give her what he described as an exclusive
interview. He told her how he'd come to check on his bulldozer, which was over there
in Jack Preece's field, awaiting its removal to the council's Brynglas landfill
site on Monday, when he'd spotted this thing caught up in branches not far from
the bank.

   
' 'E'd not been in long,' Gomer
said knowledgeably. 'Several reasons I got for sayin' that. Number one - no
bloatin'. Takes . , . oh, maybe a week for the ole gases to build up inside,
and then out 'e comes, all blown up like a life-jacket. Also, see - point
number two - if 'e'd been in there long . . . fishes woulder been at 'im.'

   
Gomer made obscene little
pincer movements with clawed fingers and thumb and then pointed into the river,
no longer in flood, but still brown and churning, bearing broken branches downstream.

   
They'd been frozen to the fringe
of a silent group of local people on the wet riverbank. They were half a mile
from the bridge, on the bend before the river moved across the Crybbe Court
land, flowing within two hundred yards of the Tump.

   
'Current brings 'em in to the
side yere, right on the bend, see,' Gomer said. 'Then they gets entangled in
them ole branches and the floodwater goes down, and there 'e is, high an' dry.
They've 'ad quite a few yere, over the years. Always the same spot.'

   
Gomer sat down on a damp tree
stump, his back to the body, got out a battered square tin and began to roll
himself a cigarette. 'Nibbled to the bone, some of 'em are,' he said, with unseemly
relish. 'So I reckon, if I was to put a time on it, I'd say 'e's been in there
less than a day.'

   
Fay thought she knew exactly
how long he'd been in there. Approximately twenty hours. Oh God, this was
dreadful. This was indescribably awful. Her fingers went rapidly up and down with
the zip of her blue cagoule.

   
'Now, you notice that wrinkling
on 'is face,' Gomer said. 'Well, see, that's what you calls the
"washerwoman's 'ands" effect.'

   
'Gomer!' The colour of Sergeant
Wynford Wiley's face was approaching magenta as he loomed over the little man
in wire-framed glasses.

   
'When your wealth of forensic
knowledge is required,' Wynford said, 'we shall send for you. Meanwhile, all
this is totally
sub joodicee
until
after the inquest. And
you
should
know that,' he snapped at Fay.

   
'Look, Wynford,' Fay snapped
back, to beat the tremor out of her voice.
'Sub
judice
applies to court cases, not inquests. Nobody's on trial at an
inquest.'

   
Really know how to make friends,
don't I? she thought as Wynford bent his face to hers. He didn't speak until he
was sure he had her full attention. Then, very slowly and explicitly, he said,
'We don't like
clever people
round
yere, Mrs Morrison.'

   
Then he straightened up, turned
his back on her and walked away.

   
'Fat bastard.' Gomer bit on his
skinny, hand-crafted cigarette. 'You got all that, what I said?'

   
'Yes,' Fay said. 'But he's
right. I won't be able to use most of it, not because it's
sub judice
but because we don't go to town on the gruesome stuff.
Especially when relatives might be listening.'

   
Christ, how could she go through
the motions of reporting this story, knowing what she knew? Knowing, if not
exactly how, then at least why it had happened.

   
There was a little crowd around
the body, including its father, Jack Preece, and its younger brother, Warren
Preece. Jack Preece's face was as grey as the clouds. He looked up from the
corpse very steadily, as if he knew what he would see next and the significance
of it.

   
And what he saw next was Fay.
His tired, hopeless, brown eyes met hers and held them. It was harder to face
than a curse.

   
She thought.
He knows everything
. And she dragged her
gaze away and looked wildly around her, but there was nobody to run to for
comfort and nowhere to hide from Jonathon Preece's dead eyes and the eyes of
his father, which held the weight of a sorrow she knew she could only partly
comprehend.

CHAPTER III

Not one person had appeared to recognize Guy Morrison. Twice today he'd
circuited this dreary town, and nobody had done more than glance at him with,
he was forced to admit, a barely cursory interest.

   
Guy liked to be recognized. He
needed to be recognized. He was insecure, he readily admitted this. Everyone he
knew in television was insecure; it was a deeply neurotic business. And it was
a visual medium - so if people started to pass you in the street without a
second, sidelong glance, without nudging their companions, then it wouldn't be
too long before the Programme Controller failed to recognize you in the lift.
   
Altogether, a legitimate cause for
anxiety.
   
And Fay had depressed him. Living like
a spinster, watching her father coming unravelled, in the kind of conditions Guy
remembered from his childhood - remembered only in black and white, like grainy
old 405-line television. He couldn't understand why Fay had failed to throw
herself at him, sobbing, 'Take me away from all this', instead of bustling off
with her Uher over her shoulder in pursuit of a local news item that would be
unlikely to make even a filler-paragraph in tomorrow's Sunday papers.

   
Guy, rather than attempt to
construct a conversation with the Canon, had claimed to be overdue for another
appointment, and thus had ended up making his second despondent tour the town
centre.

   
Country towns were not supposed
to be like this. Country towns were supposed to have teashops and flower stalls
and Saturday markets from which fat, friendly Women's Institute ladies sold
jars of home-made jam and chutney sealed by grease-proof paper and rubber bands.

   
Without a crew, without Catrin
and her clipboard and without even a hint of recognition from the public, Guy
felt a sudden sense of acute isolation. He'd never been anywhere quite like this
before, a town which seemed to have had all the life sucked out of it, bloodless
people walking past, sagging like puppets whose strings had been snipped.

   
He was almost inclined to cancel
his room at the Cock and race back home to Cardiff.

   
Instead, in the gloomy late-afternoon,
as it began to rain again, he found himself strolling incuriously into 'The
Gallery' where he and Jocasta Newsome would soon recognize a mutual need.

Outside, Powys had found some logs for the Jotul stove. They were damp,
but he managed to get the stove going and stacked a couple of dozen logs on
each side of it to dry out.

   
He couldn't remember bleaker
weather at the end of June.

   
His cases stood unpacked by the
window. On the ledge, a blank sheet of A4 paper was wound into the Olivetti.

   
Life itself seemed very
temporary tonight.

   
Just before seven, a grim-faced
Rachel arrived, Barbour awash. She tossed the dripping coat on the floor.

   
'Coffee, J.M. I need coffee.
With something in it.' She collapsed on to the hard, orange sofa, flung her
head back, closing her eyes, 'I suppose you've heard?'

   
Powys said, They found a body
in the river.'

   
Rachel said. 'What are you
going to do, J.M.?'

   
'Do they know what happened?'

   
'I don't think so. They haven't
questioned anyone except the father and Gomer Parry.'

   
Powys went into the little
kitchen to look for coffee and called back, 'Have they found the gun?'

   
'Not so far as I know,' Rachel
said. 'Perhaps Jonathon Preece didn't find it either. Perhaps the place where
you threw it was deeper than you thought. Humble, who seems to know what he's
talking about, says there are all kinds of unexpected pot-holes in the
riverbed. He says nobody in their right mind would attempt to wade across, even
in a dry summer, when the water level's low.'

   
'Humble?' Powys's voice had an
edge of panic.

   
'He volunteered the information.
In passing. I wasn't stupid enough to ask him. I feigned disinterest.'

   
Not a difficult act, he
accepted, for Rachel.

   
He returned with two mugs and a
bottle of Bell's whisky. 'I can't find any coffee, but I found this in a cupboard.'
He poured whisky into a mug and handed it to Rachel. "Can't find any
glasses either.'

   
Rachel drank deeply and didn't
cough or choke.

   
Powys said, 'What do you think
I ought to do?'

   
Rachel held the mug in both
hands and stretched out her long legs to the stove in a vain quest for heat, 'I
think we should wait for Fay. She's going to come here after she's filed her scrupulously
objective story about the drowning tragedy at Crybbe.'

   
'That won't be easy. What's she
going to say?'

   
'It seems,' said Rachel, 'that
minor flooding at Crybbe has claimed its first victim.'

   
She looked tired. There were
dark smudges on her narrow face. 'Just hope they don't find the gun. I don't know
what water does to fingerprints, do you?'

As the second stroke of the curlew hit the reverberation of the first,
clean and hard. Warren Preece tossed his used Durex, well-filled, into the
alley and zipped up his jeans.

   
'Close,' he said. 'But I reckon
I can improve on it if I puts my mind to it.'

   
Tessa Byford was leaning back
against the brick wall of the Crybbe Unattended Studio, still panting a little.
'You're confident tonight.'

   
'Yeah.' The trick, he'd learned
(he'd learned it from Tessa, but he'd allowed himself to forget this), was to
time it so you came in the split second before the bell crashed. Tonight he'd
lost his load a good five seconds before the first bong. Still near as buggery
took the top of his head off, though - always did there - but it could be
better.