Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (43 page)

   
Warren got a special kick out
of thinking of his old man up the tower, waiting to pull on the rope while he,
Warren, was in town here bonking his brains out. Dead on time again tonight: nothing
would come between Jack Preece and that bell, not even his favourite son drying
out in some police morgue.

   
'Ask not,' Warren intoned, 'for
whom the ole bell tolls. It tolls tonight, ladies and gentlemen, for Jonathon
Preece, of Crybbe.'

   
He giggled.

   
There was a snap of white -
Tessa pulling up her knickers.

   
Warren said, 'I been feelin'-
just lately, like - as I'm the only guy in this town, the only one who's really
alive sorter thing. The only walkin' corpse in the graveyard. Bleeargh!"

   
Warren wiggled his hands and
rolled his eyes.

   
Written two new songs, he had,
in the past couple of days.
R
ed-hot
stuff, too. Didn't know he
had it in him - how
much
he had in
him. He reckoned Max Golf's tape would be ready in a couple of weeks. Goff was
going to be real blown away by his next one.

   
'What would you have done,
Warren, if that woman hadn't come out of the studio before we got started? Or
if she'd come out in the middle?'

   
'Woulda made no difference. Or
I coulda saved some for 'er, couldn't I? Takin' a chance, she is, comin' yere
this time a' night. An' she wouldn't say a word, see, 'cause I seen what 'appened
by the river, 'ow they killed poor Jonathon. Poor Jonathon.'

   
Warren started to grin. 'Oh,
you should've seen 'im, Tess. Lying there with 'is tongue out. Just about as
wet and slimy as what 'e was when 'e was alive. I couldn't 'ardly keep a straight
face. And - you got to laugh, see - fuckin' 'Young Farmers' . . .

   
Warren
did
laugh. He placed both hands flat on the brick wall and almost
beat his head into it with laughing.

   
'. . . fuckin' Young Farmers'
needs a new chairman now, isn't it? Oh, shit, what a bloody crisis!'

   
'You going to volunteer,
Warren?'

   
'No.' Warren wiped his streaming
eyes with the back of a hand. 'I'm goin' into the Plant Hire business.' He went
into another cackle. 'I'm gonna hot-wire me a bulldozer.'

She was the kind of woman who, in normal circumstances, he would have
taken care to avoid, like sunstroke. She was vain, pretentious, snobbish and
too bony in the places where one needed it least.

   
But these were not normal circumstances.
On a wet Saturday evening in Crybbe, Jocasta Newsome was almost exotic.

   
Guy had her on the hearthrug,
where damp logs spat the occasional spark into his buttocks.

   
She was tasty.

   
And grateful. Guy loved people
to be grateful for him. She was voracious in a carefree sort of way, as if all
kinds of pent-up emotions were being expelled. She laughed a lot; he made her
laugh, even with comments and questions that were not intended to be funny.

   
Like, 'And your husband - is he
an artist?'
   
Jocasta squealed in delight and ground
a pelvic bone fully into his stomach.

   
Guy said, just checking, 'You're
sure there's no chance he'll be back tonight?'

   
'Tonight,' said Jocasta, 'Hereward
will be in one of those awful restaurants where the candles on the tables are
stuck in wine-bottles and some unshaven student is hunched up in the corner
fumbling with a guitar. He'll be holding forth at length to a bunch of artists about
the beauty of Crybbe and how well in he is with the local yokels. He'll be
telling them all about his close friend Max Goff and the wonderful experiment
in which he, Hereward, is playing a pivotal role. The artists will drink bottle
after bottle of disgusting plonk paid for. of course, by Hereward and they'll
think, "What a sucker, what an absolutely God-sent wally." And they'll
be mentally doubling their prices.'

   
Jocasta propped herself up on
one arm, her nipples rather redder than the feebly smouldering logs in the
grate.

   
'Oh yes,' she assured him. 'We
are utterly alone and likely to remain so for two whole, wonderful days. How
long have
you
got, Guy? Inches and inches,
if I'm any judge. Oh my God, what am I saying, I must be demob happy.'

   
The thought of
two whole days
of Jocasta Newsome didn't
lift Guy to quite the same heights. He reached for his trousers.

   
Dismay disfigured her. 'What
are you doing? I didn't mean . . .'

   
'Just going to the loo, if you
could direct me. Guy Morrison never goes anywhere without trousers. Not the
kind of risk one takes.'

   
'Oh.' Jocasta relaxed. 'Yes.
We're having a downstairs cloakroom made, but it isn't quite . . . Up the
stairs, turn left and there's a bathroom directly facing you at the end of the passage.
Don't be long, will you?'

   
Thankfully, she didn't qualify
the final entreaty with another dreadful
double
entendre.

   
Guy slithered into his trousers
and set off barefoot up the stairs, slightly worried now. Happily married women
were fine.
Un
happily married women
were worse than unattached women. They clutched you as if you were a lifebelt.
They were seldom afraid of word getting out about you and them. And while it might
be all right for pop stars, scandal was rarely helpful to the careers of
responsible producer-presenters in Features and Documentaries.

   
Bare-chested on the stairs, he
shivered. The walls had been stripped to the stonework. Too rugged for Guy
Morrison. He probably wouldn't come here again. He decided he'd open the exhibition
tomorrow night and slide quietly away. A one-night stand was OK, but a two-night
stand carried just a hint of commitment.

   
The lights went out.

   
'Oh, blast!' he heard from the
drawing-room.
   
'What's happened?'

   
'Power cut,' Jocasta shouted.
'Happens all the time. Take it slowly and you'll be OK. When you get to the
bathroom you'll find a torch on top of the cabinet.'

   
Guy stubbed his toe on the top
banister-post and tried not to cry out.

   
But he found his way to the
bathroom quite easily because of a certain greasy phosphorescence oozing out of
the crack between the door and its frame.

   
'Funny sort of power cut,' he
said, not thinking at all.

'Police say there are no
suspicious circumstances, but they still can't explain how Mr Preece, whose
family has been farming in the area for over four hundred years, came to be in
the river.'

   
'That report
,' the Offa's Dyke newsreader said,
'from Fay Morrison in Crybbe. Now sport, and
for Hereford United . . .'

   
Fay switched off Powys's radio.

   
It was thirty-three minutes
past ten and almost totally dark.

   
'Must've been awkward for you.'
J. M. Powys rammed a freshly dried log into the Jotul and slammed the iron door
on it.

   
Fay, in a black sweat-suit, was
cross-legged on the hearth, by the stove.

   
'Not really,' she said, in cases
like this you're not expected to probe too hard. If it had been a child, I'd be
spending most of the night talking to worried mothers about why the council needed
to fence off the river. Then tomorrow, this being Crybbe, I'd have to explain to
Ashpole why the worried mothers were refusing to be interviewed on tape. But in
a case like this, it's just assumed he killed himself. Be an open verdict. Unless
. . .'

   
'Unless they find the gun.'
Powys switched on a green-shaded table-lamp. Rachel drew the curtains against
the night and the rain and the river.

   
Fay said, if anybody had any suspicions,
we'd have heard from the police by now. All the same, Jack Preece . . .'

   
'His father,' Powys said.

   
'Yes. Jack Preece knows. I could
see it in his eyes when we were down by the river, with the body.'
   
'Knows what?'

   
'I think he knows Jonathon had
gone out to shoot Arnold.'

   
Rachel sat down on the sofa.
'What makes you . . . ?
'

   
'Just a minute. Hang on.' Powys
stood up. 'You say Jonathon
had gone out
to shoot Arnold
. You're saying he'd deliberately targeted Arnold?'

   
Fay nodded.

   
'Do I get the feeling there's a
history to this?'

   
Fay swallowed, 'If I tell you this,
you're going to switch to small talk for a few minutes and then look for an
excuse to get rid of me. It's so weird.'

   
'Fay.' Powys spread his arms.
'I'm the bloke who wrote
The
Old Golden Land
. Nothing's too weird.'

   
There was a longish silence.
Then the green-shaded table-lamp went out.

   
'Bugger,' Rachel said.

   
'OK,' Fay said slowly. 'You
can't see my face now, and I won't be able to see the incredulity on yours.'

   
She took a long breath. She
told them about dogs in Crybbe.

   
'How long have you known this?'
Powys asked.

   
'Only a day or so. I should be
doing a story on it, shouldn't I? A town with no dogs' Jesus, it's not common,
is it? But life here is so much like a bad dream, I'm sure if I sold it to the papers,
when all the reporters arrived to check it out, there'd be dogs everywhere,
shelves full of Chum at the grocer's, poop-scoops at the ironmonger's, posters
for the Crybbe and District Annual Dog Show . . .'

   
She was glad they couldn't see
the helpless tears in her eyes.

   
'I can't
trust
myself here,' Fay said, fighting to keep the tears out of her
voice, I can't trust myself to perceive anything correctly. Too much has
happened.'

   
'Have you thought about why it
could be?' Powys asked, a soft, accepting voice in the darkness. 'Why no dogs?'

   
'Sure I've thought about it -
in between thinking about my dad going bonkers, about holding on to my job,
about somebody breaking in and smashing up my tape-machine, about being
arrested for manslaughter, about living with a gho . . . about tons of things. I'm
sorry, I'm not very rational tonight.

   
'So what you're saying is' -
Rachel's
very
rational voice, 'that,
because you wouldn't get rid of Arnold, Jonathon Preece deliberately set out to
shoot him?'

   
'I had a phone call. An
anonymous call. Get rid of him this weekend, or . . .'
   
'Or he'd be shot?'

   
'There was no specified threat.
Just a warning. I think Jack Preece was the caller. Therefore it seems likely
he sent Jonathon out with the gun.'

   
She heard Powys fumbling with
the stove and its iron door was flung wide, letting a stuttering red and yellow
firelight into the room.

   
His face looked much younger in
the firelight. 'If this is right about no dogs - I'm sorry, Fay, if you say
there are no dogs, I believe you - we could be looking at the key to something
here.'

   
'You're the expert,' Fay said.

   
'There aren't any experts. This
is the one area in which nobody's an expert.'

   
'If all dogs howl at the
curfew,' Rachel said logically, 'why don't they just get rid of the curfew?
It's not as if it's a major tourist attraction. Not as if they even draw
attention to it. It just happens, it's just continued, without much being said.
OK there's this story about the legacy of land to the Preeces, but is anybody
really going to take that away if the curfew stops?'

   
'I don't think for one minute,'
said Powys, 'that that's the real reason for the curfew.'

   
Fay sat up, interested. 'So
what is the real reason?'

   
'If we knew that we'd know the
secret of Crybbe.'