Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (72 page)

   
'Well, making a lot of noise -
banging things, bells, tin-cans, whatever - was popularly supposed to be a way
of frightening spirits off. Maybe by altering the vibration rate; I'm not really
qualified to say.'

   
'This is . . .' Fay held on to
his hand, 'seriously eerie. I mean, you're the expert, you've been here before,
but Christ, it scares the hell out of me.'

   
'No, I'm not,' he said. 'I'm
not any kind of expert. I wrote a daft, speculative book. I'm not as qualified
as most of these New Age luminaries. All I know is that Andy Boulton-Trow, with
or without Goff's knowledge, is experimenting with what we have to call dark
forces. He's probably been doing it for years . . . since . . . Well, never
mind. Now we know why Henry Kettle was getting the bad vibes.'

   
'Boulton-Trow put Goff on to
this place?'

   
'Probably. Something else occurred
to me, too. I don't know how much to make of it, but... try spelling Trow
backwards.'

   
'Tr . . . ?' Her eyes widened.
'Jesus.'

   
'I mean, it could be pure
coincidence.'

   
'There are too many coincidences
in Crybbe, Fay said. She stood up. 'OK, what are we going to do about this?'

   
'I think ... we need to get
everything we can, and quickly, on Michael Wort. Any local historians you
know?'

   
Fay smiled, in Crybbe, Joe, an
historian is somebody who can remember what it said in last week's paper.'

   
'What about the local-authority
archives? Where, for instance, would we find the transactions of the
Radnorshire Society?'

   
'County Library, I suppose. But
that's in Llandrindod Wells.'

   
'How far?'

   
'Twenty-five, thirty miles.'

   
'Let's get over there.' He started
to get up. 'Oh God.' Sat down again. 'I can't. I have to go to Hereford
Crematorium. It's Henry Kettle's funeral.'

   
'You can't not go to Henry's
funeral,' Fay said. 'Look,
I'll
go to
the library. Tell me what we're looking for.'

   
'You can't drive with that
eye.'

   
'Of course I can. And they're
only country roads. What am I looking for?'

   
'Anything about Wort - his
experiments, his hangings, his death. And the Wort family. If they're still around,
if we can get hold of any of them. And John Dee. Can we establish a connection?
But, I mean, don't make a big deal of it. If we meet back here at . . . what?
Four o'clock?'

   
'OK, Joe, look ... is there
nobody
we can go to for help?'

   
'What about Jean Wendle?'

   
'Ha.' Fay put a hand up to her
rainbow eye. 'Her assessment of Grace wasn't up to much, was it? Harmless, eh?'
   
'We're on our own, then,' Powys said.

CHAPTER IV

Crybbe town hall was in a short street of its own, behind the square. An
absurdly grandiose relic of better days, Colonel Colin 'Col' Croston thought,
strolling around the back to the small door through which members of the town council
sneaked, as though ashamed of their democratic role.

   
Tonight, the huge Gothic double
doors at the front would be thrown open for the first time in twenty years.
Suspecting problems, Col Croston had brought with him this morning a small can
of Three-in-One Penetrating Oil to apply to the lock and the hinges.

   
Col Croston let himself in and
strode directly into the council chamber. The cleaner would not be here until
this afternoon, and so Col made his way to the top of the room where the high-backed
chairman's chair stood on its platform.

   
He sat down in the chair. There
was a pristine green blotter on the table in front of him, and on the blotter
lay a wooden gavel, unused - like the chair - since local government reorganisation
in 1974.

   
Before reorganisation, the rural
district authority had been based here. But 'progress' had removed the seat of
power to a new headquarters in a town thirty miles away. Now there was only
Crybbe town council, a cursory nod to local democracy, with ten members and no
staff apart from its part-time clerk, Mrs Byford, who dealt with the
correspondence and took down the minutes of its brief and largely
inconsequential meetings.

   
The council chamber itself had
even been considered too big for the old RDC, and meetings of the town council
were self-conscious affairs, with eleven people hunched in a corner of the room
trying to be inconspicuous. Although their meetings were public, few townsfolk
were ever moved to attend.

   
Tonight, however, it seemed likely
the chamber would actually be too small for the numbers in attendance, and the
chairman would be occupying, for the first time in nearly twenty years, the
official chairman's chair.

   
The chairman tonight would be
Col Croston.

   
Mrs Byford, the clerk, had telephoned
him at home to pass on the Mayor's apologies and request that he steer the
public meeting.

   
'Why, surely,' Col said briskly.
'Can hardly expect old Jim to be there after what's happened.'

   
'Oh, he'll be there, Colonel,'
Mrs Byford said, 'but he'll have to leave soon after nine-thirty to see to the
bell, isn't it.'
   
'Shouldn't have to mess about with
that either at his age. All he's got to do is say the word and I'll organize a
bunch of chaps and we'll have that curfew handled on a rota system, makes a lot
of sense, Mrs Byford.'

   
The clerk's tone cooled at
once. 'That bell is a
Preece
function, Colonel.'

   
Oh dear, foot in it again, never
mind. 'All got to rally round at a time like this, Mrs Byford. Besides, it
could be the first step to getting a proper team of bell-ringers on the job.
Crying shame, the way those bells are neglected.'

   
'It's a Preece function,' Mrs
Byford said from somewhere well within the Arctic Circle. 'The meeting starts
at eight o'clock.'

   
Minefield of ancient protocol,
this town. Col Croston often thought Goose Green had been somewhat safer.

   
Col was deputy mayor this year.
Long army career (never mentioned the SAS but everybody seemed to know). Recommended
for a VC after the Falklands (respectfully suggested it be redirected). But
still regarded becoming deputy mayor of Crybbe as his most significant single
coup
, on the grounds of being the only
incomer to serve on the town council long enough to achieve the honour - which
virtually guaranteed that next year he'd become the first outsider to wear the
chain of office.
   
His wife considered he was out of his
mind snuggling deep into this hotbed of small-minded prejudice and bigotry. But
Col thought he was more than halfway to being accepted. And when he made mayor
he was going to effect a few tiny but democratically meaningful changes to the
wav the little council operated - as well as altering the rather furtive
atmosphere with which it conducted its affairs.

   
He often felt that, although it
gave a half-hearted welcome to new industry, anything providing local jobs,
this council appeared to consider its foremost role was to protect the town against
happiness.

   
Indeed, until being asked to
chair it, he'd been rather worried about how tonight's meeting would be
handled. He been finding out as much as he could about Max Goff's plans and had
to say that the New Age people he'd met so far hadn't invariably been the sort
of head-in-the-clouds wallies one had feared. If it pulled in a few tourists at
last, it could be a real economic shot in the arm for this town.

   
So Col Croston was delighted to
be directing operations.
   
With a mischievous little smile he
lifted the gavel and gave it a smart double rap.

   
'Silence! Silence at the back
there!'
   
Whereupon, to his horror, Mrs Byford
materialised in doorway with a face like a starched pinny.

   
'I hope, Colonel, that you're
banging that thing on the blotter and not on the table.'

   
'Oh, yes, of course, Mrs Byford.
See . . .' He gave it another rap, this time on the blotter. It sounded about
half as loud. 'Yes . . .ha. Well, ah . . . your morning for the correspondence,
is it?

   
Mrs Byford stalked pointedly to
the corner table used for town council meetings and placed upon it the official
town council attache case.

   
'Glad you came in, actually,'
Col Croston said, 'I think we ought to send an official letter of condolence to
the relatives I that poor girl who had the accident at the Court.'

   
'I see no necessity for that.'
Mrs Byford began to unpack her case.

   
'There's no
necessity
, Mrs B. Just think it'd be a
sympathetic thing to do, don't you?'

   
'Not my place to give an opinion,
Colonel. I should think twice, though, if I were you, about making unauthorised
use of council notepaper.'

   
Col Croston, who'd once made a
disastrous attempt to form a Crybbe cricket club, estimated that if he bowled
the gavel at the back of Mrs Byford's head, there'd be a fair chance of laying the
old boot out.

   
Just a thought.

It was Bill Davies, the butcher, who rang Jimmy Preece to complain about
the picture. 'I'm sorry to 'ave to bother you at time like this, Jim, but I think
you should go and see it for yourself. I know you know more about these things
than any of us, but I don't like the look of it. Several customers mentioned
it, see. How
is
Jack now?'

   
'Jack's not good,' Jimmy Preece
said, and put the phone down.

   
He could see trouble coming, been
seeing it all the morning, in the calm of the fields and the weight of the
clouds.

   
In the cold, gleeful eyes of
his surviving grandson.

   
Ten minutes after talking to Bill
Davies, the Mayor was walking across the square towards The Gallery, traders
and passers-by nodding to him sorrowfully. Nobody said, 'Ow're you'. They all
knew where he was going.

   
Even in today's profoundly
pessimistic mood, he was not prepared for the picture in the window of The
Gallery. He had to turn away and get some control of himself.

   
Then, face like parchment, he
pushed through the pine-panelled door with its panes of bull's-eye glass.

   
The woman with too much make-up
and a too-tight blouse opened her red lips at him. 'Oh. Mr Preece, isn't it?
I'm so terribly, terribly . . .'

   
'Madam!' Mr Preece, his heart wrapped
in ice, had seen in the gloating eyes of the yellow-haloed man in the picture
that the accident to Jack and the drowning of Jonathon were only the start of
it. This was what
they'd
done with
their meddling and their New Age rubbish.

   
'That picture in the window.
Where'd 'e come from?'

   
'My husband brought it back
from Devon. Why, is there . . . ?'

   
'Did 'e,' Mr Preece said
heavily. 'Brought it back from Devon, is it?'

   
Couldn't stop himself.
   
'Devon . . . ? Devon . . . ?'

   
Saw the woman's lips make a colossal
great 'O' as he raised a hand and brought it down with an almighty bang on the
thick smoked-glass counter.

The cremation was at twelve, and Powys was late. He felt bad about this
because there was barely a dozen people there. He spotted Henry's neighbour,
Mrs Whitney. He noted the slight unassuming figure of another distinguished
elder statesman of dowsing. And there was his old mate Ben Corby, now
publishing director of Dolmen, newly acquired by Max Goff.

   
'Bloody minister never even
mentioned dowsing,' Ben said.

   
It had been a swift, efficient
service. No sermon. Nothing too religious,
nothing
psychic.

   
Powys said, 'I don't think
Henry would have wanted to be wheeled in under an arch of hazel twigs, do you?'

   
'Too modest, Joe. All the bloody
same, these dowsers. Look at old Bill over there - he wouldn't do me a book
either.'