Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (73 page)

   
Powys smiled. 'Henry left me
his papers.'

   
'In that case,
you
can do the book.
The Strange Life of Henry Kettle,
an
official biography by his literary executor. How's that? Come and have a drink,
my train back to Paddington's at ten past two.'

   
Ben Corby. Plump and balding
Yorkshireman, the original New Age hustler. They went to a pub called the
Restoration and sat at a window-table overlooking a traffic island with old
stone cross on it.

   
'Golden Land Two,' said Ben.
'How long? A year?'

   
Not the time, Powys thought, to
tell him there wasn't going to be a book.

   
'Seen Andy lately?' he asked.

   
'Great guy, Max,' Ben said.
'Best thing that could've happened to Dolmen. Been burdened for years with the
wispy beard brigade, wimps who reckon you can't be enlightened and make money.
Give me the white suit and the chequebook any day. The New Age movement's got
to seize the world by the balls.'

   
'Andy,' Powys said patiently. 'You
seen him recently?'

   
'Andy? Pain in the arse. He
wouldn't write me a book either. He's always been an Elitist twat. Hates the
New Age movement, thinks earth mysteries are not for the masses . . . but, there
you go, he knows his stuff; I gather he's giving Max good advice.'

   
'Maybe he's just using Max.'

   
'Everybody uses everybody, Joe.
It's a holistic society.'
   
'How did Andy get involved?'

   
Ben shrugged. I know he was teaching
art at one of the local secondary schools. Had a house in the area for years, apparently.'

   
That made sense. Had he really
thought Andy was living in a run-down woodland cottage with no sanitation?

   
But why teaching? Teaching
what?

   
'Andy's hardly short of cash.'

   
'Maybe he hit on hard times,'
said Ben. 'Maybe he felt he had a duty to nurture young minds.'

   
Young minds. Powys thought of
the girl at the stone. And then a man leaned over and tapped him on the
shoulder.

   
'Excuse me, Mr Powys, could I have
a word? Peter Jarman, Mr Kettle's solicitor.'

   
Peter Jarman looked about twenty-five;
without his glasses he'd have looked about seventeen. He steered Powys into a corner.
'Uncle Henry,' he said. 'We all called him Uncle Henry. My grandfather was his
solicitor for about half a century. Did you get my letter?'

   
Powys shook his head. 'I've
been away.'

   
'No problem. I can expand on it
a little now. Uncle Henry's daughter, as you may have noticed, hasn't come back
from Canada for his funeral. He didn't really expect her to, which, I suspect,
is why he's left his house to you.'

   
'Bloody hell. He really did that?'

   
'Seems she's done quite well
for herself, the daughter, over in Canada. And communicated all too rarely with
Uncle Henry. He seems to have thought you might value the house more than she
would. This is all rather informal, but there
are
formalities, so if you
could
make an appointment to come to the office.'

   
'Yes,' Powys said faintly.
'Sure.'

   
'In the meantime,' said young
Mr Jarman, 'if you want to get into the cottage at any time, Mrs Whitney next
door is authorised to let you in. Uncle Henry was very specific that you should
have access to any of his books or papers at any time.'

'You told me,' Jocasta Newsome said, suppressing her emotions, but not
very well, 'that you hadn't managed to buy much in the West Country, and you
proceeded to prove it with that mediocre miniature by Dufort.'

   
Hereward nervously fingered his
beard. Now that it was almost entirely grey, he'd been considering shaving the
thing off. As a statement, it was no longer sufficiently emphatic.

   
The black beard of the dark-eyed
figure in the picture seemed to mock him.

   
'Where did it come from,
Hereward?'

   
'All right,' he snapped, 'it
wasn't from the West. A local artist sold it to me.'

   
Jocasta planted her hands on
her hips. 'Girl?'
   
'Well . . . young woman.'

   
'Get rid of it,' Jocasta said,
not a request, not a suggestion.
   
'Don't be ridiculous.'
   
'Take it back. Now.'

   
'What the hell's the matter
with you? It's a bloody good painting! Worth eight or nine hundred of anybody's
money and that's what Max Goff's going to pay!'

   
'So if Goff's going to pay the
money, what's it doing in our window upsetting everybody?'

   
'One man!' He couldn't believe
this.

   
'The Mayor of this town,
Hereward. Who was so distressed he nearly cracked my counter.'

   
'But. . Hereward clutched his
head, 'he's the
Mayor
! Not a bloody
cultural arbiter! Not some official civic censor! He's just a tin-pot,
small-town ... I mean, how
dare
the
old fuck come in here, complaining about a picture which isn't even . . . an
erotic nude or ... or something. What's his problem?'

   
'He calmed down after slapping
the counter,' Jocasta admitted. 'He apologized. He then appealed to me very
sincerely - for the future well-being of the town, he said - not to flaunt a picture
which appeared to be heralding the return of someone called Black Michael, who was
apparently the man who built Crybbe Court and was very unpopular in his day.'

   
'He actually said that? In the
year nineteen hundred and ninety-three, the first citizen of this town - the most
senior
elected
member of the town
council - seriously said
that?'

   
'Words to that effect. And I
agreed. I told him it would be removed immediately from the window and off
these premises by tonight. I apologised and told him my husband obviously didn't
realise when he purchased it - 'in the West Country' - that it might cause
offence.'

   
For a moment, Hereward was
speechless. When his voice returned, it was hoarse with outraged incredulity.

   
'How dare you? How bloody
dare
you? Black bloody Michael? What is
this . . . bilge? I tell you, if this gallery is to have any artistic integrity
. . .'

   
'Hereward, it's going,' Jocasta
said, bored with him. 'I don't like that girl, she's a troublemaker. I don't
like her weird paintings,
and I want this
one out.
'

   
'Well, I can't help you there,'
Hereward said flatly. 'I promised it would stay in the window until tomorrow.'

   
Jocasta regarded him as she
would something she'd scraped from her shoe. It occurred to him seriously, for
the first time, that perhaps he
was
something
she'd like to scrape from her shoe. In which case, the issue of his failed trip
to the West, his attempt to recover ground by buying this painting on the
artist's eccentric terms, all this would be used to humiliate him again and
again.

   
She turned her back on him and
as she stalked away, Hereward saw her hook the tip of one shoe behind the leg
of the wooden easel on which sat the big, dark picture.

   
He tried to save it. As he lunged
towards the toppling easel, Jocasta half-turned and, seeing his hands clawing
out, must have thought they were clawing at her. So she struck first. Hereward
felt the nails pierce his cheek, just under his right eye.

   
It was instinctive. His left
hand came back and he hit her so hard with his open palm that she was thrown
off her feet and into a corner of the window, where she lay with her nose bleeding,
snorting blood splashes on to her cream silk blouse.

   
There was silence.

   
A bunch of teenage boys just
off the school bus, home early after end-of-term exams, gathered outside the
window and grinned in at Jocasta.

   
The picture of the unsmiling
man with the yellow halo in the doorway of Crybbe Court had fallen neatly and
squarely in the centre of the floor and was undamaged. Its darkness flooded the
gallery and Hereward Newsome knew his marriage and his plans for a successful
and fashionable outlet in Crybbe were both as good as over.

   
Assessing his emotions, much
later, he would decide he'd been not so much sad as angry and bitter at the way
a seedy little town could turn a civilized man into a savage.

   
Jocasta didn't get up. She took
a tissue from a pocket in the front of her summery skirt and dabbed carefully
at her nose.

   
Hereward knew there was blood
also on his torn cheek. He didn't touch it.

   
Outside, the school kids began
to drift away. Jocasta had her back against the window, unaware of them.

   
Still she made no attempt to
get up, only said calmly, voice nasally blocked, as if she had a cold, ' I
accepted some drawings from that girl a few days ago. Sale or return. Do you
remember them?'

   
'I didn't make the connection,'
Hereward said quietly.
   
'They were drawings of an old man.'
   
'I didn't see them.'
   
'He was cutting his own throat.'
   
'Yes,' Hereward said dully. '. . .
What
?'

   
'The reason I don't want this painting
here is that the other night, while you were away, the figure, the likeness of
this old man, the old man in the drawings, was seen in our bathroom.'

   
Hereward said nothing.

   
'Not by me, of course,' his
wife assured him. 'But the man I was sleeping with swears it was there.'

   
Everything was completely still
in The Gallery. Hereward Newsome stunned, aware of a droplet of blood about to
fall from his chin. Jocasta Newsome lying quietly in the window, red splashes
like rose petals on her cream silk blouse.

CHAPTER V

Fay had a whole pile of books and just two short names.
   
She was alone in the reading room of
the County Library in Llandrindod Wells, nearly thirty rural miles from Crybbe
and another world: bright, spacy streets, a spa town.

   
Two names: Wort and Dee.

   
Fortunately there was an index
to the dozens of volumes of transactions of the Radnorshire Society, a huge
collection of many decades of articles by mainly amateur scholars, exploring aspects
of the social, political and natural history of the most sparsely populated
county in southern Britain.

   
There were also books on Tudor
history and three biographies of John Dee (1527-1608) whose family came from Radnorshire.

   
She read of a farmhouse,
Nant-y-groes, once the Dee family home, at Pilleth, six miles from Crybbe. But
it had, apparently, been demolished and rebuilt and was now unrecognisable as Elizabethan.

   
Dee himself had been born in
the south-east of England but had always been fascinated by his Welsh border
ancestry. The name Dee, it seemed, had probably developed from the Welsh
Du
meaning black.

   
History, Fay discovered, had
not been over-generous to this mathematician, astronomer and expert on
navigation - perhaps because of his principle role as astrologer to the court
of Elizabeth I and his lifelong obsession with magic and spiritualism. Most
schoolchildren learned about Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon, but John Dee
hardly figured on the syllabus, despite having carried out major intelligence
operations in Europe, on behalf of the Queen, during periods of Spanish
hostility.

   
Two hours' superficial reading
convinced Fay that John Dee was basically sound. He studied 'natural magic' - a
search for an intelligence behind nature. But there was no serious evidence, despite
many contemporary and subsequent attempts to smear him, of any involvement in
black magic.

   
Dee wanted to know eternal
secrets, the ones he believed no human intelligence could pass on. He sought
communion with spirits and 'angels', for which a medium was required.