Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (74 page)

   
Fay read of several professed
psychics, who sometimes turned out to be less well-intentioned than he was.
People like the very dubious Sir Edward Kelley, who once claimed the spirits
had suggested that, in order to realise their full human potential, he and Dee
should swap wives.

   
Now
that
, Fay thought, was the kind of scam Guy might try to pull.

   
But there was no mention of Dee
working with Sir Michael Wort in Radnorshire.

   
She skipped over all the weird,
impenetrable stuff about Dee's so-called Angelic Conversations and went back to
the Radnorshire transactions.

   
It emerged that while Dee
himself might not have been a medium he clearly was, like Henry Kettle, an
expert dowser.

   
In 1574, he wrote to
Elizabeth's Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, requesting permission to seek
'hidden treasure' using a method that was scientific rather than magical
(nothing psychic), Fay smiled, involving a particular type of rod.

   
He was also most interested in
folklore and local customs, druidic lore and landscape patterns.

   
OK. Speculation time.

   
If there were such things as ley-lines,
the mounds and stones which defined them must have been far more in evidence in
Dee's time.

   
If ley-lines had psychic properties,
Dee's interest in the remains would have been of a more than antiquarian
nature.

   
If he'd been in the area in the
1570s he could hardly have failed to run into Wort.

   
If Dee felt that Wort had
knowledge or psychic abilities he lacked, he might have been inclined to
overlook the sheriff's less savoury practices.

   
Fay looked up Wort and found
only passing references. No mention of hangings. His name was in a
chronological list of high sheriffs, and that was all.

   
She looked up Trow and found
nothing. She looked in the local telephone directories, found several Worts and
several Trows, noted down numbers.

   
Then she simply looked up
Crybbe and found surprisingly little, apart from references to the curfew, with
the usual stuff about the legacy of Percy Weale, a mention of the town hall as one
of the finest in the area.

   
Had Crybbe received so little
attention because, for much of its history, it had been in England? Or was it,
as she'd intimated to Powys, because local historians weren't too thick on the
ground.

   
It was almost as though nobody
wanted the place to have a history.

   
And so Fay emerged from the
library with only one significant piece of information.

   
It came from a brief mention of
Crybbe Court in an article dated 1962 about the few surviving manor houses of
Radnorshire. Crybbe Court, which the writer said was in dire need of extensive
restoration, had been built in the 1570s by a local landowner, Sir Michael Wort,
who later served as High Sheriff of the county and who lived there until his
death in the summer of 1593.

   
It was precisely four centuries
since the hanging of Black Michael.

'Oh, what the hell,' Colonel Col Croston said. 'Don't see why not.'

   
'I'm really very grateful,' Guy
told him.

   
It was the first piece of
genuine co-operation to come his way. Well, from the locals, anyway. Whether
you could call this chap a local was highly debatable, but he
was
the deputy mayor.

   
As soon as Guy had found out that
the public meeting wasn't, after all, going to be chaired by old Preece, he'd
driven off by himself to the deputy's home, a partly renovated Welsh long-house
across the river, about a mile out of town on the Ludlow road.

   
Col Croston had turned out to
be an affable, pale-eyed, sparse-haired, athletic-looking chap in his fifties.
He lived quite untidily with a couple of Labradors, who rather resembled him, and
a tough-looking little wife who didn't. There was a mechanical digger working
on a trench fifty yards or so from the house. Try and ignore the smell,' the
Colonel had greeted him breezily. 'Spot of bother with the old septic tank.'

   
What the deputy mayor had just
agreed was to let Guy shoot a few minutes of videotape in the meeting before it
actually started, so there would at least be some pictures of an assembly of
townsfolk and councillors. Guy would milk this opportunity for character close-ups
of the taciturn, grizzled faces of Old Crybbe.

   
His heart lurched. He wished he
hadn't thought of grizzled old faces. With bulbous noses and bulging eyes and
blood fountains from severed arteries.

   
'And . . . er . . . Colonel,'
he said hurriedly. 'What I'd also like, if you have no objections, is a little
interview with you, possibly before and after, outlining the issues - the
town's
attitudes to becoming a major New Age centre.'

   
'Well, I'll do my best, Guy.
But I must say, one of the things I was hoping to learn in there tonight is
what exactly New Age
is
. Drink?'

   
Thanks, just a small one. You
like it here, Colonel?'

   
'Col. Name's Colin. Well, you
know, got to settle somewhere. No, it's not a bad place. Once one gets used to
their little peculiarities. Like the dogs - used to take these chaps into town
of a morning, pick up the paper, that kind of thing. Always well-behaved, never
chase anything. But a word or two was said and now I walk them in the other
direction. Compromise, you see. Secret of survival in the sticks. I don't
mind.'

   
'So if I were to ask you how
people here feel about Max Goff and . . .'

   
'Ho!' said Mrs Croston, passing
through, wearing a stained boiler suit.

   
'Ruth's not terribly impressed
with Mr Goff,' Col said. 'My own feeling is it's no bad thing at all, long as
it doesn't get out of hand. You've got to have an economy, and this place has
ignored the possibilities of tourism and that kind of business for too long.
Agriculture's going down the chute so, on the whole, I think we're quite
fortunate to have him.'

   
'Will you say that on camera?'

   
'Oh . . . why not? Long as it's
clear I'm speaking personally, not on behalf of the council.'

   
'Super,' Guy said. 'Now what
about all these prehistoric stones Goff's sticking in the ground?'

   
'Ah well, there've been
rumblings there, I have to say. Fine by me, but country folk are incredibly
superstitious. Who, after all, got rid of the original stones? Money, however -
money does tend to overcome quite a lot, doesn't it? But I wouldn't be at all
surprised if some of them started disappearing again.'

   
'Interesting,' Guy said. 'So
you think there'll be fireworks in there tonight.'

   
Col laughed. 'Will there be
disagreement? Oh yes. Will there be suspicion, resentment, resistance? Definitely.
Fireworks? Well, they'll listen very patiently to what Goff has to say, then
they'll ask one or two very polite questions before drifting quietly away into
the night. And then, just as quietly, they'll do their best to shaft the
blighter. That's how things are done in Crybbe If they don't like you, best to
keep the removal van on standby with the engine running.'

   
'Doesn't sound as if it would
have made very good telly, in that case, even if we got in.'

   
'Excruciatingly boring telly,'
Col confirmed. 'Unless you've got some sort of infra-red equipment capable of
filming undercurrents. 'Nother one?'

   
'No ... no thanks.' Guy covered
his glass with a hand. 'Sounds like you have this place pretty well weighed up,
Col.'

   
'Good Lord, no. Only been here
a few years. That's just about long enough to realise one needs to've been
established here a good six generations to even get close to it. Annoy the hell
out of me, these newcomers who profess to be like that - Col hooked two fingers
together - 'with the locals after a month or two. I know where I stand, and I
don't mind, we've got an interesting home with about fourteen acres I'm still
trying to decide what to do with. And I'm the token outsider on the council,
which is just about as close as anyone can aspire to get. When I'm Mr Mayor
I'll try to effect a few minor structural changes on the council which will
doubtless disappear when the next chap takes over. Mrs Byford will see to that
- she's the clerk. Mayors come and go, Mrs B doesn't.'

   
'Is that Tessa Byford's
mother?' Guy watched the Colonel's eyes.

   
'Grandmother.' No specific
reaction. 'The girl, Tessa, lives with them. What they call in Crybbe a problem
child. Shows a lot of promise as an artist, apparently - that's not a very
Crybbe thing to be, as you'll have realised. She'll leave, go to college and
never come back. They all do.'

   
'All?'

   
'Anybody who doesn't want to be
a farmer or a shopkeeper or some such. Sad, but that's the way it tends to be.'

   
'Ah,' said Guy, 'but will she
move away
now
- now there's a place
for artistic types? Now Crybbe looks set to become a little melting pot for
ideas and creativity?'

   
'Look, Guy, creativity and
ideas have always been frowned upon in Crybbe - and, before you ask, no, I
certainly won't say any of
that
on
camera. 'Nother drink, did I ask you?"

Graham Jarrett was just too smooth, too confident. Powys didn't trust
him. He'd wander down to your subconscious like he owned the fishing rights.

   
'I assure you," Jarrett
insisted, 'that this is on the level. I've checked dates, I've checked what
facts I can and . . . Now, here's something . . . The Bull. The girl said she
lived at the Bull, and as you know there's no such pub in Crybbe any more. But
I've discovered the Bull was actually the original name of the Cock. And that's
not a cock-and-bull story.' Graham Jarrett straightened his cardigan. 'I have
it on very reliable authority.'

   
He'd given Powys a transcript
of the Catrin tape without argument, because Graham Jarrett wanted to be in The
Book, didn't he?

   
'OK, how many other cases have
you encountered where the subject is regressed to the very same town where the
regression is taking place?'

   
'It's been known. Very often
they specifically return to a town because they feel they've been there
before.'

   
'But she didn't. She came here
to work.'

   
Jarrett opened his hands.
'Stranger things . . .'

   
'Yeah, OK. But you've got a
situation here where one personality is fading and another just forces its way
in over the top, right?'

   
Graham Jarrett shrank back into
the dark-green drapery of
 
his consulting
room. Powys was sure there must be more on the tape than there was on the
transcript. Jarrett claimed he'd given the cassette to Guy, but he wouldn't
have done that before making a copy.

   
'I know what you're going to
suggest, Joe.'

   
'Well?'

   
'Don't. Don't even use that
word "possession" in here.'

There was a bonus for Guy in his visit to Col Croston's house. He'd
raised the matter of the suicide, the old man and the razor, less inhibited
about it now and less intimidated by it as time went on. There'd been no
disturbance in his room at the Cock last night, unless one included Catrin's
shrill moments of ecstasy. Catrin had been quite amazing. With the light out.

   
'No,' Col Croston said. 'Can't
say I have.' But he'd referred the question to his wife, neither of them,
fortunately, seeming over-curious about Guy's interest in local suicides.

   
'I know,' Mrs Croston had said.
'Why not ask Gomer? Gomer knows everything.'

   
The little man working on the
soakaway to the Crostons' septic tank had been only too happy to come out of
his trench for a chat. There was a disgustingly ripe smell in the vicinity of
the trench and Guy found that he and Gomer Parry were very soon left alone.

   
'Good chap, the Colonel,' Gomer
said. "Ad this other job lined up, over to Brynglas, see, and it was
postponed, last minute. Straightaway, the Colonel says, you stick around, boy,
do my soakaway. Fills in two days perfect. Very considerate man, the Colonel.'