by Phil Rickman
Guy dismissed it. 'Trivial, trivial stuff. I was young, she threw herself at me. You know that. I'm essentially a pretty faithful sort of person. No, what we had…' He pushed Grace's G-plan dining chair away from the table and leaned back, throwing his left ankle over his right knee and catching it deftly with his right hand. He obviously couldn't quite remember what they'd had.
'I often wish we'd had children, Fay.'
Oh hell.
Guy's intermittent live-in girlfriend had apparently proved to be barren. Fay remembered him moaning about this to her one night on the phone. She remembered thinking at the time that infertility was a very useful attribute for an intermittent live-in girlfriend to have. But Guy was at the age when he wanted there to be little Morrisons.
'I'm at the Cock.'
'What?'
'The Cock Hotel,' Guy said, it's an appalling place.'
'Dreadful,' Fay said, pouring his coffee,
'I think I'm going to have to make other arrangements when we start shooting in earnest.'
'I should.'
'Can you think of anywhere?'
'Hasn't Goff offered you accommodation?'
'Nothing suitable, apparently. He says. Though we do have special requirements – meals at all hours.'
Sore point, obviously.
'Still,' Fay said cheerfully. 'I've heard he's going to buy the Cock, turn it into a New Age Holiday Inn or something.'
She brought her coffee and sat down opposite him. If anything, he was even more handsome these days. It had once been terribly flattering to be courted by Guy Morrison. And unexpectedly painless to become divorced from him.
'I've changed, you know, Fay.'
'Hardly at all, I'd've said.'
'Oh, looks… that's not what it's all about. Never was, was it?'
Of course not, she thought. However, in your case, what else is there to get excited about?
'And you're obviously just as arrogant,' she said brightly.
'Confidence, Fay,' he said patiently. 'Not arrogance. If you don't continually display confidence in this business, people think you're…'
'A "spent force". Like J. M. Powys?'
'Something like that. I should have held on to you,' he said softly, a frond of blond hair falling appealingly to an eyebrow. 'You kept me balanced. I was terribly insecure, you know, that's why…'
'Oh, for God's sake, Guy, you were never insecure in your life. This is me you're giving all this bullshit to. Let's drop this subject, shall we?'
He looked hurt. But not very hurt.
'How did you get on yesterday?' Fay asked him, to change direction. 'They never managed to pull the wall down, did they?'
'Don't ask,' Guy said, meaning 'ask'.
'All went wrong, then?' This was probably the reason Guy was here. He was in urgent need of consolation.
'I've just been looking at the rushes.'
'What, you've been back to Cardiff?'
'No, no, I sent Larry to a video shop in Leominster last night to transfer the stuff to VHS so I could whizz through it at the Cock. When he came back, he said, "You're not going to like this," and cleared off quick. I've just found out why. Good grief. Fay, talk about a wasted exercise. First, there's bloody Goff – plans a stunt like that and doesn't tell me until it's too late to hire a second crew and then…'
'But it didn't happen, anyway. The wall's still there.'
'I know, but I had what ought to have been terrific footage of Goff going apeshit on top of the Tump, when the sound system packed in and the bulldozer chap said he couldn't do it. But the light must've been worse than I thought or Larry hadn't done a white-balance or something – he denies that, of course, but he would, wouldn't he?'
'What, it didn't come out?' Fay, who'd never worked in television, knew next to nothing about the technicalities of it. 'I thought this Betacam stuff didn't need much light.'
'Probably something wrong with the camera, Larry claims. First this big black thing shoots across the frame, and then all the colour's haywire. By God, if there's any human error to blame in Cardiff, somebody's job could be on the line over this.'
'But not yours, of course' said Fay. 'Hold on a minute, Guy.' She was listening to a vague scraping noise, it's Dad. He can't get his key in the door.'
Fay dashed into the hall, closing the kitchen door behind her and opening the front door. The Canon almost fell over the threshold, poking his key at her eye.
'Thank God.' Fay caught his arm, whispered in his ear, 'Come and rescue me, Dad. Guy's here, and he's in a very maudlin mood.'
'Who?' He was out of breath.
'Guy, you remember Guy. We used to be married once. I've got this awful feeling he's working up to asking me to have his baby.'
A blurred film had set across the Canon's eyes. He shook his head, stood still a moment, breathing hard, then straightened up. 'Yes,' he said. 'Fay. Something you need to know.'
'Take your time.'
'Tape recorder. Get your tape recorder.' His eyes cleared, focused. 'There's been an accident. A death. Everybody's talking about it. I'll tell you where to go.'
'There'll be no delay,' the dodman said. 'We start tonight.'
'Don't you need planning permission?' Powys asked.
The dodman only smiled.
As expected, he'd turned out to be Andy Boulton-Trow with a mobile phone and a map in a transparent plastic folder.
'There are six we can put n immediately. Either on Max's land around the Court or on bits of ground he's been able to buy. Not a bad start. You're getting one, did you know that?'
'Thanks a bunch.'
'The top of your little acre, where it meets the road. See?' Andy held out his plastic-covered photocopy of Henry's map. 'Right there.'
It was a large-scale OS blow-up. The former location of each stone was marked by a dot inside a circle and the pencilled initials, H. K.
They were standing in Crybbe's main street, just above the police station, looking down towards the bridge. Two of Andy's dodmen were making their way across, carrying white sighting-poles. Powys asked him how long it had been going on, all this planning and surveying and buying up of land.
'Months. Nearly a year, all told. But it's all come to a head very rapidly. In some curious way, I think Henry's death fired Max into orbit. Henry's done the leg-work, now it was down to Max to pull it all together. There are more than fifty workmen on the project now. Stables'll be finished by Monday, ready for a start on the Court itself next week. First half-dozen stones in place by tomorrow night. That's moving, Joe.'
'No, he doesn't piss about, does he?'
'All that remains is to persuade the remaining few die-hards either to sell their land or accept a stone on it. Hence Tuesday's public meeting. A formality, I'd guess. He'll have bought them off by then. Agent's out there now, negotiating. Farmers will do anything these days to stay afloat. Caravan sites, wind-farms, you name it. They take what comes. Most of them have no choice.'
Powys wondered if you could stop people planting a standing stone close to where you lived, perhaps diverting some kind of energy through your house? How would a court make a ruling on something which had never been proved to exist?
'It seems amazing,' he said, 'that there were so many stones around here and every single one of them's been ripped out.'
'Except for one Henry found. Little bent old stone under a hedge.'
'Do you think they destroyed them because they were superstitious?'
Andy shrugged.
'Because you'd think, if they were superstitious, they'd have been scared to pull them out, wouldn't you?'
'People in these parts,' Andy said, 'who knows how their minds work?'
Powys looked up the street towards the church tower.
'There's a major ley, isn't there, coming from the Tump, through the Court, then the church, right through the town to the hills?'
'Line one.' Andy held out the plan.
'I was up in the prospect chamber at the Court. It might
have been constructed to sight along that ley.'
'Might have been?'
'You think it was?'
'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 G
allery' 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.'