by Phil Rickman
'Yes, yes,' Wynford said. 'The ole Thomas farm.'
'Well, as I said, it could be going back quite a while. I mean, any time this century, I suppose, maybe earlier.'
How long had there been cut-throat razors anyway, he wondered. Hundreds of years, probably.
'Bit of a romancer, that woman, you ask me,' Wynford said. 'From Off, see.'
Meaning a newcomer, Guy supposed. It was an interesting fact that he personally was never regarded as a stranger in areas where he was recognized from television. If they'd seen you on the box, you'd been in their living-rooms, so you weren't an intruder.
Except, perhaps, here in Crybbe.
'No, look,' Guy said, 'this happened in the bathroom. Oldish chap. Cut his own throat with one of those old-fashioned open razors.'
Wynford licked his cherub's lips, his eyes frosted with suspicion.
'What's wrong?' Guy asked.
'Somebody tell you to ask me about this, did they?'
'No,' Guy said. 'Of course not.'
'You sure?'
'Look, Sergeant, what's the problem here?'
Wynford had a drink of beer. 'No problem, sir.'
'No, you do…' Guy was about to accuse him of knowing something about this but keeping it to himself.
He looked into the little inscrutable features in the middle of the big melon face and knew he'd be wasting his time.
Wynford swallowed a lot of beer, wiped his mouth. His face was very red. He's on the defensive, Guy thought, and he doesn't like that.
He was right. Wynford looked at him for the first time. 'Somebody said you was married to that Fay? Or is it you just got the same name?'
'No, it's true. I'm afraid. We were married for… what? Nearly three years. I suppose.'
Wynford smiled conspiratorially, a sinister sight. 'Bit of a goer, was she?'
What an appalling person. Guy, who didn't like people asking him questions unless they were about his television work, looked at his watch and claimed he was late for a shoot. And, actually, they had got something arranged for later; Catrin had set up one of those regressive hypnotist chaps and agreed to be the subject.
Should be entertaining. Perhaps in some past life she'd actually been someone interesting. He wondered, as he strolled into the square, what crime she could have committed to get landed with the persona of Catrin Jones.
In the Crybbe Unattended Studio Gavin Ashpole sniffed.
He knew the pace used to be a toilet, but that wasn't what he could smell.
This was a musky, perfumed smell, and the odd thing was
that Gavin wasn't sure he could actually smell it at all. It was just there.
Probably because Fay Morrison used this studio for an hour or so every day.
There were a few of her scripts on the spike in the outer room. All hand-written, big and bold in turquoise ink.
Gavin picked up the phone and sniffed the mouthpiece. Sweating comfortably, cooling in his shell-suit. Gavin was a fitness freak, kept a hold-all in the back of his car with his jogging gear and his trainers inside. Any spare half hour or so he'd get changed, go for a run. Tuned your body, tuned your mind, and other people could sense it, too. You were projecting creative energy, dynamism.
He'd got an hour's running in tonight. Been up into the hills. Felt good. In control of himself and his destiny. Within a year he'd either be managing editor of Offa's Dyke radio or he'd have moved on.
Unlike Fay Morrison, who was over the hill and going down the other side fast. Left to him, the station would never have agreed to use her stuff. She was unreliable, awkward to deal with. And obviously unbalanced.
Bloody sexy, though.
The thought hit him surprisingly hard, a muscular pulse, where you noticed it.
He hadn't really considered her on this level before. She was older than he was. She'd had a lot more experience on radio, and although she never mentioned that, it was always there in the background, making her sound superior.
And she was a nutter. Not rational. Not objective as a reporter.
He'd see the boss tomorrow and explain precisely what had happened at Goff's press conference. She's doing us a lot of damage, he'd say. If she's put Max Goff's back up, who else is she antagonizing? No need to say anything to her or put anything in writing, just fade her out. Use less and less of her material until she stops bothering to send any. Then we'll put somebody else in.
Gavin attached a length of red-leader to the end of his tape. It hadn't taken much editing, just a forty-second clip for the morning.
He rang the newsroom to tell them he was ready to send, put on the cans, waited for the news studio to come through on the line.
He felt Fay in the cans. She'd worn them over that dark-blonde hair.
Sexy bitch.
He stretched his legs under the desk, feeling the calf muscles tighten and relax, imagining her in here with him, in this tiny little studio, not big enough for two, you'd be touching one another all the time.
Projecting forward to tomorrow night. He was back in Crybbe covering the public meeting, the big confrontation between Goff and the town councillors. Fay had followed him in here, apologizing for her behaviour, saying she'd been worrying about her father, letting it take her mind off her work, couldn't handle things any more, couldn't he see that?
He could see her now, kneeling down by the side of his chair, looking up at him.
Got to help me, Gavin.
Why should I help you?
I like muscular men, Gavin. Hard men. Fit men. That's how you can help me, Gavin.
He put his hands out, one each side of her head, gripped her roughly by the hair.
Her lips parted.
'Gavin!'
'Huh?'
'We've been calling out for five minutes.'
'You couldn't have been,' Gavin rasped into the microphone. He was sweating like a bloody pig.
'We could certainly hear you panting, mate. What were you doing exactly?'
'Very funny, Elton. I've been for a run. Six miles. You going to take some level or not?'
'Go ahead, I'm rolling. Hope you're going to clean up in there afterwards, Gavin.'
Angrily, Gavin snapped the switch, set his tape turning. This was another little clever dick who'd be looking for a new job when he was managing editor.
He took his hand out of his shell-suit trousers, put it on the desk below the mike and watched it shaking as if it wasn't his hand at all.
CHAPTER VIII
On reflection, maybe chopping holes in this particular wood wasn't such a crime. It was not a pleasant wood.
Something Powys hadn't consciously taken in when they were here yesterday and Fay had been so incensed about the slaughter of the trees, and Rachel had…
No. He didn't like the wood.
And it was uncared for. Too many trees, overcrowded, trees which had died left to rot, strangled by ivy and creepers, their white limbs sticking out like the crow-picked bones of sheep, while sickly saplings fought for the soil in between the corpses.
The wood was a buffer zone between the Tump and the town, and some of what would otherwise have reached the town had been absorbed by the wood, which was why it had such a bad feel and why people probably kept out.
And perhaps why Andy Boulton-Trow had chosen to live there.
Until you reached the clearing, the path was the only sign that anyone had been in this wood for years. It was too narrow for vehicles; a horse could make it, just about. But nobody with car would want Keeper's Cottage.
It was redbrick, probably 1920s, small and mean with little square windows, looked as if it had only one bedroom upstairs. It was in a part of the wood where conifers – Alaskan Spruce or something – had choked out all the hardwoods, crowding in like giant weeds, blinding Keeper's Cottage to the daylight.
A sterile place. No birds, no visible wildlife. Hardly the pick of Goff's properties. Hardly the type of dwelling for a Boulton-Trow. Even the gardeners which he assumed certain
<
br /> Boulton-Trows would employ wouldn't be reduced to this.
The door had been painted green. Once. A long time ago.
Powys knocked.
No answer. Unsurprising. Nobody in his right mind would want to spend too much time in Keeper's Cottage.
OK, either he isn't here or he is, and keeping quiet.
Powys felt old sorrow and new sorrow fermenting into fury, he called out, 'Andy!'
No answer.
'Andy, I want to talk.'
Not even an echo.
Powys walked around the cottage. It had no garden, no outbuildings, only a rough brick-built shelter for logs. The shelter was coming to pieces, most of the bricks were loose and crumbling.
So he helped himself to one. A brick. And he went to the back of the house, away from the path, and he hefted the brick, thoughtfully, from hand to hand for a moment or two before hurling it at one of the back windows.
A whole pane vanished.
Powys slipped a hand inside and opened the window.
Dementia, Alex thought, was an insidiously cunning ailment, it crept up on you with the style of a pickpocket, striking while your attention was diverted.
One didn't wake up in the morning and think, hello, I'm feeling a bit demented today, better put the trousers on back to front and spray shaving foam on the toothbrush. No, the attitude of the intelligent man – saying, Look, it's been diagnosed, it's there, so I'm going to have to watch myself jolly carefully – was less effective than one might expect.
And the problem with this type of dementia – furred arteries not always letting the lift go all the way to the penthouse, as it were – was that the condition could be at its most insidiously dangerous when you were feeling fine.
Today he'd felt fine, but he wasn't going to be fooled.
'Keep calm, at all times,' Jean Wendle had said. 'Learn how to observe yourself and your actions. Be detached, watch yourself without involvement. I'll show you how to do this, don't worry. But for now, just keep calm.'
Which wasn't easy when you lived with someone like Fay, who'd made a career out of putting people on the spot.
She'd come in just after six and put together rather a nice salad with prawns and other items she obviously hadn't bought in Crybbe. Bottle of white wine, too.
And then, over coffee…
'Dad, we didn't get a chance to finish our conversation this morning.'
'Didn't we?'
'You're feeling OK, aren't you?'
'Not too bad.'
'Because I want to get something sorted out.'
God preserve me from this child, Alex thought. Always had to get everything sorted out
'The business of the Revox. You remember? The vandalism?'
'Of course I remember. The tape recorder, yes.'
'Well, they haven't actually pulled anybody in for it yet.'
'Haven't they?'
'And perhaps you don't think they ever will.'
'Well, with that fat fellow in charge of the investigation, I must say, I'm not over-optimistic.'
'No, no. Regardless of Wynford, you don't really think…'
'Fay,' Alex said, 'how do you know what I think or what I don't think? And what gives you…?'
'Because I heard you talking to Grace.'
'Oh,' said Alex. He had been about to take a sip of coffee – he didn't.
Fay was waiting.
'Well, you know,' Alex said, switching to auto-pilot, 'I've often had parishioners – old people – who talked to their dead husbands and wives all the time. Nothing unusual about it, Fay. It brought them comfort, they didn't feel so alone any more. Perfectly natural kind of therapy.'
'Dad?'
'Yes?'
'Has Grace brought you comfort?'
Alex glared with resentment into his daughter's green eyes.
'Why did you think it was Grace who smashed up the Revox?'
He started to laugh, uneasily. 'She's dead.'
'That's right.'
Alex said, 'Look, time's getting on. I've a treatment booked for eight.'
'With Jean? What's she charging you, out of interest?'
'Nothing at all. So far, that is. I, er, gave her a basic outline of the financial position and she suggested I should leave her her fee in my will.'
'Very accommodating. Perhaps you could make a similar arrangement regarding your tab at the Cock. Now, to return to my question…'
Alex stood up. 'Let me think about this one, would you, Fay?'
How could he tell her his real fears about this? Well, of course dead people couldn't destroy property on that scale. Even poltergeists only tossed a few books around. Even if dead people felt a great antipathy to someone in their house, it was only living people who were capable of an act of such gross violence.
But perhaps dead people were capable of making living people do their dirty work.
Did I? he asked himself as he walked up Bell Street. Was it me?
Alex felt terribly hot and confused. Just wanted to feel the cool hands again.
The microphone was in the way. Jarrett had it on a bracket-thing attached to the ceiling so that it craned over the couch like an old-fashioned dentist's drill.
Guy said, rather impatiently, 'What do we need that thing for, anyway, if we're recording the whole session on VT?'
'I understand that, Guy,' Jarrett said, 'but I need it. I keep a record of everything. Also, it acts as a focus for the subject. I'm using the microphone in the same way as hypnotists do to swing their watches on a chain.'
'OK,' Guy said, 'I'll go with that. We'll do some shots the mike, make it swim before our eyes. OK, Larry?'
'No problem, I'll do it afterwards, come in over Catrin's shoulder. We OK with the lights?'
Guy looked at Graham Jarrett, small and tidy in a maroon cardigan, silver haired and just a tiny bit camp. Graham Jarrett said, 'One light may actually assist us if it isn't directly in her eyes, because we'll all be thrown into shadow and Catrin will be in her own little world. Can you make do with one, say that big one?'
'I don't see why not,' Guy said, gratified, remembering the hassle he'd had with Adam Ivory. Nice to know some New Age people could live with television.
Jarrett arranged a tartan travelling rug over the couch and patted a cushion. 'OK then, Catrin, lie down and make yourself comfortable. I want you to be fully relaxed, so have a good wriggle about… Where's your favourite beach… somewhere on the Med? West Indies?'
'Porth Dinllaen,' Catrin said patriotically. 'On the Lleyn, in north Wales.'
Guy turned away, concealing a snigger.
Jarrett adjusted the mike, switched on a cassette machine on a metal table on wheels, like a drinks trolley. 'OK, can we try it with the lights?'
Guy signalled to the lighting man, and Catrin's face was suddenly lit up, he thought, like a fat Madonna on a Christmas card. There was a tiny, black, personal microphone clipped into a fold of her navy-blue jumper.
'Right, Catrin,' Jarrett said softly, it's a soft, warm afternoon. You're on the beach…'
'Hang on,' Tom, the soundman, said. 'Let's have some level. Say something, Catrin. Tell us what you had for lunch.'
It was another twenty minutes or so before everyone was satisfied. Guy watched Jarrett taking off Catrin's shoes and draping another travelling rug over her stumpy legs, just below the knees. No bad thing; Catrin's legs wouldn't add a great deal to the picture. Only wished he'd known about this far enough in advance to have set up someone more photogenic.
He thought, with some amazement, back to this morning, when the night-terrors had persuaded him that he ought to invite Catrin to share his room tonight. He shuddered. Thank heaven he hadn't said anything to her.
'OK,' said Jarrett. 'It's very warm, not too hot, just pleasant. Perhaps you can hear the sea lapping at the sand in the distance. And if you look up, why there's the sun…'
The big light shone steadily down.
'Happy, Catrin?'
Catrin nodded, her lips p
lumped up into a little smile.
'But I don't want you to look at the sun, Catrin, I'd like you to look at the microphone. You must be quite comfortable with microphones, working for the BBC…
Guy, watching her intently, didn't notice her go under, or slide into a hypnotic trance or whatever they did. Nothing about her seemed to change, as Jarrett took her back to previous holidays when she was a child. He almost thought she was putting it on when she began to burble in a little-girl sort of voice, about her parents and her sister and paddling in the sea and seeing a big jellyfish – lapsing into Welsh at one point, her first language.
She would fake it, he knew; she wouldn't want to let him down.
But then Catrin started coming out with stuff that nobody in their right mind would fake.
Hard against the streaming evening light, Jack Preece took the tractor into the top meadow and he could tell the old thing was going to fail him, that poor Jonathon had been right when he said it was a false economy.
Nobody had open tractors like this any more. Tractors had changed. Tractors nowadays were like Gomer Parry's plant-hire equipment, big shiny things.
Jack had sworn this old thing was going to see them through the haymaking, which would mean he could put off the investment until next year, maybe check out what was available secondhand.
But Jonathon had been right. False economy. Especially if it failed him in the middle of the haymaking and he had to get one from Gomer to finish off.
Jonathon had been right, and he'd tell him so tonight. Least he could do.
Jack hadn't been in yet to see his son's coffin; couldn't face it. Couldn't face people seeing him walking into the church, the bloody vicar there, with his bank-manager face and his phoney words of comfort. The bloody vicar who didn't know the score, couldn't know the way things were, couldn't be any help whatever.
But that was how vicars had to be in this town, Father said. Don't want no holy-roller types in Crybbe. Just go through the motions, do the baptisms and the burials, keep their noses out and don't change nothing… don't break the routine.
And Jack wouldn't break his routine. He'd go into the church as usual tonight to ring the old bell, and he'd go just a bit earlier – but not so much earlier as anybody'd notice – so he could spend five minutes alone in there, in the near-dark, with his dead son.