by Unknown
She didn't care. She felt apart from it all, in a listless kind of dream state. She was watching a movie about a woman who was out for a drive with a murderer. But in films like this, the woman had no reason to suspect the man was a murderer, only the viewers knew that; they'd seen him kill, she hadn't. The woman in this particular movie had a black and white three-legged dog on her knee. Must be one of those experimental, surrealist epics.
The car moved out of an avenue of trees into a spread of open, sheep-strewn hills with steep, wooded sides and hardly any houses.
Before they left she'd written a note for her dad, fed the cats and listened to the answering machine, which said, 'Hi, Fay, this is James Barlow from Offa's Dyke. Just to say we understand Max Goff's coming back to Crybbe and he'll probably be holding a press conference around four this afternoon, following this Rachel Wade business. But don't worry about it, Gavin says to tell you he'll be going over there himself. . .'
So I'm free. Fay thought bitterly. Free as a bloody bird.
As if he were watching the same movie, Powys said, 'If I killed her, why would I report it?'
'Why did you?'
'Had to get an ambulance. There might have been a chance.
'Did she . . . ? Oh God, did she die instantly?'
'I heard it, you know, snap. Her neck.'
She thought his voice was going to snap too and tried not to react. 'What were you doing there, anyway? How come you happened to be under the window when she fell?'
'Still don't know how much of that was coincidence. Don't know if she saw me. If she was trying to attract my attention and fell against the bar. But she didn't call out to me. She just screamed. As if she was screaming at something inside the house.'
'And couldn't she get out? The house was locked up with her in it?'
'It was locked when I tried the doors. It wasn't when the police got there. So they say. Work that one out.'
'So she was killed by somebody in the house . . . If she was killed. Humble?'
'Well, they didn't like each other. But that doesn't explain the light. Doesn't really explain the cat either.'
'Maybe Rachel was holding the cat, for some reason, and it took longer to reach the ground because there was no weight left in it. Joe, I have to ask you this . . . What exactly were you doing at the Court?'
'Told the cops I was looking for Rachel. I think I was really looking for Andy. Oh God . . .' He sighed. 'What happened was he'd planted a stone outside the cottage, an exact replica of a thing that's been hanging over me for years.'
'A stone?'
'The Bottle Stone. Do you want to know this? It'll be the first time I've talked about it to anybody. Apart from the people there.'
'Do you want to tell me?'
'I don't know . . . OK. Yeah."
He fell silent.
'What do you want?" Fay said. 'A drum roll?'
'Sorry. OK. It goes back over twelve years. To the Moot.'
'The Moot," Fay said solemnly.
'It's organized every year by The Ley-Hunter magazine. It's a gathering of earth-mysteries freaks from all over the place. We meet every year in a different town to discuss the latest theories and walk the local leys.'
'I bet you all have dowsing rods and woolly hats.'
'You've been to one?'
Fay laughed. It sounded very strange, laughter, today.
'This particular year,' Powys said, 'it was in Hereford. Birthplace of Alfred Watkins. Everybody was amazed there wasn't a statue - nothing at all in the town to commemorate him, which is how I came to establish Trackways a couple of years later. But, anyway, all the big names in earth mysteries were there. And we were all there too. Rose and me. Andy. Ben Corby, who was at college with us, bit of a wheeler-dealer, the guy who actually managed to sell Golden Land to a publisher. And Henry Kettle, of course. We knew there was a deal coming through, and on the Monday morning after the Moot, before we all set off for home, Ben rang the publishers and learned they'd flogged the paperback rights for ten thousand quid.'
Powys smiled. 'Bloody fortune. Well, it was a nice day, so we decided, Rose and I, to invite the others - the people who'd been in on the book from the beginning - to come out for a celebratory picnic. We wondered where we could go within reach of Hereford. Then Andy said, "Listen," he said, "I know this place . . .'
She looked out through the side window of the Mini. She didn't recognize the country. One hill made a kind of plateau. She counted along the top - like tiny ornaments on a green baize mantelpiece - three mounds, little tumps. A thin river was woven into the wide valley bottom.
Powys was dizzily swivelling his head. 'Somewhere here . . .'
The third mound had a cleft in it, like an upturned vulva.
'Yes,' he said. 'Yes.' He hit the brakes, pulled into the side of the road. 'It was down there.'
'The Bottle Stone?'
Powys nodded.
'Let me get this right,' Fay said. 'This . . . legend, whatever it was . . .'
'It's a common enough ritual, I've found out since. It can be a stone or a statue or even a tree - yew trees are favourites for it. You walk around it, usually anticlockwise, a specific number of times - thirteen isn't uncommon. And then you have an experience, a vision or whatever. There's a church in south Herefordshire where, if you do it, you're supposed to see the Devil.'
'But you didn't see anything like that?'
'No, just this sensation of plunging into a pit and becoming . . . impaled. And there was nothing ethereal about it, I can feel it now, ripping through the tissue, blood spurting out. . .'
'Yes, thank you, I get the picture.'
'But it happened to me. That was the point. No indication of any danger to Rose.'
'Was she unhappy?'
'Not at all. That day at the Bottle Stone, she was very happy. That's what's so agonizing. I've had twelve years to get over it ... I can't. If I could make sense of it . . . but I can't.'
'And it was . . . how long, before ... she fell?'
'Not quite two weeks. OK, thirteen days.'
'Hmm.' Fay's fingers were entwined in the fur around Arnold's ears. 'Was .. . was she unhappy at all afterwards? I mean, pregnant women . . .'
'It was at a very early stage. I don't even know if it had been officially confirmed.'
'She hadn't told you?'
Powys shook his head. 'The post mortem report - that was the first I knew about it.'
'So this experience you had on the so-called fairy mound . . . What are your feelings about that? Do you feel you were being given a warning, that there was something you should have realized?'
Powys said, 'You're interviewing me, aren't you? I can spot the inflection.'
'Oh God, I'm sorry, Joe. Force of habit. How about if I try and make the questions less articulate?'
'No, carry on. At least it's more civilized than the cops. No, it didn't make any sense. Any more than the average nightmare.'
'And you told Rose?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'Because it had been such a nice day up to then. Because the future looked so bright. Because I didn't want to cast a pall. I just said when they dumped me on the mound I must have fainted. I said I was very dizzy. I did tell Andy about it after . . . after Rose died.'
'And what did he say?'
'He said I should have told Rose.'
'That was tactful of him.'
'And what do you think, Fay? What do you think I should have done?'
'What about Henry Kettle. What did he say?'
'He wanted nothing to do with it. He used to say this kind of thing was like putting your fingers in a plug socket.'
Fay glanced at him quickly, uneasily, over Arnold's ears. Was it possible that Joe Powys was indeed insane? Or, worse perhaps, was it possible he was sane?
He was hunched over the steering wheel. 'Oh, Fay, how could I have killed Rachel?'
He looked at her. 'I'm not saying I was in love with her. We'd only known each other a coupl
e of days, but. . .'
She looked up into the hills, all the little tumps laid out neatly.
He said, 'Think Arnold can manage a walk?'
Arnold struggled to his feet on Fay's knee.
'He obviously thinks so,' Fay said. 'Come on, then. Let's go and find the Bottle Stone.'
Max began to breathe hard.
It was astonishing.
'Take me over again, Mel,' Max said. 'Then maybe we'll get Guy Morrison and his crew to come up with you. We have to have pictures of this. For the record.'
He leaned forward, thoughts of Rachel's death blown away by all this magic.
Melvyn, his helicopter pilot, took them over the town again making a wide sweep of the valley. Max counted six standing stones - first time round he'd missed the one by J. M. Powys's cottage near the river.
He couldn't believe it. A week ago Crybbe was scattered . . . random, like somebody'd crapped it out and walked away. Now it had form and subtle harmonies, like a crystal. It had been earthed.
He could spot, clear as if it had been blasted in with a giant aerosol paint-spray, the main line coming off the Tump. It cut through the Court, cleaved a path through the woods until it came to a small clearing, and in the centre of this clearing, surrounded by tree stumps and chain-sawed branches, there was a tall stone, thin and sharp as a nail from up here.
Lucky he owned the wood. Lucky, also, that nobody in Crybbe seemed to give a shit about tree conservation.
Nice work, Andy.
Andy. Such a plain and simple user-friendly name. But the thought of Andy made him shiver, and he liked to shiver.
The line eased out of the wood, across the graveyard and sliced into the church, clean down the centre of the tower. Then it ploughed across the square and hit this building.
Which building?
Go in a bit, Mel.'
The helicopter banked, and Max looked back. Shit, it was the Cock, he'd never realized the line cut through the pub . . . the pub he'd known intuitively he had to buy. Maybe, sleeping there in that crummy room, he'd picked up the flow. These things happened when you were keyed into the system.
His thoughts came back to Rachel. Who, for once, had not been keyed in. Who hadn't known how to handle country people. Who hadn't believed in the Crybbe project, hadn't believed in much.
Should he feel any kind of guilt here? Leaving her to handle things while he was in London, knowing she was out of sympathy with the whole deal?
'OK, Max?'
'Yeah, sure, Mel. Take us in.'
Thrown out on the fucking rubbish heap - like the Court itself didn't want anybody in there hostile to the project. Rough justice. Jeez.
Was this fanciful, or what?
What he'd do, he'd have some kind of memorial to Rachel fashioned in stone. A plaque on a gate or a stile along the ley-walk, well away from the Court. Couldn't have people staring up at the prospect chamber - 'Yeah, this was where that woman took a dive, just here.'
But accidents were bad news. First thing, he'd need to have that cross-bar replaced, arrange things so the whole room was sealed off until it was fully safe.
They cleared the river and headed back over the town towards the Court. The other leys were not so obvious as the big one down the middle; this was because fewer than half the new stones were in place, several farmers refusing to give permission until after the public meeting. Or, more likely, they were holding out to see how keen he was, how much he was prepared to pay. Yeah, he could relate to that.
Cars in the courtyard. People waiting for him. Press conference scheduled for 5 p.m.
He looked at his Rolex. It was 11.15. Time to find out precisely what had happened. Talk to the police before he faced the newsmen and the TV crews, whose main question would be this:
Mr Goff, this is obviously a terrible thing to happen. It must surely have overshadowed your project here?
The press were just so flaming predictable.
Arnold was in fact moving remarkably well. 'He doesn't think he's disabled,' Fay said. 'He just thinks he's unique.'
They climbed over a stile. Arnold managed to get under it without too much difficulty. She picked him up for a while, carried on walking across the field with the dog in her arms. The few sheep ignored them.
The sky was full of veined clouds, yellow at the edges, like wedges of ancient Stilton cheese.
Powys had watched Fay wander down the field and at one point Memory, vibrating on its helipad, turned her into Rose in a long white frock and a wide straw hat, very French Impressionist.
He blinked and Rose was Fay again, in light-blue jeans and a Greenpeace T-shirt.
She put Arnold down. He fell over and got up again.
Fay stopped and turned to him.
'Where is it, then?'
He said faintly, 'It isn't here.'
'I thought perhaps there was something wrong with my eyes,' Fay said.
'I don't understand it. This was the field. There's the river, see. The hills are right. There's the farmhouse, just through those trees.'
Fay didn't say a word.
'You think I'm bonkers, don't you?'
'Scheduled ancient monuments don't just disappear,' she said. 'Do they?'
CHAPTER VI
One of the women who cleaned the church was paid to come into the vicarage on weekdays to prepare Murray's lunch. He rarely saw her do it, especially in summer; it would just be there on a couple of dishes, under clingfilm. Variations on a cold-meat salad and a piece of fruit pie with whipped cream. She never asked if he enjoyed it or if there was something he would prefer.
He lifted up a corner of the clingfilm, saw a whitish, glistening smudge of something.
Mayonnaise. He knew it could only be mayonnaise.
But still Murray retched and pushed the plate away. This had been happening increasingly, of late - he'd scraped the lunch untouched into the dustbin. He never seemed to miss it afterwards, rarely felt hunger, although he knew he was losing weight and even he could see his face was gaunt and full of long shadows. Pretty soon, he though sourly, there would be rumours going around that he had AIDs.
Next week he might let it be known that he was interested in a move. He would see how he felt.
Today was not the day to do anything hasty.
Today he'd left the vicarage as usual, before eight, and walked the fifty yards to the church where he'd found what he'd found.
The church door had not been damaged because it was never locked. Nothing had been torn or overturned. Only the cupboard in the vestry, where the communion wine and the chalice were kept, had been forced.
Murray had heard of cases where centuries-old stained glass had been smashed or, in the case of Catholic churches, plaster statues pounded to fragments. Swastikas spray-painted on the altar-cloth. Defecation in the aisle.
Nothing so unsubtle here.
What was missing was that element of frenzy, of uncontrolled savagery. This was what had unnerved him, made him look over his shoulder down the silent nave.
Candles - his own Christmas candles - had been left burning on the altar, two of them, one so far gone that it was no more than a wick in a tiny pool of liquid wax. Between the candles stood the communion chalice, not empty.
What was in the bottom of the cup was not mayonnaise.
Murray had looked inside once, then turned away with a short, whispered, outraged prayer - it might have been a prayer or it might have been a curse; either way it was out of character. His reserve had been cracked.
With distaste, he'd placed the chalice on the stone floor, remembering too late about fingerprints but knowing even then hat he would not be calling in the police, because that was all they'd done.
And it was enough.
It was inherently worse than any orgy of spray-paint and destruction. The single small, symbolic act, profoundly personal, almost tidy. Appalling in its implication, but nothing in itself, simply not worth reporting to the police and thus alerting the newspapers and Fay Morrison.
'They always ask you,' he remembered a colleague with an urban parish complaining once, 'if you suspect Satanism. What are you supposed to say? It's certainly more than anti-social behaviour, but do you really want some spotty little vandal strutting around thinking he's the Prince of Darkness?'
But this, he thought - staring down at his cling-wrapped lunch, suddenly nauseous and unsteady - this is another gesture to me. It's saying, come out. Come out, 'priest', come out and fight.
However, as he'd thought while rinsing out the chalice this morning, this can hardly be down to Tessa Byford, can it?
Murray had thrown away the candles, performed a small, lonely service of reconsecration over the chalice and decided to keep the outrage to himself. By the time the Monday cleaner came in at ten, there had been no sign of intrusion.
As for the small cupboard in the vestry - he would unscrew it from the wall himself and take it to an ironmonger's in Leominster, explaining how he'd had to force the lock after being stupid enough to lose the key. Silly me. Ha ha.
Impractical souls, vicars. Absent-minded, too.
Just how absent-minded he was becoming was brought dramatically home to him when the doorbell rang just before two o'clock and he parted the lace curtains to see a hearse parked in front of the house with a coffin in the back.
It had slipped his mind completely. But, even so, wasn't it at least a day too early?
'Ah, Mr Beech,' the undertaker said cheerfully. 'Got Jonathon Preece for you.'
'Yes, of course.'
'Funeral's Wednesday afternoon, so it's just the two nights in the church, is it?'
'Yes, I... I wasn't expecting him so soon. I thought, with the post mortem . . .'
'Aye, we took him for that first thing this morning and collected him afterwards.'
'Oh. But didn't you have things to, er . . . ?'
'No, we cleaned him up beforehand, Mr Beech. If there's no embalming involved, it's a quick turnover. Right then, top of the aisle, is it? Bottom of the steps before the altar, that's where we usually . . .'
'Yes, fine. I'll . . . '
'Now you just leave it to us, Mr Beech. We know our way around. We'll make 'im comfortable.'