Phil Rickman - Crybbe

'Oh dear, poor dog. I didn't know about that.' Rachel started the engine, 'it's rather a mystery, isn't it. About Mr Kettle. Do you think he'd been drinking?'

'I didn't know him very well. I think a heart attack or stroke or something seems more likely, don't you?'

'He was a nice old man.' Rachel swung the Range Rover off the square into the street that wriggled down past the church, the graveyard on the right, a few cottages on the left. The street narrowed and entered a wood, where the late afternoon sun was filtered away and the colours faded almost to grey, 'I don't believe all that dowsing stuff. But he was a nice old man.'

'Don't you? I thought…'

'Oh, Max does. Max believes it. Good God, yes. However, I don't get paid to share his wilder obsessions. Well, he thinks I do. ..' Rachel exhaled a short, throaty laugh.

They came out of the wood. A track to the left was barred by a gate with a metal sign. COURT FARM. Where the Preece farmed. Jack, son of Jimmy, the Mayor, and Jack's two son She'd seen Jack once, slinking almost furtively out of the church, his nightly duty accomplished.

'And what exactly is Mr Goff's obsession with the Court?'

'I'll show you in a minute,' Rachel said affably.

This was too easy. Fay was suspicious. She watched Rachel Wade driving with a languid economy of movement, like people drove in films, only you knew they weren't in real, moving vehicles. This was the kind of woman who could change a wheel and make it look like a ballet. Made you despair.

Rachel said, is that your father, the old clergyman? Or your grandfather or something?'

'Father. You've met him?'

'In the Cock. We got into conversation after my lighter fell off the bar and he picked it up.' Rachel smiled, in fact, if he'd been considerably younger, I'd almost have thought…'

Fay nodded wryly. 'The old knocking-the-lighter-off-the-bar routine. Then he carries out a detailed survey of your legs while he's picking it up. He's harmless. I think.'

'He's certainly a character.' Rachel pulled up in a walled courtyard amid heaps of sand and builders' rubble. Before them random grey-brown stones were settled around deepset mullioned windows and a dusty oak door was half-open.

Fay took a breath.

'Crybbe Court,' Rachel said. 'But don't get too excited.' She snapped on the handbrake. 'Leave the dog in the car, he won't like it. Nobody does, really, apart from historians, and even they get depressed at the state of it.'

She wondered what had made her think it was going to be mellow and warm-toned like a country house on a Christmas card.

'It's old,' she said.

'Elizabethan.'

She felt cold and folded her bare arms. Outside, it was a fairly pleasant midsummer's day; in here, stark and grim as dankest February.

Somehow, she'd imagined rich drapes and tapestries and polished panelling. Probably because the only homes of a similar period she'd visited had been stately homes or National Trust properties, everything exuding the dull sheen of age and wealth, divided from the plebs by brass railings and velvet ropes.

In Crybbe Court these days, it seemed, only the rats were rich.

The room was large, stone-floored and low-ceilinged, and apparently fortified against the sun. The only direct light was from three small, high-set windows, not much more than slits. Bare blue sky through crossed iron bars.

Fay said, 'I suppose it's logical when you think about it, the period and everything, but I didn't imagine it would be quite so.. .'

She became aware of a narrow, stone staircase spiralling into a vagueness of cold light hanging from above like a sheet draped over a banister.

'Ghastly,' Rachel said, 'is, I think, the word you're groping for. Let's go upstairs. It's possibly a little less oppressive.'

The spiral staircase opened into a large chamber with mullioned windows set in two walls. Bars of dusty sunshine fell short of meeting in the middle. It had originally been the main family living-room, Rachel explained. 'Also, I'm told, the place where the local high sheriff, a man named Wort, held out against the local populace who'd arrived to lynch him. Have you heard that story?'

'I've heard the name, but not the story.'

'Oh, well, he was a local tyrant back in the sixteenth century. Known as Black Michael. Hanged men for petty crimes after allowing their wives to appeal to his better nature, if you see what I mean. Also said to have experimented on people before they died, in much the same way as the Nazis did.'

'Charming.'

'In the end, the local people decided they'd had enough.'

'What? The townsfolk of Crybbe actually rebelled? What did they do, write "Wort Must Go" on the lavatory wall?'

'Probably, for the first ten years of atrocities. But in the end they really did come out to lynch him, all gathered out there in the courtyard, threatening to burn the place down with him in it if he didn't come out.'

'And did he?'

'No,' said Rachel. 'He went into the attic and hanged himself from the same rafters from which he'd hanged his offenders.'

'And naturally,' Fay said, 'he haunts the place.'

'Well, no,' Rachel said. "He doesn't, actually. No stories to that effect anyway. And when Mr Kettle toured the house, he said it was completely dead. As in vacant. Un-presenced, or however you care to put it. Max was terribly disappointed. He had to console himself with the thought of the hound bounding across his path one night.'

'What?'

'Black Michael's Hound. Nobody ever sees Michael, but there is a legend about his dog. A big, black, Baskerville-type creature said to haunt the lanes on the edge of town. It comes down from the Tump.'

Fay thought at once of the old lady who kept telephoning her, Mrs Seagrove. 'I didn't know about that.'

Rachel looked at her, as if surprised anybody should want to know about it.

'When was it last seen?' Fay asked.

'Who knows. The book Max found the story in was published, I think, in the fifties. One of those "Legends of the Border" collections. The more recent ones don't seem to have bothered with it.'

Fay wondered if it would help Mrs Seagrove to know about the legend. Probably scare her even more. Or maybe Mrs Seagrove did know about it and had either invented or imagined her own sighting, which would explain everything. The problem with old ladies was you could never be quite sure of their state of mind, especially the ones who lived alone.

She asked bravely, 'Are we going up to the attic, then?'

'Certainly not,' Rachel said firmly. 'For one thing, it's not terribly safe. The floor's pretty badly rotted away up there and Max isn't insured against people breaking their necks. Unless they've been hanged.'

Fay shivered and smiled and looked around. 'Well,' she said. It could be wonderful, I suppose. If it was done up.'

'With a million pounds or so spent on it, perhaps.' Rachel prodded with a shoe and sent a piece of plaster skating across the dusty wooden floor, 'I can think of better things you could do with a million pounds.'

'Has it been like this since – you know – Tudor times?'

'Good God, no. At various times… I mean, in the past century alone, it's been a private school, a hotel… even an actual dwelling place again. If we had a torch you'd see bits of wiring and the ruins of bathrooms. But nothing's ever lasted long. It was built as an Elizabethan house, and that, in essence, is what it keeps reverting to.'

'And now?'

'No big secret. Max is a New Age billionaire with a Dream.'

'You don't sound very impressed.'

Rachel stood in the centre of the room and spread her hands. 'Oh God… He wants to be King Arthur. He wants to set up his Round Table with all kinds of dowsers and geomancers and spiritual healers and other ghastly cranks. He's been quietly infiltrating them into the town over the past year. And there'll be some kind of Max Goff Foundation, on a drip-feed from Epidemic, hopefully with the blessing of the Charity Commissioners. And people will get ludicrous grants to go off an search for their own pet Holy Grails.'