Phil Rickman - Crybbe

Something had changed.

Fay said cautiously, 'So when is he going to talk to me? On tape.'

'Leave it with me,' Rachel said. 'I'll fix it.' She spread her arms to usher Fay back towards the wooden framework evidently destined to be a doorway.

'I hate having to ask this sort of question.' Fay stopped at the entrance. 'But he isn't going to be talking to anyone else, is he, first?'

'Not if I can help it. Listen, we've been walking around this place for the last forty-five minutes and I've forgotten your name.'

'Fay. Fay Morrison.'

'Would you like a job, Fay?'

'Huh?'

'Quite ludicrous salary. Seductively fast company car. Lots of foreign travel.'

Fay stared at her.

'Silly expenses,' Rachel said. 'Untold fringe benefits.' She'd turned her back on the big window. From the far end of the room, the hills had been squeezed out of the picture; the window was full of Tump.

'How long have you been doing this?' Fay asked. 'As Goff's

'Nearly four years now. I think I've done rather well on the whole. Although the physical demands are not too arduous, Max's bisexuality goes in alternating phases. During his DC periods he can leave you alone for months.'

The grey eyes were calm and candid.

'Jesus Christ,' Fay said.

'Oh, don't get me wrong – I don't mind that. I almost became an actress, anyway. And with Max, there's rarely anything terribly tiring. And never anything particularly bizarre. Well, except for the crystals, and he only ever tried that once. And anyway, one always has to weigh these things against the benefits. No, it's just…'

Rachel dug her fists deep into the pockets of her Barbour until Fay could see the knuckles outlined in the shiny, waxed fabric.

'.. It's just I don't think I can go through with it here,' Rachel said. 'Do you know what I mean?'

Grace Legge came here to die. Dad came to go slowly loopy, and I came to watch.

'Yes,' Fay said bleakly, 'I know exactly what you mean. I'm beginning to realize how hard it is to get anything positive to take off here.'

She'd read somewhere that nobody could say for certain where the name Crybbe came from. It was obviously a corruption of the Welsh, and there were two possible derivations: crib – the crest of a hill (which seemed topographically unlikely, because the town was in a valley). or crybachu – to wither.

It appeals to him, you know,' Rachel said. 'The fact that failure is so deeply ingrained here. Brings out the crusader him. He's going to free the place from centuries of bucolic apathy.'

'The first story Offa's Dyke got me to cover,' Fay remembered, 'was the opening of a new factory on the industrial estate. Quite a lively little set-up producing chunky coloured sandals – in fact I'm wearing a pair, see? They were providing eight local jobs and the Marches Development Board were predicting it'd be twenty before the end of the year.'

'Closed down, didn't it? Was it last week?'

'I'd have ordered another pair if I'd known,' Fay said.

They stared at each other, almost comically glum, then Rachel tossed back her ash-blonde hair and strode determinedly through to the room which would soon be a kitchen.

'Come on, let's get out of here, he'll be back soon.' She picked up two tumblers from the draining surface next to the new sink, and Fay followed her outside, where she dug a bottle of sparkling wine from the silt in the bottom of an old sheep trough – 'My private cellar.'

And then they collected a grateful Arnold from the Range Rover and wandered off across the field, down the valley to the river, where you could sit on the bank fifty yards from the three-arched bridge and probably not see the Court any more nor even the Tump.

On the way down the field Fay looked over her shoulder to watch the Tump disappearing and saw a man among the trees on its summit. He was quite still, obviously watching them.

'Rachel, who's that?'

'Where?'

'On the Tump. I don't think it's Goff.'

Rachel turned round and made no pretence of not staring.

'It's Humble,' she said. 'Max's minder. He loves it here. He used to be a gamekeeper. He prowls the woods all the time, supposedly organizing security. I think he snares rabbits and things.'

'Very Green, I must say,' Fay said.

'Max's principles tend to get overlooked where Humble's concerned. I think he sometimes serves the need that occasionally arises in Max for, er, rough boys.'

'I think I'm sorry I asked,' said Fay.

Alex awoke.

There was pressure on his chest. When he was able to open his eyes just a little, with considerable difficulty, he looked into blackness.

Oh lord, he thought, I've actually entered the dark place, I'm in there with Grace.

Yet he was still in the armchair. The chair was refusing to let go of him. It had closed around him like an iron lung or something. He was a prisoner in the chair and in the dark and there was a pressure on his chest.

'Grace?' he said feebly. 'Grace?'

The darkness moved. The darkness was making a soft, rhythmic noise, like a motor boat in the distance.

Alex opened his eyes fully and stared into luminous amber-green, watchful eyes. He chuckled; the darkness was only a big, black cat.

'Ras… Ras…' he whispered weakly, trying to think of the creature's name.

The cat stood up on his chest.

'Rastus!' Alex said triumphantly. 'Hullo, Rastus. You know, for a minute, I thought… Oh, never mind, you wouldn't understand.'

He wondered if it was teatime yet. The clock said… what? Couldn't make out if it was four o'clock or five. Around four, Grace always liked a pot of tea and perhaps a small slice of Dundee cake. She'd be most annoyed if he'd slept through teatime.

Fay, on the other hand, preferred a late meal. Women were so contrary. It generally saved a lot of argument if he ate with them both.

Alex chuckled again. No wonder he was getting fat.

Rachel put the bottle in the river and took off her Barbour. 'I'll be thirty-six in January.'

'Happens to us all,' Fay said.

'I was… very much on top of the situation when I took the job. Nothing could touch me, you know? I was chief Press Officer at Virgin, and he head-hunted me. He said, you’re your price, so I doubled my salary and he said, OK, it's yours – can you believe that?'

She handed Fay the glasses, pulled the bottle out of the water and shot the cork at the bridge. It fell short and they watched it bobbing downstream. 'Does that count as pollution?' Rachel wondered.

'Why was Goff so attracted to Crybbe?'

Rachel poured wine until it fizzed to the brim of both tumblers. 'Magic'

'Magic?' Fay repeated in a flat voice.

'Earth magic.'

'You mean ley-lines?'

'You know what all that's about? I mean, don't be ashamed, it's all speculation anyway.'

'Tell me what it means in the Crybbe context.'

'OK, well, presumably you know about Alfred Watkins who came up with the theory back in the 1920s. Lived in Hereford and did most of his research in these hills. Had the notion, and set out to prove it, that prehistoric sacred monuments – standing stones, stone circles, burial mounds, all this – were arranged in straight lines. Just route markers, he thought originally, on straight roads.'

'I've got his book. The Old Straight Track.'

'Right. So you know that where four or five sites fell into a straight line, he'd call it a ley, apparently because a lot of the places where these configurations occurred had names ending in l-e-y,

'Like Crybbe?'

Rachel grinned. 'Well, he didn't know about Crybbe, or he'd probably have called them Crybbe-lines. You read through Watkins's book, you won't find a single mention of Crybbe.'

'I know. I looked. I was quite disappointed.'