Phil Rickman - Crybbe

'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,

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.'