Crybbe aka Curfew

exactly? Jocasta asked silently, directing a powerful ray of naked curiosity at the woman. It usually worked.

The door closed behind him. Max Goff stood a moment on the sunlit step, Crybbe laid out before him.

Jimmy Preece's retirement cottage was a fitting place for the Mayor to live, at the entrance to the narrow road off the little square, the one which led eventually 10 the Court – Jimmy Preece being the head of the family which had lived at Court Farm since sixteen-something at least.

It was fitting also for the Mayor because it was at the top of the town, with the church of St Michael on the right. And you could see the buildings – eighteenth, seventeenth century and earlier – staggering, gently inebriated, down the hill to the river, with its three-arched bridge.

From up here Goff could easily discern the medieval street pattern – almost unchanged, he figured. The newer buildings – the school, the council housing and the small industrial estate – had been tacked on and could, no doubt, just as easily be flicked away.

It was bloody perfect.

Unspoiled.

And this was precisely because it was not a wealthy town, because it was down on its luck and had been for a long, long time. Because it was not linked to the trunk roads between Wales and the Midlands and was not convenient, never would be. No use at all for commuting to anywhere.

And yet, beneath this town, the dragon slumbered.

She was going to ring Darwyn Hall, the artist, immediately but Hereward walked in, still wearing his artisan's outfit and carrying a mug of coffee. The mug was one of the misshapen brown things they'd felt obliged to buy from the Crybbe Pottery.

'Who was that?'

Jocasta was sitting at her desk in a corner of the gallery, putting the cheque away. It was a customized company cheque, the word Epidemic faded across it like a watermark. 'A sale, of course,' she said nonchalantly.

'Good God.' Hereward looked around to see which of the pictures had gone. 'Picking it up later, are they?'

'You should be looking in the window.' Jocasta just couldn't hold her cool any longer and an awful smirk of delight was spreading over her face like strawberry jam.

'You're joking,' Hereward said, stunned. He strode to the window and threw back the shutters. 'Good grief!' He turned back to Jocasta. 'Full price?'

'This is not a bloody discount store, darling.'

'Stone me,' said Hereward. 'The triptych. Just like that? I mean, who…?'

Jocasta waited a second or two, adjusted the Celtic brooch at her shoulder and then casually hit him with the big one.

'Max Goff.'

'Gosh.' Hereward pit down his cup. 'So it's true, then. He has bought the Court.'

'Sent his personal assistant to collect it,' Jocasta said. 'Rachel Wade.'

'This is far from bad news,' Hereward said slowly, 'in fact, this could be the turning point.'

Mrs Preece waited across the square with her shopping bag until she saw the large man in the white suit stride out past the delphiniums. He didn't, she noticed, close the garden gate behind him. She watched him get into his fancy black car and didn't go across to the house until she couldn't even hear its noise any more.

Jimmy was still sitting in the parlour staring at the wall.

Mrs Preece put down her shopping bag and reached over Jimmy to the top of the television set, where the onion was sitting in its saucer.

'You'll be late for your drink,' she said.

'I'm not going today. I 'ave to talk to the clerk before she goes back to the library.'

'What was he after?' demanded Mrs Preece, standing there holding the saucer with the onion on it.

'He wants us to call a public meeting.'

'Oh, he does, does he? And who's he to ask for a public meeting?'

'An interferer,' Jimmy Preece said. 'That's what he is.'

Mrs Preece said nothing.

'I don't like interferers,' Jimmy Preece said.

There was nothing his wife could say to that. She walked through to the kitchen, holding the saucer before her at arm's length as if what it had on it was not a peeled onion but a dead rat.

In the kitchen she got out a meat skewer, a big one, nearly a foot long, and speared the onion, the sharp point slipping easily into its soft, moist, white flesh.

Then she took it across to the Rayburn and opened the door to the fire compartment. With a quick stab and a shiver – partly f revulsion, partly satisfaction – she thrust the onion into the flames and slammed the door, hard.

CHAPTER V

This may seem an odd question,' the vicar of Crybbe said after a good deal of hesitation, 'but have you ever performed an exorcism?'

The question hung in the air for quite a while.

Sunk into his armchair in Grace's former sitting-room, Canon Alex Peters peered vaguely into the thick soup of his past. Had he done an exorcism? Buggered if he could remember.

The sun was so bright now – at least suggestive of warmth – that Alex had stripped down to his washed-out Kate Bush T-shirt, the letters in Bush stretched to twice the size of those in Kate by the considerable belly he'd put on since the doctor had ordered him to give up jogging. On his knees was a fiendish- looking black tomcat which Grace had named after some famous Russian. Chekhov? Dostoevsky? Buggered if he could remember that either.

'Ah, sorry, Murray. Yes, exorcism. Mmm.'

What should he say? East Anglia? Perhaps when he was in charge of one of those huge, terrifying, flint churches in Suffolk… Needed to be a bit careful here.

'Ah! I'll tell you what it was, Murray – going back a good many years this. Wasn't the full bell, book and candle routine, as I remember. More of a quickie, bless-this-house operation. Actually, I think I made it up as I went along.'

The Revd Murray Beech raised an eyebrow.

Alex said, 'Well, you know the sort of thing… 'I have reason to believe there's an unquiet spirit on the premises, so, in the name of the Management, I suggest you leave these decent folk alone and push off back where you came from, there's a good chap.' '

The Revd Murray Beech did not smile.

'Expect I dramatized it a bit,' Alex said. 'But that's what it boiled down to. Seemed to work, as I recall. Don't remember any come-backs, anyway. Why d'you ask?'

Although he wore the regulation-issue black shirt and clerical collar, rather than a Kate Bush T-shirt, young Murray Beech didn't seem like a real vicar to Alex. More like the ambitious deputy head of some inner-city comprehensive school. He was on the edge of one of Grace's G-plan dining chairs, looking vaguely unhappy about the can of lager Alex had put unceremoniously into his hand.

'You see, the way you put it then,' Murray said carefully, as though he were formulating a point at a conference, 'makes it seem as if… you knew at the time… that you were only going through the motions.'

'Well, that's probably true, old chap. But who knows what we do when we go through the motions?' A sunbeam stroked Alex's knees; the cat shifted a little to make the most of it. 'Do I understand, Murray, that someone has invited you to perform an exorcism?'