Crybbe aka Curfew

as another.

Stones didn't speak to him the way they spoke to Henry Kettle, but he was getting the idea. Max Goff, presumably, intended to place new stones in the spots identified by Henry.

And the obvious man to select and shape the stones – an act of love – was Andy Boulton-Trow, who knew more about the nature of megaliths than anyone in Europe. Powys had met Andy at art college, to which Andy had come after university to learn about painting and sculpture… with specific regard to stone.

From beyond the courtyard, he heard an engine start, a vehicle moving away.

Then all was quiet, even the rain had ceased.

Powys slid from the trees and made his way around the side of the stone stable-building to the comer of the courtyard where the stones lay.

Fay drove into Crybbe from the Ludlow road. The windscreen wipers squeaked as the rain eased off.

She thought. We're never going to be able to talk about this, are we, Dad? Not for as long as you live.

She stopped in front of the house to let him out. 'Thank you,' he said, not looking at her, it's been… a pleasant day, hasn't it?'

'I'll put the car away. You stay here, Arnold.'

She backed the car into the entry, a little tunnel affair in the terrace, parking too close to the wall; there was only just room to squeeze out. 'Come on, Arnold.'

Alex was waiting for them at the back door. His face was grave but his blue eyes were flecked – as they often were now – with a flickering confusion.

'Got the tea on. Dad?'

'Fay.. '. I..

He turned and walked into the kitchen. The kettle was not even plugged in.

'Fay…'

'Dad?'

He walked through the kitchen, into the hall, Fay following, Arnold trolling behind. At the door of the office, Grace's sitting-room, he stood to one side to let her pass.

'I'm so sorry,' he said.

At first she couldn't see what he meant. The clock was still clicking away on the mantelpiece, the fireside chair still piled high with box files.

'The back door was open,' Alex said. 'Forced.'

She saw.

They must have used a sledgehammer or a heavy axe because it was a tough machine, with a metal top.

'Why?' Fay felt ravaged. Cold and hollow and hurting like a rape victim. 'For God's sake, why?'

Her beloved Revox – night-time comfort with its swishing spools and soft-glowing level-meters – had been smashed to pieces, disembowelled.

A few hundred yards of tape had been unspooled and mixed up with the innards, and the detritus was splattered over the floor like a mound of spaghetti.

CHAPTER IX

The women who had, in recent years, been powerfully attracted to Joe Powys had tended to wear long, hand- dyed skirts and shapeless woollies. Sometimes they had frizzy hair and sometimes long, tangled hair. Sometimes they were big-breasted earth-mother types and sometimes small-boned and delicate like Arthur Rackham fairies.

Sometimes, when Powys fantasized – which was worryingly rarely, these days – he imagined having, as he put it to himself, a bit of smooth. Someone scented. Someone who shaved her armpits. Someone who would actually refuse to trek across three miles of moorland to find some tiny, ruined stone circle you practically had to dig out of the heather. Someone you could never imagine standing in the middle of this half-submerged circle and breathing, 'Oh, I mean, gosh, can't you feel it…can't you feel that primal force?'

The woman facing him now, he could tell, was the kind who'd rather see Stonehenge itself as a blur in the window of a fast car heading towards a costly dinner in Salisbury.

But even if she'd been wearing a home-made ankle-length skirt with a hemline of mud, clumpy sandals and big wooden ear-rings, he would, at this moment, have been more than grateful to see her.

She said, 'I think you could let him go now, Humble. He really doesn't look very dangerous.'

'Find out who he is first,' said the hard-faced bastard with a grip like a monkey-wrench, the guy he'd first seen frowning at him through the window of a Land Rover when he was checking out the Tump.

He made Powys bend over the vehicle's high bonnet, which tossed another pain-ball into his stomach.

This man had punched him in the guts with a considered precision and such penetration that he was seriously worried about internal bleeding.

'Ta very much.' Deftly removing Powys's wallet from the inside pocket of his muddied jacket. Not a local accent; this was London.

'If this is a mugging,' Powys said awkwardly, face squashed into the bonnet, 'you could be…'

'Fucking shut it.' His nose crunched into the metal, Powys felt blood come.

'Don't even twitch, pal, OK?'

'Mmmph.'

'Right, then, I'm going to have a little butcher's through here, see what you got by way of ID, all right?'

'Humble, if you don't let him go I'm going to call the police.'

'Rachel, you do your job, I do mine. Our friend here don't want that. Ask him. Ask him what he was doing on private property. Ain't a poacher. Ain't got the bottle.'

He cringed, expecting Humble to tap him in the guts again to prove his point. But the pressure eased and he was allowed to stand. His nose felt wet, but he didn't think it was broken. He looked at the woman, who must be close to his own age, had light, mid-length hair and calm eyes. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Humble's used to dealing with the more urban type of trespasser.'

'Trespasser?' Powys wiped off some blood with the back of a hand. 'Now, look… You tell this bloody psycho…' He stopped. What could she tell him? He wondered where Andy Boulton-Trow had vanished to.

'All right now, are we?' Dipping into Powys's wallet, Humble smiled with the lower half of a face which had all the personality of a mousetrap. He pulled out a plastic-covered driving licence and handed it to the woman. She took it from him reluctantly. Opened it out. Gave a little gasp.

'Oh dear,' she said.

'Yeah, don't tell me. One of Max's bits of fluff.' Humble smirked, in which case, no problems, he'll have been enjoying himself.'

Rachel closed the licence and held out her hand for the wallet. Very carefully she put the licence back, then she handed the wallet to Powys.

'Not entirely accurate, Humble,' she said. 'And when he hears about this, Max, I suspect, is going to have you strung up by the balls.'

Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley was shaking his great turnip head. 'Mindless.'

'Mindless?' said Fay. 'You think it's mindless?'

'We always prided ourselves,' Wynford said, thick blue legs astride the wreckage. 'Never suffered from no vandalism in this town. Not to any great extent, anyhow.'

Only vandalism by neglect, Fay thought dully. She wondered why she'd bothered to call the police now. Wynford was just so sinister – like one of those mean-eyed, redneck police chiefs you saw in moody American movies set in semi-derelict, one-street, wooden towns in the Midwest.

'Think somebody would've seen 'em, though.' The gap narrowed between Wynford's little round eyes. ' 'Course,