Crybbe aka Curfew

'Is that a television camera?'

'They're making a documentary about Max.'

'Oh.' Jocasta brightened. 'That's… er… oh, Guy Morrison, isn't it? I think he's rather good, don't you?'

'Yes, excellent,' Rachel said absently. 'Excuse me.'

She'd seen Fay on the edge of the field, with the dog still on the end of a clothes-line. Fay looked forlorn in a royal-blue cagoule that was too long for her. She wore no make-up and her hair was damp and flattened.

'I know,' she said. 'Don't tell me. He's here.'

'Do you mean Guy? Or the Offa's Dyke man?'

Fay raised both eyebrows. 'Surrounded, am I?'

'I'm sorry about this. Fay, I really am.'

'They rang me,' Fay said. 'Offa's Dyke rang and said, don't bother with it, we're covered. I think they're trying to edge me out.'

'Ashpole's a tedious little man.'

'Poisonous,' Fay said.

'Fay, look, perhaps there's something…' If she could somehow turn Max round, fix it so he'd only talk to Fay. Most unlikely.

'Not your problem, Rachel, if I can't function here. Tempted to blame it on the town, but that's the easy answer, isn't it?' Fay grinned, if you really want to do something, I suppose you could suggest Ashpole might get some terrific actuality of the wall coming down if he stood directly beneath it…'

She wound the end of the clothes-line more firmly around her hand. 'Come on, Arnold, we'll go down by the river.'

Max Goff was on the summit of the Tump. He had a microphone on a long lead. The dripping trees were gathered around him.

Crouched under a bush, Guy Morrison's cameraman was shooting Goff from a low angle. It would look very dramatic, this apparition in white against the deep-grey sky and the black trees. On his knees next to Goff, as if in worship, Guy's soundman held a two-foot boom mike encased in a windshield like a giant furry caterpillar.

There were two big speakers on the roof of a van at the foot of the mound.

'This has been a dramatic and tragic week,' said Goff.

'Yeah, not too bad for level,' the soundman said.

'It fucking better be, pal,' the assembly heard, 'I'm not saying it again.'

Behind the speaker van, Powys smiled.

Guy Morrison said, 'I'm not pleased with him, Joe. He dropped this on me without any warning at all. A spontaneous idea, he said. He's got to learn that if he wants spontaneity we have got to know about it in advance.'

I have always disliked the Tump for some reason.

Powys thought, What does the wall mean, Henry? Why is there a wall around it?

He scrambled across the field, away from the crowd, unable to shake the feeling that perhaps getting rid of the wall was not the best thing to do – but wondering whether this feeling had been conditioned by Henry's misgivings about the mound.

Halfway across the field he saw the hub-cap from Henry's Volkswagen, glinting in a bed of thistles. It reminded him that his own car was still parked in a layby alongside the road at the end of this field.

Henry's journal was in the car.

Bloody stupid thing to do. Anybody could have nicked the car, gone off with the journal.

Behind him Goff's voice boomed out of the speakers. 'I'm glad-ad that-at so many of you were able to come today-ay.'

Powys moved swiftly through wet grass towards the road. He reached it at a point about fifty yards from the layby. The white Mini was there; it looked OK.

'Is that your car?'

A lone bungalow of flesh-coloured bricks squatted next to the layby, and at the end of its short drive stood a stocky, elderly woman in a twinset and a tartan skirt, an ensemble which spelled out: incomer.

'Yes, it is,' Powys said, taking out his keys to prove it; unlocking the boot.

'You arrived just in time, dear, I was about to report it to the police.'

'Yes, I'm sorry, I got delayed.'

Actually, I was beaten up and then went to bed with a woman I'd never seen before but whose voice I'd heard on my answering machine, but you don't want to hear about all that.

Henry Kettle's journal lay where he'd left it, on top of the spare tyre.

'What's going on over there?' She had a Midlands accent.

'They're pulling down the wall around the mound.'

'Why are they doing that?'

Did she really want to know this? 'Well, because it's a bit ugly. And out of period with the Tump. That's what they say.'

'I'll tell you one thing, dear, that wall's never as ugly as the thing in the middle. I don't like that thing, I don't at all. My husband, he used to say, when he was alive, he used to say he'd seen prettier spoil-heaps.'

'He had a point,' Powys said, opening the driver's door.

'I'm on me own now, dear. It frightens me, the things that go on. I'd leave tomorrow, but I wouldn't anywhere near get our money back on this place, not the way the market is. It wouldn't buy me a maisonette in Dudley.'

Powys closed the car door and walked over.

'What did you mean, it frightens you?'

'You from the local paper, dear?'

'No, I'm…'

A shopkeeper.

'I'm a writer. My name's Joe Powys.'

'I've never heard of you, my love, but don't take it to heart. Mrs Seagrove, Minnie Seagrove. Would you like a cup of tea? I'm always making lea for people in that layby. Lorry drivers, all sorts.'

'I won't put you to that kind of trouble,' said Powys. 'But I would like to know what, specifically, frightens you about that mound?'

Mrs Seagrove smiled coyly. 'You'll think I'm daft. That girl from the local radio thinks I'm daft. I ring her sometimes, when it gets on top of me, the things that go on.'

'What things are those? I'll tell you honestly, Mrs Seagrove, I'm the last person who's going to think you're daft.'

Following the river. Fay walked Arnold down the field, towards the bridge, close to where she and Rachel had gone with the bottle of wine on a sunny afternoon that seemed like weeks and weeks ago.

It was one of Fay's 'thinking' walks. She wanted, as someone once said, to be alone.

Before leaving, she'd pored over some of the books in her small 'local' collection – Howse's History of Radnorshire, Ella Mary Leather's The Folklore of Herefordshire, Jacqueline Simpson's The Folklore of the Welsh Border. Not quite sure what she was looking for.

Anything to do with dogs, really. Dogs and bells.

There'd been separate entries on both. Two books referred to the Crybbe curfew, one of only a handful still sounded in British towns – purely tradition – with two of them along the Welsh border. There was all the usual stuff about the bequest of Percy Weale, wealthy sixteenth-century wool merchant, to safeguard the moral welfare of the town. One book briefly mentioned the Preece family as custodian of the tradition.

Fay untied Arnold's clothes-line. He snuffled around on the riverbank, going quite close to the water but never getting his paws wet. Interested in something. Perhaps there were otters. The river looked fat, well-fed by rain.

Not raining now, but it probably would before nightfall, the clouds moving in together like a street gang, heavy