Crybbe aka Curfew

'Hasn't Goff offered you accommodation?'

'Nothing suitable, apparently. He says. Though we do have special requirements – meals at all hours.'

Sore point, obviously.

'Still,' Fay said cheerfully. 'I've heard he's going to buy the Cock, turn it into a New Age Holiday Inn or something.'

She brought her coffee and sat down opposite him. If anything, he was even more handsome these days. It had once been terribly flattering to be courted by Guy Morrison. And unexpectedly painless to become divorced from him.

'I've changed, you know, Fay.'

'Hardly at all, I'd've said.'

'Oh, looks… that's not what it's all about. Never was, was it?'

Of course not, she thought. However, in your case, what else is there to get excited about?

'And you're obviously just as arrogant,' she said brightly.

'Confidence, Fay,' he said patiently. 'Not arrogance. If you don't continually display confidence in this business, people think you're…'

'A 'spent force'. Like J. M. Powys?'

'Something like that. I should have held on to you,' he said softly, a frond of blond hair falling appealingly to an eyebrow. 'You kept me balanced. I was terribly insecure, you know, that's why…'

'Oh, for God's sake, Guy, you were never insecure in your life. This is me you're giving all this bullshit to. Let's drop this subject, shall we?'

He looked hurt. But not very hurt.

'How did you get on yesterday?' Fay asked him, to change direction. 'They never managed to pull the wall down, did they?'

'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, H. K.

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?'