Crybbe aka Curfew

snipped.

He was almost inclined to cancel his room at the Cock and race back home to Cardiff.

Instead, in the gloomy late-afternoon, as it began to rain again, he found himself strolling incuriously into 'The Gallery' where he and Jocasta Newsome would soon recognize a mutual need.

Outside, Powys had found some logs for the Jotul stove. They were damp, but he managed to get the stove going and stacked a couple of dozen logs on each side of it to dry out.

He couldn't remember bleaker weather at the end of June.

His cases stood unpacked by the window. On the ledge, a blank sheet of A4 paper was wound into the Olivetti.

Life itself seemed very temporary tonight.

Just before seven, a grim-faced Rachel arrived, Barbour awash. She tossed the dripping coat on the floor.

'Coffee, J.M. I need coffee. With something in it.' She collapsed on to the hard, orange sofa, flung her head back, closing her eyes, 'I suppose you've heard?'

Powys said, They found a body in the river.'

Rachel said. 'What are you going to do, J.M.?'

'Do they know what happened?'

'I don't think so. They haven't questioned anyone except the father and Gomer Parry.'

Powys went into the little kitchen to look for coffee and called back, 'Have they found the gun?'

'Not so far as I know,' Rachel said. 'Perhaps Jonathon Preece didn't find it either. Perhaps the place where you threw it was deeper than you thought. Humble, who seems to know what he's talking about, says there are all kinds of unexpected pot-holes in the riverbed. He says nobody in their right mind would attempt to wade across, even in a dry summer, when the water level's low.'

'Humble?' Powys's voice had an edge of panic.

'He volunteered the information. In passing. I wasn't stupid enough to ask him. I feigned disinterest.'

Not a difficult act, he accepted, for Rachel.

He returned with two mugs and a bottle of Bell's whisky. 'I can't find any coffee, but I found this in a cupboard.' He poured whisky into a mug and handed it to Rachel. 'Can't find any glasses either.'

Rachel drank deeply and didn't cough or choke.

Powys said, 'What do you think I ought to do?'

Rachel held the mug in both hands and stretched out her long legs to the stove in a vain quest for heat, 'I think we should wait for Fay. She's going to come here after she's filed her scrupulously objective story about the drowning tragedy at Crybbe.'

'That won't be easy. What's she going to say?'

'It seems,' said Rachel, 'that minor flooding at Crybbe has claimed its first victim.'

She looked tired. There were dark smudges on her narrow face. 'Just hope they don't find the gun. I don't know what water does to fingerprints, do you?'

As the second stroke of the curlew hit the reverberation of the first, clean and hard. Warren Preece tossed his used Durex, well-filled, into the alley and zipped up his jeans.

'Close,' he said. 'But I reckon I can improve on it if I puts my mind to it.'

Tessa Byford was leaning back against the brick wall of the Crybbe Unattended Studio, still panting a little. 'You're confident tonight.'

'Yeah.' The trick, he'd learned (he'd learned it from Tessa, but he'd allowed himself to forget this), was to time it so you came in the split second before the bell crashed. Tonight he'd lost his load a good five seconds before the first bong. Still near as buggery took the top of his head off, though – always did there – but it could be better.

Warren got a special kick out of thinking of his old man up the tower, waiting to pull on the rope while he, Warren, was in town here bonking his brains out. Dead on time again tonight: nothing would come between Jack Preece and that bell, not even his favourite son drying out in some police morgue.

'Ask not,' Warren intoned, 'for whom the ole bell tolls. It tolls tonight, ladies and gentlemen, for Jonathon Preece, of Crybbe.'

He giggled.

There was a snap of white – Tessa pulling up her knickers.

Warren said, 'I been feelin'- just lately, like – as I'm the only guy in this town, the only one who's really alive sorter thing. The only walkin' corpse in the graveyard. Bleeargh!'

Warren wiggled his hands and rolled his eyes.

Written two new songs, he had, in the past couple of days. Red-hot stuff, too. Didn't know he had it in him – how much he had in him. He reckoned Max Golf's tape would be ready in a couple of weeks. Goff was going to be real blown away by his next one.

'What would you have done, Warren, if that woman hadn't come out of the studio before we got started? Or if she'd come out in the middle?'

'Woulda made no difference. Or I coulda saved some for 'er, couldn't I? Takin' a chance, she is, comin' yere this time a' night. An' she wouldn't say a word, see, 'cause I seen what 'appened by the river, 'ow they killed poor Jonathon. Poor Jonathon.'

Warren started to grin. 'Oh, you should've seen 'im, Tess. Lying there with 'is tongue out. Just about as wet and slimy as what 'e was when 'e was alive. I couldn't 'ardly keep a straight face. And – you got to laugh, see – fuckin' 'Young Farmers'…

Warren did laugh. He placed both hands flat on the brick wall and almost beat his head into it with laughing.

'… fuckin' Young Farmers' needs a new chairman now, isn't it? Oh, shit, what a bloody crisis!'

'You going to volunteer, Warren?'

'No.' Warren wiped his streaming eyes with the back of a hand. 'I'm goin' into the Plant Hire business.' He went into another cackle. 'I'm gonna hot-wire me a bulldozer.'

She was the kind of woman who, in normal circumstances, he would have taken care to avoid, like sunstroke. She was vain, pretentious, snobbish and too bony in the places where one needed it least.

But these were not normal circumstances. On a wet Saturday evening in Crybbe, Jocasta Newsome was almost exotic.

Guy had her on the hearthrug, where damp logs spat the occasional spark into his buttocks.

She was tasty.

And grateful. Guy loved people to be grateful for him. She was voracious in a carefree sort of way, as if all kinds of pent-up emotions were being expelled. She laughed a lot; he made her laugh, even with comments and questions that were not intended to be funny.

Like, 'And your husband – is he an artist?'

Jocasta squealed in delight and ground a pelvic bone fully into his stomach.

Guy said, just checking, 'You're sure there's no chance he'll be back tonight?'

'Tonight,' said Jocasta, 'Hereward will be in one of those awful restaurants where the candles on the tables are stuck in wine-bottles and some unshaven student is hunched up in the corner fumbling with a guitar. He'll be holding forth at length to a bunch of artists about the beauty of Crybbe and how well in he is with the local yokels. He'll be telling them all about his close friend Max Goff and the wonderful experiment in which he, Hereward, is playing a pivotal role. The artists will drink bottle after bottle of disgusting plonk paid for. of course, by Hereward and they'll think, 'What a sucker, what an absolutely God-sent wally.' And they'll be mentally doubling their prices.'

Jocasta propped herself up on one arm, her nipples rather redder than the feebly smouldering logs in the grate.

'Oh yes,' she assured him. 'We are utterly alone and likely to remain so for two whole, wonderful days. How long have you got, Guy? Inches and inches, if I'm any judge. Oh my God, what am I saying, I must be demob happy.'

The thought of two whole days of Jocasta Newsome didn't lift Guy to quite the same