Crybbe aka Curfew

'You sure?'

'Look, Sergeant, what's the problem here?'

Wynford had a drink of beer. 'No problem, sir.'

'No, you do…' Guy was about to accuse him of knowing something about this but keeping it to himself.

He looked into the little inscrutable features in the middle of the big melon face and knew he'd be wasting his time.

Wynford swallowed a lot of beer, wiped his mouth. His face was very red. He's on the defensive, Guy thought, and he doesn't like that.

He was right. Wynford looked at him for the first time. 'Somebody said you was married to that Fay? Or is it you just got the same name?'

'No, it's true. I'm afraid. We were married for… what? Nearly three years. I suppose.'

Wynford smiled conspiratorially, a sinister sight. 'Bit of a goer, was she?'

What an appalling person. Guy, who didn't like people asking him questions unless they were about his television work, looked at his watch and claimed he was late for a shoot. And, actually, they had got something arranged for later; Catrin had set up one of those regressive hypnotist chaps and agreed to be the subject.

Should be entertaining. Perhaps in some past life she'd actually been someone interesting. He wondered, as he strolled into the square, what crime she could have committed to get landed with the persona of Catrin Jones.

In the Crybbe Unattended Studio Gavin Ashpole sniffed.

He knew the pace used to be a toilet, but that wasn't what he could smell.

This was a musky, perfumed smell, and the odd thing was

that Gavin wasn't sure he could actually smell it at all. It was just there.

Probably because Fay Morrison used this studio for an hour or so every day.

There were a few of her scripts on the spike in the outer room. All hand-written, big and bold in turquoise ink.

Gavin picked up the phone and sniffed the mouthpiece. Sweating comfortably, cooling in his shell-suit. Gavin was a fitness freak, kept a hold-all in the back of his car with his jogging gear and his trainers inside. Any spare half hour or so he'd get changed, go for a run. Tuned your body, tuned your mind, and other people could sense it, too. You were projecting creative energy, dynamism.

He'd got an hour's running in tonight. Been up into the hills. Felt good. In control of himself and his destiny. Within a year he'd either be managing editor of Offa's Dyke radio or he'd have moved on.

Unlike Fay Morrison, who was over the hill and going down the other side fast. Left to him, the station would never have agreed to use her stuff. She was unreliable, awkward to deal with. And obviously unbalanced.

Bloody sexy, though.

The thought hit him surprisingly hard, a muscular pulse, where you noticed it.

He hadn't really considered her on this level before. She was older than he was. She'd had a lot more experience on radio, and although she never mentioned that, it was always there in the background, making her sound superior.

And she was a nutter. Not rational. Not objective as a reporter.

He'd see the boss tomorrow and explain precisely what had happened at Goff's press conference. She's doing us a lot of damage, he'd say. If she's put Max Goff's back up, who else is she antagonizing? No need to say anything to her or put anything in writing, just fade her out. Use less and less of her material until she stops bothering to send any. Then we'll put somebody else in.

Gavin attached a length of red-leader to the end of his tape. It hadn't taken much editing, just a forty-second clip for the morning.

He rang the newsroom to tell them he was ready to send, put on the cans, waited for the news studio to come through on the line.

He felt Fay in the cans. She'd worn them over that dark-blonde hair.

Sexy bitch.

He stretched his legs under the desk, feeling the calf muscles tighten and relax, imagining her in here with him, in this tiny little studio, not big enough for two, you'd be touching one another all the time.

Projecting forward to tomorrow night. He was back in Crybbe covering the public meeting, the big confrontation between Goff and the town councillors. Fay had followed him in here, apologizing for her behaviour, saying she'd been worrying about her father, letting it take her mind off her work, couldn't handle things any more, couldn't he see that?

He could see her now, kneeling down by the side of his chair, looking up at him.

Got to help me, Gavin.

Why should I help you?

I like muscular men, Gavin. Hard men. Fit men. That's how you can help me, Gavin.

He put his hands out, one each side of her head, gripped her roughly by the hair.

Her lips parted.

'Gavin!'

'Huh?'

'We've been calling out for five minutes.'

'You couldn't have been,' Gavin rasped into the microphone. He was sweating like a bloody pig.

'We could certainly hear you panting, mate. What were you doing exactly?'

'Very funny, Elton. I've been for a run. Six miles. You going to take some level or not?'

'Go ahead, I'm rolling. Hope you're going to clean up in there afterwards, Gavin.'

Angrily, Gavin snapped the switch, set his tape turning. This was another little clever dick who'd be looking for a new job when he was managing editor.

He took his hand out of his shell-suit trousers, put it on the desk below the mike and watched it shaking as if it wasn't his hand at all.

CHAPTER VIII

On reflection, maybe chopping holes in this particular wood wasn't such a crime. It was not a pleasant wood.

Something Powys hadn't consciously taken in when they were here yesterday and Fay had been so incensed about the slaughter of the trees, and Rachel had…

No. He didn't like the wood.

And it was uncared for. Too many trees, overcrowded, trees which had died left to rot, strangled by ivy and creepers, their white limbs sticking out like the crow-picked bones of sheep, while sickly saplings fought for the soil in between the corpses.

The wood was a buffer zone between the Tump and the town, and some of what would otherwise have reached the town had been absorbed by the wood, which was why it had such a bad feel and why people probably kept out.

And perhaps why Andy Boulton-Trow had chosen to live there.

Until you reached the clearing, the path was the only sign that anyone had been in this wood for years. It was too narrow for vehicles; a horse could make it, just about. But nobody with car would want Keeper's Cottage.

It was redbrick, probably 1920s, small and mean with little square windows, looked as if it had only one bedroom upstairs. It was in a part of the wood where conifers – Alaskan Spruce or something – had choked out all the hardwoods, crowding in like giant weeds, blinding Keeper's Cottage to the daylight.

A sterile place. No birds, no visible wildlife. Hardly the pick of Goff's properties. Hardly the type of dwelling for a Boulton-Trow. Even the gardeners which he assumed certain

Boulton-Trows would employ wouldn't be reduced to this.