Crybbe aka Curfew

She hadn't heard from him since he'd told her he was going to look for Andy Boulton-Trow.

Joe was like a child in a dark bedroom where there's a monster in the wardrobe and a dwarf behind the dressing-table and the lampshade is a human head on a string and every deep shadow is alive, and he was out there now in a town full of deep, deep shadows.

JARRETT: 'Do you live in a house?'

CATRIN: 'At the inn. We all live at the inn. Me and my

sisters and my father. My father is the…'

JARRETT: 'The licensee? The landlord?'

CATRIN (contemptuously): 'He'll never be a lord.'

JARRETT: 'And what's the name of the inn?'

CATRIN: 'The Bull. There's another inn called the Lamb,

where Robert lived.'

JARRETT: 'Robert? Who is Robert?'

CATRIN: 'My man. He's hanged now. The Sheriff hanged

him.'

JARRETT: 'Jane, can I ask you this? The Sheriff had

your… Robert… hanged. And now he sleeps with

you? Is that what you're saying?'

CATRIN (laughing, tears on her face): 'He doesn't sleep

much!'

Guy was transfixed. Something astonishing was happening here. No way had Catrin the imagination to conjure stuff like this.

Unless Jarrett had broken through the inhibitions to a deeper layer of the girl… perhaps this was the real Catrin.

But what about all the Crybbe references? Was it even conceivable that his production assistant was the reincarnation of a woman who had lived in this same town in the reign of Elizabeth I?

Guy didn't understand; he was at a disadvantage; he hated that.

Approximately fifteen minutes later he began to hate the situation even more. Jarrett had brought the character, Jane, several years forward in an attempt to discover how long the Sheriff's exploitation of her had continued, and the responses were becoming garbled.

CATRIN: 'But I am the best of us all, he says, and he will

never leave me, never… never. I'm stroking his

beard, his hard, black beard. Never leave me…

never, never, NEVER!'

JARRETT: 'Jane, please listen…'

CATRIN: 'I'll come down… I'll come down on you.'

Catrin began to giggle and to roll her head again. She started to ignore Jarrett's questions. He looked vaguely puzzled by this and left her alone to squirm about for a few minutes. Larry Ember took the opportunity to change the tape and his camera battery.

Then Catrin blinked, as if trying to focus on something, the giggling slowly drying up.

And her lips went into a pout.

CATRIN (with a new authority): 'Come here. I'm cold.'

Her voice had changed again. It was affected, now, and petulant. And very English.

CATRIN: 'Come on! For Christ's sake, Guy!'

Guy froze. Larry looked up from his viewfinder, the camera still rolling.

CATRIN: 'We are utterly alone and likely to remain so for

two whole, wonderful days. How long have you got?

Inches and inches, if I'm any judge.'

A profound chill spread through Guy.

CATRIN: 'There's a bathroom directly facing you at the

end of the passage.'

Catrin smiled. Guy thought he was going to scream.

CATRIN: 'Don't be long, will you?'

Guy Morrison strode erratically into shot, dragging a wire, nearly bringing the light down.

'Fucking hell, Guy,' Larry Ember yelled.

Guy ignored him, shook his shoe out of the lamp wire, clutched at Graham Jarrett's cardigan. 'Wake her up. For Christ's sake, man, wake her up!'

CHAPTER X

It was cold in the wood.

Still, he waited.

The words in his pocket, scribbled in the pages of a pocket diary, kept appearing in his mind, as though the lines were rippling across a computer screen.

'Alle the nyte came strange noyses and lytes and the dogges

howled in the yarde and when he vysyted me in myne chamber he

apered lyke a clowde and a yellow cullor in the aire.'

By nine-thirty, the air was singing with tension, as if great pylons were carrying buzzing, sizzling power cables across the darkening sky.

Joe Powys was standing by the new stone in the clearing, around the centre of the wood, a hundred yards or so from Keeper's Cottage.

This stone, narrow, like a sharpened bone, would be on the line from the Tump, through the Court to the church.

At either end of the clearing, undergrowth had been hacked away to form the beginning of a track. Or to reinstate an old one. He knew all about this track now. This was the legendary secret passage between the Court and Crybbe church, along which Sir Michael Wort was said to have escaped.

Like most legends, it was a literal interpretation of something more complex.

Something suggested by the notes he'd found in Keeper's Cottage, which had turned out to be a primitive kind of schoolhouse.

Primitive in that there was no electricity, only candles, and it was not very clean. It smelled of candles and mould… and paint.