Crybbe aka Curfew

The woman facing him now, he could tell, was the kind who'd rather see Stonehenge itself as a blur in the window of a fast car heading towards a costly dinner in Salisbury.

But even if she'd been wearing a home-made ankle-length skirt with a hemline of mud, clumpy sandals and big wooden ear-rings, he would, at this moment, have been more than grateful to see her.

She said, 'I think you could let him go now, Humble. He really doesn't look very dangerous.'

'Find out who he is first,' said the hard-faced bastard with a grip like a monkey-wrench, the guy he'd first seen frowning at him through the window of a Land Rover when he was checking out the Tump.

He made Powys bend over the vehicle's high bonnet, which tossed another pain-ball into his stomach.

This man had punched him in the guts with a considered precision and such penetration that he was seriously worried about internal bleeding.

'Ta very much.' Deftly removing Powys's wallet from the inside pocket of his muddied jacket. Not a local accent; this was London.

'If this is a mugging,' Powys said awkwardly, face squashed into the bonnet, 'you could be…'

'Fucking shut it.' His nose crunched into the metal, Powys felt blood come.

'Don't even twitch, pal, OK?'

'Mmmph.'

'Right, then, I'm going to have a little butcher's through here, see what you got by way of ID, all right?'

'Humble, if you don't let him go I'm going to call the police.'

'Rachel, you do your job, I do mine. Our friend here don't want that. Ask him. Ask him what he was doing on private property. Ain't a poacher. Ain't got the bottle.'

He cringed, expecting Humble to tap him in the guts again to prove his point. But the pressure eased and he was allowed to stand. His nose felt wet, but he didn't think it was broken. He looked at the woman, who must be close to his own age, had light, mid-length hair and calm eyes. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Humble's used to dealing with the more urban type of trespasser.'

'Trespasser?' Powys wiped off some blood with the back of a hand. 'Now, look… You tell this bloody psycho…' He stopped. What could she tell him? He wondered where Andy Boulton-Trow had vanished to.

'All right now, are we?' Dipping into Powys's wallet, Humble smiled with the lower half of a face which had all the personality of a mousetrap. He pulled out a plastic-covered driving licence and handed it to the woman. She took it from him reluctantly. Opened it out. Gave a little gasp.

'Oh dear,' she said.

'Yeah, don't tell me. One of Max's bits of fluff.' Humble smirked, in which case, no problems, he'll have been enjoying himself.'

Rachel closed the licence and held out her hand for the wallet. Very carefully she put the licence back, then she handed the wallet to Powys.

'Not entirely accurate, Humble,' she said. 'And when he hears about this, Max, I suspect, is going to have you strung up by the balls.'

Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley was shaking his great turnip head. 'Mindless.'

'Mindless?' said Fay. 'You think it's mindless?'

'We always prided ourselves,' Wynford said, thick blue legs astride the wreckage. 'Never suffered from no vandalism in this town. Not to any great extent, anyhow.'

Only vandalism by neglect, Fay thought dully. She wondered why she'd bothered to call the police now. Wynford was just so sinister – like one of those mean-eyed, redneck police chiefs you saw in moody American movies set in semi-derelict, one-street, wooden towns in the Midwest.

'Think somebody would've seen 'em, though.' The gap narrowed between Wynford's little round eyes. ' 'Course, Mrs Lloyd next door, deaf as a post, see. Knock on the door, she don't answer. You got to put your face up to the window.'

Fay imagined Wynford's face, flattened by glass. Give the poor old girl a heart attack.

He said, 'Scene-of-crime boy'll be over later, with his box of tricks. I'll knock on a few doors along the street, see what I can turn up.'

He paused in the doorway, looked back at the wreckage. 'Mindless,' he said.

Fay turned to her dad for support, but Alex, gazing down his beard at the Revox ruins, had nothing to say.

'Doesn't it strike you as odd,' Fay said clinically, 'that this tornado of savagery appears somehow to have focused itself on one single item? I'm no criminologist, but I've witnessed my share of antisocial behaviour, and this, Sergeant, is not what I'd call mindless. Psychopathic, perhaps, but mindless in the sense of randomly destructive, no.'

Wynford's big, round face was changing colour. Nobody, she thought, contradicts Chief Wiley on his own manor.

'What you sayin' 'ere, then? Somebody wants to stop you broadcastin'? That it?'

'It's possible. Isn't it?

'And is it gonner stop you broadcastin'?'

'Well, no, as it happens. I.. I've got a portable tape recorder I do all my interviews on, and I can edit down at the studio in town, there's a machine there. But would they know that?'

'Listen.' Wynford was row wearing an expression which might have been intended to convey kindness. Fay shuddered. 'He – they – just came in and smashed up the most expensive thing they could find. Then, could be as 'e was disturbed – or, thought 'e was gonna be disturbed, maybe 'e yers somebody walkin' past…'

'Maybe he wasn't disturbed at all,' Fay said. 'Maybe he just left because he'd achieved what he set out to do.

'I think you're watchin' too much telly.'

'Can't very well watch too much TV in Crybbe. The power's never on for longer than three hours at a stretch.'

Wynford turned his back on her, opened the office door. Arnold walked in, saw Wynford and growled.

'See you've still got that dog Didn't leave 'im in the 'ouse, then, when you went out?'

'What? Oh. No, he came with us,' Fay said. 'What happened with the RSPCA, by the way? Does anybody want to claim him?'

'No. I reckon 'e's yours now. If 'e stays.'

'How do you mean?'

'Well. If 'e don't take off, like.'

He was wearing such a weird smile that Fay pursued him to the front door, 'I don't understand.'

Wynford shrugged awkwardly. 'Well, you might wake up one day, see, and…'e'll be… well, 'e won't be around any more.'

Fay felt menaced. 'Meaning what? Come on… what are you saying?'

Wynford's face went blank. 'I'll go and talk to some neighbours,' he said, and he went.

'Dad,' Fay said, 'I've said this before, but there's something very wrong with that guy.'

"Sorry, my dear?' Alex looked up. His eyes were like floss.

'Sit down. Dad, you've had a shock.'

'I'm fine,' Alex said. 'Fine. If there's nothing I can do here, I'll probably have an early night.'

Fay watched the policeman walk past the window, imagined him peering through it with his face squashed against the glass, like a robber in a stocking mask.

She recoiled, stared at the gutted hulk of the Revox, a bizarre idea growing in her head like a strange hybrid plant.

She turned to Arnold, who was standing placidly in the doorway gazing up, for some reason, at Alex, his tail well down.

'Christ,' Fay said.

Something had occurred to her that was so shatteringly preposterous that…

'Dad, I have to go out.'

'OK,' Alex said.

… if she didn't satisfy herself that it was completely crazy, she wasn't going to get any sleep tonight.

'You go and walk off your anger,' Alex said. 'You'll feel better.'

'Something…' Fay looked around for Arnold's plastic clothes-line. 'Dad, I've just got to check this out. I mean, it's so…' Fay shook her head helplessly. 'I'll be back, OK?'