'Look, Wynford,' Fay snapped back, to beat the tremor out of her voice. 'Sub judice applies to court cases, not inquests. Nobody's on trial at an inquest.'
Really know how to make friends, don't I? she thought as Wynford bent his face to hers. He didn't speak until he was sure he had her full attention. Then, very slowly and explicitly, he said, 'We don't like clever people round yere, Mrs Morrison.'
Then he straightened up, turned his back on her and walked away.
'Fat bastard.' Gomer bit on his skinny, hand-crafted cigarette. 'You got all that, what I said?'
'Yes,' Fay said. 'But he's right. I won't be able to use most of it, not because it's sub judice but because we don't go to town on the gruesome stuff. Especially when relatives might be listening.'
Christ, how could she go through the motions of reporting this story, knowing what she knew? Knowing, if not exactly how, then at least why it had happened.
There was a little crowd around the body, including its father, Jack Preece, and its younger brother, Warren Preece. Jack Preece's face was as grey as the clouds. He looked up from the corpse very steadily, as if he knew what he would see next and the significance of it.
And what he saw next was Fay. His tired, hopeless, brown eyes met hers and held them. It was harder to face than a curse.
She thought. He knows everything. And she dragged her gaze away and looked wildly around her, but there was nobody to run to for comfort and nowhere to hide from Jonathon Preece's dead eyes and the eyes of his father, which held the weight of a sorrow she knew she could only partly comprehend.
CHAPTER III
Not one person had appeared to recognize Guy Morrison. Twice today he'd circuited this dreary town, and nobody had done more than glance at him with, he was forced to admit, a barely cursory interest.
Guy liked to be recognized. He needed to be recognized. He was insecure, he readily admitted this. Everyone he knew in television was insecure; it was a deeply neurotic business. And it was a visual medium – so if people started to pass you in the street without a second, sidelong glance, without nudging their companions, then it wouldn't be too long before the Programme Controller failed to recognize you in the lift.
Altogether, a legitimate cause for anxiety.
And Fay had depressed him. Living like a spinster, watching her father coming unravelled, in the kind of conditions Guy remembered from his childhood – remembered only in black and white, like grainy old 405-line television. He couldn't understand why Fay had failed to throw herself at him, sobbing, 'Take me away from all this', instead of bustling off with her Uher over her shoulder in pursuit of a local news item that would be unlikely to make even a filler-paragraph in tomorrow's Sunday papers.
Guy, rather than attempt to construct a conversation with the Canon, had claimed to be overdue for another appointment, and thus had ended up making his second despondent tour the town centre.
Country towns were not supposed to be like this. Country towns were supposed to have teashops and flower stalls and Saturday markets from which fat, friendly Women's Institute ladies sold jars of home-made jam and chutney sealed by grease-proof paper and rubber bands.
Without a crew, without Catrin and her clipboard and without even a hint of recognition from the public, Guy felt a sudden sense of acute isolation. He'd never been anywhere quite like this before, a town which seemed to have had all the life sucked out of it, bloodless people walking past, sagging like puppets whose strings had been 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.