'You can't not go to Henry's funeral,' Fay said. 'Look, I'll go to the library. Tell me what we're looking for.'
'You can't drive with that eye.'
'Of course I can. And they're only country roads. What am I looking for?'
'Anything about Wort – his experiments, his hangings, his death. And the Wort family. If they're still around, if we can get hold of any of them. And John Dee. Can we establish a connection? But, I mean, don't make a big deal of it. If we meet back here at… what? Four o'clock?'
'OK, Joe, look… is there nobody we can go to for help?'
'What about Jean Wendle?'
'Ha.' Fay put a hand up to her rainbow eye. 'Her assessment of Grace wasn't up to much, was it? Harmless, eh?'
'We're on our own, then,' Powys said.
CHAPTER IV
Crybbe town hall was in a short street of its own, behind the square. An absurdly grandiose relic of better days, Colonel Colin 'Col' Croston thought, strolling around the back to the small door through which members of the town council sneaked, as though ashamed of their democratic role.
Tonight, the huge Gothic double doors at the front would be thrown open for the first time in twenty years. Suspecting problems, Col Croston had brought with him this morning a small can of Three-in-One Penetrating Oil to apply to the lock and the hinges.
Col Croston let himself in and strode directly into the council chamber. The cleaner would not be here until this afternoon, and so Col made his way to the top of the room where the high-backed chairman's chair stood on its platform.
He sat down in the chair. There was a pristine green blotter on the table in front of him, and on the blotter lay a wooden gavel, unused – like the chair – since local government reorganisation in
1974.
Before reorganisation, the rural district authority had been based here. But 'progress' had removed the seat of power to a new headquarters in a town thirty miles away. Now there was only Crybbe town council, a cursory nod to local democracy, with ten members and no staff apart from its part-time clerk, Mrs Byford, who dealt with the correspondence and took down the minutes of its brief and largely inconsequential meetings.
The council chamber itself had even been considered too big for the old RDC, and meetings of the town council were self-conscious affairs, with eleven people hunched in a corner of the room trying to be inconspicuous. Although their meetings were public, few townsfolk were ever moved to attend.
Tonight, however, it seemed likely the chamber would actually be too small for the numbers in attendance, and the chairman would be occupying, for the first time in nearly twenty years, the official chairman's chair.
The chairman tonight would be Col Croston.
Mrs Byford, the clerk, had telephoned him at home to pass on the Mayor's apologies and request that he steer the public meeting.
'Why, surely,' Col said briskly. 'Can hardly expect old Jim to be there after what's happened.'
'Oh, he'll be there, Colonel,' Mrs Byford said, 'but he'll have to leave soon after nine-thirty to see to the bell, isn't it.'
'Shouldn't have to mess about with that either at his age. All he's got to do is say the word and I'll organize a bunch of chaps and we'll have that curfew handled on a rota system, makes a lot of sense, Mrs Byford.'
The clerk's tone cooled at once. 'That bell is a Preece function, Colonel.'
Oh dear, foot in it again, never mind. 'All got to rally round at a time like this, Mrs Byford. Besides, it could be the first step to getting a proper team of bell-ringers on the job. Crying shame, the way those bells are neglected.'
'It's a Preece function,' Mrs Byford said from somewhere well within the Arctic Circle. 'The meeting starts at eight o'clock.'
Minefield of ancient protocol, this town. Col Croston often thought Goose Green had been somewhat safer.
Col was deputy mayor this year. Long army career (never mentioned the SAS but everybody seemed to know). Recommended for a VC after the Falklands (respectfully suggested it be redirected). But still regarded becoming deputy mayor of Crybbe as his most significant single coup, on the grounds of being the only incomer to serve on the town council long enough to achieve the honour – which virtually guaranteed that next year he'd become the first outsider to wear the chain of office.
His wife considered he was out of his mind snuggling deep into this hotbed of small-minded prejudice and bigotry. But Col thought he was more than halfway to being accepted. And when he made mayor he was going to effect a few tiny but democratically meaningful changes to the wav the little council operated – as well as altering the rather furtive atmosphere with which it conducted its affairs.
He often felt that, although it gave a half-hearted welcome to new industry, anything providing local jobs, this council appeared to consider its foremost role was to protect the town against happiness.
Indeed, until being asked to chair it, he'd been rather worried about how tonight's meeting would be handled. He been finding out as much as he could about Max Goff's plans and had to say that the New Age people he'd met so far hadn't invariably been the sort of head-in-the-clouds wallies one had feared. If it pulled in a few tourists at last, it could be a real economic shot in the arm for this town.
So Col Croston was delighted to be directing operations.
With a mischievous little smile he lifted the gavel and gave it a smart double rap.
'Silence! Silence at the back there!'
Whereupon, to his horror, Mrs Byford materialised in doorway with a face like a starched pinny.
'I hope, Colonel, that you're banging that thing on the blotter and not on the table.'
'Oh, yes, of course, Mrs Byford. See…' He gave it another rap, this time on the blotter. It sounded about half as loud. 'Yes.. . ha. Well, ah… your morning for the correspondence, is it?
Mrs Byford stalked pointedly to the corner table used for town council meetings and placed upon it the official town council attache case.
'Glad you came in, actually,' Col Croston said, 'I think we ought to send an official letter of condolence to the relatives I that poor girl who had the accident at the Court.'
'I see no necessity for that.' Mrs Byford began to unpack her case.
'There's no necessity, Mrs B. Just think it'd be a sympathetic thing to do, don't you?'
'Not my place to give an opinion, Colonel. I should think twice, though, if I were you, about making unauthorised use of council notepaper.'
Col Croston, who'd once made a disastrous attempt to form a Crybbe cricket club, estimated that if he bowled the gavel at the back of Mrs Byford's head, there'd be a fair chance of laying the old boot out.
Just a thought.
It was Bill Davies, the butcher, who rang Jimmy Preece to complain about the picture. 'I'm sorry to 'ave to bother you at time like this, Jim, but I think you should go and see it for yourself. I know you know more about these things than any of us, but I don't like the look of it. Several customers mentioned it, see. How is Jack now?'
'Jack's not good,' Jimmy Preece said, and put the phone down.
He could see trouble coming, been seeing it all the morning, in the calm of the fields and the weight of the clouds.
In the cold, gleeful eyes of his surviving grandson.
Ten minutes after talking to Bill Davies, the Mayor was walking across the square towards The Gallery, traders and passers-by nodding to him sorrowfully. Nobody said, 'Ow're you'. They all knew where he was going.
Even in today's profoundly pessimistic mood, he was not prepared for the picture in the window of The Gallery. He had to turn away and get some control of himself.
Then, face like parchment, he pushed through the pine-panelled door with its panes of bull's-eye glass.