cocaine? Mr. Kettle, who still read two newspapers every day, knew a bit about Max Goff and the kind of world he came from.

'Maybe your role in this is only just beginning,' Goff said. 'How about I send a car for you next time?'

Money was no object for this bugger. Made his first million by the time he was twenty-seven, Mr. Kettle had read, by starting his own record company. Epidemic, it was called. And it had spread like one. Now it was international magazines and book publishing.

'Well,' Mr. Kettle said. 'Isn't much more as I can tell you, anyway. You've got the maps. Nothing more to be found, even if you excavates, I reckon.'

'Hmmm.' Goff was making a show of being unconvinced, as they followed what Mr. Kettle now thought of, wrote of in his journal – but never spoke of – as the Dark Road, the Thoroughfare of the Dead. Returning at dusk, back into Crybbe, a town which had loitered since the Middle Ages, and probably before, in the area where England hardened into Wales.

On the very border.

CHAPTER III

It was the seventh bell they always rang, for the curfew. Almost rang itself these days. Seventeen years Jack had been doing it. Didn't need to think much about it any more. Went regular as his own heartbeat.

The bell clanged above him.

Jack let the rope slide back through his hands.

Seventy-three.

His hands closed again around the rope.

Seventy-four.

He hadn't been counting. At any point during the ringing Jack could tell you what number he was on. His arms knew. His stomach knew.

One hundred times every night. Starting at ten o'clock. Newcomers to the town, they'd asked him, 'Don't you find it spooky, going up there, through that graveyard, up all those narrow stone steps, with the church all dark, and the bell-ropes just hanging there?'

'Don't think about it,' Jack would say. And it was true; he didn't.