The Chalice

THIRTEEN

He'd finished off all the whisky in the flask. What could she say to that, after all that had happened? He gave the flask a final glance – sorrowful or contemptuous, too dark for her to tell – before stowing it away in an inside pocket of his overcoat.

'Erm… before we over react, are you quite sure about this?'

This was the first time he'd spoken since they got into the car. Juanita spun the wheel, letting out the clutch as gently as her mood allowed, feeling the ageing Volvo lurch and slide back, the rear wheels whirring uselessly in the mud.

Over-react? Jesus Christ, he was accusing her of over-reaction!

'Look, it was Diane. And it was a cream-coloured Range Rover. Who else do we know who has cream Range Rovers? There was a gloved hand over her mouth, did I tell you that? To stop her screaming.'

When she said that, Juanita tasted oil – someone trying to stop her screaming Her throat was swollen and her bottom lip felt like a slashed tyre.

'Look, would you mind giving me a push?' She hauled on the handbrake, still not looking at him. 'Please?'

He got out without a word. By the time they were free of the rut, he was creaking like an old bulldozer.

'Rankin. He'd have sent Rankin. Jesus, he sent the staff to snatch his daughter, can you believe that?'

'This is not the night,' Jim Battle said, 'to ask me what I can or can't believe.'

It was still hard to categorise her emotions when they'd come down from the Tor. Anger? Shame? Embarrassment?

Appalled relief was close. The others came later, were still coming, in waves, like a never-again hangover.

Neither of them had spoken on the way down from the Tor. Not until they'd emerged from the gate into Wellhouse Lane and the Range Rover had surged through their lamp beam, and there'd been a muffled scream and a glimpse of struggling figures in the rear, wild eyes over a glove.

Back at Jim's, Juanita had opened up the Volvo and he'd gone quietly into the house and emerged with the hip flask. Offering it to her first.

She'd shaken her head. Felt unbearably tired. The walk to the cottage had almost finished her. But she'd said, 'I'm going to get her.'

Jim had climbed silently into the Volvo.

'Like a buggering black comedy, eh?'

'You're not laughing,' Juanita said.

In a way, she was grateful for this: something to set her mind racing in another direction, to put speed and distance between them and the humiliation. She hurled the car out of Wellhouse Lane.

'Please.' He put a tentative hand on her arm. 'Slow down. You know where they're going.' His voice was sounding dry and old and frail, a voice that couldn't laugh, not a voice she'd heard before.

'Yes '

'You don't even know what you'll do when you get there.'

'I'll get out. You'll stay in the car. And this time I'll over-react.'

'Juanita. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.'

She released the accelerator with a thud, threw both arms round the wheel and hugged the car into the kerb.

He didn't look at her, stared straight forward through the windscreen at distant lights.

'I really thought I was going to die, you know.'

'I thought you were going to die!' She was not going to burst into tears, she was bloody not.

'I'd accepted it. I mean, it does happen. In the States and places. Crazy sects. Mass suicides. Inexplicable abominations. I can still hardly believe I'm alive, that's the worst of it. I still think it could have happened.'

'Yes.'

'He really might have done it. I'm not just saying this. I think he… I think he simply changed his mind. I think-'

'What I think,' Juanita said without emotion. 'And this is the last I'm going to say about it. I think he actually thought the hat would be a better joke.'

'The buggering… hat.' Jim crumpled up then in the passenger seat. She could sense his shoulders heaving, the shock finally coming down on him, like a landslide: the white moon in the sickle as it descended. The moment of singing silence. Before the gleeful chuckle.

I can chop it off. Or you can give it to me. As a sacrifice. As an offering to Gwyn ap Nudd.

And then, ultimate surrealism and humiliating degradation – the picture of Jim kneeling, getting his coughing over, wiping his face.

And then solemnly presenting the man who called himself Gwyn ap Nudd with his soft tweed hat – the last appalling image Juanita saw before they pulled the oily rag out of her mouth, put the lamp into her hand and prodded her on to the stony path.

Halfway down she was violently sick.

Then, moments before the blind rage, came that disgusting, craven sense of relief which almost amounted to being grateful to the bastards for sparing them their lives.

The only sound was the Volvo's engine ticking over; Juanita was always scared to switch off at such moments in case it wouldn't start again. Now she slipped into second gear as Jim said precisely what she'd been expecting him to say sooner or later.

'Swear to me, Juanita. Swear to me you'll never tell anybody about this.'

'They shouldn't get away with it, Jim.' She touched the lump in her cracked lower lip. 'They could be charged with assault. Robbery with menaces.'

'One tweed hat?'

Would he ever recover his self-respect, get over his humiliation? He hadn't backed down on the Tor, but God knows how it would look in the local papers if it ever came to court.

'OK,' Juanita said. 'If you don't mention it, I won't either.'

He didn't reply. She guessed he was thinking about what they'd done to her, convicting himself of cowardice, about to say, Bugger it, let's nail the bastards.

She got in first. 'It never happened, Jim. That's the finish.' She drove steadily out of town along Cinnamon Lane. To Bowermead.

Confrontation. It was all confrontation tonight. And menace.

Gerry Rankin was an ex marines officer, hard, shrewd and clothed for action in a Barbour and a leather cap.

'Then get him,' Juanita snapped.

'You really are wasting your time, Mrs Carey.'

The Hall hulked behind Rankin: a fortress, very few lights on. But then, the place was better in the dark. The appeal of Bowermead Hall – sixteenth century but brutally Victorianised – began and ended with its misleadingly lovely name.

Juanita said, 'Oh come on, do you really want the police here?'

Rankin was smiling with closed lips, leaning casually against a stone gatepost under a security light, a hard light on Jim, who was slumped inside his overcoat like a refugee, keeping his promise to say nothing.

'The police?' Rankin shook his head in pained disbelief. 'To investigate an allegation that Lord Pennard kidnapped his own daughter? Diane? Mrs Carey, the police know about Diane.'

'What's that supposed to mean?' As if she couldn't guess.

'We all know what it means,' Rankin said affably. 'If that girl was a commoner like you and me she'd be in a foam rubber boudoir in what's politely called a Residential Home. She had a real chance to make something of herself and reinforce this family.'

'You mean bring in some wealth and a couple of grandchildren to consolidate the future.'

'I'm not going to discuss family business with you, Mrs Carey.'

'You're not "family", Gerry. Anyway, you've confirmed she's here. Now go and get daddy. Tell him I'm offering his mentally ill daughter some care in the community.'

Rankin said, 'You really don't understand, do you? Lord Pennard doesn't want her in the community. Not this community. For her own good, Mrs Carey.'

'Hmmph.' Jim shuffled inside his overcoat. 'Soul of compassion.' Juanita glared at him.

Rankin stiffened. 'I don't know who you are, friend, but if you want to be abusive about Lord P, this is not the place.'

Jim grunted and moved back into the shadows of the gatepost, Juanita was quite glad Rankin didn't know him. He knew her, of course, because he'd once been into the shop, assuming it to be a general bookstore and requesting the lurid memoir of some SAS hero. There was silence. Then Jim whispered, 'Perhaps we should come back in the morning.'

Rankin had good ears. 'Yeah, I'd strongly advise that course of action.'

'I'm sure you would. God knows what you'd have done with her by then.' Juanita strode over to the gatepost, where he lounged in his well-worn Barbour, his leather cap shadowing his eyes. 'But I'll tell you one thing. If we do come back tomorrow, it'll be with a bunch of reporters and a couple of TV crews.'

He wasn't intimidated. 'Let me spell something out for you, Mrs Carey You are not taking on the soft-bellied aristocracy here. This is a business fighting for survival in a hard world. Two hundred acres and shrinking fast. Lots of overheads. A real business, Mrs Carey, not spooky books and incense burners and fucking tarot cards. We don't piss about. Am I making sense to you?'

'Perfectly.' Holding her Afghan coat together at the neck, Juanita stepped back into the full glare of the security light. 'But I do sound rather authoritative on the phone, when you can't see my beads and my crystals. They'll come, Mr Rankin. They'll all come, the papers, the radio, the television They can't afford to take the chance. If there is a story, they won't want to have missed it. I just have to wave my wand and utter the magic word… Pennard.'

He went very, very quiet. Quiet enough to hear a barn owl in the distant woods. Rankin gave Juanita a look harder than a punch in the mouth, and she almost recoiled. Then he turned tightly and walked away along the drive. After about twenty yards he turned back to keep them in view, removing something from a pocket. Juanita wondered, not altogether fancifully, if they should take cover.

'Mobile phone,' Jim said. 'I think you've hit the right nerve.'

'Let's hope so.'

'But you haven't made a friend.'

'Who wants friends like that?'

'Equally,' Jim Battle said, 'who wants an enemy like that?'

It was almost midnight when the Volvo turned into Chilkwell Street.

'I'm sorry.' Diane was wiping her eyes. 'I'm really, really sorry. They're probably right. I mean, you never know it yourself, do you? Nobody thinks they're insane.'

'Shut up,' Juanita said.

Jim Battle sat behind them, hunched inside his muddied overcoat. Juanita thought she should take him home without delay to his cottage and his canvases. Turps and linseed oil acted on Jim like smelling salts. She probably wouldn't see him for several days. He had a lot to paint out of his system.

With Diane, it had been surprisingly easy. Rankin had come off the phone and they'd waited in silence until a familiar plump figure had appeared on the drive. Juanita and Rankin had not looked at each other as Diane had come slowly towards the gate. With the security light and everything, it was rather like one of those Cold War movies, Soviet and Western spies being exchanged at Checkpoint Charlie. And then the recognition and the tears, and a final glance between Juanita and Rankin confirming that none of this had happened.

Juanita thought, The longest night of my entire life and none of it happened.

Diane was saying, 'It's just that – I'm sorry – I've just got to know that Headlice is OK. If we could just perhaps go past the camp…'

She obviously meant the boy they'd had up against the tower, who Jim had sort of rescued.

'Forget it, Diane. They'll all be back by now. I'm not going into that field tonight, not after…'

She heard the breath go into Jim, who'd insisted that even Diane shouldn't be told they'd been on the Tor tonight.

'… I mean, after what happened to this guy, they're probably blaming you. Anyway, if he's been badly hurt, what can you do about it?'

She was in no mood, anyway, to trust Diane's assessment of the situation. This was the Diane who'd told her on the phone yesterday that the bloody- travellers were frightfully nice people, once you not to know them. Jesus.

'We're taking Jim home, OK? Then we're going back to my place.'

Diane said, 'It's just that I'm sort of scared for him, anyway. There was some sort of frightful ritual on the Tor. I mean with hallucinatory drugs and things. I think they were using him in some way to… I don't know. He'd been sick. What I mean is, he was already in a bit of a state before the Rankins attacked him.'

'Shit,' Juanita said.

'Juanita…' Warning rumble from Jim.

'He might look like a hard case,' Diane said, 'with the swastika on his head and everything. But he's really quite, you know, naive and vulnerable.'

The lights of Glastonbury ahead. Also the turning to Wellhouse Lane. And to Don Moulder's bottom field.

'Fuck it,' Juanita said and spun the wheel.

At first she thought she really must be hallucinating when, at the entrance to the bottom field, the Volvo's headlights found Don Moulder himself with a big stick and a heavy-duty hand-lamp.

Moulder was wearing a bulky sheepskin jacket. Pyjamas showed in the gap between the jacket and his Wellingtons.

He was shining the lamp across the field.

Juanita pulled into the side of the lane, just short of the ditch. 'Stay,' she said sternly to Diane.

When she got out, feeling quite unsteady, Moulder had his back to the hedge and his stick clutched under his arm, pointing down.

'Don't you be coming near me, I got a twelve bore.'

'What's it fire, acorns? Calm down, Don, it's Juanita Carey.'

Don Moulder relaxed. 'Don't waste no bloody time, do you, Mrs Carey? Well, I'm telling you now, lady, 'twas their own decision. Can't say's I'm sorry, mind, but a deal was struck and that's that, s'far as I'm concerned. That don't entitle you nor Miss Diane to no money back is all I'm sayin'. They coulder had the full rime. Man of my word, always have been.'

He marched over to the five-bar gate and shone his lamp triumphantly into the bottom field.

'I don't understand,' Juanita said. 'Diane, no!'

Diane had rumbled from the car and pushed past them through the gate.

'What's to understand?' Don Moulder said.

As far as the beam would go, the field was conspicuously empty. No buses, no ambulances, not even debris, just a single white van with pink spots.

Diane stood in front of the van, looking helplessly from side to side.

'They're off my land and good bloody riddance,' Don Moulder said. 'Just like they was never 'ere at all, look. Thought at least I'd 'ave some shit to clean up.'

'Headlice?' Diane cried out. 'It's me. It's Molly.'

Her voice faded into the empty night.

'I don't understand this,' Juanita said. 'Where have they gone?'

'Thin air, Mrs Carey.' Don Moulder cackled. 'Just like one o' them bloody UFOs, look.'