The Chalice

SEVEN

Diane stared up at the cross.

'Did you make it yourself?'

What a blindingly stupid question. It was an abandoned telegraph pole with a fence post crudely nailed across it.

'Come away now.' Don Moulder said. 'I don't hang around here after dark no more.'

He led her out of the bottom field, up towards the farmhouse. It was nearly dark. The cold bit through her sweater. The Tor looked remote.

'Dogs won't go down there, n'more,' Don said. 'Night or day. What d'you say to that, Miss Diane?'

Nothing. She said nothing.

'Maybe you don't believe me.' Don pushed into the farmhouse kitchen, kicked off his wellies. Wife's WI night, he'd told Diane in the Land Rover. They could talk freely. 'Thought it anyone'd believe me, it'd be you.'

'Because of my reputation as a loony.' The kitchen was unmodernised, pale green cupboards with ventilation holes in the doors and a big, bright fire in the range. Don Moulder waved her to a chair, sat down opposite.

'Did I say that?'

'Nobody ever has to.'

'I'm a frightened man, Miss Diane. Two years ago, I d'come to Jesus for protection, all the weirdies round here, the evil, heathen things I seen when I looks across at… that thing, that hill.'

'Can you tell me about it now? Exactly what you saw?'

He wouldn't talk much about it when they were down in the bottom field. He was genuinely afraid. She was remembering the night of the fire, the way he'd kept talking about the black buzz.

'I thought it was a one-off thing,' he said now. 'Somethin' they'd kind of left behind 'em, like most of 'em leaves ole rubbish, this lot leaves… well, all the drugs they takes, maybe something in the air, I don't know, I don't, 'twas just a small hope. But I makes the cross, I prays to the Lord to bless the field and I tries not to think about it. But then the dogs… the dogs won't go in there, look, not even in broad daylight. The dogs slink off. They can sense evil, dogs can. Then – where are we now? – not last night, the night before, I'm doin' the rounds, padlockin' the sheds, when it comes again.'

He leaned close to her across the scuffed, Formica top table.

'Engine noise. Lord above, it went through me like a bandsaw. I could smell it. The fumes of oil. I could no more've gone down that field than dug my own grave. So you tell me, Miss Diane. What was they at? What was those scruffy devils at on my land that night?'

What on earth could she tell him? What did she even know?

'Cause what I do know is, what I reckernise now is I seen it before. I made careful note of every one o' them hippy heaps as they come through the gate that day. Know what I remember? The ole radiator grille hangin' off like a scab. Stuck in my mind, that did. Lazy devils couldn't even be minded to screw the bloody radiator on. I remember thinkin' that. Aye, it stuck in my mind. And that's what I seen. What they done. Miss Diane, what they done in that buzz to taint my land?'

'Oh gosh.' The fire was so warm, she was so tired, all her caution dropped away. 'They… nothing happened in it while it was here. Not while I was here, anyway. But later I think it was found… Oh, look, it was the one they found at Stoke St Michael. The one with the body in it.'

Don Moulder sat up, stiff. 'By golly, I d'remember readin' 'bout that. I never thought. By the… How'd he die?'

'I don't know.'

He stood up, began rapidly to pace the kitchen. 'Why's he come here? Why's he come back here?' He went to the window, snatched the curtains across. He looked terrified.

'I don't know,' Diane said.

'I don't want 'im. I can't live with this. I don't want no dead hippy and his black buzz. Could you live with that – knowing it's out there? Black evil? I'm afeared to set foot outside that door when it's dark, case I hears it again, chunner, chunner, chunner. How'm I gonner do my lambin' now?'

'These things… it won't harm you, Mr Moulder.' But terror was contagious; Diane bit her lip.

'Won't it? Won't it, Miss? That cross don't keep it off. What kind of evil defies the Christ?'

'I don't know, I don't know.'

The cold blue flashing lights. The hysteria of ambulances. The stolid red hulk of a fire engine. Steam rising.

Figures were in motion in the half-light, fluorescent paramedics with stretchers and oxygen equipment. And out of the murky stew of noise – moans and yells, a baby crying and the escalating whirring, whining, keening of a saw attacking metal – there was a woman wailing.

'Const… ance…'

The name caught in Sam's head. He heard it again in the squealing of the saw reaching a frenzy and the rending of metal before two firemen backed into view with most of a lorry door held between them, trampling sawn-off Christmas tree branches into the tarmac.

' Naaaaaaaaaaaaw!!!'

Echoing across the market-place like some old street-trader's cry, a woman's shredded shriek. Close to Sam, a man was being eased out of a metal cave like a snail from its shell, squirming into vicious life when his boots touched the ground.

'…was that little tosser!' Jabbing a finger. 'Slams on and just fucking…'

A pool of newly spilled oil shimmering like smoked glass with beacon blue light. A police boot slapping into the pool.

'Get back. Get back, please.' A stretcher shape coming through: red blankets, paramedics.

As the policeman pushed him back, Sam saw the lorry skewed across the road, the new Christmas tree snapped like a matchstick, the lorry's crushed-in cab garlanded with branches and little coloured lights, red and yellow and green and white.

The cab was crushed because behind the tree had been the great rigid finger of the market cross. They'd had to cut away the side of the cab to get the driver out, and he was snarling in self-defence, '… didn't have no choice, mate, that fucking lunatic

…'

'Come on, now, back,' a policeman snapped. 'It's not a flaming funfair. Everybody back!' The first ambulance squealing away, revealing a small, muddied, maroon car in the centre of the road. A sticker on its rear side window.

RESIST ROAD RAPE.

The car was a Renault Six. Sam stared at it in horror and disbelief.

'Ask him. Ask that little bastard!' the lorry driver yelled.

And there was Woolly standing in the middle of the road, blood on his fingers, one sleeve torn away and bloody skin peeling from his wrist like curled shavings from planed wood, and he was weeping. 'Oh, Jesus.' His face ragged. 'It… shit. It's… I'm going outer my fucking head, man.'

'You hear that, officer?' Ronnie Wilton, the butcher, normally a jovial bugger amid the blood and offal, his face bulging and twisting now. 'He's admitted it. You take that down. I'll be a witness, look.'

Another one who hadn't voted for Woolly.

'Yes, thank you, sir, now if you'd just…' One of the policemen wore glasses, twin ice blue beacons strobing in the lenses, concealing expressions, feelings. 'Mr Woolaston, you better go in the ambulance.'

'No, I'm not taking up ambulance space.'

Woolly's agonised face was frozen by a flashgun, some Press photographer dodging in front. And then there was an awful sound – all the worse because in other circumstances you might have thought it was a howl of glee – as a ball of crashed and bloodied metal was handed through the despoiled jungle of the great, festive tree

'Oh, Chrrrrrist!' Woolly's hands covered his face.

Sam saw that the metal ball handed from fireman to fireman was the crushed remains of a baby's pushchair.

Iridescent. Mesmeric.

With rage, it looked like.

Bad move, he thought. Wrong night. He would have turned round and left quietly, but she'd seen him.

Powys had started having second thoughts about this as soon as he was inside the hospital. If she wouldn't have visitors except for Diane, wouldn't even talk to Dan Frayne on the phone…

It you're another one come to talk me out of it, you can sod off now,' said Mrs Juanita Carey, acid in her voice.

Powys said nothing. Just gave her a smile.

The session with the Rt Rev. Liam Kelly had left him disturbed. And dismayed that anyone who thought Glastonbury Tor was 'just a hill' could get to be Bishop of Bath and Wells. Wonderful material, obviously, for a book. He'd be there at dawn on Thursday, no question. Fascinating stuff.

Fascinating for an author. Fascinating if you were outside looking in. If you didn't let your viewpoint become cluttered by something plump and vulnerable.

All the stuff Diane had told him, about Dion Fortune, Pixhill and the Dark Chalice was still washing restlessly around his head. He'd wound up in Bristol because, to get a handle on whatever was happening, or whatever Diane imagined was happening, he needed to talk to someone who wasn't Diane. Someone who knew the score but was temporarily apart from the game.

Also – face it – he was very curious to meet Juanita Carey and, after what had happened to her van, there was a fairly good chance Diane would not be here tonight.

'You a friend of hers?' the nurse in the burns unit had asked him. Not waiting for an answer. 'Do you think it might be possible to talk a bit of sense into her?'

Oh.

Mrs Carey glared at him. She was fully dressed, which was a slight surprise. Long skirt full of exotic colours. Low cut, sunny lemon top. Bright orange moccasins. Copious, dark hair down below her shoulders. Skin aglow,

Iridescent.

The bed between them, her eyes like distant warning lanterns.

He became aware of the way her arms were hanging unnaturally away from her like the arms of a dress shop mannequin plugged in at the shoulders the wrong way round. The hands frozen like a mannequin's but not with that fashioned abandon; they were both curled arthritically and as colourful in their way as the skirt

'Um, Joe Powys,' he said. 'Dan Frayne sent me.'

The awful energy something like this generated. The town would be alive with it all night.

The sick mythology was already taking shape. Sam had heard one teenage girl telling another that the baby had been taken away in two shoeboxes.

'I can't believe it,' Hughie Painter said. Not the most original remark tonight. 'It's just… Could've been one of mine, you know?'

Not very original either. Sam watched two coppers taking measurements and photos. The container lorry – car parts for Swindon – had been pulled out of the market cross monument. Council blokes checking out the stonework in case it was in danger of collapse.

'Think he'll be charged?'

'Woolly? I dunno.' Hughie was still looking quite white. 'Can you be done for slamming on your brakes without warning? Maybe.'

'If half these people had their way, the poor little bugger'd be hanged.'

'He didn't help himself,' Hughie said severely. 'You heard what he said when he got out of his car.'

'I didn't hear it. I was told. Every bugger's probably been told by now. So with Woolly's past, everybody naturally assumes he was doped up to the eyeballs. This'll finish him, Hughie. Who's gonner vote for him now?'

'Good news for your old man.'

'Yeah. Good news for Glastonbury First all round, once the weeping's over.'

'Aye. Well.' Hughie sniffed. 'I'm off home now, Sammy. Going to count my kids.'

Sam nodded and walked into the road, single-lane traffic going through sluggishly now. Counting his kids. A lot of mums and dads would be doing that tonight. Even Alternative mums and dads with a shelf full of meditation tapes and a cannabis plant in the greenhouse. Why did he think that even Hughie Painter, father of three, might well think twice about voting for Woolly again?

The fucking irony of it, though. The great anti-traffic evangelist. Slamming on in the middle of the rush hour for a bus that nobody else managed to see. Just swerving out into the centre of the road. The driver of the lorry behind him pulling the other way to avoid smashing into the back of Woolly, and the lorry going out of control and crunching through the Christmas tree, the people and the pram, smack into the side of the market cross.

Neither of them could've been going very fast. Not in the town centre, in the rush hour. But they didn't have to be.

Const… ance…

Ah, Jesus, was he going to hear that every time he walked past here, like the shriek was imprinted on the fabric of the street?

Constance Morgan. Four months old. Hardly aware she had a life before it was gone. Her mother, now in danger of losing a leg, was Kirsty Morgan.

Nee Cotton.

Daughter of Quentin Cotton.

So the chairman of Glastonbury First loses his grandchild, gets his only daughter crippled in an accident caused by…

'I can't believe this,' Sam hissed.

'' Scuse me, squire, would you mind?'

A bloke wanted to set up a black tripod. Sam moved back, thinking it was a police photographer, until the bloke slid a big video camera into the top of the tripod and a white light came on, revealing a woman in a sheepskin coat, very short blonde hair. Tammy White from BBC Bristol with a big boom microphone in a furry cover.

'What about we do it here, Rob?' Tammy White said.

'Can you get the lorry in?'

'Yeah, if the two of you come out a bit. That's fine. That'll do.'

Sam stepped into the doorway of the Crown Hotel as the camera light shone bright as day on the face of Archer Ffitch.

'Sorry to put you on the spot like this,' Tammy White said in a low, non-interviewing voice. 'They'll only use about half a minute, but I need to cover myself. Is that all right?'

'Anything you require, Tammy,' Archer said smoothly. 'It's a pretty difficult situation for me, but you've got your job to do.'

'I'm recording,' the cameraman said. 'In your own time, Tammy.'

Tammy White straightened up, held the microphone between her and Archer, just above waist level.

'Mr Ffitch, this is obviously a terrible thing to happen, particularly in the week before Christmas. What are your feelings?'

Archer said, 'It is the most appalling tragedy. People… children… gathering for this joyful occasion – the lighting of the Christmas tree… My heart goes out to the family.'

'And you saw what happened?'

'I was returning from the station when we were held up. It had happened only minutes before and there was tremendous chaos. The driver was trapped in his cab, the poor mother was semi conscious, and I don't think anyone realised at that stage that there was a pram underneath.'

Archer's voice faltered. Sam saw his jaw quiver. Sam's fists clenched.

Tammy White said, 'Now, you're one of the supporters of the plan for a Central Somerset relief road which many people are objecting to…'

'Tammy,' Archer held up a restraining hand. 'This is not the time to make political capital. I realise that many local people will be saying that, if such a road existed, commercial traffic of this size would not be passing through Glastonbury. Personally, I would rather not comment at this stage especially as the leader of the campaign against this road is tonight being questioned by police in connection with the incident.'

'This is the second death in just over a month connected with traffic congestion in the town. The other involved a fire, which emergency services couldn't reach because of New Age travellers' vehicles on the approach road to Glastonbury Tor. You've initiated a campaign to limit access to the Tor. Do you think that's a related issue?'

Tammy made a face at the clumsiness of her question, but Archer was straight in there.

'I think what both these tragedies are telling us is that this is a town which has been getting seriously out of control. I think we have to calm down, consider whether we believe Glastonbury has been going in the right direction and then take steps to ensure the town is run for – and by- normal, decent, law-abiding people.'

Meaning, Avalon out, Woolaston out. Sam felt like rushing out there, making a scene, giving them some real footage for their programme.

'Thank you.' Tammy nodded to the cameraman to wind up.

'Got all you wanted?' Archer asked obligingly as the camera light went out.

'Fine. Unless you've got any views about the Bishop's meet the pagans mission on Thursday.'

'Silly man,' Archer said. 'Off the record, of course.'

'Also off the record,' murmured Tammy, 'the word is that not every member of your family a backing your Tor scheme'

Archer smiled. 'Diane'

'Just talk. As yet.'

'Look, strictly off the record,' Archer said awkwardly, 'we've all been terribly worried about Diane, who's in a… particularly delicate state… you remember she was at that awful fire? Plus, she's been working non-stop on this, ah, hippy magazine thing from early in the morning until late at night.'

'Must be a problem for you,' Tammy said ambiguously.

'Oh lord, yes.' Archer's expression was no longer visible. 'She's given us a few headaches in her time, you must have heard about all that, Tammy.'

'Well, you know…'

'God knows, we help her all we can. Try to help her. Ha ha.'

Sam was so blind furious he could have smashed his fist into the wall. The two-faced git. So smooth, so deft. Tossing his sister to the pack like a fox cub.

Mad, restless energy was pumping through Sam's body. No way he could go home, sit there with a can of lager and a sandwich and wait for the slimy turd to come up on the box. No way he could go to any pub in this town tonight and listen to the gloating gossip about how Councillor Crackpot had helped kill an innocent little baby.

Archer and Tammy and the cameraman were moving away. 'Really, very good of you to talk to us at a time like this, Mr Ffitch.'

'Archer, please. Probably be seeing a good deal more of each other in the months to come. Do you and your colleague have time for a drink?'

Sam watched them walk away from the mess of Magdalene Street. Wanted to scream at Archer's broad, dark back, like a hooligan.

No good.

He decided to go alone to Bowermead Hall, climb a few fences, jump a few streams, figure out how to sabotage the forthcoming Pennard Hunt.