The Chalice (29 page)

       
Police say the battered
black bus had false number plates and no road fund licence, and describe the
death as suspicious.

       
Their only clue to The
identity of the man, said to be aged 19 or 20, is a distinctive swastika symbol
tattooed on the top of his head.

       
Avon and Somerset police
are appealing for anyone who might have seen the man or the bus …

      
Juanita could still hear Diane in the back of the Volvo, crying
to persuade them to go back to Moulder's field.
He might look like a hard case, with the swastika on his head and everything.

      
She and Jim hadn't been close enough to the boy to see that
kind of detail, and presumably Jim hadn't heard or had forgotten what Diane had
said in the car. Either way, he didn't know and, sooner or later, she was going
to have to tell him.

      
Jim put down Juanita's fourth glass of wine. She thanked him
and swallowed half of it.
  
Jim looked at
her with concern.

      
'Sorry,' Juanita said absently. She was still trying to get her
head around the possibility that Rankin was a murderer and Lord Pennard an accessory.

      
'Sometimes delayed shock is even worse, you know,' Jim said.
'You were very strong last night. Me, I couldn't sleep, with or without the
booze. But I've learned my lesson. I'm feeling better now - I think anger
helps, don't you? Archer and his evil plans, Griff Daniel ...'

      
Juanita looked at him and thought, quite calmly, We could stop
him. If you swallowed your pride and we went to the police and implicated
Rankin and Pennard in this boy's death; even if they got away with it, the
scandal would touch Archer. Archer would have to resign the candidacy.

      
When she was younger the idea would have excited her. The
adrenalin would have drowned all Jim's objections, carried the pair of them all
the way to the police station at Street. Or to the Press.
      
When she was younger.

      
Juanita gripped the base of her glass to prevent her throwing
back the rest of the wine. And to prevent her hand from shaking. The noise of
the pub swelled and deflated around her, a dozen conversations boiled together,
the way it was when you were very drunk.
Was
she drunk?

      
Just jittery ... OK, frightened. Frightened of jumping to the
wrong conclusions. Frightened at the way everything was going out of control.

      
She was aware that Jim was looking steadily at her, his honest
eyes unmoving in his honest, English-apple face.

      
It was a look she'd seen before, but never quite so obviously
in the face of Jim Battle, sixty-three, a friend, a good friend in the best,
the old-fashioned sense.

      
'Juanita ...' His voice coming towards her along a very circuitous
route. I'm … very fond of you. you must know that.
Very
fond.'

      
'Jim …' He was drunk. He didn't know what he was saying. She
had to stop him. Not here, not now, not ...

      
Not ever. How could she say that to him, her best friend? Her
best friend.

      
'I mean ..There was sweat on his forehead. 'That is, I don't
have any illusions, of course, that...'

      
Please
God...

      
It was, ironically, Griff Daniel who saved her. And saved Jim,
probably. Griff back already, half-grinning, half-scowling. Making an explosive
arrival at the bar.

      
'Bloody hippies. Bloody mad bastards!'

      
Everybody heard him, everybody turned. Griff ordered another
pint of Guinness.

      
'Bloody drugs, it is. Sends 'em out their minds. One minute
they're almost rational, the next…'

      
'What they done, then, Griff?' somebody called out. 'Sprayed
your ole truck luminous pink?'

      
There was laughter. Griff Daniel took delivery of his pint of
Guinness, took his time about swallowing some. Knowing he had an audience, he
composed himself.

      
'You wanner know what they done, you go out and see for
yourselves.'

SIX

Flickering

It was like a street party,
like New Year's Eve, the atmosphere weirdly electric, lights shining out of
shop windows and from the windows of the flats over the shops. More people than
there'd been in the bar, maybe a hundred among the wreckage on High Street,
many of them wandering into the road because of the scarcity of traffic so late
at night.

      
The colourful, otherworldly folk of Glastonbury's thriving New
Age Quarter: mystics, psychics, healers and dealers in crystals and tarot
cards. Under the utility streetlamps, didn't they all look so depressingly
ordinary?

      
Juanita shook her head to dear it. Where the hell were the
police? Always the same in a Glastonbury crisis: half a dozen trauma-counsellors,
but nobody to redirect the traffic, Tony Dorrell-Adams sat on the bench outside
the darkened veggie-bar. He was sobbing quietly. One of his arms was being held
up, as though he'd won a boxing bout, by a man with a white medical bag. Blood
was oozing from a limp hand. A small circle of watchers kept a half-fascinated aloofness,
like mourners around a distant relative's grave.

      
About five shop windows had been smashed. The veggie-bar had
come off worst, with a crack three feet long in its main window, a spiderwebbed
hole at the end nearest the frame.

      
'What happened, Juanita?' Councillor Woolly came to stand next
to her in the doorway of an antiques shop. Woolly's own shop (archaic string
instruments) was safely tucked away in Benedict Street.

      
'All I know', Juanita said, 'is that when Tony left the pub he
was not in an awfully good mood. And not entirely sober. What I gather is that
he found a few dozen of his newly glazed picture-plates scattered in some sort
of weird formation all over the pavement.'

      
'His plates?'

      
'Yep. The fair Domini disposing of them, apparently. In a
fairly imaginative, if cruel, fashion. I wouldn't claim to understand. I think
she's one trump short of a Major Arcana, as we mystics say.'

      
Making light of it, but she was shocked. Her voice was hoarse,
as if there wasn't enough oxygen. There was something wrong with tonight.

      
'What sort of plates?' Woolly looked worried.

      
Juanita pulled a segment from her mac pocket. 'Here's one I
rescued earlier. Sort of.'

      
Woolly stared at the picture of half a church on half a hill.
"Tis Burrowbridge Mump.' When he looked up he was almost in tears. 'These're
our
plates. I been working with this
guy, working out earth-mysteries themes. We done this series on the St Michael
line, all the churches and Abbeys and stones and stuff. Set often, boxed. Jesus
... I mean, why? Why the fuck she have to do that?'

      
'Possibly a statement about the aesthetic and spiritual validity
of Tony's art,' Juanita said dryly. Her mouth was so parched she could hardly
finish the sentence. She coughed. 'And she seems to have other ideas for the
window.'

      
Nodding across the street to the crudely fashioned, unspeakably
ugly female form, unsubtly spotlit in purple, with what looked like the
entrance to a railway tunnel between its spread thighs. The window was cracked
but intact.

      
'Sheesh, that's really gross,' said Woolly. 'No wonder the poor
bastard lost his cool.'

      
'He didn't need to start hurling his works of art at everybody
else's windows, though. Must be fifteen or twenty panes gone.'

      
Who would pay? The Alternative Community was already withdrawing
into itself. Juanita supposed repair bills would be settled quietly. She supposed
she'd have her corner pane quietly replaced without seeking recompense from
either the Dorrell-Adamses or the insurance company. As would most of the other
New Age shopkeepers. Covering up, because this sort of incident just did not
happen in sacred Glastonbury.

      
No wonder Griff Daniel had looked so happy.
      
Woolly shook his head in sorrow.
'We had this whole range planned. My knowledge, Tony's artwork. Good team, eh? I
work out the concept, he makes 'em, she dumps 'em in the street, he smashes
'em. Gotter be a philosophical message there somewhere.'

      
'The message', said Juanita, 'is Glastonbury buggers you up.'

      
'Pixhill,' Woolly said. 'Don't you go quoting Pixhill at me,
Juanita. You'll have me all paranoid again.'

      
'How do you mean?' Juanita asked, but Woolly had spotted Tony.

      
'What's he done to himself?'

      
'Cut his hand on a shard of pot. That - what's -his-name, Matthew,
the herbalist guy - is sedating him the Natural way and anointing his wound with
cowslip syrup or something.'

      
'This is a real downer,' said Woolly, the only living local
councillor to specialise in understatement. A
downer.
Christ, it showed how basically rickety the whole
community-structure was.

      
If Tony Dorrell-Adams, a steady, middle-class, terribly boring
ex-teacher from the Home Counties, could behave like this, what did it say
about some of the others?

      
She wondered where Jim was, turned to look for him.

      
It was strange: just turning around, just moving made her want
to go on moving. There was something ... a tingle in the air, an underlying
vibration that was horribly exhilarating. The Shockwaves had broken the Blight.
People's bodies were flexing as they moved about, the way they might emerging
into a bright spring morning.

      
Something not at all right about this.

      
A single, undamaged plate with a glowing cup glazed upon it,
rolled, as if from nowhere, on end down the pavement and fell flat at Juanita's
feet. It seemed awesomely symbolic, like the most innocuous things did when you
were on acid.

      
There was a moment of charged-up silence, the plate
wobbling on the flagstones. Juanita had time to think.
This is Glastonbury, buggering us up…

      
... before it all began again.

      
She heard someone shout, 'Hold him!' as Tony Dorrell-Adams
struggled to his feet, scattering the herbalist's bottled preparations and
screaming,

      
'Biiiiiiitch!'

      
The scream seemed to splatter the white walls above the shops
opposite like a gob of spit, and Georgian windows rattled with its agony. The
air was alive, fizzing like soda. The streetlamps were flickering, one
crackling - as though Tony's scream had hit an electrical current and caused a short
circuit or something.

      
Tony sank to his knees, sobs coming out of him like ghastly,
amplified hiccups. 'I want to die ... Just want to kill that bitch and die.'

      
Poor old Tony. One night he's humping his wife in the shop window,
like this was Hamburg or Amsterdam, and the next … well, this was how domestic
murders happened, one of the classic scenarios; you mock a man's prowess, his skills,
it's like trampling his balls.

      
Juanita's tongue found the swelling on her lower lip, where
the pilgrim had punched her and it all muscled in on her, everything that had
happened in the past twenty four hours: small events in the great scheme of
things - petty violence and humiliation and the unexplained death of a social
reject Diane called Headlice.
      
Diane ...

      
Where the hell was Diane? Who should have been padding around
this bizarre streetscape, wide eyed and worried and exuding that doe-like
innocence.

      
'Oh my God ...' On a night like this, she'd forgotten about
Diane. Snatching out her key, Juanita ran for the door of Carey and Frayne.

'
Do it,'
Wanda Carlisle urged. 'You won't get another opportunity
like this.'

      
'I can't,' said Verity, 'I really can't.'

      
'He can help you.'

      
'It isn't my
place
to
seek help.'