SWASTIKA CLUE… The evening paper was on the table next to Juanita's wineglass, folded through the headline.
Juanita had drunk three glasses of house white and hardly noticed them go down. Jim was chuntering on about preserving the mystery.
The paper had revealed another mystery. The police were investigating it. Juanita wished to God Tony Dorrell-Adams would drink up and go so she could discuss this development with Jim, decide what they were going to do. But Tony just slumped in his chair; whatever he'd been telling Jim earlier, he wasn't going to talk about it with Juanita around.
'It's like the Holy Grail,' Jim said. 'If somebody dug up an ancient cup under the Chalice Well and it was proved to be the actual Grail the whole thing would be diminished, reduced to another sterile antique in a glass case. There'd be no buggering mystery.'
'Bullshit, sir,' roared a voice from behind. 'The discovery of that Holy Grail would be the best thing as could happen to this town.'
Oh hell. Griff Daniel. Juanita looked up, throwing a defensive arm over the paper. Just what they could do without.
And a reborn Griff Daniel, it seemed. The last time she'd seen him he'd been grim-faced, his grey and white beard bedraggled, his eyes full of sour suspicion. Looking, in fact, exactly like a bent builder who'd lost his seat on the council to a hippy. Now, grinning savagely through a freshly trimmed beard, he'd virtually erupted at their table.
'Now you just imagine. Mr Battle, if we had that bloody Grail banged up in a glass case. No more weirdos with dowsing sticks claimin' they knew where it was buried. No more lunatics having visions of the thing and sayin' they'd been singled out by the Lord. No more bloody speculation. No more room for dreamers and nutcases. Think what that would do for this town.'
'Make it exceedingly bloody boring,' said Jim.
'Ah.' Griff accepted a pint of Guinness from the barman and paid. 'Now that's where we differ, Mr Battle. You look like a regular sort with a decent haircut, but behind it all you're still an immigrant. One o' them.'
'Listen, buster,' Jim said mildly, 'I'll have you know I'm not one of them or one of you either. There are a few buggering individuals left.'
'In this town, Mr Battle, there's only two sides: locals and hippies. Even if some of 'em does wear jackets and tweed hats and is old enough to know better.'
Juanita saw Jim tense at the mention of his hat.
'What gets me, look…' Griff burrowed into his pint and emerged with froth spiked in his beard like cotton buds, '… is they d' think they got somethin' to show us 'bout how to live our lives. By God, I wouldn't live like that if it…'
'They think', Jim said, 'that if they're living here, something will help them to become better people. That it's easier to be a better person here because of a spiritual atmosphere to which you appear to be oblivious.'
'Spiritual!' Griff's tankard connected derisively with a beer-mat. 'Bullshit, mister. You tellin' me we didn't have our abbey and our bit of tourism 'fore they come flooding the town with their cranky fads?'
'That's not what I'm saying at all, and you…'
'And didn't we used to have a proper town centre back then, with real shops sellin' stuff ordinary fold wanted to buy? And wasn't our property prices on a par with Somerton and Castle Carey if not better? And did people laugh at us in them days? No, mister, they did not.'
'What days?' said Jim irritably. 'There's always been an alternative community in Glastonbury. If you go back to the twenties and thirties – Dion Fortune at Chalice Orchard. And then Cowper Powys wrote that enormous novel…'
'Gah,' said Griff. 'Filthy bastard. Bloody ole pervert. Never showed his face here after that come out, 'cordin' to my old dad.' He finished his Guinness with a flourish. 'But I'll tell you what's behind all this, mister. That bloody hill. Brings out the hippies with their weird ceremonies and such. Pull 'em in like a kiddies' playground. Take that thing away and what you got is an ordinary, decent country town with a ruined abbey.'
'But you can't take it away,' Jim said patiently. 'You're stuck with it.'
'No you can't, that's true.' A gleam arrived in Griff's foxy eyes and a little smile crawled out of his beard. 'But you can keep them away. You can make that nasty little hill into as near as dammit a no-go area. If you goes about it right.'
'Got a plan, have we, Mr Daniel?'
'Ah, well. You could say that. You could indeed.' Griff Daniel stood up, looking smugly secretive. 'Glastonbury first, Mr Battle. Glastonbury First!'
'I'm sorry.' Tony Dorrell-Adams rose unsteadily to his feet 'I didn't come here to listen to an argument.' He pushed past Griff towards the door. 'Not what this town should be about.'
'Who the hell's he to know what the bloody town should be about?' Griff dropped into Tony's seat.
'Just a dreamer,' Jim said sadly. 'Just a nutcase.'
'Aye, well,' said Griff, 'I got to say I'd hoped for better from you, Mr Battle. I knows you're a bit of an artist an' that, but… You're very quiet tonight, Mrs Carey.'
'And you', she said, 'are looking unusually buoyant, Mr Daniel.' He'd once made a pass at her when she and Danny had ventured down to the Rifleman's Arms and had a row and Danny had walked out. Griff evidently assuming, prior to getting his face slapped, that ex-hippies had few morals and no taste.
'I'll say this, lady.' Griff wagged a bloated forefinger. 'I'll say this an' no more. There's a change on its way. An' when it comes we're gonner have 'em out. Every phoney healer. Every fortune telling charlatan. Every last dinky cult-follower. Run out of town, with their bloody jazz sticks up their arses. So them that's old enough to know better maybe oughter be thinkin' which side you're really on. 'Cause from now on, my friends, it's gonner be Glastonbury First.'
He beamed at them, smugly.
'It's, erm, joss sticks,' Jim said.
'What?'
'You said "jazz sticks".'
'Gah!' Griff Daniel pushed back his chair and slouched off in search of more malleable company. After a few moments he turned on his heel, raised a hand to the barman and went out.
'Oh my Gods'. It's him. He's coming. Quick! Mustn't let him see us. Where can we go?'
'Into the bookshop.' Diane pulled out her keys, seizing the opportunity to get the crazy woman off the street.
Inside, she steered Domini into the back parlour and flung a log into the stove.
'Energy.' Domini pulled at her hair. 'I had to use the energy. The spore's in the air. Now or never, Diana.'
She'd left a trail of coloured plates perhaps a hundred yards long from The George and Pilgrims to the door of Holy Thorn Ceramics. Except it wasn't Holy Thorn Ceramics any more. Domini had gone into the shop and switched on the lights in the window.
The lights were purple now. They spotlit a crudely repellent squatting earthenware woman with a hole between her legs the size of a chimney pot. Around her lumpen head with its jagged grin was a wreath of brambles.
'No more Holy Thorn!' Domini had screeched. The Goddess lives here now. The Goddess lives!'
'Tea, I think,' Diane said.
'No wine?'
'The last thing you need is wine.'
She'd half expected Domini would suddenly collapse into tears, shattered by the realisation of what she'd done while carried away on this dangerous overflow of energy.
But the golden woman had slipped gracefully into the rocking chair, crossing her legs, the diaphanous white dress gliding back along her thighs.
Diane put the kettle on. 'This is really ever so silly, you know. It's not incompatible at all.'
'That's what I thought at first,' Domini said. 'I became aware of the need for a religion, and this was the only really English one. I mean, all that stuff about Israel – the Holy Land. Well it never seemed very holy to me, all these Jews and Arabs killing each other. This was my holy land. England. I mean, why not?'
She stretched her neck, leaned her golden head into the spindly back of the rocking chair. At least some of the hyper-urgency had gone out of her. She was like a racehorse steaming in the winners' enclosure.
'That hymn, I suppose, turned me on to it, when I was at school. And did those feet in ancient times…? All those lovely lines, the bow of burning gold… Wonderful. Until you get to the last bit.'
'"Till we have built Jerusalem…"'
'Exactly. If you've got a green and pleasant land why deface it with a filthy warren full of Arab muggers? Anyway, our religion's so much older than theirs. They'd heard about this legendary holy island in the West with the power to transform people's lives, a place where you could walk with the spirits, and they wanted a piece of the action. Simple as that.'
A ragged voice came from the street.
'Where are you, you heartless, evil bitch?'
'Ah.' Domini didn't move. 'Tony seems to have found one of his plates.'
There was a ringing silence. Then a long wail of pure, cold anguish from the street. As if the man out there had suddenly taken a knife deep into his stomach.
And then a window shattered.
'Something afoot,' Jim said. 'Something involving Daniel and Archer Ffitch. You hear what he said? Glastonbury First. You see, that's Archer's new slogan. It's all in here…'
He fumbled at the paper. Totally ignoring the swastika story, Juanita noticed.
'Can Archer Ffitch afford to lose that much credibility?' she wondered.
'Don't underrate that man.'
'Which of them do you mean?' Juanita got up. 'Same again?'
'Either. Both. Stay there, sit down, I'll get them. I owe you more than a few drinks.'
'You don't owe me a thing.' But he'd already gathered up their glasses.
While he was at the bar, Juanita took the opportunity to open out the evening paper. The headline was no less shaking.
Swastika Clue in Bus Body Mystery New-Age travellers all over the West were being questioned by detectives today following the discovery of a man's body in an abandoned 'hippy' bus. The dead man, believed to have head injuries, was found inside the vehicle early this morning by a woman walking her dog in woodland at Stoke St Michael near Shepton Mallett. 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.'