The Chalice

'Why did you give up the fight to get Meadwell back?' Powys said.

'Legal costs.'

'No.'

'No. Of course not.' Pennard stood up. 'What's your angle on all this, Powys? What do you hope to get out of it? Book? Bloody bestseller?'

Powys shook his head. 'I'll be honest. I was going to tell you I'd publish the whole thing if you didn't play ball.'

'And now?'

'It's too heavy. Until just now I don't think I entirely believed it.' He leaned back at last on the stiff sofa. 'I don't want to threaten you. It would be the wrong thing to do. I won't write about it.'

Pennard looked at him for a long time. 'I'm inclined to believe you.'

'Then tell me what changed.'

'Why do you think I should?'

'Because I think it's something to do with Diane,' Powys said. 'Who, according to the late chairman of the Pixhill Trust, is in, and I quote, danger of a most extreme and everlasting nature. And she's disappeared.'

Lord Pennard collapsed into his chair. He suddenly looked much older.

TEN

Save Them from Themselves

'It was Archer, wasn't it?'

She kept opening her eyes but they wouldn't focus. She saw the blobs of faces around her in the gloom, but their pictures fled as she tried to identity them, flitting from one to another, very quickly. She thought she saw the Pilgrims; Rozzie and Mort and Viper and Gwyn. She must be hallucinating, dredging memories from the sludge of her subconscious. But in the end she could concentrate on only one thought.

'It was… Archer. Archer pushed her downstairs. Archer killed her.'

Capturing the certainty before sleep reached out for her.

'I've never met him,' Powys said reasonably. 'Never even seen him. Got no reason to think ill of him. Hell, I'm not even very political.'

Working on information now that he hadn't found in Pixhill papers. Piecing together what he'd gleaned from Juanita and particularly from Verity. Verity who pattered about the streets and chatted innocuously, sometimes inanely. And heard things…

'Is this gossip?' Lord Pennard seemed stunned, 'is this talked about?'

'I don't honestly think it is. It just… suggests itself. Maybe… maybe it suggested itself to you.'

'How can I discuss this with you? I've never even seen you before tonight. Certainly never heard of you. You lied to get in here; how do I know you're not lying now?'

Powys said nothing. Pennard had his head in his hands.

He'd found another bottle of whisky,

'My wife died after falling downstairs. She'd been to the nursery. Liked to spend time there. Been redecorated, refurnished in pink. She had her bed moved into the next room. Said she knew it was going to be a girl because… a wise woman had told her. My wife believed in such nonsense. She'd sit in the nursery alone and read for hours, as though the fact of the pink paint could influence matters at that stage.'

He drank some whisky. His face no longer smooth and polished but blotched with tension.

'Closed that part of the house now. Don't heat it, don't light it. Let it damn well rot. If it falls down, it falls down.'

'Were you in the house at the time?'

'I was in here. Didn't like her in her maudlin, nursery moping mood. One of the maids – still had maids then – came to tell me. They'd found my wife at the bottom of the stairs. Semi-conscious. Called the doctor. And the Belvedere, the private clinic. Sent a midwife with an assistant. Bugger-all use they were.'

'How near to time was she?'

'Seven months. Baby came out, but the damned placenta wouldn't. Because of the fall. Place was like the inside of an abattoir.'

He choked back something and became annoyed with himself and pushed all the bloodsports magazines to the floor.

Powys said, 'Someone told me Archer and his mother didn't get on.'

'Who told you?'

'Does it matter?'

'No. It's true. This… Dark Chalice business. This blasted woman… this Fortune… Firth biddy… spent a lot of time, apparently, with my mother while my father was away at his… clinic. Whatever she told her, my mother evidently passed on to Helen – my wife. One Christmas, few glasses of wine, told the boy about the legend of the Chalice. My wife was furious. Insisted it was up to the women of the family to exercise constant vigilance to counter any attempt arising from "male avarice or poverty'', as she put it, to "unbind'' the thing. Archer, of course, was immediately enchanted. We'll get it back. Father, won't we? Damn it, if he hadn't learned about it from me, someone else would have told him. Sooner or later.'

'Was that why your wife was so determined to have a girl? Because the women…?'

'Doubtless. Archer was ten at the time. Don't think she was ever close to him again. Almost afraid of him. And, of course, he played up to that. I remember he once walked in while we were having dinner. Solemnly carrying a chalice with a candle burning in it. Said he'd found it buried in the grounds. Helen had hysterics. Turned out some boy had stolen the thing from St John's. I think Archer paid him. It was smoothed over.'

The sleet had stopped. It was very quiet in the gunroom.

After a while. Lord Pennard said, 'Had the sheets burned. And the mattress. And then the fucking bed. Chopped up and burned. Sat in the library window, all the lights out. Watching the bed blazing in the walled garden.'

Powys thought, nearly twenty-eight years ago, Pennard would have been around his own age. Never imagined he'd be feeling so sorry for the guy.

'Rankin did the burning. Been with us about a year. Soaked everything with paraffin. Lit up most of the lawn. When the fire burned low, Rankin went away. Then Archer came out.'

Pennard pushed his whisky away.

'Had enough. Can't get drink any more. Can't get merry. Yes. Archer came out. Arms full of toys and baby bedding from the nursery. Pink teddy bear. I remember the pink teddy bear. With a bow. Archer burned them all. He was grinning. The baby was born. I couldn't look at her. She had blood on her. So I sat in the library in the dark and watched Archer burn all the toys. Saw his grinning face in the firelight.'

Lord Pennard began to weep.

After much frantic struggling, Juanita managed to get the shop door open and she threw herself out into the street, blue coat under her arm.

Into the empty town, moving in a staccato, sporadic fashion. Stubbornly doing 'normal' things, taking in images of ordinariness. She walked across the zebra-crossing to the post office. Looked into the phone box, an old-fashioned red one but the coinbox and phone were modern. A stand-up sandwich board said:

LPS, TAPES, CDS, ROOKS BOUGHT, SOLD

On the other side, a sticker had been slapped across the board:

Put Glastonbury First

– TAME THE TOR.

It was cold, but the sleet had stopped, leaving a thin glaze of slush on the pavement; few feet tonight to trample it away. The sky was clear again, almost starlit. There could be a hard frost, icy roads.

Alone on High Street, Juanita felt utterly wretched, but she couldn't go back. Couldn't live with those pictures. Couldn't take them down or hide them away, that would be the final rejection for Jim.

She struggled into her coat and stood for a while outside the delicatessen near the crossing. She felt agitated. Her body twitching, itching. Her hands ached abominably. She felt used and betrayed. As if her body had been strengthened just sufficiently to support the mind-twisting terror which began with the painting altering, recreating itself in her head, an unseasonal fly from the attic mutating obscenely into a symbolic black bus.

There were no roads at all in that picture, no hazy ley lines. Somehow her mind had created them as an opening for the horrid black bus which came out of the shadow-Tor and tunnelled into her brain.