'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.'
SIX
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.