She turned to him. They were in a shadowed area of the car park but he didn't need much in the way of lights to know her eyes were aglow.
'Diane,' Powys said. Very carefully, treading eggshells.
The sound of a distant ambulance echoed the warning sirens going off in his head. 'Dion Fortune died more than twenty years before you were born.'
Diane considered this.
'I don't think she would consider that a problem,' Diane said eventually.
'Sorry.' The nurse rearranged the bedclothes over the cage thing that prevented them touching Juanita's upper thighs, where the skin had been removed. 'Ruth who?'
'Dunn. Nursing sister.'
'What, here?'
'Don't know where she was. It might not even have been anywhere in the West Country, but it probably was.'
'Don't recall. Friend of yours?'
Juanita laughed shortly.
'Like that, is it? I can ask the girls tomorrow. Anything in particular you want to know about her?'
'Just… whatever. Look, Diane's here, don't say anything to her about this, OK?'
'Offended you in some way, has she, this Dunn woman?'
'No,' Juanita said. 'She paid me a compliment.'
What lovely slender hands.
Ceridwen had said.
Juanita stared grimly at the white boxing gloves. They covered scar tissue and transplanted skin. But not the unspeakable memory of gripping a melting, metal easel and staring into Jim Battle's fried eyes.
THREE
With her hair around her shoulders, no make-up and the pristine white shift, she looked very young, Diane thought.
Like a recumbent version of the sylph on the front of the old Avalonian.
But awfully vulnerable, with her hands inside those enormous bandages.
'They're taking them off tomorrow,' Juanita said.
'That's super.'
'Least it means I can get out of here.'
'When?'
'I'm thinking about it.'
'You mean you'll discharge yourself,' Diane said disapprovingly. She really didn't think Juanita was ready to face Glastonbury. She never spoke of the fire or Jim.
Juanita said, 'You know, you're looking distinctly washed-out. You've lost weight. Are you eating?'
'Sure. It's just been a bit sort of frenzied, what with people placing orders for Christmas, and… look, I wanted to get your opinion on this.'
She pulled her folder on to her knees.
The artwork had The Avalonian across the top in lettering which was only modestly Celtic. The rest of the front cover was a black and white photograph of the Tor, surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence with two searchlight towers.
'We got the fence from one of those postwar pictures of Belsen or somewhere. Paul put it all together on his computer.'
With a practised elbow, Juanita prodded a pillow into the small of her back and studied the mock-up.
'I'm impressed But it doesn't make any secret of where we stand on the issue, does it? I mean, Belsen?'
'I've also written to Quentin Cotton, asking if he'd like to write a piece expressing his views.'
'Not Archer? Not Griff?'
'This way neither Sam nor I have to deal with estranged relatives.'
'You and Archer are officially estranged?'
'I don't know, I haven't spoken to him. Oh. Gosh. I meant to say. You know who his new constituency agent is?'
'Domini Dorrell-Adams?'
'Oliver Pixhill.'
Juanita's eyes widened.
'It's true. Woolly rang to tell me just before I came out. Apparently, the constituency party isn't awfully well off at the moment so Archer offered to bring his own agent. Free of charge, as it were.'
Juanita's eyes narrowed. 'What's the scam?'
'He just wants somebody he can trust, I suppose.'
'Oliver's a shit,' said Juanita. 'Even as a kid he was a shit, so I'm told.'
Diane shrugged. 'Archer's a shit. Do you think we should run the contents along the bottom or down one side?'
'You could start off a column aligned with the The in the masthead. If you see what I mean. Actually, as an example of a first issue I suspect there ought to be something less hard line contentious up-front, less in-your-face.'
'Oh.' Diane was crestfallen. 'I just had the idea, and…'
'And it's a really great idea, Diane, and it looks terrific, but for the dummy maybe we need to be a little pragmatic.
'Hey, is Pixhill married or anything? Girlfriend?'
'Oh, really.' Diane felt herself blush.
'Public schoolboys together.' Juanita raised an eyebrow. 'Both late thirties, unattached.'
'It's an appealing thought,' Diane concluded, 'but I don't think Archer is actually gay. Just doesn't have regular girlfriends.'
'Never mind, Tory Central Office'll find him a nice fiancee before the election. Then they'll part amicably when he wins. You watch.'
'I don't want to watch.'
'No.' Juanita lay back on the pillows. 'I can't help thinking we might have stopped it. And shafted the Glastonbury First movement along the way.'
Obviously meaning the Headlice thing. But as it had turned out, it was just as well they hadn't been to the police.
Wearing her Avalonian hat, Diane had made a legitimate call to Street and learned from a detective sergeant that it was no longer a murder investigation. A post mortem had revealed that the young man, now formally identified as Alan Carl Gallagher, aged twenty, missing from his home since last summer, had had a weak heart and had taken a large quantity of drugs. It was very borderline now, the sergeant said, off the record.
'I still think somebody's been got at,' Juanita said. 'You can't just dismiss head injuries.'
'They virtually have.'
The sergeant had said the injuries were not sufficiently serious to have caused Alan's death. He might have been in a fight; he could just as easily have been stumbling around stoned out of his head and been superficially struck by a car.
Or walked into a tree and then staggered back into his bus. Driven it into the woods because he couldn't see where the hell he was going. None of the travellers they'd spoken to had admitted knowing him, but then they wouldn't, would they? As for the false number plates on the bus, well, it was hard to find any of these hippy wrecks with genuine plates.
'Was it his own bus?'
'I don't know,' Diane said. 'I haven't seen it.'
It would be easy to tell. If, for instance, there were yellow stripes under some of the black. She'd been thinking a lot about the bizarre episode with the girl, Hecate, and the children with their spray cans. Somebody had told them to spray the bus black. To make it less conspicuous, less identifiable?
'I think the travellers killed him,' she said.
There'd been bad magic on the Tor that night. Colonel Pixhill would have understood, would have recognised what she'd seen in the sky. And again in the fire.
Powys was waiting for Diane in reception, a styrofoam cup in his hand. In a baggy sweater and jeans, he still looked a lot like his picture on the back of The Old Golden Land, although he must have been ever so young when that came out. At school, other girls had photos of Tom Cruise in their lockers; she dreamed about dishy J. M. Powys, earth-mysteries writer. How could she not trust him now?
'How is she?' Powys asked.
'A little overwrought, I think. I didn't tell her you were here. You don't mind, do you?'
He shook his head.
'There's a lot she isn't telling me,' Diane said. 'She keeps talking about coming home, but I think she needs to get as much as possible out of her system before she comes home.'
'You're a bit of a psychologist then, Diane?'
'I've been to enough,' she said.
He tossed his cup into a bin. 'I, um, meant in the Dion Fortune sense.'
'Oh,' she said. 'Yes. I know what you're asking. The answer's no. I've never had what you might call a practical involvement with the occult. Never even been to a seance. Tried to take up meditation once, but I was hopeless. I… things just sort of happen to me.'