What beautiful hands you have, Juanita.
'Take it easy, now,' said Karen. She'd come on duty at four, as usual. Juanita's hands had been unwrapped since ten. She'd got dressed for the occasion, in the off-the-shoulder lemon top which Jim liked so much and a long, Aztec-patterned cotton skirt which lay easy on her flayed thighs.
Juanita looked up into the small face full of professional interest. A couple of times they'd sent a trauma counsellor to see her. At least, she'd claimed to be a trauma counsellor, her questions reflecting a certain concern for Juanita's mental-health. After all, what kind of normal person would hurl herself at the blazing, flaking corpse of even a close friend?
She said to Karen, 'Did you find out anything about Ruth Dunn?'
Karen looked even more anxious, then her face went blank. 'Talk about it later.'
'Come on, Karen, what did you find out?'
'Where's she now, Juanita? This woman.'
'Glastonbury.'
'Not in a hospital?'
'No.'
'Private clinic?'
'Nothing like that.'
'Thank Christ for that.'
'Jesus, Karen…'
'I'll see you later. Sister'll be on my back. We'll have a chat.'
Juanita glowered at the uniformed back. A hospital was like a police state. She thought about discharging herself, walking down to the motorway intersection. Holding up her weird hands to thumb a lift. Frighten the lorry drivers.
Then she sank back into the hard chair and wept.
San paced the office. He had to do something. Couldn't just sit around like a spare prick. Sod it. He snatched up the phone and rang Hughie Painter, Central Somerset's most experienced hunt-saboteur.
Mastersab, they called Hughie. Once jailed for three months after trying to ram a hunting horn down the throat of some pompous bloody Master of Foxhounds. A hero. A legend in sabbing circles. When you talked to Hughie on the phone you kept it short and careful.
'Half an hour, right? Under the Christmas tree? We'll be, like, anonymous figures in the crowd.' Sam laughed. 'OK. See you.'
About the only thing he could do for Diane was spoil Archer Ffitch's Boxing Day.
She couldn't bring herself to go back to the shop. She walked right past. Some people gave her sidelong glances.
She knew she probably looked pretty awful.
She'd never felt so isolated. There wasn't anyone she could trust. How could… how could anyone live in Glastonbury and not believe in anything?
How could you be, like Sam, a good person who cared about people and animals and the welfare of the planet, and not believe that it all existed for some purpose? How could you live in Glastonbury and not feel closer?
Actually, she didn't feel close to anything. She felt used. The candyfloss sunbeams rolling down the Tor and the ice-cream lights at night giving way to fragmented images, sharp and threatening as slivers of glass, to the dark vaporous forms which passed as fast as birds. To the black, portentous symbols you could only wish you'd never seen.
All nonsense to Sam. All bollocks. She didn't know whether to pity him or envy him his freedom.
What he thought of her; this mattered more. Sam Daniel thought Diane Ffitch was a loony. It didn't matter that most people had thought this for years, were thinking it now as they watched her trooping up the street like a fat scarecrow. It suddenly mattered awfully that Sam now thought it too. It wounded her. It was terribly unfair.
There was a funny atmosphere in the town again, the shapes of the buildings sharp against a cold, grim sky, everything so vivid, a thunderstorm air of energy-in-waiting.
She wished she could drive away for a while and think, but she hadn't even had the nerve to collect the van from the garage.
And of course that started her thinking about Archer again. That parting shot. He knew about the graffiti on the van. He might even have told them to do it. He was taunting her. Why did he always have to do that?'
She wandered, inevitably, up Wellhouse Lane, past the trees which screened Chalice Orchard, where DF had lived. Probably fooling herself over that as well. What would the legendary high priestess of Isis want with someone like her?
There was an unhealthy engine noise behind her, then an ancient Land-Rover clattered alongside.
'Lookin' for me, Miss Diane?'
Oh gosh. Moulder. Forgotten all about this morning's phone message.
'Hop in, my chicken.'
Another site-meeting, more disillusionment.
Under discussion this afternoon had been a Griff Daniel proposal for a new housing estate out on the Meare road. Green field site. Daniel's plan, an executive housing estate: four bedroom luxury homes two bathrooms (with bidets) and – and this, as far as Woolly was concerned, was the worst of it… double garages. Double bloody garages!
A double garage said this: it said you were expected to have two cars and maybe a third and fourth in the driveway far your teenage kids.
Woolly had tried to explain to his colleagues on the planning sub-committee that the only way to avoid Gridlock Somerset by the year 2020 was to start building homes with single garages or even no bloody garages at all.
And did they listen, his council colleagues?
They looked at him in his red and yellow bobcap and his pink jeans and then they looked at each other and they smiled in that He's from Glastonbury kind of way. Except for Griff Daniel (at the meeting in his capacity as developer), who'd looked at Woolly like he hoped he'd die of something painful in the not too distant future.
Afterwards Woolly had gone to a pub out past Wells for a bite of lunch with Fred Harris, the elderly Wedmore councillor, Fred trying to talk a bit of sense into him. Be pragmatic, Fred said. Your time will come.
Ho ho. His time wouldn't come until they had a New Age party with about a dozen like-minded members (if you could find twelve like-minded New Agers) and a sympathetic central government. Which was about as likely as a Mothership from Alpha Centauri coming down to a civic reception on Glastonbury Tor.
On the way back to the poor, beleaguered Isle of Avalon, he shoved Julian Cope's Autogeddon into the cassette deck. You and me, Jules, you and me. Ah, but nobody took Julian Cope seriously either, possibly on account of him being the only rock star left who dressed like Woolly.
He'd go and see Diane again. Shook him up, that did, bloody Archer Ffitch strolling in just as he was about to lay it on Diane about what the new road would do to the St
Michael line. Coincidence, or what?
'OK,' Karen said. 'No names and you didn't get this from me, all right?'
Juanita nodded. Her mouth felt very dry. She needed to hear this but didn't want to. She composed herself, crossing her hands lightly – with these hands you had to do everything lightly – in her lap in the vinyl bedside armchair.
Karen sat down on the bed. 'Geriatric ward, all right? I'm not saying where. This is what I've been told. That situation, I've been there, I know how easy it is to become impatient when you're on your own at night and half of them are incontinent. A saint would blow, some nights.'
'She isn't', Juanita said, 'a saint.'
'I was just saying that. I just need to know before I go any further that she's not any kind of friend of yours.'
'I mistrust her. I think she's a dangerous megalomaniac, a bad person to be around. OK?'
'All right.' Karen lowered her voice. 'Well, this goes back twenty-odd years. It's small things. Hard to prove. Publicly fitting catheters to old men who don't need them. Putting bedpans just out of reach of the disabled ones and then not cleaning them up and leaving the bedding unchanged for hours. Telling them stuff their relatives have said about them never coming home again and renting out their rooms – when they haven't said anything of the sort Stealing their sweets, taking away pictures of their grandchildren in the night. Telling them that there's, like, no God. That this is where it ends. Except for those who are… condemned to walk the ward. As – you know – as spirits. Take it from me, geriatrics are like little kids. They'll believe what you tell them.'