'Jesus. Those are small things?'
'Came to a head when Dunn left a dead woman on the ward all night, unscreened.'
Karen slid a robe around Juanita's bare shoulders. The warmth helped.
'Go on,' Juanita said.
'She took the Anglepoise lamp from the nurses' table and placed it on the dead woman's bedside table. So that it was lighting up the corpse's face – not a peaceful face, you know? Lit up for them all to see, all these old people, all night.'
'How do you know this?'
'Because a doctor came in unexpectedly, and she was reported.'
'She was sacked after that?'
'And blacklisted. The doctor did a good job, got a few signed statements, although the girls were pretty intimidated. God, I only had to mention the name Ruth Dunn to Jane, who came to us from Oxford… Anyway, Sister Dunn worked in another general hospital… as far as they know. The next they heard of her she was a matron at a public school.'
'Where?'
'Dunno. But some of these fancy schools, they like a sadist, don't they? Just stay well away from that woman, my advice. I better go, Juanita, I'll be getting hauled over the coals.'
'Hang on. Could I talk to this Jane? What about the doctor who reported…'
'I shouldn't have told you her name. Leave her alone, Juanita, Jane's jittery enough at the best of times.'
'What about the doctor?'
Karen rose to her feet, expressionless. 'They say the doctor's died. That's all I know. You take care, Juanita.'
Puttering into Magdalene Street in his old but catalytically converted Renault Six, Woolly spotted the coloured lights of the Christmas tree. He liked coloured lights and he liked Christmas trees.
He wondered what it would be like if you could only see the tree lights instead of headlights. If the only sounds you could hear were, like, carol-singing and stuff, not the rumble of this twenty ton truck coming up behind carrying God-knows-what to God-knows-where. All freight this size should be made to go by rail, was Woolly's view.
Fred Harris, the Wedmore councillor, who was a bit green around the edges, bless him, had patted him on the back as they straggled off Daniel's site. 'Never mind, old son. World'll catch up with you one day, look.' Fred always said that to Woolly.
Be dead by then, Woolly thought, as he drove down to where all the streets converged on the tree. He wondered why his cassette player had suddenly cut out.
'Forget it, my advice' Hughie Painter pulled Sam out the doorway of the Crown Hotel and up into High Street towards the NatWest bank and The George and Pilgrims. 'Jeez, was this your brilliant idea to come here? Can't hear yourself flaming talk.'
The kazoo band was doing a syncopated 'O little Town of Bethlehem', kids singing along, a bunch of young drunks dancing in the street
'Look, come on.' Sam hadn't been expecting this, not from Mastersab. 'They haven't done that hunt for three years at least, not on Boxing Day. Too expensive, look, too many people to entertain, too many hunt-followers. But now Pennard's pushing the boat out again for some reason, and you're saying…'
'I'm saying leave it. We got more important stuff to worry about.'
'No chance, Hughie. I'm gonner ruin that bastard's Christmas.'
Hughie pulled him up hard against the ancient walls of The George and Pilgrims and bawled into his ear, 'And how did you find out about it, eh, Sammy? Not been widely advertised, am I right?'
'Yeh, I know what you're thinking. She let it slip out by accident, OK?'
'Haw! You been set up, boy,' Hughie roared. He was about ten years older than Sam, grey in his beard. But Sam wasn't about to be humiliated.
'Hughie, this is straight up.' Sam was shouting too, now, and the words were coming very fast. 'She don't even speak to the old man. It's a dysfunctional family. Leastways, Diane's not functioning in it. I figured, what if we were to make a bit of a recce, maybe. Then we could have a meeting, draw up a ground plan, get it dead right, fuck these bastards good.'
He spotted his old man swaggering down the street with Quentin Cotton, both of them wearing big shit eating grins and enamel lapel badges with that picture of the Tor and a white no-entry sign slashed across it.
Sam wanted to leap out at the bastards, start a nice public barney, but Hughie held him back. 'What's got into you, boy?'
'What's got into me? Shit…'
'Listen!' Hughie yelled. 'The big issue right now has got to be the new road, right? The big wildlife issue. It's not just trees and fields, it's badger sets, the lot. Wholesale devastation. Word is we'll have bulldozers in by the end of January.'
'So?'
'So, naturally, we got to have the manpower ready. Like, not on bail.'
'Well, sure, I appreciate that, but this is…'
'They could start anytime, Sammy. Could be starting now, for all I know. Some civil servant, never been west of Basingstoke, gives the word, out go two damn big, nasty blokes with chainsaws. Private contractors, that's the way they work it now. Time's money. Evil buggers. Whole armies of security guards.'
'Yeah, well, Pennard's in full support of the road. Archer certainly is. We could, like, work the wider message in somehow while disrupting their hunt.'
Hughie Painter shook his head in disgust. 'This is not so much the hunt you wanner target, this is Pennard himself, right? What's this sudden thing you got about that bugger? Something to prove, maybe?'
'Bollocks.' Sam felt himself going red.
'So what's the angle here?' Hughie grinned. 'Afraid we'll all think you sold out, going into this magazine thing with Big Di?'
'Piss off.' Sam wanted to hit him, half aware of how ridiculous this was because big Hughie was a really gentle guy, nobody ever got into a row with Hughie. He walked away into a soup of swirling street noise: carol-singing, laughter, whoops and cheers. He saw traders in the doorways of their shops, some of which seemed to have reopened, lots of children of all ages.
There was a roaring in his ears. He looked up at the tree, saw coloured lights floating down like snowflakes. What?
'Bloody thing,' Woolly shouted 'Sheesh, nothing works for weeks together these days.'
And it was because he was fiddling with his stereo, worrying about the tape snapping and getting all chewed up in the mechanism that he didn't notice it until it was almost on him.
'Oh shit.'
Sweat seemed to spring out of the wheel. It was like he'd suddenly woken up, lights all around him, the big truck behind, people waiting to cross, and this bus… rumbling in a leisurely, rickety way down the wrong side of the road, the driver grinning, or maybe the bus itself was grinning, its radiator grille hanging open between the bleary headlights.
Woolly hit the brakes. Hammered his foot into the pedal, wrenching at the wheel, lurching inside his seatbelt and feeling the Renault spinning side on into the middle of the road and the bloody big lorry behind.
Gasp of airbrakes, screech and a ground-wobbling rumble like an entire block of flats collapsing.
Blur of rights, a coloured blizzard.
Woolly sat for a long, isolated moment, noticing how bone-chilling cold it was in his car and that his throat was ash-dry. Only vaguely aware of the screaming all around him, whoops of terror and pain that didn't stop, not even when he was struggling to open his door through the Christmas branches.
SEVEN
Diane stared up at the cross.
'Did you make it yourself?'
What a blindingly stupid question. It was an abandoned telegraph pole with a fence post crudely nailed across it.
'Come away now.' Don Moulder said. 'I don't hang around here after dark no more.'