He led her out of the bottom field, up towards the farmhouse. It was nearly dark. The cold bit through her sweater. The Tor looked remote.
'Dogs won't go down there, n'more,' Don said. 'Night or day. What d'you say to that, Miss Diane?'
Nothing. She said nothing.
'Maybe you don't believe me.' Don pushed into the farmhouse kitchen, kicked off his wellies. Wife's WI night, he'd told Diane in the Land Rover. They could talk freely. 'Thought it anyone'd believe me, it'd be you.'
'Because of my reputation as a loony.' The kitchen was unmodernised, pale green cupboards with ventilation holes in the doors and a big, bright fire in the range. Don Moulder waved her to a chair, sat down opposite.
'Did I say that?'
'Nobody ever has to.'
'I'm a frightened man, Miss Diane. Two years ago, I d'come to Jesus for protection, all the weirdies round here, the evil, heathen things I seen when I looks across at… that thing, that hill.'
'Can you tell me about it now? Exactly what you saw?'
He wouldn't talk much about it when they were down in the bottom field. He was genuinely afraid. She was remembering the night of the fire, the way he'd kept talking about the black buzz.
'I thought it was a one-off thing,' he said now. 'Somethin' they'd kind of left behind 'em, like most of 'em leaves ole rubbish, this lot leaves… well, all the drugs they takes, maybe something in the air, I don't know, I don't, 'twas just a small hope. But I makes the cross, I prays to the Lord to bless the field and I tries not to think about it. But then the dogs… the dogs won't go in there, look, not even in broad daylight. The dogs slink off. They can sense evil, dogs can. Then – where are we now? – not last night, the night before, I'm doin' the rounds, padlockin' the sheds, when it comes again.'
He leaned close to her across the scuffed, Formica top table.
'Engine noise. Lord above, it went through me like a bandsaw. I could smell it. The fumes of oil. I could no more've gone down that field than dug my own grave. So you tell me, Miss Diane. What was they at? What was those scruffy devils at on my land that night?'
What on earth could she tell him? What did she even know?
'Cause what I do know is, what I reckernise now is I seen it before. I made careful note of every one o' them hippy heaps as they come through the gate that day. Know what I remember? The ole radiator grille hangin' off like a scab. Stuck in my mind, that did. Lazy devils couldn't even be minded to screw the bloody radiator on. I remember thinkin' that. Aye, it stuck in my mind. And that's what I seen. What they done. Miss Diane, what they done in that buzz to taint my land?'
'Oh gosh.' The fire was so warm, she was so tired, all her caution dropped away. 'They… nothing happened in it while it was here. Not while I was here, anyway. But later I think it was found… Oh, look, it was the one they found at Stoke St Michael. The one with the body in it.'
Don Moulder sat up, stiff. 'By golly, I d'remember readin' 'bout that. I never thought. By the… How'd he die?'
'I don't know.'
He stood up, began rapidly to pace the kitchen. 'Why's he come here? Why's he come back here?' He went to the window, snatched the curtains across. He looked terrified.
'I don't know,' Diane said.
'I don't want 'im. I can't live with this. I don't want no dead hippy and his black buzz. Could you live with that – knowing it's out there? Black evil? I'm afeared to set foot outside that door when it's dark, case I hears it again, chunner, chunner, chunner. How'm I gonner do my lambin' now?'
'These things… it won't harm you, Mr Moulder.' But terror was contagious; Diane bit her lip.
'Won't it? Won't it, Miss? That cross don't keep it off. What kind of evil defies the Christ?'
'I don't know, I don't know.'
The cold blue flashing lights. The hysteria of ambulances. The stolid red hulk of a fire engine. Steam rising.
Figures were in motion in the half-light, fluorescent paramedics with stretchers and oxygen equipment. And out of the murky stew of noise – moans and yells, a baby crying and the escalating whirring, whining, keening of a saw attacking metal – there was a woman wailing.
'Const… ance…'
The name caught in Sam's head. He heard it again in the squealing of the saw reaching a frenzy and the rending of metal before two firemen backed into view with most of a lorry door held between them, trampling sawn-off Christmas tree branches into the tarmac.
' Naaaaaaaaaaaaw!!!'
Echoing across the market-place like some old street-trader's cry, a woman's shredded shriek. Close to Sam, a man was being eased out of a metal cave like a snail from its shell, squirming into vicious life when his boots touched the ground.
'…was that little tosser!' Jabbing a finger. 'Slams on and just fucking…'
A pool of newly spilled oil shimmering like smoked glass with beacon blue light. A police boot slapping into the pool.
'Get back. Get back, please.' A stretcher shape coming through: red blankets, paramedics.
As the policeman pushed him back, Sam saw the lorry skewed across the road, the new Christmas tree snapped like a matchstick, the lorry's crushed-in cab garlanded with branches and little coloured lights, red and yellow and green and white.
The cab was crushed because behind the tree had been the great rigid finger of the market cross. They'd had to cut away the side of the cab to get the driver out, and he was snarling in self-defence, '… didn't have no choice, mate, that fucking lunatic
…'
'Come on, now, back,' a policeman snapped. 'It's not a flaming funfair. Everybody back!' The first ambulance squealing away, revealing a small, muddied, maroon car in the centre of the road. A sticker on its rear side window.
RESIST ROAD RAPE.
The car was a Renault Six. Sam stared at it in horror and disbelief.
'Ask him. Ask that little bastard!' the lorry driver yelled.
And there was Woolly standing in the middle of the road, blood on his fingers, one sleeve torn away and bloody skin peeling from his wrist like curled shavings from planed wood, and he was weeping. 'Oh, Jesus.' His face ragged. 'It… shit. It's… I'm going outer my fucking head, man.'
'You hear that, officer?' Ronnie Wilton, the butcher, normally a jovial bugger amid the blood and offal, his face bulging and twisting now. 'He's admitted it. You take that down. I'll be a witness, look.'
Another one who hadn't voted for Woolly.
'Yes, thank you, sir, now if you'd just…' One of the policemen wore glasses, twin ice blue beacons strobing in the lenses, concealing expressions, feelings. 'Mr Woolaston, you better go in the ambulance.'
'No, I'm not taking up ambulance space.'
Woolly's agonised face was frozen by a flashgun, some Press photographer dodging in front. And then there was an awful sound – all the worse because in other circumstances you might have thought it was a howl of glee – as a ball of crashed and bloodied metal was handed through the despoiled jungle of the great, festive tree
'Oh, Chrrrrrist!' Woolly's hands covered his face.
Sam saw that the metal ball handed from fireman to fireman was the crushed remains of a baby's pushchair.
Iridescent. Mesmeric.
With rage, it looked like.
Bad move, he thought. Wrong night. He would have turned round and left quietly, but she'd seen him.
Powys had started having second thoughts about this as soon as he was inside the hospital. If she wouldn't have visitors except for Diane, wouldn't even talk to Dan Frayne on the phone…
It you're another one come to talk me out of it, you can sod off now,' said Mrs Juanita Carey, acid in her voice.
Powys said nothing. Just gave her a smile.
The session with the Rt Rev. Liam Kelly had left him disturbed. And dismayed that anyone who thought Glastonbury Tor was 'just a hill' could get to be Bishop of Bath and Wells. Wonderful material, obviously, for a book. He'd be there at dawn on Thursday, no question. Fascinating stuff.