A Finer End

“Fiona Finn Allen.” Kincaid was reading the artist’s signature over her shoulder. “That’s Winnie’s friend, the woman who found her after the accident.” He stepped back so that he could read the marquee above the window. “Allen Galleries.” Walking on, he remarked, “I suppose it shows our self-absorption that we even think those spirits should be concerned with us. What if there are layers of reality we can’t see that have nothing to do with human needs and desires?”

Gemma gave him a surprised glance. “Now I think Glastonbury’s getting to you too. Oh, look,” she added, stopping again to gaze through a bakery window at the empty trays, waiting for their early-morning baked goods. She felt a pang of longing for Toby, who was spending the weekend with her parents, “helping,” as he called it, in their bakery. Turning to Kincaid, she said, “You know I’ll have to go back tomorrow.”

“And I don’t see how I can leave Jack in the lurch, at this point. I hope Doug Cullen can manage a bit longer on his own.”

“What will the Guv say?” asked Gemma, referring to Chief Superintendent Denis Childs.

“I’ll give him a ring at home tomorrow, explain the situation. Then you could drop me in Bath, and I’ll hire a car.”

“No,” Gemma said, thinking it out. “I won’t need the car the next few days. After we’ve paid a visit to Faith’s parents, you can run me to Bath, put me on the train, and keep the car.”

When he started to protest, she insisted. “No, really. I want to take the train. I won’t have to fight the Sunday trippers’ traffic coming back into London.” That was true, and a valid enough argument to silence Kincaid, but it was the thought of those few hours on the train when she would have absolutely no demands that had decided her.

“You could do some background checks.”

“Along with three thousand other things on Monday morning. But make me a list tonight.”

They walked the rest of the way up the High in companionable silence. The New Age shops gave way to more pedestrian businesses: a launderette, a grocer’s, a chemist, estate agents’ offices.

When they reached the top, they turned and surveyed the street sloping gently down the hill before them. “The mundane and the sublime, side by side,” Kincaid remarked.

“I’ll miss you,” Gemma said impulsively, prompted by something deeper than thought.

Kincaid put a hand on her shoulder as they started back down the hill, matching strides. “Glastonbury must have a salutary effect on you. I should bring you more often.”

Now, thought Gemma. She had the perfect opportunity. Just a sentence or two, and she would have put it behind her.

But she still wasn’t one hundred percent sure, not until she did a test, and she absolutely would pick one up at the chemist when she got back to London.

It had been so good between them this weekend, away from their responsibilities in London, working together on a case again, however unofficial. Why should she break the spell?

Especially when they had one more night alone together, under the rose-colored canopy in the Acacia Room.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Abbey did not languish and die from internal corruption; it fell as a great ship founders, at one moment going on its way, at the next plunging to destruction with all hands.… Therefore it is that in the Abbey we have so clear a sense of our spiritual past, uncorrupted by decay. The spirit of the Abbey lives on, as it is said that the spirit of a man lives on who has died by violence before his time.

—DION FORTUNE,

FROM GLASTONBURY: AVALON OF THE HEART

GEMMA STUDIED THE man sitting across from them in the tidy sitting room. Gary Wills looked to be in his early forties, trim, an executive with an electronics firm in Street. Add a wife with her own career, bright children, a well-located suburban home, and you had all the hallmarks of success. Why, then, had this family fractured so grievously?

Maureen Wills sat near her husband, without touching him. When she had reached out a hand towards him—to comfort or be comforted, Gemma couldn’t tell—Wills had shrugged it off.

“We did everything for her,” he was saying. “School fees, sports, singing lessons, piano.” The piano sat against the far wall of the sitting room, its keyboard cover closed. “How could she be such an ungrateful little tart—”

“Gary, please,” his wife entreated, with a pointed glance at the frightened faces of the two younger children, peering round the corner.

“You two.” Wills pointed at them. “Go to your rooms. Now.” The boy and girl disappeared, but Gemma suspected they’d not gone far.