by Fay Sampson
There was a window there, on the side of the hotel, and a couple of basket chairs. Hilary sank into one of them and looked out. She gave a start. She was gazing straight along the path of the moon’s rays to Glastonbury Tor. Even by daylight, it was an arresting sight. That conical hill rising straight up out of the Levels, with the finger of St Michael’s tower pointing to the heavens. Now, with the almost-full moon rising behind it, the Tor had the Otherworld feeling that had held its grip on the human imagination for millennia.
She sat very still, gazing at it.
What was it, besides Veronica’s careless dropping of Amina’s name, that Hilary could almost remember?
She thought through all the questions the detective inspector had asked them. Amina’s burka? No, they had been pretty clear about that. Rupert Honeydew’s malevolence? But the inspector had known about that since Hilary’s urgent phone call after that frightening encounter at the gate of Straightway Farm. There could be no doubt, surely, that the man Amina had called the Guizer was responsible for all three crimes?
What else then? Detective Inspector Fellows had wanted to hear if they had seen Amina on Wednesday night, not wearing her burka, but in the clothes Hilary had glimpsed in the Galilee of the abbey before the pathologist had shrouded her body.
If Amina had been watching from St John’s churchyard, would Hilary have seen her? She racked her memory for a glimpse of a white shirt among the shadows. Nothing came. Amina might have been there, but Hilary had no recollection of having seen her, or anyone who could have been her.
And now a new doubt was growing. What would have brought her there, anyway? Hilary and Veronica had been roused by the music and drums under their window. But Amina’s lodgings were at the other end of town, on the far side of the Abbey’s extensive grounds. How would she have known there was to be a second dance at midnight?
Perhaps something had been said up on the Tor that afternoon before they chased her away. That must be it. Otherwise …
The detectives had found evidence to link Amina to the bag from the hardware shop in which her burka had been found. But he had said himself there must be many other such bags. What if Amina had not put it there herself? What if someone else had placed it, to make it seem that this was where Amina had died?
Was there a way from St John’s churchyard into the abbey grounds? Hilary tried to remember the street map of Glastonbury. No, of course not. The church was on the wrong side of the High Street.
She sighed, beginning to think of the warm bed she had left.
Something was still niggling at her.
Detective Sergeant Olive Petersen had shown them two evidence bags. One contained the burka, the other, the plastic carrier bag. Hilary frowned harder. Was this what she was trying to remember? Had she seen a bag like that somewhere else? And if she had, would it change anything? Rupert Honeydew was already in custody. Nothing she recalled could alter the fact that he must have planted the High Street bomb that had killed so many people, as well as the unexploded one she had found at the Chalice Well. Whenever and wherever he had done it, surely he must be responsible for Amina’s murder too?
She got up, took a last look at the sentinel tower on the moonlit Tor and headed back to bed.
TWENTY-NINE
Morag was already seated at the breakfast table. She brandished the morning newspaper at them. Her face was ablaze with indignation.
‘Have you seen this?’
‘Of course we haven’t, dear,’ said Veronica, sitting down. ‘We’ve only just got here.’
Morag thrust it across the table. Hilary leaned sideways to see better.
Two major stories divided the front page. On the left, what was clearly another of Joan’s photographs showed the flash-lit faces of Rupert Honeydew and two of his dancers, close up. One was in a donkey’s mask, with long ears, the other was a pale-faced girl wearing a rather crooked wreath of flowers. The headline read: SATANIST ARRESTED FOR DEATH BOMB. But it was the right-hand story that made Hilary’s throat constrict. MUSLIM WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN GLASTONBURY ABBEY. The picture this time was not of Amina in her burka, nor of her body lying in the ruins. It was a close-up of a hand clutching what Hilary knew could only be a sprig of Glastonbury Thorn.
The initial shock was overtaken by a sense of mild relief. The story was not as lurid as it could have been. ‘MUSLIM’ was less incendiary than ‘ISLAMIST’. Amina was portrayed as a mysterious victim, rather than as a suspected terrorist. She must be grateful for small mercies. But how was it possible that someone had photographed her hand holding the Thorn?
‘You knew this, didn’t you?’ Morag demanded, pointing to this second story. ‘You knew her identity and you wouldn’t tell me.’
Another wave of relief. Clearly, Morag had not remembered that careless slip Veronica had made. It had not been she who had sold Amina’s story to the press.
‘I don’t know who did this,’ she said. ‘As far as I know, we were the only people besides the police who knew who the body in the abbey was.’
‘There’s her landlady and her husband,’ Veronica said reflectively. ‘They knew Amina was missing. The police went to visit them, after we did. When they heard about the body, they must have guessed.’
‘True enough. But it wasn’t them who took this photograph.’
The three of them stared at the picture. Just a hand, with a glimpse of white cuff, and the sprig of fabled Thorn. It was more compelling than a full-length picture of the body would have been.
‘Could it have been Joan?’ Veronica wondered. ‘There was that curious question she asked us: “Is it true that the body they found in the abbey is that Muslim girl?” How did she know that?’
Hilary scanned the article and turned to an inside page for more. ‘There’s somebody else’s byline. No mention of Joan’s name as the informant. And she was always desperate to get her name in the nationals. Besides … look at that!’ She thumped her hand down on the article alongside it, making the cups jump. ‘Her name’s there clear enough on the other photo. And that ridiculous headline. Whatever else Rupert Honeydew may be, he’s not a Satanist.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I thought he was just a clown at first. Or one of those New Age types, on about his Goddess and the healing powers of the water. But unless he’s a very good actor, I think he really did believe all that. Mel’s story about why he planted the bomb at the Chalice Well made a kind of sense.’
‘He scared me, though. Those eyes.’
‘Yes. My head tells me he has to be the High Street bomber. I mean, are you going to have two bomb-makers in the town in one week? But I still feel there’s something not quite right about it. An unexploded bomb is one thing, but this one went off.’
The horror of that afternoon seared itself on her imagination.
‘Perhaps it wasn’t meant to, like the first one,’ Morag suggested. ‘It must be a pretty scary thing, putting a bomb together. Especially if you’ve never done anything like that before. I know you can find all sorts of instructions on the internet, but actually doing it is something else. It could so easily go wrong. Either the bomb doesn’t go off. Or it goes off when you didn’t mean it to.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Do you really think he didn’t do it?’ Veronica asked Hilary.
‘Let’s say there’s room for doubt. You notice our detective inspector was careful to warn us they might not be able to hold Rupert Honeydew indefinitely, if they couldn’t link him to the High Street bomb.’
‘Aren’t there anti-terrorist laws to deal with that situation?’ Morag asked.
‘Yes, but if Hilary’s hunch is right,’ Veronica said slowly, ‘then that means that, however unlikely it sounds, there must be a second bomber. And this one’s not locked up.’
The three of them sat taking in that thought.
‘Well, it’s out of our hands,’ Veronica said finally. ‘We’ve done all we can to help.’
‘And you’re getting out of this place today
,’ Morag said firmly. ‘That’s definite.’
‘Yes, dear,’ Veronica replied.
Hilary thought the meekness in her voice was not entirely genuine.
Hilary wheeled her case across the hotel car park. Veronica was already there, bidding farewell to Morag.
‘You really must stop worrying about us,’ Hilary heard her saying. ‘We’re perfectly capable of looking after ourselves.’
‘Mum, there’s at least one killer in this town. And you two have got a lot closer to him than you had any right to be. I shudder to think what could have happened.’
‘But it didn’t, did it? Rupert Honeydew is safely behind bars, and we did have a modest part to play in that. You ought to be congratulating us.’
‘All I want is to see you pack those bags in your car and drive out of here.’
‘There’s nothing to stop us going today. We’ve told Inspector Fellows all we know. Here’s Hilary now.’
Hilary heaved her own suitcase into the boot, alongside Veronica’s. Morag was juggling her car keys from one hand to the other anxiously.
‘You don’t need to wait for us, dear,’ Veronica said. ‘You’ve got a long drive back to London.’
‘I just want to make sure you go.’
‘No problem,’ Hilary said, getting into the driver’s seat. ‘We’re off.’
She nosed the car out of the gate into the morning traffic. In the rear-view mirror she saw Morag follow them for a while, and then head off towards the motorway. She relaxed.
She swung the car into Magdalene Street and turned into the abbey car park.
‘Hilary!’ Veronica exclaimed. ‘I thought we were supposed to be leaving.’
‘We are. There are just a few loose ends I want to tie up first.’
They paid their money at the ticket desk. Hilary repressed a shudder, remembering how the last time they had come through here it was to view Amina’s body.
Today the scene was totally different. The abbey grounds swarmed with Saturday crowds. A tall thin man in Anglo-Saxon costume, with an even taller hat, was leading a party of sightseers across the grass, talking enthusiastically about its history.
‘We can trace Christianity at Glastonbury back to Roman times. Here, where you see this magnificent Lady Chapel, there was once a little church of wattle and daub. Then along came the Saxons in the seventh century. But by the time they got here, they had already become Christians. King Ine of Wessex built the first stone church here, at what is now the west end of the nave.’ He had moved his group, without comment, past the flight of steps which led up from the Galilee where Amina’s body had been found into the great monastic church. He flung his arm around him. ‘St Dunstan, three hundred years later, enlarged it and added a tower. By the time of the Norman Conquest, Glastonbury was the richest abbey in England.’
Two thousand years, Hilary thought. All those centuries of reverence and pilgrimage. Conquest and yet continuity. Even Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries had not stopped people coming here to pray.
She pictured the sprig clutched in Amina’s hand. What could it have meant to her?
But the Benedictine ruins, evocative though they were, were not what she had come to see.
Beyond the Abbot’s Kitchen, the traffic was pouring along Magdalene Street.
Hilary went to peer over the hedge that rose above the railings. It was higher above the pavement than she expected.
‘I suppose you could get a body over this at night,’ she said. ‘But it would be quite an effort to heave it up.’
Veronica walked across and examined the drop. ‘That’s quite a way to lift a corpse. You’d have to be pretty strong.’
‘Or tall,’ Hilary suggested. ‘Still, it’s shoulder height, even for Rupert Honeydew. And it would be a risk, even at the dead of night. There are houses opposite. Let’s see what other possibilities there are.’
They skirted the abbey grounds along its wide perimeter. Hilary had been right about houses backing on to it. They turned the southern corner and went out past the fish ponds to where the Tor loomed surprisingly close. As they turned north again, Hilary recognized the grey stone wall that ran along the road out to the Tor. Long grass and wild flowers grew thickly between the trees. The drop to the road here would be considerable.
‘He could hardly have dragged the body through the streets from the churchyard. He’d have had to use a car.’
At last they reached what Hilary had been looking for. The boundary swung sharply away from the road. A high wire fence angled outwards at the top, with strands of barbed wire. Through it, they glimpsed gardens and a fine old house.
‘This must be it. Abbey House. The retreat house Sister Mary Magdalene told us about.’ Hilary stepped closer through the undergrowth to survey it through the wire. ‘She’d just come out of the front entrance when we were walking back from Amina’s lodgings.’
‘So somewhere along here there has to be a gate to the abbey grounds,’ Veronica said. ‘Remember, she said the retreat guests had access.’
They turned another corner. Suddenly the ruined abbey chancel was very close.
The wire surrounding Abbey House was fronted by a high yew hedge. At the far end, something gleamed pale against the dark foliage.
‘And here it is!’
The gate was made of close-set planks of wood. The arched top rose higher than the yews. It looked quite new.
Hilary bent to examine the lock. ‘See here. It looks as though they’ve cut a hole so that you can access it from either side.’
She stood back and studied it.
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ she said after a while. ‘You could drive up to the Abbey House and shift the body through the gardens to the abbey ruins from there. Less chance of being seen under street lights.’
‘But how did he get it over? Unless he had a key.’
‘Hmm. There must be things in the garden. Benches. Logs. He could have stood on something and heaved her over. Then put his foot in this hole in the gate and climbed over himself.’
Veronica looked round at the arched windows of the ruined chancel. At the far end of the nave stood the roofless walls of the Galilee.
‘Wouldn’t forensics have spotted if someone had dragged her across the grass from here?’
Hilary thought back to that slight figure under the plastic sheet.
‘She wasn’t very big. The killer could have carried her over his shoulder.’
‘Unless he met her there in the Galilee, and killed her where she was found.’
‘Twenty-four hours after she left her lodgings?’
‘No, I suppose not. She has to have died sooner, hasn’t she?’
‘The police will know the time of death by now.’
They stood for while, baffled. Then Hilary said, ‘Wait a moment.’
She retraced her steps around the wire fence. For the most part, the lawns around the ruins were kept meticulously mown, but here, close to the perimeter, the wild flowers had been allowed to grow tall under a scattering of trees. Hilary peered from side to side through this undergrowth. Suddenly she halted.
‘Could that be …?’
She pointed to a small space where the hedge parsley had been flattened, as though an animal had rolled in it, or trampled it down to make a bed. But Hilary could think of no animals that large in the middle of Glastonbury.
‘Be what?’ Veronica asked.
‘Where the body lay on Thursday. There’s no reason for anyone to come poking about here under these trees.’
‘And it’s just round the corner from that gate to the retreat house.’
Hilary stiffened. ‘It keeps coming back to Abbey House.’
They both stared through the wire at the garden bright with rhododendrons, and the distant view of people sitting in contemplation on the outdoor seats.
‘It would make it a whole lot simpler if someone had a key to that gate,’ Hilary said.
‘No!’ cried Veronica, her eyes widening.
‘Not Sister Mary Magdalene! Why ever would she?’
‘Why, for that matter, would anyone want to kill Amina? Rupert Honeydew would have to be very twisted indeed to murder her for making notes about his folk dances.’
‘Who else might have the key to that gate? Would Sonia Marsden? We know the retreat house people have access from the other side. Would someone on the abbey staff also have had a key?’
‘Whoever it was, I have a dark feeling that the only motive to kill Amina must have been that she knew who planted Tuesday’s bomb.’
Veronica stared down at the flattened flowers for a long while.
‘Do you think the police search got this far? It’s quite a distance from the Galilee where she was found. And Sonia Marsden’s colleague seemed anxious to open up the abbey as soon as they could.’
‘Sonia herself was telling him they must take as long as they needed to.’
Hilary got out her phone and looked at it reflectively. ‘Should I call Inspector Fellows and tell him about this?’
‘He’ll think you’re trying to teach him his job. The police have probably examined all the exits. They must have found this gate.’
‘But we’ve come back around the corner from the gate. If they didn’t search the whole perimeter, they might not have looked this far. It’s not as if you could scale the fence here.’ She looked up at the wire.
She pressed the key to switch on her mobile. The little screen stayed blank.
‘Bother! I didn’t put the wretched thing on charge.’
‘Use mine.’ Veronica fished in her shoulder bag. ‘No, sorry. I seem to have left mine in the car.’
‘Never mind,’ Hilary said. ‘It was probably teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. I think we’ve finished our usefulness here. But I’m glad I’ve got a clearer picture now of what happened, even if I’m only guessing why. And I’ve still no idea who.’
They started to walk back across the grass to the car park.
