by Fay Sampson
She drew a sharp audible gasp.
Joan Townsend had been shopping in Arnold’s hardware store, probably not long ago.
She threw a searching glance back at the shop front, with its stack of shopping carts and its rack of bargain pot plants. Joan Townsend and Amina, both here. Was it possible the two young women had been shopping at the same time? Cold reason was creeping up on her. If Joan had reason to believe that Amina had witnessed what she was buying, and was beginning to put two and two together …
The truth came back to hit her. Was it Joan who had told Amina about Rupert Honeydew’s midnight dance? Had she lured her out from her lodgings, where she would never otherwise have heard the pipes and drums? What had happened in the churchyard by the Holy Thorn? Or had Amina been killed somewhere else entirely? That street on the far side of the Abbey that went past the retreat house was close to Amina’s lodgings. Joan would only have had to drag her victim through the gateway, away from the street lights, and carry her through the gardens of Abbey House. She could have bundled her over that wooden gate and carried her into the undergrowth. For all her plumpness, Joan was sturdily built, and Amina only a light weight. Then she could have left the burka in the churchyard in a bag like this, to lead the police investigation away from Abbey House. While she was there, she could have plucked a sprig of the Thorn as a dramatic image to leave in Amina’s dead hand. But she had not been able to resist the temptation to photograph that image. It was chilling to think that photograph might not have been a fake.
Now that she came to think of it, Hilary and Veronica had been watching the midnight dancers for quite some time before Joan burst on the scene with her flash photography.
All these thoughts raced through Hilary’s mind. Then the essential truth struck her with the force of a car slamming into a wall.
Veronica had gone off in Hilary’s car to meet Joan. By a sluice gate on one of the drainage canals that cut a watery grid across the Somerset Levels. Had Veronica let slip something that made Joan believe that she held the secret to who had killed Amina Haddad?
And who had planted the High Street bomb.
She felt the blood leave her face. Then she pulled herself up short. Joan Townsend? The frustrated reporter in the baggy brown cardigan? Was it possible that she could put a bomb together?
But words she had forgotten came back to her. ‘I’ve got a first-class degree.’
Had Hilary seriously underestimated her? Joan Townsend had made the headlines after all. With a succession of stories, day after day. Part of a carefully planned sequence, to keep the Glastonbury story running.
And Hilary had let Veronica go to meet Joan alone.
THIRTY-TWO
Hilary dashed towards the car. The empty parking space baffled her. She was sure they had left the car just here. It was seconds before her agitated brain registered the fact that Veronica had driven off in it. Hilary had no way of following her.
With shaking hands she rummaged in her bag for her phone. At last the wretched thing might actually prove useful. But the screen remained obstinately blank. Her heart sank further as she remembered that she had let the battery run down.
There was nothing else for it. It was years since she had broken into a run, but she set off racing now towards the open store.
She tore past the checkout, colliding with a man in a paint-stained jumper, who dropped the tin he was carrying. Heads turned, voices shouted, but she disregarded them.
Mercifully, John Arnold in his blue overall was still chatting to a customer in the gardening section. Hilary charged up to him, panting.
‘You know you wanted to lynch the person who let off the High Street bomb? Well, I know who it is. And unless we get there fast, I’m very much afraid my friend is going to meet a similarly ghastly end.’
‘Excuse me!’ John Arnold tore his attention from his customer. His eyes glittered. ‘Are you sure about this? Have you told the police?’
‘My phone’s dead.’
Arnold pulled out his own. He dialled 999, said, ‘Police!’ and handed it to her.
I must try not to gabble, Hilary thought. She gave her name and location. ‘Arnold’s DIY store, the industrial estate on the southern edge of Glastonbury. My friend Veronica Taylor has gone to meet a journalist called Joan Townsend at a sluice gate somewhere on the Levels. I have reason to believe this Joan Townsend is the High Street bomber … Don’t ask how I know. Just get there. There have been more than enough deaths already. And tell Detective Inspector Fellows … No, I don’t know where this sluice gate is. But she set off driving due south. Apparently it’s no more than twenty minutes from here, and that includes walking along a footpath.’
She gave the colour, make and registration number of the car Veronica was driving. Seconds were passing.
At last she handed the phone back. Her cheeks felt flushed. There was something suspiciously like a tear in her eye.
‘She said to keep the phone on.’
‘Have you got a car?’ John Arnold asked.
‘Veronica took it. That’s what the police are looking for.’
‘We’ll take mine.’
He strode towards the entrance, flinging off his apron as he went. Hilary hurried after him.
Arnold made for a Land Rover, parked around the corner of the building.
‘Get in,’ he ordered Hilary.
It was a steep climb up for her short legs, but she made it.
‘Now, which way did you say she was headed?’
‘She set off straight along this road out of town. I didn’t stand and watch her.’
‘There are not so many side roads in that direction. If she’s going to take a footpath, chances are she’ll have parked by the roadside beside one of the rhynes.’
Rhynes. Hilary translated the word into the many canal-like channels that criss-crossed the Levels. She prayed he was right.
They sped down the long straight road. There was no need for winding turns here on this flat farmland, unlike the twisting lanes of Hilary’s native Devon. She could see for what seemed like miles ahead. Cars passed, coming towards them. There was no sign of anything parked by the road. Up over the hump where the road crossed the dead straight course of the River Brue.
Over a mile out from Glastonbury, John Arnold slowed the Land Rover to a halt.
‘If your friend was going to drive to near the rendezvous and then walk along the footpath to the sluice gate in twenty minutes, we ought to have seen the car by now.’
It was what Hilary had feared.
‘Does that mean we have to go back? Take a side road?’
Before he could answer, they were overtaken by a pair of police cars racing past, sirens blaring.
‘Looks like they haven’t yet reached the same conclusion. Hang on, I’m turning round.’
He swung the car to face back towards Glastonbury. Hilary peered on either side, looking for a possible road, a track, even, where Veronica might have left the main road. She remembered the unpaved cart track to Straightway Farm. If only she had persuaded Veronica to tell her Joan’s exact instructions.
White lines, almost obscured by mud, marked the place where a narrow minor road came in to join their own. Arnold stopped the car.
‘Hang on a minute.’
Quite deftly for a rather large man, he hauled himself up on to the Land Rover’s roof. Hilary got out and watched him. He shaded his eyes as he peered across the flat landscape of meadows and water channels, broken by the occasional flowering hawthorn tree.
Presently he swung himself down to join her. ‘There’s something catching the light about half a mile along this lane. Might be her car, might be not. Too far away to be sure of the colour. Something light.’
‘Mine is silver.’
‘You’d better get back to your policeman friend.’
Hilary took the phone he offered and dialled Inspector Fellows’ number. The call was picked up with an alacrity which told her the DI was urgently following the case.
‘DI Fellows.’
‘Hilary Masters. I’m out on the Levels with John Arnold, from Arnold’s store. You know the bag you showed me?’
‘Yes.’
‘I remembered where I’d seen one of them before. Joan Townsend. The reporter behind those sensational stories we’ve been getting in the papers. Satanists. Islamic woman.’
‘Yes, I know the one.’
‘I think she may have been to Arnold’s to buy some of the things she needed for the bomb.’
‘What!’
‘Yes. I assume your nine-nine-nine people have passed on my message. Veronica’s gone to meet her. Somewhere out here on the Levels. John thinks he can see something which could be my car. We’re …’
She looked appealingly at John Arnold for help. He took the phone from her.
‘Junction of the road that goes due south of Glastonbury. About half a mile past the River Brue. There’s something parked on the cross road to our left. Could be another half-mile away.’
He listened for a while longer. ‘Right, sir.’ He put the phone back in his pocket and turned to her with a grin that did not reach his eyes.
‘What you’d expect the police to say. Stay where we are. Wait for the uniforms to arrive. On no account to go any further ourselves.’
‘But in the meantime …’
‘My thinking entirely. I’m going in. You stay here to flag them down.’
‘Not likely!’
Hilary swung herself back into the passenger seat and snapped the seat belt on. Her stare challenged him to argue.
‘Just drive!’
The glint of metal in the distance resolved itself more certainly into a silver car. The nearer they drove, the more sure Hilary became that it was her Vauxhall. Whatever had she been thinking, to let Veronica drive it here on her own?
She was hoping, praying even, that there would be a figure inside it, that Veronica would be here unhurt.
They had almost reached it before she allowed her hopes to be finally dashed. The parked car was abandoned. No one stood beside it. There was no one in the driver’s or passenger seat.
‘Hey up,’ said John Arnold, ‘there’s only one car here. So how did that other character get here?’
Hilary looked back along the narrow road and north to the distant roofs of Glastonbury. ‘You could walk it, at a pinch. More likely she used a bike.’
Ahead of them, a wide drainage channel passed beneath the road. It led on across the fields in either direction, ruler straight. Tall reeds fringed its banks. A mud-slicked footpath ran alongside it.
‘Which way?’ John asked.
Hilary felt the shock inside her. She had no idea. She struggled to remember what Veronica had said. But there had been nothing as specific as ‘left’ or ‘right’.
John saw her blank expression. He climbed down and went to examine the path on either side of the road.
‘Left,’ he announced. ‘There’s a pretty fresh set of footprints and, yes, you were right, bicycle tyres.’
It was an enormous relief that they did not have to set out in one direction or the other merely praying they had made the right choice.
‘Phone, please.’ She relayed the information to DI Fellows and cut the call short before he could berate her any further for failing to wait for the police.
When she turned to hand the mobile back to John, he was delving into the back of the Land Rover. When he straightened up, he had a large wrench in his hand.
Panic shot through Hilary. She had a vivid, shocking memory of him saying, ‘I’d string them up from the nearest lamp post.’
‘John!’
Suddenly she realized on how flimsy a basis she had made her accusation. The coincidence of two plastic bags bearing the Arnold’s logo. The mere speculation that Amina might have seen Joan buying materials that could have been used in bomb-making. Everything else: the attack in the shadowed street past the retreat house, the bundling of the body over the gate, hiding it for a day, so that she could follow one set of dramatic headlines with another, then the placing of Amina’s body where it would be found in the Galilee on Friday morning, and inserting that telling image of the Glastonbury Thorn in her hand … All of it had been Hilary’s own invention, following on that one speculation of the two young women visiting Arnold’s store at the same time. She had no proof for any of it.
And here was John Arnold, grim-faced, with a monkey wrench in his hand and murder in his eyes.
Seven people dead in the High Street, and many more in hospital.
Too late she wished, – suddenly, fiercely – that she had heeded Inspector Fellows’ advice.
‘Look.’ She shot out a hand and grabbed his wrist. ‘I don’t want you to get this wrong. I only think Joan Townsend is the High Street bomber. And that she killed the girl they found in the abbey to keep her quiet. I can’t prove it.’
‘What about your friend, then? You came haring into the shop because you were scared silly she’d gone to meet a murderer and would likely meet the same fate. Are you telling me now that was all made up?’
‘No!’ She looked frantically down the path where Veronica’s footprints led. John was right. She had been terrified of what that assignment meant. She still was. ‘Just … don’t do anything hasty. At least give her a fair trial.’
‘Like she gave those people blown up in the High Street? Kids, even?’
If it was her. If I haven’t stood this whole thing on its head, Hilary thought.
‘You stay here, if you can’t make your mind up. I’m going after her, before she kills anyone else.’
He set off at a run. Hilary had no choice but to follow him.
John Arnold was a big man, younger and longer-legged than she was. Soon Hilary was falling behind. She stopped to catch her breath. There was a stitch in her side.
What if she was panicking about nothing? Joan must have guessed that Veronica would tell Hilary where she was going, and whom she was going to meet. If Veronica failed to return – or worse – Hilary would be sure to tell the police. Joan would be giving herself away.
Unless … What if this was a carefully planned ruse to get each of the two women on their own? Joan could not tackle both of them. But if she killed Veronica, and then waited for the unsuspecting Hilary to follow? Perhaps hidden in the reeds which grew so conveniently tall.
She did not know that Hilary had made the connection between Joan and the Arnold’s carrier bag.
She forced herself into a run again. This time she was glad the burly figure of John was in front of her.
The tall reeds shut off a clear view of the channel ahead. Sometimes she glimpsed the watery pathway stretching away through the pastures, then the tassel-headed stems closed in again and she lost the perspective. John’s figure was dwindling in the distance. She kept running.
There was a darkness looming across the channel. It stood higher than the reeds. Spanning the sky. Blocking her view of the waterway ahead.
The fringe of reeds ended suddenly. She saw it clearly then, the assignation Joan had given Veronica. A metal gantry spanned the waterway over Hilary’s head. Beneath it, massive metal shutters, greasy with green slime, barred the current. One was lifted a little way and the brown water churned under it. Why had Joan wanted to meet Veronica here?
The question was cut short by a sudden cry. Along the footpath, just beyond the gates, the burly store-owner had hold of a shorter figure whom he was dragging out of the weed-grown ditch. There was a heartbeat of anguish as Hilary realized that it was not Veronica. A stockier woman dressed mostly in brown, not the rather elegant grey jacket that Veronica had been wearing. She was struggling wildly in John’s grip.
Fear impelled Hilary forward. She hurled herself towards the two.
Just in time, she saw the bicycle wheel projecting from the tall weeds at the side of the path. She almost lost her balance as she swerved.
Now she could hear John Arnold shouting. He had hold of Joan by one massive ha
nd. The other brandished the monkey wrench over her head. Hilary’s eyes went past them, searching. She could still see no sign of Veronica.
‘Bitch! Tell me what you’ve done with her! Murderer!’ John was beside himself with rage.
Hilary was afraid he would do something irreversible before Joan Townsend said a word about what they desperately needed to know.
The reporter was fighting desperately, trying to pull free. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about! Let me go!’
‘Joan Townsend!’ Hilary’s voice rasped across their shouts with all the authority of a senior teacher with decades of experience with unruly pupils.
Joan’s eyes swivelled to her with a different sort of fear.
‘John! Drop that wrench! Joan, just tell me. Where is Veronica?’
The journalist’s eyes shifted away from her. The folds of her pudgy face drooped. ‘She … slipped.’
A cold horror had hold of Hilary’s heart. She had come too late.
THIRTY-THREE
Hilary whirled round. Her heart told her it was over, but her brain would not accept it. She was on the brink of the bank, peering over into the churning water on the lower side of the gate. Something grey caught her eye, something that should not be there.
Against the massive greasy door of the sluice, the back and one sleeve of Veronica’s jacket swirled in an eddy. Hilary plunged down the slippery bank. Waist deep in muddy water, she reached for the half-submerged cloth.
She had dreaded to feel the dead weight of the body inside it, but the jacket came away easily in her hands. There was nothing inside it. Cold disappointment numbed her. For a moment, she stood there stupidly, looking down at the dripping garment. She was aware of John still shouting at Joan Townsend somewhere above her head.
