The Wounded Thorn

by Fay Sampson

  It was harder to clamber up the muddy bank than it had been to slither down. As she hauled herself clear of the water, she felt her cold wet trousers flapping against her legs. She was panting as she stood on the bank.

  She held the sodden jacket up to John, who was still wrestling one-handed with his captive. ‘Only this.’

  He swore.

  His free arm brought the wrench swinging back behind him again. Hilary grabbed it and fought to prise it from his hand. Joan, gripped firmly by his other hand, was now cowering before him, her hands shielding her face. With an effort, Hilary tugged the heavy tool free.

  Robbed of his weapon, John brought his broad right hand round to deliver a stinging slap on Joan’s face.

  ‘Where?’ he bellowed.

  There were distant shouts behind them. Hilary turned her head. There were figures on the footpath, still dark in the distance, racing towards them.

  Another desperate glance down into the water. Hilary could still see no sign of Veronica in the shadowed channel below the sluice where she had found the jacket. The gantry loomed darkly over it.

  ‘I didn’t mean to!’ Joan was sobbing. ‘I didn’t mean any of it.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Hilary exclaimed as she turned. ‘You let a bomb off in the High Street in the middle of the afternoon, and you say you didn’t mean it! Of course you intended to kill them. Where’s Veronica?’ Her own fist was clenching round the monkey wrench now.

  ‘I … it was a mistake,’ the terrified girl hiccupped. ‘It was meant to go off at half past four in the morning. There shouldn’t have been anyone there.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! There were people living over those shops,’ John shouted at her.

  ‘I didn’t think about that …’

  She yelped as he yanked her arm back savagely.

  ‘Just tell me what you’ve done with Veronica!’ Hilary was almost beside herself.

  The pounding feet were almost on them. A uniformed policeman seized Joan and dragged her away from the angry John. Handcuffs flashed in the sunlight. The words of the police caution echoed in Hilary’s ears.

  Behind the tall arresting officer, Hilary saw a sudden blur of movement. A woman, not in uniform, but in a dark trouser suit, had leaped from the bank on the upper side of the sluice gate in an arcing dive. Hilary charged back past the other officers arriving on the crowded footpath to see.

  She had been running so hard to catch up with John Arnold and his captive that she had failed to look closely at the sluice gate as she passed it. Only now did she see on the upper side something caught against the massive metal guillotine, over near the opposite bank. Not an empty jacket this time. The white blouse and fair hair of Veronica. Face down in the water. Horror wrenched at Hilary’s heart.

  The woman in the trouser suit was powering her way across towards her. Hilary dropped the wrench. She clenched her fists, praying. What she was seeing must not be true.

  The policewoman caught the inert form under the armpits and towed her to the further bank. Only as she hoisted the limp body up on to the grass did Hilary recognize the swimmer as Detective Sergeant Olive Petersen.

  She could only watch helplessly as the sergeant bent to arrange Veronica’s limp body on its bed of grass and buttercups and start to administer CPR.

  More police officers went running across the gantry, boots hammering the metal bridge. Hilary’s legs felt too weak to follow them. She swung back slowly. The policeman who had arrested Joan was already leading her away.

  Hilary shot her a look full of scorn and disbelief. ‘Veronica tried to help you! She was sorry for you. She even phoned you to come to the High Street because she’d seen Sonia Marsden and you wanted to talk to George. And you didn’t tell her your bomb was about to go off!’

  ‘I told you! I got the timer wrong. It wasn’t meant to go off in the afternoon.’

  ‘If Veronica’s dead …’ She cast a fearful look across the channel. Petersen was still at work on the still form.

  ‘I never meant to kill anybody.’

  ‘And Amina? The Muslim girl you dumped in the abbey?’

  A frightened look replaced the desperate plea in Joan Townsend’s eyes.

  ‘I know. You approached her because you thought you could use her for another sensational story. Instead, you discovered that she was the one with a story to tell. She’d seen too much. Arnold’s hardware store.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind, ma’am,’ the arresting officer interposed. ‘We need to get this one back to Glastonbury.’

  Hilary stood aside. There were more police haring along the path now. The first arrivals were clattering down the further gantry steps. But only DS Petersen was on the further bank working on Veronica, who might be, but was probably not, still alive.

  Someone was talking to Hilary. The voice was unexpectedly gentle. ‘If you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions, Mrs Masters …’ She wrenched her eyes away from the only scene that mattered. It was Detective Inspector Fellows.

  ‘In a moment,’ she said.

  Her gaze went back to the silent drama being played out across the brown water. The other officers had almost reached them now. Presently she saw DS Petersen lean back on her heels and say something into her radio. With a dull certainty Hilary knew that she must be reporting that her efforts were in vain. Veronica Taylor was dead.

  Then, as she watched, the inert figure in front of Petersen twitched, rolled over and was sick on the grass.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  ‘Hilary, promise me you won’t tell the children.’

  Mercifully, they had been able to get dry clothes from the suitcases in Hilary’s car. Hilary looked Veronica over as they sat in the small room in the Baptist hall assigned to Detective Chief Superintendent Allenby.

  Veronica had been taken first to the nearest A&E hospital, where they had confirmed, to Hilary’s immense relief, that she had suffered no lasting damage. All the same, they had wanted to keep her in overnight for observation. This Veronica had vehemently rejected.

  ‘Just imagine Morag’s reaction if I’d had to confess that I was in hospital! After we’d promised them that we’d leave Glastonbury.’

  ‘We did,’ Hilary said grimly.

  ‘I know. I was a fool. I really thought this would be a meeting with Joan in which I could make it up to her in some way.’

  ‘She didn’t need you. She seems to have carved herself out a fairly meteoric career over the last few days. No, you must have said something to her which convinced her you knew more than you did. And I, fool that I was, didn’t make the connection with the Arnold’s bag until after you’d gone. And, guess what, my phone battery was flat. I not only couldn’t phone you to warn you, but I couldn’t even get up your number to ring you on someone else’s phone. It had to be nine-nine-nine.’

  ‘It was a very good thing you did,’ said DCS Allenby. ‘As it was, we got there only just in time.’

  Hilary looked across at her friend. The younger woman was dressed in the warmest clothes her holiday packing had allowed. The turtle-neck jumper seemed to swamp her slender form. She looked smaller, so much more vulnerable than Hilary had realized. The DCS was right. It had been a very close-run thing.

  Her eyes strayed sideways to DI Fellows and Detective Sergeant Petersen. The latter’s black hair still looked damp. Her long face was set in its habitual stern, unsmiling mask. But Hilary remembered the dark-clothed figure leaping from the bank into the muddy water churning through the sluice gate, while her colleague was busy arresting Joan Townsend. The rest of the officers had still been running towards them. Only Olive Petersen had been there first to tow Veronica’s water-logged body from the channel and perform the CPR that had restored her to life. Hilary felt a warm rush of gratitude that almost choked her.

  ‘So,’ DI Fellows was saying, ‘the powers that be, who had me still investigating the Chalice Well bomb while the full murder squad were working all out on the High Street one, were right after all, inte
ntionally or not. There really were two different bombers.’

  Veronica frowned. ‘She must have worked extremely fast. We found the Chalice Well bomb on Monday afternoon. Over the next forty-eight hours, she’d discovered that a bomb plot really did bring publicity, but only locally, and she wasn’t going to benefit from it. So it had to be something bigger. A bomb that really did go off. Could she really have found out how to do that, and assembled everything she needed, in such a short time?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Fellows said. ‘If you know where to look.’

  ‘I don’t think her journalism course was intended to equip her for that,’ Hilary observed.

  ‘And then this stupid, stupid girl never thought about the difference between four-thirty in the morning and four-thirty in the middle of a busy afternoon,’ Veronica sighed. ‘All those lives, all those injuries, for one idiotic mistake.’

  ‘There were people sleeping over the shops, even at night,’ Hilary reminded her.

  ‘So this Honeydew fellow was just a crank?’ DS Petersen asked. ‘He had nothing to do with the second bomb?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ DCS Allenby steepled her fingers. Her dyed blonde hair bent over them. ‘If it hadn’t been for his little ploy to get more publicity for the Chalice Well, Joan Townsend would never have thought of her own disastrous plan. And he must have been scared out of his wits when he realized that ninety-nine per cent of the population would assume that the two bombers were the same. Crucially Mel Fenwick, who knew about the first one.’

  ‘Would he really have harmed her?’ Hilary asked.

  ‘Who’s to say? At the very best, he’d have frightened the pants off her to keep her quiet.’

  ‘But where does Amina Haddad come into all this?’ Olive Petersen frowned. ‘I was tailing her for a while. Well, it seemed an obvious connection. Extreme Islamist, judging by her clothes.’

  Hilary felt her lips tighten. It was, after all, going to prove harder to like the detective sergeant than the first warm rush of gratitude had suggested.

  ‘Amina was a devout Muslim. That does not make her a cold-blooded murderer.’

  ‘No, but it made her a convenient suspect for Joan Townsend to latch on to, to divert attention from herself,’ DI Fellows cut in. ‘My guess is that she tried to interview Miss Haddad, to follow up on that prejudicial headline she’d already fed to the press. She may even have let slip that she saw Amina in Arnold’s and accused her of buying some of the things she needed for a bomb. Maybe, too late, she realized that the boot was on the other foot. That something in Amina’s eyes, through that burka, told her that it was she who had guessed why Joan was in that shop. If Joan had paid cash at a self-service till, Amina might have been the only person who could testify to what she bought.’

  ‘So,’ said Hilary slowly, ‘silence her, and get herself yet another sensational story to report.’

  ‘The Thorn in her hand,’ Veronica said. ‘We thought she must have been killed in St John’s churchyard.’

  ‘But she never got that far,’ Fellows added.

  ‘Friday’s newspaper story had to be the so-called Satanists dancing in the streets after dark. Joan needed to postpone the finding of Amina’s body to hit the headlines again next day. Clever. Just one melodramatic story after another from Glastonbury. The tabloid editors must have loved her.’

  They fell silent. Hilary was thinking of the young man Basil, blood pumping from his almost-severed leg. Of Amina’s delicate blue-and-gold sandal, all that could be seen of her body under the plastic sheet. Of finding Veronica’s empty jacket in the eddy below the sluice gate. Cold horror stalked over her. To have done all that in so short a time, Joan Townsend must have been both very clever and more than a little deranged. Hilary had under-estimated her when she had dismissed the would-be reporter as a shambling, rather tiresome failure.

  ‘And George Marsden?’

  DCS Allenby sighed. ‘Just a loud-mouthed, opinionated bigot, I’m afraid. Not that they can’t do their own sort of damage, mind you. But a bomber? No.’

  Hilary rose to her feet. ‘Well, if you’ve finished with us, it’s high time we were on our way. My phone’s flat, and I haven’t brought the charger, so goodness knows what messages my family have been stacking up for me. But Veronica can’t fend hers off much longer. We promised we’d move out of Glastonbury today, and here we still are. Time to hit the road.’

  ‘Well, thanks from the bottom of my heart.’ DI Fellows rose as she did. He cast an apologetic glance at his unsmiling detective sergeant. ‘I know we warned you often enough to keep out of this, but in the end, it was your perception that put the vital piece into place.’

  ‘A plastic bag?’ Hilary smiled wryly. ‘It wouldn’t have been enough on its own, and you know it. Just circumstantial evidence. In the end, she shopped herself. One headline story too many.’

  ‘And Mrs Taylor nearly paid the price.’

  ‘I owe Sergeant Petersen a tremendous debt of gratitude.’ Veronica smiled.

  There was just the hint of a flush in the detective sergeant’s face. A twitch of the resolutely set lips.

  ‘I’ll be putting her forward for a commendation,’ DCS Allenby said.

  Out in the fresh air, Veronica turned to Hilary with a more mischievous smile.

  ‘Do you know, just for a few moments, I even wondered whether we’d got the whole thing upside down, and Sister Mary Magdalene was the one. It’s amazing what suspicion can do to you.’

  ‘I know,’ Hilary agreed. ‘Those footsteps behind us in the twilight as we passed the retreat house.’

  ‘Though the real horror was actually Joan’s footsteps, catching up with Amina there.’

  Hilary shuddered. ‘But there was also the fact that Sister Mary Magdalene turned up just when the High Street bomb went off.’

  ‘Only, by that reckoning,’ Veronica concluded, ‘we should have been prime suspects ourselves.’

  Hilary’s eyes twinkled. ‘Perhaps we were. To DS Petersen, at least. But DI Fellows is far too nice to tell us.

  This time, Hilary drove. A little way out of Glastonbury, she pulled over into a lay-by and got out. As she turned to take in the town they were leaving after this turbulent week, the nearest thing that met her eye was the bent back of Wearyall Hill.

  ‘And, after all that, we never did find out who cut down the Thorn tree on the hill and who keeps going back to cut off the new shoots. There was a time when I thought it must be connected with the bombings, but apparently not.’

  ‘I must say I can’t see it,’ said Veronica, coming to join her. ‘Neither of the bombs. Rupert Honeydew may be weird. And scary too. But I can’t believe he would damage a tree he almost certainly holds to be sacred. And Joan would still have been at school when the tree was first mutilated.’

  ‘So it stays a mystery.’

  ‘There’s a greater mystery,’ Veronica said quietly. ‘The way the human spirit will not be crushed. People go on grafting cuttings of the Thorn – planting them on Wearyall Hill, in the churchyard, in private gardens, wherever.’

  ‘And the myth of Arthur, the great leader who held the Christian west against the invader. Just when you need him, there’s his grave, and his great tree-trunk coffin, at the abbey. And so the story gains power and lives on. And it may be unfashionable to say so, but it is a story of heroism to live by.’

  ‘Like Glastonbury Abbey itself. A witness to a greater Resurrection.’

  They stood in silence, looking back at the wounded town, where even now people were picking up the threads of their lives.

  Hilary found herself brushing away an uncharacteristic tear.

  They drove on, over the Levels, where the farmland was springing green again after the floods which had devastated them last winter.

  The hills of Devon began to rise in front of them.

  Hilary dropped Veronica at her front gate.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right? I’ve told you, you’re very welcome to come and spend the night
with me.’

  A strangely knowing smile flowered in Veronica’s face.

  ‘No. I’ll be fine. A good bottle of wine and an early night is what I need.’

  Hilary watched her walk up the garden path, towing her suitcase. As Veronica stopped to unlock the front door, it struck Hilary with a sharp irony that she had suggested this trip to take her friend’s mind off the loss of her husband. Veronica had come close to losing her own life. Hilary was on the point of jumping out of the car and insisting that Veronica change her mind, but the door closed. She could picture her friend relaxing at last in the comfort of her own familiar home.

  After a moment, Hilary drove on.

  It was her turn now to turn the key of her own front door. The first thing that struck her as she walked inside was that there was not the expected clutter of accumulated mail on the doormat.

  She was still trying to puzzle this out when the figure she had least expected strode out of the sitting room and stretched out an arm to hug her.

  ‘David!’

  Only one arm, because the left one seemed to be strapped to his chest.

  It was a joyful surprise to be enfolded in that lop-sided hug.

  ‘What have you done to yourself?’

  The warm voice was caught between laughter and grief. ‘A shell hit the hospital. I caught a piece of shrapnel in my side. Nothing too serious, but they sent me home early.’

  ‘Why ever didn’t you tell me?’ Indignation was warring with delight in his presence and concern for his wound.

  ‘Hilary! Does it never occur to you that a mobile phone is no good unless you switch it on occasionally? I’ve been trying to get through to you for the last twenty-four hours. In the end, I had to ring Veronica. You gave me her number in case of emergencies. Didn’t she tell you I’d rung?’

  Hilary remembered the laughter in Veronica’s eyes, her insistence that Hilary should go home alone.

  ‘I’ll wring her neck!’

  ‘From the sound of it, you two have been in quite enough danger already this week. And Veronica said they still hadn’t caught whoever was behind the bomb.’