A Finer End (3 page)

Montfort bought two more pints, then turned back to Nick. Now he seemed eager to talk. “Working at the bookshop—I suppose you read a good bit?”

“Like a kid in a sweetshop. The manager’s a good egg, turns a blind eye. And I try not to dog-ear the merchandise.”

“I have to admit I’ve never been in the place. Interesting stuff, is it?”

“Some of it’s absolute crap,” Nick replied with a grin. “UFOs. Crop circles—everyone knows that’s a hoax. But some of it … well, you have to wonder.… Odd things do seem to happen in Glastonbury.”

“You could say that,” Montfort muttered into his beer, his scowl returning. Then he seemed to try to shake off his preoccupation. “You’re not from around here, are you? Do I detect a hint of Yorkshire?”

“It’s Northumberland, actually. I came for the Festival last year”—Nick shrugged—“and I’m still here.”

“Ah, the rock festival at Pilton. Somehow I never managed to get there. I suppose I missed something memorable.”

“Mud.” Nick grinned. “Oceans of it. And slogging about in some farmer’s field, being bitten by midges, drinking bad beer, and queuing for hours to use the toilets. Still …”

“There was something,” Montfort prompted.

“Yeah. I’d like to have seen it in its heyday, the early seventies, you know? Glastonbury Fayre, they called it. That must have been awesome. And even that didn’t compare to the original Glastonbury Festival—in terms of quality, not quantity.”

“Original festival?” Montfort repeated blankly.

“Started in 1914 by the composer Rutland Boughton,” Nick answered. “Boughton was extremely talented—his opera
The Immortal Hour
still holds the record for the longest-running operatic production. All sorts of luminaries were involved in the Festival: Shaw, Edward Elgar, Vaughan Williams, D. H. Lawrence. And Glastonbury had its own contributors to the cultural revival, people like Frederick Bligh Bond and Alice Buckton.… And then there was the business of Bond’s friend Dr. John Goodchild and the finding of the ‘Grail’ in Bride’s Well. That caused a few ripples.…” Aware that he was babbling, Nick paused and drank the foam off his pint.

Looking up, he saw that Montfort was staring at him. Nick flushed. “Sorry. I get a bit carried away some—”

“You know about Bligh Bond?”

The intensity in Montfort’s voice took Nick by surprise. “Well, it’s a fascinating story, isn’t it? Bond’s knowledge was prodigious, his excavations at the Abbey were proof of that. But I suppose one can’t blame the Church for being a bit uncomfortable with the idea that Bond had received his digging instructions from monks dead five centuries or more.”

“Uncomfortable?” Montfort snorted. “They fired him. He never worked successfully as an architect again and, if I remember rightly, died in poverty. If the man had had an ounce of bloody sense, he’d have kept his mouth shut.”

“He felt he had to share it, though, didn’t he? I’d say Bond was honest to a fault. And I don’t think he ever actually claimed he’d made contact with spirits. He thought he might have merely accessed some part of his own subconscious.”

“Do you believe it’s possible, whatever the source?”

“Bond’s not the only case. There have been well-documented instances where people have known things about the past that couldn’t be accounted for otherwise.”
Glancing at the paper Montfort had partially covered with his hand, Nick felt a fizz of excitement. “But you’re not talking hypothetically, are you?”

“This is”—Montfort shook his head—“daft. Too daft to tell anyone. But the coincidence, meeting you here … I—” He looked around, as if suddenly aware of the proximity of other customers, and lowered his voice.

“I was sitting at my desk tonight, and I wrote … something. In Latin I haven’t used since I was at school, and I had no memory of writing it. I tore the damned thing up.… Then this.…” He ran his fingertips across the scrawl on the sketch pad.

“Bugger,” Nick breathed, awed. “I’d swap my mum to have that happen to me.”

“But why me? I didn’t ask for this,” Montfort retorted fiercely. “I’m an architect, but my knowledge of the Abbey is no more than you’d expect from anyone who grew up here. I’m not particularly religious. I’ve never had any interest in spiritualism—or otherworldly things of any sort, for that matter.”

Nick pondered this for a moment. “I doubt these things are random. Maybe you have some connection to the Abbey that you’re not consciously aware of.”

“That’s a big help,” Montfort said, but there was a gleam of humor in his bright blue eyes. “So how do I find out what it is, and why this is happening to me?”

“Maybe I could help. You know it wasn’t Bond who did the actual writing, but his friend, John Bartlett. Bond guided him by asking questions.”

“You want to play Bond to my Bartlett, then?”

“You said you came from Glastonbury. That seems as good a place to start as any.”

“My father’s family’s been in Glastonbury and round about for eons, I should think. He was a solicitor. A large, serious man, very sure of where he stood in the world.” Montfort took a sip of his beer and his voice softened as he
continued. “Now, my mother, she was a different sort altogether. She loved stories, loved to play make-believe with us when we were children.”

“Us?”

“My cousins and I. Duncan and Juliet. My aunt and uncle had a penchant for Shakespeare. We always visited them in Cheshire on our holidays. It was a different world. The canals, and then the hills of Wales rising in the distance.…”

Once more he fell silent, his eyes half closed. Nick was about to prompt him again, when, without warning, Montfort grasped the pen. His hand began to move steadily across the paper.

Nick translated the Latin as the words began to form.
Deo juvante … With God’s help … you shall make it right.…
Did that, he wondered, apply to him as well? Could he somehow set right what he had done?

In that instant, Nick knew why he had come to Glastonbury, and he knew why he had stayed.

Faith Wills rested her forehead against the cool plastic of the toilet seat, panting, her eyes swimming with the tears brought on by retching. She had nothing left to throw up but the lining of her stomach, yet somehow she was going to have to pull herself together, go out, and face the smell of her mother’s breakfast.

It was a bacon-and-egg morning—her mum believed all children should go off to school well fortified for the day. They alternated cooked eggs, or porridge, or brown toast and marmite; and on this Thursday morning in March, Faith had struck the worst possible option.

A whiff of bacon crept into the bathroom. Her stomach heaved treacherously just as her younger brother, Jonathan, pounded on the door. “You think you’re effing Madonna in there or something? Hurry bloody up, Faith!”

Without raising her head, Faith said, “Shut up,” but it came out a whisper.

Then her mother’s voice—“Jonathan, you watch your language,” and the crisp rap of knuckles on the door. “Faith, whatever’s the matter with you? You’re going to be late, and make Jon and Meredith late as well.”

“Coming.” Unsteadily, Faith pushed herself up, flushed the toilet, then blew her nose on a piece of toilet tissue. Easing the door open, she found her mum waiting, hands on hips, and beyond her, Jon, and her sister, Meredith, all three faces set in varying degrees of irritation. “What is this, a committee?” she asked, trying for a bit of attitude.

Her mother ignored her, taking her chin in firm fingers and turning her face towards the wan light filtering in from the sitting room. “You’re white as a sheet,” she pronounced. “Are you ill?”

Faith swallowed convulsively against the kitchen smells, then managed to croak, “I’m okay. Just exam nerves.”

Her dad emerged from the bedroom, tying his tie. “How many times have I told you not to leave studying until the last minute? And you know how important your GCSEs—”

“Just let me get my books, okay?”

“Don’t take that tone with me, young lady.” Her dad jerked tight the knot of his tie and reached for her. His fingertips dug into the flesh of her bare arm.

“Sorry,” Faith mumbled, not meeting his eyes. Tugging free, she escaped to the room she shared with her sister and, once inside, leaned against the door, praying for a moment’s peace before Meredith came back. It was a child’s room, she thought, seeing it suddenly anew. The walls were covered with posters of rock stars, the twin beds with bedraggled stuffed animals. Her hockey uniform spilled from her satchel; the sheets of music for that afternoon’s choir practice lay scattered on the floor. All things that had mattered so much to her—all utterly meaningless now.

She wouldn’t be fine, she realized, closing her eyes against
the tide of despair that swept over her. Nothing would ever be fine again.

And she couldn’t tell her parents. In her mother’s perfect world, seventeen-year-olds didn’t start the day with their heads in the toilet, and her dad—well, she couldn’t think about that.

She had promised never to tell, and that was all that mattered.

Faith hugged herself, pressing her arms against the new and painful swelling of her breasts. Never, never, never. The word became a litany as she swayed gently.

Ever.

O
N A SOFT
evening in late June, Gemma James stood beside Duncan Kincaid in the pew of St. John’s Church, Hampstead. They had come to hear Kincaid’s neighbor, Major Keith, sing in the choir at St. John’s Evensong service.

Brought up in the spare tradition of Methodist chapel, Gemma had not learned to feel at ease in the Anglican Church. She watched Kincaid closely, standing when he stood, kneeling awkwardly when he knelt, and envying the ease with which he made his responses. Her mum would be horrified to see her here, she thought with a small smile; but Gemma was used to her mother’s dismay, given her choice of career.

The music, however, made up for her discomfort with the order of service. Gemma avidly followed the program in her leaflet: first the lovely opening prayer, then a Psalm, then the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis.

Then, with a rustle of movement, the choir rose again and began to sing, the voices coming in one after another, each more joyous than the last. The sound struck Gemma with a force almost physical; so rich was it, so full, that it seemed as if it displaced the very air. She shivered, blinking back tears.

Kincaid glanced at her, eyebrow raised, and put his arm round her shoulders. “Cold?” he mouthed.

Shaking her head, she found the piece in her leaflet.
Ave Maria
, by Robert Parsons.
Hail Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb
, read the English translation.

Gemma closed her eyes, letting the soaring, pulsing sound carry her with it, and the rest of the service passed as if in a dream.

“You all right?” Kincaid asked as they filed out afterwards. The sun, low in the sky, cast the gnarled trees in the sloping churchyard into deep shadow.

“The music …”

“Lovely, wasn’t it? Good choir at St. John’s.” He whistled under his breath. “I promised the Major we’d buy him a drink. The Freemason’s Arms, you think? It’s a nice enough evening to sit outside.”

Gemma gazed at him in consternation. Tall, slender, his unruly chestnut hair falling over his forehead, looking down at her with an expression of interested inquiry—he made a picture of the perfect sensitive man. So why did she suddenly feel they might as well be from different planets?

How could he take such music for granted? Had he not felt that the glory of it was almost beyond bearing? The gap between their perceptions seemed immense.

“I—I promised Toby I’d be home for bath and story time tonight.” But she lied. The truth was she needed time to absorb what she’d heard, and that she felt too burdened by what she hadn’t brought herself to tell him to make small talk. “I’ll take the tube,” Gemma said. “You wait for the Major. Give him my best.”

“You’re sure?” Kincaid asked, his disappointment visible for an instant before he schooled his expression into pleasant neutrality.

“I’ll see you at the Yard in the morning.” Slipping her hand round the back of his neck, she kissed him quickly, a silent apology. Before she could change her mind, she turned and strode away.

But before crossing Heath Street to the Underground station, positioned at the very top of Hampstead High Street, she paused. The view from these upper reaches, south over the rooftops of London, never failed to inspire her. She loved to imagine Hampstead as the village it had once been, a green and leafy retreat, its air free of the noxious fumes and fog that choked London below.

That vision made a startling contrast to the bowels of Hampstead tube station, the deepest in London. Gemma found a seat on the crowded train and did her best to ignore the hygienic deficiencies of the man next to her, letting the echo of the choir reverberate in her head. So
intense had been the demands of the past few months that even half an hour on a train was welcome time to gather her thoughts.

The death of Kincaid’s ex-wife two months before had left him with an eleven-year-old son whose existence he had not previously suspected. His struggle to deal with the complexities of that relationship, as well as the guilt he felt over the death of the boy’s mother, had put considerable strain on his relationship with Gemma. Then, just when she’d begun to think they’d regained their equilibrium, she’d been faced with a particularly difficult case and her deep sense of connection to one of the suspects.

In the end, she’d been unwilling to give up the bond she and Kincaid had forged, but the episode had left her feeling unsettled. She sensed change in the offing, and it made her want to dig her heels into the present and hang on.