A Finer End

“A good thing. You have no room for more books in your flat. You’re right about Nick, though—makes me wonder what else he hasn’t told us.” He stopped and gave an exaggerated sniff. “Is that fish and chips I smell?”

“Don’t tell me you’re hungry again?”

“It was only soup, and that was hours ago.”

“Two, maybe three,” Gemma corrected, smiling. Faith had done her best with Jack’s meager resources, but her pot of soup had not made a particularly generous meal for five people.

They had left Jack contemplating the ramifications of Simon’s hypothesis. If there were even a possibility that a copy of the ancient manuscript might have been passed down through Jack’s family, he would be faced with the enormous task of searching through the accumulated clutter in his parents’ house.

The chippie was a bit further down, where the Market Square became a pedestrian mall. The shop’s door stood open, serving as an enticement. It was a clean, well-lit establishment, with a proper restaurant in the back.

“Do you want to sit down?” Gemma asked.

“No. Let’s keep walking. Somehow fish and chips never taste the same without the newspaper.”

Back in the street, with their steaming newspaper parcels in hand, Kincaid turned back the way they’d come. “Let’s walk up the High.”

They peered through the leaded glass windows of the ancient George & Pilgrims inn. The bar was full, the hum of conversation audible even through the glass. The building looked very old indeed, with its authentic black- and-white timbering and worn, blackened beams.

“Would Edmund have known this place?” Gemma asked.

“A century or so after his time, I think. Not that he’d have been allowed to frequent the inn. It was built to accommodate the pilgrims, and the abbot’s high-ranking overflow.”

They walked on, past the Cafe Galatea and New Age shops, until Gemma stopped, transfixed, before a gallery window. A single painting, lit by a soft spotlight, stood against a black velvet backdrop. Luminous, winged creatures hovered over a moonlit city in which tiny humans went about their business, unaware. The vision was stunningly beautiful, the colors glowing like living jewels, but the creatures’ faces were fierce and otherworldly. It made her a little uneasy. “Are they protecting the people?” she asked softly. “Or do they have their own agenda?”

“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