A Finer End

she had radar. Or second sight.
    He’d thought of going to the police, but Faith was legally an adult, living with Garnet by choice, and if he told them he thought she was being hypnotized, or coerced by dark magic, he’d merely make himself look barmy.
    Although Winnie Catesby had refused to give him Faith’s parents’ address, he’d found it easily enough on his own. One day in the café, when Faith had been talking to Buddy in the shop, Nick had glanced at the student card in her wallet.
    He had traced her family to Street; he had even sat at the top of the close, watching the house, looking for some trace of Faith in that sterile cul-de-sac. He could go to her parents now, tell them where Faith was, but they had no power to make her come home. And Faith would know he had betrayed her. That would surely end any hope he might have of continuing as her friend.
    Nothing in the past few months had turned out the way he’d imagined — not with Faith, nor with Jack.
    Simon Fitzstephen seemed to take up all Jack’s free time — and what had Nick Carlisle to offer Jack compared with the renowned Fitzstephen? The bitterness of it burned in Nick’s throat, but he knew there was more to his unease than that. The excitement of discovering Jack’s gift, the sense of adventure, of mission, had given way to a tension, a foreboding, that made him feel almost physically ill.
    He’d thought about chucking it all in, leaving Glastonbury, getting a proper job. Once he’d even got so far as stuffing his meagre belongings into a duffel bag... and once, on a very bad day, he’d even thought about going home to Northumberland and facing the music.
    Lifting a Dion Fortune book to slot it back into the shelf, he glanced at her photo on the dust jacket. She had understood the power of evil, and had faced it with strength and good sense. If only there were someone like Fortune he could talk to, someone who would not instantly dismiss what he sensed about Garnet, or attribute it to a maladjusted childhood. A priest, perhaps—
    Winnie Catesby, of course! It had been right under his nose all along, but somehow he’d never thought of Winnie in her professional capacity. How could he have been so blind?
    He would talk to Winnie, tell her the suspicions he had hardly dared to formulate. Then together they could confront Faith, get her to agree to leave Garnet before the baby came. She wouldn’t have to go back to her parents; he and Winnie could find a safe place for her.
    Locking the shop behind him, he retrieved his motorbike and headed south through the dusk towards Compton Grenville. His heart lifted when he saw Winnie’s small car parked in the gravel drive of the Vicarage.
    But there was no answer at the front door, nor did his knocking at the kitchen door bring any response. The house remained dark and silent, and he shivered with more than the chill of evening. He knew, with a sickening sense of urgency he could not explain, that he must find Winnie Catesby, and soon.
     
    ‘You all right, Fi?’ Bram Allen looked up from the remains of his supper.
    ‘Bit of a headache,’ she said. He had always seemed to know, with some uncanny sixth sense. ‘I think I may be... painting... when you get back from your council meeting.’ She did not acknowledge her hope that this time it might be different. A few days ago, she had asked him to hang some of the recent canvases in the gallery. He had done so under protest, and the resulting awkwardness between them had not been improved by his comments at Winnie’s the previous evening.
    ‘Do you want me to stay?’ he asked.
    ‘No. I’ll be fine.’ They both knew that the onset of her visions could be unpredictable, but even as a child Fiona had taken up crayons, then paints, as a means of dealing with it. If she transferred what she saw to paper, the visions no longer terrified her.
    Fiona wandered down the corridor to her studio. Bram had built it for her, a glass-walled room on the back of the house, overlooking the deep hollow of Bushy Coombe. Fiona turned on the small lamp that lit only her blank canvas and her palette. She opened her paints and took up a brush.
    The voices were clamouring now in her head, and when she looked up the shapes were thronging outside the glass — luminous, winged, half-human creatures; they beckoned to her, and the night sky beyond the glass had become a deep and iridescent blue.
    Images began to take shape on the canvas, faces impossibly