A Finer End

spirits, or sometimes, angels. Tonight, to her surprise, she had painted them within a framework of greensward and ruined stone walls — the gates of the Abbey itself — and for the first time, the spirits seemed to hold the now-familiar little girl within their protection.
    It was only blocked in, of course. She would finish it tomorrow, if there were no more visions. Now she needed rest; but first, a walk, to clear her head.
    The house was quiet, breathing in its midnight rhythm, and when she peeped into the bedroom she saw the humped shape of Bram’s body under the duvet.
    Grabbing an old Barbour off a peg, she let herself out of the front door and stood for a moment, breathing the frosty air. To her left lay Wick Hollow; to the right Bulwarks Lane gave an open view of the Coombe to the west. Threading her way through the garden, she turned to the right, and when she had passed the house a break in the canopy of leaves above her gave a view of the stars.
    As she walked, she became aware of movement in the woods, an agitation more intense than the usual nocturnal shufflings of badgers and rabbits. Fiona stopped, listening, wondering what could be disturbing the woodland creatures on such a calm and beautiful night. ‘What is it?’ she whispered, but there was no response. Feeling uneasy, she continued onwards, but more cautiously.
    When a tendril of wind moved down the lane, disturbing a bit of rubbish, she started, then chided herself. It was only a supermarket carrier bag, and as she watched it blew a few more feet, lodging against something larger in the road, a dark shape, perhaps a fallen branch, and beside it a longer, more solid object. Drawing closer, she saw that the more solid shape was oddly human. Another trick of perception, she decided. Her steps slowed until she came to a halt beside the thing.
    Not until she knelt and touched the form was she convinced that what she saw was real. It was a woman, her upturned face a pale smudge, and beside her not a branch, but a fallen bicycle. Fiona pulled her small torch from the pocket of her jacket, then gasped as it lit the woman’s face.
     
    Jack Montfort came to a halt a yard inside the intensive-care unit, overwhelmed by the sight of the machines and tubes surrounding Winnie’s slight, still form. Why hadn’t they told him she would look like this — alien, and frail beyond hope? A tube ran into her nose, another into her mouth, and on a shaved strip of her scalp the angry edges of a wound were held closed with clips.
    ‘You’re here to see Winifred, aren’t you, dear?’ a soft Irish voice said beside him.
    Jack turned, barely registering a uniform, a friendly smile, and a name badge that read ‘Maggie’. He nodded, not trusting his voice.
    ‘You’re her “friend," I take it? Her brother came in a bit ago. Took one look, turned green, and bolted, poor man.’
    ‘Did he?’ Jack’s resolve not to do the same strengthened, as he suspected she had intended.
    ‘It’s all these high-tech doodahs give people the willies. But don’t let them frighten you. They’re just keeping her comfortable, and letting us know how she’s doing.’
    ‘How — how is she?’
    ‘We’ve got her warm and toasty now, and resting quite comfortably. She was hypothermic when they brought her in, and her heart was a bit dicky, but she’s stable now—’
    ‘Heart?’ A fresh jolt of fear shot through him.
    ‘A bit of cardiac arrhythmia, due to the warming process. All perfectly normal. She’s a lucky girl, your Winifred. Do you know where she was found exactly?’
    ‘In Bulwarks Lane, below Glastonbury Tor.’
    ‘On the tarmac itself? Probably saved her life, then. The tarmac would have held the day’s heat. A few feet either way into the grass or the ditch...’ Maggie shook her head ominously.
    It had been Suzanne Sanborne who had rung Jack in the early hours of the morning. He had been increasingly uneasy about Winnie — it wasn’t like her not to let him know her whereabouts — but he had told himself that she must have had an emergency. He had, in fact, imagined her sitting at the bedside of an ill or dying parishioner. That was an irony too painful now to contemplate.
    In a daze, he had driven the thirty miles to the hospital in Taunton. While Andrew Catesby acknowledged him with a tight-lipped nod, Suzanne told him that the police believed Winnie must have been on her way to visit her friend Fiona Allen when she had been struck by a