A Finer End

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 per cent 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-coloured 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 his early forties, trim, an executive with an electronics firm in Street. Add a wife with her own career, bright children, a well-located suburban home, and you had all the hallmarks of success. Why, then, had this family fractured so grievously?
    Maureen Wills sat near her husband, without touching him. When she had reached out a hand towards him — to comfort or be comforted, Gemma couldn’t tell — Wills had shrugged it off.
    ‘We did everything for her,’ he was saying. ‘School fees, sports, singing lessons, piano.’ The piano sat against the far wall of the sitting room, its keyboard cover closed. ‘How could she be such an ungrateful little tart—’ .
    ‘Gary, please,’ his wife entreated, with a pointed glance at the frightened faces of the two younger children, peering round the corner.
    ‘You two.’ Wills pointed at them. ‘Go to your rooms. Now.’ The boy and girl disappeared, but Gemma suspected they’d not gone far.
    ‘She had a chance at the best universities,’ their father continued. ‘An abortion would have been the sensible solution, but no, she wouldn’t hear of it. So I told her the boy and his family would have to do their part — why should we take on full responsibility for the little bastard? But she wouldn’t tell us who it was!’
    ‘So you suggested that she leave?’ Kincaid asked, as if it were a perfectly sensible action.
    ‘I only meant to make her see reason. I never thought she’d actually go...’
    ‘You should have,’ said his wife, as if their presence had given her the courage to speak up. ‘You should have thought. You know how stubborn Faith is—’ Maureen turned to Gemma and Kincaid. ‘Since she was a toddler, she’s been that way. And she was a hard delivery. I used to tell her she was stubborn even then... determined to come into the world in her own time.’
    ‘But surely you must have had some idea who the boy was,’ suggested Gemma. ‘A regular boyfriend, or some gossip among her friends at school.’
    ‘She didn’t go out with boys.’ Maureen said it firmly. ‘Faith always looked down on girls who giggled and had crushes; she was far too serious for that. And her friends—’
    ‘They didn’t want to talk to us,’ Wills interrupted bitterly. ‘You’d have thought we’d done something terrible to her. And why should