A finer end - Deborah Crombie [97]
They walked on, past the Café 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