The Wounded Thorn

by Fay Sampson

  ‘But why would he do that?’ Morag objected. ‘Wouldn’t it throw suspicion on himself, or Sonia at least, for just the reason you’ve suggested? He had the opportunity.’

  ‘Hmm!’ Hilary said. ‘Perhaps he was making some sort of statement.’

  ‘You’re forgetting,’ Hilary said to Veronica, ‘there’s another way in.’

  Hilary looked at her blankly.

  ‘Don’t you remember? That night we were walking back from …’ She stopped abruptly and glanced at Morag. ‘Along the side of the abbey grounds,’ she corrected herself, ‘and we met Sister Mary Magdalene.’

  ‘I remember well enough,’ Hilary grunted. ‘I had this horrible feeling of footsteps following us in the dusk. Only it was just this teacher nun we’d met,’ she explained to Morag.

  ‘But it was what she said,’ Veronica persisted. ‘About the abbey retreat house. Guests on courses there get access to a gate that lets them into the abbey grounds outside the normal opening times.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ Morag said. ‘A spiritual retreat house. Just the place you’d find a murderer with a body to dispose of.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Veronica said. ‘It was just an idea.’

  But Hilary had a surreal memory of Sister Mary Magdalene emerging out of the fog of dust from the explosion, her clothes spattered with blood.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  They were coming out of the dining room on their way to take coffee in the lounge when a figure rose out of an armchair to greet them. Detective Inspector Fellows held out a hand.

  ‘Mrs Taylor, Mrs Masters, good evening. And this is …?’

  ‘My daughter Morag.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Detective Inspector Fellows and this is my sergeant, DS Petersen.’

  The detective sergeant had done no more than move to the edge of her seat in acknowledgement. Her face was set in a sullen expression. It struck Hilary that both detectives looked tired. She wondered what hours they had been working through this tumultuous week.

  ‘Your mother and Mrs Masters have been very observant,’ DI Fellows was explaining to Morag. ‘They’ve provided us with some significant information for our investigation.’

  Veronica gave Morag a rather smug smile.

  ‘I was wondering,’ DI Fellows went on, this time turning to Hilary and Veronica, ‘if there was anywhere private we could talk. I didn’t want to drag you out to the incident room at this time of night.’

  Hilary cast her eyes around the lamplit lounge. ‘There’s the conservatory. Nobody seems to be using it at the moment. If anyone comes, I shall resort to schoolmarm mode and glare daggers at them.’

  Fellows followed her eyes to the glass-walled extension built out from one side of the lounge. Potted palm trees made deeper shadows in the dusky interior.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. He waved the two women towards it. Detective Sergeant Petersen rose from her settee. Hilary saw the inspector look at Morag doubtfully. She intervened.

  ‘Morag, dear, would you wait here and tell them we’re taking coffee in the conservatory? You’ll be all right on your own, won’t you?’ Summoning up her sweetest smile. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll be long.’

  She saw the expression of frustrated indignation in the student’s eyes. How Morag would have loved to sit in on a real-life interview between a Detective Inspector and his informants on a murder case – especially when one of those informants was her own mother. But if Hilary had read DI Fellows’ manner correctly, he had not wanted what he had to say to go any further.

  When she joined the others, she found that Veronica had switched on a standing lamp which shed a pool of light over one end of the conservatory. Hilary noticed for the first time that DS Petersen had a bulky package on the cane chair beside her. Her hand was resting protectively over it.

  ‘Now,’ said Inspector Fellows, with the air of one making light conversation, ‘how has your time here been? One unexploded bomb, one serious explosion, and a murder, all in the course of one week. I hope it hasn’t been too devastating for you.’

  Their reply was silenced by the arrival of the chinless waiter with their coffee. Hilary ordered more for the detectives, but DI Fellows held up his hand to stop her. ‘No thanks. When we found you were having dinner we filled in the time with a cup. Rather better than what we brew up in the church hall.’

  He waited until Veronica had poured the coffee. Hilary began to sense that beneath his suave politeness was a weary and frustrated man hoping, a little desperately, for a ray of light in the darkness of this week.

  Veronica had barely set the coffee pot down when he began. ‘You saw Amina Haddad in her burka, right? You talked to her at close quarters.’

  ‘At the abbey, yes. I mean the first time we were there. Tuesday morning.’ She glanced at DS Petersen and was sure the sergeant was remembering how she had berated Hilary and Veronica for interfering with the case. Petersen had been following Amina then. Clearly she had suspected the research student of planting the Chalice Well bomb.

  ‘We have something to show you.’ He too looked at Petersen.

  Almost reluctantly, she withdrew her square-fingered hand from the parcel beside her. It was a clear plastic evidence bag, neatly labelled. The contents were blue. A bulky package of sky-blue cloth. Hilary drew in a sharp little breath.

  ‘Yes, we believe it’s Miss Haddad’s burka.’

  ‘Where did you find it?’ Veronica gasped. ‘Did she leave it behind at her lodgings?’

  As so often, the DI ignored her question. ‘Turn it over, would you, Olive?’

  The other side of the bag revealed the intricate smocking that had covered Amina’s forehead and surrounded the slit for her eyes.

  Such surprisingly blue eyes, Hilary remembered.

  ‘Can you say if this corresponds with the one Miss Haddad was wearing when you spoke to her?’

  ‘So it wasn’t at her digs,’ Veronica exclaimed.

  An expression of surprised annoyance crossed the inspector’s face. ‘I should not have underrated your intelligence. No, we found this elsewhere. Either she hid it, meaning to retrieve it later, or the killer put it there.’

  Where? Hilary longed to ask, but did not.

  ‘Yes,’ she said instead. ‘I’m not sure I could swear to it. I haven’t seen a lot of burkas at close quarters, so I don’t know how much they differ, but the cloth, the colour, the pattern of the smocking, as far I can remember, it’s the same.’

  ‘That goes for me too,’ Veronica said.

  ‘Well done, ladies.’ DI Fellows smiled with relief. ‘I’m afraid embroidery wasn’t a strong point of the officers who interviewed her.’

  DS Petersen wrote something in her notebook and put the package aside, somewhat possessively, Hilary thought.

  ‘Now,’ the inspector said more briskly, as though turning to another subject, ‘you two ladies were in the High Street at midnight on Wednesday, following Rupert Honeydew and his crew.’

  ‘They woke me up,’ Hilary said. ‘Right underneath our window. Despite the double glazing.’

  ‘I won’t comment on why you chose to get dressed and follow them, but the fact is that you were there. You saw them stop at the police tape.’

  ‘Yes. There was a rather alarmed-looking officer holding the fort. He was joined pretty quickly by a policewoman in one of those fluorescent jackets. I rather thought Honeydew might just push the tape aside and lead the dance right through. Your officers looked as though they were radioing for help.’

  ‘Yes, yes. We’ve got their statements. And you were fairly close when this happened? You seem to have taken in all the details.’

  ‘Not at first. They’d passed our hotel some time before we’d put our clothes on and got down to the street. But once they’d stopped, yes, we caught them up.’

  ‘So you passed St John’s church?’

  Something prickled alarm in Hilary’s mind. The Church of St John the Baptist, with its labyrinth in the grass and the Holy Thorn tree.

&n
bsp; ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you know what Miss Haddad was wearing when she was found in the abbey two days later.’

  ‘Black leather jacket, white shirt, black leggings, and those pretty sandals,’ Veronica confirmed.

  ‘You’ve already told us that you didn’t see Miss Haddad in her burka that Wednesday night, although she’d been wearing it when she followed the same dancers to Glastonbury Tor that afternoon.’

  ‘Not quite the same,’ Veronica corrected him. ‘There were no men in animal masks the first time.’

  ‘Just so. But you told us you hadn’t seen Miss Haddad that night.’

  ‘I see what you’re getting at,’ Hilary said. ‘We were assuming she would be wearing her burka. But she might not have been. You want to know whether we saw a girl in a black leather jacket whom we wouldn’t have recognized as Amina.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Hilary studied the glass-topped cane table with the coffee cups. So much had happened that it was hard to cast her mind back that far.

  ‘I remember noticing that there were surprisingly few people out on the street watching like us. I saw a few curtains twitch. But I had the impression the folk of Glastonbury felt this was not a show for tourists and he was better left to get on with whatever it was he was doing. So no, there weren’t many bystanders, and I don’t remember a girl dressed in black and white. I could be mistaken, though. What I definitely remember is that idiot Joan Townsend letting off flash bulbs in his face to get her pictures for the papers. I’m surprised she’s not the one who was found dead.’

  ‘You asked just now if we’d passed St John’s,’ Veronica said thoughtfully. ‘There’s a pretty big tree at the front of the churchyard. She could have been standing in its shadow and we wouldn’t have seen her. And that’s where the Glastonbury Thorn is, isn’t it? Just behind that tree. Your sergeant said Amina was clutching a sprig of it in her hand when you found her.’

  The sergeant’s face darkened with annoyance.

  ‘Is that where you found the burka?’ Veronica asked. ‘In the churchyard?’

  Again, that startled look in the inspector’s eyes.

  ‘Olive. Exhibit number two.’

  The second evidence bag the sergeant was guarding was thinner. Inside was a white plastic carrier bag with a blue-and-black logo. Hilary peered closer and decided it was a stylized picture of a hammer. The lettering below it said Arnold’s.

  ‘It’s from a local hardware shop,’ Fellows explained. ‘The burka was inside it … It’s all right, Sergeant. I’m sure Mrs Masters and Mrs Taylor can be discreet … We found the burka in it.’

  ‘But Amina …?’ Veronica frowned.

  ‘Yes, it’s not the sort of shop you’d expect a single young woman living in digs to need. So did she put the burka in the bag herself, and hide it until she wanted to go back to her lodging? Or did someone else leave it there, perhaps to put us off the scent? We followed that up. The store owner remembered her. It’s not often he gets a customer in a burka here. And I can see what you’re thinking, Mrs Masters. Was she buying ingredients or equipment for a bomb? I can set your mind at rest on that score. She came in to buy a pot of petunias.’

  Hilary relaxed. For a horrid moment she had wondered whether she had got Amina Haddad totally wrong.

  ‘You haven’t seen this bag before? That night, or earlier? Not that that would be conclusive evidence. There must be hundreds of them around. But it’s certainly very possible that Amina put the bag there herself. She must have come out of her lodgings wearing her burka. It certainly wasn’t among the possessions she left there. It could be that when she neared the High Street, she took it off so that no one would recognize her.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’ Veronica asked. ‘She didn’t mind being seen in it before.’

  ‘I think I know the answer to that.’ Hilary’s eyes went enquiringly to the inspector. ‘Only a few hours earlier, Amina had followed Rupert Honeydew and his acolytes up the Tor. She was writing notes about everything they did. From the look he gave us on Tuesday evening, when he thought we were intruding on him on the Tor, I’d say he didn’t take kindly to that. Did he threaten her? Have you asked Mel Fenwick?’

  ‘Have you ever thought of a career in CID? Yes, of course we’ve questioned Miss Fenwick about Rupert Honeydew and his antics. You’re perfectly right. He threatened that if he caught Miss Haddad intruding on their ceremonies again, his men would not only strip off her burka, but a lot more besides.’

  ‘So,’ Veronica said slowly. ‘She was in the churchyard, without her burka, thinking she was watching him secretly. So what went wrong?’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  When the detectives had gone, Hilary and Veronica rejoined Morag in the hotel lounge.

  Morag’s eyes challenged them. ‘Well, did you manage to tell them anything they didn’t know, after all that cloak and dagger stuff?’

  The two women exchanged questioning glances. ‘Not really,’ Hilary said. ‘Well, not much.’

  ‘There was a little matter of embroidery,’ Veronica smiled.

  ‘Embroidery?’

  ‘But they told us a great deal, at least Inspector Fellows did,’ Veronica added.

  ‘But you’re not going to tell me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, dear. We really can’t. I think Inspector Fellows may have overstepped the mark as it is. At least, his sergeant thought so, by the look on her face.’

  ‘I think he was hoping that something he said might prompt our memories,’ Hilary said. ‘I’m only sorry he didn’t have much success.’

  As Morag and Veronica drifted into family gossip, Hilary excused herself. ‘I don’t know about you, but it feels as though it’s been a very long day. I think I’ll have an early night.’

  ‘I’ll try not to disturb you.’ Veronica smiled. ‘We shan’t be long ourselves.’

  Alone in bed, Hilary felt the weight of sorrow for Amina that persisted beyond her night-time prayers. She felt angry with herself that, if she could not have prevented the student’s death, at least she should have done more to convict Amina’s killer. It must be Rupert Honeydew, mustn’t it? He was undoubtedly the Chalice Well bomber, and it made no sense for anyone else to have planted the High Street bomb. She could not really believe that, for all his threats, he would have added to that by murdering Amina just because she had been so assiduously taking notes of his esoteric ceremonies. They had, after all, been very public dances in the streets. No, Amina must have stumbled upon something that linked him to the bombs. But what?

  For a while longer she wrestled with the problem. Then sleep claimed her, before Veronica came upstairs.

  Hilary woke suddenly, with a clarity of conviction that she had remembered something. She looked at the digits of the clock-radio beside her bed. Twelve-thirty.

  What was it that had startled her out of sleep?

  Then it came back to her. A statement of Veronica’s, as she tried to soothe a tearful and angry Morag. ‘There’s this rather nice Detective Inspector in charge of the Chalice Well bomb and now Amina Haddad’s murder.’

  It had just slipped out. After that, both Hilary and Veronica had been particularly careful not to give away the identity of the murder victim. Morag had been too upset to make any reaction at the time. But what if it had come back to her later, just as the memory had jolted Hilary awake?

  Would her first instinct, like Joan Townsend’s, be to ring a newspaper editor or a TV producer and break the story for a fee, and to give her a feather in her would-be journalist’s cap? What had she been doing all the time Veronica and Hilary were talking to the two detectives?

  Hilary was astonished at how much she hated the thought of seeing Amina’s name plastered over the morning papers. For all her show of righteous indignation, she had not really minded all that much that Veronica had revealed Rupert Honeydew’s arrest to her journalist daughter. Honeydew was a dangerous man, and a show-off extrovert as well. What did she care if his name made the headlines he deser
ved?

  But Amina was different. Hilary was startled to realize how protective she felt about the odd, defensive young woman behind the veil. And she could imagine the headlines that would follow news of her death in a town that had just suffered a bombing outrage. Words like ISLAMIST and TERRORIST. They would end up making her sound like the perpetrator, not a victim.

  Had Morag remembered the name? Had she acted yet?

  Before she knew what she was doing, Hilary had swung her legs out of bed. She hadn’t thought to bring a dressing gown for an en-suite room, but she snatched up a thick Arran sweater and pulled it on over her nightdress. Quietly she eased the bedroom door open.

  The corridor was softly lit at night, but a stronger, colder ray streamed down its length from a window at the end. It was only two nights after Wednesday’s full moon.

  Hilary shook away a sudden thought of the men in animal masks and the hatred in Rupert Honeydew’s eyes. She was safe in the Bowes Hotel, behind locked doors.

  Morag’s room was number six, further down the corridor and on the opposite side. Hilary padded towards it.

  Halfway there, she found herself waking out of the trance-like compulsion that had driven her to advance on the student’s door and demand that she did not break the police silence over the name of yesterday morning’s murder victim.

  She had been about to make a colossal fool of herself. There was not the slightest evidence that Morag had noticed the name her mother had inadvertently let slip. She had still been sore that the inside information about Rupert Honeydew’s arrest was now all over the web and that the two women would tell her nothing further. There had been no indication that she now had another privileged story.

  Hilary scolded herself that she really would have done better to stay in bed.

  As common sense returned, she settled the sweater closer about her. The night was cold for May.

  Something else was niggling at her mind. She shook her head, trying to free the thought. It would not come. She walked slowly beyond the glow of the wall lamps into the whiter moonlight at the end of the corridor.