Phil Rickman - The Chalice

'Absolute non… nonsense.' Pennard scowled at the break in his voice and cleared his throat. 'Fucking bunkum.'

'So Violet made a deal with your old man. She would treat him again, work with him. And he would let her dispose of the Chalice however she saw fit. Which wasn't going to be easy, she knew that. At that age she really didn't feel up to dealing with evil on this scale. My guess is she probably consulted her own teacher, Theodore Moriarty – he ran a clinic specialising in cases like Roger.'

'He went away,' Lord Pennard said suddenly. A look of astonishment crossed his face. 'My mother told me this, many years later. He went away for six months in 1920.'

'To a clinic?'

'This is ridiculous.' A wave of anger quite visibly went through him, shone in his eyes as his arm swept over the desk, sent the whisky bottle spinning across the room until it hit the gun cupboard.

'While he was away,' Powys said, 'being treated by…Dr Moriarty?… your mother co-operated fully with Violet. She gathered some people, leading magicians of the day, powerful pagans and, I suspect. Christian mystics. And they took the Dark Chalice and they hid it – just as Joseph of Arimathea or the Fisher King was said to have done with the Holy Grail – in a well.'

Pennard sighed. Powys heard the whisky gurgling out of the bottle into the industrial carpet below the gun cupboard.

'They did their best with the Meadwell. They blessed it in the name of God. They did a powerful binding ritual. But it's a bit like burying nuclear waste. It's not possible to destroy something like the Dark Chalice which exists on more than one level. You can only contain it and hope for the best. But it's a hell of a contaminant. I don't know where the well leads, but that's a black spring now. You can see what it's done to the house.'

'I wouldn't know,' Pennard said. 'Not our house anymore.'

'That was part of the deal. Roger Ffitch agreed that when he died, that house would be sold to Violet Firth. Who by this time had her own home and teaching base in Glastonbury. Documents were drawn up. Your mother, Lady Pennard, was party to it, of course. But Violet died first, in 1946, as I'd guess she knew she would, after her unique contribution to the Allied cause.'

'Met the woman once, you know. As a boy. Gave me a bag of sweets.' Lord Pennard actually smiled. 'Bullseyes. Never allowed bullseyes.'

'Did you like her?'

'Did, matter of fact. Jolly. Like a scout mistress. Interfering bitch.'

'The Fall of the House of Pennard?'

'Bunkum. Useless businessman, my father. Incompetent. All there was to it. Never the same after the War. Cracked up. Spent most of his last years in bloody church.'

'Whatever, all the wealth the family acquired with the chalice began to drop away. So Pixhill says. He reckons you did everything in your power to get Meadwell back.'

'Bloody disgrace. Under the table deal while I was away in National Service, Bloody Pixhill. What damn right did fie have to take away our property? Worth over a quarter of a million now, that house. Of course I tried to get it back. Who was the bloody man?'

'Just someone Violet could trust. She needed a custodian for Meadwell. She was only fifty-six when she died. Leukaemia. She'd known it was coming. Maybe years before, you know what these people are like. I doubt if it worried her. Death was just a station between trains. That was what she told Pixhill.'

Just saying it, hearing himself, Powys felt aglow with the certainty of it all. Confirmation now in every response from Pennard, every change in expression, every involuntary gesture.

'What changed?'

Pennard didn't reply. He reached for the whisky before remembering the bottle wasn't there anymore.

'Why did you give up the fight to get Meadwell back?' Powys said.

'Legal costs.'

'No.'

'No. Of course not.' Pennard stood up. 'What's your angle on all this, Powys? What do you hope to get out of it? Book? Bloody bestseller?'

Powys shook his head. 'I'll be honest. I was going to tell you I'd publish the whole thing if you didn't play ball.'

'And now?'

'It's too heavy. Until just now I don't think I entirely believed it.' He leaned back at last on the stiff sofa. 'I don't want to threaten you. It would be the wrong thing to do. I won't write about it.'

Pennard looked at him for a long time. 'I'm inclined to believe you.'

'Then tell me what changed.'

'Why do you think I should?'

'Because I think it's something to do with Diane,' Powys said. 'Who, according to the late chairman of the Pixhill Trust, is in, and I quote, danger of a most extreme and everlasting nature. And she's disappeared.'

Lord Pennard collapsed into his chair. He suddenly looked much older.

'It was Archer, wasn't it?'

She kept opening her eyes but they wouldn't focus. She saw the blobs of faces around her in the gloom, but their pictures fled as she tried to identity them, flitting from one to another, very quickly. She thought she saw the Pilgrims; Rozzie and Mort and Viper and Gwyn. She must be hallucinating, dredging memories from the sludge of her subconscious. But in the end she could concentrate on only one thought.

'It was… Archer. Archer pushed her downstairs. Archer killed her.'

Capturing the certainty before sleep reached out for her.

'I've never met him,' Powys said reasonably. 'Never even seen him. Got no reason to think ill of him. Hell, I'm not even very political.'

Working on information now that he hadn't found in Pixhill papers. Piecing together what he'd gleaned from Juanita and particularly from Verity. Verity who pattered about the streets and chatted innocuously, sometimes inanely. And heard things…

'Is this gossip?' Lord Pennard seemed stunned, 'is this talked about?'

'I don't honestly think it is. It just… suggests itself. Maybe… maybe it suggested itself to you.'

'How can I discuss this with you? I've never even seen you before tonight. Certainly never heard of you. You lied to get in here; how do I know you're not lying now?'

Powys said nothing. Pennard had his head in his hands.

He'd found another bottle of whisky,

'My wife died after falling downstairs. She'd been to the nursery. Liked to spend time there. Been redecorated, refurnished in pink. She had her bed moved into the next room. Said she knew it was going to be a girl because… a wise woman had told her. My wife believed in such nonsense. She'd sit in the nursery alone and read for hours, as though the fact of the pink paint could influence matters at that stage.'

He drank some whisky. His face no longer smooth and polished but blotched with tension.

'Closed that part of the house now. Don't heat it, don't light it. Let it damn well rot. If it falls down, it falls down.'

'Were you in the house at the time?'

'I was in here. Didn't like her in her maudlin, nursery moping mood. One of the maids – still had maids then – came to tell me. They'd found my wife at the bottom of the stairs. Semi-conscious. Called the doctor. And the Belvedere, the private clinic. Sent a midwife with an assistant. Bugger-all use they were.'

'How near to time was she?'

'Seven months. Baby came out, but the damned placenta wouldn't. Because of the fall. Place was like the inside of an abattoir.'

He choked back something and became annoyed with himself and pushed all the bloodsports magazines to the floor.

Powys said, 'Someone told me Archer and his mother didn't get on.'

'Who told you?'

'Does it matter?'

'No. It's true. This… Dark Chalice business. This blasted woman… this Fortune… Firth biddy… spent a lot of time, apparently, with my mother while my father was away at his… clinic. Whatever she told her, my mother evidently passed on to Helen – my wife. One Christmas, few glasses of wine, told the boy about the legend of the Chalice. My wife was furious. Insisted it was up to the women of the family to exercise constant vigilance to counter any attempt arising from "male avarice or poverty'', as she put it, to "unbind'' the thing. Archer, of course, was immediately enchanted. We'll get it back. Father, won't we? Damn it, if he hadn't learned about it from me, someone else would have told him. Sooner or later.'