‘But we won’t find it again in the dark,’ insisted Michelle.
‘I’m not saying we leave it till dark, just the kind of time that Mr Weems is sitting down to his supper.’
‘But say Weems is suspicious and comes back later?’
‘We make sure he doesn’t,’ said Jake. ‘Robert, you know all about planning and stuff.’
‘Yes,’ Robert nodded.
Jake gave Robert Weems’s card.
‘Could you give him a ring at home this evening and keep him talking about what it entails for us to submit our applications to all these different organisations he mentioned?’
Robert grinned.
‘And keep him talking for just long enough for you to dig up whatever’s at that spot?’
‘Exactly,’ said Jake.
Chapter 14
Jake felt a mixture of relief and excitement when they got back to the Grail and Thorn. They’d found the hiding place, he felt sure of it, so now he should be able to relax. But the anticipation of uncovering what lay buried at that spot, maybe finding out that it was just another empty cover and not a book, made him feel sick with tension. He felt so edgy that he knew he couldn’t just sit in the pub with the others, nor would he be able to relax in the room that he and Robert shared.
‘I’m going out to explore Glastonbury,’ he told them after they’d parked the cars. ‘Anyone fancy coming with me?’
The others declined: Andy wanted to take Woody for a long run; Robert wanted to read a newspaper and do the crossword, and Michelle said she had some work to catch up on.
‘OK,’ said Jake. ‘We’ll meet back here at seven, if that’s OK with everyone. Hopefully Weems will be off duty by then and settled down in front of the telly.’
‘And ready for my very boring call about local planning regulations.’ Robert grinned.
Jake headed into the town. As well as needing to be on the move, he reasoned it was a good idea for him to continue to be seen to be checking out all things Arthurian and keep up their cover. It was as he walked along the high street that he became aware of a couple of hippies he was sure he’d seen before.
Not that there should be anything particularly suspicious about that; after all, the place was full of visitors traipsing around, going in and out of shops and exhibits, and the odds were that people would keep bumping into one another. But there was something not quite right about these particular hippies. For one thing, they were young. Most of the hippies walking around Glastonbury seemed to be of an older generation, as though they had got stuck in a time warp in the 1960s, but their bodies had continued to age, and now they were grey-haired and frail-looking echoes of a time long gone by. But these two, although dressed in clothes from a time when tie-dye and sheepskin may have been cool, looked much, much younger. There was also a sharpness, an alertness about them, about their faces and their eyes, that didn’t fit with the laid-back look of their clothes. The same alertness was also in the way they moved; they were nimble on their feet. Not that hippies shouldn’t be nimble, but these two looked like people disguised as hippies. The man wore a tie-dye waistcoat over flared blue jeans, and the woman wore a long, shaggy sheepskin coat. Both wore coloured beads around their necks, and the man wore beads wrapped around one wrist. It was all too much, thought Jake.
He wondered if they might have been undercover police officers from the drugs squad. That could explain the discrepancy about how they looked, and how they acted. He tried to remember where he’d seen them before. Then it came to him. They’d been sitting at a table in the garden at the Grail and Thorn when he and Robert had arrived. Jake was sure they’d had drinks on the table with them, but they could have been empty glasses, or belonged to someone else. Then he was sure he’d seen them when he’d done his earlier solo walk around Glastonbury.
Had it just been coincidence? Or had Robert been right when he’d said that whoever was watching them would already be at Glastonbury, waiting for them? Had this couple been waiting for them? If so, why hadn’t they followed them when they’d gone to dig in the fields?
Jake stopped outside a shop selling crystals and other Arthurian artefacts and examined the display in the window. He stood there for at least three minutes. Then he turned and looked along the street. The couple were still in the same place he’d last seen them, standing outside a café, seemingly reading the menu on display.
Jake headed away from them, along the high street, and as he did he was aware of them moving off after him. Again, it could be coincidence, but there was one way to find out.