Feverfew and False Friends

by Ruby Loren

  More than that… I was pretty certain he was now mine.

  “Where is it? I can’t see!” Jane screamed, waving an umbrella around like a sword.

  It was this unusual sight that greeted Detective Admiral and the rest of the police force when they stormed into the front room.

  18

  A Watertight Case

  “I did it okay? I made a mistake and I regret it!” Jane shouted, still waving the umbrella around.

  The police looked at one another, confused.

  “Is she threatening us?” I heard one of the officers say out of the corner of his mouth to Detective Admiral.

  “Did she do it?” Sean asked me, coming closer so he wouldn’t be overheard. I adjusted my position to avoid him making contact with the hellhound - who may or may not sink his teeth into anyone that bumped into him. The hounds may be invisible, but they were still very solid when they wanted to be. I was filled with the fear that this little room was about to be crowded with police, and I wouldn’t be able to get Erebus out without raising some serious questions.

  I tried to stay cool. “No, I don’t think she murdered Sarah and Helen, but… it’s complicated,” I told the detective, making my eyes go wide to impress upon him the weirder side of this mystery - the side that would probably never reach a court of law.

  “Right… which wall did you say it was?” he said, moving the topic onto more important things.

  “Hang on a second… what’s going on? Why are you all in here? And why is that guy carrying a sledgehammer?” Daryl asked, probably starting to figure out what was going on.

  “I know you killed them. And I know why, too,” I told him.

  He paled. “I already told the police I had nothing to do with Helen’s disappearance. I wish I knew where she was!”

  “I do know where she is. She’s in that wall,” I said, pointing to the wall that had the TV in front of it.

  Sean looked uncertainly at the spot I was indicating. “The dust on the door handle matched the plaster in the shed.”

  “Plus, there are damp marks on that wall… an internal wall,” I said, looking across at Daryl when I said it.

  His mouth set in a hard line.

  I hadn’t thought about it at the time. I’d assumed that the damp marks on the wallpaper were merely signs of an old house, but then I’d realised that this wall backed onto the dining room and wasn’t a place where you would usually see damp - unless it was pouring through the ceiling… which - I looked up - showed nothing at all.

  “The wallpaper was put on over a wall that had been plastered but didn’t have time to dry properly before the paper was added. It was the perfect way to make your partner’s body disappear where no one would think of looking. The only giveaway was the not-quite-dried plaster slowly making the wallpaper damp. It wouldn’t have been visible on the day you put the paper up and the police investigated the trail of destruction left through your property.”

  “Sounds good enough to me,” the officer with the sledgehammer said, bringing it back to take a swing.

  “That’s destruction of property! You have no right… and no evidence!” Daryl protested. “You need a warrant.”

  Sean Admiral bent down in front of the wall and rubbed his finger along the floorboards. He showed us all that it was white, coated in plaster dust that must have missed the dust sheet I suspected Daryl would have put down. He’d been smart, but he hadn’t been spotless because he’d been rushing - knowing it wouldn’t be long before I’d be round with Helen’s feverfew tea.

  “I call that probable cause,” Sean said, his voice grim. “Proceed, Officer Daniels,” he instructed. The officer with the hammer swung it at the wall.

  It caved and crumbled easily, further lending credence to my theory that it had been a bodge job. The final nail in the coffin was when Helen Regal’s corpse fell out of the stud wall.

  Detective Admiral took one look at the pale, plaster splashed corpse, and turned back to Daryl Hex.

  “Daryl Hex, I am arresting you under suspicion of the murders of Helen Regal and Sarah May.”

  A female officer walked over and cuffed Daryl whilst he gaped at the sight of his partner, revealed within the wall. “I never did that!” he protested. “Why would I have wanted to kill her?”

  “I can answer that,” I said, stepping forwards and giving Erebus a little more breathing space. With a bit of luck, and some careful manoeuvring, he might be able to slip out of the room and make a break for it if everyone piled in to look at the body. “It was only when I realised that the motive for this murder wasn’t anything to do with the accusations written on the poison pen letters that I finally understood. It was done for love. Or at least… what some might believe is love,” I added, directing the comment at Jane, who looked shamefaced.

  “I don’t get it. Why put her in the wall?” one of the officers was muttering.

  “This is all nonsense. I want a lawyer… the one that Emma Kirkus had!” Daryl said.

  “Be quiet and listen,” Detective Admiral told him, buoying my heart up for a moment, before he shot me a look that said ‘don’t mess this up’.

  I cleared my throat and kept going. “You’ve been having an affair with Jane Spiney. I’m guessing it started pretty recently.” I looked again at Jane and she blushed. “The point is, you weren’t satisfied with cheating on your partner. You wanted to be with Jane permanently, and to do that, you decided the only logical thing to do was to make your partner disappear. This part is conjecture, but I knew Helen… I’m guessing you couldn’t even get a word in edgeways when you tried to mention splitting up, plus, you have your daughter to think about. Divorce would take her away from you, and I know Hannah looks up to you a lot.”

  I took a breath but didn’t let anyone interject. “You planned this crime for weeks before you finally made your move to get rid of Helen. I’m guessing it was the true crime novels that gave you the idea. There’s quite a collection of them on your bookshelf. I’m not sure which case in particular inspired you, but when Detective Admiral hired a communication in crime analyst, it’s no wonder she drew the wrong conclusion that the letter writer was a woman jealous of her peers - you were copying someone else’s work. In terms of the actual poisonous content of the letters… you work around town as an odd-job man. I’m sure you hear a lot of gossip whilst you’re busy in the background. Your family has a long history in this town. I think you figured out enough to be able to push people’s buttons. We all assumed that where the letters were concerned, there was no smoke without fire, but in fact, they were just a smokescreen.”

  “I didn’t write the letters! You caught the letter writer redhanded,” Daryl protested, still keeping a look of bafflement on his face, even though he knew I was speaking the truth… and we’d literally just found the body that he’d hidden in the wall.

  “I think that was a piece of good luck for you. Emma deliberately copied the style of envelope and the magazine cuttings for the letters that you’d used. It was by pure chance that you’d used the library’s computer to print out the names of your victims before you made your collages. Emma is a librarian, so naturally used the same printer. You were there painting the outside of Jane’s book shop when she was caught delivering her version. I’m sure you saw the opportunity. Whilst the police were asking Emma questions, you planted the magazines you’d used in a bin by her desk in the library, making her look guilty for a lot more than just the one letter. It was only when I asked at a, uh… club meeting,” I only just stopped myself from saying ‘coven’, “that I discovered Jane was the only one in the group who hadn’t been sent a letter… until Emma sent her one. I think you couldn’t bring yourself to send something that nasty to the woman you loved.”

  Daryl just shook his head in response, but he was no longer meeting my gaze. Instead, there was an air of resignation about him.

  “When it came to the murder itself, you decided to lay a false trail.” This was where it got tricky. I was going t
o have to skirt the truth a little bit or risk looking crazy! “Helen, as you can see by the bookshelf, was interested in occult texts. Wormwood has a lot of folklore and there are those who still believe in it. You knew that when you decided to make it look like a monster had dragged her off into the woods. What else could it be when there are no wild animals native to South East England that would be able to do a thing like that to a person? I bet some of the police here have even heard strange tales of unusual animals in these parts.” This was a gamble, but I saw a few guilty nods and worried looks.

  It was the only reason why an animal attack had seemed even vaguely plausible, and Daryl had known it. More specifically, he’d known that people would suspect a hellhound - having probably been given the idea by Helen herself in the wake of the Council’s return and the worry amongst the coven. He’d used it to his advantage. It was Natalia who’d driven that home to me when she’d claimed that ‘everyone knew the Council used hellhounds’. I believed that with Daryl’s linage and Helen’s talkative nature, he’d have known it, too.

  “The trail you left had us all looking in the wrong direction. The letter and the note were just additional red herrings, put there to make the police believe it might even have been a hoax disappearance - designed by Helen herself to make everyone think that she had chosen to fake her own death, in order to escape the threat that the letter was promising to reveal. You tore the note from her diary, which you probably handled regularly as her partner and someone she trusted. You must have spotted a convenient phrase you could use which you knew would be proven to be her handwriting. The pig’s blood also backed up the illusion of a faked violent struggle. It was clever,” I acknowledged.

  I tilted my head at Daryl. “What you did to Sarah May still puzzles me. The best I can guess is that she was sitting outside of your house on the day you killed Helen. I know that she told the police she didn’t see anyone leave the house apart from you when you went to work that morning. What nobody knew was that you’d already killed Helen, plastered her in the wall, and set the scene before you left for work. With no body to help the police work out a time of death, no one would know she was missing until I came round to deliver the tea.”

  Right on cue one of the police officers looked up from the body. “It looks like she might have been poisoned. There’s foam around her lips.”

  I looked back at Daryl, suddenly remembering the washed up cup on the draining board on the day I’d found the gory false trail through the kitchen and out the back door. “You poisoned the tea. My tea!” I said, outraged that he’d surely used one of my herbal teas to murder his partner.

  He flinched but that was the only sign that I’d guessed correctly. This man had sunk to lows I’d never even guessed at.

  “I don’t even think you knew if Sarah genuinely knew anything, but I think you worried about what she’d seen that day. After all - she’d been right outside your house! What if she suddenly remembered something incriminating? Something that you hadn’t thought of? It was bad enough that she was able to say that no one had come and gone since you left for work and I arrived with Helen’s tea. That was only okay because it was widely believed that Helen had been dragged out through the back garden, so surely her attacker - probably a wild animal - had entered that way, too… but I think paranoia got the best of you and you went to see Sarah May. It was you I heard Sarah answer the door to when she was calling me to tell me something important.” I thought back to the phone conversation. Sarah had definitely opened the door and addressed the person standing on the doorstep before she’d said the words on the phone that unknowingly sealed her fate.

  “Poor Sarah was just carrying out the instructions written on a letter that you’d sent her.” I shook my head. “You didn’t have time to poison Sarah. You killed her violently and dragged her outside, knowing that no one would see because her house backs onto the woods. It would look the same as Helen’s disappearance. But the next thing you did is what marks you as a true coldblooded killer. You took a calculated risk and took the body back inside the house, locking it in the cupboard under the stairs - gambling that the police wouldn’t even notice the concealed cupboard when they were so busy following a trail that led to nowhere in the woods. You even hung air fresheners in the cupboard to conceal your actions if the police stuck around for too long.”

  I felt Erebus nudge the back of my leg, but I couldn’t react. Not now. “The phone conversation meant you were aware that I was on my way to Sarah’s house, and there was no time to do anything else. You knew that the police would be running around looking in all of the wrong places. It was probably simple to break-in to Sarah’s house when the heat had died down and move the body somewhere where no one would find it, now that you’d had time to think. Poor Sarah. I don’t think she ever suspected you,” I told him, truthfully.

  Daryl Hex said nothing, but I could see the knowledge of it in his eyes. He kept looking over at Helen’s body, like it might spring to life and get him.

  “He has a lockup,” Jane said, speaking for the first time since the body had been found. She’d turned white and looked very ill. “He stores most of his work things in it. You should look there,” she suggested.

  Judging by the venomous look Daryl shot her, she was probably right about that. Jane hung her head and looked ashamed, not meeting my gaze. She knew what she’d done… but it wasn’t something that could be punished by normal law.

  “Make a note of it,” Detective Admiral instructed the officers around him. “Take him away,” he said to the rest of them. Two officers detached themselves from the group and joined the one standing next to Daryl, leading him out of the room and towards the police cars waiting outside.

  Sean Admiral looked from me to Jane Spiney. I tried to send him a message with a look. He slightly inclined his head, so subtly, no one else would have noticed. He was trusting me again. “Ms Spiney, Ms Salem, I will need to take statements from both of you. This room is a crime scene. Please wait in the kitchen.”

  Jane stood up and made to walk out as quickly as possible, visibly sickened by being in the presence of Helen’s body - murdered by the man I knew she had - at least partially - manipulated, into doing it.

  She’d forgotten about the hellhound in the aftermath that had followed and walked straight into him. He let out a low growl that I was forced to cover with a cough, but that didn’t stop Jane from shrieking and giving me a very wide berth this time.

  “Did you just growl at her?” Sean asked me in an undertone.

  “No. I’ll explain later,” I replied, just as quietly. Then, I carefully stepped around him, allowing Erebus to lead the way into the kitchen… just behind the woman he’d come here to kill.

  Once we were alone and the investigation was underway, I pushed open the kitchen door and let Erebus out, as he didn’t seem keen to use his inter-dimensional trick again. He looked back at me and cocked his head.

  “Wait in Witchwood Forest… for now,” I told him, making sure I looked back at Jane when I said the last bit. She gulped and looked terrified. I had a feeling that getting the truth from her wouldn’t be too difficult.

  “It listens to you?” she asked in a strangled voice, looking at me in both fear and disgust.

  “He does,” I said. “Who would have thought it? I must have the luck of a devil.”

  Jane flinched, just as I’d known she would.

  “You made a deal with Chloe Rex.”

  “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen! I had no idea… I just thought it might help Daryl to ditch Helen. She was driving him mad, but he wasn’t willing to do anything about it because of Hannah. I just thought that with a little push he might divorce Helen and then we could be together. I just wanted him to pick me, not the kid that’s not even his!” She covered her mouth as soon as she said it, but I knew it was the truth. It was how she really felt.

  “I know it was selfish. I didn’t know it would do so much harm. I didn’t make him kill anyone. I didn�
�t even fulfil my side of the deal when I figured out that something bad was happening. Daryl’s been acting strangely ever since… ever since he must have done all of those terrible things,” she said, her voice breaking. “I honestly had no idea! Chloe said everything would work out for the best. It seemed like a good deal. Especially when Emma took the fall for the letters. I figured she was right.”

  “Why did Emma send a letter to you?” I asked. I’d heard the explanation the other witch had given at the coven meeting, but I hadn’t missed the look that had passed between them.

  Jane shifted uncomfortably. “She was friendly with Daryl before I was. I think he used to go to the library a lot. They liked each other.” Her lips thinned and I realised that Emma wasn’t the jealous one… it had been Jane. She’d used a deal to turn the tables on Emma’s affair, and the other witch had retaliated - before probably figuring out a few things during questioning. The look that had passed between the witches and the casual mention of Emma’s book shop dream… I’d seen enough blackmail recently to know that Emma had intended to extort Jane once she’d worked out the truth. I would have to have some serious words with her, too.

  “What did you have to do for the deal?” I asked. I was determined to find out the price of these deals that were being handed out left, right, and centre in town at the moment.

  “Oh, it wasn’t even anything that bad. I was supposed to persuade businesses to stop advertising in your magazine and stop shopping at your shop. I’m not sure why. I guess someone has got it in for you, but I refused on principle. I didn’t get what I asked for. I didn’t get Daryl. He wasn’t the same,” she said, once more revealing how selfish she was. She’d readily agreed to sabotage my business, but had only stopped when she hadn’t got what she’d wanted.

  I considered the wretched witch in front of me, who I’d only narrowly saved from being ripped to shreds by a hellhound. I knew there was no way she would be found guilty of any crimes, but I was certain the coven would judge her differently. “Your fate will be decided by your fellow witches,” I said, utterly disgusted by her actions. I hated to say it, but I’d have expected something like this from one of the Ghouls or their associates, heck - Adelaide had thought nothing of setting me up, presumably in return for some favourable feelings from the mayor - but Jane was a nasty surprise. I’d always promised myself that I wouldn’t turn dictator when it came to the coven… but I thought this might prove the exception to the rule.