Witching Murder

by Jennie Melville

  Even as Charmian looked, a buzzer sounded from an inner room and the young woman rose and disappeared without a word. Master had called.

  ‘And that was?’ asked Charmian. ‘I mean who’s she?’

  ‘Oh, that’s Miss Yeoman, she’s Mr Dix’s assistant. But she’s been working for Mr Eden a good deal the last few days.’ The information was blandly delivered, but with meaning. ‘Mr Dix has got Mr Eden in there now. He’s the Managing Director of Homeline,’ she said in answer to the question that Charmian hadn’t asked. ‘We’ve been seeing a lot of him lately. Changes, changes.’ She went back to her screen, which was now sending up angry signals, with the air of one who might not be here at the end of the week and who won’t mind if she is not. ‘Mr Dix’ll be sorry to keep you waiting.’

  A group of three came through the door: first Miss Yeoman, and then, behind her, two dark-suited men, one in early middle age, and the other older, grey-haired and spectacled. He was doing the talking.

  ‘That’s the way of it, Leonard, we are between the Devil and the deep blue sea here. When I say that, then you have it in a nutshell. But we have several valuable properties in hand, and I would ask you to bear in mind that we deal with a better class of property than Ellistons or the L and N. We’re handling Tinker’s Grange and that is a very substantial affair, well in the million bracket, Len. And I may say we have had a nibble from royalty.’

  Although Mr Dix called Mr Eden of Homeline by his given name, this did not seem to make them on familiar terms. Leonard Eden muttered something terse, ignored Charmian and took off, followed to the door by Miss Yeoman, who seemed to be receiving instructions at the door of the bright Mercedes. He rolled off, unscathed by any parking regulations.

  As he always would be, Charmian concluded. One of life’s success stories.

  Mr Dix drew a breath. ‘Thank God, he’s gone. We’ve seen more of him lately than I want. Bring us some coffee, Mary, dear.’

  Mary rose from her screen, which seemed the better without her as it steadied down and ceased the mild screams it had been sending out. ‘ So, are we still here?’

  ‘As far as I know, dear, as far as I know.’

  ‘And has the Queen enquired after Tinker’s Grange?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge, Mary,’ said Mr Dix, growing more cheerful with every minute that parted him from Leonard Eden.

  Then he saw Charmian, who had begun to think she was invisible. ‘Selling or buying, miss?’

  ‘This is Chief Superintendent Charmian Daniels,’ said Mary, who appeared to know everything, secret or otherwise. ‘Sorry, Miss Daniels, I heard you give a talk once. On women and crime. Riveted, I was.’

  Miss Yeoman came back from the door which she had been holding open as the Mercedes disappeared from view. ‘What lovely ties Mr Eden has,’ she said. ‘He’s a lovely man.’

  ‘Now you be careful,’ called Mary. ‘He’s spoken for, he’s a married man.’

  Mr Dix’s bonhomie disappeared to be replaced by gloom. ‘Be quiet, you two. I can guess why you’ve come, Miss Daniels, it’s about that poor young woman in Dulcet Road, isn’t it?’ He sighed. ‘I think we’ve given one of your colleagues all the help we can.’

  Charmian’s eyes went to the board of keys. ‘You have the keys to the house?’

  ‘Yes. I was instructed by the owner to see that I always kept a set. She only rented, a short-term let. When the locks were replaced by the police I felt it right to get a set. They obliged.’

  ‘Has your set remained here all the time?’

  Mr Dix looked alert. ‘What’s up? Had a break-in? Nothing to do with us. We haven’t handed them out, have we, Biddy?’ He looked at Miss Yeoman. ‘You’re in charge of the keys.’

  ‘Could anyone have taken a set without you knowing?’

  ‘Well, they seem to be here still,’ said Mr Dix, taking a look. ‘So they would have to have come back as well. Biddy, what’s your opinion? You’re keeping quiet.’

  Miss Yeoman took up a defensive position. ‘As you know, I only returned from holiday the day before yesterday, and Mary has been in charge of the keys.’

  ‘I had to go to the dentist,’ said Mary blithely. ‘I do the post too, you know. I’ve been in and out. I can’t say I’ve been keeping an eye.’ She stood up, dislodging several sets. ‘Whoops, there they go. Hadham House and Crescent Place.’

  Charmian prepared to leave Blood and Sons with the distinct impression that anyone who so wished could have taken and returned the keys to Dulcet Road. Although why they should then return the keys, having once removed them, puzzled her.

  ‘Sorry we can’t help you,’ said Mr Dix as she retreated. ‘But pleased to have met you, Chief Superintendent, and if you ever sell your house or desire another property, let us advise you. Or if you should wish to let your present home,’ he added hopefully, ‘we always have a list of American and overseas clients looking for good furnished accommodation near to Heathrow. Executives of important firms, diplomats, that sort of thing. Even the odd academic, but they are usually looking for the cheaper properties.’

  He saw Charmian to the door, closing it behind her. She paused for a second on the threshold, then turned quickly back.

  ‘What’s a Chief Super doing on an enquiry like this?’ Mr Dix was saying in an angry voice, by no means as polite as to Charmian. ‘It’s those cursed witches.’ He saw Charmian.

  ‘Just one question: Miss Charles had a lease. A short lease, I think you said. How short?’

  ‘I’d have to consult the files.’ Then as Charmian showed no sign of removing herself: ‘A six months’ lease.’

  ‘Furnished then, I suppose?’

  ‘A modicum of furniture.’

  And she didn’t provide any more, so she did not mean to stay. A convenience address for someone on the move. A bird of passage, this Miss Charles. If that really was her name.

  ‘She must have provided references.’

  ‘It would be in the file.’

  ‘May I see it, please?’

  The file was produced after the opening of several drawers which Charmian thought more for show than anything else. Mr Dix knew where he kept his files.

  Unasked, she sat down to study it. Vivien Charles had paid her six months’ rent in advance; she had provided no references other than her bank. The owner of the property was Barbour Rand Estates.

  She closed the file. ‘What was that about witches?’

  ‘They advertise, Miss Daniels, they advertise. Look in the Post Office window. Or try the library. Good day to you.’

  Charmian went straight to Merrywick Library, a place well known to her, and where a large display-board was open to all who wished to pin up a notice on payment of a small fee. She had used it once herself when Muff went missing. Muff could presumably read, or had friends who could, because she returned home at once.

  There, amid the appeals for drivers for Help the Aged Club, and a notice of the next church bazaar in aid of the Merrywick and Slough Refuge for Battered Women, and another for Katherine Denzil’s Dancing Class for Children – apply soon as there are still a few vacancies – (That’s the chickenpox epidemic, thought Charmian knowledgeably, it weeded them out) there too was this large square notice, white on black, which made it stand out. It had been well placed in the middle of the board with the air of having elbowed out competition. Some careful hand had fixed four large drawing pins, so there was no danger of it getting dislodged.

  TAROT READINGS

  KNOW YOUR DREAMS: A GUIDE.

  HEALTHY EATING.

  And in smaller letters at the bottom: The Merrywick Guild of White Witches. There was a Slough telephone number.

  Charmian removed the notice, taking it round to the librarian who was standing, in thought, behind her great desk.

  ‘Why do you allow this to be put up?’

  The librarian, Teresa Hawkes, took off her spectacles. ‘You shouldn’t have taken that down.’ She stretched out her hand to regain the notice, but Charmian res
isted.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s dangerous?’

  ‘Certainly not, it’s quite harmless. They’re nice women. I know them all. If you have a complaint, you should make it to our committee, Miss Daniels.’

  She knew Charmian, they had crossed swords before. They usually stood on either side of a great divide on women’s issues; Miss Hawkes was fiercely emotional, Charmian took a more intellectual approach, she liked evidence and a reasoned argument.

  But now she was troubled, without much hard fact to go on.

  ‘They are nice women, I’m sure, if you say so, Teresa. I haven’t met them.’ Although she intended to. ‘ But what they are doing could be dangerous.’

  One of them was dead, after all. She had a feeling that a Pandora’s Box had been opened and the furies were flying out.

  She had enough sense of self-preservation not to show this too clearly before Teresa Hawkes’s sceptical but interested gaze; she was enjoying their role reversal. It’s quite shocking, her eyes were saying brightly, how prejudiced you can be on occasion. Charmian winced a little.

  All the same, as she nervously flexed her right hand while walking towards Eton Bridge on her way home, Charmian was conscious of a rise of spirits, a sense of exhilaration. She was feeling better, she was really enjoying doing her own leg work.

  Dolly had achieved this small miracle for her. ‘ God bless you, Dolly Barstow, for getting me into this.’

  In Eton High Street, thinking, not for the first time, how odd it must be to live where every other shop was either an expensive restaurant or an equally expensive antique shop, she paused in front of one of the establishments she had just been deploring. This was an antique shop but of a dustier, humbler kind than the others. Very charming, though, and calling itself The Doll’s House. In the window were a group of china-faced dolls dressed in Victorian clothes, with a bundle of worn-looking Teddy bears slumped behind them.

  This shop also dealt in secondhand books, some in cases inside with a row of cheaper volumes stacked on a table in the street.

  With interest, Charmian saw that another of those black cards advertising the services of the Merrywick Guild of White Witches was stuck on the window. It looked somewhat worn, as if it had been there for some time.

  With even more interest did she observe that the astute owner of The Doll’s House had assembled a row of books on witchcraft for sale.

  Montague Summers on Witchcraft and Black Magic, a battered paperback for 50p. Another by a different author, H. T. Rhodes, called The Satanic Mass, in better condition and costing 75p. She thought she recognised the author as the writer of several respectable textbooks on criminology seen in the library at Police College. So he might be reliable on witches. Did this row of books suggest a strong local interest? Were there not only witches in Merrywick, but also witches in Windsor, and sisters in Slough?

  These two books were interesting, but what interested her more was a slim hardback, published by the Python Press, entitled The Earth Goddess and Her Lore: For modern followers of the ancient faith. The author was Alice Peacock of Merrywick.

  Charmian went inside and bought all three books, tucking them under her arm to read when she reached home. A car stopped beside her and Dolly’s voice said: ‘Hello. Shopping?’

  ‘Look,’ Charmian displayed her purchases. ‘I’ve been supporting a local industry.’

  ‘Alice Peacock? I believe she publishes them herself. She is the Python Press; her father left her a small printing business and she has turned it into something else.’

  Two college boys strolled past, aloof, silent, lordly but dishevelled. Perhaps it was the fashionable way to look. Charmian moved aside, feeling that the world would always move aside for them. Such self-confidence, not a bad way to grow up.

  Dolly poked her head out of the car again. ‘I was looking for you. Come and eat in that wine bar across the road and talk.’

  The Prince Harry Wine Bar had once been a dairy and bore witness to that still in the flagged stone floor and the green and white tiles on the walls which the present owner, an old Etonian called Harry Trefusis, had chosen to leave in situ. Indeed, he dressed up to it, wearing an old-style milkman’s blue striped apron and a straw hat. The purists said that this was what fishmongers had once worn (and still did wear, if you shopped in the right places) but Harry knew what his customers liked. A bit of style.

  He waved his hand at Dolly whom he knew of old. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Come here often?’ asked Charmian.

  ‘Now and again. But Harry and I were at university together. Then he went into wine and I went into the police. I have more of a career structure and I’ll have a pension, but he’s richer.’ At the moment her career prospects did not seem to be cheering her up. ‘They have quite a nice Beaujolais here, and the lasagne’s not bad.’

  ‘Let’s have that, then.’

  ‘I’d better only have a glass, I’ve got to work this afternoon.’

  ‘What’s up, Dolly?’

  Dolly looked a bit sick, but she just shrugged. ‘ Try the wine, not bad is it?’ Then over the lasagne, she said, ‘Had the medical report on Vivien Charles: the post mortem. I saw the doc. She was pregnant.’

  ‘Ah.’ Charmian put down her fork.

  Dolly pushed the food around on her plate, turning her head away and looking out of the window. ‘Got an old Scotch pathologist. Glasgow chap. I expect you know him?’

  ‘Fordyce?’

  ‘That’s right. He told me himself. Three months or so gone, he said. Then he said, “ Poor lass, she’d never have come to term, the embryo was all wrong. A strange little manikin, it would have been.” ’

  Dolly looked at Charmian. ‘ I don’t think he should have said that, do you? But I don’t think he could stop himself. It just popped out.’

  The two women sat in silence, the food untasted. Dolly drained her wine.

  ‘She wouldn’t have known.’

  ‘About the malformation? No, of course not. I wonder who the father was?’

  ‘That’s something we’ll have to look into.’

  ‘You could ask the witch ladies. See if they know.’

  ‘That is something I positively do not wish to do, but I can see I will have to.’

  They ate in silence for a while, then Charmian said, ‘I’d like to meet them. As a group.’

  ‘I can arrange that.’ Dolly got up. She took the bill. ‘ Let me do this. You’re helping me. And Father and Elman are looking the other way while we do it. They’ve agreed.’

  Dolly consulted with the waitress, collected her change, handed over a tip, then returned to the table to pick up her coat. She put her bag and the bill on the table while she did so. Charmian got the impression that she would’ve liked to have said something more, but nothing came out.

  ‘Goodbye. I’ll be in touch.’

  She walked off, manifestly in low spirits, leaving Charmian to consider it all.

  ‘Poor Dolly, she’s in deep,’ thought Charmian. ‘Doesn’t like what she might learn about the parentage of the baby.’ Mr Fox?

  But wasn’t that what the warlock always did? Impregnate the witch.

  She felt sorry for Dolly Barstow, but there were mixed feelings. She lifted her right hand and pulled at the fingers, they felt all right, quite normal, they were normal, just unwilling to pick up a pen and do some writing. It was all in the mind, of course, and that was bad, but she had to admit that she was passionately interested in the problem of Vivien Charles, which she might, jokingly, say she had in hand.

  She drew towards her the bill that Dolly had paid and absently left behind, and started to make notes with her left hand. It worked quite well.

  Never let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.

  Chapter Four

  Charmian walked over the bridge to her home, while Dolly drove back to her official duties. The bridge across the Thames between Windsor and Eton is for pedestrians only and in summer is crowded with visitors enjoying the view o
f the river and the houses that line it.

  Charmian pushed her way through a group of Japanese tourists who seemed to have got lost. In the distance, towards the castle, their woman guide was waving a red umbrella to attract their attention. She failed and as Charmian passed them, the group seemed to take a communal decision to walk towards Eton, leaving their guide to run after them. ‘ St George’s Chapel,’ she was calling. ‘Now it is the Chapel we go to see. After that the College.’ The wind carried her voice away.

  In the hall of her house in Maid of Honour Row, Charmian saw Muff sitting on a suitcase of expensive, striped leather which Charmian knew to come from Loewes. Only one person in her life owned luggage as expensive as that collection. She also smelt coffee, and mixed with it a floral Italian scent she recognised.

  ‘Kate?’

  A tall, tanned girl wearing jeans and a cotton shirt appeared. Ralph Laurens, thought Charmian, who had learnt to detect expensive clothes, even sometimes to buy them.

  ‘Hi, Godmother.’

  ‘So, you’re back.’

  ‘As you see. Delhi could no longer hold me.’

  And, of course, your mother, Annie, my best friend, did not say: Come home, Charmian is in trouble? But she did not utter this aloud. As with so much in her life, it went unexpressed. Possibly this was what her hand resented.

  ‘Where’s Joe?’

  Joe was the young man with whom Kate had started her journey. There was usually a young man. Either she started out with one or she came back with one, rarely the same lad. But Joe had seemed serious.

  ‘Oh, I lost him,’ said Kate airily. ‘He fell in with a lovely young begum and stayed on to help her with her stables. She breeds Arabians.’

  Her godmother could see that Kate had not enjoyed being pushed aside, even for a stable of true-bred Arabs.

  ‘You should have stayed yourself.’

  ‘Not me.’ Kate poured a mug of coffee for Charmian. ‘Anyway, it was time for home. I’d got all I could out of Lutyens. A great man, though.’

  In Charmian’s possibly prejudiced opinion (because she loved the girl), Kate would one day be a good architect, possibly even a great one, but she had a lot of things to work through yet, with, unluckily for her if you looked at it that way, the money to take her time. But she was a warm, affectionate goddaughter, whose occasional spells of lodging with Charmian were appreciated.