‘As I discovered.’
‘He didn’t seem too surprised. I wondered if he was putting on an act.’
‘Could be,’ said Charmian.
Dolly got up and took a little walk around her desk. Charmian could sometimes irritate her when she was too enigmatic.
‘We’ll have to let him go soon. Can’t hold him with what we’ve got. You don’t think he’s killed her already?’
‘She might be dead,’ said Charmian. ‘Don’t keep walking round the desk. It annoys me. No sign of Mrs Flaxon?’
Dolly shook her head.
‘I’ll come back. Hang on to her if she turns up.’
‘Will do.’
She did indeed come back towards the end of the afternoon. Dolly detached herself from a group and shook her head.
‘Not here?’ said Charmian. She wasn’t surprised, ‘ I’m worried about her.’
The two of them left together. Dolly was going to the opera, Charmian going home.
‘I hope I don’t get called away. The tickets cost about a hundred pounds,’ said Dolly. ‘Besides I want to see the new Carmen.’
At the end of the road they prepared to part, Dolly to drive one way and Charmian another. Most of the other cars parked there all day had gone, but one remained.
‘Where are Kate and Rewley?’ Charmian asked as they left each other.
‘I think they’re still reading each other’s lips,’ said Dolly absently.
‘That could last quite a time with Kate. But not for ever. I hope Rewley knows that.’
The house in Maid of Honour Row was quiet and empty. No Kate. So probably Dolly was right and she was with George Rewley.
But no Muff either, and that was a pity. Too much freedom for Muff went to her head and made her ungovernable. She was bad enough, anyway. All cats were roaring egotists, it was only to be expected, but Muff beat all.
She went to the back door and called. No Muff.
She opened the front door and could see the front garden was empty of cats, but the creature sometimes crossed the road to forbidden territory.
It was a nice evening, calm and still, the sort that Wordsworth liked. Down the road she could see Birdie Peacock and Winifred Eagle accompanied by several young girls. They were apprentice witches, Birdie was starting her Junior League. The police had sent them home with the caution that this was not the end of it, but not to worry too much. All in all Birdie thought it was the time for new beginnings.
But not all her recruits had a very clear idea what they were joining and their motives were mixed. One girl thought it was a kind of Brownie pack and she knew Miss Peacock made very good cakes. Another girl had been forcibly joined by her mother who wanted to get her out of the house and anything would do, while yet another girl was present because she wanted to leave home and never see her mother again. The fourth girl knew what it was all about and had come because she desired to learn a spell that would get her through her GCSEs, or, alternatively, put her father into a deep sleep for several years so he would never notice she had failed, either would do.
Charmian saw them distantly down the road, the castle silhouetted behind them, as she went to the gate to look for Muff. The cat slid out of the shadow of the hedge and up the garden path.
As Charmian followed the cat up to the house, another person came up behind her. She turned quickly.
‘Miss Daniels?’
A woman with a froth of dark curls, eyes more grey than blue as seen in the dusk, bright lipstick and softly pink cheeks. She was wearing a frilly cotton blouse over a printed skirt. Her white shoes were set on high slender heels which made her as tall as Charmian.
‘I’m Mrs Flaxon.’
‘Ah,’ Charmian drew in a breath. ‘I thought you might be. How did you know where to find me?’ She did not broadcast her address.
‘I’d just got to Alexandria Road when I saw you driving off. I followed. I’ve been sitting in the car waiting.’
Charmian nodded towards the open door. Muff was sitting on the threshold looking out. ‘Come in.’
‘Wait a minute, let me just get my breath back.’ Denise sounded as if she was hyperventilating.
That’ll make two of us, thought Charmian, feeling her heart beating fast.
From her seat at the door, Muff had caught sight of Benedict, black cat, neighbour and enemy, entering the garden gate. The fur rose round her neck and her tail thickened.
‘I wish I knew where I was going,’ said Denise Flaxon, not taking up the offer to go into the house.
‘Why not go home? If you’ve got one. Have you got one, Mrs Flaxon? Or is it Ms Flaxon? Or something else altogether?’
‘You’re laughing at me.’ Denise’s right arm moved and Charmian saw the flash of the knife.
She jumped back, at the same time trying to reach the stabbing arm. As the two women jostled the black wig had slipped a fraction to reveal the blonde hair beneath. In that moment of urgent danger, Charmian saw it happen.
Before her eyes, they had all fused together, all three women, becoming one.
The dark-haired woman who had been created as a persona, who had cried in a room in Woodstock Close because there was someone lost inside that face who wanted to get out. A dark-haired beauty who had been so ambivalent that Flo Jessamon had felt the presence in that house of someone unacknowledged.
The fair-haired woman who had put on the dark wig, but who had changed out of it and into her own clothes in a public lavatory in Slough so she could go home as herself, who had created this other self to kill. To kill for revenge and jealousy and hate of the girl who had stolen her husband, who had stolen her life. This double person who had put witchcraft symbols around her victim partly to incriminate the witches, but also out of hate.
And the red-haired woman in jeans who had knifed Josh Fox, who had been hired to find out if she was threatening Vivien Charles, and who had a file on this woman which he was prepared to use for blackmail. He had watched her in Woodstock Close and her husband had watched him, watching her. Her husband, who had then attacked Fox because he had not been totally truthful about finding Denise Flaxon, who was also Laura Eden.
Muff saw Benedict strolling up the garden path and in a rush of fury hurled herself forward, screaming loudly. She looked twice her normal size and was three times as strident. Ben screamed back. Battle was joined.
The sudden noise made Charmian lose her balance and the knife went into the right arm, piercing an artery. The blood began to pump out.
Like a film, a rapid succession of events began to run before her. Love, hate, blackmail. With Leonard Eden trying to find out if his wife was watching Vivien, identifying who Denise Flaxon was, but still loving his wife too much to accuse her of murder. Protecting both women, and failing both of them.
Charmian staggered backwards, holding her arm. She knew she had to stop the blood, but she was beginning to feel cold and dizzy.
This was it, then, this was how you went. In your own front garden in the middle of a cat fight.
Down the road, just about to turn the corner front Maid of Honour Row into the street where Miss Eagle lived, the band of apprentice witches and their leaders heard the noise.
‘That’s my Ben’s voice,’ said Winifred Eagle. She ran towards the sound of the fight. The rest followed, surging through the gate just as a tall woman with dishevelled hair tried to leave.
Charmian was slumped, half sitting, half lying, against the hedge. The fighting cats bounced away, leaping and screaming, carefully not damaging each other as they fell into the rosebed.
‘Stop her,’ gasped Charmian. The garden was growing dark but she could hear acutely.
A couple of the apprentices held on to the woman. To their surprise, her dark curls fell on to their hands. As she struggled, one contact lens fell out, so that the woman seemed to have one eye that was blueish, one that was brown and a kind of dark round tear on her cheek. She was a macabre spectacle. It was frightening, but they hung on. This was better t
han anything they had hoped for.
Birdie knelt by Charmian’s side. She placed firm, cool fingers on the wound in Charmian’s arm. ‘I’ll stop the bleeding, dear,’ she said in a soothing voice. Out of the darkness now falling upon her, Charmian heard her say, ‘I have the power to heal.’
In the distance, Winifred was calling her cat. ‘If I could laugh,’ thought Charmian, deep inside herself, ‘I would.’
‘You did,’ said Dolly, ‘I don’t know if you know, but you were carried into hospital roaring with laughter.’
It was a day later, and early evening. Charmian had returned home from the hospital that afternoon.
The two women were in the sitting room of the house in Maid of Honour Row. Out in the kitchen Kate and Rewley were preparing supper. The evening sunlight came through the open window, where Muff sat washing her face with a contented look. Her dishful had been tasty tonight, and although the pair doing the cooking did not yet know it, they were missing a prawn or two.
Charmian leaned back against the cushion, feeling spoilt and cared for.
‘It was my bad arm, you know. The one that has caused me all this trouble. And now, would you believe it, apart from being sore it’s working perfectly.’ She held up her right hand. ‘This hand will write. I could write a book. Probably I won’t but I could. Cured by a witch. Must be something in this witchcraft, Merrywick-style.’
‘Birdie Peacock’s very pleased with herself, I must try her on my eczema, although it feels better,’ said Dolly.
She touched her face, yes, smooth and cool. She was pleased with life. It looked as though this case, code-named FANTASY, had been good for her. The big chief himself, the Chief Constable, had congratulated her.
‘We’ve nailed Caprice, by the way. Arbat got a search warrant and a couple from the Drug Squad popped in. They caught her trying to flush her hoard down the drains. She’d had LSD and grass underneath the floor boards. She was as tight as an owl apparently. Whisky.’
‘So Arbat’s satisfied? And Fred Elman?’
‘Delighted. Got his name in print. Still handling the Edens with extreme care, though. Not clear what’s going to happen to Eden himself. He could be charged with the Twickers break-in, but he probably won’t be.’ Dolly shook her head. ‘Laura Eden’s in a very odd state. She’ll get away with unfit to plead, I think.’
‘It’s always dangerous to be two persons,’ said Charmian.
‘It loosens up all sorts of interior forces. You never know who’s going to come on top, Jekyll or Hyde.’
The interplay between husband and wife was strange and strong, a story in itself: he would save her if he could. He had known she might kill Vivien and had hired Josh Fox to watch his wife and protect the girl, yet when she did kill Vivien, and he knew she had, he still did not want her condemned.
Kate put her head round the door. ‘The meal won’t be long, but I’m just sending Rewley out for a few more prawns. I thought we had more than we have.’
She disappeared, then came back with a letter. ‘Oh, this was just delivered by hand.’
Charmian took it. The envelope was of thick and beautiful paper, a pale rich cream, a pleasure to touch. The address was beautifully typed with the kind of archaic print one hardly ever saw now, almost like engraving.
She turned it over, she knew the crest on the back. You saw it every time the Royal Standard fluttered above the castle.
She hesitated to open it, wondering what it contained.
An invitation to a party? She opened it and read. No, not a party. Or not that sort. ‘My goodness,’ she thought. ‘Who’d have believed it. Yes, I could
help there, a crime like that would be a real tease. And with dogs
too!’
Crime at the castle?
Canine crime?
Copyright
First published 1989 by Macmillan
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Witching Murder Page 19
