The Mystery of the Marsh Malaise: Wonky Inn Book 5

by Jeannie Wycherley

  The mother of the half-drowned boy effusively offered her thanks, and a few people patted him on the back. “It was nothing, really. Anyone would have done the same.”

  Pleased that everything had turned out for the best, I was about to continue on my way when I noticed that the normally clear water in the pool had assumed a strange reddy-coloured rusty hue. Half deciding it had been caused by Stan and the child disturbing the silt at the bottom of the pool, I wanted to dismiss what I was seeing, but something—some sixth sense—told me not to be too hasty. I slowly made my way to the edge of the pool and knelt beside it, dipping my fingers into the water.

  The tingle I felt, like a small electric shock, could have been the skin and nerves of my hand reacting to the coolness of the water, of course it could, but remembering the time I’d felt the same odd sensation while out walking with Wizard Shadowmender, I had my doubts. I agitated the water once more, dragging my fingers through the silt, and observed the muddy brown colour the water turned. Not red. Not rust.

  Decidedly odd.

  “Well done, Stan,” someone behind me was saying. “We need to get you home and into some dry clothes.”

  “Let him borrow a towel, somebody?” a woman suggested.

  “Stan are you okay?” A third voice.

  “I’m fine,” Stan said. The wobble in his voice drew me upright—the water all but forgotten—just as he keeled over. I gasped in surprise and made a dash forward as his knees buckled beneath him, but others were there before me, catching him before he hit the ground.

  “Oh, Stan,” I gasped. Usually a healthy-looking man, his colouring had turned to grey, and even his lips were a little blue.

  “Hypothermia?” A man asked uncertainly.

  “Surely he wasn’t in the water long enough?” I answered. “Call an ambulance. He doesn’t look well at all.”

  “I will!” a woman shouted as everyone reached for their phones.

  I grabbed Stan’s hand. “You’ll be fine, Stan,” I told him. Maybe it was his heart.

  “Rhona,” he said, his voice weak, his eyes losing focus.

  “I’ll tell her,” I said. “We’ll call her now.” Glancing behind me I asked, “Can someone call his wife. The number is 522 422. Her name is Rhona.”

  “The ambulance is coming,” the first woman relayed to us.

  “Oh no!” Another commotion off to the side of me. I heard a woman calling out, “Gregory? Gregory?”

  Stan had drifted into unconsciousness and I leaned over to try and hear whether he was still breathing. As far as I could make out he was. I remembered George helping Mr Bramble in similar circumstances. He knew how to take a pulse and perform compressions. I could copy what he had done, if push came to shove, unless one of the other bystanders knew what they were doing.

  “The little boy has collapsed too!”

  Horrified, I tore my eyes from Stan only to see the child, Gregory, on the floor. His mother, her face as pale as her son’s, eyes wide in shock, clutched at her child, while a bystander gently slapped the boy’s cheeks.

  What on earth were we dealing with here? Literally seconds ago, both the boy and Stan had seemed fine.

  I looked across at the shimmering pool next to me, the surface rippling inexplicably. “It’s the water,” I said. “There’s something wrong with the water.”

  “What do you mean there’s something wrong with the water?” Gwyn quizzed me over dinner that evening. Not that she was eating you understand. Ghosts don’t eat. But I was. Or at least I had been pushing my food around the plate while Monsieur Emietter looked on quizzically in the background. Used to seeing me with a healthy appetite, I’m not sure he really understood my sudden disinterest in food.

  “The water quality around Whittlecombe has always been of an exceptionally high standard.”

  I regarded my great grandmother with some scepticism. I’m sure the water quality around Whittlecombe had always been wonderful, but you know how it is with some folk, they become very biased about the place they live and assume everywhere else is inferior. “I’m certain it still is, Grandmama. Well, for the most part. But quite clearly something made the little boy—Gregory he was called—very sick, And Stan too!”

  “Then it will be localised to the pond at Whittle Folly.” Gwyn sounded very sure of herself. “I really see no need for alarm.”

  I puffed my cheeks out. “I’m not so sure. I’m no scientist—”

  “You might have been if you’d concentrated on your alchemy lessons in school—”

  Alchemy? Grandmama could be so last century. “Grandmama!”

  “Only an observation, my dear. Carry on with what you were saying.”

  I placed my fork down on the plate and lifted my hand to show her my fingers. “When Wizard Shadowmender was here I noticed something strange at the pool in Speckled Wood. The water seemed slightly… I don’t know how to describe it… electrified.”

  “Electrified?” Gwyn looked puzzled.

  “Grandmama, you know perfectly well what electric is. Did you never have a little electric shock while you were alive?”

  “I’m not sure I did, thank goodness. It sounds remarkably unpleasant.”

  I smiled. “A mild one is not very painful. But slightly disconcerting. The best way to describe it is as if someone was flicking you quite hard with their finger. It can have a real kick to it. There’s some pain, although not a lot.”

  “And you felt that in the pool in Speckled Wood?”

  I laid my knife down, deciding I’d finished eating. Monsieur Emietter frowned at me. “Something like that,” I told Gwyn. “It was an odd sensation.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  Something in Gwyn’s voice made me pay attention to her properly. As I looked up at her, she altered her features, presenting a face of complete neutrality.

  “See anything? Like what?” I frowned at her, curious as to what she meant.

  She simply shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything that might cause that sort of feeling?”

  That hadn’t been what she’d been thinking, I was sure of it. “No. I thought maybe it was an eel, but there are no eels in that pond. Why would there be?” I considered what I had seen. “There was a little disturbance on the water. I thought it might have been a bird or an insect, but other than that, nothing.”

  “And yesterday? When you were at the Folly?”

  “Similar sensation.” I remembered the tinged water. “But the water had an odd hue. A rusty red colour, but you could only see it when you looked at it from a low angle.”

  “So there may well be something in the water that’s caused Stan and the little boy to become ill?”

  “Yes. Some sort of contamination,” I agreed. “But that doesn’t explain that sensation I experienced, does it?”

  “No,” Gwyn replied loftily and suddenly apparated away without so much as a by-your-leave, leaving me alone, with an almost-full plate of food in front of me, and a disgruntled Monsieur Emietter.

  We eyed each other in confusion. “What was all that about?” I asked him but given his lack of command of the English language, he was no help whatsoever.

  “Inspector Norbert Kerslake, Madam. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” The small man standing stock still in front of the bar nodded at me and cast a sidelong glance at Florence who had shown him in, taking in her smouldering clothes and noticeable translucence. He looked back at me, probably hoping for a behavioural cue, unsure as to what he was seeing.

  “Alfhild Daemonne,” I introduced myself and hurried to the other side of the bar to shake his hand. “Welcome to Whittle Inn, Inspector Kerslake.” In turn, I looked him up and down. A dark grey suit, smart white shirt, subdued tie. A pair of round glasses perched on the end of his nose. A pen in his jacket pocket, sturdy boots and a yellow hard hat tucked under his arm. A briefcase in his other hand. Not a policeman. So what then? “How can I help you?”

  “I’m from the Devon and Cornwall Water Board, Madam. We’re curre
ntly collecting water samples from all around the Whittlecombe area. Whittle Inn falls into our geographical target area and I’ll therefore need access to any and all water outlets.”

  “Oooh!” Florence put her hand to her mouth in concern, wafting the smell of scorched cotton towards Norbert. He crinkled his nose. “Is the water alright? Only we have guests staying here at the moment.”

  “What happened to you, Miss?” Norbert asked. “Should you be working?”

  Florence blinked. “What on earth do you mean?” she asked in confusion. “It’s not my day off.”

  “Florence, Florence, I’ll handle this,” I interjected, and nodded my head in the direction of the kitchen.

  My housekeeper sniffed but accepted the hint. Unfortunately she also took umbrage, as well as a short cut to the kitchen, by walking through the walls to get there.

  Norbert did a double take and followed that with a few steps backwards. “How the—”

  “Ah yes. Erm—” I pondered on what to say. “We’re a themed inn, Inspector Kerslake. We have a number of, erm, parlour tricks, and optical illusions, just to keep the guests on their toes. You know? Ha ha ha.” I smiled as though there was nothing strange going on. “I hope you won’t find us too weird. And er… just ignore anything untoward.”

  He blinked at me owlishly, through the thick lenses of his spectacles. “I see.” Clearly he didn’t.

  “With this being an inn, we have quite a few bathrooms. Do you need to visit each of them?” I asked, hurriedly moving on to the matter in hand.

  “That’s why I decided it would be pertinent if I attended this property myself. Half of my team are visiting all the domestic residences in the town; the other half are looking in the woods and forests in the vicinity. I elected to attend to The Hay Loft and Whittle Inn myself.”

  “If you want a job doing well, eh?”

  “Precisely.” Norbert didn’t crack a smile. “Yes, I’ll need to see every tap in the house, plus the water tank if you have one in the attic. I’ll need to assess every water inlet and outlet, dishwasher, washing machine… those sorts of things. I’ll require all the covers taken off the drains and then I’ll need to look at any outside taps you may have. I believe your grounds are fairly extensive?”

  The man was a jobsworth for sure. “Yes. In addition to the gardens, the woods at the rear of the property belong to the estate.”

  “Any pools, marshy areas out there?”

  “Oh yes indeed, plenty.” After the heavy snow we’d had at Christmas and the torrential rain after Easter, this peculiar little man had his work cut out.

  Nothing is ever as simple as you imagine it’s going to be, is it?

  Norbert changed into a lab jacket and a pair of goggles and spent the next few hours gathering samples from every tap he could find. I watched him from a distance as he methodically labelled every single test tube by hand and filed them in a portable rack he kept in a large leather-bound wheelie case.

  Certainly, Inspector Kerslake had enough on his plate indoors, but what we hadn’t banked on was the fact that once upon a time there had been a pair of wells. The first of these we knew about, situated as it was at the rear of the inn, near where the outbuildings were. It had long been filled in and covered over, but a cursory examination of the site located it.

  What was more alarming was that the inn itself appeared to have been built over the second well, or at least it had housed the well in what was now the beer cellar. Despite my protestations, Inspector Kerslake insisted on bringing in another of his infernal teams to excavate both of these wells in order to take samples. Excavation in this case, it turned out, meant installing a huge drill in the cellar and going down through the floor.

  “What is the point?” I’d asked in dismay. “If the wells are covered up, no-one will be drinking out of them.”

  “That’s a rather simplistic view to take, Miss Daemonne,” Norbert replied. “They may well filter into the water table and infect other supplies. We need to be thorough in our investigations.”

  I nodded, more than a little grumpy, knowing that the consequent disruption would be sure to drive me and many of the inhabitants of the inn to the brink of insanity. For her part, Charity had taken to performing her duties while wearing noise cancelling headphones. Many of the ghosts had disappeared altogether. I hadn’t seen Gwyn since our conversation over dinner, so I assumed she had escaped somewhere quiet, although I had a sneaking suspicion that she was avoiding me.

  “You know that little man is seriously getting on my nerves right now,” Silvan said to me. A late riser, Silvan tended to stay up until well into the early hours and then rise at midday. It had taken some getting used to on my part, because I was up with the lark—or the owl—every morning before the dawn. I had to ensure our guests had the breakfast they desired and make sure the inn was ready for another day of hospitality. I’d been hoping to receive instruction from Silvan as soon as the breakfast service had been finished, but instead I had to wait until after lunch, for it was only then, after copious amounts of coffee, that he felt ready to face the world.

  Today I’d stumbled on him when I walked past his room just after 9.30 am. I was heading to my office to catch up on some paperwork, but the water workmen had arrived and now the walls of the inn vibrated along to the deep bass thrumming sound of the drills in the cellar. The noise made two fillings in my back teeth rattle.

  As I’d walked along the passage that ran between the guest bedrooms on the second floor I’d had to steady myself with my hands against the walls.

  Silvan appeared in the hallway wearing black pyjamas, and a pink silk eye mask, He’d tied his hair up on his head, and looked markedly different to his usual self. I couldn’t help but stare.

  A burst of drilling had us both cringing, the whine reverberating loudly throughout the inn. “I am sorry for the disruption,” I told him, when I could finally make myself heard. I truly was. Silvan was not paying to stay at the inn, but he was still my guest. “I’m hoping they’ll finish off what they need to do today and then we’ll all get some peace.” If it went on much longer some of my guests would be inclined to leave early, that much was certain.

  Another burst of drilling. I winced and began to walk past him, but he reached a hand out and stopped me. “What is the issue here?” he asked.

  “A contaminated water supply. Well, I say that, but I don’t know for certain. That’s what they suspect. They haven’t released anything official yet.”

  “The water at the inn?”

  “No, in Whittlecombe generally.”

  “In the pipes?”

  I shrugged. “I really don’t know. There’s a large natural pool of water out near Whittle Folly. A couple of people who were in the water a few days ago have been taken ill. The inspectors from the water board have found something they don’t like and so they’re checking the whole water supply around the village. And standing water too.”

  We waited for another excruciating staccato burst of whining and throbbing to pass. “Oh.” Silvan rubbed his face and yawned. “So how long will they be drilling for? My head is vibrating.”

  “It can’t be much longer.” I sought to reassure him as much as myself. “They must be through to the centre of the earth by now.”

  “I’d be careful what you wish for. Maybe we’ll all be caught up in a gush from a geyser of molten lava.”

  As the drilling started up again, and the paintings on the walls in the passageway jigged up and down, I rubbed my temples and thought that might not be such a bad end.

  Silvan stretched. “Anyhow, seeing as I’m awake, let’s get to work shall we? I’ll meet you in the attic in twenty minutes. Bring coffee.”

  I nodded my assent and tried to remember what I’d been doing before I was waylaid.

  “And painkillers,” Silvan called after me as I walked away, and the drill started up once more. “Bring plenty of those.”

  “Again! Again!”

  From behind me, Silvan thre
w half a dozen coloured silk handkerchiefs up in the air. As I whirled around, they danced, weaving rapidly in and out of each other. My task was simply to isolate the red one and set it on fire. I missed and succeeded only in singeing the wall.

  “Urgh!” I bent over, hands on my knees, catching my breath, my forehead clammy, my hair everywhere. Silvan practised a very physical form of magick, that seemed to involve a fair number of fencing moves. Most of the magick I’d learned as a youngster had involved standing still and directing energy at an object, now here I was, expected to prance around like a Viennese horse.

  “Come, come, Alfhild. Don’t fall asleep on the job.” Silvan tapped me with his wand. He’d wrapped Sellotape around the break, which seemed a little incongruous, but it still appeared to be working alright.

  “I can’t do it,” I moaned. “I’m finding it hard to hit the target when it and I are both moving. One of us needs to be still.”

  Silvan gave me such a look of pitiful disparagement that my toes almost curled up in response. “Because your enemies will remain still, will they?” he sneered.

  “Well no—” I thought of the spinning globes of The Mori, darting here and there in Speckled Wood on the night we had battled them.

  “And you? Will you be remaining in one place?”

  “I—”

  “You’ll either be running towards them or running away from them. Either way they will want to kill you, so you will need to return the favour.” Silvan folded his arms. “That’s about the shape of it.”

  I stood straight and stretched. “You’re right.” I hated to admit that he was, but you couldn’t fault his logic.

  “You know, you could consider finding yourself a wand,” Silvan suggested.

  I curled my lip. “I’ve never found one I liked. Nothing that worked for me.”

  “Well keep looking, my love.” I bristled at Silvan’s familiarity. “I think it would improve your directionality no end. You have hands as clumsy as bear paws.”