The Witch Who Mysteries Box Set 2

by Katie Penryn

  I was to remember Felix’s rhetorical question later on. Trust him to put his finger on the nub of the problem. If only I’d taken him up on it then.

  Dubois rose to his feet. “As a crime has been committed, we’ll have to get the forensic team in from Bordeaux.” He withdrew to the side and put through the call. “They’ll be here in half an hour. I’ll leave one man here and meet the team off the helicopter up at the château. I suggest you leave, too, Penzi. There’s nothing more you can do here.”

  “True. I have to get back to collect Jimbo, and someone needs to help Jean-Claude tell his children what’s happened to their mother. Who could be so wicked as to kill such a kind and gentle person as Hélène and leave her children motherless?”

  Felix took my hand and led the way back out to the open space at the edge of the long rows of vines. From there we drove back to the château with Jean-Claude and Jupiter. At first he’d argued to stay and wait for Hélène’s body to be removed, but I persuaded him his children needed him. I was worried that the shock of Hélène’s death would undermine the progress he’d made since his own accident, an accident which now seemed like an ironic prologue to the main event.

  Chapter 10

  The first thing we had to do when we reached the château was tell Jean-Claude’s three children that their mother had met with a fatal accident. It was an even worse experience for me than when I had to explain to Sam all those years before that our mother Gwinny had left us alone to fend for ourselves and bring up Jimbo.

  We found the children playing at baking with Madame Brune in the kitchen. Jean-Claude rushed in and was on the point of blurting everything out when I stopped him. It didn’t seem appropriate to break the sad news while flour and jam covered their sweet little faces.

  “Give them five minutes to clean up, Jean-Claude,” I suggested.

  He threw an agonized look my way. “I want to get it over with.”

  “Shush,” I said drawing him out of the room and leading him down the hall to the library.

  I sent Felix back to ask Madame Brune to bring the children to us there as soon as they’d washed their hands and faces.

  Jean-Claude dropped onto a sofa and collapsed forwards with his head in his hands and began to moan. Alone in the library with him, I wasn’t sure what I should do. The children would be coming in at any moment. This was no way for them to see their father. He needed to be strong and show them he was still there for them. I’m afraid I resorted to giving him a quick slap on each side of his face, making him drop his hands down and look up at me in angry surprise.

  “What was that for?” he asked.

  I sat down quickly beside him and took his hands in mine.

  “Jean-Claude, this is not the time for you to be thinking of your own loss. You need to put your children first. You must be strong for them. For you to lose your wife so young is tragic. Let’s not turn tragedy into disaster for the children.”

  He leaned back and tried to pull his hands away but I held on tightly. With a gasp, he threw himself on me and sobbed his heart out. I put my arms around him and rocked him from side to side as I do with Jimbo when he hurts himself. Gradually, he stopped his crying and wiped his eyes on his sleeves.

  “You’re so right. Get me big tot of cognac while I splash my face with cold water and straighten myself up,” he said, struggling to his feet and going over to the cloakroom that led off the library.

  As I was pouring out the cognac, Felix came back in.

  “All arranged,” he told me. “They’ll be about ten minutes.”

  “Good. That will give Jean-Claude time to pull himself together,” I said as I knocked on the cloakroom door. When Jean-Claude cracked it open, I handed through the morale boosting spirit.

  I wandered over to the window and gazed out over the vast gardens of the château. Life would never be the same for the de Portemorencys.

  Felix moved across to join me and put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a quick squeeze of encouragement.

  “We’ll get through this, Penzi, but as soon as we have, I want to go back to the scene of the accident. The police and the forensic team will have finished by then. I want to take a second look around the place and see if there’s something we or they missed.”

  “Is that possible? The forensic team is excellent as you know.”

  Felix stroked down his cheeks and out to the side of his face as if he was checking on his cat whiskers.

  “I sensed something odd when we were there. Something in the air. But we didn’t get a chance to investigate. It won’t take us long to double check, and it won’t matter if we find nothing.”

  The door opened at that point and Madame Brune ushered the three children into the library. The unusual circumstances had alarmed them. The twins Nina and Marc clung to each other. The older girl Violette held fast to Madame.

  “Come along and sit down here,” I said taking Violette’s other hand and leading her over to the sofa facing the garden. The twins, Nina as blond as her mother and Marc as dark as his father, followed us and sat down on the other side of Madame Brune.

  “Your father will be here any moment,” I added.

  On cue, Jean-Claude walked out of the cloakroom and hurried across to his three children and crouched down in front of them. All signs of his personal torment had vanished. He’d combed his hair, tucked in his shirt and washed away his tears. He even managed a gentle smile as he told them he had something to tell them. He reached for their hands and held them as he said, “This is a difficult thing to tell you. It’s not a happy thing.”

  Three little faces looked at him with wide eyes.

  Jean-Claude took a deep breath and hurried on. “Something’s happened to your mother. Something bad. She had an accident.”

  “But she’ll get better, won’t she?” Violette broke in. “Has she gone to hospital like you did after your accident?”

  Jean-Claude turned to look at me. He couldn’t carry on. I sat down quickly beside Violette and told the children as gently as I could that their mother wasn’t coming back from the accident; that she had been found too late to be saved.

  The scene that followed was the saddest I have ever personally witnessed. Mothers die every day by the thousand but for the children left behind the finality of death in each case is unfathomable. So it was for Violette, Nina and Mark.

  Felix was anxious for us to get back to the scene of the accident. So, as soon as Jean-Claude appeared to be coping, we made our farewells and left.

  *

  As the car jerked its way over the lumpy grass down to the untamed patch of scrubland in the middle of the neat rows upon rows of vines, over to the west the sun was slowly dipping towards the Atlantic fifty miles away. The chartreuse of the new Spring growth had already begun to lose its bright green hue and turn a more gloomy viridian in the fast approaching twilight.

  I parked the car at the end of the rows of vines, on the spot where Toto had been tethered. Ahead of us the scrubland had already fallen into the shade, the shrubs and reeds taking on a sinister appearance and casting long shadows out towards us.

  “What are we looking for exactly?” I asked Felix as I reached for my shoulder bag, climbed out of the car and straightened up to scan the outcrop of rock ahead of us. “It looks as if Dubois had an army out here,” I said pointing at the crushed grass and the many tire tracks.

  Felix left my question unanswered, and so I swung around only to find him mid-shift, from man to big cat, his muscles rippling and his skin morphing before my eyes into the rosetted fur coat of a male leopard in his prime. He shook himself as he dropped onto all fours, his limbs ending in powerful giant paws and his tail lashing from side to side. He sat back on his haunches and clicked his front claws in and out like lethal flick knives. I waited until his metamorphosis was complete before repeating my question.

  Catlike, he drew a front paw over his ears and out to the end of his whiskers. “Sorry if I startled you,” he began.

&
nbsp; “Don’t mention it,” I said, “but you could have warned me.”

  “I need to be in touch with my wild side. I want a leopard’s greater sense of smell. There may be evidence here that human beings are unaware of. I intend to carry out an olfactory search of every square inch of this crime scene.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “And I’ll summon up my witch’s intuition, if you’ll give me a moment.”

  Thus armed with our extra sensory advantages over Dubois and the forensics team, we advanced hopefully towards the bushes, taking our time. For me it was a question of sending out magic feelers to test the atmosphere for anything amiss. For Felix, it was the more animal approach of inhaling deeply every step and running the air through his olfactory organ. In this fashion, we began at the edge of the scrubland and worked our way in every decreasing circles towards the middle. From time to time, one of us would stop and ask the other if he or she could detect anything out of place, but each time we had to admit whatever had disturbed us could be explained by the presence of the dogs, Hélène, or Dubois and the police. It wasn’t until we were both right below the strange rock that towered up from the center of the area that Felix froze with his muzzle close to the ground and his tail twitching.

  “There’s something here,” he said backing off to give me the chance to examine the spot.

  I tiptoed forwards and crouched down to look at the earth. It appeared to be slightly darker than the surrounding ground. I put out a finger and gently felt the edge of the patch of soil. Yes, it was damp. I felt in my bag for a pair of gloves, pulled them out and put them on. The center of the patch was still quite wet in spite of the warmth of the afternoon. I could tell that even through my gloves because the earth was muddy.

  I pinched up a little and sniffed it. “Yuck,” I exclaimed and wiped my glove off on my jeans in a hurry. “That’s strong. Even I can guess it’s pee, but not strong enough to be dog pee.”

  “No,” said Felix shaking his powerful head from side to side. “Smells human to me.”

  “The killer’s?”

  Felix gave an inelegant snort. “Of course. I can’t see Dubois’s men fouling a crime scene, can you?”

  I couldn’t. Discipline would have been too strict. Maybe we’d found a trace of the man who set the traps after all.

  “Get one of your bags out, boss. Scoop up as much of the earth as possible and put it in the bag.”

  “So, you’re thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked him as I scouted about for a piece of wood to use as a scraper. “Urine equals DNA?”

  “Exactement, as Monsieur Bonhomie would say.”

  I found what I was looking for and knelt down to fill the evidence bag with the damp earth. “But Felix this won’t do in a court of law. There’s no police witness and no chain of evidence.”

  Felix stroked his whiskers again while he thought over my rebuttal. “True, but this will be corroborative. If and when we work out who we think the killer is, Dubois can check his DNA against this sample to see if he’s on the right track. It could save Dubois from a wild goose chase and tell him if his prime suspect is the right man.”

  “Then it would be up to him to find the proof?” I asked as I scooped up the soaked earth and placed it in the bag.

  Felix grunted. “Hurry it up, boss. It’s getting dark and I want to have a scout around this outcrop and up to the top. The same scent is drifting about all over the place.”

  “Go on then. Do it while I finish up here.”

  Felix’s tail swished from side to side stirring up the dust. “You know I can’t leave you, boss, and certainly not with his scent so strong. He might still be here watching us.”

  I glanced around the clearing, half fearing I’d see the killer glaring at us from the bushes, but all was still. I hurriedly fastened the bag and stowed it away. Felix bounded up onto the crag that ran around the outcrop and inched forwards scenting the air as he went, with me following along in his spoor. We slowly made out way up to the crest with many stops and starts from Felix as he concentrated on the scent that was detectable only by him, one of nature’s most efficient hunters.

  At the top, Felix sat back on his haunches and looked out around us at the miles and miles of vines, now turning indigo as the sun continued its descent below the horizon out at sea.

  “It’s a scene of such beauty and promise,” he said at last. “But over it all hangs the stench of foul play.”

  Chapter 11

  When I went to bed that night images of Hélène lying bleeding to death wouldn’t let me sleep. After tossing and turning for two hours, I climbed out of bed and went to knock on Felix’s door. When he didn’t answer, I opened the door quietly and tiptoed into his room noticing that he was sound asleep, only a soft snore disturbing the silence of his dreams.

  Taking hold of his foot, I gave it a good shake and sat down on the end of his bed to await his reaction. He was awake in a split second and leapt out of bed, taking up a defensive position while he scanned the room.

  “What the hell are you doing here at this time of night, boss? I could have hurt you,” he shouted when he saw me.

  “Shush,” I warned, finger to mouth. “Don’t wake up the rest of the family.”

  “But it’s all right to wake me up?” he whispered. “Is something wrong? Is it an emergency?”

  I shook my head.

  “I thought not,” he said. “After all, we have Zig and Zag downstairs, an efficient burglar alarm and your aura against the supernatural is intact. It’s glowing all around you. It’s not that scum of a witch doctor again, is it?” he asked as the tension left him and he sat on his bed facing me.

  “No. It’s not about me. I can’t sleep because I keep thinking about Hélène. We should do something. I don’t like this idea of keeping out of things.”

  “Tsk! We agreed. No involvement. You know we did.”

  With fifty miles between us and the Château de Portemorency and with Dubois working at the Cognac gendarmerie, we were well away from the immediate repercussions of Hélène’s death and the subsequent police investigation, but that didn’t stop my mind from buzzing over the incident when I least wanted it to. Was it empathy, curiosity or arrogance on my part?

  I wound the sheet around in my hands while I tried to work out how to explain why I was so unsettled.

  “Felix, I’m letting Hélène down. I should be doing something.”

  “Let it drop, boss. Dubois is perfectly able to sort this thing out. We said we wouldn’t get involved with police work again. It’s time to get on with our own lives. Let me see you back to your bed and tuck you in.”

  That did it. “Don’t you dare treat me like a child,” I said and flounced out of his room and back to my own where I lay awake until the morning chorus started up, whereupon I fell into an exhausted sleep.

  *

  Several times during the days that followed, I ventured to discuss the case with Felix but he told me to leave well alone, his attitude being very much one of out of sight, out of mind. I missed not be able to talk about my misgivings with him. Every time I broached the subject, he insisted I couldn’t solve every crime I heard about. My argument that I’d been personally involved with the victim didn’t change his attitude.

  That was until we attended Hélène’s funeral the following week, the legal requirement in France being burial or cremation within seven days of death.

  Chapter 12

  We arrived at the church of Saint-Léger in the center of Cognac to find the surrounding streets packed with cars. Half the population of the city had turned out for the funeral. Jean-Claude had told us he’d wanted to hold the service in the family chapel at the château but had been persuaded by the BNC and the mayor to move it to the larger church. Like many of the churches in the region it was old, the earliest parts dating from the twelfth century, the ancient petrified chalk weathered to gray by centuries of rain. The bell tower stood four to five stories high with a pointed roof to the side of the
main entrance as we passed inside with the other members of the congregation. Ahead of us the light from a rose window shone down on the altar in front of which stood Hélène’s coffin draped in white silk and adorned with white lilies and scarlet roses. Not being members of the de Portemorency family or intimate friends of Jean-Claude’s, we found seats halfway to the back. Felix and I had come to pay our respects to a woman we’d known for so short a time but whom we had liked and had wished to know better. I caught sight of Dubois standing just inside the main door. We must have walked right past him without noticing. I nudged Felix.

  “He’s doing what the police always do,” Felix whispered. “Looking to see if anyone springs to mind as having an unhealthy interest in the proceedings.”

  “You don’t think the perpetrator’s here, do you?” I asked scanning the crowd from under my lowered brow.

  “I do.”

  That made me think of CCTV cameras. Sadly, most churches have installed them nowadays to safeguard their precious religious objects within their walls and the lead flashings upon their roofs. I made a point to mention it to Dubois after the service. Who knew when the recordings could come in useful?

  So many people had shown up for the funeral service, even the standing room at the sides of the church was taken. The press of bodies, the perfume from the flowers and the clouds of sweet incense wafting from the swinging censers made the atmosphere close and intense. I soon became drowsy and found it difficult to give the speakers the attention they deserved. And the French was so rapid, I couldn’t follow what was being said, but through it all, it was clear that the city was saddened by Hélène’s unexpected and horrific death.

  At last the service was over. The coffin was carried back down the aisle and placed in a horse drawn cortège, the custom in France being to follow the coffin on foot to the cemetery outside the city walls. Many chose to make the journey this way whilst others gave the cortège a head start and then followed by car. When we reached the de Portemorency family vault, I noticed that Dubois was not missing a trick. He had one of his men photographing the attendees.