[Inspector Peach 10] - Witch's Sabbath

by J M Gregson

  Alan Hurst had a glimpse of that other life she lived, the one he would never see. For the first time in the day he felt the burden of his age. He wondered where he would be, what kind of life he would be living, in ten years’ time; but the picture was blank. He resisted the impulse to put his hands on her shoulders. He wanted the touch of warm, human flesh beneath his fingers, but he knew that this wasn’t the moment for that.

  Anna Fenton said quietly, ‘What kind of girl was she?’

  ‘Annie Clark? Oh, she was efficient enough, I suppose. Well, better than that, really. She’d made a very promising start here, as a matter of fact.’ He owed her that much at least, poor dead Annie.

  ‘Then why did she leave?’ Anna Fenton was bold and persistent; he had probably been the same, at her age.

  ‘She didn’t. She just didn’t come in one morning. It was a fairly quiet period, so I managed without her for a week or two. Then we began to get the bookings in for winter sun and short breaks, and I had to get help of some kind. I made do with a temp for six or eight weeks, until I was sure she wasn’t coming back.’ He told himself that it was useful that this girl was curious, that the police would want to know all this, so that it was a useful rehearsal for him. ‘And then you came along and filled the vacancy. My lucky day, that was!’

  ‘And mine as well!’ She turned round at last and looked at him with a smile, and it was only with a supreme effort of will that he resisted the instinct to reach out and pull her towards him. He was surprised how talking of Annie Clark had made him randy – made him want this other girl with a first name that was almost the same.

  Fortunately, the shop door opened at that point and the couple who had been studying the information in the window came in. He gave them his bright, professional smile, confirmed to them that the Canary Islands were an excellent holiday bargain at the moment, and said, ‘I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Miss Fenton here.’

  He heard her talking to them in her brisk, cheerful way as he shut the door of his office at the back of the showroom. He took out the key from his pocket and unlocked the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. He drew out the video tapes, slipped them into his briefcase, went out through the rear door of the building and moved quickly to his car.

  It was a maroon Vauxhall Vectra, with all the extras. He had got it only three months ago, and he was pleased with it. You didn’t want anything too flashy, anything that would make people ask questions about how you could make that sort of money in a small local travel agent’s shop. The short answer was that you couldn’t, of course – not with all the competition from the big boys and more and more and more people using the Internet. If it wasn’t for this lucrative little sideline, the business would be in real trouble.

  He was surprised how quickly his market had grown, how the word passed round that he could supply these things. He was making two or three deliveries a week now. It was amazing how many people there were who had a taste for this sort of thing. Perverts, he supposed, though he didn’t care to think of them like that: they were increasingly his bread and butter, weren’t they?

  He drove twenty-eight miles in all, delivering video tapes to seven very different residences. All of them knew he was coming; all of the buyers took his packages carefully into their own hands. The only exception was the last call. He left the tapes in their plain white box in the shed beside the garage as he had been instructed to do. The circuit judge was somewhere else in the county, meting out the justice of the land to those arraigned before him. Alan Hurst had never seen him, and he felt now that he never would. It was reassuring to him to know that men like that had such tastes, such secrets. It made his own double life seem relatively innocent.

  He called in at home, made Judith a sandwich for her lunch, gave her thirty minutes of his time and his love. She seemed to him a little paler, a little more frail, with each passing month. She was resolutely cheerful, pathetically grateful for every little consideration that he afforded her. She insisted on coming to the door in her wheelchair to see him off. He bent and kissed her on the forehead; it was one of the little rituals of affection they had kept up over the years of her decline.

  ‘I won’t be late.’

  Not tonight, he wouldn’t. And he wouldn’t be going out again in the evening, wouldn’t be needing to feed her one of the range of ingenious excuses he used when he had a mistress in tow. He despised himself, sometimes – more and more often, nowadays. But a man had needs. You didn’t sign up for a life of celibacy with a crippled wife, even when you went through all that rubbish that everyone mouthed about it being for better or for worse.

  He was more ashamed of this other stuff really: the tapes. But it paid well – paid for the home care and the little treats that he wanted to give Judith as life closed in on her and she got worse. What he was doing was against the law, true, but if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t bring in the easy money he was making from it. There had to be a certain element of risk attached, if you were to make big money as easily as he was doing.

  He prepared himself for a big effort when he had parked the car in the little yard at the back of the shop. Energy always went down well with these girls in their early twenties. God knows, they had enough of it themselves – that was one of the attractions. And most of them hadn’t got the inhibitions about sex that they’d had even a generation ago, he thought. Or perhaps he was just getting a little more experienced, a little better at handling the many-faceted creatures that made up this fascinating gender.

  He allowed himself a small smile at that thought. Then he went breezily into the shop and asked her how she’d been getting on.

  Anna Fenton was pleased with herself. She’d sold a package in Prague to eight lads on a stag weekend and a QEII cruise to two couples who wanted to travel together.

  ‘Excellent! I’ll make us a pot of tea to celebrate,’ said Alan Hurst. He went into the little cramped kitchen and put the china cups and saucers on the tray beside the silver-plated teapot, spread the chocolate digestives round the plate. No beakers this afternoon: make it a special occasion. He felt confidence growing within him as he made the simple moves. They’d have a little intimate snack together and get a little closer to each other.

  Young girls liked it when you did the domestic thing for them.

  Modern witches do not seek publicity, any more than did their ancient counterparts. There are reputed to be up to forty thousand of them in Great Britain, and many more in North America, but they do not boast about their numbers. Secrecy is part of their code, for a variety of reasons. The most important one of these is self-protection.

  The Wiccan order of West Brunton was only one of several groups in the town and the Ribble Valley to the north of it, that area from which, four centuries earlier, witches had been hauled off to Lancaster, tried and executed. These modern witches included men as well as women. They practised white magic, invoked the Mother Goddess and her consort, the male Horned God, and believed that there was a mysterious strength in their numbers which individually they would not have been able to muster.

  There was a muted air about the group as they met on this last Friday night in January. The snow had melted during an afternoon of wintry sunshine, but it was freezing again now. The wet roads were turning treacherous, with that thin film of black ice which is the most dangerous surface of all.

  They had never been a large group, and tonight there were only three of them present. They bowed their heads to the deities and prayed for guidance and help. They asked for help from the Life Force, that pillar of the witches’ world which united rocks and trees, deserts and streams, mountains and valleys, the humblest living forms from amoebae to human beings. Their leader reminded them that all of the earth is a living, breathing organism, a manifestation of the Goddess and the God. All was sacred, all was to be cared for and revered.

  And through such harmony would come strength. The witches, by subsuming themselves in this whole, by understanding the wholeness of the natural wo
rld and their place in it, could learn how to live, could bring power into their lives which they would not have alone.

  Normally it was easy to subsume themselves into the personality of the leader, to follow her incantations and make them their own. But tonight each of them knew that one of their number had passed on. Each of them knew that their youngest member had in fact been violently dispatched from this world, which they were seeking so earnestly to harmonize. Each of them knew that it was even possible, though none of them dared to voice the thought even in this intimate company of fellow Wiccans, that one of the people in this room had played a part in their sister’s removal from the world.

  Their service was muted tonight, not because the words and the thoughts they used were very different from their normal ones, but because they could not submerge themselves as normally into the depths of their worship and their celebration. Each mind in the room reserved a part of itself not for what they were doing and saying but for what they knew was to come.

  It was almost a relief to them when the bell shrilled in the distant hall. Their leader did not look at them. Katherine Howard moved with a stately dignity from her position facing them at the front of the room, divesting herself of the voice she used for the higher world which they had been seeking to enter. By the time she passed through the door, she was back in that more tawdry world all of them inhabited by day. It was her house, and she strode out to answer the ring of the bell and meet the challenge which all of them had known was coming.

  The man whom she brought into the room behind her did not at first sight look very formidable. He had a neat grey suit and wore no topcoat, even on a freezing night like this. He was small and bald, with a fringe of very dark hair beneath his white head and a moustache and eyebrows that were equally black. But the darkest things of all were his eyes, which flashed round each of the faces in turn as they blinked in the full light which their leader had switched on as she ushered him in. The centres of the eyes sparkled like small pieces of bright coal as they assessed the two women and the man in the room.

  He said evenly, ‘My name is Peach and I am a senior policeman. I shall need to speak to all of you individually in due course.’

  Ten

  Eleanor Boyd had a strange Saturday morning. Her husband brought her breakfast in bed.

  It wasn’t her birthday. It wasn’t their wedding anniversary; they hadn’t made much fuss about that in the last three or four years. It must be the old male thing of guilt. He must be trying to cover something up, or to make amends for something he had done. Dermot Boyd was much more conventional than he liked to think he was.

  She watched him come into the room diffidently, as if she was not his wife but some guest to whom they were giving this special treat. He held the tray awkwardly in front of him; it had on it her cereals and one of the silver-plated dessert spoons they kept for dinner parties. Then, when he had broken the ice and seen that she was going to accept his gesture, he bustled back more confidently five minutes later with a boiled egg, toast, marmalade and her mother’s little china teapot, with a woollen cosy on top of it. ‘Time you were pampered for a change,’ he said firmly. ‘I feel I’ve been neglecting you, lately.’

  Ellie resisted the temptation to ask him bluntly what all this was in aid of. He’d tell her soon enough, and a churlish voice at the back of the brain told her not to make it easier for him by asking the right questions. She beheaded her boiled egg expertly and found to her surprise that it was just as she liked it: runny but not half-raw. She cut her toast with slim, expert fingers, dipped a soldier into the yolk, and said, ‘I could get used to this.’

  Dermot smiled at her, then went into the bathroom and shaved. He came back into the room fully dressed. If this did not go well, he might need to be out of the house and away from his wife. He watched her pour a thin amber stream of tea into the china cup, then said, ‘I’m sorry we didn’t have children. It leaves life a bit empty for us sometimes, doesn’t it?’

  She said, ‘It’s old ground, that. Perhaps we should have tried harder to get an adoption, when we were still young enough.’ They were only forty-one now, but both of them knew that the time for a family had gone. ‘And we both have interesting jobs to keep us busy.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Our jobs.’ He looked at her bitterly in the dressing-table mirror. ‘Yours seems rewarding enough, even if you have to work harder at it than I think you should. But I shouldn’t have been an accountant. I’m a square peg in a round hole, most of the time.’

  This was more old ground. She tried to laugh him out of it. ‘You read books, you mean? You can quote the odd line of poetry – well, more than the odd line, if I’m honest. It might make you unusual, but I don’t think there’s an actual ban on accountants being literate.’

  ‘Literary.’ The correction was out before he could stop himself. ‘Anyway, it’s perhaps boredom in the job that has made me look for – for outlets.’ He had hesitated over the last word, trying to find something she wouldn’t think too controversial.

  ‘Outlets.’ She weighed the word, nodding over it, watching his fingers twining in the fringe of the blanket at the edge of the bed. ‘Is this what breakfast in bed is all about – outlets?’

  Dermot wasn’t looking at her as he said, ‘We get on well enough with each other, don’t we? It may not be as passionate as it was at first, but we get on well enough.’

  She wondered what he was going to tell her. Had he got another woman? Was he going to say he’d fallen in love, that he wanted a divorce? And what would she feel if he did? She’d be shocked – of course she would. But would there also be a sort of relief, a comfort in being able to acknowledge at last that they were failing with each other, that their marriage had dried up? She said, ‘Dermot, don’t you think you’d better tell me whatever it is that you want to tell me?’

  He gave her a quick smile of gratitude that she had brought it to a head, then looked down at the hand fiddling with the fringe of the blanket, watching it as if it were someone else’s hand altogether. ‘These nights when I’ve been going off to the Freemasons.’

  ‘Yes. You’re going to tell me you haven’t been going there at all.’

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’

  He looked both startled and discomfited. Men were dense creatures, at times – and this one most of the time. ‘You weren’t cut out to deceive, Dermot. You’d never have made a spy.’

  ‘I hope that’s a compliment.’

  ‘I’ve no idea whether it is or not. I wondered why there was none of the usual regalia, no aprons or anything of that kind. And Masonry didn’t seem quite your thing, really. I think that might just be a compliment, but never mind. Tell me what you’ve really been up to.’ She wondered if the woman would be much younger than her, the way they usually were, whether she was about to be what her colleagues at school called ‘traded in for a newer model’.

  ‘You’ll think it’s weird. You’ll think it’s much odder than Masonry. People always do, until they know more about it.’

  ‘It’s not a woman?’

  ‘What? No, of course it’s not a woman.’ His old irritation with her surfaced for a moment. How could Ellie be so far off the ball? ‘I wouldn’t want another woman when I’ve got you, old girl, would I?’ He reached out a hand and put it on hers on the edge of the tray for a moment, trying to win back one of those moments of intimacy they had neglected until they were perhaps lost for ever. ‘It’s just another interest – something I’d have told you about earlier, if I hadn’t thought you’d laugh in my face.’

  He’d never been able to stand ridicule. Ellie felt a sudden shaft of sympathy for him and his deficiencies. She squeezed the hand which lay still on top of hers and said, ‘You’d better tell me all about it. At least I won’t have to face Ladies’ Night at the Masons, will I?’

  ‘It’s witchcraft.’

  ‘What?’ For the first time in years, he had genuinely surprised her.

  ‘Modern witchcraft. Not all that dancing ro
und the cauldron in Macbeth. It’s a sort of lay religion. We try to do good in the world. We’re Wiccans. I can tell you all about it, if you want me to.’

  She knew that she mustn’t laugh, but that very knowledge had her biting the inside of her lip and staring hard at her mother’s china teapot. Some seconds passed before she could trust herself to say, ‘Not now. Later, perhaps, when I’ve had time to get used to the idea.’

  Then he said something that suddenly shredded her hilarity. ‘You need to know, because the police are interested in us.’

  Her leg twitched beneath the blankets, almost upsetting her neglected tea. ‘Why? What have you done?’ This was getting more bizarre by the minute.

  ‘Nothing, really. But it’s to do with that girl we found up in that farmhouse on Pendle last Saturday. Annie Clark, her name was. She was a Wiccan. She was one of our group.’

  Katherine Howard said, ‘We’re a small group. We always have been. There were eight of us at one time, but two of them moved away, joined other covens. And one man and one woman have ceased to attend. Perhaps they no longer believe; we don’t press people about that. And now poor Annie Clark is dead.’

  Peach said stiffly, ‘I should emphasize that Detective Sergeant Blake and I are interested in your activities only insofar as they concern a serious unsolved crime. We are here to investigate the position which Annie Clark had in your group and the relationship of the other members with her.’

  Sitting upright beside Peach, Lucy Blake was aware that he was not at ease. Very few things threw Percy Peach, but investigating a coven of witches might just be one of them. The most surprising thing to Lucy was how very normal Katherine Howard looked. She was a tall woman of around fifty, carefully and discreetly made up, even at quarter past nine on a Saturday morning. She had fair hair, cut rather short around a broad face, which was handsome rather than pretty. She had long, athletic-looking legs, which were shown at their best in rather close-fitting black trousers. She had alert blue eyes and what seemed to be a habit of stroking the rings on her left hand. These looked like an engagement and wedding ring, but the CID officers had so far seen no sign of a man in the house.