[Inspector Peach 10] - Witch's Sabbath

by J M Gregson

  Kath forced a shrug, feeling in that moment how stiffly she had been holding her shoulders beneath the smooth grey material of her suit. ‘No more than what we’ve been talking about, really. I warned her about the misconceptions the public at large hold about modern witchcraft. I helped to clarify her beliefs. I acted sometimes as a confidante for her. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to an older woman about emotional matters.’ She looked instinctively to Lucy Blake for confirmation of that idea, but found that the young, intelligent face was on this occasion professionally blank.

  Instead, DS Blake nodded slowly and said, ‘I’m sure you can see that you need to reveal to us any secrets which Annie confided to you. You owe it to her and to yourself, if you want us to find out who killed her.’

  ‘These things sometimes affect the living as well as the dead.’ Kath knew that she had led them into the area she had determined to keep to herself before they came. The human brain works with amazing swiftness: she had time even in her dismay to wonder whether her psyche had led them deliberately there.

  ‘And that is the very reason why we need to probe these things. If they prove to have nothing to do with Annie’s death, your confidences will be respected and we shall not pass on your thoughts.’

  Kath looked into the young, earnest features and found herself smiling – an unexpected, involuntary smile – at the thought of roles reversed. Here was the younger woman leading the older one gently into revealing the secrets of her heart, a strange role-reversal from her time with Annie Clark. She tried to speak calmly. ‘I’ve nothing very profound to tell you. I warned her gently about Jo Barrett. Then, later, I talked to her about her new boyfriend and tried to warn her against getting too excited too early about the relationship.’

  Lucy nodded, using even that small physical movement as an outlet for the excitement she knew she must conceal. Katherine Howard obviously didn’t realize that she’d given them new information, and she was much more likely to give them more if they did not react too eagerly. Lucy left the Jo Barrett reference for a moment, moving to the area they already knew something about. ‘Was Annie excited by getting together with Matt Hogan?’

  ‘Very excited. I tried to keep her calm, to tell her it was early days. She seemed pretty sure that it was going to last.’

  ‘Do you know Matt Hogan?’

  ‘No. Annie said she was going to bring him to meet me, but she disappeared before that ever happened.’

  ‘He didn’t approve of her involvement with witchcraft and the Wiccans. I fancy he would have tried to prise her away from you, from what he tells us. Is that the impression you had?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to talk to him, to show him that we were really quite normal people. But I never got the chance to do that.’ She stared bleakly past them, looking out at the frost on the lawn of her front garden, which the sun did not reach until the afternoon.

  Lucy Blake nodded her understanding, trying to make sure Katherine Howard would see nothing very remarkable in her next question. ‘And Jo Barrett? I think you said you warned Annie gently about her.’

  ‘Yes. Jo makes no secret of her sexual preferences. She would no doubt feel that she is honest and open in these things. But she was far more experienced than Annie was. And I sometimes think there is – well, a predatory streak in Jo. She wouldn’t see it that way, but I did.’

  ‘You didn’t approve of her advances to Annie?’

  Kath smiled. ‘I didn’t. No doubt Jo would tell you that I was the old-fashioned mother hen – that Annie Clark was a woman of twenty-three, perfectly capable of making her own decisions. On the face of it, she’s right; of course she is. But I saw an inexperienced and vulnerable girl who’d previously led a very sheltered life being conducted into new areas by a much more experienced woman.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I was being the protective mother, wasn’t I? But no doubt Jo Barrett has called me that and worse to you.’

  Lucy smiled. She could feel the tension in Peach beside her, but he kept quiet, trusting her to handle this. ‘We don’t reveal what people say to us, Mrs Howard – just as we shall respect your confidences, unless they seem to have a direct bearing on our investigation.’

  Kath knew from the woman’s inflection that this was a standard reassurance, probably one that she had uttered dozens of times before. Yet it was in that minute that she divined that they had not known about Jo Barrett and Annie before today. Even as she felt the pain of her unwitting treachery to her fellow Wiccan, a tiny part of her mind was asking why that should be so, why the normally scrupulously honest Jo should have concealed something that she should have known was bound to come out. She said woodenly, ‘I shouldn’t have told you about Jo Barrett and Annie. I thought you already knew.’

  Peach could restrain himself no longer. ‘On the contrary, Mrs Howard, it was your duty to speak about this. You have told us only something that Ms Barrett should have told us herself. What was the nature of their relationship?’

  Kath shrugged, feeling a need despite his words to play this down, to try to mitigate the damage she had done to her friend and show loyalty to the coven. She picked her words carefully as she said, ‘I don’t know the details. Annie told me that she’d had a teenage infatuation with Jo as her teacher, many years before they met when Annie came to the coven. Perhaps Jo thought that gave her a right to some sort of intimacy with Annie.’

  ‘So Jo Barrett made a bid for sexual favours from Annie?’

  Kath tried to show a contempt for such a simplistic question in her smile. ‘She plainly fancied Annie Clark, who was an attractive young woman. Would you find it so sinister if we were talking about a man who was ten years older and who had tried to get her into bed with him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t regard it as sinister at all. But in a murder investigation, I should certainly investigate both the man’s feelings and the girl’s reaction to them. Which is what we shall do in the case of Ms Barrett.’

  ‘Then you should take it up with her.’

  ‘That we shall certainly do, in due course. At this moment. I’m asking you how you saw the exchanges.’

  Kath wanted to tell him to go away, to refuse to discuss the matter any further. But she was a logical woman, who had trained herself to take logical, dispassionate actions. And she could see the argument that murder made its own rules, that the woman who had been at the centre of this affair was not here to give her version of it. She owed a loyalty to Jo, but a greater loyalty to the girl who had been so close to her: these two saw that, and she must behave accordingly.

  Kath tried to choose her words carefully. ‘Jo Barrett “came on strong” to Annie, in the week after she had been initiated into the coven. That was Annie’s phrase for it.’ For a moment her face carried a sad, reminiscent smile. ‘To be honest, I think Annie was flattered by Jo’s feelings. She should have knocked the idea of a lesbian affair on the head from the start. But perhaps she didn’t know Jo well enough, didn’t realize that she wouldn’t have committed herself without being intensely serious about it.’

  ‘So there was a big row between the two of them?’

  Kath’s lips set in a firm line. ‘I can’t tell you that. I only know what Annie told me.’

  ‘Which was what?’

  He wasn’t going to give up. Perhaps he was right: she was the only remaining mouthpiece that poor Annie had left. And a small, unworthy voice within her said that at least this was taking his thoughts and his suspicions away from her own part in Annie’s last days.

  ‘Annie said it was pretty grim. Jo called her a lot of unpleasant names, said that she’d led her on, lured her into making a fool of herself.’ Kath paused. ‘She’s a very proud person, Jo. A very private person, about her own feelings. I can imagine how hurt she might have been. But of course, I only had Annie’s version of events. I’ve never spoken to Jo about what happened.’

  ‘But Ms Barrett is aware that you know about this?’

  ‘I imagine she must be. We’ve never spoken of it, as I say, but J
o knows that Annie used to confide in me, both as a mother figure and as leader of the coven.’

  They asked her a little about the other people in the case. They questioned her about Dermot Boyd and whether he had been attracted to Annie, and she was carefully non-committal about that. Then they asked about the dead girl’s relationships with her flatmate and with her employer, Alan Hurst. She replied carefully, telling them that she did not know these two people herself and that Annie had scarcely spoken of them to her – not that she could remember, anyway, after all these months. Annie had been very excited about her new boyfriend, but Kath was pretty sure that she hadn’t mentioned any dispute with him. But that could have come after her last meeting with Kath, of course.

  Kath wondered if these experienced questioners realized that she was waiting for them to come back to her own part in this. She felt the tension rising in her as they checked again when she had last seen Annie Clark, but they didn’t ask her any more questions about that last day.

  Lucy Blake said, as they drove away from the tall Victorian house, ‘She was mortified when she found she’d let the cat out of the bag about Jo Barrett, wasn’t she?’

  ‘She was, but she recovered herself very quickly and went back to telling us just as much as she wanted to about things. She’s a cool one, Katherine Howard. It makes you wonder what she’s still concealing about herself.’

  Twenty

  Heather Shields was enjoying her breakfast.

  She had been to her writers’ circle on the previous night, and they had talked about the importance of bringing your personal experiences to your writing, of using events in your own life to bring immediacy to what you had to say. Heather had been happy as she listened to the earnest talk, but she had kept her thoughts to herself. She was the only person in the room who was involved with a murder, who had lived with the victim and been close to her – the only one who had known what the victim’s thoughts were; the only one who had seen the very souls of herself and Annie Clark exposed, in that raw, elemental quarrel they had flung at each other on the day before Annie had died.

  It was her secret, one she would use to inform her writing, to give it individuality. She was still musing about the advantages it would give her when she got the phone call.

  A smooth, dark-brown voice, which in other circumstances she would have found very attractive. A Police Constable Northcott, he said, at Brunton CID. The man who had interviewed her last time with that Rottweiler of a chief inspector. He had seemed sympathetic to her then, but she had not recognized his voice on the phone today: it had seemed darker and deeper than she remembered. They needed to see her again, he said, in connection with the death of Anne Marie Clark. New information had come to light, and they needed to speak with her in connection with that. It would be better if it was in private.

  Heather phoned in to the works and explained that she would be a little late on this Thursday morning. The impersonal voice on the other end of the line did not ask why, and she thought it better not to tell them. She threw away her half-eaten slice of toast and tried to drink her coffee black. Her appetite had suddenly disappeared. She told herself that she would remember what happened today, because it would be material for the writing she planned. But on this occasion, Heather failed to convince herself.

  PC Northcott was even taller and blacker than she had remembered him. He had Detective Sergeant Blake with him, the woman who had come here with Peach after the news of Annie’s death had broken. They wanted to talk to her again about that day in September when she had last seen Annie. She had known it would be that: it was almost a relief to her when they said it. She said, ‘I know that Matt Hogan has told you that I had a big bust-up with Annie on that day. He phoned me.’

  DS Blake frowned, wondering exactly what had taken place between the duo, whether they had agreed upon what she would now say. She shrugged. ‘We’d rather he hadn’t done that.’

  Heather smiled, trying to play this easy, to make herself a spectator rather than a participator in that drama these two and others were trying to unravel. ‘Matt meant well. And I’ve nothing to fear, have I? I told you all about my big row with Annie Clark when you were last here.’

  Blake studied her dispassionately, noted how her fingers twisted in her lap, beneath a chest and shoulders which were rigid with tension. ‘What we have to decide is whether you told us all about that last day with Annie, or whether you withheld something. We have to bear in mind, you see, that you denied all talk of any disagreement, when I first interviewed you, with Chief Inspector Peach.’

  ‘At first I did, yes. That was foolish of me. But I have a criminal record, as DI Peach was delighted to point out to me when he saw me again on Monday. My first inclination was to conceal any disagreements I’d had with a dead girl, or the man who used to be my boyfriend and was now hers.’

  Lucy Blake studied the round, pretty face in its frame of abundant black hair. ‘If I’d suddenly lost my long-standing boyfriend to someone who’d been sharing a flat with me, I think I’d have felt quite violent about it.’

  ‘And if you’d been a druggie with a history of violence, you’d have attacked her and killed her. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

  Blake looked at her evenly, letting the pause stretch. ‘It’s a possibility we have to consider.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Annie Clark. I felt like tearing her eyes out, but I didn’t touch her.’

  ‘But you lied about this – pretended there had been no disagreement between you, when in fact there had been a violent row.’

  ‘But with no blows exchanged. Remember that, please. I’m not an addict any more, and I’m very conscious that I have a record. I can’t afford to offer violence to anyone, and I didn’t do so.’ Heather was pleased with the quiet formality of her reply: like a much older woman, she thought.

  ‘You knew Annie was pregnant, didn’t you? In spite of what you’ve told us before.’

  Heather wondered whether she should go on denying it. But Matt Hogan had said that he was going to tell them. Perhaps they already knew the facts, and were inviting her to stumble deeper into trouble. ‘Yes, I knew. But it was only on that last Saturday, when we were screaming all kinds of things at each other. I can’t see that it has anything to do with this.’

  DS Blake looked at her for a long moment. ‘Except that you’ve lied about it, until now, so you must have thought it was significant. Did Annie tell you who the father was?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you assumed it was Matt Hogan.’

  Heather wondered if she could deny it, could scream at them that it was not so. But she had lied quite enough already, and each lie had got her further into trouble. ‘Yes, I thought it was Matt. Perhaps Annie wanted me to think that, with the things we were flinging at each other at that moment.’

  ‘It must have increased your fury with Annie Clark – made you wish you could be rid of her, once and for all.’

  ‘Probably it did. I certainly wasn’t thinking rationally. But I didn’t kill Annie.’

  The white, freckled, female face and the smooth, ebony male one studied her for seconds before Lucy Blake said, ‘We can only consider the facts. And one of those is that you were very sure that Annie Clark was gone for good. By the end of September, no more than a few days after she was last seen, you’d got someone else to take on her share of the rent.’

  ‘Because I knew there was no going back after the terrible things we’d said to each other. Because I knew she planned to set up house with Matt Hogan. Because I thought she was carrying his baby. Because I didn’t want to see either of them ever again.’ Heather threw all the vehemence she could muster into the phrases, aware that what they had said sounded very damning for her, that these were the police, looking hard to pin a killing on someone. She wondered if the desperation she felt was coming out in her words, if the wildness she felt raging in her head was visible to these watchful opponents.

  It seemed to her a long time before PC Northco
tt, speaking for the first time since they had come into the room, said softly, ‘You were one of the last people to see Annie Clark alive. Did she tell you where she was going, when she left here?’

  It was a lifeline, an acknowledgement that she might after all not be guilty of murder, and she grasped at it eagerly. ‘We parted on such bad terms that I didn’t know where she was going. We were just hurling abuse at each other, by then. But I’m sure she’d said something earlier about what she was planning to do. She’d mentioned going off the next day with someone for a long walk, trying to sort things out once and for all. Those were the words she used.’ As the phrase came back to her over the months, her face brightened with hope, as if quoting the dead girl’s exact words was some guarantee of her innocence.

  Clyde Northcott knew that it was nothing of the sort, that even if Heather Shields was speaking the truth, it might be an irrelevance, a mere cul de sac leading them away for a time from her guilt. Or it might, of course, be very important. He tried to make himself sound almost bored as he said, ‘And whom do you think Annie was planning to meet on that Sunday, when she said that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I assumed she meant Matt Hogan. That’s what started the big row between us: I thought she was rubbing my nose in the situation. Now I think it may have been someone else she was planning to see. But I’ve no idea who it might have been.’

  Dermot Boyd hadn’t seen the man Peach introduced as DC Pickering before. He was a young man, lanky and a little uncoordinated in his movements, which somehow made him seem less menacing than the squat and pugnacious man beside him.

  Unfortunately, it was DCI Peach who was doing most of the talking. Dermot had taken them into the inner office, the one he and his fellow professionals in finance used when they needed privacy with a client. He was uncomfortably aware that the place was not completely soundproof, that the exchanges in here might reach the curious ears of his colleagues if voices were raised. He found himself saying defensively, ‘I don’t know why you keep going over this. I’ve told you all that I know about Annie Clark and what went on at the time of her disappearance.’