Alchemy

by Maureen Duffy

  At first such an idea made me smile but then I thought it might do me harm, even if said in jest, and I was glad the new priest of St Edmund’s was far enough away for it not to come to his ears. From then on I was very careful with all that I treated that I should use no speech to them that might be thought any kind of spell or incantation and when one old woman who had come to me with hands crabbed in pain asked if there was not some hour of day or night that would serve best for the taking of the potion or rubbing on of the unguent I had given her with some words that she might use for greater efficacy, I answered that the virtue was all in the medicines and that nothing further was needed, they would work as well by day or night and in silence.

  ‘The cunning woman of Savernake who lives in the forest gives us a little bag to hang round our necks with something of power in it.’

  ‘Most likely something to disgust as a dried toad’s leg or owl pellet, such as can do no good but may do harm by holding some rottenness against the body until it decays entirely.’

  Here in my cell with me lives a mouse I feed with crumbs from my plate since it is the only living creature that does not mock or abuse me or search out my secrets. I am careful never to let it be seen for I know that my gaoler would cry out that I have a familiar to do my evil will and that is where my power comes from, for so the ignorant insist with their belief in magic as the treatment for men’s ills and not in natural philosophy to understand diseases and their cure by the light of reason which must come from God as being good. And here lies the danger of that very idea of a white witch or wizard for if there are white then there must, by the law of opposites, be black, evil and of Satan. Then the earth as the psalmist says is not the Lord’s but divided equally, and poor mankind the ground where the battle is played out which I take to be that heresy promulgated by the sect of the Manichees to the confusion of religion and men’s minds.

  I feel my experience in the chapel and meeting with Charlie Gao are enough excitement for one day so I head off to the bike shed and start for home, trying to make sense of it all. Do the Apostle Joachim and his henchman the Revd Bishop, not to mention Apple-pie Molders, actually believe all that apocalyptic stuff about the fringes of eternity? Are they really trying to save souls, and maybe bodies, by a combination of mass hysteria and self-hypnosis, the favourite tools of both religious fanatics and political dictators? Or is there some hidden agenda? Somewhere I read about a cult that was after its members’ money. Maybe it’s like signing up to be a monk or nun and having to make over your worldly goods to the order. That would be a scam of sorts but unless you could prove a cynical intent to deceive for gain where’s the difference from donations to charity, a political party or the established church? And anyway how does all that fit in with what happened to Galton? Which is meant to be what you’re working on, Jade, what you’re paid to suss out. The question should be: what do I have to prove to show wrongful dismissal? That’s what it boils down to.

  There’s very light traffic today because I’ve left early so I’ve time to think, a part of my brain making all the biking decisions while another part busies itself with the Galton enquiry. I have to be able to prove the grounds for his dismissal were inadequate but that’s hard when he’s such a weirdo and arrogant with it. Or else I have to prove the setup at Wessex is even weirder than him. He could have stumbled on something that made them want him out. But that would mean there’s some sinister plot I haven’t uncovered yet. Maybe I can’t. Maybe there isn’t one. You’ll have to do better than that, Jade.

  There’s a light flashing on the answering machine when I reach home but no message. I dial 1471 and get Galton’s number. I don’t press it to ring him back. I need to think but like Yeats’ long-legged dragonfly my mind moves in silence and nothing comes, no flash of brilliant intuition or deduction, my dear Watson. I don’t want to admit to Galton that I’m no further forward as I flounder around trying to make sense of something that may not be susceptible to logical thinking, that may be irrational itself or worse still non-existent.

  Most of a bottle of special offer La Chasse du Pape later, I decide to sleep on it and fall into bed. I’m dreaming, as I often do since I got sucked into this case, of somewhere small and dark which I know is Amyntas’ prison cell but I can’t see her. I grope my way forward with one hand on a cold stone wall and the other stretched out in front of me feeling for something, someone. Then suddenly I’m half awake still in the dream. There’s a phone ringing and the logical bit of my mind says that can’t be in Amyntas’ prison. I switch on my bedside light and catch the phone just before the answering machine can cut in but it’s gone dead. I check the number and look at the clock which shows ten past two. It isn’t Galton’s number. Maybe it’s some drunk misdialling. The ringing begins again. I’m wide awake now. This could go on all night if I don’t stop it. After three rings I pick up the handset.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I need your help.’ It’s Galton’s voice.

  ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have troubled you at such an hour of course but…’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Wellover police station. They said I could make one call to my solicitor. They said if you came and bailed me I could perhaps be released.’

  ‘What have they got you for?’

  ‘I’d rather explain in person. Please, Ms Green.’

  He’s never begged before. There’s none of the snide arrogance in his voice now. ‘Oh Christ! How do I get there?’

  ‘Your motorcycle?’

  ‘I’m probably not sober enough yet. Too much red plonk. Can’t you hang on till morning? I’ll come and spring you then.’

  ‘Please, Ms Green. I’m not used to such an experience. I can’t say much. This may be being recorded. They told me it might. Take a taxi. I’ll pay.’

  ‘Don’t you have a friend who could get you out?’

  ‘No, there’s no one. They’re saying I must end the call. Please come.’ The line goes dead.

  He’d sounded frightened, a real lost cause now. I get out of bed and go into the bathroom to pee and wash my face. I pinch the lobes of my ears to see if they’re still numb. I can’t tell whether my body has neutralised enough of the booze yet. I drink a glass of water. Why are we so uncivilised that most of our trains stop at twelve? I try national rail enquiries, and get a jaunty Scot in some distant call centre who cheerfully confirms that the next train from Waterloo leaves at 7.10 and gets to Wellover just over an hour later. I start trying to find a taxi.

  A quarter of an hour later I’m bowling down the M3 with Lester, a father of two whose parents came over on the Windrush. He still has the Bob Marley lilt as he tells me he prefers to drive at night when the roads are empty. His wife is a nurse and so she’s sometimes on nights too while he stays home and has to drive in the day.

  ‘You don’t see much of each other then.’

  ‘We try to get a couple of hours a day together and our days off when we’re lucky.’

  We hit the curtained suburbs of Wellover just after three o’clock and look for a friendly native sober enough to point the way to the police station. Lester drops me outside under the blue lamp and goes in search of coffee, promising to come back in half an hour to see if I need him.

  I go up the steps to the station with the usual fluttering in my gut I always get entering such institutions. There’s a weary looking constable, female, behind the desk typing something on to a screen.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You have a Dr Alastair Galton here, my client. I should like to see him, please.’

  ‘And you are?’

  I hand over my card, not the Lost Causes one I keep for clients but a more formal version (that doesn’t name Lost Causes. A sense of humour doesn’t come easy to officialdom) I keep for such occasions. She looks at it and presses an unseen buzzer.

  ‘Could I ask what the charge is?’

  ‘Indecent exposure.’ Her
sour expression shows her distaste at having to spit out the two words.

  Shit. What has the silly bugger been up to? I hope I’m keeping the alarm out of my face.

  A Sergeant, male, appears. ‘Can you take three to the interview room. His solicitor is here. And could you get number two to shut up.’ I’m aware of the sound of muffled singing and the thud of a door or wall being thumped. The sergeant goes off through a solid door. The constable, female, gets out from behind her desk. ‘I’ll show you where to go.’ She leads me through a passage into a room, bare except for a table and chairs and a monitor screen flicking from point to point of the station, including the steps outside. For a second I see Galton being escorted along a corridor. ‘We’ve cautioned him as to his charge and his rights.’ I feel as if I’ve stumbled into a cop soap, and at any moment a hand will feel my collar and I’ll be banged up too. Civil practice doesn’t prepare you for bars and locks.

  The door opens and Galton is ushered in. His usual precise clothing is somehow rumpled and his tie askew. His thinning hair is mussed up. Nobody has lent him a comb or a mirror. We stand about awkwardly.

  ‘I should like to see my client alone.’ They exchange looks. Then the woman says: ‘Buzz when you want us.’

  They leave in silence and I see them for a moment on the monitor. Their body language shows they are talking but I can’t hear the words they’re saying. I wave Galton to one of the chairs and sink on to another myself.

  ‘Now what the fuck have you been up to? And remember I warned you about lying to your solicitor and, for the moment, that’s me.’

  ‘I am so grateful to you for coming, Ms Green.’ He puts his head in his hands. This is a very chastened Galton.

  ‘Right. The taxi will be back soon. Let’s have your story. They’ve charged you with indecent exposure. Who did you expose yourself to?’ I’m silently praying it wasn’t a child.

  ‘No one. At least only to those who were similarly exposed, as they call it.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘My interest in white witchcraft isn’t merely academic, Ms Green. I practise what I teach.’

  ‘You’re a witch?’ I fight back an urge to laugh.

  ‘I am the high priest of a group of people who meet together at certain festivals to practise their beliefs and try to live according to them. You will not be aware of it I expect, but last night was a coincidence of the full moon with a traditional sabbat.’

  ‘And what do you do on such occasions? Do they take place often?’

  ‘There are eight in a year plus the main festivals – the solstices, Beltane, Samhain and so on. Some groups choose to meet more often. Once a week, I believe. As to what we do, that depends.’

  ‘Depends on what?’

  ‘On the nature of the occasion.’

  ‘Alright. Another time. Just tell me about tonight.’

  ‘We had found what we thought was a secluded place in woods near Wellover. We all arrived just before midnight and undressed. Then the high priestess cast the circle and we lit our fire. We had begun our ritual when suddenly there were torches and voices away among the trees. I told the rest to get away as quickly as possible while I banished the circle and put out the fire. Above all it was important that there should be no harm to the high priestess.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘She represents the great goddess in her own person.’

  ‘And you? What did you represent?’ I knew we had no time for all this but I couldn’t resist.

  ‘As high priest I represent Cernunnos, the horned god.’

  ‘And is this group really a coven?’

  ‘That’s what we call it, yes.’

  ‘And the rest of the public. Were you still naked when they arrested you?’

  ‘I was about to dress. You see I was the only one not naked for the meeting. I wear a red robe as high priest. I had banished the circle, thrown water on the fire, taken off my robe and was starting to dress.’

  ‘This is very important.’ I was taking quick notes. ‘How far had you got?’

  He bows his head. ‘My socks.’

  Again I want to laugh. ‘But we can claim that you were clothed throughout except for the moments of changing, like someone before and after swimming. OK we deny the charge and ask for bail. You’ll probably have to appear in court if they press charges but we’ll face that when we come to it.’

  I ping the buzzer. ‘My client denies the charge and requests bail on his own surety.’ I know they have no real grounds for holding him unless he’s got a record for this sort of thing. I just hope not and curse myself for not remembering to ask him.

  ‘You will be responsible for his appearing at the magistrates’ court at the proper time.’

  ‘My client has no intention of not answering the charge at any proper time and place.’

  They produce the bail forms and charge sheet. We sign and pay. Outside Lester is waiting. I murmur to Galton that we won’t discuss it in the car and climb in beside the driver.

  ‘They let you out then,’ Lester says when we’re safely inside. ‘Where to?’

  ‘You’ll have to give the driver your address,’ I say. ‘I don’t know it.’

  Galton leans forward from the back seat and directs him to Kempstoke.

  ‘Now if you’d been black,’ Lester says as he sets off expertly up the motorway, ‘they’d have kept you for sure until you come up before the beak. I can’t tell you man how often I was stop and search as a kid but they never found nothing because I was clean. Me mammy would have skinned me herself if I’d been caught with anything. I was always frightened they’d plant something on me, not because of them but cos of what she’d do to me.’

  It didn’t take long to the outskirts of Kempstoke where Galton began directions to his home. It turned out to be a semidetached brick house on an estate of many similar, not council but eighties ticky tacky, anonymous as the next one in its web of little roads and crescents, called executive no doubt in the developer’s brochure.

  ‘I can’t express my gratitude enough, Ms Green.’

  ‘We’re not out of the wood yet. I’ll speak to you tomorrow but not too early. I need to get some sleep if I can.’

  But I wake at seven anyway and search the literature for similar cases as I eat my breakfast. Surely there must be something in Halsbury. Then I try the internet. Out of curiosity I enter Amyntas Boston after Witchcraft and then Mary Sidney/ Herbert, Countess of Pembroke but both are blank. I ring the Law Library and ask them to put aside anything they have on the subject that’s on the shelves. Suddenly I get a sense of how big the interest might be among my fellow library browsers and members. Maybe there are several Galtons among them or even a high priestess or two. I might have passed one on the stairs. How would you know? Presumably they don’t walk around naked except for meetings. There’s obviously a market for the occult and the alternative, judging by the sections in bookshops, and even respectable broadsheets have their resident astrologer.

  Galton rings me at ten o’clock. ‘I think you’d better come in and talk,’ I say. ‘There’s a car park on the South Bank where you ought to find a space or you can get a train to Waterloo. Come as soon as you can.’

  ‘I’ll be there in an hour.’

  ‘How do you feel?’ I ask as I let him in.

  ‘A little shaky, I must confess.’

  ‘I’ll make us some coffee.’

  ‘That would be most kind.’

  Can I deal with this new, humble Galton? Maybe I would prefer my old sparring partner back. I settle us down with our mugs of coffee and open up his case on screen so I can take notes directly.

  ‘OK. Let’s assume they will prosecute and will want to make it as black as they can. First question: how do you set up your meetings?’

  ‘By email. Just because ours is a very old craft, Ms Green, you mustn’t assume we are technologically illiterate.’

  The old Galton is showing signs of revival. ‘I didn’t, don’t. But email is eas
ily hacked into. Whereas the various forms of snailmail are more secure. You need a warrant to tap somebody’s phone or open their post. How did the police know to come looking? Was it just a happy accident for them? Or were they tipped off?’ I make a note to ask them. ‘They’ll probably say a member of the public observed some suspicious late-night activity where none should be: cars or lights.’

  ‘That’s perfectly possible of course.’

  ‘But unlikely. You’d made a careful choice. You’re used to looking for secluded places. Have you ever been caught before?’

  ‘Never. We are indeed most careful.’

  ‘The possibility is a chance sighting by police or public. If so we would have to ask what they were doing out there at that time. A tip-off by some member of your own group. Have you any enemies? Anyone who’s jealous of your position as leader for instance.’

  ‘Unthinkable. Utterly against all we believe.’

  ‘Has anyone else access to your email address?’

  ‘Only the people at Wessex.’

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. How can anyone be so naive? ‘There’s our answer then. It fits perfectly.’

  Galton almost hangs his head. ‘It never occurred to me. I should have changed it all when I was suspended. Could they, could they have access to the other members of the group?’

  ‘Probably. But I doubt if they’re interested in them. I think this is directed at you, a pre-emptive strike to stop you taking any action against them. But we’re unlikely to be able to prove Wessex had any involvement. We shall have to fight this on other grounds. Insufficient evidence for example. Of course there were several policemen who saw you with only your socks on but no independent witnesses. How did they treat you? Were you allowed to continue dressing?’

  ‘Yes. Some of them were satirical but one was aggressive, pushing me and calling me a dirty pervert.’

  ‘The public thinks of such goings-on as Satanism. They’re lead to believe perversion and even sacrifice are part of your rituals. At the very least they’re envious of what they believe is all that free sex al fresco. The sort of jinks they might like to get up to round the barbecue. So they imagine all kinds of goings on they can condemn, especially with children.’