by M B Vincent
‘We may be able to do better than that. These “do”s are usually filmed. Hopefully I can spot you all dressed up in the audience.’
‘Good,’ said Gillian. She didn’t sound as if she meant it. ‘Let’s leave it there. My time’s rather more expensive than yours and you’ve wasted enough of it.’
‘Your dad,’ said Moretti, looking at his notes.
Gillian stopped on her way to the door.
‘That was a sad business,’ he said.
Gillian spun round. If looks could kill, Moretti would be six feet under in St Luke’s churchyard.
What’s this about? Moretti was a dark horse; he’d told Jess nothing about this line of questioning as they sparred over the Gummy Bears.
‘Nineteen eighty-nine. You’d have been, what, nineteen?’
‘Seventeen,’ whispered Gillian.
‘A burglary gone wrong. A blow with a heavy object. Did they ever find the perpetrator?’
‘You know they didn’t.’
‘Hard to lose your father that young. And yet . . .’
‘And yet what?’ Gillian was wound up so tight it seemed her MaxMara trouser suit might fly apart.
‘At least it stopped the beatings, eh, Ms Cope?’
***
Jess scolded herself as she settled down to watch Abonda’s interview; it was wrong to wonder if this could ‘top’ Moretti’s revelatory exchange with Gillian Cope.
This is real life. Real life and death.
As Eden fiddled with the tape machine, Jess tucked her feet under her on the low, serviceable chair. The scratchy fabric was comforting. The strip lighting’s glare was cosy. Here, where she could help, felt more like home than home did right now.
‘Thank you for coming in, Abonda,’ Eden had begun. ‘I want to be frank with you, and you can do the same for me. Truth is, you’re already lying to us. Nobody believes you don’t know where your son is.’
Abonda had dressed up for Eden. She was all in purple. There was a fake flower in her hair. She looked tired. Not the tiredness of a late night, but the tiredness of a long, long journey over stones that is far from over.
I know why you look so spent, thought Jess. Knowing a witch’s secret is uncomfortable.
‘You’re right,’ said Abonda. ‘I do lie to you. You and your laws mean nothing to me. Family’s everything. My boy’s only just out of jail and you want to put him straight back. ‘Cos his face doesn’t fit. ‘Cos he’s Roma.’
‘He’s been making and continues to make threats,’ Eden ploughed on. ‘There’s proven bad blood between the Norrises and the Wongs and the Heaps. As for our most recent victim, J P Barreau, I’ve spoken to his ex-partner and she confirms that she spent months trying to talk him out of buying a gun and finding your son to punish him for what he did to her.’
Abonda said nothing.
‘I don’t think you acted alone. None of these sorry events would have happened without Steven Norris’s taste for violence. Cooperate with me and the most you’ll be is an accessory. But continue to stonewall me and you’ll make yourself a co-conspirator.’
‘When this is over,’ said Abonda, ‘you’ll be the one with blood on their hands. Stevie has a weak heart. If all this stress kills him, you and me’ll have a little appointment, Mr Eden, and only one of us’ll walk away from it.’
***
‘She’s feisty, your mate,’ said Moretti, as he and Jess waited for Eden in his office. There had been wild talk of doughnuts.
‘Abonda’s not my mate,’ said Jess. Abonda was too elemental to be a friend. Too earthy. Too mysterious.
Watching Abonda spar with – and even threaten Eden – had set cogs whirring in Jess’s head. Did she really see integrity and spirit in Abonda? Did Abonda know about the miniature coffin, the still-warm heart? Perhaps Jess was kidding herself, and there was no connection between her and the witch of Castle Kidbury. Perhaps Jess was being played.
‘And don’t call her feisty,’ said Jess. ‘Nobody ever calls a man feisty. It’s just another way of telling women to shut the fuck up.’
Moretti, maddeningly difficult to annoy, said, ‘You sound like Gillian Cope.’
‘I sound like a woman,’ said Jess. Then, because because Moretti didn’t deserve her anger, she kicked him gently on the shin.
He seemed to understand her language and kicked her gently back.
‘Thoughts?’ called Eden as he joined them. He plonked a stack of files on the desk. Plonked himself into the chair.
‘No doughnuts?’ asked Jess.
‘Grown up thoughts, I meant.’ Eden took off his jacket and hung it carefully over the back of the chair. Too carefully; he was jangling like a pocketful of knives and was taking pains to appear calm. ‘Abonda knows where her son’s hiding. She hasn’t seen him though; we follow her everywhere.’
‘She probably sends an owl with a little note in its claws.’ Moretti was pleased with his joke but stopped smiling when he realised Eden was not. ‘Gillian’s a dark one, sir. I took a deep dive into her father’s murder. There isn’t any real evidence to support this story of a break-in.’
‘She killed her own dad?’ Jess was taken aback. Murder was everywhere when you began to look.
‘That’s just a theory,’ said Eden.
‘But it might explain the psychology of the killer going after fathers.’ Jess was energised, the doughnuts forgotten.
‘Facts. Evidence. That’s what we need. We’re three deaths deep already, with a prime suspect who seems to flit through the town like a ghost. There’s something we’re not seeing. Some detail, some element . . .’ Eden inclined his head at Moretti. ‘Good work.’
Moretti realised Eden was addressing him. ‘Oh. Thanks, sir.’
‘Now out.’ Eden pointed at the door as if Moretti was a dog.
‘It’s so out of character for you,’ said Jess, when Moretti left. ‘This prejudice. He’s all right.’ Her ambiguous status in the police station meant she couldn’t call him sarge or sir, but it also meant she could stick her neck out and criticise him.
‘Boy’s after my job.’ Eden slammed down his signature on form after form that Knott had laid out for him. ‘At the very least, he’s a spy for DI Phillips. And yes, I do know how melodramatic I sound, but I’ve worked with Phillips for years now, and he’s a sly one.’
He avoided Jess’s eye. She knew he was divorced, and she knew he didn’t want to be divorced. Did you have a Sunday roast yesterday? He was too good a man to subsist on microwave meals, but Jess suspected that’s exactly what he did. ‘The little bird who whispers to Phillips . . .’ she said. ‘It’s not Moretti. I think it’s one of your cleaners.’
There was no proof that it was Maggie who had tipped off Phillips about Norris’s disappearance. There was no proof that Maggie had tipped off the Norrises that Eden’s men were on their way. Unlike Eden, Jess didn’t always need evidence; some things she just knew.
CHAPTER 15
THE HIGH PRIESTESS
Still Monday 9 November
It was a bad idea.
Lunchtime is not the time to drop in to see your friend when that friend runs a pub.
The Druid’s Head was packed with punters, throwing ploughman’s platters down their throats and ordering the local beer. It was one way of blowing a raspberry at Blotmonap and the murders and the Norris-induced paranoia.
Or they just really really like cheese and beer.
Mary made time for Jess. She delegated underlings – all of whom both feared and fancied her – to serve other, non-VIP customers, and leaned on the ale-spattered bar to say, ‘Fancy an only slightly out of date pasty?’
Obviously the answer was yes.
‘Did you hear those noises in the garden this morning?’ Mary squirted a fart of brown sauce onto Jess’s plate. ‘Not cops. Not Norris. A kind of baa, but other worldly.’
‘God knows what Bogna’s rearing out there in the bushes.’
‘She’s a law unto herself. She probably keeps a litt
le rhino in the azaleas.’
‘And an ostrich behind the potting shed.’
It was good to talk nonsense with Mary.
‘No news on big bad Norris?’ Mary was casual, but Jess could tell she was hoping for a positive answer.
‘Nope. He’s managing to live rough and nip over to Harebell House for a quick spot of intimidation, without anybody spotting him.’ The tarnkappe was working well. ‘Have you seen Rupert? He’s almost as elusive as bloody Norris.’
‘Missing him already?’ Mary didn’t seem to be joking. There was, instead, something like pity on her face. ‘Why don’t you two talk?’
‘We talk all the time.’
‘Talk properly. About what’s going on. Or not going on.’ Mary threw a crisp in the air and caught it in her mouth. ‘Or are you too busy swooning over Mitch the Millionaire?’
‘I’m not swooning.’ Jess had to laugh at Mary’s rude disbelief. ‘I’m not! In fact . . .’ She chewed her lip. ‘I have some suspicions about him.’
‘Shuddup,’ said Mary. ‘Hang on, you’re feckin’ serious? But he’s a dad and he’s hot and, well, he’s not the murderer, Jess.’
‘So hot dads can’t kill?’
‘I’m sure I saw that on a T-shirt once.’
***
The murders were a perfect fit for Norris, but he didn’t have the field all to himself.
As Jess drove out of town, humming an Elvis favourite to keep the darkening sky at bay, her phone pinged.
Parked up by a hedgerow, she scrolled through the file Moretti had sent her. The murder of Giles Cope in nineteen eighty-nine was a cold case now, every detail set down and filed away. It was dry stuff until Jess got to the ancillary file: Gillian Cope/Minor/File 835442AW3/AT RISK.
A ten-year-old Gillian stared out from the screen. She had glasses then. At eleven she grew a fringe, then, at thirteen, the spots arrived. One aspect stayed the same. The black and blue marks. The dead eyes.
It would take a hard heart not to feel sorry for that lonely child, even if she did grow up to be unlikeable.
And Jess did not have a hard heart. Compromised, maybe, aloof, sure, but not hard. It was like one of those puzzles: What’s Wrong with this Picture?
Iris’s flat was as it ever was. A Masai shield hanging beside a watercolour of Dorset farmland hanging beside a David Bowie album cover. The smell of good coffee. The drawl of jazz.
But sitting in a leather armchair by the fire was Mitch. When he stood to greet Jess, he made the room feel small. He was too big, too denim for her great aunt’s apartment.
Jess had wanted Iris to herself. ‘Should I . . .’ She gestured as if to leave. ‘Am I in the way?’
She was relieved when her aunt told her not to be so damn silly – ‘When did you ever worry about being in the way?’ – and sat her down with a Magnum.
Mitch pouted. ‘I didn’t get one of those.’
‘That,’ said Iris, ‘is because you’re not Doctor Jessica Castle. I keep a special stash, just for her.’ She was in blood-coloured cashmere and an aged tweed skirt that, if it could talk, would probably swear like a trooper.
‘I’ve just had a long meeting with Josh,’ said Mitch. He threw one leg over the arm of the chair. He was at ease; he carried that ease around with him and unpacked it wherever he landed. ‘He’s full of ideas.’
‘Unfortunately,’ murmured Iris. ‘Don’t worry. Whenever you have to have a meeting, you can pop in here afterwards.’
‘I’d like that,’ said Mitch.
More crossing of the streams. More of Jess’s people getting out of their boxes and collaborating without her express approval. She almost wished Mary could be there to see how well she was taking it.
Except she wasn’t taking it particularly well.
The new information about David’s death ate at her. She wanted to take Iris’s hand and say, ‘I know, and I’m sorry I badgered you about him and I wish you didn’t have this pain in your life.’ She wanted to make it right somehow. She desperately needed to talk to Iris about it but felt unable to open such a Pandora’s Box.
She realised Mitch was talking to her.
‘Do you think of me differently now, Jess?’
‘Because you’re filthy rich?’ Jess’s thoughts were still laced up in tree roots, still reverberating to gunshot. ‘Why does it embarrass you? Most people would just get on with bathing in champagne and eating fivers for breakfast.’
‘Money puts everything out of whack.’ Mitch looked at his boots. ‘Makes it tricky to build relationships.’
‘Not with me,’ said Jess. ‘According to Mary, I make relationships tricky without any help.’
‘Jessica Castle,’ said Mitch. ‘Are you flirting with me?’
‘God no. Like, no. I don’t. Ever. Can’t. I certainly wasn’t flirting with you.’
‘Hmm.’ Those little noises Iris occasionally made were eloquent.
Jess bent over her Magnum.
‘Mind you, Mitch,’ said Iris, as she stretched out an elegant arm to take up a pack of cards that lay on a side table. ‘A bath in champagne does sound like fun.’
‘Bit tickly.’ He winked at Iris.
Mitch even flirts with octogenerians. He and Iris had the rapport of the effortlessly charismatic. Both of them won people over simply by entering a room. They were big cats; Jess merely a moggie. ‘You settling in to Castle Kidbury, Mitch?’ she said.
‘Do shush, darling,’ said Iris. ‘I’ve covered all the polite topics one foists on Australians, and this charming man has dutifully held forth on jet lag and the time difference and the weather etcetera etcetera. Let’s give him a break and talk murder.’ Iris tucked her legs beneath her, like a young deer.
Jess could tuck her legs beneath her but it would take a while and wasn’t the sort of manoeuvre she carried out in public. ‘Eden reckons there’ll be one more death.’
‘Does Mr Eden have a venue for this terrible event?’ Iris let the cards rain into her lap.
They were, Jess noticed, tarot cards. Colourful. Charged. She hadn’t known that Iris possessed such things. ‘Yes. It’s being watched day and night.’ The Molton Abbot Jolly Cook had more plain-clothes officers enjoying its mixed grills than it did customers. ‘Mitch, if Eden’s wrong, and this isn’t a grudge killing spree, then you might be in danger.’ She rolled out her theory about all fathers.
‘But it is Norris,’ said Iris. ‘We all know that.’
‘I’m always suspicious about anything we all know.’
Mitch was quiet. Jess wondered if her comment about fathers had startled him and wished she could take it back.
Iris said, turning a card over in her fingers, ‘I hear Norris has a passion for Vikings.’
‘Where’d you hear that?’
Iris tapped her nose with the tarot card. Said nothing.
Jess may as well spill all. ‘He fancies himself as Thor.’
Mitch let out a loud ‘Huh!’and said, ‘If Thor took steroids and shaved his fat head.’
They laughed. It was so much easier to laugh at monsters than try to understand them.
‘What,’ asked Iris, ‘is the significance of leaving body parts at Fairy Barrow and the Apostles? Surely they have nothing to do with Vikings?’
‘There’s a lot of overlap. Gods with similar duties and personalities crop up in Roman and Greek and other cultures. Thor is a loose counterpart for Zeus, or even maybe Hercules. I’m trying to think like Norris, like a Viking, like our antecdents. We used to speak the language of the earth, like radios tuned to receive. There was an acceptance of death that we’ve lost; the killer believes that death is part of life, not an ending.’
‘When Death visits,’ said Iris, ‘it certainly feels like an ending.’ She held up the card in her hand. It was the man of the hour: Death.
Jess felt David’s memory glimmer in the room.
‘Which Viking god’s in charge of the weather?’ asked Mitch, with a hyperbolic shiver and a deft change of topic. ‘Me
and my girls are finding these temperatures tough.’
‘That’d be Skadi,’ said Jess. ‘Nordic goddess of winter. She’s a pretty formidable gal. Hunts on skis. Helped to create the first earthquakes. She was punishing another god, Loki, by tying him to a rock and suspending a venomous snake over his head. Every time the venom dripped onto Loki’s body he shuddered, and the earth shook, and voila, earthquakes.’
‘I hear the last victim was on holiday here. Talk about bad luck. Wasn’t he with his kids?’
‘Twins,’ said Jess.
‘Those littlies will feel the lack of a dad.’ Mitch swallowed. ‘I know my girls miss their mum in a new way every single day.’
Nobody said anything. Neither aunt nor niece were the sort to offer platitudes.
That’s what the treehouse is about. It came to Jess in a flash, as sudden as the gunshot. And the bunk beds. Mitch was building cosiness and consolation into the bare bones of Hungry Hill Farm.
‘Ordinary families,’ he was saying. ‘Lucky families, with both parents, sometimes I have to look away.’ He stared into the fire. He spoke very low; the crackling logs almost swallowed the words. ‘Sometimes I hate them.’
‘We’re all getting far too sombre.’ Iris, averse to melancholy, threw the tarot cards to the floor.
Face up, on top of the rest, was The High Priestess. Timeless image. Harsh colour. Jess knew knew all about the High Priestess.
It was a card of stillness. Not now, it whispered. Not yet. The priestess’s advice was to reflect upon the situation and trust your instinct to guide you through.
‘Mitch,’ said Iris. ‘Dance with me.’
And so he did, on the rug, while on the sofa, Jess thought hard.
***
Getting across her own drive was like getting through airport security.
‘You know me!’ said Jess, exasperated. ‘I’m not a serial killer, I’m the poor cow who lives here.’
‘Just doing my job,’ said the officer, who had probably been the recipient of a kick up the arse from Eden.
‘I know. Sorry.’ Living under siege would make a saint surly. And Jess was no saint.
‘There she is, isn’t it,’ said Bogna, when Jess made her way to the kitchen. She stood immediately, as she always did when a fresh human entered. ‘Tea? Little sandwich? Something helfy?’
