Bonbons and Broomsticks (BEWITCHED BY CHOCOLATE Mysteries ~ Book 5)

by H. Y. Hanna

  “Maybe you gotta look at it from a bit farther back,” said Pomona, picking up the parchment and holding it at arm’s length, whilst with her other hand, she held the hag stone up to her eye, like someone holding an old-fashioned monocle.

  “Anything?” Caitlyn asked.

  Pomona shook her head in frustration. “No. It looks the same—but I was sure…” She tossed the hag stone to Caitlyn. “Here, you try.”

  Caitlyn sat down on the bed, with the parchment in her lap, and brought the hag stone up to her right eye. She squinted through the hole. Nothing. She tried the left eye. The symbols remained as unintelligible as ever.

  “Sorry, Pomie. It was a nice idea but…” She gave her cousin a smile of chagrin.

  But Pomona wasn’t giving up that easily. “Maybe it needs to be activated,” she said. “Why don’t you, like, chant over it or something?”

  “I wouldn’t know what to chant.”

  Pomona heaved a loud sigh. “Well, meditate then… or wave your fingers over it… just do something!”

  More to placate her cousin than anything else, Caitlyn turned back to the hag stone and stared at it. She took a deep breath and tried to focus her mind on the hole in the stone, to fade out everything else around her so that her world narrowed down to just that circle, through which she could see a few of the symbols on the parchment. The black marks blurred under her unblinking gaze…

  And then something shimmered.

  Caitlyn blinked. Had she imagined it? No, there it was again. A slight shimmering around the edges of the symbols. And then, for a brief second, the symbols themselves seemed to uncurl and reform into different shapes… shapes almost like letters…

  “Caitlyn? Pomona? Where are you?”

  Caitlyn jumped at the sound of the Widow Mags’s voice. The hag stone fell out of her hands, bounced on the wooden floor, and rolled under her bed.

  “Rats!” she muttered.

  Pomona hurried out to the landing. “We’re up here… in Caitlyn’s room. We’ll be down in a minute!” She returned to the room and asked eagerly: “Well? Did you see something?”

  Had she? Or had it just been her imagination, because she had desperately wanted to see something—anything? “I… I don’t know,” Caitlyn answered.

  “Well, try again!”

  “I’ve got to get the hag stone… it fell and rolled under the bed.” Caitlyn got down on her hands and knees to look under her bed. “This reminds me of the doctor’s clinic this morning,” she mumbled as she poked her head under the wooden bedframe.

  “Why?”

  “Because Nibs got out of my bag and started climbing all over the room… and he knocked a box of chocolates off the shelf and they all fell on the floor… and one of them rolled under the doctor’s desk so I had to crawl under it to pick it up… oh God, Pomie—I felt so bad. All the chocolates had to be thrown away after falling on the floor and it was such a waste. The doctor was really nice about it, but you could see that they were homemade chocolate bonbons… like someone had taken a lot of time and effort to make them for him. They were a gift from a patient, I think… there was even a card and—OH!”

  Caitlyn jerked up so quickly that she smacked her head on the underside of the bed. “OWWW!” She emerged rubbing her head ruefully.

  “What?” Pomona looked puzzled.

  “Pomie, I just realised something! When I was looking at the card, I kept thinking that there was something really familiar about the message, although I couldn’t figure out what it was—”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said: ‘To my favourite doctor… from your Ticklewickle’.”

  “‘Ticklewickle’?” Pomona pulled a face.

  “Yes, and I just realised what that reminded me of: Sir Henry and his wife!”

  “Huh?”

  “That night at the dinner party, didn’t you notice Sir Henry and his wife calling each other by those ridiculous pet names?”

  Pomona shrugged. “I dunno… maybe… I wasn’t really paying attention to them.”

  “Well, I was, and they were calling each other these really cheesy terms of endearment—”

  “What, you mean like ‘sweetie pie’—that sort of thing?”

  “Oh God, much worse, Pomie! Stuff like… like… poopykins or something like that.”

  Pomona roared with laughter. “‘Poopykins’? You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  “Well, okay, maybe not that one—but something very similar. I’m not kidding. But the point is—the names were bordering on the ridiculous. It wasn’t ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’, you know, the kind of thing you hear most people using. So… what are the chances that someone else who made Dr Nichols his chocolates would also use ridiculous pet names like that?”

  Understanding dawned on Pomona’s face. “You think… you think Sir Henry’s wife sent the doctor those chocolates?” Her eyes gleamed. “Ahhh… they’re having an affair!”

  Caitlyn frowned. “Well… I don’t know if we can jump to that conclusion.”

  “Why not? Come on, why else would she call herself ‘your Ticklewickle’? That doesn’t sound like a normal doctor-patient relationship to me.”

  “Well, maybe… I don’t know, maybe it’s a joke or something… Or maybe she has a crush on him but we don’t know if he returns her feelings.”

  “Did he look guilty?”

  Caitlyn remembered the young doctor’s flushed face as he’d snatched the card out of her hands. “Yeah, he did, actually.”

  “They’re having an affair,” said Pomona. “Trust me, I know these things.”

  “You know…” Caitlyn thought back to the dinner party. “I just remembered that night at dinner, Sir Henry complained that his wife was always having migraines and the doctor was always coming over to their house for various things.”

  “There, you see?” said Pomona triumphantly. “She could just make up some medical condition every time and get her lover to come over, see her in her room, examine her in private… it’s the perfect excuse!”

  Caitlyn gave her cousin a startled look. “They wouldn’t be… you know… in her own house? With Sir Henry there?”

  Pomona laughed. “You’re such an innocent, Caitlyn. Why not? I’ll bet that’s part of the thrill—doing it right under her husband’s nose. And he’s probably, like, one of these old-fashioned English types… you know, where the couple don’t share a bedroom… she’s got her own suite and he’s got his. It’s the perfect set-up.” Pomona leaned forwards excitedly. “And you know what? This gives her a motive to murder Sir Henry as well! I mean, you can’t tell me that she married him for love. She must have been at least twenty years younger than him.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. There are people who fall in love with someone much older than themselves,” argued Caitlyn. “And she did seem to be really grieving his death.”

  Pomona gave a cynical laugh. “Sheesh, you’re such a romantic! Yeah, I guess there are genuine happy marriages with a big age gap… but not in this case, honey. I’m telling you, Lady Pritchard married Sir Henry for his money.”

  Caitlyn frowned. “But the thing is, I don’t think she gains a lot of money from his death—his brother inherits most of the estate.”

  They heard the Widow Mags calling them again from downstairs. Caitlyn suddenly realised that it was well past lunchtime and she was starving.

  “We’d better go down,” she said, getting to her feet. She folded up the parchment again and slid it under her pillow. “I’ll look for the hag stone later. I think it’s fallen into one of the cracks between the floorboards and I might need to shift the bed to get to it. But it’ll be safe down there under the bed anyway.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  As it turned out, there was a sudden rush of customers after lunch: a big coach of Asian tourists had arrived in the village, and they were followed by more local visitors and residents of nearby towns, all keen on seeing the village with the “Black Shuck murders” that w
as being talked about so much in the press. The girls were kept busy boxing truffles, recommending chocolate bars, serving fudge brownies and fresh strawberries, and ladling out mugs of homemade hot chocolate all afternoon, whilst the Widow Mags stayed in the kitchen, tempering, mixing, melting, and moulding to meet the extra demand.

  Caitlyn didn’t manage to find a free moment to call the police until mid-afternoon and she was disappointed to learn that Inspector Walsh was away busy and couldn’t come to the phone.

  “You can relay the information to me,” said the sergeant in a bored voice.

  “I really wanted to talk to Inspector Walsh. Do you know when he’ll be free?”

  “No idea. He’s in the interview room at the moment and could be there until evening.”

  “Is he questioning someone in relation to Sir Henry’s murder?”

  “That information is confidential, miss.”

  “But I need to know if he’s questioning Derek Swanes or Julian Pritchard! If he is, I have information that could be crucial to the case. Please, can’t you at least tell me that?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation on the other end of the line, then the sergeant said grudgingly, “No, he’s not questioning those two men, but that’s all I can tell you. Now, you can either give me the information and I will pass it on to Inspector Walsh, or you can call back tomorrow. I wouldn’t try again today—the inspector’s going to be tied up for a while.”

  What’s going on? What is Inspector Walsh so busy with? Caitlyn wondered. She shifted her weight from foot to foot as she debated what to do. Somehow, it didn’t feel right to hold back the information about Swanes and Julian Pritchard, just so she could speak to Inspector Walsh herself. It was too important to the investigation. Reluctantly, she gave the sergeant a quick account of seeing the two men together and their overheard conversation. But to her surprise, he showed no excitement or even curiosity over the information.

  “That all?” he said, still in that bored voice.

  “Yes… but did you understand what I said?” asked Caitlyn. “This could be proof that they were plotting to murder Sir Henry. It’s the best lead yet on the case! Inspector Walsh needs to be told this at once. I know he’s already questioned Swanes—I don’t know if he’s questioned Julian Pritchard—but he needs to find them both at once and question them about their alibis for that night.”

  “Ahem—we do not need members of the public telling us how to run our investigations,” said the sergeant frostily. “As I said, I will pass this information on to the inspector and he will act as he sees fit. Thank you for calling.”

  Caitlyn hung up with a sigh of frustration, but there was nothing else she could do. She would just have to try and put it out of her mind for now. She could always call the station again tomorrow—perhaps first thing—and try to speak to Inspector Walsh then. Feeling cheered, she went back out to the front of the cottage, to rejoin Pomona in the shop. She found her cousin busily dealing with a queue of people all wanting to choose truffles from the display beneath the glass counter.

  “I hate to say this…” said Pomona with a grin as she grabbed the tongs and began filling another box with chocolate truffles, “… but murder is great for business!”

  Nibs was delighted as well, scampering around the shop, getting under everyone’s feet and cheekily approaching every customer to say hello. Normally, Caitlyn tried to keep the kitten at the back of the cottage, but with things being so hectic, she soon gave up constantly trying to keep the naughty ball of fluff out of the shop area. None of the customers were complaining about him anyway—if anything, most of them seemed to love him, fussing over him and obviously thinking that the “little black witch’s cat” just added to the charm of the “enchanted chocolate shop”.

  It wasn’t until the shop had closed for the day and Pomona had left to return to the Manor that Caitlyn realised she hadn’t seen Nibs around for a while. He wasn’t in the shop anywhere, and when she went into the kitchen, where the Widow Mags was carefully wrapping up some leftover ingredients to be stored in the fridge, she couldn’t find the kitten anywhere either.

  “Have you seen Nibs?” she asked the old witch.

  The Widow Mags paused in what she was doing. “He was in here a few minutes ago…” She nodded towards the open door that led to the garden at the back of the cottage. “He’s likely out in the garden.”

  Caitlyn cast a worried glance outside. She couldn’t see the little kitten in the flowerbeds but she noticed that the back gate was slightly ajar. Nibs had been getting bolder and bolder lately, often leaving the cottage garden and venturing into the forest. There was so much in there to keep an inquisitive kitten occupied. With the long summer days, it was still a few hours until sunset; nevertheless, she didn’t like the idea of the little cat being out alone in the woods.

  “I think I’d better go and look for him,” she said.

  Soon, she was back on the familiar track leading through the trees—the same one she had been walking on the night before, when she had met the Black Shuck… just before James and Nathan had appeared. She found herself hoping that the ghostly hound hadn’t been hurt in the fracas, then laughed at her thoughts. How could a demon dog be hurt? She should’ve been more worried about any humans getting hurt! In fact, come to think of it, Professor Thrope had been extremely lucky not to have been shot by mistake. The cryptozoologist always seemed to be turning up in the strangest places—which she supposed was part of his job. Still, he was lucky he hadn’t been hurt so far, if not by the monsters he was chasing, then by the humans hunting the monsters!

  A rustling in the undergrowth made her suddenly pause and peer through the bushes.

  “Nibs? Nibs, is that you?”

  “Mew!”

  “Nibs… what are you doing there?”

  There was no reply from the kitten. Caitlyn sighed and left the path, climbing in through the tangled undergrowth and crouching down to look for the kitten amongst the shrubbery.

  “Nibs?”

  Something dark moved behind a bush. Caitlyn was about to shout a gleeful “Aha! Gotcha!” and reach out to grab the kitten, when the leaves parted and she found herself staring into a pair of glowing red eyes.

  She jerked backwards in alarm. It was the Black Shuck! She had never seen the phantom hound out in daylight before—although it was fairly dim here in the forest, so it was still well concealed.

  “Mew?” A little ball of black fur suddenly popped out of the undergrowth a few feet from the Black Shuck. Nibs mewed again in delight at seeing her and started towards her. Then the kitten froze as he saw the dog.

  The huge black hound lowered its shaggy head towards the kitten and Caitlyn held her breath. Would it harm Nibs? The black muzzle moved closer and closer… Then suddenly there was a hiss and the sound of spitting, followed by a growl of pain as the Black Shuck jerked back. It pawed its muzzle and Caitlyn saw three parallel lines of red, as if a tiny claw had swiped across the dog’s nose. Nibs must have scratched it! The next moment, the Black Shuck turned with a soft whine and retreated, disappearing deeper into the undergrowth.

  “Mew!” said Nibs, scampering up to Caitlyn.

  She scooped the kitten up and checked him over: he seemed to be unharmed. In fact, it looked like it was the Black Shuck who had retreated with its tail between its legs. The terrible demon hound terrorised by a little kitten, thought Caitlyn with a smile.

  Carrying Nibs securely in her arms, she walked swiftly back to the cottage. Inside, she found the Widow Mags sitting at the wooden table in the kitchen, sorting through some cocoa beans.

  The old witch glanced up and said: “So you found him?”

  “Yes… and I saw the Black Shuck!” said Caitlyn breathlessly.

  The Widow Mags raised her eyebrows but said nothing, as if waiting for her to continue. Caitlyn hesitated a moment, then told her grandmother about her three encounters with the legendary phantom hound. It was a relief to finally be able to tell someone. She had wan
ted to tell Pomona several times but had always held back. She didn’t know why—after all, Pomona believed in the paranormal more easily and passionately than anyone else. And she knew her cousin would never have laughed or scoffed at her suggestion that the Black Shuck was more playful canine than predatory monster. Still, Caitlyn had felt somehow reluctant to share her personal experiences. Now, though, she told the Widow Mags everything.

  “Why do you think it keeps appearing?” she asked the old witch. “I mean, I just can’t believe that it’s involved in these murders… and yet it’s true that the sightings only started around the time that the tramp was first found dead.”

  “Perhaps you should think about other coincidences.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The deaths of the tramp and of Sir Henry are not the only things that occurred at the same time as the appearance of the Black Shuck. There are other coincidences too—other simultaneous appearances.”

  “Simultaneous appearances?” Caitlyn frowned. “I don’t understand…”

  “Who else arrived in Tillyhenge at the same time as these sightings began?”

  “Well… I don’t know… there are several tourists and local visitors who come every day—I can’t know them all… and then there’s James’s guests up at the Manor—Nathan and Professor Thrope—and Pomona, of course…” She shook her head. “But what do any of them have to do with the Black Shuck?”

  The Widow Mags gave her a thoughtful look. “More than you realise. However, I understand what it is like to need to keep an identity secret and I shall respect that by saying no more.”

  And she refused to be drawn further, no matter how much Caitlyn cajoled and begged. Instead, she poured the beans into a small jute sack and secured it, then gestured to the pile of similar sacks and said briskly:

  “I’m taking these over to Bertha—she’s trying a new range of cocoa bean soaps. Perhaps you can help me carry them.”

  Obligingly, Caitlyn helped the Widow Mags shut up the chocolate shop, then followed her through the winding cobbled lanes to the other side of Tillyhenge, where Bertha’s shop, Herbal Enchantments, was situated. Her aunt was just closing up the store as they arrived and she smiled at them as they walked in.