Wine, Witches and Song (The Everyday Witches of Wildham-on-Sea Book 1)

by Molly Milligan

  “Clare Davenport, isn’t it? I have heard so much about her but haven’t met her yet.”

  “No, she’s often unwell and not up to having visitors. It takes a lot out of her.”

  “Poor woman! I should come and introduce myself.”

  “No, as I said, she is often not well enough for visitors.” I didn’t like being so obstructive but I would defend Clare with my last breath. She’d been through enough.

  “That must be awful for her. But she’s well enough tonight, if you’re going around.”

  Gloria was totally missing the point and I studied her, trying to work out if she really was that dense. She just smiled back at me. “I won’t stay for long,” she said. “I’ll pop in and say hi. I won’t be any trouble at all.”

  But she was.

  Chapter Two

  Clare’s husband Steve opened the door and he smiled when he saw me. But his eyes narrowed when Gloria flapped her in way behind me like a blonde-haired vulture in floaty red gauze.

  “Hello!” she cooed, extending her hand and then grabbing him in a continental cheek-peck, kissing him while he remained startled and rigid. “I’m Gloria! I’ve got the new gallery up in the old town! We’ve come to see your poor dear Clare.”

  I met Steve’s eyes and we both winced. She was not going to be happy about being “poor Clare.” Having chronic fatigue syndrome was probably the least interesting thing about her, but it seemed to be her defining characteristic now. It not only took over her life, but also took over how people saw her.

  But Gloria was an unstoppable force of good intentions, and Steve was painfully polite and non-confrontational, so we all ended up in their over-warm living room. Clare was lying back on a sofa, under a crocheted blanket that Scarlett had made for her, and she glared daggers at me as Gloria introduced herself.

  “I won’t be staying!” Gloria assured her, and she remained standing, which was unfortunate as that meant she loomed over Clare. She was speaking in a too-loud voice, like Clare was deaf or daft or something. “I just wanted to say hello! And to let you know that if there’s anything you need while you recover, you only need to pick up the phone. I’ve written my number on a bit of paper. Here you are. No, don’t get up! I’ll put it there on the table. Can you see it? Of course you can. It’s right there. Oh, what a big book!” Gloria picked up the hardback which was all about economics in a changing world. She turned to Steve. “Aren’t you a clever man! What a lucky woman Clare is, to have you.”

  Clare said, “It’s my book.”

  “Well, I’d be tired too if I read huge things like this!” Gloria trilled. She put the book down and patted Clare on the head. “You just get better, now. Lovely to meet you. Bye!”

  Steve followed her to the door and I just stared at Clare.

  “I am so, so, so, sorry,” I said in a low voice.

  “If she ever comes back,” Clare said, “I will kill her with my bare hands. And you, too.”

  Steve came back in and gave me such a look of hurt disappointment that I felt very small. I could only apologise again. He shrugged, silently, and went off to make us some drinks.

  Clare, after her initial threats to me, brushed it off, too. Dealing with the well-meaning blunderings of people was just an everyday annoyance for her, and at least it was better – marginally – than someone being openly hostile and telling her “it was all in her mind” and that she just needed “positive thinking.”

  Anyway, minds are powerful things. Clare’s mind had got her a double first in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, and a great career for many years in national and local government before she became ill and returned to her childhood home. We’d stayed in touch and it was great to be reunited with my oldest friend; I’d celebrated her return but I knew she didn’t feel quite the same. But, she was here now, and this was the life we were dealing with.

  She flicked the television on and scrolled to the rolling news channel; little Wildham-on-Sea had made the national news, due to the unusual nature of the crime. I knew from Bernie that the whole of the UK only had about 600 murders a year – obviously that’s 600 too many (and 277 of them take place in Midsomer Murders) but when one of those isn’t the usual stabbing then it tends to get the public’s attention.

  I did a little squeak of pride when my sister appeared at the press conference. She was looking very smart in her black uniform, and very severe too. She frowned at the camera as she told everyone what was known so far.

  “The victim was a local man, Will Howlett, who had recently returned to stay with his parents in Wildham-on-Sea. The unusual manner of presenting his body leads police to believe that we are dealing with a targeted and personal attack and we do not think that there is any risk to the general public. However we would urge everyone to be vigilant and report any suspicious behaviours. We are particularly interested in anyone who saw, or spoke with Mr Howlett since his arrival in Wildham-on-Sea on Saturday the first of May. We are trying to piece together his movements. We know that he was seen in the White Horse public house yesterday, Tuesday the fourth, and interacted with a number of people there. We are examining the CCTV evidence but are keen to talk with any eyewitnesses to an altercation which is reported to have taken place. Anyone with information can call...”

  “She’s pretty good,” I said, beaming until I realised that smiling at a news report about death wasn’t very nice.

  “It’s almost like she’s a highly trained professional with years of experience,” Clare said. “Come on, then. I’m actually awake, so let’s make the most of it. Tell me all about what you saw.”

  I had relived the experience a few times now. It got a little smoother each time I told it. Clare listened with a frown on her face.

  “Does that make sense?” I said at the end. “I can go over it again.”

  She waved my offer away. “It’s fine, I got it.” She suffered “brain fog” from time to time, when even straightforward sentences seemed to get snarled up in her own mind. I couldn’t imagine how crushing that was to her. “It’s totally bizarre, though. How long would it take someone to pile up all those stones on him, do you think?”

  “I wondered that myself. Not less than an hour, surely. I pictured myself doing it.”

  “Creepy.”

  “It’s my investigative instinct. But yeah, it must have been at least an hour of solid work.”

  “That’s dedicated. Yet you saw the hand and the foot sticking out. So they weren’t trying to hide the body.”

  “Maybe they missed it, if they were doing it in the dark?”

  “The moon is nearly full,” Clare pointed out. “I know because I spent the last few nights staring out of the window, not able to sleep. If they had enough light to pile up rocks, they would have surely seen the stray hand and foot. It’s almost like they were left as a sign.”

  “Or a mad person did it. Anyway, sane people don’t go murdering.”

  “Any of us could be a murderer,” Clare said. “We all have a trigger.”

  “Okay, but even if you or I killed someone – I dunno, maybe I got cut up in the supermarket, that’s my trigger – then we still wouldn’t go to the effort of making them into an actual landscape feature. Would you?”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Who is this Will Howlett, anyway?”

  Clare’s life had been curtailed so very much over the last eight years, that I sometimes forgot she didn’t know all the comings and goings of the small town just outside her door. “The Howletts live in a fancy big house on Manor Park,” I told her. That was an exclusive development of executive homes, all curling roads and big gardens and fancy cars parked outside the garages which always seemed to be too small. It was on the far south side of town, almost a separate area in itself, and people from there didn’t work locally. They commuted to highly paid jobs in Norwich, or worked all week in London and came home for the weekends to “destress” which meant drinking expensive wine and playing golf at a country club that no one e
lse in the town could afford to go to.

  “Have you ever met them?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t think so, but I know of them, only because of Will. I remember before he left for London, he was pretty popular on the local folk music circuit. I tried to do an interview with him once, and the folk club, but it came to nothing.”

  “Ron and Mary? Do they still run it?”

  “They do. I don’t know how it keeps going. It’s like, no one new is allowed to join. It’s a very odd set-up. They didn’t want to talk to me. You’d think they’d welcome the publicity.”

  “What are they hiding?” Clare said.

  “A secret stash of hurdy-gurdies, perhaps. Anyway, so Will and this other girl used to do these amazing sets, and then they won that national folk award, and got picked up by some record label. I don’t think it was a big one, but it was worth them going off to London for. Do you remember hearing them on the radio all the time?”

  “I do. But I can’t remember the song. And who was the girl?” Clare asked. “Did she go to London too?”

  “I can’t remember who it was. It was about three years ago. There was some issue but I can’t remember what happened. I do know that he went solo. I think she stayed behind but she stopped singing. I should ask Ron and Mary – they would know.”

  “It might be worth talking to Eric in the White Horse too,” Clare said. “It sounds like there was something kicking off last night involving this Will.”

  I laughed. “I’ll pass all this on to Bernie! She’s investigating, not me.”

  Clare laughed too. “Every Tom, Dick and Harry in this town is going to be an amateur detective now. We might as well do our bit.”

  A PHONE CALL CAME THROUGH on Thursday morning, asking me to go down to the police station as soon as possible to make my official statement, and I was happy to do so. I should have been pitching articles to editors but I was finding it hard to concentrate. As I walked through the harbour and over the bridge to the main part of town, I kept looking behind. It felt as though someone was prodding me between the shoulder blades, trying to get my attention. I opened my senses to what was trying to contact me, but it was slippery and just out of sight.

  It was an overcast and blustery day with a biting wind coming in straight off the North Sea. I went to the station and got the main business over with as quickly as possible, speaking into a recorder while notes were made. I signed it all off as accurate. While the friendly young officer was packing up, I asked if there had been any developments in the case.

  “We’ve got CCTV from the pub which shows the victim in a fight,” she told me. “The other guy in the fight is his manager and promoter from London, so obviously we’re having a chat with him about that.”

  “Do you think he’s the one?”

  “I can’t possibly say, at this stage! We need to get in touch with everyone he was in contact with before his death. We’re hopeful we might get something out of his old singing partner, Charlotte Paston.”

  “Ah! Charlotte Paston. I was trying to remember her name. The pair of them were supposed to go to London together – they won the award together. Why did she stay here, in the end?”

  “They fell out but I don’t know why.” The officer stacked the plastic chairs against the wall. “She’s not been the same since, they say. But you don’t need to worry. Everyone is quite safe. Let me have you buzzed out.”

  I wasn’t worried about my safety, but I didn’t tell the nice young officer that.

  I was just burning up with curiosity.

  ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES of being a freelance writer is that people do expect you to ask questions. I knew that I was well-known in the town, and in fact many of my best stories found me, rather than the other way around. I’d have complete strangers coming up to me in the street and say, “You’re that Jackie Hardy, aren’t you? Mavis told me you might want to hear about my amazing weight loss or my project to feed the homeless or my travels with my cat around Bali or whatever.” And usually, I did want to hear all those things. I’d find a market for any story.

  So I turned on my very best and most effective gossip-radars, and went around hunting for every bit of information that I could find. I went straight from the police station to the local market which was in a big old Victorian hall just behind the Winter Gardens. The stalls sold a variety of things – amazing locally produced pies, horrible nylon aprons, fuzzy jumpers with big pictures of wolves all sparkling with sequins, fresh bread, drain unblocking gadgets, and everything else in between.

  The fishmonger told me all about his neighbour who was building a classic car in his shed. “Doesn’t he need planning permission?” he asked, glaring at me while gutting a fish without even watching what he was doing. I was hypnotised by the knife.

  “For a car? No. I think planning permission only applies to buildings.”

  “That’s what I mean. He’s doing it in his garage. You should look into that.”

  The woman who ran the craft and itchy wool stall wanted to tell me about her daughter’s friend’s parents who were “up to something” but when I pressed her, it just meant that they were hoping to move to the south of France and start a bed and breakfast place.

  I did note both of those stories in my ever-present notebook – you never know where they might lead – but nothing seemed relevant until I got talking to Angie, who ran the second-hand book stall. She was about three hundred years old, and her face was more like a wrinkled pug than a human woman. She pulled her two cardigans tight across her chest and nestled in her chair, getting ready for a good hard gossip.

  “That poor Charlotte Paston, she was never right after all that happened, you see,” she said, starting in the middle of the story. I was willing to wait. Angie took a circular route in her conversations but she got there in the end. “She lives in a bedsit up over the butcher’s shop on the High Street, and if you see her out at all, you think you’ve seen a ghost.”

  The hairs went up on my neck. “Does she work?”

  Angie blew out her checks, briefly smoothing out some wrinkles. “Well, she’s done a bit of this and a little of that, but she lives on the dole, and can’t seem to settle at a thing. Scuttles around in the shadows. Must be such a disappointment to her parents. Not like your Scarlett, now, eh?”

  I smiled politely. My daughter could never disappoint me, even if I could fervently hope for different circumstances. “Scarlett’s doing her own thing and I’m glad for her. I just wish she would move away, just for a bit, and experience life outside a small town. You know, see a bit of the world.”

  “That hasn’t done that dead man any good!” Angie said. “People are people wherever you go. Happy here, I am. Same for Charlotte Paston. She never went to London, did she? Maybe she ought to have done, but I reckon as she would have been miserable there as miserable here. Might as well be miserable by the sea, eh?” She laughed like a blocked drain.

  That was a sentiment shared by a lot of unfortunately unemployed people, and our town had more than our share of the jobless and the struggling. But I could understand it. If you’re going to be out of work, or you can’t work due to illness, you may as well be somewhere pretty while you’re at it.

  “Why didn’t she go with him?” I asked. “They were a duo.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to leave here, simple as that. Her parents, her brother, everything was here.”

  “Except happiness and a job and fame and stardom. That was all in London, with her singing partner, Will Howlett. Have you seen anything of him since he came back?”

  “Oh yes, I saw him all right. Saw him with that poor Charlotte. She was in town, sitting on a bench in the Winter Gardens, and I was going along the prom. I was going home after my reading group, so it was mid-afternoon, and she was just sitting there, staring out to sea, and there’s nothing unusual in that, because I see her there a lot.”

  “And Will Howlett was with her?” I pressed.

  “I can’t say as he was rightly w
ith her,” Angie said. “He was there, like, but they were not really together. He was standing up and waving his arms and might have been shouting because she was all hunched over and wouldn’t look up at him. He stamped off. He looked proper mad. I don’t reckon London did him any good. Come back quite rude, he has. City manners. You can’t come back and shout at people like that. Not right.”

  “Have you told the police about this?”

  Angie laughed. “Does it make her a suspect? You reckon the poor girl could have done him in? Why, and how? She can’t hardly open a bag of crisps, poor scrap of a thing.”

  I wasn’t so sure. “Everyone has a trigger,” I said, parroting Clare.

  Angie said, “Everyone has a price, too.” And that was my cue to go and fetch her a fresh cup of tea from the café at the far end of the market hall, as payment for all her information.

  After delivering a hot brew to Angie, I headed out to the Winter Gardens hoping to see Charlotte Paston on a bench somewhere. Angie had jogged my memory. It’s funny how you see someone every week, for months and years, and not really register who they are. Charlotte Paston was a willowy, quiet girl who haunted corners and secluded spaces, and never got in anyone’s way. I could now picture her – pale, with lank hair, and eyes that were large and bright. She was so much a feature of the streets that I realised, with a pang of something like shame, that I knew nothing about her and had never spoken to her.

  Angie had mentioned Charlotte’s family – her parents and her brother. I wasn’t sure where they lived, and I struggled to recall her brother. I was debating trying to find out, when I bumped into someone that I knew would be no use whatsoever in my mission for gossip.

  Evangeline Dot.

  One of the town’s witches.

  She had once been tall and stately but now she was craggy and bent and angular. She walked slowly with a walking frame and I could tell that each step was pain and effort. She was inching her way towards me along the pavement. I assumed that she was simply going to pass me by, and I stepped to one side, but she stopped, and looked at me with rheumy eyes.