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

by Molly Milligan

  “Jackie Hardy.”

  “Good day, Mrs Dot. Can I help you with anything? Are you heading to the shops?”

  “No.”

  It was hard to be nice to someone who was so abrasive. But she was old, and infirm, and I was still young and could spare the time if she needed help. “Perhaps I can walk with you?”

  “No. I came out to see you and then I am going home. Jackie Hardy, you need to accept the call.”

  “What call?” My hand instinctively went to my handbag, patting it to feel the reassuring edge of my phone.

  “It is rising, and you know it, but you’re too wrapped up to even notice. I can’t keep it at bay for much longer. I am going to die, you know. Then who will do it? Start listening and then come to me and I will tell you what you need to do.”

  I had been on one of those dementia friends courses. I smiled and nodded and said, “Thank you for letting me know, Mrs Dot! Are you having a good day today?”

  Her eyes were milky but they still seemed to fix me with a look of acute clarity. Her words confirmed it. “I am not mad and you will not speak to me as if I am mad.”

  I quailed. Had she been a headmistress in her youth?

  She went on. “Get your head out of your behind and listen to what the sea is telling you. Go home and listen. Then come to me. We need to talk before it is too late. We need to stop him. We need to talk before I die.”

  “I’m sure you’re not going to –”

  She shut me up with a snort. “Of course I am, and soon. It’s about time. Everything hurts. So you need to be ready.” Her hands were gripping her grey walking frame so tightly that I could see it tremble in her grasp. I reached out to pat her hand – and stopped myself. I was going to be as bad as Gloria, when she’d patted Clare on the head. I withdrew my hand.

  “Mrs Dot, I don’t know what you are talking about, but okay. I’ll go home and ... listen to the sea. Okay?”

  “With an open heart,” she said. “Be ready. Be ready!” Her voice became strangled and she coughed awkwardly, clearing her throat with difficulty. A shadow fell across us, but the mood was broken when I saw that it was just Ian Martinet and he was smiling, but looking with concern at the shaking Evangeline Dot.

  “Mrs Dot, let me take you home,” he said kindly. He was a gentle academic, an actual professor, with stereotypically grey hair and a neat goatee beard. Personally I thought the beard was overkill, but at least he stopped short of those tweed jackets with elbow patches.

  She shook him off angrily. “I am going to die but I am not dead yet, and that’s the only time you’ll get your hands on me, Martinet. Get off me or I’ll scream for the police and say you assaulted me.”

  He dropped his hands to his sides and looked at me helplessly. I shook my head in return. We watched her stump away, slowly, and he sighed.

  “She ought to be in a home, for her own good,” he said.

  Then he turned around and I watched him as he disappeared. Maybe he was right, but I didn’t like how he said it. I didn’t know him very well but there was an edge of nastiness to his voice.

  The invisible hand prodded me in the middle of my back again.

  I supposed I ought to do what Evangeline Dot had told me to do.

  I headed home and opened the windows, and tried to listen to the sea.

  Chapter Three

  I sent Bernie a text message inviting her to come over and see me. She replied after half an hour and said she’d come that evening as long as I could feed her. Her husband was getting fed up of eating so late, so he would “fend for himself” (that meant having pizza) and “eat at a civilised time” (and that meant while the sport was on the television, with the pizza on his knees, sitting on the sofa). As for Bernie, with the murder case taking all her time, she was grabbing meals as and when she could, mostly out of the staff canteen or petrol station forecourts.

  I prepared a rich chicken stew with a creamy white wine sauce, and it kept warm in the pot until Bernie arrived at ten past eight. I was already on my second glass of wine, and had been munching on bread and olives and crackers and half a bag of peanuts I found in the back of a cupboard.

  She looked exhausted and I told her so.

  “It’s a compliment,” I added. “It means you’re working very hard.”

  “There are no prizes for working hard,” she said. “Just working smart.”

  “I bet you tell that to your staff.”

  “Daily. Ooh, this smells nice. I am so hungry can I just eat it straight from the pot?”

  “No. Go and sit down, and pretend to be like a civilised person. I’ll serve.”

  I let her eat in peace before I started plaguing her with questions. She started the conversation, asking me how I was coping since finding the body.

  “Better than I thought. I get some flashbacks but like you said, it wasn’t gory sight so there’s nothing to haunt me. I just feel ... don’t laugh, I just feel really sad about it. He was so young.”

  She nodded. “It’s awful, isn’t it? I’ll never get used to it, and I’ve seen my share. No one deserves to die so young, no matter what they were like.”

  I mopped up the last of the sauce in my wide bowl. “What was he like, this Will Howlett?”

  “The reports we are getting are not complimentary,” she said. “But he was young and ambitious and he had a small amount of fame thrust upon him. I suppose that must change a person. His music is okay.”

  I realised I hadn’t listened to anything new for a while. I had about a dozen CDs I listened to on a rotation, and my daughter mocked me for even owning CDs.

  “I was told he was seen arguing with his manager,” I said.

  “That’s not public knowledge.”

  “I was in the pub where it happened?” I hazarded.

  She glared at me. “No, you weren’t.”

  “I ... er ... well, okay, I gave my statement earlier, and it slipped out during a conversation.”

  She frowned.

  “Hey,” I said. “Please don’t go after them. It was my fault not theirs.”

  “Hm. It’s true, though. His manager Liam Oyaide followed Will Howlett up from London and we’ve got eyewitnesses and CCTV in the White Horse showing them having an actual, literal punch-up.”

  “Who hit who? And why?”

  “It seems to be about money. Howlett was in the pub, and Oyaide came in after him, looking for him. Howlett looked up in surprise, and started to stand up. Oyaide is then seen standing over him, and shouting, and the eyewitnesses say it was things like, I need that money, and you owe me. Howlett got up and tried to walk away. He was saying things in return like, what about everything you took from me? Then when Oyaide tried to stop Howlett from leaving, Howlett swung a punch at him and landed it pretty nicely on his jaw. Oyaide was knocked to the floor, and Howlett left in a hurry.”

  “I assume you’ve got this Oyaide in custody?”

  “Yup. He’s denying everything, of course. There are complications. As soon as Howlett left the pub, he was followed, and not by Oyaide. Ron Thompson – you know, the folk club man – went straight out after Howlett and seems to catch him up at one point. Then we run out of CCTV. But he was not carrying a weapon.”

  “Why would Ron Thompson be a suspect?” I asked.

  “He isn’t,” Bernie said. “But we obviously spoke to him about the incident because we wanted to see if he had noticed anything that might help our investigation. However, as soon as we approached him, he ran off. I don’t know how he thought he was going to evade us. We got him cornered, and he was ranting and raving and making no sense at all. He kept repeating that he didn’t know anything. It took quite a while to calm him down.”

  “How odd,” I said. “But then, he is known for being odd.”

  “He is hiding something,” Bernie told me. “In my experience, most people are.”

  “More wine?” I offered.

  “Oh, God, do me a coffee please. I need to be up early in the morning so I can’t a
fford a hangover.”

  “Has anyone told you that Charlotte Paston was seen arguing with him?”

  “Good heavens, no. Who? Where, and what? This is important.”

  I filled her in quickly on what Angie had told me, and Bernie made notes while I brewed her a coffee. I wasn’t going to have caffeine at this time of night, and I didn’t think she ought to either, so I sneakily did her a decaff version, and poured myself a little more wine. You never had the caffeine issue with wine. Much safer.

  “The Paston connection needs looking into,” Bernie said thoughtfully, tapping her pen on her notebook. “Since he came back, Howlett was staying at his parents’ house up on Manor Park. They report that Vincent Paston – Charlotte’s brother – came and called, asking to see Howlett on the evening of the murder.”

  “And did he see him?”

  “No, Howlett had already gone out.”

  “Were they friends?”

  “That’s the interesting part,” Bernie told me. “No, in spite of the connection between them through Charlotte, Howlett and Vincent Paston were never friends and had had no correspondence, as far as we can tell, while Howlett was in London.”

  “I bet he didn’t say why he wanted to see Howlett.”

  “Nope. We have no idea. We’re going to speak to him.”

  I nodded. “I think you should,” I said. “I have a feeling.”

  “A witchy feeling?” Bernie asked. I’d inherited the family magic, but although she was totally unmagical herself, she knew all about my abilities.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, remember the prodding between my shoulder blades. Then I thought about that other encounter I’d had. “What do you think about Evangeline Dot? I met her earlier and she seemed even stranger than usual. Is she getting any social care help? Has she got any family?”

  “Social care, contrary to popular belief, is nothing to do with the police,” Bernie said, “although glancing into our cells on a Friday night might make you wonder. I don’t know anything about old Evangeline. You want to ask your Scarlett. She’d know more about all that than me.”

  “I will,” I said, thinking she was referring to the social care stuff. “Hey, you’re coming to her party, aren’t you?”

  “Miss my favourite niece’s twenty-first? Of course I’ll be there! Barring the usual work emergencies, so I can’t totally promise-promise. Look, thanks for the food but I had better shoot.”

  I parcelled up a bit of cake for her and walked with her to the door. She gave me a big hug before she left, and said, “Can’t you just scry to see who the murderer is?”

  “I wish it were that easy,” I said, and waved her off.

  And then I turned around and faced my empty house and said, “Could it really be that simple?”

  NO. OF COURSE IT WASN’T. If it were, all crimes would be solved pretty quickly and I’d also be rich. My magical abilities are more homely ones. I can scry a little, but my talent for that is strongest around the times of the major festivals. The rest of the year, I get blurry blobs and static, like a badly tuned television or a YouTube video buffering, constantly. I’m good at charms, and working in the kitchen. That’s why Clare wanted my ginger tea – which I had totally forgotten to take over to her, with all the fuss about Gloria. It wasn’t just that it tasted good, but it also gave her a little extra energy that she wouldn’t have to pay for with a day of sleep afterwards.

  It’s not the most glamourous kind of witching, but it’s good stuff, all the same. I like to be useful.

  It was dark outside. I had a bowl set aside just for seeing the future. It was dark and glossy, and I filled it with water that I had had standing outside – rainwater, blessed by the moon. I sat at the wooden table on my decking, and spent a little while looking out over the water. My garden was high up and fell away at the far end. I lost a few feet every year to rock falls and the erosion of the cliffs. One day my house would tumble into the sea, too. The surveyors assured me that event was a good few decades away, but the household insurers had long since given up on me, and if the place burned down tomorrow, I’d be bankrupt and homeless.

  But my garden was very long. I wasn’t worried.

  I listened to the soft breathing of the sea, and the occasional gull screeching into the night. To my right, far off, a light flashed; an unmanned lighthouse, warning of the rocks at the entrance to the harbour. If the wind came from that direction, I could hear the jingle of halyards against the masts.

  Once I was filled with the atmosphere of the coast at night, I placed my hands to each side of the bowl, and let my mind wander as I looked deep into, and then past, the water in the bowl.

  I had my intention in my heart but I kept my mind as clear as possible. I didn’t want words cluttering up the experience. Analysis would come later – for now, I only wanted sensations and impressions.

  The water was a circle. It was a scene. It was a cliff and a beach and the sea. I saw a man running but then I was the man who was running and my heart began to thud, and my breathing was laboured.

  But I was not the murderer and I was not the victim,

  I was just running, steadily, normally, usually. I was just a runner.

  And now I began to see through the runner’s eyes. There were three men, spaced out. The man in front was walking briskly, head down, not looking around.

  Behind him came an older man, awkwardly, slowly. He stumbled, and slowed, and stopped, and put his hands on his hips, deep in thought. He turned and went another way and I didn’t see where.

  And the third man, with something in his hands, slipped past the older one and caught up with the first man as he got to the beach. They faced one another.

  The runner, whose head I rode in, kept going. The figures on the beach disappeared from view.

  Someone shouted, behind, “I don’t want it back!”

  The jogger went on. Feet slapped on the pavement. Breath rasped in the throat. The vision faded. I was returned to myself.

  I remained outside for a little while, replaying what I had seen in my head. Then I lit a candle and made an offering. I didn’t really go for the full-on circle thing unless I was performing some major magic, but a vision like this really needed acknowledging. I was surprised at how clear it had been.

  Was this what Evangeline Dot had been going on about? Was this the call that I was supposed to hear, and answer?

  BERNIE DIDN’T USUALLY work out of our little local police station but due to the murder, she was spending a lot of time there. I went down the next morning, intending to tell her what I had seen. After all, it had been her idea.

  She was very busy and I spent some time hanging around. I was offered various other officers who would “listen to my concerns” but I insisted that I see her, and I sent her a few text messages too. No one else would be happy to hear I’d seen the murder in a vision in a bowl of water, through the eyes of a jogger.

  Finally she burst through into the waiting room, clutching a mug that said “World’s Best Policeman” on it, and nodded at me as she passed by. “Come on,” she said. “Walk with me. I need a bit of a break. What’s so urgent?”

  “Why doesn’t your mug say policewoman?” I asked as I scurried to keep up.

  “Because I am up to my arse in long-entrenched patriarchal systems and quite frankly, that word is the least of my problems.” She sounded very snippy.

  “Rightio.” I grimaced. She was walking very quickly, buzzing with stressed-out energy. “Um, you could do with something to calm you down. I can make you something.”

  “No, I could not. If I slow down I’ll stop completely and then I’ll miss something. I need this stress to function. Right. You have two minutes. Go.”

  “Okay, so you told me to scry, so I did. You need to find someone, I think it was a man, who was out jogging that night of the murder. He saw three people...”

  “Yes, yes, that was Nigel MacFarlane. He runs that route every night. He came to tell us yesterday. One man headed off a differen
t way, and two went onto the beach, and one of them shouted something.”

  “I don’t want it back. That’s what he shouted.”

  “Yes, that was it.” Bernie looked at me appraisingly. “Your scrying isn’t bad. I thought it only went forwards, into the future. I was joking when I said you should try.”

  “Damn it. And you already knew all this?”

  “We did. What else did you see?”

  “That was it.”

  “Not the murder?”

  I screwed up my face. “Ew, no.”

  “Shame.”

  “I’m quite glad, actually.”

  She shrugged. “It would be useful.”

  “I’d be in therapy the rest of my life.”

  “That would also be useful.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her, and she laughed, and took a big gulp of her drink.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I’ve wasted your time. Do you know who those other men were?”

  “If we knew that, we’d go and arrest them. Actually we’re fairly sure the older man, the one who turned off, was Ron Thompson from the folk club, because he followed Howlett from the pub. He won’t tell us why he followed Howlett and we don’t know where he went when he turned off. He could have gone down to the beach by another route, and still apprehended Howlett. We have him in for more questioning – we’ve got an extension – so hopefully we’ll get to the bottom of it soon.”

  “But the third man? He had something in his hands. Do you know what?”

  “No idea. However, we’re got some suspicions now about Charlotte and Vincent Paston. Certainly enough to call them in to answer a few things.”

  “Did you speak to Angie?”

  “We did. And thank you for that. And thank you for scrying. It might have been useful and it unofficially corroborates Nigel’s story, so that is good. Right, I’ve got to get back. Cheers.”