The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  The dog seemed satisfied with his inspection of the embers, and now suggested that Terry return to the house. Terry was not sure what he was meant to have noted; had the dog been indicating the scene of a crime? And were those mussel shells and splinters of bone that he could see in the ash part of the crime, or were they the remains of an innocent barbecue? He bent down, picked up a shell, rubbed it on his trousers, inspected it. It was neatly hinged, cross-rayed with brown and purple. Empty, sucked dry. It told him nothing. He followed the dog back towards the building.

  He went in again through the sidedoor, and made his way down a long corridor to the large room he had seen through the open window. And there he found more clues. An abandoned meal, laid on the large table, with knife, fork, plate, a half-empty bottle of wine, a half-empty wine glass full of drowned flies. The end of a loaf, dusted with blue mould. A hard and shining cheese rind, a brown and withered apple paring. A bowl of winkle shells. An open book, propped against a kitchen-roll. Terry stared, sniffed, prowled. He discovered a clock patience, half played. A board laid out with coloured counters for a game which he did not know to be backgammon. A dried orange skewered with a knitting needle, and an adas, open at the Americas. Spooky, definitely spooky. A little brass pot full of burnt-down joss sticks. A three-cornered pub ashtray full of cigarette ends. And, if he wasn’t mistaken, a half-open matchbox full of the weed. He picked it up, sniffed cautiously. Yes, of course. And a packet of Rizlas. Somebody here had been smoking substances. A rum old lady. And where the hell had she got to?

  Miss Frieda Haxby: Deliver in Person. Easier said than done. He smelled sorcery, he smelled witchcraft, as he was to tell his mates. He was tempted to open the package, to see if it contained a contract with the devil, but knew better than to risk his job by tampering. There weren’t many nice jobs going in the South West, for an enterprising lad like Terry Zealley.

  The skull gave him a turn. He hadn’t spotted it at first, in the clutter of bric-à-brac, but eventually it managed to catch his eye. It stared at him from its deep eye-sockets, grinned at him with its four remaining teeth, warned him from its blaring absent nostrils. Yellow and pitted and slightly marked with grey and pink, it held its place for ever. What were those cracks in its cranium? Those stitched seams joining the plates above where its ears had been? Those deep slanting eyeslits? Had it ever lived, and how had it died, and why was it here?

  Terry went out into the courtyard and ate one of his tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches. He didn’t want to eat in that house. He’d thought he was hungry, but somehow it didn’t taste as good as he’d expected. The Crosskeys Garage usually sold a good sandwich, but this wasn’t up to the mark at all.

  What to do next? Should he ring Mr Ffloyd on his mobile? Should he ring the police? Should he poke around a bit more in the hope of finding a corpse or a haul of grass?

  Terry nosed around. The sandwich had restored perspective. He’d always wanted to find a dead body. Well, who hasn’t?

  He made friends with the skull, picking it up to speak to it: he was alarmed when its jaw dropped off, but he managed, guiltily, to reassemble it so it looked just the same as before. He inspected the little bird and animal skulls that surrounded it. One was a sheep’s skull, he thought, one a badger’s. There were some curled horns, and a few feathers. Had there been voodoo, had there been slaughtered chickens and dancing goats, had there been hanky-panky? He rather hoped so. He went upstairs, boldly, and followed the sound of humming (a refrigerator? a corpse in a freezer? a dehumidifier?) to discover Frieda’s workroom. There was her word-processor, switched ori, and speaking quietly and patiently to itself. The screen was blank, but there was a line of pale green flickering writing at the top of the screen which said EYEBOX PC 2000 8.3.1990 LAST USED 00.00.00 CURRENT INTERRUPTED. TO RECOMMENCE PRESS ENTER. TO DISCONTINUE PRESS ESCAPE.

  Terry found the keys marked ENTER and ESCAPE, but thought better of pressing either of them. He did not understand computers. This whole thing was getting out of hand. How long had that machine been patiently waiting for its mistress’s return? Did it know where she had gone? Did it contain her farewell message, her suicide note?

  He looked around him, found the globe and the binoculars, switched on the light in the globe so that all the nations of the earth and all its oceans glowed with blue and green and brown and desert gold. Importantly, from the look-out post, he raked the horizon through the powerful binoculars.

  A small fishing boat chugged along westwards, over a grey and choppy sea. Was it a drug-carrying vessel, part of an international plot? Was the package for Miss Haxby a summons from her Godfather? Two tons of cannabis had been seized off Ilfracombe the month before, from a thousand-ton merchant ship called Proteus, on its way from Morocco. It had been a big story in the local and national press. Had Miss Haxby been the mastermind behind the fleet of bogus fish vans lined up to distribute this sinister loading? Was it from this very window that Miss Haxby had flashed her secret signals? For here, by the globe and the binoculars, stood a large, heavy waterproof torch, and an old-fashioned paraffin storm-lantern. He was surely on to something here.

  The house was far too big to search, but on the way down he easily found what must have been Frieda Haxby’s bedroom. A double bed, with a duvet heaped upon it, and piles of books and papers on the bedside table. A sea view. Another torch, a packet of cigarettes, a lighter, heaps of clothes upon a chair, several pairs of shoes lined up not untidily. No corpse in the bed: he lifted the duvet to look.

  Frieda Haxby would never sign the document that he carried in his plastic satchel. She had vanished, to avoid it. She had gone for good. She was dead. So who should he ring, the police or Mr Ffloyd?

  Of the two, the police seemed the more attractive option, the one which would yield him the most entertainment. He’d never had occasion to dial 999 on his mobile. Could you dial 999 on a mobile? Maybe mobiles didn’t recognize real emergencies, maybe they only recognized privatized emergencies, financial emergencies. Well, now was the time to find out. Terry Zealley settled himself in the courtyard, in a sheltered corner where he thought reception would be good. He’d got his map reference ready. He was looking forward to his stint in the witness box. He punched in the magic numbers, and waited for a reply.

  ‘Disappeared,’ echoed Gogo.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rosemary, distraught, on the verge of unseemly laughter. ‘Disappeared. Vanished. A missing person. Or a Misspers, as they seem to be called in the West Country. They’ve got the coastguards out, searching the seaward side of the cliff. And the local constabulary are going through the house.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Gogo. ‘How fucking inconvenient. Have you told Daniel?’

  ‘I’ve left a message for him at chambers. He’s in court.’

  ‘He won’t be best pleased when he hears.’

  ‘You’re right there. Can you imagine?’

  ‘Do the police know who it is they’re looking for?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She didn’t have much of a social life up there, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘Better keep this out of the press.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to put them on to it.’

  ‘What had I better do? Ring Daniel this evening? When does he usually get out?’

  ‘God knows. He’s probably aiming to get back to the Farm, but this may stop him.’

  ‘One of us is going to have to get down there.’

  ‘It’s five hours. I’m telling you. I suppose it’s lucky it’s the weekend.’ ‘Lucky?’ snorted Gogo, and laughed.

  ‘Gogo?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve just discovered I’ve got roaring high blood pressure. What does that mean?’

  Gogo paused, changed tone. ‘Oh, nothing, probably. Work pressure. Wonder we haven’t all got it. Don’t worry. Look, I can’t talk now, I’ve got a patient waiting. I’ll ring you this evening. I promise.’

  How gratified Frieda Haxby would have been had she been able to witness the constern
ation with which her family greeted the news of her vanishing, had she been able to hear the messages that ran backwards and forwards along the wires on that Friday night! Such touching distress, such urgency of response. Not all mothers would have created such a stir. How impressed she would have been by the speed with which her three grown and busy and important children managed to shed their weekend work and leisure engagements in order to hunt her down upon the moor!

  It took them, it is fair to say, a whole evening of renegotiations, during which they spoke not only to one another but also to the West Somerset Police, the Devon Police, the Exeter Express Dispatch Service, the coastguard in Swansea (why Swansea?–they were not sure, but Swansea it was), Cate Crowe, and the old-fashioned family solicitor, Mr Partridge, whom Frieda had sacked over the VAT affair. They even spoke to Terry Zealley. They cancelled guests and rearranged meetings and collated their diaries and took money out of their banks. They left instructions with PAs and secretaries and clerks of chambers. Daniel personally rang to apologize to Sir Noel for letting him down over the briefing. It was a damn nuisance, said Daniel tersely to Patsy, as he packed his bag on the Saturday morning, but he couldn’t afford not to go. Could he?

  They were able to disguise their concerns as anxiety, and anxiety indeed was what they felt–why examine its springs or its quality too closely?

  Daniel drove: Rosemary and Gogo sat together in the back. They had not travelled in a car together like this for many years. If ever. Would it have been easier had they brought one of the in-laws along, to dilute the thickness of their emotions? By unspoken consent they had agreed to travel alone, the three of them, leaving their spouses behind to guard the home front. Each had insisted that it would be unfair to involve those not of the blood in such a quest. Each had known quite well that shame and fear and greed, not selflessness, had inspired this prohibition. Patsy, David and Nathan were not fit to see the Palmers in extremis, they were not to be allowed to witness the ignoble chase. They would track Frieda down by themselves, and the three of them would confront her, alive or dead, without the help of marriage partners. This was an internal business, a family affair.

  It was Gogo’s view, which she expounded over a snack at the Gordano Service Station, that Frida was alive, and well, and had done a runner. It would have been just like her, she said, biting into an egg and cress baguette, to have left a false trail. She had faked a disappearance, and would turn up laughing in Monte Carlo or Uppsala or Rio.

  ‘This is disgusting,’ said Rosemary, opening her ham sandwich to look for the ham. A thin ragged half-slice lay, flattened in a smear of mustard. ‘Shall I take it back and ask for another?’ she asked Daniel.

  Daniel shrugged. He was eating, unaccountably, a slice of pizza, and drinking an apple juice.

  Daniel was of the opinion that Frieda had broken her leg in the woods, and would, by the time they arrived, have been discovered in a state of maximum distress and inconvenience–either dead, or dying. Rosemary agreed that something horrible must have happened, but favoured a death by drowning. ‘I think she may have fallen into the sea. It’s right on the edge, and a steep cliff. And she was always a walker.’

  All three of them contemplated the tiresomeness of a missing body. How long did it take for a missing person to turn into a missing body? How long would it be before they could prove the will? And where was the will, and what would be in it?

  All three were united in a suspicion that whatever she had done, she had done it to annoy them. They did not state this baldly, but many of their asides, as they dried their hands in the jetstream in the Ladies, as they discussed which motorway exit to take from the M5, as they gazed at the willows bending over the Somerset Levels, might have been taken in that sense. Had she not for two or more years now been pursuing a policy of irritation, of aggression? They supposed that policy to be directed largely or wholly against themselves: it did not often occur to them that they did not loom as large in her life as she in theirs. They were unwilling to admit other, non-dynastic, non-familial motivations. They were understandably unable and unwilling to think of the tracts of Frieda’s life which lay before and beyond their knowing. They feared these tracts–the dull ploughed furrows of her childhood, the swelling adolescent foothills of her career, the hidden and mysterious folds and valleys of her marriage to their father, the thickets of her scandalous romances, the public peaks and craggy coastlines of her ambition. She had been writing her memoirs: on what scrapheap, in what vault, on what agent’s desk lay those incriminating documents today? Had she mapped the past, and if so, to what end?

  Daniel and Rosemary assumed a deathwish, for what else, they argued, could the dead-end Ashcombe represent? And if death had come her way it was no more than she had asked for. She had gone to meet him halfway. Only Gogo dissented, and she with half her heart. Gogo was the last to have seen Frieda alive, and she described now the apparition of Frieda in her blue dress, shining like starlight. She had seemed–well, said Gogo carefully, she had seemed quite well.

  But it must be remembered that Gogo, professionally, saw the ill, lived amongst the ill. Frieda had not trembled, Frieda had not stumbled or jerked her head or spilt her tea or fumbled for words. Her hand had been steady, her speech clear. No palsy, no paralysis had possessed her. And to Benjamin, she reminded her brother and her sister, to Benjamin Frieda had been very kind.

  The name of Benjamin was not welcome in the car. It fell coldly, and Rosemary shivered, while Daniel turned up the heater. Neither of them wanted to hear of Benjamin’s reception at Ashcombe. They feared the worst. Jealousies, exclusions, favours, competitions. Betrayals, thefts and alienations.

  Darkness fell early even in the west, and Daniel turned on the headlights. They had agreed to pick up the keys to the house from the police station in Minehead, an unnecessary formality as the police had conceded that the house seemed to have been standing open to intruders and the elements for days, if not for weeks. They approached the neat brick suburban thirties building with apprehension, wondering what news could await them there: a discovery, a trail of clues? But the officer, apologetic, told them that no trace of Mrs Haxby had been found. They had searched the wooded areas, but had found nothing. ‘It’s very dense, very steep,’ said PC Wainwright. ‘It could take days.’ The coastguard had been out, but no bodies had been reported. There were no signs of forced entry at the house, no evidence of foul play. They’d taken away one or two items for examination, but there’d been nothing suspicious. (He did not like to mention the cannabis to these three disconcerting Londoners: it had looked to him and to his boss as though the old lady had been smoking it herself, but this seemed so unlikely that he didn’t like even to raise the matter. He’d let someone else deal with that one. If she had been having a puff, who cared? If they found outhouses full of the stuff, that would be another matter.)

  The boss had thought of shutting the house off and refusing the keys, but had decided not to bother. No point in over-reacting. There might be all sorts of innocent explanations. Mrs Haxby might have had a sudden call to go to London. She might have had a visitor and gone off with her to town. She might have gone on holiday. He gathered she was a professional lady. She wouldn’t be pleased to come back and find her absence had been treated as a crime. Nor, it had occurred to him, would she necessarily be very pleased to find her keys had been handed over to her avenging family. But that wasn’t his problem, was it? Next of kin is next of kin, in the eyes of the law. And Mr Palmer said he was a lawyer.

  Mrs Haxby was a professional and an eccentric. Exmoor was full of eccentrics. Would a normal person want to live alone at a place like Ashcombe? Ashcombe had a bad reputation. Nobody normal had ever lived at Ashcombe. In its hotel days, it might have had one or two normal guests, but they hadn’t stayed long. And the manager had been barking mad. So had the proprietor, and so had the retired admiral who had built the place. It stood to reason that anybody who lived alone at Ashcombe might well wander off alone. Nothing illegal i
n that.

  So PC Wainwright and his boss Sergeant Wiggins had reasoned, as they washed their hands of responsibility, and handed over to Daniel Palmer, Grace D’Anger and Rosemary Herz.

  The trio drove on, with Gogo now at the wheel, and Daniel by her side. Daniel had been further downcast by the news that Ashcombe lay right on the county boundary, and that if Frieda had wandered from Somerset into Devon, if her corpse was washed from Somerset to Devon, her case would be at the mercy of two police forces, the subject of two files of paperwork. How characteristically inconvenient of her to live on a boundary, he remarked, as he peered into the gathering gloom. She always liked margins, said Gogo sharply, as she swung off the main road and down the steep descent.

  Daniel was deeply shocked by the house. Neither Rosemary’s warnings nor Gogo’s emendations of those warnings had prepared him for this Victorian Gothic asylum. It offended all his instincts for comfort, for order, for maintenance. The degree of decay and dilapidation appalled. The smell stopped his nostrils. How could this ever have been kept up, how could it ever be restored? What impulse of folly had built this folly here and abandoned it here, at the sea’s edge? Its very position clamoured with offence.

  Gogo and Rosemary were almost amused by his horror, but they too were overwhelmed. The abandoned house had grown yet more sinister, it loomed darkly above them into the lowering afternoon night. Was Frieda in there somewhere, trapped in a closet, imprisoned in an oak chest? The police said they had searched the house, but had they? Frieda’s last supper still stood upon the table: the winkle shells, the glistening oily yellow rind, her open book. (Unlike Terry Zealley, they register the tide of the book, and register it with surprise: Frieda seemed to have been reading a Mills & Boon romance called The Sweet South by Amantha Knight.) And there were objects familiar to them from Mausoleum days–the skull, the skeleton clock, the alabaster egg, the vase of red Bristol glass. They were instinct with foreboding. So Frieda had moved from one folly to another, from one mausoleum to another. From the grave to the grave. What life had she had, and where were its joys now? Where was she now? WHY HAD SHE COME HERE? Had all come to this? Or was this some endgame prank?