The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  Frieda Haxby Palmer had been seen with the young man in Exeter, in Minehead, in Ilfracombe, in Bideford and in Westward Ho!

  The photofit was an excellent, an unmistakable likeness. There was Will Paine to the life: his sweet smile, his short cropped hair, his symmetrically chipped teeth. His dark skin. There aren’t all that many black men in Exeter, Minehead, Ilfracombe, Bideford and Westward Ho! According to D’Anger’s almanac, there were 0.8 per cent in most of these places, though Exeter boasted 1.45. Not much in the way of cover. And anyway, Will Paine had the kind of face that stayed in the memory. He was such a nice-looking boy.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Patsy. ‘I don’t believe there was any harm in him.’

  Daniel looked at her with that ironic expression which had thrown panic into the prose of many a hard-boiled witness. It seemed on this occasion justified.

  ‘What do they say?’ rallied Patsy, ready to spring to the defence.

  ‘Wanted for questioning. In connection with the disappearance of. And with cash withdrawals from various cashpoints.’

  Patsy breathed sharply. ‘So he stole her cashcard. That’s not the end of the world.’

  ‘Nobody said it was. It’s what he did with the body that’s of interest.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Patsy. ‘You’re not suggesting he murdered her, are you?’

  ‘Somebody seems to be,’ said Daniel reasonably.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ repeated Patsy stubbornly. But, of course, she did. And, dutifully, like a good citizen, she rang Mr Rorty and spilled the beans. She owned up to an acquaintance with Will Paine.

  Reports from the witnesses who had drawn such a damning likeness of Will Paine were confusing. He had, it is true, been seen in the company of a grey-haired, large-nosed woman of middle height; she had been wearing an old Persian-lamb jacket, grey trousers and Wellington boots, and he a leather jacket and black trousers. The couple had been spotted together in the vicinity of several cashpoints. But at no point did he appear to be threatening or menacing her; indeed, one observer, a female taxi-driver in Westward Ho!, alleged that it had been the other way round. The woman had been pushing the young man towards the bank and urging him to insert the plastic card he was holding. He had appeared reluctant.

  The police officer had tried to talk Mrs Boxer out of this statement, but she had been immovable. The woman had been pushing the boy. He had looked nervous and ill at ease. Yes, she was quite sure that this was what she had noticed.

  Mrs Haxby Palmer’s bank statements had been examined, and, bafflingly, had showed no cash withdrawals at all over the relevant period. Monies had been paid in, on a monthly basis, from her agent, and there had been one or two small debit transactions–£20 for petrol at the Crosskeys, £40 for a meal at the Hunter’s Inn, £15 from a stationer’s in Exeter. Yet witnesses swore that they had seen slabs of banknotes clicking and gliding out of West Country walls.

  Mrs Haxby Palmer had a balance of £34,000 in her current account. Roland Rorty was not convinced that this was evidence that she was involved in drug trafficking. He thought it more likely, from the profile he was compiling, that it indicated a degree of financial insouciance characteristic of an unworldly intellectual. Perhaps Mrs Palmer had never heard of deposit accounts and interest rates. Or maybe she was so rich that £34,000 was, to her, peanuts. Either seemed equally possible.

  Not surprisingly, Will Paine had vanished too. He was nowhere to be found. Nobody came forward from North London to claim him, even when Patsy had handed over what she knew of his curriculum vitae. Remarks about his strong Midlands accent had already widened the search to Wolverhampton, but his mother, if she had noticed the inquiries, remained mum.

  It was all most unsatisfactory.

  After a couple of weeks, Goltho & Goltho disclosed that they were holding not only a copy of Mrs Palmer’s latest will, but also the deeds of Ashcombe House. They were quite willing to co-operate with family pressure to view the will. She had left everything, apart from a few small legacies, in trust to her grandson Benjamin. The trustees were to be David D’Anger and her old friend Lord Ogden.

  Gogo, hearing this news, was struck with a chill of fear. It could not, nor it would not come to good. Daniel, hearing this news, resolved to challenge the will, for his mother could not have been of sound mind when she made it. Rosemary, hearing this news, felt faint with mean rage. As she happened to be wearing an ambulatory blood pressure monitor on this day, fitted to her arm at 8 a.m. that morning by the Nightingale Hospital, the mean rage was registered by the most impressive lurch in its readings.

  So nobody was pleased with Frieda’s gesture, and nobody was quite sure what it meant.

  David D’Anger, who had been taking the line that Frieda’s disappearance was none of his business, found that it was his business after all. Why had she done this to them? Why had she put them to this test? And was it legal to appoint him as trustee without even asking him?

  Gogo and David had decided to protect Benjamin from the gossip and speculation surrounding Frieda’s disappearance. So far this had been easy, as it had not hit the national press: Frieda’s fame had not been of the sort to command tabloid headlines, and the police had been discreet in their inquiries. None of the witnesses they questioned had ever heard of her, so the damage had been limited. Could this go on for ever? No, of course not. Soon Benjie and the world would have to know. His innocence was threatened.

  Jon and Jess Herz found out because they heard their parents shouting at one another about it, but it did not mean much to them as they had not seen Frieda for years. They had not been favourites. They could not think why Rosemary was so worked up about it. They preferred their Golders Green granny. Simon Palmer no longer took any interest in family affairs, but Patsy, wracked with guilt, had confessed to Emily over the telphone that Will Paine had somehow tracked down Frieda on Exmoor and made off with her.

  ‘What do you mean, made off with her?’ Emily’s cool voice had asked, as Patsy nervously paced the bedroom with the cordless phone. ‘Do you mean they’ve eloped together?’

  This new interpretation struck Patsy as a saving notion: she clutched at it.

  ‘Well, maybe they have,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘He was a nice boy, Will Paine,’ said Emily. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Patsy, weak with the relief of avowal. ‘But I think I may have been wrong.’

  ‘Never,’ said Emily. ‘He won’t have hurt her, I promise you. They’ve probably run off to Eldorado.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Patsy.

  And she told Daniel that evening, that he’d better not rush into anything hasty over Frieda’s will. She might still have the last laugh. ‘She’ll have it anyway,’ said Daniel irritably. ‘But I take your point.’

  Will Paine’s fax to Patsy put paid to this line of comfort. It came not from Eldorado but from Jamaica, and in Patsy’s trusting view it exonerated him, perhaps alas, of all blame. Will Paine had heard, he would not say how, that he was being looked for, and although he had no intention of coming home and getting into trouble he did want the Palmers to know that he hadn’t robbed Frieda. They had done right by him and he wanted to do right by them. He had left Frieda alive and well, standing on Exeter station, waving him off on the 11.31 a.m. to Paddington. He had, it’s true, a bagful of money which she had thrust upon him, but he had never asked for it, had repeatedly tried not to take it, and while he could not say he did not now want it, he had not got hold of it by unfair means. Frieda had assured him she did not need it.

  ‘She give it me to get rid of me,’ read his fax. ‘She said it was American money from a special bank account and not wanted because of tax reasons. She persuaded me to take it and I swear that is the honest truth. I bought an airticket and came here to seek my father. Please tell the police I am an innocent man and get them to take the poster down, I don’t want my mum to see it, she has e
nough trouble. Please tell Mr D’Anger that Mrs Haxby said to say it was just redistribution. I pestered Mrs Haxby but that is the worst I did. She let me stay on to help in the garden. There are blackberries in the freezer, but the electricity goes off too often, so they may be off. We had some good times and she taught me blackgammon. But then she got tired of me being around all the time and wanted me to go.

  ‘Please tell Mr D’Anger that it’s not possible to open your eyes take off the veil and wake up a different person just because of different place or money.

  ‘I hope Mrs Haxby has not come to harm. She liked to walk to Hindspring Point above the old kiln and it was a dangerous walk. Bless you Mrs Palmer, you were a stroke of real luck to me.’

  Patsy, reading this, wonders how much luck she had brought Will Paine, if any.

  She believes every word of his fax. It has the ring of truth. But will the police believe it? Will Daniel believe it? Should she keep it to herself? She does not trust Daniel not to tell the police, so instead she rings David D’Anger and reads him the text. She can hear that David is as much at a loss as she.

  ‘I can’t see what’s to be gained by telling the police, can you?’ she suggests to him. ‘They’ll never take his word for anything.’

  ‘You could check out the kiln and the blackberries,’ says David.

  ‘I’m not going near that creepy place,’ says Patsy, it sounds like hell. I’ve always hated Devon.’

  ‘Then we’ll just have to wait and see what happens,’ says David. He too is not keen to persecute Will Paine, whose presence he cannot even remember, and whose personal messages baffle him. Can he once have been an extra-mural student at an evening class, years ago?

  David compromises. He puts it to Gogo that Gogo put it to the police that she has just remembered that Frieda had mentioned a walk to the old kiln. Gogo obliges.

  Will Paine hates Jamaica. The only lie he had told to Patsy had been that he had come here to seek his father. His father was, as far as he knew, in New York, and Will had no desire to see him. His father had terrorized his mother and frightened Will Paine. Will has come to seek his fatherland, and he does not like it much. He wishes now that he had gone to one of the other islands, or to Guyana. But he had chosen Jamaica. It is a slum, or the bit of it he’s found is a slum. The dogs bark, the bananas rot, the heat is a killer, the room is full of bugs, and he has seen a snail as big as a football. He can’t get used to the dollar bills, and knows he has been cheated. His delicate stomach has been upset. He is neither one thing nor the other here. He is not a tourist, but he has no job. Where shall he drift next? How long will the money last?

  He had told the truth about the money to Patsy. Frieda had bought him off He hadn’t wanted to leave so soon, he’d liked it at Ashcombe. He’d liked the woods, the rosehips, the blackberries, the elderberries, the chanterelles, the little black trompettes de la mort. Frieda had told him where to look, and he had fetched bagsful for her. He had been happy and light of foot among the bracken, and on the narrow path to Hindspring Point. He had found liberty caps for her, on the upper grassland, and had taught her how to make a magic-mushroom stew. He had bought her weed and they had smoked together. They had eaten winkles and played cards and backgammon. They had listened to the roaring of the stags in rut, and to the crying of the gulls. But then she had been tired of him. ‘I want to be alone now,’ she had said one night. He had pleaded in vain.

  She’d taken him off, the next day, to town. To several towns. She’d got a new plastic card which she could put into the holes in the wall, which she said connected with an illegal bank account in America. She said the money was useless, she couldn’t declare it, she couldn’t spend it. He could have it. It was money for free. Free as blackberries and chanterelles. Look for the symbol, she said, and it was there–a symbol he’d never noticed before. MIDAS, next to ACCESS and VISA and all the other logos. And the money had spewed out, in town after town. English money. All over Exmoor. She got overexcited. She had laughed as one bunch fell to the pavement and began to blow away. She stuffed it into her coat pockets, into her bag. People took notice, people stared, he tried to restrain her but she didn’t care.

  ‘Let’s just get rid of it,’ she said, as she drove on to the next machine. The system had seized up, finally, in a small town–more of a village, really–on top of the purple moorland. Their last stop, and the machine refused to give. It blinked angrily, and swallowed the card for ever.

  ‘Damn,’ said Frieda happily. ‘They’ve caught up with us. Oh, well, never mind. I’ve got you enough to be going on with.’

  He’d tried to refuse it, but she hadn’t let him. ‘You’re doing me a favour,’ she said. ‘You’re making an honest woman of me.’

  And she’d forced it on him, and had driven him, the next day, to Exeter, to the station.

  ‘That’s it,’ she’d said. ‘That’s the end. I don’t want to see you back here again.’

  She hadn’t wished him luck, but she had waved as the train pulled out.

  That was his true story, and he was sticking to it. But who would believe him? He has been turned into a joke, a fraud. He too is a missing person. He will have to lie low, perhaps for life. He wonders if Patsy will feel it her duty to hand over his letter to the police. He wonders if he can be tracked down electronically through the fax machine in Kingston Korner Kommunications. He wonders about the laws of extradition. He wonders if he will ever feel more at home here. Is he Jamaican, is he a Wolverhampton man, is he a North London man? Is there a place in the world for him? This question had not arisen during his brief scamper in the bracken. Is he a man of the woodland? What is it that threatens him now?

  ***

  Benjamin’s life is also under threat.

  When Gogo had first heard, in garbled version, over the telephone, the terms of Frieda’s will, she had known that some bad thing had happened, irreversibly. What it was she did not know, but it had happened. Like a road accident, an illness, a breakage. In that moment she knew that the future had changed. She was not sure if David also felt the breath of fear. At first she did not dare to ask him.

  For what was it that seemed so ominous in this good fortune, this windfall? It would annoy her brother and sister; it would be natural for them to be annoyed. But this perhaps could be put right, with time and tact. (Not so easy, if Daniel pursued his notion of disputing the will, but maybe he would drop it. Maybe they could reach some compromise.) Gogo was clear in her own conscience that she had never sought to influence Frieda in any way in her own favour or her son’s. The idea was ludicrous. As soon might one seek to influence the tides or the weather or the traffic on the M4. She believed that Daniel and Rosemary would believe her on this point. They would not blame her personally, surely? And even if they did, she could learn to live with the disapproval of her siblings.

  Her fear attached itself to something other, some unknown shape.

  Ne ither she nor David had any notion of the size of Frieda’s estate, were she truly dead, and were it truly to come to Benjamin. They hardly dared to mention it between themselves. The fact that she had disappeared with £34,000 in her current account seemed to them, as it seemed to Roland Rorty, inconclusive. £34,000 was in itself a tidy sum for a schoolboy to inherit, but there was the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that it represented buried treasure. And what of that terrible house, and the royalties from Frieda’s books? What, come to that, of the film rights of Queen Christina? It was all too burdensome, too uncontrolled. It would ruin them all. What had Frieda been playing at? What should Gogo say to Benjamin? What had Frieda herself already said to Benjamin? Had grandmother and grandson entered into some unholy pact?

  David was also worried about the implications of this shower of gold. The D’Angers had successfully disposed of their own small fortune, back home in Guyana (though it was rumoured, as ever in such families, that some portion of the family estate awaited reclamation–a bauxite mine? a tropical valley? a plantation?). The D’Anger
s had not abandoned their homeland and survived the Burnham years to find themselves as heirs to the spoils of an English ploughman’s daughter. David had been unfairly favoured by fortune already: she had heaped upon him the gifts of beauty and intelligence, and was she now to add to these the gross injustice of unearned wealth? All his adult life David had been striving to redress the injustices of that initial over-lavish distribution, and now fate had come in like a bad fairy in the shape of Frieda Haxby, to make his position yet more untenable. David had a position on capital gains tax, he had a position on inheritance rax, as he had once had a position on private dentistry: was it fair to test and to try him in this way? Had the testing of the D’Angers been Frieda’s dark intention? Or had she been merely randomly irresponsible?

  You will note that it did not occur to Gogo that Frieda had been affectionate, or generous, in the making of her will in her grandson’s favour. Nor did Gogo see the inheritance as a blessing. Make of that what you wish.

  The memory of the house at Ashcombe, during this first week or two, pressed down upon Gogo, hung over her like a storm cloud. What had her boy done to deserve to be threatened by this gloomy pile with its midden full of shells and bones, its black fungi, its long-plundered Old Barrow, its leaking radon? Her boy was bright and beautiful, he was the future. This dump was the pit of the past out of which we may never never clamber. It sucks at our ankles, it pulls off and eats our shoes, it drags us under. Gogo went to the Bloomsbury Public Library in her lunch break, and found, in the dark nineteenth-century dinner-smelling gravy basement of Topography, a County History, which told her that Ashcombe had in its grounds an old leper colony as well as an old kiln. She shuddered. She was not superstitious, but she shuddered. And she discovered worse than that, worse than the lepers and the radon. She discovered rape and murder. She rang the estate agent in Taunton, to ask if she could speak to the young woman who had first showed Frieda round Ashcombe–hoping that in some way she could normalize Frieda’s aberration, hoping to turn Frieda back into a harmless nature-loving eccentric who had chatted her way round the battlements in the spring sunshine with gay Amanda Posy. And the estate agents told her that Amanda Posy was dead. Twenty-seven, and dead. Had they not heard? Amanda Posy had been killed by a man posing as a client. She had shown him round a house up in the woods behind Luxborough, and he raped her, throttled her and buried her in Treborough Tip. A copycat killing. A newsprint death. There had been a spate of estate agent killings and abductions. Amanda Posy was one of several.