Without further ado I reached into the pocket of my robes and plucked out my wand, my little piece of Vance from the marshes back home. “Revelare!” I demanded.
I wasn’t even slightly surprised to find the case suddenly stuffed full of a motley collection of bizarre items. A stuffed rat, a clock, some charts, a brass telescope, a barometer, several heavily annotated notepads, a bag of beads and a few jars of what looked like glitter.
The briefcase belonged to a wizard, and now I remembered exactly where I’d come across that name before.
Have you ever been so tired that you wanted to crawl on your hands and knees to the nearest soft warm place, and then just curl up and pass out? That’s exactly how I felt when my taxi pulled up in front of Whittle Inn at just before 2.30 a.m. I’d been travelling for twenty hours and my cold was now making itself fully known.
I paid the taxi driver and turned to gaze at my beloved wonky inn. It stared down at me, all crooked walls and kinked turrets. Lights burned in a few of the bedroom windows, just as I expected. Many of our guests were nocturnal creatures.
‘Creature’ being the operative word in many cases.
I somehow found the energy to let myself in through the front door. The bar area was deserted, but that was okay. I didn’t want to disturb anyone.
I tiptoed through the bar and into the back passage, popping my head around the kitchen door. No sign of Florence. Boo! I’d been looking forward to seeing her again.
I carried on up the stairs and into my bedroom. My big bed with its soft downy quilt and clean linen looked like paradise. Like everyone else, Mr Hoo, my owl, was nowhere to be seen either, but I figured he’d be out hunting.
I yanked off my robes, tossing them into the corner, and then dragged myself into the bathroom to scrub my hands and face and brush my teeth. I desperately needed a shower, but I figured that could wait till morning.
I had just clambered into bed and was reaching to turn off my sidelight when my long-dead great-grandmother appeared. I blinked sleepily at her apparition.
“Welcome home, Alfhild,” she said in her well-modulated tone. She always liked to call me by my formally given name. I’d been named after her. She was Alfhild Gwynfyre, a Daemonne by marriage. I secretly referred to her as Gwyn, but not to her face. “I trust you had a pleasant trip.”
“Oh, it was wonderful!” I gushed. “I have so much to tell you.” I thumped my pillow. “But right now? Now I’m exhausted. And I don’t feel well.”
Gwyn floated a little closer and regarded me in what I decided was concern but might have been scepticism given what she said next.
“I do hope you haven’t brought home some sort of foreign disease, dear child.”
Child? I was thirty-one! “It’s a cold, Grandmama.”
“It’s not Spanish influenza is it? That killed over fifty million people in 1918, you know?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know that. Goodness me. Imagine the sheer number of ghosts that had spawned. “Thank goodness they didn’t all end up here,” I murmured.
“Pardon?” Gwyn asked sharply.
“Nothing, Grandmama. Don’t worry. It’s a cold. Not the flu.” I looked at her pointedly. “I haven’t been to Spain. I just need some sleep.”
Gwyn sniffed. Had I hurt her feelings? Ghosts don’t need sleep. She could probably have chatted all night.
“I’ll share all my adventures with you in the morning,” I promised.
“After a good long bath, I hope. Soak the smell of the souk away.”
I gaped at her in disbelief. Since when had ghosts had any sense of smell? I shook my head at her. “Night, Grandmama.” I switched the light off.
Her glow remained in place, as I drifted off to sleep. “Good to have you home, my dear,” I thought I heard her say. I sighed with satisfaction and knew no more.
A light scratching on the cover near my face woke me the next morning. I lay where I was, my eyes closed tightly, my head pounding. Were they digging up the cellar again? Or maybe filling it in? Hadn’t that work been completed yet? I’d left instructions…
But it was just the throbbing of a headache. My throat and sinuses ached in sympathy.
The scratching came again. My eyes flicked reluctantly open. Mr Hoo had landed on the bedcovers, and now his talons pricked at the material as he lifted up first one foot and then the other, stamping about as though he just didn’t care.
“Hello, adorable!” I grinned at him and reached out to gently stroke his chest. He ducked his head and pecked gently at my fingers. “I’ve missed you lots!” My voice was thick, my sinuses completely bunged up. The calm before the storm, no doubt. As soon as I sat up, I’d be streaming.
“Where’s that Florence?” I asked my owl. “I thought she’d have been to see me by now.”
“Hooooo?” he called. “Hooo?”
“You know full well who.” I pushed myself up to sitting.
I called for her myself, “Florence?” but she didn’t appear. Perhaps everyone was busy downstairs dealing with the breakfast service.
“My head aches,” I told Mr Hoo. “And I’m still so tired.” I snuggled back down beneath the covers. “Maybe I need a pre-breakfast nap.” I closed my eyes and heard him flutter on to the bedstead where he liked to perch. “Just a little more sleep,” I mumbled.
It seemed like only seconds later that I heard a knock on the door. “Hello?” I called, my voice husky.
The door cracked open and Charity poked her head around it. She beamed when she spotted me. “Yes! You’re home!” She pushed the door open wide and came into the room, carrying a tray. “Gwyn said you weren’t feeling very well.”
“It’s just a cold.” I sat up once more and arranged my pillows more comfortably.
“Travelling kills the immune system.” Charity nodded. “It’s all that recycled air in planes.”
“Eww.” I twisted my nose up at that idea. “It’s so nice to be home. You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“As are you. Oh! I’m so pleased to have you back. We’ve all missed you.”
I wondered for a moment whom Charity meant by ‘all’. She looked at me knowingly and I rolled my eyes.
“It’s been great to get away from everything,” I said firmly. “But yes, it is fantastic to be back. You have to fill me in on all that’s been happening here.”
Charity placed the tray on my thighs. A bowl of Greek yoghurt with fresh peach slices, dribbled with honey. Two slices of toast. A small pot of tea with milk in a jug. And a packet of aspirin.
“Perfect,” I announced, and poured a test amount of tea into the cup. It needed a good stir.
Charity sat down on the bed and watched me. “George has been asking after you,” she said, subtle as a sledgehammer.
“Has he?” I asked carefully.
Before I’d departed Whittle Inn for foreign shores, I’d returned to the marsh to relieve my erstwhile fiancé of the spell I’d cast on him after I’d found he’d been playing away from home. To be fair, I truly believed that his involvement with Stacey, the girl from the local emergency police call centre, was little more than a flirtation. She had obviously been keen on him for some time. The thing is, as my mother would have said, it takes two to tango. I could forgive him—them—for their harmless dalliance, but I’d done some soul-searching of my own, and I wasn’t sure that George and I should proceed with our engagement until we both felt it was the right thing to do.
“He misses you.” Charity’s tone wheedled away at me.
“I missed him, too.” But really I had missed ‘us’. Now I couldn’t be sure there even was an us. I was reminded of something someone had said to me not so long ago. ‘Love makes you weak. It’s the thin end of a wedge that can be used to crack open the door before bludgeoning you to death.’
That had been Silvan. My annoying dark witch friend.
“Have you heard from Silvan?” I asked.
Charity pouted, sour because I’d changed the subject. “No. Not sin
ce he disappeared back to London.”
I poured my tea, this time happy with the colour. “Has everything been okay while I’ve been gone? No sign of ‘our friends’?”
Charity knew that ‘our friends’ was the euphemism we used when we were talking about my arch-enemies, The Mori. The Mori were a secretive band of nasty warlocks, hell bent on taking my land away from me by whatever means they could. A few months ago, we’d had a showdown that had resulted in the death of their regional leader. We had sent the rest of them scurrying away, their tails between their legs.
“We’ve had no new problems at all.” Charity nodded at the window, knowing what I was going to ask next. “The perimeter is safe and secure. Finbarr checks it every day. And there are still a couple of your dad’s friends hanging out in the wood.”
Finbarr was an Irish witch who seemed to have made Whittle Inn his permanent home. He was a huge help and I thought of him as my annoying younger brother. He liked to perform magick using his band of pixies. To define the rotten knee-high, pointy-eared little creatures as a menace was an understatement.
But it could have been worse. At least they weren’t leprechauns.
“But not my dad?” I sighed. It wasn’t really a question so much as a statement. I didn’t see a huge amount of my father. As a member of the Circle of Querkus, he was sworn to track down and eliminate The Mori, and that meant he spent little time here at the inn. Like my great-grandmother, Erik was a ghost, but it was good to have them both around.
“Never mind.” Charity patted my hand. “You’ve still got us.”
In this instance ‘us’ referred most specifically to Zephaniah, Monsieur Emietter, Ned and Florence – my house ghosts. “But where is Florence?” I asked, puzzled. “I haven’t seen her since I arrived home. That’s unusual for her.” Florence loved to mind my business.
Charity pulled a face. “Florence has a new interest.”
“What sort of interest?” I asked as I tucked into my delicious yogurt and peaches.
Her reply was a grunt. “Huh. You’ll see.”
Despite how groggy and spent I felt with the residue tiredness from all the travelling and the first stage of my cold, I kept fairly busy all day. My rucksack, delivered by an airport courier, arrived at the inn after lunch. I handed out gifts to Charity and Finbarr and held court in the kitchen over copious amounts of lemon tea, regaling everyone with my foreign adventures.
Of Florence there remained no sign.
At around five, I left everyone else to prepare for the dinner service. We’d decided that I shouldn’t help that evening as I’d only end up spreading my germs. I elected instead to make my way to my office and take stock on what had been happening in my absence.
Charity had stayed on top of all the inn’s business just as I’d expected she would. There were a few outstanding reservations to process, but apart from that everything appeared up-to-date. I checked the finances and things were looking as healthy as they could, given the enormous amount of money I’d forked out to have the hole in the cellar filled in. That and the cost of having two of my cottages in Whittlecombe double-glazed, painted externally and re-roofed caused me to wince in pain whenever I looked at the figures involved.
But things could have been worse. In fact, I’d expected there to be a larger deficit. Scrolling back through the bank statements I noticed one glaring omission. The cheque I’d given to Silvan as a final payment for services rendered had never been cashed. I double checked, then triple checked.
Why hadn’t he cashed it?
Silvan was a rogue, a dastardly dark witch. He loved money and a good fight and not much else. I found it strange that he hadn’t cashed my cheque. I made a mental note to ringfence the money in my business account so it wouldn’t be spent. I could try and contact Silvan to see if he was alright too, although I knew from experience that might be easier said than done.
I scribbled a note to myself on a post-it note, and as I did so I remembered the briefcase from the airport. I’d realised at the bus station where I’d heard the name Mr Wylie. Right here at the inn. Now I wanted to check his registration details. A quick search by name yielded no results in my database so I had a look at the planner I liked to keep in my desk drawer with all my scribblings in. Checking out the date of the Psychic Fayre, way back in April—which felt like a lifetime ago—I worked out the date that a Mr Wylie had stayed at Whittle Inn.
From there it should have been a simple case of looking back through the bookings at that time and cross-referencing. But no matter which way I looked at the notes, by date or name or room, I could find no record of the mysterious Mr Wylie.
He had been erased from the inn’s records.
Gwyn chose that moment to float along the corridor outside the office.
“Grandmama?”
I thought I sensed a little reluctance as my great-grandmother turned about and drifted into the office. “Yes, dear?”
“You remember Mr Wylie who stayed here in April while I was… camping out at the Psychic Fayre?” I looked up at her expectantly.
“No, dear.”
“No?”
“No.”
I sat back in my seat and frowned at her. “No, you don’t remember Mr Wylie? Or you don’t remember the date…? Or you don’t remember the Fayre?”
“Well, of course, I remember the time you impersonated a fortune teller, my dear. Who could forget that absurd get-up? But I never had cause to visit the Fayre, so I don’t remember it per se. I recall that it occurred. Will that suffice?”
I tutted. She could be such a pedantic old ghost. “But Mr Wylie? You remember him?”
“I can’t say I do. Is there a problem?”
Taken aback, I frowned at her. Gwyn was as sharp as a tack. She never forgot anything. “He stayed here a few nights while I was away,” I explained slowly, watching her face as I did so. “He claimed he was a businessman.”
Gwyn shrugged her shoulders. An impressive gesture in someone as grandly dressed—in a long velvet evening gown and a tiara—as she was. “No. Nothing’s coming back to me.”
She was lying. I was sure of it. I held her gaze, and she met mine without blinking.
“Florence was concerned about him.” Why was she being so evasive?
Gwyn turned about, creating a draft around the desk and making the papers in front of me rustle. “I suggest you ask her then.”
“I would,” I began to answer but Gwyn had disappeared, slipping like smoke down a crack in the floorboards. “Except I haven’t seen her since I arrived home,” I finished to myself. It sounded lame.
I returned my attention to the computer, running another check for the name W Wylie and finding nothing. I couldn’t help feeling disappointed in Gwyn.
It was so unlike her not to tell it to me straight. I could only assume that something somewhere was seriously wrong.
I sneezed and the throbbing in my head started up again.
I loved this inn and everyone in it, so why couldn’t anything be straightforward? Yet again I had something I needed to get to the bottom of.
The sooner the better.
“Hey, boss.” Charity poked her head around the door of my office the next morning after breakfast. “How’s your cold?”
“I’b combletely blogg’d ub,” I replied, laying it on a little thick and waving a wad of tissues around.
“Lemon and whisky, that’s what my Mum always recommends.” Charity swished into the room, full of sass and energy, her hair dyed a flame red, which was fitting for late summer.
“Good old Mum,” I said, tidying up the chaos on my desk. “I’m not a big whisky drinker though. I’ll just stick to lemon and ginger, I think.”
“Maybe some air would do you good? You haven’t been out since you came back.”
“It’s only been a couple of days and I’m poorly.” I tried—and probably succeeded—in sounding pathetic. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?”
“No. It’s only a cold.” Charity c
huckled. “It’s not even man flu. You need to get over yourself.”
I folded my arms and gave her a baleful stare. “It’s worse than man flu, it’s witch flu!”
“Heaven help me. You do go on.” We laughed together and Charity skipped over to the window to glance outside. “They’re promising rain later, but it’s only a little overcast at the moment. A walk would do you good.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?” I joined her at the window, but she backed away, crossing her fingers into the age-old ‘unclean’ gesture.
“I am as it happens. The post office rang.”
“From the village?”
“Yep. They’ve had a delivery that they think may or may not be for us.”
What did that mean? “Well is it for us? Or isn’t it?”
Charity shrugged. “I don’t know. They want someone, preferably you, to go and have a look at it. It doesn’t have a return address so they can’t tell us who it’s from.”
Weird.
“Well, alright then. I’ll have a little stroll down to the village. It’ll be nice to catch up with everyone.”
“Just don’t go spreading your germs around. We don’t want the whole village catching ‘witch’ flu.” Charity smirked at me. “You know what happens when the village gets sick.”
“Don’t remind me,” I grumbled. “I’ll wear a mask.”
I didn’t go that far of course. The day was cool, Autumn on the horizon once more, but I didn’t require a coat. I enjoyed the walk despite feeling a little lightheaded and spaced out. The trees were at their most bounteous and green, dancing in the breeze above my head. The cottage gardens I passed by were full of roses and late summer flowers. Fat, lazy bees buzzed among the blooms, while slender and slightly more determined wasps darted at me with deadly intent.
Yes, it was that time of year.
I swatted the wasps away, but when they kept coming back I decided to take shelter in Millicent’s cottage. I let myself in through her tiny front gate and slipped sideways among the rose bushes to knock at her door. Instant barking greeted me and Millicent, dressed eccentrically as always in some sort of navy blue crocheted-jumpsuit monstrosity teamed with a bright orange blouse, flung her door open wide and reached out to hug me.
The Mysterious Mr Wylie: Wonky Inn Book 6 Page 2