What The Cat Dragged In (The Celtic Witch Mysteries Book 1)

by Molly Milligan

  “Whoa.” Maddie sat back down and turned her phone off. She spun it between her fingers on the table. “What about household electricity? What about things like microwaves? What about …?”

  I gesticulated around the room. “What microwave? The electricity in the house is pretty much the bare minimum, and it’s very well insulated. Usually it’s all insulated to protect people from shocks, not to protect the electricity from people … like me. I still pop a bulb every other week, though. I am always getting trapped behind automatic doors in shops. They won’t work when I’m near them. I can’t watch television and I have a wind-up radio that sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. Don’t ask me to do the hoovering, either.”

  “No Facebook,” Maddie said again, as if that was the worst thing. “Don’t you get lonely?”

  I had to laugh. “Do you want a tour of the garden?” I said. I knew Dilys would have shown her around the house, but outside was very much my domain. “I’ll show you my kind of altar – the stones and the tree stumps. I’ll introduce you to my friends. Who needs Facebook when you have the whole animal kingdom? Not to mention Adam, and Dean, and Gruffydd.”

  I drank up the last of my tea, and we bundled into coats to explore the garden, the birds, the animals, the plants, and each other’s past histories. I kept my eyes open for more messages but apart from the distant hooting of an owl, all seemed normal. At the moment.

  I still didn’t know how long she was staying for, but if my presence was going to destroy her social media life, it probably wouldn’t be for long.

  Four

  I got on well with Maddie. She assured me that she didn’t want to get in the way of my usual day-to-day routine, and that afternoon she told me she wanted to explore the town on her own.

  I was suddenly a little cautious and I didn’t know how to explain it to her without sounding like an utter idiot.

  She got herself ready to go, and I pointed out the route, but she caught my hesitation. “What’s up? Is there someone I should watch out for?”

  “No, not at all. Everyone is really friendly. It’s just that … some people might say some things and they don’t mean to sound rude, I am sure, but they will sound a bit … um … well, look. Everyone in Llanfair is white. I mean, totally, monolithically whiter-than-white. Not all of Wales is like this, but here, it is. No one leaves this town and no one moves in. You’re not only new, but you’re … different. People are going to…”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Do you think that I am gonna experience racism for, like, my first time ever or something?”

  It wasn’t a thing I was comfortable even imagining. I wanted to believe that everyone in the world was lovely. I had to face it. I swallowed, and said, “No, it’s not that. And I don’t think people here are openly, horribly racist. They’ll probably just be awfully blunt when they speak to you. I want to prepare you. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of what people are like here. You’re going to look very different to what they are used to. Very…”

  “Don’t say exotic.”

  “I wasn’t going to.” I totally was, and I felt like a fool. I was going to talk myself into a hole if I wasn’t careful. If I hadn’t done so already. “People will be curious. They will ask you questions.”

  She shrugged then. “Which I will answer, because that’s totally normal, you know? Hey, I’m a big girl. I know what I’m facing. But thank you for being concerned.”

  “It’s just not at all like America,” I said. Or what if it was? I was making a lot of assumptions. Wasn’t it the perfect land? America was as strange to me as a fairy tale. I knew it was big, and diverse, and that was about it, really.

  “Well, I guess I’ll find out what it’s like,” she said, smiling at me, and suddenly I knew that her natural warmth would be her strength. “People are people wherever you go. What’s the name of that café I need to get the cakes from?”

  ***

  The next morning, I was up early as usual. Maddie surfaced later. She assured me her visit to the town had gone well, and that everyone had been wonderfully friendly. I hoped so. Maybe I was doing my fellow townies a disservice, and it was only me that was the parochial and inbred one.

  I had some herbal preparations to make up – Fred’s pile ointment being one of them - and I was grateful for her assistance. She didn’t have a great deal of experience with herb craft, but she was keen to learn.

  “So what do you do if you don’t do herbs?” I asked.

  “I study,” she said. “I read a lot of books.”

  “Reading isn’t doing,” I said, and laughed to show I wasn’t trying to be bitchy.

  She laughed too, but it faded. Something was wrong. Was she regretting coming here, I wondered. She spoke brightly, though, and I knew she was hiding it from me. She said, “It seems strange to me, how you work, you know. It all seems really basic, and I don’t mean in a bad way, but I expected you to be using tables of correspondences and everything. I haven’t even seen a moon phase calendar in the house. You’re so relaxed about it!”

  “You are, quite honestly, the first person in the world to ever call me relaxed,” I said in astonishment. I was fully aware of my tendency to be totally not relaxed about things. It felt like my whole day was a series of well-worn rituals, from making the first cup of tea in the morning (blue mug, stirred three times widdershins, drunk standing up and looking out of the window) to the way I folded my clothes at night (on the chair, in order from footwear at the bottom to headwear, if needed, at the top). “I suppose I don’t feel the need to put too many limits on the energy that flows through me. Just enough boundaries to be safe, really.”

  “Wow. Don’t you get scared?” she said.

  “What of?” I pointed around the room. “This is my house, in my land. I couldn’t be safer. I don’t need a moon calendar. I’ve got windows to look out of.”

  Maddie nodded, her eyes larger than usual. “I need to find my connection, too,” she said in a whisper. “I really need to.”

  ***

  I pondered Maddie’s words and reactions later that afternoon. Something nagged at me about it. She had tried to write some emails home on her laptop, but we had no wifi in the house, obviously, so she’d had to go down to the local library to use their internet. I went out into the garden to do some digging.

  Dilys had come back from her friend’s house stinking of midday sherry, and had taken to her bed with a salacious Regency romance book and a hot-water bottle.

  I had given up on the marmalade. The oranges were well over-ripe now. I’d made some very bitter cordials, and the rest were destined for one of my steaming compost heaps.

  So now I was out in the garden, and I decided to tackle the digging at the far end. Most of our garden backed onto open moorland, but this section bordered the churchyard beyond. It was an ancient site, with a curved stone wall around the graveyard and a huge old yew tree standing in the centre. It had been a pagan site before the church had been built on it, and the power still roiled up from below and above and from the stones and the trees. There were carvings on the old church that were definitely not recognised by some branches of modern Christianity.

  Winter was the best time to dig over the earth and let the frost do the hard work of breaking up the sods. This part of the garden had been fallow for years. Well, I say “fallow” as if it was some kind of horticultural decision. Basically there was too much garden and not enough of me to cope with it. This corner had become a thicket of willow and hawthorn and hazel. I didn’t like to touch the hawthorn and spent some time connecting with the spirits in the sacred tree before obtaining permission to trim some of the more unruly branches. The tree sent me a warning, which I took to mean that I should leave it mostly alone.

  I was less concerned about the willow. Willow can be a cantankerous tree, with a black heart, but its power was weaker. It could be spiteful but it was an empty spite. I knew an old folk song which explained the reason that willow was the “first tree
to rot from within” and it was to do with the Virgin Mary using willow to beat a misbehaving child Jesus – in fact, in the somewhat disturbing song, the boy had been snubbed by “rich men’s sons” and so he’d made a bridge of light and then as they crossed, he had drowned them all. It’s not a song that’s heard very often these days, as you can imagine.

  Regardless of the folklore, willow is a less sacred tree than hawthorn and I hacked away at the self-coppicing stems that had burst upwards and even, in one patch, had begun to destroy the stone wall of the churchyard.

  The hawthorn’s warning grew stronger, a red claxon in my mind.

  I moved a few feet away from the hawthorn and continued to dig.

  I let my mind wander, back to the events of the past few days. Maddie and magic. She was a magical person; I could feel it now I’d spent some time with her. There was power there, very clearly. But something was off kilter, something odd; I could not put my finger on it. Once, I had caught her doing her hair, but she had been standing with her back to the mirror, not looking into it. Instead she had her eyes closed. Did she not need to look in the mirror? Couldn’t she look into the mirror?

  Did she not want to look in the mirror? What would she see?

  The hawthorn seemed to fill my mind with red – the red of the berries, the red of a warning. I stopped and straightened up, and looked straight at the thorny bush. What? I asked it. What? I am nowhere near you.

  I stepped back again, even so, to take me out its reach. Crack. Something gave way under my boot. The warning was screaming now.

  It wasn’t warning me away from it.

  It was warning me about what I’d just stepped on.

  Only a bone would crack like that.

  I looked down, hoping very hard that it was just part of a long-dead sheep.

  A human skull, shiny and bald but with some papery stuff on it that I could only assume was really old skin, grinned its wide and empty mouth back up at me from the undergrowth.

  I took my foot off its femur and tried not to whimper.

  DEATH, the rice had said.

  ***

  I called the police.

  Well, sort of.

  I called Adam on his personal phone. I didn’t have any mobile phone, but I could use the ancient landline in the kitchen. I ran inside and grabbed it from the wall and dialled and redialled until he picked up. I cast as much protection as I could around myself to prevent my curse from knocking out communications at his end; it was something I usually did naturally as I was so used to having to do it.

  “Adam! I’ve found a dead body!”

  “Dilys?” he said immediately.

  “No, no. She’ll never die. She’s bionic. Like the Queen Mum.”

  “The Queen Mother died in, uh, 2002.”

  “She’s alive in my heart,” I snapped. “No, it’s not Dilys. It’s been dead a while. It’s just a skeleton, really.”

  “Ah, right. I wondered why you’d ring me and not an ambulance.”

  “Yeah, this is a little way past medical help,” I said. “It’s not an emergency. So I didn’t know who else to ring.”

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “In my garden. By the churchyard.”

  He sighed. “You have found a long-dead body by the graveyard.” I could hear a kerfuffle in the background. Adam had to shout something to someone, before he got back to me. “Bron, right, okay. Look, it’s a busy shift – old Farmer Twm has locked his twin brother in the milking sheds again, something to do with a bottle of vodka and some stolen red diesel – and I need to sort it out before he does something unspeakable to the milk. Again. Can you just call the station?”

  I felt daft. But there was something very wrong here. The hawthorn had told me so. “Adam, you know I have gifts, don’t you? Well, listen. This isn’t a body that’s just somehow rolled out of a grave. He’s – yes, it is a he – he’s fully clothed, or at least, he was. He’s not some ancient Celtic warrior or anything. There’s, ugh, remnants of skin. This man has died under strange circumstances. Obviously not yesterday, but still recently. Yes, I’ll call the police station and tell them. But I also think you ought to know, okay?”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Okay. That does sound odd. Thanks, Bron. Call the station so that they log your call, but I will speak to Pol and come right over too, all right? And it goes without saying, but-”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, smiling. “Don’t touch anything. I know. I’ve seen Midsomer Murders.”

  “Oh god,” he said. “Don’t turn detective. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  Five

  There was no swooping of sirens nor blue flashing lights filling the air. I heard a vehicle pull onto the gravel driveway to the side of the house, and the slam of two car doors. Harkin dashed past me, to find a spot in the bushes from where he could watch the proceedings.

  I went across the garden to meet them. I assumed Dilys would be asleep by now, and I didn’t want to alarm or upset her until the matter was almost resolved. I poked my head around the side of the cottage, and called Adam over to me before he knocked on the kitchen door.

  “Hey, Bron,” he said.

  I tried not to simper or say anything ridiculously inappropriate about the wonderful sight of a man in uniform. Fact was, though, that he did look good. Mind you, I reckon even Billy would look slightly appealing in the black-and-white of the modern British copper’s uniform.

  As it was winter, and cold, and the light was fading, the smart effect was somewhat diminished by the luminous yellow jacket he was slinging on as he approached.

  And my lust was further dampened by the presence of his immediate supervisor following closely behind. This was Sergeant Polly Jones, who had responsibility for our “local neighbourhood policing team” according to the posters that appeared from time to time in the library. By “team” they meant Polly and Adam. And sometimes a PCSO – police community support officer, or “plastic plod”, who spread his time between our town and about seventeen others in the area.

  “Shwmae, Adam, hello, Sergeant Jones,” I said politely. “Mind the mud, now.”

  I led them through the garden. Polly Jones squeaked a bit as her boots sank into the waterlogged grass. “You need a path through here, you know,” she said. “A nice line of bricks or something.”

  “What, so that when the police come round, they don’t get their trousers dirty?”

  “No, no,” she said, utterly oblivious to sarcasm. “My sister, now, her neighbour lives in Rhyl, see, well, just outside, you know, and she’s just had a really nice path done, all in concrete, but the thing is, you see, it don’t look like concrete at all, cos they’ve done this pattern on it, like!”

  I was glad that she was behind me because I could not help smirking. Baiting Polly Jones was a hobby, not just of mine, but of most people. She was lovely, she really was, but she seemed to have been promoted just because there hadn’t been anyone else available to take the job at that time. She blundered up to my side just as we reached the patch of trees, and then gave a girlish scream-gasp.

  “It really is a dead body!”

  “Did you think I’d just pulled up some mandrake and got confused?”

  “No, of course not. But we do get all sorts of odd calls.”

  “It’s true,” Adam said, coming to my other side. “We did spend three hours stalking an escaped parrot in a tree. And it turned out to be a particularly vile bobble hat.”

  “But this is definitely a skeleton,” Polly said, confidently.

  I felt obliged to praise her observational skills. “Yes, it is.”

  She sighed. “Right. There’s a protocol we have to follow, now. Oh, blast it! The tape is in the van – oh.”

  Adam passed her the roll of blue and white tape.

  “Right, thanks. Well done. Um, Constable Hamilton, will you take Bronwen’s statement, please?”

  Adam and I retreated to a safe distance while Polly proceeded to wrap herself
in the tape. She fought the hawthorn and I could feel it fighting back. Polly was not going to get out of this without shedding a little blood as payment.

  Adam flipped open his black notebook. “Right then, from the top …”

  There wasn’t much to say. I kept my eyes on the notebook but even then I found it distracting. His knobbly knuckles made the pen look too small in his hand as he scribbled down my brief sentences.

  “So what was this ‘guy talk’ with Dean, then?” I blurted out at the end and he snapped his notebook closed.

  “Come again?”

  “You said you were talking with Dean on your camping trip.”

  “Of course I was talking with him. We didn’t spend eighteen hours in silence.”

  “I just wondered what about.”

  Adam grinned. He had an angular face and cheekbones like the north face of Snowdon. “Oh, be honest. You wanted to know if we were talking about you.”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Come on, you know Dean. He mostly talked about music, and sometimes about some new computer game he’s into that seems to take half an hour every morning or something.”

  “And…?”

  He met my gaze and held it. “I’ll tell you over dinner,” he said, dropping his voice.

  I guessed there was nothing to tell and I was being silly, but it was a nice excuse for a date. I was about to ask when and where, but we were interrupted by Maddie appearing in the garden. She’d seen the police van and clearly run inside to raise a ruckus. Close behind her was Aunt Dilys, a large black cloak wrapped around her fleecy pink pyjamas.

  Sergeant Polly Jones attempted to launch herself into “capable police woman mode.” She ran forwards, her hands in the air, shouting, “Stay back! This is a crime scene!”

  “I admit the garden needs some work,” I muttered to Adam. “But that’s just rude.”

  “To be honest, you probably all ought to go back inside,” he said. “I’m sure Pol has been on to the station and alerted the right people. There’ll be some Scene of Crime bods along very soon, and the Crime Scene Investigators will have to be drafted in from somewhere.”