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

by Molly Milligan

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “Okay, okay! I am sure I can hear them calling for me … hang on, poor little things, I am coming…”

  She could not make it any more obvious. I wished for a moment that I could do the sort of fancy spell-craft that everyone associated with witches. One twitch of my nose and her bra would snap, that sort of thing. Alas I was doomed to simply consort with the dead.

  “I’m not stopping,” he said, throwing himself into a chair before I could grab the hug I so needed. He rubbed at his face. “I’ve been on shift for too long. I need a shower and I need my bed.”

  “Have you got any time off coming up soon? Oh, thank you for the flowers, by the way!”

  He looked embarrassed. “Yeah, well, about that. I am so sorry. I was a complete tit. I want to make it up to you. I do, in fact, have some rest days, starting tomorrow. So I wondered if I could take you out tomorrow night? Properly, I mean. To an actual restaurant. And everything. I will drive so there is no way I can accidentally become a lumbering oaf and ruin the whole evening.”

  “Where?”

  He suggested a new Indian restaurant in a neighbouring town about twenty minutes’ drive away. I considered it carefully for all of three seconds.

  “Yes, please. That would be lovely.”

  He grinned widely and my heart thudded. This was a date. A real and actual date. Our first proper real and actual date.

  Then as he stood up, he said, “Oh, I feel a bit bad because it will be leaving your cousin on her own. So I should invite her too-”

  My heart thudded again in an entirely different way. I was just working up the emotional maturity to politely praise his generosity when he laughed out loud.

  “Get your face! Ha! She has Dilys for company. She won’t be alone. This is just the two of us, all right?”

  “Oh. Oh, I knew that!”

  “I got you there,” he said, and he laughed his way right out of the door.

  ***

  In spite of my fears, I did get a good night’s sleep. I put it down to the calming visit from Adam. I hated the idea of having to rely on anyone else to relieve my anxiety, but it was hard to know where the line lay between reliance and dependence.

  Maddie wanted to go and work out again. I told her it was becoming a dangerous obsession and she argued that going to the gym twice in one month was a long way away from actual addiction.

  “It’s a slippery slope,” I warned her as she left. “The next thing you know, you’ll be joining sports clubs and everything.”

  She stuck her tongue out and disappeared.

  She’d find it tricky, anyway, to join any club or team that didn’t have Rachel Harris involved somewhere. She didn’t just do sport. I’d seen in the local paper that morning that her business was sponsoring some ladies’ golf tournament. She’d won it herself for ages, and been “Wales’ Youngest Champion Amateur Lady Golfer” for a few years.

  I wondered how old she was. But then, given the competition, she’d qualify as the youngest for many more years yet.

  I had a few people to call upon. I loaded up my backpack with all the necessary things, and set out into town. The rain was holding off, and I enjoyed the walk.

  I was just making my way towards Margaret Fettle’s house, with a tincture for her sore gums, when I was waylaid by Horatio Lewis. He was squeaking along on an ancient-looking bicycle that was protesting under his bulk. I rode a bike from time to time but I didn’t know much about the mechanics of it. Still, I thought that anyone riding around our hilly area needed a few more gears than he seemed to possess. Truly he was propelled along by righteousness.

  “Good morning!” I said and then felt a pang of guilt as I remembered that only the previous day, I’d given away his gift to a random druid in a retirement home.

  “Ah, Bron, my lamb. I am so glad I have seen you. Are you free just for a few moments?”

  “Of course.”

  “Not here. Would you come back to my place, please? I have some news for you. I’d rather show you in person, as it were.”

  He alighted from his bike and pushed it along as we walked back to the vicarage. I refused the offer of tea and cakes, and followed him straight through from the living room to his wonderfully untidy study.

  “Here we are.” He pulled out a slim notebook bound in brown leather from among the rubble and mess on his desk. “My predecessor was an inveterate diary-keeper and I don’t mind telling you that these things are duller than a sermon about eggs.”

  “Are there any sermons about eggs?”

  “Well, I’ve never given one, because it would be so very dull. Anyway, about these diaries. It’s just years and years and years of navel gazing and his observations of insects. Quite the naturalist, he was. And then, around the time of poor Robert Cameron’s death, he actually livens up a little. Sorry, poor conflation of images there.”

  I waited, hungry to hear what the vicar had written.

  Horatio smiled and sat down. He flicked the diary open to a place he had marked with a cardboard cut-out of an angel, coloured in with crayon, a gift from a child at Sunday School. “I will summarise because he does get distracted and wander off topic a little bit. In that he stops to write a very detailed description of a cricket. Basically, the vicar was involved in the building of the sports centre.”

  I nodded.

  Horatio looked at me. “You don’t seem surprised?”

  “I’m not. And I’ll guess that there is also a druid called Iolo Pritchard and a blacksmith called John or Johnny mentioned, as well.”

  Horatio split his flabby face in a genuine grin of delight. “My lamb, you are a clever one! You must tell me how you have found all this out.”

  “I’ve been learning to play all five strings,” I told him.

  “Good girl. Well, so this is where it gets a little … unorthodox. Apparently the building of the sports centre was plagued by problems and naturally, people being as they are, they began to talk of malign influences. Gnomes and the like.”

  “The Coblynau?”

  “Yes, that sort of thing. Rubbish, of course.”

  “Of course,” I agreed blandly.

  “You believe in them, don’t you?”

  “It’s hard not to when they pull on your hair.”

  Horatio shook his head. “Well, that is as it is. The belief was strong enough that even the vicar here was persuaded of the need to do something.”

  “Human sacrifice,” I breathed.

  “Oh, no, nothing quite so crude. That’s so mediaeval. No, Robert Cameron knew he was going to die. He himself offered to be the sacrifice.”

  “Oh!” Now it made perfect sense, barring a few little details. “He was going to be buried under the sports centre to placate the spirits?”

  “Indeed he was. A bizarre thing, if you ask me. The smith was in on it for his strength, and the druid for his … druidness. The vicar was at Robert’s bedside as he died, and then he called in the smith and the druid to get the now dead body over to the building site, to get him into the foundations.”

  “But that never happened?”

  “It did not.” Horatio tapped the book with his fat finger. “You see, the project was way behind because of all the setbacks. When they got to the sports centre in the dead of night, they could see from a distance that it was all lit up. The builders were still on site, working late. And when they investigated further, the foundations had been filled with concrete.”

  “So why didn’t they just bury Robert properly?”

  “They were going to. They put him back in the vicar’s estate car – I should imagine he was easier to handle once he stiffened up a bit – and drove him back here to the vicarage. Now, I don’t know if the vicar promised he’d bury Robert properly. Maybe he did or maybe they intended on taking the body back to the site another night. Or perhaps they had another plan. They’d already put the coffin ready for the mourners, and it was sealed, though. So to rebury him officially the vicar would have to
open it up and get the body into it. They couldn’t do that in the middle of the night. They dragged him out of the car – that would have given the milkman a shock the next morning as he came up the drive, otherwise – and popped him in a willow tunnel at the edge of the graveyard, ready for whatever they planned to do the next day.”

  “Why didn’t they bury him in the end? Why does he stay in the hedge? Does he say what went wrong?”

  Horatio spun the book around and pushed it towards me, knocking over a small pewter figure of a saint. “He didn’t say or write anything ever again.”

  The writing stopped halfway down the page.

  “But the rest of the book looked like it has more writing in it,” I protested. “Just turn the page.”

  Horatio smiled. “That is also what I thought. But look. He is one of those who uses a notebook for two purposes, and he wrote from both ends.” He flicked through and now I saw the rest of the book was filled with upside-down writing. “Here are his sermons. The poor old man died during the night. The exertion and the stress must have been too much for him.”

  “And so Robert Cameron remained in the willow tunnel until it was overgrown and no one ever saw him?”

  “Indeed so. And right on the edge of your land. So he was protected, I suppose, by your … efforts.”

  “Protected by my lack of attention to that area of the garden,” I said. “But there is something I do not understand. The sports centre has been built, and it has stayed standing, in spite of the fact that the spirits weren’t put to rest by Robert’s sacrifice because it never happened.”

  “I am supposed to tell you that there were no spirits to be put to rest, so of course the sports centre has not fallen down,” Horatio said. “But as I also know that there are many things in the world that I cannot understand, I too have asked myself that question. The answer may yet lie here.” He spun the book around to face him again, and read out loud directly from it.

  “After Iolo had gone, John stayed behind and we spoke of a compromise; he assures me it will be enough but we will see.”

  “He did a ritual anyway?”

  “Perhaps. Or they planned to. Maybe the other two did so, after the vicar’s death. Something was done. Iolo might not have been involved in that final thing.”

  “And now his spirit walks again.”

  “Indeed.” Horatio closed the book and leaned forward on his elbows. “I must tell you, my lamb, that this has been troubling me. I have prayed upon it and I wonder if I ought to do more. I am intending to speak to my supervisor about a way forward. I wanted to let you know.”

  “Of course, and thank you. Yes. What might that way forward entail?”

  He caught the expression on my face. “Do not worry! It’s more likely I light a candle and sing a song than perform an exorcism. Go on with you now. I have things to do and you have things to think about. I will not tell you to avoid meddling because I can see that you need to. This is your path. He has come to you, and you must help him, and I want to help you, if I can see a way to do so. But I will urge you again to be careful and be mindful of the effects, in this world, of the things that you do in the other.”

  It was the first time he’d really acknowledged my work in the spirit realms. It felt very strange to hear it from a clergyman. And yet, who better?

  I nodded. I regretted having given his gift away. I hoped that Iolo appreciated it. I thanked Horatio and made my way back home for my midday meal, walking very slowly, and deep in thought.

  Twenty-one

  “Hey, Maddie. Do you want to meet another local?”

  She grinned at me. “Do I!”

  “Do you?”

  “I mean, yes.”

  “I know, I’m just taking the Michael.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think it’s rhyming slang.” I realised I had no idea what it referred to. “Anyway, grab your coat.”

  We wandered out after lunch and I didn’t tell her where we were going. I wanted it to be a surprise. I’d filled her in with what Horatio had told me, and when we turned up a narrow lane, she guessed where we were going.

  “Horses come this way,” she said, “and those gates up ahead are very nicely made. We’re visiting the blacksmith, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, we are, Sherlock. He’s mostly a farrier but he does do some decorative ironwork for folks. He’s called Gruffydd. He’s a friend. One of those friends I hardly ever see but when I do, it’s like we’ve not been apart.”

  “Oh my gosh, you are gonna have to say that name of his again for me. Griff?”

  I schooled her in the pronunciation of his name – really not that hard, just remember all the ‘y’s in a word sound like ‘u’ unless they are in the last syllable when they are more like ‘i’, and ‘u’ is more like ‘i’ and the ‘dd’ is just a single letter (yes, even in crossword puzzles) sounding a little bit, but not quite, like ‘th’.

  She had pretty much got it by the time we wandered into the yard where Gruffydd worked. He had three long sheds making a u-shape around a central concrete area. One of the sheds had large double doors which were often flung open, even in cold weather. Today only one of them was ajar. I went to the gap and peered inside, calling out hello.

  “Shwmae, cariad!” Gruffydd rose up from a sagging old armchair. He had been lounging with a book, his feet up on a home-made wood-burning stove in the corner of the workshop space. “I’ve not seen you for a while now. Come on in.”

  “Hard at work?”

  “Taking a short break. Oh, and who is this?”

  I introduced Maddie, and he shook her hand, making her giggle quite unnecessarily. I sighed. “Any chance of a brew, then?”

  “Won’t be a sec. Tell me, what’s new?”

  I flopped into the easy chair that he had just vacated, and shoved at another with my foot to whizz it a bit closer to Maddie. She sat down a little more gingerly. They were proper “shed chairs”, the sort that had been from house to house over the last few decades and had now ended up in a workshop, battered and faded and torn, slightly wobbly and with worrying stains.

  Gruffydd had a kettle in a little kitchen area. It had once been made of white plastic but now had greasy black and brown handprints on it. He swilled a few mugs out under a tap of cold water. I could see Maddie’s face growing more and more alarmed.

  But when he smiled at you, you could forgive the man absolutely anything. I don’t really know what they teach at blacksmithing school but “smouldering” must be one of the skills and I am not referring to the coals in the forge. He had sandy blond hair, fairly close-cropped at the back but it was longer on top and flopped down to his eyebrows with a hint of British Public Schoolboy, but the nice kind, not the idiots who roar around in daddy’s Jaguar and shoot foxes. He was muscular but the thing about smiths is, they aren’t generally the enormous hunks of man-meat that you’d expect. He was just very toned and lean and oozed suppressed power.

  Every woman in Llanfair and for about twenty miles around fancied the leather apron off him. So far, so stereotype, I suppose.

  Every woman was doomed to disappointment, however.

  I should have warned Maddie in advance but on the other hand, it wasn’t up to me to blather on about his sexuality. He’d never had a boyfriend, locally, as far as I knew. He knew all the other gay guys in the area and as they’d grown up together, he said it felt way too incestuous to get it on with them. He had told me there was an app for his mobile phone that could hook him up with other men but he’d had to widen his search radius so far it picked up the Isle of Man which was not as useful as it probably sounds.

  “What’s new?” I repeated. “Oh, not much. Met my long lost cousin from America, healed a few haemorrhoids, found a dead body in the garden, that sort of thing.”

  “Same old, same old, eh?” he said, plonking the cups down on the small table in front of us. It was made from an upturned cable drum. “Yeah, so I heard about the dead body thing. It was in the paper and everyon
e was talking about it, well, for a few days. Turns out it was something and nothing, wasn’t it? He just died there, natural-like?”

  “Perhaps.” I hadn’t actually considered how much to confide in Gruffydd. But then I remembered he was a smith with his own powers, so I opened up completely, and summed up the whole situation as quickly as I could.

  He listened closely and didn’t interrupt.

  “I don’t think I can help you,” he said at last. “I have no idea who the smith might be.”

  I passed him the printed photo. It was very creased and worn now, but he studied it. “John,” he said. “But this was back in the sixties. I came here as apprentice to old Geraint seven years ago. He had been here since he did a mad career change when he was thirty-seven. Before that, he’d been in marketing. So he had only been here for twenty years, tops, because he retired before he was sixty and then I took over. I have no idea who was here before Geraint. There is no guarantee it was this chap here.”

  “And where is Geraint now?” I asked, clutching at straws.

  “He went off on a yacht. The Mediterranean, I think. He never did like the weather here.”

  “Lucky him.”

  “Sorry.” Gruffydd gathered up the empty cups and swished them under a bit of water, then put them back on a rickety shelf, still wet.

  But then he came back over to us and sat down again, and he looked to be deep in thought. “And yet the building still stands.”

  “What do you think they did?” I asked eagerly. Maddie leaned forward too.

  “Yeah,” she said. “The old vicar mentioned something. The blacksmith would have been in on it. What would you do?”

  “I would try very hard not to get involved in a scheme that meant I had to faff around at night with a dead body,” he said in a serious tone.

  “What about the goblins, or the Red and White Dragons?”

  “This is not my speciality. You want to speak to a mason about all this. They have their own sacred geometry. Certain rituals that must be performed, perhaps. Maybe it was more to do with that.”