The Witch Who Mysteries Box Set 2

by Katie Penryn

  “I let him sleep in,” Désirée explained. “He was tired out when he came home last night. Then what had happened hit him and he cried for so long I was afraid his heart would break and jump out of his chest.”

  “What about you? Did you get any sleep?” I asked her.

  “Not much.”

  She gave Marcel a cup of hot chocolate and a chunk of the fresh bread I’d bought. He sat quietly watching us talk as he dunked the bread into the chocolate and sucked the end. When he’d finished, Désirée sent him upstairs to get dressed and washed.

  “I can’t talk about it in front of Marcel,” she said. “All night long I had visions of Ben struggling to get free. How terrible to drown like that. I can’t begin to understand how one human being can do that to another.”

  And she burst into tears.

  “Do you have any sleeping pills?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “Yes, but I didn’t want to take one. It seemed disloyal for me to sleep when Ben had suffered so much.”

  “Désirée, you have to consider Marcel. He needs a mother who can be strong and help him through this. And we are here for you. And your neighbor. She’s a kind woman.”

  Désirée sniffed and wiped her nose with her hand.

  “Sorry, I’m being pathetic.”

  “Not a bit of it. Where are your pills? You should take one and go and lie down upstairs for a while. We’ll play a game with Marcel and keep him occupied.”

  I helped her up the stairs and tucked her under a blanket on her bed. Felix collected Marcel from his bedroom and the three of us played a board game. Felix picked out the French version of The Game of Life but I shook my head in time. I didn’t want Marcel realizing he didn’t have a father figure any longer to put in the little car, and so we settled for Risk.

  When Désirée came downstairs again later on that afternoon, I asked her about the shed.

  “That’s Ben’s private place, his den,” she said. “Ben always needed time to himself. If he wasn’t at the library, he’d be in his shed reading his sports magazines and working on his scuba gear. I’m not sure he’d want you going through his things.”

  “It might give us a clue as to what’s been going on.”

  “It’s locked and I don’t have the key.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “Felix is good at picking locks. Why don’t you take Marcel and your coffee into the sitting room and have some quiet time together while we have a look round?”

  She gave me a weak smile and got up from her chair. As soon as she was safely out of the way, Felix and I exited through the back door.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Felix. “You’ve gone too far this time, boss. I can’t pick locks.”

  “It’s time for some magic, Felix. I’ll cast the unlock spell. As soon as Désirée said the shed was Ben’s private territory, I wanted to search it. You never know what we might find. A diary. Notes on what he and Joseph have been doing. Anything.”

  Once again, we put our gloves on. When we reached the shed door, Felix stood behind me to shield me in case Désirée came down to check on us. I concentrated hard to bring the unlock spell up from my memory. It was some time since I’d used it. When I was sure I had it correct, I took a deep breath, conjured up the images in my mind and said the magic words. The padlock sprang open.

  Ben had set up the interior of the shed as a mini private office. A laptop sat on an old jumble sale desk. That was the only sign of modernity in the little space. Wonky homemade shelves held Ben’s favorite books and magazines. A gas room heater on wheels stood below the tiny window waiting for the cold season. Beside it Ben had built a kitchen counter with the makings for coffee, a bottle of cognac and a couple of dirty mugs.

  “Maybe he’s a secret porn addict,” said Felix pointing to the laptop.

  “I doubt it. Most people have a private laptop these days. Doesn’t mean they spend every spare moment looking at porn sites. But there’s only one way to find out. We’ll take it with us and you can hack into it when we’re back home.”

  “Won’t that interfere with any evidence the police might need?”

  “You’re only going to switch it on and off, Felix. You’re not going to take the hard disk out or reformat it, are you?”

  “If you say so, boss,” he replied.

  We spent a few minutes going through the contents of the shed but didn’t turn up anything germane to the case: no secret itineraries, no diary, no cryptic doodles. Felix examined the wooden floor for loose boards, but they ran from side to side with no joins and nothing shifted when he stamped on them.

  “Dead loss,” Felix said as he picked up the laptop and hid it in his anorak.

  We locked the shed behind us, peeled off our gloves and walked back up to the kitchen door. Felix detoured to the car to stow the laptop, and I entered the house to join Désirée and Marcel.

  I asked her if she wanted me to stay and cook something for supper, but she said her neighbor would be calling in with a hot dish.

  “Will you be going back to school tomorrow?” I asked her.

  “I plan to. If I stay here for another day, I’ll go mad. Wandering about with nothing to do doesn’t take the grief away. Marcel needs to get back to class. He’s missing too much schooling. And he won’t be bullied this time, will he? Now his father, the supposed murderer, is dead.”

  “Of course,” I said, but secretly I wasn’t so sure. Children could be so cruel. I would have to ask Jimbo to keep an eye on Marcel.

  *

  As soon as we arrived home Felix disappeared into the study with Ben’s laptop. He was tired after an exhausting weekend and a shift from man to cat during the early hours of the morning, but still he gave in to the temptation of exploring the computer for any information useful to our investigation into the double murders of the Marin brothers.

  Sam was out for the evening at Emmanuelle’s. I took the opportunity of joining Gwinny, Jimbo and the dogs in the sitting room for some family time. The only reference I made to the murders was to ask Jimbo to look out for Marcel the next day at school. We watched some television and played a few rounds of cards before Jimbo began to yawn. I escorted him to bed, and we listened to the first two chapters of an audio book together until Jimbo fell asleep.

  Curious to find out if Felix had discovered anything, I hurried down to the study where I found him printing pages off from the laptop.

  “Ben had his agenda on here,” he said. “It’s not very interesting, being mainly a note of meetings, medical appointments and diving lessons.”

  The printer stopped. Felix collected the pages and laid them on the desk in front of me.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to several entries.

  I tried to decipher the word that stood out, but it was a blur.

  “The shape is the same,” I said, “but I can’t tell what the word is.”

  “Sorry, boss, I forgot for a moment in my excitement. It’s not a word. No wonder you had trouble. It’s just three letters: JB2.”

  We hadn’t come across anything or anyone called JB so far. What did it mean?

  Felix continued. “He seems to have noted every trip he and Joseph made in the Princesse—that is the date and time—but he doesn’t say where they went or what was the purpose of the sailing. He adds a cryptic note each time: Details JB2.”

  “How often did they go out to sea together?”

  “At least once every weekend and sometimes once during the week in the evening, starting in mid April.”

  “Suppose we compare those entries with the Princesse’s logbook for anything that rings a bell?”

  “Okay. Did Dubois take the logbook when he searched the boat?”

  “He must have done. It would figure in his investigations into the murder of Joseph Marin. However, if it contained anything important or unusual, I’m sure Dubois would have told me.”

  “You’ll have to phone Dubois tomorrow and ask him, boss. We don’t have any other avenues left o
pen to us.”

  “All right, first thing on the list for tomorrow morning. Now, let’s take a few hours off before we go to bed.”

  But it wasn’t to be. We sat down at the kitchen table for a snack before going into the living room to watch some television. Gwinny jumped up to make us some tea, but paused as she was filling the kettle.

  “I’ve just remembered,” she said. “A parcel came for you earlier today. Were you expecting anything?”

  Felix shook his head and looked at me.

  “No,” I said, looking around.

  Gwinny slid a square package along the counter towards me and I reached for it.

  “Whoa,” Felix called out blocking my arm. “Boss, you know better than to touch it. Unexpected parcels are dangerous. Remember?”

  I snatched my hand back. “So?”

  “I’ll deal with it. That’s my job,” Felix said, picking it up and exclaiming at the weight. “It’s not a feather boa, I can tell you that. I’ll take it out onto the verandah.”

  I switched the outside light on for him and took up station by the kitchen window to see what was inside. Felix shook his head at me and shouted for me to get away from the window. He moved further out into our wreck of a garden. He stood with his back to me, blocking my view of what he was doing.

  Gwinny and I readied ourselves for an explosion but nothing happened. After a trying wait, Felix turned round and held something up. Gwinny and I rushed out to look. What a letdown. It was nothing but a piece of heavy chain, about ten rusty links.

  Did I say nothing?

  “Why on earth would anyone send you that?” asked Gwinny.

  Nothing? I caught Felix’s eye. He’d realized what it was at the same time as I had. It had to be a warning from Ben’s murderer. It was a piece of the chain he’d had tied around his ankle. A piece of the chain that had drowned him. We had rattled someone’s cage.

  Chapter 25

  Dubois said he was pleased to get my call next morning.

  “Any flashes of brilliance, Penzi? I am struggling with these two cases. Ben Marin was good for his brother’s murder in my opinion, but I’ve been proved wrong. I am at my wits’ end for another suspect. The only possible candidate is their brother-in-law Tanguy, but what would be his motive?”

  “Unfortunately, I’m as puzzled as you are, Xavier. By the way, did you take the logbook from the Princesse?”

  “What is this English word logbook? I don’t know it.”

  I turned to Felix and asked him to look up the French for a ship’s logbook.

  He clicked a few keys and came back with the answer. “Journal du bord.”

  “Xavier, it’s un journal du bord. Did you take the one for the Princesse?”

  “Naturellement. It’s an important legal document. The book’s on my desk as I speak. But there’s nothing of interest. Just casual fishing trips. We were lucky to find it. Someone had hidden it behind the little fridge in the cabin. The murderer missed it when he destroyed the navigation equipment.”

  “Do you have any appointments at lunch time?” I asked him.

  “No, do you want to meet up, but not on the Esplanade? It’s still covered with debris from the storm and the weather’s bad out there. How about meeting at the Maison de la Presse for a sandwich and a beer?”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you meeting Dubois alone this time?” Felix asked me as I closed the call.

  “He didn’t suggest it. Dubois’s all business at the moment. He sounds panicked at not being able to advance with this investigation. So you needn’t keep out of sight.”

  Felix had been doodling while he waited for my call to end. I looked down at his artwork. He had repeated one shape over and over and decorated it with whorls and arrows.

  “Something on your mind?” I asked him.

  “Of course.”

  He took a deep breath and ran his finger over his designs.

  “This is my subconscious talking to me. I’ve drawn JB2 over and over again. The idea is at the back of my mind, but I can’t quite grasp it.”

  “What about their names, Joseph and Benjamin?”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Why would he mention Details? It has to be some kind of record or jour—”

  “Or logbook,” I shouted out as realization hit me. “It could be journal du bord.”

  “Number 2? A duplicate?”

  “A secret logbook? That’s an intriguing possibility, but I don’t see how that helps us move forwards.”

  Felix doodled JB2 again while he thought things over.

  “Let’s not put the cart before the horse. Did you ask Dubois to bring a photocopy of the original logbook?”

  “No, but he probably will.”

  “To be safe, give him a quick ring and ask him to do that, boss.”

  I did as Felix suggested and Dubois said he saw no harm in granting my wish.

  Felix said, “We must compare the notes in Ben’s agenda with the official logbook. That will tell us if we should take the notes seriously or not.”

  “And then what?” I asked him as he seemed to be the one with all the answers.

  “Perhaps something will strike us as odd or we’ll be hit by a flash of inspiration. We take it one step at a time.”

  A commotion in the street outside the house halted any further discussion. Desjardins had arrived with his team to carry out the make-over of our shambles of a back garden. By the time we had sorted out access for his equipment through the side gate and given his men coffee, it was time for Felix and me to leave for our appointment with Dubois.

  *

  Felix and I hurried home with the copy of the official logbook as soon as it was polite to say goodbye to Dubois. The puzzling aspect of these murders was running neck and neck with my driving need for justice for the Marin brothers.

  I took five minutes to check on the progress being made out in the garden, but Desjardins waved me away saying it was far too early for me to visit. He had a point. Two diggers were churning away stripping back the topsoil.

  Felix looked up as I entered the study.

  “I started without you, boss. I checked the first cryptic entry in the agenda against the official logbook. They did go out to sea on that day. It was spring, so they were trawling for baby oysters on the seabed. They had been carrying out this work for ten days according to the logbook before Ben made the first JB2 entry in the agenda.”

  “So something out of the ordinary happened on that particular trip that made Ben make a note in his agenda and, presumably, start keeping JB2. The official logbook details where they sailed, doesn’t it?”

  “Should do. But why would Ben feel the need to keep a secret logbook, boss?”

  “To record where they really went. It’s possible the entries in the official logbook are fake to disguise what they were fishing for? To lay a false trail? To hide a destination? Smuggling?”

  “That’s all possible. But we don’t know for sure that we’re right about the second logbook. We’re only guessing.”

  “What worries me, Felix, is we searched Ben’s house and shed and didn’t find anything suspicious. No sign of a secret document.”

  “Maybe Joseph kept it.”

  “That’s unlikely as Ben is the one making the notes in his agenda.”

  Felix began doodling another JB2 logo. I stayed his hand.

  “Please stop doing that and concentrate. If you had to hide something like that, what would you do?”

  “First off, it must be a paper document. If he’d kept a digital record of JB2, I would have found the file on his laptop, and I haven’t. A safe deposit box is a possibility.”

  “Even if he was making one or two entries a week? He’d have to keep visiting the bank. That doesn’t seem likely to me, but find Désirée’s number for me and I’ll ask her.”

  I was lucky enough to catch Désirée in the staff room during her afternoon break. She told me she’d been in contact with her bank manager that morning to begin catalogu
ing her husband’s estate. The manager had not mentioned a safe deposit box.

  Felix dug me in the side with his elbow. “Ask her if we can go round to her house this evening for another look. I’ve got an idea.”

  Désirée said that would be fine. She and Marcel would be late home because Marcel had a karate class after school. The back door key would be under an ornamental stone snail if we wanted to make ourselves a cup of coffee.

  “So, what’s this idea?” I asked Felix as I laid my phone down on the desk.

  “You asked me what I would do. I would keep the book in something watertight, an old biscuit tin or a polythene food container.”

  “And?”

  “It could be in the attic or in Désirée’s bedroom, boss. We didn’t check there when we searched the house because she was resting. Failing that, perhaps he buried the container in the garden.”

  “And if it’s not in the house, how are we going to find a tin buried in the garden? It’s a hopeless task. We don’t have a metal detector and delivery time is two days.”

  Felix stared at me.

  “You don’t need one. Have you forgotten about your metal finding spell?”

  “Do you know? I have. What was it called again?” I concentrated. Veni metallice, which literally means Come to me, o ye metal. “I’d have to revise it, Felix. I’m not sure I can remember the images.”

  “No time like the present. Fetch your grimoire, and we’ll get the spell right now and then go out to Désirée’s house. It would be best to explore the attic and her room before she gets home.”

  Chapter 26

  We decided to search the bedroom and the attic before we tried the garden. The bedroom was clear. Access to the attic was no simple matter. There was no built-in folding ladder. Felix had to fetch a stepladder from the garage and knock the ceiling panel to the side.