The Witch Who Mysteries Box Set 2

by Katie Penryn

  “I could do that,” I said, “but I need to spend half an hour going over the spells we’ll need. I don’t want to get all the way to the library and find I’ve forgotten something.”

  Chapter 28

  It was pitch black when I awoke and glanced at my bedside clock—ten to four. I hurried out of bed and drew my drapes to look outside. Not a star in the sky and no moon. Our little town lay blacked out. Our expedition to the library was even less inviting than it’d seemed the evening before. I opened my window and stuck my hand out for it to be wet by a slight drizzle, cold and discouraging. For a moment I was tempted to jump back into bed and go back to sleep, but my burning desire to set our little world to rights took over, and I found myself scrambling into my clothes and crossing the landing to check on Felix. He, too, was up and ready for our adventure. We had a make-do breakfast of muesli and tea, donned our coats and boots and made for the front door. At the last moment I dashed back into the kitchen for a carton of cream as a gift for the library cats whom we hadn’t seen for several weeks.

  Zig and Zag stirred and sat up. Zag climbed out of his bed and accompanied me into the hall but when he saw Felix was there ready to go out with me, he gave a doggy harrumph and said, “Guess I’m not needed. Rather you than me, Penzi,” and returned to his warm basket.

  Felix and I glanced at the sea on the other side of the sea wall. After the storm of the previous weekend all was calm and the force of the sea subdued. I hoped it was the calm after the storm and not the calm before another one. I drove off down our cobbled street to the library and parked out of sight at the back in the service yard.

  “How should we tackle this?” I asked Felix as I switched off the engine and made ready to get out of the car.

  “I’ll go in first through the cat flap as my cat persona. We don’t want to alarm Magnus and Feo if we can help it. You won’t have to use up your magic energy unlocking the door, because I can shift back up to being me, the man, when I’ve spoken to the cats, and unlock the door from the inside. Magnus and Feo should be getting to the end of their shift by now.”

  Right before my eyes Felix morphed down to his Savannah cat form and squeezed his way through the flap in the service door of the library. The pause gave me time to remember the two cats we’d met on an earlier investigation, Magnus and Feo. Tough and macho as they needed to be to patrol a building of such importance to the life of the commune of Beaucoup-sur-Mer, they’d done all they could to help us and we’d enjoyed our last visit.

  The back door opened and Felix the man emerged with Magnus and Feo winding themselves in and out of his legs hampering, his progress over to the car to open the door for me.

  “How’s our favorite witch?” asked Magnus standing on his hind legs to rub his nose against my knees.

  “Fine, fine,” I answered swinging my legs out and standing up only to crouch down and say hello properly to Magnus by giving his ears a good stroking.

  Feo hung back.

  “Feo,” I called. “What’s wrong? Come and say hello.”

  “Madame Munro, we have a bone to pick with you,” he said keeping out of my reach.

  “Let’s get inside before someone reports us to the police again,” said Felix leading the way back into the library and closing the door behind the four of us. “Now, what’s the problem, Feo?”

  “Do you remember promising us you would keep your eyes open for a job for us with a witch so we could leave the library?” he asked with a scowl screwing up his face which was already misshapen by the scars of a hundred fights.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m working on it.”

  Feo lashed his tail from side to side. “We heard you found a new home for those two cats from the bakery that blew up.”

  Oh dear. Naomi and Brutus had gone to live with Audrey and her two children.

  Felix chuckled. “Over to you, boss.”

  I knelt down on the uncomfortable coconut matting of the basement floor and held out my hand to Feo. He had a chip on his shoulder about being ugly and unwanted. He’d run away from his miserable life in the streets of Barcelona on a vegetable truck and hopped off when he reached Beaucoup-sur-Mer. He was lucky enough to be taken in as part of the feline security patrol keeping the library’s books safe from rodents. I didn’t like him to feel he’d been passed over.

  “Feo, it simply wasn’t like that. Brutus and Naomi had nowhere to live and no one to feed them. The mayor couldn’t keep supplying food for ever from the commune budget if they weren’t working. I found them a home with a young mother and her two children.”

  “So people say,” said Feo. “At The Union Jack, but you promised us.”

  “Audrey isn’t a witch. You said you wanted to work for a witch. The only other witch in Beaucoup-sur-Mer is my mother, and she’s living with us for the time being. If and when she moves out to her own place, I’ll ask her about you.”

  Feo approached me and rubbed his head against my outstretched hand. “I didn’t have the full story. I’ve never seen Audrey, so I didn’t know she wasn’t a witch.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I promise I’ll keep you in mind whenever I hear of a vacancy. I haven’t been here long enough to meet any other witches in this town.”

  Felix clapped his hands together. “Enough. We need your help tonight on another of Penzi’s cases.”

  “Shush!” hissed Magnus. “You’ll wake up the security guard and then there’ll be trouble. Come up to the next floor with us quickly and quietly.”

  We scooted past the security guard’s office where he sat slumped down snoring his head off in front of the TV. When we reached the next floor, I showed the cats the carton of cream I’d brought for them.

  “That’s great,” said Magnus. “Perhaps we should keep it until after we’ve helped you. We can’t afford to waste time. It’ll be getting light in a couple of hours. Now what did you want?”

  I took out the photo of Ben Marin.

  “Jump up on that table and have a look at this. Tell me if you recognize this man,” I said to Magnus and Feo who did as I suggested.

  They stared at the picture.

  “Yes, I’ve seen him here often,” said Magnus. “Isn’t he the guy who was found on the beach this weekend?”

  “That’s right. Ben Marin. His wife told us he spent time down here at the library. We wondered if you could help us find out what interested him so much. Felix has his membership number and password, so he can find out what books he’s been taking out, but did he do anything else while he was here?”

  “Like what?” Feo asked. He shuffled closer to have another look. “My eyes aren’t too good, but I’m sure he’s one of the men who’ve been researching amongst our archives down in the floor beneath the basement.”

  “Magnus?” I asked. “So, he was in the archive section?”

  He nodded his head. “But let’s take first things first. Felix, check what books he’s taken out.”

  Felix walked over to the librarian’s desk and switched on her computer. He had all the necessary passwords from our last clandestine visit. I pulled up a chair and sat down to watch Felix do his kind of magic. Feo jumped up onto my lap, turned a circle, lay down and began to knead my thighs, purring as he did so.

  “That’s not fair,” said Magnus pacing round my chair giving little cat hisses of annoyance.

  I pushed Feo over to one side. “Hey guys, stop fighting. Felix and I need you working together, not squabbling. Come and sit on this side, Magnus.”

  Magnus brushed his whiskers back with a paw and sat down on his haunches glaring up at Feo.

  I hated to interrupt Felix while he was working but we needed peace. “Felix, help me out here.”

  “What?” he asked turning his head away from the eerie light shining up on his face from the screen.

  “Pick Magnus up and put him on my knee. He’s playing hard to get.”

  Felix rose from his seat, scooped Magnus up and dumped him on my lap. “Now, chill out, guys. Penz
i and I have to get to the bottom of this mystery before the murderer realizes how close we are.”

  “You’re close?” asked Feo.

  I sighed. “Not really. Maybe tonight’s work will give us some of the answers we need. But the murderer knows we’re after him.” And I told them about the chain that had been sent to me by special delivery.

  Magnus jumped down off my lap. “I’m so sorry, Penzi. I had no idea things were so dangerous for you. It’s just that we have no one to love us or appreciate us. It’s so lonely here in the library. The guard only tolerates us because he knows we’re on the payroll and it’s part of his job to feed us.”

  “Doesn’t Madame Blanche, the librarian, pet you?”

  “Sometimes, if she comes across us, but we’re not supposed to be up here during opening hours.”

  Felix coughed. “Sorry to interrupt the sob story, guys, but I’m in and reading down the list of books Ben borrowed.”

  “Call it out then.”

  “As you would expect several books on sailing. Books on shipwrecks and treasure hun—”

  “So we may be on the right track,” I said, unable to keep quiet in my excitement.

  “—ting. But here’s the bit I didn’t expect: five books on the naval history of World War Two.”

  “Did he bring them all back before he was killed?”

  “No, three of them are still out. We should ask Désirée if we can borrow them. And we could take the other two out with us now. That’s as much as we can do up here. Now, for the archive section. Lead the way, guys.”

  Feo jumped down to join Magnus and the two of them hurried away in front of us, tails waving in the air. The archive section was deep down in the bowels of the building, a floor below the security guard’s office. Magnus walked up to a desk facing a bank of monitors that commanded a view of the rows upon rows of precious archives.

  “The archive clerk sits here. Visitors have to sign in, and the clerk makes a note of every document viewed and by whom.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked him.

  “This is the one floor we’re allowed on during the day. Some of these documents are ancient, even made of parchment or vellum. Mice love to eat stuff like that.”

  Felix began clicking the keys on the clerk’s keyboard to bring up the records of visitors and their choice of research.

  “Here we are,” he said. “Benjamin Marin. He’s been looking at the city of Bordeaux’s war archives, or should I say the port of Bordeaux. Some of the records he’s been checking are German war records.”

  That surprised me. “My great-grandfather, who worked with the French Resistance, said the German Occupation Forces had destroyed all their records when they abandoned Bordeaux in August 1944.”

  “Boss, some of them obviously survived. Maybe they didn’t have time to finish the job. More to the point, we don’t have time to search through everything now and at this stage we don’t know what we’re looking for.”

  Magnus meowed for attention.

  “Yes?” I asked him. “You have something to say?”

  “Can either of you read German?”

  I shook my head. “You, Felix?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “Ben must have been able to.”

  Now, it was Feo’s turn to pipe up.

  “His German was basic. He spent days on each document, and he had his dictionary at his side the whole time. It was painful to watch.”

  Felix and I exchanged glances of hopelessness.

  “What are we going to do, Felix? It’s a huge task. The French documents will be difficult to read, let alone the ones in German.”

  Felix didn’t answer me for a moment. He turned away and paced up and down while he thought things over. He came to a sudden stop and swung round to the two cats.

  “I can’t believe a library with valuable archives like these has no digital record of them.”

  Magnus and Feo consulted in silent cat language.

  Magnus looked back at Felix and gave a long meow.

  “We missed out that bit. The first stage when visitors come down here is for them to study the digital version of the documents on those terminals over there,” he said pointing to three computers on the other side of the clerk’s desk. “All our micro-fiches were digitalized a couple of years ago. Visitors only get to handle the documents themselves if they have special permission. And they have to wear gloves, of course.”

  Felix strode back to the clerk’s computer and began clicking the keys again.

  “Ah, found them,” he said. “The whole collection is available on the library’s main database. That means that I can hack into the system at home and check out all the documents Ben Marin was interested in. I can also copy and paste to get digital translations. They’re not always accurate but they’ll give us an idea of what’s being said.”

  “That’s good news for you, Felix, but it means you and Penzi won’t be coming here again,” said Feo.

  I picked Feo up and held him close. “Of course, we will. We’ll visit you often. It’s only a few weeks since you saw us the last time.”

  “Ahem!” said Magnus. “You might be interested to learn how popular those particular archives have been recently.”

  I carefully lowered Feo to the floor beside Magnus.

  “Go on, Magnus. Tell us what you’re talking about. It sounds intriguing.”

  “A group of Spaniards came in one day. The clerk was annoyed with them because they were boisterous and disturbed the other readers in here. Ben Marin wasn’t here that day. In fact, I don’t think he’s ever been here when the main Spaniard’s been here.”

  “They’ve been back then?” I asked.

  Feo thrust himself forwards pushing Magnus behind him.

  “Penzi, they weren’t Spanish.”

  “Rubbish,” said Magnus. “All four of them were speaking Spanish or should I say shouting Spanish at each other before the clerk threw them out.”

  Feo took a deep breath and drew himself up to combat height.

  “You are so wrong, Magnus. The other four were Latin American. I should know. I’m Spanish, after all. Can you tell the different Spanish accents?”

  “Latin American? Someone else told us that about the crew of one of the ships in the harbor, the Eva. Felix, check who else looked at the same archives as Ben and find his name and address.”

  Felix gave me a mock salute. “Right, boss.”

  Click, clack went the keys again.

  “Raul Montigo Braun—address: the Eva, Port of Barcelona.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s significant.”

  “Too true. The crew of the Eva are not here for a holiday. They’re engaged in the same research as Ben Marin.”

  I nodded. “What does it all mean?”

  Felix shrugged. “Darned if I know. We need to examine the documents and see if they shed any light on the subject, but we can do that from home.”

  “Time for your treat, guys,” I said picking up the carton of cream.

  We tiptoed back up to the basement floor and past the guard who was still fast asleep. Feo pointed out their food bowls. I emptied the cream into them taking care to make sure each cat was given the same amount. We said goodbye to Magnus and Feo and sped home where we both went back to bed until morning.

  Chapter 29

  The next morning after the rush of getting Jimbo off to school, Felix and I repaired to the study with a cup of coffee to begin his research into the documents that had occupied so much of Ben’s time. It wasn’t long before Felix began to droop and his eyes glaze over.

  “This is hopeless, boss. I have little general knowledge of the German military occupation of France during World War Two. It was all so long ago. I need an overview. We need someone to give us a summarized history of the period.”

  Felix was supposed to be my bodyguard against the evil in the natural world. He hadn’t signed on to be a master detective or a historian. If he said he was struggling, I h
ad to take him seriously.

  “We need find out who the local historian is and ask for help,” I suggested.

  A screech of brakes drew me to the window.

  “The very person,” I said. “It’s Martine. She’ll know who we need. Come on.”

  I led the way into the hallway meeting Martine as she pushed her bulk through the front door with our mail clasped in her hand.

  She and I did the bise while Felix shook her hand to show his respect and guided her into the kitchen. As soon as she was ensconced in her favorite chair, I asked her if she could suggest anyone who was versed in local history.

  “You already know the best man for the job,” she said with a big smile. “The mayor himself, Monsieur Bonhomie. He’s the president of the Beaucoup-sur-Mer Historical Association. He’d love to help you. During the winter months from January to March he gives a weekly lecture in the Salle des Fêtes. Not many people attend. Most of us prefer television and a warm house at that time of year. So, he’ll welcome the chance to talk about his favorite subject. He specializes in World War Two and the German Occupation.”

  “Thanks, Martine,” I said patting her on the shoulder.

  I towed Felix out of the room with me. As soon as the study door was closed behind us, I rang the mayor and told him we needed his help with the history of his little town and the outlying areas of the commune.

  “I have meetings all morning,” he said, “but I’ll be free after two if you would like to come to the mairie.”

  I thanked him, switched off my phone and looked across at Felix.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “We need a break,” he said. “I suggest we take a long walk with the dogs and blow the cobwebs away. Let our subconscious minds work away at the puzzle while we relax.”

  *

  “Come in, come in,” the mayor called out to us as we arrived at his office that afternoon. “I’m excited to tell you what I know. My grandfather was in the maquis.”

  As I shook his hand, I told him about my great-grandfather and his work as a British advisor to the French Resistance. We wondered together for a few moments whether they had ever met.