by J M Gregson
She said, ‘We don’t publicize our activities, largely because what we do is much misunderstood.’
Peach said, ‘Secret societies are always misunderstood. They bring it upon themselves.’ Like Tommy Bloody Tucker’s Masons, he thought: Percy made no claims to objectivity about the Masons.
‘I wouldn’t call us a secret society, Chief Inspector. There is plenty of information available, for those who wish to acquire it.’
‘I read The White Goddess, a long time ago. I had a thing about Robert Graves, when I was a teenager. I think it all came from seeing I, Claudius on the telly when I was a kid.’
It was Mrs Howard’s turn to be surprised: a senior policeman who read books! She said, ‘At least Graves tried to get rid of the idea of witches as old crones with black cats, who fly about on broomsticks and cast evil spells. But things have moved on a lot since he wrote that book.’
‘Perhaps you’d better fill us in on the modern picture, then. As briefly as possible, but bearing in mind that we’re trying to find out all we can about Annie Clark. If this was important to her, we need to know about it.’
Katherine Howard looked at the man’s round, alert face and the younger, lightly freckled one of his companion. They were watchful and experienced, these two. Whatever else she did, she would not make the mistake of underestimating them. ‘First of all, we have no connections at all with ancient pagan cults or those poor local creatures who were dragged to Lancaster and hanged because vicious people alleged that they were witches. Wicca is creative, imaginative, and entirely an invention – or I should more correctly say a discovery – of the twentieth century.’
‘And what do you believe?’
She smiled. ‘It’s sometimes easier to list the things we don’t believe. Most Wiccans have examined one or more of the great world religions and found they are based on superstition or the self-interest of their clergy. We rely on a reconstruction of pre-Christian religions. Most of us would call ourselves neo-pagans: we distrust the tyranny of the doctrines and demands of traditional religions and practise magic rather than religion.’
Percy Peach kept his face very straight. If this was going to be gibberish, it might be important gibberish, if it offered any clue to the death of Annie Clark. ‘And what particular form does this magic take?’
Katherine smiled. ‘If you’re expecting black masses and Satanism, you won’t get it from us. Our system is based on the supremacy of natural phenomena. We believe that nature both instructs and guides us, if we will only listen.’
Lucy Blake said, ‘I seem to remember learning that Wordsworth believed in something very like that.’
It was Katherine Howard’s second surprise in three minutes. A bright girl, this woman she had thought might be just here for the ride with her superior officer. Katherine wondered for a second if things might have turned out differently for poor Anne Marie Clark if she’d had the extra brightness and experience of this girl with the earnest face in its frame of chestnut hair. ‘Wordsworth is interesting. Perhaps he might have become a Wiccan, if he’d been born a hundred and fifty years later. We take it further than fluttering and dancing with the daffodils, mind you. We take in all natural phenomena. Celestial objects such as the sun and the moon and terrestrial forces such as water and fire are all part of a whole.’
‘And how does this manifest itself? How does it affect what you actually do? How did joining your group affect the life of Annie Clark?’ Peach let a little of his impatience come out in the series of quickly spoken questions.
‘I can’t tell you that. You’d need to ask her! – which of course you cannot do.’ Katherine nodded grimly as she was forced to acknowledge their problem. ‘It’s not easy for me to put myself into the thoughts of someone nearly thirty years my junior, but I’ll do my best. I think people tend to come to Wicca from two broad but very different areas. There are those who have weighed the conventional religions and found them wanting, and yet feel there is something beyond the everyday world we see around us. That is how I became interested.’
She glanced at them, looking for a reaction, but they were too well versed in their techniques to give her one. ‘And then there are those who have never had any strong religious belief at all, and thus feel a need for something supernatural, some belief which suggests a better world than the sordid one around us. Most of this group are younger people, and I’d say that this was the need that drove Annie Clark towards Wicca.’
‘And would you say that she was an impressionable young girl?’
‘Yes. Twenty-three years old, but young for her age.’
This at least was pleasingly definite. ‘How well did you know her?’
‘Not at all, until she came here; but quite well, by the time of her death. That may seem strange to you, Chief Inspector, but belief cuts through a lot of flummery. Annie had originally thought of witchcraft as the work of crones who met secretly at night, indulged in cannibalism and orgiastic rites with the Devil, and performed ceremonies of black magic. As I disabused her of such notions, we became quite close.’
‘Have you any children of your own, Mrs Howard?’
‘Why do you need to know that?’ She was immediately prickly.
‘Because this is a murder enquiry. We need to know all about the lives of the people nearest to the victim at the time of her death. You have just indicated that you were one of them.’ He managed to deliver it without clichés, without any air of boredom, though he had had to put these arguments many times over the years, to a vast range of people.
She looked at him hard, then gave him an unexpectedly friendly smile. ‘All right. I’m a widow. I run my late husband’s business, which involves the provision of temporary staff in all sorts of office and cleaning situations. We had one child, a son. He’s now in America and I don’t see very much of him. And yes, it is possible that Annie Clark saw something of an elder and a guide in me. That was perhaps inevitable.’
A quick, intelligent woman this, who would miss very little in those around her, and would only give them what she chose to give. Peach said, ‘Thank you for your frankness and understanding.’ But he was already thinking of what she might be concealing beneath that calm and competent exterior: that was what being a detective did to you. He said, ‘You mentioned worship of the Goddess. What does that involve?’
‘The actual details of our prayers and incantations must remain secret. I couldn’t reveal them without the consent of other members of the group.’
‘So you operate under a cloak of secrecy?’ Like the bloody Masons, thought Percy Peach.
‘Not at all. You are welcome to come and join in any of our meetings, to witness and take part in our prayers to the Mother, or Triple Goddess, and the Horned God who is her male counterpart. Provided only that your interest is genuine. We have to guard against mischief-makers, as you can perhaps imagine.’
Indeed I can, thought Percy. I can just imagine some of our Brunton thugs muscling in on impressionable young witches. Finding it difficult to reconcile this seemingly very practical middle-aged woman with horned gods and triple goddesses, he said abruptly, ‘Who do you think killed Annie Clark?’
‘I’ve no idea. I should point out, of course, that there is no reason to think it was one of our coven.’
‘But you can’t rule it out.’
‘Of course I can’t. You know that. But Annie had a life in the world outside this house. It is my belief that you will find your murderer in that wider world.’
‘Didn’t you think it odd when Annie Clark suddenly stopped attending your meetings?’
‘I did – very odd indeed, in view of the fact that she had established a close relationship with us.’
‘And with you in particular.’
‘Perhaps. If you’re asking me if I was hurt, then yes, I was. But I haven’t lived to the age of fifty-one without receiving greater hurts than that in my life.’
Lucy Blake thought of her own mother and how she would react if her daug
hter suddenly vanished. This woman was not the girl’s mother, but she had already confessed to establishing some sort of intimacy with her. Lucy said, ‘Did you not think of reporting Annie’s disappearance to the authorities?’
Katherine Howard looked for a moment as if she were about to take offence. Then she controlled her anger and said, ‘To the police, you mean. I wasn’t her next of kin, you know. Annie Clark had a mother – and a boyfriend, recently acquired, to whom she seemed very attached. I thought that the most probable reason for her sudden absence from our meetings was that she’d gone off somewhere to begin a new life with him.’
‘Wouldn’t it have been hurtful if she’d done that without even a word to you about what she planned?’
‘I’ve already indicated that it was painful. And of course I wish with the benefit of hindsight that I’d reported the poor girl missing at the end of September. But I thought she might have gained a new set of beliefs, perhaps subscribed to one of the major religions after all. She was still very young in many respects, as I told you. Her mind was still at what you might call a formative stage, I think, as far as things like philosophy and serious beliefs were concerned. I thought she might not have wanted to confront me and argue with me about deserting Wicca. And if I’d reported her as a missing person, would you have done any more than make a note of it and send me away?’
Peach looked hard into the strong, determined face for a moment, as if he was going to argue with her. Instead, he said, ‘Probably not, no. Unless you could have given us any reason to suppose that her safety was at stake.’
‘Which I couldn’t have done.’
‘What about the other members of your group? Did Annie Clark form close relationships with them?’
‘With the coven, you mean? We’re not ashamed of the term, Chief Inspector. Yes, she did. We were a much larger group at one time, as I said. But at the time when Annie disappeared, there were only four of us, including her. So we all got to know each other quite well. But it’s not just a matter of numbers. When you have common beliefs, when you worship the Triple Goddess and the Horned God together, when you pray together and hope together and work for a better world, you become very close.’
‘As you know, we took all your names and addresses last night, and we shall be interviewing your fellow Wiccans in the near future. You’ve already accepted that we have to include them as suspects. Now I’m asking you again: do you think one of them killed Annie Clark?’
It was like a slap in the face, and she recoiled as if she had been hit. ‘No. Of course I don’t. I just told you that.’
‘Someone killed her, Mrs Howard. And statistically, the odds are twenty to one against this being a random killing. The odds are overwhelmingly that Annie knew her attacker, and very heavily that it was someone with whom she had quite a close relationship.’
‘I don’t think it was anyone I know. I refuse even to speculate about it.’ She was flushed a little with her emotion, staring hard at the carpet between them.
Peach ended the meeting as stiffly as he had begun it. ‘If anything occurs to you which may have a bearing upon this death, it is your duty to get in touch with us immediately.’
She said, ‘That would be not only my duty but my inclination. I want you to put away whoever killed poor Annie for a long time, Chief Inspector Peach.’
Peach decided as they drove away that he liked Katherine Howard. He wondered if it denoted some deficiency in his own personality that he liked feisty middle-aged ladies. This one had a lot of the qualities he admired. But those same qualities would equip her very adequately to be a murderer.
Eleven
Chief Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker was not a very good golfer. That, indeed, is a charitable understatement. Chief Inspector Peach would have said that he was a dreadful hacker. And this particular Saturday at the end of January, when the ground was frozen and a biting wind swept over the course from the north-east, would have taxed the skills of far more competent sportsmen than Tucker. His lack of ability was complemented rather than ameliorated by his choice of clothing. A golfer conscious of his frailties would have chosen something grey and self-effacing, and tried to pass unnoticed across the crowded landscape of human suffering.
Tommy Bloody Tucker had opted to clothe his lower limbs in bright-red tartan plus twos above salmon knee-length socks. The leaf-green sweater and bobble hat above these were relatively muted, but they clashed sonorously with what moved beneath them. This was a figure that needed to play good golf to redeem itself and quell unseemly hilarity.
Tommy Bloody Tucker was quite incapable of good golf.
Percy Peach, watching from the edge of the course, confirmed that to himself before advancing upon his chief and conveying upon him the broadest and most benign of his many smiles. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he called affably, as Tucker stooped beneath a frosted hawthorn to retrieve his ball.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Tucker shouted at him from beneath his emerald arm. After eight holes of torture on a frozen golf course, he had been thinking that things could not get any worse. Now the arrival of his chief inspector announced to him that he had not yet supped full of horrors. ‘Can’t I even get away from you on the golf course?’
It was a savage welcome, but more or less what Percy had expected. He looked suitably hurt and said, ‘You said you wanted to be briefed, sir – indicated to me that you might come into the station on a Saturday, if you remember, sir.’ Peach stressed by his inflection what an unusual departure from custom that would be, as he noted that Tucker’s two curious companions were now within earshot. ‘As you didn’t turn up, I thought, when it got towards midday, that the mountain should come to Mahomet.’
‘I forgot,’ said Tucker, with the hue of his face turning towards the colours of his lower limbs. ‘I have a lot to think about, you know!’
‘Yes, sir, I can see that. Perhaps you should try lowering your right shoulder a little more at address.’ Peach’s smile was gone now, his face serious as a praying nun’s, despite the muted titters from Tucker’s playing partners. ‘There have been developments, sir.’ He gave full weight to every syllable of the word, then studied the leafless birches thirty yards to their left as if they might conceal hidden eavesdroppers.
‘This is neither the time nor the place for a briefing,’ said Tucker. Having retrieved his ball with some difficulty, he now topped it savagely along the ground and into the frozen ditch sixty yards ahead of them. ‘Now look what you’ve made me do!’
‘Bit of a lurch, that one, sir. Try to keep your head still as you take the club back.’ Peach nodded sagely, ignoring the threat of apoplexy in his chief and the suppressed hilarity in their tiny audience. ‘Won’t take long, sir. I’ll do it as you go along, if you like: I wouldn’t want to interrupt your enjoyment.’
Tucker should have told him that all enjoyment had ceased with his arrival and that he was certainly not going to prolong his sporting ordeal in front of his junior officer. But, being a golfer, he was an incurable optimist. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, he continued to believe that his next shot would begin a dramatic improvement in his play. Peach, who played much less than he did, was an eight handicap man, against Tucker’s shameful twenty-four, but the chief superintendent could never bring himself to acknowledge their relative status in the game, especially in front of witnesses. So he accepted Mephistopheles’ suggestion that he should be briefed whilst he played on. It was a grave error.
The ice broke beneath him in the ditch as he retrieved his ball, so that one of his salmon stockings was now covered to the calf in an icy blackness. The green was within range, but he sliced his short iron wildly to the right and snarled, ‘I can’t score on this hole now. I’ll pick it up!’ He strode in peacock fury after the offending missile.
‘We’ve now managed to compile a list of those people in the dead girl’s intimate circle,’ said Peach, pursuing his man relentlessly over the icy ground.
‘Abo
ut time too,’ said Tucker automatically, ignoring the fact that things had really moved rather quickly in the circumstances.
‘We have six people to follow up: an employer, a boyfriend, a flatmate, and a group of people with whom she spent important sections of her leisure time,’ said Peach mysteriously.
‘Leisure time. Why can’t you come straight out and say what she did. Is there some sort of mystery about this?’ Tucker examined his scarred ball, then took a new one reluctantly from the packet in his golf bag.
‘They were quite a secretive group, sir. I did think at first we might have a Masonic element – which, as you know, would have given a high statistical probability that our killer would be found—’
‘I don’t want you repeating this tiresome theory of yours about Masons being more likely to commit serious crime,’ said Tucker firmly, looking a little nervously towards where his companions were putting out.
‘No, sir. Well, so far as I know, none of the people we are investigating is a Mason. Disappointing, I know, but—’
‘Get on with it, and then get out of here!’ said Tucker grimly.
‘Expressed with your usual economy, sir. Well, the group I’m talking about are Wiccans.’
‘Wiccans? What on earth are Wiccans?’ Tucker stared suspiciously at his bête noire as his companions prepared to strike off from the ninth tee.
‘Witches, sir.’ Peach nodded as if instructing a backward child. The two long-suffering golfers, having now driven, showed renewed interest in the exchanges behind them.
‘You mean you’ve interrupted my game of golf to tell me some nonsense about old women flying about on broomsticks and casting spells?’ Tucker shook his head disbelievingly and teed his ball.