[Inspector Peach 10] - Witch's Sabbath

by J M Gregson

  Percy was floundering. He said, ‘I was hoping she’d ask me to marry her, last year. On February the twenty-ninth. Hoping she’d take advantage of the old custom which allows women to propose.’

  ‘Oh, you make me want to slap you, sometimes, you lot!’ Her exasperation took in a whole generation. ‘You think you’ve got everything worked out and end up making a mess of everything! She’s not as modern as you think, our Lucy. She’d never have done that. Never be certain that you wanted her to do it. She’ll have to be asked. And she’ll say yes.’

  Now he did turn and smile at her; snatched her towel and dried his hands; took her into his powerful arms and held her surprisingly hard against his barrel chest for a full half-minute.

  ‘Thanks, Mrs B. I’ll bear that in mind.’

  Fourteen

  Dermot Boyd normally took Monday mornings in his stride. He never had a weekend hangover, and he resumed his work at the office as if he had enjoyed the refreshment of a long holiday rather than a mere two days away. His colleagues, prepared to ease themselves back into work with a weary resignation, often found Dermot quite tiresomely sprightly.

  This Monday, the last day of an eventful January for the Boyds, was different. The office would not have to endure his cheerfulness until later in the morning. The investigating officers in a murder enquiry were coming to see him at home. And he had things to explain to them.

  They had offered to see him at the office, but he said that he would prefer them to come to his house, because it would be less embarrassing for him. The female voice on the phone had said yes, that would probably be better, in the circumstances. Dermot didn’t like that last phrase.

  He was impatient with Ellie, who was obviously nervous on his behalf. ‘Just answer their questions straightforwardly,’ she said, ‘and then there won’t be any trouble. Well, there can’t be, can there?’

  She sounded as if she wanted reassurance, and he tried to offer it to her; but really he just wanted her out of the house and off to her school, so that he could have half an hour to himself to prepare for this meeting. He ushered her to the garage door as if she were a visitor who had outstayed her welcome, waved to her from the front door as she reversed out of the drive, forced himself into a small answering smile as she waved.

  But he couldn’t settle even when he had the house to himself, couldn’t make his mind work in the cool, logical way which his work at the office demanded and which he usually regarded as his forte. He washed the breakfast pots, tidied the kitchen, strode into the sitting room and positioned the chairs exactly where he wanted them for this exchange. But every action seemed not an aid to thought but an excuse not to think, not to contemplate what they would ask him and what he would reply. The doorbell rang long before he was ready for it.

  It was the detective chief inspector again, as the phone call had warned him that it would be – that man Peach, whom he hadn’t liked from the first. But at least he didn’t have that tall black Police Constable Northcott with him this time. Dermot was relieved that he wouldn’t have to contend with that ebony, unsmiling, inscrutable stare, alongside Peach’s more mobile face. Especially when he found that Peach was accompanied by a good-looking and voluptuous woman, with a bright smile and striking chestnut hair. Plain clothes for her meant a dark-green sweater and maroon trousers, which made a nonsense of the term.

  She said, ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Blake. We spoke on the phone.’

  He said, ‘We’ll talk in the sitting room. It’s the first door on the right,’ and paused for a moment to look at the police car in the drive and the empty road beyond it.

  That was a mistake. Before he could organize things, Peach had planted himself in the upright chair he had planned for himself, with its back to the morning light streaming in through the window. ‘Need to clear up a few things, Mr Boyd,’ he said without preamble. ‘Hopefully we’ll be able to do it here and now. I say hopefully, but of course professionally DS Blake and I would be delighted if you burst into a confession.’

  Dermot tried a little laugh, found there was no answering mirth, and realized that what they said must be quite true. So he tried to talk it away. ‘I appreciate that the public of Brunton are appalled that a young girl should have been killed like this, but really—’

  ‘Like what, Mr Boyd?’

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘Details of the method of this death have not been made public. The press and the other media have been informed that the victim was young and female and that foul play is suspected. There has not as yet been an inquest.’

  Dermot was not sure whether this was true or whether this squat little man was trying to rile him. He said, ‘Figure of speech, Chief Inspector. I suppose I was still preoccupied with the preposterous idea that I might have killed this girl.’

  ‘Preposterous, eh, sir? Well, I have to say, not so preposterous, from our point of view. Wouldn’t you agree, DS Blake?’

  The pretty girl pursed her lips, appeared to give the matter serious thought. ‘I’d have to agree, sir. Not so preposterous, in the light of what we’ve learned over the last few days.’ She looked hard at Dermot Boyd before she added, ‘I’m speaking quite dispassionately, sir, you understand – looking at things from a purely police point of view.’

  ‘Difficult for me to do that, of course. From where I stand, I can’t see any reason why I should even be a suspect.’

  ‘Really, sir?’ Peach’s black eyebrows arched impossibly high. ‘I should have thought that the fact that you lied to us at our last meeting would have given you a clue about that. Never a good thing to do, lie to the CID. Makes us suspicious. Most murderers try to lie to us, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry about which particular lie, Mr Boyd? Or is the apology supposed to embrace all of them?’ Peach crossed his legs at the ankles and examined his gleaming black toecaps with approval while he waited for a reply. He was enjoying this, and saw no reason to disguise the fact.

  Dermot forced a smile. ‘You really must enlighten me about what particular felonies I have committed. I don’t like games of cat and mouse.’

  Peach, who enjoyed them thoroughly when he was the cat, nodded a couple of times, then rapped, ‘You claimed you did not know Annie Clark, when in fact you knew her very well.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say—’

  ‘Quite how well is one of the things we hope to establish this morning – along with other facts about you.’

  ‘Look, Mr Peach, let me say that I’m sorry that I misled you. It was very foolish of me. I see that now. Annie Clark was a member of our coven and had been for some time before she disappeared.’

  ‘Which we discovered by our own methods, Mr Boyd. It’s my belief you would not be confessing it so frankly now if there was any alternative for you.’

  Dermot Boyd licked lips which had suddenly gone very dry. The man was right. And he didn’t like his use of that word ‘confessed’. ‘I can only say again that I was very foolish. I can see that now, but when you’re close to something, you don’t see it so clearly.’

  Peach nodded several times, as if preoccupied with his own thoughts rather than his victim’s flounderings. ‘When people lie to us, the interesting thing is often not so much the lie itself as the reason why they chose to lie. What would that be in your case, Mr Boyd?’

  ‘The reason why I pretended to you that I hadn’t known Annie Clark? Well, I suppose there were several reasons, really.’

  ‘One would be a start.’

  ‘Well, I panicked a little, to be frank. Don’t forget I’ve never been involved in anything like this before. I suppose I thought that if you knew we’d been together in the coven, I’d become a murder suspect.’

  ‘Which you did, as soon as we found out that you’d known Annie Clark quite well and specifically denied the fact to us.’

  ‘Yes. I see that now. But there was another thing that influenced me. When I spoke to you on Wednesday, my wife didn’t know
anything about my involvement in the coven. She didn’t even know that I’d taken up witchcraft. I’ve told her since then, but at the time I was trying to conceal it.’

  Peach looked at him steadily. Without uttering a syllable, he contrived to give Dermot Boyd the clear impression that he found this a very feeble explanation of his conduct. Eventually he said, ‘Tell us about the coven and its activities, please.’

  ‘There is no secret about it.’

  ‘And yet you chose to keep your membership of it secret, even from your wife.’

  ‘Yes. People tend to regard witchcraft as something of a joke. They think we make models of people and stick pins in them to kill them, or cast evil spells to make people ill.’

  ‘But you don’t do that?’ Peach’s tone was studiously neutral, his words as much a statement as a question.

  ‘No, of course we don’t. We believe in the harmony of nature. We are also neo-pagans: we distrust the demands of traditional religions and eschew their doctrines and creeds.’ He looked rather nervously from Peach’s impassive, attentive face to the younger one beside it, searching for some sort of reaction, fearing derision.

  Lucy Blake looked genuinely puzzled as she said, ‘But isn’t your witchcraft itself merely a different sort of religion?’

  ‘No. We practise magic, not religion. Our emphasis is on opening ourselves up to hidden powers. We use rites and chants and charms to do this, to bring ourselves into touch with ancient natural things, to put ourselves into alignment with what has always been and always will be, so long as man does not destroy it. We Wiccans have strong ecological and environmental concerns. We worship the Goddess and the Horned God, and other ancient deities that the established religions have tried to obliterate.’

  He had spoken with passion for the first time. Peach watched him and thought, as he had often done before, that the man with a dull life who acquires a belief in the supernatural is the most extreme believer of all. Despite Boyd’s protestations, this sounded to him rather like another religion, with less in the way of evidence to support it than some of the established ones; but he wasn’t here to get into arguments of that sort. He said, ‘And did Annie Clark agree with you on these things?’

  Boyd, who had been staring past his visitors to the light behind them as he spoke with a missionary zeal, narrowed his vision and came reluctantly back to the real world and his immediate problems. ‘She did, most sincerely. She didn’t know much about us when she first came along, but she seemed as fervent as any of us by the time she disappeared.’

  ‘And what was your own relationship with her?’

  ‘There was no sexual liaison between me and Annie Clark.’

  ‘I didn’t suggest that there was, Mr Boyd. It’s interesting that you should interpret my question in that way. As is the fact that you chose to conceal her existence from your wife. I’d simply like to know how closely you knew Annie Clark.’

  ‘We knew each other well. When you are fellow members of a small coven, that is bound to be so. And Annie was very enthusiastic, very anxious to learn about witchcraft and everything Wiccans can offer to the world. I’d say we had quite a close relationship, because of our common interests and beliefs.’

  ‘Closer than that between Annie and Katherine Howard, or between her and Jo Barrett?’

  Dermot looked at Peach suspiciously, suspecting again that he was implying a sexual relationship; but the round face beneath the shining bald head was inscrutable. ‘No, not closer. I’m aware that I’m currently the only man in the coven, but that was irrelevant. Annie asked me lots of questions, because she was anxious to learn about Wiccans – perhaps even a few more than she asked others, because I was the most recent recruit before her, and she knew I must have gone through the same process in acquiring belief.’

  Peach nodded his satisfaction, as if the reply was exactly what he had expected. Dermot was learning that the chief inspector had an annoying habit of turning straightforward replies into what seemed like acknowledgements of guilt. ‘Did you meet with her in other places than Katherine Howard’s house?’

  ‘I’ve already told you that there was no sexual aspect of our relationship.’

  ‘Straightforward question, Mr Boyd. Needs a straightforward answer.’

  Dermot told himself to control his anger, understanding that any loss of control would be playing into this man’s hands. He forced himself to think before he spoke. These two would be talking to the others; perhaps, indeed, they had already done so. And they’d begun this meeting with the reminder that he’d already lied to them once. ‘I had a drink with her a couple of times, after our meetings at Kath’s house. These occasions were at her request, because she wanted to talk about aspects of our belief. She knew I was an enthusiast and well informed: there was no more to it than that.’

  ‘Have I suggested there was, Mr Boyd?’

  ‘No. I think it was because of the very fact that there was no sexual link between us that she chose to talk to me. She felt that I was able to be dispassionate about these things.’

  That implied certain things about the two women. Lucy Blake said gently, ‘And what did Annie feel about the other members of the coven, Mr Boyd?’

  ‘I think she got on very well with them. She was quite a lot younger than any of us, remember. You’re asking me to speculate about what a girl who was eighteen years younger than me felt – a girl who had a boyfriend of her own age at the time of her disappearance. I might be quite wrong about her emotions, mightn’t I? I spend my working life dealing with figures, not people. I’m not even a teacher, used to dealing with younger people and following what they feel.’

  ‘As Jo Barrett is.’

  ‘I was thinking of my wife,’ he said stiffly.

  Peach studied him for a moment, wondering if there was something here that Boyd was holding back, before he said, ‘I want to go back to the day you discovered the body of Annie Clark. Nine days ago.’

  ‘You’ve had all I can tell you on that. I know you asked me to go on thinking about this, but nothing further has occurred to me.’

  ‘I see. That’s a pity. Because we’ve talked to other people since then.’

  That sounded ominous. Who did they mean? They’d talked to Ellie, but as far as he’d been able to ascertain, she hadn’t said anything damning about him. He looked at his watch and said, ‘Is this going to take much longer, Chief Inspector? Because I told the office that I’d be in by—’

  ‘Not long at all, Mr Boyd – if you are honest and cooperative.’ Peach’s smile implied that he considered that unlikely.

  ‘I am being very cooperative, Mr Peach. But I’ve said all I have to say about that Saturday afternoon on Pendle Hill. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. It was one I’m doing my best to forget.’

  ‘Well, that’s understandable, I suppose, sir. All the more reason to ask you one or two questions, then, before your recall of things fades. First of all, why did you try to steer your wife away from that building where the remains were found?’

  The question dropped like a grenade into the quiet room. Dermot told himself to take his time, not to be rattled by this man and his manner. ‘I didn’t. Simple as that.’

  ‘Really? That is not the impression we have.’

  ‘Then you have the wrong impression, Chief Inspector. The lace in my wife’s boot broke. We looked for the nearest opportunity of shelter in a blizzard. That ruined building was the only one in sight.’

  ‘Yes. DS Blake and I have been up there, and looked at the scene. We would agree with you that that derelict stone place was the only shelter available. All the more surprising, then, that you should seem reluctant to enter it.’

  It could only be Ellie. Blast her, with her damned broken boots and her insights and her bloody detachment! ‘If you’re saying that my wife told you this, then I’m telling you that—’

  ‘It was more what she didn’t say than what she said, Mr Boyd. Are you denying that you tried to avoid going into that building?’r />
  Dermot’s instinct was to deny it, to tell them their suggestion was ridiculous. But he couldn’t know exactly what Ellie had said, and they’d caught him out in one lie already. ‘All right, I didn’t want to go into that place. I had a bad feeling about it, that’s all.’

  ‘A feeling that it might house a four-month-old corpse?’

  ‘No, of course not – nothing as tangible as that. A feeling of evil hung about the place, for me, that’s all. I knew we were in the country of the Pendle witches. Perhaps that suggested something, I don’t know. But Wiccans are in closer touch with nature and the elements than most people. It’s what we are about.’ He had no idea whether they believed him or not.

  Peach let him go on, hoping he would offer them something significant before the words dried up. When they did, he said quietly, ‘And when you went into that outbuilding, you scarcely looked at what your wife saw in the corner. You knew that it was a body. Knew that it was Annie Clark, didn’t you, Mr Boyd?’

  They expected him to fly into a denial. Instead, he said with quiet insistence, ‘I didn’t know, Chief Inspector. But my feeling of something evil increased as we went into the place. When Eleanor found a body in there, I was certain without looking at it that it was my friend Annie Clark – my fellow Wiccan.’

  Peach studied him for what seemed to Dermot a very long time. Then he said, ‘You can go to work now, Mr Boyd. Thank you for your help.’

  Fifteen

  The district nurse wished heartily that there were more people like Alan Hurst. She visited several chronic invalids in the course of her week, and none of them was better cared for than Judith Hurst.

  Multiple sclerosis is a cruel disease, not least because of its unpredictability. No one had expected Mrs Hurst to deteriorate as fast as she had. Modern drugs and treatments had not worked as well for her as for most other people of her age. Before long, now, she would be permanently confined to a wheelchair, which always seemed especially hard when the victim was a younger woman; Judith Hurst was only forty-one.