‘What do you mean, he can listen just as well there?’ demanded the woman in some agitation, her hand at her throat.
‘Just a manner of speaking,’ said Sixsmith. ‘You know cats. Sometimes I get the feeling Whitey thinks he runs the business!’
‘And you find that remarkable?’
‘Not so remarkable as you’d find it if I put him on your case,’ laughed Sixsmith.
She smiled thinly, but the answer seemed to reassure her and she let go of the pink brooch which she’d been clutching like a talisman and took a thin gold cigarette case out of her purse.
‘Do you mind?’ she said, lighting up.
No, but the cat does, thought Sixsmith. He nudged the drawer shut with his knee. Whitey would have to suffer a little discomfort in the interests of business. A potential paying customer was entitled to a bit of atmospheric pollution.
Talking of paying, he speculated how high he dared pitch his fee. Depended what her line of business was. She dressed expensive. Maybe she was in ladies’ fashions, nice little earner at the class end of the market, he guessed. One way to find out—the subtle questioning.
He said brightly, ‘Why don’t you tell me about your business, Ms Baker?’
She said, ‘What on earth for? I run an automotive electronics firm, if you must know. But that has nothing to do with the case.’
‘It’s why you were in the plane, isn’t it?’ said Joe defensively.
‘Yes, of course. But she didn’t need access to my company records to know my schedule, did she? No, I’ve no doubt Gerald told her.’
‘Gerald?’
‘My husband, Gerald Collister-Cook.’
Sixsmith sighed. He knew he was delaying the dénouement, but he also knew that if he didn’t get things straight as he went along, you could dénoue all you liked and it would still be French to him.
‘So Baker is your maiden name?’
‘And my professional name. I saw no reason to lumber myself with that double barrelled monstrosity in business. I’ve just about got the bastards conditioned to dealing with Gwen Baker on level terms. They’d need another decade to come to terms with Gwendoline Collister-Cook, and I can’t say I blame them. Can we get on, Mr Sixsmith?’
‘I’d like that,’ said Joe sincerely. ‘You were saying that Gerald probably told her. Who is her, Ms Baker?’
‘Who is her? I’ll tell you who her is, Mr Sixsmith.’
Eyes flashing, mouth stretched taut in a rictus of hate, Gwen Baker grabbed the Present-from-Paignton paperknife out of Sixsmith’s desk tidy and swung it high. His arms shot up to ward off the blow. But he wasn’t the target. The knife plunged down with such force it passed clean through the tabloid spread out on the desk and dug deep into the woodwork.
‘That’s her!’ spat Ms Baker. ‘That’s the bitch who’s trying to kill me.’
Joe’s gaze slid down the still quivering knife and saw that its point had neatly sliced through the cleavage of raven-haired beauty Meg Merchison (29).
CHAPTER 6
It got worse.
Ms Baker quickly regained control, but the return to her cool, rational manner only heightened the craziness of what was to come.
‘She’s been having an affair with Gerald. Affair! For him, it was a one-night stand, nothing more. Meaningless. We accept such things in our marriage. We don’t exchange notes, nothing so louche as that. But we’re two adult people, leading lives which often set us far apart, and we both have strong needs. But that bitch wanted more. In fact she wanted everything. But it soon dawned on her that she wasn’t going to get it without a fight. Well, I was a match for her there, I tell you. I was well ahead on points. But I didn’t realize just how far she’d go, if pushed.’
‘The plane crash, you mean?’ said Joe, who was beginning to wonder what Butcher’s resentment would do if this was what her gratitude sent him. ‘She arranged for the pilot to be taken ill?’
‘Of course. How the hell else did she happen to be sitting out there with a video camera ready to record it all for her scrap book?’
‘You’ve told the police this, have you?’ said Joe hopefully.
‘Don’t be stupid! How much notice do you imagine they’d take?’
‘Well, I mean, they could find evidence, things I can’t begin to do. Presumably you suspect the pilot was poisoned and they can get a full medical examination, analyse samples …’
‘Poison? Who said anything about poison? She’d probably used a poppet.’
‘A poppet? Like a lathe-head?’
‘A lathe-head? What the hell’s that?’
‘It’s something to do with a lathe,’ said Joe cautiously. He usually felt it best to keep details of his past employment away from potential clients, though why he should be worried about alienating Ms Baker he didn’t know. He felt a strong pang of nostalgia for the tumult of the tool room, the smell of oil and hot metal, the shouted jokes and laughter of his workmates.
‘Is it? Very interesting, I’m sure. But this poppet I’m talking about, Mr Sixsmith, would be a small doll, made out of clay or wax or even rags, looking as much like the pilot, Arthur Bragg, as possible, and incorporating some of his hair or nail clippings or excreta, or something very closely connected with him. And when she saw the plane coming over she’d stick a needle into its belly and waggle it around. Normally that would kill, in which case I would certainly have died also. Only with her hate being directed at me, she couldn’t get a big enough surge for that, so she only made the poor man feel rather ill.’
She said all this in the kind of tone suited for delivery of a detailed analysis of automotive electronic statistics.
Joe got up and switched on his electric kettle. He needed a mug of hot sweet tea.
He said, ‘You’re saying this Meg Merchison is a witch, is that it?’
‘Not a term I care for, but use it by all means if it will tighten your grasp of the situation,’ said Ms Baker wearily.
‘And the reason she didn’t manage to kill Mr Bragg was that she was really aiming at you?’
‘That’s right. The poppet works by providing a focus for deep passionate hatred. But like I said, it’s me she hates, not Bragg, so she couldn’t generate a big enough charge to really knock him out.’
Joe put two tea-bags in his Chas’n’Di wedding mug and held it up invitingly to the woman. She shook her head.
‘If that’s the case,’ said Joe, ‘why bother with the pilot at all? Why not simply do a poppet of you and bite its head off?’
He looked at her triumphantly and for the first time she didn’t mock his triumph.
‘At last, an intelligent question,’ she said. ‘She knew it was no use trying to get at me direct. Don’t imagine she hasn’t tried. But I’m her match there. I’m well protected.’
She unclipped the pink brooch from her blouse and twisted the stone out of its setting to reveal that it was hollow. Inside Sixsmith saw a small wodge of grey stuff, like putty, into which had been pressed scraps and shards of God knows what, and Joe Sixsmith had no desire to share the knowledge.
‘You mean, you’re a … one of them too?’ he said.
‘I have some knowledge,’ she said, replacing the brooch. ‘Enough to deal with her kind in the normal course of events. But fighting over a man has never been my scene.’
‘So what’s all the fuss about?’ asked Joe, adding an extra spoonful of sugar to the four already in his tea. He needed the energy.
‘You mean, why don’t I just let her get on with it? I’ll tell you why. Because Gerald’s my husband and I don’t care to give him up, certainly not to a common little bitch like that. Also, in business matters we have a fiduciary relationship which makes it inconvenient to part company at the moment.’
Joe, who loved clarity above all things except Luton Town, studied this carefully before saying, ‘You mean, she’d not only get him, she’d get some of your cash?’
‘You could put it like that.’
He smiled his relief at g
etting back to something like firm ground.
‘So what do you want me to do, Ms Baker?’ he asked. ‘Get evidence that Meg Merchison’s trying to kill you by witchcraft?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped. ‘I need no evidence, and what evidence do you imagine you could get which would satisfy the police? I have problems enough holding my own with my chauvinist colleagues without giving them a field day by letting my name be linked publicly with a witchcraft scandal!’
‘So what do you want?’ asked Sixsmith.
She said, ‘She’s got power over Gerald, there’s no other way he’d get entangled with a creature like that.’
‘Blackmail, you mean?’ he said without much hope.
Ms Baker sighed and said, ‘Mr Sixsmith, you cannot blackmail a man into screwing you. No. She has a locket. It belonged to Gerald’s mother and that’s a very strong link to start with. Look, you can see it dangling between those gross paps in the picture.’
She had to withdraw the paperknife to reveal the heart-shaped locket nestling in Merchison’s cleavage.
‘It has a ruby cameo design, a cinquefoil, a very strong magical number and image. Inside there will be various items, we needn’t go into the details, suffice to say that with the right words spoken over them, they have real power.’
‘A love charm, you mean?’ said Sixsmith.
‘Love! But yes, a love charm, if that helps you grasp what this is all about,’ she snapped. ‘What I want you to do, Mr Sixsmith, is get hold of that locket for me, and fast. This creature is quite mad. What happened yesterday was an open declaration of war. Why do you think she told the media about the video?’
‘So’s she could make a bit of money, I suppose,’ said Sixsmith wistfully.
‘No! So that I would know she’d caused the crash. All right, so she didn’t kill me, but she hopes that she can frighten me into submission by showing me how far she will go. Well, I won’t be frightened off, but if she escalates this thing into a full-scale psychic war, it could take all my time and energy to resist and I can’t afford to neglect my business like that. So the simplest thing for me to do is get Gerald back to his right senses for long enough to regain full control of all my finances. Once she sees he’s only worth the clothes he’s wearing—and I bought most of those—she’ll soon lose interest.’
Joe was still trying to find a way out of this madness via reason.
He said, ‘If this love charm’s so powerful, why doesn’t she just use it to make your husband take off with her now?’
Ms Baker’s lips drew back from her mouth, showing a pair of long sharp incisors in a smile so unmistakably malicious that for the first time Joe began to consider the real possibility that she was a witch.
She opened her purse and took out a thin silken white cord, about nine inches long with a single complex knot tied in it.
‘Because of this,’ she said. ‘While this knot is tied, Gerald can burn with desire, but there’s nothing he can do about it. The knot gets loosened only when he’s in my bed.’
Joe looked in horror at the limp white cord. He began to feel a certain masculine sympathy for Gerald the Hyphen.
‘And does your husband have any idea that you and Merchison are …?’
‘Adepts? Of course not!’ She laughed. ‘He lectures in political economics at the University of Bedfordshire. What could he understand of such things? You on the other hand, Mr Sixsmith, with your ethnic background …’
‘I was born in Luton,’ protested Joe for the second time in twenty-four hours.
‘It’s the bloodline that counts,’ she said dismissively. ‘I was born in Bexhill, but my mother’s family have lived near Pendleton in Lancashire since Tudor times at least.’
The detail of the boast was lost on Joe but he got the drift. He opened his mouth to assert indignantly that he was tired of people deciding on the colour of his skin that he must be into voodoo and dreamtime and all that rubbish, but the sight of that knotted cord still dangling from Ms Baker’s fingers gave him pause.
‘Why’d you go to But … to Cherry, Ms Baker?’ he asked.
‘I tossed and turned all night in that hospital bed and I knew I had to do something. I needed an agent, but he had to be guaranteed discreet and sympathetic. I thought of my own lawyers but decided they’d be useless. Wrong class of business, you see. Then I remembered Cherry. It was worth a try. I discharged myself from hospital and went straight round to that hellhole she calls a law centre. When I explained discreetly what I needed, she came up with you. She told me you weren’t exactly Philip Marlowe but that you had what she called blood sympathy.’
Joe stored this away for future airing with Butcher and said, ‘But you didn’t go into details of the case?’
‘Certainly not. I had enough trouble at school putting up with her scepticism. But I always trusted her judgement of people, and I still do, Mr Sixsmith, despite all the evidence to the contrary. So, will you help me?’
As she spoke with great emphasis, the knotted cord twitched in her hand.
Joe infused a strain of fake regret into his voice and said, ‘I’m sorry, Ms Baker, I’m not into theft. It could cost me my licence. I know a couple of break-in artists, though …’
‘Don’t worry about theft,’ she said. ‘This locket, as I say, belonged to my husband’s mother. The fool must have given it to this tart, but when I spotted it was missing, he claimed it must have been stolen. We had a break-in a few weeks back. I made him add it to the list of stolen property we gave the police. So you would merely be recovering it.’
‘Couldn’t you just do it yourself, I mean, you with your powers and so forth?’ said Joe feebly.
‘Impossible,’ she said grimly. ‘We know when we’re within striking distance of each other. No, your great strength is that there’s no known connection between us. You can get close.’
‘But how …?’
‘I presume you usually do something to earn your money,’ she snapped. ‘Talking of which, I shall of course be happy to pay your normal rates plus reasonable itemized expenses. And there’ll be a two hundred pound bonus when you put the locket into my hands.’
Joe was not a natural bargainer. In markets he kept his mouth shut as he had been known to haggle a trader’s price up. But now he said sharply, ‘Three hundred,’ not because he wanted a better deal but in hope that she’d call the whole thing off.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘And here’s something to be going on with.’
To his great relief, the knotted cord slid like a thin white snake into her bag and a bundle of crisp new twenties came out.
‘Remember, speed is of the essence,’ she said. ‘I’ve no idea how long she’ll wait before her next attempt. Here’s my card. Get in touch as soon as you’ve got anywhere. But be careful. She may have me under surveillance.’
Joe knew better than to ask how.
He saw her to the door, then collapsed in his chair.
A plaintive howl reminded him that he’d shut Whitey’s drawer.
He pulled it open and said, ‘So what did you make of that?’
The cat looked up at him, then a paw snaked out, caught at the banknotes held loosely in his hand and sent them fluttering to the floor.
‘I couldn’t agree more, Whitey,’ said Joe sadly. ‘I couldn’t agree more.’
CHAPTER 7
Joe Sixsmith had been as indignant as most Lutonians when his native town was included in The Lost Traveller’s Guide, a series devoted to places unlikely to be visited on purpose. But it was hard to argue with its conclusion that the poles of the city’s social life were the Georgian Tea-Room and the Glit.
The latter was a pub, properly named The Gary Glitter, and brilliant with memorabilia of that superstar. Here Joe usually enjoyed a lunch-time lager and hamburger to the strains of the maestro’s Greatest Hits.
Today, however, he walked on by its strobing doors to the discreeter portals of the Georgian Tea-Room, a distance of about forty yards and fifty y
ears. Here he hoped to find Butcher sinking her vegetarian lunch and her principles, protected by the Tea-Room’s prices, ambience and pit-bull-terrier-like proprietrix, from the risk of interruption by past or prospective clients of the Bullpat Square Law Centre.
The proprietrix was called Miss Irma. Joe didn’t know if this was a joke, but decided it wasn’t when she barred his way and said firmly, ‘We’re full.’
Joe said, ‘Miss Butcher’s expecting me.’
With the snarl of a bad loser, she let him pass into the half-empty dining-room. Butcher was easy to spot amid the scatter of pot plants, many of which were being worn as hats.
She looked up from her three-bean salad and said piteously, ‘No, please, Sixsmith. Not here.’
‘So what’s all this about blood sympathy?’ said Joe, sitting down.
‘What? Oh that. I had to say something to recommend you.’
Joe considered this as he ordered a pot of tea and a wedge of bacon flan from a capped and aproned waitress.
‘And that was the best you could come up with?’ he said finally.
‘What’s up? Didn’t you get the job?’
‘Job you call it! You know she’s a nut?’
‘She’s made a million, probably more,’ said Butcher.
‘I thought you were above money.’
‘For itself, yes. As a measure of progress in a man’s world, it’s sometimes all we’ve got.’
‘How come you two have stayed friends?’ he asked.
‘I was the only person at school she considered bright as her,’ she said.
‘Don’t be modest.’
‘All right, brighter. Academically, at least. I think basically she reckons if she could make a million, I should have been able to make two and she can’t understand why I didn’t. That’s what’s kept her interested. Really we’ve nothing in common, except school.’
‘No. She said you weren’t in the coven.’
‘Ah. So she’s still on with that? It’s amazing, a woman like that. We all dabbled at school. Adolescent girls go through the phase. But she was the only one who took it seriously. I mean seriously seriously.’
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