‘Lou Moore,’ Tom Dimdyke said.
It could be worse, she tried to reassure herself. Lou Moore was a nice man – a kind man. He would do his best to make the whole thing as painless as possible. It might be just about bearable, if only ...
‘There d ... doesn’t have to be anyone else there watchin’, d ... does there, Dad?’ she pleaded.
‘You know there does.’
‘But you’ll g ... get what you want. You’ll all g ... get what you want. Why d ... does it have to ...’
‘The sacrifice must be witnessed, just as it has always been.’
Mary turned towards her brother. Once, long ago, he had fought the biggest boy in school, merely because that bully had pulled his little sister’s hair. Surely the obvious distress in her voice would awaken some of that old feeling now, even if he was the Witch Maker.
It had to! It just had to!
Wilf, as though he had heard nothing of the exchange – nothing of his sister’s pleading and his father’s determination – went calmly on with his work.
Hettie Todd and her mother sat on the steps of their caravan, shelling fresh green peas into an enamel pan full of cold water. They could have gone inside to do the work – the seats were more comfortable in the caravan, and the weather was not yet hot enough to make it particularly stuffy. But it was not the way of fairground folk to be enclosed within walls when there was no need to be.
‘I saw you talkin’ to your mate Pat Calhoun yesterday, Mam,’ Hettie said conversationally.
‘Did you, pet?’ her mother asked, with seeming indifference.
That was not what she should have said at all, Hettie thought. It simply wasn’t like Zelda to miss the chance to bring Pat into their conversation.
‘I wondered if it was me you were talking about,’ she said.
‘Well, of course it was you we were talking about,’ her mother said. ‘We’re always talking about you. What else would we be talking about?’
She was lying, Hettie thought. ‘The thing is, you weren’t looking at me – you were looking towards the village,’ she persisted.
‘And is there any law that says that when we’re talking about you, we have to be looking at you?’
This approach was getting her nowhere, Hettie decided. It was time to try another tack. ‘You like Pat, don’t you?’ she said.
‘He’d make you a good man,’ her mother replied, evasively.
‘That’s not what I meant, Mum. I meant that you respect him – that you trust him.’
‘I should hope that I would trust and respect any man I’d want to see my daughter paired off with.’
‘And if you had a problem, would you go to him with it?’
‘If I had a problem – though I can’t think of any problem I might have – then I probably would go to Pat. What makes you ask?’
‘You looked like you had a problem yesterday afternoon.’
‘You’re imaginin’ things, child.’
Hettie nodded, convinced she was now on the right lines – because her mother only ever called her ‘child’ when she was starting to feel defensive.
‘Do you know anythin’ about the man who was killed in the village yesterday mornin’, Mum?’ she asked.
Zelda shrugged. ‘How could I? As you know well enough yourself, we only got here the night before.’
‘But it’s not the first time you’ve been here, is it?’
‘Possibly not.’
‘Does that mean that you think you have been here before, or that you think you haven’t?’
‘If you’re so interested, you’d better ask Mr Masters,’ her mother said. ‘He’s the boss. He’s the one who keeps a record of where we go and where we don’t.’
‘Did anything unusual happen the last time you were in Hallerton?’ Hettie asked, taking her mother’s refusal to neither deny or confirm as a confirmation in itself.
‘Like what?’ Zelda asked.
Hettie frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.
‘Well, then—’
‘But I think that you do.’
Zelda Todd placed the bowl she’d been holding on her knee down on the step. Then she stood up.
‘You can finish the peas on your own, can’t you?’ she asked.
‘I could if you wanted me to, but I don’t see why—’
‘Good. Because I’ve got other business to deal with.’
‘What kind of business?’ Hettie asked.
But she was talking to her mother’s already retreating back.
Twenty-One
Standing in the centre of the field where the funfair was sited, Woodend looked around with frank admiration at what had been achieved. The previous morning it had all seemed so haphazard that it could have been dropped where it stood by some unfriendly and disorganized giant. Now, less than thirty hours later, a definite order had been imposed. The caravans had been parked neatly in one corner of the field, the trucks which had pulled the heavy trailers in another. And in the middle of the field, the very heart of the funfair was very nearly completed.
With a nostalgia for his lost childhood, Woodend let his eyes rove over the attractions.
There was the Caterpillar – that grown-up version of a kids’ merry-go-round – which first shrouded its passengers under a dark-green canvas and then took them on an undulating, sick-inducing journey into mock-terror, before finally depositing them safely right back where they had started from.
There were the bumper cars, which served no other function than to allow lads like the young Charlie Woodend to demonstrate how much they fancied young girls by crashing into them – and gave the girls, in return, the opportunity to either giggle seductively or to break hearts with their looks of disdain.
There were the stalls, offering fabulous prizes to anyone who could actually make a blunt dart stick in a specially hardened board or defy the laws of physics by getting one of the hoops to land where it needed to.
And there were the sideshow tents, which promised a myriad of delights: wrestlers who staged fights in which the clean-living lad always beat the masked bone-crusher; strippers, well past their prime, who shed far less of their clothing than the garish pictures outside might have suggested; freaks who owed their grotesque appearance more to bits of wire and plaster of Paris than they did to nature.
Once the customers poured in, it became a fantasy land, Woodend thought. But before then, it was something else entirely. Though it might not look like Hallerton or any of the other places it visited, it was still every bit as much of a village as they were.
The ‘village’ headman, Ben Masters, was sitting on his caravan steps, picking his yellowed teeth with a matchstick. He seemed totally unaware of either the Chief Inspector’s arrival on the scene or any of the construction work that was going on around him.
Which was, of course, total bollocks, Woodend told himself.
Villages like this one were not created by chance. There was a driving force behind all the hard graft which was taking place. There was a keen intelligence watching for any intruders who might threaten the community. And both that driving force and that intelligence were concentrated in the body of the man sitting on the steps.
It was only when Woodend was almost close enough to touch him that the fairground manager looked up and said, ‘Where’s the Beautiful Assistant this afternoon?’
She was talking to the widower of the second of the most recent suicide victims, Woodend thought, but he was damned if he was going to tell Masters that. So instead, he just shrugged and said, ‘If I know women, she’s probably off somewhere repairin’ her make-up.’
Masters laughed disbelievingly. ‘Sergeant Paniatowski doesn’t seem to me like the kind of woman who’d waste a lot of time paintin’ herself, even if she needed to – which she doesn’t.’
‘Fancy her, do you?’ Woodend asked.
‘I’d have to be either a fool or a blind man not to,’ Masters replied easily. ‘But I like to keep my admiration at a d
istance.’
‘An’ why’s that?’
‘I’m older than I look,’ Masters said. ‘At least, I am inside here,’ he continued, tapping his head. ‘There’s a lot of effort goes into bringing pleasure to folk. It ages you. I haven’t felt the need of a woman for years.’
‘But when you did, where did you go to find one?’
Masters chuckled. ‘Not only has Sergeant Paniatowski told you what passed between us this morning, but you actually bothered to listen to her.’
‘Aye,’ Woodend agreed. ‘Unlike some chief inspectors I could mention, I happen to think that my sergeant might have somethin’ useful to say now an’ again. So where did you find your soldier’s comfort when you still felt up to it? In the arms of the lasses who were workin’ on the fairground? Or from the girls who lived in the towns an’ villages you visited?’
‘Maybe a bit of both,’ Masters said cautiously.
‘An’ what about Stan Dawkins? Where did he choose to sow his wild oats?’
‘I was wondering when we’d get around to that.’
‘I’m sure you were,’ Woodend agreed. ‘An’ what’s the answer?’
‘He was seeing a girl who worked on the fair,’ Masters admitted, ‘but that’s not to say he couldn’t also have gone into Hallerton on the night he was killed, looking for a bit of fresh.’
‘This girl on the fair he was seein’? Is she still around?’
‘Now that’d be unlikely, wouldn’t it?’
‘That’s no answer, an’ you know it as well as I do.’
‘I feel responsible for all the people who work for me,’ Masters told the Chief Inspector. ‘It’d probably be stretching things a bit to say I’m like a father to them, but I sometimes see myself as a bit of a kindly uncle.’
‘But a kindly uncle who couldn’t stop Stan Dawkins gettin’ killed,’ Woodend pointed out.
Masters looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You’re not above putting the boot in, are you?’
‘Only when it’s necessary,’ Woodend said. ‘Speakin’ of which, I expect my sergeant’s threatened you with findin’ all kinds of safety violations on the fairground if you don’t cooperate with us.’
‘But just in case she forgot to, you’d like to make the same threats now?’
‘That’s right. But there is a difference.’
‘What kind of difference?’
‘She’d have to get clearance to carry out her threats, an’ I don’t. I could have you closed down in ten minutes.’ Woodend paused. ‘What did you say that girl Stan Dawkins was seein’ was called?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘But you will, won’t you?’
‘Don’t have much choice, do I? Her name’s Zelda Todd.’
‘An’ is she still with you?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think that if she’d been long gone, it wouldn’t have been half so difficult to prise her name out of you.’
‘You’ve got your answer, then, haven’t you?’
Woodend took out his packet of cigarettes, offered one to Masters, took one for himself, and lit them both up. ‘I’m goin’ to want to talk to her, you know,’ he said.
‘I suppose you are,’ Masters said fatalistically. ‘Thing is, she’s not here at the moment.’
‘No? Then where is she?’
‘Gone into Preston, with one of our drivers. It’s where we have to shop, you see – because the buggers in this village won’t sell us anything.’
‘Aye, I’ve seen that for myself,’ Woodend agreed. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘She’s not done a runner, has she?’
Masters laughed. ‘If you knew Zelda like I do, it’d never occur to you to even ask that question. Zelda’s not one to run. Never has been.’
‘So how long do you think she’ll be?’
Masters shrugged. ‘Not long.’
‘There’s other things I can occupy myself with for an hour or so,’ Woodend said. ‘But then I’ll be back, an’ if Zelda’s not here by then I might just take it into my head to wander around the fairground lookin’ for some of them safety violations we talked about.’
‘You’re a hard man, Chief Inspector,’ Masters said.
Woodend grinned. ‘I get the distinct impression you’re not so soft yourself, Mr Masters,’ he countered.
‘You’ll be wantin’ a cup of tea,’ Jed Thompson said, as he showed Monika Paniatowski into his front parlour.
Paniatowski weighed up her options.
She probably had no more than half an hour before word of what she was doing got back to Tom Dimdyke – and once that had happened, he’d come storming in on her and Thompson as he had stormed in on Woodend and Raby. That definitely argued for refusal.
On the other hand, she’d often found that drinking tea with the person she was questioning helped to create an intimacy between them – an intimacy which often led to that person saying more than he or she had ever intended to say.
On balance then, the tea won out.
‘I’d love a cup,’ she said.
Thompson disappeared into the kitchen. For the next five minutes Paniatowski was assailed by the sound of china banging and water running, but there was still no sign of the promised tea.
She glanced down at her watch. The half an hour she’d allowed herself was rapidly ticking by. She couldn’t wait much longer for Thompson to complete his simple task.
She rose from her seat and went to the kitchen. The place looked like a disaster area. Loose tea was spread all over the counter, and was starting to mingle with a pool of spilled milk. A saucer and cup lay smashed on the floor. The kettle was whistling furiously as it boiled itself dry. And standing in the middle of all this chaos was Jed Thompson, with clearly no idea of what to do next.
‘Why don’t you go and sit down in the parlour, Mr Thompson?’ Paniatowski suggested.
The man waved his hands helplessly in the air. ‘But what about the tea?’ he asked. ‘Who’ll make the tea?’
‘I’ll make it. It’s more woman’s work anyway,’ Paniatowski told him, hating herself even as she uttered the words.
Thompson returned to his parlour, Paniatowski cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, and within a couple of minutes they were sitting facing each other, cups and saucers resting on their knees.
The records said Thompson was in his mid-forties, Paniatowski reminded herself, but if she hadn’t known that, she could have taken him for twenty – or perhaps even thirty – years older. During the war, as she and her mother had wandered about a devastated Europe, she’d seen plenty of men burned out before their time – but she didn’t think she’d ever seen a worse case than this one.
‘You’re the local postman, aren’t you?’ she asked, wondering how he ever found the strength to lift his leather post bag, or the concentration to sort through his letters.
Thompson nodded weakly. ‘Yes, I’m the postman.’
‘I don’t envy you your job,’ Paniatowski said breezily. ‘Getting up so early in the morning! Covering the whole of the village in all kinds of weather. I tell you, I don’t think I could do it.’
‘Neither could I, if people didn’t help out.’
‘That is kind of them,’ Paniatowski said, continuing her impersonation of a little ray of sunlight while recalling that it was illegal for anyone but an authorized postman to handle the mail. ‘A couple of your mates, are they?’
‘Are who?’
‘The people who help you out. Are they a couple of your mates?’
‘No.’
‘They’re not your mates?’
‘It’s all kinds of different people who help. They just come here for the sack. I don’t know who’s doin’ the job from one day to the next.’
Paniatowski nodded understandingly. ‘I know this is painful for you, but would it be possible to talk about your wife?’
‘She hanged herself, did my Beth,’ the postman said mournfully. ‘In the lavvy. I found her myself. It was so hard, so very, very hard. I
really did love her, you know.’
‘I’m sure you did,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘Did you ever wonder why she did it?’
‘I know why she did it,’ Thompson said, with a fierceness and sudden strength which took the sergeant completely by surprise. ‘She did it because she didn’t believe. But I believe. I have to believe. It’s the only thing that stops me from goin’ completely mad.’
‘Believe in what? In God?’
‘God!’ Thompson repeated contemptuously. ‘God – if there is one – is on the side of them!’
‘Them?’
‘The squires who ride round on their fine horses an’ watch us breakin’ our backs labourin’ in the fields. The priests who collect their tithe whether we can afford to give it to them or not. Aye, an’ them judges in Lancaster, who don’t know what it’s like to live Hallerton, but who slip the black caps on their heads anyway, an’ tell two poor souls that they’ll be hanged by the neck until they’re dead.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Paniatowski said, completely taken aback.
‘You think I’m rantin’, don’t you?’ Thompson demanded.
‘No, I—’
‘You think them squires an’ priests an’ judges are all a thing of the past. But they’re not. They may wear different clothes these days. They may talk different. But they’re still out to get us.’
‘Out to—?’
‘You asked me what I believe in. Well, I’ll tell you, Miss. I believe in the village.’
‘But what exactly does that mean?’
‘It means the village is my world. I’d die for it if I had to. We’d all – each an’ every one of us – die for it if we had to.’
‘But what about the wider world?’
‘What about it?’
‘You can’t just ignore it,’ Paniatowski said. ‘You can’t just pretend it isn’t there.’
‘Why not?’ Thompson asked her. ‘It’s what we’ve doin’ for the last three hundred an’ fifty years.’
Twenty-Two
Wilf Dimdyke looked down at his Witch, and frowned. There was something missing, he told himself. He had got her right physically at last, but the essence of Meg Ramsden was still not quite there – and without that essence he had produced no more than an artfully constructed dummy.
The Witch Maker Page 11