The Witch Maker

by Sally Spencer

  Could she be pregnant? She must be! She waits for the shock – the horror – to hit her. But it never comes. Instead she is consumed by a calm which is almost beautiful.

  She considers the implications. She will have to leave the police – give up the job which she is learning to love. She will have to endure the pointing and the scorn which all unmarried mothers must endure. But she doesn’t care about that! She really doesn’t care!

  She goes to the doctor’s surgery and submits to all the usual tests. A few days pass, and she goes to see him again. He looks serious.

  Well, Mrs Paniatowski ... he begins.

  Miss Paniatowski, she corrects him firmly.

  Well, Miss Paniatowski, he continues, I have to tell you that you’re not pregnant – and it’s highly unlikely that you ever will be.

  At first she is totally devastated, but then she tells herself that she will soon get over it. She and her mother survived years of being chased round Europe during the bloodiest war the world had ever seen. Compared to that, this bit of news is a doddle to handle.

  She throws herself into her work. Her arrest rate is the highest on the Force. She is promoted. She quickly becomes the only female detective sergeant in the whole of Lancashire. And there are the affairs. Plenty of them. She is careful to promise nothing to the men she goes to bed with. She holds out no hope for them that there might be a longer-term relationship, and if it cuts them up when she drops them, then they only have themselves to blame. And then she falls for a colleague – something she’d sworn she’d never do.

  And not just any colleague.

  A man with a wife.

  A blind wife.

  A man with a baby.

  And though he may think that it is he who has seduced her, she knows that it is she who has seduced him.

  Monika gazed up at Meg’s portrait again.

  ‘It’s not the same at all,’ she told the painted woman gazing complacently down at her.

  It wasn’t even close, she argued to herself.

  Meg had taken her rage at her infertility out on the only world she knew – had revenged herself for her fate by making others suffer. She, on the other hand, had chosen to do something positive with the freed energy that her infertility had brought her. She served justice. And not for the sake of the power it gave her over others, but because justice needed to be served.

  Falling for Bob Rutter was never intended to be a punishment on his wife, who, despite being blind, had been able to do something she could not do herself. How could it have been, when she had gone out of her way to make sure that Maria Rutter never learned about the affair?

  She was not guilty, she told herself.

  She was weak, as humans often are.

  She was sometimes foolish – which made her far from unique.

  But she was not evil. She had earned herself no place at the stake, and if hell existed, she had every hope of avoiding it.

  So that was it! That was settled! And now it was settled, she could leave the portrait of Meg Ramsden behind her, and go about her work.

  Yet still she had an uneasy feeling that everything was not quite as clear-cut as she was trying to assure herself it was.

  She opened the door of small chill museum – a museum which had seemed to grow ever more chilly and constricted as she had run her life quickly through her mind.

  She stepped out into the light and breathed the gentle morning air deeply into her lungs.

  And then she saw it! Her car! Her precious little MGA, for which she would have sacrificed almost any other comfort to maintain.

  She’d had it sent up from Whitebridge the day before, but now she realized that had been a mistake.

  True, it was parked just where she had left it – outside the museum – but there was no air left in the tyres. Worse still, someone had desecrated it! Defiled it! The bright-red bonnet gleamed in the sunshine, but that only served to highlight the two words which had been crudely scratched into the cherished paintwork in letters a foot high.

  Paniatowski read the words once, twice, a third time. Her heart was beating furiously. She found herself wondering – irrationally – whether whoever had committed this act of vandalism had also been able to read her mind as she stood in front of the portrait of Meg Ramsden.

  She wouldn’t cry, she promised. She refused to cry.

  She took another deep breath and forced herself to look at the bonnet again. She had hoped the words would have miraculously disappeared in the few seconds it had taken her to fight off the tears. But they hadn’t gone. They were still there for her – and the rest of the world – to see.

  One of the words was ‘SLUT’.

  The other was ‘HARLOT’.

  Thirty

  Anger did not come anywhere near describing her boss’s mood, Monika Paniatowski thought, as she did her best to keep up with Woodend’s long, furious strides through the village. The Chief Inspector had gone beyond that. He was like a boiler which had built up so much pressure that it was on the point of exploding.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, sir,’ she said breathlessly.

  Woodend looked down at her. ‘Shut up, Monika!’ he said.

  ‘It’s only a car, when all’s said and done. The insurance will cover the cost of respraying it.’

  ‘It isn’t the damage to the bloody car that I’m worried about,’ Woodend told her.

  They reached the Witch Maker’s barn. Woodend, not standing on ceremony, pushed the heavy door open as if it weighed nothing at all, and stepped inside.

  Wilf Dimdyke was standing over his bench, just as Woodend had expected him to be. Tom Dimdyke was watching his son work, and had an expression on his face which could only have been described as awed.

  Tom swung round to see who had dared to intrude on his son’s task. When he realized it was Woodend, he scowled. ‘Do you have a search warrant to come in here?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re all for hidin’ behind the law when it suits you, aren’t you?’ Woodend asked mockingly. ‘It’s only when it gets in the way of what you want to do that you decide it doesn’t really matter any more.’

  ‘If you don’t have a warrant I’ll—’ Tom Dimdyke began.

  ‘If I don’t have a warrant, you’ll what?’ Woodend interrupted him jeeringly. ‘Call your solicitor? No, you can’t do that, can you, because you don’t have one. Because lawyers are outsiders, an’ you’d never allow an outsider to poke his nose in the affairs of your precious village.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘So you’ll have to find some other way to get at me, won’t you, Mr Dimdyke? An’ maybe this time you’ll have the guts to go for me directly, instead of attacking my sergeant.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,’ Tom Dimdyke said.

  And he didn’t! Paniatowski thought.

  He really didn’t!

  It was obvious from his face that he had no idea of what was going on, and if Woodend would only calm down for a second, he would see it too.

  But Woodend had no intention of calming down.

  ‘What did you hope to achieve?’ he demanded. ‘Did you really think a bit of vandalism would have us slinkin’ back to Whitebridge with our tails between our legs?’

  ‘Vandalism?’ Tom Dimdyke repeated.

  ‘Even with your limited vocabulary, you had the choice of thousands of words you could have chosen to scratch on to the bonnet,’ Woodend said scathingly. ‘But what did you choose? “Slut” an’ “Harlot”. You like to fight dirty, don’t you? Well, that’s fine with me, because I can fight dirty too.’

  ‘You’re makin’ a mistake,’ Tom Dimdyke said.

  ‘No, you’re the one who’s made the mistake,’ Woodend countered. ‘Because Monika’s not just any old bobby. She’s my sergeant – an’ I’d go to the wall for her, if I had to.’

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Tom Dimdyke said firmly. ‘I might have done – if I’d thought it would help – but I didn’t.’

  ‘Bollocks!�
�� Woodend strode to the door, then swung round and pointed an accusing finger at Dimdyke. ‘I’ll have you for this, you bastard!’ he promised. ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll have you for it.’

  They had not gone more than a few yards from the barn when they saw a red-faced Constable Thwaites coming towards them at as much of a trot as his corpulent frame allowed.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t the friendly local bobby,’ Woodend said. ‘But just whose friend are you, Thwaites? The law’s? Or Tom Dimdyke’s?’

  ‘Tom didn’t damage the sergeant’s car, sir,’ Thwaites said, gasping for breath.

  ‘Of course he didn’t,’ Woodend agreed sarcastically. ‘He’s a pillar of the community. Bloody hell, he is the community, as far as I can tell.’

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong, sir.’

  ‘That’s what everybody keeps tellin’ me. Are you sayin’ that Tom Dimdyke wouldn’t vandalize Monika’s car if it suited his purpose?’

  ‘No, sir. I’m not sayin’ he wouldn’t – I’m just sayin’ that he didn’t. I’m the local bobby. I’d have known if he’d done it.’

  ‘It’s a funny thing, selective knowledge,’ Woodend mused. ‘I ask you if Harry Dimdyke had a bit on the side, an’ you’ve no idea. But when it comes to the question of Monika’s car, you’re absolutely certain that his brother Tom is in the clear.’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth, sir.’

  ‘Then who did do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Find out!’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘Make it that simple,’ Woodend told him. ‘I’m tired of bein’ buggered about by the people in this bloody village. I want answers – an’ more specifically, I want answers from you. So within the hour I’ll expect a piece of paper in my hand. An’ written on it there’d better be one of two things – the name of the guilty party, or your resignation.’

  Thwaites gulped. ‘You can’t ... you can’t force me to resign if I don’t want to, sir.’

  ‘But I can, laddie. An’ if you won’t go, you can be pushed. There’s a couple of stolen radios sittin’ in the boot of my car. I was goin’ to hand them in, but I never got round to it. Now I’ve got a better idea. I might just find them in the Hallerton police house.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But nothin’! There’s only two fellers know about them – me an’ the toe-rag who nicked them. An’ he’s not going to open his mouth, now is he?’

  ‘But Sergeant Paniatowski’s just heard you say—’

  ‘Sergeant Paniatowski will back me up, like she always does. Isn’t that true, Monika?’

  ‘I see what you tell me to see, and hear what you want me to hear,’ Paniatowski confirmed.

  ‘Besides,’ Woodend continued, giving Thwaites what – in other circumstances – could have been called a smile of encouragement, ‘it’s not a Herculean task I’m settin’ you. Any local bobby worth his salt should be able to find out what I want to know in half the time I’m allowin’ you.’

  ‘But, sir—’

  ‘Do it!’ Woodend said, and then his mouth snapped shut with all the finality of a steel trap.

  The walk back through the village calmed Woodend down a little, but it was not until he spotted the old man with the check cap and the muffler that the red mist finally cleared away, and he began to see things through a policeman’s eyes again.

  The old man had seen him, too, but age had slowed down his reactions, and he was still contemplating what avenue of escape to choose when the Chief Inspector and the sergeant drew level with him.

  ‘Good mornin’, sir,’ Woodend said pleasantly. ‘Do you happen to know the time?’

  The old man’s mouth fell open, but he seemed to have difficulty getting any words out.

  ‘About half past ten, would you say?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Yes, I ... I think it is about that.’

  ‘Which is just when the pubs round here open their doors. An’ by some happy quirk of fate, we’re not more than a few steps away from the Black Bull, which is one of them pubs. I think we should take advantage of those two facts, an’ go have a drink. Don’t you?’

  ‘I’d ... I’d rather not,’ the old man said.

  ‘An’ I’d rather we did,’ Woodend replied, putting his hand on the old man’s shoulder and gently steering him towards the pub door.

  Thirty-One

  Hettie Todd was sitting on the steps of her caravan, looking across the fairground at the Big Wheel.

  It had taken a long time to put the Wheel up. It always did. And when the carnival was over, it would take a long time to take it down again. Which was why the men in charge of its construction and dismantling were famed for their complaining.

  ‘It’s a grand little earner,’ they’d admit, ‘but then all the attractions are grand little earners – and most of them don’t take half the effort. We’d be better off without it.’

  They didn’t mean a word of what they said, Hettie thought. If there’d been a move afoot to scrap the Wheel, they’d have been the first to oppose it. Because they knew – as everybody else who worked for the fair knew – that without the Big Wheel they had nothing.

  It wasn’t just that the Wheel towered over the surrounding area like a colossus. It wasn’t that it brought people scurrying to the fairground even before it had opened. It wasn’t even that at night, when it was lit up, it was pure magic. There was something more basic – something almost primeval – about it.

  The Wheel was the heart of the fairground, and just as it revolved itself, so everything else revolved around it. It was like life – it took you on an exciting journey, let you see the wider world, and then returned you to the ground from whence you came.

  ‘You’re turning into a bit of a poet on the quiet,’ Hettie rebuked herself, ‘and there’s no room for poets at the fair. Because the fair is poetry.’

  She grinned. She was getting worse and worse, and if it went on, they’d be sending in the men in white coats to calm her down and then take her away to a nice padded cell.

  She watched as two people walked slowly up to the Big Wheel, then came to a halt in front of it. She recognized them both. One was her mother. The other was the handsome Irishman whom her mother was always trying to persuade her to get friendlier with.

  Hettie sometimes thought that the only reason Zelda wanted to see her daughter paired off with Pat was so she could be close to him herself. But, she had to admit, the two of them didn’t seem to be getting on well at that moment. Quite the contrary, in fact.

  Zelda was standing rigid, with her hands on her hips. Pat kept shifting position and stance, now looking apologetic, now defiant.

  Hettie took a sudden decision – one she would not have believed herself capable of the day before.

  She would spy on her own mother! Since Zelda seemed unwilling to tell her what was going on, she would just have to find out for herself.

  She should feel guilty about her decision, she thought – she’d fully expected to feel guilty. Yet she didn’t. Perhaps the reason was that there was a part of her which recognized she needed to know what was going on – perhaps a part of her which even believed that it was vital she found out.

  The old man wrapped his hands around his glass of Guinness, though whether he thought he was protecting his drink – or his drink was protecting him – was difficult to say.

  ‘It’s quite a novelty to be stalked by old-aged pensioners,’ Woodend said jovially. ‘I can’t remember anythin’ quite like it ever happenin’ before.’

  ‘I wasn’t stalkin’ you,’ the old man protested.

  ‘No, you weren’t,’ Woodend agreed. ‘In fact, you’ve done your best to steer clear of me. But at least one of your mates has been stalkin’ my sergeant. Now why do you think that was?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘I have,’ Woodend told him. ‘The elderly men in this village see me an’ my sergeant as a threat. But what kind of threat? That’s the really interest
in’ question, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re imaginin’ things,’ the old man said in a voice which clearly conveyed the fact that though he was saying the words, he never seriously thought that he’d be believed.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Woodend said unexpectedly. ‘Probably you are. Yes, I think you must be.’

  The old man looked relieved. ‘Glad you see it that way,’ he said.

  ‘No other way to see it,’ Woodend told him. ‘By the way, we never properly introduced ourselves, did we? My name’s Charlie Woodend, an’ this good-lookin’ lass is Monika Paniatowski.’

  The old man nodded his head to show that he’d heard, but said nothing in reply.

  ‘An’ might I ask what your name is, sir?’ Woodend asked.

  The old man hesitated for a second, then said, ‘Ozzie Warburton.’

  Paniatowski saw the look of enlightenment come to her boss’s face, but had no idea what it meant.

  ‘Ozzie Warburton,’ Woodend repeated thoughtfully. ‘Then your dad would have been called Walter, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘I ... that’s right.’

  ‘An’ let me see if I can guess your mother’s name. Would it have been Catherine, by any chance?’

  ‘Yes ... I ... she ...’

  Woodend looked around the pub. Several other pensioners had entered the Black Bull after they had, and the old men were now sitting at a corner table. They were trying not to look across at the police officers, but they clearly wanted to. And they seemed very worried.

  ‘I think your mates would like a word with you, Mr Warburton,’ Woodend said. ‘Why don’t you take your drink over to their table an’ tell them they’ve got absolutely nothin’ to fret about.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’m in Hallerton to investigate a murder that occurred two days ago. It’s not my business to hound a bunch of old fellers for somethin’ that happened when Adam was a lad. An’ even if it was my business, I still wouldn’t do it. So go on, Mr Warburton! Tell your pals that not only are they in the clear but that I’d like them to have a drink on me.’