The Witch Maker

by Sally Spencer

  ‘He did wrong,’ Tom admitted. ‘Very great wrong.’

  ‘Shut up, Dad!’ Wilf said. ‘Don’t admit anythin’.’

  ‘Why not?’ his father asked, with a shrug. ‘What’s the point in denyin’ somethin’ to him that he clearly already knows.’

  ‘Your brother Harry wasn’t worthy to be the Witch Maker, was he?’ Woodend demanded.

  ‘No,’ Tom Dimdyke said reluctantly. ‘He wasn’t.’

  ‘It should have been you there in his place, shouldn’t it?’

  ‘That we will never know. Perhaps I would have been as unworthy as my brother.’

  ‘You might say that, but you don’t really believe it. Not deep down inside yourself,’ Woodend told him. ‘Anyway, we’re gettin’ side-tracked again. After Harry had raped the girl, even he saw that he’d gone too far. He came back to the village in a complete panic, didn’t he?’

  Tom Dimdyke nodded.

  ‘He needed somebody to get him out of the mess, an’ that somebody was you. You gave him a ten bob note, an’ told him to go back to the funfair to try to buy the girl off. But at the same time, you prepared yourself for any trouble there might be as a result of what he’d done. An’ there was trouble – in the form of a young lad called Stan Dawkins.’

  ‘Please shut up, Dad!’ Wilf begged.

  ‘Why should you want him to shut up?’ Woodend asked, sounding puzzled. ‘What’s he got to hide? Isn’t the whole life of this village built on doin’ what you see as the right thing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘An’ isn’t part of that bein’ prepared to stand up afterwards an’ admit what you’ve done?’

  ‘Yes, but ...’

  ‘Ah, I see your problem,’ Woodend told the young Witch Maker. ‘You think your dad killed Stan Dawkins for an unworthy reason – that he only did it to protect his no-good brother. But that wasn’t the case at all, was it, Tom?’

  ‘No,’ Tom Dimdyke said.

  ‘Dad ...!’

  ‘When he killed Dawkins, it wasn’t his brother he was protectin’ – it was the office of the Witch Maker. He did it for the village. An’ for you!’

  ‘For me?’ Wilf Dimdyke asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I was a baby!’

  ‘But you were destined to grow up to be the Witch Maker. An’ who could teach you the necessary skills if your uncle was servin’ a long prison sentence for rape?’

  ‘Is this true, Dad?’ Wilf Dimdyke demanded.

  ‘Even if the girl had been willin’ to keep quiet about what had happened, Dawkins would never have let it rest,’ Tom Dimdyke said regretfully. ‘He’d have gone to the police, whatever I said.’

  ‘So it was you!’ Wilf gasped. ‘You really did kill him!’

  ‘I only wanted the best for you.’

  ‘But I never asked ... I never wanted ...’

  ‘There was so little else I could do for you. The Witch Maker was all, and I was nothing. This one thing, at least, was within my power.’

  ‘Let me get this straight, Mr Dimdyke,’ Woodend said. ‘You’re confessin’ to the murder of Stan Dawkins now, are you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m confessin’. I did it. I knew he didn’t deserve to die, but I couldn’t see any other way out.’

  ‘I’ve no real evidence against you, you know. Even now, if you retracted your confession, I’d probably be hard put to get a conviction.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So why confess at all? Is it that it doesn’t really matter whether or not you confess to this murder, since you’re just about to confess to another one?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Tom Dimdyke agreed. ‘I not only killed Stan Dawkins, I also killed my own brother.’

  ‘Why? Because you resented the fact that he’d become Witch Maker instead of you? Because, over the years, your resentment grew into hatred?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’d be a very neat an’ tidy endin’ to the case if that was the truth,’ Woodend said. ‘The only problem is, it’s a load of bollocks.’

  ‘I swear—’

  ‘Oh, I don’t doubt for a second that you killed Stan Dawkins – that you beat him to death. But your brother Harry wasn’t beaten, was he? He was garrotted.’

  ‘What does it matter how I killed him?’

  ‘Which is a funny method for any killer to choose,’ Woodend continued, ignoring the interruption. ‘There’s somethin’ of the ritual about it, isn’t there? Its stated aim is to cause death, but there’s also an element of punishment in it. An’ it’s a tricky thing to do properly, is garrottin’. At least, it would be for anybody who’d not been practicin’ doin’ it on a dummy for the last few weeks.’ Woodend switched his attention from Tom Dimdyke to his son, who had slowly been turning paler and paler and was now the colour of chalk. ‘Do you want to tell me about it, lad?’ he asked gently.

  Forty-One

  Wilf, working alone in the barn, looks up and sees his beloved sister standing there. He can tell from the way her cheeks are puffed up that she has been crying.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks.

  ‘What do you th ... think’s the matter?’ she replies angrily. ‘In th ... three days they’re goin’ to cut off all my b ... beautiful hair.’

  ‘It’ll grow back,’ Wilf tells her, knowing the response is inadequate – wishing he could say more.

  ‘You’re the Assistant Witch M ... Maker, Our Wilf,’ she says. ‘Can’t you st ... stop it?’

  ‘I might as well try to stop an express train,’ he says.

  And even as he speaks, he realizes how odd it is to hear the phrase coming out of his mouth. What meaning does ‘an express train’ have for him? He’s hardly even seen an express train, let alone gone anywhere on one. Trains are for other people – people who lead lives which are not centred on this village.

  ‘We’re nothin’ but sl ... slaves,’ Mary says, as fresh tears run down her cheeks. ‘Sl ... slaves to somethin’ we had no part in st ... startin’ – which was all over an’ d ... done with three hundred an’ fifty years ago.’

  ‘It can never be over an’ done with,’ Wilf tells her. ‘Evil is with us always. We must fight with our hands when we can, and with our minds and spirits when we cannot. We must burn the Witch, or she has won. We must burn the Witch to show others that we, at least, are pure of heart.’

  He has known these words since he was a child. Yet only now does he start to realize that they are not his words – that though his greatest wish is to console his dear sister, these words will not do it.

  He struggles to gain some understanding of this new insight. The words are a barrier, he tells himself. They fill his mind, they clog his soul – they leave no space for the thought he really wishes to express.

  ‘I’ll have a talk to Uncle Harry,’ he says, as he feels himself drowning in a sea of inadequacy. ‘I’ll see if he can do somethin’ to save your hair.’

  ‘It’s n ... not about my h ... hair. It’s about everythin’!’ Mary almost screams at him.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he says.

  But he is starting to.

  ‘God, I h ... hate you!’ Mary says. ‘I h ... hate you all!’

  And then she turns and flees.

  ‘Do you want to know why I killed my uncle?’ Wilf demanded. ‘I did it to save Mary! An’ to save the children – the ones who haven’t even been born yet, but are already marked down to go through all this, just like we did.’ He waved his hands helplessly in the air. ‘I’m ... I’m tryin’ to make you understand, honestly I am, but I can’t ... I can’t ...’

  ‘What you want to say is that you were tryin’ to derail the express train,’ Woodend suggested.

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ Wilf said gratefully.

  ‘But when the train didn’t come off the lines with your uncle’s death, why did you slip straight into the driver’s seat?’

  ‘Because I felt the spirit of a score of dead Witch Makers urgin’ me on – and I didn’t have t
he courage to resist them.’

  ‘You’ve got what you wanted,’ Tom Dimdyke said, his voice a mixture of anger and misery. ‘Why can’t you leave the lad alone now?’

  ‘Because my job’s not just to catch murderers, it’s to see that justice is done,’ Woodend explained. ‘Wilf has to be punished for his crime – there’s no way round that – but I want it to be a fair punishment. An’ if he says no more at his trial than he has now, the punishment won’t be fair. The judge an’ jury will have no sympathy for him, an’ he’ll be given the maximum sentence. That’s why he has to be completely honest. That’s why I have to have the whole truth.’

  ‘I’ve told you the whole truth!’ Wilf protested.

  Woodend shook his head. ‘No, you haven’t. If you’d killed Harry for no other reason than to derail the Witch Burnin’, you’d have left him in the barn. But you didn’t. You tied to him to the stake and garrotted him. An’ why? Because you thought he was evil. But what had he done or said to make you think that?’

  ‘Nothin’!’ Wilf said defiantly.

  ‘You’re lyin’,’ Woodend told him.

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘If I’m right,’ Woodend said softly, ‘then the reason you’re lyin’ is to spare your dad’s feelings.’

  ‘My feelings!’ Tom Dimdyke exploded. ‘What have my feelings got to do with it?’

  ‘Nothin’ at all!’ Woodend admitted. ‘That’s perhaps the saddest part of this whole sorry business. Because what we’re talkin’ about here isn’t your real feelin’s – it’s the feelin’s that Wilf thought you’d have when you learned what he’d just learned in that barn.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Tom Dimdyke demanded.

  ‘The first time we met, you told me that you’d done your part twenty years ago. An’ it was plain to me then that you considered it a very important part. It had been hard, but it had been necessary, you said. For quite a while, I couldn’t work out what it could possibly have been. Then, when I was thinkin’ about your brother’s concubines, it came to me that there was only thing it could have been. An’ it wasn’t somethin’ you really did at all, was it? It was somethin’ you allowed to happen!’

  This is perhaps the wrong time to have the talk, because Harry is obviously drunk, but Wilf is not sure there will ever be a right time, and so he decides to speak anyway.

  He wants to ask his uncle about the things which have been troubling him since Mary fled from the barn.

  He needs to know whether it is all worth it.

  He wonders if, after three hundred and fifty years, there is any point in the Burning any more.

  He has been agonizing about the question of whether there might be something else the village could do – some other way in which its energies might be channelled.

  But he is new to using words of his own, and the question, when it comes, is not exactly what he intended it to be.

  ‘Why are we Witch Makers, Uncle Harry?’ he asks.

  Harry plops down on to the orange crate, where Mary has so often sat and watched her brother work.

  He grins. ‘Why are we the Witch Makers? Because we’re lucky bastards, that’s why.’

  ‘Lucky?’ Wilf repeats – not knowing quite what his uncle means, but understanding the conversation is already going in the wrong direction.

  ‘Bloody lucky,’ Harry says. ‘You might think that what we do is hard work, but it’s a doddle compared to what the rest of those stupid sods have to put up with. We don’t get up at dawn to milk the cows. We’re not out there in all weathers, mendin’ fences an’ deliverin’ letters. We make the Witch, an’ that’s it.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘An’ just think of the compensations.’ The grin on Harry’s face turns into a leer. ‘We can have any woman we want. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Well, we can. Take it from me. An’ we do what we like to them.’ Harry chuckles. ‘Some of the things I’ve done to the women of this village, I tell you, even the lowest whore wouldn’t have let me do.’

  ‘You ... you never talked to me like this before,’ Wilf stutters.

  ‘You were a boy before,’ Harry answers. ‘Now you’re a man.’ He climbs shakily to his feet, and drapes his arm over Wilf’s shoulder. ‘You’re my lad, an’ you’re about to start reapin’ the reward.’

  He is happy. He is proud. And though he doesn’t know it yet, he has just signed his own death warrant.

  ‘What was it your uncle told you that made you decide you needed to execute him?’ Woodend asked Wilf Dimdyke.

  ‘That bein’ the Witch Maker didn’t mean anythin’ more to him than havin’ the power to do whatever he wanted.’

  ‘An’ that was the only thing?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘You’re still holdin’ out on me, lad!’ Woodend said, the tone in his voice almost pleading. ‘For God’s sake – for your own sake – tell me the rest!’

  ‘There is no rest!’

  Woodend lit up a cigarette, took a deep drag, and grimaced as if he were inhaling cyanide. ‘You’re makin’ it more difficult – more painful – than it needs to be,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t help that,’ Wilf told him.

  Woodend sighed. ‘All right, if that’s the way you want it.’ He turned to Paniatowski. ‘When a king dies, who usually succeeds him, Monika?’

  ‘His natural heir?’ Paniatowski replied, making it sound as if she were guessing.

  ‘That’s right,’ Woodend agreed. ‘Irrespective of talent or ability, his natural heir – his son or his daughter – takes his place. It’s all in the magic of the name, you see. An’ it’s not only kings that the name works for. Look at what’s happenin’ in India, as an example. It won’t be long before Mrs Gandhi’s voted in as Prime Minister, an’ her main claim to the job – as far as I can see – is that her dad held the same post for donkey’s years.’ He paused to take another poisoned drag on his Capstan. ‘But what happens if there isn’t what you call a “natural heir”?’

  Paniatowski feigned a puzzled frown. ‘Then I suppose it’s a close blood relative who takes up the slack,’ she said. ‘Like in the United States.’

  ‘Spot on,’ Woodend agreed. ‘Jack Kennedy – the shinin’ white hope of all America – is assassinated in Dallas, an’ people immediately start to wonder who can fill his shoes. He does have a son, but that son’s too young – so it’s his brother Bobby who starts to look like a serious contender for the presidency. Now for all I know, Bobby Kennedy might turn out to be a great leader, but that’s not the point. He’s where he is because of the name.’

  ‘True,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘Of course, if Bobby had been John’s cousin rather than his brother, the magic wouldn’t have been quite so strong,’ Woodend continued. ‘It’s a risky business movin’ away from the direct line – an’ the further away you move, the riskier it is.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Paniatowski asked, still playing Woodend’s straight man.

  ‘You’ve only to look at history to find countless examples of the king’s cousin succeedin’ to the throne – an’ of civil war breakin’ out almost immediately. Now why do you think that might be?’

  ‘Because there were always other cousins – from other branches of the family – who thought they had just as much right to the throne as the man who was claiming it?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Woodend agreed. ‘The magic gets so watered down that it isn’t even magic any more.’

  ‘What’s any of this got to do with us here in Hallerton?’ Tom Dimdyke demanded.

  And though he was doing his best to sound impatient, it was his unease which came across most strongly.

  ‘Every king who’s ever ruled has done his best to ensure that it’s one of his direct descendants who succeeds him,’ Woodend said. ‘It’s the only way to maintain stability, you see. It’s the only way the king can be certain that things go on as he thinks they were meant to.’

  ‘But we hav
e nothin’ to do with kings!’ Tom Dimdyke said.

  ‘Don’t you?’ Woodend asked. ‘One of the first things that struck me when I arrived in this village was how like a king the Witch Maker was.’

  ‘That’s rubbish!’

  ‘Is it? Tell me, who was the first Witch Maker, Mr Dimdyke?’

  ‘A cousin of Tom an’ Harry’s.’

  ‘An’ the second?’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘Of course it bloody matters! It’s bloody crucial! It was Harry’s son, wasn’t it? The fruit of his second marriage – the one who was born after his father had been hanged.’

  ‘Who ... who told you all this?’ Tom Dimdyke asked.

  ‘A local historian called Tyndale told me a son had been born. I’m only guessin’ he was actually the second Witch Maker. But I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ Dimdyke admitted.

  ‘An’ what about the third Witch Maker? Was he the son of the second?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So the Witch Maker did get married in those days?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, did you? Well, now we’ve got that settled, let’s skip a few hundred years. Tell me, Mr Dimdyke, who’ll be the next Witch Maker – after your lad?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dimdyke said.

  ‘You’re lyin’,’ Woodend told him, though not harshly. ‘You do know. It’s just that he hasn’t been born yet. That’s the real truth, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why hasn’t he been born? Wilf was a baby at the time of the last Witch Burnin’, wasn’t he? An’ I’d be willin’ to bet that Harry was a baby at the Witch Burnin’ before that. So what went wrong?’

  ‘Nothin’ went wrong. I just thought it’d be better to wait a bit longer this time.’

  ‘You thought? Or your brother thought?’

  ‘I thought!’ Tom Dimdyke said fiercely. ‘He’s my lad. I didn’t want it to happen until he was ready – until he was strong enough.’