by Ellen Jane
“May I inquire as to the source of the allegations?” Sinéad asked with a raised eyebrow, presenting her wrists for the charmed pair of cuffs the policeman was now holding.
He began reading her rights as if he hadn’t heard the question.
Heather’s mind whirred. The police must have detected a spell on the painting, something that counted as probable cause and was involved in the murder, but Heather had been standing with Sinéad the whole time. Sinéad hadn’t acted at all like someone who had planned a crime and was waiting for it to occur. And Heather had seen her expression when she realised her painting was in the room; it had been one of complete shock.
“She didn’t do it,” she blurted out. “She’s been with me.”
Sinéad turned to her with a look of dry amusement. “I very much appreciate the support, little witch,” she said, her lips quirking into another smirk—although, this one was more of a sneer. “But I doubt your word is going to help me much in this particular instance.”
The policeman didn’t even have a hint of apology as he snapped the cuffs closed. “This way, please.”
Suddenly, Sinéad’s head whipped up, and a shrewd expression crossed her face. “Why were you talking to the walls?” she asked, spinning around to face Heather. “What were you up to?”
The policeman looked interested, insofar as expressionless brick walls could.
“What?” Heather snapped. “What do you—I just defended you!”
“You only just met me,” Sinéad threw back. “It could be a clever ruse! Officer, this woman has been acting suspiciously. Just look at her dress. There’s a misdirection charm on the fabric, so she clearly doesn’t want to be noticed. Who comes to a party like this and doesn’t want to be noticed?”
The policeman turned his attention to Heather, eyeing her for several moments before producing a second pair of handcuffs.
“Name, please?” he asked, balancing the handcuffs on his pinky finger while he waited for Heather to speak, pencil poised above his notebook.
“Heather Millington,” Heather replied, shoulders slumping forward.
Jen was going to kill her.
The policeman jotted down her name and a couple of points below, which Heather couldn’t read. It looked like one of the points said “suspiciously normal”, to which she took great offence. Then, he held the handcuffs out, reading off her Miranda rights in a bored tone. She obediently slid her wrists through, fighting not to say something rude as he clicked them shut.
“This is all your fault,” she hissed to Sinéad as they followed the policeman out of the house and into the car waiting out front.
Everyone stared at them. One or two people pointed at Heather and began to whisper furiously behind their hands; her spell was wearing off. A blinding flash came from the midst of the crowd, and Heather groaned and hid her face behind Sinéad’s shoulders. Just what she needed—her face in the papers, along with speculation and false allegations that would taint the good name of her business. She operated on and with discretion; her clients wouldn’t trust her anymore, regardless of whether they thought she was guilty or not. Thanks to this, it was now unclear whether she could meet their privacy needs.
“Au contraire,” Sinéad said, glaring at the whispering crowd. “It’s the killer’s fault. A fact which, if you are as innocent as you claim, you have nothing to fear.”
The sorcerer’s head was held high, and she looked to all the world as if she were strolling down a runway. When Heather only managed to splutter in response, Sinéad turned a little so that their eyes met. She must have seen something in Heather’s expression, because she gave her a rueful smile.
“Don’t worry—the innocent have nothing to fear from the law.”
Heather wasn’t sure whether Sinéad was trying to convince Heather or herself.
Chapter Two
Heather finished writing her statement, signed it with a flourish, and slid the form back across the metal desk to the officer in charge. Fortunately for her, they hadn’t taken her to the large station in the city, but only the local one—barely larger than two rooms and a couple cells for the drunk and disorderly. She knew the chief well—and, more importantly, he knew her and her business—and she was able to explain herself relatively quickly and without incident.
They even let her sit out on the plastic chairs in the designated waiting corner, rather than sit behind bars.
“This is favouritism,” Sinéad said, glaring at her through narrowed eyes from her position seated on the very corner of the cell bench.
“No, it’s appropriate treatment for someone who has been proven innocent,” Heather retorted, sitting back down on one of the chairs and taking a sip from her tea.
She only had to wait a little longer while the paperwork was filed and Patricia corroborated her story about Jen, and then she was free to go. At least she could take comfort in the fact that Patricia was certainly hating every second of her report, knowing that she was helping Heather.
As it turned out, Patricia was able to supply the name and address of the servant, so that the police could take over recovery of the stolen goods. There would be some good news for Jen after all. Even if it did come with Heather’s face plastered all over the local paper and an obnoxiously large write-up about her personal life and business. She knew this, even if only a couple of hours had passed since the event, because her cousin worked at the local press and had wanted to give her fair warning. Nothing was secret in a small town.
Chief Cooper leaned over the desk and called to her.
“You’re free to go, Heather. Got your statement here. We’ll let you know if we need anything further.”
Heather finished her now-cold tea in one gulp and dropped the Styrofoam cup into the rubbish. She felt a faint whisper of guilt as she turned away from Sinéad, alone and furious in her cell, but after a swift mental reminder that she was in this mess because of Sinéad, she pushed it aside.
“Thanks, Todd,” she said, accepting the offered bowl of mints as she walked past the desk.
As she took a mint, she paused. She was probably being entirely too naive; she should just leave and forget all about tonight while the paper hadn’t been printed and she still had the luxury. But she couldn’t.
With a resigned sigh, she picked up the bowl and turned back towards the cell.
“Mint?” she asked, thrusting the bowl towards the bars.
Sinéad raised one eyebrow and remained seated. “What are you doing?”
“Well, I’m holding a bowl of mints and asking if you want one, so I guess I’m offering you a mint.”
“Very cute.”
“I try.”
Sinéad stared at her a moment longer before rising gracefully and selecting a mint from the bowl.
“What’s your bail?” Heather asked quietly.
For a moment, she was rewarded with a brief and gratifying expression of surprise on Sinéad’s face.
“Well,” she said slowly. “If they book me, I imagine it will be a round six figures.”
Heather felt her stomach churn at the thought. She swallowed and continued resolutely. “Do you need help with it? I could loan you some money.”
Sinéad’s eyes met hers. The poor lighting in the station made them appear black rather than brown, and Heather was caught by the curiosity she saw there.
“You really don’t think I did it, do you?” Sinéad asked, her head tilted slightly to the side as she regarded Heather.
Heather had always been good at finding lost things. When she was little, before her parents had died, her mum had come to her first out of everyone whenever she lost an earring or a bracelet. Together, they would mix up a salve, dab a little on the earring’s pair or her mother’s jewellery box, and before long, it would grow warm and bright and lead them straight to the missing jewellery.
As she’d gotten older, people had learned about her skill, and slowly, day by day, her business had grown. In the early days, when her mother was sti
ll alive, they’d worked at it together. Her mother always had the talent for reading people. Heather had wondered if she had a little sorcerer blood in her after all. Her mother could tell when someone was lying or deceitful, trying to steal an item that wasn’t theirs, and she knew when they were genuinely hurt, when something vital had been taken from them.
Sometimes, when Heather worked, she was reminded of the two of them together, brewing quietly in the little work shed down behind the house, the windows fogged up with steam and the scent of rose hip on the air. And sometimes, it was even stronger than a memory, like her mother was there beside her, guiding her with knowledge that didn’t always come naturally.
“Call it a hunch,” Heather said, knowing she was right.
After a moment, Sinéad sighed—a gentle, reflective noise that seemed incongruous to her sharp features and biting wit.
“You’re one of those people who helps everyone, aren’t you?” she said, her tone dismal, like she had been personally let down by Heather’s naivety. “Thank you, little witch. It’s a very generous offer. But I can take care of it myself. You should just go home and pretend this never happened.”
Heather bristled at the affront, but even as she opened her mouth to object, she knew it wasn’t worth it. She turned away without a word, dropped the bowl onto the counter with a loud clunk, and left.
Heather dreamed about the arrest that night, her thoughts messy and confused, until she woke up in a tangle of bedsheets and sweat. By the time morning came, she had forced herself to put it from her mind, lest she go insane, and turned her attention instead to her favourite time of the year: Christmas.
The first of December was finally here, and Heather spent the morning hunting down misplaced boxes of decorations in the attic. She had tried to keep on top of where she stored things this year, but the decorations had slowly become buried as the months went on. By the time she had offered to help her neighbour store his grandchildren’s Christmas presents, she had lost track of the boxes entirely.
Finally, she emerged with two of the missing five, covered in cobwebs and with a triumphant smile on her face. Tinsel trailed out the side of one of the boxes, fluttering down the stairs behind her and making an enticing new toy for Teddy to pounce on.
“I swear, you must have been raised with cats,” she muttered, as the fifty-pound Rottweiler slammed his entire weight down on the glittering rope and sent the box tumbling out of her arms.
Teddy grabbed hold of the tinsel and tore down the stairs triumphantly, narrowly missing ploughing into the wall at the bottom, and skidding off into the kitchen.
Heather groaned at the mess and began to slowly pile everything back into the box.
Sinéad had told her to go home and stop thinking about it, but she couldn’t. Now that the drama and fear of being locked up had passed, Heather was hit with the realisation that she had just witnessed a murder. She felt sick. That poor man’s family would be distraught, and on top of that, it looked as though the killer had gotten away scot-free.
She wondered whether the painting really had been used in the murder, and, if so, what the spell had actually done. From where she was standing, it looked like the Earl had been stabbed.
The division of sorcerer magic and witch magic was very clear. One allowed the practitioner to control the subtle complexities of people, their emotions, their psychology; the other was simpler, more down-to-earth, and allowed the user to effect change to animals and inanimate objects. But beyond that one distinction, magic was hardly simple at all.
Heather was a culinary witch; her magic expressed itself through her cooking. But she could just as easily have been born a skilled woodworker, like her parents, or a musician, or a writer, and her magic would have chosen its pathway through any one of those things.
She had met a culinary sorcerer once, at a local bake sale when she had decided to try her hand at something other than potions. A visiting cousin of one of the elementary teachers, the sorcerer had been selling cupcakes that infused the eater with a sense of calm euphoria. She’d wished she could wipe the smile off his smug, little face, but compared to her sad-looking biscuits that changed the eater’s hair into a multitude of bright colours, it had been no competition.
She’d been so proud of that one, as well. The limitations of what magic could and couldn’t do were entirely subjective and variant on the individual’s skill and dedication. She’d worked for weeks to find a way to have an effect on a person—albeit a part of a person that was no longer technically alive—only to be upstaged by a smarmy toad from Kent.
If the Earl’s killer—because she refused to believe it was Sinéad—had discovered a way to use artistic magic for murder, it was going to cause an uproar. No painting would ever be safe again. And if it really was Sinéad’s painting at the thick of it, she was going to take all the blame.
Heather was interrupted from her musing by the sound of the doorbell ringing. She dropped the last bauble back in the box and ran down the stairs.
“Hello—” She broke off at the unexpected sight on her front doorstep.
Sinéad held up a paper bag with Michelle’s Patisserie scrawled on the front. Heather’s mouth immediately began to water.
“I come bearing gifts,” Sinéad said drily, glancing behind Heather at the sound of three sets of paws bounding through the hall. “Good lord, do you own a wolf pack?”
Teddy jumped up first, scrabbling to get past Heather and out to this new, exciting visitor. Heather groaned as his full weight hit her straight in the side, where she was blocking his exit, and then the rest of her breath was knocked out of her as Bear—a slightly smaller and much gentler Rottweiler—fell into the back of her legs, followed quickly by Lucifer, the border collie.
“Excuse me a moment,” she said, closing her eyes and taking a breath.
She whipped around and snapped her fingers; the three dogs sat down immediately with a unanimous fwump of bottoms hitting the floorboards.
“Leave,” she said, pointing to the living room.
Teddy whined.
“Leave, now!” She pointed again.
Bear jumped up with a wiggle and trotted off, while Lucifer spun in a half circle and began to herd Teddy after her. Heather breathed a sigh of relief.
She turned back to find Sinéad biting down on poorly concealed amusement. “Do they like doughnuts?” she enquired.
“If you give them a doughnut, I’ll kick you out,” Heather said, stepping back to let Sinéad in.
They walked into the kitchen, ignoring Teddy’s whine of protest as they passed by the open doorway. Heather looked back at him and sighed.
“Would you be happy to say hello to them?” she asked. “You don’t have to say yes. They can be a bit of a handful.”
Sinéad set the bag of doughnuts on the counter and dusted her hands off on her skirt.
“I thought you’d never ask. Here, puppy!”
Claws clattered across the floorboards as the three of them raced in. Sinéad dropped to her knees and opened her arms, and Heather couldn’t help but laugh at the strange sight. For all her perfect appearance—and today was no less than at the party, with her straightened hair and formal business dress—Sinéad didn’t seem to mind the slobber from both Teddy and Bear. When she stood up, she was covered in white fur from Lucifer, who had taken the opportunity to fetch not one, not two, but three balls from various locations and bring them eagerly to his new friend.
Heather opened her mouth to apologise, but when Sinéad bent down and threw the ball down the hallway, the words died in her throat.
“You like dogs?” she asked, feeling wrong-footed and a little ridiculous.
“The bigger, the better,” Sinéad said warmly, but the expression was soon replaced by the cool business demeanour with which she had greeted Heather at the door.
Pleasantries obviously over, Heather shepherded the dogs out the back door, into the yard, and locked them out.
“You made bail all right, th
en?” she asked, setting the kettle to boil and holding out a selection of tea for Sinéad to choose from.
“Even better,” Sinéad said, tapping one manicured fingernail against the Yorkshire. “I’m no longer a suspect; they didn’t book me. A spell was cast on my painting, but it was clearly separate from the one I put there when I painted it. That one was just a little emotional spell that Patricia requested when she commissioned me—nothing murderous at all.”
“That’s fantastic news!” Heather felt genuinely relieved. “So, you’re free to go.”
“Theoretically.” Sinéad tore open the bag of doughnuts and pointed to the clean plates drying in the rack, raising her eyebrows in a question.
Heather passed her one, and Sinéad began to arrange the pastries carefully, fingers held so they acquired the minimum amount of unwanted sugar and icing.
“I am free to go,” she agreed, setting the plate down on the table and taking the mug Heather passed her. “But someone tried to frame me, and I want answers.”
Heather had a sinking feeling she knew where this was going, though she failed to understand why Sinéad would come to her of all people.
“Who would do that?” she asked instead, taking a cinnamon doughnut that she hoped would be filled with jam.
It was delicious, and for a small moment, with the sun shining through her tiny window and down onto the table where they sat together, she imagined what it would be like to be friends with someone like Sinéad. Probably exhausting, she decided.
Sinéad wiped an invisible speck of dust off the table and bit into one of the chocolate pastries. Unsurprisingly, she managed to be the only person in existence who could eat a pastry without it flaking off in her lipstick.
“I have no idea, but I’d like you to find out.”
Heather choked on her tea. “Me? I’m not a policeman.”
“No, and thank Heaven for that, because fat lot of good they’ve been.”
“Hey, now. Some of them are my friends.”
Sinéad rolled her eyes. “I’d bet the entirety of my non-existent bail that you think everyone is your friend.”