Witching Murder Read online

  Dolly got her name and address down quickly.

  She was Mrs Denise Flaxon; she lived at Woodstock Close, Slough.

  ‘Business address?’

  ‘I work from there. I have an area franchise with Elysium Creams, also Perlita Perfumes.’ Just for a moment she gave a quick professional look at Dolly’s face and Dolly felt the impact. ‘I cover Merrywick. I visited her.’ She did not commit herself to a name as if it might be dangerous. ‘I visited the house by appointment.’ She stopped.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘No one answered the door. I knew I was expected, so after waiting a bit I tried the door. It wasn’t locked so I went in.’ She stopped again.

  ‘So you went in? Into the kitchen?’

  ‘Not straight away. I stood in the hall, I think I called out. Then I went into the kitchen … She was lying on the floor. Lots of blood, the knife beside her. I didn’t touch it … Nor those other things.’ She looked at Dolly. ‘You saw them?’

  Dolly nodded.

  ‘The … That’s witchcraft,’ she whispered. ‘Black magic.’

  I doubt it, thought Dolly. Looks like plain old murder to me with nasty undertones, but she had several things to think about on these lines herself. She knew a witch or two, and possibly now it was a pity she did.

  ‘And then?’ she prompted.

  ‘I nearly ran away,’ said Denise, speaking no more than the honest truth. But someone had seen her go into the house. ‘But in the end, I went and called the police from the call box at the end of the road.’ She nodded towards it.

  ‘Were you sick?’

  ‘No. Felt it, but I wasn’t.’

  Someone had been, though; sick in the kitchen sink. The murderer?

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Flaxon. We’ll have to get all this written down and you’ll have to sign it. I’ll send you down to the station and you can make your statement there.’

  ‘Will you come with me?’

  ‘I can’t do that, but I promise you we will be as quick as we can. Then you can go home. We may get in touch with you at home later.’

  Mrs Flaxon departed to make her statement, and in due course was allowed to leave the Merrywick Police Station. She drove herself home to Slough, skirting the crowded roads, taking a back route, driving past the street in which a shop called Twickers was still open. Woodstock Close, where she lived, was just around the corner.

  Dolly went back into the house to seize the services of DC Madden. She was interrupted by the arrival of Inspector Elman. He was new to the area, having been transferred on promotion from a country district. But he was a born Londoner who just happened to have found his career in a force outside the Met. He was streetwise, careful of himself and occasionally distrustful. Well, always distrustful, especially of his colleagues who were women.

  ‘I’ve just come in to see what’s what, but I won’t be staying. I’ve still got my hands full with the Durham Flats business.’ This was a multiple killing among a group of Asian families in Slough. ‘You are going to head the team on this, Barstow.’

  Dolly was half pleased, half annoyed. She knew she was up for promotion, but she hated to be beholden to Fred Elman for anything. If he didn’t trust her, she didn’t trust him. Mutual.

  ‘I’ll be in nominal charge, of course.’

  Of course. And Superintendent Father would be over him. But the Superintendent had responsibility for a big arson case just coming into court and would not be seen much.

  Any credit, however, for a successful conclusion to the case would go to those two, and any failure, to her. But Dolly knew the rules, and also how to bend them to her own advantage, if she had to.

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  ‘All reports to me, of course. Looks like a simple domestic killing from what I hear.’

  He had not seen the objects arranged around the body, of course, Dolly reflected.

  ‘Get it tidied up fast and we’ll all be home and dry.’

  Dolly nodded.

  ‘Well, look pleased, girl. Could do you good.’

  Dolly considered how to put what she had to say.

  ‘There’s one complication. I knew her. We were not friends, but we’ve met.’

  Two evenings later, the two women, Dolly and Charmian, met at the Discussion Club in Windsor; both of them glad to see the other, on the look-out for each other without admitting it.

  The discussion group always met in the beautiful upstairs room of the Cumberland Hall in Sheet Street, Windsor, where the panelling and the portraits of ancient dignitaries gave you something to look at if the debate palled.

  Sherry glass in hand, Dolly approached Charmian as she stood beneath a portrait of Lord North, Prime Minister to George III and one of the chief reasons for the loss of the North American colonies, and whose portrait by James Treharne is appropriately wooden.

  ‘The sherry seems better this month,’ said Dolly.

  ‘I saw to it myself.’ Charmian had developed a taste for dry sherry, one not shared by all the group, many of whom, in spite of their worldly success and polished, sophisticated appearances, still retained a liking for sweeter and even fizzy drinks. ‘I laid in some cream sherry for those who prefer it, though.’

  ‘What is the subject under discussion tonight?’

  ‘Women and equal opportunities in the professions. I can see blood being drawn. I shall probably add some myself.’

  Dolly sipped her sherry; she really liked gin herself, but had learnt to drink what she was offered, something she felt sure that Charmian had never done. ‘Can I talk to you afterwards? I need advice.’

  ‘Sure. I want to talk to you too.’

  ‘Oh?’ Dolly was thoughtful as she took her seat under a portrait of the young William Lamb, Lord Melbourne.

  Afterwards, over plates of curried chicken, Dolly said, ‘You first.’

  Charmian took a drink of water, the curry was exceptionally hot. ‘I’m interested in the woman who lives in the corner house in Abigail Place.’ She saw a flash of recognition in Dolly’s face. ‘Interested in her friends too. What goes on there, Dolly? I’ve seen you there.’

  ‘Have you? Thought you might have done. Thought I saw you looking once.’ Dolly put down the food which was suddenly unappealing to her. ‘I’m interested in what goes on there too, as a matter of fact. I keep my eye on things; I’d heard talk and I wanted to know what it amounted to.’ Dolly grinned. ‘ Preventive police work, you could call it. Also, I was curious.’

  ‘What sort of talk?’

  ‘About what the women got up to. The inhabitants of the Great Park complained they were worshipping a tree and performing rites round it. That’s how I got to know.’

  ‘And were they?’

  ‘Not exactly. But they’d had a sort of service round the oak on Midsummer’s Eve. And then Caprice Dash has a shop in Slough where she sells a mixture of organic fruit and veg, herbal stuff and vitamin supplements, and some funny odds and ends as well. I thought there might be drugs in it somewhere.’ She added thoughtfully, ‘But I’m bound to say I haven’t caught a whiff of anything like that. They seem a healthy bunch.’

  ‘And who are they?’

  ‘The four women. Winifred Eagle, you know her.’ Charmian nodded. ‘ Then there’s Alice Peacock, and Caprice Dash. And a small group of other women who come and go. And then there’s Vivien Charles. She’s younger than the others.’

  ‘I had noticed. And there’s a man at times.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Fox.’

  ‘So what does go on?’

  Dolly took a swig of sherry, considered a mouthful of curry, and then said, ‘They call themselves witches. They’re a coven.’

  Charmian was silent. Then she said, ‘A small one.’

  ‘Size doesn’t matter.’

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘I said I was just interested. They said I could watch. I was a kind of initiate. Like Vivien. I don’t think she was that keen really.’ Lonely, she had thought of Vivien; lonely and not secure.<
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  ‘Do they know you are a police officer?’

  ‘No, but I think Mrs Dash suspects. I don’t know if they’d mind. They are strangely open in a funny kind of way.’ She sounded as if she liked the women. ‘And, of course, they could have been laughing at me all the time. Having a joke at my expense. Sometimes I have thought they were.’

  ‘And the man?’

  ‘Well, just as nuns have to have a priest, he was their kind of priest. Apparently you have to have one. Or sometimes.’

  ‘So what did they do?’

  ‘It seemed quite harmless,’ said Dolly slowly. ‘ White magic, earth stuff. Quite nice really. Nothing dangerous. Or so I thought.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charmian studied Dolly’s face. ‘Well, you’ve told me what I wanted to know. And why you were there.’ It was the sort of thing a keen young policewoman might do, but with its embarrassing side as a confession. Dolly obviously found it so. ‘What did you want to ask me?’

  ‘I was called to the scene of a murder a couple of days ago. A woman had been stabbed in her own kitchen. I knew her as soon as I looked at her. It was Viv.’

  The young woman with the long blonde hair and the Renoir face was dead. She had been a beauty, with something innocent about her, thought Charmian – a country girl, a village beauty. And then, more cynically, but I only saw her across the garden fence, she could have been anything.

  And she had been murdered. Victims are sometimes made, self-made at that, not chosen at random. There has to be a reason.

  ‘It was a shock,’ Dolly said. ‘I liked the girl. And there she was, laid out on her own kitchen floor with some nasty-looking objects laid out all round her.’

  Soberly, Dolly said, ‘ It looked wicked.’

  ‘What is it you want from me?’ asked Charmian.

  ‘Advice. A chance to talk it over with you. It’s going to be my case.’

  Thoughtfully, Charmian said, ‘I’d like to see the house. I’d like to go to Merrywick and have a look.’

  Chapter Two

  The two women drove out through Windsor and took the road which circled Eton and led to Merrywick.

  Merrywick called itself a village. It had a post office, a library, a school, a church and a butcher’s shop, all of which made it a real village and a fortunate one. However, only the church and one house was old, truly old, the rest had been built in the last ten years to house a large population of prosperous people who liked to live there because it was near Windsor and Eton (not to mention two good girls’ schools), but whose professional lives were spent in London. To the purist, Merrywick was thus not a true village but a gimcrack modern imitation. Naturally the Merrywickcrs resented this bitterly and being a highly educated and articulate lot found ways of expressing this.

  Dulcet Road, where Vivien Charles had been found in pools of blood in her own kitchen, was a cul-de-sac of small houses, built in imitation Regency style with little iron balconies at the first-floor window and a minute curving flight of steps to the front door. They were tiny, spurious, pretend, but they had a kind of doll’s house charm. Every front door was a different colour, and Vivien’s was yellow.

  There were heavy footprints all over the front garden but no sign of the police presence otherwise. However, Charmian noticed at least one front-window curtain twitch as they drove up. The neighbours were on the watch, and who could blame them?

  Charmian stopped the car and sat there looking at the prospect before her. ‘Before we go in, let’s talk a bit. How did you get to know these women? In fact, start at the beginning, what put you on to them in the first place?’

  ‘Oh, gossip, hearsay, you know how things go round,’ said Dolly lightly. ‘A Yoga class starting here, a new dance and exercise club opening there, people talk about it, that sort of thing. This came into that category. I think I heard at the hairdressers. The girl who did my hair said she had a neighbour who claimed to be a witch. She didn’t seem to mind, she thought it was funny. I thought it might not be.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Then when I was in Merrywick Library I saw a woman taking out a book called The Affair of the Poisons. The librarian said it was about witchcraft in the reign of Louis XIV of France. I thought the borrower might be the witch. So I followed her. She went to a shop in Slough called Twickers.’

  ‘Funny name for a shop.’

  ‘Funny shop. But I think the name means something. It was selling books on the occult, books on witchcraft, and all sorts of odds and ends to do with it. Herbs, spices, crystal balls, black candles, specially prepared mirrors, the lot. The woman in charge told me very firmly that she only dealt in white witchcraft … the old religion, she called it. And I’m bound to say it looked quite harmless, a kind of cross between a health food shop of a rustic sort and a toy shop.’

  ‘What happened to the woman you followed?’

  ‘She bought a box of candles and went off. It didn’t matter because I was talking to Caprice Dash who turned out to own the shop and she invited me to their next meeting.’

  ‘Of their coven?’

  ‘She didn’t call it that. But I suppose it was.’

  ‘Trusting of her to invite you just like that.’

  ‘I must have a nice face,’ said Dolly. She got out of the car. ‘Anyway, that’s how I met them.’

  ‘Sounds too easy,’ said Charmian thoughtfully. She followed Dolly out of the car and they stood at the gate looking up the narrow garden path. It wasn’t a garden anyone had put any love into, so it had a sad neglected air with a few dejected roses and some unwatered window boxes. A bed of geraniums was doing well, but Charmian knew that geraniums thrived on neglect.

  ‘In a way it was. I found out later that Winifred Eagle, whose house they mostly used, had seen in her Tarot Cards that a girl like me was coming into their lives. Make what you like of that,’ said Dolly, who hadn’t quite enjoyed being the answer to the witch’s vision. It made her skin itch. Her face was sore now, and she moved her head uneasily. ‘I went to the first meeting and met the others – Alice Peacock and Vivien, and a couple of other women who seemed to have just dropped in. We didn’t do anything much, just talk and prayers to what they called The Female One. We prayed for me, for my good fortune, which embarrassed me; I’m still wondering if the prayers were answered.’ Because there was no doubt that if this case went well, her career would prosper.

  But on account of the death of one of the little group? It just confirmed Dolly’s belief that you should be careful what you prayed for.

  ‘Did you pray?’ asked Charmian, curious to find out exactly what all this had meant to her young friend.

  ‘No, I’m a Methodist,’ said Dolly prosaically. ‘I just kept my mouth shut. But the She they were praying to sounded a decent sort. For women, if you see what I mean. They said it was the ‘ old religion’. That made it white magic, the good stuff. The black magic outfit try to have a word with the Devil. Take your pick.’

  ‘There must be something about these women: I’ve been interested in them, you’ve been interested in them, and now they’ve had a murder,’ said Charmian as they walked up the path to the house. ‘Have you got a key to the house?’

  ‘Of course.’ Dolly produced one.

  Charmian studied the scene. It looked quiet enough, too quiet really, for she saw no sign of a protective police presence. Dolly observed this and spoke up:

  ‘All the forensics have been done, so the team’s cleared out. We are a bit overstretched at the moment, but a patrol car comes round regularly.’

  ‘Where do the other women live?’

  ‘Well, Winifred Eagle, you know about, she’s your neighbour, and the other two, Caprice Dash and Alice Peacock, they call her Birdie, both live in Merrywick. Dash in a block of flats overlooking the River and Peacock in a bungalow in Garter Road. The bungalow is called The Nest,’ said Dolly with a straight face.

  ‘A bunch of characters.’

  ‘Apart from being, well, what they claimed to be, they seemed quit
e ordinary, comfortable women. They could have been members of the Women’s Institute and the Conservative Party. In fact, for all I know, they are. Birdie certainly makes good scones and jam. I had some once, and I’d bet that she votes for Mrs Thatcher. In fact, I’ve had the sort of feeling once or twice that she mixes her up with The Great Mother.’ She was fumbling with the door lock. ‘The key’s sticking.’

  ‘Something wrong with the lock?’

  ‘It’s a new lock. I had all the locks replaced, just in case.’

  While Dolly was struggling with the door, Charmian walked round the flight of steps to look in at a window.

  She found she was surveying a long, narrow sitting room with a view to the garden beyond, visible through a pretty set of glass doors which managed to look both Victorian, phoney and charming at the same time. Real skill had gone into creating this pretend scene, she thought.

  The room, clear to her view, was plainly furnished as if the occupant had not long moved in and was undecided about what would make her comfortable. The floor was covered in plain, pale carpeting, on which rested several upright chairs and a severe-looking sofa. A portable television set stood on a painted round table. As far as Charmian could see there were no curtains on either of the windows, front or back.

  It was evening, dark, but with a bright moon. She could see enough.

  ‘Probably as well there are no curtains,’ she found herself thinking. ‘If one of them moved, in the moonlight, in the house where there had been a murder, even I might feel a shiver.’

  The thought was so unlike her that she drew it back rapidly and popped it into a deep drawer inside her mind.

  Then she thought, ‘But I can see into this room too well.’

  A soft red light suffused the room.

  ‘Got the door open,’ called Dolly.

  ‘Come over here, will you, I can see a light. Red light.’

  Dolly hurried over. ‘Not a fire, is it?’ she asked in alarm.

  ‘No.’

  No, the light was too steady and quiet, not a flicker in it.

  ‘Coming from the kitchen,’ said Dolly. ‘Well, let’s get in there and look.’