“So,” said Smollet, his jaw tightening, “you mean we’re looking for a witch?”
“A white witch,” said Armitage, nodding. “Or a Wiccan, as they like to call themselves.” He looked at Smollet with a smile that was not immediately returned. “I think you can safely forget the idea that whoever done this was trying to recreate the murder. It look to me like they were trying to cleanse the place instead.”
“It’s not black magic, then?” said Sean.
“The opposite,” said the SOCO. “Like I say, I’m by no means an expert on the subject, but we do get a fair bit of this jiggery-pokery around here.” He raised his eyebrows. “And if this was another bunch of would-be satanists there’d be blood, bones, feathers, most probably a load of threatening slogans painted all over the place. Not to mention a ton of empties and other recreational stimulants. No,” he said, “whoever done this was very clean, very neat.”
“I see,” nodded Sean, understanding something more of what Noj had been trying to say to him last night, beginning to puzzle out what it was about the people of Ernemouth and
their enigmatic ways. How the things they didn’t say were often more important than the things that they did.
“Len!” Smollet called. “You can come down now.”
Rivett turned his head, putting his mobile phone back into his coat pocket as he made his lumbering way back down towards them. Smollet watched him approach with narrowed eyes. Sean wondered what was riling him – whether the story the SOCO had relayed was not the one he had wanted to hear, or if he was just pissed off at being dragged out here in the first place.
“What gives then, guv?” asked Rivett.
“Ben was just saying,” a tiny muscle twitched under Smollet’s left eye, “that this looks like the work of a white witch.”
“Ha!” Rivett exclaimed. “You’re joking, in’t you? Some sick little scrote, more like.”
“Well,” Armitage hefted his bag back over his shoulder, “the two things could be one and the same. But if you want the analysis back this evening, I’d best be off.” He nodded at Sean. “I don’t think there’s much else I can really tell you at this stage.”
“Course,” Smollet made a show of looking at his wristwatch. “I’d better get going myself. If there’s anything else …”
“Yeah,” Sean said. “Can I make an appointment to speak with you later?” he said. “When the results of the tests come back.”
“Sure,” said the DCI. “Six o’clock, you reckon, Ben?”
The SOCO nodded. “Should be OK,” he said.
“Six o’clock, my office, then,” the corners of Smollet’s mouth drew upwards, more of a grimace than a smile. “In the meantime, maybe you can fill Len in on the rest of Ben’s …”
he paused before delivering the last word in a withering tone, “
thesis
.”
* * *
Paul Gray was still standing in the hallway, staring at the phone, when his wife Sandra came back through the front door.
“Paul?” she said, taking in the expression on his face, adding it to last night’s late-night phone call from Len Rivett and feeling her heart jump in her chest.
“Sandra, love,” he said, looking at her with hollow eyes. “I’m sorry … I wanted to keep you out of this.”
He shook his head, bringing his hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose.
Sandra put her shopping bags down and stepped forwards. “What is it?” she said, putting her hand over his right bicep. “What’s he now said to you?”
Gray looked at her. “What’s who now said?”
Her reply shocked him with its vehemence. “That bastard Rivett,” she said.
* * *
Rivett toed one of the lines of salt on the floor of the pillbox, a sneer on his lips.
“The devil, my arse,” he said, barking out a laugh. “Fucking little scrotes. I reckon you’re right. This is a waste of our time.”
“Yeah,” said Sean. “We’ll see what the SOCO comes up with, but I think this is gonna turn out to be a coincidence. If I hadn’t come out here, none of us would be any the wiser that some little Samantha has been using this pillbox for casting spells. I bet it’s just some teenage girl with relationship problems.”
Rivett frowned. “Samantha?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Sean. “You remember
Bewitched
– that old sitcom about a housewife who was really a witch? She used to wriggle her nose.” He mimicked the motion. “Her name was Samantha.”
“Course,” said Rivett, tipping his hat back off his brow. “I know who you mean.” He laughed, shook his head. “Well, I don’t suppose we’ll get much further hanging around here, waiting for her to come back. Not in daylight, anyway.”
“Yeah,” said Sean, turning to walk back outside.
“Mind you,” said Rivett, staying where he was, “it must have given poor old Gray a nasty turn, finding what you did in here.”
“Yeah,” said Sean, stopping on the threshold. “Yeah, I’m afraid it did. Must’ve brought back a lot of bad memories for him.”
“I reckon,” said Rivett, bringing his hat back down so that the brim shaded his eyes. “Tell you about it, did he?” He spat a piece of tobacco from his lips onto the ground, and finally came away from the pentagram, to join Sean in the doorway.
“No,” said Sean. “In fact, I got the feeling that was the last thing he wanted to do.”
Rivett nodded in the direction of The Iron Duke and started to walk. “Well,” he said, “Gray’s the strong silent type; but that weren’t the sort of sight even a hardened old sweat like myself gets to see the like of too often.”
Sean nodded. “What would you consider his state of mind to have been when you got here? Had he put Woodrow in handcuffs, read her her rights, or any of that?”
Rivett shook his head. “No,” he said. “He’d took her out of there and called an ambulance. Reckoned she was in shock. I
said we’d get a doctor to look at her once we had her safely in custody. But it did concern me that he appeared more worried about her than what she’d gone and done.”
“Maybe he was in shock too,” suggested Sean.
“S’pose he could have been,” Rivett looked like the thought had never occurred to him. “I don’t suppose any of us really do know what we’re capable of until we’re tested, do we?”
“No,” said Sean, “and I’m sure a man like Gray wouldn’t have wanted a doctor looking him over, either.”
“No, he din’t,” said Rivett. “Who would, in our game?” He shook his head. “You don’t want to show your weakness, do you? Don’t want anyone to see you’re afraid.”
* * *
The Grays sat on their sofa, Sandra’s arms around her husband’s shoulders, trying to rub away the tension as he finished telling her what he and the detective from London had found that morning. “That just brought it all back,” Gray said, “in a way I weren’t expecting.”
“Rivett made you go down there, did he?” Sandra said, the edge returning to her voice.
“No, he din’t, actually. It was that Ward’s idea. Sort of threw me, the idea of going back there, but he’s only doing his job, in’t he? Thought I better do my best to help him out. He do come across like a decent bloke and all.”
“So what did he need to talk to you about last night, then?” Sandra, withdrawing her hands, wasn’t going to let this subject lie. “Len Rivett, I mean.”
But Gray just put his head in his hands and said nothing.
Sandra stared at him for a long minute, while decades-old unanswered questions and suppressed emotions swirled back
through her mind and her heart.
“Paul,” she said, in a much softer voice. “There’s something I in’t never told you. About Edna, Edna Hoyle. You know I used to do her hair for her, every week.”
Gray looked up at her from between his fingers.
“You used to think she were a right old battleaxe,” Sandra went on, “but I come to realise that were all a front with her. She din’t have a very happy life, and the reason she fussed about her hair the whole while was because it was like her armour, her way of facing the world. Oh, she had a nice house and a lot of money, but I don’t think she had any love from that husband of hers. And in that last year she lost everything she held dear. First that was her little dog and then her granddaughter …” Sandra’s voice trailed off for a moment and she stared into space, shaking her head. “She was like a zombie by the last time I saw her. Which was the last day that anybody saw her.”
Paul stared at his wife, the face he’d loved for all these years, a softness coming over her features as she spoke, pity in her eyes.
“Yeah,” she said, “that’s right. Edna come to have her hair done that day. Friday afternoon, three o’clock, same as usual. She wanted the whole works, even though it weren’t that long since I’d last done her. I spent ages getting it all right, ’cos I knew what she’d been through. Thought I could make it better for her, somehow. She give me an enormous tip that day, ten quid, and told me she din’t know what she would ever have done without me. She knew what she was doing, all right. Edna wanted to leave the world looking her best. And, d’you know …” Tears sprang into Sandra’s eyes. “I in’t never been able to spend that money, Paul. It’s still in an old purse,
up in one of my drawers upstairs. One of them big old ten quid notes what would have been more like fifty to us in them days.”
Gray put his hand over hers and this time neither of them moved away. Both were lost in a reverie of the past, of Edna Hoyle’s funeral and the shock that this matron of Ernemouth society could have taken her own life. Memories that shook something else loose, that had been long buried in the recesses of Gray’s mind.
“Why din’t you tell me?” he asked.
“You had enough on your plate, din’t you?” she said. “But I’m telling you now. Secrets can kill, Paul, I seen it happen to Edna with my own eyes. And whatever Len Rivett think he’s got on you, he won’t have – if you can just tell me.”
“Samantha Lamb,” Mr Pearson’s ice-blue eyes glanced up from the register.
“Here,” came the muted reply.
She didn’t look up as she answered him and, as the form teacher’s gaze settled on his pupil’s head, he understood why. He continued through the rest of his list, gauging as he went the atmosphere of this Monday morning, honing in on the two knots of tension that had been steadily growing within his domain since September.
Both Miss Carver and Miss Lamb appeared to have had tiring weekends, the dark shadows under their eyes not entirely the work of make-up alone. Dale Smollet sat back in his seat, staring at the ceiling, his chin squared and his mouth a tight line. Along with the improvements in Smollet’s definition of what uniform rules actually meant, he was maintaining his distance from his former friends in the desks behind him. Complaints against Smollet had receded this term, his marks improving exponentially.
The same couldn’t be said for Reeder and Rowlands, the former of whom was red in the face with the effort of
containing his sniggers.
Closing the register, Mr Pearson stood up and walked around to the front of his desk. “Stand up please, Miss Lamb,” he said.
“What?” Samantha looked around startled, as if another Miss Lamb would suddenly appear to take her place. Two dots of colour appeared in her cheeks.
“I mean you, Samantha,” Mr Pearson nodded. “Stand up so I can see you.”
With a grimace, Samantha got to her feet, keeping her head bowed.
“Head up!” Mr Pearson snapped. Involuntarily, Samantha obeyed.
The teacher let his critical gaze linger over her for a few seconds, while a low level of excitement grew within the room, the anticipation of a good telling-off.
“Could you come out the front please, Miss Lamb, and face the class.”
Anger flared in her eyes, but she did as she was told, her face now bright crimson.
“Now then, Mr Rowlands,” Mr Pearson directed his gaze to the fuzzy-headed Lurch lookalike grinning at the back of the class, “I’d like you to come out here too.”
Rowlands pointed at his chest, feigning “what, me?” outrage.
“I need your help for a little demonstration,” Mr Pearson said.
Realising it was not him who was in trouble for once, Rowlands got out of his seat, throwing a sarcastic glance back to Smollet as he swaggered down the aisle. Smollet parried the challenge with a hard stare, a flush travelling up his neck.
“Now, if you’d like to stand next to Miss Lamb,” the teacher directed, “so we can all see you. That’s right.”
Satisfied, Mr Pearson turned to Samantha, lifting up the side of her hair that she had let flop down over her ears in a vain effort to conceal what lay beneath.
“What we have here,” he said, “is what I would call a bit too much of a close shave. Now,” he moved around the back of his pupils to stand beside the smirking suedehead, “Mr Rowlands here knows exactly what the limits of school rules are, don’t you, Shane?”
“Yes, sir,” said Rowlands, as if he were the model of decorum. He was enjoying this game as much as almost everyone else.
“Which is why he always makes sure to keep his hair,” Mr Pearson rubbed his hand over the top of the boy’s head, “neatly trimmed to half an inch. In’t that right?”
“Sir.” Not looking so pleased with himself now, Rowlands blushed, putting his own hand up to straighten out his perceived messing of his buzzcut. A murmur of laughter travelled round the room. Deborah Carver joined in with it. Dale Smollet did not.
“I’d like you to observe, Miss Lamb,” said the teacher. “I don’t want to see any part of your hair go any shorter than what Mr Rowlands has on his head,” he raised his eyebrows, “no matter how inventive the rest of your latest style may be. Which means you’ll have to stay here with me when the bell goes and you won’t be coming back to school until you’ve reached the same level of decency as Rowlands here. Understood?”
As if on cue, a loud clanging commenced.
* * *
Edna put the phone down slowly, the conversation she had just had with her daughter still not quite sunk in. She had been getting on so much better with Amanda recently, had even begun to see the good side of Wayne, that he really was rather a mature and thoughtful young man, his initial sullen demeanour a mask for understandable shyness. But she was hardly prepared for this.
For a start, Amanda had begun the conversation in a tone she had taken to adopting that Edna hadn’t yet got the hang of; one of matey confidence.