The Witch Maker (2 page)

He would not look her in the eye. Instead he turned to face the men from whose ranks he had so recently been drawn. ‘They are the words of the Devil,' he said in a frightened voice. ‘The Devil's own words, writ in his own hand.'

‘Then thou art the Devil himself, for it was thy hands which wrote it,' Meg told him.

Roger Tollance swallowed hard, and shook his head violently. ‘Not I,' he said.

‘How can thee say that when they have all seen thee do it?' Meg asked scornfully. ‘When they have all stood in this same room and watched thee scratch with thy quill?'

‘If my hand did make the marks, it was through no choice of my own,' Roger Tollance protested. ‘It was the Devil's will which was guiding me. But I am free of him now.'

‘Thee liest!' Meg protested.

But then Harold Dimdyke lifted his hand to silence her. ‘We have heard enough,' he said solemnly.

T
he hammering on the front door of the police house seemed like nothing more than a bad dream at first, and Constable Michael Thwaites – who had soon convinced himself that a bad dream was exactly what it was – turned over in his bed and hoped it would soon go away.

But it did
not
go away. Rather it grew ever louder and more demanding, until even a portly middle-aged police constable who valued his beauty sleep could no longer ignore it.

Thwaites rolled carefully out of bed. As his feet made contact with the cold linoleum, he promised himself – for perhaps the hundredth time – that sometime next week he'd get around to laying that roll of carpet which, for well over a year, had been propped up reprovingly in the corner of the bedroom.

The knocking continued – almost demented both in its force and rapidity by now.

Thwaites reached for his tartan dressing gown, which was hanging on a hook next to the bed. Now if he could only find his slippers ...

The man at the door seemed intent on waking up the whole village. Thwaites abandoned the search for his footwear with a deep sigh, and made his way carefully down the stairs.

He knew his visitor. Indeed, in a village the size of Hallerton, it would have been a miracle if he hadn't.

‘Now what's all this about, young Kenneth?' Thwaites asked sternly.

Kenneth Dugdale, who was the local milkman and couldn't have been called ‘young' for at least a couple of decades, gestured wildly with his hands.

‘Murder!' he gasped. ‘Out on the Green!'

‘Murder!' Thwaites repeated, wondering if this were all no more than a dream after all.

‘Tied to the Witching Post!' Dugdale said. He placed his hands loosely around his own neck and stuck out his tongue for a moment. ‘Strangled!'

Thwaites was suddenly more than aware of his own inadequacy. He was a local bobby, he told himself. He handled petty theft – not that there was much – and the failure to buy dog licences. He wasn't equipped to deal with this.

But there was someone who
was
equipped, he thought, as a sudden wave of relief washed over him!

‘Have you told the Witch Maker?' he asked the milkman.

Dugdale opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. He tried again, with the same result.

‘Have you told the Witch Maker?' Thwaites repeated.

Dugdale shook his head.

‘No?' Thwaites said angrily. ‘Why not?'

‘Because it
is
the Witch Maker,' Dugdale said, forcing the words out with almost superhuman effort.

The remnants of the morning mist were still swirling around the blackened stone Witching Post as Thwaites approached the Green. But even with the mist – and even from a distance – it was clear that the milkman had been right. A man was hanging limply from the post, and that man was none other than the Witch Maker.

‘What are you goin' to do?' asked Dugdale, who, much against his will, had been dragged back to the scene of the crime.

What
was
he going to do? the constable wondered.

He knew what most rural bobbies would do. They'd seize on this murder as an opportunity to get themselves noticed by the brass in Whitebridge. But he didn't
want
to be noticed. Like everybody else in the village, all he wanted was for the outside world to leave him alone.

‘Should I ... should I go an' ask his brother, Tom, to come an' deal with it?' Dugdale asked desperately.

Constable Thwaites was tempted – very tempted – to say yes, they should let Tom take charge.

Because though the man had no official position of any kind, some of the Witch Maker's authority had rubbed off on him – as the Witch Maker's authority
always
rubbed off on members of his immediate family.

But that wouldn't work!

It simply wouldn't work!

He was sure of that, because once before the village had tried to keep a violent death to itself – and had paid a heavy price for it!

‘You watch the body for a few minutes, will you?' the constable asked the milkman.

‘An' what will you be doin' while I'm standin' here?' Dugdale wondered worriedly. Then he saw that Thwaites was looking across the Green at the bright-red phone box, and his worry became a complete panic. ‘You're never goin' to ...' he gasped. ‘You're surely not thinkin' of ...?'

‘I don't like it any more than you do, but I don't have a lot of bloody choice, do I?' Thwaites snapped.

Before his resolution could fail him, the constable turned and strode rapidly towards the phone box.

Did it still work? he fretted as he closed the gap between himself and his salvation.

Say it had broken down – at some point in the ten years since it had been installed – would anybody have noticed? No one he knew had ever used it. Why should they, when all the people they could ever wish to talk to were no more than a short walk away?

He pushed the door, but the box wouldn't open. He tried again – and then a third time – before he realized that what he should have been doing was pulling, not pushing.

Once inside, he reached for the receiver with a hand which had visibly begun to shake, and lifted the instrument to his ear.

There was a dialling tone! Thank God!

With the index finger of his other hand, he began to dial. The number could not have been simpler – nine-nine-nine – yet twice his finger skidded and he had to dial again.

Finally, he was through. ‘Emergency,' the operator said, in a cool, reassuring voice. ‘Which service do you require, please?'

‘I ... there's been a ... the Witch Maker's gone an' got himself ...' Thwaites said helplessly.

‘Take a deep breath and start again,' the operator advised him. ‘Which service do you require. Police, fire or ambulance?'

‘Police!' Thwaites gasped. ‘For God's sake, get me the police!'

C
hief Inspector Charlie Woodend had a much pleasanter awakening than Constable Thwaites that June morning. The sun – playing softly on his cheek – began the process of bringing him round, and the sweet singing of the moorland birds outside his window completed the task.

He was aware of how light on his feet he felt as he made a cup of tea to take up to his still-sleeping wife, Joan, and of how caressing the air was as he walked out to his car. It might have fallen to his lot to have to deal with the nastier side of human nature, he reflected as he turned the ignition key – and to be supervised in that work by a couple of prats who couldn't tell their arses from their elbows – but whatever burdens were placed on him, there were some mornings when it seemed really good to be alive.

The feeling of well-being stayed with him all the way to police headquarters. True, he was held up for quite some time by road works – somebody had told him there were four thousand holes in Whitebridge, Lancashire, and, watching the council workmen fill in one of them with asphalt, he could well believe it. True, too, he would have rather the Chief Constable's car had
not
been parked in its allotted spot – would have preferred it, in fact, if Marlowe had been attending one of those conferences on senior-level policing which were always held conveniently close to a good golf course. But these were but minor irritations, and on such a fine day he was quite prepared to live and let live.

He smiled at the constable on duty outside the main entrance, and at various colleagues who were entering the building at the same time he was. He smiled at the desk sergeant.

Then the sergeant said, ‘Mr Marlowe would like to see you immediately, sir.'

And the smile melted away.

‘A bit late in this morning, aren't you, Charlie?' asked the Chief Constable, moving documents around on his desk in that irritating way that he had.

‘Road works,' Woodend explained.

Marlowe frowned. ‘Perhaps you should have taken that into account when you decided what time to set off from home. But I suppose that's neither here nor there at the moment.' He picked up one of the pieces of paper he had been shuffling. ‘Have you ever heard of something called the Hallerton Witch Burning?'

‘Aye,' Woodend said. ‘Takes place once every twenty years. Quite a spectacle, in its way.'

‘So you've seen it yourself?'

‘Not the last one. Couldn't make it. I was up to my neck in muck an' bullets at the time.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘The last one was in 1944, sir. There was a war goin' on, in case you've forgotten.'

Marlowe's frown deepened. He had spent his entire war in a cushy billet in Chippenham, and knew that Woodend
was well aware of the fact.

‘We were all a little inconvenienced during the period of hostilities,' he said frostily. ‘So, it was an earlier Witch Burning you saw, was it?'

‘That's right, sir. The one that happened in 1924, when I was no more than a nipper.'

‘Even so, you probably have more idea of what it's all about than I do.' Marlowe glanced down at the paper again. ‘Apparently, the chap in charge of it, who, for some reason, is called the Witch Maker—'

‘He's the one who makes the Witch,' Woodend supplied helpfully.

‘—this Witch Maker, was found murdered this morning. On the very spot, so it would seem, where this Witch Burning is to take place. There's already a uniformed team on the scene, led by a sergeant from Lancaster, but since time is pressing, I'd still like you to get up there as soon as possible.'

‘What do you mean?' Woodend asked. ‘Time is pressin'?'

‘The Witch Burning, which, as you've already pointed out, only happens rarely, is due to take place on Sunday, which is only three days away.'

‘Well, unless we can crack this case in record time, they'll just have to call it off, won't they?' Woodend said.

‘No, Chief Inspector, they will not,' Marlowe said firmly.

‘I'm sorry, sir?'

‘The Witch Burning will go ahead as planned.'

‘But it can't!' Woodend protested. ‘The place is crowded for a Witch Burnin'. The handloom-weavin' folk-art freaks travel from all over the country to see it. There's busloads of tourists who come an' rubber-neck. I can't have them tramplin' all over the crime scene.'

‘The Witch Burning is a major cultural event,' Marlowe said. ‘It reflects both the richness and the diversity of this county's history.'

‘You sound like you're quotin' straight out of some kind of pamphlet,' Woodend said.

‘I may be,' the Chief Constable replied. ‘But that does not alter the facts. I've had people –
important
people – ringing non-stop since the news broke. They all want the burning to go ahead – and so it will.'

‘Even if that means the murderer gets away with it?'

‘Hallerton's a small village, and it's obviously a local crime,' Marlowe said airily. ‘I doubt there can be more than a handful of possible suspects. It's surely not too much to ask that you pin the killing on one of them by Sunday, is it?'

‘An' what if I don't?' Woodend asked.

Marlowe smiled. It was not a pleasant sight. ‘Then I shall be forced to form a very unfavourable opinion of the way in which you have conducted the investigation,' he said.

T
he moorland road was not built for speed. It weaved and twisted its way around ancient property lines which had long since ceased to be of interest to anyone. It climbed, then dipped, then climbed again. At some points it was wide enough for two cars to pass each other comfortably, while at others it had barely the breadth to accommodate a single vehicle. Woodend seemed to have noticed none of this. He took the corners on two wheels and slammed his foot down hard on the accelerator whenever there was more than a few yards of open road ahead of him.

Sitting in the passenger seat of the Wolseley, Monika Paniatowski took it all calmly. She was, if truth be told, a bit of a mad bugger behind the wheel herself. Besides, she had learned from experience that when her boss was furious – as he undoubtedly was now – a few close encounters with dry-stone walls were just what he needed to calm him down again.

‘He wants me to have it wrapped up by Sunday,' the Chief Inspector said. ‘Wants it
pinned
on somebody – his words, not mine – by the time the Witch Burnin' gets under way.'

‘What exactly
is
the Witch Burning?' Paniatowski asked. ‘Does it have anything to do with the Pendle witch trials?'

They had begun to climb a fairly sharp slope, and the engine of the Wolseley groaned its displeasure at its driver's choice of gear. Woodend ignored the complaint.

‘No, it hasn't a lot to do with the Pendle trials,' he answered his sergeant. ‘In Pendle it might have been barbaric, but at least it was legal. It was the authorities from Lancaster who actually arrested the witches, an' the official executioner who hanged them. In Hallerton, on the other hand, it was more a case of do-it-yourself justice. The villagers themselves arrested Meg Ramsden, conducted the trial and carried out the execution – all within an hour.'