The Witch Maker (14 page)

She seemed to have spent half her lifetime watching her brother at work, Mary thought. And, in a way, she had.

Wilf had become the Assistant Witch Maker when he was ten and she'd been eight. He'd been so excited about it, she remembered. And because she'd adored her big brother, she'd been excited too. So she'd taken her place on the orange crate – her little legs so short back then that they hadn't even reached the packed-earth floor – and watched as Wilf had been initiated into the skills which had been passed down from generation to generation.

Through her young eyes, she had witnessed the change that had gradually come over Wilf. The excitement had faded – worn away by the endless sanding and polishing – and had been replaced by gravity and earnestness.

Wilf never joked with her any more. He never enjoyed the things they used to enjoy together. The Witch Maker's Assistant, it seemed, had far too many responsibilities to be allowed to behave like a normal growing boy. And because of that, his sister had lost something too.

The door swung open, and their father entered the barn. He was red in the face, Mary noticed, and looked both troubled and angry. She wondered what had happened in the time between Constable Thwaites' urgent visit to the barn and that moment.

Tom gave his son a nod which came close to being a bow. Then he turned to his daughter.

‘It's been all arranged,' he said.

‘D ... Dad ...'

‘It's all been arranged, our Mary, an' there's no point at all in arguin' about it.'

Mary glanced at her brother, but he was still working away as if he'd heard nothing.

He'd tried his best to defend her the previous day, she thought, but then the mantle of his new post had only just been placed on his shoulders, and he had not yet fully understood how heavy a burden it was. Now he did, and with that knowledge he had ceased to be her protector.

He didn't belong to her any more. That was long and short of it. He belonged to the village.

‘You're to be there at eight o'clock,' her father told her, and when she said nothing, he added sharply, ‘Did you hear me?'

‘Y ... yes, Dad.'

‘Well, don't be late.'

‘Who'll be d ... doin' it?' she asked, feeling her lower lip start to tremble.

‘Lou Moore,' Tom Dimdyke said.

It could be worse, she tried to reassure herself. Lou Moore was a nice man – a kind man. He would do his best to make the whole thing as painless as possible. It might be just about bearable, if only ...

‘There d ... doesn't have to be anyone else there watchin', d ... does there, Dad?' she pleaded.

‘You know there does.'

‘But you'll g ... get what you want. You'll
all
g ... get what you want. Why d ... does it have to ...'

‘The sacrifice must be witnessed, just as it has always been.'

Mary turned towards her brother. Once, long ago, he had fought the biggest boy in school, merely because that bully had pulled his little sister's hair. Surely the obvious distress in her voice would awaken some of that old feeling now, even if he
was
the Witch Maker.

It had to! It just
had
to!

Wilf, as though he had heard nothing of the exchange – nothing of his sister's pleading and his father's determination – went calmly on with his work.

Hettie Todd and her mother sat on the steps of their caravan, shelling fresh green peas into an enamel pan full of cold water. They could have gone inside to do the work – the seats were more comfortable in the caravan, and the weather was not yet hot enough to make it particularly stuffy. But it was not the way of fairground folk to be enclosed within walls when there was no need to be.

‘I saw you talkin' to your mate Pat Calhoun yesterday, Mam,' Hettie said conversationally.

‘Did you, pet?' her mother asked, with seeming indifference.

That was not what she should have said
at all
, Hettie thought. It simply wasn't like Zelda to miss the chance to bring Pat into their conversation.

‘I wondered if it was me you were talking about,' she said.

‘Well, of course it was you we were talking about,' her mother said. ‘We're always talking about you. What else
would
we be talking about?'

She was lying, Hettie thought. ‘The thing is, you weren't looking at me – you were looking towards the village,' she persisted.

‘And is there any law that says that when we're talking
about
you, we have to be looking
at
you?'

This approach was getting her nowhere, Hettie decided. It was time to try another tack. ‘You like Pat, don't you?' she said.

‘He'd make you a good man,' her mother replied, evasively.

‘That's not what I meant, Mum. I meant that you
respect
him – that you
trust
him.'

‘I should hope that I would trust and respect any man I'd want to see my daughter paired off with.'

‘And if you had a problem, would you go to him with it?'

‘
If
I had a problem – though I can't think of any problem I might have – then I probably would go to Pat. What makes you ask?'

‘You looked like you had a problem yesterday afternoon.'

‘You're imaginin' things, child.'

Hettie nodded, convinced she was now on the right lines – because her mother only ever called her ‘child' when she was starting to feel defensive.

‘Do you know anythin' about the man who was killed in the village yesterday mornin', Mum?' she asked.

Zelda shrugged. ‘How could I? As you know well enough yourself, we only got here the night before.'

‘But it's not the first time you've been here, is it?'

‘Possibly not.'

‘Does that mean that you think you
have
been here before, or that you think you
haven't
?'

‘If you're so interested, you'd better ask Mr Masters,' her mother said. ‘He's the boss. He's the one who keeps a record of where we go and where we don't.'

‘Did anything unusual happen the last time you were in Hallerton?' Hettie asked, taking her mother's refusal to neither deny or confirm as a confirmation in itself.

‘Like what?' Zelda asked.

Hettie frowned. ‘I don't know,' she admitted.

‘Well, then—'

‘But I think that
you
do.'

Zelda Todd placed the bowl she'd been holding on her knee down on the step. Then she stood up.

‘You can finish the peas on your own, can't you?' she asked.

‘I could if you wanted me to, but I don't see why—'

‘Good. Because I've got other business to deal with.'

‘What kind of business?' Hettie asked.

But she was talking to her mother's already retreating back.

S
tanding in the centre of the field where the funfair was sited, Woodend looked around with frank admiration at what had been achieved. The previous morning it had all seemed so haphazard that it could have been dropped where it stood by some unfriendly and disorganized giant. Now, less than thirty hours later, a definite order had been imposed. The caravans had been parked neatly in one corner of the field, the trucks which had pulled the heavy trailers in another. And in the middle of the field, the very heart of the funfair was very nearly completed.

With a nostalgia for his lost childhood, Woodend let his eyes rove over the attractions.

There was the Caterpillar – that grown-up version of a kids' merry-go-round – which first shrouded its passengers under a dark-green canvas and then took them on an undulating, sick-inducing journey into mock-terror, before finally depositing them safely right back where they had started from.

There were the bumper cars, which served no other function than to allow lads like the young Charlie Woodend to demonstrate how much they fancied young girls by crashing into them – and gave the girls, in return, the opportunity to either giggle seductively or to break hearts with their looks of disdain.

There were the stalls, offering fabulous prizes to anyone who could actually make a blunt dart stick in a specially hardened board or defy the laws of physics by getting one of the hoops to land where it needed to.

And there were the sideshow tents, which promised a myriad of delights: wrestlers who staged fights in which the clean-living lad always beat the masked bone-crusher; strippers, well past their prime, who shed far less of their clothing than the garish pictures outside might have suggested; freaks who owed their grotesque appearance more to bits of wire and plaster of Paris than they did to nature.

Once the customers poured in, it became a fantasy land, Woodend thought. But before then, it was something else entirely. Though it might not look like Hallerton or any of the other places it visited, it was still every bit as much of a village as they were.

The ‘village' headman, Ben Masters, was sitting on his caravan steps, picking his yellowed teeth with a matchstick. He seemed totally unaware of either the Chief Inspector's arrival on the scene or any of the construction work that was going on around him.

Which was, of course, total bollocks, Woodend told himself.

Villages like this one were not created by chance. There was a driving force behind all the hard graft which was taking place. There was a keen intelligence watching for any intruders who might threaten the community. And both that driving force and that intelligence were concentrated in the body of the man sitting on the steps.

It was only when Woodend was almost close enough to touch him that the fairground manager looked up and said, ‘Where's the Beautiful Assistant this afternoon?'

She was talking to the widower of the second of the most recent suicide victims, Woodend thought, but he was damned if he was going to tell Masters that. So instead, he just shrugged and said, ‘If I know women, she's probably off somewhere repairin' her make-up.'

Masters laughed disbelievingly. ‘Sergeant Paniatowski doesn't seem to me like the kind of woman who'd waste a lot of time paintin' herself, even if she needed to – which she doesn't.'

‘Fancy her, do you?' Woodend asked.

‘I'd have to be either a fool or a blind man not to,' Masters replied easily. ‘But I like to keep my admiration at a distance.'

‘An' why's that?'

‘I'm older than I look,' Masters said. ‘At least, I am inside here,' he continued, tapping his head. ‘There's a lot of effort goes into bringing pleasure to folk. It ages you. I haven't felt the need of a woman for years.'

‘But when you did, where did you go to find one?'

Masters chuckled. ‘Not only has Sergeant Paniatowski told you what passed between us this morning, but you actually bothered to listen to her.'

‘Aye,' Woodend agreed. ‘Unlike some chief inspectors I could mention, I happen to think that
my
sergeant might have somethin' useful to say now an' again. So where
did
you find your soldier's comfort when you still felt up to it? In the arms of the lasses who were workin' on the fairground? Or from the girls who lived in the towns an' villages you visited?'

‘Maybe a bit of both,' Masters said cautiously.

‘An' what about Stan Dawkins? Where did he choose to sow his wild oats?'

‘I was wondering when we'd get around to that.'

‘I'm sure you were,' Woodend agreed. ‘An' what's the answer?'

‘He was seeing a girl who worked on the fair,' Masters admitted, ‘but that's not to say he couldn't also have gone into Hallerton on the night he was killed, looking for a bit of fresh.'

‘This girl on the fair he was seein'? Is she still around?'

‘Now that'd be unlikely, wouldn't it?'

‘That's no answer, an' you know it as well as I do.'

‘I feel responsible for all the people who work for me,' Masters told the Chief Inspector. ‘It'd probably be stretching things a bit to say I'm like a father to them, but I sometimes see myself as a bit of a kindly uncle.'

‘But a kindly uncle who couldn't stop Stan Dawkins gettin' killed,' Woodend pointed out.

Masters looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You're not above putting the boot in, are you?'

‘Only when it's necessary,' Woodend said. ‘Speakin' of which, I expect my sergeant's threatened you with findin' all kinds of safety violations on the fairground if you don't cooperate with us.'

‘But just in case she forgot to, you'd like to make the same threats now?'

‘That's right. But there is a difference.'

‘What kind of difference?'

‘She'd have to get clearance to carry out
her
threats, an'
I
don't. I could have you closed down in ten minutes.' Woodend paused. ‘What did you say that girl Stan Dawkins was seein' was called?'

‘I didn't.'

‘But you will, won't you?'

‘Don't have much choice, do I? Her name's Zelda Todd.'

‘An' is she still with you?'

‘What do you think?'

‘I think that if she'd been long gone, it wouldn't have been half so difficult to prise her name out of you.'

‘You've got your answer, then, haven't you?'

Woodend took out his packet of cigarettes, offered one to Masters, took one for himself, and lit them both up. ‘I'm goin' to want to talk to her, you know,' he said.

‘I suppose you are,' Masters said fatalistically. ‘Thing is, she's not here at the moment.'

‘No? Then where is she?'

‘Gone into Preston, with one of our drivers. It's where we have to shop, you see – because the buggers in this village won't sell us
anything
.'

‘Aye, I've seen that for myself,' Woodend agreed. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘She's not done a runner, has she?'