The Witch of Exmoor (24 page)

One of the long, low, mullioned windows had blown open, and was swinging and creaking. This was odd. Terry Zealley crossed the lumpy grass, and peered in. He could see a large table, laid with various objects, including a bottle and glasses, and several smaller tables, some also littered. It looked, as he was later to tell his mates, like the
Marie Céleste.
It was creepy. Again he shouted, into the damp interior. He could have climbed in, easily, over the low window-sill, but instead he went back to the sidedoor, and tried it. It was unlocked. He went in.

The house smelled of dereliction, but there were signs of recent occupation. Muddy boots in the hallway, a raincoat and a stick hanging from a peg, tins of dog food in a cardboard carton, a new-looking Calor Gas
bombe,
empty milk bottles, a plastic bag of wine bottles and fizzy-water bottles that looked as though they were awaiting a trip to a bottle bank. Terry backed out again, to explore the courtyard, the back regions. There might be somebody hanging about in the outhouses. In one of them stood an old grey Saab, with a broken wing mirror. It was unlocked. He opened the door, sniffed. It was stale, a smoker's car. A tin of boiled sweets sat on the dashboard, with a spectacle case and a box of tissues. Nothing remarkable there.

As he slammed the car door shut, hoping and fearing that the noise might attract attention, he heard a low whining, and saw, approaching, an old thin black and white dog. Terry, born and bred in a Devon village, knew that kind of dog: a scrounger, an outcast. He whistled at it, and it approached, its ears flat, eager, but keeping its distance. It would not come near his offered hand, but crouched, looking at him with its head tilted. Terry started back towards the house, but the dog did not want him to go. It looked at him and whined again, a mournful supplication, then stood up and set off towards the garden, stopping to see if Terry were following. Was it trying to take him towards his mistress's body, his mistress's grave? Was she lying in the woods out there with a broken leg?

Terry followed the dog, which led him down the shrubbery and through a gap in a hedge to a lower level of neglected kitchen garden and crumbling walls. The ground was thick and wet with autumn leafmould, and puffballs and parasols sprouted from the decay. Brambles thick with berry clambered and caught at him. Flies buzzed, for this was a sheltered spot, and somebody had been burning garden rubbish–he could see and smell the remains of a large bonfire. He approached, kicked at the charred sticks. It had been a large fire, for the blackened circle it had left was some five feet across. Grey-black logs, partly consumed, and soft mounds of finer ash. Terry kicked again, and ash rose into the air. Looking more closely, he could see the remains of what looked like thick wads of papers, whole boxes of papers, which had been heaped on to the pyre. Was it a recent fire? Was it his imagination, or could he feel a faint warmth? He kicked again, and fancied that a single spark flew upwards. A fire like that could smoulder for days.

The dog seemed satisfied with his inspection of the embers, and now suggested that Terry return to the house. Terry was not sure what he was meant to have noted; had the dog been indicating the scene of a crime? And were those mussel shells and splinters of bone that he could see in the ash part of the crime, or were they the remains of an innocent barbecue? He bent down, picked up a shell, rubbed it on his trousers, inspected it. It was neatly hinged, cross-rayed with brown and purple. Empty, sucked dry. It told him nothing. He followed the dog back towards the building.

He went in again through the sidedoor, and made his way down a long corridor to the large room he had seen through the open window. And there he found more clues. An abandoned meal, laid on the large table, with knife, fork, plate, a half-empty bottle of wine, a half-empty wine glass full of drowned flies. The end of a loaf, dusted with blue mould. A hard and shining cheese rind, a brown and withered apple paring. A bowl of winkle shells. An open book, propped against a kitchen-roll. Terry stared, sniffed, prowled. He discovered a clock patience, half played. A board laid out with coloured counters for a game which he did not know to be backgammon. A dried orange skewered with a knitting needle, and an adas, open at the Americas. Spooky, definitely spooky. A little brass pot full of burnt-down joss sticks. A three-cornered pub ashtray full of cigarette ends. And, if he wasn't mistaken, a half-open matchbox full of the weed. He picked it up, sniffed cautiously. Yes, of course. And a packet of Rizlas. Somebody here had been smoking substances. A rum old lady. And where the hell had she got to?

Miss Frieda Haxby: Deliver in Person.
Easier said than done. He smelled sorcery, he smelled witchcraft, as he was to tell his mates. He was tempted to open the package, to see if it contained a contract with the devil, but knew better than to risk his job by tampering. There weren't many nice jobs going in the South West, for an enterprising lad like Terry Zealley.

The skull gave him a turn. He hadn't spotted it at first, in the clutter of bric-à-brac, but eventually it managed to catch his eye. It stared at him from its deep eye-sockets, grinned at him with its four remaining teeth, warned him from its blaring absent nostrils. Yellow and pitted and slightly marked with grey and pink, it held its place for ever. What were those cracks in its cranium? Those stitched seams joining the plates above where its ears had been? Those deep slanting eyeslits? Had it ever lived, and how had it died, and why was it here?

Terry went out into the courtyard and ate one of his tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches. He didn't want to eat in that house. He'd thought he was hungry, but somehow it didn't taste as good as he'd expected. The Crosskeys Garage usually sold a good sandwich, but this wasn't up to the mark at all.

What to do next? Should he ring Mr Ffloyd on his mobile? Should he ring the police? Should he poke around a bit more in the hope of finding a corpse or a haul of grass?

Terry nosed around. The sandwich had restored perspective. He'd always wanted to find a dead body. Well, who hasn't?

He made friends with the skull, picking it up to speak to it: he was alarmed when its jaw dropped off, but he managed, guiltily, to reassemble it so it looked just the same as before. He inspected the little bird and animal skulls that surrounded it. One was a sheep's skull, he thought, one a badger's. There were some curled horns, and a few feathers. Had there been voodoo, had there been slaughtered chickens and dancing goats, had there been hanky-panky? He rather hoped so. He went upstairs, boldly, and followed the sound of humming (a refrigerator? a corpse in a freezer? a dehumidifier?) to discover Frieda's workroom. There was her word-processor, switched ori, and speaking quietly and patiently to itself. The screen was blank, but there was a line of pale green flickering writing at the top of the screen which said
EYEBOX PC
2000 8.3.1990
LAST USED
00.00.00
CURRENT INTERRUPTED. TO RECOMMENCE PRESS ENTER. TO DISCONTINUE PRESS ESCAPE
.

Terry found the keys marked
ENTER
and
ESCAPE,
but thought better of pressing either of them. He did not understand computers. This whole thing was getting out of hand. How long had that machine been patiently waiting for its mistress's return? Did it know where she had gone? Did it contain her farewell message, her suicide note?

He looked around him, found the globe and the binoculars, switched on the light in the globe so that all the nations of the earth and all its oceans glowed with blue and green and brown and desert gold. Importantly, from the look-out post, he raked the horizon through the powerful binoculars.

A small fishing boat chugged along westwards, over a grey and choppy sea. Was it a drug-carrying vessel, part of an international plot? Was the package for Miss Haxby a summons from her Godfather? Two tons of cannabis had been seized off Ilfracombe the month before, from a thousand-ton merchant ship called
Proteus,
on its way from Morocco. It had been a big story in the local and national press. Had Miss Haxby been the mastermind behind the fleet of bogus fish vans lined up to distribute this sinister loading? Was it from this very window that Miss Haxby had flashed her secret signals? For here, by the globe and the binoculars, stood a large, heavy waterproof torch, and an old-fashioned paraffin storm-lantern. He was surely on to something here.

The house was far too big to search, but on the way down he easily found what must have been Frieda Haxby's bedroom. A double bed, with a duvet heaped upon it, and piles of books and papers on the bedside table. A sea view. Another torch, a packet of cigarettes, a lighter, heaps of clothes upon a chair, several pairs of shoes lined up not untidily. No corpse in the bed: he lifted the duvet to look.

Frieda Haxby would never sign the document that he carried in his plastic satchel. She had vanished, to avoid it. She had gone for good. She was dead. So who should he ring, the police or Mr Ffloyd?

Of the two, the police seemed the more attractive option, the one which would yield him the most entertainment. He'd never had occasion to dial 999 on his mobile.
Could
you dial 999 on a mobile? Maybe mobiles didn't recognize real emergencies, maybe they only recognized privatized emergencies, financial emergencies. Well, now was the time to find out. Terry Zealley settled himself in the courtyard, in a sheltered corner where he thought reception would be good. He'd got his map reference ready. He was looking forward to his stint in the witness box. He punched in the magic numbers, and waited for a reply.

 

‘Disappeared,' echoed Gogo.

‘Yes,' said Rosemary, distraught, on the verge of unseemly laughter. ‘Disappeared. Vanished. A missing person. Or a Misspers, as they seem to be called in the West Country. They've got the coastguards out, searching the seaward side of the cliff. And the local constabulary are going through the house.'

‘Jesus,' said Gogo. ‘How fucking inconvenient. Have you told Daniel?'

‘I've left a message for him at chambers. He's in court.'

‘He won't be best pleased when he hears.'

‘You're right there. Can you imagine?'

‘Do the police know who it is they're looking for?'

‘I don't think so. She didn't have much of a social life up there, I don't suppose.'

‘Better keep this out of the press.'

‘Don't worry, I'm not going to put them on to it.'

‘What had I better do? Ring Daniel this evening? When does he usually get out?'

‘God knows. He's probably aiming to get back to the Farm, but this may stop him.'

‘One of us is going to have to get down there.'

‘It's
five hours.
I'm telling you. I suppose it's lucky it's the weekend.' ‘Lucky?' snorted Gogo, and laughed.

‘Gogo?'

‘Yes?'

‘I've just discovered I've got roaring high blood pressure. What does that mean?'

Gogo paused, changed tone. ‘Oh, nothing, probably. Work pressure. Wonder we haven't all got it. Don't worry. Look, I can't talk now, I've got a patient waiting. I'll ring you this evening. I promise.'

 

How gratified Frieda Haxby would have been had she been able to witness the consternation with which her family greeted the news of her vanishing, had she been able to hear the messages that ran backwards and forwards along the wires on that Friday night! Such touching distress, such urgency of response. Not all mothers would have created such a stir. How impressed she would have been by the speed with which her three grown and busy and important children managed to shed their weekend work and leisure engagements in order to hunt her down upon the moor!

It took them, it is fair to say, a whole evening of renegotiations, during which they spoke not only to one another but also to the West Somerset Police, the Devon Police, the Exeter Express Dispatch Service, the coastguard in Swansea (why Swansea?–they were not sure, but Swansea it was), Cate Crowe, and the old-fashioned family solicitor, Mr Partridge, whom Frieda had sacked over the VAT affair. They even spoke to Terry Zealley. They cancelled guests and rearranged meetings and collated their diaries and took money out of their banks. They left instructions with PAs and secretaries and clerks of chambers. Daniel personally rang to apologize to Sir Noel for letting him down over the briefing. It was a damn nuisance, said Daniel tersely to Patsy, as he packed his bag on the Saturday morning, but he couldn't afford not to go. Could he?

They were able to disguise their concerns as anxiety, and anxiety indeed was what they felt–why examine its springs or its quality too closely?

Daniel drove: Rosemary and Gogo sat together in the back. They had not travelled in a car together like this for many years. If ever. Would it have been easier had they brought one of the in-laws along, to dilute the thickness of their emotions? By unspoken consent they had agreed to travel alone, the three of them, leaving their spouses behind to guard the home front. Each had insisted that it would be unfair to involve those not of the blood in such a quest. Each had known quite well that shame and fear and greed, not selflessness, had inspired this prohibition. Patsy, David and Nathan were not fit to see the Palmers
in extremis,
they were not to be allowed to witness the ignoble chase. They would track Frieda down by themselves, and the three of them would confront her, alive or dead, without the help of marriage partners. This was an internal business, a family affair.

It was Gogo's view, which she expounded over a snack at the Gordano Service Station, that Frida was alive, and well, and had done a runner. It would have been just like her, she said, biting into an egg and cress baguette, to have left a false trail. She had faked a disappearance, and would turn up laughing in Monte Carlo or Uppsala or Rio.

‘This is disgusting,' said Rosemary, opening her ham sandwich to look for the ham. A thin ragged half-slice lay, flattened in a smear of mustard. ‘Shall I take it back and ask for another?' she asked Daniel.