The Witch Maker (5 page)

Hallerton, however, had obviously been untouched by this revolution the internal combustion had brought about. The stone cottages still looked just as their builders had intended them to – squat, hunkering structures, groaning under the weight of oppressive stone roofs. There were no picture windows recently added here. No electric doorbells replacing the blunt metal knockers. The Venetian blind had not secured so much as a foothold in this village where mock-lace curtains still reigned supreme.

The Witch Maker's barn stood perhaps a hundred yards from the edge of the village proper. Like the rest of the buildings in Hallerton, it had been built from stone quarried not three miles from the spot on which it stood. Yet though it was no taller than any of the cottages, it somehow managed to seem more imposing and formidable. In front of the barn stood a sheep pen which looked as if it had been thrown together from any material which came readily to hand, and was clearly intended to be only a temporary enclosure. Inside the pen, half a dozen sheep were nibbling at a pile of freshly cut grass.

‘What's this place used for when they're not makin' the Witch?' Woodend wondered aloud.

This question, like so many of the previous ones he'd asked, seemed to confuse Constable Thwaites. ‘I'm not sure I know what you mean, sir,' he said. ‘They're
always
makin' the Witch.'

The constable pushed on the heavy oak door, and it swung open just wide enough for the three of them to enter.

The barn was a dark, dank place, full of shadowy corners. There were a few largish gaps in the wall, through which sunlight had managed to struggle into the building, but as if exhausted by the effort, the rays fell only weakly on the compacted earth floor.

Most of the effective illumination was provided by half a dozen oil lamps, which filled the air with the stink of paraffin. Smoke rose from these lamps – grey snakes of it – and slithered through the air before wrapping itself around the blackened rafters of 400-year-old dead oak. It was, Woodend thought, the perfect location in which to make a Hammer Horror film.

There were three people in the barn – a older man, a younger man and a girl. The men were bent over a large workbench. The girl was sitting somewhat apart from them, on an up-turned orange crate. All three glanced up to look at the new arrivals, but the two males, at least, showed very little interest when they saw who those new arrivals were.

The older man was thick-set and middle-aged, and even in the gloomy light of the barn it was possible to see that he bore a remarkable resemblance to the corpse that had only recently been cut down from the Witching Post. The younger man had not yet fully developed the shape he would assume as a mature adult, but was broad and well muscled. On the evidence of his stub nose, broad forehead and rough jaw line, there was little doubt that he was the older man's son.

The girl was something else! She had long golden hair. And deep blue eyes, which were blank now – but could probably express a world of meaning when she wanted them to. Unlike the men's noses, hers was long, slim and delicate. Her mouth was wide, and her lips were inviting – or perhaps pleading. Woodend had long since stopped being attracted to young girls, yet he was forced to admit to himself that she was one of the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen.

The older man spoke. ‘Somethin' the matter here, Constable Thwaites?'

Somethin' the matter? Woodend repeated silently. Your brother's just been murdered – that's what's the matter!

‘This is Mr Woodend, Tom,' Constable Thwaites said. ‘
Chief Inspector
Woodend.'

‘Oh aye,' Tom Dimdyke replied, clearly unimpressed by both the man and the title.

‘Mr Woodend would like to ask a few questions,' Thwaites continued uncertainly.

‘There's nothin' of importance I can tell him, an' I've no time for idle chit-chat,' Dimdyke replied.

‘Don't you care who killed your brother?' Woodend asked.

‘Of course I care,' Dimdyke said angrily. ‘But findin' our Harry's murderer can wait.'

‘It can
wait
!'

‘Yes, it can. But Meg Ramsden can't. She's due for a burnin' three days from now.'

Woodend remembered the Witch Burning he'd attended as a boy, forty years earlier. The figure tied to the stake had been very realistic, he recalled – almost frighteningly human-like. Even now, he could still picture the long blonde wig she had been wearing – and the eyes which seemed to gaze helplessly into the jeering crowd. Yet even allowing for that, he could not see the task taking so long that a brother's murder had to be put to one side until it was completed.

‘Why don't you come an' see for yourself?' Tom Dimdyke said, reading his mind.

Woodend took a step forward, and Dimdyke and his son moved to one side so he could get a better look at what they had been working on.

Despite himself, the Chief Inspector let out a gasp of amazement. He had been expecting a crude dummy packed with bunched-up newspaper and other stuffing. What he was being presented with instead was a perfect representation of a human skeleton, which, had it not been made of wood, he would have been prepared to swear was the real thing.

‘Somethin' wrong?' Tom Dimdyke asked, with a half smile forming on his lips.

‘I ... I don't remember it as a skeleton,' Woodend said.

‘Oh, it won't be a skeleton when it's tied to the Witching Post,' Dimdyke told him. ‘We'll have fleshed it out by then.'

‘Fleshed it out,' Woodend repeated, feeling stupid.

‘There's a skin that goes over the frame. It's made out of cow hide. An' between the skin an' the skeleton, there's the fat of half a dozen sheep that have been freshly butchered.'

‘The sheep that are grazin' outside now?'

‘That's right. The ones that are grazin' outside.' Dimdyke laughed. ‘Waitin' to be led like lambs to the slaughter.'

‘But what I don't see—' Woodend said.

‘What you don't see is why, when the skeleton's covered with sheep fat an' hide, it has to be so accurate,' Tom Dimdyke said, completing his sentence for him.

‘That's right.'

‘Because it has to be as much like Meg as it's humanly possible to make it,' Tom Dimdyke said. ‘What do you notice about the fourth rib on the left side of her chest, Mr Policeman?'

Woodend bent down to take a closer look. A jagged line ran across it, as if it had been half sawn through. ‘It's cracked,' he said.

‘Aye, it is,' Tom Dimdyke agreed. ‘Meg Ramsden fell when she were bein' taken down from the cart. She broke her rib so badly that them that was holdin' her could feel it pokin' out.' He shook his head regretfully. ‘It was an accident. Nobody wanted to hurt her.'

‘Nobody wanted to hurt her! She was about to be burned at the stake, wasn't she?'

‘That was necessity, not punishment. Anyway, as I were sayin', she fell an' broke her rib. That's why
this
rib's been prepared like it has – so it'll break like Meg's did just before she died.'

‘What's the point of that?'

‘It's the way it has to be.'

And it made sense, Woodend thought to his own amazement. In a way that he couldn't even begin to explain to himself, he fully accepted that it was essential the effigy had just the same broken rib – and broken in
exactly
the same place – as Meg Ramsden did when she was tied to the stake.

‘Now that
you're
the Witch Maker—' he said.

‘Me!' Tom Dimdyke interrupted. ‘You think
I'm
the Witch Maker?'

‘Yes.'

‘An' what
made
you think that?'

‘Well, I assumed that since you said you had a lot of work still to do on the Witch ...'

‘I do – more than you could even begin to imagine. But only under the supervision of my lad, who would have been Witch Maker four days from now anyway, even if Harry hadn't been killed.'

Woodend looked from Dimdyke to his son and back again – and saw the obvious pride that the older man had in the younger.

‘Me! Take over from Harry?' Tom Dimdyke scoffed. ‘You know nothin' about it. Bein' Witch Maker calls for
dedication
. We all have to make sacrifices for the Witch Burnin' in this village, but the Witch Maker an' his assistant make the greatest of the lot. The assistant builds his first Witch when he's ten.'

‘I've already told Mr Woodend that, Tom,' Constable Thwaites said, in an obvious attempt to ingratiate himself.

‘Then he builds another ... an' another ... an' another ...' Dimdyke continued, as if Thwaites had never spoken. ‘Until finally he builds one that's fit to take Meg's place at the stake. Do you think that's easy?'

‘No,' Woodend admitted. ‘I don't imagine it is.'

‘There's no childhood for the lad born to be Witch Maker. There isn't the time. But like I said, it's a sacrifice that has to be made.'

Woodend wondered how any man could willingly condemn his small son to such an undertaking.

‘Have you actually made a sacrifice
yourself
, Mr Dimdyke?' he asked caustically.

Tom Dimdyke nodded gravely. ‘Oh aye. Twenty year ago now. It was hard – but it was necessary.'

‘An' what form, exactly, did
your
sacrifice take?'

Dimdyke's eyes hardened. ‘That's none of your bloody business!' he said.

And Woodend realized that it
was
none of his bloody business – though not in the way that Dimdyke meant.

His
business, he reminded himself, was tracking down murderers who existed very firmly in the second half of the twentieth century. And with that realization came another. That something strange had happened to him in the previous few minutes. That almost without knowing it, he had been sucked into the mysteries of the Witch Making – into a world which had only vague points of contact with the reality he had known out in the sunlight.

‘What can you tell me about your brother's movements last night?' he demanded, reasserting the solid sense of self which he had carried around with him for most of his life.

‘I've told you once, I've got too much on my hands to waste time talkin' to you,' Tom Dimdyke said.

‘Maybe you've been so busy you haven't noticed that I represent the law,' Woodend said, aware that he sounded like nothing so much as a small child challenging an adult – and not giving a damn. ‘I'm not
askin
' for your co-operation, Mr Dimdyke. I'm
tellin
' you I want it. An' if you get in my way, I'll have this place sealed off until the investigation's over. Which will mean you won't be allowed in here at all, and there'll be no bloody witch to burn!'

Dimdyke gave him a gaze which would have turned a lesser man to stone, and made even Woodend start to wobble.

‘If I was you, I'd think twice before I started threatenin' somethin' like the Witch Burnin',' he said.

‘H ... help him, Dad!' the girl said, speaking for the first time. ‘All he w ... wants to do is find out who killed Uncle Harry. H ... help him!'

Dimdyke looked thoughtfully at his daughter for a moment, then turned to Woodend and said, ‘All right, what do you want to know?'

‘I've already told you. I want to know about your brother's movements last night.'

Dimdyke shrugged. ‘He would have been here. The Witch Maker never leaves the Witch alone in the week before the Burnin'.'

‘What about you?' Woodend asked Wilf Dimdyke. ‘Were you here as well?'

The young man nodded. ‘Yes.'

‘All night?'

‘No. I stayed until about half past eleven, then I went to the Black Bull for a couple of pints.'

‘You're not lyin' to me, are you?'

‘My lad doesn't lie!' Tom Dimdyke said angrily.

‘But the pub would have been closed by then,' Woodend pointed out.

‘No it wouldn't,' Tom Dimdyke said. ‘It's thirsty work bein' the Assistant Witch Maker – an' the pub doesn't close until he's slaked it.'

‘An' bugger the licensin' laws?' Woodend asked, interestedly.

‘There's laws an' laws,' Tom Dimdyke said. ‘In this village we know which ones matter – and which ones don't.'

‘It doesn't work that way,' Woodend explained. ‘Nobody gets to choose the laws they'll follow an' the ones they'll ignore.'

‘Yes, they do – at least in Hallerton,' Dimdyke said with certainty. ‘What do you think the Witch Burnin' is all about, if it's not to show that some things are above the law?'

‘Well, your ancestors certainly seem to have had that attitude,' Woodend agreed. ‘They disregarded the law – but they also paid the price!'

‘An' not just th ... them,' said the girl, with a sudden fierceness. ‘We're s ... still payin' for what they did, even now. An' we always
w ... will
.'

Even without the stutter, it would have been hard to say for certain whether her voice was full of anger or full of pride, Woodend thought. Perhaps it was a little of both.

‘So the last time you saw your uncle was at about half past eleven?' the Chief Inspector said, returning his attention to Wilf Dimdyke.

‘That's right.'

‘An' you didn't notice anybody suspicious hangin' about when you left?'

‘No.'

‘He wouldn't!' Tom Dimdyke said. ‘They're far too sneaky to be seen if they don't want to be.'

‘Who's too sneaky?'

‘The fairground folk.'

‘You think one of them's the killer?'

‘Who else could it have been?' Tom Dimdyke asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

T
he Green was a great deal quieter than it had been earlier in the day. The body had been removed in an ambulance, and then, no doubt as a result, the crowd had drifted away. Looking at the barriers fencing off a large section of the area – and at the two uniformed constables who were patrolling them – a newly arrived visitor might well have been forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about.