Reginald Hill - Blood Sympathy

‘I’d like that,’ said Joe sincerely. ‘You were saying that Gerald probably told her. Who is her , Ms Baker?’

‘Who is her? I’ll tell you who her is, Mr Sixsmith.’

Eyes flashing, mouth stretched taut in a rictus of hate, Gwen Baker grabbed the Present-from-Paignton paperknife out of Sixsmith’s desk tidy and swung it high. His arms shot up to ward off the blow. But he wasn’t the target. The knife plunged down with such force it passed clean through the tabloid spread out on the desk and dug deep into the woodwork.

‘That’s her !’ spat Ms Baker. ‘That’s the bitch who’s trying to kill me.’

Joe’s gaze slid down the still quivering knife and saw that its point had neatly sliced through the cleavage of raven-haired beauty Meg Merchison (29).

It got worse.

Ms Baker quickly regained control, but the return to her cool, rational manner only heightened the craziness of what was to come.

‘She’s been having an affair with Gerald. Affair! For him, it was a one-night stand, nothing more. Meaningless. We accept such things in our marriage. We don’t exchange notes, nothing so louche as that. But we’re two adult people, leading lives which often set us far apart, and we both have strong needs. But that bitch wanted more. In fact she wanted everything. But it soon dawned on her that she wasn’t going to get it without a fight. Well, I was a match for her there, I tell you. I was well ahead on points. But I didn’t realize just how far she’d go, if pushed.’

‘The plane crash, you mean?’ said Joe, who was beginning to wonder what Butcher’s resentment would do if this was what her gratitude sent him. ‘She arranged for the pilot to be taken ill?’

‘Of course. How the hell else did she happen to be sitting out there with a video camera ready to record it all for her scrap book?’

‘You’ve told the police this, have you?’ said Joe hopefully.

‘Don’t be stupid! How much notice do you imagine they’d take?’

‘Well, I mean, they could find evidence, things I can’t begin to do. Presumably you suspect the pilot was poisoned and they can get a full medical examination, analyse samples …’

‘Poison? Who said anything about poison? She’d probably used a poppet.’

‘A poppet? Like a lathe-head?’

‘A lathe-head? What the hell’s that?’

‘It’s something to do with a lathe,’ said Joe cautiously. He usually felt it best to keep details of his past employment away from potential clients, though why he should be worried about alienating Ms Baker he didn’t know. He felt a strong pang of nostalgia for the tumult of the tool room, the smell of oil and hot metal, the shouted jokes and laughter of his workmates.

‘Is it? Very interesting, I’m sure. But this poppet I’m talking about, Mr Sixsmith, would be a small doll, made out of clay or wax or even rags, looking as much like the pilot, Arthur Bragg, as possible, and incorporating some of his hair or nail clippings or excreta, or something very closely connected with him. And when she saw the plane coming over she’d stick a needle into its belly and waggle it around. Normally that would kill, in which case I would certainly have died also. Only with her hate being directed at me, she couldn’t get a big enough surge for that, so she only made the poor man feel rather ill.’

She said all this in the kind of tone suited for delivery of a detailed analysis of automotive electronic statistics.

Joe got up and switched on his electric kettle. He needed a mug of hot sweet tea.

He said, ‘You’re saying this Meg Merchison is a witch, is that it?’

‘Not a term I care for, but use it by all means if it will tighten your grasp of the situation,’ said Ms Baker wearily.

‘And the reason she didn’t manage to kill Mr Bragg was that she was really aiming at you?’

‘That’s right. The poppet works by providing a focus for deep passionate hatred. But like I said, it’s me she hates, not Bragg, so she couldn’t generate a big enough charge to really knock him out.’

Joe put two tea-bags in his Chas’n’Di wedding mug and held it up invitingly to the woman. She shook her head.

‘If that’s the case,’ said Joe, ‘why bother with the pilot at all? Why not simply do a poppet of you and bite its head off?’

He looked at her triumphantly and for the first time she didn’t mock his triumph.

‘At last, an intelligent question,’ she said. ‘She knew it was no use trying to get at me direct. Don’t imagine she hasn’t tried. But I’m her match there. I’m well protected.’

She unclipped the pink brooch from her blouse and twisted the stone out of its setting to reveal that it was hollow. Inside Sixsmith saw a small wodge of grey stuff, like putty, into which had been pressed scraps and shards of God knows what, and Joe Sixsmith had no desire to share the knowledge.

‘You mean, you’re a … one of them too?’ he said.

‘I have some knowledge,’ she said, replacing the brooch. ‘Enough to deal with her kind in the normal course of events. But fighting over a man has never been my scene.’

‘So what’s all the fuss about?’ asked Joe, adding an extra spoonful of sugar to the four already in his tea. He needed the energy.

‘You mean, why don’t I just let her get on with it? I’ll tell you why. Because Gerald’s my husband and I don’t care to give him up, certainly not to a common little bitch like that. Also, in business matters we have a fiduciary relationship which makes it inconvenient to part company at the moment.’

Joe, who loved clarity above all things except Luton Town, studied this carefully before saying, ‘You mean, she’d not only get him, she’d get some of your cash?’

‘You could put it like that.’

He smiled his relief at getting back to something like firm ground.

‘So what do you want me to do, Ms Baker?’ he asked. ‘Get evidence that Meg Merchison’s trying to kill you by witchcraft?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped. ‘I need no evidence, and what evidence do you imagine you could get which would satisfy the police? I have problems enough holding my own with my chauvinist colleagues without giving them a field day by letting my name be linked publicly with a witchcraft scandal!’

‘So what do you want?’ asked Sixsmith.

She said, ‘She’s got power over Gerald, there’s no other way he’d get entangled with a creature like that.’

‘Blackmail, you mean?’ he said without much hope.

Ms Baker sighed and said, ‘Mr Sixsmith, you cannot blackmail a man into screwing you. No. She has a locket. It belonged to Gerald’s mother and that’s a very strong link to start with. Look, you can see it dangling between those gross paps in the picture.’

She had to withdraw the paperknife to reveal the heart-shaped locket nestling in Merchison’s cleavage.

‘It has a ruby cameo design, a cinquefoil, a very strong magical number and image. Inside there will be various items, we needn’t go into the details, suffice to say that with the right words spoken over them, they have real power.’

‘A love charm, you mean?’ said Sixsmith.

‘ Love! But yes, a love charm, if that helps you grasp what this is all about,’ she snapped. ‘What I want you to do, Mr Sixsmith, is get hold of that locket for me, and fast. This creature is quite mad. What happened yesterday was an open declaration of war. Why do you think she told the media about the video?’

‘So’s she could make a bit of money, I suppose,’ said Sixsmith wistfully.

‘No! So that I would know she’d caused the crash. All right, so she didn’t kill me, but she hopes that she can frighten me into submission by showing me how far she will go. Well, I won’t be frightened off, but if she escalates this thing into a full-scale psychic war, it could take all my time and energy to resist and I can’t afford to neglect my business like that. So the simplest thing for me to do is get Gerald back to his right senses for long enough to regain full control of all my finances. Once she sees he’s only worth the clothes he’s wearing—and I bought most of those—she’ll soon lose interest.’