Eva Ibbotson - Not Just a Witch

Heckie was beside herself, running backwards and forwards with medicines and blankets, and it was the garden witch who said: ‘Wait! I’ve seen this before. Seen it with Mad Millicent’s familiar.’ She scratched her head, but Heckie was far too worried to clip off the green shoot that burst out between her eyebrows. ‘The fiercest witch in the east, she was, and her familiar with her.’

The cheese wizard nodded. ‘That’s right. He was a lizard and he’d come on just like that when there was some evil in the place. And Wall-eyed William’s familiar too. An eagle, he was — a real brute and he used to come out in great red boils under his feathers. A proper help it was to William.’

‘You mean…’ Heckie looked up and she was blushing. ‘Are you saying…? Oh, surely not. I’m only an ordinary witch. Surely I couldn’t have made one of… you know… them ?’

The wizards and witches nodded and looked at Heckie with a new respect.

‘Made what?’ Joe wanted to know.

‘A detector! A wickedness detector! A familiar who comes over queer when he meets anyone wicked!’ cried Heckie, clapping her hands, and Daniel felt quite cross. How could she look so pleased when the dragworm was suffering? Though actually he was beginning to look a little better: some of the black was returning to his hair and the spots were fading. ‘A wickedness detector. Oh my, oh my! So we’ll always know for certain whether somebody’s evil or not! Well, there’s nothing to stop us now!’

‘Yes, but who made him come out in spots like that?’ asked Joe.

Everybody looked at everybody else. In the silence, they could hear the parrot still asking: ‘Where’s Sam? Where’s Sam?’

‘Of course!’ cried Heckie. ‘The woman in the shop. The woman with the white Rolls-Royce. After her, children! Find out everything you can about her. Everything!’

It didn’t take the children long to trace the owner of the white Rolls-Royce. Her name was Mrs Winneypeg and she was one of the richest women in Wellbridge. She didn’t just have a white Rolls-Royce, she had a white BMW and a white Jaguar. She lived alone in a house with seven bedrooms and a private swimming pool and owned seven fur coats, three of them mink.

And she made her money looking after old people.

‘But that’s a good thing to do, surely?’ said Daniel when they had reported back to Heckie. ‘So why was the dragworm so ill when he saw her?’

Could the dragworm be wrong? Nobody thought so, but it was odd all the same.

‘We’ll just go on sniffing round,’ said Heckie. ‘For one thing, I’d like to know why she sold that parrot.’

For the parrot still said nothing except: ‘Where’s Sam?’ and had to be coaxed to eat.

The way Mrs Winneypeg looked after old people was to run a number of rest homes where they could go when they were too old or ill to look after themselves. They were called the Sundown Homes and it so happened that one of them was at the bottom of Daniel’s street. It was made up of three old houses knocked together and from the front it looked nice enough. The brass plate was brightly polished, the paintwork looked new.

But now Daniel slipped in to the alleyway behind the houses, where no one ever went, and here it was very different. The windows were dirty, the dustbins were overflowing, and one could see the wispy grey heads of the old people herded together in a dingy room.

The children began to ask questions in the neighbouring shops and to hang round the home to see if they could find out more, but it seemed that nobody wanted to talk about Mrs Winneypeg and her Sundown Homes. And then, on the third day, when Daniel just ‘happened’ to be loitering there after school, the door burst open and a nurse in a blue uniform came stumbling down the steps and bumped right into Daniel. She was Irish and very young, and she was crying.

‘That place — that awful place!’ she sobbed. ‘I can’t stand it any more. I’m leaving.’

And because Daniel had a listening sort of face and she had to talk to someone, she told him what it was like in the building she’d just left. She told him about the bullying and the disgusting food and the way the old people were sent up to bed at six o’clock to save the heating. She told him about Miss Merrick who so loved flowers and had been told she could have a window-box, and then when she spilled a little bit of earth because her hands were shaky, Mrs Winneypeg had screamed at her and taken the window-box away. She told him about Major Holden who’d fought in two world wars and asked for some boot polish because he liked to keep himself neat even if he couldn’t see too well, and who’d been locked in his room for making a fuss.

‘She’s a fiend, that Mrs Winneypeg — she ought to burn in hell,’ said the nurse, mopping her eyes. ‘All her homes are like that and the poor old things never get out once she’s got hold of them. She takes their pension books and their savings and burns the letters they write, so no one ever knows.’

‘Can’t the council do anything?’ Daniel asked.

The nurse shrugged. ‘People have complained, but she’s buttered up the councillors for years. I meant to stick it out, but that old chap and his parrot was the last straw. Such a nice bloke — been in the navy all his life and no bother to anyone. He only came because she said he could keep his parrot, and now she’s told him it’s dead. You should see him — he won’t last a month the way he’s going. And the parrot isn’t dead! I saw the chauffeur put it in the boot of her car. She’ll have flogged it or torn its feathers out for a hat.’

‘Is his name Sam?’ asked Daniel. ‘The gentleman with the parrot?’

The nurse blew her nose and looked at Daniel. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is.’

So now they knew why the dragworm had come out in those dreadful boils. Mrs Winneypeg was what is called a Granny Farmer, and there is probably nothing more unpleasant in the world.

But Mrs Winneypeg was about to get a big surprise.

A week later, a new resident arrived at the Wellbridge Sundown Home. Miss Smith was ancient and tottery and deaf — and she was very rich. Mrs Winneypeg was waiting to greet her and her greedy eyes lit up when she saw the poor old thing helped out of the taxi by her great-nephew. She wasn’t going to give any trouble, that was certain! And the nephew and his family were off to Australia, she’d said on the phone, so there’d be no relatives to poke and pry.

‘It’s very kind of you to let me stay in your lovely home,’ quavered Miss Smith — and winked at Daniel. Madame Rosalia might be a show-off, but there was nothing she couldn’t do with make-up. Heckie’s wrinkles would have fooled anyone; her hair was white; brown blotches covered her skin.

‘Not at all. I’m sure you’ll be very happy with us,’ said Mrs Winneypeg in a plummy voice. ‘You’ve brought some money with you? Cash, I like — it makes less work.’

Miss Smith fumbled in her handbag.

‘That’ll be fine,’ said Mrs Winneypeg, grabbing some notes. ‘Now if your dear nephew will just say goodbye, we’ll soon make you comfortable.’

An hour later, Heckie was in a small bedroom in which four beds had been shoved so close together that you could hardly move between them. Three wispy-haired ladies in nightdresses sat one on each bed, shivering with cold.

‘You shouldn’t have come,’ said one of them hopelessly. ‘It’s a dreadful place this.’

‘Oh, I expect we can soon get things cheered up,’ said Heckie. But she was so angry she could hardly speak. She’d decided not to do anything till she was sure that the home was as bad as the young nurse said. Now she knew that it was worse. She’d seen Major Holden tied to his chair because he liked to wander about and the staff said he got in the way. She’d seen old Sam force-fed with revolting stew because he wouldn’t eat since he lost his parrot and Mrs Winneypeg didn’t want him to die and bring the doctor to ask awkward questions. She’d seen a woman as thin as a skeleton slip on the bathroom floor and be scolded for carelessness…