Witch Hunt

Chapter Two




Tuesday, 17th October

It began like a drip in a far off place. A vast echoing chamber. Or a faltering trickle into a dark yawning cave. First sibilance. Just off a hiss. Followed by a wheezy gasping sound. ‘Ssss – rhey.’

Was it drawing closer or becoming louder? It was certainly getting clearer, wafting to me on an unfelt breeze. ‘Sorr- rhey.’ Puffed out in tones of torment. Fleshed out with a sob.

Falling on my ears, with a cold snatch of breath I got it. The single word. And it was on my lips. ‘Sorry.’

Then I was sitting up in bed, awake. Fully alert. Despite the lightness of the cotton nightie sweat had pooled under my breasts. I was gulping down air as if I had only just reached the surface of some dark, subterranean lake. The bed sheet was twisted around my legs like a boa constrictor trying to eat me alive and my heart was banging like mad.

What was that?

Had I said that? Or was someone in the flat?

I strained to listen into its depths.

The hum of the fridge. The trees shushing in the breeze outside my window. The sound of roadworks further up the hill. A door slamming in the neighbour’s flat. The deceleration of a train pulling into Chalkwell station.

But nothing else. No one in the flat.

It must have been me.

Well, I knew I had just articulated the word – said it out loud as I was coming into consciousness. But I had a notion that I was merely repeating someone else’s plaintive cries.

Sorry.

It had happened several times since the funeral. Each time I had woken up from a nightmare I couldn’t remember, with the absolute conviction I was not on my own.

But then, the mind has a funny way of dealing with grief.

And of course, I was sorry.

Terribly.

The guilt was almost unbearable.

I knew Mum had been trying to talk to me. That last time we were alone at the hospice. I’d walked in to find her sleeping, so had kissed her on her forehead. Her hair was spread like a black fan across her pillow. She had been a young mum, and if you looked past the lines the illness had carved on her face, with her perfect semi-circles of long dark lashes and her thick black hair, she was still as serene and beautiful as a Renaissance Madonna.

But she’d woken at my touch and when she realised it was me she’d made a big thing of trying to meet my eyes. At first I thought she said, ‘Sadie – fit.’ It was difficult to tell. Her speech was much impaired since the last stroke. She’d been left with paralysis on the left side of her face and was unable to move her left arm.

‘You okay, Mum?’

She was frustrated. ‘Ift.’

I said nothing, waiting for her to try another attempt.

She struggled up a bit. I reached behind her and helped her sit up onto the pillows, plumping them carefully as she rested her neck.

She took a breath and looked at me. Her mouth opened, tongue lolling to the front. ‘Gift.’

‘A gift?’

She nodded.

‘Okay. Who for?’

She moved her good hand in my direction. ‘You.’

‘You have a gift for me?’ I looked at the bedside table. Glass, hand cream, anglepoise lamp.

‘No. Come.’ She paused for breath. ‘To … you.’

‘I have a gift coming?’

She expelled a lungful of air and shuddered. I could see the frustration scratching across her face. ‘Speak Dan.’

Dan was my mum’s boyfriend of about twelve years. A nice chap with a heart of gold. But he’d gone AWOL a couple of days before and Mum was in a real state about it, naturally. The poor woman was totally incapacitated, unable to do anything to find out where he was.

Thing was, Mum and Dan had a lot of things in common. They were both educators; both furious campaigners for human rights; and they both loved me. But, and this was a big but, they had both experienced long periods of depression. Mum’s strokes had been a result of high blood pressure, which, in turn, it was suggested, had been brought about by her often high state of anxiety. See, Mum didn’t have bouts of sadness, she had episodes of deep clinical depression, some of which developed into psychosis and paranoia. Just like Dan. In fact, that’s where they had met – in a private clinic. Therefore we were all concerned about his absence. I shook my head and said, ‘We still can’t find him, Mum. He’s not at work. He must have had to go somewhere urgently.’

Mum did a shrugging sort of action with her good side and said, ‘Sadie.’ She made a move that looked like she was trying to shake her head, making an effort to form her lips and shape the words. Though her dark eyes were alert I couldn’t understand her, so I took her good hand and placed a pencil in it. Mum’s elegant fingers groped for the pad of paper that never left her side. It took her a while.

Her writing was getting worse. When she finished I tried to decipher what she’d written. I could make out a ‘B’ then an ‘O’ but the figure after it could have either been an ‘X’ or a ‘K’.

I looked at Mum. ‘Box?’

Mum’s lips suckered in. She looked more fragile than ever. Then she let out a wail and started to judder, her head shaking back and forth. It was so frustrating for her.

With the functioning side of her face she tried to speak. ‘Earme.’ Working hard to take in a good breath of air, she swallowed and said, ‘Portent.’ She was really het up. I hated to see her like that but I just couldn’t understand her meaning.

‘Sorry, sorry.’ I focused on the writing. Perhaps it wasn’t an X but an O and a K? ‘Book?’

She made a sound like the air going out of a balloon. I leant in and smiled at her. She was sweating and her hair was messed up. I pushed a couple of black strands away from her eyes. Despite everything, she still had only a dusting of grey.

Stiff creases divided her forehead. Her good hand was clenched into a fist. She was working out how to say what she needed to tell me.

I cut in, trying to relieve her of the effort. ‘Okay, the book. I know you don’t like the idea but Mum …’

She made a strangled sort of sound, then slumped back into her pillows, giving up communicating. But her hand crept into mine. I squeezed it. Gently.

See, I finally got my book commissioned ten days previously. It wasn’t life-changing but it was definitely a good deal. In between the various loops and curves of my volatile career as a freelance journalist, I had been writing a book on the Essex witches.

Mum always said she thought we were distantly related to one. And there was this song, an old Essex folk ballad, The Weeping Willow, which Mum thought was connected to an ancestor. And there was a game in the playground: the kids would form a circle around one blindfolded child, the ‘witch’, and then you’d all dance around. When the verse ended the blindfolded child would try to catch one of the circle dancers. Whoever they caught was out. I can’t remember all of it but there are a couple of verses that stick:

They kicked them off and laid them down

And put them in the cold hard ground

The summer wind blew long and chill

The Divil bade her do his will

Pale and wild pale and wild

The witch did down the child

She picked her up and put her down

The willow’s leaves wrapped round and round

Her evil cries filled the air

And so did end the bad affair

Pale and wild pale and wild

The witch did up end the child

I think it was the song that got me interested, even as a child. That, my mother’s proud connection to it, and the fact that Essex had so many witches. There was folklore and myths about them everywhere I turned. And, if I’m honest, I did seek them out. I was always a bit of a spooky girl, fascinated by rather macabre stories and shrunken heads. My dad tried to get me interested in Roald Dahl, but to his great disappointment I quickly cast off Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in favour of Tales of the Unexpected. As I got older, I started delving into the witch hunts. It turned out to be rather sobering. In fact I soon became both horrified and hooked. The statistics were phenomenal: between 1580 to 1690 the combined total of indictments for witchcraft in Hertford, Kent, Surrey and Sussex was 222. In Essex alone over the same amount of time it was 492 – although recent studies put the number at 503. More than most other counties in the UK, by a long stretch. All those poor souls put to death by superstition. And did we know their names? No. We knew about the Witchfinders: James I, Matthew Hopkins, John Stearne. But if you were asked to name one of their many victims you’d be lost.

When I read about their stories I was revolted. They stayed with me. I just couldn’t get them out of my head.

I’d been a freelance writer for several years and I guess a book is always floating somewhere in the back of your mind. But it seemed almost like the idea just sprang into my mind, fully formed, like it had been nestling in the shadows all the time. I spent some time on a synopsis and had pitched it to a fair few publishers. I knew Mum was proud of me – she had wanted to write herself and even considered going into publishing when she was a teenager. She once told me she did work experience but had been put off. She wouldn’t say why. But she was pleased, I think, in that way that parents are, that I was doing what she had failed to. Anyway, the book was not met with the unbridled enthusiasm I had expected. In fact, I had had a series of rejection letters and was just about to go back to the drawing board, when I got a call from Emma of Portillion Books. She loved my sample chapter, and what she called my ‘fresh new unstuffy voice’. The proposal, she said, had been presented in an acquisitions meeting and got a rapturous reception. Consequently, I had been given a contract.

I was elated.

But there was a fly in the ointment: Portillion Books were the literary part of the Robert Cutt empire. The owner of a fleet of fast food restaurants, a football club, a few social networking sites, several magazines and two new private academies in London, Cutt was a powerful tycoon and a generous donor to the Conservative Party. The current rumour was that he was hoping to be made a Lord with a view to fast-tracking to a cabinet position. Political commentators were speculating that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport had already reserved him a parking space.

In our house Cutt’s name was a swear word. He wasn’t known for his great pay and conditions and cracked, as in broke, most of the unions his workers had been affiliated to. Plus, he was generally a bit of a git. Ruthless, you know the sort – did well out of the banking crisis. You could see corruption all over his face whenever his mug was in the papers.

I came from a firmly socialist background. Mum, a History teacher, and Dad, with his background in trade unions, constantly railed against continued control and acquisition of British media till Dad departed when I was sixteen. Dan had been less vehement when he came on the scene in my early twenties, but only fractionally. Unsurprisingly, Cutt was our antichrist.

But I was desperate to get my book published and I kind of felt that I’d have to swallow down my righteous outrage to get the witches’ stories out. It was a compromise, true, but I was prepared to make it. A whole chunk of me didn’t like or approve of that, but I was weak. And okay, okay, if I’m honest, there was the ego thing going on. It was, I justified to myself, only the book wing of Cutt’s empire, after all.

Mum, on the other hand … When I’d sprung it on her she’d had a mixed reaction. At first she was over the moon to hear I’d at long last got a book deal, but then, when I told her who it was with, her expression dimmed. She’d started trying to say something about jewellery. I don’t know if she was making some point about wealth or something but whatever it was she’d got so distressed that the nurse, Sally, had to come in and sedate her. It was horrible. I didn’t ever want to see that again.

So you can see why, on that particular day, when she was really not looking very well at all, I was trying really hard to sound upbeat and positive about it all.

‘I’m due to meet Emma next week.’ My voice sounded purposefully cheery. ‘I’m so excited. I’ll get the contract, then as soon as I sign it they’ll give me part of my advance. Isn’t that great? I mean it’s so tough being freelance. A lump sum will really help out. And it’s my chance to get the stories of the witches out there. Maybe I can find our ancestral witch. And if we are related, then surely it’s a kind of duty too?’

Mum was frowning and doing her best to say something, but I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. I wanted her just to listen and be proud of me and to say it was okay.

And it wasn’t only that which made me fill up every inch of breathing and conversation space in her room in the hospice that afternoon. No. At the back of my mind there was the notion that what she truly wanted to tell me was that she loved me and I couldn’t let her. Don’t get me wrong – we did tell each other quite often, but there was something in the atmosphere that afternoon that made me desperately not want to hear it. Almost as if I did then there would be finality in the words. For if she told me she loved me and I told her I loved her too everything would be harmonious, and she would be able to slip off away into the everworld, her work here done.

And I didn’t want that. I wasn’t ready to lose her just yet. So I didn’t let her speak.

God, if only I had. I should have. I should have let her tell me.

She so wanted to. In fact, she was struggling with all her might to tell me.

And now, I know what it was, I am ashamed.

She was seriously worried – rightly so.

If I’d let her speak she would have told me the truth. Then maybe I would have been forewarned. And forewarned is, as they say, forearmed.

But I didn’t, did I?

I gabbled on and on until the nurse came in and had to administer the drugs. And then Mum was tired. When I came back in, she had fallen asleep. So I went home.

And it was that night, as the moon sailed upwards, my mother, along with her unspoken words, finally let go.

But I couldn’t.

And now I was haunted by my stupid stupid actions. Hearing the word ‘sorry’ in my dreams, waking up to unknown sobs.

I moved my legs off the bed and crept into the shower.

Unfortunately there are some stains that just won’t wash away.