Witch Hunt

Chapter Thirty-One




Mistley Churchyard, allegedly the site of Hopkins’ burial, was way out on the heath. Despite the hideous visions of last night, or maybe because of them, I was determined to check it out. Part of me was tremulous at what the visit might prompt. Yet a greater part didn’t care: I felt drenched with anger and motivated by a feeling that was close to revenge. Seriously, I honestly felt that if I came face to face with any of those vile creatures I encountered in the ‘room’ last night, I’d be ready to swing at them. The upside of experiencing those kind of emotions is that you’re flooded by a kind of ‘storm surge’ of electrifying vigour. Since I had opened my eyes in the morning, I had been besieged by this edgy vigour.

I had expected to see or hear from Rebecca in Manningtree, but never anticipated anything like the experience I had gone through last night. I knew that the pardon might help her poor lost soul but it was clear now that there was something even darker going on. Something else I had to do to help her move on. I wondered if my conversation with Amelia had perhaps prompted the vision. Whatever, I was resolved to follow up her leads and hunt down the Witchfinder, despite the years. There was a lot to do.

I had packed an old map, which indicated St Mary’s was halfway up the road. According to my sources, the portico, which dated back to the 1500s, was listed. There was a picture of it in the book Amelia lent me: a small tower with an arched door, surrounded by trees. However there was nothing about to indicate any building had existed here at all. And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. I wasn’t even sure if the church ground had been annexed to the house next door. A discoloration of grass, in fuzzy rectangular shapes, was the only indication that it had ever been used to accept human remains.

I got out of the car and hopped over the low perimeter wall.

‘Come on then,’ I whispered through the grass to the spirit of Matthew Hopkins. ‘I’m here. Do your best, you old bastard.’

Nothing stirred the air – no melancholy, malice nor any of the loose sense of tragedy one sometimes feels in graveyards. It was almost like the place had simply ceased to exist.

I got back into the car, unsure whether I was relieved or disappointed. I was becoming used to coasting a range of emotions on a day-to-day basis.

As I revved up the engine I realised that I was feeling completely neutral about this place. Whatever happened there, it had no connection to me.

If it had been Rebecca who had messaged me last week, and now I was pretty sure it had been, she’d been right about one thing: Hopkins wasn’t buried here.

On my way home I detoured past a bookshop and picked up a map of New England. There was something I wanted to do. As I drove back I kept thinking about what Amelia had said about the first witch trial over there.

When I got home I googled ‘Early Witch Trials in New England’.

The first case I came across was that of Margaret Jones, who Amelia had mentioned. A midwife accused of having a ‘malignant touch’, she was the first person executed for witchcraft in New England. On June 15th, 1648. That was interesting. What I read on the website next got me completely fired up. ‘The case against her was built on evidence collected using the methods of the English Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins.’

I sat up and swallowed. Then I read on. The Governor, John Winthrop, attested that an imp was seen to go up to her ‘in the clear light of day’.

Imps. Hopkins’ favourite pastime – imp watching.

Of course his book, The Discovery of Witches, had been published the year before. A copy could have found itself on board a ship bound for Massachusetts. But what if Amelia’s speculations were right? What if it wasn’t only his pamphlet that had gone abroad? What if he boarded a vessel bound for Massachusetts to start a new life?

I scrolled down and found an entry by the American historian Clarence F. Jewett who listed twelve women executed prior to Salem. Margaret Jones of Charlestown, Boston in 1648. Followed by Mary Johnson at Hartford, 1650, who had a child while she was in prison awaiting execution.

Mrs Henry Lake of Dorchester circa 1650 demonstrated two themes I’d seen a lot in the confessions of the witches on both sides of the Atlantic – guilt and grief. A mother of five, after her youngest baby died, Alice Lake attested that the little thing had come to her in spirit form. Realising that this could be seen as a familiar of the Devil she immediately confessed that she had had sex before marriage, became pregnant and had tried to abort the foetus. The visitations by the ghost baby, she believed, were a punishment for her own crime against God. Poor woman – the trauma of her sin endlessly tormented her. When she was hanged her husband fled, leaving their four remaining children virtual orphans.

In 1651 there were three more – Mrs Kendall, of Cambridge; Goodwife Bassett at Fairfield in Connecticut and Mary Parsons, of Springfield. Mary had been fine until two of her three children died, whereupon she accused another local woman of witchcraft. This was not upheld and Mary declared that she had used witchcraft and as a result her five-month-old baby had perished. In a peculiar turn of events she was acquitted of witchcraft but convicted of murdering her child. As with Alice Lake’s husband, Mr Hugh Parsons also buggered off to a nearby town where he remarried, leaving their only child to fend for himself.

Two years later, in Hartford again, Goodwife Knap was sent to the gallows. Three years later Ann Hibbins was hanged. Her husband had been one of the magistrates who sentenced Margaret Jones to swing. Hibbins, though, tried to sue some builders who had worked on her house, stating that they had overcharged her. She won but local people considered the lawsuit to be ‘abrasive’ and she was subjected to an ecclesiastic court. Refusing to apologise to the workers, she was excommunicated and cited as ‘usurping’ her husband’s authority. Women didn’t bite back then, and as soon as her husband died she was made an example of. Witchcraft proceedings commenced and she was hanged as a witch, as one contemporary stated, ‘only for having more wit than her neighbours’. That same year, Goodman Greensmith was hanged at Hartford for, amongst other trumped-up accusations, ‘not having the feare of God before thine eyes’.

Then finally, poor Ann Glover in 1688. And what a tragic tale that was. Born a Roman Catholic in Ireland, Cromwell’s forces sold her into slavery and sometime in the 1650s sent her to Barbados. There, her husband was killed for refusing to renounce Catholicism. Somehow by 1680 Glover – known as ‘Goody’ – and her daughter wound up in Boston, working as servants for John Goodwin. However, after her daughter had an argument with the Goodwin children, some of them fell ill. The doctor visited, pronounced it to be witchcraft and, hey presto, Ann is up in court. The poor love couldn’t speak English, only Gaelic. When asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer to prove she is not a witch, Glover stumbles, unable as she is to speak the language. This is taken to be proof of her witch status so on November 16th of that year, Goody Glover is led out to the Boston gallows and hanged amid mocking shouts from the crowd.

I was pleased to see at the bottom of this account a little note detailing that in 1988 Boston City Council ruled that Goody’s conviction was not ‘just’ and proclaimed November 16th to be Goody Glover Day.

One woman, one day. At least Boston had the decency to do that. If they had a day a year for each witch hanged in Essex … At least Flick was on the case now.

But why hadn’t anyone tried it before? Perhaps because women never really thought it was their place to do so. Probably because, until recently, they didn’t have the means, influence, know-how or power to do so.

Witches were still seen as evil satanic things. I remembered how, a few years ago, Janet had attempted to hold a Halloween party for Lucy and Lettice and their friends. She’d not been able to secure a venue. None of the church halls would allow the booking, nor the local Conservative Club, nor their Constitutional Club. People still associated the witch with evil, malign spirits, wickedness and mischief. But we weren’t living in the seventeenth century any more and people really needed to wake up to just what happened back then.

The time was right.

I took out the map I had bought on the way home and spread it across my living room floor. With a red pen I began circling the places where the cases had broken out.

You could tell Essex people had migrated to New England by the names they gave the places they lived in, attempting to replicate a better life in the New World; Danbury, Chelmsford, Colchester, Billerica.

And there was Wenham. Hopkins’ birthplace. About five miles north of Salem. The same distance as Great Wenham was from Manningtree. The geographical similarity was spooky. Even the rivers that separated Great Wenham and Manningtree, and Wenham and Salem, would have been about the same width.

The hangings from 1647 to 1692, the year Salem erupted and the whole thing went nutsville, were dotted about the place.

But these were the tip of the iceberg, the end of the line – the executions. I started pulling in other accusations and trials.

There were a huge amount. And other executions too – I’d missed John and Joan Carrington, a husband and wife both executed for witchcraft.

I picked up a blue pen and started drawing small crosses where there had been accusations.

After two hours my back hurt and my neck had a serious crick in it. I sat on my haunches and viewed the map. I hadn’t finished marking them all down, yet I could see a pattern was emerging.

There were two outbreaks. One was more of a line situated in Connecticut, spreading down to New Haven. The crosses spread out to Fairfield in the west and then east as far as Old Lyme. The shape resembled an upside down ‘Y’. At its centre was a huge cluster. That town’s name was Hartford.

‘Hartford, Hartford,’ I repeated to myself. ‘That sounds familiar.’

I went back to my laptop and googled it. The witch craze in those parts lasted from 1647 to 1662. As far as I could make out they had at least eighteen accusations, in Hartford. And hangings too.

But there was something else about that name. I took my folder of research from my filing cabinet and flicked through it keeping my eyes peeled for the place name. Then I found it – when Stearne had been in Huntingdonshire he had pulled in the witches to be examined by magistrates in Hartford, UK.

Stearne had gone inland, while Hopkins had taken the coastal route.

I flicked over to the east coast. The first Hopkins-type witch hunt had occurred in Boston. Where the ships from England docked. There was a dense fan of blue crosses there.

Something dropped from the ceiling onto the map. I flinched, remembering the liquid that had landed on my face only two nights ago. But I had no need to be afraid, it was only another moth. It skittered across the paper lightly, settled for a moment on Boston, then spread its wings and took off to my left. I watched it zigzag through the air and land on the mirror. It turned itself around, launched into the air and landed on the map of the south-east that I had pinned on the chimneybreast.

Strange. That was just where the last one had gone. Was there something attracting it?

I was about to go to it and see if there was anything behind the map that might be luring the little critters, but I stopped. From my perspective on the floor I could see the pattern of crosses I’d mapped out weeks ago – all the known cases of Hopkins and Stearne spreading out in little arc shapes.

I looked back down at New England and began to smile. On my American map, dotted in red, was the same shape – a bloody horseshoe.

Bastard.

There was no way that Stearne accompanied Hopkins out there. He had died in 1671 and was buried in Lawshall near Bury St Edmunds.

But what if Hopkins had met someone on the journey over? Someone who shared his zeal.

I regarded the area around Boston. Could it possibly be the same MO?

I knew it was late but I needed to know now. Right now. And there was one person who might be able to tell me. I dialled his number.

‘Hi Joe.’ I registered the sound of music in the background. ‘What are you up to? You off duty?’

‘Sadie! I’ve been meaning to call but we’ve all been bombarded with overtime. Just finished up at the snooker hall.’

I bit my tongue and hedged my bets. ‘Listen – I’ve got something I need to bounce off you. Would you mind coming over?’

He broke off and shushed some unseen gathering. I could imagine him there, jovial, flapping down their attention but loving the interest it provoked. ‘Okay. You all right? Is it your computer?’

‘No, that’s all fine now. Touch wood. It’s more of a police thing.’

‘Sounds interesting.’

‘Do you want me to pick you up?’

‘No, it’s fine. I’ll hook a lift with Dave. He lives up your way. I’ll be over in about an hour.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘No actually, I haven’t.’

‘I’ll put some pasta on.’ It was the least I could do.

Before he got there I went and got the moth. It crawled into my hand without any coaxing. Its peppery wings were lighter than the last and reminded me of what I’d read on the totem website – something about the insect being a guide. It was certainly a clever little thing, nudging me towards a kind of enlightenment. I thanked him and took him outside onto the balcony. When I opened my hand it took off lopsidedly, flew down to the front garden then past the hedge and to the sea. As I followed its flight path my eyes clapped onto the sleek glossy form of a black car parked in the station’s layby. When I passed the window two minutes later it had gone. I didn’t think too much of it, focusing more on getting the place presentable for a guest, and whizzed around the house, removing dirty plates from the living room floor, vacuuming the carpet.

As I emptied a packet of tortellini into a saucepan, I wondered if Joe might construe this as a come-on: ‘Come over to my place. I want to show you my etchings.’ I hoped I hadn’t given that impression. Not that he wasn’t adorable in his own way. He was, and there was undeniably chemistry there, but I had things to do and was now compelled by an innate energy that had been amplified by the strangeness reaching for me. At that moment in time I could no more consider a romantic liaison with Joe than have downed tools and, literally, given up the ghost.

Not that those thoughts were clear, you understand. A whirling feverishness had taken possession of my mind, making it difficult for me to efficiently process everything that was going on. I was constantly reeling from my last experience whilst coming to terms with the one before. All I knew was that I was being led forwards by forces of which I was only half aware. After last night, the combination of revelations had left me in no doubt that in some small way, perhaps because I was writing the book, I should avenge Rebecca West.

Joe had been drinking and obviously got the taste for it as he turned up with a very dimpled grin and a bottle of wine. I asked him if he wanted to eat straight away but he didn’t. Instead he poured two large glasses and took them into the living room beckoning me to follow with a flirtatious hand gesture. I smiled at it, and followed. At least half of me wanted to accept the invitation. As I watched his back disappear into the shadows of the hallway, I was visited with a vision of lying in bed, my head on his chest, free of care. Although incredibly seductive and attractive right now, I could see that it was a surrendering sort of thought and had to beat it away. It was almost like if I gave in to Joe, it might be so lovely that I feared I would lose my drive and ambition in him. I couldn’t do that now. Not yet. So I cautioned myself and tried to keep focused on the matter in hand.

After a couple of minutes of small talk we ended up sitting close together, cross-legged round the New England map.

‘So, what you after?’ He nudged me in the ribs, gave me a wink, grinned and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. ‘I hope it’s not sensitive, in which case no can do. We all had media training a few weeks ago. Now I’m the model of discretion.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said and laughed at the way it came out. Despite his inebriation he was still really cute. ‘You won’t be compromised. This stuff’s four hundred years old.’

‘My God,’ he said in mock horror. ‘Nearly as old as you!’ Then he reached out and rubbed my shoulder.

I didn’t move away, just said, ‘Cheeky.’

His arm went slack and reached for his wine. ‘You always did worry about that far too much.’

I leant back on my knuckles. ‘What?’

He took a large sip. ‘The age difference. It’s only four years.’

I drank in his face, flushed and glowing, and nodded. Take away those dimples and we’d look roughly the same age. ‘Seemed a lot back then.’

‘But not any more?’

‘No,’ I told him truthfully. ‘Not any more.’

He replaced his drink and moved his hand to my knee. ‘Good,’ he said and shot me a look that had my stomach flipping. God, those eyes were as dark as chocolate. How had I never notice that before? But I brought myself upright – must focus – and shook myself to attention.

I pointed to the map of Essex, pinned up over the fireplace. ‘I need your expertise, PC Joe.’

He tugged his gaze away from my face and looked at the map.

It took me about five minutes to explain as concisely as possible what the crosses and circles meant. When I finished he stood up and took his glass over to the map and leant against the wall, taking a couple of minutes to process everything I had said.

‘Okay?’ He looked up expectantly. ‘And your query is?’

I turned the New England map around to face him.

‘Right, well this is New England: Massachusetts and Connecticut.’ Then I took him through the red marks, drawing my finger inland down from Hartford to New Haven and Old Lyme on the Long Island Sound, an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean.

‘Now look at the coastal region here.’ I read out the names and recounted some of the accusations and trials, not forgetting to mention Margaret Jones, the first victim, whose trial took place slap bang in the middle of Boston, where immigrants from England were likely to have first disembarked.

He came back to my map and squatted over it. Despite the booze I could see Joe’s interest was piqued. He listened to me going over the chronology of the trials, citing some of the methodologies used, shaking his head and tutting. I was so used to the casual brutality evoked in these trials I forgot about how Joe might react. I supposed that as a policeman he was hardened to the grotesqueries that life and criminality threw his way. But I could see from the paling of his face that he was horrified by it all.

There was certainly something pathetic about the nature of the witches’ crimes. And in most cases their status was already at the bottom of the social scale in the place kept for the mad, debased, disabled, starving. It made the aggression of the accusers all the more despicable. I saw Joe physically wince when I told him about Alice Lake and her phantom baby.

Though my position had changed a bit. I still sympathised and wanted justice for them but I was also on the hunt for the bullies. I gave him some time to recover before I asked him, ‘In your view, can you see similarities? Could this American map chart the same MO?’

For three long minutes Joe didn’t speak. Then he stood back and rubbed his hand across his short crop. ‘I’m not a profiler, Sadie. With something like this I’d suggest you take it to Chelmsford and try and get someone there to look at it.’

It wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. It wasn’t an answer at all really.

I had to push him. ‘Come on, Joe. I told you – it’s off the record. I’m not going to quote you on this. Just give me a clue. What do you think?’

He stroked his chin and picked up the New England map, holding it up next to the Essex map. After another long pause he straightened up. ‘I’d say it was worth investigating.’

I breathed in deeply. ‘Really?’

He nodded. ‘You’d need to go into more detail with victims and areas if you wanted a profiler to give you a full report, but I’d say something is going on here.’

He cast the map down. It swung through the air, landing a foot from me.

I gathered it up and thanked him very genuinely for his time. ‘Are you ready for pasta?’

He nodded but he looked weary. His eyes had lost their benevolent gleam.

Over dinner Joe was more reserved. I guess this wasn’t the sort of evening he’d anticipated. I sat him with his back to the window in the best chair and tried to chat about his work. He didn’t bite. In the end he said, ‘This is dark, Sadie.’

I scooped a spoonful of sauce and parmesan into my mouth. ‘Tell me about it.’

Joe put his elbows on the table. ‘Has it occurred to you that all this research might have affected you? Mentally?’

‘Absolutely,’ I told him with a little laugh. I meant it to sound like a joke though it was true.

He sighed. ‘No. I was talking about what happened on your computer. When Lesley and I were last here you said you had someone saying they were frightened of the Devil.’

I put my spoon down and looked him straight in the face. ‘I did.’ I kept my gaze steady.

His eyebrows dropped. ‘Lesley was concerned. There was no evidence of any “chat” on your internet history.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s because …’ my words died before they reached my tongue. I was going to say it was because it was Rebecca, but I knew how that would sound.

Joe didn’t let it go. ‘Because?’

He seemed a whole lot more sober now. I almost regretted feeding him.

I shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘Go on.’

I shook my head. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Try me.’

‘No,’ I said and forced a smile. ‘How’s your pasta?’

He ignored the comment and placed his hands on the table. ‘What happened to your mirror?’

Ah. I had forgotten about that. After I’d tried to call Rebecca up and failed, I had covered it over with a blanket. I didn’t want any surprises, I think. Seemed perfectly sensible at the time, but I could see, now, that to an outsider, it probably looked freaky.

‘I had an accident,’ I said simply.

Joe wasn’t having it. He leant forwards. ‘What’s going on with you, Sadie?’

His face was so full of concern it touched me. I was a tough cookie, but to look at him just then, sitting across the table, wanting to find out what was happening with me, for no other reason than that he cared about me – well, it made me crack a little. And I had so much to bear on my own. Maybe if I just told him a bit, maybe he could help me.

‘I think I’m being haunted,’ I said, my voice breaking slightly. ‘I saw someone in the mirror. In fact, I know who she is now.’ And I told him how I knew.

I could hear how it sounded as it came out, so I peppered my narrative with qualifiers. I even told him what Felix had said about incorporating some of these experiences into the book.

When I finished Joe had his arms crossed and a stern look about him.

Very gently, he asked, ‘Is there any history of mental illness in your family, Sadie?’

I laughed out very loudly. Too loudly. ‘Not the reaction I was hoping for,’ I said.

He repeated his question. ‘Don’t be evasive, I’m trying to help.’

‘Well, you’re not. It’s nothing to do with my mental state.’

‘It’s not?’

‘No.’

‘But your mother suffered from depression and psychosis.’

It was like a slap round the face. I pushed back from the table and expelled a long noisy breath, breathing in again quickly to try and stifle my building anger. It wasn’t easy. There was so much of it in me, coiling and uncoiling like a serpent in my stomach. ‘How do you know that? Have you been looking me up in your databanks?’

He held my gaze. There was peace in his eyes and a kind of rigorous strength. ‘You told me,’ he said very calmly. ‘The first time we met, sitting on the beach in Westcliff.’

I ran my hand over my lips. Of course. I had forgotten about that. ‘Sorry. Listen, I’m not experiencing psychosis. This is something different.’

‘It doesn’t sound like it. I’d like you to promise me you’ll see a doctor.’ He could have been talking to a twelve-year-old.

‘No, I won’t,’ I half shouted. The serpent was uncoiling. I pushed it back down and commuted my anger into a sulk, quite forgetting that the same thought had occurred to me only two days since. I moderated my tone. ‘If it sounds like madness then why has my editor asked me to put some of my experiences in the book, eh?’

‘It seems bizarre,’ he said softly. ‘I really don’t have a clue why he’d want you to.’

‘Exactly,’ I said with a nasty hiss. It was coiling upwards through me. ‘You don’t have a clue. You’re a policeman not a creative.’

He didn’t even smart. ‘In my job I have seen how people can,’ he paused to find the right words, ‘how they can spiral downwards quickly. Especially after a shock or a bereavement. One minute they’re on a minor with a “drunk and disorderly”, the next you’re locking them up because they’ve turned to junk or they’re homeless. It doesn’t take much. You could organise some support. Talk this through with a counsellor.’

But I wasn’t listening. I wanted him to believe me, regardless of the incredible nature of my tale. I thought he liked me.

‘Nor are you a bloody doctor or social worker.’ The fury was rising up, taking control. Was he suggesting I was losing my mind? Comparing me to a junkie? I stood up. ‘I’d like you to leave now please.’

Joe threw up his hands in mock surrender. ‘Okay, okay. I’ll go. I’m only saying this because I care about you. You know that. This research that you’ve sunk yourself into – it’s morbid. And unhealthy. I think it’s affecting you.’

I couldn’t say a word. If one came out it would be followed quickly by lots more of varying degrees of nastiness. I marched to the door and held it open for him, pursing my lips as he went through.

He stopped outside and pulled out a card. ‘Got a pen?’

‘Not on me.’

He pulled a pencil out of his back pocket and leant against the wall, scribbling something on the back of the card. ‘Look, take this number. A mate of mine is a therapist. Think about giving her a call.’

I said nothing but took the card with one hand and with the other held on to the door handle, knuckles turning white.

This time Joe trundled slowly down the stairs, zero spring in his step. I waited until I heard the sound of the outer door close then I went back into the living room and sat on the floor.

I knew he’d only said what others would if I told them the same tale. But, I thought as the serpent settled, I wasn’t mad. I was right. In fact I was righteous.

However, his words had warned me: whatever path lay ahead, I’d be walking it alone. Excepting spirits and their bleak and lonely moans.