Witch Hunt

Chapter Five




The landline answer phone was flashing when I finally got back to the flat. It was a message from my dad, checking in on me to see how I was going. Lots of people were doing that. I didn’t phone many back. It was weird – although I wanted to be able to talk about it, I didn’t want to talk about it. I guess I just needed to know I had the option.

However, I should return Dad’s call at least.

I picked up the phone, hit ringback and got my stepmum, Janet, who informed me Dad was putting the kids to bed and would probably be another fifteen minutes. I said I’d call back in the morning and that, no, it wasn’t urgent.

‘You’re still coming on Saturday though, aren’t you?’ Janet wanted to know.

Saturday, Saturday. What was on Saturday? I reached into my handbag and pulled out my diary. ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ I told her, still unsure of what I’d committed to.

‘Good, good. I know it’s a fair way. Your dad will appreciate the effort.’

‘Right. Of course,’ I thumbed through to Saturday’s entry – Uncle Roger’s birthday. I groaned.

‘Mercedes?’ Like my father, Janet too had developed the annoying habit of calling me by my full name.

‘Sorry, Janet. I had forgotten. I’m sure he wouldn’t miss me if I didn’t come.’

‘Mercedes, honestly! Don’t say that. Your dad certainly would. You know you’re the apple of his eye.’

I managed to stifle a snort of contempt. This was pretty typical of lovely rosy Janet, but a blatant lie. Dad had always been a remote sort of parent, though not unloved or unloving. But the emotional and physical distance increased when he and Mum split and he moved out of our home back to his native Suffolk. I’m not being self-pitying when I say he never appeared particularly interested in me. True – he did the regular check-up and monthly phone call thing. And true – it didn’t bother me one iota. But then my half-sisters, Lettice and Lucy, came along.

Janet was a homely and family orientated woman. A fair-haired big old farmer’s wife type, who insisted that I got more involved with the family. When I did, I saw that Dad absolutely idolised his new daughters with an affection that was doting. It was different to the parenting style I’d known, for sure. But to be frank, I couldn’t blame him: Lettice and Lucy were cool. Fourteen and eight years old respectively, and completely feral. Borderline punk. I liked their attitude.

I think a lot of their wildness came from living in the country; after he left, Dad bought a row of dilapidated cottages in the middle of nowhere. He did the first one up and moved into it whilst renovating the rest, then sold them on, retaining three of them to rent.

It was a canny move. Over the past couple of decades the ‘middle of nowhere’ had transformed into ‘desirable rural location’, affording him a very comfortable early retirement.

‘Mercedes? Are you still there?’ Janet’s voice brought me into the present. Oh yeah, the birthday party.

I made a snuffling noise.

‘Oh come on, love. Uncle Roger might not be around for much longer. His kidneys aren’t looking good.’

Dad’s rather morose older brother was a permanent downer at any festive occasion.

A small sniff conveyed my cynicism. ‘He’s been saying that for years.’

‘Yes, well now it looks like he’s right.’ Janet made it sound like a final reflection, demanding of compassion.

I sighed audibly. She changed tack. ‘It’d do you good to get away. And everybody’s expecting you. The kids are looking forward to seeing you and you know how upset your Dad will be if you don’t …’

‘Okay, okay. I’ll be there. I’ll only stay for a couple of hours though.’

‘That’s perfect. Thank you. See you Sunday then. One p.m. Try to be prompt.’

I hung up.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like visiting Dad. It was just with everything going on at the moment …

Though I didn’t want to think about any of that. Instead I decided to distract myself with some brain candy so I dumped myself on the sofa and flicked on the TV. Out of habit I surfed through to my preferred twenty-four-hour news channel.

There was some kind of kerfuffle outside County Hall. I couldn’t get what was going on at first then, as the report built up the eyewitness accounts, I sussed that Robert Cutt had been visiting and got an egg in the face from a couple of bystanders protesting about media monopolies.

The mere image of him flashing up on the screen made my stomach tighten. Though he’d moved to England in his thirties, his white-blond hair accentuated a classic American face: fantastic cheekbones, wide jaw, good teeth and eyes that showed hyena-like cunning mixed with the blank dumbness of a circling shark. Sometimes in a certain light, it looked like there was nothing going on behind those startling peepers. Like the man had long said goodbye to his soul.

Yet none of this did anything to detract from the overall effect; even his most vociferous opponents had to admit that Robert Cutt was a very handsome devil indeed. Regrettably the well-groomed exterior and contrived panache concealed a business savvy that was ruthless and pretty unethical in its hunger for power.

I couldn’t help thinking, as I watched the sixty-something politician brushing away the cameras, that despite the egging he looked rather pleased with himself. It was gross: there was something about the man that really creeped me out. It wasn’t just the fact that, a few months ago, he’d been coaxed into revealing in a rather probing and frank interview that he believed that men were infinitely better adapted to leadership than the female of the species. Following on from that another documentary had revealed his friendship with TV evangelist, Pat Robertson.

I knew about Mr Robertson before I had ever heard of Cutt: a friend once bought me a joke present for my birthday. It was a mug that had one of Mr Robertson’s quotes printed on it. It read: ‘The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.’

Bless his little cotton socks.

After that documentary Cutt did a fair bit of political manoeuvring to put a respectable distance between their camps. Even so, there were similarities; both advocated a stable family should have a mother and father (one of each sex). And there was an insidious suggestion that women should remain within the home, though it wasn’t stated explicitly. Nor was it their conviction that human nature was ever nurtured. It was more about genetics and nature. But that was easy for him to say, coming as he did, from a line of pilgrim Baptists back in the good old US of A. Mr Cutt made a big deal of those roots and set himself up as something of a paragon of ancestral virtue.

God knows how he came to be a political contender in the UK.

And yet, it was none of that that had me reflexing into gag response when I saw his nauseatingly beautiful face. No. It was something about his eyes. The hard grey circles reminded me of someone.

I’d just never been able to put my finger on who.

I almost convulsed with repulsion as the screen showed him ushered by bodyguards into a black BMW: just before he got in, he waved a two-fingered victory sign at reporters.

The scene had dulled my mood, leaving me with a restlessness that I couldn’t counter. I switched channels trying to find some comedy. Unfortunately the smarmy mogul had dampened me, so I cut my losses and retired to bed.

I was just sinking into a light slumber when I heard that noise again: a scratching followed by a creaking of sorts. When I strained my ears, I could tell it was right above me, in the loft.

I groaned and buried my head under the duvet, underlining my mental note to call pest control in the morning.

But it got louder.

I pulled the duvet down from my face and stared at the ceiling. ‘Shut up,’ I yelled at it.

Magically, the shuffling stopped.