What The Cat Dragged In (The Celtic Witch Mysteries Book 1) Read online

“Oh! Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

  He shook his head. “Foolish child. Listen to me.” He tapped his finger hard on the book. “He had no family here. Not officially. No wife, no children that are known.”

  “Not officially?”

  “And this is where I must insist that you are tactful. Yes, he had a child, and you know her. Everyone knows her.”

  “Who?”

  “Rachel Harris.”

  “Right. So she doesn’t know?”

  “Maybe she does, maybe she does not. But she was raised by her mother and Barry Harris, her step-dad. She might not know. Goodness, even Barry himself might not know, and he is a good man. Does truth win over peace? It is something I must contemplate.”

  “Truth should,” I said, but I had doubts. He read them in my face.

  “Maybe we are using the wrong word. Let us seek to have integrity. After all, when the German soldiers knocked on the doors of those harbouring Jews in Occupied France, what would truth demand? That they say yes, there are Jews here? Or would you follow the path of integrity … and lie.”

  “I would lie,” I said. “I see. Thank you. That makes sense.”

  He considered me for a while. I squirmed under his scrutiny until he broke into a smile and opened the book. He ran a finger down the endless lists and finally alighted upon the entry for Robert Cameron’s death.

  “He was buried, it says here.”

  “Where?”

  “In the churchyard. And we went out to the graves and I found the correct stone. So of course, last night, the police came to open it up.”

  “Last night?”

  “Yes. Well, no one wants to see then opening up a grave during the day.”

  I shivered. That could explain my unsettled night, however. “And what did they find?”

  “Nothing. No matter how far down they dug, there was absolutely nothing there.”

  “What, not even an empty coffin?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “That is very odd. How did he die?”

  “He had cancer,” Horatio told me. “I believe his organs simply failed, in the end.”

  “How awful.” I rubbed my hands together, seeking warmth. “But do you have any idea, or any theory at all, as to why he was in the shrubbery? And why on earth was that grave empty? That can’t be a mistake, surely?”

  “Absolutely not. It was deliberate.”

  “I just don’t understand.”

  Horatio closed the book. “Much is at work here,” he said. “And we see through a glass, darkly, at this moment. You have alluded to a ghost-like presence. Let us not beat about the bush. There is a ghost. Does it hold malevolent intent, do you think?”

  “I suspect so,” I said. “Strange things have been happening.” Although that could be the presence of my cousin, I reminded myself. “And I cannot communicate with it. I’ve tried. Perhaps you could?”

  “I find that deeply unlikely,” he said with a smile. “I will do what I may, of course. Insight might come to me if the Lord wills it.”

  “Mmm.”

  He laughed then, and stood up. “I know you don’t want to insult me, so you are staying quiet instead. My head is not as far in the clouds as you sometimes suspect, you know, my lamb. After all, it is my own belief that faith begins in the earthly realm. I live incarnately in the sight of God, and through my work here on earth I can build and explore my mysticism.”

  “I think I understand the words yet I am pretty sure I don’t understand what you are saying,” I told him. I got to my feet, ready to take my leave. The tea had been drunk and I had as much information as I thought I was going to get for the moment.

  “Wait,” he said. “I have a way to teach you.”

  He disappeared very briefly into another room and when he returned, he gave me a small wooden carving of a Celtic-style harp. He could have bought it in a souvenir shop for a few quid, or perhaps it was an ancient heirloom with great significance. I turned it over to see if there was a price sticker on the bottom, but there wasn’t.

  “No, it’s not from the local charity shop,” he said, wagging his finger at me impishly. “You must learn to play the five-stringed harp.”

  “Must I?” I thought of my great aunt’s recent forays into the musical world, and winced. “I am not terribly gifted in that way.”

  “The five strings are the five senses. And together as a melody they bring you the sixth, and an understanding of what is deeper. Look to all your senses, all five, and you will find more.”

  The wood was warm in my grasp. Very warm. It was alive. “Thank you,” I said. I put it into my ever-present backpack.

  As I left, he reminded me one more time. “Do not blunder in with this knowledge of Rachel Harris’s biological father,” he warned me. “Keep your integrity. And keep your heart.”

  Thirteen

  I avoided telling both Maddie and my great aunt about my dinner date with Adam until I was pretty much leaving the house. Even then, I was not able to get away unscathed: I had twenty-seven questions fired at me as I fought my way free of the kitchen.

  Adam was waiting in his car at the side of the road, the engine idling. I slid into the passenger seat.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  “Thanks. Do you like what I’ve done?”

  A brief moment of panic showed on his face. “Er, yes. Your … hair?”

  “No. I thought policemen were supposed to be amazing observers?”

  “I’m not currently at work.”

  I tossed my head. “I am wearing eye liner.”

  “Oh. Oh! I thought you’d just been having some sleepless nights because of this dead body business.”

  I slapped his arm. “Just drive.”

  “Okay, but are you ready?”

  I shielded myself as much as I could. “Yes. Go.”

  When Adam had first moved to the area, he’d been driving a decades-old heap of rust with wheels and my techno-allergy hadn’t really affected it. Purely mechanical things were immune to my curse. When he’d upgraded to this modern thing, though, with its “engine management system” and flashing warning lights and integrated sat nav and everything, I’d caused chaos.

  Luckily it was a short distance to his house, albeit up a steep hill that I hated walking up. “Prince is here for a few days while mum and dad are away,” Adam warned as he unlocked his front door. He was one of the few people around here who used the front door, which was usually reserved for births, deaths and weddings.

  “Oh – argh!” I could have done with a bit more warning that that. Adam’s parents had moved to Wales from Zambia a few years after he had left, and soon acquired a nice house, part-time jobs and a truly vicious poodle called Prince.

  That dog was currently standing on its back legs, its forepaws on my chest – it was a big damn thing – sniffing my face with menaces. When I spoke, it sniffed my breath, like it was assessing what I’d had to eat.

  “Down!” I ordered.

  It looked at me. I shouldn’t say “it.” There was a very definite mad kind of intelligence in the beast. Slowly, with an attitude that said “I am doing this because I want to, not because you told me to,” he got down. He then cocked his leg on Adam’s front step while maintaining a steady and challenging eye contact with me, before trotting back into the house.

  “I am really not sure that’s a dog,” I told Adam as he led me inside. “I think you might have a fluffy demon there.”

  “Mum loves him,” Adam said.

  Prince growled from his vantage point on a chair in the corner.

  I sat on a tall stool by the breakfast bar and watched as Adam sorted out the food. He’d had a stew on the go in a slow cooker all day, and he didn’t have much to do beyond warming the bowls and buttering some bread. He waved away my offers of help.

  I liked to watch him, anyway. There was something very appealing about a person moving so smoothly and capably around their kitchen, and something very very appealing about Adam a
s he did so. I hated the fact that I seemed so shallow, even to myself. He had a string of admirers, and I was just one more woman in the town who lusted after his muscular body and easy grin – and the stereotypical appeal of a man in uniform.

  I was slightly further up the queue to get at him, I supposed. After all, I was the one he was currently cooking for.

  It made me sad. I was never good enough for him.

  Then I quashed that ridiculous thought. What was I, a forties-era maiden swooning and drowning in her own self-imposed inadequacies? Get over yourself, I told myself. Grow a pair.

  “So,” I said, “was it dental records?”

  He piled up a heap of slices of bread on a plate and pushed it over to me. “Was what … oh, I see. The man in your hedge. No, not initially. I think we’ll be using those to confirm identity but it takes a little while.”

  “How did you do it then?”

  “He had a label in his jacket with ‘R Cameron’ on it and a folded invoice in his pocket which was on quite tough paper. Most of it had rotted but we were able to make out the name on the top. Thank heaven for biros. An ink pen’s writing would have been long gone. We confirmed age and rough year of death with the records held by the reverend.”

  “Oh, how dull.”

  “You wanted science?”

  “I wanted something a little more interesting than the fact he was pretty much parcelled up and labelled. Ooh, this is quite good stew.”

  “Quite good?”

  “It’s a bit … dry.”

  “How can it be dry?” he said. “It’s stew.”

  I stared at him until he opened a bottle of wine.

  “Much better, thank you.”

  “Huh. Well, anyway, there are a few rather interesting points about him. He was completely bald.”

  “I happen to have my own sources,” I told him, “and I know he died of cancer. So, chemo.”

  “Oh, you talked to Horatio too, did you?”

  “Stop being so clever.”

  “It is my job,” he pointed out. “Point scored! We’re even.”

  “Huh, okay.”

  Adam waved his spoon at me. “Anyway, as it happens, the type of therapy he was receiving in the sixties was pretty rough and crude compared to now. It is unlikely he would have lost his hair.”

  “Unlikely. He might have, though? What about the rest of his body?”

  “Exactly,” Adam said. “Sorry, do you want to discuss this while we’re eating?”

  “May as well,” I said.

  “Okay, so the post mortem did flag up a few odd things. He was, in the pathologist’s words, ‘haphazardly bald’. She meant that he had had his hair cut very short but in a rough way. He hadn’t lost it from medication. He still had body hair, or the remnants, everywhere else.”

  “Perhaps he expected to lose it? That’s what some people do, isn’t it. They shave their heads before they go through the trauma of losing it, bit by bit.”

  “It is a thought. However, that doesn’t explain the one other thing that was missing.”

  I looked at him slightly sideways. “Go on…”

  He spun out my curiosity for a little too long before saying, “His finger.”

  “You what?”

  “That’s right. One finger had been completely hacked off.”

  “That is a bit grim. Do you know if it was before or after he died?”

  “After, she said. It was the middle finger on his right hand.”

  I put down my spoon and took a large gulp of the wine. “Why would anyone do that?”

  Adam shook his head. “None of us have any idea.”

  I sighed. “There is something I need to tell you,” I said, and began to outline how the ghost had begun to make himself known.

  We’d got through the whole bottle before very long. We started quickly on a second.

  Adam needed it to help him to accept what I was telling him. He knew about and believed in my powers, but he was reluctant to actually ever talk about it. I didn’t want to scare him or put him off, so I tended to downplay things as much as I could. He was happy to see me as a healer – after all, you could explain herbal remedies as a kind of science – but the more esoteric aspects to my work did unsettle him.

  Still, alcohol can help you come to terms with many things, at least temporarily.

  “I am worried about this,” he confessed. The second bottle was nearly gone now. We had now moved to the settee in his living room, still under the baleful eye of Prince. “And…” He tailed off and began to prod at a cushion.

  “What’s up?”

  “I can’t protect you against ghostly things,” he said, muttering with his head down.

  “You don’t have to protect me against anything.”

  “Don’t be so infuriatingly feminist. I would like to protect you against things that might harm you. But I am helpless against this kind of thing. Useless.”

  “This is the drink talking,” I said. “You’ll be crying into your gin about how nothing is worth it soon.”

  “Don’t make light of it,” he said, and there was a huffiness in his voice. I realised that we were having a bit of ‘in vino veritas’ and this was something that had been bugging him for a while. It would explain his on-off relationship with me.

  Not that it was entirely down to him, of course.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can see that it is important to you but maybe we should talk about it when we’ve not been drinking.”

  “I’m not drunk,” he said, and stifled a belch. He looked up at me and his face was red. “Dammit, why don’t you get drunk like normal people?”

  “I’m not normal people.” My body just didn’t react in the usual way to alcohol. I used to pretend to be drunk to fit in, but I didn’t want to fake anything in front of Adam.

  He was too tipsy to appreciate that.

  “No,” he said. “You’re not.”

  There was a horrible silence.

  “I’m drunk,” he said thickly. “I am sorry. I’ve had a lot of stress at work. That’s not an excuse. And then I was worried about you, about you finding that body, and then you said about the ghost, and I can’t do anything about that. So what’s the point of me?”

  I grabbed his hands. “You are amazing and strong and funny and a good cook and handsome and a great policeman,” I told him.

  He smiled very weakly. “I am going to be sick.”

  I thought he was making a joke about my stream of compliments.

  He wasn’t.

  Fourteen

  I didn’t get drunk but I always had a hangover. My body really is out to get me. I sat at the kitchen table the next morning while Maddie grilled me about the evening.

  “Was it a real date?” she asked. “Are you guys actually, you know, getting it on?”

  I rubbed at my head wondering why I wasn’t able to heal myself. I knew the answer. This was self-inflicted. I liked the taste of wine, even if I didn’t get the pleasantly drunk effects. “It wasn’t really a real date,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think we’ve slipped into being good friends.”

  “You do not talk about him with the same expression on your face as when you talk about Dean,” Maddie pointed out. “You like him, right?”

  “I do. Is that shallow?”

  “Hell no! He’s gorgeous. You should like him. And he must like you because he asked you over to his place for food. So, what gives?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you kiss?”

  “No,” I said, somewhat glumly. “He threw up and that does put me off. I might not have high standards but I have some.”

  “Really? Did he? That’s a bit of a dick move, though. He might be hot but he’s not all that bright.”

  I was about to leap to his defence when there was a knock at the door. Dilys was just coming into the kitchen so she turned around and went to answer it. She came back through a moment later, carrying a large bunch of flowers.

  I knew instantly
they were from Adam, and so did Maddie, as she launched herself at them to try to get the card first.

  “I do not think so!” Even in my foggy-headed state, I was able to grab the bunch from my great aunt and get hold of the envelope.

  “Read it out!” both Maddie and Great Aunt Dilys said.

  It was easier to give in right away though if I had felt better, I would have fought them for a little while, just on principle.

  “Dear Bron. I am so sorry about my atrocious and ungentlemanly behaviour last night. It was inexcusable yet I hope you can forgive me. I owe you a decent night out. Adam.”

  Dilys nearly exploded. “He did what? What did he do? Did you fight him off? Did you break his legs? Where does he live, again? Get me my stick. All of my sticks! I need that one with the hidden knife!”

  I didn’t even know one of her walking sticks had a hidden knife, and I filed that information away for future exploration. Hastily, Maddie and I explained what Adam had actually done the previous night, and managed to talk her out of her murderous rage.

  And then Maddie had a great suggestion to make me feel better.

  It was my turn for a slowly-growing murderous rage.

  ***

  “I cannot do this,” I muttered but Maddie didn’t hear me. I suppose that I didn’t intend her to. I stood in the changing room at the sports centre, and slowly bent down to put my ragged old trainers on. I was a little afraid that my head might come off if I moved too quickly.

  Maddie had wanted company on her induction session, and she claimed to feel nervous on her own. It was absolute nonsense. She had flown halfway across the world alone.

  But as I felt my knees creak and my stomach fold where it didn’t use to fold, I conceded she might have a very small point to make.

  She had got me in using a member’s guest pass, and seemed convinced that once I tried the instruments of torture, I’d be instantly addicted to twisting and pushing and burning or whatever it was one did on the metal and rubber dungeon implements.

  She bounced from machine to machine, looking amazing in her fitted and branded sportswear. I slouched behind in baggy jogging bottoms and a t-shirt I’d used to paint the fence in. She understood what “adductors” were and why they had to be exercised, and I couldn’t make eye contact with her while she merrily sat astride a machine and appeared to try to break it with her own thighs.