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rather ill.’

      She said all this in the kind of tone suited for delivery of a detailed analysis of automotive electronic statistics.

      Joe got up and switched on his electric kettle. He needed a mug of hot sweet tea.

      He said, ‘You’re saying this Meg Merchison is a witch, is that it?’

      ‘Not a term I care for, but use it by all means if it will tighten your grasp of the situation,’ said Ms Baker wearily.

      ‘And the reason she didn’t manage to kill Mr Bragg was that she was really aiming at you?’

      ‘That’s right. The poppet works by providing a focus for deep passionate hatred. But like I said, it’s me she hates, not Bragg, so she couldn’t generate a big enough charge to really knock him out.’

      Joe put two tea-bags in his Chas’n’Di wedding mug and held it up invitingly to the woman. She shook her head.

      ‘If that’s the case,’ said Joe, ‘why bother with the pilot at all? Why not simply do a poppet of you and bite its head off?’

      He looked at her triumphantly and for the first time she didn’t mock his triumph.

      ‘At last, an intelligent question,’ she said. ‘She knew it was no use trying to get at me direct. Don’t imagine she hasn’t tried. But I’m her match there. I’m well protected.’

      She unclipped the pink brooch from her blouse and twisted the stone out of its setting to reveal that it was hollow. Inside Sixsmith saw a small wodge of grey stuff, like putty, into which had been pressed scraps and shards of God knows what, and Joe Sixsmith had no desire to share the knowledge.

      ‘You mean, you’re a … one of them too?’ he said.

      ‘I have some knowledge,’ she said, replacing the brooch. ‘Enough to deal with her kind in the normal course of events. But fighting over a man has never been my scene.’

      ‘So what’s all the fuss about?’ asked Joe, adding an extra spoonful of sugar to the four already in his tea. He needed the energy.

      ‘You mean, why don’t I just let her get on with it? I’ll tell you why. Because Gerald’s my husband and I don’t care to give him up, certainly not to a common little bitch like that. Also, in business matters we have a fiduciary relationship which makes it inconvenient to part company at the moment.’

      Joe, who loved clarity above all things except Luton Town, studied this carefully before saying, ‘You mean, she’d not only get him, she’d get some of your cash?’

      ‘You could put it like that.’

      He smiled his relief at getting back to something like firm ground.

      ‘So what do you want me to do, Ms Baker?’ he asked. ‘Get evidence that Meg Merchison’s trying to kill you by witchcraft?’

      ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped. ‘I need no evidence, and what evidence do you imagine you could get which would satisfy the police? I have problems enough holding my own with my chauvinist colleagues without giving them a field day by letting my name be linked publicly with a witchcraft scandal!’

      ‘So what do you want?’ asked Sixsmith.

      She said, ‘She’s got power over Gerald, there’s no other way he’d get entangled with a creature like that.’

      ‘Blackmail, you mean?’ he said without much hope.

      Ms Baker sighed and said, ‘Mr Sixsmith, you cannot blackmail a man into screwing you. No. She has a locket. It belonged to Gerald’s mother and that’s a very strong link to start with. Look, you can see it dangling between those gross paps in the picture.’

      She had to withdraw the paperknife to reveal the heart-shaped locket nestling in Merchison’s cleavage.

      ‘It has a ruby cameo design, a cinquefoil, a very strong magical number and image. Inside there will be various items, we needn’t go into the details, suffice to say that with the right words spoken over them, they have real power.’

      ‘A love charm, you mean?’ said Sixsmith.

      ‘Love! But yes, a love charm, if that helps you grasp what this is all about,’ she snapped. ‘What I want you to do, Mr Sixsmith, is get hold of that locket for me, and fast. This creature is quite mad. What happened yesterday was an open declaration of war. Why do you think she told the media about the video?’

      ‘So’s she could make a bit of money, I suppose,’ said Sixsmith wistfully.

      ‘No! So that I would know she’d caused the crash. All right, so she didn’t kill me, but she hopes that she can frighten me into submission by showing me how far she will go. Well, I won’t be frightened off, but if she escalates this thing into a full-scale psychic war, it could take all my time and energy to resist and I can’t afford to neglect my business like that. So the simplest thing for me to do is get Gerald back to his right senses for long enough to regain full control of all my finances. Once she sees he’s only worth the clothes he’s wearing—and I bought most of those—she’ll soon lose interest.’

      Joe was still trying to find a way out of this madness via reason.

      He said, ‘If this love charm’s so powerful, why doesn’t she just use it to make your husband take off with her now?’

      Ms Baker’s lips drew back from her mouth, showing a pair of long sharp incisors in a smile so unmistakably malicious that for the first time Joe began to consider the real possibility that she was a witch.

      She opened her purse and took out a thin silken white cord, about nine inches long with a single complex knot tied in it.

      ‘Because of this,’ she said. ‘While this knot is tied, Gerald can burn with desire, but there’s nothing he can do about it. The knot gets loosened only when he’s in my bed.’

      Joe looked in horror at the limp white cord. He began to feel a certain masculine sympathy for Gerald the Hyphen.

      ‘And does your husband have any idea that you and Merchison are …?’

      ‘Adepts? Of course not!’ She laughed. ‘He lectures in political economics at the University of Bedfordshire. What could he understand of such things? You on the other hand, Mr Sixsmith, with your ethnic background …’

      ‘I was born in Luton,’ protested Joe for the second time in twenty-four hours.

      ‘It’s the bloodline that counts,’ she said dismissively. ‘I was born in Bexhill, but my mother’s family have lived near Pendleton in Lancashire since Tudor times at least.’

      The detail of the boast was lost on Joe but he got the drift. He opened his mouth to assert indignantly that he was tired of people deciding on the colour of his skin that he must be into voodoo and dreamtime and all that rubbish, but the sight of that knotted cord still dangling from Ms Baker’s fingers gave him pause.

      ‘Why’d you go to But … to Cherry, Ms Baker?’ he asked.

      ‘I tossed and turned all night in that hospital bed and I knew I had to do something. I needed an agent, but he had to be guaranteed discreet and sympathetic. I thought of my own lawyers but decided they’d be useless. Wrong class of business, you see. Then I remembered Cherry. It was worth a try. I discharged myself from hospital and went straight round to that hellhole she calls a law centre. When I explained discreetly what I needed, she came up with you. She told me you weren’t exactly Philip Marlowe but that you had what she called blood sympathy.’

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