Jess Castle and the Eyeballs of Death Read online

  ‘Unless you have a vision of the name and address of the killer, that’s not much use to me.’

  ‘You don’t have to believe in magic for it to work. Look, I’m an academic. I’m all about the facts, but whoever crafted this box has knowledge of the old ways, and they mean a lot to him.’

  ‘The box is our way into his head.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Jess hesitated before picking up the box again. She felt the responsibility keenly. ‘There’s one letter on each side of the box. This tells me where to start.’ She pointed to the ‘more than’ symbol.

  ‘So that tells you where to stop.’ Eden indicated the ‘less than’ symbol.

  ‘Yessir.’ Jess turned the receptacle in her hand, interpreting as she went. She concentrated. She was rusty. ‘E,’ she said. ‘Y. Another E. And . . .’ She squinted, remembering.

  ‘S,’ said Jess and Eden in unison.

  ‘Eyes.’ Eden snorted.

  ‘Our man is literal and sarcastic.’ Jess enunciated what was in the air. ‘Very Pan.’

  ‘Yet this is sensitive work.’ Eden caressed the box. Then pulled his hand away.

  Jess understood its allure. It was a sensuous little thing, despite its dark purpose. Perhaps because of it.

  ‘Nothing here about your three-headed goddess?’ Eden seemed to want a ‘yes’.

  He got a ‘no’. ‘Hecate is associated closely with the yew tree. Death. The underworld. That’s all Hecate’s brief. Bulls slaughtered in her name were garlanded with yew, and yew trees were planted in circles to protect centres of natural energy. We came along and built our churches on those energy spots. Plus Hecate helps her worshippers with potions, some of them good, some of them deadly. Yew’s a big ingredient when cooking with Hecate.’

  ‘All very interesting, but not sure where it gets us.’ Eden took the box suddenly, dropped it back into its cardboard case. ‘Don’t discuss this with anybody, Jess. These symbols don’t leave this room.’

  ‘Got it, no leaky-weakies.’

  ‘If that happened I’d have no option but to remove you from the investigation.’

  Jess pulled on her jacket. ‘You mean I’m on the investigation?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Eden, disassociating, looking at his computer screen, ‘I do.’

  Chapter 6

  AN AFFAIR OF THE HEART

  Thursday 19 May

  The dream chased Jess out of bed earlier than she would have liked. So early that she witnessed the Judge on his way out of the front door with his bicycle.

  Lycra, she thought, should be a restricted product for the over-sixties.

  ‘See you,’ she said. The phrase served a double purpose. Polite enough to build a bridge, casual enough to irk him. She leant on the polished oak console that had stood in the hallway since before she was even an idea. The arrangement of inherited this and that on top of it hadn’t changed. A pink snuffbox. A brass tray where keys and buttons were thrown. ‘Where’s the fox?’ Jess frowned.

  Out on the porch, the Judge didn’t look back. ‘Do you mean Mum’s fox?’

  ‘You hated it,’ remembered Jess. She hadn’t much liked the porcelain animal herself. Pert. Sarky. Bright orange. ‘Mum loved it.’

  ‘She did.’ The Judge swung a leg over his bike and was away.

  Even that one small rebellion couldn’t be allowed. Harriet had made acquiescing to her husband an art form, but she’d hung onto that fox. The Judge had muttered about it every evening when he came in. Harriet had countered that it made her smile. It had kept its place on the oak table.

  Now it was purged. The Judge sure had an eye for detail.

  ‘Moose?’ She trailed through the kitchen, through the back door and out into the sun-filled garden. Jimbo, the Castles’ gardener since forever, took pride in his work; the lawn glowed, spilling out towards the old orchard.

  She heard Moose. A distant, restrained ‘uff’ rather than his usual out-and-out ‘arf’. Jess followed the sound to the narrow passage that ran beside the defunct pool. Moose capered leadenly along it. Jess smiled, an artless wide grin that transformed her wan face. Beyond this dark, green passage was a glorious grotto of roses. Her mum had loved her rose garden as though it were a discreet lover. She talked to it and believed it talked back. The roses knew Harriet. And Jimbo would have kept it just so. Radiant and generous.

  Jess reached the end of the passage. Her head swam as if she’d been struck. ‘What the fucking hell is this?’

  ‘Hello, my darling.’ Bogna’s blonde head appeared from behind a thick patch of rhubarb. There was mud on the end of her nose. ‘Welcome to my allotment!’

  Jess’s eyes welled. She was livid, impotent in the face of desolation. ‘What have you done, Bogna? What have you done?’

  Bogna approached her, reached out, but Jess wasn’t having it.

  ‘Oh no. You might get your hands on the garden, but you don’t get your hands on me. This was Mum’s rose garden. She loved this place more than anything and you come here . . .’ Jess began to splutter. ‘You have come here and you’ve stolen the kitchen, you’ve stolen her apron, you’ve thrown away lovely special things and now you kill what she loved most. Get the fuck out. I don’t care what “the Judge” says, get out of my house and keep going till you drop dead!’

  Bogna gently took her hands. She pulled her to her, pushing through the angry resistance. She held Jess tight as the tears came. ‘It is all right, my kochana. There, there. It’s all all right, isn’t it.’

  Bogna’s arms melted Jess’s fury into shame. She was an overgrown child. Running away from college. Screaming at Polish women. ‘It’s not all right, Bogna,’ she whimpered. ‘It’s all wrong.’

  ‘Let’s sit in the kitchen,’ said Bogna, releasing Jess from her somewhat firm embrace.

  The kitchen was always cooler than the rest of the house. It was where she and Stephen had played in the unbearable heat of childhood summers.

  Bogna brought a teapot – the new, upstart teapot – to the table.

  Jess sipped silently. She was chastened by Bogna’s generosity.

  Bogna began. ‘Jimmy is . . . your father is unwell.’

  ‘Unwell?’ Jess’s mind emptied. ‘When you say unwell, Bogna, what does that mean?’

  ‘It is his heart.’

  Jess’s face crumpled. ‘Oh God. Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ Remorse flooded into the empty spaces of Jess’s brain. ‘Why didn’t somebody call me? What is it, when did—’

  ‘Just before Christmas. Heart attack, kochana. He was lifting boxes of your mother’s clothes and he falls down. Just like that.’ Bogna clapped her hands. Jess jumped. ‘The doctors at hospital tell him it is arctic stasis. Or attic stavros, something like that. He has pills now and he feels better.’ She smiled. ‘Can I tell you why I do these things you do not like?’

  Jess nodded.

  ‘I did not know your mother, of course, but I see she was loved by everyone. Especially by your father.’

  Jess snorted.

  ‘No, my darling, it is very true. I came here to keep things a bit tidy just. I soon saw that Jimmy was living without reason he used to have for living. So when he was ill, I thought, well, that’s it, it’s up to me to keep him well. I am not trying to be wife, kochana. I don’t want nuffing from him. Only for Jimmy to get better. To want to live. So I make an allotment, you see! To grow him healthy things to eat. To make his heart well. And, yes, Jimbo took away Mum’s roses.’ Bogna offered her hands from across the table. ‘Jess, your mother is gone. But your father is here. Let’s make sure that he stays here.’

  Kidbury Road.

  The bridge.

  The long-stay car park.

  The medical centre.

  The vet’s.

  And then the long turn into the main thoroughfare. A right. A left. A cut-through.

  The house Jess was looking for was on the end of a row of hobbit cottages, the one spacious modern house on the street.

  ‘Jess?’ It was Eden, emerging from a twee wooden po
rch.

  ‘Do you live here?’ The house didn’t suit him. ‘Jesus, do you both live here?’ she said, as Karen Knott followed him down the path.

  ‘We’re going door to door,’ said Karen.

  ‘Like on the telly,’ said Jess.

  ‘Just like that.’ Eden was thin-lipped.

  ‘Bit beneath a detective sergeant, surely?’ Jess savoured his repressed sigh.

  ‘The boss requested more manpower. Didn’t you, sir?’ asked Karen, as if her superior officer was a dim but well-loved pet. ‘No go, so he’s out here, doing his bit.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Jess. She meant it. ‘Getting your hands dirty.’

  ‘Where are you off to?’ asked Eden.

  ‘Don’t let us hold you up,’ said Karen.

  ‘I’m on my way to . . .’ Jess lifted her arm to point, then dropped it. Best if she didn’t say. ‘Why don’t I help you?’ Jess had no intention of following Rupert’s advice; why break the habit of a lifetime? Besides, he was wrong about Eden; the man didn’t drag her into anything disturbing, he kept her at arm’s length. ‘In case signs and symbols come up.’

  ‘Most irregular,’ snapped Karen.

  Jess was already halfway up the next path. She raised the brass knocker. An elderly lady in standard-i ssue knitted cardigan opened the door.

  ‘Good morning.’ Eden held his police badge aloft. ‘I’m DS Eden from Castle Kidbury station and I wondered if you had time for a few questions.’

  The lady peered at his badge.

  Knott said, ‘It’s Mrs Holyoake, isn’t it?’ She leant against the door jamb. ‘I remember you from the Neighbourhood Watch meetings. How’s your budgie? Still bald?’

  ‘What we’d like to know, Mrs Holyoake,’ interjected Eden, ‘is whether you knew the late Keith Dike.’

  Mrs Holyoake put her hand to her throat. ‘Dreadful business. I heard he was eaten by circus animals.’

  Jess converted her giggle into a complicated cough.

  Eden glowered at Jess. ‘Could you tell us how you knew Mr Dike, and if you know of anyone who might have had a quarrel with him?’

  ‘Keith Dike put my family through hell.’ Mrs Holyoake twisted a tissue in her arthritic hands.

  ‘Go on,’ said Eden. He was alert, like Moose when he heard the fridge door open.

  ‘My husband bought a carburettor for a Robin Reliant off him a while back. Paid him cash. Keith only goes and gives him a carburettor for a Ford Escort.’ Mrs Holyoake pulled in her chin, her tale of despair finished. ‘Ooh, my hubby was livid.’

  ‘Would it be possible,’ said Eden, ‘to talk to your husband?’

  ‘Dead, dear. Since 1983.’

  Four more houses. Four more swirly hall carpets. Four more tales of Keith Dike’s lack of civic duty.

  ‘We’re learning nothing new about Keith,’ said Eden as they convened by the big house on the end. ‘It’s all he painted my shed the wrong colour or his whippet crapped on my dahlias. Nobody liked the sour old bastard, but nobody would kill him, either. People were even good enough to take him home from the pub when his trousers fell down.’

  Knott closed her eyes in virginal horror. ‘He was a dirty filthy pervert, Sarge.’

  ‘Keith was not,’ snapped Eden, ‘a pervert. He was a mardy pisshead whose trousers didn’t fit. Honestly, Knott, sometimes . . .’

  There was a clatter at the modern house as two figures bustled out.

  ‘Danny!’ called Eden, hand raised in greeting.

  ‘Jess!’ Danny’s face erupted into a smile.

  ‘Is this where you were headed?’ Knott, who caught on to very little, managed to catch on to this. ‘To interview a suspect on your own?’

  ‘He’s not a suspect, he’s an old friend.’ Jess was rumbled. Part-rumbled; she’d been looking forward to seeing Danny.

  Hugs. Danny was big on hugging.

  ‘Danny has something to say.’ Danny’s mother was mithered. Coat askew. ‘Tell him, Daniel. Tell Mr Eden what you told me.’

  Danny’s good cheer evaporated. Head down, teeth gritted, he said, ‘I was going to meet Tallulah.’ He turned to Jess. ‘I’m not a sneak. She said I could give her name.’

  ‘He. Has. A. Girlfriend.’ Danny’s mother was appalled. A tired woman, she was doing her best not to be angry. ‘She’s, you know, like him. He knows that’s not on.’

  ‘Is she nice, Danny?’ asked Jess.

  ‘She’s a goddess,’ said Danny.

  Eden and Jess very carefully didn’t look at each other as they said their goodbyes.

  ‘Right, that’s Barton Street done.’ Eden scratched a line through a page of his notebook and turned to DC Knott. ‘Where next?’

  ‘Technically, it should be Parson’s Hill, sir, but we did diverge from the itinerary at—’

  ‘Just name a road, Knott!’

  DC Knott’s plain little gob, the face of a parlourmaid in a BBC period drama, fell. ‘In that case, Parson’s Hill, sir.’ To Jess, she said, ‘You don’t have to come’.

  Jess wondered if Eden knew that his DC was in love with him. ‘Do you have a boyfriend, Karen?’ she asked as they toiled up Parson’s Hill.

  ‘I’m married to the job, like the boss,’ said Karen. She seemed proud of this.

  Eden muttered, ‘I wouldn’t say I’m married to the job.’

  ‘At least, sir,’ said Karen, ‘the job won’t treat you like a right bitch and bleed you dry of your last penny, eh.’ She shook her head, remembering. ‘Mrs Eden was a right bitch.’

  Eden stopped dead, about to say something, but thought better of it. ‘Let’s stick to the matter in hand, Knott.’

  ‘He’s lonely,’ mouthed Karen, pulling a sad face.

  ‘Nah,’ said Jess. ‘He’s in his element.’ She saw something raw on Eden’s face. She let him walk ahead.

  Two more streets. Many gossipy anecdotes. Nothing, as Eden said, ‘of any real use’.

  ‘If Keith was unpopular, but not so unpopular that somebody would kill him, it’s a motive problem,’ said Jess as they approached the car park on Cheap Street. ‘A murder occurred, but there’s no reason for it.’ Jess slipped into the tone she used for lectures. ‘It’s like archaeology. When you find something from the past but you’re not sure what it is, you place it in various contexts to give you possible answers. You try to establish what it is you do have, so you have a better idea of what you don’t have. You slowly build a picture until you’re closer to the truth. Being a detective is a bit like being an archaeologist.’

  ‘Except somebody’s dead.’ Eden was sharp. ‘And whoever killed him is still at large. So, no, it’s not like archaeology and we’re not putting together a broken jug on Time Team.’

  ‘Understood.’ Jess had shown her hand; she needed to ease off, insert herself into the drama more subtly. Eden mustn’t know how badly she needed this case while she licked her wounds in Castle Kidbury. ‘Any chance of a lift?’

  She winced as Eden’s face hardened.

  Apparently there wasn’t.

  Chapter 7

  IF I’D KNOWN YOU WERE COMING I’D HAVE BAKED A CAKE

  Friday 20 May

  In her bed, Jess drowned over and over. It was hard to discern the true nature of sounds through the distorting water. Were they screams or laughs?

  A chunk of broken glass drifted by. Too close. She panicked. She scrabbled away. She woke up.

  It was late. Even by her standards. By Harebell House standards, it was criminal. The old floorboards were cold beneath Jess’s bare feet as she stood outside her bedroom and listened. This house always had something to say.

  This morning it echoed her dream. Running water. She heard humming. A gentle whining. She crept instinctively up the narrow stairs to the attic bathroom, where she found her father wrestling with a soapy Moose.

  ‘Ah. Jessica. Good. You can help.’

  Jess knew the drill. She secured Moose by the collar as her father scooped the reluctant hound out of the bath and onto the mat. Fickle old Moo
se hated both getting into the bath and out of it.

  ‘You had that watery dream again.’

  Jess felt spied on. ‘How the hell do you know that?’

  ‘The noises from your room.’ The Judge worked around any need for eye contact by concentrating on the wriggling golden retriever. ‘Whimpers. You used to have that dream when you were small. Your mother gave you the creeps when she shut off our pool so dramatically.’

  Could he have forgotten? Only an ogre of self-absorption could forget such a day. ‘Dad, seriously, it wasn’t our pool that gave me the creeps.’

  Childhood memories are out of whack.

  Adults so tall.

  Their behaviour seen only opaquely.

  The seven-year-old Jess who’d dangled her legs in the water at a birthday pool party had misunderstood the parallel grown-up world around the noisy indoor lagoon.

  The adults were dry. Dressed up. The kids were sopping wet.

  Something held the day as if in a pair of scissors. A sharp edge hovered over the bunting.

  Beneath the chlorine was a vaporous smell the adult Jess would recognise as wet paint.

  The dad of the house – she hadn’t known his name; seven-year-olds don’t clock the names of their friends’ fathers – kept saying stuff in a funny tone. Bitey. Funny but horrid. As if he was saying two things at once but one of the meanings was covered up. She remembered him taking Harriet by the hand when they arrived – oh Mum! So slim and so pretty and without a line on her face in this troubled home movie – and pointing to a plaque.

  Decorative, out of place, it was a pretty carving of a lady. ‘See that, Mrs C,’ the dad had said. ‘That’s the only thing in the whole place I was allowed to choose, even though muggins here paid for everything.’

  Jess had looked around for Muggins.

  Close up, the dad smelt peculiar. Like the glass of wood-coloured water her own dad sometimes poured himself after a day in court, just before he locked himself away in his study.

  The memory was not only tilted, it was stained. Jess refused to examine it too closely in case she saw her own guilty face reflected in the scissor-cut water.

  ‘Jessica!’ The Judge’s voice brought her back to the moment. ‘Towel!’