Authors: Kerry Greenwood
‘Not so far as I know,’ responded Miller. ‘They don’t tell us a lot. Ever since all them bloody forensic TV programs got so popular, they’ve been getting above themselves, SOCO have. Think they’re CSI Miami. But we’ve interviewed all the witnesses and it’s clear this bloke was alone. No one pushed him.’
‘So, it’s an accident,’ said Daniel hopefully.
‘Not if someone sold him the fairy dust,’ said Jones. ‘And I’m old enough to remember this happening before, eh, Daniel?’
‘Don’t look at me,’ he protested.
Jones sucked up more tea and I resupplied him and his mate.
‘The Summer of Love,’ he pronounced with slow relish. ‘Only time I ever saw people who thought they could fly was when Timothy Leary brought in LSD. I reckon that’s what it is.’
‘Acid?’ asked Daniel. ‘There’s always some around, of course. Tiny little doses on blotting paper.’
‘This,’ said Miller, ‘wasn’t a tiny little dose. When you went out at nine, the bloke must have been on the roof. You didn’t see or hear anything, Daniel?’
‘No. I went out the front door into Flinders Lane and straight down towards the station to get the croissants. He must have fallen when I was away and I came in through the front door when I came back. Missed all the excitement— which is good, as I don’t like excitement.’
‘See anyone around?’ asked Jones casually.
‘Not that sort of person, no,’ replied Daniel. This was clearly a coded conversation.
‘Too much to hope,’ remarked Miller. ‘Ah, there goes the blood-wagon.’
I heard an ambulance crunch and turn, just where the wider-than-usual wheel base always impacts on a slightly raised paving stone.
‘We’ve finished with your alley,’ Miller told me politely. ‘Body’s gone now.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ I said. There was no way that I was going out there until a heavy shower of rain had fallen and removed the blood and organic material. I am not cut out for crime scenes. I cherish my ignorance of autopsies. The Mouse Police would just have to do without their tuna scraps.
‘Do we know who the bloke was?’ asked Daniel.
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‘Yeah, respectable citizen,’ said Jones, as though reading from a card. ‘No warrants, no criminal record. Wallet and driving licence in his pocket. Allan Morris. Worked for Treasury. Married with two small children. Well, gotta go,’ he said, levering himself to his feet. ‘Least the widow will be over the poached egg stage by now. Thanks for the tea,’ he added, and took himself and his mate away.
‘Poached egg?’ I asked Daniel.
‘The eyes widen with the sudden shock,’ he explained gently. ‘They don’t mean to be callous. It’s the job. Now, make another pot of that tea, shall we? And I’m going to have a shower and put on some clean clothes. I feel like I’ve been wearing these since last week.’
‘I feel the same,’ I said. ‘Bags first shower.’
I beat him to the bathroom by a short half-head and washed myself vigorously with pine-plantation soap, a clean and bracing scent which Daniel also selected when I yielded him the shower. We might not have known what we were doing, but at least we would smell clean.
For her encounter with Barnabas Meroe had dressed not in deep black, which I had expected, but in a drape of fiery red silk with soup-plate sized suns emblazoned on it in gold thread. Huge gold rings hung from her ears. A necklace with the gold reserves of a small European duchy—Mecklenburg-Strelitz, say—encircled her brow and gold coins jingled on her wrists, her neck and around her waist. Meroe was armed against the darkness with pure bright gold. She gleamed.
Feeling very dim ourselves, Daniel and I followed her out into the street, where she summoned a taxi with a flick of the fingers and had us driven to Parkville.
We found that Barnabas and his followers had been accommodated in one block of an undistinguished set of flats built for visiting academics, undoubtedly designed to prod them into either going home or leasing a real house. Nostalgia hit me on the stairs. As a first year accounting student at Melbourne University I had babysat there for a charming American law professor whose child only ate lightly cooked hamburger mince. And thrived on it, as I remembered. The doors were just as ill-fitting as ever and the stairs uneven. Barnabas’s search for treasure might have something to do with his living standards. Still, weren’t witches supposed to be outdoor creatures, strongly linked to nature and the Powers? Possibly not this one.
Meroe did not knock but thumped the door with her fist and, when it opened, swept in without pause. We followed in her magnificent wake.
The flat was small and crammed with people. Barnabas sat, like Father Christmas, in the big chair by the fire with a couple of girls on his lap. His lap was quite commodious. He saw Meroe, leapt to his feet (spilling both young women, who rolled quite easily, like puppies, onto the floor) and held out both arms.
‘Meroe!’ he roared. ‘Come to me, my sweet witch!’
Meroe threw herself at him, grabbed him around the neck, and swung, both feet off the ground, until he had to bend down. Then she bit his ear. Hard. He grimaced.
Daniel and I looked at each other. Probably better not to intervene, we thought, could be this is some strange Rumanian way of greeting another witch... cultural differences, tolerance, etc. Besides, Meroe looked quite prepared to bite us, too.
On the other hand the victim did appear to be bleeding. The girls sat up. Barnabas was forced to his knees and Meroe came down with him, not releasing her bulldog grip until he was quite under control.
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‘What are you doing?’ she yelled. Her coarse black hair lashed his eyes. Blood ran down his neck. ‘You profane the ceremonies! You dare to spit in the face of the Goddess!’
I was, at this moment, not watching the main event but scanning the room for something less bloody to look at. Was this, indeed, that law professor’s very flat? I could not remember the number. And all of these buildings looked alike. I thus surprised a gorgeous man wearing an expression of such gleeful malice that I might have gasped, except that I did not want to draw his attention onto me or my lover. He was very good-looking, perhaps forty with hair as short and plush as a black cat and dark, unfathomable eyes. His chest was bare, with beautifully well defined muscles and little rings in his nipples and belly button. And Meroe’s punishment of Barnabas was tickling his fancy, and it was not a nice fancy. Daniel had followed my gaze—he also has no taste for blood sports—and he waded into the mob and drew the man out by the hand.
‘Well, well, Rocky, I wondered where you had got to,’ he said affably, just loud enough to be heard. ‘When did you get out of jail?’
‘Daniel,’ said Rocky, with little or no pleasure in seeing an old friend again. ‘The name is Cypress. Remember that. And this is my mate Cedar.’
A pale youth—no, must have been twenty-five, but as languid as a Gilbertian aesthete—leaned on Cypress’s chest and cooed at him. He was beautiful. Cedar was, however, the wrong name. It ought to have been jasmine. Or wisteria. Or even better, ivy, a clinging vine. Cedar’s expression, when he looked at Cypress, was one of complete devotion. Cedar had the most beautiful dark brown eyes, like a labrador dog. Cypress went on speaking to Daniel: ‘I never expected to see you here. You came with the bitch?’
‘Yes, but unless you want me to regale good old Barnabas with highlights of your career, I shouldn’t use that term again,’ said Daniel, very quietly.
‘She bites like a bitch,’ said Cypress, and laughed. He was very pretty. But pretty isn’t everything. ‘All right—’ he raised his free hand to ward off revelation—‘I won’t say it again if she’s a pet of yours. I got into Wicca in jail. The others were dumb. Turned Christian. No one ever believes that. But show a parole board a sincere commitment to New Age beliefs and they buy it. Some of them. Some of the time, anyway. There’s this big festival so I came along. Lots of magic,’ he said hungrily.
‘So you wouldn’t know anything about the sale of drugs to finance this treasure hunt?’ asked Daniel in that same flat tone.
Cypress slid out from under Cedar’s hands, ducking his plush head. ‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘I got nothing to do with drugs. I never did. You know that, right?’
‘You didn’t in the past,’ Daniel agreed. ‘Theft, yes. Stealing anything that moved including two speedboats and a yacht which you sailed to Tasmania, yes. But drugs, not when I knew you.’
‘And I don’t now.’
‘All right,’ said Daniel. ‘You know where I am. You probably still know my mobile number. You find out anything, you call me, right, Cypress?’
‘Is there a buck in it?’ the man asked hopefully.
‘I don’t know that there mightn’t be,’ said Daniel. ‘And you can go on being Cypress.’
‘Okay,’ said Cypress, far too tractably, and slipped away, taking Cedar back into the pile of bodies on the floor. Several young women embraced him. Cypress had fallen on, so to speak, his feet.
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Meanwhile Meroe was scolding Barnabas. Her mouth was close to his injured ear. His blood was on her lips. She was berating him in a harsh, relentless stream of insults and exhortations which steadily became more, not less, unbearable as they went on. ‘You fool, Barnabas, you lead-footed fool, you big jelly-bellied idiot! Do you think gods like being mocked? Do you think they’ll forget this because your intentions were pure? What were your intentions? Barnabas! What have you been doing?’
Daniel and I watched, unable to think of a way of helping—indeed, unsure of who might need the help if we gave it. Cypress had escaped Daniel’s attention but some of the people on the carpet were getting restless.
‘Why’s she biting him?’ asked one child, pushing a couple of boys aside and crawling to her feet. ‘She shouldn’t be biting him. Barnabas?’
‘It’s Meroe,’ said an older woman, rubbing her shaved scalp with a narrow, dark palm. ‘Best not to interfere with Meroe. Solitary. Powerful. Sibyl’s Cave,’ she added in a warning tone.
‘Oh.’ The girl bit her lip. ‘I’ve heard of her.’
‘Those Rumanians are feisty,’ commented a boy in leather trousers who was almost as decorative as Cypress.
‘That means full of beans,’ said a woman wearily, shoving a couple of puppy-dog youngsters off her lap. ‘I reckon that finishes communion for now. I’m going to slump into a nap. Coming, Celeste?’
‘Yes,’ said Celeste, a tired forty with red hair looped into a coil.
‘Can we talk?’ I suggested. The Meroe/Barnabas confrontation showed no signs of slowing down at all. Now he was yelling at Meroe and she was hissing like a Naga to whom an indecent suggestion has just been made by a pit viper of low manners and unpleasant associations.
‘Why not?’ said the woman. ‘I’m Selene. She’s Celeste. Come next door. Barnabas wanted a council, but we didn’t decide anything.’
‘Only because he never lets anyone decide anything,’ objected Celeste. ‘I don’t know what got into us, joining a Goddess-based religion and ending up being pushed around by a man.’
‘You have a point,’ agreed Selene. ‘It was because of Eugenia, really, that we got into it, and when she went to the Goddess, I suppose we just stayed on...she was Barnabas’s partner, a wonderful mentor. Oh dear, we have no manners,’ she apologised, ushering us into a flat identical to the one we’d just left. ‘You came with Meroe, yes? I seem to know you. You’re the baker,’ she said, her dark face lighting up. ‘You’re going to make the soul cakes. Your chocolate muffins have frequently saved my sanity. I’m a teacher,’ she explained. We sat down and she poured a cool yellowy infusion into small cups. ‘Dandelion, want some?’
Daniel and I declined.
‘I’m Daniel, this is indeed Corinna Chapman, the baker from Earthly Delights,’ Daniel said. ‘We came because Meroe might need back-up.’
‘If she does, she’s got it,’ said Celeste. ‘She’s always been known to be very close to the Goddess.’
‘And you’ve come to town for Samhain?’ I asked, talking about a pagan celebration as though I was commenting on the spring racing carnival.
‘Celeste lives in Sydney and I live in South Yarra,’ said Selene. ‘The others come from everywhere—from little covens in Queensland to communes in microclimates in Tasmania.
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It’s always a good feast, because although in Europe it’s the autumn, here it’s spring. And we are not going to open that debate again,’ she added, as though in warning, flapping her hands.
‘What debate?’ asked Daniel, puzzled.
‘Do we reverse the ceremonies’ dates because we follow the seasons, or do we follow the seasons and reverse the dates?’ asked Selene.
I took a moment to work this out. Autumn in Europe was spring here. Summer in Australia was winter in Europe. The north wind doth blow in England and they shall have snow, and what will the robin do then, poor thing, but sit in the barn and keep himself warm, whereas in Australia the north wind doth blow and we shall be fried to a crisp, and all the robin can do is try to find a drop of water in the bottom of a parched pond somewhere. But presumably in both cases it can hide its head under its wing (poor thing). The common verse of England has always added just another level of confusion to Australian children, plus the sneaking suspicion that they or the robins were living in the wrong country...or someone was... the poets, maybe?
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Right. What has been decided?’
‘Better the communality of all the Craft celebrating the same ceremony all over the world, regardless of seasons,’ replied Celeste promptly, ‘than halving the celebration just to make it match. Not my view, but I agree to differ. Put on the kettle, Sel? I could do with another cup of tea.’
I liked these women. They seemed very sensible, unlike the lolling young in the other flat. Daniel had found a chair and was absent-mindedly scratching the healing wound on the back of his hand. He was smiling.
‘What do you teach?’ he asked.
‘I teach maths,’ said Selene. ‘Celeste runs a tea shop.’
‘Ah,’ said Daniel.
We sat quietly while the kettle heated and tea was made. Through the thin walls we could hear the battle of the witches going on. There was an occasional crash. They were probably throwing things. Things which smashed very satisfactorily. I also heard youthful laughter.