Blood and Broomsticks Read online

  Her old school friend had only recently moved to the village of Swainswick, just a spit and a promise from the city centre. If she’d stayed in France with her ex-husband, two children, three cats, dog, parrot, and an au pair from Toulouse, Honey could have evoked distance as a credible reason for not attending her birthday party. As it was, Andrew, Alison’s husband, had run off with the au pair and the parrot. The au pair was young and pretty so running away with her was understandable. The parrot, however, was a different matter. According to Alison it swore like a trooper, but Andrew was very fond of it and if he had left it she would have had it put down, stuffed, and Fedexed it off to him.

  Honey conceded that Andrew had guessed her likely reaction and as he was as fond of the parrot as the au pair, he had no wish to see the poor bird stuffed in retribution for his wandering groin.

  ‘So. What will you come as?’ asked Alison, her face bright with childish anticipation.

  Honey smiled secretively over the top of a chocolate éclair she’d just taken from the cake stand. ‘Not telling. It’s a secret.’

  She wasn’t lying. Not really. The costume was a secret to her too. What the hell would she go as? A ghost? A witch? Something purple and indescribable?

  The present wouldn’t be a problem. Alison was a dyed in the wool chocoholic and Smudger, Honey’s head chef, was a closet chocolatier. Handmade chocolates. Sorted!

  But the outfit? There was no way she was going to attend dressed in a bedsheet with holes cut for eyes. If she got it askew, she’d end up tripping over the hem. And no way did she want to cover herself in odd colours and wear rubber appendages, or masks, or a hooked nose, or any of those things. Especially she did not want to dress up as a spider. She did not like spiders. Anyway, despite the theme she harboured the grim determination to hang on to some kind of normality.

  I want to be recognisable.

  The question of costume stayed with her on the walk back to the Green River Hotel, set not far from Pulteney Street in the heart of the lovely city of Bath.

  Spiders, ghouls, goblins, pumpkins, and witches with warts on their noses; none appealed.

  Shrugging her chin into her upturned coat collar, she paused to let a plastic carrier bag and a brace of autumn leaves scuttle past.

  In the act of pausing she happened to glance into a shop window display offering ‘EXPERT financial advice’. So how about expert supernatural advice. When it came to things that go bump in the night, there was only one person to ask. She was tall, gangly, had eyes that were sometimes piercing and sometimes looked as though they’d shot into orbit around Mars.

  On arrival back at the Green River Hotel, an early Georgian building of infinite possibilities if only she had the money for development, she sidled behind the reception desk and punched in 07 on the phone. Nobody answered.

  Anna was on duty and for once she wasn’t pregnant. Currently working out her notice, she was soon moving back to Poland, where the money she’d earned had been invested in a small café presently being run by her mother.

  Honey put down the phone. ‘Anna, have you seen Mary Jane today?’

  Mary Jane was the Green River’s resident professor of the paranormal. She knew everything there was to know about ghosts and ghouls. Looking slightly otherworldly herself she’d flown in from California many years ago (with American Airlines, not on a broomstick) and hadn’t gone back. This was because she’d stumbled across an ancestor haunting her room and decided to keep him company. So entrenched was she in her new life with an old ghost, that she’d also brought over her car, a 1961 Cadillac coupé. It was pink, the steering wheel was on the wrong side for driving on the left hand side of the road, and so too, a lot of the time, was Mary Jane.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna in response to her question. ‘She has gone underground.’

  Anna slapped a pile of brochures into apple pie order then fanned them in a circle with a sleight of hand that was breathtaking to watch.

  Honey stood for a moment admiring the display. She’d never mastered that particular sleight of hand herself.

  ‘How do you do that?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘Fanny dancing,’ said Anna. ‘I used to do fanny dancing.’

  ‘Fan dancing,’ Honey corrected, something she frequently did, even though Anna had been resident in Bath for a few years. Anna’s English was quite good now, but she had an unfortunate tendency to make comments that didn’t quite say what she meant. ‘Now where did you say Mary Jane was?

  Anna nodded towards the floor. ‘Underground. She has gone under the ground. It happened this morning – just an hour ago.’

  A sudden cold shiver ran down Honey’s spine. ‘You mean …’ Getting the rest of the words out was like dredging for gold. Had Mary Jane, way past the three score years and ten, finally been united with Sir Cedric, the ancestor with whom she had daily contact?

  ‘Oh my God! What happened?’ she exclaimed, fully expecting to hear that Mary Jane and the pink Caddy had gone to that big car park in the sky.

  ‘She went underground because Adrian said it was spooky and that somebody was down there. She is still down there. Adrian has quit.’

  Listening to Anna explain a happening was sometimes like wading through treacle. Progress was slow but you got there in the end.

  Seeing as Adrian was, or had been, a trainee wine waiter, this meant that Mary Jane was down in the cellar. He hadn’t been that good a wine waiter, but having him quit so swiftly raised the obvious query.

  ‘Why did he quit? Is he scared of spiders or something?’

  She could understand it if he had. The cellar was a haven for spiders; cobwebs hung in abundance like torn shrouds.

  ‘No. He said it was soldiers. According to him they wore little leather skirts and armour that went clang, clang, clang when they marched through the cellar.’

  ‘Oh, is that all?’

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Honey thanked Anna, dared to touch the leaflet display with an enquiring finger, and scooted as it fell into instant disarray.

  The cellar was a gloomy place, mainly because a series of arches supporting the building impeded the distribution of the dismal lighting. White paint flaked off bare brick and spiders lurked in dark corners. Some of them were big – very big!

  Wine, beer, and discarded furniture considered too good to dump were stored down here, along with tax records that would never again see the light of day; paper mouldered swiftly away, a victim of damp, mice, and beetles.

  Roman soldiers marching through had never been a problem before. In fact she didn’t recall anyone mentioning them, not even Mary Jane who could sniff out a ghostly apparition with one nostril blocked. However, Mary Jane had never been in the cellar before.

  Honey groped her way down the cold stone steps, ducking cobwebs and keeping her eyes open for furry friends scuttling past when you least expected them to.

  This was hardly her favourite place and playing Dungeons and Dragons had never been high on her favourite things list.

  Nothing to worry about though. Wimpy Adrian! A nervous type with a thin frame and long hands with very thin fingers. Not strong fingers. Would they have been able to hold onto a magnum of champagne? Not that they sold many magnums of champagne … Creep up behind him and shout ‘boo’ and he might have dropped them. Now how good would that be for the Green River’s reputation?

  A cold draught came up the steps, making her skirt into a bell tent. At the same time she slapped the prickling sensation at the nape of her neck. Or had a spider landed there? If so, where was it now?

  She wriggled from the waist in the hope of dislodging the eight-legged creature that just might have fallen down her back.

  A light bulb fizzled and blinked out. She paused, one foot poised over the bottom step. Her heart wasn’t exactly leapfrogging against her ribs. The frequency of the palpitations she was experiencing were reminiscent of Morse code. She read the dot-dot, dash-dash encryptions easily. They were telling her to get out.

&nb
sp; Gird up your loins!

  The advice came out of nowhere and was less than helpful. It was difficult to be brave with all these cobwebs around and light bulbs blinking out for no reason. Still, there was just enough light to see by.

  Taking a deep breath she called Mary Jane’s name. It echoed right back. The following silence was worse than the echoes. There was a terrible emptiness to silence. As though it’s waiting for loud noises to fill it, she thought.

  Scuffles!

  Her heart leapt at the sound. Her brain was telling her to run back up the steps. Her feet seemed to be buried in concrete.

  She held herself very still. First there was silence. Then more scuffles.

  Probably a mouse, she told herself. A mouse she could cope with. Please, not a rat. She hated rats. How the hell could people keep a rat as a pet?

  Rats! It could be rats. That rustling, scuffling sound was too loud for it just to be Robert Burns’ ‘timorous beastie’. This beastie was far from timorous or tiny; it sounded huge.

  Narrowing her eyes, trying to focus, her attention was drawn to a particularly dark corner. Another sound came to her; heavy breathing, like somebody struggling to get out from somewhere. Hopefully nobody had buried a vampire down here in the darkness. She tried to recall ever seeing a coffin down here. No. The oblong thing lying to her right on top of a stainless steel table was not a coffin. It was an old blanket box that used to sit in a small corner on the first floor landing. Only blankets could fit in it. If it did harbour a vampire, then his name had to be Shorty. She figured she could handle a very small Count Dracula.

  Short vampire or not, her heart had given up on Morse code and was beating like a drum. Her tongue turned to sandpaper when the pitch blackness in a far corner changed shape. Throwing herself back up the stairs to daylight leapt high on the agenda, but she was hedging her bets. It had to be Mary Jane.

  First there was what looked like something hunch backed scrabbling on all fours. Suddenly the paleness of a face pierced the gloom, and the culprit popped out of a hole.

  ‘Honey! Did I scare you? My torch went out.’

  Mary Jane came into the light and straightened to her full height. At over six feet tall her stiff curls – orange this month – scraped the flaking paint from the ceiling. Flecks of it showered around her. She looked like a figure from a very large paperweight, one of those you turn upside down to make it snow.

  ‘Mary Jane! I was worried about you.’

  The Californian professor brushed cobwebs from her hair and shoulders. ‘No need to be, dear. It may have escaped your notice, but I’m not the kind to be frightened of the dark. Or spooks. Or ghouls. Or anything ephemeral.’

  Honey felt her heart lying back and sighing with relief.

  ‘Did you find anything interesting?’

  She said it as though the cellar held no fears for good old Honey Driver.

  ‘Could be a possibility that your hotel was built on an old Roman burial ground. Or even an old battleground. We need to do a little research.’

  ‘Lindsey will be pleased.’

  Honey had always entertained surprise that her daughter was more interested in medieval history than she was men. Not that Lindsey didn’t have her moments. Indeed she did. But if something interesting on the historical front came up, the chance of some guy in tight jeans getting anywhere with Lindsey went down. It was Lindsey who would do the research.

  ‘How very interesting. So you think the buried soldiers are still marching into battle?’

  ‘Poor guys. They probably didn’t even get to the battle. Could have been victims of an epidemic. Either that or the natives cut their throats before they had chance to draw their swords.’

  ‘Well it it’s only long-dead Roman soldiers, there really isn’t anything to worry about,’ said Honey airily. Roman legionaries were far less frightening than spiders and small imagined furry creatures.

  ‘Tea,’ said Mary Jane without making comment about what or who might be lurking in the darkness. ‘I need tea. Investigating a haunting is guaranteed to work up a thirst.’

  Honey would have preferred something stronger, but it was only mid-afternoon. Besides, she’d come up from the cellar without wearing cobwebs in her hair. A definite bonus!

  Nice white tablecloths covered the dining tables in the restaurant. Mary Jane smoothed the sparkling linen with one wrinkled hand after gulping back her first cup of tea which Honey promptly refilled. She was unconcerned that Mary Jane was leaving a trail of white flakes and coal dust whenever she moved.

  ‘There’s a tunnel down there,’ she said after gulping back her second cup of tea. ‘I think I was pretty close to the end of it when my flashlight gave out. Damned shame. I’m sure I was on to something. I could feel the vibes. There are old bones down there, mark my words. It could be that the tunnel links up with the ones below the Roman Baths. Even to those underground places in Milsom Street.’

  Honey had it on the tip of her tongue to remark that it was Mary Jane’s old bones that had been down there.

  More flakes of dry paint and dust fluttered in the air as Mary Jane sipped tea and nibbled at home-made lemon drizzle cake.

  ‘Still, I’m so glad you’re in one piece,’ Honey remarked. ‘When Anna said you’d gone, I wondered what she meant. You know how she is muddling up meanings of words.’

  Mary Jane chuckled and her eyes twinkled. ‘You afraid I wasn’t here anymore?’

  Honey felt her face turn warm. How could she possibly admit to thinking that Mary Jane had finally joined her ancestor, Sir Cedric, on the other side?

  ‘I would really miss you …’ Honey began, meaning to go on to say how embarrassed and sorry she was to have assumed that Mary Jane had passed over, but Mary Jane didn’t give her chance.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she trilled, her blue eyes looking deeply into Honey’s. ‘You should know for sure that I am never leaving you and going back to the US. Sir Cedric would be so upset if I did. Nice to think that you would too.’

  Honey exhaled a big breath. Phew! What an upset she could have caused. Mary Jane had misunderstood, not guessing she’d thought she was dead. There was no way Honey was going to own up, and she was genuinely relieved that Mary Jane was still in the here and now.

  ‘What would we do without you?’

  Her remark coincided with loss of tension. It was like having all the bones fall out of her shoulders, leaving the muscles like soft cushions.

  Mary Jane said that she was relieved to hear it and what a silly goose Honey was to have thought that she would leave without saying goodbye.

  From there she went on to explain about the birthday party and the fact that she had no intention going dressed in a bedsheet or look terribly purple and ugly as a monster, a spider, or a witch with an overlarge hooked nose.

  ‘I thought you might have an idea of who I could go as. Something spooky but sexy. That’s my take on what the outfit should be.’

  Mary Jane blinked, put down her cup, and went immediately into a trance – or so it seemed. Closing her eyes, she raised her arms so that her hands were out to each side, palms upwards. She was making a humming noise.

  Feeling a tad concerned, Honey snatched at Mary Jane’s teacup and took a sniff. She had good reason to do so. Some time back their washer up, Rodney Eastwood, aka Clint, had mislaid a sachet of magic mushrooms that he kept purely for personal recreational use. The restaurant had been busy. The dishwashing had been going at full pelt and Clint had been forced to help out with the beverages. He’d made pot after pot of tea.

  After polishing off a pot of Earl Grey, six members of the Swainswick Senior Bowling Club proceeded to dance and behave as they had back in the Summer of Love. On seeing what was going on, the rest of the club demanded to have the same as their colleagues. It wasn’t until later that Clint was spotted spooning teabags from pot after pot, searching for his mislaid stash.

  Luckily that didn’t seem to be the problem on this occasion. Suddenly Mary Jane’s eyes p
opped open.

  ‘Morticia Addams!’

  Honey sat back, genuinely impressed. She recalled the American TV show and remembered the gorgeous female lead.

  ‘Dark. Sexy. Recognisable,’ she said feeling and sounding seriously impressed. ‘That HAS to be me!’

  ‘Right!’

  ‘Long black clingy dress with feathery, shroud-like sleeves. I think I can find something suitable. Pale complexion, dark makeup, and long dark hair. My mother has the stage makeup. The dramatic society are “resting” at present.’

  The truth was that a number of members had dropped dead or gone senile, which accounted for the latter so frequently forgetting their lines.

  Lindsey joined them, bubbling with the news that the honeymoon couple had finally surfaced, paid their bill, and left a very generous tip.

  ‘They reckoned it was the best hotel they’d every stayed in.’

  ‘How would they know? They never came out of their room.’

  Lindsey waved a fifty-pound note in front of her face. ‘That’s why they enjoyed their stay. They never got out of bed and nobody ever disturbed them. What better honeymoon could they have had?’

  After agreeing the point, Honey went on to tell her about the fancy dress Hallowe’en birthday party.

  ‘A lot of parties rolled into one. I’m going as Morticia Addams. I’ve got a long black dress. It’s not too shroud-like, but I can unpick the sleeves and make them more ragged.’

  ‘That should work. If you like, I can get you a long dark wig from Clarissa,’ said Lindsey. ‘She used to wear it all the time when she was doing art class at college.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a student friend named Clarissa,’ Honey remarked with a satisfied sigh. She was feeling incredibly happy now her outfit was on the drawing board – so to speak.

  ‘She was the life model. She posed naked. The long black wig was a modesty thing.’

  Chapter Two

  Steve Doherty grumbled, between soft caresses and promises of good things to come, that he didn’t like fancy dress parties.