Not Just a Witch (12 page)

To the stone witch, Mr Knacksap didn’t say anything about snow leopards. What he spoke to Dora about was his Cousin Alfred.

‘What’s happened to my poor dear cousin is the one thing that is spoiling my happiness,’ he said, dabbing his eyes with his handkerchief.

‘What has happened to him?’ asked Dora Mayberry.

‘He is in prison,’ said Mr Knacksap, and sighed. ‘Here in Wellbridge. That sweet, sensitive soul eating his heart out among all those ruffians.’

‘Oh, Lewis, that’s so sad. How did it happen?’

‘It wasn’t Alfred’s fault, I promise you. He was led astray by bad people. If only you could have seen him as a little boy. We were such friends. He used to build sandcastles for me, and whenever his mummy bought him a lollipop, he would let me have a lick. Look at his photograph – isn’t that an innocent face?’

Dora took the picture and said, yes it was, and fancy him having ringlets! (The picture was actually of a child actor who had played Little Lord Fauntleroy in a film.)

‘What is he in prison for?’ she asked.

‘He stole the purse out of an old lady’s handbag. The wicked people he fell in with made him do it.’ He dabbed at his eyes again and sniffed. ‘If only I could get him out of prison, I would send him to a wonderful mind doctor that I know of. Then he’d soon be well again and never do anything bad any more.’

‘But how could you, Lewis? How could you get him out?’

This time, Mr Knacksap did go down on his knees. After all, soon he would be able to buy dozens of pairs of new trousers, hundreds of them . . .

‘With you to help me, dearest Dora, I could do it. If you could turn the prison guards to stone, just for one night, I could get him out.’

Dora thought for a while and then she said that if it was only his Cousin Alfred he was going to get out, and if she could turn the guards back into people the next day, she didn’t mind. ‘I couldn’t leave them stone, of course, because they aren’t wicked. Not so far as I know. But for a night it shouldn’t hurt.’

‘Oh, my dearest, dearest Dora,’ said Mr Knacksap, ‘you’ve made me so happy! I just couldn’t face sitting over my porridge and kippers in Paradise Cottage, knowing that poor dear Alfred was lying in a cold stone cell.’

Then he went back to town and put up a big FOR SALE notice outside his shop. Everything was ready – and there was nothing between him and three-quarters of a million pounds.

Mr Knacksap’s plan was simple. He would take Dora to the prison as soon as it was dark and when she’d turned the guards to stone, he’d send her packing. Then two of his accomplices, Nat and Billy, would drive the vans into the prison – they were huge ones, hired from a circus, and would take the leopards comfortably enough. Nat knew about electronics too; there’d be no trouble with the alarm system with him around.

When they’d taken over the prison, he’d go and fetch Heckie and let her in by a side door so that she wouldn’t see the stone guards, and bring the prisoners to her one by one – and when she’d changed them into leopards, she’d be sent packing too.

And then the following morning both witches would meet on the station platform to catch the 10.55 to the Lake District! It was this part of the plan that always made Mr Knacksap titter out loud when he thought of it. For he had told both witches to wait for him at the Windermere Hotel. He had told both of them that he would marry them in a little grey church by the edge of the water. Both of them thought they were going to live happily ever after with him in Paradise Cottage!

If only he could have been there to see them scratch each other’s eyes out! But by that time the leopards would be dead and skinned, and he’d be on the way to Spain!

As for how to kill three hundred leopards without marking their pelts, Mr Knacksap had got that sorted out too. About five miles to the east of Wellbridge, there was a derelict stately home called Hankley Hall. No one went there – it was said to be haunted – but some of the rooms were still in good repair. The ballroom, in particular, had windows that fitted well and a wooden gallery that ran round the top. The man he’d hired to do the actual killing said it was a doddle. You just lobbed a canister down from the gallery and waited.

When you wanted to kill someone and leave no mark, Sid had said, there was nothing like plain, old-fashioned gas.

Farewell parties are often sad, and Heckie’s was sadder than most.

She gave it on her last day before leaving Wellbridge, and she gave it in the afternoon because in the evening she had to go and change the prisoners. Heckie had told no one of Mr Knacksap’s plan – not even her helpers – but they could see that she looked tired and strained, and not really like a bride.

The furrier couldn’t be at the party, but almost all her friends were there and had brought presents. Sumi’s parents had sent a huge tin of biscuits with a picture of Buckingham Palace on the lid, Joe had made some book-ends, and the cheese wizard brought a round Dutch cheese.

‘It can’t do much,’ he explained. ‘Just a few centimetres. But if you’re going to eat it, it won’t matter.’

Madame Rosalia gave her a make-up bag full of useful things: pimples, blotches, pockmarks and a tuft of hair for joining her eyebrows together; and the garden witch brought a cauliflower which got stuck in the door and had to be cut free with a hatchet.

But the best present – really an amazing present – came from Boris Chomsky, and it was nothing less than a hot air balloon which really did fly on the hot air talked by politicians!

Boris had been very upset by what happened at the Tritlington Poultry Unit and he began to work much harder at his invention. He got out all his books of spells and studied late into the night. Then he went up to the Houses of Parliament with his tape recorder hidden under his greatcoat and started to record the speeches that the members made. He took down the waffle that the Minister for Health talked about it being people’s own fault if they got ill, and the piffle that the Minister for Employment talked about there really being lots of lovely jobs for everyone if only they weren’t too lazy to look, and the garbage that the MPs shouted at each other during Question Time.

Then he went back to his garage and boiled things in crucibles and burnt them in thuribles – and at last the day came when he put a tape of the Chancellor’s speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet into one of the fuel converters, and the balloon rose up so quickly that it hit the roof.

So now they all trooped across the road and round the corner to Boris’s garage and admired Heckie’s balloon (which was grey because it rains a lot in the Lake District) and the other balloons which he had converted so that they could be used by any wizard or witch who wanted them.

But when Heckie had thanked him again and again, and taken her guests back to the party, her face grew very sad and her eyes went more and more often to the door to look for the one person who hadn’t come.

‘I’m sure he’ll be along soon,’ said Sumi, who always seemed to know what was troubling people. ‘I expect the professors have made him do some extra piano practice.’

But the clock struck five, and then six, and Heckie had to face the fact that the boy she loved as though he was her son had not even troubled to say goodbye.

The prison crouched on its hill, surrounded by warehouses and factories. Even by day it was a grim building, but at night, rearing out of the mist, it looked deeply sinister.

Dora and Mr Knacksap walked up to the main gate just as the clock was striking eleven. There was no one about; they could hear the echo of their own footsteps. Dora wasn’t so much nervous as shy, and she was carrying a powerful electric torch because stone magic depends on being able to see the victim’s eyes.

‘I’m sure you’re going to do splendidly, dear,’ said Mr Knacksap in his oily voice – and pressed the big brass bell.

They could hear it shrilling and then a uniformed guard came out, carrying a gun.

‘My friend is feeling faint,’ said Mr Knacksap. ‘I wonder if you could help?’

‘This isn’t a bloomin’ hospital,’ said the guard. ‘It’s a pris—’

And then he didn’t say anything more.

It was almost too easy. If Mr Knacksap hadn’t been so ignorant, he’d have realized how honoured he was to see such a powerful witch at work. A second guard appeared, wanting to know what was going on, and then he too fell silent. Mr Knacksap pushed Dora through the crack in the gate and into the guardroom where two more men were playing cards – and in an instant even the playing cards they were holding turned to stone.

Within half an hour, the prison was full of statues. Statues of the warders in charge of each corridor, one caught as he peered into the spy-hole of a cell . . . A statue of the chief warder, sitting in his office – a statue with ear-phones because he’d been listening to the radio to make the long night pass more quickly. There was a statue of a patrol man, still shouting at his dog, and a most graceful one of the dog itself, an Alsatian whom Dora had looked at just before it sprang at her throat.

‘Well, that seems to be it,’ said Mr Knacksap when they had walked up and down the corridors and the winding iron stairs without anybody challenging them. ‘Now you just go home and make sure you’re on that train, otherwise you won’t be ready for your Lewis when he comes.’

Dora had hoped he might ask her to stay till he had found his Cousin Alfred. She was curious to see what a little boy with ringlets, who’d let Lewis have a lick of his lollipop, looked like after his time in prison. But the furrier took her firmly to the gate. He didn’t even say thank you, or hail a taxi, or give her a kiss.

But Dora was a humble witch. She turned up her collar and trudged out into the night.

‘Oh, Li-Li, not that one! Please! He looks so young.’

An hour had passed and Heckie sat in a small

cloakroom off the prison yard, facing her first prisoner. She had kicked off her shoe and her Toe of Transformation felt icy on the bare tiles.

‘Surely he can’t have done anything terrible?’ Heckie went on.

The furrier leant forward. ‘He strangled a little girl in cold blood,’ he hissed – and the prisoner looked up, puzzled. They couldn’t be talking about him, surely? He was doing three years for house-breaking.

But Heckie had believed Mr Knacksap. She leant forward and touched the young man with her knuckle – and then even the horrible Mr Knacksap gasped in wonder.

There are no words that can describe the beauty of a snow leopard. Their coats are a misty grey with black rosettes that are clouded by the depth of the rich fur. Their golden eyes stare out of a face that belongs on shields or banners, it is so grave and mythical – and when they move, their long, thick tails curve and coil and circle in a never-ending dance.

Mr Knacksap had retreated behind a chair, his hand in the pocket of his coat where he kept a gun, but Heckie knew her job. She had made the leopard as sleepy as the prisoner had been. The great cat yawned slowly and delicately. Then it loped off, out of the door, through the wire tunnel, and up the ramp to the first lorry which had SIMPSON’S CIRCUS painted on its side.

Everything was going the way Mr Knacksap had planned. The prisoners had been woken and told they were going to be moved to a new jail with better food and more space, and they shuffled out of their cells, half-asleep, giving no trouble. Nat, who brought them to Heckie, didn’t need the sub-machine gun he’d insisted on carrying.

And how Heckie worked! She turned one prisoner and then two and three and four . . . Sometimes she stopped when a particularly innocent-looking prisoner was brought to her, but always Mr Knacksap would bend over her and hiss some frightful lie into her ear and she would go on with her job.

When she had changed over fifty prisoners, she swayed and her head fell forward. Mr Knacksap had no idea what he was asking her to do. Turning one person into an animal can leave a witch completely exhausted. Turning three hundred . . . well, witches have died from over-straining themselves like that. But the furrier knew exactly how to get round her.

‘Dearest Hecate,’ he said with his gooey smile, ‘if you knew how happy you are making me!’

That did it, of course. Heckie lifted her head, blew on her throbbing knuckle and got to work again. And by one in the morning, her task was done.

But if Heckie had hoped that Mr Knacksap would thank her or give her a kiss or order a taxi, she, like Dora, had hoped in vain. As the door of the lorry slammed on the last of the leopards, Heckie let herself out of a side door and half limped, half staggered, home.

But though she fell straight into bed, Heckie couldn’t sleep. Her Toe of Transformation ached and stabbed every time she moved, and when her knuckle caught on the sheet, she flinched with pain.

After an hour, she got up and fetched the dragworm and packed him carefully in his tartan shopping basket. What she had decided to do probably wouldn’t work out, but it was her only chance, for familiars never thrive except with witches, and powerful ones at that. It wasn’t as though she was asking anything for herself. Heckie knew that Dora wanted nothing more to do with
her
– but could anybody turn away something so appealing and unusual as the dragworm?

Dora, too, was overtired and couldn’t sleep, and after a while she gave up trying and put on her boiler suit and went downstairs.

The wardrobe was lying flat in the van that Dora had hired to take her furniture to be stored. Everything else had already gone to the warehouse to wait till Dora knew what she would need in Paradise Cottage. Only the wardrobe was left and as Dora approached, the wood spirit floated out and gave her a shy and wavery smile.

Dora had not wanted a ghost at all, and when the spirit first started floating about among her coathangers, she had been quite annoyed. But gradually she had become fond of it. It still didn’t say much except ‘Don’t chop down the wardrobe,’ but in its own way the thing was affectionate. Dora would have liked to take the wardrobe with her to Paradise Cottage, but Lewis did not care for ghosts. The first time he had come to tea and the spirit had called down from the bedroom, Lewis had leapt from the sofa and dropped his cup cake on the floor.