[Inspector Peach 10] - Witch's Sabbath Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Titles by J M Gregson from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Titles by J M Gregson from Severn House

  Lambert and Hook Mysteries

  MORTAL TASTE

  JUST DESSERTS

  TOO MUCH OF WATER

  CLOSE CALL

  SOMETHING IS ROTTEN

  A GOOD WALK SPOILED

  DARKNESS VISIBLE

  IN VINO VERITAS

  DIE HAPPY

  MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

  CRY OF THE CHILDREN

  REST ASSURED

  SKELETON PLOT

  Detective Inspector Peach Mysteries

  THE WAGES OF SIN

  DUSTY DEATH

  THE WITCHES SABBATH

  REMAINS TO BE SEEN

  PASTURES NEW

  WILD JUSTICE

  ONLY A GAME

  MERELY PLAYERS

  LEAST OF EVILS

  BROTHERS’ TEARS

  A NECESSARY END

  BACKHAND SMASH

  WITCH’S SABBATH

  J. M. Gregson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain 2006 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  First published in the USA 2006 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS INC of

  110 East 59th Street, 22nd Fl., New York, NY 10022

  This eBook first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Ltd.

  Copyright © 2006 by J M Gregson.

  The right of J.M. Gregson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Gregson, J. M.

  Witch’s sabbath

  1. Peach, Percy, Detective Inspector (Fictitious character) – Fiction

  2. Blake, Lucy (Fictitious character) – Fiction

  3. Police – England – Lancashire – Fiction

  4. Detective and mystery stories

  I. Title

  823.9’14 [F]

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6342-3 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0032-7 (ePUB)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  In memory of Ben,

  a faithful canine companion of many years,

  who died as this book was completed.

  One

  There would be more snow before nightfall, she thought.

  This was a snow wind, light at present but steadily gathering strength. There had been nothing to indicate more snow when they set out. There had been only a cold hard frost and a bright low sun, pouring its heatless light over the Pennine Hills from the east, blinding at first on the white carpet which had already covered the hills. But with each of the passing hours the wind had gathered strength. Now it was blowing relentlessly over the lower slopes beneath them, sweeping in from the west, where the land dropped away to the sea thirty miles away.

  There was a crust of frost on the snow that had fallen last night, so that their feet crunched through a hard top into the soft cold beneath. The snow built up on the soles of their boots until it made another sole, thicker and more treacherous, and every few minutes Dermot would stop and knock the compacted whiteness away methodically, then watch her toiling behind him, with what she was sure was disapproval of her faltering progress.

  Her boots were smoother than his, worn with the miles of climbing over the Lake District fells which they had endured over the years. Dermot hadn’t done much of that and he had new boots. It was perfectly logical that she should slip and slide more than he did as the ground became steeper. She wanted to tell the self-satisfied sod that Pendle Hill was a mere pimple compared with Scafell Pike and Helvellyn, that she had climbed grander hills than this in her time without breaking sweat. But she was panting too hard for anything like that, and he moved on each time she came up to him, as if to show that he was impatient with her weakness, that he tolerated it only because of his benevolent nature.

  As they climbed higher and the wind became more bitter, she drew the string of her hood tight beneath her chin, concentrating on the patch of ground ahead of her, enjoying the fact that theirs were the first footsteps here since the snow had fallen. They were on a well-used path beneath the whiteness, but she enjoyed the illusion that they were making a new track where none had existed before, that this was somehow wilder terrain and a more individual exercise than it really was.

  She watched her breath wreathing in long cones of steam as she climbed the last few yards to the gap in the dry-stone wall, where Dermot stood looking towards the long mound and steep northern end of Pendle Hill. He leant with his elbows lightly on the dark pillar of stone that marked the gap in the wall they would pass through and surveyed the ground ahead.

  ‘“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, / Arrives the snow,”’ he said.

  He liked to throw in quotations. It would have been more impressive if she hadn’t known that this one had appeared in The Times yesterday, Eleanor thought ungenerously. And more telling if he had been able to complete it: she was sure it had been four lines in all. But she couldn’t remember how it had ended either, so she said nothing, merely nodding rather stupidly and looking past him at the awesome scene ahead.

  ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson,’ Dermot added pretentiously.

  She pushed past him and set out resolutely across the huge white carpet of the next rise. She knew she was being ungenerous, that she should have responded to him in some way, should have at least acknowledged the attempt at communication he had made. Perhaps this happened to others as well; perhaps this was what marriage did to you. She could remember the old, premarital days when she had loved him to quote, when she would have teased him, come back with an answering quotation of her own in happy competition. But now all she could think of was Christina Rossetti’s carol,

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

  Snow on snow,

  In the bleak m
idwinter,

  Long ago.

  She might have crooned it softly to him, in the days before they were married, when he had admired her warm alto voice. But now she would be too inhibited to do anything but quote the words. It would be a cliché, and Dermot would underline the fact with that small, contemptuous smile of his, which said this was so obvious that it would have been better left unsaid.

  She could hear him panting a little as he came up beside her, and she kept up her brisk pace, as if it were necessary to her, not a mere substitute for conversation. And then, inevitably, she slipped, and her arms clawed wildly at the air for a moment. She saved herself from any serious injury by dropping forward on to all fours, her gloves feeling for the iron ground beneath the inches of snow. He reached out a hand to her, but she scrambled up without its help, absurdly furious with herself for this small evidence of weakness.

  She looked away to her left towards where the village of Sabden lay, invisible over the slope of this winter landscape. ‘This is the area where the Lancashire witches used to operate,’ she said, attempting to divert him away from her feebleness.

  ‘If indeed they were witches at all,’ said Dermot, happy in his twenty-first-century scepticism.

  ‘They were hanged for it,’ said Eleanor, suddenly resentful on behalf of her sex.

  ‘Convicted at Lancaster Assizes,’ Dermot said. He sounded as if he was anxious to cap her little gobbet of conversation and tidy it away.

  She was reluctant to let him have the last word, contemptuous of her own pettiness even as she indulged it. ‘I read a book about it a long time ago,’ she said determinedly. ‘It was quite good. Brought it all to life. Gave you the flavour of the times. They were mostly just women who were using herbal remedies to—’

  ‘Mist Over Pendle,’ he said with a superior smile. ‘I expect we all read that in our youth. Only fiction, of course.’

  He spoke as if that made the book both highly suspect and not worthy of serious consideration. Perhaps he wrote off all the books she chose to read as mere frivolity. But no doubt she was just fancying that, Eleanor told herself. She found it difficult to give Dermot credit for anything these days. It was as if he had forfeited her trust in all areas, rather than just one.

  Somewhere over the shoulder of the hill, an invisible sheep baaed, its bleating sounding unnaturally close, carried to them from miles away by some freak of the searing wind. Both of them looked automatically towards the sound, but there was no living thing visible across this frozen landscape.

  ‘We’d better get on if we’re going to the top. The darkness will drop in early now that the sun’s gone, and we want to be down by then,’ Dermot said.

  Thank you for stating the obvious: I’ve done a damned sight more walking in my time than you, she thought. But she knew that he was trying to be conciliatory, though on the face of it they had had no disagreement, and that she should be grateful to him for that. ‘You’ll have earned a pint by that time!’ she said with a smile, and both of them thought of the lights and the welcoming warmth of an old, low-roofed pub, even though they knew that the pubs would be closed when they came down from Pendle, in the late afternoon of the January day.

  They moved forward in a more companionable silence, united now in their contest against nature, concentrating on their small, safe battle against the English winter on this last outpost of the Pennines. As they turned on to the long slope towards the summit, the wind was at its keenest, hard into their faces, stinging their cheeks with the tiny fragments of ice it whipped from the waste ahead of them.

  Then it began to snow. The flakes were tiny at first, a welter of painful pinpricks to supplement the icy fragments from the ground. Then they grew larger, the wind blew almost horizontally, and all landmarks disappeared. The sky seemed to be reaching down to engulf them.

  It was at this point that the lace snapped in Eleanor’s left boot.

  She fumbled with it for a moment, then realized that frozen fingers were never going to handle the icy threads. Dermot had toiled on, head down against the strengthening wind and snow, oblivious of his partner’s distress. Typical! She swore heartily after him, but he could not hear her above the torrent of wind. He looked back when he reached the next wall and the next gap, to see her limping drunkenly up the slope through the white world behind him.

  ‘My lace has gone.’

  ‘You should have checked them before we set out, on a day like this.’

  She wanted to hit him, felt a compelling impulse to swing a drunken uppercut at what little she could see of his smug face. But she knew she would miss, would lose her balance and fall on her face in the snow. She must conserve what energy she had: for the first time, she felt a little burst of fear.

  She said through stiff lips, ‘We can’t get to the top now. Not in this.’

  Dermot turned and looked towards the now invisible top of Pendle Hill. ‘This isn’t a blizzard. It’s only a snow shower. We knew we might get one or two of these when we set out. Conditions will improve in a minute or two. We’re not far from the top, really.’

  She didn’t believe that. But she couldn’t stand still and argue, not with the snow building steadily on the front of her anorak and waterproof trousers. She caught a glimpse of what was no more than a dark, low shadow, through what this smug bastard said was not a blizzard. ‘There’s a building over there. I’m going to shelter for a few minutes and lace up my boot again.’

  He said, ‘I don’t think that’s a building at all. And it means losing height and leaving the path. You’d be better crouching here, in the lee of the wall. I’ll help you with your lace.’

  But his belated offer of help was borne away on the wind as it howled about his ears. Eleanor had set off towards her haven, setting her feet sideways and downwards into the deepening snow to retain her balance, taking tiny steps with her stricken left boot and much longer ones with her right. He hesitated a moment, bellowed a useless ‘Bloody women!’ into the teeth of the gale, and set off reluctantly after his wife.

  It was a building all right – a series of buildings, indeed. It emerged as she neared it as the remnants of a farmhouse, deserted now for probably fifty years and more, where some wretched tenant had striven hopelessly to wring a living out of a few acres of this hostile world. Most of the roof of the main building had collapsed years ago; what was left hung drunken and dangerous from the exposed rafters.

  Dermot caught up with her as she paused briefly to decide which was the best shelter to choose. ‘You can’t go in there. It’s not safe! The place is falling apart. It’ll come down about your ears.’

  ‘I’m bloody going!’ Eleanor, who never swore, found it strangely satisfying to shout the words through the gale. It was a fitting answer to the silly sod’s determination that she shouldn’t go into the place.

  She moved past a tiny enclosure with low walls, which must once have been a sty with a single pig. She stopped in front of a low building which had been added to the end of the stone gable of the farmhouse. ‘This will do.’ It was better preserved than anything else in the place, because the main building had protected it from the prevailing west wind and the worst ravages of desolation.

  ‘You shouldn’t go in there. It won’t be safe. There could be rats or anything!’ He sounded desperate to stop her.

  And the mention of rats almost did stop her. She didn’t like rats, and the thought of them in the near-darkness of this hovel filled her with terror. But then she said, ‘There’ll be no rats here. Not at this altitude. Not with no food around.’ She wished she felt as certain of that as she sounded. She lifted the remnants of a wooden door and ducked her head beneath the low stone lintel of the outbuilding.

  Eleanor waited a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, as her body welcomed the blessed relief of shelter from the blizzard. It felt almost as if the place was heated, such was the fury of the wind and the snow outside. She bent and brushed the compacted snow from the instep of her boot with the back of her gloved
hand, then picked cautiously, experimentally, at the broken lace beneath.

  She needed to re-thread the longest part of the broken lace through the top few holes of the boot and re-tie it. That would be good enough for her to get down to the valley, or even to complete the walk if the weather relented and her oaf of a husband insisted on going to the top. And it should be possible, if she could just get some feeling back into her frozen fingers. It’s only Pendle bloody Hill, she told herself resolutely. Not Everest; not the Matterhorn; not even Ben Nevis.

  It was whilst she was trying to motivate herself that she saw the thing in the corner.

  It was against the far wall of the room, hard up against the stone of the wall, as if someone had been saving space. A long, low, indeterminate shape, only dimly visible even now, when her eyes had accustomed themselves to the semi-darkness of her refuge. She did not want to investigate it, but she felt her legs moving her towards it, even as her instinct told her to turn away.

  Dermot’s voice said from outside, ‘It’s coming fine now. I told you it would. Let’s be on our way!’

  The words seemed to come to her from a great distance. She wondered why he had not come in, why he had been so reluctant to follow her into shelter from that icy torment outside. She bent towards the dark shape at the far end of the small, square room, recognized what had once been clothes upon it, accepted in her mind that this thing was probably human.

  It was in the darkest spot of all, in the furthest and darkest corner of the hovel, that she saw what had once been a face.

  Two

  Detective Chief Inspector ‘Percy’ Peach, reluctant to venture into the biting cold until the last possible minute, sat in the passenger seat of the police car and watched his detective sergeant donning boots.

  It was a much more interesting sight than it would have been when he began his CID career. This was entirely due to the fact that he now had a female sergeant – or, to be strictly accurate, this particular female sergeant. Percy Peach was only thirty-eight, but that made him an old sweat in police terms. DS Lucy Blake’s calves, even within the close-fitting blue trousers which passed for plain clothes, were infinitely more attractive to Peach than the long shanks of DS Bert Collins, which had once walked beside him on journeys such as this. That long streak of discretion, as Percy had been used to calling him, had displayed solid police virtues; but DS Blake had other qualities altogether.