she did not attempt to taste it), a carafe of colourless liquid which, from her knowledge of witchcraft, she diagnosed as water, and a V-shaped metal object up the arms of which two serpents, joined at the tail, were climbing. There was also a tall, curiously-ornamented metal cabinet, but it was locked.
Experimentally Dame Beatrice walked behind the table and pulled the cord which operated the black velvet window curtains. Immediately the curtains in the other half of the room also came together and the dim red light from a chandelier, which switched itself on as the curtains closed, balefully illuminated the scene.
‘Very pretty,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Black, rather than white magic, I fancy, with overtones of Satanism and, for good measure, a splash of voodoo.’ She pulled the cord again to draw the curtains apart. The light extinguished itself and, after a last look around, she went downstairs and into the shop.
When the police arrived she put a handkerchief over her hand before she drew the front door bolts and let them in, although there was not likely to be any evidence, she thought, that the murderer had been the last person to handle the bolts.
The police superintendent wasted no time. ‘Serious ma’am, so Mrs Gavin said.’
‘A dead man. This way,’ said Dame Beatrice, going towards a door at the back of the shop.
‘When we heard it was the chap who kept the shop here, we smelt a rat.’
Dame Beatrice looked at Laura, who said:
‘Sorry, but I had to give this address and the police insisted on a detail or two. I didn’t say the chap had been murdered.’
‘It has not been established that he died by the hand of another,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘not yet.’
‘Anyway, I’ve brought my boys and the police surgeon has been notified and will be here at any minute, so if you two ladies would show us where the body is, we’ll get weaving,’ said the Superintendent.
Dame Beatrice conducted him, the fingerprint expert, a sergeant and the official photographer to the office. The fingerprint expert got to work on the room, the sergeant, wearing gloves, methodically turned out the desk and the filing-cabinet, the photographer stood by, waiting for orders, the Superintendent and Dame Beatrice studied the blood-soaked figure on the floor.
‘All right, Ford,’ the Superintendent said. ‘Take from all angles. The knife is still in the body, but it looks like murder all right. And I’m not altogether surprised,’ he added, leading Dame Beatrice out of the room and away from the sweetish, horrible stench of decay. ‘We’ve thought for a long time that this shop was a cover for something illegal, but we’ve never been able to pin down what it is. We got a tip-off from the local manor of his last place of residence, which was in a suburb of Manchester. They hadn’t been able to get anything on him, but they’d have loved to pull him in.
‘To the local police station, you mean? Well, Superintendent, perhaps what I have to show you upstairs may interest you, although, since the Witchcraft Act was repealed, it will not be so significant as it might have been before 1951, and most certainly before 1736.’ She led the way to the staircase, followed by the Superintendent. Laura, who had stood aside at the doorway of the office to let them out, hesitated a moment, but, impelled by curiosity and having received no orders to remain downstairs, followed them up the staircase.
The Superintendent looked around the walls decorated so startlingly with their nudes and then he looked at the carpet with its white painted square, its circle, its pentagrams and other magical devices, before he turned his attention to the witches’ altar.
‘I suppose that table would be moved into the centre of the circle when anything was going on,’ he said. ‘Oh, well, that metal job must be hiding something – a special cup, I daresay – but it’s locked, so we’ll have to wait before we get it open. Anyway, it ought to yield some very nice dabs, although I bet they’ll only be Bosey’s own. Well, it’s a very elaborate set-up, Dame Beatrice, and hardly tallies with the junk shop downstairs. Neither does the office, for that matter. He can hardly have needed that expensive desk and a big filing-cabinet for the amount of antique-dealing he did. Ah, well, there may be a lot of perverse nastiness attached to this Satan’s Circle, but I can’t spot anything criminal about it, unless we can get him on a charge of procuring, and that’s no use now he’s dead.’
‘Ah!’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Sacrificial virgins! Dear me!’
‘Elysee Barnes!’ muttered Laura in the background. ‘Gosh! That would explain a lot.’
The Superintendent did not seem to have heard the slight mutterings, but when they had returned to the ground floor and the Superintendent, a handkerchief over his hand – ‘although I expect Davis has dusted everything off in here already, to get any dabs there may be – not that they’ll help us much, I’m afraid—’ had drawn back the bolts to let the ladies out by the shop door, Dame Beatrice said, when they were settled in the car:
‘Elysee Barnes? Yes, it all ties up very nicely.’
‘Do you really think she was mixed up in this business? She didn’t seem at all the type to me. Anybody ass enough to rush into marriage for the reason she more or less gave, is too much of a rabbit to be mixed up with what could be black magic.’
‘If there were no rabbits there might be no stoats,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘and to that extent the rabbits may be deemed to be culpable. Girls are enticed to embark upon evil courses because human nature, even when revolted by evil, has a devouring curiosity about real wickedness. Before they realise what is happening, these rabbits are petrified and rendered helpless by the stoats and then (to change our metaphor back into human terms) they are first victimised, as I say, then perverted and at last either discarded or, in extreme cases, murdered.’
‘But that only refers to young girls, not to young men.’
‘In a different way, men are corrupted too. The balance of their minds is upset and they find themselves taking part in doings which are more like a madman’s nightmare than any course of conduct they had ever visualised.’
‘Seems to me there must be the germs of corruption, anyway, in such men and women. It can’t just be nothing but curiosity in the first place.’
‘Well, you may be right, but, of all things, I think that witchcraft has its own fascination. The old gods may be dead, but, in the words of Miss Gracie Field’s deservedly popular song, they won’t lie down.’
‘Of course, witchcraft is no longer against the law, as you said. I believe there are dozens of covens in England alone.’
