She looked confused again. “Who does?”
“Karmen. She doesn’t look the same as she did. She looks like a very old woman.”
“But that’s ridiculous. She can’t be more than forty-five at the most.”
“I’m just telling you what I saw. I don’t want you to be shocked.”
She scrunched up her face as though faced with a difficult math problem. Gently, I said, “You must have known she was a witch.”
Now she pulled her hand away from mine. “It’s not nice to speak ill of the dead.”
Hey, I was a witch. Since when was that an insult? I merely said, “I have every respect for the craft. But I think she may have been older than she looked.”
She waved a hand around the shelves filled with the distinctive dark blue bottles. “It was her cosmetics. The cream is wonderful. That’s all.”
Again, I didn’t want to be insulting, but I said, “Do you use the creams?”
“Of course, I do. I get an excellent discount. I use them faithfully, day and night.”
“And yet you don’t look forty.” Sixty, at a guess.
She looked at me as though I’d hit her. I was not doing well in the winning friends and influencing people department. “I do the best I can. I admit, Karmen cared more about her appearance than I did. I’m sure she wasn’t above helping nature along, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t entirely. “Are you suggesting she used surgery and facelifts and so on to stay young? Or do you mean she used witchcraft?”
She let out a huge sigh. “I never inquired too deeply. She stayed remarkably young looking. And, of course, it helped the business enormously. I always got a nice bonus every year.” She looked around again, now forlorn. “I suppose that’s all over.”
I thought, not only was that woman not going to get any more bonuses, but she was most likely out of a job.
“Do you know anything about Karmen’s family?”
She shook her head. “She didn’t have any. Friends, of course, and everyone in Wallingford knew her.”
“I wonder what will happen to her estate?”
Tilda suddenly pulled herself together and looked offended. “That’s hardly your business.”
I could see she was overcoming her shock and probably becoming protective of the woman who had employed her.
“I’m sorry. You’re right. Her death has thrown me, too.”
She stood up and said, “Why don’t you head on home now. I can take care of the police. I should make sure she’s comfortable.” And then her face crumpled and she began to cry.
Obviously, Rafe and I couldn’t let her go into the house. If it was a murder scene, the last thing the police would want was more people blundering around in there, obscuring any clues.
However, Tilda wasn’t thinking straight, and I’d promised the police I wouldn’t leave the scene.
Luckily, my sharp ears picked up the sound of approaching cars. Sure enough, two police cars pulled into the drive. I stepped out of the pub to greet them. There were two uniforms from Thames Valley Police, and in the second car was the coroner.
We waited outside while they went in and had a brief look around, and then a woman who introduced herself as PC Dunford came out to take my statement and Rafe’s. Obviously, I didn’t tell her my reason for visiting Karmen was that she had sold one of my wedding guests a poisoned version of the elixir of life. I said, instead, that I had purchased some face cream and bridesmaid gifts from her, which was true and easily checkable, and had come back to talk to her about her products because I’d liked them so much. That seemed plausible.
More vehicles began to arrive. Tilda came out of the pub and looked around as though she’d stepped into a nightmare. After giving our names and contact information, we were allowed to leave.
On the drive back to Oxford, Rafe said, “That was very unfortunate.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“I don’t like this, Lucy. I don’t like it at all. That woman sent you poisoned elixir of life and then was herself poisoned.”
I didn’t like where his thoughts were heading either. “We don’t know that she was poisoned. You saw how old she was. Couldn’t she have died of natural causes?”
“No.”
“Okay, she could have been bashed over the head or, I don’t know, smothered or something.” She hadn’t been strangled, because there weren’t any marks on her neck. Or were there? She was so shriveled and her skin so old that there were odd marks and blemishes consistent with aging.
“We’ll wait until the postmortem’s been done, but I want you to be very careful.”
“Why?” It would help if he would articulate what he was hinting at.
“If you were sent poison, and she was poisoned, it’s possible that the killer will try again to finish you off.”
“But why would anyone want to kill both me and Karmen? There was no connection between us.”
He sent me a disbelieving look. “I can think of one obvious connection.”
“Well, okay, we’re both witches. But so is Margaret Twigg a witch and—” Just mentioning her name made me recall that I had seen her driving away from Wallingford as we’d been driving towards it. I turned to him. “Rafe. Margaret Twigg was heading back to Oxford when we were on our way to see Karmen. Remember?”
He kept his eyes on the road but nodded. “Are you suggesting that Margaret Twigg might have killed a rival witch?”
“Not really. It does seem kind of a stretch. But it’s an odd coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Lucy, this is a reasonably well-traveled road. There could be any number of reasons why Margaret Twigg would be on it, and she was certainly headed back in the direction of her cottage.”
That was true. I was probably looking for trouble where none existed. “Still, if you were looking for a connection between me and Karmen, Margaret Twigg would be one. I don’t think she was very pleased
