‘Why is your face funny?’ Carly said, squinting up at her.
‘I have to go to work.’ Mrs Farrier picked up her keys and her case. She pulled a face that was sad and uncomfortable and impatient all at once.
‘Have you told her?’ Bex indicated the top of Carly’s head with a downward jerk of her chin.
‘Not yet,’ Mrs Farrier said, heading for the hallway. ‘We’ll probably do it on the weekend.’
Bex detached Carly from her front and followed, interpreting Mrs Farrier’s words as she moved. No room for messy scenes. No goodbye and no warning.
Mrs Farrier was already opening the front door. She clearly couldn’t wait to get out.
‘This discussion is not finished,’ Bex said, surprising herself.
Mrs Farrier paused, evidently a little surprised, too. ‘I’m going to be late.’ She bent down and kissed her daughter goodbye. ‘Be a good girl for Bex.’
Once the children were at school and nursery, Bex had a few hours of relative freedom. She was meant to spend these tidying, sorting laundry and cooking nutritious after-school snacks, but instead she put on her coat and walked out of the town centre towards End House.
Bex knew about Iris Harper – everybody in town did – but had always dismissed the rumours as silly superstition. The way Bex saw it, either the creepy old woman had special powers, which made her, according to every fairy tale Bex had ever read, highly dangerous. Or she didn’t, which made her your usual meddlesome old woman with a side-order of battiness thrown in.
As Bex picked her way across Iris Harper’s overgrown garden she didn’t let herself dwell on what she was doing; knew that she would lose her nerve if she looked at it head on. All Bex knew was that she was desperate. Her mistake had caused so much damage; it had broken up a relationship, lost her friends, and almost ruined her chances of getting work. She’d come clean with the childcare agency and the woman who interviewed her had agreed to bend the rules and take her on, to give her a second chance. If the Farriers called the police or refused her a reference, that chance would be well and truly blown.
Nestled amongst the wild flowers and bushes of rosemary and lavender were ripe red peppers and fat purple aubergines, both of which were utterly impossible outside of a greenhouse at this time of the year. Bex had always been a practical and focused kind of person, not easily derailed. Dutifully, she ignored the impossible vegetables and concentrated on the job in hand; to find the wicked old witch who lived in the broken-down cottage and obtain a magical potion that would sort out her life. She snorted out loud at the unlikely nature of this scenario and then almost fell over with surprise when a voice, very close to her ear, said, ‘And who might you be, traipsing through my garden without so much as a good morning?’
The woman must’ve stepped out from behind the hawthorn tree to the side of the path. Bex swallowed. She was not in a fairy tale and the woman was not about to turn her into a frog. No matter how terrifying she appeared. ‘I’m Bex. Bex Adams. I’m looking for Iris Harper.’
‘You’re Janet Adams’s girl. Silbury Road?’ The woman was old. Frail-looking, too, in that brittle way the ancient sometimes had. It seemed that old women went one of two ways; you could either become comfortably chubby and rosy-cheeked or you could wither away until you resembled a stick.
‘They sold that house,’ Bex said, trying to hide her surprise. ‘Ages ago.’
Iris’s mouth turned up at one side. ‘Ages ago? You’re barely grown, girl, haven’t had time for “ages”.’
Well, there was nothing to say to that. Not unless you had a snappy comeback like ‘I’ve got a rare disease. I’m actually sixty-five.’
‘Not unless you’re like that Benjamin Button fellow,’ Iris continued, giving the unpleasant impression she could read minds. ‘You’d better come in. I’m finished out here anyway.’
In the kitchen, Iris Harper boiled a kettle on the stove and made tea. She poured out thick brown liquid from a cracked earthenware teapot into a stained mug which said ‘Stonehenge Discovery Centre’ on the side in sickly green writing.
Bex thought she’d controlled her expression very well, but when she raised her eyes she saw Iris watching her with quiet amusement. ‘If I gave folk pretty china and a slice of cake, they’d never leave me alone. It’s like Piccadilly Circus in here, as it is.’
The kitchen was painted yellow and the cabinets must’ve been added sometime in the nineteen-fifties or sixties. The Formica worktop was heavily scarred from years of knife cuts and hot pans.
‘So. What brings you to my door?’ Iris raised her mug, regarding Bex steadily over the rim.
‘I’m in trouble.’ Bex stared at the brown surface of her drink and tried to formulate the words. The only sound was a clock ticking.
Then there was a knock on the door and Iris motioned to Bex. ‘Be a dear and get that.’ A man was at the back door, somewhere between the age of seventy and a hundred.
‘Hang on, Fred,’ Iris said. She rose from the table, slowly, with a flash of something on her face. ‘I’ll just get it.’
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ the man said. ‘So soon. I thought it would last a bit longer, but I dropped it and –’
‘Not a problem,’ Iris said. ‘I’d invite you in, but –’
‘I’m not stopping.’
Bex watched the woman slide open a drawer in the dresser that stood next to the back door. She passed the man a screw-top jar and he went away. So it was true; she was a witch. Or a herbalist, at least.
Bex’s mother had liked a bit of that, natural remedies and so on. She’d poured a foul-smelling concoction from a brown bottle into Bex’s ear whenever she had an infection,
