I Put A Spell On You

Chapter 7

Xander insisted on calling a cab to drive me home and for once I didn’t argue. All my fight had left me and I just wanted to go home and get my thoughts in order.

Wearily I tramped up the stairs to our flat wondering for the umpteenth time why anyone had decided to build tall tenement blocks before they’d invented lifts. As I reached our front door and rummaged for my keys, the door flew open. Esme stood there, a candle in her hand, looking for all the world like Jane Eyre or some other Victorian heroine with her hair round her shoulders and wearing a long fleecy nightie.

“Harry, thank god,” she said. “Do you know how to change a fuse?”

I looked again at the candle. Maybe it wasn’t Elizabeth Bennet night after all.

“Power cut?” I said, my heart sinking.

Esme nodded.

“But weirdest thing,” she said. “I phoned the electricity company and they said there was no problem in the area. It’s just our flat.”

“And the spa,” I said. I put my bags down on the floor and peeled off my gloves and coat.

Esme looked at me in astonishment.

“Really?” she said. “Oh god.”

“That’s not the worst of it,” I said, following her into the living room. “The power cut wiped our server.”

She grimaced.

“But you’ve got a back-up, right?”

“Right,” I said. “And wrong.”

I told her about the fire.

“Shit,” Esme said. She blew her nose loudly and for the first time I noticed she looked dreadful.

“Are you ill?” I said.

She pulled her horrible fleecy nightie round herself.

“I’ve got a rotten cold,” she said. “That’s why I came home from work early. But then I couldn’t actually do any work because there was no sodding electricity.”

A thought struck me.

“Are the fuses blown?” I said.

“I thought that might be the problem,” she said, shaking her head. “But I’m not sure what they’re supposed to look like. I wondered if you’d know what to do.”

“Did you try magic?” I asked.

Esme gave me a shocked look.

“With electricity?” she said. “That’s asking for trouble.”

“You’re such a goody-goody,” I said, ignoring the fact that I’d shied away from trying to sort the power cut at the spa with magic.

“Where’s Jamie?” I had a vague – possibly ridiculous – notion that men knew about electricity.

“Rugby,” said Esme, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “But he’d be no use anyway. He can’t even change a lightbulb. It’s just you and me, sister. Let’s do it the old-fashioned way,”

With the help of the iPad, Google and the torches on our phones, we found the fuse box and peered inside.

“I think we just flip this switch,” Esme said, looking at the instructions on the iPad.

I flipped it, and the lights came back on.

“It’s like magic,” Esme said with a grin, wiping her nose again.

I gave her a most un-Harry-like hug, then bustled her through into the living room, tucked her up under a blanket and made her a hot toddy. Then I poured myself a stiff measure of whisky – I hardly ever drank whisky but I felt it would be medicinal – and curled up on the sofa next to her. I couldn’t face thinking about the computer at the spa.

“Tell me about your lesson with Xander,” I said.

Esme shrugged.

“Not much to tell,” she said.

“Liar,” I said. “Tell me. Did you agree to teach him because of that detective?”

“Louise,” she said in a passable imitation of Jamie’s voice. “She’s brilliant, she’s such a laugh and she’s great on the rugby pitch.”

“Ooh,” I said. “Have I touched a nerve?”

Ez blew her nose again.

“I know I’m being ridiculous but we’d had such a nice evening, you know, and we’d just got engaged and suddenly he’s all over another woman…”

I had a feeling – a hope – that Louise was gay, but I didn’t say anything. Interrupting Esme mid-rant was more trouble than it was worth.

“So, I was feeling a bit contrary when I met Xander anyway, and he wanted me to teach him, and you said I wouldn’t have time…”

“Ah,” I said. “It’s my fault.”

She scowled at me over the top of her hot toddy.

“No,” she said. “I just felt like I couldn’t say no.”

“So what happened?” I asked. “At the lesson?”

“Xander rang me and asked if I was free,” she said.

“But you weren’t free,” I pointed out. “You were at work.” Esme never left work early.

“I know,” she said. “But I felt rotten with this cold, and suddenly I just wanted to get out of there.”

I was amazed. And uneasy. Xander was handsome and charming and funny – but so was Jamie, and I’d never known Ez to leave work early for him.

“I met him in Princes Street Gardens, by the clock,” she said. “We just walked really. It’s all because of you, H, that he wants to learn magic. He wants to help you.”

That was sweet, I had to admit. Xander was protective of me, which I’d found very odd to begin with. I was used to being fiercely independent and just getting on with stuff. Sometimes I liked him looking after me. Sometimes it annoyed me massively. Today, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

“So you just walked,” I said. “Did you touch him?”

“Harry!” Esme said in mock outrage. “I’m an engaged woman. I wouldn’t touch another man.”

“Did you touch him?” I asked again.

“It was cold in the park and I took Xander’s arm as we walked and chatted,” she said sulkily. “That’sokay, isn’t it? We’re friends. It didn’t feel wrong.”

“What did it feel like?” I said.

“It felt nice,” she said. “Warm, mostly.”

I let it drop.

“And what did you teach him?”

“Mostly he wanted to know about Star,” she said. “And why you couldn’t save her.”

“No one could save her,” I said, feeling my stomach plummet again, like it did every time I thought about Star.

“So what did you say?”

“I told him that when someone, or something’s gone, it’s gone,” she said, squeezing my hand. “I said that we can’t raise the dead. What we do is a kind of extension to real life. We can speed things up, or slow them down, or intensify things. Not create things out of thin air.”

I nodded, relieved that she’d explained it all so well.

“And did he understand?” I asked. I was desperate to know Xander didn’t blame me for Star’s death.

“Oh completely,” Esme said. “It’s funny…” She trailed off.

“What?” I said.

“When I was telling him stuff – like the rules of three and whatever – I got the impression I was telling him things he knew already.”

I screwed my nose up.

“He’s probably picked some stuff up,” I said. “He’s always been interested.”

“I guess so,” Ez said. “He asked how often I do magic.”

“What did you say?” I asked. Despite my best efforts, Esme still didn’t do a lot of magic, preferring to do things like actually clean the loo or wash the dishes with her own fair hands. I’d almost given up trying to persuade her that spells were the way forward. Almost.

“I told him the truth,” she said, sounding surprised. “Hardly ever, I said. I told him I use it more now than I used to, but still not much. I sometimes tidy the flat with it. I’ve been known to make a bus come quicker. And I do protective enchantments if a friend’s in trouble. But that’s about it.”

I was pleased, reluctantly. I’d thought Esme might try to big herself up magic-wise, just to impress Xander.

“So what are you going to teach him?”

“More rules, I guess. They’re so important. And I can go through some incantations with him.”

She looked serious.

“I suppose I should warn him that I can’t guarantee it’ll work,” she said. “I have no idea how much is learned and how much is innate.”

I didn’t know either.

“I couldn’t teach Natalie anything,” I said, remembering how keen she’d been to learn at first and how quickly she’d grown to resent it. “Not even basic stuff. She just couldn’t do it. I reckon Xander might be different, though.”

Esme nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I think he might be. And he’s so desperate to learn – he just wants to keep you safe.”

“I can keep myself safe,” I said, bristling.

“He wanted to know if we could harm someone who’d harmed us,” Esme said. “But I reminded him that witchcraft – at least our kind – was based on goodness and that any negative spells would return on the witch threefold and taught him that we harmed no one.”

That was exactly what Xander had told me she’d said.

“And what did he say to that?” I asked.

“I think he was a bit disappointed,” Esme said. “But we didn’t talk about it for long.”

“I’m not sure these lessons are a good idea, Ez,” I said. “I’m not really comfortable with Xander’s views on magic, and” – I paused, knowing I was about to annoy her – “I think you’ve got a bit of a thing for him.”

“I have not got a thing for him,” Esme said, as crossly as her bunged-up nose allowed her to sound. “I love Jamie. Xander’s just a friend.”

I kicked myself inwardly for mentioning it. Now she’d go all contrary again and be arranging another lesson before I could say incantation.

“I’ll ring him tomorrow,” she said. “Arrange another lesson.”

See.

“All right,” I said, getting up and rubbing her hair, the way I knew she hated. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

She grinned at me.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I can look after myself.”

Chapter 8

The next day was chaos in the spa. Malc had saved some of our stuff to the ‘cloud’ – I pictured folders floating gently in the sky – so he was gradually retrieving a few bits. I had some things saved on my laptop, too, and by an amazingly fortunate quirk of fate (if you believe in those, which I don’t) I’d saved our entire database to a memory stick a few weeks earlier. I’d intended to use it to send out a Christmas email from home and never got round to it. When I’d found the little stick (in the fruit bowl would you believe?) I’d kissed it joyfully. I copied it on to my laptop straightaway. I even thought about asking Esme and Jamie to do the same, just to be sure, but dismissed the idea almost as fast. I was just being paranoid. What we didn’t have was our appointments diary – it had all been on Star’s computer and it was gone. All morning people were turning up for appointments we didn’t know about, and I had therapists wandering into reception and saying things like: “Anyone here for acupuncture?”

So, I sent an email to everyone on our database explaining our technology problems and asking them to email back with details of any future appointments they had booked. I was acutely aware it all seemed dreadfully incompetent but I wasn’t sure what else to do.

I knew that Esme had been right when she’d told Xander that when something was gone, it was gone, but I still tried magic, waving my hands over the computer and straining every bit of my brain desperately trying to restore all the lost files. But nothing happened. As the email responses began to trickle in I sent Nancy out to buy an old-school appointments diary and she laboriously jotted down every appointment we knew of by hand.

I was so busy just firefighting that I didn’t have time to dwell on what had caused the power cut. I couldn’t quite bring myself to think that the chances of there being a power cut at my work and my home – and nowhere in between – were very slim. I was too frightened about what that would mean.

But, eventually, as the sky outside darkened and things began to calm down, I got out the pictures I’d taken from Star’s flat and looked at them again.

They might not even all be of Star, I told myself. The one of her with a neck collar on was the only one that showed her whole face. But the close-up of the cut on her eyebrow showed a lock of curly blonde hair – Star’s hair – and anyway I remembered her having cut her face. She’d said a car had thrown up a loose stone as it drove past her. Had that been true?

The bruised knees could have belonged to anyone, and the burned arms and bloody hand. But why would she have photos of injuries someone else had suffered?

A knock on my office door made me look up. Fallon, one of the yoga instructors, stood there.

“I’ve found my diary,” she said. “I’ve got all my classes written in there – thought it might be helpful.”

“Brilliant,” I said. “Give it here and I’ll pass it to Nancy on reception.”

She came to hand it over and as she did so she glanced at the photo on top of the pile.

“Oh god,” she said. “Was that Star’s hand?”

I looked at her in surprise.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so. Did she cut it?”

Fallon picked up the photo and shuddered.

“She did it on one of the baubles from the Christmas tree,” she said. “She said it had happened when she was decorating it. But she was sitting at her desk when I found her. It was really strange.”

“It’s a nasty cut,” I said. “It’s deep.”

“I know,” Fallon said. “Like she’d fallen on it, not just that it had shattered in her hand. I bandaged it up for her and it took ages to pick out all the bits of glass. Poor girl. It must have really hurt.”

“Why would she lie, though?” I said.

Fallon shrugged.

“Why would she take a photo?” she pointed out. “I wondered…”

“What?”

“Just that she was so cagey about it, I wondered if she’d done it herself.”

“Really?” I said in surprise.

“You never know what’s going on in people’s heads,” she said, darkly. She tapped the diary on my desk.

“I’ve got a class,” she said. “Leave this in my pigeon hole when you’re done.”

I stared at the door as she left. She was right, in a way, I thought. You couldn’t really know what was going on in people’s heads. Except I did. Some of the time, at least. It was one of the witchy skills that I had that I enjoyed the most. Had I missed something terrible going on in Star’s?

On a whim, I pulled Louise’s business card out of my bag for the hundredth time and typed out an email.

“I know you’re busy,” I wrote. “And I don’t want to be in the way. But I found these photos in Star’s house and I wondered what you thought?”

I snapped photos of the photos with my phone – they weren’t brilliant quality but they’d do – attached them to the email and pressed send before I could change my mind.

Really what I wanted, I thought, was DI Baxter to come back to me and say I had nothing to worry about. The graffiti on the spa’s front door, and the broken windows, and Star’s injuries, and her death, were all just coincidences. A run of terrible, awful, horrific bad luck.

Feeling sick again, I stuffed the photos into my bag, and wandered off to find Xander. He’d told me he’d arranged to meet Esme again the next day and I’d pretended to be pleased.

“You’re so stressed, H,” he said, using the nickname my family used. I quite liked it when he called me H. “I can help you if I learn more about magic.”

He’d wrapped me in a hug and I’d let myself snuggle into his chest. I’d never had many close male friends, and I’d never known my dad so when I first met Xander with his tactile nature and habit of draping his arms round my neck or my shoulders, I was thrown for a while by his sheer maleness. But now I enjoyed how he was never afraid to give me a hug when he thought I needed one.

He kissed the top of my head.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “With my brains and your beauty we’ll have things back to normal in no time.”

I patted his chest and ducked out of his embrace.

“My brains,” I said. “You’re just the wallpaper.”

He stuck his tongue out at me.

“Go home,” he said. “I’ll close up.”

I suddenly realised how tired I was.

“Thank you,” I said. “What would I do without you?”

“You’d be bored,” he said with a grin.

I doubted that, but I grinned back as I put on my coat. The weather was getting worse and outside it was sleeting. Dirty grey freezing sleet covered car windscreens. Everywhere looked dark and gloomy because Twelfth Night was gone and now the Christmas decorations had been taken down. I felt uncharacteristically sorry for myself.

Chapter 9

Esme and Jamie, however, had obviously not received the misery memo, because I arrived home straight into wedding planning central.

They were in the living room, surrounded by magazines, Esme’s laptop open, foolish grins on both their faces and an enormous sparkler on Ez’s finger.

“Look!” she shrieked as I walked in. She waved her finger in my face and I caught her hand. It was a beautiful ring – a traditional solitaire with a square diamond set in a platinum band.

“It’s gorgeous,” I said truthfully. “Well done, guys.”

My bone-aching weariness was actually beginning to wear off in the face of such happiness, so I flopped down beside Esme.

“Are you making plans?” I said.

“We are,” she said. “You can help. Jamie, give Harry some fizz.”

Jamie went off to the kitchen and came back with a champagne glass and a bottle of Prosecco.

“There’s another bottle in the fridge,” he said, handing me the glass and filling it to the brim.

We chinked glasses.

“So what are you thinking?” I asked.

“We looked at some fancy Edinburgh venues,” Jamie said. “But they weren’t really us. And then Esme had an idea.”

“I want to go home,” she said with a smile. “I want to get married at the café.”

My mum, Suky, Esme’s mum, Tess and their friend Eva, ran a café on the banks of Loch Claddach, where we’d grown up. It was a thriving little business with amazing views. They’d had a difficult time a couple of years ago, when my mum had been diagnosed with breast cancer and the vultures started circling their business. But things were on the up again. In fact, they were expanding. Eva’s husband, Allan, who was a landscape artist whose paintings adorned birthday cards, posters, prints and teacups across Britain, had come up with a plan. He’d persuaded Mum and Suky to clear the top floor of the café – a little-used attic space with incredible light – whitewash the walls, sand the floorboards and turn it into a gallery. Claddach was brimming with artists, writers, poets, musicians – it was that sort of place – so there was no shortage of interest.

He started with an exhibition of his own work, had quickly found other artists to feature and now ran poetry readings, concerts and all sorts in the room upstairs. In fact, that’s what he’d called it – The Room Upstairs. Cute, huh? He was in the process of drawing up plans for an extension out the back, which would allow the gallery and the café to grow. I’d helped him out with business plans and accounts and the like and been pleasantly surprised by his financial acumen. He was a dark horse, Allan, I’d decided. But he was making a massive success of the gallery and it was, without a doubt, the most perfect place for Esme and Jamie’s wedding. I clapped my hands in a very girly way – apparently talk of brides and flowers can do that even to a cynic like me.

“What an amazing idea,” I said. “Have you asked your mum?”

“I have,” she said. “She was thrilled. Your mum was in the background shouting out ideas. We’ll have to go up and have a look and make some lists.”

“Oh that’ll be nice,” I said. “You guys can tell me what the gallery’s like.”

“Not Jamie,” Esme said. “He’s too busy to come up. I meant you and me.” She looked shifty for a second. “Actually, H, I’ve got something to ask you.”

“What?” I said warily.

“I rang Chloe,” she said. “I asked her to be bridesmaid.”

I nodded. Chloe was the obvious choice – she’d been Esme’s best friend forever and knew all about our family and its quirks.

“She said no,” Esme said.

“What? Why?”

Ez screwed her face up.

“She’s pregnant.”

“Again?” I said in horror. “She’s got about four kids already.”

“She’s got two,” Esme said, in a tone that suggested she thought I was less intelligent than either of Chloe’s sprogs. “I think this one was a bit of a surprise and she’s only just found out.”

“So why can’t she be bridesmaid?”

“Because her baby is due in August,” Esme said. “And we’re getting married in September. She says she’ll do a reading, or be a witness, or whatever. She just doesn’t want to be bridesmaid and have to squeeze into a fancy frock while she’s sore and lumpy and breastfeeding.”

I shuddered.

“You’re not selling it, Ez,” I said. “So what has Chloe’s fertility got to do with me?” Realisation dawned.

“No,” I said. “I’m not the bridesmaid type.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“Mum would love it. Your mum would love it.”

Esme looked at me, her blue eyes twinkling.

“Will I have to organise a hen night?” I said.

Esme shook her head.

“What about the dress? Can I choose it?”

“You can even choose mine,” she said. “You’re much better at clothes than I am.”

I knew when I was beaten.

“Okay,” I said. “But you are not to call me anything vile like matron of honour.”

Esme grinned.

“Maid of honour,” she said. “Because you’re not married.”

I whacked her with a wedding magazine and she chuckled.

I left her and Jamie to their plans, ran myself a bath, and sank into the bubbles, closing my eyes and letting my mind drift. It was just what I needed after such a stressful few days.

I didn’t think about Star, or the power cut and our lost files, or Xander’s pursuit of Esme, or even the fact that I’d just agreed to be a bridesmaid. It was bliss.

Maybe it was all coincidence, I thought. This wasn’t the Wild West. No one had a grudge against me, no one would have targeted Star deliberately. It was just bad luck. I got out of the bath, and into bed feeling much better about everything. And then, the next day, it all went wrong again.