Not Just a Witch (8 page)

This was true. The fish that Heckie had left in a tank by the West Gate of the zoo labelled:
ANOTHER PRESENT FROM A WELL WISHER
had really brought the scientists running.

Sumi didn’t say any more. She knew how Daniel felt about Heckie, and she knew why. If you had a mother who had written seven books about The Meaning of Meaning and had no time for you, you might well turn to a warm-hearted witch for the love you didn’t get at home.

And quite soon they had something more to worry them than whether Ralph Ticker did, or did not, like being an unusual fish.

Although she was so busy Doing Good, Heckie never forgot her pet shop. Since she knew so much about animals, all the rabbits and guinea pigs she sold were healthy, so she made quite a lot of money. At first she had kept this money in her mattress, but she was worried that the mice who lived there would nibble it and this would be bad for them.

‘Mice have very tender stomachs,’ she told the children. ‘Not everyone knows that, but it’s true.’

So she went to the bank and signed a lot of papers and after that, every Friday afternoon, she paid in her takings.

Heckie liked going to the bank. She enjoyed chatting with the other shopkeepers and the people in the queue. It made her feel ordinary and that is a thing that witches do not often feel.

On the particular Friday when something unexpected happened at the bank, Heckie found herself standing beside a tall and very distinguished-looking man with a Roman nose, dark eyes set very close together, and a little beard like goats have. He wore a black coat with a fur collar and carried an ivory cane, and Heckie thought she had never seen anyone more handsome. She didn’t approve of the fur collar, but there was always the hope that the raccoon it was made of had died in his sleep, and no one is perfect. So she gave him a beaming smile, showing all her large and sticking out teeth, and when he got to the counter, she listened carefully as the clerk said: ‘Good morning, Mr Knacksap,’ and thought what an unusual name Knacksap was and how well it suited him.

Mr Knacksap wasn’t putting money into the bank, he was taking it out, and as she waited, she squinted over his shoulder at his cheque-book and saw that his initial was L. Did that stand for Lucien or Lancelot or Lovelace? Such an elegant man was sure to have an unusual name.

Mr Knacksap took his money and Heckie smiled at him again, but he didn’t smile back. Then it was her turn. She had just put her paying-in book down on the counter, when the door burst open and a masked man rushed into the bank, waving a sawn-off shotgun.

‘Everybody on the floor!’ he shouted to the people in the queue.

Everybody got down at once, even Heckie who had become very excited. She had seen bank robbers on the telly, but never in real life. This one looked a bit thin and she thought he might have a hungry wife and children at home, or perhaps he was going to give the money to the poor like Robin Hood.

‘Anyone who moves, gets it,’ the robber went on, and strode to the counter. Outside, Heckie could see a van parked alongside the kerb, and a fierce-looking man inside. The getaway car! Really, it was just like the telly!

Mr Knacksap, lying on the floor beside Heckie, did not seem to be excited at all. He looked quite green and his beautiful bowler hat had rolled away. Heckie wanted to comfort him, but she thought it was best to keep quiet till the robber had gone.

‘Come on, hand it over. The lot! And hurry!’ barked the robber.

Heckie squinted up and saw a little fat cashier run up to the grille with wads of bank-notes, and start pushing them through. ‘Don’t shoot!’ he kept saying, ‘Don’t shoot!’ The other cashiers were huddled together at the back – all except one girl. A very young girl with long blonde hair who looked as though she had only just left school. She was edging her way carefully forward to where the alarm bell was. She had almost reached it . . .

The next second there was a blast from the shotgun, a scream . . . and the blonde girl fell across her desk with blood streaming from her shoulder.

Up to now, Heckie had just been interested. Of course it was wrong to rob banks, but after all if there was one thing banks had plenty of, it was money.

But now she lost her temper. Her eyes narrowed, her knuckle throbbed, she kicked off her shoe. The robber, meanwhile, had turned away from the counter. He felt in his pocket and lobbed a metal canister on to the floor where the people were lying. It was a smoke bomb, and as the choking fumes spread through the room, he made for the door.

At least he started off. But a hand had fastened round his ankle . . . a hand like a steel trap. He raised his gun, ready to shoot . . . but he didn’t seem to have arms any more . . . he didn’t seem to have . . . anything.

No one else saw. As they groped and struggled to the exit, they thought that the robber had escaped. But Mr Knacksap, lying beside Heckie, had seen. He had seen the robber’s shape become dim . . . become wavery . . . shrink almost to nothing. And then reform in the shape of a small brown mouse which scampered over to the wall panelling – and was gone!

Mr Knacksap’s Christian name was not Lancelot or Lucien, it was Lionel, and the raccoon on his collar had not died in its sleep because Mr Knacksap was a furrier. He owned a shop in Market Square where he sold fur coats and he had a workshop in the basement and a store-room where he kept the skins of dead animals ready to be made up into coats or sold to other furriers at a profit.

The shop was called Knacksap and Knacksap, but the first Knacksap, who had been Mr Knacksap’s father, was now dead. The old man had been a good craftsman and had made very beautiful coats which ladies had paid good money for, because in those days people did not think it was cruel to kill an animal simply for its skin and there were not so many other ways of keeping warm. But his son, Lionel Knacksap, was not a good craftsman. His coats were badly made, and at the time he took over, people were beginning to ask annoying questions before they bought fur coats. They wanted to know how the animals had been killed – had they suffered at all, and were they rare; because if so they didn’t want to wear them.

So Mr Knacksap found himself getting poorer and poorer, and as he was a man who had expensive tastes, he didn’t like this at all. In the basement he had kept two ladies who made coats for him. Now he sacked them and started doing business with very dubious people. These were men who came at night and talked to him in the shop with the shutters closed and they wanted him to get skins for them that were no longer allowed to be sold in England: the skins of Sumatran tigers or jaguars from the Amazon – beautiful animals that were almost extinct. They were willing to pay thousands of pounds for pelts like that because there were always vain or ridiculous people who would do anything to lie on a tiger skin or wear a coat like no other in the world. But it wasn’t easy to get hold of such skins. Mr Knacksap was finding it very hard to supply his customers and he had been getting into debt.

And then he saw Heckie fasten her hands round the bank robber’s ankle and realized that he had been lying next to a very powerful witch. A witch who could change people into animals. But any animal? Mr Knacksap meant to find out.

Heckie was worrying about the mouse. Suppose they set mouse-traps in the bank and it got caught?

‘Or killed,’ she said, looking desperate. ‘Imagine it! An animal I produced, lying dead! I had no time to think, you see, but that’s no excuse.’

‘I’m sure they don’t use traps,’ said Daniel. ‘I’ve never seen a mouse-trap in a bank.’

‘It’ll be perfectly happy behind the panelling, eating the crumbs from the cashier’s sandwiches,’ said Sumi.

But it was hard to comfort Heckie. Dora had known how to do it; she’d just told Heckie to shut up and not be so daft, but the children couldn’t do that, and Heckie went on pacing up and down and saying that if anybody she’d changed into an animal got hurt, she’d never know another moment’s happiness again.

‘Why don’t we take the dragworm for a walk?’ said Joe, who was used to dealing with gorillas when they went over the top. ‘Then you can go to the bank and
ask
about mouse-traps.’

Heckie thought this was a good idea – she wanted to enquire anyway about the girl who’d been shot in the shoulder. As for the dragworm, he only had to hear the word ‘walk’ and he was already inside the tartan shopping basket on wheels. It fitted him just like a house with a roof and he was never happier than when he was rattling and bumping through the streets of Wellbridge.

When they had gone, Heckie went to change her batskin robe for something more suitable, but she never got to the bank, for just then the doorbell rang.

Out in the hall, holding a bunch of flowers, stood the tall, distinguished man that Heckie had seen in the bank.

‘Forgive me for calling,’ he said. ‘My name is Knacksap. Lionel Knacksap. May I come in?’

Mr Knacksap was wearing his dark coat with the raccoon collar and his bowler hat, and smelled strongly of a toilet water called Male.

‘Yes, please do.’ Heckie was quite overcome. ‘I was just going to . . . change.’

‘You look delightful as you are,’ said Mr Knacksap in an oily voice, and handed her the flowers which he had stolen from the garden of an old lady who was blind. ‘I came to congratulate you. I saw, you see. I saw what you did in the bank.’ And as Heckie frowned: ‘But don’t worry, Miss . . . er . . . Tenbury-Smith. Your secret is safe with me.’

Heckie now offered him a cup of tea. This time she put in three tea-bags because she had never been alone before with such a handsome gentleman, but Mr Knacksap said that was just how he liked it.

‘Tell me,’ he said, resting his cup genteelly on his knee. ‘Can you turn people into any kind of animal? Or only little things like mice?’

‘Oh, yes, pretty well any animal,’ said Heckie, looking modest. ‘But of course I have to think of what will happen to it afterwards.’

Mr Knacksap’s eyes glittered with excitement. ‘Could you, for example, could you . . . say . . . turn someone into a tiger? A large tiger?’

Heckie nodded. ‘I’d have to make sure they wanted a tiger in the zoo.’

She then went on to tell the furrier of her plans for making Wellbridge a better place. ‘I have such wonderful helpers. Wizards and witches – and children. The children in particular! And a most wonderful familiar – a dragworm. He’s just out for a walk, but you must meet him. He’s a wickedness detector and he can sniff out even the tiniest bit of evil!’

Mr Knacksap didn’t like the sound of that at all. ‘I’m afraid I’m completely allergic to dragons . . . and . . . er, worms. What I mean is, I can’t bear to be in the same room. When I was small, I had asthma, you see; I couldn’t get my breath, and the doctors told me that if I went near anything like . . . the thing you have described, I would simply choke to death.’

Heckie was very disappointed. She had set her heart on showing the dragworm to this attractive man. But of course the idea of Lionel Knacksap choking to death was too horrible to think about.

Mr Knacksap, in the meantime, was doing sums in his head. A tiger skin fetched over two thousand pounds. Even after he’d paid someone to kill and skin the beast, there’d be a nice profit. And plenty more where that came from: ocelots, jaguars, lynx . . . All he had to do was butter up this frumpy witch.

‘Dear Miss Tenbury-Smith—’

‘Heckie. Please call me Heckie.’

Mr Knacksap gulped. ‘Dear Heckie – I wonder if you would care to have dinner with me next Saturday? At the Trocadero at eight o’clock?’

‘How do I look?’ asked Heckie, and Sumi and Daniel said she looked very nice.

This was true. Heckie had gone to Madame Rosalia for advice about what to wear for her night out with the furrier, but she had made it clear that she wanted to be tastefully dressed.

‘I may be a witch,’ Heckie had said to Madame Rosalia, ‘but I am also a woman.’

So she had decided not to wear black whiskers on her chin, or a blue tooth, and just three blackheads – more enlarged pores, really – on the end of her nose. And her dress was tasteful too – a black sheath embroidered all over with small green toads.

‘My shoes pinch,’ said Heckie, but there was nothing to be done about that. Heckie’s Toe of Transformation always hurt when she bought new shoes.

Mr Knacksap had booked a table by the window and ordered a three-course meal. He hated spending money, but he knew that if he was going to get the witch to do what he wanted, he’d have to make a splash for once. The Trocadero was very smart, with gleaming white tablecloths and a man playing sloppy music on the piano, but the dinner didn’t get off to a very good start.

The trouble began with a beetle that was crawling about in the centre of a rose in a cut glass vase on the table. Heckie thought the beetle did not look well and she asked the waiter if he’d mind putting it out in the garden, if possible near a cowpat.

‘It’s a dung beetle, you see,’ she told him, ‘so it really cannot be happy on this rose.’

Then the starter came and it was shrimps in mayonnaise.

‘Is there anything wrong?’ asked Mr Knacksap. ‘They look nice and pink to me.’

‘Yes,’ said Heckie faintly. ‘But you see, shrimps aren’t meant to be pink. They’re meant to be a sort of grey. If they’re pink they’re dead.’

‘Well, we could hardly eat them if they weren’t,’ said Mr Knacksap, but he had to keep on the right side of Heckie so he sent them back and ordered vegetable soup.

After the shrimps came some meat in a brown sauce and when Heckie saw it, she turned quite pale.

‘
Now
what’s the matter?’ asked Mr Knacksap. ‘Those are pheasant breasts done in wine.’

‘I know they’re pheasant breasts,’ said Heckie faintly. ‘But you see eating them would be . . . well, like eating a friend.’ And as Mr Knacksap frowned at her: ‘You must know what I mean. Think of a friend of yours. Any friend.’

Mr Knacksap tried to think of a friend he had had. ‘There was a boy called Marvin Minor at my prep school. He used to lend me his roller skates.’

‘Well, now you see,’ said Heckie. ‘Imagine you were served slices of Marvin Minor’s chest in wine sauce. How would you feel?’