Broomsticks Over Flaxborough
Book 7 in the Flaxborough series with Inspector Purbright
Colin Watson
Chapter One
Naked as on the day she was born, save for a double-looped string of amber beads and a pair of harlequin-framed spectacles, Mrs Flora Pentatuke, of 33 Partney Avenue, Flaxborough, leaped nimbly over the embers of the fire.
As she danced into the deep darkness beyond, there arose small yellow flames, stimulated by the not inconsiderable draught of her passing. Briefly they were reflected from Mrs Pentatuke’s well developed but still handsome buttocks. They illumined too the backs of weighty thighs and calf muscles. The thighs were dimpled and lacked the tautness of the calves, which looked as if they had been hardened by much exercise. As, indeed, they had; for Mrs Pentatuke was a zestful member of Flaxborough Ladies’ Golf Club.
She pranced towards the edge of the clearing, swerved and came back for another fire vault. Her hands moved in gestures of sinuous supplication. Now and again they would stretch to become rigid extensions of the strong, white, plump arms. Then Mrs Pentatuke would halt on tiptoe, shut tight her eyes behind the bejewelled glasses, and cry in a rich tenor: “O mighty spirit! We are thine! Amen evil from us deliver but!”
Other figures appeared in turn at the fire. Several jumped over it with something of the expertise of Mrs Pentatuke. Some skipped up to it resolutely enough but then seemed to find themselves wrongly footed for take-off. They went into a quick shuffle and leaped with such determination that they were winded on landing. One or two shirked the ordeal altogether by making a last-minute switch of direction and hop-skipping round the perimeter of cold ash. Among these were a portly middle-aged man with a small beard and two women who held hands and occasionally glanced at each other’s feet as if to seek reassurance that they had not lost step.
The bearded man wore a mask over the upper part of his face. The mask was made of a soft velvety material neatly hemmed around the contours of nose and cheeks. A bag of the same material was slung under his belly, with the purpose, presumably, of preserving modesty rather than anonymity.
A watcher would not have found it easy to make a tally of the number of people taking part in the ritual. Somewhere in the sky was a third-quarter moon, but rifts in the heavy, slow-moving cloud were thin and infrequent. The street lamps on Orchard Road were at least a hundred yards distant, on the other side of a double row of black poplars and a thorn hedge more than eight feet high. The glow and fitful flaming of what was left of the wood fire showed sometimes three or four, sometimes as many as eight figures at once. The total number of dancers was greater than a dozen but probably fewer than twenty.
Women outnumbered men and seemed less inhibited in their choice of costume. Even so, the example of Mrs Pentatuke’s virtually complete nudity was emulated by only two others. Most had retained one or more articles of underclothing. One somewhat diffident-looking participant wore a black one-piece bathing costume, the skirt of which she kept tugging down over errant segments of her bottom.
“O master! Give us the power of thine unlight!” The cry came from a tall, scraggy man in khaki shorts. He had halted so suddenly to make this supplication that those behind bunched up like holiday makers thwarted by the closing of an ice-cream kiosk.
Somewhere in the outer darkness there sounded off the response of Mrs Pentatuke.
“Seven times and seven times and Yah-loo-hally!”
The jam resolved itself and the round went on. Perhaps the tempo had slackened a little. Some feet dragged for a step or two; but then the stubbing of a naked toe against a stone or a root would restore vigour.
Between the dancers and a bank of foliaged shrubbery—possibly laurel or rhododendron—that screened them from the gardens of the nearest houses stood a woman who gently beat a drum with one hand while in the other she held a treble recorder. The tune was a somewhat stilted version of Percy Grainger’s “Handkerchief Dance”. The woman’s lack of height—she was not much more than four feet tall—was emphasized by her wearing a broad, square-cut cape of thick tweed and, at the end of sturdy, unstockinged legs, a pair of rock climber’s shoes. Her hair was mannishly cropped. She was, as nearly as might be judged in the near-darkness, of a stern and chunky countenance, well weathered and inclined to whiskeriness. If ecstasy possessed her, she did not show it. She was quite grotesquely cross-eyed.
Mrs Pentatuke completed two more circuits, then skipped off towards a point where three small, steady lights gleamed. She halted and drew several deep breaths, her head thrown back, her neck taut and throbbing still from the exertion of the dance. Her spectacles had slid a little down her sweat-dewed nose. She pushed them back with two fingers.
The lights were the flames of three candles, each set within a large glass jar to shield it from the night breeze. The wax of the candles appeared to be black. The jars were suspended from a branch overhanging a pair of card tables that had been set up together and spread with a sheet of black polythene.
“Behold that which is and is not and is again!” declared Mrs Pentatuke when she had got her wind back. “Yah-loo-hally!”
“Nema!” gasped a fat, grey-permed woman in woollen drawers and heavily-armoured brassiere who had just arrived at the tables.
“It is almost time,” cried Mrs Pentatuke. “I feel Him near!”
The fat woman grasped her bosom in both hands, as if to help contain any explosion that its violent heaving might portend, and nodded eagerly. Her face was much flushed.
Mrs Pentatuke selected one of a number of assorted drinking vessels that littered the tables. It was a china mug fashioned in the likeness of a can-can dancer’s be-frilled rump and over-printed: Ooo, la-la! Bottoms Up! She dipped the mug into a green plastic bucket that was more than half full of a pale amber-coloured fluid—the aggregate, presumably, of the contents of a number of bottles that had been heaped on the ground near by—and drank with a sort of dedicatory ferocity.
“Take me, Abaddon!” called Mrs Pentatuke into the upper air. “Ashtoreth, strike off my seals!”
She searched among the glasses, cups and mugs until she found a squat jar, the lid of which she unscrewed. With some of the contents of the jar—something oleaginous that smelled not unlike sage and onion stuffing—she anointed her hips and thighs. Then she replaced the lid on the jar and stood it back where it could be seen readily in the light of the candle.
The woman in the woollen drawers was drinking quickly, and with eyes tightly shut, from a goblet that she had filled at the plastic bucket. Her breathing had subsided a little but her face was still dark with blood pressure and pricked with little beads of sweat. Having drained the last of the liquor, she held the goblet a few inches in front of her face, squinted at it critically, and broke wind. “Baboon blood,” she remarked to Mrs Pentatuke, then dropped the goblet into the bucket, where it sank.
“You ladies enjoying yourselves?”
The inquirer, who had silently manifested himself beside them, was a bald-headed man with inquisitive, restless eyes, an expression of bland solicitude and a church porch voice. He wore scouting stockings rolled down to the tops of a pair of brogues. Round his waist was a string of pennons of the kind collected and displayed on windscreens by motorists anxious to be deemed hardy travellers.