Enter Pale Death(82)
He felt in the right pocket and encountered a small hard lump. “Take my handkerchief from my breast pocket, Ben, and spread it here by me.”
The dark brown-grey, slightly crumbling mess he scooped out was greeted with a schoolboy’s exclamation of disgust by Ben. “Urgh! It’s sh—horse-excrement! What’s she doing with that in her pocket!”
“Not shit, Ben. No, something infinitely more evil! Horse-droppings are ambrosial in scent compared with this stuff.” Joe was beginning to feel queasy and recognised that without Adelaide Hartest’s sound talking-to, he would have been dashing straight for the jug and ewer on the toilet table. “Hard to believe, but that substance was once a slice of Mrs. Bolton’s excellent gingerbread.”
“Where did it get the stink, then? And why?” Ben wanted to know.
“I could give you the recipe for the very special frosting but you wouldn’t want to hear it. I’ll just say it’s a mixture of decayed animal parts—stoat’s liver being one. It’s a magic formula for scaring horses. Yes, scaring them. They’ll take fright and try to run away on catching scent of this.”
“Anyone offering a lump of this to a savage horse …” Ben had got there and his face froze into pale disbelief.
“Anyone standing in the entrance to the horse’s stall will be cleared out of the way in the horse’s instinctive effort to escape,” Joe confirmed Ben’s fears. “It will use its teeth and hooves and frantic strength to obliterate what it perceives as the horror that’s advancing on it.”
Joe reminded himself that it had been Ben, tip-toeing along in his patent-leather slippers, who had come upon the awful scene and had stood guard over the body with a raging stallion crashing about an open stable. “But you were there, Ben. You saw the results for yourself,” he said quietly. He’d noticed that the lad’s teeth were chattering at the memory.
“I was lucky then,” he said when he could get the words out. “Having smashed her up, he went backwards into his stall, shivering. People say I was brave to have stuck it out down there but—the honest truth is—I reckoned that big feller was more scared than I was. Poor devil! Poor lady!”
“Poor silly lady! Where, I need to know, did she come by her recipe? Perhaps she left it in the other pocket.” Joe pulled a hopeless face. “Well, we ought to check.”
“Good lord! What the hell’s this?… These?”
He placed a folded sheet of paper on the floor and opened it up.
“Shopping list? Recipe? ‘Cummin … Rose Mary …’ No, I never saw that handwriting before, sir. Scruffy. Pencil. Not what you’d call educated, is it?”
“Just lists the attractants. No nastiness here. But I’ll show you something that is quite stomach-churning. The second thing Grace had left in the pocket for us to find.” He placed it carefully beside the note.
“Chicken’s wish-bone? That’s for good luck, sir.”
A memory had stirred. Joe had heard of these things but he’d never seen one before. “No. The opposite of good luck. This is magic,” he said. “Black magic. It’s bone all right but it’s from a toad. Method: First catch your toad. Then you kill it and pound the flesh to a pulp and chuck it into a running stream at midnight. Of course, the flesh and most of the bones float away downstream with the current, but one bone—this one—perversely, swirls away upstream. This is the one you want. The piece that’s going to give you magic powers. Over horses. Or warts. Or sharp-tongued mothers-in-law. They do a similar bit of jiggery-pokery with frogs and ant-hills in India …”
Ben was prepared to scoff. “Floats upstream? Naw! How could it?” Gingerly, he picked it up and smoothed it between his fingers. “Light as a dry leaf. That scooped bit looks something like the bottom of a toy boat. That wouldn’t sink, but it would go along with the current.”
“Look at the shape. It’s like one of those Australian weapons that turn and fly back at you—a boomerang—don’t you think? Some winged things do move apparently against the forces of Nature as we know them—winged sycamore seeds … aeroplanes, for goodness sake! I don’t believe in magic, either, Ben. I think the shape must be special. No time to experiment but if we popped this onto the rippling surface of a stream it might well be caught by some rule of … shall we say … aquadynamics and sweep off in the opposite direction to what you’d expect. It would be fun to try. But the men who own one of these things don’t want to test out, cast light and explain. No—they want to believe without question and work in the dark. They also seek power by frightening and manipulating the credulous. ‘Toadmen,’ they call themselves where I come from.”