Not Just a Witch

Chapter Twelve

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?’

But even now, Mr Knacksap kept his temper. The pheasant breasts were taken away and Heckie was given a mushroom omelette instead. And there was no fuss over the pudding. Even Heckie didn’t think that caramel custard was like swallowing a friend.

By now they had drunk quite a lot of wine and Mr Knacksap was ready to come to the point.

‘I have a favour to ask you,’ he said, leaning across the table and fixing Heckie with his piercing eyes. ‘A great favour!’

Heckie looked down at the tablecloth and tried to flutter her eyelashes like she had seen Madame Rosalia do. ‘Yes?’ she said shyly.

‘I want you to make a tiger for me. I want you to change the next wicked person you see into a tiger. A male tiger — and large.’

‘Well, I will if you like, Lionel,’ said Heckie (because she had been told to use his Christian name). ‘But are you sure you can manage it? They’re tricky things to look after, the big cats.’

‘It’s not for me personally — I wouldn’t ask you anything for myself,’ said Mr Knacksap soupily. ‘It’s for a friend of mine. An aristocrat. A lord.’

‘Oh, really?’

Everyone is a bit impressed by lords, and Heckie was no exception.

‘Yes. The poor man was left a great castle… I don’t like to talk about him because he’s very shy, but you’d know the name if I told you. But it’s in a very bad state — loose tiles on the roof, dry rot, all that kind of thing. So he’s started a safari park to bring in the trippers and help him get enough money to do repairs. But what the safari park really needs is a tiger.’

‘Well, if you’re sure he’d care for it properly.’

‘It would live like a prince,’ said Mr Knacksap. ‘A heated house, a huge enclosure, children to come and photograph it. And my friend would be so happy.’

Heckie stirred her coffee. ‘All right, then. Mind you, one can’t be absolutely certain with this kind of magic. Sometimes things sort of happen by themselves. There was an animal witch in Germany who kept being overcome by hippopotamuses. Whatever she tried to turn people into, they always came out as hippos.’

Mr Knacksap didn’t like the sound of that. No one wore coats made of hippopotamus skins. ‘I’m sure that wouldn’t happen to you, dear Heckie,’ he said. ‘You’re such a powerful witch. I knew the moment I saw you.’

As soon as he got back to his shop that evening, Mr Knacksap telephoned a man he knew in Manchester. ‘Is that you, Ferguson?’

‘Yes, it’s me.’

‘Well, listen; I’ve got you your tiger skin. A full-grown male.’

‘Go on. You’re kidding.’

‘No, I’m not. I take it the Arkle woman still wants one?’

‘You bet she does. She’s upped the price to two and a half thousand.’

Gertrude Arkle was married to a chain-store millionaire and had set her heart on a tiger skin to put on her bedroom floor. She wanted to lie on it in silk pyjamas like she had seen film stars do in pictures of the olden days. And the more Mr Arkle told her that she couldn’t have one because it was illegal to import them, the more she wanted one.

‘All right, then,’ said Mr Knacksap. ‘I’ll give you a call when it’s ready.’