Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

My big-eared friend sat up straighter and gave me a look of terribly greasy cockiness.

“No problem, sahib, no problem.”

“I would have thought—”

“Sahib, I was seeing out of corner of eye what had happened. So at once, quick-quick, I was running back. I was taking out this knife I have.” He flicked open his shirt, and I saw to my surprise that his long leather sheath actually contained nothing. “Sahib, you must be knowing that private eye is sometimes needing one weapon only. And, sahib, I was at once kneeling down and plunging same deep-deep into body of Thakur Dada and leaving there.”

“But why did you do that? Wasn’t he dead? Or what?”

“Oh, sahib, yes. Dead-dead. But that knife was having on it my name. So in not much of time entire Bombay was knowing who had disposed of Thakur Dada. Who had the daring to do it. So now no one will do anything against me. They are damn well knowing, if so, they are facing Murder Number Two.”

I looked at my friend.

No, I thought, no. I don’t really believe Inspector Ghote is ever going to have to solve the case of the serial-killer private eye.

The Watchers by Jo Bannister

Jo Bannister is as clever as they come with the twist-in-the-tail short story. For those interested in trying her longer, fiction, St. Martin’s Press has a new novel due out in May entitled A Taste for Burning, and her previous Book, Charisma, published by St. Martin’s last autumn, is available in bookstores...

* * *

It didn’t look much like a witch’s cottage. For one thing, it wasn’t in the middle of a deep dark wood at the end of a winding path overhung with cockle, spurge, dead nettles, and Old Man’s Beard. A witch living in Colliers Row would have to take two buses to anywhere you could pick ingredients for even a very modest spell, to cure boils on a cat, for instance. A love potion for a tax inspector would involve a longer journey than that.

For another thing, the curtains at the parlour window were yellow gingham and the sill was decorated with a collection of china pigs. All right, so maybe modern witches prefer not to advertise their presence with plum velvet and wax effigies; still, there was something distinctly nonoccult about yellow gingham and china pigs.

Denzil Boswell and Geordie Baker passed Colliers Row going to and from work each day — Denzil at a hardware store, Geordie as an apprentice butcher — so the cottage was part of their local scenery. You might think they would long ago have stopped noticing it; but no. Hardly a day went past without one of them cracking some joke about it or crossing his fingers to ward off the evil eye. This they did with great hilarity and hoots of mirth, without realising that such obsessive derision was only another way of paying respect to the myth. Two young men who really thought it was nonsense would have talked about something else.

“Did you ever see her?” Denzil asked once. “My mum says she’s all shrivelled and wrinkled, and ninety if she’s a day.”

“Your mum thinks everybody’s shrivelled and wrinkled unless they go through turnstiles sideways.” It was true. Mrs. Boswell came from Jamaica, where anybody worth a row of beans is expected to have at least two chins.

“My mum says she was a famous witch in Haiti but she had to leave. Something to do with an army officer’s son and a goat.”

Geordie stared. “What — she turned him into one?”

“Turned him into one, married him to one — something like that.” Denzil affected a nonchalance he didn’t altogether feel. The West Indian blood in his veins was significantly diluted by the Tyneside steelrigger who had been his father, but the spirit of the islands sends out long fingers, and at times like these he could feel them stirring in his hair.

Denzil’s mother was a devout Christian and knew voodoo for the work of the Devil. If asked, she would say she’d told her children about mambos and houngans as an awful warning. But the truth was that Mrs. Boswell was a natural storyteller, that she sometimes missed the vibrant colours and fevered passions of home, and that the violent erotic activities of the voodoo pantheon — of Damballah the snake god and Erzulie the temptress and Baron Samedi the lord of the underwprld — sent a delectable shiver up the spine if related with sufficient enthusiasm over a well-made fire on a cold northern night.

So though Denzil Boswell considered himself a modem urban Englishman, rational and pragmatic, there was something about the idea of a voodoo witch living two streets away that teased and intrigued him.

“Our Joyce” — Geordie’s sister worked in the supermarket — “says she wears gold jewellery all the time, big earrings and bangles and things, and pulls out wads of notes to buy a tin of dog food.”