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

“What’s she called?” All Denzil could remember was that it was something long, complicated, and foreign.

Geordie didn’t know either. He shrugged. “Something Froggy.”

Her name was Clarice Erzulie Tituba Vincour, and she was somewhere in her ninth decade. Even she wasn’t quite sure where: public records in Haiti at the beginning of the century fell somewhat short of Somerset House standards. She had lived in England for more than forty years and if she, like Mrs. Boswell, missed the warmth and spontaneity of the West Indies, she didn’t miss the way people in authority could make your life a misery if they took against you. And it was such a little goat, and any fair-minded person would have said it was hers and not the army officer’s son’s to start with. Well, probably.

So she fled Port au Prince and came to England as housekeeper to a cousin’s brother-in-law, a widowed shopkeeper. Clarice looked after him until he died, when, having no children, he left her the little house in Colliers Row and enough money to see her through her own old age.

Though this closing phase of her life was lasting longer than either of them had expected. Fortunately Clarice had ways to boost her savings over and above the rate of inflation. There were advantages in being seen as a practitioner of the old arts.

She didn’t practice much now: partly because of her age, more because of the age they lived in. People today, you threaten to put a hex on them, they laugh in your face. You threaten to take their duppy, they think you’re talking about something you buy in a pet shop.

Still, there were worse places in the world for a woman to grow old without family, without friends, with just a hit of money to keep the wolf from her door.

Until the night she was snoozing in the old bentwood rocking chair by the embers of the parlour fire and woke with a start to hear someone opening the kitchen door.

The thought of the old witch, shrivelled and wrinkled and shunning the world except for rare occasions when she went shopping with a wad of notes, filled Denzil Boswell’s thoughts more and more. He thought about her while stacking galvanised buckets, while weighing out nails, while decanting white spirit, and when he went home at night he dreamed of her. What else did she keep in that little house, behind the gingham curtains? Were there effigies and lambs’ hearts stuck with thorns? Was there a black cat that suckled from a nipple in her armpit?

And the money: How much was there? She was a very old woman, she was probably deaf, you could probably hammer her down with a twelve-pound maul and not wake her. He would dearly love to see the effigies, and if he were to find her hoard of witch’s gold she probably wouldn’t miss a little of it. She probably didn’t know how much she had.

Denzil thought he could get into her house easily enough. The back door gave onto a small yard reached from an alley running behind the row, just like his mother’s house; and just like his mother, she probably forgot to lock it half the time. He could be in and out without her even knowing, with a handful of gold and one of those effigies to show Geordie the next day. Geordie was a bit law-abiding at times, but stealing from a witch wasn’t like stealing, it was more like proving yourself. A rite of passage.

In the end he’d thought about it so long, in such detail, that it became inevitable. If doing it proved him a man, what did failing to do it prove? So late one night, when his mother was asleep, he crept out by their own back door — unlocked, naturally; one day they’d have burglars — and slipped along the alleys to Colliers Row.

It was a strange frame of mind in which he found himself: at once elated and afraid, eager to get there and aching to get home, proud of himself and also ashamed. But this wasn’t about how he felt, it was about what he did. And he was going to take some witch’s gold, just to show that he could.

It was an ominously dark night: low clouds, no stars. He’d come by the back alleys to avoid being seen — his mum would kick up a stink if she ever heard what he’d been up to — but it was an unnecessary precaution. In dark clothes, with his middling-dark colouring, he was as hard to spot as a prowling cat.

The house with the yellow curtains was the last in Colliers Row, so it didn’t take much counting on his fingers to work out which was the right yard. The yard gate was latched but not bolted: Denzil let himself in with only a little creak from an unoiled hinge. It was enough to stop his heart for a beat or two but nobody else could have heard it.