Not Just a Witch

‘Did you see the notice? Did you see where it says KEEP OUT?’ With each question he shook Daniel again. ‘You were snooping, weren’t you? You were spying. Well, let me tell you, if you say one word about this place to anyone, I’ll get you. I’ll get your mother too. I’ve got people everywhere. People who throw acid, people with guns . . . Got it?’

He pushed Daniel forward and the boy stumbled out and ran over the bridge of wooden planks, across the fields . . . ran, panting, for the safety of the station.

And Ralph Ticker looked after him with narrowed eyes.

‘It’s no good, sir,’ said the assistant when Daniel was out of sight. ‘Even if the kid keeps quiet, they’re beginning to talk in the village.’

Ticker said nothing. Twice before, the inspectors of the RSPCA, those snooping Do-Gooders, had closed down his chicken farms. Once in Cornwall, once in Yorkshire – and the second time he’d been fined two hundred pounds. But what was two hundred pounds – chicken feed, thought Ticker, grinning at his own joke. Each time he’d made a whopping profit before they got wise to him.

‘Time to move on, Bert,’ he said. ‘Scotland this time, I think. You know what to do.’

‘But, Mr Ticker, there’s four thousand chickens here. I can’t chop the heads off—’

‘Oh, I think you can, Bert. Yes, really I think you can.’

‘You’ve got to do something,’ said Daniel, trying not to cry into the ‘nice cup of tea’ which Heckie had brewed him. ‘You’ve got to turn him into a chicken himself and force him into one of those cages and—’ ‘Now, Daniel,’ said Heckie severely, ‘how many times have I told you that the second someone becomes a chicken he is not a wicked chicken, he is a chicken who needs only the best? And anyway, the zoo doesn’t want a chicken, what the zoo wants is an okapi. Now drink up and leave everything to me.’

The next day, without saying anything to the children, Heckie called the wizards and witches to a meeting. She had made a map of the Tritlington Poultry Unit from Daniel’s description and was feeling important, like Napoleon.

‘Now you all understand exactly what you have to do?’ she asked.

‘I’m to flush him out of the building,’ said the cheese wizard gloomily. He was not looking forward at all to changing Mr Ticker into an okapi. He had never seen an okapi and didn’t know if he would like it if he did, and he couldn’t remember a single spell for flushing anybody out of anything at all.

‘And I’m to lure him into the field with my beauty,’ said Madame Rosalia, fluttering her false eyelashes which were made of spider’s legs.

Heckie frowned. ‘I didn’t say anything about luring. What I said was, I want him in the field in front of the shed because I shall need space to work in. Boris will take you all down in the van and park it across the drive so that Ticker can’t escape in his car. And you, Frieda, must stop him crossing the bridge. If he makes a dash for the station, we’re done for.’

‘How?’ said the garden witch. ‘How do I stop him?’

‘How? Good heavens, woman, you’re a witch. Root him to the ground. Wrap his legs in ivy. Just stop him!’

Frieda scratched her head and Heckie reached irritably for the garden shears. Really, having to deal with witches of such poor quality was hard.

‘But what about you?’ asked Madame Rosalia. ‘How are you going to get there?’

Heckie simpered. ‘I shall descend from On High!’

‘Eh?’

‘I shall float down in one of Boris’s hot air balloons,’ said Heckie, waving a hand at the mechanical wizard and feeling more like Napoleon than ever. ‘And remember, not a word to the children till it’s all over. We wizards and witches may be bullet-proof, but not the children.’

Nobody liked the sound of this at all. It was so long since any of them had done any proper magic that they had no idea whether they were bullet-proof or not.

But the cheese wizard had other worries too. ‘Do they bite?’ he asked, as he shuffled with the others to the door.

‘Do what bite?’

‘Those okapi things. I just wondered.’

Ralph Ticker was standing by the great hole he’d bulldozed the day before on the waste ground behind the sheds. He was waiting for Bert to come and chop off the heads of the birds and bury them. Once the hole was covered, there’d be nothing to show those snoopy RSPCA people that there’d ever been hens in the place, and he’d be safely away over the border.

Only where was Bert? He was late. Ticker’s Porsche was parked in the drive, his case was packed – but he certainly wasn’t going to kill four thousand chickens by himself.

What Ralph Ticker didn’t know was that Bert had already done a bunk. He was sick of cutting the heads off chickens for peanuts and he was sick of Ticker. While his employer waited by the death pit, Bert was on the pier at Brighton, playing the fruitmachines.