The Family Demon

THE FAMILY DEMON

Philip Brian Hall

Copyright © 2019 Philip Brian Hall

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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For Sheila,

who puts up with me sitting and writing when there’s real work to be done.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: A Death in the Family

CHAPTER 2: Accidents will Happen

CHAPTER 3: Enquire Within

CHAPTER 4: Clues Across

CHAPTER 5: The Sad Mouse

CHAPTER 6: A Brief History of Demons

CHAPTER 7: Mrs Le Tocq Checks in

CHAPTER 8: Witness to Murder

CHAPTER 9: As Legend Has It

CHAPTER 10: Follow that Car

CHAPTER 11: Ouse Dams Farm

CHAPTER 12: The Wicked Witch

CHAPTER 13: Moss d’Eau cottage

CHAPTER 14: The Demon's Disciples

CHAPTER 15: Pat a Cake, Pat a Cake

CHAPTER 16: USA Modes

CHAPTER 17: A Foggy Day in Cirencester

CHAPTER 18: Heads You Lose

CHAPTER 19: The Astral Plane and How to Fly it

CHAPTER 20: Sarah's Dream

CHAPTER 21: A Book and its Cover

CHAPTER 22: Caught up in The Tale

CHAPTER 23: The Chalice of Moses Aud

CHAPTER 24: The Light of Battle

CHAPTER 25: Toby, Tobias

CHAPTER 26: A Very Fishy Business

CHAPTER 27: Council of War

CHAPTER 28: A Betrothal is Announced

CHAPTER 29: Rough Night in Peckham

CHAPTER 30: Tourney’s End

EPILOGUE

About the Author

CHAPTER 1: A Death in the Family

I’m attracted to older women. Young women, like young wine, are fruity but unsophisticated. They may quench my thirst or accompany a meal, but I’d never think of opening a bottle at the end of a hard day just for the pleasure of drinking it.

Sammie Chalmers wasn’t really an exception to my rule. Though she'd been only twenty years of age in her latest incarnation, she’d aggregated around three thousand years inclusive of all her past lives. Now she was dead and gone, at least from the present one. It took me a couple of years to accept what had happened.

Maybe that explains why I like my women to be older. After a few lifetimes, you’re instinctively tired of going back to adolescent immaturity and starting again, even if you can’t actually remember doing it before.

I felt obliged to tell Fred and Doreen the truth about Borminster. They believed me, which was something, I suppose, but now and again I’d catch them giving me an odd look, as if wondering whether my latest piece of wisdom was my own or Solomon’s.

That was the sort of look Fred gave me the morning he told me about Sarah Goldman. Sarah, however, was no everyday older woman. Granted, she was thirty-two and by all accounts very beautiful, but that was where she and my paradigm parted company. 

Apparently, she was a virgin. In addition, she was insane.

* * *

I want you to do this as a personal favour, Fred said. It’s family.

You mean we aren’t being paid. Again, I fired back. "I’ve given up pro bono cases. My last one had unpleasant consequences."

Fred picked up the ashtray from his desk, turned it around slowly in his hands and put it down again. He’s been taking anger-management classes. His doctor told him that at fifty-eight it was bad for his blood pressure to shout at people so often. It’s exactly your experience that makes you the ideal investigator for this case, he explained patiently. I’d normally take care of family business myself, especially since we weren’t invited to investigate. In fact, my cousin Edna was almost too embarrassed to tell me about it. When she finally did spill the beans I knew straight away she needed someone with your unusual talent.

"What do you mean someone? I demanded irritably. There’s no one else with it, is there? And it’s not so much a talent as an acquired skill. It was painfully acquired in the first place and painfully reacquired two years ago. And apart from making me a fixture in every pub quiz team The Drovers’ Arms puts out, I’m not sure what it’s good for."

We’ve been through all that, Fred soothed. We both know you'd no choice. You weren’t to blame for the deaths of the Borminster witches.

They didn’t die by my hand, I replied, but they died because of me.

Rubbish! Fred exclaimed. But look, I don’t want to argue over that for the fiftieth time. The fact is you were left with the Book and the knowledge. If they'd been supplied to you for just the one unusual case, don’t you think they’d have disappeared along with the witches when the job was done?

There isn’t much call for magic around Peckham, I protested. I haven’t touched the Book since, and I can’t say I’m sorry. You’re not, I hope, telling me your family case requires knowledge of demonology?

I’m not sure what it requires, Fred grimaced. But I do know it would be hard to explain by the long arm of coincidence. Or even by the long arms of Mr. and Mrs. Coincidence and all the little Coincidences holding hands together.

All right, I sighed resignedly, since you’re obviously determined to tell me, you’d better fire away.

I’ll get the tea, said Doreen brightly.

She was back with three cups before Fred had done much more than fill me in on the background. Naturally, she stayed to listen to the story. If we’d asked her to leave, she’d have eavesdropped over the intercom anyway.

Fred began at the end, which is often a more sensible place than the beginning. Sarah, his cousin Edna’s only child, was currently a voluntary patient in a private mental hospital. She'd attempted suicide after finding her husband dead in the bridal suite of the hotel on their wedding night. It seemed she blamed herself, though the doctor had certified her husband’s death was the result of a massive heart attack, unusual but not without precedent in a man of forty who worked in a high-stress City position. They'd not been making love at the time; indeed she'd not even been in the bedroom at the time. She found his body when she emerged from the bathroom a couple of minutes after the attack and her screams brought hotel staff to the scene within thirty seconds. Neither their efforts nor the defibrillator of the hastily-summoned paramedics availed to resuscitate her husband, who was pronounced dead at twelve midnight.

Fred, I’m sorry to hear about her loss, I interjected, And I’m even sorrier to hear how badly it’s affected her. But not only is there no case here requiring my so-called special talent, there’s no case here at all. Death by natural causes followed by hysterical depression on the part of a thirty-two-year-old woman who thought she’d been rescued from the shelf only to have happiness snatched away. Tragic but nothing requiring investigation. I’ll lay odds the police closed the case the instant they received the autopsy report.

They did, Fred confirmed.

So? What makes you think there’s anything I can usefully contribute?

Perhaps the fact, he said slowly, that this is the seventh time something like this has happened.

I suspect it’s more common than that, I replied. I don’t know whether anyone keeps statistics on honeymoon fatalities but you do read about them from time to time in the tabloids. Human interest stories, you know. Bridegroom dies in earthquake; new bride eaten by shark, that kind of thing. Heart attacks on the wedding night can’t be that rare.

No, you misunderstand me, Fred was speaking even more slowly as though explaining to a child. This is the seventh time something like this has happened to Sarah.

CHAPTER 2: Accidents will Happen

Asa Stein was a barrow boy. I don’t mean a market-stall holder, I mean a barrow boy. Asa specialised in short term unauthorised retailing at well-known locations where he would purvey brand-name goods of unorthodox provenance at popular prices. His typical volume of stock-in-trade was too large for a suitcase and too small for a full-size stall. In any case, the latter would have been insufficiently rapidly-portable for Asa’s requirements; hence the barrow.

In his commercial endeavours, Asa employed an expert assistant in the form of a brown and white cocker spaniel named Daniel. Yes, Daniel the spaniel, you read it right. Daniel had two particular talents.

The first talent, one he shared with most spaniels and a good many other dogs too, was to lie beside the barrow and look appealingly up at prospective customers with his huge mournful eyes. The effect of this was to cause passers-by to pause when they would not normally have dreamed of pausing in the vicinity of Asa’s barrow, thus giving Asa time for a whole sentence of patter instead of just a couple of words.

The second talent was considerably rarer and of a more logistical nature. Daniel was trained to take note of anyone in uniform approaching Asa’s sales stance at a speed greater than a typical shopper’s dawdle. At a whistle from Asa, Daniel would rouse himself briskly from his reverie and disappear into the crowd, whence he would magically reappear precisely one foot in front of the onrushing plod, precipitating the latter’s collapse to the pavement and extending Asa’s leeway sufficiently to facilitate his getaway. Daniel was reputedly capable of making his own way home from any location between Portobello Road and Petticoat Lane.

Asa was a distant relative of Fred on his mother’s side. In our line of work, a black sheep of the family is an asset to be prized rather than a disgrace to be shunned. Accordingly, Fred would do what he could to help Asa out of scrapes. In return, Asa helped us with information that would have been difficult or impossible to obtain by above-board means. In our long acquaintance, however, I had never been able to persuade him to call me by my first name. He invariably chose to preserve the proper formalities.

I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going to start with Sarah Goldman’s case, but Fred’s cousin Edna, Sarah’s mother, seemed as good a point as any. Fred had got the story from her, ironically enough, at a family wedding for which Edna travelled up to London from her home at Bourton on the Water in the Cotswolds.

At my request, Fred phoned Edna and persuaded her to accept a visit. After that, Doreen and I went out for lunch together whilst Fred put in one of his occasional appearances at the local nick to brown-nose with Superintendent Smythe. He found it convenient to hold these meetings every six months. He also found it helpful to purchase a bottle of Tamnavulin from the off-license on the way there and absent-mindedly forget to pick up his carrier bag when he left the superintendent’s office. It was a little charade the two of them had been playing for years.

As Doreen and I stepped out into the street, Asa Stein, inevitably accompanied by Daniel the spaniel, emerged from an alleyway where they'd been lying in wait for us. For reasons best known to himself, Asa did not frequent the office.

’Eard you was goin’ on a little trip, Mr. Le Tocq, Asa announced cheerily.

It was usually better not to enquire the source of Asa’s information but, even by his standards of intelligence-gathering, this was remarkable. I'd known about it for less than half an hour; the phone was not tapped, the office was not bugged, and none of us in the office had been in touch with Asa.

News travels fast, I replied.

Only Danny an’ me, we’re needin’ a little ’oliday too, Asa continued. It was just a spur of the moment thing, like. Danny me boy, I says to ‘im, we needs an ’oliday and ’ere’s young Mr. Le Tocq needs a gofer on ‘is trip, sort of fing, and ’ere’s us the very ones to do ’im a favour.

This spur of the moment decision wouldn’t be connected with the VAT inspectorate? I enquired with an innocent lift of the eyebrows.

No, Mr. Le Tocq the very idea! Asa affected outrage. As a matter of fact, if you must know, it was ’Er Maj’s Customs an’ Excise. But that’s not the point is it? You does need a gofer doesn’t you?

I didn’t get a chance to express my reservations about the ability of a Cockney barrow boy to blend inconspicuously into the Cotswolds landscape or the relevance of Asa’s particular areas of expertise to an enquiry that probably had more need of an actuary.

He certainly does! Doreen agreed with a smile. I can’t go because Fred needs me here, and anyway your legs are younger than mine, Asa.

But not ’arf so nice looking, Miss Doreen Asa interjected gallantly. Doreen was in her later thirties and getting sensitive about her age.

Thank you, Asa. Just for that, we’ll make the casual labour rate ten pence more than the minimum wage, Doreen announced, switching hats from secretary to bookkeeper.

I smelled a set-up, but I was ready to accept that delays flowing from having to do my own gofering would probably cost us more than Asa’s pay. In any case, Asa possessed astute intuition and a well-established ability to keep confidential information confidential even under serious provocation.

It was agreed I’d pick up Asa and Daniel the next morning. I had room for both of them, having just that month made the trip to Jersey to pick up the Riley RMA Grandpa Henri had rebuilt for me over the last eighteen months. I wasn’t sure Daniel was exactly the ideal passenger for the first use of my real leather rear seats, though.

At the cruising speed of a 1947 car, Bourton on the Water is a long way from Peckham, and I didn’t want to pay the sort of recovery charges you get when your classic breaks down on the M40. We stopped for coffee at a genuine-reproduction Elizabethan hostelry somewhere in the region of Nettlebed, and I briefed Asa on the case.

Sarah had been engaged twice before she eventually married. The first time she'd been twenty-two years old and her fiancé, Simon, was a university contemporary. As a Nice Jewish Girl, Sarah hadn’t followed the cultural norm of shacking up with the guy before marriage and she hadn’t slept with him either. NJG’s don’t do that sort of thing, though I suspected missed opportunities might have contributed to her present mental disorder. Straight out of university, Simon landed a job with a major antique dealer in Bristol. His responsibilities included personal supervision of valuable items coming in through the docks. One day, a crane cable broke and a container crashed to the ground exactly where Simon was sitting in his car reading his shipping notes. The car was crushed and Simon killed instantly. Sarah and Simon had been an item for eighteen months, and the wedding was three months away.

The second engagement had been to Joseph, a regional TV news reporter. They first met when he was assigned to cover the story of Simon’s death. Two years later, they met again when Sarah, by now a pupil in legal chambers, was junior counsel in a case in Cheltenham crown court. Joseph, not surprisingly, remembered the striking blonde and reintroduced himself. One thing led to another, and an engagement followed six months later. Two months after that, Joseph got his big break with a national TV station. He was filming an undercover investigation in a London nightclub when the entire place was destroyed by a gas explosion.

That’s bad luck if you like, Asa observed wisely. As Oscar Wilde ’isself might ’ave said, to lose one fiancé may be considered a misfortune but to lose two looks like carelessness. I suppose it really was a gas leak?

Before my time, I answered, but Fred remembers it. He says there was no suspicion of foul play, just a rather elderly gas main.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Le Tocq, Asa went on, But by my count that’s only three dead partners including the latest one. Didn’t you say seven? So that means there’s four more, right?

Daniel gave something like an affirmative woof.

No-one ever doubted your mathematical abilities, Asa, I agreed.

I suppose to call the first two fatalities partners of Sarah is stretching things a bit. In her last year at school, two sixth-form boys, Mark and James, had been rivals for her affections, more or less taking it in turns to invite her out. Sarah liked them both and couldn’t choose between them. Since she shared classes with each of them at different times, she didn’t need to. All three of them were accepted by Bristol University, but the two boys had never made it. They went on an adventure holiday together in the Alps. The two of them were roped together with an experienced guide on the Zugspitze when there was an unexpected avalanche. They were swept away and the bodies never found.

That’s five, said Asa.

Daniel woofed again. I gave the dog a suspicious glance.

After Joseph’s death, Sarah was convinced she was jinxed. She concentrated on her career at the bar and eschewed close relationships with members of the opposite sex for another two years. In spite of herself, she grew attached to a colleague in chambers, an NJB by the name of Luke just a year older than herself. She ended up going steady with Luke but resolutely fobbed him off with excuses whenever the subject came up of putting the relationship on a more formal footing. Her nervousness was not enough to save him from the jinx.

It seemed a client called Armand was more than usually grateful for her legal services. He became obsessed with her; showering her with presents and invitations to prestigious functions. Perhaps unwisely, she accepted a couple of these, further fuelling his ardour. When Armand found out about Sarah’s association with Luke, he became furiously jealous, pestering her continually and stalking her when she attempted to give him the brush off. Eventually, Armand accosted the couple in a crowded restaurant, pulled out a gun and shot Luke through the head. He then aimed at Sarah and pulled the trigger but the gun misfired. The fault was not repeated seconds later when he put the barrel into his mouth and blew his brains out.

Wow! Asa breathed. This girl was misnamed. She’s not Sarah, mother of the nation, she’s the Angel of Death.

"She hasn’t actually done anything, I protested. She’s not exactly the girl who took an axe and gave her parents forty whacks, is she? I can’t imagine what it must be like for her, terrified to let any man get close for fear he ends up very nastily dead."

Let me get this straight, Asa began, counting on his fingers. She was twenty-two when Simon met a sticky end and twenty-five when Joseph was scattered all over Soho – so that makes ’er twenty-seven at the time of the gunfight at the OK Cafe. Now she’s thirty-two, right? So this time she managed to stay celibate for five years?

And according to Fred, it took two of those years for Max, whom she eventually married, to coax her out of her shell and reassure her none of what'd happened had been her fault.

"You mean this guy Max knew about the trail of corpses? Well ku-u-dos! ’E ’ad balls! Was ’e some kind of super-’ero?"

I explained Max was a millionaire merchant banker, considerably older than Sarah and divorced, with two teenage daughters. He met Sarah at Alcoholics Anonymous, both of them having resorted to the bottle in an attempt to cope with the stress of their lives. Max was very good for Sarah, never pushing her and always supportive. She'd been good for him too; the knowledge that their relationship could not be rushed was credited with helping him recover his self-control and rebuild a career that had been threatening to crumble. The couple grew steadily closer and, in the end, the very longevity of their relationship persuaded Sarah that this time it was going to be different. Nothing so much as a sprained wrist befell Max in the two years she'd known him. All the tragedies were behind her and, at long last, she could start to live a normal life like a normal person.

At which point, re-enter death, stage left, said Asa. Poor girl.

I think you might say that’s an understatement, I replied.

Woof! said Daniel.

CHAPTER 3: Enquire Within

Fred’s cousin Edna lived with her husband Reg in a large, thatched manor house about a mile outside of Bourton on the Water. The house