The Witch Maker Read Online Free PDF Page A

–
desperately
wanted to do – was to join them.
    To immerse himself in the collective consciousness.
    To almost drown in it.
    So it was that, when he emerged from the comparative safety of his police house and arrived on the Green, it was towards the people confined behind the barrier that his legs automatically took him.
    He was nearly there when he saw the look in the eyes of the people he had known all his life – and lost his nerve.
    â€˜Betrayer!’ the eyes said.
    â€˜Judas!’ they called him.
    And he couldn’t ignore what the eyes were saying – couldn’t even plead his own case with the people to whom the eyes belonged – because there was at least a part of him which knew that they were right.
    He froze for a moment, then turned on his heel and skulked away. The legs now urged him to keep on walking – to tramp the moors until, through sheer exhaustion, they gave way under him. But his brain and – more importantly – his heart, had now taken over. And they told him that he couldn’t leave the village however hard he tried – because he was part of it, and it was part of him.
    He came to a halt in front of the Black Bull. His heart was thumping; his breaths were coming in short gasps.
    Got to get a grip on myself! he thought desperately. Got to be able to find the strength – from
somewhere
– to deal with that bugger from Whitebridge.
    He tried to remember whether he had actually
chosen
to become a policeman or whether it had been chosen for him. But this was the village, and such thoughts – such choices – had no meaning. Yet of one thing he was very sure: from the moment he had donned the blue serge uniform, he had behaved in the way the village expected of him.
    â€˜Until now!’ he moaned softly.
    Until this morning, when he had taken it upon himself to bring the outside world into a place where the outside world did not belong.
    But what other option had he had? What else was he
supposed
to have done? Was he to allow the fate of the village to be guided by someone who still only shaved every other day?
    Thwaites turned his attention – and that decreasing portion of his mind he still had control over – to the Witching Post.
    The big man in the hairy sports coat must be Woodend, he thought. They had never met, but he had heard enough about the chief inspector’s unorthodox approach to police work to be convinced that – from the village’s point of view – headquarters could not have sent a worse officer to investigate the case.
    The woman who was with the chief inspector – the attractive blonde with the stunning figure and the nose which was perhaps just a little too large for Lancashire tastes – was a stranger to him. But from the way she stayed so close to Woodend, there could be no doubt that she was his bagman – and that made her a danger, too!
    Woodend turned his back on the Witching Post, and walked over to where the sergeant from Lancaster was standing. They conferred for a few moments, then Thwaites saw the uniformed sergeant point in his direction. The constable had been expecting that, of course – but it still sent fresh waves of dread coursing through his body.
    Monika Paniatowski saw the portly local constable standing in front of the pub, shifting his weight first on to one foot and then on to the other. He was nervous, she thought, but that was only to be expected from a rural bobby preparing to meet the Big Cheese from Police Headquarters. What he didn’t know – but was about to find out – was that this wasn’t a normal Big Cheese at all. It was Charlie Woodend – ‘Common-Touch’ Charlie – and within a couple of minutes, the constable would be wondering why he’d ever felt any concern.
    As Woodend and Paniatowski drew level with him, Constable Thwaites gave the Chief Inspector a rusty salute. Woodend acknowledged it with a brief nod,