Free The Language of Spells by Sarah Painter Page B

door open and the wind blew it shut,’ she said to Gwen.
    ‘I definitely locked the door before I went to bed,’ Gwen said, stamping down on her anger. ‘City girl, remember? Paranoid.’
    ‘Well, maybe someone popped by for a visit. One of your neighbours.’
    ‘At two o’clock in the morning?’ Gwen said tightly.
    PC Green shrugged and walked to the front door. PC Davies was already there, holding it wide open and letting a wall of freezing air into the hall.
    Gwen hugged herself to keep from shouting at an officer of the law. ‘If a neighbour decided to visit, why didn’t they speak to me? Call upstairs?’ As she spoke, Gwen remembered Lily’s stealth casserole.
    PC Davies looked apologetic. ‘We’ll file a report. Let us know if you have any more problems.’
    ‘I definitely locked that door,’ Gwen said again, trying not to sound shaky and pathetic.
    Green was already halfway to the panda car.
    ‘I’m not crazy,’ Gwen called to her. Green raised a hand without turning round.
    Gwen shut the door and locked it. There was something tugging at her memory, too. A feeling. When she’d gone downstairs and seen the door closing, she’d had the strong sense it was a man on the other side of it. Gwen had been brought up to pay attention to her intuition, to believe in it. She closed her eyes and concentrated. A strong smell of aftershave filled her nostrils. She opened her eyes and it dissipated. Definitely a man then. She couldn’t exactly call Green back and explain how she knew that and it seemed that the house was magnifying the Harper family intuition. Either that or she was going crazy. Cat wound around her ankles, purring like a jet engine. ‘Bloody marvellous,’ Gwen said, and went to find him some tuna fish.
    The next morning, Gwen was reading in bed after a fitful night. She told herself that she was completely calm and fine, but for some irritating reason she still hadn’t been able to sleep for more than half an hour at a time. Iris’s notebook wasn’t exactly comforting, either. Amongst the unknown initials of Iris’s customers and acquaintances, her own name kept leaping out.
    Gloria was here with her girls today. She didn’t tell me, of course, but I could see it straight away: Gwen has the Finding. Poor child. There’s a reason Finding Lost Things was banned by the charter of 1539. Some things aren’t meant to be found
.
    Gwen closed her eyes. Iris wasn’t wrong about that. Before Gwen had started to refuse to do her party piece on demand, Gloria was always pimping her out. Lost car keys, wallets, pets, wedding rings. When she was eleven, she’d had to tell a woman that her lost engagement ring was at an address that turned out to be a pawn shop. Rather than believe that her husband (who everyone knew had a teeny-tiny problem with gambling) had hawked it, she accused Gwen of nicking it and then trying to squeeze some more cash out of her by finding it. Being screamed at by a member of the school PTA wasn’t the worst Gwen had experienced, but she still remembered the feeling of betrayal. Why had Gloria made her do it? She was supposed to be the grown-up, the protector. Sure, she’d hauled Gwen out of the woman’s kitchen, taken her home and passed her tissues to wipe her face, but the experience didn’t stop her asking Gwen to find something for a client later that same day. Gloria didn’t let a little thing like her daughter’s feelings get in the way of increasing revenue.
    At half past eight, Cat stalked into the room and jumped onto the bed. He landed with a thud that made the bed springs creak. ‘How are you so heavy?’ she asked him. ‘You defy the laws of physics.’ Unless the cat was a black hole. That would make sense.
    The doorbell rang. Gwen pulled on slippers and a dressing-gown and picked up the cricket bat. The man at the front door wasn’t in uniform or a bad suit, but she could see he was police just the same.
    ‘Detective Inspector Harry Collins. Please