can’t see it, but I have just remembered that Rose once mentioned it. She wanted to go there.’
I began to walk, and the policeman followed, still holding my elbow.
We walked for several hours, always moving uphill and mostly in silence, then the policeman stopped. ‘I still can’t see snow, but my blood is turning to ice,’ he said. He sounded shaken but not afraid. I reminded myself that he had summoned Nullah, which told me his mind was not limited by reason and logic; even so, I hesitated a moment before drawing my elbow from his grasp. He did not vanish as I had half expected. He slipped off the pack he carried and got out the thermos of hot chocolate that the cook had made. His hands shook as he poured it into the enamelled cups and I saw that his fingers were white as marble. When he drank, his teeth chattered a little against the rim of the mug.
‘Why aren’t you married?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘I never married because as far as I could see, marriage was the end of the mystery of love. Or the beginning of the end. And I like mysteries.’
‘But you are a policeman, so you must like solving mysteries, which ends them. That is a paradox.’
‘I like paradoxes even better than mysteries,’ he said.
We packed away the mugs and the thermos, then as we continued, he asked me to tell him exactly what Rose had said of the tower. Somehow he was able to be a policeman in the midst of all the strangeness he was encountering, or perhaps he became his policeman self in order to cope with it. Either way, I liked how seriously he asked questions and listened to my answers, never telling me this or that was impossible, and how he sometimes smiled reassuringly at me. I explained that Mama had often told me stories when I was a little girl, and that I had passed them on to Rose. ‘Her stories were full of towers and princesses and princes.’
‘And wicked witches?’ he guessed.
I laughed a little. ‘Of course! The witch was the most important character. It was she who gave something and then demanded a terrible price, or who was offended and cursed the hero or heroine or locked them up. Without the witch there would be no story.’
‘Do you think this story has a witch?’ he asked.
I frowned, sobering. ‘I don’t know . . .’ I stopped, because the policeman was looking past me, his eyes widening with surprise. I turned to see that we had come to the top of the snowy incline we had been following. Now the land fell away sharply to a deep valley, which was white with snow at the upper edges but green and undulating at its base. Rising above one of the hills was a roof.
‘The tower,’ I said, my heart quickening.
But it was not a tower. An hour later, when we had got down into the valley, we saw that the steep-pitched roof we had seen belonged to a solitary little hovel, half built into a hill. It was sheer chance that we had been at the right angle to catch sight of it. We could see smoke drifting out of its crooked chimney.
‘What should we do?’ I asked, whispering.
‘Knock at the door and ask for directions to the tower,’ the policeman suggested. ‘Unless you think it might be the witch’s cottage.’ He sounded almost giddy and I wondered if he was telling himself that he was dreaming. But when I looked at him properly, his eyes were alight with determination and curiosity.
We made our way to the cottage door and banged its heavy knocker. The door opened after a long moment, and a wizened little woman peeped out, squinting short-sightedly at us.
‘We are seeking directions to the tower,’ said the policeman courteously.
‘I will ask my mistress,’ offered the crone and hobbled away, leaving us standing on her doorstep.
‘There is our witch,’ he said.
‘You must not joke,’ I said sternly, for I had the idea it might be dangerous to disbelieve the story you were in.
‘I have surrendered to mystery,’ he said. ‘That is when I began to see what you see.’
The old woman returned and bade us enter. We followed her down a dim, ornately carved corridor that seemed too long and grand to be contained by the little cottage. The policeman made a ghastly face at me as we entered and I had such an urge to