asked to name one of their many victims you’d be lost.
When I read about their stories I was revolted. They stayed with me. I just couldn’t get them out of my head.
I’d been a freelance writer for several years and I guess a book is always floating somewhere in the back of your mind. But it seemed almost like the idea just sprang into my mind, fully formed, like it had been nestling in the shadows all the time. I spent some time on a synopsis and had pitched it to a fair few publishers. I knew Mum was proud of me – she had wanted to write herself and even considered going into publishing when she was a teenager. She once told me she did work experience but had been put off. She wouldn’t say why. But she was pleased, I think, in that way that parents are, that I was doing what she had failed to. Anyway, the book was not met with the unbridled enthusiasm I had expected. In fact, I had had a series of rejection letters and was just about to go back to the drawing board, when I got a call from Emma of Portillion Books. She loved my sample chapter, and what she called my ‘fresh new unstuffy voice’. The proposal, she said, had been presented in an acquisitions meeting and got a rapturous reception. Consequently, I had been given a contract.
I was elated.
But there was a fly in the ointment: Portillion Books were the literary part of the Robert Cutt empire. The owner of a fleet of fast food restaurants, a football club, a few social networking sites, several magazines and two new private academies in London, Cutt was a powerful tycoon and a generous donor to the Conservative Party. The current rumour was that he was hoping to be made a Lord with a view to fast-tracking to a cabinet position. Political commentators were speculating that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport had already reserved him a parking space.
In our house Cutt’s name was a swear word. He wasn’t known for his great pay and conditions and cracked, as in broke, most of the unions his workers had been affiliated to. Plus, he was generally a bit of a git. Ruthless, you know the sort – did well out of the banking crisis. You could see corruption all over his face whenever his mug was in the papers.
I came from a firmly socialist background. Mum, a History teacher, and Dad, with his background in trade unions, constantly railed against continued control and acquisition of British media till Dad departed when I was sixteen. Dan had been less vehement when he came on the scene in my early twenties, but only fractionally. Unsurprisingly, Cutt was our antichrist.
But I was desperate to get my book published and I kind of felt that I’d have to swallow down my righteous outrage to get the witches’ stories out. It was a compromise, true, but I was prepared to make it. A whole chunk of me didn’t like or approve of that, but I was weak. And okay, okay, if I’m honest, there was the ego thing going on. It was, I justified to myself, only the book wing of Cutt’s empire, after all.
Mum, on the other hand … When I’d sprung it on her she’d had a mixed reaction. At first she was over the moon to hear I’d at long last got a book deal, but then, when I told her who it was with, her expression dimmed. She’d started trying to say something about jewellery. I don’t know if she was making some point about wealth or something but whatever it was she’d got so distressed that the nurse, Sally, had to come in and sedate her. It was horrible. I didn’t ever want to see that again.
So you can see why, on that particular day, when she was really not looking very well at all, I was trying really hard to sound upbeat and positive about it all.
‘I’m due to meet Emma next week.’ My voice sounded purposefully cheery. ‘I’m so excited. I’ll get the contract, then as soon as I sign it they’ll give me part of my advance. Isn’t that great? I mean it’s so tough being freelance. A lump sum will really help out. And it’s my chance to get the stories of the witches out there. Maybe I can find our ancestral witch. And if we are