I knew that Esme had been right when she’d told Xander that when something was gone, it was gone, but I still tried magic, waving my hands over the computer and straining every bit of my brain desperately trying to restore all the lost files. But nothing happened. As the email responses began to trickle in I sent Nancy out to buy an old-school appointments diary and she laboriously jotted down every appointment we knew of by hand.
I was so busy just firefighting that I didn’t have time to dwell on what had caused the power cut. I couldn’t quite bring myself to think that the chances of there being a power cut at my work and my home – and nowhere in between – were very slim. I was too frightened about what that would mean.
But, eventually, as the sky outside darkened and things began to calm down, I got out the pictures I’d taken from Star’s flat and looked at them again.
They might not even all be of Star, I told myself. The one of her with a neck collar on was the only one that showed her whole face. But the close-up of the cut on her eyebrow showed a lock of curly blonde hair – Star’s hair – and anyway I remembered her having cut her face. She’d said a car had thrown up a loose stone as it drove past her. Had that been true?
The bruised knees could have belonged to anyone, and the burned arms and bloody hand. But why would she have photos of injuries someone else had suffered?
A knock on my office door made me look up. Fallon, one of the yoga instructors, stood there.
“I’ve found my diary,” she said. “I’ve got all my classes written in there – thought it might be helpful.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “Give it here and I’ll pass it to Nancy on reception.”
She came to hand it over and as she did so she glanced at the photo on top of the pile.
“Oh god,” she said. “Was that Star’s hand?”
I looked at her in surprise.
“Yes,” I said. “I think so. Did she cut it?”
Fallon picked up the photo and shuddered.
“She did it on one of the baubles from the Christmas tree,” she said. “She said it had happened when she was decorating it. But she was sitting at her desk when I found her. It was really strange.”
“It’s a nasty cut,” I said. “It’s deep.”
“I know,” Fallon said. “Like she’d fallen on it, not just that it had shattered in her hand. I bandaged it up for her and it took ages to pick out all the bits of glass. Poor girl. It must have really hurt.”
“Why would she lie, though?” I said.
Fallon shrugged.
“Why would she take a photo?” she pointed out. “I wondered…”
“What?”
“Just that she was so cagey about it, I wondered if she’d done it herself.”
“Really?” I said in surprise.
“You never know what’s going on in people’s heads,” she said, darkly. She tapped the diary on my desk.
“I’ve got a class,” she said. “Leave this in my pigeon hole when you’re done.”
I stared at the door as she left. She was right, in a way, I thought. You couldn’t really know what was going on in people’s heads. Except I did. Some of the time, at least. It was one of the witchy skills that I had that I enjoyed the most. Had I missed something terrible going on in Star’s?
On a whim, I pulled Louise’s business card out of my bag for the hundredth time and typed out an email.
“I know you’re busy,” I wrote. “And I don’t want to be in the way. But I found these photos in Star’s house and I wondered what you thought?”
I snapped photos of the photos with my phone – they weren’t brilliant quality but they’d do – attached them to the email and pressed send before I could change my mind.
Really what I wanted, I thought, was DI Baxter to come back to me and say I had nothing to worry about. The graffiti on the spa’s front door, and the broken windows, and Star’s injuries, and her death, were all just coincidences. A run of terrible, awful, horrific bad luck.
Feeling sick again, I stuffed the photos into my bag, and wandered off to find Xander. He’d told me he’d arranged to meet Esme again the next day and I’d pretended to be pleased.
“You’re so stressed, H,” he said, using the nickname my family used. I quite liked it when he called me H. “I can help you if I learn more about magic.”
He’d wrapped me in a hug and I’d let myself snuggle into his chest. I’d never had many close male friends, and I’d never known my dad so when I first met Xander with his tactile nature and habit of draping his arms round my neck or my shoulders, I was thrown for a while by his sheer maleness. But now I enjoyed how he was never afraid to give me a hug when he thought I needed one.
He kissed the top of my head.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “With my brains and your beauty we’ll have things back to normal in no time.”
I patted his chest and ducked out of his embrace.
“My brains,” I said. “You’re just the wallpaper.”
He stuck his tongue out at me.
“Go home,” he said. “I’ll close up.”
I suddenly realised how tired I was.
“Thank you,” I said. “What would I do without you?”
“You’d be bored,” he said with a grin.
I doubted that, but I grinned back as I put on my coat. The weather was getting worse and outside it was sleeting. Dirty grey freezing sleet covered car windscreens. Everywhere looked dark and gloomy because Twelfth Night was gone and now the Christmas decorations had been taken down. I felt uncharacteristically sorry for myself.
Esme and Jamie, however, had obviously not received the misery memo, because I arrived home straight into wedding planning central.
They were in the living room, surrounded by magazines, Esme’s laptop open, foolish grins on both their faces and an enormous sparkler on Ez’s finger.
“Look!” she shrieked as I walked in. She waved her finger in my face and I caught her hand. It was a beautiful ring – a traditional solitaire with a square diamond set in a platinum band.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said truthfully. “Well done, guys.”
My bone-aching weariness was actually beginning to wear off in the face of such happiness, so I flopped down beside Esme.
“Are you making plans?” I said.
“We are,” she said. “You can help. Jamie, give Harry some fizz.”
Jamie went off to the kitchen and came back with a champagne glass and a bottle of Prosecco.
“There’s another bottle in the fridge,” he said, handing me the glass and filling it to the brim.
We chinked glasses.
“So what are you thinking?” I asked.
“We looked at some fancy Edinburgh venues,” Jamie said. “But they weren’t really us. And then Esme had an idea.”
“I want to go home,” she said with a smile. “I want to get married at the café.”
My mum, Suky, Esme’s mum, Tess and their friend Eva, ran a café on the banks of Loch Claddach, where we’d grown