The Eighth Witch (11 page)

“You didn’t do so badly with Henry at the hospital earlier.”

“That wasn’t psychometry, not in its real sense. I built a bridge into Henry Norton’s subconscious through flesh-to-flesh contact. That was all. To try to pick up something from an inanimate object, well…”

“So you won’t even try?”

“How long ago did Laura give you the pendant?”

“About three months ago.”

“And you’ve worn it ever since?”

Annie’s cheeks flushed and she averted her eyes. “Yes.”

“So if the pendant had been carrying Laura’s energy signature, yours would have overwritten it by now. Right?”

Annie nodded reluctantly.

“Okay, so let’s get back to the deaths,” Carter said, anxious to move on. “Apart from the fact the victims were all incomers, there’s nothing else to connect them.”

“No, but Henry seems to think there is. It’s why he’s here in Ravensbridge.”

“And we can’t talk to him, because he’s been taken out of the picture. Did he say why he thought the deaths were connected?”

She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “This is Henry Norton we’re talking about here. He gave us clues, but the trouble with Henry is that he likes to be enigmatic. He’ll give you enough information to get you hooked and then he’ll drop little snippets in every so often just to keep you on the line. But he’ll never give you enough so you can get the full picture.”

Carter sighed. “I know he’s your friend, Annie, but as far as I’m concerned, Henry Norton is nothing more than a bloody pain in the ass.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “Does the name Elinor Yardley mean anything to you?” he said, switching tack.

“No, should it?”

“Probably not. It’s just a name I saw in a footnote on one of Norton’s files. I wondered if he’d mentioned her at all.”

“Not that I can recall. I could ask Penny. She and Adam are a lot closer to Henry than I am. Would you like me to call her? They’re late birds, never in bed before midnight.”

“No, it can wait until morning.”

“Okay,” she said. “Then I’m off to my bed. It’s been a helluva day.” She gave him a peck on the cheek and left him pouring yet another cup of coffee.

“Annie,” he said as she was halfway up the stairs. “If Laura is connected with all this, I’ll find her and bring her back to you.”

Annie Ryder paused on the stairs, but didn’t look back at him. “Thanks, Rob,” she said softly and made her way to bed.

Carter sat looking through the notes he had taken during his conversation with Annie and then took out his mobile phone and punched in a number. The phone at the other end of the line rang a few times before it was picked up.

“Hello. Martin Impey.”

“Hi, Martin. It’s Rob Carter.”
 

“Robbo! Good to hear from you,” he said. Martin Impey was head of research at Department 18. He lived in a comfortable, three-bedroomed, semi-detached house in a small Hertfordshire town with his wife Emilie and their two young children, Charlie and Molly.

“Not disturbing anything, am I?”

“Only the football highlights on the TV, and that’s no big deal. Spurs are losing again anyway. What can I do for you? I thought you were on leave.”

“I am. I’m staying with a friend in Yorkshire. Listen, how are you fixed to do a little private research for me?”

“Well,” Martin said. “It’s the usual bun fight in Whitehall, and Crozier seems to be getting more anal by the day, but I should be able to do something for you. What do you need to find out about?”

“I’m in a place called Ravensbridge. It’s a small town in the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire. There have been a series of deaths over the past eleven years. I need everything you can find out about them, police files, inquest results, anything the press ran on them…the usual really.”

“Names, dates?” Martin said.

Carter read from his notes. “The dates are approximate,” he said.

“No problem. The names should be enough to go on. Anything else?”

“Yes. I’ve run into someone up here. I need a full background search. Professor Henry Norton. American. Professor of History.”

“Right. The usual type of dossier?”

“As comprehensive as you can make it.”

“No sweat,” Martin said. “How quickly do you need this?”

“As soon as you can. You can send it all through to my PDA.”

“I’ll need a couple of days. That okay?”

“Best you can do. I appreciate you’ll have to slot it into your schedule. One more thing. This one might test you. See what you dig up on the name Elinor Yardley. I can’t give you much, but she was either born or died on the 14th October, 1608.”

“Ancient history. English?”

“I would think so, and I’m guessing she was from around this area.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh, and by private I take it you mean beneath the radar?”

“Beneath Crozier’s radar certainly.”

“I figured as much. Enjoy the rest of your leave. It sounds like you’re having fun.”

That’s one way of putting it,
Carter thought as he disconnected the phone.

Chapter Twelve

Martin Impey switched off his phone and retrieved the remote control.

“Who was that, hun?” Emilie came into the room, a bundle of bedclothes clutched in her arms.

“Rob Carter.”

The smile dropped from Emilie’s face. “Oh.” She took the bundle through to the kitchen and Martin heard the washing machine kick into life.

“Everything okay?” Martin said when she returned.

“Well, Molly’s got a really bad teething rash and won’t settle for the night, and Charlie’s just chucked up over his new quilt. Hence the washing machine. Apart from that, just another fun-packed evening in the Impey household. What did he want?”

“Who?”

“Rob Carter.”

“Nothing really. He just wants me to check a few things out for him.”

“That bloody department! They don’t believe you should have a life.”

“Don’t get upset, Em. It’s not the department, it’s just Rob. He asked me to do him a favor, that’s all. Unofficially.” He could tell as soon as the word was out of his mouth that he’d said the wrong thing.

“Sometimes, Martin, you beggar belief. Robert Carter rings you up at stupid o’clock tonight night to ask you to do something quite against the terms of your contract with Department 18, and you’re actually considering it. Does he want you to lose your job?” She shook her head. “No, I doubt that possibility has even crossed his mind.”

“Rob’s not like that,” Martin said, but the words were wasted. Emilie wasn’t listening anymore. Strange that they’d never argued before Molly came along, but the birth of their second child had produced a fundamental change in his wife. She looked tired most of the time now, and she no longer laughed as much as she used to. As for her tolerance level…

“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”

“I’ll be careful. Crozier won’t find out.”

“Well, you’d bloody well better be careful. Or else…”

“Mummy! I’ve been sick again.”

“Oh, bloody hell!” Emilie said and chased back up the stairs.

Martin pressed the button on the remote.

“So with just under a quarter of an hour to go, it’s Spurs, nil, Manchester United, four…”

He hit another button and the screen went blank. It looked like Tottenham Hotspurs, his beloved Spurs, were getting hammered again. “Fantastic,” he muttered under his breath, went across to the computer in the corner of the room and switched it on. He pulled out his office chair from under the desk and picked his notepad filled with scribbled names and dates. “Half an hour,” he promised himself. “No more.”
 

When Emilie came downstairs two hours later he was still there sitting in front of the screen.

She set a mug of hot, sweet tea down on the desk and kissed his cheek. “Sorry, hun,” she said. “Hormones.”

Martin squeezed her hand. “Love you.”

“Not too much longer, eh. You’ll be wrecked in the morning.”

“Another ten minutes and I’ll be up. Promise.”

She looked at him skeptically and left the room. He picked up the mug and sipped the hot, sweet liquid. Sometimes he loved his wife more than anything else on earth.

Carter leaned back in his chair and yawned. There was little more he could do tonight.
 

He took his mug across to the sink and ran water into it and then switched off the main light. As he walked back across the kitchen to the stairs, the light from the moon was pouring in through the window and catching something on the table, making it glint. The opal in Annie’s pendant was glowing. He scooped up the pendant and held it tightly in his fist, concentrating fiercely.

Nothing.

With a sigh of resignation he tossed the pendant onto the table and went to bed.

Ollie Tucker hauled himself from his chair and went across to pull open the drapes. A watery sun was peering out from behind some low cloud. He’d been up all night trying to fix Carter’s laptop. He opened the French doors and stepped out onto the narrow balcony, breathing in the morning air, trying to revive himself. He was like a dog with a bone when faced with a computer problem, worrying at it, chewing it over in his mind. He was convinced he could fix it, or at least retrieve the data from the hard drive, but so far his efforts had been futile.

He hadn’t gone to bed, but he had taken a few naps in his chair, and now his back was aching. He ran on the spot for a few moments until he was breathless, made a few token stretches, pulling the kinks out of his arms and legs, and then went back inside to switch on the kettle and make himself a pot of tea. Rummaging in the kitchen cupboard, he found an unopened packet of chocolate biscuits. He tore the packaging and took out three biscuits, thought for a moment, considering his bulging waistline, then took out three more. He’d skip breakfast to make up for the sugar intake, but at the moment he needed an injection of instant energy and the sweet digestives covered in thick, dark chocolate would do the job.

He took the tea and biscuits back to his desk and settled down again. There was a light breeze eddying in from the open French doors, chilly but not enough to bother him.

The laptop lay in pieces around him, the hard drive at the forefront connected by a series of cables to an independent power supply and another computer. He dunked two of the biscuits into the hot tea and popped them into his mouth. Reaching over, he tapped a few keys on the ergonomically designed keyboard and waited to see the results on the screen.

SYSTEM FAIL
.

SYSTEM FAIL
.

“Bugger!” he said and took a mouthful of tea. He was running out of ideas.

At the second mouthful of tea he realized his bladder was uncomfortably full and went to relieve himself. In the cramped bathroom he washed his hands at the sink, cupped some water to bathe his eyes and stared long and hard at his reflection in the mirror.

“Think, Ollie,” he said to himself. “The solution is simple. It’s staring you in the face. Think.” He realized after a moment or two the only thing staring him in the face was his own image. He looked into the bloodshot eyes and grimaced. “Admit it, mate,” he said to the Ollie in the glass. “This one’s defeated you.”

With a long sigh of resignation he padded back to the lounge and to the crippled hard drive. As he sat down it took him a moment to realize that the computer screen was filled with folder icons.
 

He studied the icons for a while before deciding he didn’t recognize any of them. They had nothing to do with him. His mind made the leap. If they weren’t his files then they must be…

He stared long and hard at the hard drive, which had miraculously come back to life. “Oh, you little beauty,” he said to the thin metal box sitting on the desk.

Before the hard drive had a chance to die on him again, he highlighted the files and ran a copy program. When he was sure that the drive was backing up properly he picked up the phone and dialed Robert Carter’s number. The call went straight to voice mail.

“Hi, Rob, it’s Ollie. Good news, my friend. I’ve fixed the hard drive and it’s backing up as I speak. Get back to me and let me know when you’re coming to Rochdale and I’ll have everything burned onto disc for you.”
 

He hung up the phone and turned his attention to the screen. He’d been wondering on and off throughout the night what it was on the hard drive that was so important to make Robert Carter go to such lengths to retrieve it. He scanned the folder names but nothing screamed out at him.
Grant
,
Brown
,
Clarke
,
Gillespie
,
Yardley
. He picked one at random and opened it. Inside was a single file. He clicked on it and a word processing document appeared on the screen. His eyes flicked over it quickly. It seemed to be a report of a house fire in which a young woman, Amy Clarke, was killed. There didn’t seem to be anything remarkable about it. At the bottom of the page was a footnote.
See Alice Yardley, 21st May 1606
.