The Eighth Witch (12 page)

He closed the file and ran the cursor across the screen, hovering over the folder called
Yardley
. His finger was poised to click the mouse button when the doorbell rang.
 

“Bugger!” Ollie Tucker said and lumbered across to answer it.

The young woman standing at the door was not one of Ollie Tucker’s typical visitors and he was thrown. She was tall, slender and pretty, with blond curls hanging to her shoulders and with not a trace of geekiness about her. As he opened the door she smiled and for Ollie, it was as if someone had switched on the sun. “C-C-Can I help you?” he said.

“If you’re Oliver Tucker you can,” she said. “May I come in?”

“Why?”

The smile widened. “Because I want to.”

Let her in, you bloody fool,
he thought.
How often does a beautiful young woman come to your door?

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

She floated in past him, leaving him to shut the door behind her. When he entered the lounge behind her he found her standing at his desk, in front of the computer, staring at the screen.

He moved past her and minimized the image.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry, but computers fascinate me and I hear you’re a bit of a wizard with them.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say… No, I would say. Yes, I’m a wizard.”

“That’s useful, because I’m a witch.”

She said it deadpan and Ollie stared at her, hard. When he saw the twinkle in her eyes he figured she was teasing him and he felt himself blush. “So how can I help you? A computer problem you want fixed? That’s why people normally come to see me.”

She perched on the edge of the desk. “Well,” she said. “It involves a computer, and it’s very much a problem. But I don’t think you’ll be able to fix it.”

“I think I’m better placed to judge that, don’t you?” he said, an edge of condescension to his voice.

She shook her curls. “Not this time, Ollie. You see, the problem is you.”

“Me? I don’t understand.”

“Well, let me try to make you see. Do you have a hammer?”
 

He screwed up his face, trying to work out where this situation was heading. “Look, who are you? Why are you here?”

“I’m here about this,” she said, pointing to the hard drive sitting on the desk.

“The hard drive? Did Rob Carter send you? No, he couldn’t have done. I only phoned him a few minutes ago.”

“You didn’t answer my question, Ollie.”

He was starting to lose patience. “Yes, I have a hammer. Why?”

“Just fetch it.” There was something in her tone.

He shook his head.

No, that wasn’t right. The tone was fine, sweet and light, but there was something underneath it, something compelling. He went across to his tool drawer and produced a small steel hammer.

“Will this do?”

She cocked her head to one side and considered the hammer clutched in his pudgy fist. “I should think so. Now come here.”

He started to move towards her, but a small voice in his mind was shouting at him. This was wrong…all wrong!

He reached the desk.

She slipped from her perch and stood next to him. “Good,” she said. “Now smash it.”

“What?”

“The hard drive. Smash the hard drive.”

“No!” he said, but even as the word left his lips he raised his arm and brought the hammer crashing down onto the slim metal box.

His eyes widened in horror when he saw what he had done.

“Again,” she said.

He smashed it again, and again, until there was nothing left but a pile of twisted metal and circuit boards.

The young woman was smiling at him. “Good,” she said again. “And now the computer.”

He shook his head. “No, I won’t.”

“Ah, I think you will.”

Before he could even try to stop himself, he demolished his precious computer with a few well-aimed blows of the hammer.

Sweat was pouring from his face and he was panting heavily.

“Poor, Ollie. You look all hot and flustered,” she said. “I think you need some fresh air.”

Ollie Tucker stared at her slack jawed, dropped the hammer at her feet and started to walk towards the French doors.

“Oh, and don’t forget the cable.”

“The cable…yes.”

He went to the cabinet and pulled open the drawer. After a moment’s searching he took out a length of electrical cable, showed it to her for her approval and then carried it out to the balcony. He turned and the young woman was standing in the doorway, smiling again.

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Go on. You know you want to.”

“Yes,” he said, and tied one end of the cable to the metal railings of the balcony. He made a loop with the other end and slipped it over his head, tightening it around his neck.

“Up you go then. It’s such a beautiful day, don’t you think?”

He pulled an aluminum chair across to the railings and climbed up onto it.

“All the way.”

He lifted one foot and placed it on the top bar of the railings. One foot and then the other.

For a moment he was poised, in perfect balance, on the narrow metal bar, like a ballet dancer about to attempt a difficult pirouette.

“Bye, Ollie,” she said and moved back inside.

In a searing moment of clarity Ollie Tucker realized his predicament and made to step down from the railings, but then his foot slipped from beneath him and he started to fall.

His downward progress was halted for a moment as the cable tightened around his neck with a crack. And then his body was falling again, down past other balconies just like his. Twenty-six of them. Finally Ollie Tucker’s overweight body smashed onto the concrete path below.
 

His head followed a few seconds later.

Chapter Thirteen

Carter awoke to the sound of the radio alarm. There was a local news report about a suicide outside a block of flats in Rochdale but his mind was too woolly to absorb it.
 

He showered and dressed and went downstairs. There was a note from Annie taped to the kitchen table. She had taken Holly to the hospital again to visit Norton. Carter made himself a pot of tea, cut two slices from a fresh loaf in the ceramic bread bin and slipped them into the toaster. His mobile phone vibrated in his pocket. He took it out and checked it. Two texts and one voice message.

He dialed the number for his messaging service and, as he spread butter onto his toast, listened to Ollie Tucker’s excited voice, surprised that Ollie had managed to solve the problem so quickly. He punched Ollie’s number into his mobile, but all he got was a message telling him that the person he was trying to phone was currently unavailable and he could leave a message after the tone. He hung up.

Both texts were from Detective Inspector Lacey asking that he make contact. The second seemed more urgent than the first. Lacey could wait until he’d finished his toast.

The opal pendant was still on the table where he’d dropped it last night. He picked it up again and ran the chain through his fingers. Thinking about Annie’s relationship with Laura Sallis had kept him awake for some time, and he was left wondering if the real reason he was here was to use the department’s resources to track Laura down. It was not a path he wanted to tread. There could be all manner of reasons for the woman’s disappearance, not least being Annie herself. Maybe his old friend had come on too strong and Laura had taken flight, just to be away from her. It was a possibility he had to consider.

As he popped the last piece of toast into his mouth, his mobile phone rang.

“Carter? Where the bloody hell have you been? Switch on the TV.”

Annie kept a small portable television on a shelf in the kitchen. Carter turned it on.

The first image he saw was Ollie’s flat block in Rochdale. A young female reporter was standing in front of it, microphone in her hand, doing a piece to camera. In the background he could see an ambulance and several police cars. He turned up the sound.

“…police are not treating the man’s death as suspicious, but are appealing for witnesses who may have seen the incident this morning.”

The program then cut to two studio-based presenters and an item about a school in Burnley. He switched off the TV.

“What’s happened?” he said into the phone.

“Your computer guru’s dead,” Lacey said flatly.

“How?” Carter said, feeling hollow inside.

“Took his own life apparently, but not before trashing his flat and smashing his computers to bits with a hammer.”

“No,” Carter said. “Not Ollie. He wasn’t the type to kill himself. As for smashing his computers… Well, you didn’t know him, but his computers were his life. They were his friends, his family almost. He’d never do such a thing.”

Lacey snorted derisively. “Well it looks for all the world that’s precisely what he did do. Battered them to bits and then jumped from his balcony with a few yards of electrical cable around his neck. The cable, combined with his weight, took his head clean off. At least, that’s what the doctor who signed the death certificate thinks. We’ll get more from the post mortem.”

Carter said nothing.

“Are you still there?”

“He didn’t kill himself,” Carter said. “I got a message from him this morning telling me he’d pulled the data from the laptop’s hard drive and was backing it up. He was very up, triumphant almost. He was expecting me to call him to say when I was coming over to pick it up. It was not a message from a man who was planning to jump from the top of a tower block.”

“Do you still have the message?”

“I can retrieve it.”

“Are you still at Ms. Ryder’s place?”

“Yes.”

“Then wait there. I’m coming over. Give me an hour.”

The phone went dead. Carter went upstairs to the lounge and flopped down onto the couch. The news of Ollie’s death had taken something out of him. It brought too many memories flooding back. Over the past few years so many people around him had died. Horrible deaths mostly, all relating to events Carter was investigating, and while the rational side of his mind told him he wasn’t responsible, there was a nagging voice giving testimony to the contrary.

He went across to the drinks cabinet, found a bottle of vodka and poured himself a large measure. It burned all the way down his throat but took away most of the nausea that was churning in his stomach.

Once he’d drained the glass he poured himself another and settled back into the cushions, closed his eyes and let himself drift as he waited for Lacey to arrive.

Lacey slipped his mobile phone back into his pocket and stepped out of Cavendish House. After watching the news first thing this morning he’d called an old friend, Bill Mackie, the D.I. with Rochdale C.I.D. He’d figured that Mackie would be involved in this somewhere along the line and he’d been right. Bill Mackie was already at the scene.
 

Mackie extended an invitation and Lacey had jumped in his car and headed to Rochdale, picking up his sergeant on the way.

“What did Carter say?” Sparks said as he followed his boss back to the car from the flat.

“He’s shocked. He doesn’t think it was suicide.”

“Looks pretty open and shut to me.”

“Does it?” Lacey said as he unlocked the car and settled in behind the driver’s seat.

“Yes,” Sparks said. “We don’t know what was going through Tucker’s mind, but the way he’d trashed the computers shows he was fairly unstable.”

“Tell me, Matt, using all your skills as a detective, did you notice anything out of place in Tucker’s flat?” Lacey started the car.

“Hard to say. The place is a shit hole. I doubt it’s seen a vacuum cleaner in the last two years.”

“Agreed, but putting that aside, did you notice anything unusual?”

Sparks thought for a moment. “Tucker had very feminine tastes when it came to aftershave.”

“Exactly!” Lacey said. “Only it wasn’t aftershave. It was perfume. I know because my ex used to wear the same scent. Which leads us to believe what exactly?”

“That Tucker has had a woman in his flat sometime in the not-so-distant past.”

“I mentioned it to Bill Mackie. He’d noticed it too. He’s going to chase down the CCTV footage of the block.”

Sparks nodded. “I noticed all of the cameras. What’s all that about?”

“Cavendish House is notorious in the area. It’s a known crack cocaine house and a number of the flats are used by hookers. The local authority installed the cameras to keep an eye on the place, and to deter some of the more obvious criminals. Mackie’s going to check out the footage from the last twenty-four hours. He’ll let me know if he comes across anything he thinks I should know about.”

At the main road Lacey crashed the gears and swore savagely.

“You’re not happy,” Sparks said.

“The silly bugger had to go and top himself. Worse, he had to smash up the bloody computers, which has dropped me right in it with Superintendent Knox. He’s going to want my balls for breakfast once he finds out about it.”