The Eighth Witch (14 page)

Winded and sore he opened his eyes. He was out of the tanker’s cab and was lying on the soft, damp earth of the woodland floor. Confused and wincing with pain, he levered himself up onto his elbows and looked about him. The tanker was a hundred yards away. The young woman he called Lisa was standing by the cab, staring at him impassively.

There was a mechanical noise in the air and, as he watched, the truck’s storage silo started to rise from one end, pushed upwards to an angle of forty-five degrees by the hydraulic lift.
 

Flour was pouring from an opening at the lower end of the tank and gathering in a soft, white heap on the earth.

“Hey! Stop that!” he shouted. “You’ll cost me my job!”

The young woman said nothing but continued to stare at him.

He couldn’t read the expression in her eyes but he felt she was mocking him. Anger surged through him. Despite the pains that were throbbing through his body he hauled himself to his feet and stood there swaying slightly. “Right, you bitch,” he said and took an unsteady step towards her.

Before he had taken half a dozen steps, a gust of wind hit the pile of flour at the rear of the tanker. It lifted in a thick, white cloud, hanging in the air like a fog. He opened his mouth to shout at her again but the words died on his lips as the flour-cloud launched itself at him.

He cried out, turned and started a limping run towards the cover of the trees. The cloud caught up with him before he had covered half the distance, and he found himself enveloped in a choking mass of the fine, white powder.

He continued to run but now he was blinded and couldn’t gauge where the trees were. Flour filled his nostrils and poured into his mouth. His airways were becoming clogged with the stuff. Choking and spluttering, he ran on and collided with the trunk of a silver birch. His nose smashed and the trunk opened a two-inch gash in his forehead. Blood mingled with the flour to form a thin, pink mud that rolled down his face, covering it like a mask.
 

Another step forwards and a tree root snagged his foot, tripping him and sending him sprawling down onto the leaf-strewn earth. He lay there for a moment, fighting for breath. The air about him was clearing. He rolled over onto his back and stared back at the tanker, but the young woman was nowhere to be seen. He hacked a cough and blew air through his nostrils, trying to clear them.

A twig snapped behind him. He spun round and cried out. There was a figure shambling through the trees towards him. He rubbed his eyes, trying to get a clearer view, but the blood and flour mixture smeared and he couldn’t wipe it away. It stung and blurred his vision further.

The figure was almost upon him and he watched it with frightened and disbelieving eyes. At first he’d thought it might be the girl, might be Lisa, but the figure was larger, nearly twice her size, and there were no features to the face, just an oval ball of flour, expressionless, bland.

There was a fallen branch to the side of him. He grabbed it and swung it through the air. The figure stopped, swaying slightly as if deciding whether or not to proceed.

Scott swung the branch again, gathering his courage. “Come on then, you bastard!” he said, nearly choking on the flour in his throat.

He coughed to clear it and in that second of distraction the figure moved forwards once more and was now within striking distance. He hefted the branch in both hands, pulled it back and swung it in an arc, hitting the figure in the side of the head, watching as the head exploded into dust.

He yelled incoherently in triumph and waited for the figure to fall.

But it didn’t fall. The white, headless body stood motionless for a moment and then another cloud of flour accumulated above its shoulders. Within seconds a head had formed once more and the figure advanced upon him.

He took a few rapid shuffles backwards but a tree stopped his retreat, cracking against his spine. He dropped the branch and held his hands out in front of him, a futile gesture to halt the flour-creature’s progress. It stopped within a few feet of him. A gash opened in the lower half of the head, forming a mouth.

“Let’s have some fun,” it said in a powdery voice.

And Dave Scott started to scream.

Chapter Fifteen

In his office in Whitehall Martin Impey scrolled down the computer screen and scribbled a few notes on the A4 pad beside him. He called up a search box and typed in
Ravensbridge
. He’d tried the same last night and come up with nothing useful, but then he had only been using the Internet. Now he was in the office he could utilize the powerful Department 18 servers to access databases from across the world. Housed within the mainframe computers of various security services and private companies, the databases gave Martin much wider search parameters.

He listened to the whirring of the hard drive and drummed his fingers on the desk as he waited for the results to appear on the screen. A box appeared and gradually began to fill up with text. Some of the text was highlighted in blue—hyperlinks to various external links.

Many of them he’d checked out last night, but there were a few he didn’t recognize.

“Right,” he said to himself. “Let’s get started.”

In a plush, immaculately decorated office on the next floor Simon Crozier’s laptop bleeped at him. He looked up from the file he was reading and saw that a small window had appeared in the corner of the screen. The box contained the word
Ravensbridge
and the number
five
. The box belonged to a program he and he alone had on his computer. All the computers at Department 18 were networked. The program on his laptop was a watchdog. It alerted him if certain keywords were used on any other computer in the building. The digit, in this case, 5, told him the terminal belonged to Martin Impey.

Using a mirror program, he called up Martin’s screen onto his own and checked out what his head of research was working on. He watched the searches for five minutes and then went into his own directories and found the file entitled
Ravensbridge
, opened it and started scrolling down the pages.

The file had been created two years previously. It gave a list of deaths in the Ravensbridge area. He remembered it now, and remembered there appeared to be nothing to interest the department. The deaths seemed to be unrelated and consisted of suicides and accidents. It had been dismissed and consigned to a holding directory.
 

He took half an hour to read through the file and then sat back in his chair, tapping a pen against his teeth. As far as he could see there was still nothing of interest there. So why was Martin Impey wasting valuable department time looking into it? He rose from his desk and walked down the corridor to Martin’s office.
 

Martin minimized his screen as soon as Crozier entered the room and looked up at his boss, affecting a pleasant, good-morning type of face.

Crozier said nothing but came around the desk, leaned over Martin’s shoulder and hit a key. The page Martin was reading filled the screen.

“Ravensbridge,” Crozier said. “Something I should know about?”

Martin glanced at him nervously. “Just a little private research,” he said.

“Really? And what specifically are you researching? You know my views about employees using department time to their own ends.”

“Well, not private exactly,” Martin said, wondering how on earth Crozier had found out what he was doing so quickly.

“Explain.”

“Carter called me last night. He’s up there at the moment. He wanted me to look into a few things.”

Simon Crozier frowned. Robert Carter knew the rules and knew what he had asked Martin Impey to do was a flagrant disregard of them. But then that was typical of the man—always the maverick, never the team player. If he wasn’t so good at his job Crozier would have sacked him years ago.

“Leave that,” he said, waving a finger at the computer screen. “Come through to my office.”

Martin Impey’s heart sank. He’d overstepped the mark this time. Emilie was going to kill him.

He followed Crozier along the corridor and into the office.

“Shut the door,” Crozier said. “And sit down.”

Martin pulled a chair up to the desk and sat, folding his arms with a nonchalance he certainly didn’t feel.

Crozier went around to the other side of the desk and sat down in his brown leather chair. He typed something into his computer and then swiveled it around on the smoked-glass desktop to let Martin see the screen.

“So, in your search of Ravensbridge, what have you come up with?”

“Very little,” Martin said. He saw Crozier’s eyes narrow slightly and found the need to elaborate. “In fact, nothing. Bugger all.”

“So nothing about the series of deaths in the area?”

Martin uncrossed his arms and leaned forwards in his seat, focusing on the laptop’s screen. “Where did you get this?” he said after a few moments.

“If my memory serves me correctly it was sent anonymously a few years back. I read it through at the time but didn’t see anything to relate the deaths, and certainly no paranormal aspect to them, so I consigned it to the holding directory. Buried it.”

“And now you’re having second thoughts?”

Crozier shook his head slightly. “No, not really. But the fact that Carter has broken off his vacation to contact you and get you to start digging probably means I’ve either missed something, or there have been further developments.”

“So you want me to continue digging?”

Simon Crozier rubbed his chin. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours. See what you unearth. I’ll download this lot to your terminal. It might give you something to get you started.”

“It will certainly help. Thanks,” Martin said, inwardly breathing a huge sigh of relief. He got to his feet. “Anything else?”

“No, that’s all.”

Martin had reached the door when Crozier called him back. “Actually, Martin, I’ve just remembered. There was something else. Anything you find hits my desk first before you send it to Carter. Clear?”

“Crystal,” Martin said and headed back to his office.

Carter dropped the last file onto the coffee table and rubbed his eyes. “I need a coffee,” he said and went down to the kitchen.
 

Ian Lacey gathered up the folders and slipped them back into the plastic carrier bag and then went to join Carter in the kitchen. He sat down at the table. “That’s a pretty thing,” he said, lifting up Annie’s opal pendant and examining it.

“It belongs to Annie,” Carter said, glancing round. “Holly Ireland made it…or at least she designed it.”

“Clever girl,” Lacey said. “What do you make of her?”

“Holly? I don’t know really. I hadn’t given it much thought.”

“She’s been living with Norton. You’d think they would have talked about his reasons for being here. When I interviewed her she gave me some background on him—told me he’d written a few books—but very little else. She was a bit vague, to tell you the truth. I got very little out of her.”

“So she didn’t tell you he was studying witchcraft in the area?”

“No, she didn’t…well, not specifically. She did tell me he’d written a book about the Salem witch trials.”

“According to Holly, witchcraft is one of his obsessions. Did she tell you he thought he was being followed?”

“Yes, she did. But she also told me he was paranoid.”

“So you didn’t give it any credence?”

“I’ll be following it up as one line of inquiry, but I don’t think it will lead anywhere.”

Carter poured two cups of coffee, passed one to Lacey and lit a cigarette.

“Can you spare one of those?”

“Sure,” he said, sliding the packet across the kitchen table. “I didn’t realize you smoked.”

“I don’t normally,” Lacey said. “I gave up two years ago, but sometimes, like now, I get the urge.” He tapped out a cigarette from the pack and accepted Carter’s offer of a light. “I think Norton would have had his work cut out for him if witchcraft was the subject of his research. This valley has quite a history of it. There were never any witch hunts or trials, but witchcraft has been part of the valley’s culture and it persists to this day. But the people around here don’t really like to talk about it, certainly not with outsiders. I doubt he would have had any help from the locals.”

“But it sounds as if you know quite a bit about it,” Carter said.

“No, not really, but you can’t live in these parts without picking up the odd local legend, the occasional old wives’ tale.”

“And do you live in these parts?”

Lacey smiled. “I was born and bred in Halifax and I’m still there. But my grandparents lived here in Ravensbridge. I used to spend a lot of time here as a boy. It was a great place to grow up.”

“I can imagine,” Carter said.

“My gran considered herself to be a bit of a witch.”

Carter narrowed his eyes. “Really?”

“Oh yes,” Lacey said. “She took it very seriously. White magic, of course. Healing potions, love charms, that kind of thing. And I suppose, growing up with it, it never struck me as in any way strange. I think she was responsible for opening up my mind. She taught me that there was more to life than what we see on the surface. It’s kind of stuck with me.” He drew on the cigarette and washed down the smoke with a mouthful of coffee. “I’d give anything to see what Norton was working on. Were all his papers in the safe?”