The Eighth Witch (19 page)

“We will, Annie. We will.”

His phone rang.
 

“It’s Ian Lacey. Are you sober enough to get yourself over to Bradford police station?”

“Probably not, but I’m sure Annie could drive me. Why?”

“I want to show you something. You’ll find it interesting.”

“Forty minutes?”

“Fine.” Lacey disconnected.

“Who was that?” Annie said. “And where am I driving you?”

“Lacey. He wants to show me something. Do you mind driving me to Bradford?”

Annie shook her head. “Not at all.”

Forty-five minutes later they pushed through the doors of Trafalgar House, Bradford’s main police station, and approached the desk. The uniformed sergeant looked up from the form he was filling in and smiled. “And how can I help?”

“Robert Carter and Annie Ryder,” Carter said. “Here to see Detective Inspector Lacey.”

“Concerning what?” Still smiling.

“None of your damned business, Sam,” Lacey said, seeming to appear from nowhere. “Let them in.”

Sam Taylor, the duty sergeant, widened his smile still further and pressed a button by his right hand. There was a buzz and a click. “Come on through,” he said.

The door swung outwards. Lacey was there to meet them. “Follow me.”

He led them through a maze of corridors, each freshly painted in blue and white. Finally he opened one of the many doors and ushered them into an interview room. There was a table, four chairs, a flat-screen television and a DVD player. “Take a seat,” he said. “Matt will be along in a moment.”

“What’s this about?” Carter said.

“You’ll see shortly, but I want to wait for my sergeant. He’s having a few problems getting his head around things. Hearing your opinion on what you’re about to see may help bring him into the daylight.”

“I’ll do my best,” Carter said. “But it might be easier if I knew…”

Lacey raised his hand to silence him. “I don’t want to influence your thinking or your opinions. I want you to watch what I’m about to show you without any preconceptions.”

“Fair enough,” Carter said, sat down and crossed his legs.

Annie joined him, taking the next chair along. A few seconds later Matthew Sparks entered the room, nodded at them both and sat, saying nothing.

“Well, if we’re sitting comfortably, I’ll begin,” Lacey said. He picked up a small remote control unit from the table, pressed a button and the TV screen flickered into life.

What played on the television was a DVD copy of the CCTV tapes from Cavendish House. Bill Mackie had been true to his word. He’d copied the tapes and sent the disc over to Lacey by courier.

The images of a blond-haired woman entering the lift on the top floor and a ginger-haired woman exiting on the ground floor was just as impressive and perplexing as it had been the first time around. At least it was for Lacey. Sparks was leaning forwards in his seat, elbows on his knees, chin in his hands, watching the screen with rapt attention as if trying to work out the mechanics of a Penn and Teller illusion. When the disc finished he sat back in his seat and shook his head slowly.

Lacey turned to Carter. “Well?”

“The tapes were unedited?” Carter said.

“Essentially, yes. There were source tapes and Bill Mackie, or his technician, have spliced them together in the correct timeline. But the descent from penthouse to ground floor is in real time. No edits, and Bill timed the descent, and it’s accurate to the second, so it didn’t stop on the way down.”

“So no way they could have switched.”

“No.”

“Bloody impossible!” Sparks said. “I’ve watched this disc five times now and still can’t work out how they did it.”

“A chameleon,” Annie Ryder said.

Lacey turned to her. “Pardon?”

“A term we heard a short time ago, used to describe someone connected to the disappearance of Laura Sallis,” Carter said.

“Laura Sallis? Who’s Laura Sallis?” Sparks said. “I’m not following this at all. I thought this was about the death of Ollie Tucker.”

“It is,” Carter said. “And, unless I’m mistaken, it’s about a whole lot more. Tell me, Sergeant, as someone who, as you say, has watched the disc five times, can you describe the two women, the one who entered the lift and the one who came out of it?”
 

“Of course I can,” Sparks said. “The one who entered has blond hair, the one who stepped out was ginger.”

“And that’s it?” Carter said. “Years of police training and that’s the best you can do? One’s blond, the other’s ginger. Describe what they looked like, what they were wearing.”

Sparks opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut, his brow furrowed in a frown. “I can’t bring them to mind,” he said after a few moments. He looked to Lacey for help.

“Can any of us?” Carter said. “I know I can’t.”

Annie shrugged and shook her head.

“I’ll be damned,” Lacey said. “How the fuck does that work? It’s like trying to remember a dream. At first it all seems so vivid, but then the more you think about it the vaguer it becomes.”

“I think we’re dealing with a shape-shifter,” Carter said. “I’ve read about them but never encountered one before. But the perception barrier, the fact that none of us can recall her features, that’s a different kind of magic, a much higher level entirely.”

“Shape-shifters? Magic?” Sparks said, an edge to his voice. “Come on, Ian, this is fantasy land.”

“And today, Matt, you saw the driver of a flour truck, apparently suffocated by his own load, in the middle of a wood. Not exactly your average, every day felony, is it? There’s something going on here, Matt. Something that flies in the face of logic and even sanity. We have to keep our minds open to every possibility, no matter how outlandish it may appear.”
 

Sparks got to his feet. “Bollocks to that!” he said and stalked from the room.

Lacey watched him leave and sighed.

“I think your sergeant protests too much,” Carter said.

Lacey nodded slowly. “I was thinking much the same. I’ll have a word with him later. See if I can discover what the real problem is. In the meantime you’d better tell me what you’ve learned about Laura Sallis’s disappearance.”

“The driver in the wood, suffocated by flour,” Carter said. “Is it connected?”

“He picked up the ginger-haired woman from a café opposite Cavendish House and that’s the last time anyone saw him alive. Connected? Yes, I think so. Now, Laura Sallis. What can you tell me?”

Simon Crozier closed the file on his desk and rubbed his eyes. It was only early afternoon but he was weary. He’d gone to his club the evening before and met up with an old friend who’d insisted on taking him to dinner. Sir Andrew Martin was a high-ranking civil servant who worked out of the Treasury. He’d had the ear of various chancellors over the last decade and was widely seen as the power behind the throne. He was also a notorious womanizer and a lush, with a capacity for alcohol only equaled by his capacity for recreational drugs. But at least he was discreet, Crozier thought as he accepted the invitation. Four hours later he was regretting it.
 

Andy Martin had gotten himself into a spot of bother with a young prostitute, and the incident was threatening to expose the civil servant’s hedonistic lifestyle. He’d wanted a shoulder to cry on and Simon Crozier just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 

The evening had dragged on until four o’clock in the morning and finished when Crozier packed his old friend into a taxi and sent him back to his Bayswater home. Crozier had finally gotten back to his riverside flat close to five, thrown up the best part of a bottle of Dom Perignon and crawled into bed, only to be awoken two hours later by the savage ringing of his alarm clock.

Now, at four o’clock in the afternoon he was feeling fairly wretched. He was about to take his coat from the stand and head for home when the door of his office opened and Trudy, his secretary, bustled into the room.

“Oh, good. You’re still here.”

“Only just,” Crozier said. “I was about to call it a day. I’ve got a splitting headache.”

“You might want to reconsider,” Trudy said. “I’ve just had Kings Cross police on the phone. There’s been an incident at the British Library. Martin Impey’s been seriously injured.”

Crozier froze, arm outstretched, hand clasped around the astrakhan collar of his coat. “How seriously?”

“He’s been taken to the University College Hospital where he’s now in intensive care, but apart from that they wouldn’t say.”

Crozier seemed to shake himself. It broke the spell. He removed his coat from the stand and slipped it on. “Get me a car. I’ll drive down to the hospital and get an update on his condition myself.”

“What about Emilie?”

“Emilie?”

“Martin’s wife. She should be told.”

“Yes,” Crozier said. “You’re probably right. Text her number to my phone and I’ll call her from the hospital.”

“Don’t you think news like this is better delivered face to face?” Trudy said.

“No, I do not,” Crozier said. “Besides, Impey lives in the wilds of Hertfordshire. That would be a round trip of over two hours, and I have plans for tonight.”

“Very well,” Trudy said, unable to keep the disapproval out of her voice. “I’ll order your car and text you her number.” She spun on her heel and left the office, muttering darkly under her breath.

Crozier walked back to his desk and sat, waiting for Trudy to tell him when his car was ready. “Hertfordshire,” he said quietly to himself. “Absurd.”
 

Chapter Twenty-One

The girl who came to sit next to Martin Impey in the reading room of the British Library was pretty, about eighteen or nineteen, with almond eyes, a slightly upturned nose with a smattering of freckles across the bridge and an almost completely shaved head. There was about an eighth of an inch of dark brown hair, but it did little to hide the oriental motif tattooed on her scalp.
Probably a student,
he thought as he flipped over a page and continued to read.

The book was there waiting for him when he arrived at the library. The assistant who had retrieved it for him was waiting to hand it over personally. He was a young man, dressed in black jeans, with an acne-marked face and a blue British Library sweatshirt, several sizes too big for his gaunt frame. “Remarkable,” he said cheerily as he checked the book out to Martin. “A book lies dormant in our storage facility for more than fifty years, and then, in the space of four weeks, it’s requested twice.” He read the title and mouthed the words silently. “Witchcraft, eh? Are you writing a book? The other guy was.”

“Something like that,” Martin said. It always paid to be vague. He didn’t want a long, explanatory conversation about the workings of Department 18 to eat into his research time.

“What a coincidence. Two people writing a book at the same time, about the same subject.”

“Who was the other guy? The one who requested the book before?”

“I’m afraid that information is confidential,” the young man said. “I can’t give you those kinds of details.”

“Fair enough,” Martin said easily. “No big deal. Thanks.” He took the book from him, ignoring the slightly deflated look on the young man’s face, and started to move away from the desk.

“He was American,” the assistant blurted out, eager to engage in some kind of dialogue, keen to validate his standing at the library. “A university professor.”

“Right,” Martin said, refusing to take the bait. “Thanks again.”

“But don’t you…?”

Martin smiled and shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble,” he said, and walked away without looking back.

The young library assistant glared at him, then shrugged and turned his attention to his computer, calling up a half-finished game of Spider Solitaire to the screen. Christ! This day was never ending!
 

Martin had been reading for half an hour when the girl came to sit next to him. “Do you mind if I sit here?” she said. “Only all the other desks with electrical points are taken and I noticed you weren’t using yours, and I have this.” She indicated the slim laptop tucked under her arm.

“No, please. Feel free.”

She beamed a smile and settled down in the chair next to him, pulling a cable from a plastic carrier bag and slotting the plug into the power point. She set the laptop down on the desk and fed the other end of the cable into the computer’s power inlet.

Martin glanced across at the screen as it blossomed into life. It bore the legend
City University
. It was as he thought. The girl was a student.

He went back to the book. It was starting to make fascinating reading. There were seven Yardley sisters who had made their home in the Lancashire town of Pendle. Martin had heard of Pendle before. Back in the late fifteen and early sixteen hundreds it was the focus of the church’s war against witchcraft. Witch hunts were commonplace as were the trials and executions.

According to McCutcheon, the book’s author, the Yardleys were targeted by Jacob Barker, a Lancashire magistrate whose estate bordered the Yardley’s land. Reports were filed and the family’s arrest was imminent. When Barker and his subordinates raided the Yardley’s house they found it empty, the sisters having fled south into Yorkshire, specifically the area in the Calder Valley close to Ravensbridge.