Witchmoor Edge (2 page)

Tobias N'Dibe was darker than Millicent and
more obviously of African origin, somewhat older and had a cultured
air, but the same pedantic preciseness about him.

"Millicent Hampshire," Millie said, taking
the proffered hand.

"You are interested in dowsing?" NDibe
asked.

"I suppose so," Millicent answered. "I find
the whole topic of ... of.." She struggled for an appropriate
phrase.

"Psi talents?" NDibe suggested.

"I find the whole subject interesting,
yes."

N'Dibe was looking at her, not appraisingly in any
sexual sense, but weighing her up nonetheless.

"But you are interested because you have some
talents yourself, I think," he said at length.

Millicent thought about Carlos again and how
she had not admitted her feelings to anyone since his death.
"Well," she said, finding the cultured black stranger easy to talk
to, "I have had some ... err ... experiences over the years.
Insights into problems where I seem to know for a fact things for
which there are not established facts at all. What you might call
visions. But they're not something a detective should admit to
following."

"I see." N'Dibe nodded slowly. "I thought
detectives were allowed their hunches. So you are a police
woman?"

"Detective Inspector Millicent Hampshire. You
don't sound like a farm labourer yourself."

N'Dibe smiled. "I rather hope not," he
observed. "I am a moderately senior civil servant at the Regional
Development Office. However, senior civil servants do not generally
experiment in dowsing, any more than detectives admit to
visions."

"What were you dowsing for?" Millicent
asked.

"I was about to have some tea from my flask,"
N'Dibe said. "Would you care for a cup?"

"I'd rather have coffee, if you don't mind,"
Millicent said. "I have a flask with me too."

The afternoon was pleasantly warm without
being unpleasantly hot. Sitting on a fallen stone in the August
sunshine with the soft breeze holding the temperature down a little
made it a delightful day. Millicent luxuriated in calmness and
peace like wallowing in a warm bath after a hectic day's work.

"Do you come up often onto the moors like
this?" N'Dibe asked.

"I rarely have time," Millicent answered. "Do
you?"

N'Dibe shook his head, watching Millie and
frowning slightly. "Not often," he said, and added, "That we should
both choose this afternoon is perhaps an interesting synchronicity,
rather than mere coincidence."

Millicent thought he might be right, though
she couldn't see where he was leading. He continued to study
her.

"I think you drive yourself too hard," he
said at last. "There is something obsessive about you. A crusade. I
detect a certain sadness about you too and a connection with the
military. Did you serve in the armed forces?"

Hampshire shifted a little uncomfortably.
"Yes," she said. "I was in the army for a few years. In the bomb
squad."

N'Dibe sipped his tea but continued to watch
Millicent, nodding again slowly. "Yes. I think some one close to
you was hurt by a bomb."

For some time Millicent said nothing. At
length she said, "My late husband." And added, "You never told me
what you were dowsing for."

N'Dibe noted the change of subject and did
not pursue Millicent's problem. Not there and then anyway.

"From the heel stone of circles like this,"
NDibe said, "there are sightlines to distant markers showing the
sunrise and sunset lines at the solstices. For reasons not entirely
clear to me such lines are easily found by dowsing."

"What I don't understand," Millicent
remarked, looking around at the rolling vastness of the moors
around them, "is why anyone should build a stone circle up here, so
far from anywhere."

"Ah," NDibe answered, "At one time these
moors were all woodland. This stone circle would have been in a
clearing. The soil beneath the woodlands was too poor to sustain
agriculture when the trees were cleared."

"I suppose the people just moved away?"

"To the valleys," N'Dibe agreed. "Now about
your visions. I am involved with a little group, which could help
to control them. Make them, perhaps, come to order. I think I will
contact you again in the next few days."

Was N'Dibe was being deliberately enigmatic,
Millicent wondered, and he did nothing to ease the obscurity of his
remark. He stood and stretched.

"I have almost finished what I came to do,"
he remarked. "I was thinking of a leisurely walk back to 'The
Craven Heifer' public house on the East Morton road for an early
evening meal. Would you care accompany me?"

Millicent had likewise been at a loose end.
"That would be rather nice," she agreed. "But would you just
demonstrate those rods to me again?"

"With pleasure," N'Dibe said. However, I
suggest that it may be more enlightening for you to try it
yourself." He stood up and added, a trifle obscurely, "For me too,
perhaps."

* * *

Late on Sunday afternoon, a long-suffering
desk officer at Witchmoor Edge Police Station reluctantly took down
some details.

"You can't say he's missing just because he
didn't come home last night," the desk officer said.

Shirley Hunter, though, seemed to want to
tell her story.

"Like I said," she repeated to the man, "We
went on a picnic yesterday. We had a row. I locked myself in the
car and when he made to break in I drove the car at him and knocked
him down. When I got out of the car to see if he was all right he
got up and chased me off. When I got back to the place, the car was
gone and I haven't seen him since."

The desk sergeant had heard it all before.
"He probably drove off in a temper, had a drinking binge and he's
sleeping it off somewhere," he told her. "You come back on Tuesday
if you haven't seen or heard from him by then."

"Aren't you going to make a note of his name
and the car number?"

"He'll turn up," the policeman said. "They
usually do."

"Well, note down that I reported it," Shirley
Hunter insisted. The officer gave a sigh and noted it down in the
day book, but he didn't give it a crime number or enter Simon
Hunter on the computer as a 'missing person'. He was certain the
man would turn up.

Chapter 2: Monday 13th August (pm)

Monday morning began with what Detective Inspector
Hampshire had thought might be a long and boring meeting of senior
staff. It tuned out not to be as bad as she had feared - not quite,
but nearly.

The Divisional Commander had passed on the
hierarchy's worries about a declining crime detection rate. The
Home Secretary was worried about public perceptions across the
country, and the Commissioner of the West Yorkshire Police was
worried about the figures for the County as a whole. Quite what
good would be done by wasting the time of senior officers, when the
real problem was recruitment, completely escaped Millicent, but it
had provided enough material for a meeting long enough to make the
pleasant weekend seem a distant memory.

By the time she returned to her desk on
Monday afternoon, Millicent was faced with several new folders
waiting her attention, and turned to her real interest of solving
crimes with some relief. The first folder contained the beginnings
of what she realised was probably going to be a very substantial
investigation. It was the autopsy report of the man pulled from the
canal on Sunday.

The man had not drowned - he was already dead
when he entered the water. The blow on the skull, Doctor Millard
thought, would probably have killed him, but that too was done
after death. There was another blow to the front of his head which
he had received while alive, but that wouldn't have killed him,
though it might have knocked him unconscious. He also had extensive
bruising and a crack, though not a fracture, to one thigh. Millard
thought a minor traffic accident might have caused either or both
of the injuries before death, or perhaps a fall. As to what had
actually killed him there were no doubts. There was enough morphine
and pure heroin in his blood to have killed two or three people.
After consideration she picked up the phone and rang Doctor
Millard.

"Afternoon Brian," she said. "Millicent here.
I just got your report on the body from the canal."

"Strange one, that," Millard said. "Talk
about overkill. Enough blood in his morphine stream to kill an
army, hit over the head hard enough to kill him and then
drowned."

"I thought you said he didn't drown."

"I was joking. He was quite definitely dead
before he entered the water. I think, incidentally, he got the
second blow on the head while he was lying down. That would be
lying down dead, of course. The wound didn't bleed because he was
already dead."

"Anything else you can tell me?"

"You mean that isn't enough?" Millard snorted
with laughter. "Well, he died lying on his left side - lividity,
the blood drained to that side. The morphine was injected and the
knock out blow and bruising were on the right and right front.
Actually, he'd several skin punctures in his arms. I wouldn't go so
far as to say he was a regular addict, but it wasn't a single
injection. I know the morphine was injected, because there was none
in his stomach but lots in his blood."

"I see. Any thoughts on the time of
death?"

"Sometime Saturday," Millard said. "Probably
about the middle of the day. A bit too long dead to be precise
about it, but if you looked at between eleven and three Saturday
you’d probably be in the right area."

"What I really rang you up to ask was whether
the fire would have disguised the death from morphine."

"Aha," Millard teased, "The detective brain
at work." There was a short pause. "The answer is that it would
depend on the severity of the fire, but probably. From what I hear
of the fire in the warehouse, it was pretty fierce, so in this case
it would have disguised the cause of death as completely as a
cremation. Besides, I looked for evidence of drowning and only did
a blood test when I was sure he didn't die from drowning or the
cracked skull. If he'd died in the fire the cause of death would
have seemed pretty obvious, so I might not have done all the tests,
even assuming there was enough there to test."

"Thanks very much, Brian. I'm trying to keep
an open mind, but I think the morphine is the connection between
the fire and the body."

"You may very well be right," the doctor
agreed, "but in that case, what’s the connection between the canal
and the body?"

"Good question," admitted Millicent.

"Now, what about the other body you dragged
from the canal?"

"I hadn't got around to that one yet,"
Millicent said, opening the second folder and reading aloud. "Late
teens or early twenties ... drowned ... consumed a lot of alcohol
..."

"Yes," Millard said, "He was drunk or close
to it. Of course, he may have nothing at all to do with the other
body of the fire but..." The doctor left the sentence in mid
air.

"It would be a hell of a coincidence,"
Millicent agreed. "And I don't believe in coincidences."

That was not entirely true. Some things just
happened at the same time by what Carl Jung had called
synchronicity and Millicent knew that she had more than her share
of what the world would call luck, but she found there was usually
an explanation for events like this, and she preferred to find it.
That was one of several strengths she had as a detective.

"You're a bit of a cynic," Millard said
cheerfully, "But I'm inclined to agree with you on this one. Well,
I wish you the joy of it."

Millicent said her goodbyes and rang off.

Before she called in several members of her
department, Millicent glanced at the third new folder. This was a
report from the Fire Investigation Branch of the fire brigade, to
the effect that the fire had started suddenly and fiercely with
some kind of incendiary agent or accelerant and that a body had
been discovered in the ruins.

A third body. Millicent was still inclined to
think that the three deaths were connected, though there was no
evidence to that effect at this stage. She rang for her secretary
to fetch her a coffee and sent for Sergeant Lucy Turner and
Constables Tommy Hammond and Gary Goss. Sergeant Gibbs had the day
off, but she would probably need him as well.

"This will probably be a big one," Millicent
told her team as they gathered in her office. She went through the
main points of Sunday’s events and the autopsy findings.

There was nothing on the body to identify the
kid from the canal, but his prints were on file. "They identified
him as Kevin Musworth," she said. "According to his record, he's a
minor vandal and a thug known to this division. He was nineteen,
but the record was light on convictions, other than a handbag
snatching count."

"There's nothing connecting him with the
fire, but I'd be surprised if he wasn't connected with it somehow,"
Millicent continued. "Tommy, start with the fire and the woman who
reported it. See if she saw anything else. Get a statement from
her. DC. Goss, you talk to the barge man who was there when the
first body was found, then find out what Musworth was up to on
Saturday night and who he was up to it with. Work in tandem with
Tommy."

She paused a moment as she opened the other
file.

"We don't have an identification of the man
at all," she went on. "His prints aren't on record and there was no
wallet or anything. Lucy, see if there's anything reported to
missing persons. If there isn't we'll have to do a door to door and
see if the face clicks, or perhaps enlist the help of the Witchmoor
Argus." She glanced at the face, photographed in death the victim
had been a handsome man in his early forties. Handsome, yes, but
something else. Petulant or spoiled, perhaps?