Witchmoor Edge (9 page)

"It's the last of the tuna," the assistant
said, "You may as well have what's left." She piled Lucy's plate
high.

The four of them carried their plates and
drinks to the same table. Lucy's was enormous.

"You'll need a doggy bag for that," DC Goss
observed.

"Catty bag," Lucy corrected.

"Should that be 'pussy bag'?" Goss wondered
aloud.

"That sound faintly obscene," said Tommy.
"But are you going to save some tuna for your cat," he asked
Lucy.

"My cats do all right," Lucy answered. "It's
a cats world: I'm just there to open the tins for them."

"We can't have cats," DC Goss said. "The
children are allergic to them."

"My cats are allergic to children," Lucy
responded. That's why me and Julia haven't got any children!"

By an unspoken agreement there wasn't much
talk of business over the food - business was saved until they got
back to the Incident Suite.

The uniformed officer on the dedicated
reception, PC Gail Downing, had settled herself in and established
a database, but there wasn't a lot on it yet. Gail was not long out
of training and looked up in awe as Millicent entered. DC Bright
was also in the room.

"Inspector Hampshire, ma'am," Gail Downing
said.

"Yes."

"Chief Inspector Cooke rang and said he'd
like you to pop into his office as soon as you got back, to have a
briefing on how it's all going."

"Ring him up now. We're about to meet and
compare notes, so if he can get in here right away it would save us
going over the same ground more than once."

"Okay," She turned telephone Cooke.

"Right," Hampshire said, "Grab yourselves a
chair each and sit in a circle. Gail, unless the phone goes you'd
better listen in. We may need you to know where something fits in
and who'd be interested."

PC Downing flushed slightly but joined the
circle feeling important.

"Now," Millicent began. "You all know more or
less what's in the autopsy reports, but look at them again if
you've any doubts. DS Turner and I spoke to the wife." Hampshire
explained the story. "Now DS Turner was going to talk to Ellen
Barnes. Did you find her in?"

Chief Inspector Cooke came in as Lucy was
giving her account of her talk with Ellen Barnes and Alice
Dent.

"Is there anything to support the alibi?"
Cooke asked.

"I've got a till slip from the shopping
expedition. Date's correct and the time is shown at 2.51pm. I've
asked Vodaphone for a print out of the calls, so I can check the
call time against the till slip."

"That should tell us how reliable the story
is," Hampshire remarked. "It's a pretty strange story but it may
well be broadly true." She paused and looked around. "Or of course
it may not. Shirley Hunter is a nurse, and that puts her high on a
list of suspects as regards means, and she's pretty high as regards
motive, considering the kind of man Hunter was. However, I talked
this morning to two other people who admitted wanting him
dead."

She told them of her conversations with
Shields and Knowles. "They both have pretty powerful motives and
this IT specialist we have yet to speak to may have at least as
good a motive," she concluded.

"DC Goss was starting from the other end.
What was Musworth doing Saturday night?" Detective Inspector
Hampshire continued. "How did you get on?” she asked, turning to
Goss.

"According to what DC Hammond learned
yesterday, Musworth was definitely with Sansom and possibly with
Koswinski and the word was that Sansom was going to the Youth
Centre, so that's where I began," Goss explained, and recounted his
finding at the Youth Centre and the Apocalypse.

"So they were together at around ten thirty,"
Cooke observed.

"I'm going to check with the doorman at the
Apocalypse, but it looks that way," Goss agreed.

"Musworth drowned, Koswinski swam ashore and
there was an unidentified body in the rubble," Hampshire said. "It
looks virtually certain the body in the burnt out building was
either Sansom or Barker. We'd better try and identify Barker and
trace him, before we tell Sansom's family he's dead. On the
evidence so far, I'd say they - some of them or all four - threw
the body in the canal and the fire broke out and cut them off. What
the four of them were doing only Koswinski knows." She turned to
Cooke. "What I'd like to do is have DC Goss and DC Hammond pick him
on suspicion of murdering Hunter and Musworth."

There was a slight shuffling. "Oh I know he
isn't even a suspect," Hampshire said hastily. "But he's getting to
be a hardened nut and he won't tell us anything if we ask him
nicely. Hammond and Goss can give him something of a grilling and
just maybe he'll come out with the story. This time we're not
actually after him, at least I don't think we are."

"Worth a try, I suppose," Cooke said at
length.

"How did you get on at the hospital, DS
Gibbs?" Hammond asked, moving the agenda on.

"Nothing very concrete, I'm afraid," Gibbs
said. "Shirley Hunter is a nurse, like she said, and seems
reasonably well liked. She would have had access to morphine, but
drugs are fairly well controlled. When something out of the
ordinary is prescribed for a patient, supplies are sent up from the
pharmacy, enough for a day at a time."

"You spoke to the pharmacy?" Millicent
asked.

"Yes. Youngish bloke called O'Connor runs it
and seems well in control. One thing I did come across, though ..."
He hesitated.

"Go on," Cooke urged.

"It's probably not important, but there was a
rumour linking the Hunter woman to a Doctor Patel in Respiratory at
Bradford Royal. He was on duty all weekend and seen regularly all
day Saturday doing different jobs. I think you can rule him out,
but it may give her even more motive."

"Right," Hampshire said, "DC Bright was
checking with neighbours for anything to confirm Shirley Hunter's
story or call it into question. Find anything?"

"Nothing useful," Bright answered. "The next
door neighbour says they were always quarrelling and that he used
to hit her, but we knew that anyway."

"Take someone with you," Hampshire said,
"Keep at it. I'd like to find someone who saw them leave at around
eleven thirty."

"Okay," she continued, "DC Hammond and DC
Goss can pick up Koswinksi tomorrow and try to put the frighteners
on him to find out what happened between ten thirty and twelve
thirty Saturday. DS Gibbs. First I want you to go to Hunter's house
and go through his work area for anything personal. Use Matthew as
a witness and then he can get on with the door-to-door enquiries
afterwards. After you've done that, take someone from scene of
crimes and take a cast of car prints from Knowles's car and
Shields's car and compare them to the casts taken at the picnic
site."

At that moment she had one of her flashes of
uncontrolled insight and nearly fell off the chair. She dropped her
notebook and folder and clasped a hand to her forehead.

"You all right?" Cooke asked.

"Yes," Millicent said faintly. Then more
strongly she said, "Yes, I'm OK. DS Gibbs. When those items of food
from the picnic scene come back from forensic, check them against
that till receipt. DS Turner, you and I will go and talk to the IT
specialist tomorrow. I've just remembered that she was called Rosie
O'Connor. Its very odd that someone with a strong motive for a
murder using morphine should share a surname with a hospital
pharmacist."

Chapter 6: Tuesday 14th August (Eve)

N'Dibe smiled benignly and, perhaps, a touch
complacently. Although he was quite a big man, he was not
noticeably overweight nor was he a big eater. However he did seem
to have a fondness for ice cream. He ordered an especially large
one with chocolate syrup and cream. Millicent thought it looked
rather sickly, but N'Dibe finished it with an obvious relish and
pushed the dish away with a sigh of contentment. He wiped his mouth
almost daintily with a napkin and pulled his coffee towards him. He
must, Millicent thought, be approaching sixty if he had not already
reached it. He took a sip of coffee and continued as if he had not
paused for the ice cream.

"At our public meetings we have a range of
speakers and discussion topics intended to attract as wide an
audience as possible. From those attending the open meetings we can
select those we invite to join the inner circle."

"Select?"

"It would hardly be appropriate to work at
close quarters with others about whom you entertain unease or
doubts."

"That cuts both ways, surely," Millicent
objected.

"Of course it does," N'Dibe agreed, smiling
again. "We meet people. We decide whether they would fit in and
whether we would enjoy their company. Then we try to get as close
to them as possible, to see whether they like our company before we
invite them."

"I see."

"You are privileged. It is rare that anyone
learns of even the existence of the inner group before we invite
them to join."

"Why am I so special?" Millicent asked.

"N'Dibe was thoughtful and took another long
drink of coffee before answering. "First," he said at length, "I
felt you were out of the ordinary from the moment I met you at the
twelve apostles stones. A silly name, by the way, since they
pre-date Christianity by three thousand years. Second, because you
told me of your second sight when you had not previously mentioned
it to anyone but your late husband."

"And you made up your mind because of that?"
At that point Millicent realised she hadn't actually mentioned
second sight to the man, though perhaps she had implied it. "How do
you know that anyway?"

"On the question of how I know, I know many
things not put into words. It was in any event a little more than
that which was decisive. Firstly I spoke to the others and they
will study you for themselves this evening. Secondly, much as it
may upset a detective to be on the receiving end of investigation,
I checked up on you."

Millicent was not sure whether to be
offended. "How?" she demanded.

"I made one or two phone calls, consulted a
crystal and so on." N'Dibe was smiling benignly again and Millicent
could not tell to what extent he was being serious. She was still
not sure whether she was offended. The large black man glanced at
his watch.

"The meeting at the Central Library is at
eight," he said. "If we leave at once there should be plenty of
parking space just behind, off Manchester Road. That will give us
just enough time to get up to the fourth floor."

The meeting was a mildly interesting one,
about the pendulum dowsing experiments conducted by Tom Lethbridge.
He had been an archaeologist and museum curator at Cambridge who
had retired to Devon and conducted as a hobby a series of
experiments, which had honed the accuracy of pendulum dowsing. He
had irritated fellow archaeologists before his retirement by
dowsing the most suitable places to dig and been right more often
than them. Millicent thought that Lethbridge's eccentricity had
probably irritated his colleagues less than being right more often
than they were.

Lethbridge, it seemed, had discovered that,
if you had a long cord, adjustable by winding it round a pencil or
stick, and a weight on the end, you could hold it out over various
items and get a rate for a length of cord at which the pendulum
would swing or rotate for various materials. For instance, with a
cord length of twenty-two inches a pendulum circled a silver object
twenty two times.

The speaker in the room at Bradford City
Library had urged them all to try it for themselves and Millicent
had found a silver ring hidden beneath one of six sheets of paper,
each with an item of different material concealed underneath.

"That's pretty good for a first try," an
auburn haired woman commented. She was rather striking with very
green eyes, which suggested the auburn might be at least partly
natural. Her hair was slightly longer than shoulder length and tied
back with a pewter clasp at the nape of her neck. "Assuming it was
a first try," the woman added.

"Can anyone do this kind of thing?" Millicent
asked.

Tobias NDibe was watching and it was he who
answered the question. "According to studies by the Stanford
Research Institute in the US," he said, "About 95 to 98 percent of
people can learn to do psi things like remote viewing, though, of
course, some have more natural talent than others. Some of the
human race need a lot of practice to be any good at all."

"Yes, Toby," said the auburn haired woman,
"but Tom Lethbridge thought that only about 60 or 70 percent of
people could dowse, and your new friend looks like a natural."

"I tend to agree, Judith," N'Dibe nodded.
"But with the question of natural talent at least I side with the
Stanford Research Institute rather than Tom Lethbridge."

Millicent wondered which of those present
were part of the inner group sizing her up. She thought that Judith
was probably one of them and quite liked the woman. Of the others
she could not be certain. She thought the speaker was probably one
and he certainly seemed able to dowse and there was a tall, dark
haired and vaguely Italian looking woman in her late twenties who
seemed somehow another likely candidate.

As the twenty or so people drifted away at
the end of the meeting, Millicent decided that she was sufficiently
interested in the outer group to come again in a months time, if
pressure of work allowed. She also decided she was interested in
knowing more about the inner group as well.

They had driven in separate cars from the
restaurant so there would be no need for them to see each other
further that evening.

"Just a moment," N'Dibe said as they went out
into the street. "I want to talk to one or two others before we go
our separate ways."