Witchmoor Edge (15 page)

"You do not need to explain, but you do. The
door is a portal to many places and you explain that tonight you
wish to go to where this vehicle, about which you are concerned,
can be found. The doorkeeper bows again and holds the door open
wide. You go through. Beyond all is blue. You can come back to the
here and now at any time by counting from 1 to 3 and saying "Wide
awake" twice. You are surrounded by a blue nothingness and you sink
slowly to the ground, through the blueness and the clouds to a
reality."

"Now," N'Dibe said, "Keep your eyes closed,
but look around you in your mind and tell me where you are."

Millicent was faced with a haze of images and
impressions. "Inside, I think," she said. "In some kind of
workshop."

"Do you see shapes or patterns around
you?"

"Yes. There are T shaped things and ... cars.
Yes, cars on the T shaped things. They're ramps." Millicent sounded
excited. "I think I'm in a garage."

"Good," he said. "Better than we had any
right to hope at the first try. I'm going to ask your impressions
about various things and I want you to answer without
rationalising.

First, what city do you think you are in?"
NDibe asked.

"Bradford, I think."

"When?"

"Now I imagine." Millicent sounded surprised
by the question.

"So your victim's vehicle is in a garage in
Bradford?"

"Yes," she said, rather taken aback that she
was so sure.

"And is it there legally?"

Millicent paused this time. She looked around
in her imagination. No, this was not legal. There was something
dark about it. She still hesitated.

"Don't rationalise," N'Dibe advised her
again. "Our conscious minds try to find the logical and explicable
to hold onto. This isn't either logical or explicable in ordinary
terms, so your logical mind may well be wrong."

"I don't think I'm rationalising," Millicent
said. "It's just that I'm getting more than one impression. I think
it's something criminal and it either has been, or will shortly be,
raided."

"Very good," N'Dibe said. "I think you have
enough to go on. You can ask around whether anyone in Bradford
Division is planning a raid on a garage, or has recently raided
one. I want you to count up to 3 and say wide awake twice."

Millicent counted under her breath but said
"wide awake" audibly. At the second saying of the words, N'Dibe
switched off the tape and she sat there, blinking but relaxed and
unmoving.

"So," N'Dibe said, "You have completed your
first deliberate remote viewing session. I think it has been much
more successful than either of us had reason to hope."

"It wasn’t a nice simple answer, but it does
explain why the interest report didn't produce anything."

"From my own impressions and feelings,"
N'Dibe said, "it would not surprise me if the car was stolen and is
being re-sprayed."

"It's given me something to work on, anyway.
More coffee?"

"Mmm," said NDibe. "I'd rather have ... err
...ice cream, if you've got it. I find it very good after Remote
Viewing."

"I think I have some left," she said, going
into the kitchen and opening the freezer to investigate. "Yes,
there's nearly half a tub of strawberry ripple."

"Oh very suitable," NDibe remarked.

Millicent scooped some into a glass bowl,
popped in a spoon and carried it through to Tobias, who sighed with
contentment.

"Does ice cream help remote viewing?" she
asked.

"Ice cream? Good gracious no, not as far as I
know. I just happen to like it, that's all."

"But you said just now that it was very good
after remote viewing.

"So it is, my dear, so it is. In fact it's
very good at any time."

He dug into the ice cream with a smile of
pleasure and added, "I think we have earned it this evening."

"Tell me," Millicent said over the second cup
of coffee, "Why were you concerned about psychedelic drugs, when
shamans of every variety use drugs as a way of achieving the
visions of other worlds they seem to need. Are they somehow
primitive?"

"We all sprang from the creative source and
every path - Shamanic, Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and so on -
every path back to the creator, has union with the divine as its
objective. We each must choose the correct path for us. Too many
fundamentalists of every religion think that, because it is the
right path for them it is the right path for everyone."

"What you have to recognise," N'Dibe
continued, "is that the rules of life for a particular path are not
necessarily rules of life for any other path. You cannot easily
control involuntary psychism however you deal with it. The shaman
controls it in ways that do not fit at all with the Western Mystery
Tradition I follow. I will not consider working with anyone who has
used hard or psychedelic drugs recreationally. That is not true of
other people on other paths."

"So someone who experimented with LSD in
their teens is barred for life from your path?" Millicent said
doubtfully.

"I said recreationally," NDibe pointed out.
"To experiment once is not the same thing as regular use for
recreational purposes or even regular use for medical purposes.
Nevertheless, it would make their way upon the path I follow more
difficult."

"I see," Millicent said, nodding slowly. "But
I don't see why it is that so many different paths all work? Why do
we need more than the one path? After all, the destination is the
same."

N'Dibe showed no sign of impatience. "The
best simile I can find is water," he said. "Water will always find
its level. It will use an existing channel if there is one or cut
its own new one if none exists. The reason the cult of the Virgin
Mary was so immediately successful is that it used the same channel
as the worship of Isis. It is not in the least sacrilegious to
point out that the emotions felt by followers of either cult were
similar to the emotions felt by followers of the other."

"I feel as if I'm waking from a long dream,"
Millicent remarked.

"Perhaps you are at a good age to wake up,"
N'Dibe observed. "According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the
whole purpose of life is to become aware that material existence is
a dream and that you must live repeated lives until you waken from
the outer reality and become aware of the significance of the inner
reality."

"Hmm," said Millicent. "And Sunday is part of
the wakening process?"

"You might indeed say that," N'Dibe agreed.
"Now, about Sunday. I will leave you these papers to read through
and Judith and I will call round to see you Saturday evening for
about an hour or so to talk through the details, if that's
convenient. On Sunday I will call for you about six pm, if that is
agreeable to you."

* * *

Julia was waiting for Lucy and rose from her
chair as she walked into the lounge.

"Busy?" she asked, giving Lucy a perfunctory
kiss.

"A bit," Lucy answered. "I've been
interviewing that couple I told you about, for a second time. Well,
one of them. The other was working. She's a nurse and has worse
shifts than me."

"Have you eaten?"

"Not really since lunch, but I don't want
much."

"Drink? I was just about to get one for me,"
Julia said, going into the kitchen. "You said 'a second time'",
Julia continued, raising her voice slightly. "Do you think there's
something wrong with their story?"

Lucy had taken off her jacket and replaced
her lowish-heeled court shoes with sandals more appropriate to
August.

"I'm not sure," she said going into the
kitchen after Julia. "It's beginning to look as if there's
something wrong with the strange story the victim's wife is
telling, but the story those two are telling may be okay. I think
I'll make myself a cheese sandwich," she added. "You ate at work, I
take it."

"Staff canteen," Julia said.

"How is work?"

"It's going really well. There are five IT
support staff on my team and they all seem decent people who work
reasonably hard. Most of what we do is related to solving immediate
problems, but it's interesting. How are you finding your boss?"

"It's ironic really," Lucy said. "We've had
to get where we are in spite of being women, she's got where she is
because she's a woman and black. She's a bloody good detective
though."

"Does she know about us?" Julia asked.

"I think so," Lucy said, "But I don't think
she cares. She's got a good attitude: it doesn't matter a damn to
her as long as I do my job."

"Talking of jobs, what does it look like for
the weekend?"

"I'm on duty Sunday this week. I have
tomorrow off in lieu, but I might pop in for an hour to file this
report and see what's new."

"Don't go getting yourself lumbered on your
day off."

"I don't think that will happen," Lucy
answered, taking sliced bread from the packet. "Anyway, I'm trying
to make a good start at this station and it's an interesting case.
There are too many suspects with too many dodgy alibis."

Julia poured boiling water from the kettle
over the teabags in the two mugs and smiled.

"It was a good move this," she said, turning
to Lucy. "A fresh start with new jobs in a new area. I like it
here."

"Anywhere's all right with you Jules, but I
like it up here too."

Chapter 10: Thursday 16th August (am)

Millicent wove through the traffic to the
accompaniment of the driving country beat of Mi Vida Loca, driving
like the singer's boyfriend - as if she were herself a little mad.
She behaved as if there was a blue flashing light on her car,
turned across the oncoming traffic with far too little room to
spare, roared into the secure yard behind Witchmoor Edge Police HQ,
with a careless abandon which would have made her wince in a more
normal mood and screeched to a halt.

She slammed the car door behind her and
triggered the self-locking from the key fob with complete lack of
attention and mounted the back stairs of the station two at a time
to enter the interview room before any but Gail Downing had
arrived.

"Anything new?" she asked as she bustled
past.

PC Downing was just saying, "Just the autopsy
report you asked me to chase, and one from the Fraud Squad", when
she realised that Millicent wasn't listening - she was already on
the phone to CDI. Cooke.

"Sorry to catch you in such a rush," she was
saying, "but I wanted you to do me a favour before you got started
on anything else ... Yes, it's in connection with this enquiry and
it's urgent, and sort of delicate."

"Explain!"

"Someone in Bradford Division has either just
pulled a raid on a suspect garage and car sales place, or is about
to. I have reason to believe that's where the Porsche is."

"How do you know?"

Millicent swallowed. "Err ... Let's say I've
tapped some fairly unusual sources."

"Why can't you ask around yourself?"

"It may not have actually happened yet. I
thought it might be easier for you to get wind of it."

Cooke sounded a bit reluctant. "I could try,
I suppose. No harm in asking."

Hampshire took a breath and added. "If it
hasn't happened yet, I'd like to join it, and I thought you might
be able to pull it. Favour to you from some other senior
officer."

Cooke snorted, but he had already more or
less agreed by not refusing outright earlier in the conversation.
"All right, I'll ask around," he said. "But you owe me. And have
you got that analysis done for the Divisional Commander?"

Millicent smiled to herself: after Tobias
NDibe had left the night before, she had stayed up late finishing
it.

"Yes," she said. "I'll send it through with
PC Downing immediately. ... Gail! Take this file to the Chief
Inspector right away."

She held out the folder for Gail Downing to
take and tried to imagine Cooke's face - she was usually pretty
tardy in dealing with matters like that.

"Must rush off to read through the latest
reports on the canal murders," she said sweetly, "I want to be bang
up to date for your press conference this afternoon." She rang off
before he had time to comment.

Next she glanced at the folder PC Downing had
been referring to: the body that did not appear to be that of
Sansom or Barker after all. It had apparently been that of a fully
grown young adult male, whose skull had been fractured by a blow to
the left side of his head and neck broken. Time of death not known
but almost certainly before the fire.

Unless this new corpse had nothing to do with
the murder or arson or the doings of Koswinski, it just complicated
the whole story. Had Koswinski lied? Quite possibly! Had the
arsonist killed as well as trying to start a fire to hide a murder?
That was possible too. Was the arsonist a very clever murderer or
was the fire an afterthought? No way to tell yet. Of course, if
there was no connection with case there was an even more difficult
identity problem.

The report from the Fraud Squad said that
some potentially fraudulent dealings had been uncovered, but these
were mainly between KHS Investments and Hunter and were the subject
of an internal audit. As regards a murder investigation, there
didn't seem to be anything helpful.

DC Bright came into the office at that
moment.

"Found 'em," he said triumphantly as he
approached Millicent.

"Sansom and Barker?"

"And Uncle Olu," Bright agreed. "I got an
address in Leeds from Mrs. Sansom. Leeds Division picked them up
and did some preliminary interviews. We got them last night. I took
statements and let them go to their families. I hope that was all
right." He added.

"What were their stories?"

"I've got the full statements here," he said,
waving a folder, "But they've not a lot to add. They say Koswinski
and Musworth started kicking the tramp around and they took off
scared. They don't know anything about the body in the canal,
except that Koswinski was talking about dumping it in there. They
claim he threatened them with the canal too, which is why they ran
off to Uncle Olu."