Witchmoor Edge Read Online Free Page A

business
partner and seemed charming. I only found out afterwards what he
was really like."
    Lucy Turner looked from her note taking and
asked, "Why didn't you just leave him?"
    Mrs. Hunter hesitated again, but Millicent
thought she was reflecting rather than inventing.
    "I had decided to go into the nurse's hostel
temporarily. It was all arranged and if you'd come tomorrow I might
not have been here," Shirley Hunter said. "As to why I didn't do it
before ... Partly, I suppose because he was my brother's partner
and it seemed like letting my brother down. Partly because you just
hope things will change. After last Saturday I realised they
wouldn't."
    Millicent decided against any mention of the
morphine at this stage, better Shirley should not be put on her
guard if she had any involvement at all. She realised, of course,
that an ill treated wife who was a nurse would have both a source
of morphine and the knowledge to use it. As to motive, maybe the
worm had turned.
    "Could you take us to the picnic spot?"
Millicent asked.
    "I'm not sure about driving straight to it,"
Shirley replied, "but I could certainly find it again. The place is
pretty well etched on my memory."
    "Then I think we’ll go there if you can spare
the time."
    Shirley got up. "Can I get us a cup of tea
before we go?" she asked. "I don't know whether you need one, but I
certainly do. Whether or not I looked shocked, I am rather."
    "Good idea," Millicent conceded. Shirley
Hunter had paled a little under her make up and her hands were
white and trembling a little, so perhaps it had been a shock, as
she said.
    Lucy Turner stood up, very short - only just
tall enough to qualify for the police - her height emphasised by
the tallness of Mrs. Hunter. "I'll go with you, Mrs. Hunter," she
offered.
    Millicent gazed out of the window at two
magpies on the lawn. She remembered the old children's rhyme about
magpies that began ‘One for sorrow, two for joy...’ Two for joy.
Who was going to be lucky this time?
    * * *
    DC Gary Goss crunched through the rubble in the
street behind the burnt out shell of the warehouse. DC Tommy
Hammond picked his way more carefully after him, flicking off the
dust settling on his neatly creased trousers.
    "I wasn't able to get into the building until
first thing this morning," Ted Johnson from the Fire Investigation
Branch was saying. "The 999 call came in just after 20 past
midnight Sunday morning from a Mrs. Evans at 47 Edward Mews, just
across the canal. The fire seems to have started on this side, so,
by the time it could be seen from across the canal, this side was
well away. The building isn't safe in places and we'll need
demolition immediately."
    "What are these road works," Tommy asked,
stepping over a short trench.
    "I gather," Johnson said, "that it was
Yorkshire Electricity who dug up the road in the process of cutting
off power before demolition. That makes one of my discoveries very
interesting indeed."
    "How d'you mean?" Goss asked.
    "Someone had taken a power line from that
street light to the building." He pointed to a lamp standard less
than a foot from the building at one corner, and quite with reach
of a window.
    "Why?" Tommy asked.
    "There are two possible reasons I can think
of," Johnson replied. "Firstly, somebody may have needed light for
something they were doing and some sort of interruption or accident
started the fire."
    "And the other reason?"
    "It might have provided power for a timing
device, so the fire could be started when no one was around, but in
that case it failed."
    "There was some one around?"
    "There was a body in the stairwell leading
down to the lower floor and the exit at canal level. It was a young
black or mixed race male of uncertain age. The fire spread up
rather than down, so he probably died of smoke inhalation before
the fire got anywhere near him. He was taken for autopsy an hour or
so ago."
    This was the third death around the fire. What on
earth were the connections between the bodies