Wading Into Murder Read Online Free Page B

could be a connection between the baby’s presence in the Bath and the bomb scare.”
    “What makes you think that?” Sergeant Prescott snapped.
    Laura shrugged. “It’s such a coincidence that both should occur on the same day. I thought the bomb scare might have been a way to make sure no one was in the Baths until… Well, I suppose until the baby had been picked up by whoever was supposed to take it away, but then I came along and fouled things up.”
    The Sergeant looked thoughtful, and for a moment she seemed to forget her interrogator role. “That is certainly possible,” she murmured, more to herself than to Laura. “I wonder…”
    Her thought was interrupted by knock on the door. A young constable who looked no more than fifteen came in, expertly cradling a now contented baby. It was sucking greedily at a bottle. When it saw Laura it promptly spat out the nipple and began to scream again.
    “After all I did for you,” Laura joked to the child. The comment fell flat. Neither the constable nor the Sergeant smiled.
    “Made an appointment at the clinic,” the constable informed Sergeant Prescott. “Just in case. Had a hard time, poor little mite.”
    “I thought the baby might have been drugged,” Laura volunteered, and could have bitten off her tongue. The police would probably think she was trying to disclaim any responsibility if drugs were found in the baby’s system.
    To her surprise and the Sergeant’s obvious disapproval, the constable agreed. “I thought that myself,” he told her. “What made you think so?”
    “The baby seemed to fall asleep at odd moments,” Laura answered. “It would start screaming, a normal reaction considering what was happening to it, then fall asleep as if it couldn’t help itself. I also wondered if the drug had affected its stomach. The smell seemed unusually strong.”
    “Yes, that’s what I noticed,” the constable replied. “She was quite a stinker. Still, I think most of it has come through, if you take my meaning.”
    “She? It’s a girl then? I wonder if the other one is too,” Laura mused.
    Sergeant Prescott resumed control of the interview. “I believe we have all the information we need for the moment, Dr. Morland,” she told Laura. “You can leave the matter in our hands now. We may have more questions for you, however, and I need to know how to reach you.”
    Laura provided the necessary information and left with a sigh of relief. They hadn’t taken her fingerprints or kept her passport, so maybe they didn’t really suspect her of stealing the baby. Regardless, she intended to leave the puzzle in their competent hands and get on with her trip.
    She consulted her watch. In a few hours she would meet her fellow travelers on the bus tour she had decided to join after she finished the Cotswold Way. Walking trips left no time for sight-seeing, she had discovered - unless one could walk at the marathon pace of British ramblers, who were reputed to manage three castles before lunch. She could not. Besides, sitting peacefully on a bus while someone else drove and handled the logistics sounded wonderfully peaceful. All she had to do for the next few days was watch scenery and enjoy the sights.
    After that, she would head for Oxford to teach her seminar. Recently, she had compiled a series of lectures on the effects of religious and political turmoil on women’s status across the world today. Since her field was the evolution of gender stretching back more than a million years, this was a more contemporary issue than she’d tackled before and she was anxious to see how the material would be received, particularly its most tragic aspects like slavery and the excesses of fundamentalism like stoning women to death for presumed adultery.
    A more pleasurable interlude would follow – a long weekend with Thomas, her co-adventurer from last summer.
    An old man with rheumy eyes and shabby clothes came up to her as she passed the Baths again on her way