by Mike Crowson
* * *
Rosie O'Conner let Detective Inspector Hampshire and Detective Sergeant Lucy Turner into a flat that had been allowed to get untidy in the last week or so. Underneath it was clean and showed signs of having been well decorated and nicely furnished. Now there were unwashed coffee cups on the small table by the sofa, along with old magazines and unopened post. The wastepaper basket was overflowing, un-cleared dinner things littered the table and ironing was piled high on two chairs. She moved one stack of ironing to the table and invited Lucy and Millicent to sit on the sofa.
Rosie herself was a red haired and freckled, vaguely outdoor type, in her late twenties. Her face lacked animation, her top was creased, her jeans dirty, and she looked generally un-groomed and apathetic. Millicent had a distinct impression that the change was fairly recent and wondered whether the end of an affair with Hunter or the sacking was responsible, or something else. Rosie didn't look at first sight like a potential murderer, but was there a recognisable type? Perhaps a fiery temper went with the red hair and Hunter had pushed her too far.
"You knew Simon Hunter, I believe?" said Millicent blandly for openers.
"Yes."
"And you know he died last Saturday night?"
"Yes," Rosie said again. "I didn't know until my brother told me a detective was asking questions about his murder though."
Straight to the point Millicent thought. "Your brother?" she asked.
"He works at the same hospital as Simon's wife."
"What does he do there?"
"He's a pharmacist."
Millicent wondered whether she knew Hunter had died of a morphine overdose. Unless the woman had killed him herself she almost certainly didn't know. Everyone on the enquiry had been told to keep that fact confidential if they could, and Gibbs wouldn't have said anything, though asking questions about access to drugs would have given clues. Hampshire listened for any sign of giveaway knowledge.
"How well did you know Hunter?" the detective asked.
"Too well for my own good and not as well as I thought I did," the woman answered obscurely, a little bitterly but otherwise quite unemotionally.
"Would you mind explaining that," Millicent said.
Rosie shrugged vaguely. "I met Simon a year or so ago through work," she said. "He was a frequent visitor to the bank's offices and when he asked me out to dinner I was flattered. I didn't know he was married then."
"You were an IT specialist of some sort?"
"Yes. Team leader for a team of IT services staff at the bank."
"Which bank is that?"
"Frankfurt-Manhatten," Rosie answered with a sigh. "It's a merchant bank in Leeds."
"Doing what there, exactly?" Lucy interposed.
"Seeing that there were no problems with external or internal IT communications."
"Had you access to confidential information?" Lucy asked.
Rosie hesitated, and Millicent could see what Lucy was driving at.
"Access, yes," the red headed woman answered. "I could theoretically monitor anybody's email, though I didn't do that," She added hastily.
"Did Hunter ask you for information to do with your work?" Hampshire asked.
"Sometimes." Rosie was silent for a while then, just as Millicent was about to probe a bit further, added, "I know now that all he wanted was the information. I suppose I should have known then."
"You were dismissed from your job, I believe," Millicent said, approaching the potentially damning part of the interview casually.
"Yes."
"And that’s when he broke off the affair?"
"Of course."
"Why were you dismissed?"
Rosie didn't answer Millicent's question for even longer this time.
"Did Hunter have anything to do with that too?" Millicent asked.
"What, and kill the goose that laid the golden egg?" said Rosie, still without much animation, and without visible rancour either. Then she added, "I suppose he was responsible indirectly, though."
"I don't follow, "the detective said.
Rosie shrugged again. "I suppose you could find out easily enough, even if I didn't tell you myself," she said. "I'm not very proud of it."
Millicent waited and Rosie gave a sigh and began.
"Simon offered me heroin and I indulged. Don't tell me I shouldn't have, because I knew that then and I know it even better now. I don't know why I accepted, but he was very persuasive, very charming and very attractive. Before I knew it, I was hooked. About six or eight months ago I decided to try and dry out. I got my doctor to prescribe methadone and went for a stay in a clinic. The bank agreed to keep me on after I came back, as long as I didn't touch the stuff again. Simon was trying to get me started again and he left a dose on my desk. They found it and I got the sack."
Hunter seemed to have been a thoroughly nasty, corrupt, cruel and violent individual, Millicent thought. She felt rather sorry that it was her job to track down the murderer.
"Who's your GP?" she asked.
"Doctor Leverett. Why?"
"I may want to verify your story with him."
"Her."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The doctor is a woman," Rosie explained. "Not that it make any difference. You can go to her if you like." She had a bleak, defeated expression. "I can't stop you anyway," she added.
"What did you do last Saturday?" Hampshire asked.
"A friend dragged me off on a cycle race," Rosie said. "I used to be a cycling fanatic before I met Simon. Always off on road races every weekend in summer, Gloria thought it would be good for me. Get me out of myself or something."
"You have a bicycle of your own?" Millicent asked, thinking of the tyre tracks at the picnic site.
"Yes. I did have an expensive one just for racing, but I got rid of that before I went into the clinic. I've just the one now."
"What time did you set off?" Hampshire wanted to know.
"We met about 9 at Bingley. The start was 9.15 and the race was supposed to end about 4 o'clock, but I gave up about halfway through. It was a shortish road race, but I wasn't fit after a year off, I suppose."
Lucy’s brain was just ticking over as she listened to the woman. "What was the route?" she asked.
Good question, Millicent thought, and listened to the reply with interest.
"Up through East Morton, then by the back lanes to Burley Woodhead and Ilkley and back by way of Bolton Abbey and Silsden."
That would have taken her right over the other side of the moors at the time of Hunter's disappearance at the picnic site, Millicent thought, assuming she had actually got that far before giving up.
"Where did you drop out?" she asked.
"Ilkley," said Rosie. "I had lunch with Gloria in a café in the town, then I caught the train back and Gloria cycled on."
"What time was this?"
Rosie shrugged. One. One Thirty," she said. "Who knows? Ask Gloria."
"DS Turner will take down details of the race and of Gloria ...?"
"Gloria Cullen," said Rosie. "She lives on the far side of Bradford, nearly in Pudsey."
Lucy noted down the address and phone number and they got up to leave.
Outside, Millicent said, "I'd like you to check out Gloria Cullen now. Concentrate on where the O'Connor woman dropped out of the race and where she went. I want to know whether she had time to have got back to the picnic site, so treat the Cullen woman as giving her an alibi. Get details of the race organisers and check whether she passed checkpoints and when. I think I'll have Tony Gibbs go round and check her bike tyres against the casts we took at the scene."
"Right," Lucy said. "You think she's another suspect then?"
"Oh she's up there. First we go over her alibi in detail, then we check with her former employers exactly why she was fired and when. Finally, we check her bike tyres and very carefully check out the doctor."
"Why?"
"That doctor has the same surname as Shields's partner who was che
ated by Hunter. It may be a coincidence, but Leverett's an uncommon name."
"Hey," Lucy said, "This whole thing's running away with us. First the mistreated wife is a nurse, so she could have got the morphine. Second, there's Shields and Leverett, and it could be that they had access to the drug from Leverett's wife or sister or something, then there's the O'Connor woman with plenty of motive and a brother with access to morphine and possible contact through the GP, maybe related to another of Hunter's victims."
"Don't forget Knowles," Millicent reminded her. "So far there's no evidence of method, except that his sister's a nurse, but he had as much motive as any of them. More maybe. Anyway, you take the car, I'm going to walk back along the canal bank and think it all through. Then I'll see how Hammond and Goss made out with Koswinski."
There was nobody around the canal towpath that lunchtime, so Millicent enjoyed an unhurried peace as she walked in the midday sunshine. The weather was still the gentle, mild, sunlit day one associates with childhood memories of summer in England, as it had been up on the moors at the stone ring the previous Sunday. Though earth and air were dry and for a couple of weeks there had been no more than the odd light shower it was not yet a drought.
Millicent in her mind compared August in Witchmoor to August in Seville and the airless shimmering heat that rocked buildings, dried plants, cracked the earth and drove those who could afford it to the relative cool of the coast. There was no wonder that southern Spain closed down each day between one and five and came alive at night.
It had been months since she'd even thought of Spain, until this last week. Was it her age or something? Probably not - it was more a facing up to her demons; to beginning to control her visions and to search for a realistic purpose to her life, rather than simply burying herself in her job. After almost fifteen years of suspended animation, perhaps she was waking up.
The slow chug-chug of a narrow boat broke into Millicent's rather abstract thoughts and a gaily-painted holiday barge slipped past, barely rippling the water or disturbing her soul.
Opposite the burnt out shell of the warehouse, Millicent stopped and became the detective again. In what way was Hunter's body connected with the fire? To disguise the morphine probably, but who had injected the morphine and dumped the body? Who had made the timing device? Some of the story could be guessed at, but where was the Porsche?
Some scaffolding had been erected around two of the walls and there was a bulldozer there. There was no sign of any workmen, but they would have gone for lunch. The thought reminded Millicent that she was now rather hungry herself, so she walked on towards the town centre cafes and the Witchmoor Edge Police Head Quarters. On the whole, a café seemed more tempting than the canteen, or the George and Dragon pub in the Market Square did good food.
Chapter 8: Wednesday 15th August (pm)
