by Neha Yazmin
“Can I go to the bathroom?” I ask a few silent seconds later, and it’s not just to change the subject. I do need the bathroom. “I’m bursting.”
*
Once I’ve freshened up in the ladies, I’m led back to the interview room by the female officer who’d escorted me to the bathroom.
Carver and his colleague are waiting for me.
I take my seat opposite them.
They say nothing.
I decide to take the initiative and fill the silence with my own questions, which, unhelpfully, come out in a rush:
“Have you identified the body, Detective? Have you spoken to Imogen’s family? Have you spoken to Jax – I mean, Jacqueline? Do you know how Imogen died?”
Did you speak to Callum?
Carver leans back in his seat, a picture of calm.
“We’re pretty sure the victim is indeed Imogen Hardy,” he tells me, his voice sombre. “We’ve sent officers to the Hardy residence to relay the news and bring them in so they can confirm it for us.”
“Oh my god, poor Imogen.”
My eyes start stinging.
DI Carver clears his throat and goes on to tell me, “We’ve brought in Jacqueline Gilmore. She’s being interviewed as we speak.”
I nod because he seems to wait for me to react to that information.
Then he says, “Initial observations strongly suggest that the victim died of blood loss from the slit wrists – the cuts were deep and… precise. No way to survive that without medical intervention.”
Tears well in my eyes now, and a gasp escapes my mouth.
“And,” he adds before pausing for dramatic effect, “it appears as though she died in the basement of that club. She wasn’t moved there – she wasn’t moved at all – after she died, as we were led to believe due to the lack of blood in the premises.”
I wipe the tears from my eyes, confused by what he’s telling me.
“Furthermore, it seems likely that she died last night,” the younger of the cops says informatively. “Well, that’s when her heart finally gave out. In other words, not long before you found her body.”
“How do you explain that?” Carver asks me pointedly. “How do you explain any of that, Miss Adams?”
I snap my head from the young officer to the detective.
“I can’t,” I reply, my breath hitching. “I can’t explain it. I can’t explain any of it.”
Carver leans forward on the table and says, “Why don’t you venture a guess, Miss Adams?”
I shake my head, tears streaming down my cheeks silently.
The rest of my body, my head, can’t seem to react to this news yet – just like I hadn’t been able to contemplate how I went to sleep with black hair and woke up with golden locks – not with the barrage of questions being thrown at me.
“I really have no idea, Detective,” I say in a pleading tone. “I swear, none of this makes any sense to me. Just like it doesn’t make sense to you.”
And you don’t know about the haunted A-Z, either.
“Oh, we have a few theories, Miss Adams,” the young officer says. “We just want to hear yours.”
“I’d share them with you if I had any, I swear.”
They wait.
Wait a long time, perhaps hoping for me to say something.
Maybe it’s some cop tactic, I don’t know, and the silence stretches.
But I really have nothing to say.
“Fine,” Carver says eventually and I sigh, relieved.
The wordlessness was making me uncomfortable, edgy.
If I had any information – apart from mysterious A-Zs displaying specific pages on their own accord – I’d have babbled by now.
“What were you doing on Sunday – the day Imogen Hardy went missing?” Carver clears his throat as he finishes speaking.
“Huh?”
The detective starts repeating the question but I cut him off with, “I heard you, Detective, but… Am I a suspect, here?”
“We just need to know the whereabouts of everyone close to the case,” he says dismissively.
“I was home, studying.”
“For what?”
“I’m doing evening classes,” I reply. “English, Maths and Science.” Before they can ask, I tell them the name of the institution where I’m studying.
“And you were home all day?” he queries.
“Yes.”
“Can anyone confirm that?”
“No. I’m living alone at the moment,” I say in an unintentional whisper. “My brother, Aiden, he’s away travelling.”
“Where?”
“Just around the UK.”
“So you have no alibi?”
I shake my head no.
“What about Monday, Tuesday and yesterday?” DI Carver asks.
“Well, most of yesterday, I was with Jax and Simone.”
“Yes, you told us that.”
“And Monday and Tuesday were pretty much the same as Sunday,” I tell them. “I did some grocery shopping on Monday. I had class on Tuesday evening, but the rest of the time I was home, studying.” Evening classes, studying… can’t see myself doing that any time soon.
The next second, the young officer begins to say, “We need more details on–”
But Carver cuts him off, asking, “Where is Callum Dent?”
My heart jumps at the sound of his name.
A little squeak departs my mouth.
“I don’t know,” I mumble. “He told me he had a photo shoot in the morning and would contact the police about Imogen… Did he not get in touch…?”
“We have no idea about the whereabouts of Mr. Dent,” Carver tells me, voice suddenly strict and overly formal. “When we called his apartment block, we learned that his flat had suffered a fire in the early hours of this morning.”
I gasp, mouth open wide.
My brain freezes, unable to entertain the meaning of what I’ve heard.
Carver pushes on:
“The authorities are still investigating the fire. We don’t know whether or not the flat was occupied when the fire started. But I have a feeling Mr. Dent wasn’t home at the time. Do you have any idea where he might be, Miss Adams?”
“Why would I know where he is?”
Wrong thing to say, Amber!
“You did see him late last night…”
And early this morning in my dreams…
“I have no idea where he is, Detective,” I tell him.
“None whatsoever?” he probes.
I shake my head no.
“I only met him yesterday.”
Chapter 17
LUCKILY, I’M NOT MOVED TO A HOLDING CELL WHEN THE POLICE WANT TO HAVE ANOTHER ‘BREAK’ FROM QUESTIONING ME. Carver leaves me in the interview room, so he and his colleague can go see to other work related to the case.
I don’t know how long I spend in this dingy room, not really able to pace it as it’s so small, but it feels like a very long time.
I wish I’d asked the cops what time it was – the interview room has no window and I had to hand over my phone when they first brought me in for interrogation.
Selfish though it is, but I mourn over Imogen’s death as much as I worry over the likelihood of getting arrested for her murder.
Don’t judge me – I’m human and no martyr.
If eighty percent of my thoughts are equally split between grief over the demise of a fellow witch and fear that I’ll get blamed for it, then the remaining twenty percent take the form of questions about how my hair colour changed in real life like it did in my dreams and what happened to Callum.
Is he still alive?
Why don’t the police know where he is?
Did he burn to a crisp?
I wonder if the police will tell me if they find his body in his burnt down apartment…
By the time DI Carver returns to me, alone this time, I think I’ve figured out why I’m once again a blonde:
I must’ve unconsciously cast a spell
to change my hair colour from black to golden whilst dreaming.
Think about it: Last night over drinks, Callum mused over wishing that he’d seen me with my natural hair colour, and my subconscious desire was to show him. So I did.
That has to be it.
Then again, I’ve never cast any spells in my dreams before – I rarely have any dreams at all – and I’ve never heard of this sort of thing happening to other witches.
Probably because it’s very rare?
If so, it’s a good thing that this isn’t a frequent occurrence. I mean, can you imagine the havoc it would create if magical witches cast spells in their dreams and those spells affected reality?
A witch might conjure up the man of her dreams, literally – and he’d become real. She’d wake up with him sleeping right next to her in bed.
If a witch wanted a pony, she could potentially find one licking her face when she comes to.
And a witch like me, who has a secret desire to battle supernatural creatures and come out on top… Maybe I’d magic me a demon to train with in my dreams and end up setting it loose on the unsuspecting human population.
Unlike the man of one’s dreams and a pony, an evil demon wouldn’t hang out in my bedroom until I woke up.
Is that why I – and perhaps all witches – rarely have fluid dreams? To prevent such mayhem?
I must ask Jax and Simone when I next see them whether they have proper dreams.
Simone…
Poor thing.
Losing her sister, whom she was clearly so close to.
If I lost Aiden… I’d die.
I would just die.
I can’t imagine what Simone and her parents are going through right now.
They must have identified the body for the police by now. I wonder if they were allowed to go home afterwards or if Carver kept them behind for more questioning.
I hope not.
They deserve some private time together to grieve.
Yes, I think the police will let them go home and visit them in the next few days if they want more information.
As for Jax… I hope she’s backing up my story.
More than anything, I hope she doesn’t mention sneaking into Callum’s flat last night.
No, she won’t be so stupid.
Young though she may be, Jax has always appeared to me as someone who is street-smart enough to not make herself vulnerable to the police.
What I’d do to become a fly on the wall of the room where they’re questioning her…
I guess Carver’s going back and forth between the two of us, trying to see if Jax corroborates the details I’m supplying him. That’s most likely what he does when he takes his ‘breaks’ from interviewing me.
As he takes his seat opposite me now, I wonder if he’s just come from speaking to Jax.
But he says, “Okay Miss Adams, you’re free to go.”
“I am?” I ask, stunned that it’s the first thing he says to me.
“Don’t tell me you want to stay the night?” he asks with a little amused grin. And of course, he clears his throat.
Then my brain clocks onto how he finished his question:
Stay the night…
So it is Thursday night after all, early evening at least.
“No, of course I want to go home,” I tell him in a rush, jumping to my feet.
“Not so fast, Miss Adams.”
I slump down to my seat again.
It was too good to be true.
“Don’t you want to know how much progress we’ve made in our investigation today?”
“Of course, but… am I allowed to know?”
I am one of the suspects after all…
To my surprise, Carver laughs. It makes him look so much younger.
And rather handsome…
“You’re not a suspect, Miss Adams,” he says with a chuckle.
“Aren’t I?” There’s just a hint of a challenge in my tone. “I’ve been treated like one,” I mumble.
“I’m sorry you felt that way,” he says apologetically.
Whatever has convinced the police to let me go must have been quite emphatic. And made Carver regretful of all the suspicious looks he and his partner threw at me all day.
I wave it off with a hand.
He clears his throat, rather loudly, and begins to debrief me.
“So, Miss Gilmore backed up your story, Miss Adams. Right down to a T. And Simone Hardy did the same.” Another throat-clearing. “The two of them also assured us that you didn’t know Imogen Hardy personally before they enlisted your help in finding her. All this suggests that you had no motives to abduct or kill her.”
I stifle a sigh of relief.
“However,” Carver adds in a strict tone, “we still have no idea where Callum Dent is–”
“So he didn’t burn in the fire?” I blurt out without thinking.
I hope Carver didn’t detect the hint of hope and relief in my voice.
Hope that Callum might be safe.
Relief that he didn’t die in the fire.
“–and since you were the last person, that we know of, to see him since he disappeared,” he says as though I never interrupted him, “I’m trying to decide if you know anything about his whereabouts and aren’t telling us.”
“I swear I don’t know where he is, Detective.”
And the last time I saw him was in a make-believe castle in my nightmare-turned-dream…
Throat-clear. “Well, I don’t quite believe you,” he tells me in a stern voice. “But I can’t hold you here any longer based on my gut instincts alone.
“Unless we arrest you, that is. And it’s clear that, as of yet, we have no grounds to do that. As of yet.”
I nod. It’s all I can do.
“So,” he finishes with a sigh, “you’re free to go. BUT, please don’t leave the country, Miss Adams.”
“No, Detective.”
I rise from my seat slowly, unsure if he’s going to stop me from leaving the table again.
When he too gets to his feet, in silence, I say, “Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need any more information. Well, if you think of any questions you’ve yet to ask me. I really do want Imogen’s killer to be caught and brought to justice.”
Wordlessly, he leads me to the door and reaches for the handle.
Before he opens the door, one that his partner always locked whenever they left me alone in here, he says, “You seem so certain that she was murdered. What if it really was just a… freaky suicide?”
“It’s just a gut feeling,” I tell him with a shrug. “Just like you must have your gut instincts about this case.”
Carver nods and opens the door.
As I exit the room, he calls out to me, reciting a cliché that would’ve made me laugh if the situation wasn’t so severe.
“I’ll be watching you.”
Chapter 18
“WHAT THE HELL, AMBER? YOU WERE IN THERE FOR AGES!”
“I was in there the whole day, to be precise, Jax,” I retort into my mobile phone.
I’ve just exited the police station after getting my phone back. There were like a million missed calls from Jax.
A call from the young witch came through just as I was about to call Simone to convey my condolences.
“That is, if it is indeed still Thursday,” I continue bitterly, “and not Friday or Saturday, which would mean I’ve been cooped up in a police station for a bit longer.”
“It’s still Thursday,” she tells me. She had the decency to sound a little sheepish.
Yes, I know from my phone that it’s Thursday, just past 8pm, but I wasn’t impressed by Jax’s accusatory tone so I wanted to get even with her.
“When did they let you go?” I ask her, my tone clipped.
“Oh, a few hours ago.”
A few hours…!
I take a deep, calming breath.
Jax hadn’t found a dead girl’s body, I had.
She hadn’t ke
pt mum about Callum till she couldn’t help it, it had been me.
There was no reason for the cops to keep her in as long as they kept me.
I shouldn’t be snappish towards her for that.
And she did back up my alibi.
“I guess I owe you a thank you for backing me up today.”
“A thank you?” she hisses. “A sorry would be more like it. Especially for Simone.”
“I beg your pardon?” I snap.
“The cops said Imogen probably died around midnight,” she says in an irate tone. “Not too long before you found her. If you’d gotten there an hour earlier–”
“You think I don’t know that?” I almost shout. “You think that thought isn’t eating me up, even though I know there’s no way I – or anyone else – would’ve found her tonight if it wasn’t for…”
A pause.
“What?” she prods after a few seconds. “If it wasn’t for what, Amber? How’d you find her, anyway?”
“You’ll never believe me…”
“Try me.”
“I will actually,” I murmur, suddenly recalling that Jax’s gift of seeing an object’s history is exactly what might uncover the mystery behind the A-Z. “I’ll come round your house tomorrow,” I tell her in a ‘no-nonsense’ voice. “Then I’m going to go see Simone. We’ll go see her together. And I’ll bring with me my little… messenger, I suppose.”
“Messenger?” Jax asks, sounding bewildered.
“The… thing that… more or less told me Imogen’s exact location.”
“What was it?” she demands eagerly.
“Not now, Jax,” I insist in an ‘I’m-putting-my-foot-down’ tone. “I’m tired and hungry and need to spend some time by myself tonight.
“I’m going to hang up and call and speak to Simone, and make sure it’s okay for us to visit her tomorrow. Then I’m going home and taking a long bath before trying to get some sleep. I suggest you do the same. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Goodnight.” And I hang up.
Of course, Jax tried to interrupt me several times during that short monologue of mine, but I wasn’t in the mood so I didn’t let her get her oar in.
Locating Simone’s number, I dial her phone now.
She answers after a long while.
“Amber?” she sniffs.
“Simone. Honey, I’m so sorry about Imogen.”
