She barely felt buzzed, yet there seemed to be a fogbank inside her head, shrouding her memories like a twilight mist.
Amanda glared at Tim and spoke up for her roommate. “What do you need to talk to her about?”
“A private matter,” he said.
“Scarlett told me about your investigation, and if you think she had anything to do with this, you couldn’t be more wrong.” Amanda’s pitch rose as she became more strident. “And what kind of man throws baseless accusations around? I’ve known Scarlett for ten years and I can tell you she would never hurt anyone. She’s no murderer!”
Scarlett saw some heads turn in the pub. “Why not scream it from the rooftops?” she hissed.
“I will if I have to,” Amanda said, still indignantly, but softer now. “And as for you, Soldier Boy, if you think you can intimidate an innocent woman, you’re in for the fight of your life.”
Tim seemed amused by the outburst and waited for Amanda to settle before continuing. “I’m not accusing Scarlett of anything. I just want to talk to her. To clear the air.”
“It’s all right,” Scarlett said to Amanda. “Sounds like a day for make ups.”
Scarlett indicated to the stool beside her. He sat down and ordered a Guinness. Amanda sipped her pint quietly, and seemed to be sulking.
“I need to be up early,” Amanda said. “I’ll leave you two to your chat.” She stood up from her stool, leaving her mug half-full. She put a hand on Scarlett’s shoulder. “Don’t be too late coming home.”
“I won’t,” Scarlett said.
Before leaving, Amanda wagged a finger of warning at Tim. “And if you upset her, I’ll come after you.”
Tim stiffened his lips and gave her a mock salute.
Amanda turned on her heels and strode out.
Chapter Thirteen
The White Hart Pub, Bicester, England
With Amanda gone, Tim turned his attention back to Scarlett. “She’s quite the firecracker.”
“Not usually,” Scarlett said. “But you definitely brought it out in her.”
“I seem to have that effect on women.”
His Guinness arrived. He paid and took a hearty chug from the glass before setting it down.
“Have you two really known each other that long?” he asked.
“Since university. We had some classes together. She was in History. I studied Archeology and Anthropology.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Archeology? A veritable Indiana Jane.”
“Not quite. But I did get to work on a dig one summer.”
“What kind of dig?”
“It was a Minoan site on Santorini. We were trying to date the eruption of Thera, an ancient volcano that erupted and may have caused the end of the Bronze Age in that region.”
“Santorini,” he said. “I hear it’s beautiful there.”
She warmed to the memory. “It really was. But I was only on the site for a month, and it was mostly work. Digging and cataloging. It’s a very slow process, as you might imagine.”
“Did you dig up any bones?” he asked.
Her heart skipped a beat. She realized what he was implying.
“I see what you did there,” she said.
“Clever girl.” He took another drink from him glass before continuing. “I spoke with the coroner about the body we dug up on Johnson’s farm.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“Relax. I said I wasn’t accusing you, and I meant it.”
“But you still want to talk to me about it. About something I have no connection with.”
“There may be a connection. And if there is, I may need your help. I noticed you read mysteries.”
Scarlett wondered how he could have known that, but then realized that he must have seen her reading in the wine shop or seen one of her mystery books by the register.
“So?”
“Well, I’m trying to solve a mystery too. And I could use all the help I can get.”
Scarlett took a deep breath and looked around to see if anyone else in the pub was paying attention to them. But no one was. She saw a young couple at the end of the bar, four guys throwing darts and a small group gathered to watch football on the big screen.
“What did the coroner’s report say?” Scarlett asked.
“Too soon for the full report. But there was a curious development. The body was exsanguinated.”
She knew the word from the stories she’d read. “The blood was drained.”
“That’s right.”
“Maybe he bled out,” she said.
Tim shook his head. “Too much blood loss. More than if he’d just bled somewhere. If he’d cut his femoral artery, then maybe he would have lost that much blood. But he didn’t have any deep lacerations that would explain it.”
“Then what accounts for the blood loss?”
“Hard to say. He was killed and moved, so any evidence of blood loss would be at the location he was killed, which we haven’t yet determined yet.”
“How can you be sure he wasn’t killed right there in the field?”
“We found tire tracks and footprints,” Tim said. “But none of the footprints matched the shoes he was wearing.”
“So he didn’t walk there on his own two feet.”
Tim nodded. “That’s the current theory.”
“Why are you telling me this? I’m not strong enough to move a dead body like that. I mean, I work out. But look at me.”
He did. “I know you can’t have done it on your own. You would have needed someone with a truck.”
Scarlett knew Ronnie had a truck but said nothing.
Tim continued. “I checked the registrations in town. Twenty-five people in Bicester own trucks. One of those twenty-five people may have been your accomplice.”
“Theoretically.”
“Not accusing,” he said. “Just spitballing.”
Scarlett couldn’t tell how serious he was with this line of conjecture. Was she really a suspect or was he just toying with her to see how she’d react?
Either way, she had to play it safe.
“Why would I even want to murder anyone?” she asked. “Especially the new guy in town.”
Tim shrugged and took another sip. “Maybe he wasn’t behaving himself.”
“He’d have to seriously misbehave to get himself killed.”
“All depends on the circumstances, doesn’t it?”
“You said he was exsanguinated. How would I even do that? And to a man twice my size?”
“Another reason you must have had an accomplice. Presumably a male. Larger and stronger.”
Scarlett looked away, staring vacantly at the stone fireplace, her eyes not really taking in anything, just trying to get her bearings.
She turned back to him. “This is crazy.”
“I know. But it’s all I have. Unless you help me.”
“How?”
“You have to give me something…”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I just want to figure out who did this.”
“So do I! Don’t you think I’d help if I could?”
“You can, Scarlett.” He set his beer down and leaned toward her. “You know more than you think you know. There’s something you’re not telling me. You know the town better than me. You’ve lived here longer. People know and trust you. People come into this bar, into your shop, into your life. Whether you like it or not, you’re connected to the crime. I’m not saying you did the deed, but you’re connected. Maybe the whole damn town is connected. But you more than most. And you’re here now. So help me.”
She considered his words and gulped down the last of the lukewarm lager.
“So,” she said tentatively, trying to steel her courage, “what do you want me to do?”
“Tell me everything you know.”
She knew she had no choice. Tim wasn’t going to give up, and she had to clear her name. With the right questions and recollections, mayb
e she could help him solve the case, though she didn’t at the moment understand how.
Something about the situation felt like a challenge, like a summons to a quest. The game was afoot, and the detective needed her to crack the case. It might even be fun, she thought, if she didn’t sense the real danger.
Someone had been murdered. The killer was on the loose.
And I’m still a suspect.
In that moment, she found her resolve. “You’ll have to buy me another beer,” she said.
“Done.”
She got a Guinness this time, same as him. It was stronger than what she usually drank, but it fit the moment. She needed a bit of liquid courage right about now.
As the chill drained slowly from the mug, she told him everything she could remember about these past few days.
She started with the nightmare. The darkness and the teeth and the body on the ground. Then waking to find her clothes muddy on the floor. Then her morning without Karl, and his strange behavior. She told Tim about finding the shovel and missing the wheelbarrow and discovering it at Ronnie’s house.
When she finished her beer Tim bought her a coffee to keep her talking, and by now she was on a roll, recounting conversations with Karl and Amanda and Ronnie and Cliff.
Eventually, as the crowd at the pub was beginning to thin, she fell silent. Through it all he had listened with rapt attention, not taking notes, but watching her with a keen look, prompting her for details, and soaking in her story.
A silence fell and lingered a moment between them.
“Right,” he said at last. “I need to show you something.”
He finished his own coffee in a single swallow then stood up. “Come on.”
She didn’t know where they were going and didn’t ask. She grabbed her purse and followed him out the door.
+++
Private Lounge, The Bicester Hotel
It was a five-minute walk over to the Bicester Hotel, giving Scarlett’s brain time to churn as she wondered what Tim wanted to show her. Meanwhile, he strode by her side, making small talk about the evening.
She was a suspect in a murder and a potential witness. Though she knew she was innocent, and found the subtle accusations outrageous, she also knew that she had to be smart in how she played this.
Soldier Tim seemed open to the idea that Scarlett might be innocent, but he clearly thought she knew more than she did. If she turned out not to be the killer, he expected her to be a witness.
The problem was that Scarlett had nothing to offer Tim that might help his case. She had suspicions of her own, regarding the shovel and the wheelbarrow, but those only seemed to implicate Scarlett in the crime.
Gosh, if I were him, I’d like me. She realized how that would have sounded.
I mean… arrest me. Arrest me. Of course I like me, but I’m not a military Adonis who likes likes me…. Her mind rambled and her cheeks flushed, embarrassed by her own spiraling thoughts.
She needed to be more careful.
And I need to find out who actually did this, she realized.
As much as she wanted nothing to do with the case, she was involved now. If she did nothing, or refused to cooperate, it only made her look guiltier. Just playing along wouldn’t be much help either, and it opened up the possibility that she could implicate herself even further by saying or revealing something that could be misinterpreted as evidence of her guilt.
The way out was now clear. She had to find the real killer. She might not have the tools or resources to pull that off, but Tim Clarke did. He was investigating this death on behalf of the military and with the full cooperation of the local police.
He needed her help.
And she needed to prove her innocence.
Not exactly a match made in heaven, she thought sarcastically. More a marriage of convenience.
In a way, she felt she’d been training for this her whole life, or at least since she’d starting reading on her own. She had always been drawn to mystery stories, and now she found herself in a real-life mystery, with real-life stakes.
Tim led the way into the pub-like hotel. He took her to his private lounge-cum-investigation room, which looked to be an all-purpose room for business meetings and classes, but which he’d converted to a makeshift office. She saw photos on the wall and stacks of papers on the business table that Tim was using for a desk.
She gravitated to the wall of photos. Many were of locations: the garrison presumably at RAF Bicester, the White Hart pub, her wine shop, her aunt’s allotment, and Johnson’s farm.
Most of the photos were of the crime scene at the farm. Scarlett felt a wave of nausea as she studied the pictures of the corpse and the gravesite. The body itself was hard to identify but beside one of the images of the corpse’s face was a matching photo of Bill Knight that looked like the kind of author photo you might find on the back of a book.
“Who was he?” Scarlett asked. “This Bill guy?”
“Bill Knight,” said Tim.
He consulted a file folder of documents.
“He used to be a professor of history at Nottingham. His colleagues considered him something of a kook, but he was a popular lecturer. Students loved him, in large part because he was so eccentric. He was a good storyteller, apparently, and fond of esoterica. His academic papers centered on medieval witchcraft, ancient alchemy, things of that sort. He was a tenured professor, but he was fired by the university a few years ago.”
“How come?” Scarlett asked.
“I don’t have all the details, but I know his daughter died in a night club shortly before he ran afoul of the administration. My sources say he had some kind of mental breakdown. He completely fell apart. He was always a little strange but had been reliable enough on the job. After his daughter died he stopped showing up to work. The school tried to cover his classes, but eventually the situation became untenable. There were heated arguments and accusations. Knight was off the rails. They tried to get him into counseling, and he refused. Eventually, they decided to let him go.”
“So what happened to him then?”
“He became a recluse for a while. His neighbors say he rarely left the house. But then one day, almost a year ago, he emerged from his monastic seclusion and seemed like a man on a mission. He pretended to be writing a book, and maybe that was true. I don’t know. But he started doing interviews, telling people that he was investigating the local history of Oxfordshire, and in particular Coventry, which is where he thought his daughter had been killed.”
“And you think that’s why he was killed?”
“It’s possible,” Tim said. “Frankly, the guy was a real loon, so he could have gotten himself caught up in all sorts of trouble. He was a bit of nuisance, peppering people with bizarre questions and spouting conspiracy theories. Most of the people who interacted with him report that he was crazy. I’m finding a lot of agreement on that.”
“But you’re military,” Scarlett said. “Why is the military investigating this?”
Tim sighed. He poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher on the table. He offered her one.
“Yes, please.”
He handed her a glass and sat down in one of the conference chairs.
“At first he was talking to the locals, hanging out in pubs and chatting up the old-timers, people who’d lived locally to the area where his daughter was killed. So the story that he was writing a local history book made sense. People, especially the older ones, sparked to the idea. Then something brought him to Bicester.”
“Have you tried talking to some of these people?”
“I’m talking to one of them now,” he said.
Scarlett frowned and sat at the table across from him. “I told you I never met him.”
Tim measured her with a look but didn’t challenge her statement.
“He had been granted access to do some interviews at the garrison. That’s why he was here, I believe. I knew he was coming. I was set to liaise with him.”
“Ah. And that’s where you come in.”
He nodded. “Bill Knight spoke to a number of soldiers at the pubs in town. As you probably know, the boys like to fraternize with the locals.”
“Yes, I’m well aware.”
“Well, a number of men on the base were interviewed in town by Bill Knight, and they started to compare notes. My office picked up on the chatter and became concerned by these unofficial interviews.”
“Why?”
“Because of the questions he was asking.”
“Classified?”
“Exactly.”
“You must be used to that, though,” she said. “Don’t reporters often ask about things that are classified? Isn’t that part of their job?”
“Sure. And we track that.” Tim took another sip and seemed to be calculating how much to reveal.
He decided to continue. “Most of the time, we’re looking for leaks. When a reporter starts digging, it’s tentative at first. But once in a while, they smell blood. There’s a story, and they don’t exactly know what it is, but they start to get aggressive with their questions. They start to take chances. That may mean they know more than they should, but don’t have the evidence needed to go public. They become like a dog with a bone, and you can’t shake them loose. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. From our perspective, we don’t want certain information in the public, because the enemy has access to it.”
“Who’s the enemy?”
Tim didn’t answer that. “So, what usually happens,” he says, “is that the nosy reporter gets a whiff of something and makes a formal inquiry. They contact our public relations people, and it rattles around the chain of command, and the RAF gives either a canned denial or a carefully crafted reply designed to kill the story. And if we can’t kill it, we need to manage it.”
“Manage it how?”
“Very carefully.” He refilled his glass from the pitcher.
“You lie to the press,” she said.
“No.”
“Never?”
“Rarely. It’s not necessary. We guide the narrative. When pressed into a corner, we either issue a flat denial or a no-comment or a partial truth that steers the story away from things we can’t, in the name of national security, reveal to the public.”
A Very British Witch Boxed Set Page 16
