Witchmoor Edge Read online

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  Detective Inspector Millicent Hampshire propped herself up on a pillow and took stock. Sun was streaming through the curtains and the room had a pleasant, rather dappled feel to it. Millicent was feeling this patchwork of colour appropriate to a meandering and rather aimless patchwork of thoughts and memories. Her mother had been from Belfast while her father had been - still was in fact - Afro-Caribbean. She was approaching forty and a detective with one hell of a reputation and a driving, rather obsessive need to succeed. She was quite tall for a woman at over 5'10", which is a respectable for a man, and looked a little prim. She was easy on the make up and straightened rather curly hair to make it no more than wavy and she did not tint out the odd grey strand. However, she did visit the gym regularly and she was both trim and fit.

  The prim image was misleading. For a start, Millicent was much more approachable than she seemed and, apart from a fiery temper when roused, easy to get on with. She was popular with colleagues and subordinates and a good leader, who drove herself harder than she did others.

  What Millicent was considering now was another reason why one would not call her prim, and perhaps contributed to why she was such a good detective. Ever since she could remember there had been insights or visions, in which puzzles and problems became transparent and she was almost always able to spot a lie.

  It was not something to talk about too much, and over the years Carlos was the only person she had discussed her psychic insights with, but her late Spanish policeman husband had been blown up in an ETA car bomb incident years ago. Her daughter Ana had been brought up by Carlos's parents in Seville. Millicent regretted too late that she had not shared her daughter's childhood, and let the years wash past her. She sighed.

  The phone rang. Even in August at a weekend a detective was liable to be called from her headquarters, and no one else was likely to be calling her.

  "Blast," she muttered and picked it up. "Hampshire," she said.

  "D.S. Gibbs here. Sorry to bother you off duty, but I wanted to check an idea I had with you before I okayed it."

  Millicent knew that he didn't really like deferring to a black woman who'd been fast tracked up the force. He regarded her a bit as a token woman and felt that he had deserved the promotion. Or rather, he had felt like that, but Millicent Hampshire had the army background to give her a thick skin and she was a good cop, for which he could take a lot. She preferred to delegate where she could and at least what he was calling about now didn't sound like something that needed her to go into work this morning.

  "Yes?" she queried.

  Gibbs told her of the fire and the body. "I'd like to get a couple of divers down there to take a quick look for anything else. What gave him that blow to the head and so on. If we wait till the post mortem report it might have gone cold."

  "Nice day for a dive," Millicent observed. "Go ahead if there's anyone available right now."

  When Gibbs had rung off, she stirred herself and climbed out of bed, crossing the carpeted floor of the cottage to the bathroom. It was one of those well modernised eighteenth century houses that are so prized by estate agents and their customers: stone built and mellow, just small enough to merit the description 'cottage' and the images that go with it, but large enough to be practical when modernised. The corner of Baildon it occupied was quiet on a Sunday morning.

  As Millicent put the kettle on to make coffee and slipped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, she thought she would like to go up on the moors that afternoon, to try and find the twelve apostles - a stone circle that was shown on maps but which she'd never actually visited.