Witchmoor Edge

by Mike Crowson

Lucy Turner pulled up her car outside the block where Alice Dent and Ellen Barnes had their flat, parked it and went to ring the security buzzer.

  Ellen Barnes was on late shift at Bradford Royal Infirmary and consequently not home, but Alice Dent was there and let her in.

  "I have to check on some of the things you told us," Lucy began, as she sat down in the lounge and took out her notebook. "I told you I would have to be extra thorough to satisfy myself, and my boss turned up a couple of anomalies I can't explain."

  "Go on," Alice Dent said, quite neutrally.

  "You are diabetic - yes?"

  Alice nodded. "Well," She said, "Not me but Ellen."

  "But Shirley Hunter isn't and Simon Hunter wasn't."

  "I wouldn't know."

  "Yet among the items on at the picnic site and on the till slip from Ellen's shopping expedition with Shirley Hunter was a jar of diabetic jam."

  Alice shrugged. "Our jar is still here, in the kitchen." She got up and went into the kitchen. Lucy heard her rummaging in a cupboard and returned with a jar of jam, opened and about a quarter used. Alice held it out.

  "As you see," she said. "Opened and partly used."

  There was no way of telling whether it was the same jar, of course, but it was the same jam and could easily have been opened since Saturday.

  "Diabetic strawberry jam," Alice said. "Ellen gets through a fair amount. I don't. I'm a peanut butter person myself."

  Lucy wrote down the brand, variety and net weight and glanced at the best before date. Unsurprisingly it told her nothing.

  "Okay," she said. "There were other items at the scene that appeared on that shopping list as well."

  "Such as?"

  "There were a couple of tubs of yoghurt."

  Alice shrugged again. "Supermarkets sell an awful lot of yoghurts. It's just coincidence."

  "Let's leave that for the moment. When the jar and the tubs were fingerprinted they had no fingerprints but Simon Hunter's on them. No cashier at the supermarket, no Shirley Hunter's, it looked to the Scene of Crime people as though they had been carefully wiped clean before Hunter"s prints were put on them."

  Alice waited.

  "This casts some doubt on Shirley Hunter's version of events and, therefore, on Ellen's story," Lucy said when the pause had become long enough to need filling.

  "Ellen picked up Shirley Hunter on the main road." Alice sounded a little irritated. "She never saw the picnic area or commented on it."

  This was true. Ellen's statement had said nothing about the picnic site and claimed never to have been there.

  "Did you check the time of Shirley Hunter's mobile phone call?" Alice asked.

  Lucy checked her notebook, where she had indeed written down the time, to check it out.

  "14.08. 8 minutes past 2, and the call lasted just over 4 minutes."

  Alice didn't comment and Lucy looked at the other time involved: the time on the till receipt. 14:46.

  "How long would it have taken Ellen to drive to where Shirley was waiting," Lucy wondered out loud, not really asking a question.

  "I've no idea," Alice said shortly. "You'd have to ask Ellen."

  Of course she would, Lucy thought. There were serious holes in Shirley's story, but the inconsistencies didn't amount to proof. Not yet, anyway.

  "You said you were an electrician."

  "Yes."

  "What are you working on at the moment?"

  "We've just started the wiring of a new factory in Guisley."

  "And before that, did you have anything to do with the old warehouse in Canal Street?"

  "A couple of us popped in there last week to cut off all electrics before Yorkshire Electricity cut off the whole building. It was going to be demolished."

  "You were inside the building?"

  "Of course."

  "When?"

  "Thursday afternoon last week."

  Lucy changed tack, covering the other point worrying her, though her boss hadn't specifically mentioned it.

  "You said you drive?"

  "Yes, though I use a motorcycle most of the time."

  "Do you drive at work?"

  "Occasionally. There are vans for tools and equipment. I sometimes drive one and I'm sometimes a passenger. More often I ride the motorbike."

  "But you have access to vans?"

  "I could drive one if I arranged it, but I didn't do last Saturday, if that's what you're getting at. Check with the transport foreman."

  "I think I will, just as a matter of eliminating possibilities. I told you I was going to be extra thorough, so nobody could accuse me of going soft on you, not even me."

  Alice nodded. She understood, even she didn't like it.

  "Thanks for your cooperation," Lucy said, rising. "I think that's all for the moment, but I may need to speak to Ellen again."

  Alice Dent got up too, and let her out without further comment, just a polite 'goodbye'.