“You are now friends with Alexander Percival Brown?”
“Yes.” No, but hopefully he wouldn’t find that out. “I came here with Miles Thompson. You know Miles.” Since I actually was friends with Miles, or at least had some kind of history with him, Ian had to back off. “Be careful, Lucy. A murder happened there, and the murderer is still at large.”
A chill crept down my arms. “I know. That’s what I want to talk to you about. Can you meet us at the entrance to the wine cellar?”
“Us?”
I rolled my eyes even though he couldn’t see me. “Rafe Crosyer is with me.”
“Of course he is.” Said with complete sarcasm.
Oh, this was nice. Now I was going to be stuck in the middle of a tug-of-war, with two men pulling at me emotionally. I didn’t have the time or energy to cope.
However, as grumpy as he’d sounded when he hung up, Ian arrived within five minutes. He must have come straight in the front door and come down to see what I had found. One thing about Ian, he might be irritable with me, but he’d known me long enough that if I wanted to show him something, he knew it was probably worth looking at.
He was wearing his usual suit, with white shirt and tie. He gave Rafe a curt nod, which was returned in kind, and then said, “What’s all this about, Lucy?”
I couldn’t tell him about my witchy senses, and I certainly couldn’t tell him about Rafe’s vampire senses, so I’d come up with the best I could. Lucy the super sleuth. “I think I found something. Follow me.”
Rafe said he’d take his case of wine to the car and meet me out there. No doubt he believed Ian would be more likely to listen to my theory that Pamela had died here if Rafe wasn’t around. No doubt he was right.
I led Ian back into the wine cellar, past the section where the wine from the other night was stored, and he paused. “Isn’t this where you want to be?” So he’d traced Miles and Charles’s footsteps too and no doubt timed the return trip.
“No. What I want to show you is around here.”
Our footsteps scuffed along the paved cellar floor as he followed without comment. I led him to the spot where I was almost certain Pamela had been killed. Ian looked around, looked at me, and then I realized what a super weak clue this was that I was offering him. If he couldn’t feel the psychic energy that I was picking up on, all he was going to find was a patch where some dust had been wiped off some bottles. A hundred things could have done it. Somebody coming in here with a broom, an animal brushing by—what had I been thinking? Still, I knew that this was the spot where Pamela’s life had ended. I had to help Ian come to that same conclusion. I squatted down and pointed to the area where the dust had been wiped off the bottles. “I think that Pamela may have died here.”
As I had feared, he looked at me like I was a few bottles short of a wine cellar. “Based on what?”
Based on my witch’s powers, which he didn’t know about. I tried to sound convincing. “Isn’t it possible? This is the only area where dust has been wiped off the bottles. Look here and here. Imagine I was being strangled.” I put my own hands to my throat and mimed pushing back against one side of the row of bottles and over to the other and then falling to the ground. I wasn’t much of an actor, but I could make the marks on the bottles match.
“A number of things could have wiped the dust off these bottles. Is that all that you’ve got?”
“Call it a hunch. At least investigate.”
He put the flashlight on his phone, which wasn’t exactly calling in the forensics team, and, squatting down, ran the light over the area. He was about to get up and I knew I was going to get some scathingly dismissive comment when he stopped. And muttered something.
“What is it?”
Was he actually going to believe me?
Almost to himself, he said, “The forensics team found traces of red dust on her clothes. We thought it was from the stables, but we haven’t been able to match it. Maybe it’s red dust from the bricks.”
When I looked closer, I could see what he meant. While she’d rubbed dust off the bottles as she was falling, she would have also rubbed against the crumbling, old, red brick that was part of the cellar.
I felt a rush of elation. Mostly about being believed. “So you think I’m right?”
He looked at me with a strangely intent expression. “I think you have remarkable hunches.” He didn’t say it like it was a compliment, almost as though there was some kind of con going on. Of course, there was, but he was a man of evidence and science. Of rational explanations and clues that built up a case that was then proved in court. Saying that I was a witch who felt death? That was not going to go down well with Detective Inspector Ian Chisholm.
So I tried to wave off his words. “Call it women’s intuition.”
“I don’t believe in women’s intuition.”
Not wishing to hang around so he could interrogate me any further about my brilliant intuition, I said, “Well, I’ll let you keep investigating.”
As I left the cellar, I could feel him watching me.
Chapter 17
As we drew near Oxford, Rafe turned to me and said, “What are you thinking, Lucy?”
He said this because I’d been quiet for most of the journey. And Rafe knew me well enough to know that this was unusual behavior. He tended more to the strong, silent type while I was closer to the
