My sister, Janie, was dead. And as deaths go, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant one. Identifying that body was the most harrowing thing I have ever had to do. You can hide the crazed eyes of a violent death by closing the eyelids, but you can’t hide the tautness of the muscles around the eyes. They spoke of the truth of the event – as did the fingermarks around the neck, and the deep gouge in the back of the head. Even the coroner was undecided just when she died. Did the crack on the head kill her, or did it merely stun her whilst those fingers held her in the grip of death?
But that was academic. Janie, my sister, was dead; murdered in a depraved, vicious attack – and in her own flat!
Simon seemed to take it badly. Whether it was guilt or not I didn’t really know. Simon had been Janie’s boyfriend. They’d walked out with each other for nearly two years before their bust-up a couple of weeks ago.
‘It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been so stupid,’ he said after the tears had dried a little. ‘I would have been with her that night. I would! She should still be alive.’
‘It’s no good blaming yourself,’ I told him. But it was no good. The police were at a loss. An army of detectives and forensic specialists went over the flat with a fine toothcomb, but they drew blank. They carried out house-to-house inquiries, but no one had seen a thing.
Then came the theories. A thief, disturbed in the flat – but nothing was missing. Nothing was disturbed. Perhaps it was an assault – but there was no sign of sexual advances. A psychopath – but they were usually more messy, taking death as a kind of artform.
Eventually, it was me who came up with the correct source of inquiry. ‘I want to try something, Simon,’ I said. ‘I want to consult a dowser.’
Simon thought I was nuts, but then I went into a long explanation of the dowser’s art – I’d just read a book on the subject, and some of the successes of what were termed ‘psychic detectives’ were quite impressive. You see, dowsing wasn’t just the finding of water with a forked twig. Many dowsers used pendulums and, quite literally, asked the pendulum questions. The answer came from the reaction of the pendulum.
Some researchers were of the opinion that the pendulum acted simply as a focus for the dowser’s clairvoyant mind, the actual information coming from the dowser himself. This was best seen in map dowsing, when minerals, water, oil, even people, had been found by holding the instrument above a map. Personally I didn’t care how the hell it worked, as long as it did.
Had I known that the investigation that followed would end up with me receiving a six inch blade in the gut, I doubt if I would have done it, no matter how close me and Janie had been.
There are a lot of dowsers around if you take the time to look. The nearest was only ten miles from where I lived. His name was Archibald Verney. He was a strange little man with a shiny bald head and squinted eyes and he spoke how you’d expect a viper to speak; a sharp, rasping hiss. He sent a shiver down my spine, and I could sense that Simon was just as nervous as I as we stood next to him in the barely lit front room of his house.
The formalities were brief. We offered payment, but he declined. I’d decided on a test of his abilities straight away. In this way we could find out pretty quickly whether he was a fake or not. Hence, we gave no names. We simply said that a friend had died recently, and we asked if he could tell us where.
He spread a map of the county across the table and then he looked us both up and down. He took out his pendulum. It looked to me like a piece of gold dangling from that string. He concentrated on the pendulum and slowly moved it across the map. It just hung there, unmoved. Then, as it approached the village in which Janie lived, it slowly began to circle, the speed of rotation increasing as it moved. Above the village, it went mad, gyrating wildly in Verney’s grasp.
‘This is where your sister died,’ he said; which was surprising as I hadn’t told him it was my sister. ‘And,’ he said, ‘by the action of the pendulum, the death was violent.’
I was convinced. This guy knew his stuff. I told him the whole story. Then I asked him if he could identify the murderer.
I wish I hadn’t. He asked the pendulum. I wish he hadn’t. The pendulum began gyrating straight away, building up speed as it circled the dowser’s hand. Then, suddenly, it shot out to the side, the string so rigid that it could have been metal as the dowser restrained it. But Simon was more shocked than me. It was pointing at him – and his knife was pointing at me …
(c) Anthony North, 2003
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