“Is there anything else you can remember about the tunnel?” Joanna asked.

“No…” Mrs. Davenport said after a minute. “It was dark.”

“Dark,” Joanna wrote down. She always took notes in case the tape ran out or something went wrong with the recorder, and so she could note the subject’s manner and intonation. “Closemouthed,” she wrote. “Reluctant.” But sometimes the reluctant ones turned out to be the best subjects if you just had patience. “You said you heard a noise,” Joanna said. “Can you describe it?”

“A noise?” Mrs. Davenport said vaguely.

If you just had the patience of Job, Joanna corrected. “You said,” she repeated, consulting her notes, “ ‘I heard a noise, and then I was moving through this tunnel.’ Did you hear the noise before you entered the tunnel?”

“No…” Mrs. Davenport said, frowning, “…yes. I’m not sure. It was a sort of ringing…” She looked questioningly at Joanna. “Or maybe a buzzing?” Joanna kept her face carefully impassive. An encouraging smile or a frown could be leading, too. “A buzzing, I think,” Mrs. Davenport said after a minute.

“Can you describe it?”

I should have had something to eat before I started this, Joanna thought. It was after twelve, and she hadn’t had anything for breakfast except coffee and a Pop-Tart. But she had wanted to get to Mrs. Davenport before Maurice Mandrake did, and the longer the interval between the NDE and the interview, the more confabulation there was.

“Describe it?” Mrs. Davenport said irritably. “A buzzing.”

It was no use. She was going to have to ask more specific questions, leading or not, or she would never get anything out of her. “Was the buzzing steady or intermittent?”