Kissed a Sad Goodbye

“Are you Lewis?” she said when he reached her. “Aunt Edwina said you’d meet me. I’m Irene.”

“Sorry I’m late.” Lewis picked up her bulky suitcase and maneuvered it into the back of the trap. “What have you got in here? Stones?”

Irene gave him her warm smile again and jumped up into the trap unassisted. “Just about everything I own, or at least everything we could salvage from the wreckage. And I didn’t mind that you were late, except I was trying to think what I’d do if you didn’t come at all. I’ve never tried hitchhiking, and I didn’t know if anyone would be brave enough to pick me up with this monster of a suitcase.”

Lewis glanced at her, surprised. He and William had never quite got up the nerve to try hitchhiking. “You could have telephoned,” he pointed out. “There’s a call box just next to the platform. This isn’t exactly the wilds of Africa, you know.”

“How old are you?” Irene asked, apparently unperturbed by his sarcasm.

“Fourteen in January,” he answered, sitting up a bit straighter as he backed up Zeus and got them started in the opposite direction.

“I’ll be fourteen the week before Christmas. So I’m older than you.” Irene’s triumphant grin was so infectious he couldn’t help smiling back.

It was a perfect July evening, the air still soft and smelling of newly mown hay. The road ran through leafy, light-dappled tunnels, and there was little sound expect for birdsong and the soothing clip-clop of the horse’s hooves.

“How far is it to the house?” asked Irene when they’d ridden in silence for a bit.

“A couple of miles. It will take us about three-quarters of an hour.” Lewis suddenly remembered how great the distances had seemed to him when he’d first come to the country, and how he hadn’t been able to imagine a stretch of road without a house or shop in sight.

“It’s not at all like Kilburn,” Irene said, and some quality in her voice made him look more closely at her, wondering if underneath that cheerful exterior she might be just a little bit frightened.

“No, but you’ll like it,” he said. “I promise.”

LEWIS AND IRENE BECAME FAST FRIENDS so swiftly that the first few weeks after William’s return were a bit awkward. William had come back rather full of himself, having spent his holiday immersed in his family’s business. When Irene remained unimpressed with the importance of Hammond’s Teas, William very politely tried to make it clear to her that she wasn’t included in Lewis’s and his schemes. But Irene always affected not to notice: she tagged along anyway, and after a bit William gave up in exasperation. He soon seemed to forget that he’d ever tried to leave her out.

In August, Mr. Cuddy returned from his long holiday on the Cornish coast, and they were busy with schoolwork again. If Mr. Cuddy and the boys had got into a bit of a rut with their studies, Irene soon woke them up. She was fascinated by Mr. Cuddy’s geographical mapping of the war, and always had a question or an argument.

They had a special interest in the campaign in North Africa, and Irene followed the exploits of Montgomery’s 8th Army against Rommel with as much partisan fervor as the boys, even though she’d never met John Pebbles. As the days shortened into autumn, they spent long afternoons before the schoolroom fire with cups of cocoa, discussing the war and their futures.

“It’s going to be over before we’re old enough to join,” complained Lewis one day when the rain beating against the windows kept them from going outside. “North Africa’s only the beginning. With the Yanks in it now, Europe’s bound to be next. Old Hitler won’t be able to stand up to the combined forces.”

“Yes, but I remember when everyone said the war would be over in weeks.” William stretched out on the rug and propped his chin on his hands, staring into the fire, and Lewis thought that he couldn’t imagine William fighting anyone, even if things did stretch out that long.

“Do you ever think about losing?” asked Irene. With Edwina’s cooperation, she had taken happily to wearing trousers like the boys, and sat cross-legged on the floor with her back against the old armchair. “Everyone talks as though there’s no question we’ll win, eventually. But what if we don’t?”

“Don’t be silly,” retorted William. “Of course we’ll win, so there’s no point thinking about it.”

But Lewis had thought about it. Lots of things he’d thought could never happen—his house being bombed, his two brothers dying—had happened, so he had to consider the possibility that they could lose this war.

“Of course, I hope it will end soon,” said Irene, studying the flames. “But if it doesn’t, I’m going to join up when I’m old enough and I’m going to be a general.”

“You’re positively daft,” said William. “Girls can’t be generals.”

“I don’t see why not.” Irene’s chin went up the way it did when she was going to be stubborn. “I like planning maneuvers and things.”

“But that’s just playing at it,” Lewis said, trying to be reasonable. “If it was real, you’d have to deal with wounded, and intelligence reports, and oh, all sorts of things. And you’d have to tell people what to do all the time.”

“So?” Irene stuck her tongue out at him. “I could do any of those things just as well as you.”

Mr. Cuddy looked up from the book he was reading. “Don’t squabble. I think Irene’s perfectly capable of telling people what to do. In fact,” he continued, warming to his subject, “has it ever occurred to you that we might have won the war by this time if all the generals were women? Think about Artemis, the hunter goddess.”

Lewis and William looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Now she’d got old Cuddy started on one of his tears, and they’d get the entire Greek mythology if they weren’t careful.

“And what about Boadicea—the ancient British warrior queen who led her forces against the Romans. That’s a bit closer to home.” Mr. Cuddy smiled at Irene. “And she had red hair.”

“I’ll bet people told her she couldn’t be a general, either,” Irene said, tossing her head with irritating smugness.

But Lewis was willing to let the matter drop for the sake of peace, because he had a feeling that if they kept on at her, Mr. Cuddy would get really cross.

Their tutor had seemed different since he came back from his long Cornish holiday, but Lewis had not quite been able to put his finger on what it was. At first he’d thought that maybe Mr. Cuddy didn’t like Irene, but that didn’t seem to be it, as he was much less likely to snap at her than at William and him. But something had changed, and the small, nagging worry this caused Lewis was the only thing to mar his contentment.

AS KINCAID PULLED THE CAR INTO a shady spot across from Gordon Finch’s flat, Gemma saw Gordon walking down East Ferry Road from the direction of Mudchute Station, clarinet case in his hand, Sam at his side. They waited until he had almost reached his flat, then got out of the car and crossed the road to intercept him.

“We’d like a word, Mr. Finch, if you don’t mind,” Kincaid said, showing his warrant card as if Gordon might have forgotten who they were.

“And if I do?” Gordon said easily, but his eyes flicked towards Gemma. He wore his military gear again today, and looked disreputable beside Kincaid, who wore khakis and a blue chambray shirt, his collar unbuttoned beneath the knot of his tie.

“We can have a chat somewhere less comfortable.”

Gemma felt the tension mount between the two men, then Gordon shrugged without speaking and led them up the stairs to his flat. Once inside, he looked at Gemma and threw down a challenge. “You know your way round, I think.” The physical presence of the two men, so close together in the small room and radiating dislike, made her feel she’d got caught in the middle of a pissing contest.

She held her ground. “We want to know exactly what Annabelle said to you in the tunnel. Word for word.”

“I’ve told you—”

“A very small piece—that she wanted to mend things between you. What you didn’t say was that Annabelle had just found out that your father had lied to her, betrayed her, just as she meant to betray her own father.”

“My father doesn’t lie,” Gordon said sharply.

“Then why did he tell Annabelle he would preserve the Hammond’s warehouse if she sold it to him, when all along he meant to tear it down?”

“Tear it down?” he repeated, frowning.

“She didn’t tell you? She must have been terribly angry with him.”

“She said …” He looked down as if surprised at the clarinet case he continued to hold in his right hand, then he knelt and set it carefully by the music stand. “She said something about loyalties that no longer mattered. I’d heard rumors, back in the spring, about Lewis’s interest in the warehouse, and that they’d been seen together a good bit. But when I asked her about it, she denied either a business interest or an affair.” He looked up and met Gemma’s eyes. “So I followed her. She spent the night at his flat. When I confronted her with it, she never even tried to justify herself. She said I wouldn’t understand.… And then she let me walk away.”

“But you didn’t stop loving her.”

Gordon rose, his hands looking awkwardly empty. “No.”

“And that night, she told you she loved you. She wanted to work things out. In the video in the tunnel, she was pleading.”

“She said … she said she’d realized that she’d thrown away what mattered to her most … but that my being there meant it wasn’t too late—we could still work things out, if we loved each other.”

Gemma sensed Kincaid move restlessly behind her, but he didn’t speak. “You turned her away,” she said softly, not taking her eyes from Gordon. “You didn’t believe her.” She heard her words fall flat as stones in a pool, and as she looked at Gordon Finch she thought the desolation on his face far worse than weeping. “There was something else, wasn’t there? What else did she say, Gordon?”

When he didn’t speak, she said it for him. “She said she meant to prove it, didn’t she? In the video, I saw her turn back for a last word, and she was still angry, defiant even. She meant to prove she loved you.”

“IT LOOKS LIKE LEWIS FINCH, DOESN’T it?” Gemma felt no sense of elation at the prospect. For Gordon to have to face the guilt of a father he obviously cared for more than he admitted was bad enough, but she herself had liked and admired Lewis Finch.

“It wasn’t her engagement she said she was going to break off when she rang him that night,” Kincaid said as he eased the Rover into the northbound traffic on East Ferry Road. “It was their deal. That’s why he sounded angry in the message he left on her answering machine.”

“And not just the deal, but her relationship with him as well—how could she keep seeing him after what she’d learned?”

“It sounds as though she was using Lewis from the beginning—”

“As he was using her.” Gemma glanced up at the high banks of the Mudchute to the right as they passed, and on the left the sun glinted off the water of Millwall Dock. “But that doesn’t solve the problem of where and how they met that night, or how Lewis Finch could have got her body into the park.”

“Or his motive,” Kincaid mused. “It seems apparent why Annabelle was willing to defy her father’s wishes in selling the warehouse. The business was more important to her than anything, and if she believed that was the only way she could keep it afloat—”

“But why was Lewis Finch willing to pay any price for the property? And why was he determined to tear it down once he had it, a contradiction of everything he believes in?”

“Did he think killing Annabelle would stop the sale from falling through?” Kincaid asked.

“He couldn’t have been sure what would happen.” Gemma frowned and glanced at her watch. “Do you want to try to catch him at his office? He said he’s usually out on site in the afternoons.”

Kincaid drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited for a light to change. “No. Not until we have enough to nail him. We’ll ask Janice to have a discreet word with his neighbors, see if they noticed any unusual comings and goings.”

“So what do we do in the meantime?” asked Gemma, a little surprised, but conceding the logic of his approach.

“The reason we can’t make sense of Lewis Finch’s behavior is because we haven’t got at the root of it,” Kincaid said slowly. “And I think that root lies in the past—I can’t believe it’s mere coincidence that William Hammond and Lewis Finch knew each other during the war, or that Annabelle sought out Gordon Finch.”

“William Hammond’s made it clear he’s not going to talk about it,” Gemma protested.

“So we’ll find someone who will.” Kincaid glanced at her. “Come to Surrey with me. There’s a nice B and B in Holmbury St. Mary—remember?”

Yesterday’s encounter with Gordon Finch flashed unbidden into Gemma’s mind—How could she face a romantic getaway with Duncan in a B&B with that on her conscience?

“I promised I’d look after the kids for Hazel tonight,” she said. Knowing that Hazel and Tim’s plans to take in a movie were flexible and that she was stretching the truth, she felt guiltier still. “And you might need me this end,” she added, bolstering her excuse.

“I might,” Kincaid said lightly, his tone disguising the hurt she was certain she had glimpsed in his eyes.

JO LOWELL HAD TOLD GEMMA THAT she thought the house where her father had spent the war years was now a country-house hotel, and that his godmother had been named Burne-Jones. That was all the information Kincaid had to go on when he arrived in Surrey in the late afternoon and took a room at the pleasant farmhouse B&B in Holmbury St. Mary. He’d hoped he might see his friend Madeleine Wade, who lived in the village, and Holmbury was in the vicinity Jo Lowell had indicated.

Madeleine practiced massage and aromatherapy from a small flat above the village shop, which she also owned, and when Kincaid had met her on a case the previous autumn he’d found her fascinating as well as a bit disturbing. She was the most matter-of-fact of selfconfessed psychics, a former investment banker with a gift for reading what she rather disparagingly referred to as “emotional auras,” and he’d discovered that conversations with her could have unexpected pitfalls.

When he’d settled the few things from his emergency overnight kit in his room, he’d walked down the road into the village proper. The shop was not on the green but tucked away in a cul-de-sac on the hill above the village, and by the time he reached it he was warm and perspiring, even with his jacket slung over his shoulder.

The girl working the counter was unfamiliar, but said she thought Madeleine was at home, then watched him curiously as he thanked her and let himself out with a jingle of the bells on the door. He climbed the white-painted steps that ran up the side of the building and knocked at the glossy white door at the top. After a moment, it swung open. Madeleine regarded him with a faint smile. “You’ve not lost your knack for good timing, I see.”

She looked just as he remembered—her bobbed, platinum hair and sharp nose receding into insignificance the moment you met her deep, moss-green eyes.

“You’re not surprised to see me?” he asked, looking round as he stepped into the small flat. He had last been here in November, but on this warm summer evening the two windows overlooking the shop-front were open to the breeze that moved the cheerful red-polka-dot curtains.

Her smile broadened. “No conjuring tricks this time,” she said, referring to the fact that the last time he’d called in unannounced, he’d found the table set for two. “But I did put a bottle of wine in the fridge to chill, just in case some old friend happened to drop by unexpectedly.”

“Madeleine, you’re astounding.”

“And you’re easily impressed,” she retorted, but she looked pleased as she retrieved a bottle of Australian sauvignon blanc from the fridge and uncorked it.

When she’d filled their glasses with the wine and they had sat down in the sitting area, she studied him for a moment before speaking. “So what brings you here, Duncan? It’s not strictly pleasure, I’m sure.”

“No, unfortunately.” He swirled the wine in his glass. “Do you happen to know of a country-house hotel nearby, used to be owned by a woman named Burne-Jones?”

Madeleine frowned as she thought. “The name sounds vaguely familiar.…” Her face cleared. “Wait, I’ve got it. There is a place, up near Friday Green.”

“Any of the family still about, by any chance?”

“It does seem as though I’d heard something about one of the family still living on the grounds, in the old tied cottage. A distant cousin, female, I believe.… Sorry, I can’t seem to dredge up any more.”

“It’s a place to start.”

“I can give you directions, at least,” said Madeleine. “It’s quite near here, actually.”

Kincaid jotted them down, then slipped the notebook back into the pocket of his jacket and returned his attention to her. “How are things, then?” he asked.

Madeleine laughed. “Blessedly dull since you went away, Superintendent, thank you very much. The ripples have subsided, and we’ve all gone back to pretending we never suspected one another of murder. And what about you?”

As he told her a bit about the Hammond case, she listened intently, and when he mentioned Lewis Finch’s name, she made a small movement of surprise. “Do you know him?” Kincaid asked.

“I did, in my previous incarnation, you might say. He had quite a reputation in the City.”

“A good one?”

“Yes, surprisingly; after all, success and honesty don’t often go hand in hand. Then again, Finch didn’t get where he is without a good deal of ruthlessness. Your Annabelle was a strong character indeed if she stood up to that one.”

“To her cost.”

“Do you think Lewis Finch killed her?”

“He seems the most likely possibility. Her former brother-in-law is the only one who professes to hate her, but he has a tidy alibi. Her fiancé seems to have had everything to lose and nothing to gain by killing her, and while he might have lost control enough to have a bloody great row with her, there’s a great gap between that and murder.” He studied his wine. “And Lewis Finch’s son has no motive that I can see—he’d known about her relationship with his father for months, and Annabelle pleaded with him to make up with her.”

Madeleine refilled their glasses, her expression pensive. “That’s a volatile situation—a father and son in love with the same woman … and if she threw the father over for the son …”

“What did you think of him?”

“You want me to tell you if I think Lewis Finch is capable of murder?” She frowned. “I suppose a man as driven as I remember Lewis Finch being might go over the edge. But I also sensed in him a great deal of grief—the sort of sadness that’s carried so long it becomes an integral part of the personality.” She gave Kincaid a swift glance over the rim of her glass, and he keenly remembered how exposed she could make him feel. “So tell me about you,” Madeleine demanded.

With anyone else, Kincaid would have found it easy to dissemble. He took a sip of his wine. “My ex-wife died—was murdered.”

“Oh, Duncan, I’m so sorry. Were you close?”

“Not for years. I wish we had been … friends.” He met Madeleine’s eyes, looked away. She seemed to be waiting. “And I learned I have a son. Kit. He’s eleven.”

“Your ex-wife’s child? But how wonderful for you.”

“And complicated,” Kincaid said a bit ruefully.

“How’s your sergeant coping with all of this?”

“Gemma? I think she can take anything in her stride.”

“Do you?” Madeleine’s voice held its characteristic trace of wry amusement.

Without warning, he was assailed by a longing for Gemma. He finished his wine, wishing she had agreed to come with him—wishing they could have had this one night alone together, uninterrupted.

“Another glass?” asked Madeleine, but he shook his head, recalling the unusually incapacitating effect of drinking with Madeleine, especially on an empty stomach.

“Thank you, but I’d better not,” he said, standing, and Madeleine gracefully uncoiled herself from the sofa and walked him to her door. “It was good to see you, Madeleine. I like to think of you here, sometimes. A calm center.”

“If you start quoting Yeats at me, I won’t have you back,” she said lightly, her marvelous eyes level with his.

“Never fear, then. I’m forewarned. And I will come again.” He kissed her cheek and turned away.

“Duncan.”

All the amusement had vanished from her voice and he stopped, compelled to look back.

“Whatever it is that’s happened to you, it won’t go away on its own,” said Madeleine. “Please take care.”

THE SKY HAD PALED FROM BLUE to violet to cobalt, but Gordon Finch had not stirred to turn on a light. In his lap the dressing gown he had bought for Annabelle, his only tangible connection with her, lay crumpled beneath his fingers.

Until today, he had not allowed himself to think it out. Until today, he had not had all the pieces—had not been forced to follow events through to their logical conclusion. Had Gemma and her watchful-eyed superintendent taken the same path? If not, how long would it take for them to realize where Annabelle had gone and what she had done?

All that remained was for him to decide how much loyalty he owed his father … and what vengeance Annabelle demanded.

CHAPTER 14For the majority of families whose livelihood depended on river trade activity, the abandonment of the upstream docks was as unexpected and destructive as a natural catastrophe. It was their Great Fire. They could only watch and accept the consequences of a process which they had no part in initiating and little chance of controlling.

George Nicholson, from Dockland

“You will not talk when I am speaking to you,” said Mr. Haliburton, his shaking hand raised to the chalkboard, his back still turned to the children, in the too-quiet voice Lewis had learned to recognize as a danger signal.

It had been Irene, leaning over to whisper something to Lewis, whom Mr. Haliburton had heard while he was lecturing to them on the structure of the Houses of Parliament. Now Lewis gave her a warning look and held his breath, hoping the moment would pass.

The shaking hand began to move again, and Lewis relaxed as much as was possible while in the same room with their new tutor. Chafing his freezing fingers together under the table, he tried not to think of Mr. Cuddy, tried not to remember the days when the four of them had sat round the schoolroom table arguing excitedly over a book they were reading or a point of history—because all that had changed on that June morning when Mr. Cuddy had gathered them together in the schoolroom as his annual holiday was to begin. As he’d asked them to sit down, Lewis had seen, to his surprise, that his tutor had tears in his eyes.

“I cannot put this off any longer,” Mr. Cuddy had said then. “You all know that I’m going away, but I’m not going on holiday as I’ve told you, and I’m afraid that I won’t be coming back.”

Irene recovered first. “Don’t be silly, Mr. Cuddy. Why ever wouldn’t you come back?”

Mr. Cuddy had turned away from them, a slight, balding, familiar figure in spectacles and moth-eaten jacket, and Lewis had felt the first stirring of fear.

“I have been torn this last year between what I saw as my duty to you, and what I felt was my duty to my country, and I’m afraid I have let myself be swayed by my desire to stay with you three children. But I have realized that you are not children any longer.” Mr. Cuddy turned back to them, his hands in his pockets, and Lewis knew he would be fingering the old watch he always kept there. “I have told you that I believe the Allies will shortly be invading Italy and the Mediterranean. Translators will be needed—”

“Are you saying you’ve joined up?” asked William, with an expression of astonishment that was almost comical.

“They refused me at the beginning of the war, but I speak Greek as well as rudimentary Italian and German, and it seems the army has come to see the advantages of that.” The light glinted from Mr. Cuddy’s spectacles as he nodded. “Yes, I have enlisted. And if this war goes on as it has, you boys will be doing the same before long.”

“But you’re too old,” blurted Lewis, without thinking.

Mr. Cuddy smiled. “I tried telling myself that. But for this it doesn’t matter. I won’t be fighting at the front, just trying to keep things running smoothly behind the scenes.”

“But what about us?” Irene was frowning so hard that Lewis guessed she was holding back tears.

“You will all be perfectly fine without me,” Mr. Cuddy had replied. “William will rebuild his father’s business when the war is over. Lewis, I think you can do anything you set your mind to, once you decide what that is. And Irene—our Irene is going to be prime minister, of course.” He lifted Irene’s chin gently with his forefinger, the first time Lewis remembered him touching any of them, then he had bid them a determined goodbye.

They’d watched him from the window, tramping down the drive with his rucksack as if he were going on holiday after all, and Lewis had felt as if he’d awakened from a silly sort of bad dream and found it not to be a dream.

In the autumn, Edwina had enrolled them in the village school, and while they were bored with their schoolwork, life at the Hall had gone on very much as before.

At first, Lewis wouldn’t talk about Mr. Cuddy when William or Irene brought his name up, and when letters came from Italy, he pretended disinterest and refused to read them. But sometimes in the evenings, when everyone had gone to bed, he would creep into Edwina’s drawing room. There he could pore over the letters alone, by the light of a guttering candle, as many times as he wanted.

Mr. Cuddy had been posted to General Clark’s 5th Army, which had landed at Salerno, on the shin of Italy, a few days after Montgomery’s 8th Army entered Italy at its toe on the 3rd of September. As the weeks passed and William and Irene speculated about whether Mr. Cuddy would eventually meet up with John Pebbles, Lewis occasionally let slip that he knew more than he admitted. Irene looked at him but said nothing, and somehow this made their friendship closer.

Raids had been light and infrequent over the past eighteen months, since the Blitz had ended in May of ’41. They were all allowed home for a long holiday at Christmas—William to his family’s home in Greenwich; Irene to Kilburn, where her house had been repaired enough to be at least habitable; and Lewis to his parents’ tiny flat in Millwall.

As they sat down to tea the first evening in the room that served his family as bedroom, parlor, and kitchen, Lewis had glanced at the three places set on the makeshift table and asked, “Where’s Cath, then?” thinking she must be working an evening shift at her factory.

The look he’d come to recognize passed between his parents again, then his father stared down at the pile of mashed turnips on his plate and muttered, “Bloody Yanks.”

Lewis turned to his mother for enlightenment. He’d seen the American soldiers in the street, and the American military police everyone called “snow-drops,” in their white belts and hats, but he didn’t make the immediate connection.

His mother gave another glance at his da before she said softly, “Your sister’s gone, Lewis. I hadn’t the heart to tell you in a letter. She’s married an American flier who’s been invalided home—” Faltering, she touched his father’s arm, but he shook his head, refusing her comfort. “And she’s going to have a baby,” his mother finished quickly.

Lewis had heard enough village gossip to guess the order of events, but that didn’t quell his rising anger. “You mean she’s gone off to the States without even saying goodbye?”

“It was all that quick, in the Registry Office … and your da didn’t want any fuss.” His mum’s eyes filled with tears and she pushed a covered dish towards Lewis. “The greengrocer saved me a special treat for your tea—fresh Brussels sprouts.”

Feeling suddenly nauseated, Lewis pushed back his chair. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m not hungry.”

The air outside was dense with a freezing fog that seemed to creep inside his clothes and cling to his skin, but Lewis found himself trudging along West Ferry Road in the dark, the thin fabric of his coat pulled up round his chin. There was nothing he could do about the cold nipping at his wrists and ankles. His sleeves were too short, as were his trousers: he’d already outgrown the few items allotted by his ration coupons.

It seemed there was nothing he could do about people leaving, either, he thought, kicking savagely at an empty tin in the street. A man hurrying in the opposite direction gave him an angry look as he stopped and picked it up. “Don’t you know there’s a salvage drive on, sonny?” the man said roughly, pushing past him.

Fury washed through Lewis and he turned, fists up, but the man had disappeared into the blackness.

How could his sister leave them, knowing they would probably never see one another again, and not even send him a letter?

He walked on, as far as Island Gardens, but the river was invisible in the heavy overcast and he felt it only as an icy void sucking more of the warmth from his body. At last, he turned and trudged back to the flat, but that evening seemed to set the tone for the rest of his holiday.

His parents had changed. It seemed to Lewis that his sister’s desertion, following so soon on his brothers’ deaths, had made his gentle father bitter, while his mother was simply worn down with repeated grief and loss. And he found he had changed, as well. When he met his old mates they jeered at his accent, and their lives were filled with talk of going down the pub and concerns that seemed foreign to him. Most had left school at fourteen, in favor of factory work until they were old enough to enlist, and although he felt an outcast, to his surprise he didn’t envy them.

The days dragged by. He thought several times of William, just across the river, but Greenwich seemed a world away and William had not invited him to visit. On Boxing Day, with guilty relief, he kissed his parents goodbye and caught the train back to Surrey, but his pleasure at returning there had been short-lived.

As he watched Mr. Haliburton at the chalkboard, he thought of the first time he had seen him in Edwina’s drawing room, on New Year’s Day. William and Irene had returned and they’d all gathered in the kitchen, poking spoons and fingers into Cook’s pots while she scolded and flapped at them with her apron. After a few weeks of subsisting mostly on turnips and potatoes, Lewis’s stomach was growling at the thought of the ham Cook had promised for their New Year’s feast, and there was to be a tart as well, made from the preserved gooseberries they’d picked in the autumn. He’d been inching towards the larder with the idea of just having a peek at the sweet when Edwina had come into the kitchen and asked them to join her.

“Maybe we’ll get a glass of sherry for a New Year’s toast,” William whispered, elbowing him as they followed Edwina down the corridor, but Lewis had been more interested in watching Irene. She wore a wool skirt and jumper rather than trousers, her glossy copper hair bounced on her shoulders, and it seemed to him that there was something different about the way she walked. Irene had looked back then and smiled at him, and it had made him feel quite odd.

As they entered the drawing room, Lewis first saw through the window the strange car in the drive, its bonnet glistening with rain. Then he noticed the tall, thin man standing before the fire, smoking, his back to them. He didn’t turn round to greet them and Lewis noticed that the hand holding the cigarette shook.

Edwina glanced at the man and lit a cigarette of her own before she spoke. “This is my cousin, Freddie Haliburton. He’s been invalided out of the RAF and will be staying with us for a while.” She paused, sipping at a glass of the sherry she hadn’t offered them. Lewis had been smirking at William’s disappointment and not paying much attention when she’d continued, “Freddie is going to be your new tutor, so I wanted you to get acquainted right away.”

This brought Lewis up with a snap, and as the stranger turned round slowly, he heard Irene give a small gasp beside him.

It took all of Lewis’s effort not to react, though a sidelong glance told him that Irene had raised a hand to her mouth and William had lost his color. The left side of Freddie Haliburton’s face was a shining mass of red scar tissue, closing his eye, dragging the corner of his brow down and the corner of his mouth up in a way that might have looked comical, but did not.

“It’s Group Captain Haliburton,” the man said, and Lewis knew he’d seen the horror in their eyes. “But since we’re going to be such good friends, you may call me Mister Haliburton.” His light, mocking drawl had a slight rasp to it, as if he had difficulty breathing. Then he smiled. Or at least the right side of his mouth rose in a grotesque parody of a smile that was even more unpleasant than his face in repose, and Lewis had suddenly had a very bad feeling about it all.

Now, Freddie Haliburton turned from the chalkboard to face them, and while the shock of seeing his face had lessened, Lewis’s dislike of him had not.

“Mr. Finch,” said Freddie, with the smile Lewis had come to loathe, “shall we see if your ability to think logically about the House of Commons has improved since yesterday? Or could it be that common is as common does?”

KINCAID SLEPT FITFULLY ON THE NARROW bed, waking with the duvet kicked onto the floor, a dull headache, and an image of Annabelle Hammond that had somehow become entwined with a vivid dream of Vic.

But the day that greeted him when he stepped from his room in the farmhouse’s converted stable block was fresh and clear enough to revive his spirits. When he’d breakfasted and thanked his hosts, he set out in the Rover with Madeleine’s directions on the seat beside him.

His route wound up into the hills, and the occasional gap in the thick woodlands gave a superb view of the Surrey Weald. He thought of walking in these woods with Gemma the previous autumn, when they’d climbed Leith Hill together, and the moment’s reminiscing caused him to bypass the turning for the hotel.

After carefully backing up in the narrow road, he entered the drive and bumped slowly along it. As he rounded a curve, the building came into view—massive, redbrick, late Victorian Gothic, and although it was most impressive, he could see why the structure was no longer used as a private house.

Behind the hotel and to the right, the land dropped away down the hillside; to the left the elevation rose slightly, and among the trees he caught a glimpse of a chimney and a red-tiled roof that he assumed must belong to the cottage Madeleine had mentioned.

He left the Rover in the car park in front of the house and walked up the small, graveled lane that led into the woods. As he neared the cottage, he heard voices—no, it was only one voice, he decided as he came closer, rising and falling, then pausing before beginning again.

Another few yards brought him to a clearing in which stood a redbrick cottage surrounded by a low-walled garden. On a sunny patch of lawn he saw a woman, her back to him, pacing and speaking to herself. She wore trousers and a pale blue cotton shirt, and her slender figure was almost boyish, an impression furthered by the short cropping of her auburn hair. She reached the end of her circuit and turned, then came to a surprised halt as she looked up and saw him standing at the bottom of her garden. As her face came into the sunlight, he saw that she was considerably older than he’d first thought, well past middle age, perhaps.

“Hullo,” he called. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m looking for someone called Burne-Jones.”

Coming forward, she rested her hands on the rusting, wrought-iron gate and examined him. “My name is Burne-Jones. What can I do for you?” Her face was pleasant and open, and her eyes, although on close inspection surrounded by a network of fine lines, were a bright and inquisitive blue.

Kincaid slipped his warrant card from his jacket and presented it. “My name’s Kincaid, with Scotland Yard. I’ve some questions about the house”—he gestured back towards the way he had come—“and the people who stayed here during the war.”

“The war?” She frowned and took the card from his hand, scanning it carefully before handing it back. “What could you possibly—” Pausing, she looked back at the cottage, then seemed to come to a decision. “Right. Come in, Superintendent. I was about to make coffee.

“It’s just that I’ve a deadline,” she explained, looking back over her shoulder as he followed her into the house. “When I’m a bit stuck on something, I work it out in the garden.”

As they entered the front room of the cottage, he saw that the worktable set against the front window held a computer monitor and keyboard, and that a good portion of the pleasant room was filled with well-stuffed bookcases. “Are you a writer, Miss Burne-Jones?” he asked, taking in the comfort of the room, with its squashy, chintz furniture, worn Aubusson carpet, and robin’s-egg-blue walls. A large, new television and VCR were positioned to one side of the fireplace.

“A freelance political journalist. And you can dispense with the awkwardness—I’m Irene. Just have a seat and I’ll be back in a moment,” she added as she disappeared through a door he thought must lead to the kitchen. But instead of sitting, he had a look at the bookcases.

Irene Burne-Jones’s taste in reading matter was wide-ranging, with a concentration in British history and political biography, and he gathered from the number of volumes on him that she had a particular fondness for Winston Churchill.

He had removed William Manchester’s The Last Lion and was thumbing through it when Irene reentered with a tray. “Sorry,” she said as she pushed a stack of obviously unread newspapers aside to make room for the tray on the coffee table. “Things tend to accumulate when I’m finishing up an article. Do you like books, Mr. Kincaid?” She glanced at him as she poured coffee into mugs.

“Second nature. My parents own a bookshop,” he answered, returning the volume to its spot and taking a seat in the armchair.

“I’m not sure I’d have liked that,” Irene replied. “Taking books for granted, that is. My parents weren’t great readers, so I found books a revelation.” She added a dash of cream to her coffee and sat back, regarding him curiously. “Now, tell me how I can help you.”

“Did your family own the Hall during the war, Miss Burne—Irene?” he corrected himself.

Irene shook a cigarette from the packet of Dunhills on the table and lit it thoughtfully. “It belonged to my aunt Edwina. There were no surviving Haliburtons, so when she died she left the estate to my father, and upon his death it passed to me. I’m afraid our family has suffered the attrition of spinsters and childless marriages until I’m all that’s left of it.” The glance she gave him was wry and not the least self-pitying.

“And you sold it?”

“What else was I to do?” she said. “The very idea of living there was preposterous. This was in the mid-seventies; I had my life and my career in London, and the upkeep on the place had become prohibitive. You know what happens with these old houses. I kept the cottage as a weekend retreat—my lover at the time was married, so it came in quite handy.…” She gave him an amused glance, as if checking to see if she’d shocked him.

Suddenly wishing he’d known her a quarter of a century ago, he smiled at her, and she went on, “Then a few years ago I decided I’d had enough of the city and moved down here full-time. With a fax and a modem it’s not really necessary to be in the middle of things these days.”

“I believe your aunt Edwina had a boy staying here during the war, her godson. His name was William Hammond.”

“William?” Irene stared at him. “Why do you want to know about William? Has something happened to him?”

“You knew him?” Kincaid asked, his interest quickening.

“Well, of course.” Irene took an impatient drag on her cigarette. “I spent two and a half years of the war here myself, evacuated from London when our house was bombed. We were inseparable … William, Lewis, and I,” she said more softly. Then, raking Kincaid again with her bright blue glance, she ground her cigarette out in the ashtray. “Tell me what’s happened to William.”

“You won’t have seen it, then,” Kincaid said, with a gesture at the stack of unread papers. “It’s his youngest daughter, Annabelle, who had taken over as managing director of the firm. She’s been murdered.”

“Murdered?” Irene exclaimed. “How awful for him. But I don’t understand what that has to do with the Hall.”

Kincaid reached for his coffee before asking, “Did you mean Lewis Finch, a moment ago?”

“Yes, of course. But how would you know that?” Irene frowned. “And what has Lewis to do with William’s daughter?”

“He was having an affair with her, for a start.”

“Lewis? And William’s daughter?” She sounded astonished. And perhaps a bit amused? “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Annabelle Hammond not only had a relationship with Lewis, she sought out his son and seduced him—although I don’t imagine he gave her much argument.”

“She was beautiful?”

“Yes. But it wasn’t only that. She was a very strong personality, used to having her way.”

“Have you any idea why she took such an interest—if you want to call it that—in the Finches?”

“She was extremely curious about Lewis Finch, and that seems to have extended to members of his family. Did you know that Finch has been actively trying to buy William Hammond’s property the last few years?” Kincaid asked.

“No, but it doesn’t surprise me. The Hammond’s warehouse is just the sort of thing Lewis would snap up in a minute.”

“Apparently, Annabelle was as eager to sell as Lewis was to buy—she felt the warehouse was a liability to the future of the firm, and that the profit from such a sale should be used to set up the business in more modern and cost-efficient premises downriver. The thorn in all this was William Hammond. He refused to consider a sale under any circumstances, and he still owned enough shares to block it unless all the other major shareholders voted against him.”

Irene leaned forward and tapped another Dunhill from the packet, then made a slow business of lighting it and extinguishing the match. “You’d think William would have seen that change was inevitable, but he was always a bit obsessive about Hammond’s. I suppose he was fortunate that one of his children inherited his passion for tea, if not for preserving the family heritage. His daughter’s death must have been a dreadful shock for him. And for poor Lewis, if he cared for her. Who’d have thought things would come to such a pass for any of us?” She sighed. “There were a few magic years when I thought we three could overcome anything.”

“During the war?”

“You have to understand our circumstances, Mr. Kincaid. Our friendship was so uncomplicated at first—we were so young, and we had all been removed from our homes, our security. We became family to one another. But we were growing up that last year, and things changed between us.”

“You fell in love with William,” guessed Kincaid.

“Oh, no. It wasn’t like that at all,” Irene said quietly, gazing out the casement of the sitting room window, where fat bees sampled the roses and lavender in the perennial bed. She looked up and met his eyes with her direct gaze. “You see, Superintendent, I fell in love with Lewis.”

“DOODLEBUGS,” SAID IRENE. “THAT’S WHAT EDWINA’S friends at the War Office are calling them.” She kicked her heels against a hay bale outside Zeus’s stall, and the white cotton shirt she was wearing above an old pair of Edwina’s jodhpurs looked luminous in the light of the barn. They had turned the horses out to graze on the lush June grass, then Irene had followed Lewis back into the barn with the determined expression that meant she had something to say.

He looked up from forking the dirty straw out of the stall but didn’t answer. He supposed it had been too much to hope that the raids of the winter and spring would be the last Hitler could throw at them. But with the Allied invasion of Europe earlier in the month, they had begun to hear rumors of a German retaliation weapon, and three days ago had come the first serious assault on Greater London.

“Everyone’s saying they’re really pilotless planes, and that you hear the engine stop just before they explode,” Irene continued, hugging herself as if the thought made her cold in spite of the summer warmth.

“I’m still going home, bombs or no bombs. Anything’s better than that bastard digging at me all the time.” There was no need to say who he meant: the presence of Freddie Haliburton seemed to have worked its way into every nook and cranny of their lives.

At first they’d thought Edwina would get over feeling sorry for him because of his injuries and begin to see him for what he was. But they learned soon enough that Freddie presented a different side to Edwina, and it seemed that she was too honest herself to suspect deception in others.

Freddie was always watching the three of them, always eavesdropping, always ferreting out a weakness or the smallest misdeed as a target for his ruthless tongue. That morning he’d picked apart Lewis’s translation of Virgil with such vicious sarcasm that Lewis’s face had flamed from the humiliation of it, and when he’d protested, Freddie had pinched his earlobe so hard he’d nearly cried aloud. It was only Irene’s quick hand on his arm and a quelling glance from William that had kept him in his seat, and he’d been simmering ever since.

“Well, I think you’re bloody selfish, Lewis Finch.” Irene glared at him, her chin up. “We swore a blood pact, the three of us, that we’d stick together no matter what—”

Lewis jammed the fork into the straw. “It’s all right for you. He doesn’t call you a guttersnipe, and a … a barrow boy—”

“Why is that worse than him making fun of me because I’m a girl? We’re all in this, and it’s not been easy for William, either. You know how Freddie loves to tell him horrid stories about the war just because he knows how much they upset him.” She slid down the bale until her booted feet touched the ground and her face was almost on a level with his. “Sometimes I think you’re the only thing that keeps William from doing something really silly. You can’t just leave us—”

“You’d be all right; you and William will stick up for each other—”

“How can you be so bloody stupid, Lewis? I’m trying to tell you that I don’t want you to go. Can’t you see that?”

Baffled, he stared at her. Under the thin white shirt her chest was rising and falling quickly, and her blue eyes snapped with anger.

“But …” His tongue refused to cooperate. “I don’t—”

Irene stretched up on tiptoe, placed her hands on his shoulders, and kissed him hard on the mouth. Then she stepped back and put her hands on her hips. “Now tell me you want to go.”

“I—” Lewis’s head spun with confusion and a rush of desire. For months he’d tried to ignore the way Irene had made him feel; he’d never dreamed it might be the same for her. “I—” he began again, then gave up trying to sort things out in words and reached for her. This time her lips were soft against his and he felt the pressure of her breasts against his chest.

“Irene.” He pulled away with a groan. “What about William? If he sees us—”

“He won’t. He’s working on some project in the attic and he told me to sod off, it was none of my business.” She added, “This can be our secret,” as she kissed him again.

Lewis felt he might drown in the pleasure of it, but he didn’t care. With his hands, he felt the curve of her back and the definition of her ribs, then the beginning of the swell of her breasts. So lost was he that it took a moment for the faint cough to register, and before he could react he heard Freddie say, “How sweet. Love amidst the hay.”

Lewis and Irene jumped apart as if shot and whirled towards the door. Freddie stood just inside, his shoulder propped against the jamb, his thumbs hooked through his braces. He stepped forward, smiling and shaking his head. “My, my. It’s a good thing I’m the one volunteered to look for you two, isn’t it? It might have been Edwina, and then where would we be?”

Beside Lewis, Irene drew a swift breath and opened her mouth, then shut it again with a sharp shake of her head.

“Look,” said Lewis, anger overcoming his fear. “You won’t say anything to Edwina.”

Freddie’s smile grew wider, distorting the grotesque mask of his face. “Not unless it suits me,” he said, very softly, and the menace in his words made the hair rise on Lewis’s arms. “But just now she wants you inside, Lewis, and if I were you I’d pop along like a good lad.”

“I’m coming with you to the house,” said Irene as Lewis took a step towards Freddie, and taking Lewis by the elbow, she tugged him from the barn.

“Don’t be stupid,” she hissed as they crossed the yard. “That’s just what he wants.”

“What do you suppose he means to do?” whispered Lewis worriedly.

“Hold us hostage.” Irene gave him a quick glance, then released his arm. “But I don’t care. It’s worth it.”

“Irene—”

“It’ll be all right; we’ll talk later. You’d best go see what Edwina wants.” Then she slipped ahead of him through the kitchen door and went to help Cook with the scones for tea.

In the corridor, Lewis straightened his collar and smoothed his hair before tapping on Edwina’s door. Edwina seldom asked to see him on his own and his pulse gave a moment’s anxious jump, but there was no way she could know about what had just happened in the barn. He took a breath and went in.

Edwina stood before the open window, staring out and smoking, and the first thing Lewis noticed was that the cigarette in her right hand had an inch of ash on its end. As he watched, the ash fell to the carpet and shattered, but she didn’t seem to notice.

It was then that he saw the yellowed slip of paper she held in her left hand, half crumpled in her fist. His first thought was that it was John Pebbles, or Mr. Cuddy, killed in action—but for that she’d certainly have called the others in as well.

Then she raised her head and met his eyes, and he knew.

“I SUPPOSE IT WAS A TERRIBLE irony,” Irene said. “His parents survived so much, then to be killed in the first wave of the V1s. If I remember correctly, they were just coming out of the corner shop, such an ordinary thing, on a June day much like this one.…” She shook her head and lit another Dunhill.

“Lewis refused to let William come to the funeral, or me, but Edwina insisted on going with him. He would never speak about it afterwards, or about his parents. Except once.”

Kincaid waited in silence as she smoked for a bit, and in the clear light he could see the deep creases running from her nose to the corners of her mouth—laugh lines, his mother had always called them, but he thought Irene’s face expressed a multitude of joys and griefs.

“He said if he’d been there, it might not have happened,” she went on at last. “He might have heard the rocket in time.”

“And you blamed yourself for his guilt, because you wanted him to stay,” Kincaid said. He knew about guilt, about the relentless game of what if the mind could play.

“Yes. And I tried to comfort him.” For a moment, Irene seemed lost in the memory, then her blue eyes met his. “But nothing could have prepared us for what happened afterwards. You see, Edwina and Freddie Haliburton, our tutor, were killed in an accident very shortly after Lewis’s parents died.” She ground out her half smoked cigarette in the ashtray. “Edwina’s death … it was just too much grief—for all of us, but particularly for Lewis, who had lost both his brothers early in the war, as well as his parents. He left after Edwina’s funeral. There was nothing I could do to persuade him to stay.”

“It must have been hard for you.”

“I went back to my family in Kilburn, bombs and all, but we made it through the last of the war without incident.”

“And William Hammond?”

“William went home to Greenwich. I had the occasional letter, then they dwindled to Christmas cards.”

“And you never heard from Lewis?”

Irene’s smile was self-mocking. “I had fantasies for years that he would find me again someday. Then in the sixties his name began appearing in the papers, and I did some research. He must have lied about his age, because he did a brief stint in the army at the end of the war. Then when he was demobbed at the end of 1945, he joined a rebuilding crew and worked his way up in the construction business. There were great opportunities after the war for those with the brains and the talent to take advantage, and Lewis Finch had both.”

“But you never contacted him?”

“No. I toyed with the idea, of course, but I’d learned he was married. I’ve never been much of a masochist,” she added with a smile.

Kincaid thought for a moment. “William Hammond’s older daughter told us that he had warned her and Annabelle against Lewis Finch. Have you any idea why?”

“I can’t imagine,” said Irene, but Kincaid thought he detected a note of doubt in her voice. She rose, and going to her desk, she idly straightened the papers on its surface. “Although I suppose there was some tension between them that summer.”

“Was William jealous of you and Lewis?”

Irene frowned. “I’m not sure William even noticed what was happening between Lewis and me. He had concerns of his own.” Kincaid waited for her to continue. Softly, she said, “I promised myself I’d never become one of those old biddies who drone on about their youth. But we led an idyllic life in the year and a half we had together, William and Lewis and I, in spite of the hardships of the war. Then Freddie Haliburton came, and everything changed.” Turning, she met Kincaid’s eyes again. “He had a talent for digging out weaknesses and making lives miserable that I’ve seldom seen since.”

“You said he died?” Kincaid asked.

“Yes. It’s a wonder he wasn’t killed when his fighter crashed in the war, if he flew with the same disregard for the laws of nature he demonstrated when he got behind the wheel of a car. He went up to London every few weeks to drink himself senseless in the officers’ club, and I suspect to do other things that I didn’t understand at the time.” She shook her head. “I can’t say I’ve met many truly wicked people in my life, but Freddie … Freddie was the serpent in the garden of Eden.”

LEWIS STARED OUT THE SCHOOLROOM WINDOW at the rain-washed July morning and tried not to think of other July mornings.… The July he and William had learned to spot planes … summer hikes with Mr. Cuddy on the Downs, imagining themselves to be Roman soldiers … teaching Irene to ride Edwina’s hunter. There were so many closed roads in his mind now … places he could no longer bear to go … and always the one that teased at the edge of thought. Home. His mum, and his dad …

He turned back to the five pages of Latin translation Freddie had assigned him before their regular class time began, as punishment for some transgression, but really because he knew how much Lewis hated it. And hated him.

The door opened and Lewis tensed. He never knew now when the ruler might smack down across his knuckles, or the cruel fingers pinch his earlobe until the blood came.

“What a good boy you are,” said Freddie behind him, and Lewis heard the rasping of his breath. The same fire that had destroyed half of Freddie Haliburton’s face had seared the delicate tissues of his lungs, and Lewis found himself wishing more and more often that the burning plane had left nothing behind but scraps of charred flesh. The thought made him shudder.

Freddie said, “Cold?” and moved a step closer. Then Lewis felt Freddie’s hand settle on his shoulder, and he steeled himself for the pain.

But the pain didn’t come, only a gentle stroking of his shoulder—and somehow this was far worse. “Don’t.” He wrenched himself free, his feet tangling in the chair legs as he tried to scramble away; then he turned and, stumbling, faced his tormentor. “Don’t touch me,” he said huskily, panting against the nausea that threatened to overwhelm him.

“You wound me, Lewis. I might even think you find me distasteful,” Freddie said in his most dangerous drawl. “I’ll wager you don’t say that to Irene when she touches you. It’s quite unfair, don’t you think, that her fair face should render her your favor?”

“You leave Irene out of this,” said Lewis, not understanding everything Freddie had said, but hearing the threat.

“Oh, but you’re the one who won’t leave Irene alone, Lewis. I’ve seen the way you look at her. I’ve even seen the way you touch her when you think no one’s looking. And sometimes I do wonder what Edwina would think if she knew …” He smiled and Lewis backed up another step.

“You don’t seriously think she would approve, do you, boy? You can’t seriously think Edwina would consider a trumped-up barrow boy good enough for her own niece? Because you’ll never be good enough. You’ll never be anything but slum rubbish, no matter how much education you have, no matter how hard you try to speak like a gentleman—” He leaned forward and hissed, “You will never be one. You do understand that, Lewis?”

Lewis stared at the drop of spittle that had collected at the corner of Freddie’s ruined mouth, hoping desperately that if he kept his mind on some small and disgusting detail, the words would bounce away harmlessly, like hail against the slates.

“Answer me, boy.” The ruler appeared in Freddie’s hand as if by magic.

Then came the sound of voices in the hall, and a moment later William and Irene burst in, laughter dying on their lips as they took in the faces before them.

“Aren’t we eager this morning,” drawled Freddie, making a quick recovery, while Lewis slipped back into his chair and bent over his copybook.

Freddie started them on drills, but the atmosphere in the schoolroom was more uneasy than usual, and Lewis found it impossible to meet Irene’s eyes.

By midmorning they were sweating from the heat, and Freddie had begun the restless pacing that Lewis had learned meant trouble was brewing.

After a bit, Freddie stopped behind William and looked over his shoulder until William began to fidget. Then he said, conversationally, “Have you seen the papers this morning, William? They’re reporting a successful bombing run last night over Germany, a score of direct hits. Of course”—he paused—“it’s too bad some of those targets happened to be in heavily populated areas.”

William went white, then pressed his lips together, refusing to be baited. They all knew his views on civilian bombings. It was a subject he and Lewis had avoided by mutual consent after a few charged discussions.

William had argued that any civilian deaths were unconscionable, whatever the victim’s nationality, and that Lewis should feel the same because of what had happened to his parents—while to Lewis it seemed just the opposite, and he couldn’t understand how William could condone restraint against the Germans after what they had done to London.

“Women, children …,” Freddie clucked sympathetically, and turned on his heel, pacing again. “Of course, there were pilots shot down, too, and that is rather a shame, wouldn’t you agree?” He stopped near his desk and studied William. “Or perhaps you wouldn’t agree with that, dear Will? Perhaps your sympathies lie elsewhere?” Reaching into his desk, he pulled out a twine-wrapped bundle and brought it over, dropping it on the table before them. “I do think you could spend your time in the attic a bit more profitably.”

William reached out a hand as if to snatch the bundle, but Freddie tapped him on the knuckles with the ruler and drawled, “I imagine Lewis and Irene would like to see what you’ve been doing.” He jerked at the twine, and leaflets spilled out across the tabletop.

Lewis stared curiously, then with growing horror as he realized what they were—pacifist tracts, with a crudely drawn cartoon showing a leering RAF pilot deliberately strafing a fleeing German child.

“I … they sent them to me, this group in London,” protested William. “I hadn’t given them out to anyone.” He reached for them again, but once more Freddie interceded, gathering them back into a bundle.

“I’ll keep these for you,” Freddie said kindly. “Just in case Edwina or any of her friends at the War Office should want to see them.”

Eyes on William, Lewis said, “How could you do such a thing?” He stood up, past caring if it made Freddie angry. “I think they’re … they’re disgusting.”

“I didn’t mean—” William began, but Lewis had pushed back his chair and started for the door. “Lewis, wait!” William shouted after him.

Lewis glanced back, once, before slamming the schoolroom door shut behind him, and the expressions on their faces stayed burned into his memory—Irene, her brow furrowed with concern, her lips shaping his name; William, his eyes dark with fright; and Freddie, the good half of his face stretched into a grimace of satisfaction.

HE KNEW HIS FATHER’S HABITS. LEWIS would leave his office midafternoon to check round the building sites—he never trusted anyone else to get things right; that was one of the things that had made working with him impossible. And so Gordon waited near the gunmetal-gray Mercedes in the Heron Quays car park, smoking, watching the sky darken as heavy banks of clouds moved in from the west. The stifling air smelled faintly sulphurous.

Gordon had given up trying to prepare what he would say. His mind was blank, suspended between fragmented thoughts of Annabelle and a recurring memory of his father lifting him from the waves when he was a child. When he saw Lewis come round the end of the building, he ground out his cigarette with the heel of his boot and moved to intercept him.

“Dad.”

Lewis looked up, hand on the Mercedes’s door. “Gordon! What are you doing here?”

“I need to speak to you.”

“We can go back in the office—”

“No, here. I want to know what happened the night Annabelle died. She came to see you, didn’t she?”

“I never knew until that night that there was something between you. I’d not have kept on seeing her—”

“You couldn’t let me have one thing you hadn’t stamped as yours, could you? You always had—”

“No, it wasn’t like that,” Lewis said tiredly, and Gordon saw lines in his father’s face he hadn’t noticed before. “I never meant to hurt you—I never meant to hurt Annabelle—”

“Then why did you plan to cheat her?”

“How did you know about that?” Lewis said quietly.

“You’re a fucking hypocrite, Lewis Finch. After you spent years drumming the importance of integrity into me, it turns out you’re no better than all the rest. Annabelle told me that night what you’d done—”

“You wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t about Annabelle. It wasn’t even about the business, except as a means to an end.”

“And what end was that?”

“I wanted to take something from him, something he loved as much as I loved Irene, and Edwina, and he always cared more for the business and his bloody family name than he did people. But it’s nothing to do with you—”

“Do you mean William Hammond? Did you kill Annabelle to get back at William Hammond?” Gordon was shouting, past caring if anyone heard.

“What?” Lewis sounded utterly baffled. “What are you talking about?”

“When she came to see you, she told you the deal was off, didn’t she? And she told you she loved me—she said she meant to prove she loved me—and you killed her!”

“You think I killed Annabelle?” Lewis spoke slowly, as if trying to get it clear in his own head, and for the first time Gordon felt doubt. “But I thought you … When she left that night I thought it was you she was going to see.… I was afraid …”

Gordon stared at his father. “Are you saying that all this time you thought it was me?” His throat tightened with a wave of relief he wasn’t sure he could allow himself to feel. “And I thought … they said it was someone who loved her, someone who laid her body out so carefully, and I couldn’t believe that you’d killed her and just left her.…”

“Laid her body out?”

“They said she looked serene.…” Gordon saw that his father was no longer listening.

“I should have seen it from the beginning,” Lewis said softly, his gaze still far away. A gust swirled dust and rubbish round their ankles, and in the west lightning arced from cloud to cloud.

“Seen what?”

Lewis yanked open the door of the Mercedes. “This time I’m not going to let him get away with it.”

“What are you talking about? Let who get away with it?” As Gordon reached for his father, the slamming car door brushed the tips of his fingers. “Dad!”

But Lewis was already reversing out of the parking space, and the spinning tires threw grit into Gordon’s eyes as the car accelerated away.

CHAPTER 15Trade-union and community campaigns to prevent this decline were transmuted in the 1980s into campaigns to redevelop the area in the best interests of local people, to encourage investment which would bring more jobs, to improve transport, schooling and health care. Alongside these concerns was a concern that the community should not lose touch with its roots.

Eve Hostettler, from Memories of

Childhood on the Isle of Dogs, 1870–1970

“We could use a bit of rain, old girl,” said George Brent. He was on his knees in the vegetable patch in his back garden, with Sheba sitting beside him, watching him as if he might turn up something tasty. “Marrows are getting to be as scrawny as I am, in this blasted heat.”

Sheba lifted her sleek black muzzle, sniffing the air, and George straightened his back a bit as he sniffed, too. His nose wasn’t what it used to be, but he could smell rain, and the sky to the west looked thunderous. “Rheumatism’s playing up—that’s a good sign,” he added as he stood and worked the stiffness from his joints. “Maybe we’d best pick them ripe tomatoes, just in case.” He was proud of his tomatoes—he started them early in the spring, on the kitchen windowsill, and bragged on them to the neighbors whenever the opportunity arose. Reaching for the basket he’d left on the grass, he bent to the task and had it half filled when he heard a whistle and a shout from the house.

“Dad. What are you doing out here in the garden with a storm coming on, you stubborn old goat?”

“Eh, lad, come and give me a hand,” called George, beaming at the sight of his only son, who had been out on his merchant ship these past two weeks.

A large, good-natured man with dark, curling hair just beginning to recede, George Brent, Jr. was never called anything other than “Georgie.” He strode across the small square of lawn and thumped his dad on the shoulder, then took the basket. “These will make a proper feast with the sausages I’ve brought for tea, and I’ve put the kettle on.”

“Good lad.”

When they had settled at the small, oilclothed table with their sausages, fried bread, tomatoes, and steaming cups of tea, George proceeded to tell his son about the events that had taken place in his absence. He could talk now about finding the body without getting a lump in his throat, and in every telling the red-haired young woman grew more and more beautiful. “Like an angel, she was,” he said now, wiping up the last of his tomato with a bit of bread, and thinking of Lewis Finch with a twinge of guilt. He couldn’t quite bring himself to tell Georgie what he had confessed to Janice Coppin.

A crack of thunder rattled the crockery on the shelves and Sheba yipped. “This one’s going to be a corker,” George said, but as he poured them another cuppa, he wished he could bring the image that had been nagging at him into focus. A face seen at the wrong time and in the wrong place, it hovered at the very edge of his consciousness. He gave up, shaking his head in disgust, and proceeded to inform his son that perhaps that Janice wasn’t so bad after all.

AS DROPS OF RAIN SPATTERED AGAINST the windscreen, Lewis put the wipers on delay and switched on the headlamps. He drove blindly, instinctively south, besieged by the memories he had kept buried for so long. He had thought he owned them, that he could use the knowledge of the past to fuel his hatred and yet remain unscathed. But he’d been wrong; he saw that now. And he saw, too late, that Annabelle had reminded him of Irene—

IRENE HAD COME TO HIM THAT night, in his room over the stable.

“Lewis,” she’d whispered, sitting on the edge of his bed and shaking his shoulder. “I want to talk to you.”

He’d awakened instantly. “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t—”

“It’ll be all right—they’re all asleep.” She settled herself more comfortably against his hip as he struggled to prop himself up on his elbows. “Listen, you mustn’t mind about William. You know he doesn’t mean any harm—”

“That’s no excuse,” said Lewis, his anger rushing back. “Where does he think that sort of rubbish comes from? Straight from the Germans, that’s where. And when our men are dying—it could be John next, or Mr. Cuddy—”

“He’s only thinking about innocent people being killed, and he doesn’t understand how you feel about your parents, not really. He thinks you can be logical about something like that—”

“Logical? What does he bloody know about anything?” And to his shame, Lewis began to cry—the hiccuping, wrenching sobs he’d never let out, even at his parents’ funeral. Irene sat quite still, her hand on his shoulder, silent and concerned, and when he could manage, he said, “I know it’s stupid, but I keep thinking if I’d only been with them, I might have saved them somehow—”

“Lewis, you’d have been killed, too, you know that. That’s the last thing your mum and dad would have wanted.” She pulled back his blanket and slid into bed beside him, wrapping her arms round him.

“Irene—”

“I want to be with you, Lewis. We could be bombed, too—the rockets fall short of their targets all the time—and I don’t want to die not knowing what it’s like.”

She kissed him, pressing her body against his, and for a long moment he let go—then he pulled away, panting. “We can’t; what would Edwina—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered, her mouth against his ear. “Nothing matters but us. Now. I want to be everything to you—mother, sister, lover—and I want you to need me more than you’ve ever needed anyone.”

He felt her trembling against him, and when he kissed her she tasted of tears. She was right—no one had ever loved him like this. Nothing mattered but this. And then sensation washed his mind clean of any thought at all.

LEWIS WOKE, AS HE USUALLY DID, when the first hint of dawn lightened the oblong of his window. Irene still lay beside him, her chest rising and falling gently as she slept. When he woke her, she sat up groggily and smiled at him.

“I suppose I’d better get back before anyone stirs,” she said, yawning and snuggling back down under the covers.

“You’d better hurry,” he urged. “You know how early Cook gets up sometimes.” As tempted as he was by her warm body against his, he felt suddenly uneasy, and he pushed her out of his bed with a hasty kiss.

From his window, he watched her cross the yard in the faint gray light, and for an instant he could have sworn he saw a curtain twitch at one of the upstairs windows.

ALTHOUGH LEWIS HAD KEPT HIS ROOM above the stable, he had for several years shared a bathroom on the second floor with William.

That evening, after tea, he’d finished his bath and had just stepped from the tub when he heard the door open behind him. William, come to patch things up at last, he thought as he reached for his towel, but when he glanced up at the mirror he saw nothing but the fog from his bath. “It’s taken you long enough,” he said, determined to make light of it, for they had been avoiding one another all day.

Then he heard hoarse breathing close by, and arms went round him, pinning him hard with his knees against the cast-iron tub.

“Hasn’t it?” said Freddie, and Lewis felt him fumbling against him, and then came a searing pain.

For an instant, he didn’t understand what was happening. Then, as Freddie thrust against him, he began to struggle with all the strength of his rage and humiliation. Freddie tightened his grasp, hissing, “You’ll do what I want, boy. I saw her leave this morning—I know what you’ve been—”

The door opened and Lewis wrenched himself round, but he couldn’t free himself from Freddie’s grip.

William stood in the doorway.

And Freddie smiled. “You know all about it, don’t you, William? You learned it at school. And if you know what’s good for you … and your little cause … you’ll bugger off … now.”

William stood frozen, white-faced with shock, his hand raised, his lips parted in protest.

Then he met Lewis’s eyes—and turned away. The door clicked shut behind him.

GORDON STOOD OUTSIDE THE CALL BOX at Mudchute Station, staring at the smudged card he’d found in his trouser pocket. Gemma had given it to him the first time she’d come to his flat—it seemed ages ago, not a mere five days—and she’d scribbled her mobile number on the back.

He’d already provided the police with enough information to damn his father—would he make things even worse by ringing her now? But as he turned away, he saw again Lewis’s face as he had sped off in the car, and an urgency that made his stomach feel hollow drove him back to the phone.

When Gemma answered, he said without preamble, “Lewis didn’t kill Annabelle.”

“Gordon?”

“All the time I thought he’d killed her, he was thinking the same about me. And when he realized it wasn’t me, he said—it didn’t make sense.…”

“Go on,” said Gemma, her voice tense.

“He said …” Gordon paused, struggling to remember the exact words. “He said he should have known … and then something about not letting him get away with it again. Then he drove off.… He looked … I’m afraid he’ll do something crazy.…”

“Gordon?”

He didn’t answer. Without warning, the pieces had come together in a way he hadn’t thought possible, and he felt a surge of anger so intense it left him shaking.

“Gordon?”

Realizing he was still holding the receiver to his ear, he said, “I have to go,” and aimed the phone at the cradle as he turned away.

He reached his flat in minutes and took the stairs three at a time, startling Sam into a volley of barking when he burst through the door. “It’s all right, boy,” he said automatically. But he knew nothing was all right unless he could make it so.

Dropping to his knees, he dug under the bed until his fingers touched the smooth wood of the box stored there, a gift from his father on his twenty-first birthday, one of the few possessions he had carted from place to place over the years. He slid it free and clicked up the latches.

“It’s a goddamned antique,” he muttered to Sam. A sentimental memento—he’d never dreamed of shooting anyone with it. But his father’s Webley Mark IV lay snug in its red felt cradle, clean and oiled, and beside it was an unopened box of .38 cartridges.

KINCAID HAD DRIVEN BACK FROM SURREY slowly, thinking about Irene Burne-Jones and the things she had told him. He doubted Irene had ever loved anyone the way she’d loved Lewis Finch, and he’d found he hadn’t the heart to suggest to her that Lewis might have murdered Annabelle Hammond.

Knowing something now of Lewis Finch’s history, he tried to imagine that Annabelle’s rejection of Lewis that night had been the loss that had tipped him into despair, driving him to murder. But for the first time he had doubts, and he still didn’t understand what had made Lewis so determined to take William Hammond’s property from him.

He was still mulling it over when he pulled into the car park at Limehouse Station and saw Gemma coming out the door. She wore a black, sleeveless dress that just brushed the tops of her knees, but his pleasure at the sight of her faded when he saw her distracted frown. When he called out to her, she looked his way and came to intercept him. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Gordon Finch just rang me. He said he was sure his father didn’t kill Annabelle—and then he hung up.”

“Was he ringing from his flat?”

“Probably a call box. He doesn’t have a phone.”

“We’ll try the flat first. Get in.”

She came round the car, and as she buckled herself in, he asked, “Is that all he said?”

“No. Duncan, they were protecting each other—Gordon and Lewis—but neither of them knew it. When Lewis realized Gordon hadn’t killed her, he said he should have known, and that he wasn’t going to ‘let him get away with it again.’ ”

“Let who?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think Gordon knew.”

Kincaid’s phone rang as he pulled out into West India Dock Road. He answered, then said to Gemma as he rang off, “That was Janice. Forensics just called. They’ve found a trace amount of hair and blood in a sample taken from one of the tea chests in Annabelle Hammond’s office.”

“So it looks like she was killed at Hammond’s,” Gemma said. “Who would she have met there in the middle of the night?”

“If we assume it was neither of the Finches?” He switched on his wipers as rain spattered the windscreen. “Martin Lowell? If he wouldn’t let her come to his flat, and she wanted to have it out with him?”

“We’ve had Brandy Bannister in again this morning. She hasn’t budged an inch on her statement. It looks as though Lowell’s alibi is good.” Gemma sounded unhappy about it.

Kincaid frowned. “Maybe we should look at this from another angle. Who, besides Annabelle, had access to the warehouse?”

“Reg Mortimer and Teresa, of course, but Mortimer’s the most obvious. He knew Annabelle liked to go there when she was troubled, and he desperately wanted to talk to her.”

“But if he killed her in the warehouse, how did he get her body to the park?” Kincaid asked. “We’re back to square one.” Then, as he shook his head in frustration, he remembered something. “Teresa Robbins said that since his wife died, William Hammond turned up at the warehouse at odd hours, that he couldn’t bear to let go of the business.… What if it wasn’t a case of Annabelle arranging to meet someone, but an accidental encounter.…”

“And you think William might have seen someone?”

“It’s possible,” Kincaid said slowly. “But it’s also possible that it was William who killed her.”

“William Hammond?” Gemma’s voice rose on a note of disbelief. “Her own father? The poor man was devastated—you saw him.”

“I don’t doubt that. But … everything seems to come back to William Hammond and Lewis Finch.” He told her about his interview with Irene Burne-Jones. As he negotiated Westferry Circus and headed south on Westferry Road, thunder boomed and rain began to beat against the roof of the car. “What did Hammond have against Finch? And why was Finch so determined to buy the warehouse when he knew its importance to William Hammond? Something happened in the last few months the three of them were together—William, Lewis, and Irene—that Irene isn’t willing to talk about, even after all these years.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” protested Gemma. “Why would William Hammond kill Annabelle when she’d just made up her mind to call off the deal with Lewis?”

“I don’t know. But if Lewis Finch said he wasn’t going to ‘let him get away with it again,’ what could he have meant but murder? Someone was killed in those last few months those three children were together—the children’s tutor. Irene said it was an accident.…”

“But what if it wasn’t?” said Gemma. She shook her head. “We’re missing too many pieces. Gordon must know something we don’t—”

“And I don’t think it’s very likely we’re going to find him sitting at his flat, waiting for us.” He peered through the windscreen, but the curtain of rain obscured virtually everything. “Ring William Hammond’s house—do you have his number?”

“In my notebook.” Gemma found the number and dialed her mobile. “No answer.”

“Try Lewis Finch.”

“At home?”

Glancing at his watch, Kincaid nodded. “It’s already after five.”

But Lewis Finch didn’t answer, either, and after a moment Gemma disconnected. Slowly, she said, “If it was William Hammond Lewis meant, and he thought he might find him at the warehouse …”

“It’s worth a try,” Kincaid said as a flash of lightning illuminated the long line of cars crawling down Westferry Road ahead of them. “But we’re not getting anywhere in a hurry.”

AS LEWIS PULLED UP THE MERCEDES on Saunders Ness, the square bulk of the Hammond’s warehouse was scarcely visible in the blinding rain. His hands shook as he lifted them from the wheel. He was sweating and nauseated, as powerless to stop the flow of memories now as he had once been to stop Freddie Haliburton.…

He had passed the night in a black fury unabated by exhaustion. Unable to bear the thought of seeing anyone, or speaking to anyone, he had started on his chores in the barn without going up to the Hall for breakfast. He didn’t know what he would do if he saw William—he didn’t even want to think about William—but Irene was not so easy to avoid.

She came looking for him, as he knew she would, gliding silently through the barn door and stopping in the shaft of sunlight that fell from the high window. “Lewis? What happened to you last night? Why didn’t you come to breakfast this morning?”

“Just go away, Irene. I don’t want to talk to you,” he said roughly, turning back to the hay he was forking into Zeus’s manger. He felt her watching him, but she didn’t speak, and after a moment she went out again. Knowing how much he’d hurt her only stoked his rage. How could he touch her after what Freddie had done to him? And how could he stop it from happening again? Freddie had made clear that his refusal would mean compromising Irene, and that was the one thing Lewis could not allow to happen.

It seemed to him that he had only one option … and that would mean never seeing her again.

IT WAS MIDMORNING WHEN FREDDIE FOUND him, sitting hunched against the stone wall that ran behind the kitchen garden.

“There you are,” Freddie said sweetly as he came round the corner. “It’s not like you to miss lessons, Lewis. Whatever is the matter?”

Lewis rose, fists clenched, but Freddie stopped just out of reach.

“Cook’s quite worried about you, you know. If you miss another meal she’ll feel it’s her duty to tell Edwina, and I don’t think we want that, do we?” Freddie stretched his face into the grimace that mimicked a smile. “Oh, and when you’ve had your breakfast, you can get my car ready for me, there’s a good boy. I’m going up to town for the night and I want everything shipshape.”

He turned away, as if that settled everything between them, but when he reached the end of the wall he looked over his shoulder and said, “But I’ll be back—and there’s always tomorrow, isn’t there, Lewis?”

IT CAME TO HIM AS HE lay beneath Freddie’s car. It was so simple—a nick in a hydraulic line and the whole system would lose pressure—that he wondered why he hadn’t seen it before. Everyone knew Freddie Haliburton drove like a maniac—even Cook was always clucking and predicting he’d come to a bad end. No one would think anything of it. He would be safe, and Irene would be safe, and William … he didn’t care about William.

He felt as if he were divided into two people—one who concentrated on the task, and one who observed. That Lewis heard his mother’s voice, but the Lewis who acted ignored them both, and his hands were steady and precise with the knowledge John Pebbles had given him. It was not until he had finished and slid from beneath the car that he realized he was being watched.

William stood just inside the stable door, and Lewis had no idea how long he had been there or what he’d seen. “You have to understand,” William said, stepping forward, and Lewis saw that his face was white and strained. “My grandfather was killed in the Somme. My father was decorated, even though he was only nineteen, and he’s suffered from the gas ever since. If they found out—”

“I don’t care about your bloody pamphlets! You could have stopped him—”

“There was nothing I could do! And now he says maybe he’ll tell my parents anyway, just because he hates cowards. They’ll disown me—”

“Then it serves you bloody right, William Hammond!” Lewis shoved William hard in the chest and bolted out the door.

He ran through the yard and down the hill to the meadow, then along the stream, legs and heart pumping, until at last he collapsed facedown in the soft moss along the bank, sobbing as if his heart would break.

It was an hour before he returned to the house, calm from his weeping, determined to undo what he had done. Then he would tell Irene goodbye and leave.… It was the only way. He’d lie about his age and join up, or get work somewhere, it didn’t matter.

But when he reached the stable yard he heard a wail of anguish from the kitchen, and he knew he had come too late.

IT WAS IRENE WHO TOLD HIM that Edwina had been killed with Freddie. There had been a farm cart in the lane, just over the crest of the hill, and the car had been unable to stop in time. It was Irene who had grown up from one minute to the next and taken charge, helping Cook to her bed and going to ring her father with the news; Irene who had left Lewis alone in the kitchen with William.…

“She wasn’t supposed to go,” Lewis said numbly. His brain and his tongue felt as if they were frozen, and the words seemed to hang in the air, brittle as ice.

“She … she changed her mind at the last minute.” William sat slumped at the kitchen table, his face blotchy with weeping. “He was taking her to see my parents. He said … he said he was going to tell them. I didn’t think. I didn’t think she’d be …”

The import of William’s words dawned slowly on Lewis. He shook his head from side to side to stop the ringing in his ears. “You mean you knew? You knew about the car … and you let Edwina go?”

“I’m not as stupid as you think. You jumped when you saw me standing in the barn, so when you ran away I looked.… I only thought it would delay them—”

“Delay them? You know how Freddie drives and you let Edwina go?” He lunged for William, yanking him from his chair by his collar. “You—you bastard!” Lewis shouted, shaking him. “I’ll kill you for this.” When his fist struck William’s face, the sight of the bright blood flowing from William’s nose only made him angrier.

William hit him back and they grappled, straining for a better hold, another blow.

Then Irene was between them, shouting, pulling them apart.

“Stop it! What’s the matter with you? Stop it! Lewis, how could you?”

Panting, he stared at her. “I … He …” In that moment Lewis realized he couldn’t tell Irene what he’d done that day—he could never tell her. And when he met William’s eyes, he saw that William knew it, too.

He had no memory of the days before Edwina’s funeral, only of Irene, afterwards, coming to him in the barn. His case was packed; he had meant to leave without telling her goodbye.

“You can’t tell me you don’t love me,” she said. “I won’t believe you.”

“No,” he had answered her. “I won’t tell you that. But it doesn’t matter now. Nothing does. I’m sorry.”

He had left Irene then, left the Hall, left them all behind. And he’d never told anyone the truth … until the night Annabelle had told him she loved his son and called him a cheat and a liar. She’d said she’d never hurt her father for him, that she couldn’t believe she had ever considered doing something that would cause William Hammond so much pain.

He hadn’t known until that moment how much Annabelle had come to mean to him—that she should turn against him was beyond bearing. His words poured out—he’d wanted to hurt her—and he told her that her precious father was a coward and a murderer, and he told her exactly what William had done.

Lewis opened the door of the car and stumbled out into the rain. He was soaked by the time he reached the warehouse, but he hardly felt it. The door was unlocked, and he stepped for the first time into the building he had tried for years to destroy.

As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, he saw that the large main floor was empty, but a light shone from a door on the catwalk that ran along the left-hand side of the building. Feeling his way carefully to the stairs, he began to climb. He heard a faint sound, and as he neared the top of the staircase, the sound sorted itself into a singsong voice, rising and falling beyond the open doorway.

William Hammond sat behind one of the scarred oak desks in the center of the room. He was talking to himself, his hands busy with the colorful tea tins on the desktop, but when he looked up and saw Lewis he didn’t seem at all surprised.

“She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” said William, his eyes drifting back to the tins. “She made these for me. My favorite colors, cobalt and russet. Russet like her hair. She looked like her mother, so beautiful.”

“William.” Lewis stepped further into the room. “Why did you do it? What did Annabelle say to you?”

“Do you remember, Lewis?” William’s gaze skated across his again. “Do you remember the watercress? And the deer? I’ve been thinking.… It all seems so vivid, like it was just yesterday.”

“Did Annabelle find you here, William? She was angry with you, wasn’t she?”

For an instant William’s eyes were clear. “Annabelle loved me. She was a perfect daughter.”

“I know she was. But she found out, didn’t she … about Edwina.”

William froze, the tea tins suspended in midshuffle like a shell game gone awry. “She said things … terrible things. She said she’d tell people … Sir Peter, even. That she would sell … this.” His hand looked almost translucent as he gestured round the room. “And she said … she said she’d spent her whole life trying to live up to me—and that I was a hollow man. A hollow man,” he repeated. “I didn’t mean—”

“You didn’t mean to kill her?” said a voice behind Lewis, and without turning he knew it was his son.

Lifting a hand to halt him, Lewis warned, “Gordon, no.” But Gordon came on, and as Lewis felt the force of his son’s fury, he realized his own had drained away at last.

William rose. “I only wanted to stop her from saying those things. I never meant …” He looked impossibly frail.

“But I do.” A gun appeared in Gordon’s hand—and Lewis saw that it was his own.

IT WAS STILL POURING WHEN THEY reached the warehouse. Kincaid killed the engine as the Rover coasted to a stop behind a gray Mercedes.

“Lewis’s car?” asked Gemma, thinking she remembered seeing it in the car park at Heron Quays.

Kincaid nodded, meeting her eyes. “Careful.”

They dashed through the pelting rain to the warehouse. The door stood open a few inches. Kincaid eased inside and Gemma followed, coming to a halt beside him in the shadowy interior.

They heard the voices immediately, coming from the open door of Annabelle and Teresa’s office high above them. Gemma felt Kincaid touch her arm, lightly, then move away towards the staircase. She followed as quietly as she could, cursing the fact that she’d worn slick-soled shoes.

Halfway up, she found she could distinguish the voices—Lewis’s; Gordon’s; and, though less familiar to her, William’s—if not quite make out the words. Then, as they neared the top, she heard Lewis shout, “Gordon, don’t be a bloody fool! Give it to me.”

There was the sound of a scuffle, then the smack of something hard hitting the floorboards.

Gemma skidded to a halt inches from Kincaid and peered through the doorway. Gordon and Lewis Finch were locked together as if frozen in the midst of a dance, Lewis’s hand clamped round Gordon’s wrist, Gordon’s fingers splayed, empty. Their eyes were fixed on the opposite side of the room, where William Hammond stooped and straightened again, a gun in his hand.

He held it awkwardly, staring at it as if not quite certain what it was. Then he looked up at them, and Gemma saw in his faded blue eyes not surprise, but a grief so bleak it made her bones feel cold.

He lifted the gun. Before Gemma or Kincaid could react, Lewis shouted, “William, no!” and lunged towards him.

But William Hammond touched the barrel of the revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER 16There is a growing movement determined to bring the river back to life.

George Nicholson, from Dockland

“He loved her,” Gemma said slowly. She sat in Janice’s office at Limehouse Station, drinking revolting coffee from the machine. “Annabelle was the child of his dreams, the one who would carry on for him, fulfill his ambitions. How hard it must have been for her, living up to that.”

Janice said, “And he couldn’t bear for her to destroy his image of her—”

“Or his own image. William Hammond spent fifty years living a lie so thoroughly that he even convinced himself.”

A week had passed, and they were still sorting out the details of the case. Lewis Finch had made a detailed statement, as had Gordon, and it seemed to Gemma that their shared loss might go a long way towards healing the rift between them.

“And Lewis?” said Janice. “He was responsible for Edwina Burne-Jones’s and the tutor’s deaths as well. Will he be prosecuted?”

“Unlikely, I should think. There’s no evidence, except for Lewis’s own statement, and I doubt the Crown Prosecution Service would waste their time.” Softly, Gemma added, “I have a feeling Lewis Finch has paid enough.”

Janice nodded. “I was wrong about Reg Mortimer,” she said wryly, making a face as she sipped at her coffee. “And it seems I was wrong about George Brent, too. He did know something. When I told him what happened, he remembered that the night Annabelle was killed, he’d stepped outside sometime after midnight to see his lady friend home. He saw a car come slowly up Seyssel Street and turn right into Manchester Road, and he knew the driver’s face—although he’d never actually met him, he’d seen him many times over the years.”

“William Hammond?”

“He must have had his car at the warehouse when Annabelle arrived unexpectedly, and that’s the way he would have gone, taking Annabelle’s body to the park. What I don’t understand is why he didn’t turn himself in when he realized he’d killed her.”

“I suppose even then he couldn’t face the truth of what he’d done to Annabelle—or to Edwina. But it destroyed him.” Gemma thought of the way he had left his daughter’s body, so lovingly arranged … and she thought of Jo Lowell, bereft now of mother, sister, and father, burdened with the terrible knowledge of what her father had done. But she thought Jo, like Annabelle, had taken her strength from their mother, and that she would be all right.

“There’s one good thing to come out of this, maybe,” Janice said a bit hesitantly. When Gemma looked at her, she went on with a little smile, “George Brent’s son’s been round to see me. He was an old beau, before I met Bill.”

“And?” asked Gemma, grinning.

“We have a proper dinner date. Tonight. He’s a nice enough bloke,” Janice added, defensively.

“I’m sure he is,” said Gemma, and surprised Janice by giving her a quick hug before collecting her things and saying goodbye.

• • •

DURING LAST FRIDAY’S STORM, LIGHTNING HAD struck the DLR tracks, but the damage had been repaired and Gemma had taken the tube and then the train out to Limehouse.

The storm had brought a week of clear skies and mild weather as well, and as Gemma boarded the DLR at Westferry, she looked forward to her walk home alone from the Angel tube stop. All week she had been plagued by a sort of melancholy that not even the thought of tomorrow’s piano lesson had relieved, and although she knew she was indulging it, she couldn’t seem to shake it off.

She had tried to put Gordon Finch from her mind—it had been an impossible relationship from the beginning, she knew that. But still she had this nagging sense of opportunities missed, of doors not opened, and when she emerged from the Angel and saw that the music shop across Pentonville Road was still open, she went in.

She browsed for a bit, looking over simple arrangements that she thought she might be able to learn to play, but in the end she bought what she knew she had come in for—the sheet music for Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When.” Tomorrow, she’d ask Wendy if she could work towards learning it.

Tucking the music a bit guiltily into her bag as she left the shop, she walked back to the Liverpool Road, past the Sainsbury’s where she’d first seen Gordon, turning into Richmond Avenue for the last few blocks before she reached Thornhill Gardens.

Suddenly, she stopped, listening, thinking at first she was imagining the notes of the clarinet, faint on the clear air. Then she saw him, sitting on a swing in the empty school yard, clarinet in hand. He stood and came towards her.

“I took a chance,” he said.

“But how—”

“I used to watch the way you walked home. I wanted to know about you.”

“But you—” She shook her head. He had never seemed to notice her at all.

“I’ve seen your son, too. How old is he?”

“He’s three,” said Gemma, bemused. “His name’s Toby. Gordon, about your dad—how is he?”

“He’s gone to Surrey—something about laying ghosts. But that’s not why I wanted to see you,” he added quickly. “I think we have some unfinished business, you and I … and …” He looked away, rubbing his fingers absently over the keys of the clarinet. “And it seems to me that the past has done enough damage, that we shouldn’t let what’s happened chart our course.”

Gemma met his eyes then, and what she saw there made her throat tighten with emotion. Gordon Finch would never say he was lonely, would never admit to needing anyone, and she knew the effort it must have taken him to come here.

But she also saw something else. He had put before her the choice she’d never expected to have the option of making. Reaching up, she kissed him on the lips, then stepped back and looked at him. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry.” And before she could change her mind, she turned and walked away.

THERE WAS NO ANSWER WHEN TERESA rang Reg Mortimer’s bell, but when she tried the door it swung open.

“Reg?” she called softly as she stepped inside and looked round. The sitting room was a maze of cardboard boxes, some sealed, some still standing open, and the bare walls made the flat feel even more abandoned.

She had called out again when she saw him, sitting in a chair on the little round balcony, huddled into a shapeless old cardigan even though it was quite warm.

When she went out to him, he said, “I will miss the view,” as if continuing a conversation.

“Where are you going?”

“To my parents’ for a bit. Until I can find a job, get back on my feet. The removal men come tomorrow.”

“I want to talk to you.” She moved between him and the river, so that he had to look at her. “About Hammond’s.”

“Teresa, I—”

“No, listen to me. I thought about leaving, too. I didn’t know if I could go on, with everything that’s happened.… But there’s Jo to consider now. She needs me. And I … I don’t think I can do it without you,” she finished hurriedly. How could she say things any more clearly and still retain a shred of pride?

Reg looked past her, frowning. “I’ve told you, you don’t give yourself enough credit, Teresa. You’ll be fine.”

“All right, I’ll give myself credit,” she said on a rush of anger. “I may be fine, but you’re not. You’re—you’re a mess, Reg. Look at you.”

He seemed to take her command seriously, picking at his shabby cardigan, but when he looked up and met her eyes for the first time, she saw a trace of amusement in his. “I was cold.”

“You know what I meant.”

“The funny thing is, I was so afraid of failure, afraid of losing Annabelle. And now that there’s nothing to fear, it’s rather peaceful. I’m not sure I want to put myself in jeopardy again.”

“I’m not Annabelle,” Teresa said softly, and for the first time, she was glad.

“No.” He said it with a sort of wonder that made Teresa’s pulse spring with hope. “You’re not.”

BRAVING THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON TRAFFIC ON his way back from Cambridge, Kincaid fought to hold the Midget on course as a lorry roared past him on the motorway and the little car shook and rattled in its tailwind. He really must do something about the damned old thing, he thought, swearing. But he had promised Kit he’d keep it, and he was learning not to take such promises lightly.

Ian had rung him earlier in the week, asking him to come to Cambridge at the earliest opportunity. Since Ian had brought Kit back to the Grantchester cottage, the boy had been silent and unresponsive, spending all his time down by the river with the dog.

That was where Kincaid had found him, stretched out on his stomach on the damp bank under the chestnut trees, making holes in the mud with a stick.

“I used to do that,” Kincaid said, sitting down beside him and scratching Tess behind the ears. “The water will bubble up in them, after a bit.”

Kit gave him a sideways glance and went back to his digging. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I said I would.” Kincaid took a stick and poked a hole himself. “Do you want to come to London next weekend? I’ve a few days off.”

“Are they really off?”

“Yes. I promise.” He would make sure of it, even if it meant tossing his phone and pager in the nearest bin.

“I might,” said Kit, but he dug a little harder.

“What’s up with you and Ian?” Kincaid asked casually, reaching for a flat stone and skimming it across the water. “He’s worried about you.”

Kit pushed himself up to his knees and sat back, staring at the river. After a moment, he said, “I asked him if you were really my dad, and he said he thought you might be—but that it didn’t matter. He says he and I are family, and he wants us to be together.”

Kincaid waited as Kit snapped his stick into pieces and fed them to the current.

When the last piece of wood had lodged in the roots of a chestnut tree, Kit said, “But he left last time.”

“I think,” Kincaid said slowly, “that Ian needs to be with you just now. He’s done some things he knows were wrong, and this is his way of trying to make it up. You could help him.”

Kit gave him a surprised glance. “Me?”

“I think so. And I know he misses your mum, and he needs someone to share that with.”

Sitting back, Kit wrapped one arm round his knees and absently petted the dog with his free hand, but it seemed to Kincaid that there was a receptive quality to the boy’s silence.

After a bit, Kincaid said, “Hungry?” and Kit looked up and smiled.

“Starving.”

Kincaid took him to tea at The Orchard, and they spent an easy hour under the apple trees with the wasps while Kit worked his way through the menu.

When it was time to go, Kincaid walked him back to the cottage and said, “I’ll ring you about next weekend.” Then he offered his hand for their customary high five, and it seemed to him that his son left his palm in his just an instant longer than usual.

HE FOUND THAT GEMMA HAD LEFT him a note on her door, and another on the Cavendishes’, directing him to the sitting room. Bemused, he followed the trail and found her sitting at Hazel’s upright piano. She wore a crinkly, white cotton dress that ended just above her bare ankles, and she’d pulled her hair back loosely at the nape of her neck with a seashell slide.

“Where are Hazel and Tim and the kids?” he asked, pulling a chair up beside her.

“They went to the pictures. A Friday night treat.”

“You didn’t want to go?”

“I thought I’d be here when you got back. How was it with Kit?”

“All right,” he said, suddenly realizing that perhaps, at least for the time being, it was. “What’s this?” he added, noticing the piano primer standing open on the music rack.

Gemma poised her hands over the keys, then tentatively touched middle C. “I’ve started lessons.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, surprised. “I’d no idea you wanted to play.”

“I thought you might laugh. And … I know it’s silly, but I wanted something in my life that was just mine.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, baffled.

“I know.” Gemma turned to him. “I’ve been thinking about Annabelle Hammond.”

“What has Annabelle to do with this?”

“She lived by other people’s expectations—because she was so beautiful, everyone in her life had their idea of who she was, what they wanted her to be. And what seems tragic to me is that she finally made different choices, her own choices, about what mattered to her—but she never got to see where they might have led. Or who she might have become.”

Kincaid still didn’t understand, but he saw the fear that had been hovering at the back of his mind for what it was. “Gemma, if this is about Gordon Finch—if you want—”

“No. This isn’t about Gordon … or only a little bit. It’s me. I don’t know what I want.… I only know that I’m in the process of becoming, and I want to see where it takes me, who I might be. I love you, Duncan. I do know that.”

“Well, that’s something, anyway,” he said, trying to make light of the chasm yawning before him.

But Gemma regarded him with perfect gravity. “It’s all we ever have, really. Isn’t it?” she said.

LEWIS SAT FACING IRENE IN THE rusting iron chairs of the cottage’s rose garden. Their knees touched, and she held his hand in both of hers lightly.

It had been John Pebbles’s cottage once, and John had tended these fragrant roses with as much care as Irene evidently did now. It was fitting, Lewis thought, that Irene should be here, and that he had come back at last.

He had told her everything, and she had listened without comment. Now she looked up at him, and in the clear afternoon light he could see the tracing of fine lines in her fair skin. Her eyes were as blue as he remembered, and she looked the way he’d imagined she would, as if she’d grown into herself.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Lewis?”

“I couldn’t. I suppose I was just as guilty as William in that sense. I couldn’t bear you knowing I wasn’t what you thought.”

“How were you to know what I thought?” she said sharply. “Or what we might have made of our lives if you had told me? Who were you to decide that it was better for me to spend my life alone than to share the burden of your guilt?”

“I—”

“Never mind,” Irene said with a sigh. “We are who we are now, and that path’s not worth following. But it seems to me that Freddie Haliburton has ruined enough lives. And that you underestimated my capacity for forgiveness. Let it go now, Lewis. It’s time.”

He met her eyes, and he knew he had found the only absolution that mattered.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Winner of the Macavity for Best Novel of 1997 for Dreaming of the Bones, Deborah Crombie received international acclaim for her first four mysteries, as well as nominations for the Edgar and the Agatha Awards. She grew up in Dallas, Texas, and later lived in Edinburgh and in Chester, England. She travels to Great Britain yearly to research her books. She now lives in a small north Texas town with her husband, daughter, cocker spaniel, and four cats, and is at work on the seventh book in the Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James series, which includes All Shall Be Well, A Share in Death, Leave the Grave Green, Mourn Not Your Dead, and the award-winning Dreaming of the Bones.

If you enjoyed Deborah Crombie’s Kissed a Sad Goodbye, the sixth in the Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James series, you won’t want to miss any of her superb novels. Look for them at your favorite bookseller.

And turn the page for an exciting preview of Deborah Crombie’s next novel, A Finer End, available in hardcover from Bantam Books.

A

FINER

END

BY

DEBORAH CROMBIE

CHAPTER 1

The shadows crept into Jack Montfort’s small office, filling the corners with a comfortable dimness. He’d come to look forward to his time alone at the day’s end—he told himself he got more done without phones ringing and the occasional client calling in, but perhaps, he thought wryly, it was merely that he had little enough reason to go home.

Standing at his window, he gazed down at the pedestrians hurrying down either side of Magdalene Street, and wondered idly where they were all scurrying off to so urgently on a Wednesday evening. Across the street, the Abbey gates had shut at five, and as he watched, the guard let the last few stragglers out from the grounds. The March day had been bright with a biting wind, and Jack imagined that anyone who’d been enticed by the sun into wandering round the Abbot’s fish pond would be chilled to the bone. Now the remaining buttresses of the great church would be silhouetted against the clear rose of the eastern sky, a fitting reward for those who had braved the cold.

He’d counted himself lucky to get the two-room office suite with its first-floor view over the Market Square and the Abbey gate. It was a prime spot, and the restrictions involved in renovating a listed building hadn’t daunted him. His years in London had given him experience enough in working round constraints, and he’d managed to update the rooms to his satisfaction without going over his budget. He’d hired a secretary to preside over his new reception area, and begun the slow task of building an architectural practice.

And if a small voice still occasionally whispered, “Why bother?” he did his best to ignore it and get on with things the best way he knew how, although he’d learned in the last few years that plans were ephemeral blueprints. Even as a child, he’d had his life mapped out: university with first class honors, a successful career as an architect … wife … family. What he hadn’t bargained for was life’s refusal to cooperate. Now they were all gone—him mum, his dad … Emily. At forty, he was back in Glastonbury. It was a move he’d have found inconceivable twenty years earlier, but here he was, alone in his parents’ old house on Ashwell Lane, besieged by memories.

Rolling up his shirtsleeves, he sat at his desk and positioned a blank sheet of paper in the pool of light cast by his Anglepoise lamp. Sitting round feeling sorry for himself wasn’t going to do a bit of good, and he had a client expecting a bid tomorrow morning on a residential remodel. And besides, if he finished his work quickly, he could look forward to the possibility of dinner with Winnie.

The thought of the unexpected entry of Winifred Catesby into his life made him smile. Besieged by arranged dates as soon as his mother’s well-meaning friends decided he’d endured a suitable period of mourning, he’d found the effort of making conversation with needy divorcees more depressing than time spent alone. He’d begged off so often that the do-gooders had declared him hopeless and finally left him alone.

Relieved of unwelcome obligations, he’d found himself driving the five miles to Wells for the solace of the Evensong service in the cathedral more and more frequently. The proximity of the cathedral choir was one of the things that had drawn him back to Glastonbury—he’d sung at Wells as a student in the cathedral school, and the experience had given him a lifelong passion for church music.

And then one evening a month ago, as he found his usual place in the ornately carved stall in the cathedral choir, she had slipped in beside him—a pleasantly ordinary-looking woman in her thirties, with light brown hair escaping from beneath a floppy velvet hat, and a slightly upturned nose. He had not noticed her particularly, just nodded in the vague way one did as she took her seat. The service began, and in that moment when the first high reach of the treble voices sent a shiver down his spine, she had met his eyes and smiled.

Afterward, they had chatted easily, naturally, and as they walked out of the cathedral together, deep in discussion of the merits of various choirs, he’d impulsively invited her for a drink at the pub down the street. It wasn’t until he’d helped her out of her coat that he’d seen the clerical collar.

Emily, always chiding him for his conservatism, would have been delighted by his consternation. And Emily, he felt sure, would have liked Winnie. He extended a finger to touch the photograph on his desktop and Emily gazed back at him, her dark eyes alight with humor and intelligence.

His throat tightened. Would the ache of his loss always lie so near the surface? Or would it one day fade to a gentle awareness, as familiar and unremarkable as a burr beneath the skin? But did he really want that? Would he be less himself without Emily’s constant presence in his mind?

He grinned in spite of himself. Emily would tell him to stop being maudlin and get on with the task at hand. With a sigh he looked down at his paper, then blinked in surprise.

He held a pen in his right hand, although he didn’t remember picking it up. And the page, which had been blank a moment ago, was covered in an unfamiliar script. Frowning, he checked for another sheet beneath the paper. But there was only the one page, and as he examined it more closely, he saw that the small, precise script seemed to be in Latin. As he recalled enough of his schoolboy vocabulary to make a rough translation, his frown deepened.

Know ye what we … Jack puzzled a moment before deciding on builded, then there was something he couldn’t make out, then the script continued in Glaston? Meaning Glastonbury? It was fair as any earthly thing, and had I not loved it overmuch my spirit would not cling to dreams of all now vanished.

Ye love full well what we have loved. The time … Here Jack was forced to resort to the dog-eared Latin dictionary in his bookcase, and after concluding that the phrase had something to do with sleeping or sleepers, went impatiently on … to wake, for Glaston to rise against the darkness. We have … something … long for you … it is in your hands.…

After this sentence there was a trailing squiggle beginning with an “E” which might have been a signature, perhaps “Edmund.”

Was this some sort of a joke, invisible ink that appeared when exposed to the light? But his secretary didn’t strike him as a prankster, and he’d taken the paper from a ream he’d just unwrapped himself. That left only the explanation that he had penned these words—alien in both script and language. But that was absurd. How could he have done so, unaware?

He went back to the beginning of the passage. Who were “they,” who had built in Glastonbury and who wrote in Latin? The monks of the Abbey, he supposed, a logical answer. And “he,” who had “loved it overmuch,” whose spirit still clung to dreams long vanished? The ghost of a monk? Worse by the minute.

What did “rise against the darkness” mean? And what had any of it to do with him? The whole thing was completely daft; he refused to consider it any further.

Crumpling the page, Jack swiveled his chair round, hand lifted to toss it in the bin, then stopped and returned the paper to his desk, smoothing the creases out with his palm.

Frederick Bligh Bond. The name sprang into his mind, dredged from the recesses of his childhood. The architect who, just before the First World War, had undertaken the first excavations at Glastonbury Abbey, then revealed that he had been directed by messages from the Abbey monks. Had Bond received communications like this? But Bond had been looney. Cracked!

The walls of Jack’s office leaned in on him, and the silence, usually so soothing, seemed alive with tension. He felt breathless, as if all the air in the small room had been used up, and he was suddenly desperate to get out.

Ripping the sheet of paper in half, he dropped the pieces in the bin, slipped into his jacket, and, sketchpad in hand, took the stairs down to the street two at a time.

He stepped out into Benedict Street, fumbling with unsteady fingers to lock his office door. Across the Market Square, the leaded windows of the George & Pilgrims beckoned. A drink, he thought with a shiver, was just what he needed. He’d work on his proposal, and the crowded bar of the old inn would surely be an antidote to whatever it was that had just happened to him.

Tugging his collar up against the wind, he sidestepped a group of adolescent skateboarders who found the smooth pavement round the Market Cross a perfect arena. A particularly fierce gust sent a sheet of paper spiraling past his cheek. He grabbed at it in instinctive self-defense, glancing absently at what he held in his fingers. Pink. A flyer, from the Avalon Society. Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, Saturday, 7:30 to 9:30. An introduction to crystal energy and their healing powers, showing how the chakras and crystals correspond. Make elixirs and learn how to energize your environment.

“Oh, bloody perfect,” he muttered, crumpling the paper and tossing it back to the wind. That was the worst sort of nonsense, just the type of thing that drew the most extreme New Age followers to Glastonbury. Ley lines … crop circles … Druid magic on Glastonbury Tor, the ancient, conical hill that rose above the town like a beacon …

Although Jack, like generations of his family, had grown up in the Tor’s shadow, he’d never given any credence to all the mystical rubbish associated with it—nor to the myths that described Glastonbury as some sort of cosmic mother-lode.

So why on earth had he just scribbled what seemed to be a garbled message from some long-dead monk? Was he losing his mind? A delayed reaction to grief, perhaps? He had read with mild curiosity about post traumatic-stress syndrome, never dreaming it could happen to him. And what had happened, after all? A lapse of consciousness, a daydream as harmless as those one had occasionally while driving, when you found you’d reached your destination without recalling the journey. For an instant, he saw again the small, precise script, a thing of beauty in itself, and felt a tug of familiarity in the cadence of the language.

He resumed his walk to the pub, then a thought stopped him midstride. What if … What if it were even remotely possible that he had made contact with the dead? Did that mean … could it mean he was capable of instigating contact at will? Emily—

No. He couldn’t even allow the idea of such a thing. That way lay madness.

A skateboarder whooshed past him, wheels clacking. “You taking root, mister?” the boy called out. Jack lurched unsteadily on, across the bottom of the High Street toward the George & Pilgrims. As he reached the pub, the heavy door swung open and a knot of revelers pushed past him. An escaping hint of laughter and smoke offered safe haven before the wind snatched sound and scent away; and then, he could have sworn he heard, faintly, the sound of bells.

• • •

The cats slept in the farmyard, taking advantage of the midday warmth of the pale spring sun. Each had its own spot—a flowerpot, the sagging step at the kitchen door, the bonnet of the old white van that Garnet Todd used to deliver her tiles—and only the occasional twitch of a feline ear or tail betrayed their awareness of the rustle of mice in the straw.

Garnet stood in the doorway of her workshop, wiping her hands on the leather apron she wore as a protection against the heat of the kiln. She had almost completed her latest commission, the restoration of the tile flooring in a twelfth-century church near the edge of Salisbury Plain. The manufacture of the tiles was painstaking work. The pattern suggested by the few intact bits of floor must be matched, using only the materials and techniques available to the original artisans. Then came the installation, a delicate process requiring hours spent on hands and knees, breathing the dank and musty atmosphere of the ancient church.

But Garnet never minded that. She was most comfortable with old things. Even her work as a midwife—although it had honored the Goddess—had not given her enough visceral connection with the past.

Her farm, a ramshackle place she’d bought more than twenty-five years ago, was proof of how little use she had for the present. The house stood high on the western flank of the Tor, its pitted stone façade in the path of a wind that had scoured down from the hilltop for years beyond memory. The sheep that grazed the grassy slope were her nearest neighbors, and for the most part she preferred their company.

At first she’d meant to put in electricity and running water, but the years had passed and she’d got used to doing without. Lantern light brought ochre warmth and comforting shadows, and why should she drink the chemically poisoned water the town pumped out of its tanks when the spring on her property bubbled right up from the heart of the sacred hill? Enough had been done in this town to dishonor the old and holy things without her adding to the damage.

A cloud shadow raced down the hillside and for a moment the yard darkened. Garnet shivered. Dion, the old calico cat who ruled the rest of the brood with regal disdain, uncurled herself from the flowerpot and came to rub against Garnet’s ankles. “You sense it, too, don’t you, old girl?” Garnet said softly, bending to stroke her. “Something’s brewing.”

Once before she had caught that scent in the air, once before she had felt that prickle of foreboding, and the memory filled her with dread.

Glastonbury had always been a place of power, a pivot point in the ancient battle between the light and the dark. If that delicate balance were disturbed, Garnet knew, not even the Goddess could foresee the consequences.

Glastonbury did strange things to people—as Nick Carlisle well knew. He’d come here for the Festival, part of his plan to take a few months off, see a bit of the world, after leaving Durham with a First in Philosophy and Theology. On a mild evening in late June he had rounded a bend in the Shepton Mallet road and seen the great conical hump of the Tor rising above the plain, St. Michael’s Tower on its summit standing squarely against the blood red western sky.

That had been more than a year ago, and he was still here, working in a New-Age bookshop across from the Abbey for little more than minimum wage, living in a caravan in a farmer’s field in Compton Dundon.

He often came to the George & Pilgrims for a pint after work. A fine thing, when a pub did duty as his home away from home, but then his caravan didn’t count for much—a place to put the faded jeans, T-shirts and sweatshirts that made up his meager wardrobe, along with the books he’d brought with him from Durham. The small fridge smelled of sour milk, and the two-ring gas cooker was as temperamental as his mother.

The thought of his mum made him grimace. Elizabeth Carlisle had raised her son alone from his infancy, and in the process had managed to make quite a successful career for herself penning North-country Aga sagas. She had managed her son’s life as efficiently as she did her characters, and had then pronounced herself affronted when he refused to feel grateful.

He had left home, sure that his true path would present itself as soon as he escaped his mother’s orbit. But freedom had not turned out to be the panacea he’d expected: he had no more idea what he wanted to do with his life than he had a year ago. He only knew that something held him in Glastonbury, and yet he burned with a restless and unfulfilled energy.

From his corner table, he surveyed the pub’s clientele as he sipped his beer. There was an unusual yuppie element this evening, young men sporting designer suits accompanied by polished girls in skimpy clothes. Nick could almost feel the rumble of displeasure among the regulars, clustered at the bar in instinctive solidarity.

But it was the man sitting alone at the bar’s end who caught his attention. He was notable not only for his large size and fair hair, but also because his face was familiar. Nick had seen him often in Magdalene Street—he must work near the bookshop—and once or twice they had exchanged a friendly nod. Tonight he sat hunched over his drink, his usually amiable countenance set in a scowl.

Intrigued, Nick saw that he seemed to be writing or sketching on a pad, and that every few moments he raised visibly trembling fingers to brush a lock of hair from his forehead.

When Nick made his way to the bar for a refill, the blond man was staring fixedly at his beer glass, his pen poised over the paper. Nick glanced at the pad. It held neat architectural drawings and figures, and, scrawled haphazardly across the largest sketch, a few lines in what looked to be Latin. It is for my sins Glaston suffered … he translated silently.

“You’re a Classics scholar?” Nick said aloud, surprised.

“What?” The man blinked owlishly at him. For a moment Nick wondered if he were drunk, but he’d been nursing the same drink since Nick had noticed him.

Nick tapped the sketchpad. “This. I don’t often see anyone writing in Latin.”

Glancing down, the man paled. “Oh, Christ. Not again.”

“Sorry?”

“No, no. It’s quite all right.” The man shook his head and seemed to make a great effort to focus on Nick. “Jack Montfort. I’ve seen you, haven’t I? You work in the bookshop.”

“Nick Carlisle.”

“My office is just upstairs from your shop.” Montfort gestured at Nick’s empty glass. “What are you drinking?”

Montfort bought two more pints, then turned back to Nick. Now he seemed eager to talk. “Working at the bookshop—I suppose you read a good bit?”

“Like a kid in a sweet shop. The manager’s a good egg, turns a blind eye. And I try not to dog-ear the merchandise.”

“I have to admit I’ve never been in the place. Interesting stuff, is it?”

“Some of it’s absolute crap,” Nick replied with a grin. “UFO’s. Crop circles—everyone knows that’s a hoax. But some of it … well, you have to wonder.… Odd things do seem to happen in Glastonbury.”

“You could say that,” Montfort muttered into his beer, his scowl returning. Then he seemed to try to shake off his preoccupation. “You’re not from around here, are you? Do I detect a hint of Yorkshire?”

“It’s Northumberland, actually. I came for the Festival last year—” Nick shrugged, “and I’m still here.”

“Ah, the rock festival at Pilton. Bane and blessing of the locals, depending on whether it affords an opportunity for commerce or just clogs every road for miles round.”

“You’re from Glastonbury, then?”

“Born and bred. I came back last year to take care of my parents’ affairs, and I’m still here. Like you.

“Never made the Pilton Festival, though,” he continued. “I had my sights set on the bright lights of London in those days. I suppose I missed something memorable.”

“Mud.” Nick grinned. “Oceans of it. And slogging about in some farmer’s field, being bitten by midges, drinking bad beer and queuing for hours to use the toilets. Still …”

“There was something,” Montfort prompted.

“Yeah. I’d like to have seen it in its heyday, the early seventies, you know? Glastonbury Fayre, they called it. That must have been awesome. And even that didn’t compare to the original Glastonbury Festival—in terms of quality, not quantity.”

“Original festival?” Montfort repeated blankly.

“Started in 1914 by the composer Rutland Boughton,” Nick answered. “Boughton was extremely talented—his opera, The Immortal Hour, still holds the record for the longest running operatic production. All sorts of luminaries were involved in the Festival: Shaw, Edward Elgar, Vaughn Williams, D.H. Lawrence. And Glastonbury had its own contributors to the cultural revival, people like Frederick Bligh Bond and Alice Buckton.… And then there was the business of Bond’s friend, Dr. John Goodchild, and the finding of the ‘Grail’ in Bride’s Well. That caused a few ripples.…” Aware that he was babbling, Nick paused and drank the foam off his pint.

Looking up, he saw that Montfort was staring at him. Nick flushed. “Sorry. I get a bit carried away some—”

“You know about Bligh Bond?”

The intensity in Montfort’s voice took Nick by surprise. “Well, it’s a fascinating story, isn’t it? Bond’s knowledge was prodigious, regardless of his methods; his excavations at the Abbey were proof of that.”

“It’s his methods that were in question, not his results.”

“I suppose one can’t blame the Church for being a bit uncomfortable with the idea that Bond had received his digging instructions from monks dead five centuries or more.”

“Uncomfortable?” Montfort snorted. “They fired him. He never worked successfully as an architect again, and if I remember rightly, died in poverty. If the man had had an ounce of bloody sense, he’d have kept his mouth shut.”

“He felt he had to share it, though, didn’t he? I’d say Bond was honest to a fault. And I don’t think he ever actually claimed he’d made contact with spirits. He thought he might have merely accessed some part of his own subconscious.”

“Do you believe it’s possible, whatever the source?”

“Bond’s not the only case. There have been well-documented instances where people have known things about the past that couldn’t be accounted for otherwise.” Glancing at the paper Montfort had partially covered with his hand, Nick felt a fizz of excitement. “But you’re not talking hypothetically, are you?”

“This is—” Montfort shook his head. “Daft. Too daft to tell anyone. But the coincidence, meeting you here … I—” He looked round, as if suddenly aware of the proximity of other customers, and lowered his voice.

“I was sitting at my desk tonight, and I wrote … something. In Latin I haven’t used since I was at school, and I had no memory of writing it. I tore the damned thing up.… then this …” He ran his fingertips across the scrawl on the sketchpad.

“Bugger,” Nick breathed, awed. “I’d swap my mum for a chance at something like that.”

“But why me? I didn’t ask for this,” Montfort retorted fiercely. “I’m an architect, but my knowledge of the Abbey is no more than you’d expect from anyone who grew up here. I’m not particularly religious. I’ve never had any interest in spiritualism—or other-worldly things of any sort, for that matter.”

Nick pondered this for a moment. “I doubt these things are random. Maybe you have some connection to the Abbey that you’re not consciously aware of.”

“That’s a big help,” Montfort said, but there was a gleam of humor in his bright blue eyes. “So how do I find out what it is, and why this is happening to me?”

“You know it wasn’t Bond who did the actual writing, but his friend, John Bartlett. Bond guided him by asking questions.”

“You want to play Bond to my Bartlett, then?” Montfort sounded amused.

“You said you came from Glastonbury. That seems as good a place to start as any.”

“My father’s family’s been in Glastonbury and round about for eons, I should think. He was a solicitor. A large, serious man, very sure of where he stood in the world.” Montfort took a sip of his beer and his voice softened as he continued. “Now, my mother, she was a different sort altogether. She loved stories, loved to play make-believe with us when we were children.”

“Us?”

Montfort was silent.

“Us?” Nick repeated.

“My cousins and I. Duncan and Juliet.” Montfort smiled. “My aunt and uncle had a penchant for Shakespeare. We always visited them in Cheshire on our holidays. It was a different world. The canals, and then the hills of Wales rising in the distance …”

He fell silent, his eyes half-closed. Nick was about to prompt him again, when, without warning, Montfort grasped the pen. His hand began to move steadily across the paper.

Nick translated the Latin as the words began to form … Deo juvante … with God’s help … you shall make it right.…

In that instant, Nick knew why he had come to Glastonbury, and he knew why he had stayed.

Faith Wills rested her forehead against the cool plastic of the toilet seat, panting, her eyes swimming with the tears brought on by retching. She had nothing left to throw up but the lining of her stomach, yet somehow she was going to have to pull herself together, go out and face the smell of her mother’s breakfast.

It was a bacon-and-egg morning—her mum believed all children should go off to school well fortified for the day. They alternated cooked eggs, or porridge, or brown toast and marmite; and on this Thursday morning in March, Faith had struck the worst possible option.

A whiff of bacon crept into the bathroom. Her stomach heaved treacherously just as her younger brother, Jonathan, pounded on the door. “You think you’re effing Madonna in there or something? Hurry bloody up, Faith!”

Without raising her head, Faith said, “Shut up,” but it came out a whisper.

Then her mother’s voice—“Jonathan, you watch your language”—and the crisp rap of knuckles on the door. “Faith, whatever’s the matter with you? You’re going to be late, and make Jon and Meredith late as well.”

“Coming.” Unsteadily, Faith pushed herself up, flushed the toilet, then blew her nose on a piece of toilet tissue. Easing the door open, she found her mum waiting, hands on hips, and beyond her, Jon, and her sister, Meredith, all three faces set in varying degrees of irritation. “What is this, a committee?” she asked, trying for a bit of attitude.

Her mother ignored her, taking her chin in firm fingers and turning her face towards the wan light filtering in from the sitting room. “You’re white as a sheet,” she pronounced. “Are you ill?”

Faith swallowed convulsively against the kitchen smells, than managed to croak, “I’m okay. Just exam nerves.”

Her dad emerged from the bedroom, tying his tie. “How many times have I told you not to leave studying until the last minute? And you know how important your GCSE’s—”

“Just let me get my books, okay?”

“Don’t take that tone with me, young lady.” Her dad jerked tight the knot of his tie and reached for her. His fingertips dug into the flesh of her bare arm.

“Sorry,” Faith mumbled, not meeting his eyes. Tugging free, she escaped to the room she shared with her sister and once inside, leaned against the door, praying for a moment’s peace before Meredith came back. It was a child’s room, she thought, seeing it suddenly anew. The walls were covered with posters of rock stars, the twin beds with bedraggled stuffed animals. Her hockey uniform spilled from her satchel; the sheets of music for that afternoon’s choir practice lay scattered on the floor. All things that had mattered so much to her—all utterly meaningless now.

She wouldn’t be fine, she realized, closing her eyes against the tide of despair that swept over her. Nothing would ever be fine again.

And she couldn’t tell her parents. In her mother’s perfect world, seventeen-year-olds didn’t start the day with their heads in the toilet, and her dad—Well, she couldn’t think about that.

She had promised never to tell, and that was all that mattered.

Faith hugged herself, pressing her arms against the new and painful swelling of her breasts. Never, never, never. The word became a litany as she swayed gently.

Ever.

Table of Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Contents

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

About the Author