Deborah Crombie - Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James 11 - Water Like A Stone

Chapter Twenty-three

Babcock had come into the station whistling under his breath, having left Piers Dutton shouting at some solicitor’s poor secretary and the fraud team beginning a systematic removal of his fi les. All in a good morning’s work, he’d told himself. He was liking Dutton more and more for Annie Lebow’s murder, and the fact that he’d developed a healthy distaste for the man only added to his satisfaction. Police officers, of course, were supposed to be unbiased, but he’d yet to meet one who didn’t enjoy making a collar on a bastard like Dutton.

Now, if he could just sort out this business with the baby—

The whistle died on his lips as he caught sight of the posse gathered round Sheila Larkin’s desk. Larkin, Rasansky, Kincaid, and the lovely Gemma, all watching him with expressions that boded no good.

“You lot look like a convention of funeral directors,” he said as he reached them, his heart sinking. “What’s happened, then?”

It was Kincaid who told him, concisely, ignoring increasingly evil looks from Rasansky, who would rather be the bearer of bad news than shoved out of the picture altogether. Larkin was chewing on a fingernail again, a habit he thought she’d broken.

“Guv—” Rasansky began when Kincaid had finished his summary, but Babcock held up a hand for silence.

“Just let me think a minute, Kevin.” He patted his coat pockets, as he always did when faced with a problem, then remembered, as he always did, that he no longer smoked. He settled for nicking a pencil off Larkin’s desk and rotating it in his fingers as he said,

“Okay, so this Wain fellow can’t have murdered his baby daughter.

But it can’t simply be coincidence that he did mortar work in the dairy near the time the infant must have been interred, or that he knew Annie Lebow, or that he had a public row with her a day before she died.”

“Maybe he didn’t kill his own daughter,” said Rasansky. “Maybe it was someone else’s daughter that he conveniently walled up in that barn—”

“Then why were no baby girls that age reported missing?” broke in Larkin. “And how would Annie Lebow have known that when she met up with him again?”

“She kept her own counsel, Annie,” Babcock replied. “She might have known all sorts of things she didn’t put down on paper.” He tapped the report on Larkin’s desk with the pencil end. “And if he had nothing to do with her death, why did he lie about knowing her when he was first questioned?”

“That’s easy enough,” said Gemma. “If he’d been in trouble with the law before, especially if he and his wife were unjustly accused, he’d not want to call attention to himself. That’s understandable.”

Babcock looked at the two women, wondering why they seemed to be defending a man Gemma had not even met. “Well, he’s going to regret it,” Babcock said crossly. He dropped the pencil on the desk and watched it bounce, his visions of an easily solved case evaporating. “We’re going to talk to him again.” Turning to Rasansky, he added, “Kevin, I’ll need you to stay here to liaise with the fraud team. I’m not giving up on Dutton yet.” Then, to Larkin,

“Sheila, you’ve met Wain; you’d better come with me.” He eyed his friend. “And I suppose the two of you want to tag along?”

Kincaid met his eyes with no trace of humor. “Ronnie, I want to see this case solved as much as you do. Maybe more.”

“All right,” Babcock agreed, against his better judgment. It would be a wonder if Wain didn’t make a run for it when he saw four coppers descending on him like storm troopers. “We’ll make a bloody party of it.”

Kincaid realized he’d seen the boat, both on Boxing Day and on the following morning, after Annie Lebow’s murder, but he’d paid no attention other than to notice the trickle of smoke from the chimney.

Now he noticed that it was an old boat, perhaps even prewar, and painted in the traditional style, although it looked as though it had been neglected recently. But a wisp of wood smoke spiraled from a chimney whose brass rings still gleamed, and the scent was sharp on the still, damp air.

They crossed the bridge and stepped down to the towpath single file, with Babcock leading, but when they reached the boat, it was obvious that the four of them couldn’t crowd into the well deck.

Babcock stood back and nodded at DC Larkin. “You’ve met him, Sheila. You make the contact.”

Larkin glanced at him, and whatever passed between them seemed to give her confidence. Although it must have been awkward, with everyone watching, she climbed from the towpath into the well deck nimbly enough, then squared her shoulders and rapped at the cabin door.

“Mr. Wain,” she called out, “it’s DC Larkin. I—” The cabin door swung open before she could say more.

The man who stepped out, blinking in the gray light, was tall and well built, with the sort of musculature that comes from hard physical labor rather than time spent in a gym. His dark hair was

still thick, but flecked with silver, and his cheeks were sunken, his dark eyes hollow, as if he’d suffered a recent illness, or grief.

Yet his stance, as he surveyed them, was defiant, and he answered Larkin brusquely. “I know who you are, Constable. I thought we’d finished our business.”

“So did I, Mr. Wain, until I found out you lied to me.” There was a note of personal injury in Larkin’s voice that made Kincaid think of the way Gemma sometimes made an intense connection with a suspect. “You said you only met Annie Lebow when she scraped your boat,” continued Larkin, “but in fact you knew her very well.”

Kincaid saw the shock ripple through the man’s body, saw him tense with the automatic instinct to flee, then saw him force himself to relax.

“This is my boss, by the way.” Larkin gestured at Babcock, reinforcing her position. “Chief Inspector Babcock. And this is Superintendent Kincaid, from Scotland Yard, and Inspector James.”

At the mention of Scotland Yard, Wain rested his fingertips on the top of the boat’s curved tiller, as if for support, but when he spoke his voice was steady. “I knew her, all right, I’ll admit that. But this is why I didn’t say.” His gaze took in all the gathered officers, and Kincaid thought he saw a flash of recognition as his eyes passed over Gemma, but the man didn’t acknowledge it. “I knew, when I heard she was dead, that you’d pick me out. I’ve had dealings with the police before.

I know you lot go for the easiest target, and you don’t care about the truth.”

“Why don’t you try me and see,” said Larkin, resolute as a bull terrier. “What did you argue with Ms. Lebow about on Christmas Day?”

“I don’t know any Lebow. She was Annie Constantine to me. I hadn’t seen her in years, since she got the case against us dismissed.

That day, I think she was as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

She seemed pleased, asked after the children, wanting to see how they were doing.

“But I couldn’t have that, do you see? It brought it all back, that terrible time. When she came back the next morning, I’m ashamed to say I shouted at her, and she was hurt. She said she’d never done anything but help us, and it was true. I’d take the words back, if I could.”

Wain’s words rang with sincerity. Still, Kincaid had the sense that he was somehow skirting the truth.

“And she didn’t ask you what you knew about the infant found in the wall of the dairy barn where you worked?” asked Larkin.

Kincaid knew instantly Larkin had made a mistake, that the timing was wrong. Juliet had only found the child’s body on Christmas Eve. It was highly unlikely that Annie could have learned about the baby by Christmas morning. In fact, they had no proof that she had ever known.

“What?” Wain looked stunned. “What are you talking about?”

Taking a step nearer the boat, Babcock intervened. “The body of a female infant was found mortared into the wall of the old dairy just down the way.”

“The Smiths’ place?” Wain asked, and seeing Babcock’s nod of confirmation, went on, “I did some work for them, yes, but I didn’t—

you can’t think—” He stopped, shaking his head, as if speech had deserted him.

“I don’t know what to think,” Babcock said conversationally. “It seems a bit much to believe that someone else did mortar work in that barn without Mr. Smith noticing. Or that someone else took advantage of your work to add a little of their own and you didn’t twig to it.”

Gabriel Wain’s face hardened. “You can’t possibly know that this”—he stopped, swallowing—“this child was put there during the time I did the work for the Smiths. I was only there a few days.”

He was right, and Kincaid could see that Babcock knew it.

They had no physical evidence that could link Wain directly to the body, nor any explanation as to why or how Wain could have acquired the child. Not only that, but Kincaid had dealt with a good

number of perverts over the course of his career, and while they sometimes presented a very plausible persona, there was always something just slightly off about them. He’d developed radar of a sort for the unbalanced personality, and he didn’t read the signs in Gabriel Wain.

Babcock, apparently realizing that he couldn’t push further without more to back up any accusations, changed tack. “Where were you night before last, Mr. Wain?”

“Here. With my wife and children.”

“The entire night? Can your wife vouch for you?”

“You leave my wife out of this,” Wain said, angry again. “I won’t have you hounding her. She’s been through enough.”

“Mr. Wain.” Gemma’s voice was quiet, gentle almost, but it held everyone’s attention. “Where are your children?”

Kincaid realized that he’d not heard a sound from the boat, or seen a twitch of the curtains pulled tightly across the cabin windows.

“Gone to the shops.”

“And your wife? ”

He hesitated, looking round as if enlightenment might appear out of thin air. “Resting,” he said at last.

“And the doctor who visited you yesterday, she’s treating your wife? That would be Dr. Elsworthy, I think?” Gemma glanced at Babcock for confirmation.

Babcock stared back. “Elsworthy? Here? This was the boat she visited?”

This was a train wreck, Kincaid thought, looking on in horror, a massive miscommunication. Neither Babcock nor Gemma could have known the doctor’s patient and Gabriel Wain were connected.

Babcock, however, made a recovery that any good copper would have envied. After a muttered, “Jesus Christ,” under his breath, he turned to Wain and said in a tone that brooked no argument, “I think you’d better start by telling me exactly how you know our forensic pathologist.”

Babcock waited until he was in the privacy of his office before he rang Althea Elsworthy. He tried the hospital first, but was not surprised to be told she’d called in, pleading illness, an occurrence apparently so noteworthy that her colleagues in the morgue had taken wagers on whether she’d been struck down with plague or dengue fever.

This seemed to be his day for calling in favors. It took a bit of wheedling and downright arm- twisting, but in the end he ran down her home telephone number, and the vague direction that she lived

“somewhere near Whitchurch.”

Hoping the phone number would be sufficient, he dialed and listened to the repeated double burr. No answer phone kicked in, and he was about to give up when the ringing stopped and her familiar voice came brusquely down the line. “Elsworthy.”

“Babcock,” he replied, just as succinctly, and when there was no response, he sighed and said, “Don’t you dare hang up on me, Doc.”

There was another silence, then she said with resignation, “I take it you’ve seen Gabriel Wain.”

“Oh, yes. And aside from the fact that you’ve made a first-class idiot of me, do you realize you could be struck off for this? Colluding with a suspect in a murder investigation? Keeping vital information from the police?”

“Chief Inspector, you have every right to be angry with me. But I’m a doctor first and a pathologist second, although I suppose it has been a good many years since I’ve been reminded of it.”

“I think you had better start from the beginning,” he said, his patience forced.

“Gabriel didn’t tell you?”

“I want to hear it from you.” And he did, not just to verify Wain’s story, but because he still couldn’t quite believe that the Dr. Elsworthy he had known had strayed so far off course.

“I knew Annie Constantine when she worked for Social Services.

Not well, but I found her competent, and professional, and we got on together. The last case we worked together was a bad one, though—the one where the child was killed by his foster father, do you remember?

“I could tell Constantine was having a difficult time, possibly even suffering some posttraumatic stress, so I wasn’t all that surprised when a few months later I heard she’d taken early retirement.

After that, I didn’t hear from her, or of her, until two days ago, when she showed up at my door as I was leaving for the morgue.

“How she got the address of my cottage, I don’t know—perhaps she had some of the same connections as you, Chief Inspector.” For the first time, he heard a trace of her wry humor.

“She seemed quite distraught,” the doctor continued, “and wouldn’t be brushed off, so in the end I agreed to listen to her. She said she needed help, that one of her former clients was gravely ill but refused to seek any medical treatment. Then she told me what had happened to Rowan Wain and her family.

“Well, I know the doctor who filed the MSBP complaint against Rowan. He’s a self-serving little shit who, when a case is beyond his competence, looks for someone else to blame.”

Babcock, who had never heard the doctor swear before, found himself slightly shocked.

“It wasn’t the first time he’d used a diagnosis of Munchausen by proxy,” she said, an undercurrent of anger in her voice, “and the other parents might have been blameless as well, but they didn’t have Annie Constantine to go to bat for them. They lost their children.

“As Constantine spent time with the Wains, she became convinced that the boy, Joseph, really had suffered from life-threatening seizures, and that the parents had only turned to the medical establishment in desperation.

“It seems she made a crusade of proving their innocence.” Elsworthy paused, and Babcock imagined her frowning, as she did during a postmortem when she didn’t like what she was seeing. “I

suspect she needed a crusade,” she went on, slowly. “The murdered foster child had been in her care, and when the natural parents reported after their visitations that they suspected abuse, she dismissed their claims as no more than a manipulative effort to get their child back. They were drug users, you see, and not terribly dependable.”

Babcock had worked that case, and remembered it all too well.

The natural parents had lashed out at everyone involved in a fury made all the more vicious by the fact that they, too, had failed their child. No wonder Annie Constantine had felt a need for atonement.

“Her determination paid off,” Elsworthy continued. “Eventually, she found corroboration, both from witnesses who had seen the seizures and in hospital records that the doctor reporting the suspected abuse had somehow missed. She got the case dismissed.”

“So how does all this tie in with what happened these last few days?” asked Babcock.

“Chance,” said Elsworthy. “It was pure chance that she motored past the Wains at the Middlewich Junction on Christmas Eve. It’s surprising, I suppose, that she hadn’t run into them before. The waterways are a fairly self-contained world.

“She spoke to them, and although the children seemed well, she thought Rowan looked really ill. The more she thought about it, the more concerned she became. It was when she went back that she and Gabriel had the row, but in the end he agreed to let her see Rowan, who had worsened even in that short time. Annie became convinced that Rowan would let herself die from an untreated illness rather than expose her family to the system again. That’s when she came to me, asking me to examine Rowan, off the record.”

“And was she right? About Rowan’s illness?”

Elsworthy sighed and lowered her voice, as if she didn’t want to be overheard. “Unfortunately, she was more than right. Rowan Wain is suffering from advanced congestive heart failure. She might have been helped, if it had been caught early, but even then she would s

have had to agree to a transplant. Now it’s much too late for that, even were she willing.”

Babcock digested this. “So Rowan Wain really is dying?”

“Yes. All I can do is make her a bit more comfortable. I promised Annie Constantine I would do that, and that I would treat Rowan without calling in the authorities. Then, when Annie was killed, I felt I had to honor my obligation, both to her and to Rowan . . .”

It was, Babcock suspected, as close to an apology for her behavior as he was going to get. “And when you heard Annie Constantine had been murdered, you never thought Gabriel Wain might be involved? ”

“No! Why would Gabriel Wain want to harm Annie? He owed her his family, and more.”

“What if Annie discovered he was connected with the infant we found in the barn?”

“Gabriel?” The doctor’s voice rose in astonishment.

“He did mortar work in the dairy not long before the Smiths sold the place. We’ve narrowed the time frame for the interment to between five and ten years, so it would fi t.”

“I don’t believe it,” Ellsworthy said with utter commitment. “I don’t believe Gabriel Wain could have murdered a child. It’s bound to be coincidence, Chief Inspector, just as it was coincidence that Annie met the family again on Christmas Eve.”

And coincidence that two days later she was dead, he thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. There was no use preaching to the converted. Instead, he asked, “Doc, did Annie Constantine say anything to you about the child in the barn? Or you to her?”

“No, she didn’t mention it. And neither did I,” she added, sounding incensed that he should question her discretion, as if she hadn’t violated a half dozen ethical rules in the last few days.

“One more thing, Doc,” he said lightly, as if it were of no great import. “Do you have the children?”

The silence on the other end of the line was so profound that for

a moment he thought she had severed the connection. Then he heard her draw in a breath. “Yes. Yes, I have the children. I though it best, under the circumstances.” She hesitated again, then said quietly,

“Ronnie, leave them be. And promise me that if you feel you must take Gabriel Wain in for questioning, you’ll let me know. Someone needs to stay with Rowan.”

“If you’ll make me a promise, Doc,” he returned, unable to imagine calling her by her first name. “Tell me the truth from now on.”

He’d just rung off when he heard a tap on his door and Sheila Larkin peered in. “Got a minute, Guv?” When he nodded, she came in and sat demurely in his extra chair. She was dressed rather sensibly again today, in trousers and a warm jumper. A good thing, he supposed, especially as they’d stood around on the freezing towpath for half an eternity, but he found he missed watching her struggle to sit in a short skirt without revealing her knickers. “So has our doc gone completely off the rails, then?” she asked with relish.

“She had her reasons,” he said, surprising himself. “And they’re mine to know,” he added, putting Larkin firmly in her place, then grinned. “But you can run down a couple of things for me.”

“Yes, sir, Guv’nor, sir.” Larkin saluted.

“I want you to find out anything you can about the doctor who filed the MSBP allegations against Rowan Wain. And then I want you to find out what happened to the parents of the little boy who was beaten to death by his foster father.”

Babcock was treating Kincaid and Gemma to the dubious pleasure of a late lunch at the Subway shop near the Crewe railway station when his phone rang. It was Rasansky, sounding jubilant.

“Preliminary from the fraud lads says you were right, Guv,” he said. “They’ve just reviewed the Constantines’ files and a few others, but it looks as though Dutton has been skimming. It’s certainly enough to have another word.”

Surveying the remains of his chicken breast on Parmesan bread, Babcock bundled it into its wrapper and tossed it into the nearest bin. “I’m on my way. Meet me there, and bring a couple of uniforms along for backup, just in case.”

“What’s happened?” Kincaid asked even before Babcock had disconnected. “Is it Wain?”

“No.” Babcock couldn’t resist a smile. “It’s Piers Dutton. It seems your sister was right.” He watched the emotions chase each other across his friend’s face—first satisfaction, then dismay as he realized the implications. “And no,” he continued, forestalling what he knew would come next, “you can’t come with me to interview him, either of you. You’ll just have to trust Cheshire CID to manage.”

Kincaid’s struggle not to argue was visible, but he was too experienced an officer not to know the difficulties his direct involvement could cause.

Gemma, Babcock saw, had shown no pleasure at Juliet Newcombe’s vindication. She listened without expression, all the while carefully folding the paper wrapper round her barely touched food.

“Why don’t the two of you wait for me at the station?” he suggested. “You can help Larkin with the files. Just don’t let her boss you around too much,” he added. “She’ll be insufferable if she thinks she can lord it over two detectives from the Big Smoke.”

Piers Dutton had stopped protesting the ransacking of his office. He stood in the reception area, watching tight-lipped as uniformed officers carried out the remainder of his files in boxes, and didn’t acknowledge Babcock’s entrance with so much as a blink.

“Sorry about the inconvenience,” Babcock said cheerfully. “Moving is always so disruptive, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Dutton?”

Dutton compressed his lips further, but the silent riposte wasn’t

in his nature, and after a moment he gave in to the temptation to retort. “You’ll be hearing from my solicitor, Chief Inspector. And don’t think you won’t regret this.”

“I’m surprised your solicitor isn’t here already. Have a bit of trouble running him down?”

“He was on holiday,” Dutton admitted reluctantly. “Not that it will matter, as there’s no question that what you’re doing here is illegal.”

“I can see why he wouldn’t be anxious to give up his post-Christmas amusements to deal with your spot of trouble.”

“Now see here, Babcock. I’ve rung your chief constable—”

“Yes, I’ve rung him myself, Mr. Dutton. He wasn’t too keen on the idea that he’d been playing golf with a swindler, especially as it seems you convinced him to make one or two small investments.” Babcock shook his head in mock dismay. “You wouldn’t have been so foolish as to skim a percentage off the chief constable’s account?”

Dutton quite wisely clamped his mouth closed on that one, but Babcock thought he looked a little pale. “And by the way, Mr. Dutton,” he added, “I don’t appreciate being threatened. I think you’ll find that sort of thing doesn’t win you any friends—especially if I should mention it to the custody sergeant at Crewe headquarters.”

“What are you talking about?” Dutton’s voice rose to a squeak of panic.

“You’re going to be our guest, Mr. Dutton, while we talk about Annie Lebow.”

“But you can’t—”

“I can. Twenty- four hours without charge, and then we’ll see where we are.” Babcock stepped closer, into the other man’s comfort zone. “You’re going to tell me about every contact you ever had with Annie Lebow, or with anyone connected with Annie Lebow. And then you’re going to take me through every second of your time the day before yes—”

“Boss?” Rasansky pushed open the door. “Mr. Newcombe’s here. He wants to—”

But Caspar Newcombe didn’t wait to have his mission announced. Shoving Rasansky, who outweighed him by a good two stone, aside, he barged into the room.

“Hey, you can’t—” Rasansky began, but Newcombe had already turned to Babcock.

“You’re in charge here? What is this? What do you think you’re doing?” He was wild-eyed with outrage, and his breath told Babcock he’d had a fortified lunch. “This is our business. You can’t just take things away. Piers, you’ll tell them—”

“Mr. Newcombe.” Babcock stepped back, out of range of Newcombe’s uncoordinatedly swinging arms. He knew Caspar Newcombe by sight, had even been briefly introduced to him once over drinks at a Nantwich pub, but he doubted the man remembered his name or title. “I’m Detective Chief Inspector Babcock. Did your partner not tell you we had some questions about his accounts? Or that one of his clients was murdered night before last? And that unfortunately, it appears that Mr. Dutton had been helping himself to a percentage of her profits without permission?”

“What?” Newcombe’s thin face went slack with shock. “You can’t be ser—”

“Annie Lebow. Or Annie Constantine, according to your records. Mr. Dutton will be helping us with our inquiries.”

Newcombe turned to Dutton like a child asking for reassurance.

“Piers, this can’t be true—”

“I’m afraid it is true that Annie Constantine was murdered, Caspar, but I had nothing to do with it,” Dutton said, his voice even, soothing.

“And you haven’t—”

“Of course not. I’m sure the police will find it’s all a misunderstanding, perhaps a bookkeeping error. Juliet sometimes—” Dutton stopped and shrugged, and Newcombe nodded, accepting the implication without protest.

He turned back to Babcock and regarded him owlishly. “Night before last, you say?”

“Yes.”

Newcombe drew himself up to his full height. “Then you have no reason to harass my partner, Inspector. Piers was with me the entire evening.”

From the corner of his eye, Babcock saw the flash of dismay on Dutton’s face.

Juliet wanted nothing more than a hot bath. Her entire body felt as if it had been stomped on by a rugby team, due, she suspected, to her daylong efforts to put a good face on her rising internal panic.

She’d begun by taking her foreman, Jim, to the building site, and while she viewed the aftermath left by the deconstruction crew with horror, he’d stood shaking his head in a wordless dismay that made her feel even worse.

Leaving him to it, she’d retreated to her van and, forcing a smile on her face, had rung the Bonners in London and told them cheerfully that it would take only a few days to get back on schedule.

Her clients were already jittery over the idea that their future home had been used as a burial ground for a child, and Juliet was afraid that with the snowballing delays, they might cut their losses and pull out altogether. When her thoughts strayed down that path, her heart began to pound.

Keep things in proportion, she’d told herself, turning up the van’s heater in hopes that air from the still-warm engine would stop her teeth chattering.

There would be other jobs. She and the kids wouldn’t starve—they could stay with her folks as long as necessary, and it was only her pride that would suffer. And if worse came to worst and her business failed, she could find another job. She had skills; she’d managed

Caspar’s office efficiently enough—in spite of Piers—and she’d made a good bit on the side doing small fix-up projects for friends.

Somehow, she had to get herself through the day. Confine her thoughts to minutiae, concentrate on the sequence of steps required to get her project back on course.

For a moment, her hatred of Piers Dutton squeezed her chest like a python, and she swallowed against the bile rising in her throat. It occurred to her that she’d never known true hatred before. If she’d thought about it at all, she’d imagined it as cleansing, a pure emotion unadulterated by the burden of fairness or compassion.

But it was corrosive, spilling over into every facet of her life, poisoning all her relationships. It kept her from forgiving Caspar his weakness; it kept her from telling her brother and Gemma that she understood they’d only done what they felt they must. And it was keeping her from reassuring her children that she loved them, especially Lally.

The thought pierced her heart. She’d sniffed, wiped her eyes, and gone back to the job site determined to do better, to keep focused on the things that really mattered.

But by midafternoon, when she’d picked Lally and the two younger boys up at the bookshop, her daughter’s sullen withdrawal only made her angry again.

She knew Lally had been hurt by her grandfather’s singling out Kit for this morning’s trip to Audlem—she’d felt a stab of jealousy herself that shamed her—but all her attempts at engaging the girl in some sort of ordinary conversation had failed so miserably that even the boys had become quiet, embarrassed.

When they reached the house, they’d found Kit and Hugh just back from their expedition, red cheeked and irritatingly cheerful. Hugh had lit the fire in the sitting room, and had dared the boys and Lally to take him on at Monopoly, but Lally had disappeared upstairs, refusing to join in. When Juliet called after her, she’d pretended not to hear.

Juliet sank down on the bottom step, desolation settling over her.

She tried to force her cold fingers to unlace her work boots, but stopped halfway through. Suddenly even the longed- for bath seemed more than she could manage. Perhaps she’d have a nip from the bottle of brandy her dad kept under the kitchen sink, just to get herself going, she thought, and she’d just pushed herself upright when the doorbell rang.

She knew, with the absolute certainty born of dread, who it was.

The dogs barked in chorus, and when her dad looked out of the sitting room, she waved him back and said, “It’s for me.”

Opening the door, Juliet stepped out onto the porch and faced her husband.

Her first thought was that he looked diminished, much less frightening than her imagination had painted him after his attack on her in the pub. His chest seemed to have sunk, his cheeks were unshaven, but his eyes glittered so feverishly that any hopes she had had that he’d come to apologize were quickly dashed.

The muscles in his jaw worked as he said, “They’ve taken him in.

Piers. To the police station. They say he cheated this woman who died, and others, too. Piers!” Outrage warred with disbelief in his voice.

“Caspar—” She reached out, moved by unexpected pity, but he jerked his arm away from her fingers as if stung.

“It’s your doing,” he spat at her. “You’d stoop to anything to get back at him for rejecting you, even ruining the business, ruining me.

And now the police suspect him of murder.”

Juliet let her hand fall to her side. So she had been right all along. The police wouldn’t have taken Piers in for questioning unless they’d found evidence to support her suspicions. Jubilation flared through her, but it faded in an instant and she felt merely tired and infinitely sad. There was no joy in vindication, not at this cost, but the oddest thing was that her fear had vanished.

Piers couldn’t hurt her now, and in defending him even in the face of reason, Caspar had lost his power over her.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Caspar,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? You bitch. You—”

She stopped his venom with a wave of her hand, and felt like Moses parting the Red Sea. Her head was suddenly clear. “I’ve started divorce proceedings. My solicitor will contact you. In the meantime, I want you out of the house. The children and I will be moving back in until things are settled. I’ll give you twenty-four hours to get your things. After that, if you come near us, except for arranged visitations with the children, I’ll take out restraining orders against you.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending. “You can’t—”

“I can.” She looked at her husband one last time, then stepped back into the house and closed the door.

It was only as she turned round that she saw Lally standing at the foot of the stairs.

“I got two of the big houses,” shrieked Toby, almost upsetting the game board in his excitement. “I win.”

“You can’t win yet, silly,” Sam told him. “Not until everyone runs out of money, and that can take days.”

Hugh, who had been coaching Toby on his moves, stepped in.

“It’s all right, Toby. You can buy lots more houses, and railroads, and you may beat us all yet.” He winked at Kit over the little boy’s head, and Kit grinned back.

Kit still felt a glow of pleasure from their morning, spent exploring the stair-step locks in the pretty town of Audlem, south of Nantwich.

Hugh—he still didn’t quite feel comfortable calling him

“grandfather”—had talked to him as if he were an adult, drawing him out about his opinions and interests, and had then taken him for lunch at a pub in the village of Wrenbury. Only thoughts of Annie

Lebow and the Horizon had marred Kit’s enjoyment, and he’d tried hard to keep them at bay.

Now, as Hugh urged Toby to roll the dice again, Kit made an effort to join in, but he kept thinking about the raised voices he’d heard a few minutes earlier, and the slamming of the front door. Hugh, too, kept glancing at the sitting-room door, and Kit sensed his enthusiasm for the game was at least partly an attempt at distracting them from whatever scene had taken place on the front porch.

And where, he wondered, was Lally?

“Sam,” he whispered, “take my turns for me, will you? I’ve got to go to the loo.” Then he was up and slipping from the room before anyone could protest, or Toby could follow.

The air in the front hall felt frigid compared to the warmth of the sitting room. No sound came from the kitchen, where the dogs were having a kip by the stove. Not wanting to disturb them, he climbed the stairs quietly, although he couldn’t have explained quite why he felt the need for stealth.

When he reached the upstairs hall, he saw that the bathroom door was closed, and as he moved closer he heard faint splashing, and smelled the scent of bubble bath wafting from under the door. He doubted it was Lally in the tub, although the fleeting image conjured up by that thought made his skin prickle with embarrassment.

Hugh’s study, then, where Lally and Juliet had been sleeping?

The door stood slightly ajar, but when he looked in, the sofa bed was tucked away, and only the clutter of Hugh’s books and papers hinted at its occupancy.

Perplexed, Kit wondered if Lally had been in the kitchen all along, but decided that while he was upstairs he’d grab a book he’d been reading that he’d promised to show Hugh.

He flung open the door to the room he shared with the other boys, with none of the care he’d taken in the study, and froze.

Lally, crouched on his bed with her hand plunged into the depths of a backpack, jumped as if she’d been shot.

“What are you doing in here?” she hissed at him.

“It’s my room,” he said, incensed. “What are you doing in here?”

“Trying to get away from my fucking mother, that’s what.” Lally eased her hand from the backpack, but stayed in her crouch, clutching the pack to her chest like body armor.

“Why?” asked Kit, still not following the plot.

“Because I hate her,” said Lally, vicious.

“You don’t mean—”

“Yes, I do mean it.” Her eyes filled. “I hate her. I wish she were dead.”

Kit crossed the room in two strides. When the edge of the bed stopped his forward momentum, he reached out and slapped Lally across the face, hard. Only then did he realize he was shaking with anger. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. You don’t know what it means.”

He waited for her to hit back, to tell him to sod off, to yell for help, but she only stared at him and whispered, “And you don’t know what she’s done.” The tears that had threatened spilled over, making glistening trails across the white handprint on her cheek, and Kit felt ashamed.

“Lally, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—it’s just that—”

“She’s ruined everything. Why

couldn’t she just leave things

alone? We were all right the way we were.”

Feeling helpless now, Kit sat down beside her. He pulled her hand from the pack and held it between his own. “Look, I know your parents aren’t getting on, but whatever happens with them, you’ll be okay.” Her hand felt like a live thing between his, a small creature caught unawares, still with terror.

“I won’t.” Her eyes met his, and in them he saw a certainty that chilled him.

Before he could speak, she pulled her hand away and zipped the pack. “I’m going out tonight,” she said dully. “As soon as it’s dark.”

“You can’t,” he protested. “Your mother’s practically had you under lock and key, even in the daytime.”

“She can’t watch me every minute. And she can’t stop me walking out the door.”

“Why do you have to go out? Tell me what’s going on—”

“Why should I?” she said, defiant now. “Why should it matter?”

It was a challenge, and Kit knew suddenly that if he failed her now he would never make it up.

“God almighty, he’s one slick bastard.” Kevin Rasansky shook his head, half in obvious disgust, half in admiration. He’d just come from the interview room where Babcock had been questioning Piers Dutton for the last few hours, and had apparently picked out Gemma and Kincaid as the most appreciative audience.

They had settled into the temporary incident room, lending a hand where they could, both chafing at the inactivity and their lack of command, but unwilling to leave. Gemma had taken Sheila Larkin’s desk, as the DC had gone to meet Roger Constantine at the morgue. She was thumbing through files she knew Larkin had already scanned while keeping an uneasy eye on Kincaid, who had gone broodingly silent as the hours passed. It worried her, and she had to keep herself from overcompensating with cheery conversation.

“And now he’s got his high- priced lawyer, I doubt we’ll keep him twenty- four hours,” Rasansky continued, seeing that he had their attention.

“But surely with the evidence in his files—” Gemma began, but Rasansky interrupted her.

“Oh, no doubt we’ll get a fraud charge somewhere down the line, but it may take months to build a solid case. And in the meantime, his alibi for the night of Lebow’s death is at least convincing enough that I don’t think the boss will charge him without corroborating evidence. His friends confirmed that he had dinner with them in s

Tarporley, and that he didn’t leave the pub until well after ten. They also admitted, a bit reluctantly, that he’d had a good bit to drink, and probably shouldn’t have driven. And if he was that cut, how likely is it that he stumbled his way down the towpath in the fog, pulled Lebow’s mooring pin loose, and waited patiently for her to come out and see what was amiss?”

“Then what about Caspar Newcombe?” asked Kincaid. Babcock had told them about Caspar’s hastily proffered alibi for his partner.

“Dutton says he admires his loyalty, but that Newcombe’s gesture was ‘misguided.’ The man’s an idiot, if you ask me,” Rasansky added, and Gemma wondered if he’d forgotten that Caspar Newcombe was Kincaid’s brother-in-law. Anyone with the barest minimum of tact would have stopped at the expression on Kincaid’s face, but Rasansky barreled on. “We’ve applied for a warrant for Newcombe’s fi les as well, and we’ve padlocked the premises in the meantime. If we’re lucky, we’ll get both the bastards for fraud.” He smiled at them, pleased at his prediction.

Gemma had managed a strangled “Yes” when, with great relief, she saw Sheila Larkin come in through the door. Larkin stopped, belatedly, to stomp caked snow off her boots onto the industrial carpet. “Bloody snowing again,” she said as she reached them, and when Gemma started to get up, she waved her back into her chair. She tossed her padded coat over a vacant desk and continued to Gemma,

“You’re welcome to it. I’ve got to use the computer. Any luck with Dutton?”

The DCI is still in with him.”

Larkin made a face. “Bugger all on this end, too, except in the pro cess of elimination. I met Roger Constantine at the morgue for the formal identification.” She propped a hip on the desk, pushing a paper stack out of the way. “He was pretty cut up, poor bloke, so I thought I’d take advantage of his fragile emotional state.” This last was said in obvious quotes, and Gemma suspected it could be attrib-uted to Babcock.

“He was shocked to find his neighbors had been gossiping about his occasional dinners in the pub with the young woman—turns out she’s his goddaughter. But he did admit, with a bit of encouragement, that after his call from Lebow on the night she was killed, he spent the rest of the evening visiting a neighbor. It seems her husband was out of town, but she’s willing to back him up if need be.” Shrugging, Larkin added, “Can’t say I blame him for having a bit on the side, if they’d been separated for five years. It’s only human, isn’t it? But he says he’d have taken her back in an instant if that’s what she’d wanted.”

“That’s all very well after the fact,” Kincaid said sharply. “But we can’t be sure that Annie Lebow didn’t threaten to pull the plug on his finances that night—maybe she found out about the neighbor and didn’t take quite such a philosophical view. And we can’t discount the possibility that said neighbor was in on it with him. Maybe she plans to leave her husband when Constantine inherits.”

“You’re as cynical as my guv’nor,” Larkin said, dimpling at him.

“But that doesn’t tell us how he drove from Tilston to Barbridge in blinding fog, then found his way along the towpath to the boat. And he seems more a cere bral type, if you know what I mean. If he were going to kill her, I can’t see him bashing her over the head. I’d bet he’d plan ahead, and make it look like an accident, or suicide. After all, she had a history of depression.”

“You’ve an evil mind.” Kincaid looked inordinately cheered, and if Gemma hadn’t been so relieved at the lifting of his mood, she’d have felt a stab of jealousy.

“What about the other leads the guv’nor asked you to follow up?” put in Rasansky, breaking up the party to which he hadn’t been invited.

“No joy. The doctor who made the MSBP diagnosis was on duty that night, with multiple witnesses. And as for the parents of the child who died in foster care, the mother committed suicide a couple of years ago, and after that the father went completely off the rails.

He’s serving time for aggravated assault and dealing.” Even Larkin’s cheeky demeanor seemed dampened by the recital of this sad little story. Standing, she said, “I’d better get these reports entered and printed before the boss takes a break from his interview.”

While Larkin made her way to a vacant computer terminal, Rasansky pulled Kincaid aside and began questioning him about procedures at the Yard. Gemma suspected he was trying to impress Kincaid, with an eye to a transfer, and judging from Kincaid’s air of polite forbearance, he’d come to the same conclusion.

Trying to put from her mind the thought of the parents whose child’s death had deprived them of any reason to pull their own lives together, Gemma restraightened the papers Sheila Larkin had shoved aside. Lifting the top page of the stack, she saw that it was part of Annie Constantine’s report on the Wain case. Gemma had read the narrative earlier, remarking on the clarity of the writing, and Constantine’s obvious compassion. She wished she had met her. Even after her years on the job, the finality of death never failed to jar her; the human mind was so geared to think in the future tense, about opportunities yet to come. But there would be no tomorrows for Annie Constantine, and Gemma felt a personal pang of loss.

Now she glanced through the narrative idly, half listening to Kincaid and Rasansky’s conversation, half worrying about the latest development with Caspar Newcombe and Kincaid’s reaction to it.

Then a sentence caught her eye. She stopped, rereading, feeling a frisson of shock travel up her spine. Closing her eyes, she brought back the image of the little girl, fishing under her large black umbrella.

It couldn’t be. And yet— Once more she read the descriptions of the Wains’ children, so carefully noted by Annie Constantine, and she knew that she was not mistaken.

The little girl she had met was not Marie Wain.