Water Like a Stone (31 page)

“Annie Lebow died violently, Mr. Wain. We have to investigate anyone who might have wished her harm.”

“You’re saying you think I’d kill a woman I hardly knew over a
bit of scraped paint?” His anger was righteous now, and he didn’t trouble to keep it in check. “That’s downright daft.”

“We have to ask. You can understand that. We also have to ask where you were last night.”

“I was here, with my family. But I’ll not have my family brought into this. It’s nothing to do with—”

“For the moment, we just need to know we can speak with you again. You weren’t planning on leaving Barbridge?”

Seeing the detective give a covert glance at her watch, Gabriel realized she’d finished with him, and was more than likely trying to work out how to juggle more tasks than she could manage in a given amount of time.

Relief flooded through him, so intense it left his hands shaking. She would, no doubt, be checking his story with anyone else she could find to speak to along this part of the canal, but none of the nearby boats was occupied, and he doubted if anyone other than the Millsap woman had witnessed Annie’s visit on Christmas Eve.

He shoved his telltale hands in his trouser pockets and nodded brusquely. “We’ve no plans to move on, for now,” he said, and it struck him, as he watched her walk away, that he had no plans at all. For him, time had stopped here in Barbridge, and his future had ceased to exist.

Kit followed Lally back towards the shop, struggling to keep up with her pace. He was still trying to work out why she was angry with him, and what any of it had to do with her friend Peter, but the taut line of her back offered no helpful clues.

“Lally!” he called out as they neared the back door of the bookshop. “Wait. Can’t we talk?”

She slowed, but kept her face averted. “There’s nothing to—”

Kit caught a shadow of movement out of the corner of his eye, then
Leo stepped in front of them, as if he’d appeared from out of nowhere. “What’s the matter, Lal?” he said. “You and coz have a falling-out?”

Lally gave a little yelp of surprise, then turned to face him, hands on her hips. “Bloody hell, Leo. Are you trying to make me wet my knickers? And no, we haven’t had a falling-out, but even if we had, it’s none of your business.”

Leo didn’t take up the challenge. Instead, he said, “Where have you been?” and to Kit’s surprise he sounded more worried than belligerent. “I’ve been ringing you since yesterday and your mobile goes straight to voice mail.”

“You didn’t leave anything…personal…in a message?” Lally’s voice had suddenly gone breathy with panic. She pulled them into the doorway of the next-door shop’s back entrance, and Kit realized that was where Leo must have been waiting. “My mum took my phone yesterday. She doesn’t want me talking to my dad. That’s why I didn’t call.”

“Couldn’t you have used someone else’s phone? What about coz here?”

Kit wondered if Leo had guessed that he didn’t have a phone and was deliberately trying to humiliate him. “I left it at home,” he said, as nonchalantly as he could.

“Liar.” Leo rolled his eyes. “No one leaves their phone, not even the übergeeks.” He turned his attention back to Lally. “I hitchhiked into town last night and waited by the Bowling Green. Surely you could have got out for a bit.”

“She won’t let us go home, my mum. We’re staying at my grandparents’.”

“All the better, then.” Leo sounded as if she’d just won the lottery. “That makes us practically neighbors. Come out tonight, when everyone’s gone to bed. We could meet at the old dairy, see where your mum found the mummy. It’s a good place to have a nip, and I’ve got some really brilliant st—”

“You don’t understand,” Lally said vehemently. “After what hap
pened this morning, my mum and my grandparents aren’t letting any of us out of their sight.”

Leo stared at her. “What? What are you talking about? What happened this morning?”

“You don’t know?” Her satisfaction was evident. “Kit found a body. On the canal, just below Barbridge.” Lally gave Kit a proprietary glance that he didn’t find the least bit flattering. “It was the woman we met on her boat yesterday. Someone killed her.”

“No way.” Leo glanced from Lally to Kit, his eyes wide with disbelief.

“Way,” Lally retorted, with taunting smugness. “She was—”

“Lally, we’ve got to go,” broke in Kit. He wasn’t sure how much Lally had actually overheard from the grown-ups that morning, but he couldn’t bear the thought of her reciting Annie’s injuries to Leo. “We should have been back ages ago,” he urged, reaching for her arm to pull her towards the door. But then he saw Leo’s expression, and his fingers fell away, suddenly nerveless.

Lally shrugged away from them both. “All right, all right. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

As she turned towards the bookshop door, Leo called out, “At least say you’ll try tonight. Just ring me to say when. You can use your grandparents’ phone without being overheard—get lover boy here to create a diversion,” he wheedled. “You could come, too,” he added to Kit, the animosity of a moment ago seemingly forgotten. “We’ll show you a good time, won’t we, Lal?”

“Shut up, Leo.” She was angry again, and Kit was as lost as before. He was glad, however, when she pulled open the bookshop door and shoved him inside, closing it firmly behind her.

The storeroom was empty. Kit leaned against the door, listening, his heart pounding. But a steady hum of voices came from the front room, one of them the unmistakable drone of Mrs. Armbruster. They had made it back without their absence being noticed.

The sudden relief gave him courage. He turned to Lally, who had sat casually on a box and was picking at her fingernails. When she looked up at him with a challenging half smile and said, “See?” he snapped back without thinking.

“Is Leo your boyfriend?”

“No!” Caught off guard, she’d spoken with unaccustomed vehemence.

“Then how come you do whatever he says?”

“I don’t.” She must have seen the disbelief in Kit’s eyes because she went on. “It’s not like that. You don’t understand. It’s just that Leo…knows…things…”

“What sort of things?”

Lally met Kit’s eyes, and for just an instant, a frightened child looked back at him. Then the barriers sprang up again, as tangible as shutters, and as she turned away she said, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“You’ll be all right?” asked Gemma, turning to Juliet as they stopped outside the small shop and office Juliet rented in Castle Street, tucked away behind the town square.

They had walked down Pillory Street from the café, and when Juliet had hesitated as they passed the bookshop, Gemma had urged her on, saying, “I’m sure the children are fine. It might be best to wait a bit before you see Lally, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so,” Juliet agreed with a sigh. “Although I’m not sure waiting a few hours will make it any easier to talk to her and pretend I know nothing. God, she must think me a fool,” she added, her anger returning.

“I’ve no more experience than you, but I suspect that most fourteen-year-olds think their parents are fools, on a good day.” Gemma had given Juliet’s arm a squeeze, and got a small smile in return.

Then Juliet had insisted that if she couldn’t do anything for the children, she must update her crew and try to contact the Bonners, the clients who had commissioned the reconstruction of the barn.

Gemma, afraid that Juliet’s shop was the first place Caspar would look for her if he was in a temper, felt uneasy about leaving her there
on her own. “Don’t worry,” Juliet assured her, pointing to a battered van parked half on the curb in front of the shop. “My foreman’s here, and I’d like to see Caspar try anything in front of him—Jim does kickboxing in his spare time. When I’ve finished, I’ll have Jim walk me up to the bookshop. I can get a ride back to the house with Mum or Dad.”

Gemma hesitated, afraid of overstepping bounds, but after considering what she’d already had to tell Juliet that day, decided in for a penny, in for a pound. “Juliet, you know that whenever you decide to talk to Caspar, Duncan and I can be there to back you up. You don’t have to do it on your own.”

With her hand on the knob of the shop door, Juliet turned back. “I—I’m not sure I’m quite ready. But thanks.”

Gemma stood watching until Juliet had gone inside the shop, her uneasiness not dispelled. But she couldn’t stand guard over an unwilling subject, and besides, Caspar had never actually harmed Juliet, or even made outright threats. Perhaps it was just the shadow cast by Annie Lebow’s murder that was making her feel so unsettled.

That, and the fact that she’d once again found herself a spare cog. Juliet had her business to see to, the children were with Rosemary and Hugh, and Kincaid was still off somewhere with Ronnie Babcock, no doubt indulging in a bit of male bonding.

As she walked slowly towards the car park at the end of Castle Street, she saw that the shops and businesses that had characterized the street nearer the town center were soon replaced by well-kept Georgian residences. Some of the houses were occupied by solicitors and insurance agents, but the commercial use didn’t mar the serene feel of the tree-lined street.

It made her think of Islington, where she had lived in her friend Hazel Cavendish’s garage flat, and she felt a pang of nostalgia for a life that had seemed simpler, at least in retrospect. But that simplicity had been deceptive, she reminded herself, and if her life had been less complicated, it had also been less rich.

She wouldn’t willingly trade the life she led now—in fact, she found it hard to envision anything other than the hustle and bustle of the Notting Hill house shared with Duncan and the boys. And if she sometimes wished that Duncan hadn’t felt obligated to take her and Toby in, she tried to put the thought aside. She couldn’t change what had happened, or bring back the child she had lost.

She felt a cold kiss of moisture on her cheek, like a frozen tear. Looking up, she saw a single snowflake spiraling down, but the sky looked less threatening than it had earlier, when she and Juliet had felt a spatter of sleet as they walked from the car park to the café.

Although Juliet had given her an illustrated map of the town and suggested she take a walking tour on her own, when Gemma reached the car park, she stood and gazed across the road at the River Weaver. She imagined the canal, running parallel a half mile to the west as it passed the outskirts of the town, then leaving the course of the river and angling northwest towards Barbridge and distant Chester—the same canal that passed Juliet’s dairy barn, and the scene of Annie Lebow’s murder.

It was a coincidence, surely, that the remains of the child, perhaps long buried, should lie so near the place where a woman had died violently sometime last night. She could see no logical connection, but still it nagged at her. Suddenly, she felt she had better things to do than sightsee.

The same uniformed constable she had spoken with that morning was still restricting access into Barbridge, but he recognized Gemma and waved her through. The crime-scene van was still parked near the bridge end, and she knew the local force would try to limit traffic through the area until the SOCOs had finished.

She found a place to leave her own car, then spoke to the officer who was monitoring pedestrian movement over the bridge and onto
the towpath. “What about boats?” she asked him, when he’d checked her identification.

“Not much traffic this time of year,” he answered. “And we’ve had someone stationed at the Middlewich Junction, to warn the boaters off, as well as down at the Hurleston Locks, below the crime scene. I’ve mostly had to turn back gawkers who have walked in to visit the pub,” he added, gesturing at the Barbridge Inn.

Thanking him, Gemma crossed the humpbacked bridge and climbed down the incline to the towpath. There was only one boat moored below the bridge, a matte black vessel with small brass-rimmed round portals, like multiple eyes. Gemma peered curiously at the portholes as she passed, but the interior curtains were drawn tight, and both fore and aft decks were closed in with heavy black canvas. The boat looked deserted, and unpleasantly funereal.

The two boats moored on the other side of the canal were more cheerful, painted in traditional reds and greens, but they appeared just as devoid of human presence.

Gemma walked on, following the sharp curve of the canal to the left, and as the boats and houses of Barbridge vanished behind her she felt she’d entered a different, secret world. There was nothing but the wide curve of the water, always turning sinuously just out of sight, and the black tracery of bare trees against the gray sky.

The place seemed to her unutterably lonely—and yet she could feel the pull of it, the desire to see always what lay round the next bend. And she could imagine that in summer, when the trees were thick with leaf and the air soft and drowsy, it would be enchanted.

Looking down, she saw that that rutted path worn into the surrounding turf held a collage of footprints—a nightmare for the scene-of-crime team. She went on, conscious of the sound of her own breathing, and of the occasional faint rustle of the wind or a small creature in the surrounding woods. When a trio of swans appeared round the next bend and glided towards her, she felt an unexpected easing of tension. They were company, even if not human.

She spoke to them, feeling slightly foolish, and they changed course and came towards her, swimming in formation, trailing geometrically perfect wakes behind them. When they saw she had no food to offer, however, they quickly abandoned her, picking desultorily at the rushes lining the banks.

“Silly cow,” Gemma admonished herself aloud. What had she expected, a conversation? A look at the heavy cloud layer drawing nearer the horizon told her that her window of opportunity might not last. If she was going to see anything, she had better get a move on, and not fritter away her time idling with swans.

She set off again, her stride more purposeful, and after a few more bends the canal straightened a bit, and hedgerows began to replace the trees. Ahead, Gemma saw a black iron bridge that possessed none of the grace of the old stone humpbacked bridges, and to one side, a gnarled and twisted black silhouette of a tree that rose in unnatural parody.

And beyond that, she glimpsed the first fluorescent lime-green flash of a police officer’s safety jacket. She had reached the crime scene. After identifying herself, she stood for a few moments at the perimeter, watching. The technicians were still searching for trace evidence, combing through every blade of grass and every twig of hedgerow. The deep blue boat floated serenely against the bank, as if removed from the fuss, but as Gemma looked more closely she could see the dusting of print powder on the sides and decks. There was no sign, of course, of the victim’s body, only a dark patch in the turf, unidentifiable as blood from where Gemma stood.

“The lads have finished inside the boat, if you want to have a look,” the officer told her, but Gemma resisted the temptation. She knew Babcock’s crew would have been over the boat thoroughly, and that was not why she’d come.

“Is there some way I can get past, without contaminating the scene?” she asked. The hedgerow looked as impenetrable as Sleeping Beauty’s briar thicket.

“There’s a stile a few yards back—you’ll have passed it. It’s a bit overgrown, but I think you could get over it into the field.” He didn’t ask why, and although she suspected he could tell her what she wanted to know, there was no substitute for seeing the lay of the land herself.

“Thanks,” she said, adding, “I’ll give you a shout if I get stuck,” and got a friendly and appreciative grin in return.

A few moments later, she found the stile, and was glad enough that the curve of the hedge hid her from the constable’s sight. “Overgrown” had been an understatement, she thought as she pushed aside branches and placed a foot on the raised step. She swung the other leg awkwardly over the top and found herself hung, straddling the fence, the back of her coat caught on a bramble. “Bloody country,” she swore, wishing she were double-jointed as she reached round to free the snag from her back. When she finally clambered down, as graceful as a ballerina in lead boots, she could feel her face flushed pink with aggravation and embarrassment. Now she’d just have to hope she didn’t meet an irate cow.

She discovered soon enough that her nemesis was mineral rather than animal. The field had been plowed, and although sprouts of bright green winter grass grew on the raised ridges, the furrows held a porridge of slush and mud. Gemma trudged on, her boots growing heavier with every step, until the hedgerow diminished to a few strands of wire fencing and she was able to climb back to the towpath. Ahead, she saw the now-familiar shape of a stone bridge, half hidden by the curve of the canal.

As she came round the bend, she saw the redbrick building hugging the rise on the opposite side of the canal—Juliet’s dairy barn. She had reached the far side of the bridge that went nowhere.

Getting onto the bridge itself required climbing over another stile, but this time Gemma managed a bit more gracefully. From her vantage point at the top of the bridge, she could see the activity still under way at the dairy, but there was no sign of the irascible
sergeant she and Juliet had met that morning. She thought that without him to play watchdog, she’d have no trouble getting inside the building, but first she meant to finish what she had come to do.

She stood at the parapet and looked back the way she had come, at the still reach of the canal, empty now of any movement save a faint ripple in the rushes lining the bank. Then she turned, and crossing the bridge, looked south. In the distance, she could see the rising bank of the Hurleston Reservoir, stark after the tree-lined curves she had seen to the north, and she knew that beyond that lay the Hurleston Locks and the entrance to the Llangollen Canal, and farther still, the village of Acton, and Nantwich.

Close by, in the lee of the dairy barn, a half dozen narrowboats were moored opposite the towpath, like a gay trail of ducklings, and she could see where a path led from the dairy’s lane along the edge of the field, allowing access to the boats. But the deck doors were sealed tight or covered with canvas, and no smoke rose from the brass-ringed chimneys. Gemma doubted that Babcock’s men had found any witnesses there.

Why had Annie Lebow chosen such a deserted stretch of the canal in which to moor her boat? Did it have some connection with the proximity of the dairy barn?

Or look at it another way, Gemma thought. If Annie had been accustomed to mooring her boat there when she came to the Barbridge area, had she seen something at the barn? And if that was the case, could the discovery of the child’s body have brought her to the killer’s attention?

But for all they knew, Gemma reminded herself, the baby might have been interred in the barn wall long before Annie Lebow had even bought her boat. She shook her head in frustration. She was hypothesizing without hard data, a dangerous thing.

But her walk had netted her one thing more than muddy boots and fingers that were starting to go numb. She knew concretely what she had guessed from looking at the map—that whoever had
attacked Annie Lebow had come either from Barbridge or from the lane that led down to the dairy barn. Of course, it was possible that someone could have walked the towpath from as far away as Nantwich to the south, or from above Barbridge to the north, but in last night’s heavy fog, she thought it very unlikely—as unlikely as the idea that the killer had blundered his or her way across the fields and through wood, fence, and hedgerow to the path.

That, however, was as far as supposition could take her, but she realized she was not willing to stop there. Once back at her car, she’d run down Kincaid and Ronnie Babcock, and see what they had turned up. It was time she did what she did best, putting the pieces together.

But even as she started towards the towpath, she hesitated. Turning, she gazed once more at the redbrick barn. There was still no sign of Sergeant Rasansky, and it looked as though the deconstruction crew was winding down. There was no one who knew her history to call her curiosity morbid—why shouldn’t she see the last resting place of the mystery child for herself?

That was one of the things he hated about women. The way they said one thing and meant another. Or the look, the one they gave you that was worse than words, but kept you from striking back, because there was nothing concrete you could name.