Where Memories Lie

by Deborah Crombie

  As Wanda's face began to crumple again, Gemma said quickly, "Do you know who rang her on her mobile?"

  "No. She didn't answer. But I assumed it was the young man who called just afterwards on our phone. It was her friend from work, Giles. He was very polite, but she didn't seem particularly happy to talk to him."

  "What did she say?"

  "Well, he must have been asking her to do something, because she said thanks, but she couldn't, really. But Bob was grumbling at her by that time, so she left the room…"

  "She didn't say anything about work? Or tell you where she was going?"

  Wanda shook her head slowly, and Gemma could see the grief swamping her again, a rising tide. "No. She kissed me, the way she always does when she goes out, and said she loved me. But she was that aggravated with her dad. If he hadn't-if she hadn't-When he asked where she was going, she said out with friends, and that she wouldn't be late…"

  Kincaid, who had been listening intently, spoke for the first time. "Mrs. Cahill, I'm sure that your daughter's little tiff with her father meant nothing at all. These things happen in families all the time."

  "They do, don't they?" said Wanda Cahill, latching on to the offered crumb of comfort. "And she never ordinarily said, you know, who she was meeting, or where she was going. It was…she was defending her independence, I think."

  "Did she ever talk about work?" asked Gemma.

  "To me, sometimes. I run a small antiques shop, just across the way, so I know a bit about the business."

  "Did she mention a brooch, an Art Deco diamond brooch that she'd taken in for sale?"

  "Kristin? A diamond brooch?" Mrs. Cahill looked at Gemma so blankly that the answer was obvious.

  "Never mind," Gemma said gently. "I'm sure it wasn't important." She started to rise. "We'll leave you to-"

  "There was one thing." Wanda Cahill squeezed her hand, hanging on. "That phone call she took. She was friendly enough, at first. But when she went to her bedroom, before she closed the door, she said again, 'No, I don't want to come over,' but this time she sounded angry." Frowning, she seemed to search for a word. "Not just angry. Final."

  ***

  "She won't forgive him." Kincaid slammed the car door harder than he'd intended.

  "Who?" asked Gemma. "Who won't forgive who-I mean whom?"

  "The mother. She won't forgive the father. And the poor bastard will probably spend the rest of his life blaming himself as well. I'll give you odds that marriage won't last a year."

  "It was bad. It will be bad." Gemma touched his cheek. "I'm sorry."

  "No." He covered her hand with his for a moment. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't be taking it out on you. And you were brilliant with Mrs. Cahill, by the way. It made me miss you, miss doing this together, every day."

  Reaching for the ignition, he glanced at her. "You hungry?"

  "After that?" Gemma shook her head. "Can't bear the thought."

  "All right. We'll give it a bit. No word from Doug, or from the Yard on the CCTV or Kristin's phone records, so let's pay a call on Kristin's mate Giles. Do we have a last name for him?"

  Gemma checked the notes she'd made at Harrowby's. "Oliver." She gave him the address.

  It was a fairly well-heeled area in Fulham, near enough to Stamford Bridge that you'd not be able to get through the streets before or after a football match, nor get a foot in the door of the local pub on a match day. Kincaid thought the young man must be doing quite well for himself as a sales assistant at the auction house, unless he, like Kristin, still lived with his parents.

  But when they reached the address Gemma had written down, they found a terraced house in bad repair, obviously a rental property. Paint flaked off the cream stucco and peeled from window and door trim; dead plants drooped from a first-floor window box, and the small yard attached to the garden flat was littered with empty crisp packets and beer bottles, and smelled of rotting food and cat pee.

  "Lovely," Gemma muttered under her breath as Kincaid rang the bell for the top flat. A release buzzer sounded for the main door-there was apparently no intercom system. Kincaid opened the door for Gemma with a flourish. "Oh, you're going to make me go in first?" she said, teasing. "Very gallant of you." But as they entered the communal hall, she wrinkled her nose in real distaste. The ambience was on a par with the yard in front, but there was less fresh air to dilute it.

  They climbed, Kincaid leading the way, passing scarred doors and treading on ever more threadbare carpet. A small, smudgy window on the landing let in much-needed light and air.

  They reached the top floor, but before Kincaid could raise a hand to the door, a great woofing roar shook the corridor. Gemma started visibly and even Kincaid took a step back. "What the hell does he have in there, a bloody lion?"

  "Get back, Mo, you great oaf!" came a shout from inside the flat, but the voice lacked a reassuring element of command.

  Then the door swung open and a young man faced them, panting, hanging on to the collar of the largest dog Kincaid had ever seen. "Don't worry," the young man said. "He won't do anything worse than drool on you."

  From the size of the dog's drooping jowls, Kincaid didn't doubt the drooling, and as the beast's tail was whipping back and forth in a frantically friendly wag, he decided to take the owner's word for the rest. "Mr. Oliver? We're from the police. We'd like to talk to you about Kristin-"

  "Mo, sit." Giles Oliver dragged the dog into a sitting position away from the door, giving them room to step inside, although Kincaid noticed Gemma stayed a pace behind him. "You want to talk to me about Kris-Kristin?" Oliver's voice broke on the name. The dog stopped straining towards the visitors and leaned against his master's leg, looking up at him with a furrowed canine brow.

  "If you don't mind. I'm Duncan Kincaid and this is Gemma James." The young man's face, Kincaid saw, was almost as puffy with weeping as Wanda Cahill's, and he suspected that, for the moment, sympathy would be more persuasive than rank.

  Oliver gestured towards a small sofa. "Here, sit down. I'll just give it a brush-"

  "We'll be fine," Kincaid said, preferring the risk of dog hair on trousers to the possibility of being bowled over if Oliver let go of the dog.

  "He's a mastiff, isn't he?" asked Gemma, apparently unfazed by the dog's size. "He's lovely." While Kincaid gingerly took a seat, she dropped into a crouch and added, "Can I stroke him?"

  Giles Oliver's rather weak-chinned face lit in a smile. "You don't mind? Most people would rather not. Just let me bring him to you so he won't knock you down."

  Kincaid imagined Gemma saying a prayer for her newest Per Una skirt and layered cardigan, but she weathered the onslaught heroically, even to the slurp across her cheek with the longest pink tongue Kincaid had ever seen. Then she gave the dog a last scratch behind his floppy ears and joined Kincaid on the sofa, arranging her skirt demurely over her knees and obviously making an effort not to brush at the wet streaks.

  Her exercise in canine bonding had given Kincaid a chance to examine the flat. Although small-the back of the sofa served as a divider between the living and sleeping areas-it didn't share the dilapidated state of the rest of the building. The place was clean and freshly painted-although there was a definite odor of dog-and the few pieces of furniture were of good quality, as was the rich-hued oriental carpet. But the studio's outstanding feature was a solid wall of shelving filled with vinyl LPs. To one side stood a double turntable and mixing station. It was apparent that Giles Oliver had at least one passion other than his dog, and he wondered where Kristin Cahill had figured in the equation.

  "I know you," Giles said to Gemma as he settled into a squat, using an arm over the dog's shoulders as a prop. "You came into the salesroom, to talk to Kris. That's why she got a bollocking from Mr. Khan," he added, his tone becoming less friendly.

  "I didn't mean to get her into trouble," answered Gemma. "Was he very cross?"

  "More than usual. Although he's always harder on Kris than on anyone else. Was." His chin wobbled, giving
him a fleeting resemblance to his dog. "Was harder on her."

  "Have you any idea why?"

  "No. I asked her, as a matter of fact, and she said she'd no idea. I wondered, though, if he, you know…fancied her. And if she'd turned him down…"

  "Does Mr. Khan have a reputation for chatting up the female assistants?" asked Kincaid, interested.

  "Well, no. But Kristin-I mean how could he not want…" His arm went a bit tighter round the dog, who groaned and slid down into a fawn-and-black mound on the carpet. The poor kid really had been besotted with Kristin Cahill, Kincaid thought with a flash of sympathy, and would not have had a snowball's chance in hell. But that made him all the more viable as a suspect.

  Oliver righted himself, left the dog, and perched on the edge of a chair with smooth, curving, burnished wooden arms. Furniture design was not Kincaid's forte, but he guessed the chair was expensive, and original. "He'll be all right now," Oliver said, with a look at the dog. "Once he's out, he's out." As if in answer, Mo began to snore, and his owner looked at Gemma and frowned. "I don't understand. What were you doing at the salesroom yesterday, and why do you want to talk to me about Kristin?"

  "Giles," said Gemma, "are you sure it was after I was there that Mr. Khan was upset with her?"

  His face darkened. "Well, before…all this…I thought it might have been because of the roses. They came just after you left."

  "Mrs. March said someone sent her roses. It wasn't you?"

  "Are you kidding?" His laugh was bitter. "I just barely manage to pay the rent on this dump. There's no way I could afford flowers like that."

  Priorities, Kincaid thought-Oliver apparently managed fine furniture and collector's vinyl on his pittance quite well.

  "Do you know who did send the flowers?" asked Gemma.

  Giles shook his head, tight lipped. "No."

  Kincaid picked up the questioning, changing tack. "Did Kristin talk to you about the brooch?"

  "What brooch?" Giles looked from Kincaid to Gemma.

  "The Jakob Goldshtein diamond brooch," Gemma answered.

  "Oh, that. She helped Mr. Khan catalog it. That's her job." Giles merely looked puzzled.

  "She didn't tell you she was getting a bringing-in fee?"

  "Kristin? Where would Kristin come across something like that?"

  "We thought you might be able to tell us. That Kristin might have talked to you about it." Gemma leaned forward, inviting him to confide in her.

  He colored, an ugly flush that brought out splotches on his neck. "No. She never said anything."

  "What about when you called her last night?" asked Kincaid, taking the opportunity to play bad cop. At the sharpness in his voice, the dog raised his head and gave a low rumble, and Kincaid suddenly remembered reading that mastiffs were very protective of their owners.

  But Giles Oliver seemed unaware of his dog's distress. "What?" he said, staring at them, but the blotches deepened in color.

  "We talked to her mum," said Gemma. "What was it that you wanted Kristin to do?"

  "I-I just wanted-I thought she might want someone to talk to about Khan giving her such a hard time."

  "You asked her out?"

  "No, not out, exactly. I thought she might want to come over. Listen to some records. You know, chill a bit. But-" He looked round the flat, as if seeing it through their eyes. "I should have known, shouldn't I?"

  "That she'd say no?"

  "She said she was going out," he retorted, as if trying to recover a shred of pride. "Meeting someone. At the Gate. That's why she couldn't come over."

  "The Gate in Notting Hill?" Kincaid asked, frowning. The Gate was the nightclub in the basement of the cinema of the same name, a Notting Hill landmark.

  "Yeah. I guess. I don't go places like that. Can't afford the drinks, and I'd rather make my own music." He gestured at the records and turntable.

  "Did she say who she was meeting?"

  "No. Maybe the same guy who sent her the roses. She was on her mobile with someone, after she argued with Mr. Khan."

  "Or maybe you're making it all up," Kincaid said slowly. "Maybe when she turned you down, let you know you were a stupid git to even think she would consider going out with you, you decided to get even. You drove over and waited for her to come home, then gunned the car at her. Maybe you just thought you'd teach her a lesson."

  "What?" Giles stood, and the dog rose onto his massive haunches, growling. "Are you saying someone ran Kristin down on purpose?"

  "You had good reason."

  "Me? Why would I do that? I loved her!" He began to laugh, with a hint of hysteria. "And I don't have a bloody fucking car."

  CHAPTER 11

  It was after Germany had occupied Austria in March 1938, and the dreadful events of Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, when 269 synagogues, 1,000 Jewish shops and dwellings were burned and 30,000 arrests made, that emigration escalated. Thousands of Jews were thrown into concentration camps, and there were desperate attempts to flee. By the end of 1938 there were 38,000 German and Austrian Jewish refugees in Britain, and by 1940 about 73,000…

  – Dr. Gerry Black, Jewish London: An Illustrated History

  "Well, that was a great success," Kincaid said as he eased the Rover back into traffic. He'd rung Cullen as soon as they were back in the car, learning that Giles Oliver not only had no car registered in his name, he had no driving license.

  "Sarcasm doesn't become you," Gemma replied mildly. "And it wasn't a waste of time. We know where Kristin went-"

  "Or at least where she told Giles she was going."

  She glanced at him-his lips were set in a straight line. He didn't like feeling a fool. "You're determined to be difficult," she told him. "We at least have a place to start. And we know that there was a bloke in her life who probably sent her roses. Was that what made Khan angry, or was it me asking her about the brooch? And is Giles right? Did she meet the rose sender when she went out?"

  "Or maybe Giles borrowed a neighbor's car, license or not."

  "Do you really see Giles Oliver running someone down?"

  "Vehicular homicide doesn't require getting up close and personal. Although I have to admit I can't see him asking for someone's keys, much less hot-wiring the neighbor's Volvo." His mouth relaxed, quirking into a smile. "Now if it had been accidental assault by dog…"

  "I can't blame Kristin for resisting the dog and DJ combo," Gemma said, but the thought made Kristin seem very real. Sobering, Gemma wondered what would have happened if Kristin had accepted Giles's invitation. Would Giles and Mo have seen her home and kept her safe, at least for that night? "We'll have to check with his neighbors. Someone might have seen something, however unlikely."

  "Where do you want to go, love?" Kincaid asked as they reached the King's Road again. "We seem to be at a momentary standstill. I can drop you at the Yard, if you want to get the tube to the hospital."

  Gemma realized that for the last hour she'd hardly given her mum a thought, and with the prick of guilt all her worries came rushing back, both for her mum and for Erika. Glancing at her watch, she saw that Kit would just be getting home from school. An idea struck her and she said, "Let me make a quick call."

  She caught Kit just as he was coming into the house, spoke to him, and was ringing off when Melody beeped in, her voice filled with cat-in-the-cream satisfaction.

  "You'll never guess what I found out, boss."

  ***

  Kit felt rather pleased. He liked Gemma's thinking that he could be helpful, and he wanted to talk to Erika again. He was curious about what had happened to her family, but felt he had put his foot in it a bit yesterday. He would have to bring it up more tactfully. Nor was he quite sure how to talk to Erika about the girl Gemma said had been killed, but he supposed he would think of something.

  And, unlike yesterday, this time he had the opportunity to get out of his school clothes. Today was even warmer, so he swapped blazer and tie for jeans and T-shirt, let the dogs out into the garden for a quick pee and g
ave them biscuits, then set off down Lansdowne Road. When a gaggle of uniformed schoolgirls passed him and gave him the eye, giggling, he grinned at them with an unaccustomed sense of power and quickened his step.

  When he rang the bell in Arundel Gardens, Erika answered immediately, and she didn't seem at all surprised to see him.

  "I've made lemonade," she said. "Real lemonade, the way we used to make it in the summers in Germany when I was a child, not the fizzy stuff from a bottle."

  "Did Gemma ring you?" he asked, following her into the flat.

  "She's fussing over me. And sending you to fuss by proxy," Erika answered, but she didn't sound displeased. "Anyone would think I was an old biddy, although I've never been sure just what a biddy is. It sounds rather unpleasant.

  "It's cooler inside today than out," she added as they reached the kitchen.

  She had put two tall glasses on a tray, along with a clear glass jug in which floated a few ice cubes and slices of lemon. When she poured Kit a glass he drank it down thirstily, finding he liked the tartness. He slid into a seat at the small table, and at Erika's nod, poured himself another glass.

  Erika sat across from him, but barely touched her own drink. He saw now that in spite of her chatter, she looked tired, and bright spots of color burned in her cheeks.

  "I'm sorry about the girl who was killed," he said, finding it suddenly easy. "And I'm sorry for what I said about your father yesterday. It wasn't fair of me."

  "No." She shrugged aside his apology. "It was what happened that wasn't fair. Nothing was fair then, but you were right, you know. We should never have let my father talk us into letting him stay behind. But he was a stubborn man, and he convinced himself that if he carried on as usual and pretended we had gone to visit relatives in Tilsit, then there was less likely to be an alert for us.

  "Not that the Nazis were averse to letting Jews out of the country at that point, mind you, but David was a troublemaker, and they might have thought he would stir up antagonism against the regime if he reached a country where he could speak freely."