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

by Water Like A Stone

  It wouldn’t seem right, taking food from a dead woman, no matter if everything in the kitchen eventually got chucked in the bin.

  Taking her notebook and a pen from her coat pocket, she jotted down Babcock’s list of tasks. The first thing was to ring Western Division and set the inquiries in Tilston in motion.

  When Control had put her through, she asked the duty sergeant to send an officer who knew the village—that would increase their odds of getting useful information. She asked about the fog as well, and the sergeant told her that the previous night it had been heavy in western Cheshire and on over the border into Wales. That was one question answered right off the bat, she thought, ringing off with satisfaction.

  Then she went back to the task of searching the boat for anything that might shed light on the victim, or the circumstances of

  her death. She had begun in the salon, the careful survey of which had taken only a few minutes—Annie Lebow had obviously been an enthusiastic proponent of the simplified life.

  Thinking of the suburban semidetached house she shared with her mother in North Crewe, Sheila sighed. If anything happened to her or her mum, it would take the police a week just to go through the sitting room. It wasn’t that either of them was particularly fond of clutter, it was just that accumulation seemed to overtake them, and neither had the time to deal with it.

  They rubbed along together pretty well, she and her mum. Her mum, Diane, had been only seventeen when Sheila was born, and her dad had buggered off without ever doing the right thing, so it had been just the two of them for as long as Sheila could remember.

  She was perfectly happy to go on sharing a house with her mum.

  She paid her share of the mortgage and the rates and the groceries—

  not that either of them was home to eat all that often, or even to see each other, for that matter. Her mum was a nurse who worked night shifts in accident and emergency at Leighton Hospital, so the two of them could go for days communicating only by notes left on the door of the fridge.

  Still, even when the house was empty, there was the feel of another person’s presence, and Sheila found that comforting, especially after a diffi cult case.

  Now, as she moved into the bedroom—or master stateroom, she supposed it was called—it seemed to her that she could feel loneliness settle over her like a pall. Any envy she’d felt over the dead woman’s posh living situation vanished. Annie Lebow had created a cocoon for herself: beautiful, expensive, and emotionally isolated.

  She soon found, however, that Lebow’s spare lifestyle had advantages. A section of panel in the stateroom dropped down to form a desk, and the space behind the panel held organizing nooks and

  niches. In these she easily found such paperwork as Annie Lebow had seen fit to keep.

  A leather- bound accordion file held carefully sorted bills for a credit card and a mobile phone, as well as the last several quarterly statements for a number of investments. In another nook, she found a personal address book, also leather bound.

  Tucked inside the book’s front cover were a half dozen loose photographs. All featured the boat, and from the background foliage, looked to have been taken in spring or summer. Only one, however, showed the victim.

  Annie Lebow stood at the helm, her right hand resting lightly on the end of the S-shaped tiller. Her bare arms and face looked tanned, her expression relaxed, with a hint of a smile touching the corners of her mouth. It seemed to Sheila that she had been gazing at whoever held the camera with a slightly tolerant affection.

  Although the photo was undated, Sheila guessed it was several years old, perhaps taken when Lebow had first acquired the boat.

  Her hair had been longer and darker, the planes of her face softer, less pronounced, and the more Sheila gazed at the image, the more she thought there was a sort of tentative pride in the way the woman held the tiller.

  Sheila took a last look at the photo, then grimaced and snapped the book closed. She had looked at Annie Lebow’s body and felt the shock and anger she always experienced at a murder scene. She had riffl ed through the woman’s clothes and most intimate possessions, and had still managed to keep a distance between herself and the victim. That separation was a learned skill, a necessity of the job that she struggled to maintain.

  But as Annie Lebow met her eyes in the photograph, Sheila felt a connection. The crumpled body on the path had become a woman who had lived and worked and slept and dreamed, who had inhabited this small space, however lightly. In that instant of association

  across time and space, Annie Lebow had become real to Sheila, and her death had become personal.

  She wore boots, trousers, and a heavy woolen coat, but even from a distance and out of uniform, he could tell she was a cop. There was something in the way she moved, confident but alert, that marked her like a brand.

  As he moved around the boat, from one small task to another, he watched her. She’d come up the towpath from the direction of the crime scene, and after handing a parcel to one of the uniformed officers standing guard in the parking area, she’d made her way along the houses that lined the Cut just below Barbridge.

  When the woman with the frizzy hair and the pink dressing gown had come out to speak to her, panic rose in his throat. It was all he could do to keep himself still, to concentrate on what the doctor had told him. It would do no good to run. He couldn’t disguise his family or his boat, and the Cut was a small world. Once before, fear had driven him to take the Daphne into Manchester’s industrial slums, but things were different now. Even the inner-city parts of the Cut were changing as the old ware houses became desirable “water-side properties.” And no one had been looking for him then.

  The woman in the pink dressing gown gestured, and even from a distance he could hear her raised voice. He didn’t need to make out the words. Bending over the strap he was repairing, he kept his eyes down and whistled tunelessly between his teeth. The soft turf of the towpath muffled footsteps, but he didn’t need sound to track the policewoman’s progress. When, a few moments later, a voice called out,

  “Mr. Wain?” he looked up with feigned surprise.

  She stood on the towpath, across from the bow. Up close, he could see that she was pretty in a snub- nosed sort of way, and that she was a bit older than her bouncy stride had led him to expect. Intelligence gleamed from her eyes, and his heart sank.

  He nodded, his hand still on the strap, as if he were impatient at the interruption. “Aye. What’s it to you, miss?”

  “Detective Constable Larkin, Cheshire police.” She held up an identification card, though she must have known he couldn’t read it at that distance. “Could I have a word?”

  “Nothing’s stopping you,” he said, and began to coil the straps.

  Shifting her weight ever so slightly to the balls of her feet, she squared her shoulders. “I suppose you’ve heard that a woman died last night, just down from Barbridge.” She nodded in the direction of the bridge. “Her name was Annie Lebow.”

  “Aye?” he said again, standing and brushing the palms of his hands against his trousers. Now he’d put her at a disadvantage. She had to tilt her head back to look up at him.

  “Did you know her?”

  He shrugged. “You meet a lot of folks on the Cut.”

  Larkin pulled a photograph from her coat pocket and held it out to him. Gabriel had no choice but to lean over the gunwale and take it. He squinted at the print for a moment, then handed it back. “The Horizon. You should have told me the name of the boat. It’s boats I remember, more than names or faces.”

  “You’re saying you did know Ms. Lebow?” asked the detective.

  “In passing.” He felt the sweat forming under his heavy fisherman’s jersey, as if the sun had suddenly come out, and hoped she couldn’t see the dampness on his brow. For a moment he was tempted to tell her the whole truth, just to have it over with, to stop the pressure squeezing his heart, but he knew he couldn’t. Not with Rowan and the children at stake.<
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  Larkin nodded back towards the houses in Barbridge. The woman in the pink dressing gown was still standing in her garden, he saw, watching them. The old biddy must be freezing herself by now, just to satisfy her curiosity. “Mrs. Millsap says you had a row with the deceased, on Christmas Day.”

  Gabriel made a swift calculation. Mrs. Millsap might have heard

  raised voices, but she couldn’t have made out what was said, not from that distance. “The bloody woman scraped my boat,” he admitted, sounding aggrieved. “Reversed right into it, the silly cow.” He leaned over the gunwale, pointing at a long abrasion, just above the Daphne’s waterline. He’d done the damage himself, banging into the side of Hurleston Locks a week ago, and he hadn’t had the heart or the energy to repair it.

  “Not to speak ill of the dead,” he added, “but I was that pissed off.”

  “Did you threaten her?”

  “Threaten? I told her to watch where she was bloody going, if you call that a threat.”

  The detective studied the scrape, then shook her head, as if commiserating. “Then what happened?”

  “She said she was sorry, she’d been distracted. And she offered to pay for any repairs, I’ll give her that. But I told her no, there was no need, I could fi x it myself.” He looked up at the leaden bowl of the sky. “Have to wait until it’s a bit drier, though.”

  “So you parted amicably? On good terms?” she added.

  He should have been used to it—people assuming boaters were stupid, or at least illiterate. Illiterate they may have been, for the most part, but they had never been stupid, and Gabriel’s parents had made sure that he learned to read well. They had known that times were changing, that hard work and a knowledge of the Cut would no longer be enough.

  Controlling a flare of anger, he said, “Not on ill terms. Look, it was just an ordinary row, the sort that happens if someone cuts you off at a lock, or leaves the lock against you. What has any of it to do with this woman dying?”

  “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 happened 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 withou
t 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.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “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.”