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

by Water Like A Stone

  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 Ba
bcock’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—”