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

by Water Like A Stone

“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 boo
ts 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.”