Water Like a Stone (30 page)

Rosemary had given a little start every time the bell on the shop door rang, and Hugh had come down often from his small office on the first floor, making some excuse to check on them, once stopping to give Kit an awkward pat on the shoulder. Kit had caught Rosemary watching him as well, with a mixture of kindness and concern in her eyes that made him feel slightly uncomfortable and funnily warm at the same time.

Unlike his cousin, Kit was happy enough to stay in the shop. He liked the slightly musty smell emanating from the used-book section; he liked the higgledy-piggledy unevenness of the floors and the walls; he liked the weight of the books in his hands and the lure of the bright covers, the promise of adventures that would take him out of himself. He didn’t mind being kept busy, either—that held the recurring visions of what he had seen that morning at bay.

“Watch the books,” he said sharply as the stack behind Lally’s head teetered.

“I don’t care about the bloody books,” she retorted, but pushed the volumes back from the edge of the table and straightened them a little. She gave Kit a sly glance from under the wing of dark hair that had fallen across her face. “We could just slip out the back door.”

“No.” Kit collapsed the box he’d emptied with a little more force than necessary. “And even if we did, where are you going to get cigarettes? You can’t buy them.”

Lally grinned. “Oh, there are always places where you can get things. You know the pub round the back of the shop? This bloke that works behind the bar, he’ll buy them for me if I give him the money.”

“But that’s—” The bell on the shop door jangled, startling them both, then Kit saw Lally relax as a distinctly female voice answered Rosemary’s greeting. So she was nervous about her dad after all.

“It’s Mrs. Armbruster,” Lally whispered. “She’ll talk Nana’s ear off for an hour. Come on. If we go now, we can be back before anyone notices we’re gone.”

“What about Sam and Toby?”

“Granddad took them upstairs to play draughts. They won’t be looking for us. Come on.” She stood and moved lightly towards the door, her trainer-shod feet soundless on the wooden floorboards.

“Lally, no, wait.” Kit pushed himself up, but his feet seemed to have tangled themselves together and he stumbled awkwardly. “We shouldn’t—they’d worry—”

She stopped, her hand on the knob of the back door. “I’ll go on my own, then. You can cover for me.” Her eyes held disdain, and a challenge.

Kit flushed, shamed at being treated like a child. But worse was the thought of Lally alone on the street. What if her dad saw her and snatched her up? Then he, Kit, would be responsible for losing her. If Lally was determined to go out, he would have to go with her.

“Make it quick,” Kit hissed at her as they stood on the pavement outside the pub. It was a quiet time of day, and he could see through the leaded window that the bar was almost empty. “How are you going to manage this, anyway? You can’t go in.”

They had gone out without coats, and he was already shivering. The sky had darkened to the purple-gray of tarnished silver, and he thought he could smell snow in the air.

“You’ll see.” Lally tugged down the hem of her cotton sweatshirt, raised her chin, and pulled open the door. Stepping over the threshold, she called out, “Can I use your loo?”

Through the window, Kit saw the barman look up. He had spots on his pudgy face, and was probably not much more than eighteen.

“Sorry, love.” The barman shook his head as he wiped a cloth across the bar top. “You’re underage. Find the public toilets, or go to the Crown. They’ll let you in.”

Making a show of jiggling impatiently, Lally said, “Please. I’m desperate. I don’t think I can make it that far. I’ll be really quick.”

“Oh, all right. But shut the bloody door, and hurry up.”

Lally flashed Kit a smile and slipped inside. He saw her disappear into a passage that led towards the rear of the pub. After one more flourish with his cloth, the barman reached for something under the bar, then stepped casually into the same passage.

A moment later, he reappeared, then Lally emerged and quickly crossed the room, hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt. “Ta, love,” she tossed cheekily over her shoulder as she pushed her way out the door.

“That’s Sean,” she explained as they started back towards the bookshop, Kit hurrying her along with a hand on her elbow. “Lives down the road from us. He’d do anything for me.” Lally fished a packet of Benson & Hedges from her sweatshirt pocket and began peeling the cellophane from the top. The wind caught the ephemeral scrap as she tossed it away, spinning it like a bit of tinsel come to life before it disappeared.

Pulling a cigarette from the pack and a plastic lighter from her pocket, she slowed and ducked under a shop-window awning. “Wait,” she said, holding the cigarette to her lips and shielding the tip with her hand as she flicked the lighter.

“Lally, stop pissing about. You can’t stand here in the street and smoke. Someone will see you.” Nervous impatience edged Kit’s voice.

“So? What am I going to do? Wait until we get back to the shop and have a smoke in the back room? That was the point of this whole exercise, remember, for me to have a smoke.” She inhaled and leaned a little farther back into the awning’s cover, watching him with narrowed eyes before looking away.

Kit stared at her profile. For just an instant, he had the oddest sensation that he was seeing her as she might look in ten years, or twenty, the delicate contours of her face drawn and hardened by time and experience.

But he said only, “They’ll miss us. What on earth are we going to
say if they’ve been looking for us?”

“I’ll think of something,” she snapped back at him. “For God’s sake, Kit, don’t be so wet. You sound just like my friend Peter. ‘Don’t smoke, Lally,’” she mimicked. ‘Don’t drink, Lally. Don’t do this, don’t do that. You might get into trouble, Lally.’” Dropping her half-smoked cigarette, she ground it viciously into the pavement with her heel. “It was all bollocks. In the end, he was no different—No, he was worse.” She glared at Kit, as if daring him to argue. Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears as she turned away, starting back towards the shop.

An icy dart of rain stung Kit’s cheek, then another. It had started to sleet. Running after her, he struggled to find his voice. “Why? Why was he worse?”

The rising wind snatched her words, throwing them back at him in a gust of disembodied fury. “Because. Because he was a fucking hypocrite, that’s why.”

“He’s lying, I’d say.” Babcock gave a last glance at the house before turning the BMW into the main road.

“About last night?” Kincaid snapped the lock on his seat belt and turned the heater vent—now spewing frigid air—away from his face. “Yes, I think so,” he agreed. “And maybe more besides, but something about the last question really put the wind up him.”

He was still sorting his own impressions of Roger Constantine, and found himself missing Gemma. They used each other as sounding boards, and no idea was too far-fetched to be tossed into the pot. Ronnie Babcock, however, had proved himself a good listener. “Constantine seems a clever man, though,” he allowed himself to muse aloud. “You’d think if he meant to kill his wife, he’d have a ready-made alibi.”

As they left the leafy village of Tilston behind and the heater began to generate some welcome warmth, Babcock said, “But what if it wasn’t planned? What if Annie didn’t just ring him to set a date for dinner? After all, we only have his word for that. What if she dropped a bombshell? Told him she wanted to meet and discuss a divorce? No more living the good life in the Victorian villa for poor
Roger.” He gestured behind them. “Not only would he lose the house, but I’d wager he could never afford to keep up a comparable lifestyle on a journalist’s pay. Now he gets it all, plus the life insurance, with no strings attached. I’d say he had a good deal to lose.”

Kincaid considered this, frowning. “Or what if it was just the opposite—she rang up and said she was coming home, for good? In the five years she’s been gone, he may have come to like the status quo very well. Maybe he didn’t want her to come back. Either way—”

“Either way, he’s got a motive, but the logistics are difficult. Say he was surprised by her phone call, whatever the content, and wanted to talk to her in person. I’m not sure he could have driven from Tilston to Barbridge in last night’s fog, much less have found his way to the boat, especially if he didn’t know exactly where she was moored.”

They had just swept round a ninety-degree blind turn on a lane not much wider than the car. Kincaid shuddered at the thought of driving this road at night, in bad conditions. It was possible, but was it likely? “Was the fog as heavy to the west?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but we’ll find out.” Babcock slipped his phone from his pocket and hit speed dial. “Sheila? Are you still on the boat? Okay, listen. I’ve some things I want you to check. I need to know if last night’s fog extended as far west as Tilston. What?” He glanced at Kincaid and grinned. “I know you’re not the weather bureau,” he continued. “But we’re going to need someone from that area to knock on doors, chat up the neighbors about Roger Constantine. We need to know any tidbits of gossip, as well as whether anyone noticed his movements last night. And if you get on to Tilston, I’m sure the locals can tell us if they had a pea-souper last night.

“Oh, and when you’ve got that sorted, pull any financial records you find on the boat—in fact, pull any sort of papers you can find. And what about the house-to-house in Barbridge?”

A tinny squawk of protest issued from the phone’s speaker and
Babcock rolled his eyes. “Of course you can do all that,” he said soothingly. “I’ve great confidence in you. I’ll ring you when we get to the station. ’Bye now.”

“Complaints, complaints,” he said to Kincaid as he flipped the phone closed. “I’m sure we never whinged like that. What’s happened to the copper’s work ethic?” He slowed, and Kincaid saw that they’d once again reached the junction for No Man’s Heath, the village with the reputed pub. “Now,” Babcock continued, a gleam in his eye, “what do you say to a ploughman’s lunch?”

Sheila Larkin swore under her breath. Who did the DCI think she was, bloody Wonder Woman? Not that she wasn’t used to him expecting her to be in two places at once, but he’d been enjoying bossing her about in front of his mate, and that she resented.

She’d been looking round the narrowboat’s galley when her phone rang, and now, as her stomach growled in protest, she eyed with longing an unopened packet of ginger biscuits in the cupboard. The temptation passed quickly, however, and she shut the cupboard door. 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 difficult 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 riffled 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 warehouses became desirable “waterside 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.

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 fix 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?”