The Garden of Lamentations

by Deborah Crombie

  Swallowing and giving his head another shake, he said, “Why are you here?”

  “We need your help,” Gemma told him. “You can start by telling us when you saw Reagan last.”

  Edward thought for a moment. “It was after the garden party. So Monday last, I think.”

  “Had you spoken to her since then?”

  “Yes. I was—we were going to get together on Friday night. I had a distillery event—we often have tours on Fridays—but Reagan said she’d meet me after. She had to—this is awkward—” He stopped as Agatha came in, carrying a tray with a mismatched assortment of mugs and a chipped teapot. She poured for them, efficiently, giving Edward a concerned glance.

  “Thomas rang,” she said. “He’s coming in to deal with the run. So you can go home as soon as you like.”

  “And do what, exactly?” he snapped at her, then immediately apologized, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Ag. It’s just—I can’t—I’d rather be here.”

  Agatha seemed unoffended. “Well, think about it, anyway.” She gave Gemma and Kerry a nod and left them to their tea.

  “Thomas is your brother?” asked Gemma.

  “And my partner. He’ll be— Oh, Christ, Ag will have told him, then, when she rang him. He’ll be gutted, too. He’s—he was—fond of her.” Edward pushed aside his untouched tea and rubbed at his face.

  “You’ve known Reagan for a while, then?”

  “Since she came to work for Nita. Nita helped us get off the ground here, when everyone thought we were crazy.” He stood, restlessly, taking a bottle from the cabinet and sloshing the liquid into one of the tumblers with a shaking hand. “Best medicine,” he said, raising his glass to them before taking a swallow. “Would you like to try some?”

  Gemma caught the sharp, clean scents of juniper and citrus, and intriguing hints of spice. “We’d better stick to tea, but thank you,” she said.

  “But in spite of predictions, your business has been successful,” said Kerry, straightening her back and shifting her thigh away from Gemma’s, obviously finding it a struggle to seem professional when squashed into such intimate contact. Kerry was on a tack, and Gemma waited to see what it was.

  “Yes. More than we ever imagined.” Edward managed a smile. “We thought we were crazy, too. Now we’ve got two more stills ordered.”

  “You distill here on the premises?”

  “Yes. We have one still now, our original copper-pot still.”

  “And you use strong alcohol in your distilling process?”

  Edward frowned at her, as if he thought the question a bit daft, but he didn’t seem concerned by it. “Yes, of course. We start with good-quality grain spirit—ours is barley—which is about sixty percent alcohol by volume. That goes into the still with our combination of botanicals. It macerates at an even temperature overnight, then the next day we distill it, slowly, so that the botanicals come off in layers.” From Kerry’s expression, he might have been speaking Greek. “That’s why it’s called ‘small batch,’” he said. “It’s nothing like the gin you get from the big distillers, which is made using concentrates—”

  Kerry waved him to a stop with her free hand. “All to put in a glass of tonic?”

  “Well, you can do a bit more than that.” From the flash of amusement in Edward’s face, he’d realized he was talking to someone likely to prefer bathtub to boutique.

  Although Gemma thought Kerry wanted to know more about the alcohol, she said instead, “You were telling us about Friday night. You were supposed to meet Ms. Keating. What happened?”

  Edward shrugged. “She didn’t show up.”

  “Surely you called her, or texted her?”

  “Of course I did.” Edward’s face went blotchy, the unbecoming blush of the very fair-skinned. “No response. Some of the chaps were still here, checking on the next day’s run. So I waited, and after a bit I texted her again. A few minutes later, I got this weird text back, and I thought she was blowing me off.”

  “Would you mind showing me?” asked Gemma. “Just her reply,” she added, sensing his deepening embarrassment.

  With a reluctant shrug, Edward scooped the mobile from his desktop and tapped the screen a few times before coming round the desk and handing it to Gemma. The text was highlighted by a pop-up box and tagged with a tiny photo of Reagan, which made her seem suddenly, eerily alive. Gemma read it aloud for Kerry’s benefit. “‘Sorry, headache, can’t make it.’”

  “And that was it?” she asked, looking up at Edward and resisting the temptation to scroll backwards or forwards on the screen.

  Edward nodded, taking the mobile back and sitting again at the desk.

  “And did you try to get in touch with her after that?”

  He took another swallow from his glass, not meeting their eyes. “No,” he admitted. “At least not until yesterday, and then her voice mail was full. Look, as I said, this is a bit awkward.” His blush deepening, he went on, “Reagan and I, we liked each other. But we weren’t . . . sleeping . . . together, if that’s what you think. She’d been seeing someone else, and she said she had to break it off with him completely before she—before we . . .” He cleared his throat, then said, as if challenging them, “She was a nice girl, damn it.”

  “I’m sure she was,” agreed Gemma. “So when she canceled on you, and then didn’t get in touch, did you think she’d changed her mind about breaking it off with her boyfriend?”

  “I didn’t know what to think. I mean, isn’t ‘a headache’ the classic excuse when a girl doesn’t want to see you?”

  “Possibly. But Reagan told some other people that night that she had a headache. It may be that she really didn’t feel well.”

  “But that’s not why she died, is it?” said Edward. It was the first time he’d asked anything specific about Reagan’s death.

  “Mrs. Cusick didn’t tell you?” asked Kerry.

  He shook his head. “No, she just said that Reagan was . . .” He swallowed. “Dead. That she was found murdered. I assumed—I couldn’t bear to think . . .”

  “She wasn’t raped,” Gemma said. “Nita didn’t tell you that?”

  “No. Nita was not exactly chatty. That’s the other thing that’s awkward.”

  Gemma frowned. “I’m not following you.”

  Edward hesitated, then said, “Look, of course I was worried when I didn’t hear from Reagan. It wasn’t like her to just leave things hanging with no explanation. I thought if she’d decided she didn’t want to go out with me, she’d at least put me out of my misery.

  “I’d have called the house to check on her, but Nita . . . Reagan didn’t think Nita would approve of her seeing me, so of course I didn’t want to drop her in it. She meant to tell Nita. And she said that if Nita wasn’t comfortable with us seeing each other, she’d quit the job. She was ready to move on. The only reason she’d stayed as long as she had was because she was worried about the kid.”

  “Jess?” asked Gemma, frowning. “Why?”

  “He was under a lot of pressure with tryouts for the ballet school. She wanted to at least get him through that. She said he depended on her. He hadn’t dealt well with his parents’ divorce. The dad has a new girlfriend, too, which hasn’t helped.” Edward stood again. Moving to the drinks’ cabinet, he began lining the bottles up more precisely, his movements jerky. “Now, I think if I’d just called her that night, or gone to the house, or something, she might not have . . .” He kept his back to them.

  “Mr. Miller,” said Gemma. “Edward. What time did you get that return text from Reagan?” She hadn’t held the mobile long enough to check the time stamp.

  He turned around, sniffing. “I don’t know. The chaps had gone home. It must have been well after midnight.”

  “I think you shouldn’t worry too much over what you might have done,” Gemma said, but a little absently. She was wondering how certain the pathologist could be in determining whether Reagan had died before or after midnight.

  Doug Cullen had no
t been easily convinced to talk, much less meet.

  “Why didn’t you tell me Denis was back?” he said, before Kincaid got further than a half-formed request to meet for a drink.

  “I didn’t know—”

  “You must have heard he’d been attacked, then. Why didn’t you have the bloody courtesy to tell me that?” Doug’s public school vowels grew stronger, as they did when he was really upset. “And why have you been treating me like a pariah the last couple of months? Now all of a sudden you want to meet for a bloody pint?”

  “Look, Doug, it’s complicated. I’m in—someplace near Wallingford. If you could just meet me after work, I’ll let you know when I’m—”

  “What are you doing in Wallingford? That’s where—”

  “I know where Wallingford is.” Kincaid was getting irritated himself. “Just meet me. I don’t want to talk about this on the phone. Make some excuse to get out of work, but don’t tell anyone you’re seeing me. No one. Got it?”

  “Why all the cloak-and-dagger? Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?” But now Doug was curious—Kincaid could hear it in his voice.

  “I’ll explain everything,” he said. “I promise. Meet me at”—he thought for a moment—“the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. You know where it is. I’ll text you when I’m in the city.”

  Kincaid disconnected. It was the only way to stop Doug once he got started talking.

  He’d put the car into gear and was pulling out of the marina when his phone rang. Not Doug calling back, he saw when he glanced at the screen. Rashid.

  “Rashid, what have you got?” he asked, clicking on. Then, with a spike of panic, “It’s not Denis, is it?”

  “No. I’ve not heard anything,” Rashid assured him. “It’s that other matter. I think you’d better come in—”

  “I’m outside London at the moment. Can’t you just tell me—”

  “No. I’d rather not.” Rashid was unusually brusque. “And there are some things you need to see. I’m off the rota for the day, but I’ll wait in my office until you get here.”

  London traffic was heavy. Kincaid was sweating and tense by the time he finally reached the hospital. He wondered if Rashid would have waited for him, but the pathologist was in his office, as he’d promised.

  “Duncan,” he said, and stood. His usual dry smile was missing, and for the first time that Kincaid could remember, he closed his office door. “Thanks for coming.” Waving Kincaid into his usual chair, Rashid sat again behind his desk. “Sorry to have brought you in like this.”

  Kincaid’s alarm bells ticked up another notch. “Rashid, what the hell is it?”

  Rashid had picked up a pen. Turning it in his fingers, he said, “I thought—I know you’ve had a rough few months. I thought maybe you were being a tiny bit paranoid when you told me about your friend. And I apologize.”

  Kincaid sat still. Whatever Rashid had found, it must be bad.

  “I need you to look at some photos, if you don’t mind coming round the desk,” Rashid said, clicking his computer mouse a few times with his free hand. Kincaid stood and went to stand beside Rashid. “You’ll have seen gunshot wounds, yeah?” The slip from the pathologist’s normal and somewhat formal English into Cockney patois was even more unnerving.

  Mouth dry, Kincaid nodded.

  “Okay, look at this.” Rashid opened a photo on one of the two large monitors on his desk. “This is a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. We see them often enough. Normally, people hold the gun right against the skin. On the temple, or sometimes under the chin. Now, here, see the bubbling under the skin around the entry point?” He used his pen as a pointer. “That’s blowback, caused by the gases created by the projectile. Now, here’s your mate’s photo,” Rashid said, swiveling to the other monitor.

  Kincaid blinked, trying to disassociate himself from what he’d seen that night. “Okay.” It could have been anyone, he told himself, this close-up view of a head and the dark point where the bullet had entered.

  “No blowback, you see?” Rashid tapped the screen with the pen.

  He did see. “So what does that mean?”

  “It means that very few suicides manage to hold the gun away from the skin. In the midst of an argument, maybe. Or maybe they have a last-second change of heart but the reflexes can’t catch up. Highly unlikely, at any rate. And then—” He zoomed in the photo until the gunshot wound looked like an alien landscape, and Kincaid let out a little breath of relief. “Look at this. There are plastic shards in the wound. You see?” He used his pen as a pointer again. “And that means—” Rashid looked up at him, as if expecting a response from a prize pupil.

  “A silencer. A drink-bottle silencer. Homemade.”

  “Exactly.” Rashid sounded pleased. “It’s not impossible for a suicide to use a silencer, granted. I’ve seen it once. Guy lived alone, maybe didn’t want to disturb his neighbors. It was weeks before someone complained about the smell.”

  “But not likely in this case. What else?”

  “The angle of the wound is off. Not to mention that your guy was found in the middle of his sitting room. Not sitting on the chair or the sofa, not lying on the bed. How many people top themselves standing up? Again, it’s not impossible. I’ve seen that, too, with a bloke who was drunk and in a slanging match with his wife. But even he managed to press the gun to his scalp before he pulled the trigger. See what I mean?” Rashid tapped and another photo came up.

  Kincaid’s stomach lurched. It was a photo of the body in situ, taken with the crime scene tech’s wide-angle lens. Ryan lay sprawled in the middle of floor in the cheap sitting room Kincaid remembered, his face turned to one side, his arms splayed, a dark pool spreading beneath his head. The fingers of his right hand were curved in the grip of a semiautomatic handgun.

  For an instant, the smell hit Kincaid again. There was the warm coppery scent of fresh blood, and beneath that, excrement. He stuffed his hands in his pockets to stop them trembling.

  And then, as he stared at the photo, the room surrounding the body seemed to come into sharper focus. It was the cheap sitting room, yes, but it was not exactly as he’d seen it. “There’s no backpack,” he said.

  Rashid looked up at him, dark brows raised in a query.

  “I remember now. I wasn’t in the room more than a minute. I saw that he was dead, and I knew I couldn’t be connected with him. But I’ve never been quite sure how I knew that it wasn’t suicide. There was a backpack, half open, by the sofa. He’d been packing. Whatever he’d left in that flat, he’d come back for it. And between the first responders and the SOCOs’ photos, somebody took it.”

  “There you are, then,” said Rashid. “You were right. I’d never have ruled this as a suicide.”

  “But—” Kincaid made an effort to collect himself. “How, then? How did this scene get passed as a suicide?”

  “Pathologist’s call,” Rashid said, grimacing.

  “Rashid, who was it? Who was the pathologist?”

  “Kate Ling.”

  The sheet was too tight, binding him. He tried to pick at it, but found he couldn’t move his hands. Were they tied? He tried to struggle, but his body seemed unable to obey.

  “Just take it easy, Mr. Childs,” said a voice that seemed vaguely familiar. “You’re in hospital, do you remember?”

  Of course, he thought, the surgery. He remembered he was having surgery. Was it over? Where was his sister? “Liz? Where’s Liz?” he tried to say, but his mouth didn’t work, either.

  Gagged, he must be gagged. They’d found him out. Panic set in. He had to free himself. They would hurt Diane. Craig had said so.

  “Mr. Childs, don’t struggle. We’ll have to increase your sedation again if you don’t calm down.”

  Sedation? Why was he sedated? His heart pounded wildly and he tried again to free his hands.

  The voice said, distantly, “His blood pressure and heart rate have shot up. We’ll try again this evening, when his wife’s here.”
/>   And then the fog descended.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “According to the pathologist, she was having sex with someone,” Kerry Boatman said as she and Gemma drove back towards Kensington. “Assuming—and that’s a big assumption—that Mr. Miller is telling the truth about not having slept with the girl, was it Hugo Gold? Maybe she wasn’t as fed up with Hugo as everyone seems to think. Or she decided to give him a farewell shag.”

  “You’re a bloody cynic,” said Gemma, amused.

  Kerry flashed her a grin as she braked two inches from the back of a Transit van. “Goes with the job. So what if she did meet Mr. Miller when she left the club? A romantic tête-à-tête. He brought some of his poncey gin with a little extra punch to it, thinking he’d get in her knickers at last.”

  “And?” asked Gemma, hoping that Kerry could theorize and keep her eyes on the road at the same time.

  “She confesses that she’s just shagged Hugo. Poncey’s romantic evening is in ruins. Nice girls don’t do that. He means to have her himself, so he holds her down and tries to keep her quiet. Then, poof, she’s dead. So he lays her out like an unsullied princess.” There was anger beneath Kerry’s mockery.

  “What about the text?” asked Gemma.

  “He sent it himself. From her phone, which he likely tossed in a bin on the way back to wherever it is he lives.” Kerry accelerated away from the traffic light as if she were driving at Le Mans.

  “Um,” said Gemma, as mildly as she could. “It sounds as if he might have an alibi, up to midnight or so.”

  “So he met her after that.”

  It was obvious that Kerry had taken a dislike to Edward Miller. But that didn’t make her right. Before they’d left Red Fox, they’d got the contact information for Edward’s brother Thomas, and for the others who’d stayed behind after the tasting. Agatha Smith had been one of them. Even if Gemma had been disinclined to believe Edward, she had a hard time imagining Agatha as a liar. “We need to pin down Kate Ling on the time of death,” she said. “And we need to verify what time Reagan left the club in Kensington.”