Water Like a Stone

by Deborah Crombie

  Tess, Kit’s little terrier, raised her head and tilted it expectantly. “Leave her,” Kincaid said softly, not wanting to disturb Toby, and Kit signaled her to stay. They slipped into the front hall, grabbed their coats from the pegs, and eased out the door, quiet as burglars. The snow still lay bright on the land, but the light had softened, a harbinger of the early winter dark. The scent of wood smoke, pure and painfully sweet, caught at Kincaid’s throat.

  Without speaking, he led the way around to the back of the house and picked up the footpath that led across his parents’ field. After all these years, his feet still seemed to know every rise and hollow, and after so long in London, it surprised him how little the countryside had changed. Once, he glanced back, but the farmhouse had disappeared behind its sheltering screen of trees.

  Tromping along beside him, Kit placed his feet with deliberation, as if the imprint of each boot were of colossal importance. He seemed equally determined not to meet Kincaid’s gaze, but after a few moments he said, “Aren’t you going to lecture me?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it.” Kincaid kept his tone light. He’d realized, after yesterday’s shouting match, that his first priority was to reestablish communication with his son. “Do you want me to?”

  This provoked a surprised glance. “Um, no, not really.”

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on at school, then?” Kincaid asked, just as easily.

  Kit hesitated for so long that Kincaid thought he might not answer, but at last he said, “Not now. Not today, anyway.”

  Kincaid nodded, understanding what was unsaid. After a moment, he squeezed Kit’s shoulder. “It’s been a good Christmas.”

  “Brilliant,” agreed Kit. Swinging his arms, the boy picked up his pace, as if he’d been given permission to delight in the walk. The tension had drained from him, and suddenly he seemed an ordinary boy, one without the weight of the world on his shoulders—or as ordinary as any thirteen-year-old could be, Kincaid reminded himself.

  They went on, the silence between them now stretching in an almost tangible bond. Round spots of color bloomed on Kit’s cheeks from the cold and exertion. Then they crested a small hill and saw the sinuous curve of the canal before them, like a hidden necklace tossed carelessly across the rolling Cheshire countryside.

  Kit stopped, looking puzzled, then scanned the horizon as if trying to get his bearings. “But I thought—Last night, I thought the canal was running alongside the main road.”

  “It was.” Kincaid stooped and drew a line in the snow with his finger to illustrate. “That was the main branch of the Shropshire Union, which goes more or less north to Chester and Ellesmere port.” He then drew another line, intersecting the first at right angles, and nodded at the canal in front of them. “This is the Middlewich Branch, which meanders off to the northeast, towards Manchester. The two intersect at Barbridge, where we turned onto the main road last night. It’s a challenge getting a boat round the bend at Barbridge Junction, I can tell you.”

  “Can we see?” Kit asked, with a simple enthusiasm that Kincaid had not expected.

  “I don’t see why not.” Having intended to go that way all along, Kincaid was pleased at having found something to interest his son. He led the way through the field gate and down onto the towpath. Here the snow had been compacted by the passage of feet, both human and canine. Bare trees stood crisply skeletal against the snow, and in the distance a trio of black birds circled. Crows, Kincaid thought, searching for carrion, and if he guessed right, not far from the site of last night’s grisly discovery.

  Not that there was anything left for them to find, of course, but the reminder made him wonder what was happening at the crime scene. Had they identified the child? Old cases, cold cases, were the most difficult. He didn’t envy his former schoolmate Ronnie, he told himself firmly. And yet, his curiosity nagged him.

  He thought of Juliet, wondering if the image of the dead child was haunting her, wondering if that and worry over the fate of her project might have driven her back to the building site. And what in hell’s name was going on between Juliet and Caspar?

  “Do you really think Aunt Juliet is all right?” asked Kit, as if he’d read his mind.

  “Of course she is. Your aunt Jules is tougher than she looks, and very capable of looking after herself. I’m sure she had a good reason for going walkabout for a bit,” he answered, but even as he spoke he realized how little he really knew about his sister.

  There was little wind, and in the bright sunshine he hadn’t felt the cold at first. But now he realized that his nose and the tips of his ears had gone numb, and even in gloves his hands were beginning to stiffen. Shoving his hands firmly into his pockets, Kincaid said, “Juliet loved this walk when we were kids. She could tramp round the countryside all day, and in all weathers. She used to say she was going to be an explorer when she grew up, like Ranulph Fiennes.” She had been full of dreams, his sister. Had any part of her life turned out as she had imagined?

  “But she’s a builder instead. Isn’t that a funny job for a woman?”

  Kincaid smiled. “Better not let Gemma hear you say a thing like that. It’s no more odd than a woman police officer. And Jules was always good at making things. My father used to build us stage sets, and Jules would help him.”

  “You put on plays?” Kit asked, with a trace of wistfulness.

  Guilt stabbed at Kincaid. Wasn’t he always too busy with work to spend time with his son?

  “Shakespeare, usually,” he forced himself to answer cheerfully, “given my dad’s penchant for the bard. I used to be able to declaim whole bits of Hamlet, but I’ve forgotten them now.”

  Kincaid had a sudden vision of a summer’s afternoon, and Juliet, as Ophelia, sprawled on a blue tarp they had appropriated for a river. “Can’t you die a little more gracefully?” he’d groused, and she’d sat up and scowled at him.

  “Dead people don’t look graceful,” she’d retorted, and he’d had plenty of opportunities since to discover that she had been right. He pushed the memory away, searching for a distraction.

  Kit provided it for him, pointing. “Look, there’s a boat.”

  They were nearing Barbridge, and Kincaid thought it only due to the slowness of the season that they hadn’t encountered moored boats before now. “And a nice one it is, too,” he said admiringly as they drew closer. Its hull was painted a deep, glossy sapphire, with trim picked out in a paler sky blue. The elum, as the tiller was called on a narrowboat, was striped in the same contrasting colors, and everything on the boat, down to the chimney brasses, sparkled with loving care. The craft’s name was painted on its bow in crisp white script: Lost Horizon. A steady column of smoke rose from the chimney, and he heard the faint hum of the generator. Someone was definitely aboard.

  As they drew alongside, the bow doors opened and a woman stepped up into the well deck. She was tall, with a slender build undisguised by her heavy padded jacket, and her short fair hair gleamed in the sunlight. Catching sight of them, she nodded, and Kincaid felt a start of recognition.

  Last night in church she had seemed an outsider, her shield against the world penetrable only when she sang; here, she moved with the grace of familiarity. Here, he had found her in her element.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Juliet’s hand had seemed to turn the key in the ignition of its own accord, her foot had eased in the clutch, and she’d found herself driving. Her reflexes had taken over, funneling her into the most familiar route, up the A529 towards Nantwich.

  The rolling meadows of the Cheshire Plain had slipped by, dark stubble now peeking through the snow. At each roundabout she hesitated, thinking she must turn back, but her body seemed unwilling to obey her mind’s instructions.

  Suddenly, she realized she’d reached the southern outskirts of Nantwich. Swerving the car into a side street, she pulled up against the curb and lifted her trembling hands from the wheel.

  What the hell had she done, leaving Caspar’s parents like that
? She had to go back, had to make some sort of excuse, but what could she say? No excuse would soften Caspar’s cold fury; she had done the unforgivable: embarrassing him in front of his parents. And what would she tell the children? That it had been the sound of her mother-in-law’s voice as she said, “Juliet, darling, if you could just give the gravy boat a little rinse?”

  Rita Newcombe had turned from her state-of-the-art oven to give Juliet a brittle smile and a nod in the direction of the gold-rimmed gravy boat on the worktop, as if Juliet were too dense to recognize a gravy boat when she saw one. Rita, Juliet knew from experience, hated to risk her manicured nails with washing up, and would no doubt find a good excuse to stick her daughter-in-law with a sink full of dirty crockery when the meal was finished as well.

  Juliet had complied, her lips pressed together in irritation, but if Rita noticed her bad grace, she gave no sign. They were having stuffed goose, Rita informed her, a recipe she’d seen in a gourmet cooking magazine, and Juliet doubted the children would do more than push it around on their plates. It would never have occurred to Rita that the children would have preferred plain roast turkey, and if it had been pointed out to her, she’d have announced that the children needed a bit more sophistication—implying that Juliet was falling down on the job at home.

  Now it made Juliet flush with shame to remember that when she’d first married Caspar, she’d compared her parents to his and wished hers had a bit more polish, a bit more appreciation for the finer things in life, and a little less interest in books.

  How could she have been so stupid? And how could she have gone all these years without realizing how thoroughly she despised her in-laws? Rita, with her flawlessly colored hair and trendy jogging outfits—although Juliet had never been able to imagine her actually running, or doing anything else that might cause an unladylike sweat. And Ralph—or Rafe, as he insisted on being called—with his paunch and thinning hair, who fancied himself irresistible to anything in a skirt, and flirted shamelessly whenever Rita’s back was turned.

  The Newcombes had embraced their retirement, trading in their suburban home in Crewe for a modern flat overlooking the locks in Audlem, a pretty town near the Shropshire border. The flat was open plan and too small for the children to stay over, a deficit that Juliet suspected was intentional.

  The truth was that her mother-and father-in-law didn’t like the disruption of grandchildren—didn’t really even like to admit that they had grandchildren, because it meant they were losing their tenacious grip on middle age.

  Juliet had wiped the gravy boat dry and set it beside the stacked dishes waiting to be carried to the perfectly set table. As she turned from the sink, she’d glanced into the combined dining and sitting areas. Caspar and his father were ensconced with whiskies in the corner Rita referred to as “the nook,” and from the drone of her father-inlaw’s voice, Juliet guessed he’d launched into one of his interminable golf stories. Sam sat on the floor near the ultrarealistic gas fire, silently picking at one of his shoelaces. And Lally…Lally had been curled at her father’s knee, tilting her head so that he could stroke her hair.

  Then Caspar had looked up and met her eyes, and the venom in his glance struck Juliet like a physical blow. Suddenly her head swam and her heart pounded. She couldn’t seem to move air into her lungs. Sweat broke out on her face and arms, trickled down between her shoulder blades.

  Heart attack, she thought. She was having a heart attack. Don’t be daft, she told herself, it was just the overheated flat coupled with the stress of her rush of anger. But then a wave of nausea clutched her, and she knew if she didn’t get outside that instant she would disgrace herself.

  “Sorry,” she’d mumbled desperately. “Left something. In the car. Back in a tick.” She glimpsed their white, startled faces, turning towards her like sea anemones moving in an ocean current, then she was out the door and down the stairs, gulping clean cold air as she ran.

  When she’d reached the car, she’d leaned against it, fists pressed to her heaving chest. Something sharp jabbed her palm, and looking down, she realized that she had somehow, miraculously, snatched up her keys as she ran out the door. They had come in her aging Vauxhall Vectra, thank God, as Caspar’s little sports model didn’t have room for the kids, and when Juliet unlocked the door and slipped into the driver’s seat, it felt like a safe haven.

  The car’s interior was warm from the sun, and at first she only meant to sit there until her heart slowed and her head cleared. Then it occurred to her that someone might come after her, and she knew she couldn’t face anyone quite yet, not even her children, not until she pulled herself together.

  So she had driven away, but she hadn’t pulled herself together, even now, sitting in an unfamiliar street outside a house where some other family would be having their Christmas dinner. She swallowed hard against the nausea rising again in her throat. The image of Lally at her father’s knee, looking at her with alien, sullen eyes, seemed frozen in her mind.

  Despair clutched at her. She would lose her children if she didn’t get out of this marriage; already Lally was slipping away. Caspar was poisoning her children against her, as Piers had poisoned him, and she felt powerless to stop it. Caspar was weak, susceptible to suggestion, but Piers…she knew now what Piers was, she had seen what lurked beneath the charm, and that had been her downfall. Hatred surged through her, corrosive and searing as acid. Her body jerked from the force of it, and for a moment her heart seemed to squeeze to a stop.

  But then, slowly, she sank back into her seat. Calm washed through her and everything took on an unexpected clarity. She touched the keys dangling from the ignition with fingertips that felt sensitive as a newborn’s.

  Caspar was stranded in Audlem, until he had to humiliate himself by begging a ride home from his parents. Piers, as Caspar had told her repeatedly, was spending the day in Chester with his father, a retired barrister. She had the keys to the office, and the freedom to do whatever she pleased, unobserved.

  It was time she brought Piers Dutton to account.

  The town center was deserted, the shops and cafés tightly, protectively, shut. It was an illustrator’s dream, gilded by the afternoon sun, the roofs of the buildings still bearing a confectioners’-sugar dusting of snow, unmarred by the messy unpredictability of human subjects.

  Juliet passed the empty space just in front of Newcombe and Dutton, cautiously parking a few streets away. She’d left without her coat, and as she made her way back to Monk’s Lane, she soon discovered that the afternoon’s clear golden light was deceptive. The cold bit through her thin blouse, and by the time she reached the office, her teeth were chattering. She chafed her hands together, trying to warm them enough to fumble the key into the lock.

  Once inside, she stood, shivering with more than cold. She could hear her blood pounding in her ears, feel her heart thudding against the wall of her chest as if she’d been running a marathon.

  Light filtered in through the partially opened blinds, and a lamp had been left burning on the credenza against the back wall of the reception area. The space felt ominously still, and smelled faintly of men’s aftershave and leather furniture. How odd that she’d never noticed the scent before—had Piers’s presence become stronger in her absence?

  She told herself not to be silly—she’d been in the office alone countless times and nothing was different. Taking a steadying breath, she reached back and locked the door. No sense in inviting someone to wander in unexpectedly.

  It suddenly occurred to Juliet that she was breaking the law. What would her brother think of that? The idea made her smile, and she felt suddenly better.

  After considering for a moment, she went to what had been her desk and rooted in the drawer for a paper clip. Piers and Caspar had been doing without a secretary since she’d left—she doubted Piers meant to tempt discovery twice—and the neglect was obvious in the desk’s cluttered interior. She found what she wanted eventually, however, and straightened out the silver wire, sm
oothing it with her fingertips.

  She’d begun to feel an unexpected excitement, an exhilarating pulse in her veins, dimly recalled from childhood when she and Duncan had embarked on some sort of mischief.

  Caspar’s office was to the right, Piers’s to the left. Juliet turned left without the least hesitation.

  “She’s lovely, your boat,” Kincaid called to the blond woman as he nodded at the long, graceful lines of the Lost Horizon. “You must have read James Hilton.”

  For an instant, her face held the wariness he’d glimpsed the night before. But as she studied them, something in her features softened and she said, “Yes. Although it was years ago. But I always liked the idea of Shangri-La.”

  “Weren’t you in church last night?” asked Kit, surprising Kincaid, who hadn’t realized anyone else in the family had noticed this rather odd but striking woman. It was unlike Kit to speak up so quickly to a stranger.

  “At St. Mary’s? Yes, I was.” The woman glanced at Kincaid and inclined her head almost imperceptibly, as if acknowledging their brief rapport. “It was a lovely service. But you’re accustomed to it, I’m sure.” There was something in her tone that Kincaid couldn’t quite pin down—envy, perhaps?

  “We’re just visiting for the holidays,” he told her. “But I grew up here. Not much has changed.”

  She had left the double cabin doors ajar, and Kincaid became aware that Kit was leaning to one side, trying to peer inside the boat. As he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, preparing to move him on before they infringed on the woman’s privacy any further, Kit said, “Do you live on your boat, then?” His face was alight with interest.

  “Kit, that’s really none of our business,” Kincaid said hurriedly. He gave his son’s shoulder a squeeze, turning him back towards the towpath, and felt the reassuring solidity of muscle and bone beneath the padded anorak. To the woman, he added, “Sorry. We’d better be off—”

  “No, it’s all right.” She smiled, erasing some of the lines in her face, and seemed to reach a decision. “Yes, I do live aboard. Would you like to see the boat? My name’s Annie, by the way. Annie Lebow.”