Water Like a Stone

by Deborah Crombie

  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?”

  “Annie Lebow died violently, Mr. Wain. We have to investigate anyone who might have wished her harm.”

  “You’re saying you think I’d kill a woman I hardly knew over a bit of scraped paint?” His anger was righteous now, and he didn’t trouble to keep it in check. “That’s downright daft.”

  “We have to ask. You can understand that. We also have to ask where you were last night.”

  “I was here, with my family. But I’ll not have my family brought into this. It’s nothing to do with—”

  “For the moment, we just need to know we can speak with you again. You weren’t planning on leaving Barbridge?”

  Seeing the detective give a covert glance at her watch, Gabriel realized she’d finished with him, and was more than likely trying to work out how to juggle more tasks than she could manage in a given amount of time.

  Relief flooded through him, so intense it left his hands shaking. She would, no doubt, be checking his story with anyone else she could find to speak to along this part of the canal, but none of the nearby boats was occupied, and he doubted if anyone other than the Millsap woman had witnessed Annie’s visit on Christmas Eve.

  He shoved his telltale hands in his trouser pockets and nodded brusquely. “We’ve no plans to move on, for now,” he said, and it struck him, as he watched her walk away, that he had no plans at all. For him, time had stopped here in Barbridge, and his future had ceased to exist.

  Kit followed Lally back towards the shop, struggling to keep up with her pace. He was still trying to work out why she was angry with him, and what any of it had to do with her friend Peter, but the taut line of her back offered no helpful clues.

  “Lally!” he called out as they neared the back door of the bookshop. “Wait. Can’t we talk?”

  She slowed, but kept her face averted. “There’s nothing to—”

  Kit caught a shadow of movement out of the corner of his eye, then Leo stepped in front of them, as if he’d appeared from out of nowhere. “What’s the matter, Lal?” he said. “You and coz have a falling-out?”

  Lally gave a little yelp of surprise, then turned to face him, hands on her hips. “Bloody hell, Leo. Are you trying to make me wet my knickers? And no, we haven’t had a falling-out, but even if we had, it’s none of your business.”

  Leo didn’t take up the challenge. Instead, he said, “Where have you been?” and to Kit’s surprise he sounded more worried than belligerent. “I’ve been ringing you since yesterday and your mobile goes straight to voice mail.”

  “You didn’t leave anything…personal…in a message?” Lally’s voice had suddenly gone breathy with panic. She pulled them into the doorway of the next-door shop’s back entrance, and Kit realized that was where Leo must have been waiting. “My mum took my phone yesterday. She doesn’t want me talking to my dad. That’s why I didn’t call.”

  “Couldn’t you have used someone else’s phone? What about coz here?”

  Kit wondered if Leo had guessed that he didn’t have a phone and was deliberately trying to humiliate him. “I left it at home,” he said, as nonchalantly as he could.

  “Liar.” Leo rolled his eyes. “No one leaves their phone, not even the übergeeks.” He turned his attention back to Lally. “I hitchhiked into town last night and waited by the Bowling Green. Surely you could have got out for a bit.”

  “She won’t let us go home, my mum. We’re staying at my grandparents’.”

  “All the better, then.” Leo sounded as if she’d just won the lottery. “That makes us practically neighbors. Come out tonight, when everyone’s gone to bed. We could meet at the old dairy, see where your mum found the mummy. It’s a good place to have a nip, and I’ve got some really brilliant st—”

&nb
sp; “You don’t understand,” Lally said vehemently. “After what happened this morning, my mum and my grandparents aren’t letting any of us out of their sight.”

  Leo stared at her. “What? What are you talking about? What happened this morning?”

  “You don’t know?” Her satisfaction was evident. “Kit found a body. On the canal, just below Barbridge.” Lally gave Kit a proprietary glance that he didn’t find the least bit flattering. “It was the woman we met on her boat yesterday. Someone killed her.”

  “No way.” Leo glanced from Lally to Kit, his eyes wide with disbelief.

  “Way,” Lally retorted, with taunting smugness. “She was—”

  “Lally, we’ve got to go,” broke in Kit. He wasn’t sure how much Lally had actually overheard from the grown-ups that morning, but he couldn’t bear the thought of her reciting Annie’s injuries to Leo. “We should have been back ages ago,” he urged, reaching for her arm to pull her towards the door. But then he saw Leo’s expression, and his fingers fell away, suddenly nerveless.

  Lally shrugged away from them both. “All right, all right. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

  As she turned towards the bookshop door, Leo called out, “At least say you’ll try tonight. Just ring me to say when. You can use your grandparents’ phone without being overheard—get lover boy here to create a diversion,” he wheedled. “You could come, too,” he added to Kit, the animosity of a moment ago seemingly forgotten. “We’ll show you a good time, won’t we, Lal?”

  “Shut up, Leo.” She was angry again, and Kit was as lost as before. He was glad, however, when she pulled open the bookshop door and shoved him inside, closing it firmly behind her.

  The storeroom was empty. Kit leaned against the door, listening, his heart pounding. But a steady hum of voices came from the front room, one of them the unmistakable drone of Mrs. Armbruster. They had made it back without their absence being noticed.

  The sudden relief gave him courage. He turned to Lally, who had sat casually on a box and was picking at her fingernails. When she looked up at him with a challenging half smile and said, “See?” he snapped back without thinking.

  “Is Leo your boyfriend?”

  “No!” Caught off guard, she’d spoken with unaccustomed vehemence.

  “Then how come you do whatever he says?”

  “I don’t.” She must have seen the disbelief in Kit’s eyes because she went on. “It’s not like that. You don’t understand. It’s just that Leo…knows…things…”

  “What sort of things?”

  Lally met Kit’s eyes, and for just an instant, a frightened child looked back at him. Then the barriers sprang up again, as tangible as shutters, and as she turned away she said, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “You’ll be all right?” asked Gemma, turning to Juliet as they stopped outside the small shop and office Juliet rented in Castle Street, tucked away behind the town square.

  They had walked down Pillory Street from the café, and when Juliet had hesitated as they passed the bookshop, Gemma had urged her on, saying, “I’m sure the children are fine. It might be best to wait a bit before you see Lally, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so,” Juliet agreed with a sigh. “Although I’m not sure waiting a few hours will make it any easier to talk to her and pretend I know nothing. God, she must think me a fool,” she added, her anger returning.

  “I’ve no more experience than you, but I suspect that most fourteen-year-olds think their parents are fools, on a good day.” Gemma had given Juliet’s arm a squeeze, and got a small smile in return.

  Then Juliet had insisted that if she couldn’t do anything for the children, she must update her crew and try to contact the Bonners, the clients who had commissioned the reconstruction of the barn.

  Gemma, afraid that Juliet’s shop was the first place Caspar would look for her if he was in a temper, felt uneasy about leaving her there on her own. “Don’t worry,” Juliet assured her, pointing to a battered van parked half on the curb in front of the shop. “My foreman’s here, and I’d like to see Caspar try anything in front of him—Jim does kickboxing in his spare time. When I’ve finished, I’ll have Jim walk me up to the bookshop. I can get a ride back to the house with Mum or Dad.”

  Gemma hesitated, afraid of overstepping bounds, but after considering what she’d already had to tell Juliet that day, decided in for a penny, in for a pound. “Juliet, you know that whenever you decide to talk to Caspar, Duncan and I can be there to back you up. You don’t have to do it on your own.”

  With her hand on the knob of the shop door, Juliet turned back. “I—I’m not sure I’m quite ready. But thanks.”

  Gemma stood watching until Juliet had gone inside the shop, her uneasiness not dispelled. But she couldn’t stand guard over an unwilling subject, and besides, Caspar had never actually harmed Juliet, or even made outright threats. Perhaps it was just the shadow cast by Annie Lebow’s murder that was making her feel so unsettled.

  That, and the fact that she’d once again found herself a spare cog. Juliet had her business to see to, the children were with Rosemary and Hugh, and Kincaid was still off somewhere with Ronnie Babcock, no doubt indulging in a bit of male bonding.

  As she walked slowly towards the car park at the end of Castle Street, she saw that the shops and businesses that had characterized the street nearer the town center were soon replaced by well-kept Georgian residences. Some of the houses were occupied by solicitors and insurance agents, but the commercial use didn’t mar the serene feel of the tree-lined street.

  It made her think of Islington, where she had lived in her friend Hazel Cavendish’s garage flat, and she felt a pang of nostalgia for a life that had seemed simpler, at least in retrospect. But that simplicity had been deceptive, she reminded herself, and if her life had been less complicated, it had also been less rich.

  She wouldn’t willingly trade the life she led now—in fact, she found it hard to envision anything other than the hustle and bustle of the Notting Hill house shared with Duncan and the boys. And if she sometimes wished that Duncan hadn’t felt obligated to take her and Toby in, she tried to put the thought aside. She couldn’t change what had happened, or bring back the child she had lost.

  She felt a cold kiss of moisture on her cheek, like a frozen tear. Looking up, she saw a single snowflake spiraling down, but the sky looked less threatening than it had earlier, when she and Juliet had felt a spatter of sleet as they walked from the car park to the café.

  Although Juliet had given her an illustrated map of the town and suggested she take a walking tour on her own, when Gemma reached the car park, she stood and gazed across the road at the River Weaver. She imagined the canal, running parallel a half mile to the west as it passed the outskirts of the town, then leaving the course of the river and angling northwest towards Barbridge and distant Chester—the same canal that passed Juliet’s dairy barn, and the scene of Annie Lebow’s murder.

  It was a coincidence, surely, that the remains of the child, perhaps long buried, should lie so near the place where a woman had died violently sometime last night. She could see no logical connection, but still it nagged at her. Suddenly, she felt she had better things to do than sightsee.

  The same uniformed constable she had spoken with that morning was still restricting access into Barbridge, but he recognized Gemma and waved her through. The crime-scene van was still parked near the bridge end, and she knew the local force would try to limit traffic through the area until the SOCOs had finished.

  She found a place to leave her own car, then spoke to the officer who was monitoring pedestrian movement over the bridge and onto the towpath. “What about boats?” she asked him, when he’d checked her identification.

  “Not much traffic this time of year,” he answered. “And we’ve had someone stationed at the Middlewich Junction, to warn the boaters off, as well as down at the Hurleston Locks, below the crime scene. I’ve mostly had t
o turn back gawkers who have walked in to visit the pub,” he added, gesturing at the Barbridge Inn.

  Thanking him, Gemma crossed the humpbacked bridge and climbed down the incline to the towpath. There was only one boat moored below the bridge, a matte black vessel with small brass-rimmed round portals, like multiple eyes. Gemma peered curiously at the portholes as she passed, but the interior curtains were drawn tight, and both fore and aft decks were closed in with heavy black canvas. The boat looked deserted, and unpleasantly funereal.

  The two boats moored on the other side of the canal were more cheerful, painted in traditional reds and greens, but they appeared just as devoid of human presence.

  Gemma walked on, following the sharp curve of the canal to the left, and as the boats and houses of Barbridge vanished behind her she felt she’d entered a different, secret world. There was nothing but the wide curve of the water, always turning sinuously just out of sight, and the black tracery of bare trees against the gray sky.

  The place seemed to her unutterably lonely—and yet she could feel the pull of it, the desire to see always what lay round the next bend. And she could imagine that in summer, when the trees were thick with leaf and the air soft and drowsy, it would be enchanted.

  Looking down, she saw that that rutted path worn into the surrounding turf held a collage of footprints—a nightmare for the scene-of-crime team. She went on, conscious of the sound of her own breathing, and of the occasional faint rustle of the wind or a small creature in the surrounding woods. When a trio of swans appeared round the next bend and glided towards her, she felt an unexpected easing of tension. They were company, even if not human.