Water Like a Stone

by Deborah Crombie

  She spoke to them, feeling slightly foolish, and they changed course and came towards her, swimming in formation, trailing geometrically perfect wakes behind them. When they saw she had no food to offer, however, they quickly abandoned her, picking desultorily at the rushes lining the banks.

  “Silly cow,” Gemma admonished herself aloud. What had she expected, a conversation? A look at the heavy cloud layer drawing nearer the horizon told her that her window of opportunity might not last. If she was going to see anything, she had better get a move on, and not fritter away her time idling with swans.

  She set off again, her stride more purposeful, and after a few more bends the canal straightened a bit, and hedgerows began to replace the trees. Ahead, Gemma saw a black iron bridge that possessed none of the grace of the old stone humpbacked bridges, and to one side, a gnarled and twisted black silhouette of a tree that rose in unnatural parody.

  And beyond that, she glimpsed the first fluorescent lime-green flash of a police officer’s safety jacket. She had reached the crime scene. After identifying herself, she stood for a few moments at the perimeter, watching. The technicians were still searching for trace evidence, combing through every blade of grass and every twig of hedgerow. The deep blue boat floated serenely against the bank, as if removed from the fuss, but as Gemma looked more closely she could see the dusting of print powder on the sides and decks. There was no sign, of course, of the victim’s body, only a dark patch in the turf, unidentifiable as blood from where Gemma stood.

  “The lads have finished inside the boat, if you want to have a look,” the officer told her, but Gemma resisted the temptation. She knew Babcock’s crew would have been over the boat thoroughly, and that was not why she’d come.

  “Is there some way I can get past, without contaminating the scene?” she asked. The hedgerow looked as impenetrable as Sleeping Beauty’s briar thicket.

  “There’s a stile a few yards back—you’ll have passed it. It’s a bit overgrown, but I think you could get over it into the field.” He didn’t ask why, and although she suspected he could tell her what she wanted to know, there was no substitute for seeing the lay of the land herself.

  “Thanks,” she said, adding, “I’ll give you a shout if I get stuck,” and got a friendly and appreciative grin in return.

  A few moments later, she found the stile, and was glad enough that the curve of the hedge hid her from the constable’s sight. “Overgrown” had been an understatement, she thought as she pushed aside branches and placed a foot on the raised step. She swung the other leg awkwardly over the top and found herself hung, straddling the fence, the back of her coat caught on a bramble. “Bloody country,” she swore, wishing she were double-jointed as she reached round to free the snag from her back. When she finally clambered down, as graceful as a ballerina in lead boots, she could feel her face flushed pink with aggravation and embarrassment. Now she’d just have to hope she didn’t meet an irate cow.

  She discovered soon enough that her nemesis was mineral rather than animal. The field had been plowed, and although sprouts of bright green winter grass grew on the raised ridges, the furrows held a porridge of slush and mud. Gemma trudged on, her boots growing heavier with every step, until the hedgerow diminished to a few strands of wire fencing and she was able to climb back to the towpath. Ahead, she saw the now-familiar shape of a stone bridge, half hidden by the curve of the canal.

  As she came round the bend, she saw the redbrick building hugging the rise on the opposite side of the canal—Juliet’s dairy barn. She had reached the far side of the bridge that went nowhere.

  Getting onto the bridge itself required climbing over another stile, but this time Gemma managed a bit more gracefully. From her vantage point at the top of the bridge, she could see the activity still under way at the dairy, but there was no sign of the irascible sergeant she and Juliet had met that morning. She thought that without him to play watchdog, she’d have no trouble getting inside the building, but first she meant to finish what she had come to do.

  She stood at the parapet and looked back the way she had come, at the still reach of the canal, empty now of any movement save a faint ripple in the rushes lining the bank. Then she turned, and crossing the bridge, looked south. In the distance, she could see the rising bank of the Hurleston Reservoir, stark after the tree-lined curves she had seen to the north, and she knew that beyond that lay the Hurleston Locks and the entrance to the Llangollen Canal, and farther still, the village of Acton, and Nantwich.

  Close by, in the lee of the dairy barn, a half dozen narrowboats were moored opposite the towpath, like a gay trail of ducklings, and she could see where a path led from the dairy’s lane along the edge of the field, allowing access to the boats. But the deck doors were sealed tight or covered with canvas, and no smoke rose from the brass-ringed chimneys. Gemma doubted that Babcock’s men had found any witnesses there.

  Why had Annie Lebow chosen such a deserted stretch of the canal in which to moor her boat? Did it have some connection with the proximity of the dairy barn?

  Or look at it another way, Gemma thought. If Annie had been accustomed to mooring her boat there when she came to the Barbridge area, had she seen something at the barn? And if that was the case, could the discovery of the child’s body have brought her to the killer’s attention?

  But for all they knew, Gemma reminded herself, the baby might have been interred in the barn wall long before Annie Lebow had even bought her boat. She shook her head in frustration. She was hypothesizing without hard data, a dangerous thing.

  But her walk had netted her one thing more than muddy boots and fingers that were starting to go numb. She knew concretely what she had guessed from looking at the map—that whoever had attacked Annie Lebow had come either from Barbridge or from the lane that led down to the dairy barn. Of course, it was possible that someone could have walked the towpath from as far away as Nantwich to the south, or from above Barbridge to the north, but in last night’s heavy fog, she thought it very unlikely—as unlikely as the idea that the killer had blundered his or her way across the fields and through wood, fence, and hedgerow to the path.

  That, however, was as far as supposition could take her, but she realized she was not willing to stop there. Once back at her car, she’d run down Kincaid and Ronnie Babcock, and see what they had turned up. It was time she did what she did best, putting the pieces together.

  But even as she started towards the towpath, she hesitated. Turning, she gazed once more at the redbrick barn. There was still no sign of Sergeant Rasansky, and it looked as though the deconstruction crew was winding down. There was no one who knew her history to call her curiosity morbid—why shouldn’t she see the last resting place of the mystery child for herself?

  That was one of the things he hated about women. The way they said one thing and meant another. Or the look, the one they gave you that was worse than words, but kept you from striking back, because there was nothing concrete you could name.

  It made him think of his mother, when he had continued to wet the bed long past the age when it might be excused.

  She’d waited until he left his room, then slipped in, bundling up the fouled sheets and putting on new ones. He watched her sometimes, from round the corner in the hall.

  Later, when she would pass by him, she’d give him a look that said she knew what he’d done, and without a word spoken, she had entrapped him in a conspiracy of shame.

  Furious, he eventually began to deliberately soil the bed, his way of taking back his power, over her, over his own body. But somehow his mother had seemed to know. She simply stopped changing the linen, and a night spent on sodden, stinking sheets made that game not worth playing.

  And still she had smiled and said nothing.

  Time had worn her down. She’d tired of the game, and he of her, and he had let her go.

  But not this time, not this one. This one, with her sideways glances and treacherous tongue—oh, he knew the signs, the signals
, all too well. But she would not slip away from him like quicksilver through his fingers. He would make sure of that.

  By the time Kincaid and Babcock returned to Crewe Station, the incident room was humming with a gratifying level of activity. Both Larkin and Rasansky were back and occupied at separate desks, but one look at Rasansky’s sour face told Kincaid he didn’t have anything positive to report.

  “No joy with the deconstruction, I take it?” Babcock asked, as if he, too, was guessing what the answer would be.

  “Bloody waste of time,” grumbled Rasansky. “Not to mention the fact that I think I’ve developed double pneumonia.” His nose had taken on a Rudolf-like hue, but Constable Larkin, for one, displayed no sympathy.

  “I can’t think why you’re sorry you didn’t turn up another body,” Larkin said tartly, eyeing them over the stack of papers she’d loaded onto her desk. “Or were you hoping for mass infant graves?”

  “Any luck tracing the infant we did find?” Babcock asked, warding off argument.

  “We’ve started tracing birth records for the county, going back fifteen years,” said Larkin, “as I doubt the blanket and clothing are older than that. No hits so far, but it will take some time just to process the county records. And that’s not taking into account the fact that the birth might have been unregistered.”

  “What about midwives?”

  Larkin nodded at a uniformed constable ensconced at a desk in the corner, phone glued to his ear. “We’re checking with locally registered midwives, although they’re usually pretty good about getting the birth records filed. Still, slipups can happen.” She shrugged, adding, “We’ll canvass the local doctors, too, just in case someone made a home delivery off the books.”

  “And we still haven’t found the Smiths?” Babcock asked, scowling, but Larkin didn’t look intimidated.

  “Sorry, boss. I’ve got someone checking every few hours to see if the couple who supposedly kept up with the Smiths have come back from holiday. We’ve left word with their neighbors, a note on their door, and a message on their answer phone.”

  Kincaid, who had propped himself on a desk and faded unobtrusively into the background, spoke up. “Have you contacted the Yard to see if they have a record of any similar cases?”

  “Yesterday.” Rasansky’s irritated look said he didn’t appreciate being told how to do his job, however politely. “When I sent out a description of the infant and its clothing to all agencies.”

  Pacing, Babcock said, “We’re bloody handicapped without more information from the Home Office. Surely the forensic anthropologist can at least give us an idea how long that baby was buried. Ring them again, will you, Sheila? And while you have them on the line, ask if they can do a facial reconstruction.”

  “Don’t all babies that age look pretty much alike, boss?” Larkin asked, raising a carefully shaped eyebrow.

  “Just do it. What about the DNA sample Dr. Elsworthy entered into the system?”

  Larkin shook her head. “Too soon to have checked it against the database.” She gave him a measuring glance. “Looks like that leaves us with the media, boss. Who gets to chat up Lois Lane from the Chronicle?”

  Watching the glance that passed between them, and Larkin’s slight nod in Rasansky’s direction, Kincaid guessed there was unspoken context to her query. From what he’d seen of the sergeant, he suspected that Rasansky would make the most of the importance of the case—and of his part in it—and that that served Larkin and Babcock very well.

  “Right then, Kevin,” Babcock said to Rasansky. “Give little miss reporter the child’s approximate age and clothing description, and have her ask if anyone knows of a child who mysteriously disappeared in the last few years. We’ll have someone man a designated contact number when the story runs. But for God’s sake, tell her to keep the buried-in-the-wall part out of it for now.”

  Larkin straightened her files with a thump. “Can we get on to the good stuff now, boss? I know we have to trace the child, but that little girl’s been dead a long time, and we had a murder on our doorstep this morning. What did you find out from the husband?”

  “A dodgy setup, if you ask me. He lives in her house—a Victorian lodge that would make a fitting residence for the chief constable—and apparently lives at least partly off her money. He’s certainly not going to lose financially by her death, as he’s her heir, and he hasn’t an alibi for last night. He says she rang him, wanting to talk, and they made a date to meet for dinner tonight.”

  “Prime suspect, then?” asked Larkin. “I pulled every bit of paper that looked even remotely relevant off the boat.”

  “Motive, possibly,” answered Kincaid, “and it will be interesting to see what you turn up. But I don’t know about the feasibility. I’m not sure he could have got to the boat in last night’s fog, or even to the Cut—much less found the boat even if he knew exactly where to look.”

  “What about the door-to-door in Barbridge?” asked Babcock. “Any luck there?”

  “More like boat-to-boat.” Larkin grinned. “I did find one old biddy, a Mrs. Millsap, who said she overheard the victim having a row with a man on a boat moored by the pub, on Christmas Day. He was still there, and I spoke to him. His name’s Gabriel Wain, and he says Ms. Lebow scraped his boat and they had a bit of argy-bargy over it. He showed me the damage. But then he said she’d offered to pay for any repairs, and apologized, and that was that. I’ve made a note of it, but it didn’t seem the sort of thing that would lead to sneaking up on someone days later and bashing them over the head.”

  Kincaid frowned. “He said Annie scraped his boat?”

  “Yeah. When she was mooring next to him,” Larkin clarified. “A nice long patch on the bow.”

  “That’s odd.” Kincaid rubbed his chin as he thought, feeling the stubble that was just beginning to break through the skin. “I watched her maneuver the Horizon myself, and I’d have said she was a very competent boater.”

  By the time Gemma neared Barbridge again, this time relatively unscathed by her encounters with stile and hedge, she felt chilled to the bone. She wasn’t sure, however, how much of her discomfort came from the physical cold and how much from the memory of the gaping hole she’d seen in the wall of the old dairy.

  With the departure of the sergeant, the lads working deconstruction had been happy enough to let her have a look round the interior as long as she didn’t interfere with their grid. She’d only ventured in far enough to see the place where Juliet had found the infant, and that glimpse had made her realize that although she’d sympathized with Juliet’s experience, she hadn’t, until that moment, understood the visceral horror of it.

  Gemma wondered if Juliet’s clients, who had envisioned turning the old structure into a warm family retreat, would ever regain their enthusiasm—or if Juliet would find any pleasure in completing the job, assuming she had the opportunity.

  The day seemed to have softened, a slight rise in temperature transmuting the sleety pellets of early afternoon into fine beads of moisture that soaked into her clothing and coated her hair. It seemed likely that dusk would presage a recurrence of the previous night’s heavy fog.

  The thought gave Gemma a prickle between her shoulder blades, a rise of the hair on her neck. She jerked round, as she had more than once on her walk back from the barn, but there was no one on the path. Shaking herself, she picked up her pace. The curve of the stone bridge was now in sight; in just a few moments she would be snug in her car and laughing at her paranoid fantasies of being followed.

  But she stopped just short of the steps leading up to the road, arrested by the sight framed in the weathered stone arch of the bridge. A small girl, perhaps not much older than Toby, sat at the canal’s edge a few yards beyond the bridge, huddled under an enormous black umbrella. She held a fishing rod in one hand, but both girl and line were so still they might have been sculpted.

  A boat was moored nearby, its colors softened by the mist, but Gemma realized it was the one she had s
een the forensic pathologist visit that morning. Her curiosity aroused, she watched for a moment, then walked slowly forward until she emerged from beneath the bridge.

  The girl looked up at her approach. Her curling hair was darkened by the damp, but nothing could dim the brilliant cornflower blue of her eyes.

  “A bit wet for fishing, isn’t it?” Gemma asked, stopping a few steps away.

  The child regarded her seriously. “Poppy says the fish bite better in the rain. I think it’s because they can’t tell where the water ends and the air begins.” She was older than Gemma had first thought; the gap left by the loss of her two front teeth had begun to fill in.

  Moving a bit closer, Gemma dropped into as graceful a squat as she could manage, her face now level with the girl’s. “What do you catch?”

  “Roach. Perch. Bream. Sometimes gudgeon.”

  Gemma’s face must have reflected her distaste, because the girl gave a sudden peal of laughter. “They’re tiny things, the gudgeon,” she explained. “But you have to use maggots to catch them and I don’t much like that. I don’t like cleaning the fish, either, but Poppy says it’s no different from peeling potatoes or cutting up a hen.”

  “Can you do that, then?” asked Gemma, impressed. Although Kit was quite skilled in the kitchen, Toby was just mastering making toast and sandwiches, and was certainly never given a sharp knife.

  “Not as well as my brother,” the girl answered. “I can make smashing mac cheese, though. Much better than fish, but Poppy says we shouldn’t pay for food that we can provide ourselves.” There was no resentment in her tone.

  Gemma realized that it wasn’t this child she’d glimpsed opening the door to the doctor, but a boy perhaps a few years older. “Are there just the two of you, you and your brother?”

  The girl nodded. “That’s Joseph. I’m Marie,” she added, favoring Gemma with a grave smile.

  “I’m Gemma.” Gemma rocked back on her heels, trying to find a more comfortable position without actually letting the seat of her trousers come in contact with the damp turf.