Kissed a Sad Goodbye

by Deborah Crombie

  “What about fluids on the body?” she heard Kincaid ask as she stared at the loops and dashes of her shorthand.

  “Nothing came up on the swabs, and I’ve not found anything else obvious. No evidence of recent intercourse, either.”

  “There’s no indication that this was a sex crime, then.”

  Gemma heard Kate’s shrug in her voice as she said, “Not unless it’s a nutter who just likes to fantasize about it afterwards. But they usually leave something behind.”

  When Kate had finished with Annabelle Hammond’s back and had Gerald turn the body again, she said, “Unless you have something else in particular you want me to look for, I’m ready to start the internal now.”

  As Kincaid shook his head he met Gemma’s eyes. He knew she’d be struggling, but he wouldn’t embarrass her by saying anything. And from his expression, he wasn’t too keen, either.

  Kate chose a scalpel from her array of instruments and spoke into the mike. “Right, then. Let’s begin with a Y incision.”

  Gemma concentrated on breathing through her nose and recording Kate’s observations in her notebook. Healthy female. Probably an occasional smoker. No sign of a pregnancy, or of previous pregnancies.

  When the internal organs had been removed and weighed, Kate said, “We’ll get the stomach contents off to the lab—should have something for you shortly. Now let’s have a look at the neck.”

  Gemma glanced up just long enough to see the scalpel poised over Annabelle’s white throat; then she forced her gaze back to her shorthand.

  “Look.” Kate sounded as though she’d found a prize in her Christmas cracker. “There’s some bruising on the tissue that didn’t show up on the skin. Odd, but you sometimes see that. And the hyoid cartilage is intact.”

  “Are you saying she wasn’t strangled?” Kincaid asked, frowning.

  “No, just that it’s not obvious. And there’s always the possibility of vagal inhibition. But let’s have a look at that head injury.”

  Gemma took a deep breath and focused on Annabelle Hammond’s toes.

  EVEN WITH THE AID OF A sedative, Reg Mortimer had slept poorly. He had dreamed of Annabelle, disjointed fragments in which she had either dismissed him or furiously accused him of something he could not remember. In the last dream, they had been children again, and he had watched helplessly as she stepped into an abyss—then it had been he who was falling, and he’d awakened with mouth dry and heart pounding.

  He forced himself to bathe and dress, to eat a bowl of cornflakes and drink a cup of tea, but through it all he had the strangest feeling of unreality, as if any moment he might wake again and find that everything, even the dreaming, had been a dream.

  By half past nine, the walls of his flat had begun to close in, and not even the much-prized view of the Thames from his sitting room window offered relief. He had loved the playful conceit of his building, with its architectural mimicry of a great steamliner, but now he had a sudden vision of the building tipping, plunging to the depths and taking him with it.

  Reg blinked away the vertigo and grabbed his keys from the entry table. The central lift whooshed him to the ground floor and the lobby doors ejected him into a fine morning. His feet took him south, along the river path and the blinding, molten sheet of the Thames, then into Westferry Road and round the corner into Ferry Street.

  The sight of the blue and white tape fluttering from the door of Annabelle’s flat brought him up short. A uniformed constable stood near a van, talking to a man in a white overall. Reg stood for a moment, watching, then forced himself to go past. Whatever impulse had driven him there was spent, but he knew now where he should go.

  By the time he’d crossed under the river and climbed halfway up the hill in Greenwich, he was sweating. He entered Emerald Crescent from the bottom end, slowing his steps as his sense of unreality deepened. The lane had the peculiar Sunday morning sort of quietness that spoke of families sleeping in or lazing over coffee and newspapers; birdsong swelled from the hedges, and death seemed an impossibility.

  As he neared the top of the lane, the land rose sharply on the left and through the thick screen of trees on the hillside he could glimpse William Hammond’s pale blue door. Ahead, just past the lane’s right angle, Jo’s house sat foursquare and level with the lane. The back gardens of the two properties were adjacent, but not connected.

  Jo and Martin Lowell had bought the house during Isabel Hammond’s last illness, and while he would find it difficult to live next door to his father, he could understand Jo’s choosing to settle so near her parents. His own family had lived in a Georgian terrace in Knightsbridge, and when he’d come here as a child he’d been fascinated both by the secret quality of the lane and by the Hammonds’ house. Perched at an angle on the side of the hill, canopied by trees, it had seemed magical.

  But this morning he didn’t want to see Jo—he wasn’t ready to think about what had happened there on Friday evening. It suddenly occurred to him that she might be with William and he hesitated a moment, then shrugged and began climbing the steps cut into the thick ivy on the hillside. It would be all right; Jo wouldn’t say anything in front of her father.

  A sound caused him to spin round and almost lose his balance on the steep steps. He could have sworn he’d heard a high, faint laugh, but there was no one there. Then as he turned back something flickered in his peripheral vision—a girl running up the steps away from him, barelegged and with a long red plait bouncing on her back.

  Blinking, he took a breath. Nothing there. He shook himself like a dog coming out of water and continued to climb, slowly—a lack of sleep and proper meals, that’s all it was, and too much thinking about the past.

  By the time he reached William’s front door he had recovered his equilibrium. He rang the bell and waited.

  William Hammond answered the door himself. As Reg gazed at him he realized that until now he hadn’t thought of William as old. He’d been too much in awe of him as a child, and he had somehow kept that image fixed in his mind. But this morning William seemed to have shrunk. The black suit he wore emphasized his frailness, and against his silver hair his skin looked pale as driftwood.

  Swallowing, Reg said, “Mr. Hammond. I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

  William smiled and extended a hand that trembled as if he had palsy. “Reginald, my dear boy. How good of you to call. Do come in and have some tea.”

  Reg followed him through the house and into the kitchen. William put the kettle on the hob, then motioned Reg into a chair. “Jo said she’d bring over some cakes, but I’m afraid she hasn’t managed it quite yet.”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Hammond. I’m sure Jo has enough to deal with this morning.”

  “Yes, yes, she’s taking things in hand. Telephoning and such. She and Annabelle are always so good at organizing, just like their mother.” William set delicate cobalt and russet teacups on a tray, then reached for a brightly colored foil packet of Ceylon tea adorned with the Hammond’s emblem. Annabelle had developed the blend herself, and it had been her favorite.

  Reg stifled the urge to rise and snatch the packet from William’s hand. “Would you mind if we had the Assam? Somehow I don’t think I …”

  William seemed to see what he was holding for the first time. “Oh, of course. Quite right …” He stood for a moment, as though the interruption had caused him to lose his place in the ritual, then he exchanged the tea packet and went methodically on with his preparations. When the pot had been warmed with the hot water, he filled it and brought the tray to the table. Reg saw that his hands had stopped shaking.

  Suspended between the ticking of the kitchen timer and the tocking of the grandfather clock in the hall, they waited for the tea to steep. Feeling no sense of discomfort in the silence, Reg looked round the familiar kitchen. Here since his childhood had hung William’s collection of framed Hammond’s advertisements, some of them going as far back as the 1880s, when a young man named John Hammond had left his Mincin
g Lane employer and made the unprecedented move of setting up as a tea merchant on the Isle of Dogs. He had been William’s great-grandfather.

  “I always loved these.” Reg gestured towards the black and white drawings. “Especially the ones from the London Illustrated News.”

  “Yes. That was Annabelle’s favorite, the one with the little Chinamen.” While a pretty woman in late Victorian dress dozed in an armchair, a swarm of Chinese the size of pixies struggled to pull a canister of tea to the top of a table, where a teapot and cup sat waiting. “I’m afraid now it would be considered racist, but I’ve always thought the poster had great charm, and Annabelle made up stories about the little men—even named them, I believe. Their faces are so individual.” William stared at the drawing for a long moment, then said softly, “I’m afraid I’ve not taken it in yet, not really.”

  “Have you seen the police?”

  “The police? No. But Jo says … Jo says they told her we can’t bury … we’re not to arrange the funeral, because …” The kitchen timer dinged, and William lifted the teapot with apparent relief. He pushed his spectacles up on his nose and carefully poured a little milk into his cup before adding the tea. The milk first, always, after steeping the loose tea at least five minutes in a warmed pot. Annabelle had taught Reg that when they were children, and she had learned it from her father.

  And like her father, she had always insisted on bone china, arguing that the development of English china and the drinking of tea were so intertwined as to be inseparable. It had been an esthetic preference as well, because she felt the delicacy of the porcelain affected the taste of the tea, and because the perfection of the ritual mattered to her as much as the quality of the tea itself.

  Forcing himself back to the present, Reg said, “I’m sure the police don’t mean to be insensitive,” although he didn’t like to think of the reasons they might need to keep Annabelle’s body. “You can understand that they have to be thorough about these things.” He took his cup and added a spoonful of sugar. Annabelle had nagged him into cutting down from two spoons to one, insisting that too much sugar blunted the taste of the tea. He added a second teaspoon and stirred.

  “I don’t understand how something like this could happen,” William said slowly. “They say she was in the park.… But why would she have gone alone to the Mudchute at night? Surely Annabelle would never have been so foolish.…”

  Surely not, thought Reg, but had any of them known Annabelle as well as they thought? And how could her death have been random, a grotesque coincidence unconnected with the events of the past few days? But beyond that, his mind closed in upon itself, refusing to follow the chain of probabilities to a possible conclusion.

  Looking up, William met Reg’s gaze. He grimaced. “I’m so sorry, my dear boy. I didn’t mean to imply that you had been remiss in any way. This must be difficult enough for you as it is. Your plans …”

  How could he tell William that it had been months since Annabelle had been willing to discuss their wedding, and that when he’d asked her point-blank to set a date, she’d refused? Lifting his cup with both hands, he sipped at the tea. It was too hot, but he welcomed the mingled sensations of pain and pleasure on the delicate tissues of mouth and tongue. Anything was better than numbness. Carefully, he said, “You and I know how headstrong Annabelle could be. And I’m sure we both learned that most of the time it was easier to let her have her own way than to fight a losing battle. But this time I let her go too far.…” His eyes filled with tears.

  Reaching out awkwardly to pat him on the shoulder, William said, “You mustn’t blame yourself. It’s just as you said: Annabelle liked her own way about things. But she was a dear girl, all the same, everything a father could have wanted.” His face convulsed with emotion and he looked away, staring into the leafy rectangle of the kitchen window.

  Reg gave him time. Without asking, he added a little milk to William’s cup, filled the cup with fresh tea from the pot, then rose and retrieved the still-steaming kettle from the hob. When he’d topped up the pot with hot water, he turned back to the cooker and stood gazing, like William, out of the window. He felt the air move round his face, heavy as a hand, warmer than his skin; it seemed to have no power to dry the sweat sliding under his collar.

  Jo’s children were playing in her garden next door—he could hear their voices fading in and out intermittently, like a radio broadcast from a far-off country. It might have been himself he heard, his voice mingled with Jo’s and Annabelle’s as they played in this same garden.… Had it been this green when they were children? Perhaps it had, for he remembered suddenly that Annabelle had liked to pretend it was the jungle in Sri Lanka, and that her mother’s hedge of rhododendrons was a plantation of tea bushes. He wondered if there was some genetic factor involved in the inheritance of passions, for in Annabelle, William’s fascination with tea had appeared full-fledged and undiluted, while in Jo it had never aroused more than a mild interest.

  When she’d been too young to read the more complicated text in her father’s books, Annabelle had demanded explanation of the pictures, and they’d fueled her imagination. One wet spring day in the garden, she’d decided they would pick tea. It would be the finest tea, a royal tea, she’d proclaimed as she armed Reg and Jo with baskets and instructed them to pluck only the bud and the first leaf from each stem.

  They had not been discovered until the poor rhododendrons had been stripped of almost every tightly furled pink bud, and when confronted by her furious and baffled mother, Annabelle had shouted that she’d only been doing the job properly. She’d spent a week in her room after that.

  “Do you remember when Annabelle plucked the rhododendrons?” he asked.

  William smiled. “And when her mother allowed her out of her room, she nearly burned the shed to the ground, trying to dry the leaves.”

  Reg walked round the table and sat again, slowly. He wrapped his hands round his Wedgwood teacup and stared at the skin forming on the surface of the tea, clouding it, just as time would cloud their memories and Annabelle’s sharpness would disappear beneath a film of kindly self-deception. She would become the “dear girl” William thought her, and her father’s illusions would remain unmarred by the less-than-perfect person Annabelle had been.

  Looking up, he met William’s eyes. “Nothing meant more to Annabelle than the business. I know that.” Reg heard the bleakness, unexpected, in his own voice, but he continued. “We have to carry on the way she would have wished. We owe her that.”

  JANICE COPPIN TOOK A LAST BITE of her donut, then brushed the flakes of sugar icing from her desk. Sipping her coffee to wash away the sweetness, she reshuffled her paperwork and scowled. She’d groused under her breath last night when Mr. Scotland Yard had sent her to Reg Mortimer’s flat. While she thought Mortimer a bit of a poser, she hadn’t relished seeing him white and ill with the news, suddenly bereft of all his charm.

  But perhaps she hadn’t been quite fair to the superintendent. There were worse tasks, including the one Kincaid had undertaken himself last night—informing the dead woman’s sister and accompanying her to the morgue. And he had asked her if she wanted to attend the postmortem this morning—she just hadn’t been able to admit that she wasn’t sure she had the bottle for it, and she couldn’t have borne embarrassing herself in front of him.

  It was even remotely possible, she supposed, that when Kincaid had told her to go home last night and see to her family, he hadn’t been condescending to her because she was female. His sergeant had mentioned having a young son, so he would be familiar with the difficulty of making arrangements.

  Janice wondered if they were sleeping together. It happened often enough, and she sensed an unspoken familiarity between them that went beyond the requirements of the job. Not that she cared, of course—if the woman was daft enough to get involved with her superior officer, that was her problem.

  But if she was going to give Kincaid credit for some sensitivity, perhaps she ought to give his
advice a second thought as well. He’d said there was no such thing as an unimportant witness in a murder investigation, even old George Brent—though they’d got no further forward when they’d interviewed him.

  This was her patch, her neighborhood; she had history and a knowledge of these people that outsiders couldn’t begin to appreciate. It was time she put it to good use. She’d have another word with old George, even if it meant apologizing for some long-ago slight.

  First things first, though. Standing up, she dropped the donut wrapper in the bin and flicked the crumbs from her jacket. Reg Mortimer’s description of the busker in the tunnel had brought immediately to mind the controversial son of Lewis Finch, a local property developer who had made his name and fortune in the rebuilding of the Docklands. She couldn’t imagine what connection Gordon Finch could have had with the late Annabelle Hammond, but she had a pretty good idea where she might find him.

  THE THREE TERRACED HOUSES AT THE end of Ferry Street had been built in the late seventies, the first phase of a massive waterside housing scheme that had failed because of the oil recession. Only the jutting angles of the rooflines were visible now over the brick wall and well-established private gardens that separated the houses from the street, but they were spectacular enough to make Kincaid wish he could see them from the river.

  Janice Coppin had been his informant—when she’d heard the address last night, she’d wrinkled her nose and pronounced that the houses looked like a house of cards in the process of collapsing. He smiled now at the aptness of the description, but he found he liked the playful quality incorporated into the strong geometric design, and he wished the economic climate had allowed completion of the project.

  According to Janice, in the intervening years, the economy had recovered, plummeted, and recovered again. Recently, an old building that stood between the private gardens and Ferry Street had been converted into flats, and it was here that Annabelle Hammond had lived.