“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 Mincing 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
“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
