“How about if I talk, and you listen?” Kincaid suggested. “You don’t have to say anything.”
When Kit didn’t answer, he went on, picking his words carefully. “I’m sorry about what I said the other night. But it doesn’t change anything between us. It’s just a fact, like having blue eyes, or blonde hair. It doesn’t mean I’m not your friend, or that I’d have done anything differently if there weren’t that connection between us. It’s just extra, like icing on the cake.” When he paused, Kit blinked, but still didn’t look at him.
“I’m not going to stop being your friend, no matter what. You can still visit me in London, just like before, if it’s all right with Ian—”
“I’m not going back there! Not to the cottage.” Kit jumped up and turned his back on Kincaid, then kicked at the tree, but not before Kincaid had seen his eyes fill with tears. “You can’t make me!”
“Kit, I didn’t come here to make you do anything. But you can talk to me about it. Tell me why you don’t want to go back.”
Kit shook his head, but this time the gesture seemed anguished rather than stubborn.
“Is it because of your mum?” Kincaid asked very gently, praying that for once he had said the right thing.
“I can’t—” Kit’s voice broke and Kincaid could see the effort he was making to continue. “She’s not—”
When he didn’t go on, Kincaid thought furiously for a moment, then said, “Kit, do you remember when you ran away from your grandparents, and I found you at the cottage? You were asleep in your bedroom, you and Tess. And you felt safe there, didn’t you?”
After what seemed a very long while, Kit nodded.
“It wasn’t such a bad feeling, was it?” Slowly, knowing he was treading on very unsure ground, Kincaid added, “It might be a good thing, even, to remember some of the times with your mum—”
“I want to stay here, with Laura,” Kit said, turning to face him. For the first time, this seemed a plea rather than a refusal to consider alternatives.
But it was a desire Kincaid had no power to grant. He temporized, carefully. “Well, perhaps you could just go over for a visit, have a look round, see how things feel. Have you seen Nathan lately?”
“No.” Kit dug the toe of his trainer into the grass. “Not since I finished the fish project I was doing for school last month.”
“You could pay Nathan a visit. I’ll bet he’d like to see Tess.”
Kit shrugged, frowning, but didn’t reject the idea.
“I could even take you, if you like,” Kincaid offered, looking away, trying to impart an impression of nonchalance.
Kit shook his head, but slowly, as if he might be thinking about what to do. “I suppose I could ride my bike.” He looked up and met Kincaid’s eyes for the first time. “Would he be there … my dad?”
Kincaid sat down on the old garden chair the boys had been using as a carpenter’s bench. “I don’t know. How did you leave things with him?”
“He said he had a lot of things to do this week at the college, and getting the house ready, but he’d come this weekend and move my stuff—” Kit’s voice rose at the last and he clenched his hands, looking round as if the thought made him want to bolt in panic.
“Whoa. That’s ages from now,” Kincaid said soothingly. “You can only do things one day at a time, sport. Sometimes life is so bloody that’s the only way you can get through it. But the good bit about living one day at a time is that when nice things happen, you enjoy them more than people who are always thinking about the past or the future.”
Kit frowned at him, looking unconvinced, but to Kincaid’s relief, his hands and shoulders had relaxed.
The odor of grilling meat reached them, and from the kitchen Kincaid heard the murmur of voices. Knowing his time was running out, he said, “What if you go over on your own this afternoon, just for a bit of a recce, then you give me ring and we’ll talk about it. What do you say?”
The kitchen door opened and Colin came out to the edge of the patio and waved. “Mum says will you stay and have beefburgers?” he called out.
Kincaid cupped his hands and yelled, “Wouldn’t miss it!” then turned back to Kit. “Is it a deal, then?” He held out his hand, palm up, an invitation for their customary high five.
Kit looked towards the patio, where Colin was making a face and a hurry-up gesture, then at Kincaid. He shrugged. “Okay,” he said at last. “I suppose it can’t hurt just to have a look.” With a slap of his palm against Kincaid’s, he turned and darted off towards the house, followed by a furiously barking Tess.
Kincaid watched them go, his relief at making a bit of progress marred by the awareness that he’d just done his best to give his son into the care of a man he neither liked nor trusted.
AFTER RETURNING FROM HAMMOND’S, GEMMA SPENT the remainder of the morning at Limehouse, sifting through the accumulated reports and the logs of telephone and house-to-house inquiries. When Janice returned at lunchtime, they called out for some sandwiches and coffee, clearing a space to eat on one of the desks in the incident room so that they could compare notes.
“Did we get Martin Lowell’s girlfriend’s statement?” Gemma asked.
“It’s here somewhere.” Janice dabbed at the bread crumbs that had fallen on the papers nearest at hand, then reshuffled them until she found the relevant copy. “Brandy Bannister, aged nineteen, resident of—”
Washing down a bite of her tuna on brown bread with a sip of tepid coffee, Gemma snorted dangerously, precipitating a fit of coughing. “Brandy Bannister?” she sputtered when she had recovered sufficiently. “Suits her. You could almost feel sorry for her if she weren’t such a nit.”
“That bad?”
When Gemma nodded, mouth full, Janice continued, “It is a bit unfortunate. You always wonder what parents could have been thinking.” She looked back at the report. “At any rate,
