Kissed a Sad Goodbye

He ran then, skidding across the drizzle-slick cobbles as he reached her and was enveloped in a fierce hug. To his amazement, he found that his face was on a level with hers, or perhaps a bit higher.

“Lewis Finch, I swear you’ve grown a foot.” She held him off so that she could study him. But although she was still smiling, there was something not quite right about her voice, a quaveriness. Up close, he saw that her pale skin had the faint blue cast of fresh milk, and there was a puffiness round about her eyes.

“You said you weren’t coming to visit,” he said, ignoring the tiny prickle of fear. “Did you get my present? Is that why you’ve come? Where’s Da?” Then a sound from the kitchen drew his attention, and he looked past his mother into the room. Cook sat at the table, her apron drawn up over her face, and he suddenly knew it was a sob he’d heard, for he could see her shoulders shaking.

He looked back at his mother, stepping away. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“We’ll go for a walk—somewhere we can talk,” she said, slipping her arm through his, but she didn’t meet his eyes, and from the kitchen he heard Cook sob again.

He led her blindly, out through the gate in the back of the yard, across the blackening stubble in the pasture, to the old stone wall that marked the lip of the valley. Below them, the trees marched down the slope and up the other side, their branches as gray today as the mist that shrouded them, like wraiths standing in a sea of russet leaves.

“We had a telegram,” his mother began in a careful, level voice. “A supply convoy and its naval escort were attacked in the North Atlantic—”

“Is it Tommy? Or Edward?” Lewis interrupted, the knowledge of what was coming squeezing the air from his lungs. He heard a faint buzzing in his ears, and unbidden, the names of the German battleships he’d read in the newspapers flashed before him: the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, the Admiral Scheer.

His mother didn’t answer. When Lewis dared look at her, he saw that she was staring down into the valley, her face still except for a tiny tic at the corner of her mouth.

“No.” Lewis tried to shout it, but the mist seemed to catch the word, dampening it in cotton-wool fingers.

“Your brothers were born ten months apart,” his mother said slowly. “And from the very first they always wanted to be together.” She turned to him at last, touching his cheek with her cold fingertips. “Oh, Lewis … I’m afraid that’s all the comfort we have.”

WHEN GEMMA HAD FIRST MOVED INTO the Cavendishes’ garage flat, which had only a tiny shower, Hazel had given her carte blanche use of the bathtub in the house. She’d seldom found time to take advantage of the offer, but tonight, after the children had been bathed and got ready for bed, she’d brought over a towel, a dressing gown, and a handful of CDs and locked herself in the bathroom.

Hazel kept a small CD player on the shelf above the tub, insisting that music not only kept the children calm in the bath, but restored her own sanity, and at the moment Gemma felt in dire need of a little restorative treatment. She started the water, added lavender bath gel, lit the candles Hazel kept ready, then hesitated over the choice of music. In the end, she chose Jim Brickman over Loreena McKennitt, and as the unaccompanied notes of the piano filled the room, she slipped out of her clothes and dimmed the lights.

The bathroom was large enough to have existed as a dressing room in a previous incarnation, but Hazel had managed to make it serene and cozy at the same time. A stained-glass lamp produced multiple reflections in the mahogany dressing table’s time-speckled triple mirrors; the walls had been sponged a soft, periwinkle blue with a border of seashells; and a bookcase held volumes for perusing while soaking in the clawfoot tub.

But the books didn’t tempt Gemma for once, and the room did little to calm her troubled thoughts. She sank down into the foaming water, willing herself into the music as if she could absorb the clean simplicity of it.

Involuntarily, however, she looked down at her body, half submerged in the water, and touched her bare shoulders as if Gordon Finch’s fingertips might have left a tactile impression on her skin. Even remembering the sensation made her shiver, then flush with shame. She’d tried telling herself that nothing had actually happened between them that afternoon, but she knew she’d teetered on the very edge of temptation—and that if she had fallen she would have compromised both her career and her relationship with Duncan irrevocably.

As much as she wanted to believe Gordon innocent, he was a suspect in a murder investigation, and her behavior had been rash and dangerous. The fact that she suspected something similar had happened to Duncan on a case they’d worked last year didn’t make her feel any better, and he’d at least not been involved with her at the time.

She closed her eyes and eased herself further down into the water, wishing she could wash away what had happened. But she knew that no amount of guilt or regret could alter the connection that existed between her and Gordon Finch—a connection she somehow had never doubted was mutual, a connection so powerful it had made her contemplate throwing away everything that made her who she was.

The thought frightened her so much she felt tears well behind her closed eyelids. She blinked them angrily away. Were her commitments to the job and to Duncan flimsy fabrications that would crumble under the slightest pressure?

Could it be that she didn’t know herself at all?

CHAPTER 13The trade and industry which had first brought work and workers to the Island in the nineteenth century was now in terminal decline. One by one, in the 1970s the remaining factories closed their gates and moved away; rumours that the Docks too might close, proved to be all too true. The last ships came and went.

      Eve Hostettler, from

Memories of Childhood

      on the Isle of Dogs, 1870–1970

Teresa Robbins dressed carefully in her best pale blue suit and white lawn blouse, even putting on tights, although it took the help of a bit of talcum powder to get them up in the morning’s sticky heat. At least the sky was solidly overcast, she thought, and there was hope the weather might break by the end of the day.

She painstakingly applied her makeup, and at the last minute used a bit of spray to set her hair—all the while feeling as if she were the condemned going to face the guillotine. Sharply, she reminded herself that it was unlikely anything that happened to her today could be worse than the things she had endured in the past week.