Deborah Crombie - Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James 09 - Now May You Weep

“He said they found this in the trampled area in the wood,” the constable continued, “along with traces of semen.”

“Thank you, Constable.” Ross looked at the wisp of pale yellow yarn he held in his hand, then at Hazel Cavendish.

“You’re not serious.” Gemma faced Constable Mackenzie across the work island in the Inneses’ kitchen. “You want to do a metal trace test on me?” Her voice rose in a squeak

of outrage in spite of her attempt to control it. Having given her statement to another constable seated in the corner, she had then been passed on to Mackenzie.

“I’m sorry, ma’am.” Mackenzie’s brow was furrowed with distress. “It’s orders from the chief inspector. Everyone in the household, he said, no exceptions. I’m to take a footprint, as well.”

“The bastard,” swore Gemma under her breath. Feeling her face flush with telltale warmth, she turned away for a moment, trying to master her temper. Would Ross have treated Kincaid this way, she wondered, or would Kincaid have been respected as a fellow officer—even deferred to?

Of course, there was the matter of rank, she told herself, attempting to be fair, but even that didn’t excuse Ross’s behavior.

Nor was it Kincaid’s fault that he was male and automatically a member of the club, she reminded herself, curbing the unjustified flash of anger she felt towards him. In its place, she felt a sudden longing for him so acute that it caught at her chest like a vise.

He’d have Ross wrapped round his finger in no time, and she—she wouldn’t feel so afraid. The law had always been her friend, her protector, and now she found herself on the other side of the wall.

Damn Ross. Well, if he wouldn’t work with her, she saw no reason why she should cooperate more than regulation demanded. But that, at least, she would have to do. Summoning a smile for Mackenzie, she turned back and held out her hand. “Right, then. Let’s get on with it.”

As Mackenzie swabbed each of her fingers in turn, Gemma gazed out the window. The rain had come on, softening the outline of shrubs, drive, and barn. God, what a mess. She should be glad this wasn’t her scene,

her case, her responsibility, she told herself. And so she might be, if she could just rid herself of the nagging uncertainty she felt over Hazel.

A movement in the drive caught her eye. Two uniformed officers had emerged from around the corner of the house, a third figure between them. As Gemma watched, one constable opened the door of a marked car and eased the third person into the back, protecting the top of the dark, curly-haired head from the doorframe with a large hand.

Gemma jerked her hand away from Mackenzie, reaching out as if she could stop the car door closing over Hazel’s white, frightened face.

Chapter Eleven

I wave the quantum o’ the sin, The hazard of concealing;

But och; it hardens a’ within, And petrifies the feelin!

robert burns, “First Epistle to John Lapraik”

Carnmore, April

It was only after Charles had been buried in the Chapeltown churchyard that Livvy began to realize all griefs were unique.

She had lost her mother at sixteen, to a lingering respi-ratory illness that not even her physician father had been able to cure. Livvy’s grieving had been wild and hot, punctuated by racking sobs and waves of such hollowness that she thought surely her body must collapse into this interior abyss.

But with Charles’s death, she’d felt a surprised numbness, and a cold that grew daily, settling into bone and flesh like the weight of the snow that lay across the Braes.

She felt dull, diminished, as if her soul had become a hard, heavy thing inside her.

And secreted inside that brittle shell, a kernel of guilt; for Livvy knew Charles’s death to be her fault.

She had not loved him enough. She had liked him, respected him, admired him even, and between them had grown a comfortable intimacy and dependence. But there had been no passion on her part, and it was that missing bond that might have held him tethered, to her and to Will. Had he seen her failure, when he’d looked in her eyes for the last time?

In late March, the snow turned to rain. The already saturated ground became spongy with moisture; water seeped and trickled down the hillsides into the fast-flowing Crombie Burn. The village children came out to play, like rabbits emerging from their burrows, and the men began to talk about the spring planting.

Livvy began to feel a painful anticipation, as if possibilities waited alongside the green shoots in the earth, and it frightened her. So she tried not to think at all, throwing herself into the running of the house and, with Will, the business of the distillery.

She practiced holding each moment, like a pearl in her hand, but one by one they slipped inexorably away. And then on a morning when the sun shone and the breeze blew soft from the east, an auburn-haired man came riding up from the village on a bay horse, and she knew him.

Louise slipped out the front door while John was cooking a belated breakfast for the guests. There were still two white-coveralled technicians working in the scullery, and the guests were milling about in the hall and sitting room—no one seemed to want to face the dining room, where they had been interrogated by Chief Inspector Ross.

She’d had to ask John for the keys to the old Land Rover—letting go her car had been just one of the sacri-

fices they’d made when they came to this godforsaken place. When he’d questioned her, she’d told him they needed biscuits for tea that afternoon, and she’d offered no explanation to anyone else. The constable on the porch nodded but didn’t stop her.

The rain fell in a mist so fine and heavy that it felt as if she were walking through water, and she had forgotten an umbrella. By the time she reached the car she was sopping, bedraggled as a water rat.

There was English rain, she had discovered, and there was Scottish rain, and Scottish rain invariably made you wetter and colder.

Whatever had possessed her all those years ago, to give up life in London and come here? It had been Hazel, of course, the one person she had ever truly thought of as a friend, and now Hazel had come back and turned everything topsy-turvy once again.

How could they have taken Hazel away? Every time Louise thought of it, she came up against a wall in her mind, as if this shock on top of all the others had formed an impenetrable barrier. It couldn’t be happening—none of this could be happening. Donald couldn’t be dead. She saw the square shape of the mortuary van at the edge of the drive and looked away, her throat closing convulsively.

And John, where had John gone that morning? It shouldn’t have taken him more than half an hour to buy eggs, yet he had been gone a good deal longer than that. He was terrified, she could smell it on him, and this wasn’t the first time he’d disappeared without explanation.

Louise backed the Land Rover up and drove to the gate, rolling to a stop as a constable came up to the window.