with a copper’s life are just about nil,”
Babcock conceded. Even as he spoke he remembered that Kincaid had been divorced, and that he’d heard his ex-wife had died tragically. To cover his momentary awkwardness, he said, “So, how did you get together with your Gemma?”
This time Kincaid’s smile was wicked. “She was my sergeant.”
When Althea Elsworthy saw Rowan Wain, she knew. Still, she went through the motions, listening to heart and lungs, checking capillary refill, lips and gums. The woman’s labored breathing echoed in the boat’s small cabin.
The social worker—Annie Lebow, as she was calling herself now—had given the doctor a brief history of the Wains, explaining why Rowan Wain and her husband refused to seek medical help through the system.
“Munchausen’s by proxy?” Althea had said. “Christ. Who made the diagnosis?”
When Annie told her, she shook her head and compressed her lips.
“The man’s a poisonous toad. I’m not saying that such things don’t happen now and again, mind you, parents abusing their children in order to get attention, but it should be called just that—abuse—and dealt with as such. But Sprake pulls MSBP out of his hat whenever he can’t diagnose a child or the parents refuse to cooperate with his conception of himself as God.”
“And there’s no way to have the diagnosis removed from Rowan’s records?”
“Not likely, even if the couple had unlimited funds and fancy lawyers. The boy seems all right now?”
“Remarkably well, as far as I can tell,” Annie had answered, and Althea nodded. She’d seen cases like that, where a young child failed to thrive, then, without any visible explanation, suddenly seemed to turn a corner. Certainly, both children, seen briefly peeking from behind their father in the main cabin of the narrowboat, had looked healthy, if a trifle thin. Better that, in her opinion, than
the pudginess she saw so often these days in children who spent hours in front of the telly.
“Doctor.” The whisper of Rowan Wain’s voice snapped Althea out of her woolgathering. The thin fingers Rowan placed on her arm were cold and blue as ice. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s not good, I’m afraid,” Althea admitted. “I don’t suppose I can change your mind about going to hospital?”
Rowan gave only the slightest shake of her head, but her eyes were adamant, and filled with a calm acceptance that made the doctor look away. Carefully coiling up her stethoscope and placing it in her bag, she said, “I can try to make you more comfortable. Perhaps some oxygen would help.”
“It won’t go on any records?”
“I’ll see it doesn’t.”
“Then that would be good. Thank you.” Rowan smiled. “Will you speak to my husband?”
“If you’d like, yes.” Thinking of the anxious faces of those waiting outside the tiny cabin, Althea was reminded of why she had become a pathologist—she found it much easier to deal with the dead than with the pain of the living. “I’ll come back soon,” she said.
“When I’ve arranged for the oxygen.”
Rowan’s eyes were drifting closed; even their short interview had tired her.
When the doctor emerged into the main cabin, she found only Annie and the husband, Gabriel Wain. There seemed to be a tension between them, and Althea wondered briefly if it was due to more than concern.
“I’ve sent the children up top,” Wain said, without offering any pleasantries. He, too, was thin, she realized, with the gauntness of worry, and his dark eyes were as feverish in their intensity as his rough demand when he spoke. “Say what you have to say.”
“I suspect you know what I’m going to tell you, Mr. Wain,” said Althea, speaking softly enough that she hoped her voice wouldn’t
carry into the next cabin. “Your wife is suffering from congestive heart failure. I understand your feelings about treatment, and in Rowan’s case I must say I fear her heart is too damaged for surgical intervention to be effective, even if it were possible. There are drugs that might help temporarily, but again . . . I’ve said I’d arrange some oxygen, to make her more comfortable. You do understand that this is strictly my opinion?” she added.
He stared at her. “You’re saying there’s nothing can be done for her? Even if she went into hospital?”
“In the long term, I fear not.”
She heard the quick intake of Annie Lebow’s breath and glimpsed her stricken face, but it was Gabriel Wain who held her gaze. His eyes drew her in, and for an instant she felt herself falling into the pit of his grief. But then she saw a flicker of something that might have been relief in those depths, and he seemed to diminish. If the will to keep his wife alive had driven him beyond his limits for too long, it had now released its hold.
“Have you told her,” he asked, “that she’s dying?”
“Not in so many words, no. Do you want me to speak to her again?”
He drew himself up, once more dominating the claustrophobic confines of the cabin, and his dignity made her suddenly feel an intruder. “No,” he said quietly. “I thank you for your help, Doctor, but that burden is mine.”
Chapter Fourteen
The victim clutched his head and staggered, then swayed and slumped to the floor of the inn’s lounge bar, like a rag doll divested of stuffing. He twitched and, with a final moan, lay still.
Standing over him, the murderer nudged him with a toe, once, twice, then, still holding the club, raised his hands above his head and pumped his arms in victory. He pranced around the room in an impromptu dance, face obscured by his mask, ragged clothes fl uttering.
“A doctor!” someone called out from the crowd. “Get a doctor!”
A tall, skeletally thin man in a black top hat pushed through the bystanders and, kneeling beside the corpse, opened his large black bag. From its depths, he pulled a jug of medicine that looked suspiciously like cider, and a pill the size of a Ping-Pong ball. The doctor held the pill up between thumb and forefinger, displaying it to the crowd, then pushed it between the unresponsive lips of the corpse.
There was a pregnant pause, a momentary holding of the collective breath, then the corpse stirred, sat up, and gave an exaggerated shake. He spat out the pill and took a swig from the jug, which made him roll his eyes and wipe his lips with the back of his hand. Then
he leapt to his feet and began to attack his assailant with the same club that had previously been used against him.
After a frenzied chase round the small open space in the pub’s center, the murderer at last fell to his knees, vanquished, and the crowd erupted into cheers. Murderer, victim, and doctor all took bows, then the doctor swept off his top hat and began passing it through the crowd to the accompaniment of clinking glasses.
“That’s barbaric,” murmured Gemma to Kincaid, who stood beside her at the bar. They’d been queuing for drinks when the play had begun and everyone had fallen silent to watch.
Tossing the change he’d received from the barman into the doctor’s hat as it passed by, Kincaid said, “Mummers on Boxing Day are a respected rural tradition. I thought they were quite good, actually.”
To Gemma, Boxing Day meant watching football on the telly, which she thought more civilized than pantomimed murder, football hooligans notwithstanding. Toby, who had clamped himself to her and tucked his face away as the villain struck his blows, now tugged on her trousers leg. “Mummy, is the bad man gone?”
Contrite at not realizing he’d really been frightened, she knelt beside him and tousled his hair. “Yes, lovey. It was all just pretend, like on the telly, or a film. See, they’re friends again.” She pointed to the actors, now engaged in a spirited conversation at a far table, and Toby stood on tiptoe to look.
“The play’s medieval, or older,” Kincaid explained as he and Gemma collected the round of drinks he’d bought for their table.
“Perhaps even pagan—no one seems to know for certain. At least they don’t stone wrens these days.”
“Stone wrens?” Gemma looked at him askance. “As in little birds?”
“The twenty-sixth of December is the feast day of Saint Stephen, an early Christian martyr who was stoned to death,” Kincaid explained as they threaded their way through the crowded room, Toby s
