road.
“About last night?” Kincaid snapped the lock on his seat belt and turned the heater vent—now spewing frigid air—away from his face.
“Yes, I think so,” he agreed. “And maybe more besides, but something about the last question really put the wind up him.”
He was still sorting his own impressions of Roger Constantine, and found himself missing Gemma. They used each other as sounding boards, and no idea was too far- fetched to be tossed into the pot.
Ronnie Babcock, however, had proved himself a good listener. “Constantine seems a clever man, though,” he allowed himself to muse aloud. “You’d think if he meant to kill his wife, he’d have a ready-made alibi.”
As they left the leafy village of Tilston behind and the heater began to generate some welcome warmth, Babcock said, “But what if it wasn’t planned? What if Annie didn’t just ring him to set a date for dinner? After all, we only have his word for that. What if she dropped a bombshell? Told him she wanted to meet and discuss a divorce? No more living the good life in the Victorian villa for poor
Roger.” He gestured behind them. “Not only would he lose the house, but I’d wager he could never afford to keep up a comparable lifestyle on a journalist’s pay. Now he gets it all, plus the life insurance, with no strings attached. I’d say he had a good deal to lose.”
Kincaid considered this, frowning. “Or what if it was just the opposite—she rang up and said she was coming home, for good? In the five years she’s been gone, he may have come to like the status quo very well. Maybe he didn’t want her to come back. Either way—”
“Either way, he’s got a motive, but the logistics are diffi cult. Say he was surprised by her phone call, whatever the content, and wanted to talk to her in person. I’m not sure he could have driven from Tilston to Barbridge in last night’s fog, much less have found his way to the boat, especially if he didn’t know exactly where she was moored.”
They had just swept round a ninety-degree blind turn on a lane not much wider than the car. Kincaid shuddered at the thought of driving this road at night, in bad conditions. It was possible, but was it likely? “Was the fog as heavy to the west?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but we’ll find out.” Babcock slipped his phone from his pocket and hit speed dial. “Sheila? Are you still on the boat?
Okay, listen. I’ve some things I want you to check. I need to know if last night’s fog extended as far west as Tilston. What?” He glanced at Kincaid and grinned. “I know you’re not the weather bureau,” he continued. “But we’re going to need someone from that area to knock on doors, chat up the neighbors about Roger Constantine. We need to know any tidbits of gossip, as well as whether anyone noticed his movements last night. And if you get on to Tilston, I’m sure the locals can tell us if they had a pea-souper last night.
“Oh, and when you’ve got that sorted, pull any financial records you find on the boat—in fact, pull any sort of papers you can find.
And what about the house- to- house in Barbridge?”
A tinny squawk of protest issued from the phone’s speaker and
Babcock rolled his eyes. “Of course you can do all that,” he said soothingly. “I’ve great confidence in you. I’ll ring you when we get to the station. ’Bye now.”
“Complaints, complaints,” he said to Kincaid as he flipped the phone closed. “I’m sure we never whinged like that. What’s happened to the copper’s work ethic?” He slowed, and Kincaid saw that they’d once again reached the junction for No Man’s Heath, the village with the reputed pub. “Now,” Babcock continued, a gleam in his eye, “what do you say to a ploughman’s lunch?”
Sheila Larkin swore under her breath. Who did the DCI think she was, bloody Wonder Woman? Not that she wasn’t used to him expecting her to be in two places at once, but he’d been enjoying bossing her about in front of his mate, and that she resented.
She’d been looking round the narrowboat’s galley when her phone rang, and now, as her stomach growled in protest, she eyed with longing an unopened packet of ginger biscuits in the cupboard. The temptation passed quickly, however, and she shut the cupboard door.
It wouldn’t seem right, taking food from a dead woman, no matter if everything in the kitchen eventually got chucked in the bin.
Taking her notebook and a pen from her coat pocket, she jotted down Babcock’s list of tasks. The first thing was to ring Western Division and set the inquiries in Tilston in motion.
When Control had put her through, she asked the duty sergeant to send an officer who knew the village—that would increase their odds of getting useful information. She asked about the fog as well, and the sergeant told her that the previous night it had been heavy in western Cheshire and on over the border into Wales. That was one question answered right off the bat, she thought, ringing off with satisfaction.
Then she went back to the task of searching the boat for anything that might shed light on the victim, or the circumstances of
her death. She had begun in the salon, the careful survey of which had taken only a few minutes—Annie Lebow had obviously been an enthusiastic proponent of the simplified life.
Thinking of the suburban semidetached house she shared with her mother in North Crewe, Sheila sighed. If anything happened to her or her mum, it would take the police a week just to go through the sitting room. It wasn’t that either of them was particularly fond of clutter, it was just that accumulation seemed to overtake them, and neither had the time to deal with it.
They rubbed along together pretty well, she and her mum. Her mum, Diane, had been only seventeen when Sheila was born, and her dad had buggered off without ever doing the right thing, so it had been just the two of them for as long as Sheila could remember.
She was perfectly happy to go on sharing a house with her mum.
She paid her share of the mortgage and the rates and the groceries—
not that either of them was home to eat all that often, or even to see each other, for that matter. Her mum was a nurse who worked night shifts in accident and emergency at Leighton Hospital, so the two of them could go for days communicating only by notes left on the door of the fridge.
Still, even when the house was empty, there was the feel of another person’s presence, and Sheila found that comforting, especially after a diffi cult case.
Now, as she moved into the bedroom—or master stateroom, she supposed it was called—it seemed to her that she could feel loneliness settle over her like a pall. Any envy she’d felt over the dead woman’s posh living situation vanished. Annie Lebow had created a cocoon for herself: beautiful, expensive, and emotionally isolated.
She soon found, however, that Lebow’s spare lifestyle had advantages. A section of panel in the stateroom dropped down to form a desk, and the space behind the panel held organizing nooks and
niches. In these she easily found such paperwork as Annie Lebow had seen fit to keep.
A leather- bound accordion file held carefully sorted bills for a credit card and a mobile phone, as well as the last several quarterly statements for a number of investments. In another nook, she found a personal address book, also leather bound.
Tucked inside the book’s front cover were a half dozen loose photographs. All featured the boat, and from the background foliage, looked to have been taken in spring or summer. Only one, however, showed the victim.
Annie Lebow stood at the helm, her right hand resting lightly on the end of the S-shaped tiller. Her bare arms and face looked tanned, her expression relaxed, with a hint of a smile touching the corners of her mouth. It seemed to Sheila that she had been gazing at whoever held the camera with a slightly tolerant affection.
Although the photo was undated, Sheila guessed it was several years old, perhaps taken when Lebow had first acquired the boat.
Her hair had been longer and darker, the planes of her face softer, less pronounced, and the more Sheila gazed at the image, the more she thought there was a sort of tentative pride in the way the woman held the tiller.
Sheila took a last look at the photo, then grimaced and snapped the book closed. She had looked at Annie Lebow’s body and felt the shock and anger she always experienced at a murder scene. She had riffl ed through the woman’s clothes and most intimate possessions, and had still managed to keep a distance between herself and the victim. That separation was a learned skill, a necessity of the job that she struggled to maintain.
