own, when Gemma reached the car park, she stood and gazed across the road at the River Weaver.
She imagined the canal, running parallel a half mile to the west as it passed the outskirts of the town, then leaving the course of the river and angling northwest towards Barbridge and distant Chester—the same canal that passed Juliet’s dairy barn, and the scene of Annie Lebow’s murder.
It was a coincidence, surely, that the remains of the child, perhaps long buried, should lie so near the place where a woman had died violently sometime last night. She could see no logical connection, but still it nagged at her. Suddenly, she felt she had better things to do than sightsee.
The same uniformed constable she had spoken with that morning was still restricting access into Barbridge, but he recognized Gemma and waved her through. The crime-scene van was still parked near the bridge end, and she knew the local force would try to limit traffic through the area until the SOCOs had finished.
She found a place to leave her own car, then spoke to the officer who was monitoring pedestrian movement over the bridge and onto
the towpath. “What about boats?” she asked him, when he’d checked her identification.
“Not much traffic this time of year,” he answered. “And we’ve had someone stationed at the Middlewich Junction, to warn the boaters off, as well as down at the Hurleston Locks, below the crime scene. I’ve mostly had to turn back gawkers who have walked in to visit the pub,” he added, gesturing at the Barbridge Inn.
Thanking him, Gemma crossed the humpbacked bridge and climbed down the incline to the towpath. There was only one boat moored below the bridge, a matte black vessel with small brass-rimmed round portals, like multiple eyes. Gemma peered curiously at the portholes as she passed, but the interior curtains were drawn tight, and both fore and aft decks were closed in with heavy black canvas. The boat looked deserted, and unpleasantly funereal.
The two boats moored on the other side of the canal were more cheerful, painted in traditional reds and greens, but they appeared just as devoid of human presence.
Gemma walked on, following the sharp curve of the canal to the left, and as the boats and houses of Barbridge vanished behind her she felt she’d entered a different, secret world. There was nothing but the wide curve of the water, always turning sinuously just out of sight, and the black tracery of bare trees against the gray sky.
The place seemed to her unutterably lonely—and yet she could feel the pull of it, the desire to see always what lay round the next bend. And she could imagine that in summer, when the trees were thick with leaf and the air soft and drowsy, it would be enchanted.
Looking down, she saw that that rutted path worn into the surrounding turf held a collage of footprints—a nightmare for the scene-of-crime team. She went on, conscious of the sound of her own breathing, and of the occasional faint rustle of the wind or a small creature in the surrounding woods. When a trio of swans appeared round the next bend and glided towards her, she felt an unexpected easing of tension. They were company, even if not human.
She spoke to them, feeling slightly foolish, and they changed course and came towards her, swimming in formation, trailing geo-metrically perfect wakes behind them. When they saw she had no food to offer, however, they quickly abandoned her, picking desultorily at the rushes lining the banks.
“Silly cow,” Gemma admonished herself aloud. What had she expected, a conversation? A look at the heavy cloud layer drawing nearer the horizon told her that her window of opportunity might not last. If she was going to see anything, she had better get a move on, and not fritter away her time idling with swans.
She set off again, her stride more purposeful, and after a few more bends the canal straightened a bit, and hedgerows began to replace the trees. Ahead, Gemma saw a black iron bridge that possessed none of the grace of the old stone humpbacked bridges, and to one side, a gnarled and twisted black silhouette of a tree that rose in unnatural parody.
And beyond that, she glimpsed the first fluorescent lime-green flash of a police officer’s safety jacket. She had reached the crime scene. After identifying herself, she stood for a few moments at the perimeter, watching. The technicians were still searching for trace evidence, combing through every blade of grass and every twig of hedgerow. The deep blue boat floated serenely against the bank, as if removed from the fuss, but as Gemma looked more closely she could see the dusting of print powder on the sides and decks. There was no sign, of course, of the victim’s body, only a dark patch in the turf, unidentifiable as blood from where Gemma stood.
“The lads have finished inside the boat, if you want to have a look,” the officer told her, but Gemma resisted the temptation. She knew Babcock’s crew would have been over the boat thoroughly, and that was not why she’d come.
“Is there some way I can get past, without contaminating the scene?” she asked. The hedgerow looked as impenetrable as Sleeping Beauty’s briar thicket.
“There’s a stile a few yards back—you’ll have passed it. It’s a bit overgrown, but I think you could get over it into the field.” He didn’t ask why, and although she suspected he could tell her what she wanted to know, there was no substitute for seeing the lay of the land herself.
“Thanks,” she said, adding, “I’ll give you a shout if I get stuck,”
and got a friendly and appreciative grin in return.
A few moments later, she found the stile, and was glad enough that the curve of the hedge hid her from the constable’s sight. “Overgrown” had been an understatement, she thought as she pushed aside branches and placed a foot on the raised step. She swung the other leg awkwardly over the top and found herself hung, straddling the fence, the back of her coat caught on a bramble. “Bloody country,” she swore, wishing she were double- jointed as she reached round to free the snag from her back. When she finally clambered down, as graceful as a ballerina in lead boots, she could feel her face flushed pink with aggravation and embarrassment. Now she’d just have to hope she didn’t meet an irate cow.
She discovered soon enough that her nemesis was mineral rather than animal. The field had been plowed, and although sprouts of bright green winter grass grew on the raised ridges, the furrows held a porridge of slush and mud. Gemma trudged on, her boots growing heavier with every step, until the hedgerow diminished to a few strands of wire fencing and she was able to climb back to the towpath. Ahead, she saw the now-familiar shape of a stone bridge, half hidden by the curve of the canal.
As she came round the bend, she saw the redbrick building hugging the rise on the opposite side of the canal—Juliet’s dairy barn.
She had reached the far side of the bridge that went nowhere.
Getting onto the bridge itself required climbing over another stile, but this time Gemma managed a bit more gracefully. From her vantage point at the top of the bridge, she could see the activity still under way at the dairy, but there was no sign of the irascible
sergeant she and Juliet had met that morning. She thought that without him to play watchdog, she’d have no trouble getting inside the building, but first she meant to finish what she had come to do.
She stood at the parapet and looked back the way she had come, at the still reach of the canal, empty now of any movement save a faint ripple in the rushes lining the bank. Then she turned, and crossing the bridge, looked south. In the distance, she could see the rising bank of the Hurleston Reservoir, stark after the tree- lined curves she had seen to the north, and she knew that beyond that lay the Hurleston Locks and the entrance to the Llangollen Canal, and farther still, the village of Acton, and Nantwich.
Close by, in the lee of the dairy barn, a half dozen narrowboats were moored opposite the towpath, like a gay trail of ducklings, and she could see where a path led from the dairy’s lane along the edge of the field, allowing access to the boats. But the deck doors were sealed tight or covered with canvas, and no smoke rose from the brass-ringed chimneys. Gemma doubted that Babcock’s men had found any witnesses there.
Why had Annie Lebow chosen such a deserted stretch of the canal in which to moor her boat? Did it have some connection with the proximity of the dairy barn?
Or look at it another way, Gemma thought. If Annie had been accustomed to mooring her boat there when she came to the Barbridge area, had she seen something at the barn? And if that was the case, could the discovery of the child’s body have brought her to the killer’s attention?
But for all they knew, Gemma reminded herself, the baby might have been interred in the barn wall long before Annie Lebow had even bought her boat. She shook her head in frustration. She was hypothesizing without hard data, a dangerous thing.
But her walk had netted her one thing more than muddy boots and fingers that were starting to go numb. She
