“Yeah. When she was mooring next to him,” Larkin clarifi ed. “A nice long patch on the bow.”
“That’s odd.” Kincaid rubbed his chin as he thought, feeling the stubble that was just beginning to break through the skin. “I watched her maneuver the
By the time Gemma neared Barbridge again, this time relatively un-scathed by her encounters with stile and hedge, she felt chilled to the bone. She wasn’t sure, however, how much of her discomfort came from the physical cold and how much from the memory of the gaping hole she’d seen in the wall of the old dairy.
With the departure of the sergeant, the lads working deconstruction had been happy enough to let her have a look round the interior as long as she didn’t interfere with their grid. She’d only ventured in far enough to see the place where Juliet had found the infant, and that glimpse had made her realize that although she’d sympathized with Juliet’s experience, she hadn’t, until that moment, understood the visceral horror of it.
Gemma wondered if Juliet’s clients, who had envisioned turning the old structure into a warm family retreat, would ever regain their enthusiasm—or if Juliet would find any pleasure in completing the job, assuming she had the opportunity.
The day seemed to have softened, a slight rise in temperature transmuting the sleety pellets of early afternoon into fine beads of moisture that soaked into her clothing and coated her hair. It seemed likely that dusk would presage a recurrence of the previous night’s heavy fog.
The thought gave Gemma a prickle between her shoulder blades, a rise of the hair on her neck. She jerked round, as she had more than once on her walk back from the barn, but there was no one on the path. Shaking herself, she picked up her pace. The curve of the stone bridge was now in sight; in just a few moments she would be snug in her car and laughing at her paranoid fantasies of being followed.
But she stopped just short of the steps leading up to the road, ar-rested by the sight framed in the weathered stone arch of the bridge.
A small girl, perhaps not much older than Toby, sat at the canal’s edge a few yards beyond the bridge, huddled under an enormous black umbrella. She held a fishing rod in one hand, but both girl and line were so still they might have been sculpted.
A boat was moored nearby, its colors softened by the mist, but Gemma realized it was the one she had seen the forensic pathologist visit that morning. Her curiosity aroused, she watched for a moment, then walked slowly forward until she emerged from beneath the bridge.
The girl looked up at her approach. Her curling hair was darkened by the damp, but nothing could dim the brilliant cornflower blue of her eyes.
“A bit wet for fishing, isn’t it?” Gemma asked, stopping a few steps away.
The child regarded her seriously. “Poppy says the fish bite better s
in the rain. I think it’s because they can’t tell where the water ends and the air begins.” She was older than Gemma had first thought; the gap left by the loss of her two front teeth had begun to fi ll in.
Moving a bit closer, Gemma dropped into as graceful a squat as she could manage, her face now level with the girl’s. “What do you catch?”
“Roach. Perch. Bream. Sometimes gudgeon.”
Gemma’s face must have reflected her distaste, because the girl gave a sudden peal of laughter. “They’re tiny things, the gudgeon,”
she explained. “But you have to use maggots to catch them and I don’t much like that. I don’t like cleaning the fish, either, but Poppy says it’s no different from peeling potatoes or cutting up a hen.”
“Can you do that, then?” asked Gemma, impressed. Although Kit was quite skilled in the kitchen, Toby was just mastering making toast and sandwiches, and was certainly never given a sharp knife.
“Not as well as my brother,” the girl answered. “I can make smashing mac cheese, though. Much better than fish, but Poppy says we shouldn’t pay for food that we can provide ourselves.” There was no resentment in her tone.
Gemma realized that it wasn’t this child she’d glimpsed opening the door to the doctor, but a boy perhaps a few years older. “Are there just the two of you, you and your brother?”
The girl nodded. “That’s Joseph. I’m Marie,” she added, favoring Gemma with a grave smile.
“I’m Gemma.” Gemma rocked back on her heels, trying to find a more comfortable position without actually letting the seat of her trousers come in contact with the damp turf.
Marie detached a hand from the fishing rod and held it out. The small, calloused fingers felt icily cold in Gemma’s, but the child seemed unaware of any discomfort.
Nodding towards the boat, Gemma said, “You and your brother live on the boat with your dad?”
“And our mum. But she’s dying,” Marie added, in the same
matter-of- fact tone. “Mummy and Poppy don’t know that we know, but we do.”
Gemma gazed at the girl, at a loss for a response. At last she said,
“Has your mum been ill long?”
“I’m not sure.” A small crease marred Marie’s smooth brow.
“But I think she’s tired. It’s just that she doesn’t want to leave us.”
“I can understand that,” offered Gemma, her heart contracting.
“She must love you very much.”
Afterwards, Gemma could never guess what signal alerted the child, but Marie suddenly ducked her head round the edge of her umbrella and looked up the towpath. In the distance, Gemma saw a man and a boy, their arms filled with firewood, walking slowly down from the Middlewich Junction.
“That’s my poppy coming,” said Marie, tucking herself back under the black umbrella like a retreating tortoise. “You’d better go.”
The cornflower-blue eyes that met Gemma’s were as calm and ancient as the sea. “He doesn’t like us talking to strangers.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Gemma found Crewe Police Station without trouble, and the temporary incident room more easily still. Although the duty sergeant had given her directions, she could have followed the scent trail of stale coffee, half- eaten takeaways, and slightly damp wool, carried on the murmur of multitudinous voices muttering into telephones. Her spirits rose at the familiarity of it, and as she entered the basement room, the sight of the battered desks and snaking telephone and computer wires brought a smile to her lips. She might have felt a fi sh out of water these last few days, but here she belonged.
She saw Kincaid before he saw her. He was perched on the corner of a desk occupied by Ronnie Babcock, who was leaning back in a battered chair, phone glued to his ear. Kincaid was listening, brow creased, as if trying to make out the unheard end of the conversation.
Glancing up, he saw Gemma, grinned and started to rise, but she motioned him to stay where he was and crossed the room to him.
A few of the officers occupying the other desks looked up as she passed. Most were too occupied with their own tasks to display much curiosity, but the young constable who had been so kind to Kit that morning looked up from a stack of papers and gave Gemma a
smile of recognition. Sheila Larkin was her name, Gemma remembered.
The sergeant she’d met at the building site was there as well. He looked no more pleased to see her than he had earlier, but if he’d meant to protest her presence, he was stopped by his ringing phone.
Gemma couldn’t resist giving him a cheeky little wave, and was rewarded by a full-wattage scowl.
Gemma’s shoulder brushed Kincaid’s as she reached him. In such surroundings the contact seemed unexpectedly intimate, but she resisted the urge to touch him even as she felt a flush of pleasure in her cheeks.
“Where have you been? ” he asked softly, his breath tickling her ear.
“Tell you later,” she whispered back, ignoring the rise of goose-flesh on her arms as she tried to catch the
