an audience. “What did they say about the baby?”
He clicked his tongue. “Shocked, absolutely shocked. I thought the missus might have a coronary on me, poor old dear. Husband had to sit her down and fetch a glass of water. They said they’d no idea how something like that could have happened in their barn,
and they certainly hadn’t lost any infants. Their grandkids were ten and twelve when they moved away, so I suppose that lets them out as potential parents.” He scanned the room, ignoring Larkin’s look of disappointment. “Where’s the boss?”
“Still interviewing Piers Dutton. So what’s all the fuss about, then?”
Rasansky hesitated, as if debating whether he was willing to lose the cachet of telling Babcock first, but the temptation of listeners on tenterhooks proved too much. “Well, I thought it was a bust, but they insisted on giving me tea and cakes, for all the trouble I’d taken to drive there.”
Larkin, sitting just out of her sergeant’s line of sight, rolled her eyes, and Gemma suppressed a smile. From the comfortable curve of Rasansky’s belly and the crumbs dotting his tie, this wasn’t an unusual occurrence.
“Good thing, too,” Rasansky went on, “because it was only when the old man had calmed down and had a few minutes to think that he remembered he’d had some masonry work done in the old dairy, not too long before they decided to sell the place. Hired a fellow off the boats, name of Wain.” He pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket and made a show of consulting his notes. “Gabriel Wain. Now all we have to do is find this bloke—”
“Oh, Christ.” Sheila Larkin’s normally rosy cheeks had gone pale. “Gabriel Wain. He was right under our noses the whole time, and I didn’t bloody see it.”
“What are you talking about?” broke in Kincaid.
“His wife’s name is Rowan—it must be.” She shook her head, impatient with their lack of understanding. “I interviewed him. His boat’s moored at Barbridge, and a woman who lives along the canal said he had a row with Annie Lebow on Christmas Day. He said she’d scraped his boat—he even showed me the damage—and it seemed plausible enough. I didn’t—”
“Sheila, I’ve told you you’re too gullible—” Rasansky began, but Kincaid cut him off.
“You’re saying that the same man who might be connected with the baby had an argument with Annie Lebow?”
Larkin nodded miserably. “There’s more. I was reading through the victim’s case files—Annie Constantine, as she was then. I had them sent over from Social Services. I was just skimming, really, so I didn’t—” The color had crept back into her cheeks, but this time it was a blush of embarrassment. “I didn’t make a connection.
“There was a case, not long before Constantine retired. The mother was accused of MSBP—Munchausen syndrome by proxy. She kept telling the doctors that her little boy had fits and stopped breathing, but they couldn’t find anything, so the doctor in charge of the case referred it to Social Services. Annie Constantine had the case dismissed, so I didn’t pay all that much attention. But the thing is, the woman had a second baby while the case was under investigation, a little girl called Marie. And the mother . . . the mother’s name was Rowan Wain.”
The gears in his brain visibly clicking, Rasansky said, “The Smiths sold up five years ago, so it must have been a bit longer than that when they had the work done in the dairy. Mr. Smith said it was dead of winter—he worried about the mortar setting in the cold.”
“That would fit with what the pathologist found,” Kincaid put in. “No sign of insect activity on the corpse.”
Sheila Larkin scrabbled through the papers on her desk until she found the file she wanted, then scanned the pages, running down the text with her forefinger. Her nail, Gemma noticed, was bitten to the quick.
Larkin stopped, her lips moving with concentration as she read to herself, then looked up at them. “The timing might fi t. Constantine worked the case the year before she left the job.”
“So this Wain bloke, or his wife, was abusing the older kid.”
Rasansky sounded positively gleeful at the prospect. “Then they start on the baby, but this one dies. Wain just happens to be working in the dairy, repairing a bit of masonry, so he thinks, ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ the perfect opportunity to dispose of the body, no one the wiser. And they’re gypsies, these boat people. No one keeps track of their kiddies, so afterwards they move on and no one notices they’re one tyke short.”
“Except Annie Constantine,” Larkin said softly. “When she met up with the Wains on Christmas Day. If that was why she argued with Gabriel Wain, if she threatened to go to the authorities—”
“Motive.” Rasansky ticked one meaty forefinger against the other.
“And he certainly would have had opportunity—if anyone could have found her boat in the dark, it was this Wain fellow. He must know the Cut like the back of his hand.”
Larkin glanced at the clock on the basement wall. “Where the hell is the guv’nor? I don’t know if he’s going to kill us or kiss us, but we’ve got to get Wain in—”
“There’s only one problem with all this,” broke in Gemma. They all turned to stare at her.
She had been listening, first with a rush of relief that perhaps none of this would touch Juliet after all, then with growing dismay as she put the pieces together.
“More than one, actually. First, Annie Constantine had the case dismissed, and from what you’ve just said, the doctors never found evidence that the child was physically abused. Basically, they were accusing the mother of making up his illness, to get attention for herself.”
As Larkin nodded slowly, Kincaid raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“And,” Gemma said, “Marie Wain is alive and well, and as bright and healthy a seven-year-old as you could imagine. I’ve met her.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Babcock had come into the station whistling under his breath, having left Piers Dutton shouting at some solicitor’s poor secretary and the fraud team beginning a systematic removal of his fi les. All in a good morning’s work, he’d told himself. He was liking Dutton more and more for Annie Lebow’s murder, and the fact that he’d developed a healthy distaste for the man only added to his satisfaction. Police officers, of course, were supposed to be unbiased, but he’d yet to meet one who didn’t enjoy making a collar on a bastard like Dutton.
Now, if he could just sort out this business with the baby—
The whistle died on his lips as he caught sight of the posse gathered round Sheila Larkin’s desk. Larkin, Rasansky, Kincaid, and the lovely Gemma, all watching him with expressions that boded no good.
“You lot look like a convention of funeral directors,” he said as he reached them, his heart sinking. “What’s happened, then?”
It was Kincaid who told him, concisely, ignoring increasingly evil looks from Rasansky, who would rather be the bearer of bad news than shoved out of the picture altogether. Larkin was chewing on a fingernail again, a habit he thought she’d broken.
“Guv—” Rasansky began when Kincaid had finished his summary, but Babcock held up a hand for silence.
“Just let me think a minute, Kevin.” He patted his coat pockets, as he always did when faced with a problem, then remembered, as he always did, that he no longer smoked. He settled for nicking a pencil off Larkin’s desk and rotating it in his fingers as he said,
“Okay, so this Wain fellow can’t have murdered his baby daughter.
But it can’t simply be coincidence that he did mortar work in the dairy near the time the infant must have been interred, or that he knew Annie Lebow, or that he had a public row with her a day before she died.”
“Maybe he didn’t kill his own daughter,” said Rasansky. “Maybe it was someone else’s daughter that he conveniently walled up in that barn—”
“Then why were no baby girls that age reported missing?” broke in Larkin. “And how would Annie Lebow have known that when she met up with him again?”
“She kept her own counsel, Annie,” Babcock replied. “She might have known all sorts of things she didn’t put down on paper.” He tapped the report on Larkin’s desk with the pencil end. “And if he had nothing to do with her death, why did he lie about knowing her when he was first questioned?”
