In A Dark House

“We can’t disappoint Kit now. You know that.” She stepped back, the momentary softness of her expression replaced by a bright smile. He had ventured onto forbidden ground and she’d withdrawn again. “Now go,” she added briskly, “or you’ll be late.”

She was right, of course, he admitted to himself a few minutes later as he walked up Lansdowne Road, towards Holland Park tube station. Kit had to come first just now, but acknowledging that didn’t make it any easier to deal with Gemma shutting him out – or the realization that she was, whether consciously or not, using the situation with Kit as an excuse to avoid talking about her miscarriage and the possibility of having another child.

And to add insult to injury, he’d had no luck trying to get Kit to discuss his feelings about Monday’s impending hearing. Arriving home a bit before ten the previous evening, he’d found Gemma at the piano in the dining room, practicing for her Saturday afternoon lesson. She’d been working on a simple Bach piece, and although she didn’t have much time to play, he could tell she was improving. Her tempo was still a little slow, but her fingertips moved lightly and surely over the keys.

Pausing, she’d looked up and smiled, but he’d waved her on. “Don’t stop. I’m going to check on the boys.”

He’d started up the stairs, and the dogs, having dutifully met him at the front door, settled back into position on the first landing. This had become their usual strategy for dealing with divided loyalties when the family was split between up-and downstairs. Their cat, Sid, on the other hand, operating on the principle of all things come to those who wait, would be curled on the foot of their bed.

First, he looked in on Toby, now sleeping alone in the room he’d shared with Kit until a few weeks ago. The five-year-old lay sprawled on his stomach, covers thrown back to reveal his train-printed pajamas, his stuffed bear tossed to the floor. Kincaid carefully tucked in the bear and pulled up the duvet, but there was no change in the rhythm of Toby’s slightly whuffly breathing.

Kincaid moved on to the room down the hall, once intended as the nursery. When his light knock brought no answer, he opened the door. Kit sat at his desk, hunched over a sheet of paper, drawing. A set of headphones explained his lack of response, and Kincaid could hear the tinny, muted sound of the personal CD player from across the room.

Rapping more loudly on the open door, Kincaid called out, “Hey, sport.”

Kit turned, startled, and yanked off the headphones. “Sorry. Didn’t hear you.”

“I’m not surprised.” Kincaid thought of all the times his mother had told him he was going to ruin his hearing, and refrained from further comment on the volume. “What are you listening to?” he asked instead, sitting down on the bed. Tess, Kit’s terrier, had followed him upstairs and now jumped up beside him.

“The Mighty Diamonds.” Kincaid must have looked blank, because Kit added, in the don’t you know anything? tone that had been creeping into his voice more frequently of late, “It’s reggae. Classic eighties.”

“Oh, right. I must have been listening to the Police in the eighties, myself.”

“But the Police were influenced by reggae, and by Bob Marley,” Kit told him with great seriousness, and Kincaid congratulated himself on inadvertently getting something right. He suspected that would become more and more difficult, but he meant to keep trying.

“Did you borrow the CD from Wesley?”

“He said I could.” Kit’s reply was unexpectedly defensive. “I haven’t scratched it or anything.”

“No. I’m sure you haven’t. You’re very good at looking after things,” Kincaid assured him, thinking he’d have to ask Wes for a crash course on reggae on the sly. In the meantime, he’d try an easier topic. He glanced at the paper on Kit’s desk. “Are you sketching?”

Kit held up a drawing of a tortoise, copied from the open zoology book beside it. “Galapagos tortoise.” The boy’s latest hero was Dr. Stephen Maturin, the surgeon/naturalist from Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander novels, and he’d become determined to learn to draw.

“Wow, that’s terrific,” Kincaid said, and the sincere admiration in his voice elicited a smile from Kit.

“I could use some better watercolor pencils. There’s an art supply shop off Portobello, near Otto’s. I thought maybe I could get them tomorrow.”

“Listen, sport. About tomorrow. I’m going to have to miss out on our shopping expedition. Something’s come up-”

“I know. Gemma told me.” Kit’s expression was neutral, reserved.

“I’m sorry. I wanted-”

“Don’t worry about it.” Kit shrugged and turned back to his desk. “It doesn’t matter.”

The absolution cut Kincaid to the quick.

When Kincaid arrived at the morgue, Farrell, Cullen, and Bell were there before him, and Kincaid suspected that Cullen, at least, derived some satisfaction from getting one up on his boss.

He joined them in the postmortem theatre gallery, where they looked down on Kate Ling and her assistant, and on the grotesque and blackened form on the steel dissection table. The smell made Kincaid wish he’d forgone even his light toast and bacon breakfast.

Dr. Ling and the assistant pathologist wore long green plastic aprons tied over their scrubs and, viewed from the back, made him think of gunslingers in chaps. Perhaps it was something in the assurance of their stance, feet apart, ready to take on the grim reaper himself.

Ling turned and saw him, her eyes crinkling in a smile above her mask. She switched off her mike. “Duncan, I was just saying to your colleagues that we’ve finished the preliminary exam. As I’m sure you all know, we can learn a good bit simply from measurements and radiology, even when the corpse is quite severely damaged.” She gestured towards the far wall, where a series of X-rays were mounted on light boards. “These things tell us that our victim was an adult female, of medium height – probably five-five or-six. Although fire can cause some shrinkage of bone, in this case I don’t believe the heat was that severe.”

“Could you narrow ‘adult’ down a bit, Doc?” Kincaid asked.

“Postadolescent, definitely. In females, by the age of twenty, the lower epiphysis – that’s one of the bony plates at either end of the forearm – and radius have fused. Shortly thereafter the upper epiphysis and radius fuse as well, as is the case here.

“The collarbone gives us our next marker – it has usually finished growing by the age of twenty-eight or so – but as the victim’s upper torso has suffered the most severe fire damage, I can’t give a definitive opinion on that.

“As to the upper end of the spectrum, older subjects show signs of degeneration around the edges of the vertebrae, and joints may show signs of arthritis. Neither of those are evident here, but we may want to have a forensic anthropologist take another look.”

“So you’re saying twenty to-”

“Midthirties, possibly forty.”

Kincaid winced at the idea that, according to a pathologist’s estimate, he was already going downhill. He caught a glimpse of the pained expression on Bill Farrell’s face and guessed the thought had occurred to him as well.

“Twenty to forty. That’s a big bloody help,” Cullen muttered in Kincaid’s ear. While his sergeant might approach the most tedious and time-consuming data search with equanimity, postmortems made him cranky.

“Any chance the victim could be older than forty, Doc?” Kincaid asked.

“With good genes, maybe. As I said, I’m no expert. Let’s move on to the exterior physical examination. Although it’s not unusual to find a burn victim’s clothing fused to the skin, we were unable to discover any fabric traces. Officer Farrell, has your team turned up any evidence of clothing at the scene?”

“Not so far. Even if the fire destroyed all fabric, we’d expect to turn up a bit of button or zipper, or a fragment of shoe leather. I’d say this woman was stripped and her clothing taken away from the scene, or she arrived there starkers.”

Ling nodded, as if he were a promising pupil. “That leads us to another interesting point. The stripping of a female victim usually implies some sort of sexual assault, but this woman shows no obvious signs of sexual trauma. Of course, that doesn’t completely rule out a sexual motive, but it does narrow things down a bit. We’ll know more when we get the results of the swabs.”