out of a restless sleep. In her dreams, she wandered in a long corridor filled with endless rows of doors, hearing voices she could never quite reach.
As noon approached, Kincaid called Maura Bell and Cullen into their temporary office. “Maura, will you take charge of coordinating the searches of Tony Novak’s flat and car? Doug, you can take the statements from the Yarwoods. I’ve got to go, but I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He meant to get a bite of lunch, then to meet Gemma, Kit, and their solicitor at the family court. “You’ll let me know if there’s any news about Harriet?”
“Right, guv,” said Cullen, then he hesitated a moment before adding, “Good luck with the hearing.”
Kincaid nodded his thanks and left the station, his mind occupied with sifting and sorting what they’d learned to date.
When Gemma had called a few minutes earlier to say she’d pick Kit up from school, he’d told her about Rose Kearny’s theory, and the news about Laura.
She’d listened in silence as he confirmed what she’d already guessed. After a moment, she said quietly, “You know Harriet’s running out of time, don’t you? Every hour she’s missing lessens our chances of finding her alive.”
“I know,” he told her, “but I’ve run out of ideas.” They’d put out an all-points bulletin, now that they were sure the child was not with her mother. He and Bell had sent uniformed officers to interview the children and personnel at Harriet’s school, to reinterview hospital staff who had worked with Laura and with Elaine Holland, and to search for any useful background information on Elaine.
At least they had reunited one child with a parent. Michael Yarwood, Cullen said, had crushed his daughter to him in a spasm of relief, then shaken her and called her an idiot, then hugged her again. Yarwood admitted that the men from the club had threatened him, and that he’d feared Chloe dead when he couldn’t reach her after the fire. He’d gone on in desperate hope, trying to raise the money, trying to find Chloe, and cursing the involvement of Scotland Yard.
“I couldn’t very well protest when the AC asked you to look into things,” he’d said to Kincaid when he arrived at the station. “Not without buggering my own pitch.”
“You should have been honest with us from the beginning,” Kincaid had told him, but without great conviction. In Yarwood’s place, he might have withheld the truth, too.
“Do you think those bastards were responsible for this?” Yarwood asked, beginning to sound like a crusading politician again. “Do you think they killed that poor woman as an example? Or because they thought she was Chloe?”
Kincaid thought back over what Cullen had told him. “No. First of all, I don’t think they wanted Chloe dead. That would have meant killing the goose before it laid the golden egg. And from what Chloe’s told us, it seems pretty obvious that the victim knew her killer.”
“Then why kill her in my warehouse? And why burn it?” Yarwood shook his head. “I’m sorry. That sounds callous. I only meant-”
“We don’t know. We don’t know if the fire was set as the last attempt to hide the victim’s identity, or if there was an unrelated motive. We may never, in fact, prove that the fire was set at all.” Kincaid couldn’t broadcast the fact that they suspected they might be dealing with a serial arsonist turned murderer, not to someone with Yarwood’s media connections, and not when Yarwood stood to gain by making such news public.
But the conversation had started him thinking about Rose’s theory again, and as he paid for his sandwich at a takeaway near the station, he had an idea. Glancing at his watch to make sure he could squeeze in a few more minutes, he went back into the station and found Sarah, the sergeant who had helped with the CCTV video.
“Can you print me another still from the tape?” he asked. When he’d shown her what he wanted, he ate his sandwich while waiting for the photo, then drove to Southwark Fire Station.
He found Rose and Bill Farrell sequestered in an unused office, surrounded by a mountain of files. They both looked tired and discouraged. The London Fire Brigade only hired new staff irregularly, and then they were inundated with thousands of applications for a few hundred positions.
“No possibles?” he asked, and they both shook their heads.
Rose sat on the floor against the back wall, her knees drawn up, a box of files beside her.
Kincaid handed her the print he’d made. “Maybe this will help.”
She took it and stared at it. “What – where did you get this?”
Hearing the excitement in her voice, Farrell joined her and bent to look.
“It’s the man who walked by the Southwark Street warehouse a few minutes after Chloe Yarwood and her friend went inside. He only hesitated a moment as he passed, so we didn’t think anything of it. Do you recognize him?”
“Yes. I – I think so.” She looked at the time stamp on the print. “But this was only a little after ten. The fire wasn’t reported until after midnight.”
“Maybe he came back,” Kincaid suggested.
“At midnight?” asked Farrell.
“Or earlier, if he killed Laura Novak.” Kincaid told them what they’d learned from Chloe Yarwood. “We’ve no way of knowing exactly when she died, and even if it was nearer ten than twelve, we don’t know how long he spent… preparing the body.”
Rose flinched. “But why this particular woman? I mean, I can understand, in a bizarre sort of way, his wanting to kill a firefighter if he has some sort of grudge against the brigade. But why Laura Novak?”
Kincaid thought again of the words Chloe had overheard. Could Laura have learned about the fires and confronted the arsonist? But how could she have discovered something like that? What connection could she have had with this man?
His phone rang and he snapped it open, irritated at the interruption when he knew he was in danger of running late for Kit’s hearing. It was Maura Bell.
“Guv, we’ve found another body.”
“What? Where?” He felt a sick dread. “It’s not Harriet-”
“No. But you’d better come. It’s Crossbones Graveyard, just behind the Southwark Street warehouse. And we’ve met her. It’s Beverly Brown, the young woman who reported the fire.”
“The woman from the shelter? Mouse?” He saw instantly the pinched little face, the hair with its badgerlike white streak.
“Yes. And it looks like she’s been strangled.”
17
Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.
CHARLES DICKENS
THEY MET IN the judge’s chambers. It was a comfortable room, anchored by a long, polished, mahogany table. The Honorable Sophie O’Donnell, an attractive woman in her fifties with smartly styled, blond-streaked hair, sat at the head.
On one side were Kit’s maternal grandparents, Eugenia and Bob Potts, and their solicitor, a rabbity-faced man named Cavanaugh; on the other, Gemma, Kit, and Miles Kelly, their solicitor. It was shaping up to be the battle of the Irish, thought Gemma, but she couldn’t summon a smile. The large clock on the wall behind the judge read straight up two o’clock, and Kincaid hadn’t arrived.
Neither party had spoken to the other. Eugenia was in full war paint, her fair hair freshly lacquered, but it seemed to Gemma that her clothes hung too loosely and there was a feverish look to her eyes. Bob merely looked diffident and distressed, the classic henpecked husband, and Gemma wondered if he might someday snap and bite the hand that had led him such a merry dance.
