Having asked her why she wanted to play the piano, Wendy Sheinart had accepted her fumbling attempt at an explanation with a smile. “You don’t have to understand it,” she’d said. “I think perhaps a need to make music is innate with some of us, and background and experience don’t figure into it. And it really doesn’t matter. I just wanted to be sure you were doing this for
you.”
“Here we are.” Kincaid touched her arm, and with a start Gemma realized she’d been about to walk past the doors to the morgue. He gave her a quizzical glance. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not all here this morning?”
Gemma smiled and pushed the bell for admittance. “Sorry. I was gathering wool.”
“Then I envy the sheep.”
The door swung back and they identified themselves to the ponytailed young man in spectacles.
“Dr. Ling’s expecting you,” he informed them as he ushered them in.
Kincaid frowned. “Dr. Ling? Would that by any chance be Kate Ling?”
“In the flesh,” said a white-smocked woman as she emerged from the postmortem room. Dark hair as straight as broom bristles framed her pale, oval face and swung just above her shoulders. The pathologist’s dark eyes gleamed with the wicked humor Gemma remembered. They had worked with her in Surrey the previous autumn, on a case that had resulted in the death of one of Gemma’s friends and the near-fatal injury of another. The unexpected rush of memory was sudden and painful enough to leave Gemma momentarily speechless, but Kincaid carried on in the breach.
“What are you doing in London?” he asked, shaking Kate Ling’s hand warmly.
“A promotion of sorts,” Kate answered. “The Home Office had a vacancy needed filling, and I drew the short straw. But I can’t say I’m minding the bright lights all that much, and I get a nice variety of clientele.” She nodded towards the room at her back. “Nice fresh one, this, and just out of the cooler. Shouldn’t be too unpleasant for you, if you’re ready.”
They followed her into the room, masking and gowning as Kate retied her mask and pulled the instrument trolley up to the autopsy table. Was it possible to envy the dead? Gemma wondered as she looked at Annabelle Hammond’s
body. The breasts were perfectly formed, neither too large nor too small; the neck slender, the shoulders well-shaped; the waist small and belly flat; the thighs smooth and slim. Even her feet and ankles were beautiful, and Gemma had seldom seen a set of toes worth writing home about. Fat lot of good all that loveliness did her now, of course—and it might even have got her killed. But it had certainly been a body to inspire passion, even obsession.
“Did you do the on-scene yesterday?” Kincaid asked Kate Ling. “Sorry to have missed you. Bit of a balls-up there.”
“The old headless-chickens routine,” Kate agreed as she pulled a new pair of latex gloves from the dispenser. “But I imagine we’ll cover everything now.”
As she reached up to switch on the microphone over the table, Kincaid said, “What about time of death? Off the record?”
The corners of Kate’s eyes crinkled as she smiled beneath her mask. “Half past twelve.” She laughed aloud as she saw Kincaid’s skeptical expression. “You asked me for off the record, and now you don’t believe me? Seriously, though, I’d say it’s not likely she was killed before midnight, although the calculation of body cooling is made a little more difficult by the fact that the ambient temperature began rising rapidly as soon as the sun came up. Lividity was fixed, but the corneas had just begun to cloud, and rigor was not fully established.”
Gemma looked up from her notebook, pen poised over the page. “Eight hours or less, then?”
Shrugging, Kate said, “There are always unanticipated factors. Perhaps the tox report and stomach contents will help you.”
“Spoken like a true pathologist,” Kincaid said, grinning, and it abruptly occurred to Gemma that he found Kate Ling attractive. It wasn’t that he was flirting, exactly, but there was somehow an extra degree of attentiveness in his responses. And his interest was a dangerous thing, as she well knew.
“Was she killed where she was found?” Gemma asked, diverting Kate’s attention from Kincaid.
“It looks that way, unless she was moved very shortly after death. The lividity corresponds to the position of the body.”
“Can you hazard a guess yet as to how she died?” Kincaid asked.
“Now that
would
be telling.” Kate reached up and switched on her microphone, then stated that she was continuing the external examination of Annabelle Hammond. She tilted the head back so that they had a good view of the throat. “We won’t know until we get into the tissue if there was any crushing of the larynx. But the bruising on the throat is minimal, as is the facial congestion.”
“Anything else obvious?”
Kate lifted one of Annabelle’s hands and then the other, examining the long, slender fingers. “No visible blood or tissue under the nails, but we’ll send samples to the lab just in case.”
When she’d finished her careful scraping of the nails, she buzzed for the attendant. “Gerald, let’s have a look at her back.”
Gerald turned the slender body with the ease of practice, and Kate began her examination of the back of Annabelle’s head, carefully parting the mass of red-gold hair with her gloved fingertips. “Here’s something,” she said after a moment, glancing up at them. She used a magnifier for a closer look. “I think it’s possible we have some blunt force trauma here. There’s a bit of loose hair and tissue, maybe a bit of swelling. We won’t know for sure until we peel back the scalp.”
Gemma swallowed and focused fiercely on her notebook. This was the part she hated most, even more than the initial incision and the removal of the internal organs. She’d always assumed that this part of the job would get easier for her the more exposure she had, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case, and somehow it was always worse when the corpse was as unblemished as this one.
“What about fluids on the body?” she heard Kincaid ask as she stared at the loops and dashes of her shorthand.
“Nothing came up on the swabs, and I’ve not found anything else obvious. No evidence of recent intercourse, either.”
“There’s no indication that this was a sex crime, then.”
Gemma heard Kate’s shrug in her voice as she said, “Not unless it’s a nutter who just likes to fantasize about it afterwards. But they usually leave something behind.”
When Kate had finished with Annabelle Hammond’s back and had Gerald turn the body again, she said, “Unless you have something else in particular you want me to look for, I’m ready to start the internal now.”
As Kincaid shook his head he met Gemma’s eyes. He knew she’d be struggling, but he wouldn’t embarrass her by saying anything. And from his expression, he wasn’t too keen, either.
Kate chose a scalpel from her array of instruments and spoke into the mike. “Right, then. Let’s begin with a Y incision.”
Gemma concentrated on breathing through her nose and recording Kate’s observations in her notebook.
Healthy female. Probably an occasional smoker. No sign of a pregnancy, or of previous pregnancies
.
When the internal organs had been removed and weighed, Kate said, “We’ll get the stomach contents off to the lab—should have something for you shortly. Now let’s have a look at the neck.”
Gemma glanced up just long enough to see the scalpel poised over Annabelle’s white throat; then she forced her gaze back to her shorthand.
“Look.” Kate sounded as though she’d found a prize in her Christmas cracker. “There’s some bruising on the tissue that didn’t show up on the skin. Odd, but you sometimes see that. And the hyoid cartilage is intact.”
“Are you saying she wasn’t strangled?” Kincaid asked, frowning.
“No, just that it’s not obvious. And there’s always the possibility of vagal inhibition. But let’s have a look at that head injury.”
Gemma took a deep breath and focused on Annabelle Hammond’s toes.
E
VEN WITH THE AID OF A
sedative, Reg Mortimer had slept poorly. He had dreamed of Annabelle, disjointed fragments in which she had either dismissed him or furiously accused him of something he could not remember. In the last dream, they had been children again, and he had watched helplessly as she stepped into an abyss—then it had been he who was falling, and he’d awakened with mouth dry and heart pounding.
He forced himself to bathe and dress, to eat a bowl of cornflakes and drink a cup of tea, but through it all he had the strangest feeling of unreality, as if any moment he might wake again and find that everything, even the dreaming, had been a dream.
By half past nine, the walls of his flat had begun to close in, and not even the much-prized view of the Thames from his sitting room window offered relief. He had loved the playful conceit of his building, with its architectural mimicry of a great steamliner, but now he had a sudden vision of the building tipping, plunging to the depths and taking him with it.
Reg blinked away the vertigo and grabbed his keys from the entry table. The central lift whooshed him to the ground floor and the lobby doors ejected him into a fine morning. His feet took him south, along the river path and the blinding, molten sheet of the Thames, then into Westferry Road and round the corner into Ferry Street.
The sight of the blue and white tape fluttering from the door of Annabelle’s flat brought him up short. A uniformed constable stood near a van, talking to a man in a white overall. Reg stood for a moment, watching, then forced
himself to go past. Whatever impulse had driven him there was spent, but he knew now where he should go.
By the time he’d crossed under the river and climbed halfway up the hill in Greenwich, he was sweating. He entered Emerald Crescent from the bottom end, slowing his steps as his sense of unreality deepened. The lane had the peculiar Sunday morning sort of quietness that spoke of families sleeping in or lazing over coffee and newspapers; birdsong swelled from the hedges, and death seemed an impossibility.
As he neared the top of the lane, the land rose sharply on the left and through the thick screen of trees on the hillside he could glimpse William Hammond’s pale blue door. Ahead, just past the lane’s right angle, Jo’s house sat foursquare and level with the lane. The back gardens of the two properties were adjacent, but not connected.
Jo and Martin Lowell had bought the house during Isabel Hammond’s last illness, and while he would find it difficult to live next door to his father, he could understand Jo’s choosing to settle so near her parents. His own family had lived in a Georgian terrace in Knightsbridge, and when he’d come here as a child he’d been fascinated both by the secret quality of the lane and by the Hammonds’ house. Perched at an angle on the side of the hill, canopied by trees, it had seemed magical.
But this morning he didn’t want to see Jo—he wasn’t ready to think about what had happened there on Friday evening. It suddenly occurred to him that she might be with William and he hesitated a moment, then shrugged and began climbing the steps cut into the thick ivy on the hillside. It would be all right; Jo wouldn’t say anything in front of her father.
A sound caused him to spin round and almost lose his balance on the steep steps. He could have sworn he’d heard a high, faint laugh, but there was no one there. Then as he turned back something flickered in his peripheral vision—a girl running up the steps away from him, barelegged and with a long red plait bouncing on her back.
Blinking, he took a breath. Nothing there. He shook himself like a dog coming out of water and continued to climb, slowly—a lack of sleep and proper meals, that’s all it was, and too much thinking about the past.
By the time he reached William’s front door he had recovered his equilibrium. He rang the bell and waited.
William Hammond answered the door himself. As Reg gazed at him he realized that until now he hadn’t thought of William as old. He’d been too much in awe of him as a child, and he had somehow kept that image fixed in his mind. But this morning William seemed to have shrunk. The black suit he wore emphasized his frailness, and against his silver hair his skin looked pale as driftwood.
Swallowing, Reg said, “Mr. Hammond. I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
William smiled and extended a hand that trembled as if he had palsy. “Reginald, my dear boy. How good of you to call. Do come in and have some tea.”
Reg followed him through the house and into the kitchen. William put the kettle on the hob, then motioned Reg into a chair. “Jo said she’d bring over some cakes, but I’m afraid she hasn’t managed it quite yet.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Hammond. I’m sure Jo has enough to deal with this morning.”
“Yes, yes, she’s taking things in hand. Telephoning and such. She and Annabelle are always so good at organizing, just like their mother.” William set delicate cobalt and russet teacups on a tray, then reached for a brightly colored foil packet of Ceylon tea adorned with the Hammond’s emblem. Annabelle had developed the blend herself, and it had been her favorite.
Reg stifled the urge to rise and snatch the packet from William’s hand. “Would you mind if we had the Assam? Somehow I don’t think I …”
William seemed to see what he was holding for the first time. “Oh, of course. Quite right …” He stood for a moment, as though the interruption had caused him to lose his place in the ritual, then he exchanged the tea packet
and went methodically on with his preparations. When the pot had been warmed with the hot water, he filled it and brought the tray to the table. Reg saw that his hands had stopped shaking.
Suspended between the ticking of the kitchen timer and the tocking of the grandfather clock in the hall, they waited for the tea to steep. Feeling no sense of discomfort in the silence, Reg looked round the familiar kitchen. Here since his childhood had hung William’s collection of framed Hammond’s advertisements, some of them going as far back as the 1880s, when a young man named John Hammond had left his Mincing Lane employer and made the unprecedented move of setting up as a tea merchant on the Isle of Dogs. He had been William’s great-grandfather.
“I always loved these.” Reg gestured towards the black and white drawings. “Especially the ones from the
London Illustrated News.”