“Look, Duncan, I’m sorry.” The smooth rumble of the superintendent’s voice hinted at his bulk. “I know you’re not on the rota this weekend.”
Kincaid’s heart sank. An apology up front was not a good sign.
“But it’s been one of those days,” his boss continued. “The other teams have already been called out, and we’ve just had a homicide report that the local team feels needs our intervention. Their DCI is away for the weekend, and their guv’nor feels it might be a bit much for the newly promoted inspector on call this weekend.”
“A proper baptism,” Kincaid agreed. “Where’s the body, then?”
“The Isle of Dogs. Mudchute Park.”
“Oh, Christ.” Kincaid hated outdoor crime scenes. At least indoors you had some hope of containing the evidence.
“A young woman,” continued Childs. “From the preliminary reports it sounds like a strangulation.”
“Are the SOCOs on the way?” Kincaid asked, grimacing. An outdoor
sex
crime. Even better. “Have the uniformed lads cordoned off the area?”
“In the process. How soon can you be there?”
“Give me—” Kincaid glanced at his watch, and the movement brought Kit’s white, tense face into his focus.
He had forgotten him.
“Guv—” Then he stopped. How to explain his predicament to his chief? “Under an hour,” he said at last, with another glance at Kit. “I’ve some things to take care of first. What about Gemma?”
“The duty sergeant’s ringing her now. Keep me informed,” Childs added, and rang off.
Kincaid switched off the phone slowly and turned to Kit. “I’m sorry. Something’s come up, and I’m afraid I’ll have to go to work.”
“Can’t you—” the boy began, but Kincaid was already shaking his head.
“I’ve no choice in the matter, Kit. I’m really sorry, but you’ll have to go back to Cambridge—”
“I can’t,” said Kit, his voice rising. “The Millers have gone away for the weekend. Don’t you remember?”
Kincaid stared at Kit. He’d forgotten that as well. He was finding it increasingly difficult to coordinate the demands of his job with his commitment to Kit, and now he seemed to have run up against an insoluble dilemma.
“I suppose you’ll have to stay at the flat on your own, then,” he said with a smile, trying to soften the blow.
“But the tennis—” Kit bit down on his lip to stop its trembling.
Kincaid looked away, giving the boy time to collect himself. Then an idea occurred to him and he said slowly, “Maybe we can work something out. Wait and see.”
“C
ORNSILK,” THE PAINT SAMPLE HAD READ
, and Jo Lowell had liked the name as much as the color. As she painted, Jo imagined it spreading over her kitchen and dining room walls like warm butter, and when she’d finished, the rooms seemed to glow with perpetual summer sun.
There was nothing like a bit of fresh paint to cheer you up if you were in the doldrums, she often told her clients, but she seldom found the time to take her own
advice. And of course her clients almost never did the actual painting themselves, but she thought the physical labor might be the most effective part of the therapy. Perhaps she should change her business cards to read
Interior Decorating and Mood Counseling
and raise her hourly rates.
The small smile raised by the thought quickly vanished as she thought of the previous evening. Her cheery yellow walls and soothing green trim had done little to prevent the very eruption of tempers she’d meant to avoid. She’d intended a little civilized dinner party—a means of making peace with Annabelle without actually having to offer forgiveness, because in spite of everything that had happened between them, she had missed her sister.
Jo had been good at entertaining, once, but this had been her first attempt without Martin, and it had been difficult to find the right mix of people. One of the worst things she’d found about divorce was the division of friends into
his
and
her
camps. Martin’s friends, of course, were out of the question, but she hadn’t dared bring her own partisan supporters into contact with Annabelle, whom they viewed as the villain of the piece. So she’d invited guests she’d felt sure would contribute to a pleasant, neutral evening—a couple who were recent clients; Rachel Pargeter, a neighbor who had been a close friend of their mother’s; Annabelle and Reg. And it had almost worked—until her son Harry had told his aunt what he thought of her.
Carefully, Jo slipped the last of the bunch of early sunflowers into the vase on the dining room table. The kitchen door slammed and Sarah’s high, piping voice carried clearly from the back of the house. “Mummy, Mummy!”
“In here, sweetheart.” Gathering up her shears and the florist’s paper, Jo headed for the kitchen. Her daughter stood just inside the door, her dark hair disheveled, her cheeks pink from the heat. She’d spilled something that looked suspiciously like Coke down the front of her tee
shirt, and the waistband of her little flowered shorts had worked its way below her navel. At four, Sarah was a highly articulate and skilled tattletale.
“Harry’s in the shed, Mummy. You said he wasn’t to go in there. And I know he broke something, ’cause I heard it smash.”
Jo felt the swiftly rising bubble of anger; she clamped down on it. Sarah didn’t need any encouragement for her righteous indignation. “I’ll deal with Harry—you wash your hands at the sink. You’ve been into the Coke again, haven’t you, missy?”
Sarah glanced down at her shirt, and Jo saw the swift calculation pass across her heart-shaped face before she said earnestly, “It wasn’t me, Mummy, really it wasn’t. Harry got it out and he spilled it on my shirt.” She tugged the stained fabric away from her chest as if removing any association with it.
“Oh, dear God.” Jo closed her eyes and breathed a prayer. Her precious baby daughter was going to be an actress or a criminal, and she felt incapable of dealing with either possibility just now. She took a deep breath. “Right. When you’ve finished with your hands I want you to pick up your toys in the sitting room, and I don’t want to hear any more stories. Is that clear?”
Sarah put on her best injured face. “But, Mummy—”
Jo, however, was already pushing open the door to the garden. She was learning that the only way to manage her daughter was to disengage from the dialogue, because if she continued to participate the child would eventually wear her down. With Harry, things had been different. The slightest reprimand had been enough to bring the boy to tears, as if his emotions ran uncontainably close to the surface. And now that sensitivity seemed to have been translated into a sullen anger she was unable to breach.
The garden was quiet except for the drone of the bumblebees in the lavender, and it seemed deserted. The only
signs of suspended activity were a chipped cricket bat and an old rubber ball lying in the thick grass, but at the bottom of the garden the door to the shed stood open. The small mail-order building was her retreat and studio.
She’d painted the outside a color called Labrador Blue and picked out the trim in white. Inside, she’d washed the walls with diluted emulsion, then furnished the space with bits and pieces of old furniture, a few watering cans, and books. Here she experimented with the custom finishes that were her trademark, or read, or sometimes just tried to sort out her life. And the shed was strictly off-limits to both children.
Slowly, she crossed the lawn and stepped inside. Harry sat on the floor with his back to the bookcase, his knees drawn up to his chin. Beside him lay the cut-glass jug she’d filled with roses from the garden, its handle snapped off. Water pooled on the floor and ran into the rag rug; roses lay scattered like flotsam from a storm.
Jo knelt and touched him on the shoulder. “Did it cut you? Are you all right?” When he didn’t answer she pried his hands from his knees and checked them. They were unblemished. She kept one hand in hers and tried again. “Harry, did you break the vase because you were angry with me? You know what you did last night was wrong, but maybe I was wrong to punish you instead of talking about it.”
Harry turned his head further away from her and the sunlight slanting in from the window lit his hair like a flame. What an irony it was, thought Jo, that while Sarah had inherited her own dark auburn coloring, Harry might have been cloned from her sister’s genes. And her father, who had always adored Annabelle at Jo’s expense, had fastened his expectations on Harry as the heir to, if not the family name, at least the family tradition.
“Sometimes mums can be wrong, too,” she continued. “But somehow I have to make you understand that you can’t say things like that to people. I’m sure you hurt Annabelle very—”
“I don’t bloody care.” Harry snatched his hand away and for the first time looked at her. “She’s a
whore
. I meant to hurt her.” He blinked and tears spilled over into his pale lashes.
“Harry, you mustn’t use words like that. You know better—”
“I don’t care! I
hate
her.”
“Harry, darling—”
“Don’t call me that.” He pushed himself up from the floor and stood over her. “I’m not your darling, and I hate
you
, too!” Then, with a slam of the door, he was gone.
T
HE COINS CLINKED INTO
G
ORDON
F
INCH’S
clarinet case in a staccato, irregular rhythm. The children tossed them, then stood as close as they dared, rapt with attention, moving their bodies unselfconsciously to the music. Both the small girls and boys were bare-chested in the heat, the definition of their ribs showing like the delicate tracery of the branching veins in a leaf. Their faces were flushed from the sun, and some held half-forgotten ice creams in sticky fingers.
He envied them their uncomplicated innocence, intact until someone came along to bugger it up for them. Thank God he hadn’t the responsibility for the shaping of a life. Caring for Sam was about as much as he could manage, and he’d been off his nut to think otherwise.
He finished “Cherry Blossom Pink” and wiped the clarinet’s mouthpiece. The children watched him, large-eyed, jiggling up and down in expectation. Their parents stood behind them, some half sitting on the knee-high iron railing that separated the flower bed from the round, brick bulk of the Isle of Dogs entrance to the foot tunnel. Lifting the clarinet to his lips again, he played a bit of “London Bridge.” The children giggled and he thought for a moment, searching his memory for tunes they might like, then improvised “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.”
A pied piper with a clarinet, he slid into “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” then “When I’m Sixty-Four,” from the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper
album, and the children bounced and swayed happily. But after a bit their parents grew restive, and one by one the families began to drift away. They all had agendas, he thought as he watched them leave—places to go, things to do, people to see. Surely he didn’t envy them that as well?
Finishing the piece, he drank from the bottle of water he’d bought at the refreshment kiosk a few yards away. He stood with his back to the spreading plane tree at the far end of Island Gardens. Behind him, just the other side of the tree, ran the river promenade. People strolled by at the undemanding pace dictated by the hot summer day, pausing occasionally to rest on the benches or gaze at the bright glint of the Thames. Directly across the river, the twin white domes of the Royal Naval College irresistibly drew the eye, echoed by the round dome of the Greenwich end of the foot tunnel.
Between the Naval College and the tunnel rose the tall masts of the
Cutty Sark
, in dry dock at Greenwich Pier. The ship was the last survivor of the lovely clippers that had once unloaded their cargoes in the East End’s docks, and he’d often wished he had been born in time to witness the end of that era. But near the
Cutty Sark
, the much smaller, flag-bedecked
Gipsy Moth
proved that adventure was still possible, for in 1967, Sir Francis Chichester had single-handedly sailed the tiny yacht around the world.
A voyage around the world would present an easy solution to his own present predicament, but Gordon knew even as the thought flitted through his mind that he was too well-rooted here, in the place where he’d spent his childhood, and that running away would solve nothing in the end.
Squatting, he sloshed a bit of water into the bowl he always carried for Sam. “Thirsty, mate?” The dog raised his head, then lumbered to his feet with an air that spoke more
of duty than desire. After a few obliging laps of water, he circled twice on the patch of bare earth he’d chosen as his bed and settled himself again, nose on his front paws. Sam’s movements were visibly slower these days, but it was hot, after all, and the heat made everyone lethargic. Still, Gordon had made up his mind not to take the dog down into the tunnel anymore—the seeping dampness couldn’t be good for the animal’s joints.
Not that he wanted to play in the tunnel anyway, after what had happened last night. Of course, he’d known he would see her—it was inevitable, living and working in such close proximity. Yet he had stayed on the Island, playing in the park, in the tunnel, beneath the shadow of the cranes on Glengall Bridge, tempting fate. Even today, as good as this pitch was, there were places he might have done better. Maybe he should pack up and try South Ken, or Hampstead High Street, or Islington again.
He knelt, hands on the clarinet as he prepared to break it apart, and before his eyes flashed an image of Annabelle’s face, white and furious. Last night, anger had stripped her of the cool veneer of detachment she’d maintained even when he’d told her he wanted no more to do with her. He’d thought that, perhaps for the first time, he’d had a glimpse of who she really was, what she really felt, but still he’d not been willing to believe her. Now, doubt gripped him and he wondered if he had been blinded by pride.
What if he’d misjudged her? What if he had been wrong?
J
ANICE
C
OPPIN’S HEART HAD JUMPED WITH
a peculiar mixture of dread and excitement when the phone rang. Getting called out on the job was always difficult on the weekends—with Bill gone, she had to send the children to the center, and at ten pounds per child, per day, she sometimes wondered if she’d be better off on the dole. Not that Bill had been worth much as far as looking after the kids went—or good for much of anything at all, for
that matter, the big lout, except dropping his trousers and getting her pregnant. She should have listened to her mum.