“You bastard,” Juliet said quietly. “Did Piers just happen to suggest that to you, too, over a confidential drink? Or did you think of it yourself?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Gemma glimpsed a movement at the top of the stairs. Looking up, she saw the treaded bottom of a trainer and a ragged denim cuff disappear round the landing. Lally. She’d noticed earlier that the bottoms of Lally’s jeans were fashionably shredded. She reached out to Juliet in warning, but Juliet was speaking again, her attention so focused on her husband that the house could have come down round their ears before she noticed.
“You’re a gullible fool, Caspar,” said Juliet, her voice rising now.
“But whatever you think I am, and whatever you think I’ve done, I’m not a liar and an embezzler.”
At least he was warm, thought Ronnie Babcock as he stood in the Fosters’ sitting room, although he suspected that soon his damp clothes would start to visibly steam. Tom and Donna Foster had invited him in, albeit grudgingly, but had not taken his coat, or given him a seat. Nor had they offered that most obvious of courtesies on such a miserable night—a drink. Maybe they’d simply thought he’d refuse on principle, but that was a charitable interpretation.
He guessed the couple to be in their mid- to late fifties, townies who had embraced the country life and brought their slice of heaven along with them, transforming the interior of what must once have been a charming traditional farmhouse into a replica of the most banal suburban semidetached.
The electric two-bar heater that had been pulled in front of the s
empty brick hearth radiated waves of a harsh, dry heat that had at least defrosted Babcock’s extremities, even though half blocked by Foster’s considerable bulk. The wife was thin, with a tightly drawn face and hair lacquered a very unnatural shade of red. The sparkling sequined reindeer on her jumper was by far the most cheerful—not to mention the most tasteful—thing in the room. She’d perched on the edge of the sofa, part of a hideous three-piece suite done in peach plush, and kept glancing at the large tele vision hulking in one corner of the room, its sound muted, as if she couldn’t bear to tear herself away.
Tired of standing around waiting for frostbite to set in while he watched the techies do their jobs, Babcock had decided to call on the previous own ers of the barn. He’d gone on his own, intending to give his subordinates the rest of their evening off before the investigation swung into full gear tomorrow, but he’d begun to wish he had brought along a friendly face.
“I’d very much like to know what’s going on, Inspector,” demanded Tom Foster, as if he had summoned Babcock for an interview. “You lot have been up and down our lane all night, making a muck of things. We’ll be lucky to get our car out in the morning.”
His accent was broad Mancunian. Babcock didn’t know about the wife’s, as she hadn’t spoken, even though her husband had included her in his perfunctory introductions.
“It’s Chief Inspector,” Babcock said mildly, but he didn’t apologize for the inconvenience. “Mr. Foster, I understand that, until recently, you owned the old barn down by the canal.”
“That’s right,” agreed Foster, his bald head gleaming in the glare of the ceiling light. “Bought the property as an investment fi ve years ago, didn’t we?” If he’d hoped for confirmation from his wife, he was disappointed, as her eyes had swiveled back to the girls in skimpy Santa outfits parading across the telly screen.
“Figured we couldn’t lose, with the property market going up, and we didn’t, oh no.” Foster allowed himself a satisfi ed smirk.
“Made as much on the sale of the barn and surrounding pasture as we spent on the whole place, including this house. Of course, the house was in a terrible state, and the own ers left it full of moldy old bits. Had to call the junkman to haul them off.
“We’ve done the house up proper since. All the mod cons.”
Foster looked round with the pride of a monarch surveying his kingdom.
Babcock realized he was beginning to grind his teeth, and that he was sweating inside his overcoat. He made a conscious effort to relax his jaw and unfastened the top button of his coat. “Mr. Foster, has the barn been in use since you bought the property?”
“What’s all this about the barn, Inspector?” Foster’s temporary joviality vanished. “Have those kids been getting into things? I won’t have them crossing my property—I’ve told them often enough—and if they’ve been trespassing down the building site, the Bonners have a right to know.”
“It’s not kids, Mr. Foster. The builder, Mrs. Newcombe, made a discovery. Someone mortared a baby into the barn wall.”
In the shocked silence that followed Babcock’s announcement, he heard a faint squeak, like the mew of a distressed kitten. He’d succeeded in removing Mrs. Foster’s attention from the tele vision.
“What? What did you say?” Foster shook his head as if he had water in his ears.
“A baby,” whispered Mrs. Foster. “He said they found a baby.
How horrible.”
Babcock relented a fraction. “It’s been there a good while, Mrs.
Foster. Perhaps years.” On second thought, he wasn’t sure why the passage of time made the child’s fate any less terrible, but Mrs. Foster nodded, as if he’d said something profoundly comforting. Neither husband nor wife expressed any concern for Juliet Newcombe’s ordeal.
“Before our time, then.” Foster seemed to find some personal satisfaction in that.
“We won’t know for sure until the experts have examined the child’s remains,” said Babcock smoothly. He wasn’t about to reveal to the Fosters that the experts’ opinions might not give him a well-defined time frame, nor did he intend them to know how handicapped he was by the lack of that knowledge. “That’s why I need to know if there’s been any activity in the barn in the time you’ve owned it.”
“Never go down there, myself,” said Foster. “But we see if anyone goes up and down the lane. And we’d see lights if there was any funny business at night.”
Babcock had surveyed the prospect from their front garden himself, and felt quite sure that the bend in the lane would block any view of lights in the barn. “So you’re saying you haven’t seen anything?”
The struggle between the desire for importance and the wisdom of noninvolvement was clearly visible in Foster’s face. Caution won out. “No. No, I can’t say as we have.”
“When exactly did you sell the property to the Bonners?”
Foster screwed up his already round face in concentration, so that he looked like an overripe plum about to burst. “Must be just on a year, now. After Christmas. Old hulk of a place—we thought sure the Bonners would raze it and build new. And why on earth would they hire an inexperienced girl as a contractor? We said as much, but they paid no heed. Taken leave of their senses, if you ask me.”
Juliet Newcombe must be in her late thirties, Babcock calculated, and he doubted very much that she would think being referred to as a “girl” a compliment. “Why did they choose Mrs. Newcombe against your advice?” he asked.
“Referred by his high muckety-muck up the lane,” said Foster, jerking his head towards the Barbridge road. “Dutton. Piers Dutton.
Though if you ask me, he’d like you to call him Lord Dutton.”
“We’ve asked him for drinks a half dozen times. He always has some sort of excuse,” added Mrs. Foster. Babcock felt a twinge of
sympathy for the neighbor, stalked by the social-climbing Fosters, who had undoubtedly been angling for a return invitation and a look at the Victorian manor house.