“Complaints, complaints,” he said to Kincaid as he flipped the phone closed. “I’m sure we never whinged like that. What’s happened to the copper’s work ethic?” He slowed, and Kincaid saw that they’d once again reached the junction for No Man’s Heath, the village with the reputed pub. “Now,” Babcock continued, a gleam in his eye, “what do you say to a ploughman’s lunch?”
Sheila Larkin swore under her breath. Who did the DCI think she was, bloody Wonder Woman? Not that she wasn’t used to him expecting her to be in two places at once, but he’d been enjoying bossing her about in front of his mate, and that she resented.
She’d been looking round the narrowboat’s galley when her phone rang, and now, as her stomach growled in protest, she eyed with longing an unopened packet of ginger biscuits in the cupboard. The temptation passed quickly, however, and she shut the cupboard door.
It wouldn’t seem right, taking food from a dead woman, no matter if everything in the kitchen eventually got chucked in the bin.
Taking her notebook and a pen from her coat pocket, she jotted down Babcock’s list of tasks. The first thing was to ring Western Division and set the inquiries in Tilston in motion.
When Control had put her through, she asked the duty sergeant to send an officer who knew the village—that would increase their odds of getting useful information. She asked about the fog as well, and the sergeant told her that the previous night it had been heavy in western Cheshire and on over the border into Wales. That was one question answered right off the bat, she thought, ringing off with satisfaction.
Then she went back to the task of searching the boat for anything that might shed light on the victim, or the circumstances of
her death. She had begun in the salon, the careful survey of which had taken only a few minutes—Annie Lebow had obviously been an enthusiastic proponent of the simplified life.
Thinking of the suburban semidetached house she shared with her mother in North Crewe, Sheila sighed. If anything happened to her or her mum, it would take the police a week just to go through the sitting room. It wasn’t that either of them was particularly fond of clutter, it was just that accumulation seemed to overtake them, and neither had the time to deal with it.
They rubbed along together pretty well, she and her mum. Her mum, Diane, had been only seventeen when Sheila was born, and her dad had buggered off without ever doing the right thing, so it had been just the two of them for as long as Sheila could remember.
She was perfectly happy to go on sharing a house with her mum.
She paid her share of the mortgage and the rates and the groceries—
not that either of them was home to eat all that often, or even to see each other, for that matter. Her mum was a nurse who worked night shifts in accident and emergency at Leighton Hospital, so the two of them could go for days communicating only by notes left on the door of the fridge.
Still, even when the house was empty, there was the feel of another person’s presence, and Sheila found that comforting, especially after a diffi cult case.
Now, as she moved into the bedroom—or master stateroom, she supposed it was called—it seemed to her that she could feel loneliness settle over her like a pall. Any envy she’d felt over the dead woman’s posh living situation vanished. Annie Lebow had created a cocoon for herself: beautiful, expensive, and emotionally isolated.
She soon found, however, that Lebow’s spare lifestyle had advantages. A section of panel in the stateroom dropped down to form a desk, and the space behind the panel held organizing nooks and
niches. In these she easily found such paperwork as Annie Lebow had seen fit to keep.
A leather- bound accordion file held carefully sorted bills for a credit card and a mobile phone, as well as the last several quarterly statements for a number of investments. In another nook, she found a personal address book, also leather bound.
Tucked inside the book’s front cover were a half dozen loose photographs. All featured the boat, and from the background foliage, looked to have been taken in spring or summer. Only one, however, showed the victim.
Annie Lebow stood at the helm, her right hand resting lightly on the end of the S-shaped tiller. Her bare arms and face looked tanned, her expression relaxed, with a hint of a smile touching the corners of her mouth. It seemed to Sheila that she had been gazing at whoever held the camera with a slightly tolerant affection.
Although the photo was undated, Sheila guessed it was several years old, perhaps taken when Lebow had first acquired the boat.
Her hair had been longer and darker, the planes of her face softer, less pronounced, and the more Sheila gazed at the image, the more she thought there was a sort of tentative pride in the way the woman held the tiller.
Sheila took a last look at the photo, then grimaced and snapped the book closed. She had looked at Annie Lebow’s body and felt the shock and anger she always experienced at a murder scene. She had riffl ed through the woman’s clothes and most intimate possessions, and had still managed to keep a distance between herself and the victim. That separation was a learned skill, a necessity of the job that she struggled to maintain.
But as Annie Lebow met her eyes in the photograph, Sheila felt a connection. The crumpled body on the path had become a woman who had lived and worked and slept and dreamed, who had inhabited this small space, however lightly. In that instant of association
across time and space, Annie Lebow had become real to Sheila, and her death had become personal.
She wore boots, trousers, and a heavy woolen coat, but even from a distance and out of uniform, he could tell she was a cop. There was something in the way she moved, confident but alert, that marked her like a brand.
As he moved around the boat, from one small task to another, he watched her. She’d come up the towpath from the direction of the crime scene, and after handing a parcel to one of the uniformed officers standing guard in the parking area, she’d made her way along the houses that lined the Cut just below Barbridge.
When the woman with the frizzy hair and the pink dressing gown had come out to speak to her, panic rose in his throat. It was all he could do to keep himself still, to concentrate on what the doctor had told him. It would do no good to run. He couldn’t disguise his family or his boat, and the Cut was a small world. Once before, fear had driven him to take the Daphne into Manchester’s industrial slums, but things were different now. Even the inner-city parts of the Cut were changing as the old ware houses became desirable “water-side properties.” And no one had been looking for him then.
The woman in the pink dressing gown gestured, and even from a distance he could hear her raised voice. He didn’t need to make out the words. Bending over the strap he was repairing, he kept his eyes down and whistled tunelessly between his teeth. The soft turf of the towpath muffled footsteps, but he didn’t need sound to track the policewoman’s progress. When, a few moments later, a voice called out,
“Mr. Wain?” he looked up with feigned surprise.
She stood on the towpath, across from the bow. Up close, he could see that she was pretty in a snub- nosed sort of way, and that she was a bit older than her bouncy stride had led him to expect. Intelligence gleamed from her eyes, and his heart sank.
He nodded, his hand still on the strap, as if he were impatient at the interruption. “Aye. What’s it to you, miss?”
“Detective Constable Larkin, Cheshire police.” She held up an identification card, though she must have known he couldn’t read it at that distance. “Could I have a word?”
“Nothing’s stopping you,” he said, and began to coil the straps.