Shifting her weight ever so slightly to the balls of her feet, she squared her shoulders. “I suppose you’ve heard that a woman died last night, just down from Barbridge.” She nodded in the direction of the bridge. “Her name was Annie Lebow.”
“Aye?” he said again, standing and brushing the palms of his hands against his trousers. Now he’d put her at a disadvantage. She had to tilt her head back to look up at him.
“Did you know her?”
He shrugged. “You meet a lot of folks on the Cut.”
Larkin pulled a photograph from her coat pocket and held it out to him. Gabriel had no choice but to lean over the gunwale and take it. He squinted at the print for a moment, then handed it back. “The Horizon. You should have told me the name of the boat. It’s boats I remember, more than names or faces.”
“You’re saying you did know Ms. Lebow?” asked the detective.
“In passing.” He felt the sweat forming under his heavy fisherman’s jersey, as if the sun had suddenly come out, and hoped she couldn’t see the dampness on his brow. For a moment he was tempted to tell her the whole truth, just to have it over with, to stop the pressure squeezing his heart, but he knew he couldn’t. Not with Rowan and the children at stake.
Larkin nodded back towards the houses in Barbridge. The woman in the pink dressing gown was still standing in her garden, he saw, watching them. The old biddy must be freezing herself by now, just to satisfy her curiosity. “Mrs. Millsap says you had a row with the deceased, on Christmas Day.”
Gabriel made a swift calculation. Mrs. Millsap might have heard
raised voices, but she couldn’t have made out what was said, not from that distance. “The bloody woman scraped my boat,” he admitted, sounding aggrieved. “Reversed right into it, the silly cow.” He leaned over the gunwale, pointing at a long abrasion, just above the Daphne’s waterline. He’d done the damage himself, banging into the side of Hurleston Locks a week ago, and he hadn’t had the heart or the energy to repair it.
“Not to speak ill of the dead,” he added, “but I was that pissed off.”
“Did you threaten her?”
“Threaten? I told her to watch where she was bloody going, if you call that a threat.”
The detective studied the scrape, then shook her head, as if commiserating. “Then what happened?”
“She said she was sorry, she’d been distracted. And she offered to pay for any repairs, I’ll give her that. But I told her no, there was no need, I could fi x it myself.” He looked up at the leaden bowl of the sky. “Have to wait until it’s a bit drier, though.”
“So you parted amicably? On good terms?” she added.
He should have been used to it—people assuming boaters were stupid, or at least illiterate. Illiterate they may have been, for the most part, but they had never been stupid, and Gabriel’s parents had made sure that he learned to read well. They had known that times were changing, that hard work and a knowledge of the Cut would no longer be enough.
Controlling a flare of anger, he said, “Not on ill terms. Look, it was just an ordinary row, the sort that happens if someone cuts you off at a lock, or leaves the lock against you. What has any of it to do with this woman dying?”
“Annie Lebow died violently, Mr. Wain. We have to investigate anyone who might have wished her harm.”
“You’re saying you think I’d kill a woman I hardly knew over a
bit of scraped paint?” His anger was righteous now, and he didn’t trouble to keep it in check. “That’s downright daft.”
“We have to ask. You can understand that. We also have to ask where you were last night.”
“I was here, with my family. But I’ll not have my family brought into this. It’s nothing to do with—”
“For the moment, we just need to know we can speak with you again. You weren’t planning on leaving Barbridge?”
Seeing the detective give a covert glance at her watch, Gabriel realized she’d finished with him, and was more than likely trying to work out how to juggle more tasks than she could manage in a given amount of time.
Relief flooded through him, so intense it left his hands shaking.
She would, no doubt, be checking his story with anyone else she could find to speak to along this part of the canal, but none of the nearby boats was occupied, and he doubted if anyone other than the Millsap woman had witnessed Annie’s visit on Christmas Eve.
He shoved his telltale hands in his trouser pockets and nodded brusquely. “We’ve no plans to move on, for now,” he said, and it struck him, as he watched her walk away, that he had no plans at all.
For him, time had stopped here in Barbridge, and his future had ceased to exist.
Kit followed Lally back towards the shop, struggling to keep up with her pace. He was still trying to work out why she was angry with him, and what any of it had to do with her friend Peter, but the taut line of her back offered no helpful clues.
“Lally!” he called out as they neared the back door of the bookshop. “Wait. Can’t we talk?”
She slowed, but kept her face averted. “There’s nothing to—”
Kit caught a shadow of movement out of the corner of his eye, then
Leo stepped in front of them, as if he’d appeared from out of nowhere.
“What’s the matter, Lal?” he said. “You and coz have a falling-out?”
Lally gave a little yelp of surprise, then turned to face him, hands on her hips. “Bloody hell, Leo. Are you trying to make me wet my knickers? And no, we haven’t had a falling-out, but even if we had, it’s none of your business.”
Leo didn’t take up the challenge. Instead, he said, “Where have you been?” and to Kit’s surprise he sounded more worried than belligerent. “I’ve been ringing you since yesterday and your mobile goes straight to voice mail.”
“You didn’t leave anything . . . personal . . . in a message?” Lally’s voice had suddenly gone breathy with panic. She pulled them into the doorway of the next-door shop’s back entrance, and Kit realized that was where Leo must have been waiting. “My mum took my phone yesterday. She doesn’t want me talking to my dad. That’s why I didn’t call.”
“Couldn’t you have used someone else’s phone? What about coz here?”
Kit wondered if Leo had guessed that he didn’t have a phone and was deliberately trying to humiliate him. “I left it at home,” he said, as nonchalantly as he could.
“Liar.” Leo rolled his eyes. “No one leaves their phone, not even the übergeeks.” He turned his attention back to Lally. “I hitchhiked into town last night and waited by the Bowling Green. Surely you could have got out for a bit.”
“She won’t let us go home, my mum. We’re staying at my grandparents’.”
“All the better, then.” Leo sounded as if she’d just won the lottery. “That makes us practically neighbors. Come out tonight, when everyone’s gone to bed. We could meet at the old dairy, see where your mum found the mummy. It’s a good place to have a nip, and I’ve got some really brilliant st—”
“You don’t understand,” Lally said vehemently. “After what happened this morning, my mum and my grandparents aren’t letting any of us out of their sight.”
Leo stared at her. “What? What are you talking about? What happened this morning?”
“You don’t know?” Her satisfaction was evident. “Kit found a body. On the canal, just below Barbridge.” Lally gave Kit a proprietary glance that he didn’t find the least bit flattering. “It was the woman we met on her boat yesterday. Someone killed her.”
“No way.” Leo glanced from Lally to Kit, his eyes wide with disbelief.
“Way,” Lally retorted, with taunting smugness. “She was—”
“Lally, we’ve got to go,” broke in Kit. He wasn’t sure how much Lally had actually overheard from the grown- ups that morning, but he couldn’t bear the thought of her reciting Annie’s injuries to Leo.