“We should have been back ages ago,” he urged, reaching for her arm to pull her towards the door. But then he saw Leo’s expression, and his fingers fell away, suddenly nerveless.
Lally shrugged away from them both. “All right, all right. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”
As she turned towards the bookshop door, Leo called out, “At least say you’ll try tonight. Just ring me to say when. You can use your grandparents’ phone without being overheard—get lover boy here to create a diversion,” he wheedled. “You could come, too,” he added to Kit, the animosity of a moment ago seemingly forgotten.
“We’ll show you a good time, won’t we, Lal?”
“Shut up, Leo.” She was angry again, and Kit was as lost as before. He was glad, however, when she pulled open the bookshop door and shoved him inside, closing it firmly behind her.
The storeroom was empty. Kit leaned against the door, listening, his heart pounding. But a steady hum of voices came from the front room, one of them the unmistakable drone of Mrs. Armbruster. They had made it back without their absence being noticed.
The sudden relief gave him courage. He turned to Lally, who had sat casually on a box and was picking at her fingernails. When she looked up at him with a challenging half smile and said, “See?” he snapped back without thinking.
“Is Leo your boyfriend?”
“No!” Caught off guard, she’d spoken with unaccustomed vehemence.
“Then how come you do whatever he says?”
“I don’t.” She must have seen the disbelief in Kit’s eyes because she went on. “It’s not like that. You don’t understand. It’s just that Leo . . . knows . . . things . . .”
“What sort of things?”
Lally met Kit’s eyes, and for just an instant, a frightened child looked back at him. Then the barriers sprang up again, as tangible as shutters, and as she turned away she said, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Chapter Twenty
“You’ll be all right?” asked Gemma, turning to Juliet as they stopped outside the small shop and office Juliet rented in Castle Street, tucked away behind the town square.
They had walked down Pillory Street from the café, and when Juliet had hesitated as they passed the bookshop, Gemma had urged her on, saying, “I’m sure the children are fine. It might be best to wait a bit before you see Lally, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so,” Juliet agreed with a sigh. “Although I’m not sure waiting a few hours will make it any easier to talk to her and pretend I know nothing. God, she must think me a fool,” she added, her anger returning.
“I’ve no more experience than you, but I suspect that most fourteen-year-olds think their parents are fools, on a good day.” Gemma had given Juliet’s arm a squeeze, and got a small smile in return.
Then Juliet had insisted that if she couldn’t do anything for the children, she must update her crew and try to contact the Bonners, the clients who had commissioned the reconstruction of the barn.
Gemma, afraid that Juliet’s shop was the first place Caspar would look for her if he was in a temper, felt uneasy about leaving her there
on her own. “Don’t worry,” Juliet assured her, pointing to a battered van parked half on the curb in front of the shop. “My foreman’s here, and I’d like to see Caspar try anything in front of him—Jim does kickboxing in his spare time. When I’ve finished, I’ll have Jim walk me up to the bookshop. I can get a ride back to the house with Mum or Dad.”
Gemma hesitated, afraid of overstepping bounds, but after considering what she’d already had to tell Juliet that day, decided in for a penny, in for a pound. “Juliet, you know that whenever you decide to talk to Caspar, Duncan and I can be there to back you up. You don’t have to do it on your own.”
With her hand on the knob of the shop door, Juliet turned back.
“I—I’m not sure I’m quite ready. But thanks.”
Gemma stood watching until Juliet had gone inside the shop, her uneasiness not dispelled. But she couldn’t stand guard over an unwilling subject, and besides, Caspar had never actually harmed Juliet, or even made outright threats. Perhaps it was just the shadow cast by Annie Lebow’s murder that was making her feel so unsettled.
That, and the fact that she’d once again found herself a spare cog. Juliet had her business to see to, the children were with Rosemary and Hugh, and Kincaid was still off somewhere with Ronnie Babcock, no doubt indulging in a bit of male bonding.
As she walked slowly towards the car park at the end of Castle Street, she saw that the shops and businesses that had characterized the street nearer the town center were soon replaced by well-kept Georgian residences. Some of the houses were occupied by solicitors and insurance agents, but the commercial use didn’t mar the serene feel of the tree- lined street.
It made her think of Islington, where she had lived in her friend Hazel Cavendish’s garage fl at, and she felt a pang of nostalgia for a life that had seemed simpler, at least in retrospect. But that simplicity had been deceptive, she reminded herself, and if her life had been less complicated, it had also been less rich.
She wouldn’t willingly trade the life she led now—in fact, she found it hard to envision anything other than the hustle and bustle of the Notting Hill house shared with Duncan and the boys. And if she sometimes wished that Duncan hadn’t felt obligated to take her and Toby in, she tried to put the thought aside. She couldn’t change what had happened, or bring back the child she had lost.
She felt a cold kiss of moisture on her cheek, like a frozen tear.
Looking up, she saw a single snowflake spiraling down, but the sky looked less threatening than it had earlier, when she and Juliet had felt a spatter of sleet as they walked from the car park to the café.
Although Juliet had given her an illustrated map of the town and suggested she take a walking tour on her own, when Gemma reached the car park, she stood and gazed across the road at the River Weaver.
She imagined the canal, running parallel a half mile to the west as it passed the outskirts of the town, then leaving the course of the river and angling northwest towards Barbridge and distant Chester—the same canal that passed Juliet’s dairy barn, and the scene of Annie Lebow’s murder.
It was a coincidence, surely, that the remains of the child, perhaps long buried, should lie so near the place where a woman had died violently sometime last night. She could see no logical connection, but still it nagged at her. Suddenly, she felt she had better things to do than sightsee.
The same uniformed constable she had spoken with that morning was still restricting access into Barbridge, but he recognized Gemma and waved her through. The crime-scene van was still parked near the bridge end, and she knew the local force would try to limit traffic through the area until the SOCOs had finished.
She found a place to leave her own car, then spoke to the officer who was monitoring pedestrian movement over the bridge and onto
the towpath. “What about boats?” she asked him, when he’d checked her identification.
“Not much traffic this time of year,” he answered. “And we’ve had someone stationed at the Middlewich Junction, to warn the boaters off, as well as down at the Hurleston Locks, below the crime scene. I’ve mostly had to turn back gawkers who have walked in to visit the pub,” he added, gesturing at the Barbridge Inn.
Thanking him, Gemma crossed the humpbacked bridge and climbed down the incline to the towpath. There was only one boat moored below the bridge, a matte black vessel with small brass-rimmed round portals, like multiple eyes. Gemma peered curiously at the portholes as she passed, but the interior curtains were drawn tight, and both fore and aft decks were closed in with heavy black canvas. The boat looked deserted, and unpleasantly funereal.