“It wasn’t like that!” Leo shouted, the anger that had been sim-mering beneath the surface of his offhand manner suddenly boiling over. He stood, pacing in the cramped space, and Kit began to feel really frightened.
“Oh, I could have done it, whenever I wanted,” Leo went on, his voice calmer, but Kit could hear him breathing hard. “But we were
different, special. And then she ruined it because she felt sorry for pretty- boy Peter, just like she does you.”
Kit knew that Lally hadn’t gone with Peter because she felt sorry for him, and he didn’t think she liked him because she was sorry for him, either.
Understanding came to him with a sickening jolt. Lally had refused Leo, telling him their relationship was too special for sex. Leo had believed her, accepted it, until he discovered she’d been sleeping with Peter Llewellyn.
And then Peter had died.
“I’m going.” Kit pushed himself to his feet, his heart thumping.
“Suit yourself,” said Leo, with a return of his mocking manner.
“Think you can find the towpath in the dark?”
“How hard can it be?” asked Kit, trying to match him for nonchalance. In the faint light from Leo’s covered torch, he found the door. But as he stepped out, Leo switched the torch off, and the dark descended like a cloak.
Kit stood still, fighting panic. He thought back to the way they’d come, parallel to the canal as they’d crossed the field and entered the wood, then turning gradually to the right. They had come straight to the door side of the shed, which must mean that the way to the canal lay round the back of the cubicle.
He felt his way round the building, then carried straight on, brushing the tree trunks with his fingertips. After a few yards, the trees thinned, and he thought he smelled the mossy scent of water, even beneath the sharp tang of snow in the air. Yes, he could see it now, the water reflecting very faintly the overcast sky.
Relief quickened his steps, and it was only when he reached the water’s edge that he realized the towpath was on the far side, and there was no bridge.
He couldn’t be that far from the dairy barn, though, if he just followed the water. The ground was tussocky, but he could man—
The shove caught him in the middle of the back like a cannonball.
He had only an instant’s sensation of falling, and then the water closed over him, cold enough to freeze his heart.
Ronnie answered on the first ring. “I was just on my way to you.
There’s been—”
“Ronnie, we’re going to need backup.” Kincaid paused, taking the phone from his ear while he spoke to his niece. “Lally, can you get to this tollhouse from the Dutton place?”
“There’s a track, from the gate at the back of the garden through the woods.”
“It’s Kit,” he said to Ronnie again. “It’s looks like Leo Dutton may have been involved in Annie Lebow’s murder, and now he has Kit—”
“Leo Dutton? But he’s just a kid. Why would—”
“Ronnie, there’s no time.” He gave Babcock the best directions he could, adding, “You’ll need a torch.”
“I’m just leaving Nantwich,” said Ronnie. “Can I pick you up?”
“No. We’re at Barbridge. We’ll take the car round and be there before you. And, Ronnie, call for uniforms.”
At the shock of the water, Kit had instinctively opened his mouth and inhaled. He thrashed wildly, struggling towards the surface, and when his head broke water he gagged and spewed up canal water mixed with the little vodka he’d drunk. Still coughing, he tried to catch his breath, then discovered he could stand. But the cold was quickly numbing his arms and legs—if he didn’t move he’d be paralyzed.
Through the water streaming from his hair, he could make out the near bank. His arms felt leaden, but he forced himself to reach out in a long swimmer’s stroke. When his fingers touched fi rm bank, he grasped with all his strength. Then a crushing weight came down on his hand.
Yelling, Kit wrenched his hand free and, with a lunge, wrapped both his arms round Leo’s ankles, pulling with all his might.
The force of it toppled the other boy, but he fell back, rather than into the canal, and by the time Kit had managed to clamber onto the bank on his hands and knees, Leo was already back on his feet.
With a grunt more vicious than any swear word, Leo pulled back a booted foot and kicked Kit hard in the chin.
Kit’s head snapped back. Then he was lying in the grass, coughing on the metallic taste of the blood flowing from his lower lip. His head buzzed from the impact, and he shook it like a punch-drunk boxer as he hauled himself back up to his knees and then stood, staggering unsteadily.
He tensed, balling his fists as he waited for the next blow, then realized that Leo was moving away from him, back towards the shed.
“You bastard!” he shouted, and started after him. The fact that he had a chance to run, to get a head start, was banished by his fury as quickly as it had crossed his mind. No one was going to try to drown him, then kick him in the face, and get away with it. He stumbled forward, hampered by the sodden, icy weight of his clothes and shoes, and by the ringing in his head. “Is that what you did to Peter? ” he gasped. “Did you push him in and hold him under?”
Then Leo disappeared round the corner of the shed and Kit stopped, suddenly uncertain. But before he could decide whether to follow, Leo reappeared and walked towards him.
Even in the dim light, Kit could see what Leo held in his hands.
He stared down the barrel of the shotgun, then into Leo’s eyes, and he knew he was dead.
“Lally, stay in the car. Wait for the police.” Kincaid had driven down Piers Dutton’s drive until the Escort’s wheels spun and stuck.
The house was dark, so he knew there’d be no help from that quarter, and that they’d have to make it the rest of the way on foot.
His niece had gone quiet in the backseat, her silence more disturbing than her earlier tears. But now she said, “No,” in a voice as implacable as his own. “You won’t find it without me. I’m coming.”
Then she was out of the car and running across the back garden that lay to the left of the drive, and all they could do was follow her.
Kincaid knew she was right, and that she had relieved him of making the choice of risking her safety at the expense of Kit’s.
“Don’t use a torch,” Lally called back to them. “It’ll confuse you.
Just stay close to me.”
She slipped through a gate at the back of the garden and into what seemed at first glance to be impenetrable scrub. But as they followed her through the gate, he saw that a barely discernible path, no wider than a deer trail, led through the woods.
Once he heard Gemma stumble and curse, but when he reached back to steady her, she whispered, “No, I’m fine. Hurry.” The path twisted and turned, but Kincaid’s sense of direction told him they were heading towards the canal at a slightly oblique angle.
The path curved once more, and Lally came to a dead stop.
When they cannoned into her, she steadied herself, then raised a hand to motion them to silence. Ahead, Kincaid could see a small brick building, but it was dark and there was no sign of movement.
Lally let out an audible breath and moved forward, skirting the shed on the left as she headed towards the canal. “They’re not here.
What if we’re too—”
Kincaid and Gemma had stepped up to flank her, so that when she froze, they saw the tableau before them in the same instant.
Kit stood to one side of a slight clearing ahead of them. Ten feet away, on the clearing’s far side, Leo Dutton held a raised shotgun.
“You’d better stop where you are,” Leo said, so casually that Kincaid knew he had heard them before they saw him. “That’s what I call in the nick of time. And, Lally, you brought the cavalry, clever girl.”