“Leo, I— Don’t hurt Kit. He hasn’t done any—”
“Shut up.” With the barrel of the gun, Leo motioned to Kit to move closer to the others. Then he rotated slightly, so that he could cover them all evenly. “So now you’re a snitch, Lally, as well as a thief and a liar. But this time you can’t take it back. You can’t make it up to me.”
“I can. I’ll do whatever you want—”
“What? You think it’s that easy? That I’ll just let you lot walk away?” Leo’s voice rose, and the barrel of the shotgun came up with it.
“You won’t gain anything by hurting us, Leo,” said Kincaid, as levelly as he could manage. If he could keep the boy talking, he might be able to contain him until backup arrived. “The police already know you drowned Peter Llewellyn and you killed Annie Lebow. She recognized you on Boxing Day, didn’t she, when you and Lally and Kit stopped at the boat? She’d seen you the night Peter died.
“You were wet because you’d had to hold Peter under, weren’t you? It was harder than you’d thought to drown someone. Annie said you were ‘wild-eyed’; maybe you hadn’t known what it would feel like to kill another human being. She thought, when she heard about the drowning later, that it was Peter she had seen, and that she might have helped him.”
“She stepped right into my path, the stupid cow. She saw my face.
That day on the towpath, while Kit here was making chitchat, I could see her looking at me, trying to make the connection.”
“You killed her?” Kit’s voice was high with shock, and Kincaid realized his mistake. Kit had guessed about Peter, but he hadn’t known enough to put the pieces together about Annie. “You killed Annie!” Kit was shouting now, blazing with rage. “She was a good person. She never did anything to hurt anyone. She didn’t deserve to die. And you— I saw her. I saw what you did to her.” Kit charged towards the other boy, in his fury oblivious to the danger.
“No!” shouted Lally, and launched herself at Kit.
In that instant, a twig cracked. Kincaid just glimpsed Ronnie Babcock stepping into the clearing as Leo whirled towards the noise and the gun discharged.
The boom reverberated, deafening in the still night air, but beneath it Kincaid heard Ronnie’s grunt of surprise. Gemma ran towards him even as he fell.
“Don’t move. Nobody move,” commanded Kincaid. Lally had pushed Kit down and they both froze in a crouch. Leo still held the gun, but he was visibly shaking. “Easy, Leo, easy,” Kincaid said, then to Gemma, “How bad is it?”
She’d knelt, slipping off her coat and pressing it to Ronnie’s midriff. Her face looked white in the gloom as she glanced up at him.
“We need help. Quickly.”
Kincaid prayed that the gun had been filled with birdshot, that it had not been tightly choked, that the boy’s aim had been off. Ronnie groaned and Gemma murmured something he couldn’t hear.
Slowly, carefully, Kincaid turned back to Leo Dutton. The gun was double- barreled. Had the boy loaded both chambers? “Leo. Put the gun down. If you do it now, that was an accident. We all saw that.
But if you let a policeman die, it’s murder.”
“You said the police already knew about Peter and that woman,”
Leo countered. “So what do I have to lose?” But some of the bravado was gone; he sounded, for the first time, like a frightened teenager.
“Oh, they know, but that’s not the same as proof, is it? Not even Lally can prove you killed Peter Llewellyn. It’s only conjecture on her part. And there’s no forensic evidence linking you to the murder of Annie Lebow, and no witnesses. Anything you’ve said tonight will be inadmissible in court.
“But even if the police could connect you to these crimes, you’re a juvenile. You might get a few months in a psychiatric ward, then probation. Your father can pull strings.” Kincaid could only hope that Leo didn’t know his father was facing indictment for fraud, and
that the influence Piers Dutton had wielded among the rich and powerful in the county might soon be a memory.
He glanced over at Babcock, who lay alarmingly still. Gemma shook her head at him, a signal of distress.
Kincaid dropped his voice, mustering every ounce of persuasion he possessed. “But if you let the chief inspector here die, not even your father can protect you. It won’t matter what you do to the rest of us. And there isn’t anywhere you can run that they won’t find you.”
A flash of light came from the woods, then another, followed by the faint echo of voices. Leo glanced towards the sound, the whites of his eyes showing, then back at Kincaid. He shifted the gun until it pointed not at Kincaid, but at Kit. “I could shoot him. You know I could. And you couldn’t stop me.”
Despair washed over Kincaid, followed immediately by an incan-descent anger. He would not let this monster take his son. He tensed his body, ready to throw himself at the boy, but said, “You won’t.”
The moment stretched until Kincaid thought his heart would stop.
Then Leo let the gun barrel drop until the end touched the ground.
He laughed. “No, I don’t suppose I will. But I had you.” Turning to Kit, he said, “And you. I had you. A few seconds, a little pressure on the trigger. That’s all it would have taken, and you knew it. I won.
Don’t forget it.”
Chapter Twenty- six
It was after midnight by the time Kincaid managed to get to Leighton Hospital.
Although Kevin Rasansky had secured the crime scene competently enough after the ambulance crew had taken Babcock away, it had been Babcock’s superintendent who had met them at Crewe Police Station to take statements from Kincaid, Gemma, Lally, and Kit, and to oversee the booking in of Leo Dutton. Special arrangements would have to be made for the boy’s custody, as he was a juvenile, but for now he was safely ensconced in an interview room with a constable on the door.
Piers Dutton had been contacted and had arrived, at first too shocked to bluster, but the last Kincaid had seen of him, he’d been on his mobile, calling solicitors and his father, the judge.
Having obtained dry clothes for Kit from one of the officers, Kincaid had rung his sister and was surprised to find that she, too, was at the police station, assisting her husband in making a statement concerning a fire at Newcombe and Dutton. Once Lally had given her statement, he had taken her to meet her mother in the lobby, and Juliet had hugged her daughter as if she would never let her go. When
Lally had at last pulled away and asked, “What about Daddy?” Juliet had simply told her he would be staying for a bit, helping the police.
“I can take Lally and Kit home,” Juliet had offered. “And Gemma, too, if you’re not ready, Duncan.” She paused. “Your friend the chief inspector—”
“I’ll stay,” Gemma had said. “I can drive you to hospital.”
“No, go on, the boys need you,” he’d told her, but the truth was that if the news was bad, he wanted to be on his own when he heard it. He’d tried ringing the hospital several times, but they’d refused to tell him anything about Babcock’s condition. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.” He’d brushed his lips against her cheek and given Kit a quick hug.
Now, as he entered the waiting room outside intensive care, his stomach clamped with dread. By the time the medics had arrived, Ronnie had lost consciousness, and Gemma’s hands and arms had been covered with his blood.
The small room was filled with men and women with tense white faces, sitting and standing, clutching polystyrene coffee cups like talismans. He recognized many of them, officers both plainclothed and uniformed, whom he had seen in the incident room and at Crewe station.