Corrine smiled. “Fine. Robbie’s doing your breakfast. You like bacon, I hope.” And without waiting for a reply, she was gone.
Downstairs, Robin emerged from the kitchen just as Barbara reached the dining room. He had a pan in one hand from which he slid two fried eggs onto her plate. He said with a glance out of the window where, to Barbara’s eye, the sky was still black with the night, “Dawn’s not far. We’ll have to be about it if you still want to see the canal by five.”
As they’d walked from their cars to the house last night, she’d announced her intention of viewing the body site at the same time of day as the body had entered the water. Robin had winced—“That means we’re out of here by quarter to five,” he’d pointed out—but when she’d responded with “Fine. Set your alarm,” he hadn’t made any further protest. And now he seemed as awake as if he rose every day while it was still night, although he stifled a yawn as he wished her bon appétit and returned to the kitchen.
Barbara tucked into the eggs. She shovelled them down, and since no one was present to comment on her manners, she sopped up the yolk with toast. She crammed the bacon into her mouth, washed it down with orange juice, and was done. She gave a curious glance to her watch. Three minutes of gastronomy. Definitely a new record.
Robin was subdued on the way out to the crime scene. To her immediate gratitude, Barbara discovered that he was a smoker, so they lit up and happily filled his Escort with carcinogens. After a few minutes of silent nicotine intake, he guided the car off the Marlborough Road and onto a narrower lane that led behind the village post office and out into the country.
“I used to work there,” he said suddenly with a nod at the post office. “I used to think I’d be trapped there forever. It’s why I got such a late start at this CID business.” He glanced her way, and seeming anxious to clarify what he’d just said and whatever worries his words might have aroused in her, he went on quickly. “But I’ve taken some extra courses to get a leg up.”
Barbara said, “The first investigation is always the roughest. I know mine was. I expect you’ll do just fine.”
“I had five O levels,” he went on earnestly. “I’d thought I’d try for university.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He tapped ash from his cigarette through a speck of an opening he’d created by slightly lowering his window. “Mum,” he said. “The asthma comes and goes. She’s had some bad spells over the years, and I didn’t feel like I could leave her alone.” He tossed another look her way. “I expect that sounds like I’m tied to her apron.”
Hardly, Barbara thought. She considered her own mother—both of her parents in fact—and the years upon years of her adulthood that she had spent living in the family home in Acton before and after her father’s death, a prisoner to one parent’s ill health and the other’s mental erosion. No one was more likely to understand what it meant to keep one’s life on hold than Barbara. But she settled upon saying, “She has Sam now, so your freedom’s on the horizon, isn’t it?”
“You mean our ‘little chappie’?” he asked sardonically. “Oh yes. Right. If the marriage comes off, I’ll be cut loose. If the marriage comes off.”
He had the sound of a man who’d been this close to liberty more than once before, only to have his hopes and plans quashed. Celia, Barbara thought, whoever she was, must have the aspiratory constitution of a congenital optimist.
The lane humped over a bridge that spanned the Kennet and Avon Canal. “Wilcot,” Robin said, identifying the hamlet of thatched cottages strung along the canal’s banks like misshapen beads on a necklace. He went on to tell her that the site wasn’t too much farther, and Barbara examined her watch in the dashboard lights to see how close they would be to five A.M. when they arrived. It was four fifty-two. Right on schedule, she thought.
They spun deeper into the countryside and the road veered west. To the south lay farmland where the corn—glaucous with the coming daylight—swayed in the breeze from the car. To the north rose the downs, across which one of Wiltshire’s white chalk horses stretched out its neck in a motionless gallop, an eerie presence that pierced the gloom.
When they pulled into the hamlet of Allington, the sky was shifting from black to the colour of Trafalgar Square pigeons. Robin said, “We’re coming on it,” but rather than drive her directly there, he made a complete circuit of the hamlet first, showing her the two means of access to it from the main road. One access was farther north and cut past Park Farm and half a dozen rough stucco houses with red-tiled roofs. The other was closer to Wilcot and the way they’d come, and it bisected much of Manor Farm, whose houses, barns, and outbuildings sat behind brick walls overgrown with greenery.
Both means of access conjoined at a knobby track, and it was into this track that they jounced, with Robin telling her—with apologies for his car’s suspension—that it was a mile and a half farther along to the site.
Barbara nodded vaguely, but she was busy taking note of the area. Even at five in the morning, lights had been on in three of the houses. No one had been outside, but surely if a vehicle had passed this way at this same hour earlier in the week, someone might have heard it, might have seen it, and might only be waiting for the right question to jog a memory.
She said, “CID’s spoken at each of the houses?”
“First thing.” Robin changed down gears to first, and the car lurched uneasily.
Barbara gripped the dashboard. “We may want to talk to them all again.”
“Could do.”
“They may have forgotten. Someone had to have been up. People are up right now. If a car passed by—”
Robin whistled through his teeth. It was the sound of a doubt, unwilling to be given voice.
“What?” she asked him.
“You’re forgetting,” he said. “It was on Sunday morning the body was dumped.”
“So?”
He slowed for a crater-sized pothole. “You are from the city, aren’t you? Sunday’s rest day in the country, Barbara. Farm people are up before dawn six days a week. On the seventh they do like God suggested and have themselves a lie-in. They’re probably up by six-thirty. But at five? Not on a Sunday.”
“Damn,” she muttered.
“It doesn’t make things any easier,” he agreed.
Where the track rose to meet a bridge, he pulled as far to the left as he could and switched off the engine, which sputtered three times and then settled into stillness. They got out into the morning air. Robin said, “Down this way,” and led her to the other side of the bridge, where a declivity thickly grown with grass dropped to the towpath that ran along the canal.
Here reeds grew in abundance as did a wealth of wildflowers that speckled the dark green banks like pink, white, and yellow stars. Among the reeds, waterfowl nested and their sudden cries as they took to the air seemed to be the only sound for miles. West and east of the bridge, two narrow-boats were moored along the canal banks, and when Barbara turned to question Robin about them, he told her in explanation that they were trippers only, not permanent residents. They hadn’t been here the day the body was discovered. They wouldn’t be here tomorrow.
“Cruising up to Bradford-on-Avon,” he said. “To Bath, to Bristol. They’re up and down the canal from May to September, the narrow-boats. They just dock for the night where they can create a mooring. City people, most of them.” He smiled. “Like you.”
“Where do they get the boats?”
He took out his cigarettes and offered her one. He used a match to light hers first, sheltering the flame from the breeze by cupping his hand round hers. His skin, she found, was smooth and cool.
“Hire them,” he said in answer to her question. “Just about any spot where the canal’s near a town, someone’s hiring out narrow-boats.”
“Such as?”
He rolled his cigarette between thumb and forefinger as he considered the question. “Hungerford for one. Kintbury. Newbury. Devizes. Bradford-on-Avon. Even Wootton Cross. T
here’s a hiring spot there.”
“Wootton Cross?”
“There’s a wharf farther up the Marlborough Road. That’s where the canal passes through the village. Boats are hired from there.”
Barbara saw the spider-webbing of the case’s complexities. She squinted through her cigarette’s smoke, back to the track they’d driven on. She said, “Where does that lead if you keep heading down it?”
He followed the direction of her gaze and indicated the southeast with the hand that held his cigarette. “It keeps running through the fields,” he said. “Ends in a copse of sycamores about three-quarters of a mile along.”
“Anything there?”
“Just the trees. Fences where the fields meet. Nothing else. We went over it Sunday afternoon with a comb. We can have another look if you like, when we’ve a bit more light.”
As it was, the light was continuing to grow from the eastern sky where a fan of pale grey was streaking into the pigeon-feather darkness like uncurling fingers. Barbara considered the offer. She knew how serious was their disadvantage in this investigation. Five days had passed since Charlotte Bowen’s disappearance, six if one wanted to include this as one of them. Forty-eight hours had passed since the discovery of her body, and God only knew how many since her actual death. With every additional handful of sand that trickled through the hour-glass, the trail got colder, people’s memories grew dimmer, and the possibility of successfully concluding the case grew more remote. Barbara knew this. At the same time, she knew she was feeling mightily compelled to go over ground that had once been gone over. Why? she wondered. But she knew the answer. This was her chance to make her mark—every bit as much as it was DC Payne’s chance—and she meant to make the most of it.
That compulsion didn’t serve the interests of Charlotte Bowen’s family or justice, however. She said, “If your lo found nothing there—”
“Not even a jingle of a nothing,” he said.
“Then let’s stick with what we have.” They’d paced some yards along the canal to the exact location where the body had lain near the reeds. Now Barbara led the way back to the bridge, an arched affair of bricks beneath which a patch of concrete formed a narrow shelf over the water. She flicked her cigarette into the canal, and when she caught Robin wincing, she said, “Sorry, but there’s still not quite enough light and I need to see…” The water flowed to the west. “Two possibilities,” she said. She slapped her hand against the arch of the bridge that rose in a curve above their heads. “He parks above, comes down the path, dashes under the bridge with the body. He’s out of sight in what, ten seconds? He drops the body in the water here. The body floats. The current carries it over to the reeds.”
She walked back to the towpath. Robin followed. Unlike her, he put out his cigarette on the heel of his shoe. He put its dog end into his pocket.
Faced with such scrupulous environmentalism, Barbara felt guilty enough to dive into the water after her own cigarette. But instead, she said, “Or he brought her here in a narrow-boat. He eased her out the back end of it—what is it, the prow? the bow? the stern?”
“Stern.”
“Right. Okay. He eased her out the stern and just kept on cruising, another holiday maker out on the canal.”
“So we’ve all the boat hiring spots to look into as well.”
“It appears that way. Does Sergeant Stanley have a team on that?”
He tapped his front teeth together, just as he had done on the previous night when Sergeant Stanley’s manner of handling the case had come up.
“Is that a no?”
“Is what—?” He looked confused.
“What you’re doing with your teeth.”
He touched his tongue to them, then gave a short laugh. “You don’t miss anything. I’ll have to watch my p’s and q’s.”
“I dare say. And as to the sergeant…? Come on, Robin. This isn’t a test of loyalty. I need to know where things stand.”
His oblique answer gave her the information she wanted. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to scout round a bit today. You’ve the autopsy to see to, right? And Sergeant Stanley will want to meet with you after that. You’ve things the Yard wants you to dig into. You’ve phone calls to make and people to talk to. You’ve reports to write. I see it like this: I could drive you round—and I’m happy to do it, make no mistake of that—and be your right-hand man, or I could be another set of eyes and ears. Out there.” He lifted his chin as a means of pointing in the direction of the track, the car, and the rest of Wiltshire.
She had to admire his diplomacy. Once she was back in London, he’d still be working with Sergeant Stanley. Both of them knew that the delicate balance of that relationship had to be his primary concern if he wanted to advance in CID.
She said, “Right. That works for me.” She headed up the acclivity towards the track. She heard his heavier footsteps behind her. At the top she paused and glanced back his way. She said, “Robin,” and when he looked up, “I think you’re going to do fine as a Jack.”
His teeth flashed in a smile and he quickly ducked his head. The light was still bad, but had it been better, Barbara was sure she would have seen him blushing.
“I swear to God I didn’t,” Mitchell Corsico said hotly. “D’you think I’m crazy? D’you think I want to slit my own throat?” He hitched up his jeans in some agitation and paced what little space was available in Rodney Aronson’s office while Rodney himself watched the investigative reporter from behind his desk and listened to the creak of his cowboy boots. He unwrapped an Aero bar with his usual attention to the delicacy of the operation, exposing a single bite-sized portion of the chocolate.
“I can’t help reliving your threats of yesterday, Mitch,” Rodney said, chocolate deposited into the pouch of his cheek. “Doubtless, you see our concerns.”
The word our wasn’t lost on Corsico. He said, “You didn’t actually tell Luxford what I…Fuck it, Rodney, Luxford doesn’t think I turned traitor, does he? You know I was just blowing off steam.”
“Hmmm,” Rodney said. “But the fact remains…” He let that morning’s copy of The Source’s foremost rival complete the sentence for him. The Globe lay atop Rodney’s desk. On its front page, next to a telephoto shot of MP Eve Bowen emerging from her car at her home in Marylebone, a one-hundred-forty-four-point headline blared: MP Daughter Snatched, No Call Made to Police! The tabloid had had a veritable field day with the same story that Mitchell Corsico had presented—and Luxford had soundly rejected—on the previous afternoon.
“Anyone else could have got that information,” Corsico said. “Maybe I was first on the scene—”
“Maybe?”
“All right. Fuck it. I was. But that doesn’t mean I’m the only person that the housekeeper might have given the story to. She was cut up, like the kid was her own. She would’ve talked to anyone who acted sympathetic.”
“Hmmm,” Rodney said again. He’d learned long ago that to look contemplative was just about as good as actually being contemplative. So having emitted the appropriate noise of deep thinking, he made a diamond of his fingers and thumbs and placed them beneath his chin. “What to do,” he murmured.
“What d’you mean?” Corsico demanded. “Has Luxford seen this?”
Rodney lifted one shoulder in reply.
“I’ll talk to him. He knew I was apeshit, but he also knows I wouldn’t give my own story to another paper.”
“There’s no by-line on the story, Mitch. You must see how that looks.”
Corsico snatched the tabloid from Rodney’s desk. He ran his gaze over the front page. Where one would expect to see Exclusive: By Joe Reporter boxed off beneath the headline, there was nothing at all. He threw the paper down. “So what’re you saying? I gave the story to the Globe, told them to run it without my name, and advised them I’d be coming on board just as soon as I gave my notice to Luxford? Come on, Rodney. Have some sense. If I wanted to do that, I would’ve quit last night and you’d be sitting
here now, looking at my name on page one of that rag.”
He paced again. He prowled the width of the office. Outside in the newsroom, it was business as usual, but more than one glance in the direction of the deputy editor’s glass-walled office told Rodney that others on the floor, besides himself, knew of the Globe’s coup. Heads ducked when he looked their way. They all felt the same, sick in the gut. Being scooped was as bad as being inaccurate. Worse, in fact. Inaccuracy still sold papers.
Rodney peeled away another portion of the Aero bar’s wrapper. He used his tongue to manoeuvre a new piece of chocolate into place. His dentist had told him that if he didn’t stop stowing chocolate between his molars and his cheek, he wouldn’t have teeth left by the time he was sixty. But what the hell, he thought. There were worse things in life than owning a set of porcelain chompers.
“It looks bad,” Rodney said. “Your stock round here is something of an iffy thing at the moment.”
“Great,” Corsico muttered.
“So you’ll just have to get a story in for us, fast. For tomorrow’s paper.”
“Yeah? What about Luxford? He didn’t want this sort of stuff yesterday”—He jabbed his index finger at the copy of the Globe—“without confirmation from Scotland Yard that Bowen hadn’t gone straight to Victoria Street and just bypassed the local cops. So what makes you think anything’s changed today? And don’t tell me someone from Scotland Yard actually confirmed the Globe’s story. That’s a real stretch, and I won’t buy it.”
“It is possible,” Rodney said. He went on meaningfully with, “Snouts’re everywhere, Mitch. As—and may I be sure of this?—you well know.”
The fact that Corsico had received Rodney’s message was implicit in his answer. He said, “Okay. Okay. So I was burning when I left here yesterday. So I went out and got pissed.”
“Instead of working to confirm your story. As, I believe, you were directed to do.” Rodney tut-tutted. “We don’t want that sort of thing to happen again. I don’t. Mr. Luxford doesn’t. The chairman doesn’t. Am I being clear?”