A Share in Death

Hannah frowned, the skin between her brows forming tiny furrows, and adjusted the position of her cutlery by a millimeter. “That reminds me … I mean the cloak-anddagger part. My flat was broken into about six months ago. Nothing much taken, just my watch, a cheap camera, some small jewelry. But everything was gone through. My desk, all my drawers. It was the most uncomfortable feeling. 1 was terribly angry, but at the same time it made my skin crawl, thinking about someone looking through my things. Even my underwear. It’s stupid, really,” she added, sounding slightly embarrassed.

“It’s not unusual,” Kincaid said. “Most people feel both angry and violated, and it takes a long time to fade.” The professional reassurance had been automatic, born from experience. He’d worked burglary in his early days and had calmed his share of the distraught, who almost always found the invasion of their privacy harder to bear than the loss of possessions. Hannah looked at him with interest, breath drawn for a question.

That’s queered it, he thought. What a master of deception. A prudent change of subject just might carry him through the evening, if he could keep his foot out of his mouth. “Our waitress looks like she’d like to sweep us out. Let’s go, shall we?”

They met in the forecourt of Followdale House, standing awkwardly between Hannah’s new Citroen and the Midget. The comparison made Kincaid feel as if he ought to apologize for his old friend. “I like it,” he said, in mock defense. “Age and beauty go hand in hand.”

Hannah laughed, and the slight clumsiness between them dissolved. “And in this case, beauty is entirely in the beholder’s eye.”

The night was unusually soft and misty for September, with an almost balmy feel to the air. Kincaid found himself reluctant for the evening to end. “A turn around the garden before we go in?”

26 deborah grombie

“Yes, all right,” Hannah answered, and they walked in companionable silence. The light in the garden was diffuse and shadowless, and the white stone lions on the parapets gleamed eerily at them through the mist. Sutton Bank loomed in front of them, a dark hump against the sky. They stopped at the path’s end and looked back toward the house. Yellow light spilled from the first-floor windows, and a light flickered in the empty ground-floor suite, so briefly that Kincaid thought it must have been a trick of his eyes.

“We’re next to each other, did you know? We’ll have to have a competition for the best view. Cassie assured me mine’s the best in the house.”

“She told me the same thing,” said Hannah. “You’ll have to recite to me from your balcony, poetry at midnight.” She laughed, then stretched her arms above her head and twirled around on the path in an odd gesture of abandon. “It’s been a marvelous evening. I had doubts about this holiday. I thought it might have been … ill conceived. Oh, I can’t explain—it’s too complicated. But suddenly I feel as though everything will be all right. You must be a positive influence.”

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment,” he said with a goodnatured grin, but he wondered what, or whom, lay behind her burst of exhilaration, as he didn’t think the credit was entirely his.

The whistling and piping of birds woke him. The sound drifted in through the open French door on a bar of sunlight, rising and falling on the still air. Kincaid rolled over and pulled the cushion over his head, then stretched and looked at his watch. Seven o’clock.

He had fallen asleep on the sofa, fully dressed, the lamp on, his book open across his chest, after bidding Hannah goodnight at her door. He felt surprisingly refreshed by his unorthodox night. There was just enough time for a swim and a shower before breakfast, and then it promised to be an ideal day for touring the Yorkshire Dales. Leaving his rumpled clothes in a heap on the bed, he slipped into

A share in death 27

bathing trunks and a terry-cloth dressing gown, and feet bare, let himself out of the suite.

A hushed calm pervaded the house—no odor of coffee or bacon, no hum of conversation from behind closed doors. He paused a moment in the hall, reveling in the peace of the morning and his newly regained sense of physical well-being.

He pushed open the door to the balcony. Perhaps he would have the pool to—

A shrill, keening wail drifted up to him from below. An animal in distress, a puppy or kitten—his first fleeting impression shifted, and with full awareness came the realization that the pitiful cry was human. He leapt down the stairs and shoved through the doors.

The two children stood huddled together on the steps just inside, a few feet from the Jacuzzi end of the pool.

Sebastian Wade’s naked body bobbed gently against the side nearest them, caught in the perpetual whirlpool of the bubbling jets.

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