Leave the Grave Green

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

All Shall Be Well

A Share in Death

SCRIBNER

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1995 by Deborah Darden Crombie

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Designed by ERICH HOBBING

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crombie, Deborah.

Leave the grave green/Deborah Crombie.

p. cm.

1. Police—England—Fiction. 2. Policewomen—England—Fiction. 3. England—Fiction.

I. Title.

PS3553.R5378L43 1995

813′.54—dc20

94–22496

CIP

ISBN 0-684-19770-7

eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-1764-1

For my dad,

whose creativity and

enjoyment of life

continue to inspire me

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Stephanie Woolley, of Taos, New Mexico, whose beautiful watercolors provided the model for Julia’s portraits. I am also grateful to Brian Coventry, head cutter at Lilian Baylis House, who took time from his extremely busy schedule to show me LB House and introduce me to the mysteries of Making Wardrobe; and to Caroline Grummond, assistant to the orchestra manager at the English National Opera, who was kind enough to show me both front-and back-of-house at the Coliseum.

My agent, Nancy Yost, and my editor, Susanne Kirk, provided their usual expert advice, and thanks are, as always, due to the EOTNWG for their reading of the manuscript.

Last, but by no means least, thanks to my daughter, Katie, for helping our household run smoothly, and to my husband, Rick Wilson, for his patience and support.

LEAVE

THE

GRAVE

GREEN

PROLOGUE

“Watch you don’t slip.” Julia pushed back the wisps of dark hair that had snaked loose from her ponytail, her brow furrowed with anxious concern. The air felt dense, as thick and substantial as cotton wool. Tiny beads of moisture slicked her skin, and larger drops fell intermittently from the trees to the sodden carpet of leaves beneath her feet. “We’ll be late for tea, Matty. And you know what Father will say if you’ve not done your lessons in time for practice.”

“Oh, don’t be so wet, Julia,” said Matthew. A year younger than his sister, as fair and stocky as she was thin and dark, he’d physically outstripped her in the past year and it had made him more insufferably cocksure than ever. “You’re a broody old hen. ‘Matty, don’t slip. Matty, don’t fall,’” he mimicked her nastily. “The way you carry on you’d think I couldn’t wipe my own nose.” His arms held shoulder-high, he balanced on a fallen tree trunk near the edge of the swollen stream. His school haversack lay where he’d dropped it carelessly in the mud.

Clutching her own books to her thin chest, Julia rocked on the balls of her feet. Serve him right if he caught it from Father. But the scolding, even if severe, would be brief, and life in their household would return quickly to normal—normal being that they all behaved, to quote Plummy when she felt particularly exasperated with him, “as if the sun rose and set out of Matthew’s backside.”

Julia’s lips twitched at the thought of what Plummy would say when she saw his muddy bookbag and shoes. But no matter, all would be forgiven him, for Matthew possessed the one attribute her parents valued above all else. He could sing.

He sang effortlessly, the clear, soaring treble falling from his lips as easily as a whispered breath. And singing transformed him, the gawky, gap-toothed twelve-year-old vanishing as he concentrated, his face serious and full of grace. They would gather in the sitting room after tea, her father patiently fine-tuning Matthew on the Bach cantata he’d be singing with the choir at Christmas, her mother interrupting loudly and often with criticism and praise. It seemed to Julia that the three of them formed a charmed circle to which she, due to an accident of birth or some inexplicable whim of God, was forever denied admittance.

The children had missed their bus that afternoon. Julia, hoping for a private word with the art mistress, had delayed too long, and the loaded bus had rumbled by them, splattering dark freckles of mud on their calves. They’d had to walk home, and cutting across the fields, had caked their shoes with clay until they had to lift their heavy feet deliberately, like visitors from a lighter planet. When they reached the woods, Matthew had caught Julia’s hand and pulled her, slipping and slithering through the trees, down the hillside to the stream nearest their house.