She seemed pleased, asked after the children, wanting to see how they were doing.
“But I couldn’t have that, do you see? It brought it all back, that terrible time. When she came back the next morning, I’m ashamed to say I shouted at her, and she was hurt. She said she’d never done anything but help us, and it was true. I’d take the words back, if I could.”
Wain’s words rang with sincerity. Still, Kincaid had the sense that he was somehow skirting the truth.
“And she didn’t ask you what you knew about the infant found in the wall of the dairy barn where you worked?” asked Larkin.
Kincaid knew instantly Larkin had made a mistake, that the timing was wrong. Juliet had only found the child’s body on Christmas Eve. It was highly unlikely that Annie could have learned about the baby by Christmas morning. In fact, they had no proof that she had ever known.
“What?” Wain looked stunned. “What are you talking about?”
Taking a step nearer the boat, Babcock intervened. “The body of a female infant was found mortared into the wall of the old dairy just down the way.”
“The Smiths’ place?” Wain asked, and seeing Babcock’s nod of confirmation, went on, “I did some work for them, yes, but I didn’t—
you can’t think—” He stopped, shaking his head, as if speech had deserted him.
“I don’t know what to think,” Babcock said conversationally. “It seems a bit much to believe that someone else did mortar work in that barn without Mr. Smith noticing. Or that someone else took advantage of your work to add a little of their own and you didn’t twig to it.”
Gabriel Wain’s face hardened. “You can’t possibly know that this”—he stopped, swallowing—“this child was put there during the time I did the work for the Smiths. I was only there a few days.”
He was right, and Kincaid could see that Babcock knew it.
They had no physical evidence that could link Wain directly to the body, nor any explanation as to why or how Wain could have acquired the child. Not only that, but Kincaid had dealt with a good
number of perverts over the course of his career, and while they sometimes presented a very plausible persona, there was always something just slightly off about them. He’d developed radar of a sort for the unbalanced personality, and he didn’t read the signs in Gabriel Wain.
Babcock, apparently realizing that he couldn’t push further without more to back up any accusations, changed tack. “Where were you night before last, Mr. Wain?”
“Here. With my wife and children.”
“The entire night? Can your wife vouch for you?”
“You leave my wife out of this,” Wain said, angry again. “I won’t have you hounding her. She’s been through enough.”
“Mr. Wain.” Gemma’s voice was quiet, gentle almost, but it held everyone’s attention. “Where are your children?”
Kincaid realized that he’d not heard a sound from the boat, or seen a twitch of the curtains pulled tightly across the cabin windows.
“Gone to the shops.”
“And your wife? ”
He hesitated, looking round as if enlightenment might appear out of thin air. “Resting,” he said at last.
“And the doctor who visited you yesterday, she’s treating your wife? That would be Dr. Elsworthy, I think?” Gemma glanced at Babcock for confirmation.
Babcock stared back. “Elsworthy? Here? This was the boat she visited?”
This was a train wreck, Kincaid thought, looking on in horror, a massive miscommunication. Neither Babcock nor Gemma could have known the doctor’s patient and Gabriel Wain were connected.
Babcock, however, made a recovery that any good copper would have envied. After a muttered, “Jesus Christ,” under his breath, he turned to Wain and said in a tone that brooked no argument, “I think you’d better start by telling me exactly how you know our forensic pathologist.”
Babcock waited until he was in the privacy of his office before he rang Althea Elsworthy. He tried the hospital first, but was not surprised to be told she’d called in, pleading illness, an occurrence apparently so noteworthy that her colleagues in the morgue had taken wagers on whether she’d been struck down with plague or dengue fever.
This seemed to be his day for calling in favors. It took a bit of wheedling and downright arm- twisting, but in the end he ran down her home telephone number, and the vague direction that she lived
“somewhere near Whitchurch.”
Hoping the phone number would be sufficient, he dialed and listened to the repeated double burr. No answer phone kicked in, and he was about to give up when the ringing stopped and her familiar voice came brusquely down the line. “Elsworthy.”
“Babcock,” he replied, just as succinctly, and when there was no response, he sighed and said, “Don’t you dare hang up on me, Doc.”
There was another silence, then she said with resignation, “I take it you’ve seen Gabriel Wain.”
“Oh, yes. And aside from the fact that you’ve made a first-class idiot of me, do you realize you could be struck off for this? Colluding with a suspect in a murder investigation? Keeping vital information from the police?”
“Chief Inspector, you have every right to be angry with me. But I’m a doctor first and a pathologist second, although I suppose it has been a good many years since I’ve been reminded of it.”
“I think you had better start from the beginning,” he said, his patience forced.
“Gabriel didn’t tell you?”
“I want to hear it from you.” And he did, not just to verify Wain’s story, but because he still couldn’t quite believe that the Dr. Elsworthy he had known had strayed so far off course.
“I knew Annie Constantine when she worked for Social Services.
Not well, but I found her competent, and professional, and we got on together. The last case we worked together was a bad one, though—the one where the child was killed by his foster father, do you remember?
“I could tell Constantine was having a difficult time, possibly even suffering some posttraumatic stress, so I wasn’t all that surprised when a few months later I heard she’d taken early retirement.
After that, I didn’t hear from her, or of her, until two days ago, when she showed up at my door as I was leaving for the morgue.
“How she got the address of my cottage, I don’t know—perhaps she had some of the same connections as you, Chief Inspector.” For the first time, he heard a trace of her wry humor.
“She seemed quite distraught,” the doctor continued, “and wouldn’t be brushed off, so in the end I agreed to listen to her. She said she needed help, that one of her former clients was gravely ill but refused to seek any medical treatment. Then she told me what had happened to Rowan Wain and her family.
“Well, I know the doctor who filed the MSBP complaint against Rowan. He’s a self-serving little shit who, when a case is beyond his competence, looks for someone else to blame.”
Babcock, who had never heard the doctor swear before, found himself slightly shocked.
“It wasn’t the first time he’d used a diagnosis of Munchausen by proxy,” she said, an undercurrent of anger in her voice, “and the other parents might have been blameless as well, but they didn’t have Annie Constantine to go to bat for them. They lost their children.
“As Constantine spent time with the Wains, she became convinced that the boy, Joseph, really had suffered from life-threatening seizures, and that the parents had only turned to the medical establishment in desperation.
“It seems she made a crusade of proving their innocence.” Elsworthy paused, and Babcock imagined her frowning, as she did during a postmortem when she didn’t like what she was seeing. “I
suspect she needed a crusade,” she went on, slowly. “The murdered foster child had been in her care, and when the natural parents reported after their visitations that they suspected abuse, she dismissed their claims as no more than a manipulative effort to get their child back. They were drug users, you see, and not terribly dependable.”