“He was on holiday,” Dutton admitted reluctantly. “Not that it will matter, as there’s no question that what you’re doing here is illegal.”
“I can see why he wouldn’t be anxious to give up his post-Christmas amusements to deal with your spot of trouble.”
“Now see here, Babcock. I’ve rung your chief constable—”
“Yes, I’ve rung him myself, Mr. Dutton. He wasn’t too keen on the idea that he’d been playing golf with a swindler, especially as it seems you convinced him to make one or two small investments.” Babcock shook his head in mock dismay. “You wouldn’t have been so foolish as to skim a percentage off the chief constable’s account?”
Dutton quite wisely clamped his mouth closed on that one, but Babcock thought he looked a little pale. “And by the way, Mr. Dutton,” he added, “I don’t appreciate being threatened. I think you’ll find that sort of thing doesn’t win you any friends—especially if I should mention it to the custody sergeant at Crewe headquarters.”
“What are you talking about?” Dutton’s voice rose to a squeak of panic.
“You’re going to be our guest, Mr. Dutton, while we talk about Annie Lebow.”
“But you can’t—”
“I can. Twenty- four hours without charge, and then we’ll see where we are.” Babcock stepped closer, into the other man’s comfort zone. “You’re going to tell me about every contact you ever had with Annie Lebow, or with anyone connected with Annie Lebow. And then you’re going to take me through every second of your time the day before yes—”
“Boss?” Rasansky pushed open the door. “Mr. Newcombe’s here. He wants to—”
But Caspar Newcombe didn’t wait to have his mission announced. Shoving Rasansky, who outweighed him by a good two stone, aside, he barged into the room.
“Hey, you can’t—” Rasansky began, but Newcombe had already turned to Babcock.
“You’re in charge here? What is this? What do you think you’re doing?” He was wild-eyed with outrage, and his breath told Babcock he’d had a fortified lunch. “This is our business. You can’t just take things away. Piers, you’ll tell them—”
“Mr. Newcombe.” Babcock stepped back, out of range of Newcombe’s uncoordinatedly swinging arms. He knew Caspar Newcombe by sight, had even been briefly introduced to him once over drinks at a Nantwich pub, but he doubted the man remembered his name or title. “I’m Detective Chief Inspector Babcock. Did your partner not tell you we had some questions about his accounts? Or that one of his clients was murdered night before last? And that unfortunately, it appears that Mr. Dutton had been helping himself to a percentage of her profits without permission?”
“What?” Newcombe’s thin face went slack with shock. “You can’t be ser—”
“Annie Lebow. Or Annie Constantine, according to your records. Mr. Dutton will be helping us with our inquiries.”
Newcombe turned to Dutton like a child asking for reassurance.
“Piers, this can’t be true—”
“I’m afraid it is true that Annie Constantine was murdered, Caspar, but I had nothing to do with it,” Dutton said, his voice even, soothing.
“And you haven’t—”
“Of course not. I’m sure the police will find it’s all a misunderstanding, perhaps a bookkeeping error. Juliet sometimes—” Dutton stopped and shrugged, and Newcombe nodded, accepting the implication without protest.
He turned back to Babcock and regarded him owlishly. “Night before last, you say?”
“Yes.”
Newcombe drew himself up to his full height. “Then you have no reason to harass my partner, Inspector. Piers was with me the entire evening.”
From the corner of his eye, Babcock saw the flash of dismay on Dutton’s face.
Juliet wanted nothing more than a hot bath. Her entire body felt as if it had been stomped on by a rugby team, due, she suspected, to her daylong efforts to put a good face on her rising internal panic.
She’d begun by taking her foreman, Jim, to the building site, and while she viewed the aftermath left by the deconstruction crew with horror, he’d stood shaking his head in a wordless dismay that made her feel even worse.
Leaving him to it, she’d retreated to her van and, forcing a smile on her face, had rung the Bonners in London and told them cheerfully that it would take only a few days to get back on schedule.
Her clients were already jittery over the idea that their future home had been used as a burial ground for a child, and Juliet was afraid that with the snowballing delays, they might cut their losses and pull out altogether. When her thoughts strayed down that path, her heart began to pound.
Keep things in proportion, she’d told herself, turning up the van’s heater in hopes that air from the still-warm engine would stop her teeth chattering.
There would be other jobs. She and the kids wouldn’t starve—they could stay with her folks as long as necessary, and it was only her pride that would suffer. And if worse came to worst and her business failed, she could find another job. She had skills; she’d managed
Caspar’s office efficiently enough—in spite of Piers—and she’d made a good bit on the side doing small fix-up projects for friends.
Somehow, she had to get herself through the day. Confine her thoughts to minutiae, concentrate on the sequence of steps required to get her project back on course.
For a moment, her hatred of Piers Dutton squeezed her chest like a python, and she swallowed against the bile rising in her throat. It occurred to her that she’d never known true hatred before. If she’d thought about it at all, she’d imagined it as cleansing, a pure emotion unadulterated by the burden of fairness or compassion.
But it was corrosive, spilling over into every facet of her life, poisoning all her relationships. It kept her from forgiving Caspar his weakness; it kept her from telling her brother and Gemma that she understood they’d only done what they felt they must. And it was keeping her from reassuring her children that she loved them, especially Lally.
The thought pierced her heart. She’d sniffed, wiped her eyes, and gone back to the job site determined to do better, to keep focused on the things that really mattered.
But by midafternoon, when she’d picked Lally and the two younger boys up at the bookshop, her daughter’s sullen withdrawal only made her angry again.
She knew Lally had been hurt by her grandfather’s singling out Kit for this morning’s trip to Audlem—she’d felt a stab of jealousy herself that shamed her—but all her attempts at engaging the girl in some sort of ordinary conversation had failed so miserably that even the boys had become quiet, embarrassed.
When they reached the house, they’d found Kit and Hugh just back from their expedition, red cheeked and irritatingly cheerful. Hugh had lit the fire in the sitting room, and had dared the boys and Lally to take him on at Monopoly, but Lally had disappeared upstairs, refusing to join in. When Juliet called after her, she’d pretended not to hear.
Juliet sank down on the bottom step, desolation settling over her.
She tried to force her cold fingers to unlace her work boots, but stopped halfway through. Suddenly even the longed- for bath seemed more than she could manage. Perhaps she’d have a nip from the bottle of brandy her dad kept under the kitchen sink, just to get herself going, she thought, and she’d just pushed herself upright when the doorbell rang.
She knew, with the absolute certainty born of dread, who it was.
The dogs barked in chorus, and when her dad looked out of the sitting room, she waved him back and said, “It’s for me.”
Opening the door, Juliet stepped out onto the porch and faced her husband.
Her first thought was that he looked diminished, much less frightening than her imagination had painted him after his attack on her in the pub. His chest seemed to have sunk, his cheeks were unshaven, but his eyes glittered so feverishly that any hopes she had had that he’d come to apologize were quickly dashed.