Deborah Crombie - Where Memories Lie

Kincaid, who had been listening intently, spoke for the first time. "Mrs. Cahill, I'm sure that your daughter's little tiff with her father meant nothing at all. These things happen in families all the time."

"They do, don't they?" said Wanda Cahill, latching on to the offered crumb of comfort. "And she never ordinarily said, you know, who she was meeting, or where she was going. It was…she was defending her independence, I think."

"Did she ever talk about work?" asked Gemma.

"To me, sometimes. I run a small antiques shop, just across the way, so I know a bit about the business."

"Did she mention a brooch, an Art Deco diamond brooch that she'd taken in for sale?"

"Kristin? A diamond brooch?" Mrs. Cahill looked at Gemma so blankly that the answer was obvious.

"Never mind," Gemma said gently. "I'm sure it wasn't important." She started to rise. "We'll leave you to-"

"There was one thing." Wanda Cahill squeezed her hand, hanging on. "That phone call she took. She was friendly enough, at first. But when she went to her bedroom, before she closed the door, she said again, 'No, I don't want to come over,' but this time she sounded angry." Frowning, she seemed to search for a word. "Not just angry. Final."

"She won't forgive him." Kincaid slammed the car door harder than he'd intended.

"Who?" asked Gemma. "Who won't forgive who-I mean whom?"

"The mother. She won't forgive the father. And the poor bastard will probably spend the rest of his life blaming himself as well. I'll give you odds that marriage won't last a year."

"It was bad. It will be bad." Gemma touched his cheek. "I'm sorry."

"No." He covered her hand with his for a moment. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't be taking it out on you. And you were brilliant with Mrs. Cahill, by the way. It made me miss you, miss doing this together, every day."

Reaching for the ignition, he glanced at her. "You hungry?"

"After that?" Gemma shook her head. "Can't bear the thought."

"All right. We'll give it a bit. No word from Doug, or from the Yard on the CCTV or Kristin's phone records, so let's pay a call on Kristin's mate Giles. Do we have a last name for him?"

Gemma checked the notes she'd made at Harrowby's. "Oliver." She gave him the address.

It was a fairly well-heeled area in Fulham, near enough to Stamford Bridge that you'd not be able to get through the streets before or after a football match, nor get a foot in the door of the local pub on a match day. Kincaid thought the young man must be doing quite well for himself as a sales assistant at the auction house, unless he, like Kristin, still lived with his parents.

But when they reached the address Gemma had written down, they found a terraced house in bad repair, obviously a rental property. Paint flaked off the cream stucco and peeled from window and door trim; dead plants drooped from a first-floor window box, and the small yard attached to the garden flat was littered with empty crisp packets and beer bottles, and smelled of rotting food and cat pee.

"Lovely," Gemma muttered under her breath as Kincaid rang the bell for the top flat. A release buzzer sounded for the main door-there was apparently no intercom system. Kincaid opened the door for Gemma with a flourish. "Oh, you're going to make me go in first?" she said, teasing. "Very gallant of you." But as they entered the communal hall, she wrinkled her nose in real distaste. The ambience was on a par with the yard in front, but there was less fresh air to dilute it.

They climbed, Kincaid leading the way, passing scarred doors and treading on ever more threadbare carpet. A small, smudgy window on the landing let in much-needed light and air.

They reached the top floor, but before Kincaid could raise a hand to the door, a great woofing roar shook the corridor. Gemma started visibly and even Kincaid took a step back. "What the hell does he have in there, a bloody lion?"

"Get back, Mo, you great oaf!" came a shout from inside the flat, but the voice lacked a reassuring element of command.

Then the door swung open and a young man faced them, panting, hanging on to the collar of the largest dog Kincaid had ever seen. "Don't worry," the young man said. "He won't do anything worse than drool on you."

From the size of the dog's drooping jowls, Kincaid didn't doubt the drooling, and as the beast's tail was whipping back and forth in a frantically friendly wag, he decided to take the owner's word for the rest. "Mr. Oliver? We're from the police. We'd like to talk to you about Kristin-"

"Mo, sit." Giles Oliver dragged the dog into a sitting position away from the door, giving them room to step inside, although Kincaid noticed Gemma stayed a pace behind him. "You want to talk to me about Kris-Kristin?" Oliver's voice broke on the name. The dog stopped straining towards the visitors and leaned against his master's leg, looking up at him with a furrowed canine brow.

"If you don't mind. I'm Duncan Kincaid and this is Gemma James." The young man's face, Kincaid saw, was almost as puffy with weeping as Wanda Cahill's, and he suspected that, for the moment, sympathy would be more persuasive than rank.

Oliver gestured towards a small sofa. "Here, sit down. I'll just give it a brush-"

"We'll be fine," Kincaid said, preferring the risk of dog hair on trousers to the possibility of being bowled over if Oliver let go of the dog.

"He's a mastiff, isn't he?" asked Gemma, apparently unfazed by the dog's size. "He's lovely." While Kincaid gingerly took a seat, she dropped into a crouch and added, "Can I stroke him?"

Giles Oliver's rather weak-chinned face lit in a smile. "You don't mind? Most people would rather not. Just let me bring him to you so he won't knock you down."

Kincaid imagined Gemma saying a prayer for her newest Per Una skirt and layered cardigan, but she weathered the onslaught heroically, even to the slurp across her cheek with the longest pink tongue Kincaid had ever seen. Then she gave the dog a last scratch behind his floppy ears and joined Kincaid on the sofa, arranging her skirt demurely over her knees and obviously making an effort not to brush at the wet streaks.

Her exercise in canine bonding had given Kincaid a chance to examine the flat. Although small-the back of the sofa served as a divider between the living and sleeping areas-it didn't share the dilapidated state of the rest of the building. The place was clean and freshly painted-although there was a definite odor of dog-and the few pieces of furniture were of good quality, as was the rich-hued oriental carpet. But the studio's outstanding feature was a solid wall of shelving filled with vinyl LPs. To one side stood a double turntable and mixing station. It was apparent that Giles Oliver had at least one passion other than his dog, and he wondered where Kristin Cahill had figured in the equation.

"I know you," Giles said to Gemma as he settled into a squat, using an arm over the dog's shoulders as a prop. "You came into the salesroom, to talk to Kris. That's why she got a bollocking from Mr. Khan," he added, his tone becoming less friendly.

"I didn't mean to get her into trouble," answered Gemma. "Was he very cross?"

"More than usual. Although he's always harder on Kris than on anyone else. Was." His chin wobbled, giving him a fleeting resemblance to his dog. " Was harder on her."

"Have you any idea why?"

"No. I asked her, as a matter of fact, and she said she'd no idea. I wondered, though, if he, you know…fancied her. And if she'd turned him down…"

"Does Mr. Khan have a reputation for chatting up the female assistants?" asked Kincaid, interested.

"Well, no. But Kristin-I mean how could he not want…" His arm went a bit tighter round the dog, who groaned and slid down into a fawn-and-black mound on the carpet. The poor kid really had been besotted with Kristin Cahill, Kincaid thought with a flash of sympathy, and would not have had a snowball's chance in hell. But that made him all the more viable as a suspect.