Deborah Crombie - Where Memories Lie

It was blackmail, no matter how politely it was couched. And she was helpless against it. Gavin was lost to her. Even in death she could not touch him, could not help him.

Everything that had mattered to her was slipping away, dissolving like mist when she clutched at it. Erika made a last desperate effort. "But my husband-what about my husband's murder?"

Tyrell smiled. "Someone else will look into it, Mrs. Rosenthal. I promise you."

Gemma hailed a cab and within minutes was standing on the Embankment across from Cheyne Walk. She stared out at the river, framed between the Albert and Battersea bridges. The day was still overcast, and the water looked dull and impenetrable.

The report on Gavin Hoxley's death said his body had washed ashore farther downstream, near Chelsea Bridge. That didn't mean that was where it had gone in, however, but there would have been no way of calculating tide and current unless one knew when he had gone in.

She looked east. According to his personnel file, Hoxley had lived in Tedworth Square, near the top of the Royal Hospital Gardens. Had he, as the report inferred, simply walked down Tite Street and jumped in the river? The report said there had been no marks on his body to suggest an altercation, and that the balance of his mind may have been disturbed due to domestic problems. No postmortem had been ordered.

It seemed to Gemma a very cavalier judgment, even for a time when procedures may not have been as stringent-and if that was the case, Gavin Hoxley had been an anomaly. If his work on David Rosenthal's murder had been anything to go by, she couldn't have done a better job herself.

She watched a number 11 bus trundle down the Embankment, and suddenly felt a weird sense of displacement, as if time had rippled. Gavin Hoxley had surely stood here, watching the buses go past, admiring the delicate tracery of the Albert Bridge, puzzling over a crime he couldn't solve. In the hours spent reading his notes, she'd come to feel she knew him, and now she experienced a sharp and personal sense of loss.

Silly, Gemma told herself. Gavin Hoxley had been dead for more than fifty years. But somehow that made no difference.

And because Gavin Hoxley had died, she thought, David Rosenthal's murder investigation had been shelved. Or…had it perhaps been the other way round?

Hearing a shout, Gemma turned and saw Kincaid and Doug Cullen getting out of a car in Cheyne Walk. She waved, then walked back to the crossing and waited for the light.

When she reached them, she said, "Anything new?"

"More a lack of anything new," Kincaid answered. "We keep coming back to the fact that Dom Scott and the brooch are the only two links between the victims. We thought maybe Dom stole the brooch and used Harry to sell it so he wouldn't be connected. Then when Erika came forward he had to cover his tracks."

"So you're just stirring it?"

"Basically, yeah." He shrugged. "What was it you wanted to talk about?"

Gemma hesitated, looking up at the house. "It's complicated. I'll tell you after." She mounted the steps and pushed the bell.

The door flew open before Gemma's finger left the buzzer.

Ellen Miller-Scott stared out at them. Gone was the salon polish they had seen before. Her blond hair was disheveled, her face bare of makeup and tear-streaked. "But I just called," she said on a sob. "How did you-You've got to help me-He-I can't-"

"Where?" Kincaid barked at her. "Show us."

She turned and started up the stairs, stumbling and grabbing the banister for support. As soon as Kincaid saw where she was going, he shot past her, and Gemma followed, taking the steps two at a time, leaving Cullen to help the woman.

But Kincaid came to a dead stop at the door of Dominic Scott's apartment, and Gemma almost cannoned into his back.

"Oh, Christ," he said, stepping slowly into the room, and without his body as a shield, Gemma saw what he had seen.

Dominic Scott hung from the beam in his sitting-room ceiling. A rope made of neckties was knotted round his neck, and a chair lay on its side beneath him. He wore jeans and a dress shirt, unbuttoned, and his feet were bare. His handsome face was purple, suffused with congestion, and his open eyes had the opaque flatness that belonged only to the dead.

There was a terrible smell, and urine dripped from inside the leg of his jeans onto the carpet.

"Can't you do something?" wailed Ellen Miller-Scott, and Gemma realized that she had come in behind them, and that Cullen was trying to restrain her and dial his mobile at the same time. Gemma put her arm round the woman so that Doug could release her.

Dominic's mother turned to her, pleading, "Can't you get him down? Please? I tried, but I couldn't-"

Gemma met Kincaid's eyes and tightened her hold. "Mrs. Miller-Scott. Ellen. I'm sorry, but I'm very much afraid it's too late."

While Gemma restrained Ellen Miller-Scott, Kincaid took Cullen aside and asked him to ring for the pathologist and SOCOs.

"Right, guv," said Cullen. Then he added in a whisper that carried, nodding in the direction of Dom Scott's body, "But how likely is it that someone did that to him?"

Kincaid gave him a quelling glance and shook his head, but Gemma knew what he was thinking. It wouldn't be the first time they'd seen it happen, someone strangled, then strung up to make it look like a suicide.

Ellen Miller-Scott pulled away from Gemma. "What do you mean, a crime scene? You can't think-Dom-" She looked at her son's body and took a heaving breath.

"Mrs. Miller-Scott, let's get you downstairs." Ellen Miller-Scott was definitely not going to fail a hearing test, Kincaid thought. "Doug, will you wait for reinforcements?"

Gemma didn't think Cullen looked terribly thrilled at the prospect, but he nodded and pulled out his phone.

But it wasn't until the ambulance team had arrived, shaken their heads and said, "Not our job, guv'nor," that Gemma and Kincaid managed to get a protesting Ellen Miller-Scott downstairs and into her white sitting room.

The bold splashes of color in the paintings on the white walls seemed garish and somehow indecent after what they had seen upstairs. "I don't want to leave him," Ellen said again, looking back towards the stairs.

Gemma guided her to a spot on the sofa, deliberately positioning her so that the front hall was out of her view, while Kincaid pulled up an occasional chair so he could look at her directly.

"Mrs. Miller-Scott-Ellen-I know your son was upset over Kristin Cahill's death," he said. "But was there anything else troubling him?"

Ellen Miller-Scott rubbed hard at the fingers of her left hand with her right, as if she might peel the skin off. Shock and distress had left her looking her age, and Gemma could see the imperfections in her skin that makeup had covered on their first meeting.

"He-There were men, wanting money," Ellen said. "Dom had had some problems with drugs since, oh, since school. Prescription stuff, mostly. You know, he injured his knee at football, and then it was difficult for him to stop the pills. I'm sure it happens all the time." Even now, it sounded as if it were hard for her to admit. "And I-I didn't like people threatening him, but this time I decided that it had to stop, that he would never get better if I helped him. But I never thought-What if-" Her face contorted in a sob, and turned, looking again at the doorway.

It seemed to Gemma that the human need to keep watch over the dead was beyond reason-rooted in the knowledge that once the loved ones left your sight, they were lost to you forever. She couldn't imagine how she would feel if it were Kit or Toby.