Deborah Crombie - Where Memories Lie

"He struggled," said Kate, lifting Dom's hands and examining the fingertips. "They usually do when they strangle themselves rather than breaking the neck. See, there's some bruising and torn nails, and here"-she touched the silk at his throat-"there are some little tears in the fabric."

Kincaid made an involuntary grimace and Kate shot him a quick look. "Had you met him, then, before this?"

"Yes. We'd interviewed him a couple of times."

"Always makes it harder," she said. "Fortunately, I seldom have that problem. At least there doesn't seem to have been any autoerotica involved. He kept his trousers on. But I've certainly seen more determined suicides." She looked up. "That wasn't a very good knot. Or a very big drop. And the neckties were resourceful enough, but if he'd really been determined, he'd have used a length of flex, something like a lamp cord, maybe. If you want my very professional opinion, I'd say it took him a good few minutes to die."

"His mother was here. He might have had a half-formed hope that she would find him."

"Well, speculating's your job," said Kate. "Let's see what I can tell you for certain." She pushed back the cuffs of the unbuttoned sleeves of his shirt, then turned his wrists over. "Ah. Look at this." She traced the faint white lines on the pale, smooth skin on the underside of Dom's wrists. "More on the left than on the right. Was he right-handed?"

Kincaid thought back, recalling Dom lifting a hand to pick at his shirt, or to push the hair from his forehead. "I think so. Hesitation scars?"

"Yes. And let's see what else." She pushed the left sleeve up above the elbow. The inside of Dom Scott's arm bore a trail of purple marks, some faded to scars, some fresh bruises, the punctures still visible. "And on the right, too," Kate said, pushing back the other sleeve. "I won't be surprised if we find tracks on the thighs as well, and any other place he could find to stick a needle." She looked up at Kincaid, all humor gone, her face implacable. "This boyo needed help in a big way."

Gavin Hoxley was buried the next day in Brompton Cemetery, with full police honors. Erika had found the notice in the Times, and in doing so had learned for the first time his date of birth, the names of the parents who had predeceased him, and the names of his wife and children. His death had, of course, been reported as an accident, and she recalled with bitter irony his superintendent telling her that the department took care of its own.

The preponderance of mourners, however, allowed Erika to stand back from the crowd, unnoticed. The fine May weather continued unabated, and Gavin Hoxley's widow-Linda, she was called-wore black linen, and a hat that Erika would have admired when she'd worked in the millinery department at Whiteleys, early in the war. The children, a boy and a girl, looked stodgy and dull, as if they had failed to inherit their father's looks as well as the spark that had set him apart.

At any other time, Erika would have scolded herself for the unkind thought, but on this day she did not care. She watched the grieving widow, supported on either side by an older couple who must be her parents, throw a clod of earth on the coffin, and Erika felt not even a stirring of pity.

For Linda Hoxley would recover, would marry again, would perhaps even have more children.

For a moment, as Erika watched Gavin's children follow their mother's example, she felt a wild flare of hope-perhaps she was carrying Gavin's child. But the thought faded as quickly as it had come. She had been too damaged by the things that had happened to her. The doctors had told her so in her first weeks in England, and although she had never been given a chance to test their diagnosis, she'd not doubted the truth of it.

And tomorrow she had her own husband to bury. The police had released David's body, and she had made arrangements for a service and a burial plot in the Jewish cemetery in Willesden. But tomorrow she would feel no less out of place than she did here, watching a Christian funeral for a man she had loved for a day.

Her father had not been an observant Jew. He had felt that being perceived as "too Jewish" would damage his prospects-and yet his degree of Jewishness had mattered not one jot in the end.

And David-David had felt that his God had betrayed him, had betrayed them all-what rational god, after all, would allow six million Jews to die? And David had been a rational man.

Erika watched as the service drew to a close and the mourners straggled away. She saw the large, ginger-haired Francis Tyrell glance at her, picking her out among the headstones where she stood, but after a moment's hesitation, he turned and followed his fellow officers.

And when they were all gone, the sextons went about the business of returning the earth they had removed. Erika lowered herself to the grass and began to pull the spring weeds from the grave of a child whose name had been half rubbed from the headstone by weather and time.

The sun beat down on her head. Her vision blurred, and her fingernails grew caked with crumbly dark soil. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. She knew the Anglican litany; she had buried enough friends during the war.

After a while, she looked up and saw that even the sextons had finished. Slowly, she stood, brushing her green-stained hands against her skirt, and walked across the rough grass.

There was no headstone, of course, only the raised mound of the grave, which would settle with time as the grass and nettles grew over it. Erika knelt, but could not bring herself to touch. It would bring her no closer.

What would she do now? David was gone, and the past with him. Whatever he had done, or tried to do, she knew it was not within her power to achieve justice for him, if Gavin had failed.

And Gavin was gone. There her mind stopped. She could not contemplate the why, or how, or what might have been. She could think only of how she would go on, who she might become. What had she left within the husk of her heart?

Reason, she told herself. Logic. The intelligence to look after herself, to make a mark in the world. And those things would have to be enough.

Gemma was waiting when Kincaid and Cullen came out of Dominic Scott's house. "Kate's not finished, then?" she asked.

"Not quite," Kincaid told her. He looked tired, she thought, as if the last half hour spent with Dominic Scott's body had drained him. "His mother said he had a problem with prescription drugs. Well, it was a bit more than that. It looks like we guessed right. He was a raging junkie, and had been for a good while. And he was self-harming, at the least."

"Cutting?" When Kincaid nodded, she said, "Do you think his mother knew?"

He sighed. "I don't know. I can't gauge her. And parents have an enormous capacity for self-deception."

"Why does it matter whether she knew or not?" asked Cullen. "It puts him squarely in the frame, and so does his suicide. He needed money to pay off his suppliers. He nicked the diamond brooch, then got his girlfriend to put it up for sale through Pevensey. Then, when you came round saying Erika had claimed it, he got the wind up. Didn't want his name connected, so killed the girlfriend, then Pevensey, then topped himself because he felt guilty."

"First off," Gemma said sharply, "she wasn't the girlfriend . Her name was Kristin. And it doesn't tell us where he got the brooch, where he got the car, or what Harry Pevensey had to do with it. Or why Dom would think he couldn't bluff it out-we still have no more than circumstantial evidence that he was even connected."

"Maybe he just didn't want his mum to find out," Cullen shot back.