Chapter Text
Kate woke up first. She lay still for a moment, staring up at the ceiling. The light through the curtains was pale and early. Dalgliesh's side of the bed was occupied this time, the sheets rising and falling with the steadiness of a man deeply asleep, which she found obscurely touching. He did not sleep easily; she knew that without having been told.
He had kissed her. It replayed in her mind during the night. She had imagined what his kisses were like, and he surpassed all imaginings. A solid kiss, one might say. A kiss of commitment.
A kiss for a cover, Kate reminded herself.
She got up carefully and went downstairs. The kitchen still smelled faintly of rain. Of him, too, which she was not going to examine. She made tea. She made enough for two, and set his mug on his side of the table where he always put his notebook, and then sat down with her own and looked at it for a moment.
Oblique, she told herself. Perfectly oblique.
She heard him on the stairs at half past seven, and then he appeared in the doorway already dressed, which meant he had been awake for some time before she heard him move. He looked at the table. At his mug. A small pause, the kind that contained something, and then he sat down and wrapped both hands around the tea as he always did.
"Good morning," Kate said.
"Good morning." His voice was quiet, still carrying some sleep in it, or something else. He looked at the garden. "It's cleared."
"Yes."
"Good day for it," he said. "If you wanted to speak to Morrow again."
"I thought I might go early, before the village is properly awake." She turned her mug in her hands. "And you?"
"I want another look at the Hearthstone outbuildings." He picked up his tea. "The orchard side. There's a gate in the far wall I didn't get close enough to on the first pass."
She nodded. He nodded. They drank their tea and ate their toast.
It was, Kate thought, almost entirely normal. That was the thing about him — he was so very good at making the irregular seem simply like the next thing that had happened. She had always admired it. This morning she found it slightly maddening.
"Adam," she said, before she had quite decided to, and he looked at her, waiting for her as he always did.
"Last night," Kate said. "The person watching. Did you get enough of a look to be useful?"
Dalgliesh nodded, ,"Small. A woman, as I said. The build might fit Pamela, but it could equally be Susannah, or Lucia, or any of half a dozen village residents." He set his mug down. "I wouldn't stake anything on it."
"But it tells us someone is watching the cottage."
"Yes. Deliberately, and at night, in the rain." His eyes were on his notebook now. "Which narrows the field considerably."
Kate exhaled. "Right. Good.” She exhaled, tapping the side of her mug. “Well, not good, but we have a narrow range of suspects; see who is acting strangely,” she added.
"Yes," Dalgliesh agreed with a nod.
They were very good at this, she reflected. Possibly too good.
Morrow was waiting for her at the bench again, this time with two paper cups of coffee from the tea room, which Kate accepted with genuine gratitude.
"I've been thinking about the second wife," Morrow said, without preamble. He had the look of a man who had been up since five. "Thomas Crale's second marriage. Her name was Ruth Ashby — old Norwich family, some farmland, a trust from her grandmother. She died four years after the wedding."
Kate looked at him.
"Also carbon monoxide," Morrow said. "Different county, different coroner. No one connected them because why would they? Both recorded as accidental. Both old properties, old boiler systems. Open and shut."
"So Thomas Crale did it twice."
"Looks very much like it." He sipped his coffee. "And Pamela knew him better than anyone. Visited him every month, according to neighbours who remembered. Was with him when Ruth was ill."
Kate thought of Pamela in the orchard, tending things with the ease of long familiarity. The certainty in her face. The warmth was entirely genuine, as she pressed Kate's hands in both of hers.
I wish you both every happiness.
"She didn't learn it from him," Kate said slowly. "Or not only that. She watched him, and she decided he was right. That it was right."
Morrow looked at her. "She's a true believer," he said.
"Yes." Kate folded the paper Morrow had given her along its crease. "Which means she won't stop. Not because we stay an extra night, not because she likes us. She'll be sorry, and she'll do it anyway."
Morrow was quiet for a moment. A woman wheeled a pram past along the lane, and they both waited. "What do you need from me?"
"I need you to speak to the coroner's office about Thomas Crale's first wife. And I need someone to watch the Hearthstone grounds tonight, from the lane. Not uniformed, not visible. Can you manage that?"
"There's a DC in the next village who owes me a favour."
"Good." Kate stood. "And Morrow, say nothing to the Gosses. Nothing changes today. We need one more day."
He nodded. "You think tonight?"
Kate looked back toward the lane that led to Hearthstone. The roses over the gate are very pretty in the morning sun.
"I think if I were Pamela," she said, "I would want to do it kindly. On a beautiful night, when they were peaceful and happy. I think that's how she would reason it." She paused. "So yes. Tonight, or tomorrow at the latest."
David Hale's office was in Ealing, above a dry cleaner's, which Tarrant felt said something about the quality of his client list that he couldn't quite articulate but definitely felt.
The waiting room had two chairs, a nice fern, and a receptionist who looked at Tarrant the way people looked at someone who had turned up to the wrong party and hadn't realised yet.
"I have an appointment," Tarrant said. "Daniel Tarrant. Two o'clock."
"Mr Hale is just finishing with someone." She gestured at the chairs.
Tarrant sat. Someone finished at twenty past. The someone was a small, anxious man in a good coat who left without making eye contact, which Tarrant noted professionally and filed under Graham Cleave's solicitor has more than one nervous client.
David Hale was not what Tarrant had expected. He had expected someone polished — the kind of solicitor who dealt in inherited wealth and land transactions tended toward a certain type like the boss.
David Hale was instead a short, careful-looking man in his sixties with the permanently slightly surprised expression of someone who had spent forty years hearing things he wished he hadn't.
"Mr Tarrant." He shook his hand. "Please, sit down. My secretary said you were enquiring about estate administration?"
"In a manner of speaking." Tarrant sat, and produced his warrant card, and watched David Hale's expression do several things in quick succession. "I'm hoping you can help me with some information. Purely informally, at this stage."
"I see," said Hale, in the voice of a man who was already mentally composing his letter to the Law Society.
"The Taylor estate," Tarrant said. "Sam and Diane. You administered the trust."
A pause. "I'm not able to discuss client matters—"
"They're dead, Mr Hale."
"The estate, then. The beneficiaries—"
"Are also dead. The brother who inherited died two years ago. No children." Tarrant smiled pleasantly. "So there's no one left to protect, really, is there?"
Hale looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at the dying fern, which offered nothing. "What is it you want to know?"
"Who referred the Taylors to you?"
Hale shifted in his chair. It was a small shift, barely perceptible, but Tarrant had spent enough time watching people in interview rooms to know the difference between a man considering his answer and a man considering whether to give one. "Referrals come from many sources-"
"Mr Hale."
"A colleague," Hale said finally. "A solicitor I'd worked with some years ago. He sent several young clients my way. Couples, mostly. Starting out. He said I was particularly thorough with trust arrangements." A pause. "I was pleased with the work at the time."
"And the colleague's name?"
"Crale," said Hale. "Thomas Crale."
Tarrant wrote it down, slowly, "And when did Mr Crale stop referring clients to you?"
"When he died." Hale looked at his hands. "Five years ago. Heart attack, I believe."
"Did you ever meet his sister?"
The shift again. Smaller this time, but there. "Once or twice. She came to the office with Thomas early on. A very warm woman. She brought biscuits, I remember. Homemade." He stopped. "I didn't think anything of it."
"Of course not," Tarrant said.
Upon returning to the station, Tarrant rang the cottage, glad when Dalgliesh answered.
"Thomas Crale referred the Taylors to the solicitor," he said, when Dalgliesh picked up. "And the Patels. Probably others we haven't found yet. Pamela wasn't just copying her brother's method - she was copying his network. He'd already done the groundwork. She inherited the whole system."
A pause on the line. Dalgliesh's thoughtful silences had a particular quality - not empty, just occupied. He had found it frustrating and never understood how Kate was fine with. Well, he had a theory as to why.
"She learned it from watching him," Dalgliesh said.
"And improved on it, near as I can tell. He only managed two. She's at three and counting." Tarrant leaned against the stairwell wall. "How's the Cotswolds?"
"We may need to move sooner."
"Right." A pause. "Both of you alright?"
"Yes."
"Only asking," Tarrant said, in his professional voice.
"Tarrant."
"I'm not doing anything. I'm the picture of professionalism." Tarrant insisted. He straightened up. "Tell Kate I found the biscuit angle very useful. She'll know what I mean."
"She won't."
"She will. Good luck, sir." He rang off before Dalgliesh could correct him on the sir, which he only used when he wanted to be annoying, which was most of the time.
He looked at his notes. Pamela Goss, née Crale. A warm woman who brought homemade biscuits and learned murder from a brother she thought was wonderful.
The countryside was a strange place.
Dalgliesh found the gate in the orchard wall at half past eight.
It was not locked. The latch was oiled — recently, he thought, running his thumb along the mechanism. The gate opened onto a narrow path that ran along the back of the properties, behind the hedge line, connecting the kitchen garden to the lane on the far side of the village. Invisible from the cottages. Invisible from the Farmhouse.
A very convenient path, if you knew it was there.
He stood in the gateway for a moment, thinking about timing. The victims had always been found in the morning. The gas would take several hours to build to a fatal concentration. Someone would need to access the boiler shed late — after midnight, most likely, when the cottages were dark and the guests reliably asleep. This path would bring them there and take them away without passing a single lit window.
He crouched and looked at the ground. The rain had softened the earth along the path's edge, and there, pressed into the mud beside the gate's threshold, was the clean half-moon of a boot print. Small. A woman's boot, or a slight man's.
He photographed it with the small camera they had brought for exactly this kind of purpose, then stood and looked back across the orchard. The apple trees were very still. The cottage windows caught the morning light.
Dalgliesh stood and sighed, pondering on Pamela. She was a true believer in what she was doing. The problem with a true believer, he thought, was that they were not deterred by affection. Pamela Goss liked her guests. He was certain of that. And she would grieve Joel and Laura with the same unfeigned sorrow she had shown for the others, and that grief would not feel like hypocrisy to her, because it was not. She had two entirely consistent positions in her mind — that these people were worthy of happiness, and that their happiness was built on the wrong foundation.
He had seen that kind of certainty before, in various forms. It was the most difficult thing in the world to argue with, and the only answer was to simply stop it.
Kate would be thinking the same thing, he knew, in the village right now. They had a way of arriving at the same point from different directions and then meeting there, which he had come to rely on more than he had ever found comfortable to acknowledge.
She had been rather nervous this morning, no doubt wanting to know why he kissed her. Dalgliesh
He went back through the gate and latched it carefully behind him.
They met at the cottage just before noon. Kate had sandwiches from the village shop and spread them on the kitchen table without ceremony, and Dalgliesh sat down and told her about the gate and the boot print as well as the phone call from Tarrant before she had finished unwrapping the paper, because that was the kind of partnership they had — information shared in the same breath as the ordinary things, almost like a marriage.
"The path connects to the lane behind the church," Kate said. "I walked part of it on the way back. You could get from the Farmhouse to any of the cottages in under four minutes."
"Yes." He looked at the map they had pinned to the inside of the folder. "She wouldn't even need to cross the main garden."
Kate sat down across from him. "Morrow's confirmed a second death under Thomas Crale. A second wife, same method, same result. Pamela was present throughout."
Dalgliesh was quiet for a moment. "So the brother was her template."
"And possibly her justification." Kate plated sandwiches. "If he could do it twice and remain a good man in her eyes, then it was never wrong. It was only unusual."
"A private moral economy," Dalgliesh said. He picked up his pen and wrote something briefly, then set it down. "How long do we have, do you think?"
"Tonight," Kate said. "Joel and Laura's final night is tomorrow. She won't leave it to the last moment, she'll want the evening to have been happy, for them to have gone to sleep peacefully." She looked at the table. "Morrow has someone watching the lane from ten o'clock."
"Good thinking. We'll wait, and we'll catch her.”
He met her eyes across the table, and there was a moment — not the first such moment, not the most significant, but one she would remember nonetheless — in which everything that had not been said simply existed between them, acknowledged without being named, which was perhaps the closest they had come, and perhaps, for now, was enough.
"Good," said Kate.
"Yes," said Dalgliesh.