A finer end - Deborah Crombie [92]
The policewoman, O’Toole, stood, too, closed her notebook, and gave Faith another bright, false smile as she followed Greely out.
Faith sat where they had left her. The baby moved, kicking her repeatedly just above the pelvis, fierce little jabs. Placing her hands against her belly, Faith whispered, “Shhh, shhh, it’s all right,” and rocked mindlessly back and forth. Gradually, the kicking grew less frequent, then ceased. “It’s going to be all right,” Faith said again, softly, reassuring herself as much as the baby. But how?
Greely had made up his mind to pin Garnet’s murder on her and Nick: he would keep looking for some sort of evidence to support his theory. It was her fault that Nick had got involved in all this; it was her responsibility to find a way to clear him.
If she could just search Garnet’s things, and her papers. Surely Garnet had left some trace, some clue, as to who wanted her dead.
Tomorrow she’d insist on going back to work, and then she would find a way to get back into the farmhouse. And she would not let herself wonder what Nick might have done if he’d found her missing and believed Garnet responsible.
Nick stood outside the police station in Yeovil, stranded, without his bike and without a ride.
When he’d arrived at the bookshop that morning, Inspector Greely and a policewoman had been waiting for him in an unmarked car. “Let’s go for a little ride while we chat,” Greely had said. “Unless you’d rather we talked in the shop?”
Nick had got into the car. But then they’d driven him from Glastonbury to the Yeovil station, and when Nick had protested, Greely replied slyly that they were just protecting his interests by doing things properly, tape recorder and all.
They marched him inside and into an interrogation room, Nick burning all the while with fury. After four hours of repeating the same questions in the bare, ugly room, they had let him go. With the smile Nick had begun to hate, Greely had assured him they would soon find something that would link him to Garnet Todd’s murder. “Oh, and don’t leave town,” Greely added cheerfully, as if it were an afterthought.
Still running on anger and adrenaline, Nick stuck his hands in his pockets and started walking. By the time he reached the A37 going north, he’d begun to feel weak. He realized he hadn’t eaten all day.
A lorry driver took him all the way to Glastonbury, dropping him at the Street roundabout. He started up Magdalene Street out of habit, but as he neared the shop it occurred to him that he had no idea what he would say to his boss.
Oh, just a bit of police grilling, a small matter of a murder. Nothing to worry about. Right.
Hurriedly, he crossed the street and, rounding the corner into the High, took refuge in the Café Galatea.
Now that he could get something to eat, he found he’d lost his appetite. Instead, he spooned sugar into a coffee and sipped it gratefully, warming his hands on the cup. It was a normal Saturday afternoon in the café; half a dozen customers relaxing over tea in the midafternoon lull; a middle-aged hippie in tie-dye and sandals hunched over the computer in the back; Melissa, the waitress who fancied him, glancing at him from beneath her lashes.
But in the space of four days his life had become a nightmare, and he had no guarantee that, for him, things would ever be normal again.
How the hell had he got himself into this mess? And what did he do now? Would he have been better off if he hadn’t taken Superintendent Kincaid’s advice—if he’d continued to deny that he’d been to the house? But Greely had told him they’d found his prints, and they would be doing a forensic match between his bike tires and the tracks in Garnet’s yard. When the test results came back, he’d look guilty as hell.
He could tell Greely some of the things he’d begun to suspect about Garnet, but it would only make his motive look