Kissed a sad goodbye - Deborah Crombie [40]
Kincaid nodded. “I expect we’ll be here a few minutes. Time enough for a quick break if you’d like.”
“Right, sir. Cheers.” He gave them a wave as he started across the street towards the park.
Kincaid raised an eyebrow as he looked at what was left of the lock on Annabelle Hammond’s door. “I think ‘brutal’ might be a bit more descriptive.”
“Inconsiderate of her not to have left us with a key,” Gemma said as she pushed the door wide and Kincaid followed her in.
He glanced at her, concerned. Gemma seldom indulged in sarcasm, but when she did it was her way of whistling in the dark. The door swung closed behind them and suddenly the silent vacuum of the airless hall seemed louder than a symphony. “Good soundproofing,” he commented as he switched on the lights and scooped up the post scattered on the floor. After flipping quickly through the letters, he put them on a side table. “Nothing too interesting, but we’ll go through it later.”
“No revealing letters addressed to herself?”
“No such luck. Just bills, from the look of them.” He glanced from Gemma to the closed doors lining the T-shaped corridor. “Eenie meenie?”
Gemma considered, then pointed to the door at the other end of the T’s short arm. “That one.”
“Right.” The sand-colored Berber felt soft under his feet as he walked down the hall. “No expense spared on the carpet,” he commented.
“No expense spared anywhere, I should think,” said Gemma, close behind him. “A flat in this building must have cost a pretty penny.”
Opening the door, he found that they had chosen the sitting room. They stood on the threshold, staring. It was a large room, done in simple, spare furniture, the color scheme one of neutral sands and oatmeals. On its far side, French windows looked out over an enclosed garden, and it was the greenery framed in the glass panes that provided the room’s focal point.
“It’s beautiful,” murmured Gemma, moving into the room. “Restful. She must have loved the garden.”
From a small, flagged patio, steps led down to a walled oasis. A white wooden table and chairs stood under the trees at one end, a few pots of impatiens provided splashes of color, and on the lush rectangle of lawn, a croquet set had been abandoned, as if someone had been called away midgame.
The waiting garden gave Kincaid a stronger sense of life interrupted than he’d felt standing over Annabelle Hammond’s body in the morgue.
Turning away, he examined the room curiously. The SOCOs had been a bit more delicate in here, it seemed, and had left little evidence of their presence other than the thin dusting of fingerprint powder. There was a fireplace on the left-hand wall, fitted with gas logs and framed on either side by custom-built shelves filled with books. What people chose to read never failed to fascinate him, and he crossed the room to take a closer look.
There were a number of hardcover best-sellers, and a handful of titles that he recognized as being novels about successful women overcoming obstacles. None showed a particularly adventurous or introspective turn of mind, and all were tucked neatly between brass or alabaster bookends, with the spines arranged according to height rather than by content or author. It seemed as though Annabelle Hammond had been as tidy in her reading habits as she was in her housekeeping, and had reserved her passions for things other than books.
“Anything interesting?” asked Gemma as she came to stand beside him.
“Interesting by its absence, maybe. And obsessively neat.”
“So I noticed.” Gemma gestured towards the coffee table, where a few upscale design magazines were precisely stacked. “There’s no sign of anything in progress—no half-read books or magazines, no newspapers left open, no basket of knitting or needlework.” Turning back to the shelves, she touched the CDs stacked beside the stereo system. “She liked music, though, and her taste was a bit more eclectic. There’s jazz and classical here, as well as pop.”
His hands in his pockets, Kincaid resumed his wandering about the room, stopping to peer in the small kitchen alcove