Chapter One
Duncan Kincaid's holiday began well. As he turned the car
into the lane, a shaft of sun broke through the clouds and
lit a patch of rolling Yorkshire moor as if someone had
thrown the switch on a celestial spotlight.
Drystone walls ran like pale runes across the brilliant
green of pasture, where luminous sheep nibbled,
unconcerned with their importance in the composition. The
scene seemed set off in time as well as space, and gave
him the sensation of viewing a living tapestry, a world
remote and utterly unattainable. The clouds shifted again,
the vision fading as swiftly as it had come, and he felt
an odd shiver of loss at its passing.
The last few weeks' grind must be catching up with him, he
thought, shrugging away the faint sense of foreboding. New
Scotland Yard didn't officially require newly promoted
Detective Superintendents to work themselves into early
coronaries, but August Bank Holiday had slipped easily
into September, and he'd gone right on accumulating his
time off. Something always came up, and the last case had
been particularly beastly.
A string of bodies in rural Sussex, all women, all
similarly mutilated - a policeman's worst nightmare.
They'd found him in the end, a real nutter, but there was
no guarantee that the evidence they'd sopainstakingly
gathered would convince a bleeding-heart jury, and the
senselessness of it took most of the satisfaction from
finishing up the mountain of paperwork.
"Lovely way to spend your Saturday night," Gemma James,
Kincaid's sergeant, had said the evening before as they
waded through the last of the case files.
"Tell the recruiters that. I doubt it occurred to them."
Kincaid grinned at her across his littered desk. Gemma
wouldn't grace a poster at the moment, her face white with
fatigue, carbon smudge like a bruise along her cheekbone.
She puffed out her cheeks and blew at the wisps of red
hair that straggled into her eyes. "You're just as well
out of it for a week. Too bad some of us don't have
cousins with posh holiday flats, or whatever it is."
"Do I detect a trace of envy?"
"You're off to Yorkshire tomorrow, and I'm off home to do
a week's worth of washing and go round the shops? Can't
imagine why." Gemma smiled at him with her usual good
humor, but when she spoke next her voice held a trace of
motherly concern. "You look knackered. It's about time you
had a break. It'll do you a world of good, I'm sure."
Such solicitousness from his sergeant, ten years his
junior, amused Kincaid, but it was a new experience and he
found he didn't really object. He'd pushed for his
promotion because it meant getting away from the desk and
out into the field again, but he'd begun to think that the
best thing about it might be the acquisition of Sergeant
Gemma James. In her late twenties, divorced, raising a
small son on her own - Gemma's good-natured demeanor,
Kincaid was discovering, concealed a quick mind and a
fierce ambition.
"I don't think it's exactly my cup of tea," he said,
shuffling the last loose sheets of paper into a file
folder. "A timeshare."
"Your cousin, is it, who arranged this for you?" Kincaid
nodded. "His wife's expecting and their doctor's decided
at the last moment that she shouldn't leave London, so
they thought of me, rather than let their week go to
waste."
"Fortune," Gemma had countered, teasing him a bit, "has a
way of picking on the less deserving."
Too tired even for their customary after work stop at the
pub, Gemma had gone off to Leyton, and Kincaid had
stumbled home to his Hampstead flat and slept the
dreamless sleep of the truly exhausted. And now, deserving
or not, he intended to make the most of this unexpected
gift.
As he hesitated at the top of the lane, still unsure of
his direction, the sun came through fully and beat down
upon the roof of the car. Suddenly it was a perfect late
September day, warm and golden, full of promise. "A
propitious omen for a holiday," he said aloud, and felt
some of his weariness drop away. Now, if only he could
find Followdale House. The arrow for Woolsey-under-Bank
pointed directly across a sheep pasture. Time to consult
the map again.
He drove slowly, elbow out the Midget's open window,
breathing in the spicy scent of the hedgerows and watching
for some indication that he was on the right track. The
lane wound past occasional farms, squarely and sturdily
built in gray, Yorkshire slate, and above them the moor
stretched fingers of woodland enticingly down into the
pastures. Crisp nights must have preceded this blaze of
Indian summer, as the trees were already turning, the
copper and gold interspersed with an occasional splash of
green. In the distance, above the patchwork of field and
pasture and low moorland, the ground rose steeply away to
a high bank.
Rounding a curve, Kincaid found himself at the head of a
picture-book village. Stone cottages hugged the lane, and
pots and planters filled with geraniums and petunias
trailed cascades of color into the road. On his right, a
massive stone half-circle bore the legend "Woolsey-under-
Bank." The high rise of land, now seeming to hang over the
village, must be Sutton Bank.
A few yards further on his left, a gap in the high hedge
revealed a stone gate-post inset with a brass plaque. The
inscription read "Followdale," and beneath it was engraved
a curving, full-blown rose. Kincaid whistled under his
breath. Very posh indeed, he thought as he turned the car
into the narrow gateway and stopped on the gravel
forecourt .
© 2003-2026