Where Memories Lie by Deborah Crombie Read Free Book Online Page A

line snaked from a shunt in her hand to the standing pole at the head of the bed, but otherwise there were no wires or tubes, no indication that Vi Walters’s universe had been turned on its head.
    Her eyes were closed, her forehead creased in a slight frown, as if sleeping were an effort. When, Gemma wondered, had she last seen her mother in repose? Her mum was always busy, always doing, the only respite she allowed herself the occasional cup of tea in the small kitchen of the flat above the bakery. Sometimes, after a particularly hard day, she would prop her feet on one of the other chairs and sigh, but if Gemma’s dad came in, she would right herself briskly, as if she didn’t want to be seen slacking.
    Gemma pulled the stiffly upright visitor’s chair as close to the bed as she could and took her mother’s hand a little awkwardly, unsure if the touch would wake her, but her mum’s eyelids merely fluttered, then the line on her forehead relaxed, as if she’d found some subconscious comfort.
    Dawn found Gemma still there, her cheek now pillowed on the bed beside her mother’s hand, when the consultant making early rounds came in with his diagnosis.

CHAPTER 4
    As the years go by the truth becomes more and more agitated; the energies that go into the maintenance of the fortress are Herculean; they must be manned night and day…
    —Diana Petre, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerle y
    “He was circumcised, if that helps.” Dr. Rainey peered over his half-glasses at Gavin Hoxley, then back down at the body on his mortuary table. “He could very well have been Jewish.”
    Hoxley averted his eyes. Circumcised or not, the sight of naked male genitalia, blue tinged and limp, made him feel acutely vulnerable. Nor did he like seeing his unidentified victim stripped of all dignity. The man’s hands and nails had been clean, his hair and face barbered and shaved. He had been someone, this thin man with the salt-and-pepper hair, and now he was nothing but a specimen to be poked and prodded on Dr. Rainey’s table.
    The fact that the man might have been a Jew made Hoxley still more uncomfortable. If it was true, it meant that the autopsy itself would be considered a desecration of the remains.
    Not that Hoxley put much stock in autopsies himself, or caredmuch for pathologists under the best of circumstances. Most of them treated wrongful-death investigations as a nuisance, but Rainey, a small, agile man with a long, mobile face and curly brown hair, had a policeman’s curiosity. Hoxley had requested him specifically, even though it had meant trekking across London Bridge to Guy’s Hospital.
    Looking up, he found Rainey regarding him with the same intense gaze he leveled at his corpses. “You look a bit worse for wear yourself,” Rainey commented.
    “Thanks, Doc. We try to impress.” With a grimace, Hoxley brushed his hat at the front of his suit, a futile gesture. Arriving home in the early hours of the morning, he had flung jacket, shirt, and trousers across a chair without a thought for wrinkles.
    Then, when he climbed into bed, he’d discovered that the small détente he’d established with Linda earlier in the evening had vanished—she’d turned away from him, balancing on her edge of the bed like a tightrope walker, and the inches between them seemed as cold and dangerous as no-man’s-land.
    When he’d roused himself from a fitful sleep a few hours later, she hadn’t spoken, even though he’d known from her breathing that she was awake. Not wanting to disturb the children, he’d settled for a quick wash and shave instead of a bath, and it was only when he’d looked in his car’s driving mirror that he’d seen the patches he’d missed on his chin. It was fitting, he thought, that he looked like the walking wounded.
    “Late night, early start,” he went on with a shrug, “and I don’t have a thing on the victim. What else can you tell me, Doc?” A fingertip search of the garden started at first