Kissed a Sad Goodbye

green when they were children? Perhaps it had, for he remembered suddenly that Annabelle had liked to pretend it was the jungle in Sri Lanka, and that her mother’s hedge of rhododendrons was a plantation of tea bushes. He wondered if there was some genetic factor involved in the inheritance of passions, for in Annabelle, William’s fascination with tea had appeared full-fledged and undiluted, while in Jo it had never aroused more than a mild interest.
    When she’d been too young to read the more complicated text in her father’s books, Annabelle had demanded explanation of the pictures, and they’d fueled her imagination. One wet spring day in the garden, she’d decided they would pick tea. It would be the finest tea, a royal tea, she’d proclaimed as she armed Reg and Jo with baskets and instructed them to pluck only the bud and the first leaf from each stem.
    They had not been discovered until the poor rhododendrons had been stripped of almost every tightly furled pink bud, and when confronted by her furious and baffled mother, Annabelle had shouted that she’d only been doing the job properly. She’d spent a week in her room after that.
    “Do you remember when Annabelle plucked the rhododendrons?” he asked.
    William smiled. “And when her mother allowed her out of her room, she nearly burned the shed to the ground, trying to dry the leaves.”
    Reg walked round the table and sat again, slowly. He wrapped his hands round his Wedgwood teacup and stared at the skin forming on the surface of the tea, clouding it, just as time would cloud their memories and Annabelle’s sharpness would disappear beneath a film of kindly self-deception. She would become the “dear girl” William thought her, and her father’s illusions would remain unmarred by the less-than-perfect person Annabelle had been.
    Looking up, he met William’s eyes. “Nothing meant more to Annabelle than the business. I know that.” Reg heard the bleakness, unexpected, in his own voice, but he continued. “We have to carry on the way she would have wished. We owe her that.”
     
    JANICE COPPIN TOOK A LAST BITE of her donut, then brushed the flakes of sugar icing from her desk. Sipping her coffee to wash away the sweetness, she reshuffled her paperwork and scowled. She’d groused under her breath last night when Mr. Scotland Yard had sent her to Reg Mortimer’s flat. While she thought Mortimer a bit of a poser, she hadn’t relished seeing him white and ill with the news, suddenly bereft of all his charm.
    But perhaps she hadn’t been quite fair to the superintendent. There were worse tasks, including the one Kincaid had undertaken himself last night—informing the dead woman’s sister and accompanying her to the morgue. And he had asked her if she wanted to attend the postmortem this morning—she just hadn’t been able to admit that she wasn’t sure she had the bottle for it, and she couldn’t have borne embarrassing herself in front of him.
    It was even remotely possible, she supposed, that when Kincaid had told her to go home last night and see to her family, he hadn’t been condescending to her because she was female. His sergeant had mentioned having a young son, so he would be familiar with the difficulty of making arrangements.
    Janice wondered if they were sleeping together. It happened often enough, and she sensed an unspoken familiarity between them that went beyond the requirements of the job. Not that she cared, of course—if the woman was daft enough to get involved with her superior officer, that was her problem.
    But if she was going to give Kincaid credit for some sensitivity, perhaps she ought to give his advice a second thought as well. He’d said there was no such thing as an unimportant witness in a murder investigation, even old George Brent—though they’d got no further forward when they’d interviewed him.
    This was her patch, her neighborhood; she had history and a knowledge of these people that outsiders couldn’t begin to appreciate. It was time she put it to good use. She’d have another word with old George, even if it meant apologizing for some long-ago slight.
    First things first, though. Standing up, she dropped the donut wrapper in the bin and flicked the crumbs from her jacket. Reg Mortimer’s description of the busker in the tunnel had brought immediately to mind the controversial son of Lewis Finch, a local property developer who had made his name and fortune in the rebuilding of the