Glancing at Gemma, he found her studying him. Her freckles, usually an almost imperceptible dusting against her fair skin, stood out in sharp contrast to her pallor. He suddenly felt her exhaustion as if it were his own, and the familiar, intimate awareness of her ran through him like a shock. As he lifted a hand to touch her shoulder, she started to speak, and they both froze. They had lost the ease of it, all their carefully established camaraderie had gone, and it seemed to him as if she might misconstrue even his small gesture of comfort. Awkwardly, he dropped his hand and shoved it in his pocket, as if removing it from temptation.

As Deveney came back to them, Gemma abruptly excused herself and left the kitchen by the mudroom door without meeting Kincaid’s eyes again.

“Dr. Ling said she’d schedule the postmortem first thing tomorrow at Guildford Mortuary.” As he spoke, Deveney slumped against the doorframe and watched with an abstracted expression as one of the civilian techs scraped up a blood sample from the floor. “Can’t be soon enough, as far as the brass are concerned. I’ll have the plods out door-to-door at first light-” He paused, and for the first time his expression was wary as he glanced at Kincaid. “That is, if it meets with your approval.”

The chain of command when the Yard was called in to work with a regional force could be a bit tricky. Although technically Kincaid outranked Deveney, he had no wish to antagonize the local man at the outset. Nick Deveney seemed an intelligent and capable copper, Kincaid thought as he nodded assent, and he’d be more than happy to let him run his end of things without interference. “You’ll be following up on this intruder business?”

“Maybe at daylight we’ll find he’s left half-inch-deep footprints all over the garden,” Deveney said, grinning.

Kincaid snorted. “Along with a set of perfect prints on the doorknob and a previous a mile long. We should be so lucky. How early is first thing, by the way?” he asked, yawning and rubbing his hand across the stubble on his chin.