Cherringham--Death on a Summer Night by Neil Richards Page B

talked much since she came back except to say how much she liked London, “Dad’s great apartment,” the cool restaurants …
    The high life.
    Sarah well knew its pull.
    Daniel scrambled up the ladder again.
    “See it?”
    “Sure did,” Jack said. “Surprised there’s any water left in the river.”
    Daniel grinned at that.
    Jack’s so good with him , she thought.
    She had her eyes on Jack as Daniel did another run. Only this time when he did, Jack turned away.
    She knew that look, into the distance, signalling that he suddenly wasn’t simply watching the water show and enjoying the martini.
    And as he turned to her, she discovered that she was right.
    *
    “I had a call with Alan. Just a chat to see if there was anything we should know about Henry Trask.”
    “Really. Anything interesting?”
    Jack looked away. “Not much. But he did say there was a decades-old ‘nuisance report’ on Trask that had him lurking outside people’s homes. Happened a few times, then never again.”
    “Maybe his new wife … Dinah’s mother … didn’t appreciate it?”
    Jack tilted his head. “Yes. Could be. But the lurking? It’s exactly a person like that … that would stop, pick someone on the road.”
    “Jack, now you’re scaring me.”
    “One other thing, Sarah. When I spoke to Trask, asked about his car, what he drove. ‘A Vauxhall’, he said, just as he does now … he said. But he got rid of it just about the time Dinah disappeared.”
    Sarah listened, always amazed when things started to fit together for Jack. And of all the mysteries they had dealt with, this — besides being the oldest — also had become the creepiest.
    For that reason alone, Sarah was more than motivated to find out whether Tim Bell was guilty … or not.
    Daniel did another run; body tightly tucked again, Jack watching him.
    “If something happened that night, with Trask, Dinah, in his car. How would you make it all go away?”
    Daniel’s plunge sent a geyser shooting across the bow of the Goose.
    And Sarah could follow where Jack’s thoughts were leading.
    “In the car itself. In the water.”
    Jack added the other piece. “Yeah. In the lake that belonged to Trask.”
    “God. Wait a minute! There’s something here that maybe you don’t know, Jack.”
    “Hmm?”
    “I covered it a few months back for the Cherringham Newsletter. There were outline plans for developing that lake. And Trask was one of the people opposing it. No boating, windsurfing, swimming facilities.”
    “And no scuba diving, I bet?”
    “Exactly.”
    “See, back in the day, I always had NYPD dive teams at the ready to fish whomever and whatever out of the Hudson and East Rivers. Never learned scuba myself … but if I did dive, I know where I’d like to take a look now.”
    “You don’t dive?”
    “No.”
    Sarah looked away. She enjoyed it when she could surprise Jack.
    “Well — there’s a thing. I do .”
    And Jack’s grin said that he enjoyed a good surprise as much as his partner.
    “My ex insisted on it. We did the basic PADI work in London, and—”
    “PADI?”
    “Professional Association of Dive Instructors. Then we did our open water certification dives in the Caymans — gorgeous, clear water. Visibility over a hundred feet, watching hammerheads circling near the Cayman ‘Wall.’ A sheer drop to thousands of feet below.”
    “Now that sounds scary to me. But how long has it been?”
    “A while. But I did a lot of dives, even some just after we had the kids. The Red Sea, the Maldives.”
    She took a breath.
    “Jack. I could do this.”
    He shook his head. “Dunno, Sarah. Sounds—”
    “I’ve still got all the gear. Well, except for air tanks. But I know a sports shop in Oxford that carries them. Everything else I have.”
    She noticed that his eyes were locked on Daniel’s jumping in, climbing out, over and over.
    Thinking:
    He doesn’t want me in danger.
    But she knew with the number of dives she’d done, diving that still lake