Leave the Grave Green (17 page)

He knew she must be trying to catalogue him—not a familiar client or supplier, no briefcase or samples to mark him as a commercial traveler—and he couldn’t resist teasing her a bit. Her short bobbed dark hair and heart-shaped face gave her an appealing innocence. “Nice office,” he said, looking slowly around the reception area. Modular furniture, dramatic lighting, art-deco advertising prints carefully framed and placed—it added up, he thought, to clever use of limited funds.

“Yes, sir. Is there someone you wanted to see?” she asked a little more forcefully, her smile fading.

He removed his warrant card and handed her the open folder. “Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, Scotland Yard. I’d like to speak to someone about Connor Swann.”

“Oh.” She looked from his face to the card and back again, then her brown eyes filled with tears. “Isn’t it just awful? We only heard this morning.”

“Really? Who notified you?” he asked, casually retrieving his card.

She sniffed. “His father-in-law, Sir Gerald Asherton. He rang John—that’s Mr. Frye—”

A door opened in the hallway behind her desk and a man came out, shrugging into a sport jacket. “Melissa, love, I’m off to the—” His hand up to tighten his tie, he stopped as he saw Kincaid.

“Here’s Mr. Frye now,” she said to Kincaid, then added to her boss, “A man from Scotland Yard, here about Connor, John.”

“Scotland Yard? Connor?” Frye repeated, and his momentary bewilderment gave Kincaid a chance to study him. He judged him to be about his own age, but short, dark, and already acquiring that extra layer of padding that comes with desk-bound affluence.

Kincaid introduced himself, and Frye recovered enough to shake hands. “What can I do for you, Superintendent? I mean, from what Sir Gerald said, I didn’t expect…”

Smiling disarmingly, Kincaid said, “I just have a few routine questions about Mr. Swann and his work.”

Frye seemed to relax a bit. “Well, look, I was just going round to the pub for some lunch, and I’ve got a client meeting as soon as I get back. Could we talk and grab a bite at the same time?”

“Suits me.” Kincaid realized that he was ravenously hungry, a not unexpected side effect of attending an autopsy, but the prospect of the culinary delights to be found in a Reading pub didn’t fill him with anticipation.

As they walked the block to the pub, Kincaid glanced at his companion. Three-piece suit in charcoal gray, expensively cut, but the waistcoat strained its buttons; midday beard shadow; hair slicked back in the latest yuppie fashion; and as Kincaid matched his stride to the shorter man’s, he caught the scent of musky aftershave. He thought Connor had given the same attention to his appearance—and advertising was, after all, a business of image.

They made desultory chitchat until they reached their destination, and as they entered the White Hart, Kincaid’s spirits lifted considerably. Plain and clean, the pub had an extensive lunch menu chalked on a board and was filled with escapees from other offices, all busily eating and talking. He chose the plaice, with chips and salad, his stomach rumbling. Turning to Frye, he asked, “What are you drinking?”

“Lemonade.” Frye grimaced apologetically. “I’m slimming, I’m afraid. I love beer, but it goes straight to my middle.” He patted his waistcoat.

Kincaid bought him a lemonade and ordered a pint for himself, not feeling the least bit of guilt at giving his companion cause for envy. Carrying their drinks, they threaded their way to a small table near the window. “Tell me about Connor Swann,” he said as they settled into their seats. “How long had he worked for you?”

“A little over a year. Gordon and I needed someone to do the selling, you see. We’re neither of us really good at it, and we’d acquired enough clients that we thought we could justify—”

“Gordon’s your partner?” Kincaid interrupted. “I thought there were three of you.” He sipped his pint and wiped a bit of foam from his lip with his tongue.

“I’m sorry. I’d better start at the beginning, hadn’t I?” Frye
looked longingly at Kincaid’s celery, sighed and went on. “I’m
Frye
, of course, Gordon is
Gillock
, and there isn’t a
Blackwell
. When we went out on our own three years ago, we thought Gillock and Frye sounded like a fishmongers’.” Frye smiled a little sheepishly. “The Blackwell was just to add a bit of class. Anyway, I function as creative director and Gordon does the media buying and oversees production, so we were stretched pretty thin. When we heard through a friend that Connor might be interested in an account executive’s position, we thought it was just the ticket.”

The barmaid appeared at their table with laden plates. Tall and blond, she might have been a Valkyrie in jeans and sweater. She bestowed a ravishing smile upon them along with their lunches and made her way back through the crowd. “That’s Marian,” Frye said. “We call her the Ice Maiden. Everyone’s madly in love with her and she enjoys it immensely.”

“Does the adjective refer to her looks or her disposition?” I Kincaid looked at Frye’s plate of cold salad and tucked happily into his steaming fish and chips.

“I’m not allowed fried things, either,” Frye said, eyeing Kincaid’s food wistfully. “Marian’s disposition is sunny enough, but she’s not generous with her favors. Even Connor struck out.”

“Did he chat her up?”

“Does the sun rise every morning?” Frye asked sarcastically, pushing a sprig of watercress into the corner of his mouth with his little finger. “Of course Con chatted her up. It was as natural to him as breathing—” He stopped, looking stricken. “Oh Christ, that was tasteless. I’m sorry. It’s just that I haven’t quite taken it in yet.”

Kincaid squeezed a little more lemon on his excellent fish and asked, “Did you like him? Personally, I mean.”

Frye looked thoughtful. “Well yes, I suppose I did. But it’s not that simple. We were quite chuffed to have him at first, as I said. Of course, we wondered why he would have left one of the best firms in London for us, but he said he’d been having domestic problems, wanted to be a bit closer to home, get out of the London rat race, that sort of thing.” He took another bite of salad and chewed deliberately.

Kincaid wondered if Frye’s sorrowful expression reflected his opinion of his lunch or his feelings about Connor. “And?” he prompted gently.

“I suppose it was naive of us to have believed it. But Con could be very charming. Not just with women—men liked him, too. That was part of what made him a good salesman.”

“He was good at his job?”

“Oh yes, very. When he put his mind to it. But that was the problem. He was so full of enthusiasm at first—plans and ideas for everything—that I think Gordon and I were rather swept away.” Frye paused. “Looking back on it, I can see that there was a kind of frantic quality to it, but I didn’t realize it at the time.”

“Back up just a bit,” Kincaid said, his forkful of chips halted in midair. “You said you were naive to have believed Connor’s reasons for coming to work for you—did you find they weren’t true?”

“Let’s say he left a good deal out,” Frye answered ruefully. “A few months later we began hearing trickles through the grapevine about what had really happened.” He drew his brows together in a frown. “Didn’t his wife tell you? You have spoken to the wife?”

“Tell me what?” Kincaid avoided the question, trying to fit the vivid image of Julia in his mind into that neutral possessive.
The wife
.

Frye scraped ham salad and shredded carrot into a neat pile in the center of his plate. “Con’s firm in London handled the ENO account. That’s how he met her—at some reception or other. I suppose she must have attended with her family. So when she left him and he had a…” Looking rather embarrassed, Frye studied his plate and pushed his food around with his fork. “I guess you’d call it an emotional breakdown. Apparently he went quite bonkers—broke down crying in front of clients, that sort of thing. The firm kept it all very hush-hush—I suppose they felt they couldn’t risk offending the Ashertons by publicly turning him out on his ear.”

They had all been very discreet, Kincaid thought. Had compassion entered into it at all? “The firm gave him a recommendation when he came to you?”

“We wouldn’t have taken him on, otherwise,” Frye answered matter-of-factly.

“When did things begin to go wrong?”

An expression of guilt replaced the embarrassment on Frye’s face. “It’s not that Con was a total washout—I didn’t mean to give you that impression.”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” Kincaid said soothingly, hoping to forestall Frye’s
let’s not speak ill of the dead
qualifications.

“It was a gradual thing. He missed appointments with clients—always with a good excuse, mind you, but after a few times even good excuses begin to wear thin. He promised things we couldn’t deliver—” He shook his head in remembered dismay. “That’s a creative director’s nightmare. And all those new accounts he was going to bring in, all those connections he had…”

“Didn’t materialize?”

Frye shook his head regretfully. “’Fraid not.”

Kincaid pushed away his empty plate. “Why did you keep him on, Mr. Frye? It certainly sounds as if he became more of a liability than an asset.”

“Call me John, why don’t you,” Frye said. Leaning forward confidentially, he continued, “The funny thing is, a few months ago Gordon and I had just about screwed ourselves up to give him the sack, but then things started to improve. Nothing earth-shaking, but he seemed to become a bit more dependable, a bit more interested.”

“Any idea what prompted the change?” Kincaid asked, thinking of Sharon and little Hayley.

Frye shrugged. “Not a clue.”

“Did you know he had a girlfriend?”

“Girlfriends, you mean. Plural,” Frye said with emphasis. With the resigned air of the much-married, he added, “Once my wife met him a few times, it was more than my life was worth to have a pint with him after work. She was sure he’d lead me into temptation.” He smiled. “Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, I never had Connor’s knack with women.”

The lunchtime crowd had thinned. Relieved from the crush at the bar, Marian came to collect their empty plates. “Anything else, lads? A sweet? There’s some smashing gateau left—”

“Don’t torment me, please.” Frye put his hands over his face with a moan.

Marian scooped up Kincaid’s plate and gave him a most un-icy wink. Smothering a chuckle, he thought that Frye’s wife needn’t have worried about Connor’s influence—her husband’s weaknesses obviously lay in other directions. That train of thought reminded him of a particular weakness they hadn’t addressed. “Were you aware of Connor’s gambling debts?”

“Debts?” Frye asked, draining the last drop of lemonade from his glass. “I knew he liked a bit of racing, but I never knew it was that serious.”

“Ever hear of a chap called Kenneth Hicks?”

Frye wrinkled his brow for a moment, then shook his head. “Can’t say that I have.”

Kincaid pushed his chair back, then stopped as another question occurred to him. “John, did you ever meet Connor’s wife, Julia?”

Frye’s reaction surprised him. After a moment of rather sheepish throat-clearing, he finally looked Kincaid in the eye. “Well, um, I wouldn’t say I exactly met her.”

Kincaid raised an eyebrow. “How can you ‘not exactly’ meet someone?”

“I saw her. That is, I went to see her, and I did.” At Kincaid’s even more doubtful expression he colored and said, “Oh hell, I feel an idiot, a right prat. I was curious about her, after all I’d heard, so when I saw the notice in the paper of her show in Henley…”

“You went to the opening?”

“My wife was away at her mum’s for the night, and I thought, well, why not, there’s no harm in it.”

“Why should there have been?” Kincaid asked, puzzled.

“I want to paint,” Frye said simply. “That’s why I studied art in the first place. My wife thinks it’s frivolous of me—two kids to support and all that—”

“—and artists are bad influences?” Kincaid finished for him.

“Something like that.” He smiled ruefully. “She does get a bit carried away sometimes. Thinks I’d bugger off and leave them to starve, I suppose, if someone waggled a paintbrush under my nose.”

“What happened at the opening, then? Did you meet Julia?”

Frye gazed dreamily past Kincaid’s shoulder. “She’s quite striking, isn’t she? And her paintings… well, if I could paint like that, I wouldn’t spend my life doing print layouts for White’s Plumbing Supply and Carpetland.” He gave a self-deprecating grimace. “But I can’t.” Focusing again on Kincaid, he added, “I didn’t meet her, but not from lack of trying. I’d drunk my cheap champagne—not without a good bit of it knocked down my shirt-front by careless elbows—and had almost made my way through the mob to her when she slipped out the front door.”

“Did you follow her?”

“Eventually I elbowed my way to the door, thinking I’d at least pay my respects on my way out.”

“And?” Kincaid prompted impatiently.

“She was nowhere in sight.”

The trees arched overhead, their branches interlocking like twined fingers, squeezing tighter and tighter—Gemma blew a wisp of hair from her face and said, “Silly goose.” The words seemed to bounce back at her, then it was quiet again inside the car except for an occasional squeaking as the twigs and rootlets protruding from the banks brushed against the windows. The sound reminded her of fingernails on chalkboard. London and Tommy Godwin’s urbane civility seemed a world away, and for a moment she wished she’d insisted on attending the autopsy with Kincaid. He had left a message for her at the Yard, summing up the rather inconclusive results.

She shifted down into second gear as the gradient grew steeper. Kincaid had been with her when she’d driven this way the first time, his presence forestalling any lurking claustrophobia. It was all quite silly, really, she chided herself. It was just a narrow road, after all, and some of her discomfort could surely be put down to her London-bred distrust of the country.

Nevertheless, she spied the turning for Badger’s End with some relief, and soon bumped to a stop in the clearing before the house. She got out of the car and stood for a moment. Even in the chill air, the damp scent of leaf mold reached her nose, rich as autumn distilled.