Leave the Grave Green (24 page)

“He hasn’t eaten anyone since lunch, love.”

“Ta, Bert,” said Gemma, grinning. “That makes me feel ever so much better.”

Still, she went along the corridor in some trepidation. In truth, Chief Superintendent Denis Childs was known to be fair with his staff, but there was something in his pleasant and courteous manner that made her want to confess even imagined misdeeds. His door stood open, as was his policy, and Gemma tapped lightly before entering. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

Childs looked up from a file. He had recently adopted granny-style reading glasses, and they looked so incongruous perched on his massive moon-shaped face that she had to bite her lip to stifle a giggle. Fortunately, he took them off and dangled them daintily from thumb and forefinger. “Sit down, Sergeant. What have you and Kincaid been up to the past few days—tiddlywinks? I’ve had a prod from the assistant commissioner, wanting to know why we haven’t produced the expected brilliant results. Apparently Sir Gerald Asherton has put quite a flea in his ear.”

“It’s only been four days, sir,” Gemma said, stung. “And the pathologist only got round to the PM yesterday. Anyway,” she added hurriedly, before Childs could trot out his dreaded maxim—
results, not excuses
—“we have a suspect. I’m interviewing him this afternoon.”

“Any hard evidence?”

“No, sir, not yet.”

Childs folded his hands across his belly and Gemma marveled, as she always did, that for all his bulk the man radiated such physical magnetism. As far as she knew, he was happily married and used his appeal for nothing more sinister than keeping the typists working to order.

“All the teams are out just now—we’ve had a regular rash of homicides. But as badly as I need the two of you, I don’t think we want to let the AC down, do you, Sergeant? It’s always in our best interest to keep the powers-that-be happy.” He smiled at her, his teeth blindingly white against his olive skin. “Will you pass that along to Superintendent Kincaid when you talk to him?”

“Yes, sir,” Gemma answered, and, taking that as dismissal, beat a hasty and grateful retreat.

*      *      *

When Gemma returned to Kincaid’s office, bars of sunlight slanted into the room. They looked solid enough to touch, the quality of the light almost viscous. Not quite trusting the phenomenon, she went to the window and peered through the blinds. The sky was indeed clear and as blue as it ever managed with the city smog. She looked from the window to the paperwork, lying haphazardly where she’d left it. The angle of the light across the desk revealed streaks of dust and several perfect fingerprints—smiling, Gemma walked over and wiped them away with a tissue. Remove the evidence—that was the first rule. Then she grabbed her bag from the coat stand and made for the lift before anyone could stop her.

She cut through St. James Park, walking quickly, taking in great breaths of the cool, clear air. The English have an instinct for sunshine, however brief its duration, she thought, like a radar early-warning system. The park was busy with others who had heeded the signal, some walking as quickly as she was, obviously on their way somewhere, others strolling or sitting on benches, and all looking oddly out of place in their business clothes. The trees, which in the past few days’ drizzle had looked drab as old washing, showed remnants of red and gold in the sunlight, and pansies and late chrysanthemums made a brave showing in the beds.

She came out into the Mall, and by the time she’d made her way along St. James Street to Piccadilly she could feel her heart beating and warmth in her face. But it was only a few more blocks along Albemarle Street, and her head felt clear for the first time that day.

Although she had timed it accurately, arriving a few minutes early, Tommy Godwin was there before her. He waved at her, looking as at home in the hotel’s squashy armchair as he might in his own parlor. She made her way over to him, suddenly aware of her windblown hair and pink cheeks, and of her unfashionably sensible low-heeled shoes.

“Do have a seat, my dear. You look as if you’ve been exerting yourself unnecessarily. I’ve ordered for you—I hope you don’t mind. Stuffy and old-fashioned as it is”—he nodded at the room, with its wood-paneled walls and crackling fire—“they do a proper tea here.”

“Mr. Godwin, this is not a social occasion,” Gemma said as severely as she could while sinking into the depths of her chair. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

“I paid a visit to my sister in Clapham this morning. A gruesome but regular family necessity, one which I fear most of us are subject to—unless one has had the good fortune to come into the world via test tube, and even that has ramifications that don’t bear thinking of.”

Gemma tried to straighten her back against the chair’s soft cushion. “Please don’t take me round the mulberry bush, Mr. Godwin. I need some answers from you—”

“Can’t we have tea first?” he asked plaintively. “And call me Tommy, please.” Leaning toward her confidentially, he said, “This hotel was the model for Agatha Christie’s
At Bertram’s Hotel
—did you know that, Sergeant? I don’t believe it’s changed much since her day.”

Curious in spite of her best intentions, Gemma looked round the room. Some of the little old ladies seated nearby might have been Miss Marple’s clones. The faded prints of their dresses (covered by sensibly wooly cardigans), harmonized with the faded blues and violets of their hair rinses, and their shoes—Gemma’s comfortable flats weren’t even in the same realm of sensibleness as their stout brogues.

What an odd place to appeal to Tommy Godwin, she thought, studying him covertly. She pegged today’s navy jacket as cashmere, his shirt was immaculate pale gray broadcloth, his trousers charcoal and his silk tie a discreetly rich navy and red paisley.

As if reading her mind, he said, “It’s the prewar aura I can’t resist. The Golden Age of British manners—vanished now, much to our loss. I was born during the Blitz, but even during my childhood there were still traces of gentility in English life. Ah, here’s our tea,” he said as the waiter brought a tray to their table. “I’ve ordered Assam to go with the sandwiches—I hope that’s all right—and a pot of Keemun later with the pastries.”

Tea in Gemma’s family had run to Tetley’s Finest teabags, stewed in a tin pot. Not liking to admit that she had never tasted
either, she pounced on his previous remark. “You only think that time must have been perfect because you didn’t live it. I imagine the generation between the wars saw Edwardian England as the Golden Age, and probably the Edwardians felt the same way about the Victorians.”

“A good point, my dear,” he said seriously as he poured tea into her cup, “but there was one great difference—the First World War. They had looked into the mouth of hell, and they knew how fragile our hold on civilization really is.” The waiter returned, placing a three-tiered tray on their small table. Finger sandwiches filled the bottom tray, scones the middle, and pastries the top, the crowning touch. “Have a sandwich, my dear,” said Tommy. “The salmon on brown bread is particularly nice.”

He sipped his tea and continued his lecture, a cucumber sandwich poised in his fingers. “It’s fashionable these days to pooh-pooh the Golden Age crime novel as trivial and unrealistic, but that was not the case at all. It was their stand against chaos. The conflicts were intimate, rather than global, and justice, order and retribution always prevailed. They desperately needed that reassurance. Did you know that Britain lost nearly a third of its young men between 1914 and 1918? Yet that war didn’t physically threaten us in the same way as the next—it stayed safely on the European Front.”

Pausing to down half the cucumber sandwich in one bite, he chewed for a moment, then said sadly, “What a waste it must have seemed, the flower of Britain’s manhood lost, with nothing to show for it but some newspaper headlines and politicians’ speeches.” He smiled. “But if you read Christie or Allingham or Sayers, the detective always got his man. And you’ll notice that the detective always operated outside the system—the stories expressed a comforting belief in the validity of individual action.”

“But weren’t the murders always clean and bloodless?” Gemma asked rather impatiently through a mouthful of sandwich. She’d felt too tired and unsettled to eat lunch, and her walk had left her suddenly ravenous.

“Some of them were in fact quite diabolical. Christie was particularly
fond of poisoning, and I can think of no less civilized way to commit murder.”

“Are you suggesting that there are civilized methods of murder?”
Such as drowning your victim in a convenient river
, she thought, wondering at the bizarre turn the conversation seemed to be taking.

“Of course not, my dear, only that I’ve always found the idea of poison especially abhorrent—such suffering and indignity for one person to inflict upon another.”

Gemma drank a little more of her tea. She rolled it around on her tongue, deciding she liked the rich, malty taste. “So you prefer your murders quick and clean, do you, Tommy?”

“I don’t prefer them any way at all, my dear,” he said, glancing up at her as he poured more tea into her cup. He was playing with her, teasing her, she could see it in the suppressed laughter in his eyes.

Time for a little dose of reality
, she thought, licking egg salad from her fingertips. “I’ve always thought drowning would be quite horrible myself. Giving in at last to that desperate need to draw air into the lungs, then choking, struggling, until unconsciousness comes as a blessed relief.”

Tommy Godwin sat quite still, watching her, his hands relaxed on the tabletop. What beautiful hands he had, thought Gemma, the fingers long and slender, the nails perfectly kept. She found quite inconceivable the idea of him fighting like a common ruffian, using those hands to choke and squeeze, or perhaps to hold a thrashing body under water.

“You’re quite right, my dear,” he said softly. “It was tasteless of me to go on that way, but crime novels are rather a hobby of mine.” He picked up a watercress sandwich and looked at it a moment before returning it to the plate. The eyes that met hers were a surprisingly dark blue, and guileless. “Do you think poor Connor suffered?”

“We don’t know. The pathologist didn’t find evidence indicating he’d inhaled river water, but that doesn’t rule it out.” She let the silence stretch for a heartbeat, then added, “I was hoping you might tell me.”

His eyes widened. “Oh, come now, Sergeant. You can’t think—”

“You lied to me about attending the opera that night. One of the ushers saw you come in from the street just minutes before the performance ended. And I have a witness who can place you in a pub in Wargrave, having a not-too-friendly dinner with Connor Swann,” she said, tendering her bluff with all the authority she could manage.

For the first time since she had met him, Tommy Godwin seemed at a loss for words. As she studied his still face, she saw that most of his attractiveness lay not in his individual features, but in the expression of alert, humorous inquisitiveness that usually animated them. Finally, he sighed and pushed away his empty plate. “I should have known it was no use. Even as a child I was never any good at lying. I had meant to attend the performance that night—that much at least was true. Then I had an urgent message from Connor on my answer phone, saying he needed to see me. I suppose he must have been looking for me when he came to the theater that afternoon.”

“He asked you to meet him at the Red Lion?”

As Tommy nodded the waiter brought their second pot of tea. Lifting the pot, Tommy said, “You must try the Keemun, my dear. What would you like with it?”

Gemma had started to shake her head when he said, “Please, Sergeant, do have something. This was to be a special treat for you—I thought hardworking policewomen probably didn’t have too many opportunities to take afternoon tea.”

She heard Alison’s words again, and she found that no matter what else Tommy might have done, she couldn’t reject this small act of kindness. “I’ll have a scone then, please.”

Having taken a scone for himself, he poured tea into her cup from the fresh pot. “Taste your tea. You can put milk in it if you like, but I’d advise you not to.”

Gemma did as instructed, then looked up at him in surprise. “It’s sweet.”

He looked pleased. “Do you like it? It’s a north China Congou. The best of the China blacks, I think.”

“Tell me about Connor,” Gemma said, spreading clotted cream and strawberry jam on her scone.

“There’s not much to tell, really. I met him at the Red Lion, as you said, and from the beginning he behaved quite oddly. I’d never seen him like that, although I’d heard stories about the weeks after he and Julia first separated. He had been drinking, but I didn’t think he’d had enough to account for his manner. It was… I don’t know… almost hysterical, really.”

“Why did he want to see you?”

Tommy washed down a bite of scone with tea. “I found out soon enough. He said he’d decided he wanted his old job back—that he’d had enough of dealing with two-bit, small-town accounts, and he wanted me to intercede for him.”

“Could you have done it?” asked Gemma in some surprise.

“Well, yes, I suppose so. I’ve known the firm’s senior partner for years. In fact, it was I who encouraged him to go after the ENO account in the first place.” He looked at Gemma over the cup he held cradled in both hands. “It’s unfortunate that we can’t foresee the consequences of our actions. If I had not done that, Connor would never have met Gerald and Caro, and through them, Julia.”

“But you refused Connor’s request.”

“Politely at first. I told him that my reputation would ride on his performance, and that considering his previous conduct, I didn’t feel I could risk it. The truth of the matter is,” he added, setting down his cup and looking away from Gemma, “I never liked him. Not the thing to say when one is suspected of foul play, is it, dear Sergeant?” He smiled, teasing her once more, then said reflectively, “I can remember their wedding day quite clearly. It was a June wedding, in the garden at Badger’s End—I know you won’t have seen it, but it can be quite lovely that time of year. All Plummy’s doing, although Julia used to help her quite a bit when she had the time.