Leave the Grave Green (25 page)

“Everyone said how perfect Julia and Connor looked together, and I have to admit they did make a handsome couple, but when I looked at them I saw only disaster. They were completely, utterly unsuited for one another.”

“Do stick to the point, Tommy, please,” said Gemma, wondering how she could impress the gravity of the situation upon him with her mouth full of scone.

He sighed. “We argued. He became more and more abusive, until finally I told him I’d had enough. I left. That’s all.”

Moving her plate out of the way, Gemma leaned toward him. “That’s not all, Tommy. The barman came out just after you and Connor left the pub. He says he saw you fighting down by the river.”

Although she wouldn’t have believed that a man with Tommy Godwin’s poise and experience could blush, she could have sworn his face turned pink with embarrassment.

There was a moment’s pause as he refused to meet her eyes. Finally, he said, “I’ve not done anything like that since I was at school, and even then I considered any form of physical violence both undignified and uncivilized. It was the accepted way to get on in the world, beating what one wanted out of someone else, and I made a deliberate choice to live my life differently. It got me labeled a pansy and a poofter, of course,” he added with a hint of the familiar, charming smile, “but I could live with that. What I couldn’t live with was the thought of abandoning my principles.

“When I found myself locked in a ridiculous schoolboy scuffle with Connor, I simply stopped and walked away.”

“And he let you?”

Tommy nodded. “I think he’d run out of steam himself by that time.”

“Had you parked your car on the gravel by the river?”

“No, I’d found a spot on the street, a block or two up from the pub. Someone may have seen it,” he added hopefully. “It’s a classic Jaguar, red, quite distinctive.”

“And then, after you’d returned to your car?”

“I drove to London. Having agreed to see Con, against my better judgment, I’d spoiled my evening, and I felt he’d rather made a fool of me. I thought I’d try to salvage as much of my original plan as I could.”

“Five minutes’ worth?” asked Gemma, skeptically.

He smiled. “Well, I did my best.”

“And you didn’t make a point of stopping by Sir Gerald’s dressing room in order to establish an alibi?”

Patiently, he said, “I wanted to congratulate him, as I told you before, Sergeant.”

“Even though you hadn’t actually seen the performance?”

“I could tell by the audience’s response that it had been particularly good.”

She searched his face, and he returned her gaze steadily. “You’re right, you know, Tommy,” she said at last. “You are an awful liar. I suppose you went straight home from the theater?”

“I did, as a matter of fact.”

“Is there anyone who can vouch for you?”

“No, my dear. I’m afraid not. And I parked in back of my building and went up in the service lift, so I didn’t see anyone at all. I’m sorry,” he added, as if it distressed him to disappoint her.

“I’m sorry, too, Tommy.” Gemma sighed. Feeling suddenly weary, she said, “You could have put Connor’s body in the boot of your car, then driven back to Hambleden after the performance and dumped him in the lock.”

“Really? What an extraordinarily imaginative idea.” Tommy sounded amused.

Exasperated, she said, “You do realize that we’ll have to impound your car so that the forensics team can go over it. And we’ll have to search your flat for evidence. And you will have to come down to the Yard with me now and make a formal statement.”

He lifted the delicate porcelain teapot and smiled at her. “Well, then you had better finish your tea, my dear Sergeant.”

Lunch with Jack Makepeace improved Kincaid’s outlook on life considerably. Replete with cheese, pickle and pints of Green King ale, they blinked as they came out into the street from the dim interior of a pub near the High Wycombe nick. “That’s a surprise,” said Makepeace, turning his face up to the sun. “And I doubt it’ll last long—the forecast is for cats and dogs.”

The perfect antidote to a morning spent wheel-spinning, thought Kincaid as he felt the faint warmth of the sun against his face, was a good walk. “I think I’ll take advantage of it,” he said to Makepeace as they reached the station. “You can reach me if anything comes up.”

“Some people have all the luck,” Makepeace answered good-naturedly. “It’s back to the salt mines for the likes of me.” He waved and disappeared through the glass doors.

Kincaid made the short drive from High Wycombe to Fingest, and on reaching the village he hesitated for a moment before turning into the pub’s carpark. Although the vicarage looked mellow and inviting in the afternoon sun and the vicar was certainly the authority on local walks, he decided it was much too likely he’d end up spending the rest of the afternoon being comfortably entertained in the vicar’s study.

In the end, Tony proved as useful and accommodating on the matter of walks as he had about everything else. “I’ve just the thing,” he said, retrieving a book from the mysterious recesses under the bar. “Local pub walks. Three and a half miles too much for you?” He eyed Kincaid measuringly.

“I think I can just about manage that,” Kincaid said, grinning.

“Fingest, Skirmett, Turville, and back to Fingest. All three villages are in their own valleys, but this particular walk avoids the steepest hill. You might get a bit mucky, though.”

“Thanks, Tony. I promise not to track up your carpets. I’ll just go and change.”

“Take my compass,” Tony called out as Kincaid turned away, producing it from the palm of his hand like a conjurer. “It’ll come in handy.”

At the top of the first long climb, some thoughtful citizen had placed a bench on which the winded walker could sit and enjoy the view. Kincaid took brief advantage of it, then toiled on, through woods and fields and over stiles. At first the vicar’s brief history rolled through his mind, and as he walked he imagined the progression of Celts, Romans, Saxons and Normans settling these hills, all leaving their own particular imprint upon the land.

After a while the combination of fresh air, exercise and solitude worked its magic, and his mind returned freely to the question of Connor Swann’s death, sorting the facts and impressions that he had gathered so far. The pathologist’s evidence made it highly unlikely that Tommy Godwin had killed Connor outside the Red Lion in Wargrave. He might, of course, have knocked Connor unconscious and killed him a couple of hours later after returning from London—but like Gemma, Kincaid could come up with no logical scenario for the later removal of the body from the car to the lock.

Dr. Winstead’s report also meant that Julia could not have killed Con during her brief absence from the gallery, and David’s statement placing Connor in Wargrave until at least ten o’clock made it impossible for her to have met him along the River Terrace and made an assignation for later. Kincaid shied away from the feeling of relief that this conclusion brought him, and forced himself to consider the next possibility—that she had met Connor much later and that Trevor Simons had lied to protect her.

So caught up was he in these ruminations that he failed to see
the cowpat until he had put his foot in it. Swearing, he wiped his trainer as best he could on the grass. Motive was like that, he mused as he walked on more carefully—sometimes you just couldn’t see it until you fell into it. Hard as he tried, he couldn’t come up with a likely reason why Julia would have wanted to kill Con, nor did he believe that having had one row with him that day, she would have agreed to meet him later in order to have another.

Had that lunchtime argument with Julia been the trigger for Connor’s increasingly odd behavior during the rest of that day? Yet it was only after he had left Kenneth that Con had visibly deviated from an expected pattern. And that brought Kincaid to Kenneth—where had Kenneth been on Thursday evening, and why had asking him about his movements sent him from reluctant cooperation into complete and obstinate withdrawal? As he pictured Kenneth, huddled in his bomber jacket as if it were armor, he remembered the female witness Makepeace had mentioned. “A boy in leather,” she’d said… Kenneth was slightly built and Makepeace had described him as five foot eight or nine. Next to Connor he might easily have been mistaken for a boy. It was certainly a possibility worth pursuing.

The woods enclosed him again as he left Skirmett. He walked in a dim and soundless world, his footfalls absorbed by the leaf mold. Not even birdsong broke the stillness, and when he stopped, staring after a flash of white that might have been a deer bounding away, he could hear the rush of his own blood in his ears.

Kincaid walked on, following the next tendril that shot out from the amoebic mass of speculation—if Connor had driven away from the Red Lion after his scuffle with Tommy Godwin, where had he gone? Sharon Doyle’s face came into his mind—she, like Kenneth, had become belligerent when Kincaid had pushed her about her movements later that evening.

As he came into Turville he looked northwest, toward Northend, up the hill where Badger’s End lay hidden under the dark canopy of the beeches. What had brought Julia back to that house, as if drawn by an unseen umbilical cord?

He stopped at the Northend turning and frowned. Some thread ran through this case that he couldn’t quite grasp—he felt it move away whenever he approached it too closely, like some dark underwater creature always swimming just out of reach.

Nestled among Turville’s cluster of cottages, The Bull and Butcher beckoned, but Kincaid declared himself immune to the temptation of Brakspear’s ales and pushed on into the fields again.

He soon came out onto the road that led to Fingest. The sun had dropped beneath the tops of the trees, and the light slanted through the boles, illuminating dust motes and flickering on his clothes like a faulty film projector.

By the time the now-familiar twin-gabled tower of Fingest church came into view, Kincaid found he had made two decisions. He would ask Thames Valley to pick up Kenneth Hicks, and then they’d see how well Hicks’s bravado held up in an interview room in the local nick.

And he would pay another visit to Sharon Doyle.

When Kincaid returned to the Chequers, a bit muddy as Tony had predicted and feeling pleasantly tired from his walk, there was still no word from Gemma regarding her progress with Tommy Godwin. He rang the Yard and left a message for her with the duty sergeant. As soon as she finished in London she was to join him again. He wanted her in on the interview with Hicks. And considering Kenneth’s obvious dislike of women, Kincaid thought with a smile, maybe she should conduct it.

In Henley, Kincaid left the car near the police station and walked down Hart Street, his eyes on the tower of the church of St. Mary the Virgin.

Square and substantial, it anchored the town around it like the hub of a wheel. Church Avenue lay neatly tucked in the tower’s shadow, facing the churchyard as if it were its own private garden. A plaque set into the stonework informed him that the row of almshouses had been endowed by John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1547, and rebuilt in 1830.

The cottages were unexpectedly charming, built of a very pale green-washed stucco, with bright blue doors and lace curtains in every window. Kincaid knocked at the number Sharon Doyle had given him. He heard the sound of the television, and faintly, the high voice of a child.

He had raised his hand to knock again when Sharon opened the door. Except for the unmistakable golden corkscrew curls, he would hardly have recognized her. She wore no makeup, not even lipstick, and her bare face looked young and unprotected. The tarted-up clothes and high heels were gone—replaced by a faded sweatshirt, jeans and dirty trainers, and in the few days since he had seen her she seemed visibly thinner. To his surprise, she also seemed rather pathetically glad to see him.

“Superintendent! What are you doing here?” A sticky and disheveled version of the child in the wallet photo Kincaid had seen slipped up beside Sharon and wrapped herself around her mother’s leg.

“Hullo, Hayley,” said Kincaid, squatting at her eye level. He looked up at Sharon and added, “I came to see how you were getting on.”

“Oh, come in,” she said as if making an effort to recall her manners, and she stepped back, hobbled by the child clinging to her like a limpet. “Hayley was just having her tea, weren’t you, love? In the kitchen with Gran.” Now that she had Kincaid in the sitting room, she seemed to have no idea what to do with him, and simply stood there stroking the child’s tangle of fair curls.

Kincaid looked around the small room with interest. Doilies and dark furniture, fringed lampshades and the smell of lavender wax, all as neat and clean as if they had been preserved in a museum. The sound of the television was only a bit louder than it had been when he stood outside, and he surmised that the cottage’s interior walls must be constructed of thick plaster.

“Gran likes the telly in the kitchen,” Sharon said into the silence. “It’s cozier to sit in there, close by the range.”

The front room might have been the scene of some long-ago courtship, thought Kincaid. He imagined young lovers sitting
stiltedly on the horsehair chairs, then remembered that these cottages had been built for pensioners, and any wooing must have been done by those old enough to know better. He wondered if Connor had ever come here.

Diplomatically, he said, “If Hayley would like to go in with Gran and finish her tea, perhaps you and I could go outside and have a chat.”

Sharon gave Kincaid a grateful glance and bent down to her daughter. “Did you hear what the superintendent said, love? He needs to have a word with me, so you go along in with Gran and finish your tea. If you eat up all your beans and toast, you can have a biscuit,” she added cajolingly.

Hayley studied her mum as if gauging the sincerity of this pledge.

“I promise,” said Sharon, turning her and giving her a pat on the bottom. “Go on now. Tell Gran I’ll be along in a bit.” She watched the little girl disappear through the door in the back of the room, then said to Kincaid, “Just let me get a cardy.”