Leave the Grave Green (30 page)

A Siamese cat posed on a chair beneath the window. Paws tucked under her chest, she regarded them with unblinking sapphire eyes.

“You’re quite right, Superintendent,” Tommy said as she joined them, “these flats were built in the early thirties, and they were the ultimate in advanced design for their day. They’ve held up remarkably well, unlike most of the postwar monstrosities. Sit
down, please,” he added as he seated himself in a fan-shaped chair that complemented the swirling design on his dressing gown. “Although I must say, I think it must have been a bit nerve-racking during the war, as high above the city as we are. You’d have felt like a sitting duck when the German bombers came over. A chink in the blackout and—”

“Tommy,” Gemma interrupted severely, “they said at LB House that you weren’t well. What is it?”

He ran a hand through his hair, and in the clear gray light Gemma saw the skin beginning to pouch a little under his eyes. “Just a bit under the weather, Sergeant. I must admit that yesterday rather took its toll.” He stood and went to the drinks cabinet against the wall. “Will you have a little sherry? It’s appropriately near lunchtime, and I’m sure Rory Allyn always accepted a sherry when he was interrogating suspects.”

“Tommy, this isn’t a detective novel, for heaven’s sake,” said Gemma, unable to contain her exasperation.

He turned to look at her, sherry decanter poised in one hand. “I know, my dear. But it’s my way of whistling in the dark.” The gentleness of his tone told her that he acknowledged her concern and was touched by it.

“I won’t refuse a small one,” said Kincaid, and Tommy placed three glasses and the decanter on a small cocktail tray. The glasses were sensuously scalloped in the same delicate frosted pink as the fluted lampshades and vases Gemma had already noticed, and when she tasted the sherry it seemed to dissolve on her tongue like butter.

“After all,” said Tommy as he filled his own glass and returned to his chair, “if I’m to take the blame for a crime I didn’t commit, I might as well do it with good grace.”

“Yesterday you told me you’d been to Clapham to visit your sister.” Gemma paused to lick a trace of sherry from her lip, then went on more slowly. “You didn’t tell me about Kenneth.”

“Ah.” Tommy leaned against the chair back and closed his eyes. The light etched lines of exhaustion around his mouth and nose, delineated the pulse ticking in his throat. Gemma wondered why
she hadn’t seen the gray mixed in with the gold at his temples. “Would you admit to Kenneth, given a choice?” Tommy said, without moving. “No, don’t answer that.” He opened his eyes and gave Gemma a valiant attempt at a smile. “I take it you’ve met him?”

Gemma nodded.

“Then I can also assume that the whole sordid cat is out of the bag.”

“I think so, yes. You lied to me about your dinner with Connor. There wasn’t any question of him going back to his old job. He confronted you with what Kenneth had told him.” This seemed to be her day for making accusations, she thought, finding that she took Tommy’s deception personally, as if she’d been betrayed by a friend.

“A mere taradiddle, my dear—” Catching Gemma’s expression he stopped and sighed. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. You’re quite right. What do you want to know?”

“Start from the beginning. Tell us about Caroline.”

“Ah, you mean from the very beginning.” Tommy swirled the sherry in his glass, watching it reflectively. “I loved Caro, you see, with all the blind, single-minded recklessness of youth. Or perhaps age has nothing to do with it… I don’t know. Our affair ended with Matthew’s conception. I wanted her to leave Gerald and marry me. I would have loved Julia as my own child.” Pausing, he finished his sherry and returned the glass to the tray with deliberate care. “It was a fantasy, of course. Caro was beginning a promising career, she was comfortably ensconced at Badger’s End with the backing of the Asherton name and money. What had I to offer her? And there was Gerald, who has never behaved less than honorably in all the years I’ve known him.

“One makes what adjustments one must,” he said, smiling at Gemma. “I’ve come to the conclusion that great tragedies are created by those who don’t make it through the adjustment stage. We went on. As ‘Uncle Tommy’ I was allowed to watch Matty grow up, and no one knew the truth except Caro and me.

“Then Matty died.”

Kincaid set his empty glass on the cocktail tray, and the click of glass against wood sounded loud as a shot in the silent room.
Gemma gave him a startled glance—so focused had she been on Tommy that for a moment she had forgotten his presence. Neither of them spoke, and after a moment, Tommy continued.

“They shut me out. Closed ranks. In their grief Caro and Gerald had no room for anyone else’s. As much as I loved Matty, I also saw that he was an ordinary little boy, with an ordinary little boy’s faults and graces. The fact that he was also extraordinarily gifted meant no more to him than if he’d had an extra finger or been able to do lightning calculus in his head. Not so, Gerald and Caro. Do you understand that? Matty was the embodiment of their dreams, a gift God had sent them to mold in their own image.”

“So how did Kenneth come into this?” asked Gemma.

“My sister is not a bad sort. We all have our crosses—Kenneth is hers. Our mother died while she was still at school. I was barely making ends meet at the time and wasn’t able to do much for her, so I think she married Kenneth’s dad out of desperation. As it turned out, he stayed around just long enough to produce his son and heir, then scarpered, leaving her with a baby to look after as well as herself.”

Gemma saw an echo of her own marriage in Tommy’s account of his sister, and she shuddered at the thought that in spite of all her efforts, her own little son might turn out to be like Kenneth. It didn’t bear thinking of. She finished her sherry in one long swallow, and as the warmth spread to her stomach and suffused her face, she remembered she’d gone without breakfast that morning.

Tommy shifted in his chair and smoothed the fold of his dressing gown across his lap. The cat seemed to take that as an invitation, leaping easily up and settling herself under his hands. His long, slender fingers stroked her chocolate-and-cream fur, and Gemma found she could not force herself to see those hands wrapped around Connor’s throat. She looked up and met Tommy’s eyes.

“After Matty died,” he said, “I went to my sister and poured out the whole story. There was no one else.” Clearing his throat, he reached for the decanter and poured himself a little more sherry. “I don’t remember that time very clearly, you understand, and I’ve
just been piecing things together myself. Kenneth can’t have been more than eight or nine, but I think he was born a sneak—possessive of his mother, always hiding and eavesdropping on adult conversations. I had no idea he was even in the house that day. Can you imagine how shocked I was when Connor told me what he had heard, and who had told him?”

“Why did Connor come to you?” asked Kincaid. “Did he ask for money?”

“I don’t think Connor knew what he wanted. He seemed to have got it into his head that Julia would have loved him if it hadn’t been for Matty’s death, and that if Julia had known the truth about Matty, things would have been different between them. I’m afraid he wasn’t very coherent. ‘Bloody liars,’ he kept saying, ‘They’re all bloody hypocrites.’” Tommy laced his fingers together and sighed. “I think Con had bought the Asherton family image lock, stock and barrel, and he couldn’t bear the disillusionment. Or perhaps he just needed someone to blame for his own failure. They had hurt him and he had been powerless, unable to nick even their armor. Kenneth put the perfect weapon into his waiting hands.”

“Couldn’t you have stopped him?” Kincaid asked.

Tommy smiled at him, undeceived by the casual tone. “Not in the way you mean. I begged him, pleaded with him to keep quiet, for Gerald’s and Caro’s sake, and for Julia’s, but that only seemed to make him angrier. In the end I even tussled with him, much to my shame.

“When I walked away from Connor I had made up my mind what to do. The lies had gone on long enough. Connor was right, in a sense—the deception had warped all our lives, whether we realized it or not.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kincaid. “Why did you think killing Connor would put an end to the deception?”

“But I didn’t kill Connor, Superintendent,” Tommy said flatly, weariness evident in the set of his mouth. “I told Gerald the truth.”

Gemma started the Escort’s engine and let it idle while Kincaid buckled himself into the passenger seat. She had been silent all the way from Tommy’s flat down to the car. Kincaid glanced at her, feeling utterly baffled. He thought of the usual free give-and-take of their working relationship, and of dinner at her flat just a few nights ago, when they had shared such easy intimacy. At some level he had been aware of her special talent for forming bonds with people, but he had never quite formulated it. She had welcomed him into her warm circle, made him feel comfortable with himself as well as her, and he had taken it for granted. Now, having seen the rapport she’d developed with Tommy Godwin, he felt suddenly envious, like a child shut out in the cold.

She swatted at a spiraling wisp that had escaped her braid and turned to him. “What now, guv?” she said, without inflection.

He wanted urgently to repair the damage between them, but he didn’t quite know how to proceed, and other matters needed his immediate attention. “Hold on a tick,” he said, and dialed the Yard on the mobile phone. He asked a brief question and rang off. “According to forensics, Tommy Godwin’s flat and car were as clean as a whistle.” Feeling his way tentatively, he said, “Perhaps I was a bit hasty in my conclusions about Tommy. That’s more your style,” he added with a smile, but Gemma merely went on regarding him with a frustratingly neutral expression. He sighed and rubbed his face. “I think we’ll have to see Sir Gerald again, but first let’s have something to eat and see where we are.”

As Gemma drove he closed his eyes, wondering how he might mend their relationship, and why the solution to this case continued to elude him.

They stopped at a cafe in Golders Green for a late lunch, having rung Badger’s End and made sure that Sir Gerald would see them whenever they arrived.

Much to Kincaid’s satisfaction, Gemma ate her way steadily through a tuna sandwich without any of the reluctance she’d shown at breakfast. He finished his ham-and-cheese, then sipped his coffee and watched Gemma as she polished off a bag of crisps. “I can’t make sense of it,” he said when she had reached the finger-licking stage. “It can’t have been Gerald whom Con phoned from the flat. According to Sharon, Con made that call at a little after half-past ten, when Gerald was busy conducting a full orchestra.”

“He might have left a message,” said Gemma, wiping her fingertips with a paper napkin.

“With whom? Your porter would have remembered. Alison what’s-her-name would have remembered.”

“True.” Gemma tasted her coffee and made a face. “Cold. Ugh.” She pushed her cup away and folded her arms on the table-top. “It would make much more sense if Sir Gerald rang Con after Tommy had left.”

According to Tommy, Gerald had expressed neither shock nor outrage at his revelation. He gave Tommy a drink, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, then said as if to himself, “The worm ate Arthur’s empire from the inside, too, as he always knew it would.” Tommy had left him sitting slumped in his makeup chair, glass in hand.

“What if the call Sharon overheard had nothing to do with Connor’s murder? We have no proof that it did.” Kincaid drew speculative circles on the tabletop with the damp end of his spoon. “What if Con didn’t follow Sharon out of the flat? He didn’t tell her he meant to leave right away.”

“You mean that if Gerald had rung him after Tommy left, he
might still have been there? And he might have agreed to meet him at the lock?” continued Gemma with a spark of interest.

“But we’ve no proof,” said Kincaid. “We’ve no proof of anything. This entire mess is like a pudding—as soon as you sink your teeth into it, it slides away.”

Gemma laughed, and Kincaid gave thanks for even a small sign of a thaw.

By the time they reached Badger’s End, the drizzle had evolved into a slow and steady rain. They sat for a moment in the car, listening to the rhythmic patter on roof and bonnet. Lamps were already lit in the house, and they saw a flick of the drape at the sitting room window.

“The light will be gone soon,” said Gemma. “The evenings draw in so early in this weather.” As Kincaid reached for the door handle, she touched his arm. “Guv, if Sir Gerald killed Connor, why did he want us in on it?”

Kincaid turned back to her. “Maybe Caroline insisted. Maybe his friend, the assistant commissioner, volunteered us, and he didn’t think he should protest.” Sensing her discomfort, he touched her fingers and added, “I don’t like this, either, Gemma, but we have to follow it through.”

They dashed for the house under the cover of one umbrella, and stood huddled together on the doorstep. They heard the short double ring as Kincaid pushed the bell, but before he could lift his finger, Sir Gerald opened the door himself. “Come in by the fire,” he said. “Here, take your wet things off. It’s beastly out, I’m afraid, and not likely to get any better.” He shepherded them into the sitting room, where a fire blazed in the grate, and Kincaid had a moment’s fancy that it was never allowed to go out.

“You’ll need something to warm you inside as well as out,” said Sir Gerald when they were established with their backs to the fire. “Plummy’s making us some tea.”

“Sir Gerald, we must talk to you,” said Kincaid, making a stand against the tide of social convention.

“I’m sorry Caroline’s out,” said Gerald, continuing in his
hearty, friendly way as if there were nothing the least bit odd about their conversation. “She and Julia are making the final arrangements for Connor’s funeral.”

“Julia’s helping with the funeral?” asked Kincaid, surprised enough to be distracted from his agenda.

Sir Gerald ran a hand through his sparse hair, and sat down on the sofa. It was his spot, obviously, as the cushions had depressions that exactly matched his bulk, like a dog’s favorite old bed. Today he wore another variation of the moth-eaten sweater, this time in olive green, and what seemed to be the same baggy corduroys Kincaid had seen before. “Yes. She seems to have had a change of heart. I don’t know why, and I’m too thankful to question it,” he said, and gave them his engaging smile. “She came in like a whirlwind after lunch and said she’d made up her mind what should be done for Con, and she’s been putting us through our paces ever since.”