Leave the Grave Green (31 page)

It would seem that Julia had made peace with Con’s ghost. Kincaid pushed the thought of her aside and concentrated on Gerald. “It’s you we wanted to see, sir.”

“Have you found something?” He sat forward a bit and scanned their faces anxiously. “Tell me, please. I don’t want Caroline and Julia upset.”

“We’ve just come from Tommy Godwin, Sir Gerald. We know why Tommy came to see you at the theater the night Connor died.” As Kincaid watched, Gerald sank back into the sofa, his face suddenly shuttered. Remembering the comment Sir Gerald had made to Tommy, Kincaid added, “You knew that Tommy was Matthew’s father all along, didn’t you, sir?”

Gerald Asherton closed his eyes. Under the jut of his eyebrows, his face looked impassive, remote and ancient as a biblical prophet’s. “Of course I knew. I may be a fool, Mr. Kincaid, but I’m not a blind fool. Have you any idea how beautiful they were together, Tommy and Caroline?” Opening his eyes, he continued, “Grace, elegance, talent—you would have thought they’d been made for one another. I spent my days in terror that she would leave me, wondering how I would anchor my existence without
her. When things seemed to fizzle out between them with Matty’s conception, I thanked the gods for restoring her to me. The rest didn’t matter. And Matty… Matty was everything we could have wanted.”

“You never told Caroline you knew?” put in Gemma, disbelief evident in her tone.

“How could we have gone on, if I had?”

It had started, thought Kincaid, not with outright lies but with a denial of the truth, and that denial had become woven into the very fabric of their lives. “But Connor meant to wreck it all, didn’t he, Sir Gerald? You must have felt some relief when you heard the next morning that he was dead.” Kincaid caught Gemma’s quick, surprised glance, then she moved quietly to stand by the piano, examining the photographs. He left the fire and sat in the armchair opposite Gerald.

“I must admit I felt some sense of reprieve. It shamed me, and made me all the more determined to get to the bottom of things. He was my son-in-law, and in spite of his sometimes rather hysterical behavior, I cared for him.” Gerald clasped his hands and leaned forward. “Please, Superintendent, surely it can’t benefit Connor for all this past history to be raked over. Can’t we spare Caroline that?”

“Sir Gerald—”

The sitting room door opened and Caroline came in, followed by Julia. “What a perfectly horrid day,” said Caroline, shaking fine drops of water from her dark hair. “Superintendent. Sergeant. Plummy’s just coming with some tea. I’m sure we could all do with some.” She slipped out of her leather jacket and tossed it wrong-side-out over the sofa back, before sitting beside her husband. The deep red silk of the jacket’s lining rippled like blood in the glow from the fire.

Kincaid met Julia’s eyes and saw pleasure mixed with wariness. It was the first time he had seen her with her mother, and he marveled at the combination of contrast and similarity. It seemed to him as if Julia were Caroline stretched and reforged, edges sharpened and refined, with the unmistakable stamp of her father’s
smile. And in spite of her tough mannerisms, her face was as transparent to him as his own, while he found Caroline’s unreadable.

“We’ve been to Fingest church,” said Julia, speaking to him as if there were no one else in the room. “Con’s mum would have insisted on a Catholic funeral and burial, with all the trappings, but it didn’t matter the least bit to Con, so I mean to do what seems right to me.” She crossed the room to warm her hands by the fire. Dressed for the outdoors, she wore a heavy oiled-wool sweater still beaded with moisture, and her cheeks were faintly pink from the cold. “I’ve been round the churchyard with the vicar, and I’ve picked a gravesite within a stone’s throw of Matty’s. Perhaps they’ll like being neighbors.”

“Julia, don’t be irreverent,” said Caroline sharply. Turning to Kincaid, she added, “To what do we owe the pleasure of your company, Superintendent?”

“I’ve just been telling Sir Gerald—”

The door swung open again as Plummy came through with a laden tea tray. Julia went immediately to her aid, and together they arranged the tea things on the low table before the fire. “Mr. Kincaid, Sergeant James.” Plummy smiled at Gemma, looking genuinely pleased to see her. “I’ve made extra, in case you’ve not had a proper lunch again.” She busied herself pouring, this time into china cups and saucers rather than the comfortable stoneware mugs they’d used in the kitchen.

Refusing the offer of freshly toasted bread, Kincaid accepted tea reluctantly. He looked directly at Gerald. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m afraid we must go on with this.”

“Go on with what, Mr. Kincaid?” said Caroline. She had taken her cup from Plummy and returned to perch on the arm of the sofa, so that in spite of her small stature she seemed to hover protectively over her husband.

Kincaid wet his lips with a sip of tea. “The night Connor died, Dame Caroline, Tommy Godwin visited your husband in his dressing room at the Coliseum. He told Sir Gerald that he had just had a very unpleasant encounter with Connor. Although Connor was a little drunk and not terribly coherent, it eventually
became clear that he had discovered the truth about Matthew’s parentage, and was threatening to make his knowledge public with as much attendant scandal as possible.” Kincaid paused, watching their faces. “Connor had discovered, in fact, that Matthew was Tommy’s son, not Gerald’s.”

Sir Gerald had sunk into the sofa cushions again, eyes closed, his hand only loosely balancing the cup on his knee.

“Tommy and Mummy?” said Julia. “But that means Matty…” She subsided, her eyes wide and dark with shock. Kincaid wished he could have softened it for her somehow, wished he could comfort her as he had yesterday.

Vivian Plumley also watched the others, and Kincaid saw in her the perpetual observer, always on the edge of the family but not privy to its deepest secrets. She nodded once and compressed her lips, but Kincaid couldn’t tell if her expression indicated distress or satisfaction.

“What utter nonsense, Superintendent,” said Caroline. She laid her hand lightly on Gerald’s shoulder. “I won’t have it. You’ve overstepped the bounds of good manners as well as—”

“I am sorry if it distresses you, Dame Caroline, but I’m afraid it is necessary. Sir Gerald, will you tell me exactly what you did after Connor left you that night?”

Gerald touched his wife’s hand. “It’s all right, Caro. There can’t be any harm in it.” He roused himself, sitting forward a little and draining his teacup before he began. “There’s not much to tell, really. I’d had quite a stiff drink with Tommy, and I’m afraid I kept on after he left. By the time I left the theater I was well over the limit. Shouldn’t have been driving, of course, very irresponsible of me, but I managed without mishap.” He smiled, showing healthy, pink gums above his upper teeth. “Well, almost without mishap. I had a bit of a run-in with Caro’s car as I was parking mine. It seems my memory misled me by a foot or so as to its position, and I gave the paintwork a little scrape on the near side. It must have been close on one o’clock when I wobbled my way up to bed. Caro was asleep. I knew Julia was still out, of course, as I hadn’t seen her car in the drive, but she’s long past having a curfew.” He gave his daughter an affectionate look.

“But I thought I heard you come in around midnight,” said Plummy. She shook her head. “I just opened my eyes and squinted at the clock—perhaps I misread it.”

Caroline slipped from the arm of the sofa and went to stand with her back to the fire. “I really don’t see the point to this, Superintendent. Just because Connor was obviously disturbed does not mean we should be subjected to some sort of fascist grilling. We’ve already been over this once—that should be enough. I hope you realize that your assistant commissioner will hear about your irrational behavior.”

She stood with her hands clasped behind her back and her feet slightly apart. In her black turtleneck, with fitted trousers tucked inside soft leather riding boots, she looked as though she might have been playing a trouser role in an opera. With her chin-length dark hair and in those clothes, she could easily pass for a boy on the verge of manhood. Her color was a little high, as befitted the hero/heroine under trying circumstances, but her voice, as always, was perfectly controlled.

“Dame Caroline,” said Kincaid, “Connor may have been emotionally distraught, but he was also telling the truth. Tommy admitted it, and Sir Gerald has confirmed it as well. I think it’s time—” He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. Caroline’s jacket slid from the back of the sofa to the cushion with a rustling sound, the soft black leather as fluid as running water.

An odd sensation came over him, as if he had suddenly receded down a tunnel, distorting both his hearing and his vision. Blinking, he turned again to Caroline. Rearrange a few insignificant pieces in the pattern, and the whole thing shifted, turning on itself and popping into focus, clear and sharp and irrefutable. It amazed him now that he hadn’t seen it all from the beginning.

They were all watching him with various degrees of concern. Smiling at Gemma, who had frozen with her cup poised midway in the air, he set his own empty cup firmly upon the table. “It wasn’t the doorbell you heard that night, Mrs. Plumley, it was the telephone. And it wasn’t Gerald you heard coming in a few minutes after midnight, but Caroline.

“Connor rang this number from the flat a little before eleven o’clock. I think it likely that he was looking for Julia, but it was Caroline who answered the phone.” Kincaid rose and went to stand against the piano, so that he could face Caroline directly. “He couldn’t resist baiting you, could he, Caroline? You were the architect of the deception he felt had cost him his happiness, after all.

“You thought you could calm him down, make him see reason, so you said you’d meet him. But you didn’t want him making a scene in a public place, so you suggested somewhere you wouldn’t be overheard—what could have been more natural than your favorite walk along Hambleden Lock?

“You dressed quickly, I imagine in something quite similar to the things you’re wearing just now, and put on your leather jacket. The night was cold and damp, and it’s a good brisk walk from the carpark to the river. You slipped quietly out of the house, making sure not to wake Plummy, and when you reached the river you waited for Con at the beginning of the weir.”

He shifted his position a bit, putting his hands in his trouser pockets. They all watched him, as mesmerized as if he were a conjurer about to pull a rabbit from a hat. Julia’s eyes looked glazed, as if she were unable to assimilate a second shock so soon after the first.

“What happened then, Caroline?” he asked. Closing his eyes, he pictured the scene as he spoke. “You walked along the weir, and you argued. The more you tried to reason with Con, the more difficult he became. You reached the lock, crossing over it to the far side, and there the paved path ends.” He opened his eyes again and watched Caroline’s still, composed face. “So you stood with Connor on the little concrete apron just upstream of the sluicegate. Did you suggest turning back? But Con was out of control by that time, and the argument disintegrated into—”

“Please, Superintendent,” said Sir Gerald, “you really have gone too far. This is all absurd. Caro couldn’t kill anyone. She’s not physically capable—just look at her. And Con was over six feet tall and well built…”

“She’s also an actress, Sir Gerald, trained to use her body on the stage. It may have been something as simple as stepping aside
when he rushed at her. We’ll probably never be certain of that, or know what actually killed Connor. From the results of the postmortem I think it likely he had a laryngospasm—his throat closed from the shock of hitting the water, and he died from suffocation without ever drawing water into his lungs.

“What we do know,” he said, turning back to Caroline, “is that help was less than fifty yards away. The lockkeeper was at home, he had the necessary equipment and expertise. And even had he not been available, there were other houses just a bit farther along the opposite bank of the river.

“Whether Connor’s fall into the river was an accident, or self-defense, or a deliberate act of violence, the fact remains that you are culpable, Dame Caroline. You might have saved him. Did you wait what seemed a reasonable time for him to come up again? When he didn’t surface, you walked away, drove home and climbed back into bed, where Gerald found you sleeping peacefully. Only you were a bit more flustered than you thought, and didn’t quite manage to leave your car exactly as it had been.”

Caroline smiled at him. “That’s quite an amusing fiction, Mr. Kincaid. I’m sure the chief constable and your assistant commissioner will find it most entertaining as well. You have nothing but circumstantial evidence and an overactive imagination.”

“That may be true, Dame Caroline. We will have forensics go over your car and your clothes, however, and there’s the matter of the witness who saw a man and, she assumed, a boy wearing a leather jacket on the weir walkway—she may recognize you in an identity parade.

“Whether or not we can build a case against you that will hold up in court, those of us here today will know the truth.”

“Truth?” said Caroline, at last allowing her voice to rise in anger. “You wouldn’t know truth if it came up and bit you, Mr. Kincaid. The truth is that this family will stand together, as we always have, and you can’t touch us. You’re a fool to think—”

“Stop it! Just stop it, all of you.” Julia rose from the sofa and stood shaking, her hands clenched and her face drained of color. “This has gone on long enough. How can you be such a hypocrite,
Mummy? No wonder Con was furious. He’d bought your load of rubbish and taken on my share of it, too.” She paused for a breath, then said more evenly, “I grew up hating myself because I never quite fit into your ideal circle, thinking that if I’d only been different, better somehow, you would have loved me more. And it was all a lie, the perfect family was a lie. You warped my life with it, and you would have warped Matty’s, too, if you’d been given a chance.”

“Julia, you mustn’t say these things.” Sir Gerald’s voice held more anguish than when he’d defended his wife. “You’ve no right to desecrate Matthew’s memory.”