Leave the Grave Green (7 page)

“The house was quiet. Caro was asleep and I didn’t wake her. I can only assume the same for Vivian. So you see, young lady, if it’s an alibi you’re after,” he paused and twinkled at Gemma, “I suppose I haven’t one.”

“What about your daughter, sir? Was she asleep as well?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say. I don’t remember seeing Julia’s car in the drive, but I suppose someone could have given her a lift home.”

Kincaid stood. “Thank you, Sir Gerald. We will need to talk to Dame Caroline again, at her convenience, but just now we’d like to see Julia.”

“I believe you know your way, Mr. Kincaid.”

“Good God, I feel like I’ve been dropped right in the bloody middle of a drawing room comedy.” Gemma turned her head to look at Kincaid as she preceded him up the stairs. “All manners and no substance. What are they playing at in this house?” As they reached the first landing, she stopped and turned to face him. “And you’d think these women were made of glass, the way Sir Gerald and Mrs. Plumley coddle them. ‘Mustn’t upset Caroline… mustn’t upset Julia,’” she hissed at him, remembering a bit belatedly to lower her voice.

Kincaid merely raised an eyebrow in that imperturbable manner she found so infuriating. “I’m not sure I’d consider Julia Swann a good candidate for coddling.” He started up the next flight, and Gemma followed the rest of the way without comment.

The door swung open as soon as Kincaid’s knuckles brushed it. “Bless you, Plummy. I’m star—” Julia Swann’s smile vanished abruptly as she took in their identity. “Oh. Superintendent Kincaid. Back so soon?”

“Like a bad penny,” Kincaid answered, giving her his best smile.

Julia Swann merely stuck the paintbrush she’d held in her hand over her ear and stepped back enough to allow them to enter. Studying her, Gemma compared the woman to the thin, serious child in the photo downstairs. That Julia was certainly visible in this one, but the gawkiness had been transmuted into sleek style, and the innocence in the child’s gaze had been lost long ago.

The shades were drawn up, and a pale, watery light illuminated the room. The center worktable, bare except for palette and white paper neatly masking-taped to a board, relieved the studio’s general disorder. “Plummy usually brings me up a sandwich about this time,” Julia said, as she shut the door and returned to the table. She leaned against it, gracefully balancing her weight, but Gemma had the distinct impression that the support she drew from it was more than physical.

A finished painting of a flower lay on the table. Gemma moved toward it almost instinctively, hand outstretched. “Oh, it’s lovely,” she said softly, stopping just short of touching the paper. Spare and sure in design, the painting had an almost oriental flavor, and the intense greens and purples of the plant glowed against the matte-white paper.

“Bread and butter,” said Julia, but she smiled, making an obvious effort to be civil. “I’ve a whole series commissioned for a line of cards. Upscale National Trust, you know the sort of thing. And I’m behind schedule.” Julia rubbed at her face, leaving a smudge of paint on her forehead, and Gemma suddenly saw the weariness that her smart haircut and trendy black turtleneck and leggings couldn’t quite camouflage.

Gemma traced the rough edge of the watercolor paper with a finger. “I suppose I thought the paintings downstairs must be yours, but these are quite different.”

“The Flints? I should hope so.” Some of the abruptness returned to Julia’s manner. She shook a cigarette from a pack on a side table and lit it with a hard strike of a match.

“I wondered about them as well,” Kincaid said. “Something struck me as familiar.”

“You probably saw some of his paintings in books you read as a child. William Flint wasn’t as well known as Arthur Rackham, but he did some marvelous illustrations.” Julia leaned against the worktable and narrowed her eyes against the smoke rising from her cigarette. “Then came the breastscapes.”

“Breastscapes?” Kincaid repeated, amused.

“They are technically quite brilliant, if you don’t mind the banal, and they certainly kept him comfortably in his old age.”

“And you disapprove?” Kincaid’s voice held a hint of mockery.

Julia touched the surface of her own painting as if testing its worth, then shrugged. “I suppose it is rather hypocritical of me. These keep me fed, and they supported Connor in the lifestyle to which he’d become accustomed.”

To Gemma’s surprise, Kincaid didn’t nibble at the proffered bait, but instead asked, “If you dislike Flint’s watercolors, why do they hang in almost every room in the house?”

“They’re not mine, if that’s what you’re thinking. A few years ago Mummy and Daddy got bitten by the collector’s bug. Flints were all the rage and they jumped on the bandwagon. Perhaps they thought I’d be pleased.” Julia gave them a brittle little smile. “After all, as far as they’re concerned, one watercolor looks pretty much like another.”

Kincaid returned her smile, and a look of understanding passed between them, as if they’d shared a joke. Julia laughed, her dark hair swinging with the movement of her head, and Gemma felt suddenly excluded. “Exactly what lifestyle did your husband need to support, Mrs. Swann?” she asked, rather too quickly, and she heard an unintended note of accusation in her voice.

Propping herself up on her work stool, Julia swung one black-booted foot as she ground the stub of her half-smoked cigarette into an ashtray. “You name it. I sometimes thought Con felt honor-bound to live up to an image he created—whiskey, women and an eye for the horses, everything you’d expect from your stereotypical Irish rogue. I wasn’t always sure he enjoyed it as much as he liked you to think.”

“Were there any women in particular?” Kincaid asked, his tone so lightly conversational he might have been inquiring about the weather.

She regarded him quizzically. “There was always a woman, Mr. Kincaid. The particulars didn’t concern me.”

Kincaid merely smiled, as if refusing to be shocked by her cynicism. “Connor stayed on in the flat you shared in Henley?”

Julia nodded, sliding off the stool to pull another cigarette from the crumpled packet. She lit it and leaned back against the table, folding her arms against her chest. The paintbrush still positioned over her ear gave her an air of slightly rakish industry, as if she might be a Fleet Street journalist relaxing for a brief moment in the newsroom.

“You were in Henley on Thursday evening, I believe?” Kincaid continued. “A gallery opening?”

“Very clever of you, Mr. Kincaid.” Julia flashed him a smile. “Trevor Simons. Thameside.”

“But you didn’t see your husband?”

“I did not. We move in rather different circles, as you might have guessed,” said Julia, the sarcasm less veiled this time.

Gemma glanced at Kincaid’s face, anticipating an escalating response, but he only answered lazily, “So I might.”

Julia ground out her cigarette, barely smoked this time, and Gemma could see a release of tension in the set of her mouth and shoulders. “Now if you don’t mind, I really must get back to work.” She included Gemma this time in the smile that was so like her father’s, only sharper around the edges. “Perhaps you could—”

“Julia.”

It was an old interrogation technique, the sudden and imperative use of the suspect’s name, a breaking down of barriers, an invasion of personal space. Still, the familiarity in Kincaid’s voice shocked Gemma. It was as if he knew this woman down to her bones and could sweep every shred of her artifice away with a casual flick of a finger.

Julia remained frozen in mid-sentence, her eyes locked on Kincaid’s face. They might have been alone in the room.

“You were only a few hundred yards from Connor’s flat. You could have stepped out for a smoke by the river, bumped into him, arranged to meet him later.”

A second passed, then another, and Gemma heard the rustle as Julia shifted her body against the worktable. Then Julia said slowly, “I could have. But I didn’t. It was my show, you see—my fifteen minutes in the limelight—and I never left the gallery at all.”

“And afterward?”

“Oh, Trev can vouch for me well enough, I think. I slept with him.”

“Division of labor,” Kincaid told Gemma as they stopped for a quick lunch at the pub in Fingest. “You see if you can confirm Sir Gerald’s alibi—that’ll allow you a night or two at home with Toby—and I’ll tackle Henley. I want to go over Connor Swann’s flat myself, and I want to have a word with—what did Julia say his name was? Simons, that was it—Trevor Simons, at his gallery. I’d like to know a bit more about Julia’s movements that night,” he added, and Gemma gave him a look he couldn’t interpret.

They finished their sandwiches under Tony’s watchful eye, then Gemma ran upstairs to pack her bag. Kincaid waited in the graveled carpark, jingling the change in his pockets and drawing furrows in the gravel with his toe. The Ashertons were very plausible, but the more he thought about it, the more difficult it became to make sense of what they had told him. They seemed to have been on close terms with a son-in-law their daughter barely tolerated, and yet they also seemed to go to great lengths to avoid confrontation with Julia. He made a
J
in the gravel with his shoe, then carefully raked it over again. How had Julia Swann really felt about her husband? In his mind he saw her again, her thin face composed and her dark eyes fixed on his, and he found he didn’t quite buy the tough persona she wore so successfully.

Gemma came out with her case, turning back for a moment to wave good-bye to Tony. The sun sparked from her hair, and it was only then that Kincaid realized it had ventured out from the clouds that had hidden it through the morning.

“Ready, guv?” asked Gemma as she stowed her things in the boot and slid behind the wheel of her Escort. Kincaid put his speculations aside and got in beside her. She seemed to him refreshingly uncomplicated, and he offered up a silent thanks, as he often did, for her competent cheerfulness.

Leaving the hills behind, they took the wide road to Henley. They had a glimpse of the river beneath the Henley Bridge, then it vanished behind them as the one-way system shunted them into the center of town. “Can you get back to the pub all right, guv?” Gemma asked as she pulled up to let Kincaid out in Henley’s marketplace.

“I’ll ask the local lads for a lift. I could pull rank and requisition a car, of course,” he added, grinning at her, “but just now I think I’d rather not be bothered with parking the bloody thing.”

He stepped out of the car and gave the door a parting thump with his hand, as if he were slapping a horse on its way. Gemma let up on the brake, but before nosing back into the traffic she rolled down the Escort’s driver’s-side window and called to him, “Mind how you go.”

Turning back, he waved jauntily to her, then watched the car disappear down Hart Street. The sudden note of concern in her voice struck him as odd. It was she who was driving back to London, while he merely intended an unannounced interview and a recce of Connor Swann’s flat. He shrugged and smiled—he’d quite grown to like her occasional solicitousness.

Henley Police Station lay just across the street, but after a moment’s hesitation he turned and instead climbed the steps to the Town Hall. A cardboard sign taped to the wall informed him that Tourist Information could be found downstairs, and as he descended, he wrinkled his nose at the standard public building accoutrements—cracked lino and the sour smell of urine.

Fifty pence bought him a street map of the town, and he unfolded it as he walked thankfully back out into the sun. He saw that his way lay down Hart Street and along the river, so tucking the map in his jacket and his hands in his pockets, he strolled down the hill. The square tower of the church seemed to float
against the softly colored hills beyond the river, and it drew him on like a lodestone. “St. Mary the Virgin,” he said aloud as he reached it, thinking that for an Anglican Church the syllables rolled off the tongue with a very Catholic resonance. He wondered where they meant to bury Connor Swann. Irish Catholic, Irish Protestant? Could it possibly matter? He didn’t yet know enough about him to hazard a guess.

Crossing the busy street, he stood for a moment on the Henley Bridge. The Thames spread peacefully before him, so different from the thunder of water through Hambleden Weir. The river course wound north for a bit after Henley, curved to the east before it reached Hambleden, then meandered northeast before turning south toward Windsor. Could Connor have gone in the river here, in Henley, and drifted downstream to Hambleden Lock? He thought it highly unlikely, but made himself a mental note to check with Thames Valley.

He took a last look at the red-and-white Pimm’s umbrellas beckoning temptingly from the terrace of the Angel pub, but he had other fish to fry.

A few hundred yards beyond the pub he found the address. Next door to the tearoom a discreet sign announced
THE GALLERY, THAMESIDE
, and a single painting in an ornate gilded frame adorned the shop window. The door chimed electronically as Kincaid pushed it open, then clicked softly behind him, shutting out the hum of sound from the riverside.

The silence settled around him. Even his footsteps were muffled by a thickly padded Berber carpet covering the floor. No one seemed to be about. A door stood open in back of the shop, revealing a small walled garden, and beyond that another door.

Kincaid looked round the room with interest. The paintings, spaced generously around the walls, seemed to be mostly late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century watercolors, and most were river landscapes.

In the room’s center a pedestal held a sleek bronze of a crouching cat. Kincaid ran his hand over the cool metal and thought of Sid. He had made arrangements with his neighbor, Major Keith,
to look after the cat when he was away from home. Although the major professed to dislike cats, he looked after Sid with the same gruff tenderness he had shown to the cat’s former owner. Kincaid thought that for the major, as well as himself, the cat formed a living link to the friend they had lost.