Leave the Grave Green (3 page)

“We’ll certainly need more evidence before we can treat this as an official murder inquiry, Dame Caroline.”

“But I thought…” she began, then looked rather helplessly at Kincaid.

“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Was your son-in-law well liked?” Kincaid looked at them both, including Sir Gerald in the question, but it was Caroline who answered.

“Of course. Everyone liked Con. You couldn’t
not.”

“Had he been behaving any differently lately? Upset or unhappy for any reason?”

Shaking her head, she said, “Con was always… just Con. You would have to have known…” Her eyes filled. She balled one hand into a fist and held it to her mouth. “I feel such a bloody fool. I’m not usually given to hysterics, Mr. Kincaid. Or incoherence. It’s the shock, I suppose.”

Kincaid thought her definition of hysteria rather exaggerated, but said soothingly, “It’s perfectly all right, Dame Caroline. When did you see Connor last?”

She sniffed and ran a knuckle under one eye. It came away smudged with black. “Lunch. He came for lunch yesterday. He often did.”

“Were you here as well, Sir Gerald?” Kincaid asked, deciding that only a direct question was likely to elicit a response.

Sir Gerald sat with his head back, eyes half closed, his untidy tuft of gray beard thrusting forward. Without moving, he said, “Yes, I was here as well.”

“And your daughter?”

Sir Gerald’s head came up at that, but it was his wife who answered. “Julia was here, but didn’t join us. She usually prefers to lunch in her studio.”

Curiouser and curiouser
, thought Kincaid.
The son-in-law comes to lunch but his wife refuses to eat with him
. “So you don’t know when your daughter saw him last?”

Again the quick, almost conspiratorial glance between husband and wife, then Sir Gerald said, “This has all been very difficult for Julia.” He smiled at Kincaid, but the fingers of his free hand picked at what looked suspiciously like moth holes in his brown woolen sweater. “I’m sure you’ll understand if she’s a bit… prickly.”

“Is your daughter here? I’d like to see her, if I may. And I will want to talk to you both at more length, when I’ve had a chance to review the statements you’ve given Thames Valley.”

“Of course. I’ll take you.” Caroline stood, and Sir Gerald followed suit. Their hesitant expressions amused Kincaid. They’d
been expecting a battering, and now didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. They needn’t worry—they’d be glad to see the back of him soon enough.

“Sir Gerald.” Kincaid stood and shook hands.

The watercolors caught his eye again as he turned toward the door. Although most of the women were fair, with delicate rose-flushed skin and lips parted to show small glistening white teeth, he realized that something about them reminded him of the woman he followed.

“This was the children’s nursery,” Caroline said, her breathing steady and even after the three-flight climb. “We made it into a studio for her before she left home. I suppose you might say it’s been useful,” she added, giving him a sideways look he couldn’t interpret.

They’d reached the top of the house and the hall was unornamented, the carpeting threadbare in spots. Caroline turned to the left and stopped before a closed door. “She’ll be expecting you.” She smiled at Kincaid and left him.

He tapped on the door, waited, tapped again and listened, holding his breath to catch any faint sound. The echo of Caroline’s footsteps had died away. From somewhere below he heard a faint cough. Hesitating, he brushed his knuckles against the door once more, then turned the knob and went in.

The woman sat on a high stool with her back to him, her head bent over something he couldn’t see. When Kincaid said, “Uh, hello,” she whipped around toward him and he saw that she held a paintbrush in her hand.

Julia Swann was not beautiful
. Even as he formed the thought, quite deliberately and matter-of-factly, he found he couldn’t stop looking at her. Taller, thinner, sharper than her mother, dressed in a white shirt with the tail out and narrow black jeans, she displayed no softly rounded curves in figure or manner. Her chin-length dark hair swung abruptly when she moved her head, punctuating her gestures.

He read his intrusion in her startled posture, felt it in the room’s instantly recognizable air of privacy. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Duncan Kincaid, from Scotland Yard. I did knock.”

“I didn’t hear you. I mean, I suppose I did, but I wasn’t paying attention. I often don’t when I’m working.” Even her voice lacked the velvety resonance of Caroline’s. She slid off the stool, wiping her hands on a bit of rag. “I’m Julia Swann. But then you know all that, don’t you?”

The hand she held out to him was slightly damp from contact with the cloth, but her grasp was quick and hard. He looked around for someplace to sit, saw nothing but a rather tatty and overstuffed armchair which would place him a couple of feet below the level of her stool. Instead he chose to lean against a cluttered workbench.

Although the room was fairly large—probably, he thought, the result of knocking two of the house’s original bedrooms into one—the disorder extended everywhere he looked. The windows, covered with simple white rice-paper shades, provided islands of calm in the jumble, as did the high table Julia Swann had been facing when he entered the room. Its surface was bare except for a piece of white plastic splashed with bright daubs of paint, and a Masonite board propped up at a slight angle. Before she slid onto the stool again and blocked his view, he glimpsed a small sheet of white paper masking-taped to the board.

Glancing at the paintbrush still in her hand, she set it on the table behind her and pulled a packet of cigarettes from her shirt pocket. She held it toward him, and when he shook his head and said, “No, thanks,” she lit one and studied him as she exhaled.

“So, Superintendent Kincaid—it is Superintendent, isn’t it? Mummy seemed to be quite impressed by the title, but then that’s not unusual. What can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Swann.” He tossed out an expected opening gambit, even though he suspected already that her response would not be conventional.

She shrugged, and he could see the movement of her shoulders under the loose fabric of her shirt. Crisply starched, buttons on the left—Kincaid wondered if it might have been her husband’s.

“Call me Julia. I never got used to ‘Mrs. Swann.’ Always sounded to me like Con’s mum.” She leaned toward him and picked up a cheap
porcelain ashtray bearing the words
Visit the Cheddar Gorge
. “She died last year, so that’s one bit of drama we don’t have to deal with.”

“Did you not like your husband’s mother?” Kincaid asked.

“Amateur Irish. All B’gosh and B’gorra.” Then she added more affectionately, “I used to say that her accent increased proportionately to her distance from County Cork.” Julia smiled for the first time. It was her father’s smile, as unmistakable as a brand, and it transformed her face. “Maggie adored Con. She would have been devastated. Con’s dad did a bunk when Con was a baby… if he ever had a dad, that is,” she added, only the corners of her lips quirking up this time at some private humor.

“I had the impression from your parents that you and your husband no longer lived together.”

“Not for…” She spread the fingers of her right hand and touched the tips with her left forefinger as her lips moved. Her fingers were long and slender, and she wore no rings. “Well, more than a year now.”

Kincaid watched as she ground out her cigarette in the ashtray. “It’s a rather odd arrangement, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Do you think so, Mr. Kincaid? It suited us.”

“No plans to divorce?”

Julia shrugged again and crossed her knees, one slender leg swinging jerkily. “No.”

He studied her, wondering just how hard he might push her. If she were grieving for her husband, she was certainly adept at hiding it. She shifted under his scrutiny and patted her shirt pocket, as if reassuring herself that her cigarettes hadn’t vanished, and he thought that perhaps her armor wasn’t quite impenetrable. “Do you always smoke so much?” he said, as if he had every right to ask.

She smiled and pulled the packet out, shaking loose another cigarette.

He noticed that her white shirt wasn’t as immaculate as he’d thought—it had a smudge of violet paint across the breast. “Were you on friendly terms with Connor? See him often?”

“We spoke, yes, if that’s what you mean, but we weren’t exactly what you’d call best mates.”

“Did you see him yesterday, when he came here for lunch?”

“No. I don’t usually break for lunch when I’m working. Ruins my concentration.” Julia stubbed out her newly lit cigarette and slid off the stool. “As you’ve done now. I might as well quit for the day.” She gathered a handful of paintbrushes and crossed the room to an old-fashioned washstand with basin and ewer. “That’s the one drawback up here,” she said, over her shoulder, “no running water.”

His view no longer blocked by her body, Kincaid straightened up and examined the paper taped to the drawing board. It was about the size of a page in a book, smooth-textured, and bore a faint pencil sketch of a spiky flower he didn’t recognize. She had begun to lay in spots of clear, vivid color, lavender and green.

“Tufted vetch,” she said, when she turned and saw him looking. “A climbing plant. Grows in hedgerows. Flowers in—”

“Julia.” He interrupted the rush of words and she stopped, startled by the imperative in his voice. “Your husband died last night. His body was discovered this morning. Wasn’t that enough to interrupt your concentration? Or your work schedule?”

She turned her head away, her dark hair swinging to hide her face, but when she turned back to him her eyes were dry. “You’d better understand, Mr. Kincaid. You’ll hear it from others soon enough. The term ‘bastard’ might have been invented to describe Connor Swann.

“And I despised him.”

“A lager and lime, please.” Gemma James smiled at the bartender. If Kincaid were there he would raise an eyebrow at the very least, mocking her preference. So accustomed to his teasing had she become that she actually missed it.

“A raw evening, miss.” The barman set the cool glass before her, aligning it neatly in the center of a beer mat. “Have you come far?”

“Just from London. Beastly traffic getting out, though.” But the sprawl of western London had finally faded behind her, and she left the M40 at Beaconsfield and followed the Thames Valley. Even in the mist she had seen some of the fine Victorian houses fronting the river, relics of the days when Londoners used the upper Thames as a playground.

At Marlow she turned north and wound up into the beech-covered hills, marveling that in a few miles she seemed to have entered a hidden world, dark and leafy and far removed from the broad, peaceful expanse of the river below.

“What are the Chiltern Hundreds?” she asked the barman. “I’ve heard that phrase all my life and never knew what it meant.”

He set down a bottle he’d been wiping with a cloth and considered his answer. Approaching middle age, with dark, wavy, carefully groomed hair and the beginning of a belly, he seemed happy enough to pass the time chatting. The lounge was almost empty—a bit early for the regular Friday night customers, Gemma supposed—but cozy with a wood fire burning and comfortable tapestry-covered furniture.
A buffet of cold pies, salads and cheeses stood at the bar’s end, and she eyed it with anticipation.

Thames Valley CID had certainly been up to the mark, booking her into the pub in Fingest and giving her precise directions. When she arrived she’d found a stack of reports waiting for her in her room, and having attended to them, she had only to enjoy her drink and wait for Kincaid.

“The Chiltern Hundreds, now,” said the barman, bringing Gemma sharply back to the present, “they used to divide counties up into Hundreds, each with its own court, and three of these in Buckinghamshire came to be known as the Chiltern Hundreds because they were in the Chiltern Hills. Stoke, Burnham and Desborough, to be exact.”

“Seems logical,” said Gemma, impressed. “And you’re very knowledgeable.”

“Bit of a local history buff in my spare time. I’m Tony, by the way.” He thrust a hand over the bar and Gemma shook it.

“Gemma.”

“All the Hundreds are obsolete now, but the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds is still a nominal office under the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the holding of which is the only reason one is allowed to resign from the House of Commons. A bit of jiggery-pokery, really, and probably the only reason the office still exists.” He smiled at her, showing strong, even, white teeth. “There, I’ve probably told you more than you ever wanted to know. Get you a refill?”

Gemma glanced at her almost-empty glass, deciding she’d drunk as much as she ought if she wanted to keep a clear head. “Better not, thanks.”

“You here on business? We don’t let the rooms much this time of year. November in these hills is not exactly a drawing point for holiday-makers.”

“Quite,” said Gemma, remembering the fine drizzle under the darkness of the trees. Tony straightened glassware and kept an attentive eye on her at the same time, willing to talk if she wanted, but not pushing her. His self-assured friendliness made her wonder
if he might be the pub’s owner or manager, but in any case he was certainly a likely repository for local gossip.

“I’m here about that drowning this morning, actually. Police business.”

Tony stared at her, taking in, she felt sure, the curling ginger hair drawn back with a clip, the casual barley-colored pullover and navy slacks. “You’re a copper? Well, I’ll be.” He shook his head, his wavy hair not disturbed a whit by his incredulity. “Best-looking one I’ve seen, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Gemma smiled, accepting the compliment in the same good humor as it was given. “Did you know him, the man that drowned?”

This time Tony tut-tutted as he shook his head. “What a shame. Oh, everyone around here knew Connor. Doubt there’s a pub between here and London where he hadn’t put his head in once or twice. Or a racetrack. A real Jack the Lad, that one.”