“It’s not at all like Kilburn,” Irene said, and some quality in her voice made him look more closely at her, wondering if underneath that cheerful exterior she might be just a little bit frightened.
“No, but you’ll like it,” he said. “I promise.”
L EWIS AND I RENE BECAME FAST FRIENDS so swiftly that the first few weeks after William’s return were a bit awkward. William had come back rather full of himself, having spent his holiday immersed in his family’s business. When Irene remained unimpressed with the importance of Hammond’s Teas, William very politely tried to make it clear to her that she wasn’t included in Lewis’s and his schemes. But Irene always affected not to notice: she tagged along anyway, and after a bit William gave up in exasperation. He soon seemed to forget that he’d ever tried to leave her out.
In August, Mr. Cuddy returned from his long holiday on the Cornish coast, and they were busy with schoolwork again. If Mr. Cuddy and the boys had got into a bit of a rut with their studies, Irene soon woke them up. She was fascinated by Mr. Cuddy’s geographical mapping of the war, and always had a question or an argument.
They had a special interest in the campaign in North Africa, and Irene followed the exploits of Montgomery’s 8th Army against Rommel with as much partisan fervor as the boys, even though she’d never met John Pebbles. As the days shortened into autumn, they spent long afternoons before the schoolroom fire with cups of cocoa, discussing the war and their futures.
“It’s going to be over before we’re old enough to join,” complained Lewis one day when the rain beating against the windows kept them from going outside. “North Africa’s only the beginning. With the Yanks in it now, Europe’s bound to be next. Old Hitler won’t be able to stand up to the combined forces.”
“Yes, but I remember when everyone said the war would be over in weeks.” William stretched out on the rug and propped his chin on his hands, staring into the fire, and Lewis thought that he couldn’t imagine William fighting anyone, even if things did stretch out that long.
“Do you ever think about losing?” asked Irene. With Edwina’s cooperation, she had taken happily to wearing trousers like the boys, and sat cross-legged on the floor with her back against the old armchair. “Everyone talks as though there’s no question we’ll win, eventually. But what if we don’t?”
“Don’t be silly,” retorted William. “Of course we’ll win, so there’s no point thinking about it.”
But Lewis had thought about it. Lots of things he’d thought could never happen—his house being bombed, his two brothers dying—had happened, so he had to consider the possibility that they could lose this war.
“Of course, I hope it will end soon,” said Irene, studying the flames. “But if it doesn’t, I’m going to join up when I’m old enough and I’m going to be a general.”
“You’re positively daft,” said William. “Girls can’t be generals.”
“I don’t see why not.” Irene’s chin went up the way it did when she was going to be stubborn. “I like planning maneuvers and things.”
“But that’s just playing at it,” Lewis said, trying to be reasonable. “If it was real, you’d have to deal with wounded, and intelligence reports, and oh, all sorts of things. And you’d have to tell people what to do all the time.”
“So?” Irene stuck her tongue out at him. “I could do any of those things just as well as you.”
Mr. Cuddy looked up from the book he was reading. “Don’t squabble. I think Irene’s perfectly capable of telling people what to do. In fact,” he continued, warming to his subject, “has it ever occurred to you that we might have won the war by this time if all the generals were women? Think about Artemis, the hunter goddess.”
Lewis and William looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Now she’d got old Cuddy started on one of his tears, and they’d get the entire Greek mythology if they weren’t careful.
“And what about Boadicea—the ancient British warrior queen who led her forces against the Romans. That’s a bit closer to home.” Mr. Cuddy smiled at Irene. “And she had red hair.”
“I’ll bet people told her she couldn’t be a general, either,” Irene said, tossing her head with irritating smugness.
But Lewis was willing to let the matter drop for the sake of peace, because he had a feeling that if they kept on at her, Mr. Cuddy would get really cross.
Their tutor had seemed different since he came back from his long Cornish holiday, but Lewis had not quite been able to put his finger on what it was. At first he’d thought that maybe Mr. Cuddy didn’t like Irene, but that didn’t seem to be it, as he was much less likely to snap at her than at William and him. But something had changed, and the small, nagging worry this caused Lewis was the only thing to mar his contentment.
AS KINCAID PULLED THE CAR INTO a shady spot across from Gordon Finch’s flat, Gemma saw Gordon walking down East Ferry Road from the direction of Mudchute Station, clarinet case in his hand, Sam at his side. They waited until he had almost reached his flat, then got out of the car and crossed the road to intercept him.
“We’d like a word, Mr. Finch, if you don’t mind,” Kincaid said, showing his warrant card as if Gordon might have forgotten who they were.
“And if I do?” Gordon said easily, but his eyes flicked towards Gemma. He wore his military gear again today, and looked disreputable beside Kincaid, who wore khakis and a blue chambray shirt, his collar unbuttoned beneath the knot of his tie.
“We can have a chat somewhere less comfortable.”
Gemma felt the tension mount between the two men, then Gordon shrugged without speaking and led them up the stairs to his flat. Once inside, he looked at Gemma and threw down a challenge. “You know your way round, I think.” The physical presence of the two men, so close together in the small room and radiating dislike, made her feel she’d got caught in the middle of a pissing contest.
She held her ground. “We want to know exactly what Annabelle said to you in the tunnel. Word for word.”
“I’ve told you—”
“A very small piece—that she wanted to mend things between you. What you didn’t say was that Annabelle had just found out that your father had lied to her, betrayed her, just as she meant to betray her own father.”
“My father doesn’t lie,” Gordon said sharply.
“Then why did he tell Annabelle he would preserve the Hammond’s warehouse if she sold it to him, when all along he meant to tear it down?”
“Tear it down?” he repeated, frowning.
“She didn’t tell you? She must have been terribly angry with him.”
“She said …” He looked down as if surprised at the clarinet case he continued to hold in his right hand, then he knelt and set it carefully by the music stand. “She said something about loyalties that no longer mattered. I’d heard rumors, back in the spring, about Lewis’s interest in the warehouse, and that they’d been seen together a good bit. But when I asked her about it, she denied either a business interest or an affair.” He looked up and met Gemma’s eyes. “So I followed her. She spent the night at his flat. When I confronted her with it, she never even tried to justify herself. She said I wouldn’t understand.… And then she let me walk away.”
“But you didn’t stop loving her.”
Gordon rose, his hands looking awkwardly empty. “No.”
“And that night, she told you she loved you. She wanted to work things out. In the video in the tunnel, she was pleading.”
“She said … she said she’d realized that she’d thrown away what mattered to her most … but that my being there meant it wasn’t too late—we could still work things out, if we loved each other.”
Gemma sensed Kincaid move restlessly behind her, but he didn’t speak. “You turned her away,” she said softly, not taking her eyes from Gordon. “You didn’t believe her.” She heard her words fall flat as stones in a pool, and as she looked at Gordon Finch she thought the desolation on his face far worse than weeping. “The
re was something else, wasn’t there? What else did she say, Gordon?”
When he didn’t speak, she said it for him. “She said she meant to prove it, didn’t she? In the video, I saw her turn back for a last word, and she was still angry, defiant even. She meant to prove she loved you.”
“IT LOOKS LIKE LEWIS FINCH, DOESN’T it?” Gemma felt no sense of elation at the prospect. For Gordon to have to face the guilt of a father he obviously cared for more than he admitted was bad enough, but she herself had liked and admired Lewis Finch.
“It wasn’t her engagement she said she was going to break off when she rang him that night,” Kincaid said as he eased the Rover into the northbound traffic on East Ferry Road. “It was their deal. That’s why he sounded angry in the message he left on her answering machine.”
“And not just the deal, but her relationship with him as well—how could she keep seeing him after what she’d learned?”
“It sounds as though she was using Lewis from the beginning—”
“As he was using her.” Gemma glanced up at the high banks of the Mudchute to the right as they passed, and on the left the sun glinted off the water of Millwall Dock. “But that doesn’t solve the problem of where and how they met that night, or how Lewis Finch could have got her body into the park.”
“Or his motive,” Kincaid mused. “It seems apparent why Annabelle was willing to defy her father’s wishes in selling the warehouse. The business was more important to her than anything, and if she believed that was the only way she could keep it afloat—”
“But why was Lewis Finch willing to pay any price for the property? And why was he determined to tear it down once he had it, a contradiction of everything he believes in?”
“Did he think killing Annabelle would stop the sale from falling through?” Kincaid asked.
“He couldn’t have been sure what would happen.” Gemma frowned and glanced at her watch. “Do you want to try to catch him at his office? He said he’s usually out on site in the afternoons.”
Kincaid drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited for a light to change. “No. Not until we have enough to nail him. We’ll ask Janice to have a discreet word with his neighbors, see if they noticed any unusual comings and goings.”
“So what do we do in the meantime?” asked Gemma, a little surprised, but conceding the logic of his approach.
“The reason we can’t make sense of Lewis Finch’s behavior is because we haven’t got at the root of it,” Kincaid said slowly. “And I think that root lies in the past—I can’t believe it’s mere coincidence that William Hammond and Lewis Finch knew each other during the war, or that Annabelle sought out Gordon Finch.”
“William Hammond’s made it clear he’s not going to talk about it,” Gemma protested.
“So we’ll find someone who will.” Kincaid glanced at her. “Come to Surrey with me. There’s a nice B and B in Holmbury St. Mary—remember?”
Yesterday’s encounter with Gordon Finch flashed unbidden into Gemma’s mind—How could she face a romantic getaway with Duncan in a B&B with that on her conscience?
“I promised I’d look after the kids for Hazel tonight,” she said. Knowing that Hazel and Tim’s plans to take in a movie were flexible and that she was stretching the truth, she felt guiltier still. “And you might need me this end,” she added, bolstering her excuse.
“I might,” Kincaid said lightly, his tone disguising the hurt she was certain she had glimpsed in his eyes.
JO LOWELL HAD TOLD GEMMA THAT she thought the house where her father had spent the war years was now a country-house hotel, and that his godmother had been named Burne-Jones. That was all the information Kincaid had to go on when he arrived in Surrey in the late afternoon and took a room at the pleasant farmhouse B&B in Holmbury St. Mary. He’d hoped he might see his friend Madeleine Wade, who lived in the village, and Holmbury was in the vicinity Jo Lowell had indicated.
Madeleine practiced massage and aromatherapy from a small flat above the village shop, which she also owned, and when Kincaid had met her on a case the previous autumn he’d found her fascinating as well as a bit disturbing. She was the most matter-of-fact of selfconfessed psychics, a former investment banker with a gift for reading what she rather disparagingly referred to as “emotional auras,” and he’d discovered that conversations with her could have unexpected pitfalls.
When he’d settled the few things from his emergency overnight kit in his room, he’d walked down the road into the village proper. The shop was not on the green but tucked away in a cul-de-sac on the hill above the village, and by the time he reached it he was warm and perspiring, even with his jacket slung over his shoulder.
The girl working the counter was unfamiliar, but said she thought Madeleine was at home, then watched him curiously as he thanked her and let himself out with a jingle of the bells on the door. He climbed the white-painted steps that ran up the side of the building and knocked at the glossy white door at the top. After a moment, it swung open. Madeleine regarded him with a faint smile. “You’ve not lost your knack for good timing, I see.”
She looked just as he remembered—her bobbed, platinum hair and sharp nose receding into insignificance the moment you met her deep, moss-green eyes.
“You’re not surprised to see me?” he asked, looking round as he stepped into the small flat. He had last been here in November, but on this warm summer evening the two windows overlooking the shop-front were open to the breeze that moved the cheerful red-polka-dot curtains.
Her smile broadened. “No conjuring tricks this time,” she said, referring to the fact that the last time he’d called in unannounced, he’d found the table set for two. “But I did put a bottle of wine in the fridge to chill, just in case some old friend happened to drop by unexpectedly.”
“Madeleine, you’re astounding.”
“And you’re easily impressed,” she retorted, but she looked pleased as she retrieved a bottle of Australian sauvignon blanc from the fridge and uncorked it.
When she’d filled their glasses with the wine and they had sat down in the sitting area, she studied him for a moment before speaking. “So what brings you here, Duncan? It’s not strictly pleasure, I’m sure.”
“No, unfortunately.” He swirled the wine in his glass. “Do you happen to know of a country-house hotel nearby, used to be owned by a woman named Burne-Jones?”
Madeleine frowned as she thought. “The name sounds vaguely familiar.…” Her face cleared. “Wait, I’ve got it. There is a place, up near Friday Green.”
“Any of the family still about, by any chance?”
“It does seem as though I’d heard something about one of the family still living on the grounds, in the old tied cottage. A distant cousin, female, I believe.… Sorry, I can’t seem to dredge up any more.”
“It’s a place to start.”
“I can give you directions, at least,” said Madeleine. “It’s quite near here, actually.”
Kincaid jotted them down, then slipped the notebook back into the pocket of his jacket and returned his attention to her. “How are things, then?” he asked.
Madeleine laughed. “Blessedly dull since you went away, Superintendent, thank you very much. The ripples have subsided, and we’ve all gone back to pretending we never suspected one another of murder. And what about you?”
As he told her a bit about the Hammond case, she listened intently, and when he mentioned Lewis Finch’s name, she made a small movement of surprise. “Do you know him?” Kincaid asked.
“I did, in my previous incarnation, you might say. He had quite a reputation in the City.”
“A good one?”
“Yes, surprisingly; after all, success and honesty don’t often go hand in hand. Then again, Finch didn’t get where he is without a good deal of ruthlessness. Your Annabelle was a strong character indeed if she stood up to that one.”
“To her cost.”
“Do you think Lewis Finch killed her?”
“He seems the most likely possibility. Her former brother-in-law is the only one who professes to hate her, but he has a tidy alibi. Her fiancé seems to have had everything to lose and nothing to gain by killing her, and while he might have lost control enough to have a bloody great row with her, there’s a great gap between that and murder.” He studied his wine. “And Lewis Finch’s son has no motive that I can see—he’d known about her relationship with his father for months, and Annabelle pleaded with him to make up with her.”
Madeleine refilled their glasses, her expression pensive. “That’s a volatile situation—a father and son in love with the same woman … and if she threw the father over for the son …”
“What did you think of him?”
“You want me to tell you if I think Lewis Finch is capable of murder?” She frowned. “I suppose a man as driven as I remember Lewis Finch being might go over the edge. But I also sensed in him a great deal of grief—the sort of sadness that’s carried so long it becomes an integral part of the personality.” She gave Kincaid a swift glance over the rim of her glass, and he keenly remembered how exposed she could make him feel. “So tell me about you,” Madeleine demanded.
With anyone else, Kincaid would have found it easy to dissemble. He took a sip of his wine. “My ex-wife died—was murdered.”
“Oh, Duncan, I’m so sorry. Were you close?”
“Not for years. I wish we had been … friends.” He met Madeleine’s eyes, looked away. She seemed to be waiting. “And I learned I have a son. Kit. He’s eleven.”
“Your ex-wife’s child? But how wonderful for you.”
“And complicated,” Kincaid said a bit ruefully.
“How’s your sergeant coping with all of this?”
“Gemma? I think she can take anything in her stride.”
“Do you?” Madeleine’s voice held its characteristic trace of wry amusement.
Without warning, he was assailed by a longing for Gemma. He finished his wine, wishing she had agreed to come with him—wishing they could have had this one night alone together, uninterrupted.
Kissed a Sad Goodbye Page 32
