As if aware of his thoughts, Gemma said, “You believe Ogilvie, don’t you, guv?” as they swung around the roundabout and headed towards Holmbury St. Mary. “Why?”
Shrugging, Kincaid said, “I’m not sure I know.” Then he grinned at her. “The infamous gut feeling. Seriously… he lied about some things, and I could tell. Gilbert’s response when he told him he’d not do his dirty work anymore, for instance. But I don’t think he’s lying about Gilbert or Jackie.”
“Even if you’re right about that, and I don’t grant it to you, why Claire?”
He thought he heard a trace of resentment in her voice. Sighing, he thought he couldn’t blame her. He liked Claire Gilbert, too-admired her, even. And maybe, just maybe, he was wrong. “In the first place, there’s no physical evidence to place him there-not a hair nor a fiber in that kitchen.
“Then think about everything we’ve learned about Alastair Gilbert. He was a jealous and vindictive man with a megalomaniac’s thirst for power. He enjoyed inflicting pain on others, whether physical or emotional. Who would have borne the brunt of it?” He glanced at Gemma’s profile, then said emphatically, “His wife. I’ve always said this murder was committed in rage, and I think Claire Gilbert hated her husband.”
“if you’re right,” said Gemma, “how are you going to prove it?”
Claire met them at the back door with an anxious expression. “I’ve called the hospital and they’re being very closemouthed about Constable Darling. Have you heard anything?”
“Better than that,” Gemma reassured her. “I’ve seen him, first thing this morning, and he’s doing fine.”
Kincaid paused in the mudroom, running his eye along the macintoshes hanging on a row of hooks. When he saw what he was searching for he didn’t know whether he felt jubilant or sorry.
“And… David?” Claire asked as they entered the kitchen. She looked at Kincaid.
“He’s still helping us with our inquiries.”
Lewis was lying on Lucy’s quilt, but this morning he lifted his head and thumped his tail. Kincaid knelt and scratched his ears. “I see this patient is improving, too, though he’s not entirely back to his rambunctious self.”
“Lucy insisted on staying up with him all night. It was only after the vet came an hour ago that I was able to convince her to curl up on the sofa in the conservatory.” Claire hesitated, fingering the silk scarf bunched in the neck of the crisply tailored white shirt she wore. “About David… he was a good man, once. Whatever has happened to him in the last few years, I still can’t imagine him capable of…killing anyone.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” Kincaid said, feeling Gemma’s sharp glance.
Claire gave him a relieved smile. “Thank you for coming to set my mind at rest. Can I get you a coffee or some tea?”
Kincaid took a breath. “Actually, we’d like a word with you. Someplace a bit more private, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Her smile faltered, but she agreed readily enough. “We can use the sitting room. I’d rather not disturb Lucy just now.”
They followed her into the room that had seemed so welcoming the night Alastair Gilbert died, leaving the door just slightly ajar. The fire was cold in the hearth, and the red walls seemed tawdry in the thin daylight streaking through the shutters.
Kincaid sat stiffly on the armchair’s chintz seat. He had rehearsed angle after angle, how he might surprise her, trick her, but in the end he began simply.
“Mrs. Gilbert, I’ve learned several things this last week that have led me to believe your husband physically abused you. Perhaps this happened only on one or two occasions, perhaps it had been going on from the very beginning of your marriage. I don’t know.
“I do know, however, from sources other than David Ogilvie, that your husband suspected you of having an affair. He went so far as to accuse Malcolm Reid, and he threatened him.”
Claire put a hand to her mouth, pressing hard on her lips with her fingers. Reid hadn’t told her, thought Kincaid. What else had Claire Gilbert’s friends kept from her in their desire to protect her? And what had she kept from them?
“But Reid was guilty of no more than helping you hide financial assets, and he told Gilbert where to get off. How close did your husband get to the truth, Claire? Did he threaten Brian, too?”
The silence stretched as Claire twisted her hands together in her lap. This was the watershed, Kincaid knew, and he had to remind himself to breathe. If she denied her relationship with Brian, he had no other lever to use and no evidence against her but his own wild suppositions. Her face seemed shuttered and remote, as if none of this quite touched her, then she took a little breath and said, “David knew, didn’t he?”
Kincaid nodded and made an effort to keep the relief from his voice. “I think so, but he didn’t tell us.”
“It was no great middle-aged passion, you know, Brian and me,” she said with a trace of a smile. “We were lonely, both of us, and needy. He’s been a good friend.
“And Malcolm. I never told Malcolm the whole truth about Alastair, only as much as I could bear. I said I was tired of being condescended to, of being treated like a chattel, and Malcolm helped me any way he could. I was so careful not to take that bankbook home. I even hid it away in a secret place in the shop, in case Alastair managed somehow to search my desk. He was very plausible when he wished it, you know. I imagined that he might come in when he knew I would be out on a consultation, and tell Malcolm I’d rung and asked him to pick up something. What could Malcolm do?
“And then, of course, I wondered if my paranoia had reached epic proportions, if I was becoming mentally ill.” She shook her head and gave a strangled laugh. “But I know now that not even my paranoia did justice to Alastair.”
Her words poured out in a torrent of release, and it seemed to Kincaid that the façade Claire Gilbert had built around herself was cracking before his eyes. Emerging from the splintered shell was the real Claire-frightened, angry, bitter, and no longer the least bit remote.
“It didn’t occur to him to wonder why I brought home so little money, because he didn’t think my work worth anything. That, of course, was the only reason he tolerated my working at all, and I’m not sure that would have lasted much longer.
“I have an old school friend in the States, in North Carolina. I thought that when Lucy finished school I’d have enough money put by, and we would just… disappear.”
“What about Brian?” asked Gemma, sounding as though she’d decided he needed a partisan voice.
Slowly, Claire said, “Brian would have understood. Things with Alastair had… escalated… in the last year. I was afraid.”
Gemma sat forwards, her cheeks pink with indignation. “Why didn’t you just leave him? Tell him you wanted a bloody divorce and be done with it?”
“You still don’t understand, do you? ‘It sounds so easy,’ you’re thinking. ‘No one with half a backbone would put up with that sort of treatment.’ But things never start out that way. It’s a gradual process, like learning a foreign language. One day you wake up and find you’re thinking in Greek, and you hadn’t even realized it. You’ve bought his terms.
“I believed it when he told me I couldn’t manage on my own. It was only when I started working with Malcolm that I began to see it might not be true.” Claire stopped, her face intent, her eyes focused on something they couldn’t see. “It was the beginning of a sort of resurrection, a rebirth of the person I’d had the potential to become before I married Alastair ten years ago.” She sighed and looked at them again. “But I’d learned enough over the years to try to keep those changes to myself.”
Softly, Kincaid said, “It didn’t work, did it? You’ve had two broken bones in a little over a year.”
Claire cradled her right wrist in her left hand, an instinctive, protective gesture. “I suppose he could sense that my center of attention had shifted. I’d ignore the subtle signals that were usually all he needed to manipulate me, until finally he woul
d explode.”
“Was that the beginning of the violence?”
She shook her head, and when she spoke her voice was barely audible. “No. That started almost at the beginning, but little things, things he could laugh off. Pinching… shaking. You see, I discovered as soon as we were married-” Claire stopped and rubbed a hand across her mouth. “I don’t know a delicate way to say this. Sexually, he wanted… he only wanted me to be compliant. If I expressed any desires or needs of my own, or even enjoyment, it made him furious-he wouldn’t come near me. So when I began to find him… distasteful, I would pretend to be eager, and he would leave me alone.
“Do you see? It was a very complicated game, and finally I grew tired of playing. I rejected him outright, and that’s when he began accusing me of having a lover.”
“Did you?” asked Kincaid.
“No, not then. But it made the possibility real for me. If I had sinned in fiction, why not in fact?” She smiled, mocking herself. “Somehow it made it easier to justify.”
Starved, thought Kincaid, remembering the word David Ogilvie had used. Starved for tenderness, starved for affection, in Brian she had found both. But did she count it worth the cost?
“Claire.” He waited until he had her full attention. “Tell me what happened the night Alastair died.”
She didn’t answer, didn’t raise her eyes from her clasped hands.
“Shall I tell you what I think?” Kincaid asked. “Lucy went to the shops in Guildford alone that afternoon. We had a positive identification of her, but no one remembered seeing you. Your husband had told you he had a meeting that evening, but much to your surprise, he walked in only a few minutes past his usual time. He had just met Ogilvie at the Dorking train station, and Ogilvie had told him about your secret bank account.
“Gilbert was livid, beyond anything you’d seen before. How dared you go behind his back, make a fool of him?” Kincaid paused. He had seen the quickly aborted gesture, the nervous raising of her hand towards her throat. “Untie your scarf, please, Claire.”
“Wh-what?” She cleared her throat.
“Untie your scarf. You were hoarse that night-I remember feeling surprised at the huskiness of your voice. This morning I realized you’ve kept your throat covered all this last week with scarves and turtleneck jumpers. Let me see it now.”
He thought she might refuse, but after a moment she reached slowly up and untied the tag ends of the scarf. She unwound the two loops around her throat, then pulled, and the silk cascaded to her lap.
The thumbprints were clear, either side of her windpipe, the purple fading into an unlovely shade of yellow.
Kincaid heard the intake of Gemma’s breath. Slowly, deliberately, he said, “Alastair came home and put his hands around your throat, squeezing until things began to go dark. Then something distracted him for a moment, and he turned away from you. He wasn’t afraid of you, after all. But you knew this time he had lost all reason, and you were afraid for your life. You picked up the closest thing to hand and hit him. There was another hammer, wasn’t there, Claire, lying handy in the kitchen?
“And when you realized what you’d done, you put on that old black mac hanging in the mudroom and carried the hammer up the lane. Percy Bainbridge saw you, a dark shadow slipping by. Where did you put the hammer, Claire? In the ashes of the bonfire?”
Still she didn’t speak, didn’t look up from her hands. Kincaid went on, gently. “I don’t believe you’ll let anyone else take the blame for this-not Geoff, not Brian, not David Ogilvie. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t claim self-defense in the first place.” He gestured at her throat. “You had irrefutable evidence.”
“I didn’t think anyone would believe me.” Claire’s words came so softly she might have been speaking to herself. “He was a policeman, after all. It didn’t occur to me that I had proof.” She raised her head and smiled at them. “I suppose I wasn’t thinking very clearly. It happened just as you said, only I didn’t mean to kill him. I only wanted to stop him hurting me.”
She sat up on the edge of the sofa and her voice grew louder, as if practice made it easier to say the words. “But yes, I did kill him. I killed Alastair.”
She’s too calm, thought Kincaid, then he saw that her hands were still clenched in her lap. Her knuckles were white from the pressure, as were her short-bitten nails. An odd habit for such a well-groomed woman, he thought, and then it came to him with sickening clarity.
The pathologist, Kate Ling, describing the tiny rips in the shoulders of Gilbert’s shirt. Rips Claire couldn’t have made. And Claire hadn’t been protecting herself at all with her manufactured story of missing jewelry and open doors.
He swallowed against the sudden lurch of nausea, then looked at Gemma. Did she see the truth? If only he knew; should he, could he, let Claire get away with her deception?
The door opened and Lucy came in, shutting it carefully behind her. In her green dress, with her dark-honey hair sleep tangled and her feet bare, she looked like a wood nymph.
“I’ve been listening,” she said as she came to stand beside Kincaid, facing her mother. “And it’s not true. Mummy didn’t kill Alastair. I did.”
“Lucy, no!” Claire started to rise. “Stop it this minute. Go to your room.”
Gemma put out a restraining hand, and Claire sank back to the edge of the sofa, looking up at her daughter. When Lucy stood implacable beside Kincaid, Claire turned to him, hands outstretched in entreaty. “Don’t pay her any attention. She’s upset, distraught. She’s just trying to protect me.”
“It happened just the way she said,” Lucy continued. “Except that I came home from Guildford. I wondered why Alastair’s car was in the garage when Mummy had said he’d be late and why the mudroom door wasn’t quite shut.
“They didn’t hear me come in. He had his hands around her neck and he was shouting at her in a sort of hoarse whisper. His face was red and the veins on his neck were standing out. I thought she was dead, at first. She looked limp, and her face had gone a funny color. I screamed at him and grabbed him by the shoulders, trying to pull him away.” Lucy stopped and swallowed, as though her mouth were dry, but she didn’t take her eyes from her mother’s face. “He swatted me off like I was a fly and went right back to choking her.
“I’d left the hammer out on the worktop. I’d been hanging a new piece Geoff had framed for me. I picked it up and hit him-Alastair, I mean. After the second or third time he fell.”
Lucy swayed slightly. She reached out and rested light fingers on Kincaid’s shoulder, as if the mere human contact were enough to keep her steady. Her mother watched her, transfixed, powerless to stop her now.
“I don’t remember much after that. When Mummy could breathe again, she made me strip off my clothes and my trainers. We put them in the washer with some other dirty things and some enzyme liquid-you know, the sort of stuff that takes the bloodstains out. She told me to dip my hands in it, too, before I went upstairs for clean clothes.
“When I came down again, the hammer was gone. She told me we’d say we’d found the door open, and some of her jewelry missing. When the washer finished its cycle we put the clothes in the dryer, then she called the police.”
“She’s a child,” Claire said, looking at Gemma, then Kincaid. “She can’t be held responsible for this.”
Lucy’s fingers tightened on Kincaid’s shoulder. “I’m seventeen, Mum. I’m legally an adult. I don’t think I meant to kill Alastair. But the fact is that I did.”
Claire put her face in her hands and sobbed.
Lucy went to her mother and put her arms around her, but she looked at Kincaid as she spoke. “I tried not to think about it, to pretend it hadn’t happened. But that’s what I’d done for years. I knew about Alastair, and Mummy knew I knew, but we didn’t talk about it. Maybe none of this would have happened if we had.”
“Sir.” Gemma’s whisper was urgently formal. “I’d like a word with you.” She nodded towards the door, and they
left mother and daughter together as they rose and went into the hall.
“How can we let her do this?” she hissed at him when they’d closed the sitting room door behind them. “Gilbert was a beast. She only did what anyone might have done in the circumstances, but this will ruin her life. She’s paying for Claire’s mistakes.”
Kincaid took her by the shoulders. He loved her then, for her prickly defense of the underdog, for her generous spirit, for her readiness to question the status quo, but he couldn’t tell her.
Instead, he said, “I thought the same thing, when I realized what had happened. But Lucy’s right, and she’s taken it out of our hands. We have to let her make her reparation. It’s the only way she’ll be able to live with herself.”
He let her go and leaned against the wall, tiredly. “And we can’t compromise ourselves, not even for Lucy. We swore to uphold the law, not to pass sentence, and we dare not cross that line, no matter how good our intentions. I don’t want Lucy to suffer any more than you do, but we have no choice. We must charge her.”
CHAPTER 17
Leaving Gemma with Claire, Kincaid had taken Lucy into the station himself Having changed into jeans and sweater and said a brief good-bye to Lewis, she sat quietly resolute beside him.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said as they came into the outskirts of Guildford, “that maybe now I can finish the game.” She’d looked at him and seemed to hesitate. “You know,” she said slowly, “if you’d been more like him, it would have been much easier to go on pretending, not facing up to things. But you remind me a bit of my dad.” And having given him the highest compliment in her vocabulary, she administered the coup de grace. “Will you come and visit me, wherever I am?”
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