Leave The Grave Green

by Deborah Crombie

  The perfect antidote to a morning spent wheel-spinning, thought Kincaid as he felt the faint warmth of the sun against his face, was a good walk. “I think I’ll take advantage of it,” he said to Makepeace as they reached the station. “You can reach me if anything comes up.”

  “Some people have all the luck,” Makepeace answered good-naturedly. “It’s back to the salt mines for the likes of me.” He waved and disappeared through the glass doors.

  Kincaid made the short drive from High Wycombe to Fingest, and on reaching the village he hesitated for a moment before turning into the pub’s carpark. Although the vicarage looked mellow and inviting in the afternoon sun and the vicar was certainly the authority on local walks, he decided it was much too likely he’d end up spending the rest of the afternoon being comfortably entertained in the vicar’s study.

  In the end, Tony proved as useful and accommodating on the matter of walks as he had about everything else. “I’ve just the thing,” he said, retrieving a book from the mysterious recesses under the bar. “Local pub walks. Three and a half miles too much for you?” He eyed Kincaid measuringly.

  “I think I can just about manage that,” Kincaid said, grinning.

  “Fingest, Skirmett, Turville, and back to Fingest. All three villages are in their own valleys, but this particular walk avoids the steepest hill. You might get a bit mucky, though.”

  “Thanks, Tony. I promise not to track up your carpets. I’ll just go and change.”

  “Take my compass,” Tony called out as Kincaid turned away, producing it from the palm of his hand like a conjurer. “It’ll come in handy.”

  At the top of the first long climb, some thoughtful citizen had placed a bench on which the winded walker could sit and enjoy the view. Kincaid took brief advantage of it, then toiled on, through woods and fields and over stiles. At first the vicar’s brief history rolled through his mind, and as he walked he imagined the progression of Celts, Romans, Saxons and Normans settling these hills, all leaving their own particular imprint upon the land.

  After a while the combination of fresh air, exercise and solitude worked its magic, and his mind returned freely to the question of Connor Swann’s death, sorting the facts and impressions that he had gathered so far. The pathologist’s evidence made it highly unlikely that Tommy Godwin had killed Connor outside the Red Lion in Wargrave. He might, of course, have knocked Connor unconscious and killed him a couple of hours later after returning from London-but like Gemma, Kincaid could come up with no logical scenario for the later removal of the body from the car to the lock.

  Dr. Winstead’s report also meant that Julia could not have killed Con during her brief absence from the gallery, and David’s statement placing Connor in Wargrave until at least ten o’clock made it impossible for her to have met him along the River Terrace and made an assignation for later. Kincaid shied away from the feeling of relief that this conclusion brought him, and forced himself to consider the next possibility-that she had met Connor much later and that Trevor Simons had lied to protect her.

  So caught up was he in these ruminations that he failed to see the cowpat until he had put his foot in it. Swearing, he wiped his trainer as best he could on the grass. Motive was like that, he mused as he walked on more carefully-sometimes you just couldn’t see it until you fell into it. Hard as he tried, he couldn’t come up with a likely reason why Julia would have wanted to kill Con, nor did he believe that having had one row with him that day, she would have agreed to meet him later in order to have another.

  Had that lunchtime argument with Julia been the trigger for Connor’s increasingly odd behavior during the rest of that day? Yet it was only after he had left Kenneth that Con had visibly deviated from an expected pattern. And that brought Kincaid to Kenneth-where had Kenneth been on Thursday evening, and why had asking him about his movements sent him from reluctant cooperation into complete and obstinate withdrawal? As he pictured Kenneth, huddled in his bomber jacket as if it were armor, he remembered the female witness Makepeace had mentioned. “A boy in leather,” she’d said… Kenneth was slightly built and Makepeace had described him as five foot eight or nine. Next to Connor he might easily have been mistaken for a boy. It was certainly a possibility worth pursuing.

  The woods enclosed him again as he left Skirmett. He walked in a dim and soundless world, his footfalls absorbed by the leaf mold. Not even birdsong broke the stillness, and when he stopped, staring after a flash of white that might have been a deer bounding away, he could hear the rush of his own blood in his ears.

  Kincaid walked on, following the next tendril that shot out from the amoebic mass of speculation-if Connor had driven away from the Red Lion after his scuffle with Tommy Godwin, where had he gone? Sharon Doyle’s face came into his mind-she, like Kenneth, had become belligerent when Kincaid had pushed her about her movements later that evening.

  As he came into Turville he looked northwest, toward Northend, up the hill where Badger’s End lay hidden under the dark canopy of the beeches. What had brought Julia back to that house, as if drawn by an unseen umbilical cord?

  He stopped at the Northend turning and frowned. Some thread ran through this case that he couldn’t quite grasp-he felt it move away whenever he approached it too closely, like some dark underwater creature always swimming just out of reach.

  Nestled among Turville’s cluster of cottages, The Bull and Butcher beckoned, but Kincaid declared himself immune to the temptation of Brakspear’s ales and pushed on into the fields again.

  He soon came out onto the road that led to Fingest. The sun had dropped beneath the tops of the trees, and the light slanted through the boles, illuminating dust motes and flickering on his clothes like a faulty film projector.

  By the time the now-familiar twin-gabled tower of Fingest church came into view, Kincaid found he had made two decisions. He would ask Thames Valley to pick up Kenneth Hicks, and then they’d see how well Hicks’s bravado held up in an interview room in the local nick.

  And he would pay another visit to Sharon Doyle.

  When Kincaid returned to the Chequers, a bit muddy as Tony had predicted and feeling pleasantly tired from his walk, there was still no word from Gemma regarding her progress with Tommy Godwin. He rang the Yard and left a message for her with the duty sergeant. As soon as she finished in London she was to join him again. He wanted her in on the interview with Hicks. And considering Kenneth’s obvious dislike of women, Kincaid thought with a smile, maybe she should conduct it.

  In Henley, Kincaid left the car near the police station and walked down Hart Street, his eyes on the tower of the church of St. Mary the Virgin.

  Square and substantial, it anchored the town around it like the hub of a wheel. Church Avenue lay neatly tucked in the tower’s shadow, facing the churchyard as if it were its own private garden. A plaque set into the stonework informed him that the row of almshouses had been endowed by John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1547, and rebuilt in 1830.

  The cottages were unexpectedly charming, built of a very pale green-washed stucco, with bright blue doors and lace curtains in every window. Kincaid knocked at the number Sharon Doyle had given him. He heard the sound of the television, and faintly, the high voice of a child.

  He had raised his hand to knock again when Sharon opened the door. Except for the unmistakable golden corkscrew curls, he would hardly have recognized her. She wore no makeup, not even lipstick, and her bare face looked young and unprotected. The tarted-up clothes and high heels were gone-replaced by a faded sweatshirt, jeans and dirty trainers, and in the few days since he had seen her she seemed visibly thinner. To his surprise, she also seemed rather pathetically glad to see him.

  “Superintendent! What are you doing here?” A sticky and disheveled version of the child in the wallet photo Kincaid had seen slipped up beside Sharon and wrapped herself around her mother’s leg.

  “Hullo, Hayley,” said Kincaid, squatting at her eye level. He looked up at Sharon and added, “I came to
see how you were getting on.”

  “Oh, come in,” she said as if making an effort to recall her manners, and she stepped back, hobbled by the child clinging to her like a limpet. “Hayley was just having her tea, weren’t you, love? In the kitchen with Gran.” Now that she had Kincaid in the sitting room, she seemed to have no idea what to do with him, and simply stood there stroking the child’s tangle of fair curls.

  Kincaid looked around the small room with interest. Doilies and dark furniture, fringed lampshades and the smell of lavender wax, all as neat and clean as if they had been preserved in a museum. The sound of the television was only a bit louder than it had been when he stood outside, and he surmised that the cottage’s interior walls must be constructed of thick plaster.

  “Gran likes the telly in the kitchen,” Sharon said into the silence. “It’s cozier to sit in there, close by the range.”

  The front room might have been the scene of some long-ago courtship, thought Kincaid. He imagined young lovers sitting stiltedly on the horsehair chairs, then remembered that these cottages had been built for pensioners, and any wooing must have been done by those old enough to know better. He wondered if Connor had ever come here.

  Diplomatically, he said, “If Hayley would like to go in with Gran and finish her tea, perhaps you and I could go outside and have a chat.”

  Sharon gave Kincaid a grateful glance and bent down to her daughter. “Did you hear what the superintendent said, love? He needs to have a word with me, so you go along in with Gran and finish your tea. If you eat up all your beans and toast, you can have a biscuit,” she added cajolingly.

  Hayley studied her mum as if gauging the sincerity of this pledge.

  “I promise,” said Sharon, turning her and giving her a pat on the bottom. “Go on now. Tell Gran I’ll be along in a bit.” She watched the little girl disappear through the door in the back of the room, then said to Kincaid, “Just let me get a cardy.”

  The cardy turned out to be a man’s brown wool cardigan, a bit moth-eaten, and ironically reminiscent of the one Sir Gerald Asherton had worn the night Kincaid met him. Seeing Kincaid’s glance, Sharon smiled and said, “It was my granddad’s. Gran keeps it for wearing about the house.” As she followed Kincaid out into the churchyard, she continued, “Actually, she’s my great-gran, but I never knew my real gran. She died when my mum was a baby.”

  Although the sun had set in the few minutes Kincaid had been inside the house, the churchyard looked even more inviting in the soft twilight. They walked to a bench across the way from the cottages, and as they sat down Kincaid said, “Is Hayley always so shy?”

  “She’s always chattered like a magpie, from the day she learned to talk, even with strangers.” Sharon’s hands lay loosely in her lap, palms turned up. They might have been disembodied, so unanimated were they, and Kincaid noticed that since he’d seen her last, the small pink nails had been bitten to the quick. “It’s only since I told her about Con that she’s been like this.” She looked up at Kincaid in appeal. “I had to tell her, didn’t I, Mr. Kincaid? I couldn’t let her think he just scarpered, could I? I couldn’t let her think he didn’t care about us.”

  Kincaid gave the question careful consideration before answering. “I think you did the right thing, Sharon. It would be hard for her now, regardless, and in the long run I’m sure it’s better to tell the truth. Children sense when you’re lying, and then they have that betrayal to deal with as well as the loss.”

  Sharon listened intently, then nodded once when he’d finished. She studied her hands for a moment. “Now she wants to know why we can’t see him. My auntie Pearl died last year and Gran took her to the viewing before the funeral.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  Shrugging, Sharon said, “Different people do things different ways, that’s all. What else could I say?”

  “I imagine she wants some concrete evidence that Con is really gone. Perhaps you could take her to see his grave, afterward.” He gestured at the graves laid out so neatly in the green grass of the churchyard. “That should seem familiar enough to her.”

  She turned to him again, her hands clenching convulsively. “There’s not been anyone to talk to, see? Gran doesn’t want to know about it-she disapproved of him anyway-”

  “Why was that?” asked Kincaid, surprised that the woman would not have been pleased at a better prospect for her great-granddaughter.

  “Marriage is marriage in the eyes of the Lord,” mimicked Sharon, and Kincaid had a sudden clear vision of the old lady. “Gran’s very firm in her beliefs. It made no difference that Con wasn’t living with her. And as long as Con was married I had no rights, Gran said. Turned out she knew what she was on about, didn’t she?”

  “You must have girlfriends you can talk with,” said Kincaid, as there seemed no helpful answer to the last question.

  “They don’t want to know, either. You’d think I’d got leprosy or something all of a sudden-they act like they’re afraid it might rub off on them and spoil their fun.” Sharon sniffed, then added more softly, “I don’t want to talk to them about Con, anyway. What we had was between us, and it doesn’t seem right to air it like last week’s washing.”

  “No, I can see that.”

  They sat quietly for a few minutes as the lights began to come on in the cottages. Indistinct shapes moved behind the net curtains, and every so often a pensioner would pop out from one door and then another, putting out milk bottles or picking up papers. It made Kincaid think of those elaborate German clocks, the kind in which the little people bob cheerfully in-and-out as the hour chimes. He looked at the girl beside him, her head again bent over her hands. “I’ll see you get your things back, Sharon. She would want you-” Bloody hell, now he was doing it. “Mrs. Swann would like you to have them,” he corrected himself.

  Her response, when it came, surprised him. “Those things I said, the other night… well, I’ve been thinking.” In the fading light he caught a quick flash of her eyes before she looked away from him again. “It wasn’t right, what I said. You know. About her…”

  “About Julia having killed Connor, is that what you mean?”

  She nodded, picking idly at a spot on the front of her sweatshirt. “I don’t know why I said it. I wanted to hit at someone, I guess.” After a moment she continued in a tone of discovery, “I think I wanted to believe she was as awful as Con said. It made me feel better. Safer.”

  “And now?” Kincaid asked, and when she didn’t answer he continued, “You had no reason for making those accusations? Con never said anything that made you think Julia might have threatened him?”

  Shaking her head, she said so softly that he had to lean close to catch it, “No.” She smelled of Pears soap, and the good, clean ordinariness of it suddenly squeezed at his throat.

  The twilight deepened, and from some of the cottage windows came the blue flicker of televisions. Kincaid imagined the pensioners, all women that he had seen, having their evening meals early so that they could settle down in front of the box, uninterrupted, isolated from themselves as well as one another. He gave a tiny shudder, shaking off the wave of melancholy that threatened him, like a dog coming out of water. Why should he begrudge them their comfort, after all?

  Beside him, Sharon stirred and pulled the cardigan a little closer about her. Rubbing his hands together to warm them, he turned to her, saying briskly, “One more thing, Sharon, and then you’d better go in before you catch a chill. We have a witness who’s certain he saw Connor at the Red Lion in Wargrave after he left you that night. Con met a man who fits the description of Tommy Godwin, an old friend of the Ashertons. Do you know him, or did you ever hear Con mention him?”

  He could almost hear her thinking as she sat beside him in the dark, and he thought that if he looked closely enough he would see her brow furrowed in concentration. “No,” she said eventually, “I never did.” She turned to him, pulling her knee up on the bench so that she could face him directly. “Did they… we
re they having a row?”

  “According to the witness, it was not a particularly friendly meeting. Why?”

  She put her hand to her mouth, nibbling at the nail of her index finger. Nail-biting was a form of self-mutilation that had never tempted Kincaid, and it always made him wince for the damaged flesh. He waited, lacing his own fingers together to stop himself from pulling her hand away from her mouth.

  “I thought it was me made him angry,” she said in a rush. “He came back that night. He wasn’t pleased to see me-he wanted to know why hadn’t I gone back to Gran’s, like I said.” She touched Kincaid’s sleeve. “That’s why I didn’t say anything before. I felt such a bloody fool.”

  Kincaid patted her hand. “Why hadn’t you gone home?”

  “Oh, I did. But Gran’s bridge finished early-one of the old ladies felt a bit ill-so I came back. I was sorry I’d left in a huff before. I thought he’d be glad to see me and we could-” She gulped, unable to go on, but what she had hoped was painfully clear to Kincaid without any further elaboration.

  “Was he drunk?”

  “He’d had a few, but he wasn’t proper pissed, not really.”

  “And he didn’t tell you where he’d been or who he’d seen?”

  Sharon shook her head. “’E said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and walked past me like I was a piece of bloody furniture or something.”

  “Then what? Tell me bit by bit, everything you can remember.”

  Closing her eyes, she thought for a moment, then began obediently, “He went into the kitchen and fixed himself a drink-”

  “Not to the drinks trolley?” asked Kincaid, remembering the plethora of bottles.

  “Oh, that was just for show. Company. Con drank whiskey and he always kept a bottle on the kitchen counter,” she said, then continued more slowly. “He came back into the sitting room and I noticed he kept rubbing at his throat. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked him. ‘You’re not feeling ill, love?’ But he didn’t answer. He went upstairs into the study and closed the door.”