A Share in Death (2 page)

‘I’m Sebastian Wade, assistant manager, or lackey to Lady Di here, depending on your point of view,” he said, offering his hand. He glanced quickly at Cassie, gauging the effect of his barb, then grinned at Kincaid as he shook his hand. There seemed to be genuine warmth in his greeting, and Kincaid found himself more drawn to Wade’s engaging maliciousness than to Cassie Whitlake’s polished cordiality. A slightly built man in his late twenties, Wade had butter-yellow hair, fashionably cut, and pockmarked skin over thin and rather delicate features. His eyes were unexpectedly dark.

Cassie moved quickly around her desk and disengaged Kincaid with a touch of cool fingers on his arm. “I’ll show you to your suite. Then when you’ve had a chance to settle in, I’ll give you a tour and answer any questions you might have.” Sebastian Wade lifted a hand to him in mock salute as Cassie led him from the room.

As Kincaid followed her into the hall he admired the way the soft fabric of her dress clung to the outline of her body. A hint of some sharp, musky perfume drifted back to him, not the sort of scent he would have expected from one so elegantly groomed. But he had been right about her height—her head was almost level with his own.

She turned back to him as she started up the stairs. “I think your suite is the best in the house. Such a shame for your cousin and his wife to have to cancel their holiday at the last minute. Fortunate for you, though,” she added, and again he heard the hint of archness.

“Yes,” Kincaid answered, and wondered for a moment how his kindly, guileless cousin had fared under Cassie Whitlake’s sophisticated onslaught.

At the top of the stairs he followed Cassie down a hall
that ran toward the rear of the house, ending at a door adorned with a discreet, brass number four. Cassie unlocked the door with her own key and preceded him into the tiny entry. Kincaid couldn’t maneuver his bag through the small space without brushing up against her, and the smile she gave him was suggestive.

The entry opened into a sitting room in which Cassie’s hand was again evident in the decorating, at least in the choice of colors. The plush sofas and armchairs were a dull gold with rolled arms, buttons and fringes, the curtains were olive green, and the figured carpet combined the two in a fussy, geometric marriage. The whole room, which could have been lifted en masse from any middle-class department store showroom, gave an impression of solid, anonymous respectability.

The room’s saving grace was the French door at its far end. Cassie followed Kincaid as he crossed the room, set down his bag, and pulled open the door. They stepped out onto the narrow balcony together. Below them stretched the grounds and gardens of Followdale, leading his eyes up to the bulk of Sutton Bank rising in the distance.

“There’s the tennis court.” Cassie pointed down to his left. “And the greenhouse. We have croquet and badminton and lawn bowling, as well as riding and walking trails. Oh, and indoor swimming, of course. The pool is one of our star attractions. I think we’ll keep you occupied.”

“I’m overwhelmed.” Kincaid grinned. “I may have a nervous collapse trying to decide what to do.”

“In the meantime, I’ll let you get settled in. If you want to lay in some supplies, it’s only a few steps down the road to the village shop. There’s a cocktail party at six in the sitting room, so the guests have a chance to get acquainted.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t any experience with timesharing. Don’t the other guests already know each other, all of them owning the same week?”

“Not really. New people buy in all the time. Owners trade weeks, or use their time somewhere else, so you never really know who’s going to turn up. We have several first-timers this week, as a matter of fact.”

“Good. I won’t be the only novice, then. How many guests are there?”

Cassie leaned back against the balcony rail and folded her arms, patient with his tourist’s curiosity. “Well, there are eight suites in the main house, and three cottage-type accommodations in another building. You may have noticed it to your left as you drove up to the house. I’m using one of the cottages myself right now, the one at the far end.” Her spiel of facts and figures came effortlessly, her delivery as smooth as her voice.

She looked steadily and directly into his eyes, and attractive as she was, the calculated and somehow impersonal invitation made him feel uncomfortable. Moved by a perverse desire to ruffle her, to indicate that he was not one to be so easily manipulated, he asked, “Does your assistant live here on the premises as well? He seems a pleasant chap.”

Cassie straightened up abruptly. Her voice, as she delivered Sebastian Wade’s social condemnation, betrayed a hint of the venom he had heard earlier. “No. In the town with his old mum. She keeps the tobacconist’s shop.” She brushed her hands together, as if disposing of crumbs. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve things to do. Let me know if you need anything, otherwise I’ll see you later.” The smile was brief this time, and held no invitation. Cassie slipped past and left him alone on the balcony.

Penelope MacKenzie stole a furtive look into the suite’s sitting room, where her sister Emma seemed to be absorbed in checking her life-list against today’s notations in her birding notebook. Penny settled herself more comfortably in front of the bedroom window with a quick sigh of relief. She’d have a few more minutes with no demands, a small escape from her sister’s solicitous supervision.

Things were different before Father died. Penny hadn’t been forgetful then, really; just a little absent-minded sometimes. But after those last, long months of Father’s illness some of the tenuous connections between thought and action just seemed to dissolve.

Only last week she’d put a saucepan of water on the cooker and gone into the sitting room for a book. When she remembered the pan, the water had all boiled away and the middle layer of the pan’s bottom had melted and run across the cooker’s top in a silvery flood. And then there was the leftover Sunday roast she popped into the oven instead of the fridge. Emma had been furious when she discovered it the next day and had to throw it away.

But those were the little things. Penny didn’t like to
think about the day she went down to the shops in the village, did her errands, and found she couldn’t remember how to get home. Instead of the memory of the well-worn path through Dedham village and up the hill to Ivy Cottage, there was only an emptiness in her mind.

She stumbled, terrified, into the familiar warmth of her friend Mary’s tea shop. She sat there perspiring, chatting and drinking hot, sweet tea, trying to pretend a gaping hole hadn’t opened in her universe, until she saw a neighbor pass. She caught up to him, and asked breathlessly. “Are you going home? I’ll walk with you, shall I, George?” As she walked, familiarity with her surroundings returned, filling the vacant space, but the fear settled itself comfortably inside her. She told no one, most particularly not Emma.

Perhaps a holiday was all she needed, a fortnight with no responsibilities. It had taken her long enough to convince Emma that they deserved something after their years with Father. After all, they had his money now and could do what they pleased. She’d seen the timeshare brochure herself, at the travel agent’s in the village. And Followdale was lovely, every bit as lovely as she’d imagined.

“Daydreaming as usual, Pen?” Her sister’s voice startled her. “Stir yourself, then. We’d best be getting to the shops if we’re to return in time to dress for the party.” Emma pulled her waterproof jacket out of the wardrobe and began buckling herself into it with her usual no-nonsense briskness.

“Yes, Emma, coming,” Penny answered. There was no need to make Emma cross, or even worse, to try her until she spoke with that unaccustomed air of gentle patience. Penny rubbed her forehead with her fingertips,
as if the physical smoothing of lines would return the accustomed veneer of placid cheerfulness to her face, and smiled brightly when Emma turned to her.

*   *   *

Twenty-eight … twenty-nine … thirty … Hannah Alcock sat in front of the mirror and counted the smooth, circular motions of the hairbrush. Odd, she thought, how childhood habits stayed with you. She knew of no logical reason why hair should be brushed a hundred strokes a day, but if she closed her eyes for a moment she could see herself sitting at her old dresser in her nightgown, watching the arc of the brush descend through her long, brown hair, and hearing her mother’s voice from the hall, “Hannah, darling, remember to brush your hair.”

All that was a long time ago—almost thirty years, in fact, since the night she had taken the scissors to her waist-length hair. It had lain like a pall across her back, a rich, shining chestnut brown with glints of auburn, her mother’s pride, and she had brutally hacked it off just at the nape of her neck.

Although she’d kept her hair cut short in the years since, she had continued the nightly brushing. A silly ritual, one that should have been discarded with that remote adolescence, but when she was nervous, as she was tonight, she found it oddly comforting. Her stomach muscles relaxed as she breathed with the rhythm of the strokes, and by the time she laid the silver-backed brush neatly beside its matching mirror, she felt a little more capable of getting through the evening.

The cocktail party had already been in progress for a quarter of an hour. If she didn’t hurry she would be more than fashionably late. Still, she continued to examine herself
in the glass. A good face, she had come to think, once she had outgrown a girl’s desire for conventional prettiness. Those round, blond fluffy girls she had so envied were faded now, their skin puffy, hair streaked and tipped to cover the encroaching gray. Her own hair, now carefully and expensively cut, held only a few silvery threads at the temples, and the strong, underlying bone structure she had despised now gave her face an arresting individuality.

It had been years since she had worried about others’ opinions. Successful, confident, serene—she thought nothing could disturb her carefully built balance. Nothing, that is, until the strange, slow stirrings of the last year had grown within her, warping the shape of her life, leading her finally to take action that might prove irrevocable folly.

She had planned this face-to-face meeting with all the attention she would have given the most demanding experiment, hiring a private detective to ferret out the details of his life, buying into the timeshare for the exact same week—yet here she was, dithering at the last minute, suffering from stage-fright like the gawky schoolgirl she had once been.

What had she to lose, after all? They might spend a week passing in the halls, a greeting, a casual physical contact, and then he would leave without remembering her name or face. Surely, there could be no harm in that?

Or they might become friends. She wouldn’t think beyond that—what she might say to him, how he would react. Tonight, with an easy introduction and polite exchange of trifles sure to follow, was beginning enough.

She rose, picked up her bag from the sitting room, and shut the front door firmly behind her.

*   *   *

Duncan Kincaid leaned on his balcony rail, reluctant to move, reluctant to knot a tie around his throat, to go through the civilized motions required if he were to meet his social obligations. His earlier burst of energy had given way to a creeping lethargy.

It would be easy enough to fix himself some supper, then stretch out on the sofa with the battered paperback copy of
Jane Eyre
he’d found in the drawer of the bedside table. The eggs, bacon, and loaf of fresh-baked whole-meal bread he’d bought at the village shop would be sufficient provision for a quiet evening.

He had been browsing in the shop’s biscuit aisle when a girlish voice behind him chirped, “You must be the new guest. We’ve been so eager to meet you.” He turned, and found himself facing a slight woman wrapped in a voluminous, tartan cape. She was, he judged, sixtyish, with a fluffy bird’s nest of gray hair surrounding a thin face and a pair of extraordinarily blue eyes. Peeping from the folds of the cape’s bottom were a pair of old-fashioned, lace-up ladies’ boots.

“Cassie told us your name was Kincaid and we were so thrilled—a Scot, like us, you see—we’re MacKenzies. Our granddad had quite a place in Perthshire in his day.” The sentences tumbled from her mouth in a breathless flood. “It must have seemed just like this in the old days, I mean how it is at Followdale. I can just imagine—”

Kincaid, amused, interrupted. “You don’t live in Scotland now?”

“Oh no. Our father … well, you see, there were so many sons that he was forced to find an occupation. He took a position in Essex when he was quite a young man. He was Rector, in Dedham, for forty years before he
retired. But all that seems a long time ago, now.” She smiled up at him, a little wistfully. “We live there still, Emma and I, though of course somebody else has the old rectory now. We raise goats. Wonderful animals, don’t you think? So sanitary, and there’s quite a good market for goat’s milk and cheese these days. Although Father could never really bring himself to approve. And what about you, Mr. Kincaid? Where did your family come from?”

“I’m a second generation immigrant, like yourself. My father moved from Edinburgh to Cheshire before I was born, and he married an English girl, so I guess my ancestral stock is pretty diluted. And call—”

“I’m Emma MacKenzie,” broke in the woman Kincaid had noticed paying at the counter. “My sister Penelope.” She took his hand in a firm, dry clasp. “How do you do?”

With her straight, gray, pudding-bowl hair, her mannish, waterproof jacket and her uncompromising expression, she reminded Kincaid of his sixth-form master. Her only ornament was the pair of binoculars slung from her heavy neck. The sisters Prim and Grim, he dubbed them, then felt rather shamefaced.

“I’m sure Mr. Kincaid doesn’t want to hear all our family history, Penny. And we must go if we’re to change for the party.” Emma nodded at him and herded her sister away with all the delicacy of a school chaperon.

“Miss MacKenzie,” he called out, as they were almost through the door, “it was nice to meet you. Perhaps I’ll see you at the party.” He was rewarded by a radiant smile.