Leave the Grave Green (11 page)

“Did Sir Gerald seem upset in any way? Anything different about his routine that night?”

“No, not that I can think—” Alison stopped, hand poised over her teacup. “Wait. There was something. Tommy was with him Of course, they’ve known each other practically forever,” she, added quickly, “but we don’t often see Tommy here after a performance, at least not in the conductor’s dressing room.”

Feeling the sense of the interview fast escaping her, Gemma said distinctly, “Who exactly is Tommy?”

Alison smiled. “I forgot you wouldn’t know. Tommy is Tommy Godwin, our Wardrobe Manager. And it’s not that he considers one of his visits akin to a divine blessing, like some costume designers I could name”—she paused and rolled her eyes—“but if he’s here at the theater he’s usually busy with Running Wardrobe.”

“Is he here today?”

“Not that I know of. But I expect you can catch him tomorrow at LB House.” This time Gemma’s bewilderment must have been
evident, because before she could form a question, Alison continued. “That’s Lilian Baylis House, in West Hampstead, where we have our Making Wardrobe. Here.” She reached for Gemma’s notebook. “I’ll write down the address and phone number for you.”

A thought occurred to Gemma as she watched Alison write in a looping, schoolgirl hand. “Did you ever meet Sir Gerald’s son-in-law, Connor Swann?”

Alison Douglas flushed. “Once or twice. He came to
ENO
functions sometimes.” She returned the pen and notebook, then ran her fingers around the neck of her black sweater.

Gemma cocked her head while she considered the woman across the table—attractive, about her own age, and single, if her unadorned left hand and the date she’d alluded to were anything to go by. “Shall I take it he tried to chat you up?”

“He didn’t mean anything by it,” Alison said, a little apologetically. “You know, you can tell.”

“All flash and no substance?”

Alison shrugged. “I’d say he just liked women… he made you feel special.” She looked up, and for the first time Gemma noticed that her eyes were a light, clear brown. “We’ve all talked about it, of course. You know what the gossip mill’s like. But this is the first time I’ve really let myself think…” She swallowed once, then added slowly. “He was a lovely man. I’m sorry he’s dead.”

The canteen tables were emptying rapidly. Alison looked up and grimaced, then bustled Gemma back into the dark green tunnels. Murmuring an apology, she left Gemma once again in Danny the porter’s domain.

“’Ullo, miss,” said Danny, ever cheerful. “You get what you came for?”

“Not quite.” Gemma smiled at him. “But you may be able to help me.” She pulled her warrant card from her handbag and held the open case where he could see it clearly.

“Crikey!” His eyes widened and he looked her up and down. “You don’t look like a copper.”

“Don’t get cheeky with me, mate,” she said, grinning. Resting her elbows on the counter-sill, she leaned forward earnestly. “Can you tell me what time Sir Gerald signed out last Thursday evening, Danny?”

“Ooh, alibis, is it?” The glee on Danny’s face made him look like an illustration right out of an Enid Blyton novel.

“Routine inquiries just now,” Gemma said, managing to keep a straight face. “We need to know the movements of everyone who might have had contact with Connor Swann the day he died.”

Danny lifted a binder from the top of a stack and opened it at the back, flipping through the last few pages. “Here.” He pointed, holding the page up where Gemma could see. “Midnight on the dot. That’s what I remembered, but I thought you’d want—what is it, corroboration?”

Sir Gerald’s signature suited him, thought Gemma, a comfortable but strong scrawl. “Did he usually stay so long after a performance, Danny?”

“Sometimes.” He glanced at the sheet again. “But he was last out that night. I remember because I wanted to lock up—had a bird waiting in the wings, you might say.” He winked at Gemma. “There was something, though,” he said more hesitantly. “That night… Sir Gerald… well, he was half-cocked, like.”

Gemma couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice. “Sir Gerald was drunk?”

Danny ducked his head in embarrassment. “I didn’t really like to say, miss. Sir Gerald always has a kind word for everybody. Not like some.”

“Has this happened before?”

Danny shook his head. “Not so as I can remember. And I’ve been here over a year now.”

Gemma quickly entered Danny’s statement in her notebook, then closed it and returned it to her bag. “Thanks, Danny. You’ve been a great help.”

He passed over the sign-in sheet for her initial, his grin considerably subdued.

“Cheerio, then,” she said as she turned toward the door.

Danny called out to her before she could open it. “There’s one other thing, miss. You know the son-in-law, the one what snuffed it?” He held up his ledger and pointed to an entry near Sir Gerald’s. “He was here that day as well.”

Eggs, bacon, sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms—and could that possibly be kidneys? Kincaid pushed the questionable items a little to one side with the tip of his fork. Kidneys in steak-and-kidney pie he could manage, but kidneys at breakfast were a bit much. Otherwise the Chequers had done itself proud. Surveying his breakfast laid out on the white tablecloth, complete with china teapot and a vase of pink and yellow snapdragons, he began to think he should feel grateful for Sir Gerald Asherton’s influence. His accommodations when out of town on a case were seldom up to these standards.

As he’d slept late, the more righteous early risers had long since finished their breakfasts and he had the dining room to himself. He gazed out through the leaded windows at the damp and windy morning as he ate, enjoying his unaccustomed leisure. Leaves drifted and swirled, their golds and russets a bright contrast against the still-green grass of the churchyard. The congregation began to arrive for the morning service, and soon the verges of the lanes surrounding the church were lined with cars parked end to end.

Wondering lazily why a church in a village as small as Fingest would draw such a crowd, he was suddenly struck by the desire to see for himself He pushed a last bite of toast and marmalade into his mouth. Still chewing, he ran upstairs, grabbed a tie from his room and hastily knotted it on his way back down.

He slipped into the last pew just as the church bells began to
ring. The notices tacked up in the vestibule answered his question quickly enough—this was the parish church, of course, not just the village church, and he must have been living too long in the city not to have realized it. It was also most likely the Ashertons’ church. He wondered who knew them and if some of those gathered had come out of curiosity, hoping to see the family.

None of the Ashertons were in evidence, however, and as the peaceful order of the service settled over him, he found his mind drawn back to the previous evening’s revelations.

It had taken him a few minutes to calm her down enough to get her name—Sharon Doyle—and even then she’d taken his warrant card and examined it with the intensity of the marginally literate.

“I’ve come for me things,” she said, shoving the card back at him as if it might burn her fingers. “I’ve a right to ’em. I don’t care what anybody says.”

Kincaid backed up until he reached the sofa, then sat down on its edge. “Who would say you didn’t?” he asked easily.

Sharon Doyle folded her arms, pushing her breasts up against the thin weave of her sweater. “Her.”

“Her?” Kincaid repeated, resigned to an exercise in patience.

“You know. Her. The wife.
Julia
,” she mimicked in an accent considerably more precise than her own. Hostility seemed to be triumphing over fright, but although she moved nearer him, she still stood with her feet planted firmly apart.

“You have a key,” he said, making it a statement rather than a question.

“Con gave it to me.”

Kincaid looked at the softly rounded face, young beneath the makeup and bravado. Gently, he said, “How did you find out Connor was dead?”

She stared at him, her lips pressed together. After a moment her hands dropped to her sides and her body sagged like a rag doll that had lost its stuffing. “Down the pub,” she answered so quietly that he read her lips as much as heard her.

“You’d better sit down.”

Folding into the chair across from him as if unaware of her body, she said, “Last night. I’d gone round to the George. He hadn’t rung me up when he said, so I thought ‘I’m bloody well not going to sit home on my own.’ Some bloke’d buy me a drink, chat me up—serve Con bloody well right.” Her voice wavered at the last and she swallowed, then wet her lips with the pink tip of her tongue. “The regulars were all talking about it. I thought they were havin’ me on, at first.” She fell silent and looked away from him.

“But they convinced you?”

Sharon nodded. “Local lad came in, he’s a constable. They said, ‘Ask Jimmy. He’ll tell you.’”

“Did you?” Kincaid prompted after another moment’s silence, wondering what he might do to loosen her tongue. She sat huddled in her chair, arms folded again across her breasts, and as he studied her he thought he saw a faint blue tinge around her lips. Remembering a drinks trolley he’d seen near the wood-stove as he explored the room, he stood and went over to it. He chose two sherry glasses from the glassware on the top shelf, filling them liberally from a bottle of sherry he found beneath.

On closer inspection he discovered that the stove was laid ready for a fire, so he lit it with a match from the box on the tiled hearth and waited until the flames began to flicker brightly. “This will take the chill off,” he said as he returned and offered the drink to Sharon. She looked up at him dully and lifted her hand, but the glass tipped as she took it, spilling pale gold liquid over the rim. When he wrapped her unresponsive fingers around the stem, he found them icy to the touch. “You’re freezing,” he said, chiding her. “Here, take my jacket.” He slipped off his tweed sport coat and draped it over her shoulders, then circled the room until he found the thermostat for the central heating. The room’s glass-and-tile Mediterranean look made for a pleasant effect, he decided, but it wasn’t too well suited for the English climate.

“Good girl.” He sat down again and lifted his own glass. She’d drunk some of hers, and he thought he saw a faint flush of color on her cheeks. “That’s better. Cheers,” he added, sipping his sherry,
then said, “You’ve had a rough time, I think, since last night. Did you ask the constable, then, about Connor?”

She drank again, then wiped her hand across her lips. “He said, ‘Why you want to know, then?’ and gave me this fishy-eyed look, so I knew it was true.”

“Did you tell him why you wanted to know?”

Sharon shook her head and the blond curls bounced with the movement. “Said I just knew him, that’s all. Then they started a slanging match about whose round it was, and I slipped out the door by the loo.”

Her survival instincts had functioned well, even in shock, Kincaid thought, a good indication that she’d had plenty of experience looking out for herself. “What did you do then?” he asked. “Did you come here?”

After a long moment she nodded. “Stood about outside for hours, bloody well freezing it was, too. I still thought, you know, maybe…” She put the fingers of both hands over her mouth quickly, but he’d seen her lip tremble.

“You had a key,” he said gently. “Why didn’t you come in and wait?”

“Didn’t know who might come in here, did I? Might tell me I hadn’t any right.”

“But today you got up your courage.”

“Needed my things, didn’t I?” she said, but she looked away, and Kincaid fancied there was more to it than that.

“Why else did you come, Sharon?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

She met his eyes and seemed to see in them some possibility of empathy, for after a moment she said, “I’m nobody now, do you see? I thought I’d never have another chance just to be here, like… we had some good times here, Con and me. I wanted to remember.”

“Didn’t you think Con might have left you the flat?” Kincaid asked.

Looking down into her glass, she swirled the few remaining drops of sherry. “Couldn’t,” she said so quietly that he had to lean forward to hear.

“Why couldn’t he?”

“Not his.”

The drink didn’t seem to have done much in the way of lubricating her tongue, Kincaid thought. Getting anything out of her was worse than pulling teeth. “Whose is it, then?”

“Hers.”

“Connor was living in Julia’s flat?” He found the idea very odd indeed. Why hadn’t she booted him out and stayed herself, rather than going back home to her parents? It sounded much too amicable an arrangement for a couple who had supposedly not been speaking to one another.

Of course, he added to himself as he considered the girl sitting across from him, it might not have been true. Perhaps Connor had needed a handy excuse. “Is that why Connor didn’t have you move in with him?”

His jacket slipped from Sharon’s shoulders as she shrugged, reexposing the pale swell of her breasts through the weave of the pink fuzzy sweater. “He said it wasn’t right, it being Julia’s house and all.”

Kincaid hadn’t imagined Connor Swann being a great one for moral scruples, but then Connor was proving to be full of surprises. Glancing at the open-plan kitchen, he asked, “Do you cook?”

Sharon looked at him as if he had a slate loose. “Course I can cook. What do you take me for?”

“No, I mean, who did the cooking here, you or Connor?”

She thrust her lower lip out in a pout. “’E wouldn’t let me touch a thing in there, like it was a bloody church or something. Said fry-ups were nasty, and he’d not have anything boiled in his kitchen but eggs and water for the pasta.” Still absently holding her glass, she stood and wandered over to the dining table. She traced a finger across its surface. “’E cooked for me, though. No bloke ever did that. Nobody ever cooked anything for me but me mum and me gran, come to think of it.” Looking up, she stared at Kincaid as if seeing him for the first time. “You married?”