Geoff emptied the warm water from the pot and spooned in tea. With his back to her, he said, “You’re the lady copper, aren’t you? Brian told me you came last night.” He added boiling water from the kettle on the cooker, then brought the pot and two mugs to the table. “Milk?” Mouth too full to speak, Gemma nodded, and he returned to the fridge for a pint bottle. “Sugar’s on the table,” he said as he slid into the chair across from her.
“Did you know him?” Gemma asked, having managed to swallow. “Commander Gilbert, I mean.”
“Course I did. Place like this, you can’t not know people.” Even around a mouthful of bread and cheese, his tone held disgust.
“It must be hard for you,” said Gemma, her curiosity aroused. “Living in such a small village, I wouldn’t think there’d be a lot going in the way of social life.”
Lots of young people stayed on with their parents when they couldn’t find work-it was an economic fact of life. There’d been times after Rob left that she’d been afraid she and Toby might have to go back to her parents’ small flat above the bakery, and the idea had horrified her. Geoff merely shrugged and said, “It’s all right.”
“The sandwich is super,” she said, washing down a bite with a mouthful of the tea he’d poured her. When he gave her a gratified smile, she ventured, “What do you do? For a job, I mean?”
He waited until he’d finished chewing before answering. “Oh, this and that. Mostly I help Brian out around the pub.” Pushing away from the table, he stood up and reached into the cupboard above the cooker. “Look.” He snagged a package of biscuits and held it out for her inspection. “I know just what we need to finish up.”
“Chocolate digestives?” Gemma said with a sigh of contentment. “The plain ones, too. My favorite.” She ate in silence for a few minutes, and when she’d finished her sandwich, she separated a biscuit from the stack and nibbled on its edge. Geoff had undoubtedly shied away from the personal-she’d try the general again. “You must have been pretty shocked when you heard about the commander. Were you here last night?”
“I was in my room, but Brian saw the pandas go by, lights and sirens. He called me down to help with the bar, then he went straight across the road, but they wouldn’t let him through. ‘There’s been an accident’ was all they’d tell him, and he came back in a right state. We didn’t know until Nick Deveney sent a constable over to make arrangements for you that it was the commander, not Lucy or Claire.”
“And that made a difference, did it?” asked Gemma, thinking how much people revealed unwittingly, just by the construction of their sentences, their emphasis on certain words.
“Of course it did.” Geoff sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Like I said, it’s a small place, and everybody knows everybody, especially neighbors. Lucy’s a nice kid, and Claire… everyone likes Claire.”
Odd, thought Gemma, if Claire Gilbert was so well thought of, that she had leaned on Will Darling rather than accepting comfort from a sympathetic neighbor. “But not Alastair Gilbert?” she asked. “You didn’t mind so much about him?”
“I didn’t say that.” Geoff frowned at her, their pleasant camaraderie definitely damaged. “It’s just that he’s not here-I mean he wasn’t here-what with his job and being in London most of the time.”
“I knew him,” said Gemma, putting her elbows on the table and propping her chin in one hand. She wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it to Kincaid, then shrugged. She hadn’t felt inclined to volunteer anything remotely personal.
“He was my super at Notting Hill when I first joined the force,” she continued. Geoff relaxed, looking interested and settling more comfortably into his chair, as if Gemma’s admission had put them back on equal footing. Sipping her tea, she said, “But I didn’t really know him, of course-there were more than four hundred officers at Notting Hill, and I was too lowly to come to his attention. He might have spoken ten words to me in all that time.” The man she remembered seemed to have little connection to the body sprawled so messily on the Gilberts’ kitchen floor. He’d been small and neat, soft-spoken and particular in his dress and his diction, and had occasionally given little pep talks to the ranks about the importance of rules. “‘A tight ship,’ my sergeant used to say. ‘Gilbert runs a tight ship.’ But I don’t think he meant it kindly.”
“He did like things his way.” Geoff broke another biscuit in two and popped one half into his mouth. Indistinctly, he said, “He was always on the outs with the village council over something, wanting them to enforce the parking restrictions round the green, things like that.” The second biscuit half followed the first, then he refilled both their cups. “And he had a row with the doctor a couple of weeks ago. If you can call it rowing when no one raises his voice.”
“Really?” Gemma sat up a bit. “What about?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t actually hear it. It was a Saturday, see, and I do some odd jobs for the doctor. When I went up to the kitchen door to ask her about the compost, he was just leaving. But something had happened-you know how you can tell sometimes, like bad feeling stays in the air. And Doc Wilson had that tight-lipped look.”
“Her? I mean she?” said Gemma, trying to sort out her cases.
“This is a very feminist village-lady doctor and lady vicar. And I don’t think the commander got on with either of them.”
Gemma remembered that Gilbert’s manner to the women under his command had bordered on condescending, and he’d been notorious for overlooking female officers for promotions.
“I can’t wait to meet them,” she said, toying with the idea of stealing a march on Kincaid by interviewing the doctor.
“This afternoon?” Geoff studied her with concern. “You look all in, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Thanks.”
Her evident sarcasm made Geoff blush. “I’m sorry. It’s just that-you know what I mean. You look tired, is all.”
She relented. “It’s okay. Maybe I will go up to my room for a bit. And thanks for looking after me. I’d have caved in, I think, if you hadn’t rescued me.”
“Any time, fair damsel.” He stood and gave a little bow. Gemma laughed, thinking doublet and hose would have suited him and imagining his fair curls under a plumed hat.
She followed him up the stairs, and when they reached the door of his room, he stopped. “Tell me if you need anything else. I’m at your-”
His words faded out of Gemma’s perception. A computer sat on a desk across his room, and she stood staring, fascinated by the image on the screen. “What is it?” she asked, without taking her eyes from the picture. Mist seemed to swirl in the eerie, three-dimensional scene, but she could make out a turreted castle, and through one of its doorways a vista of green grass and a path leading towards a mountain.
“It’s a role-playing game, an adventure. A girl finds herself transported to a strange land, and she must survive by her wits, her skills, and her small knowledge of magic. Only by following a certain path and collecting talismans can she discover the secrets of the land, and then she will have the power to stay or to go back to our world.
“You can play. I’ll show you.” He touched her arm, but Gemma shook her head, resisting the enchantment.
“I can’t. Not now.” Pulling her gaze away, she focused on his face. “What does she choose, in the end?”
He regarded her, the expression in his gray eyes unexpectedly serious. “I don’t know. That all depends on the player.”
CHAPTER 5
Kincaid stood alone in the Gilberts’ kitchen, listening to the sound of the ticking clock. It hung above the refrigerator, and the large black hands and numerals against its white face were impossible to miss, reminding him that time was indeed fleeting. He should be concentrating on Alastair Gilbert’s murder, rather than wanting to punch his fist against the wall in frustration every time he thought about Gemma. After her outburst in the garden, she had left for Guildford without speaking an unnecessary word to him. What in hell ha
d he done now? At least, he thought with a flare of satisfaction, he hadn’t sent her off traipsing around the county with Nick Deveney, after the way he’d leered at her last night.
Sighing, Kincaid ran a hand through his hair. There was nothing for it but to get on with things as best he could. Glancing automatically at his watch, he shrugged in irritation. He bloody well knew what time it was, and as long as he had to wait for Nick Deveney and had the ground floor of the house to himself, he might as well have a look round.
Entering the hall, he stood quietly for a moment, orienting himself. For the first time he noticed the higgledy-piggledy nature of the house-a step up here, a step down there-every room seemed to exist on a different level. The exposed beams in the walls were canted at slightly tipsy angles. For a moment he fancied he heard an echo of the kitchen clock, then traced the insistent ticking to a longcase clock half hidden in an alcove beneath the stairs. To his untrained eye, it looked old and probably quite valuable. A family heirloom, perhaps?
Nearest the kitchen lay the sitting room they had used last night, and a quick glance showed it quiet and empty, the fire burnt down to cold ash. Continuing down the hall towards the front of the house, he opened the next door and peered in.
A green-shaded lamp cast a pool of light on a massive desk. Lucy must have forgotten to switch it off when she collected the dog last night, thought Kincaid, as he entered and looked about. The room seemed almost a parody of a masculine retreat-the walls not covered with bookshelves were dark-paneled, and the sofa set before the heavily curtained windows was covered in a deep red tartan. Moving closer, he studied the pale oblongs on the dark walls-hunting prints, of course. The sound of the heavy clock on the desk mimicked his heartbeat, and for a moment he imagined the entire house ticking to its own internal rhythm. “Bloody hell!” Swearing aloud broke the spell, and he banished thoughts of the Edgar Allan Poe story from his mind.
Crossing to the desk, Kincaid found the surface as tidy as expected, but a photo in a silver frame made him pause and lift it for a better look. This was an Alastair Gilbert he’d never seen, in shirtsleeves, smiling, with his arm around a small white-haired woman. Mother and son? He replaced the photo, filing in his mind the thought that interviewing the elder Mrs. Gilbert might prove useful.
The top drawer held the usual office paraphernalia, neatly arranged, and the side drawers, tidy ranks of files that would have to wait for someone else to give them a detailed going-over. Unsatisfied with such meager results, Kincaid went through the drawers again, and the more careful search revealed a leather-bound book tucked behind the files in the right-hand drawer. Removing it carefully, he opened it on the blotter. It was a desk diary, with the usual engagement notations and a few unidentified phone numbers written in a neat penciled hand. How like Gilbert not to have risked making a mistake in ink.
Kincaid turned a few more pages. The day before Gilbert’s death held an ambiguous “6:00,” accompanied by a question mark and another penciled phone number. Had Gilbert met someone, and if so, why? He’d have to leave it to Deveney’s team to run checks on all the notations while he concentrated on the interviews. Closing the book, he’d placed it on the desktop when a voice startled him.
“What are you doing?”
Lucy Penmaric stood in the doorway, arms crossed, heart-shaped face creased in a frown. In jeans and sweatshirt she looked younger than she had the night before, less sophisticated, and her pale face bore tiny creases, as though she’d just got up. “I heard a noise-I was looking for my mother,” she said before he could answer.
Not wanting to talk to Lucy from behind Gilbert’s desk, Kincaid closed the drawer and came around it before he said, “I think she’s upstairs having a rest. Can I help?”
“I didn’t think to look there,” she said, rubbing her face as she went to curl up in the corner of the tartan sofa. “I can’t seem to wake up properly-Mum gave me a sleeping pill and it’s made my brain go all fuzzy.”
“They can make you feel a bit hung over,” Kincaid agreed.
Lucy frowned again. “I didn’t want to take it. I only agreed so Mum would rest. Is she… is she all right this morning?”
Kincaid felt no compunction in editing out Claire’s fainting spell in the kitchen. “Coping reasonably well, under the circumstances. She went to visit your grandmother first thing.”
“Gwen? Oh, poor Mum,” said Lucy, shaking her head. “Gwen’s not my real grandmother, you know,” she added in an instructive voice. “Mummy’s parents are dead, and I don’t get to see my dad’s very often.”
“Why not? Doesn’t your mother get on with them?” Kincaid settled himself against the edge of the desk, willing to see where the conversation might lead.
“Alastair always had some reason why I shouldn’t go, but I like them. They live near Sidmouth, in Devon, and you can walk to the beach from their house.” Lucy twirled a strand of hair around her finger as she sat quietly for a moment, then she said, “I remember when my dad died. We lived in London then, in a flat in Elgin Crescent. The building had a bright yellow door-I remember when we came back from walks I could see it from a long way away, like a beacon. We had the top-floor flat, and a cherry tree bloomed just outside my window every spring.”
If he’d thought about Claire Gilbert’s first husband at all, he would have assumed they’d divorced, but then what were the odds that a woman in her forties would find herself twice widowed? “It sounds lovely,” he said softly after Lucy fell silent for so long he feared she’d retreated where he couldn’t follow.
“Oh, it was,” said Lucy, coming back to him with a little shiver. “But cherry blossoms always make me think of death now. I dreamed of them last night. I was covered in them, suffocating, and I couldn’t wake myself up.”
“Is that when your father died? In the spring?”
Lucy nodded, then pushed her hair away from her face and tucked it behind one ear. She had small ears, Kincaid thought, delicate as seashells. “When I was five I was really ill with a high fever one night. Dad went out to the all-night chemist in the Portobello Road to get something for me, and a car hit him at the zebra crossing. Now it’s all mixed up in my head-the police coming to the door, Mum crying, the scent of the cherries from my open window.”
So Claire Gilbert had not only been widowed but had faced a husband’s sudden death once before. Remembering the days when giving an occasional death notification had been part of his duties, he imagined the scene from the officers’ view point-light spilling out from the flat on a soft April evening, the pretty young blond wife at the door, apprehension growing in her face as she took in the uniforms. Then out with it, baldly, “Ma’am, we’re sorry to tell you that your husband is dead,” and she would stagger as if she’d been slapped. They’d been taught to do it that way in the academy, kinder to get it over with, supposedly, but that never made it any easier.
Lucy sat with her hair twined around her finger again, staring at one of the hunting prints behind Gilbert’s desk. When Kincaid said, “I’m sorry,” she didn’t respond, but after a moment began to speak without looking at him, as if continuing a conversation.
“It feels odd, sitting here. Alastair didn’t like us to come in this room, particularly me. His ‘sanctum,’ he called it. I think women somehow spoiled the atmosphere.
“My dad was a writer, a journalist. His name was Stephen Penmaric, and he wrote mostly about conservation for magazines and newspapers.” She looked at Kincaid now, her face animated. “He had his office in the box room of our flat, and there must not have been enough room because I remember there were always stacks of books on the floor. Sometimes if I promised to be really quiet, he’d let me play in there while he worked, and I built things with the books-castles, cities. I liked the way they smelled, the feel of the covers.”
“My parents had a bookshop,” said Kincaid. “Still do, in fact. I played in the stockroom, and I used books for building blocks, too.”
“Really?” Lucy looked up at h
im, smiling for the first time since she’d described her dog the night before.
“Honestly.” He smiled back, wishing he could keep that expression on her face.
“How lovely for you,” she said a bit wistfully. Tucking her feet up on the sofa, she wrapped her arms around her calves and rested her chin on her knees. “It’s funny. I hadn’t thought about my dad so much in years.”
“I don’t think it’s funny at all. It’s perfectly natural under the circumstances.” He paused, then said carefully, “How do you feel about what’s happened, about your stepfather’s death?”
She looked away, her finger back in her hair again. After a bit she said slowly, “I don’t know. Numb, I suppose. I don’t really believe it, even though I saw him. They say ‘seeing is believing,’ but it’s not really true, is it?” With a quick glance at the door, she added, “I keep expecting him to walk in any minute.” She shifted restlessly, and Kincaid heard voices from the back of the house.
“I think that’s probably Chief Inspector Deveney, looking for me. Will you be all right on your own for a bit?”
With a return of some of the spirit she’d shown last night, she said, “Of course I’ll be all right. And I’ll look after Mummy when she gets up.” She jumped up from the sofa with the fluidity of the very young and had reached the door before he framed a reply.
As she turned back to him, he said, “Lewis will be glad to see you,” and was rewarded by one more brilliant smile.
“Have you noticed,” Kincaid said to Nick Deveney as they wound their way through the series of tracks that lay between villages, “that no one seems to be grieving for Alastair Gilbert? Even his wife seems to be shocked but not distraught.”
“True enough.” Deveney flashed his lights at an oncoming car and backed into the nearest passing place. “But that doesn’t give us a motive for murder. If that were the case, my ex-mother-in-law would be dead twenty times over.” The other driver lifted a hand in a wave as he passed, and Deveney pulled out into the road again. “Hope you don’t mind the shortcut. Actually, I’m not sure it is a shortcut, but I like driving through the hills. Beautiful, isn’t it?” Storm clouds had gathered in the west, but as he spoke a shaft of sun broke through, illuminating the air deep in the woods. Deveney glanced in his rearview mirror. “I’ll bet they’re getting a soaking in Guildford,” he said, then he pointed at the elaborate gates of an estate as they passed. “Look. It’s people like that who keep this part of Surrey from being overrun by tourists. They come here from London, bringing their money with them, so that we don’t really need to boost our economy by encouraging trippers.” Shrugging, he added, “But it’s a double-edged sword. Although they buy property and use services, many of them are never really accepted by the locals, and that generates some conflicts.”
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