“Not daft, politically minded,” snorted Deveney
“Gemma’s right, you know,” said Kincaid. “It’s all completely circumstantial, based on the assumption that Geoff might have taken Claire Gilbert’s earrings, which we did not find in his possession. For all we know she lost them or accidentally knocked them down the bloody drain in the lav.
“We’ve checked his prints with the unknowns found in the Gilberts’ kitchen, and there’s not a smudge with a remote resemblance. Nor has forensics come up with any hair or fibers that might provide a link.”
Deveney grinned. “So we assume that in the few minutes it took Geoff to download a file, he equipped himself with hat, gloves, and protective clothing, nipped across the road and killed the commander, then disposed of Claire’s earrings, the murder weapon, and the aforementioned protective clothing on his way back to the pub. Although, of course, we’ve searched every square inch in between and turned up sweet eff-all.” This brought a chorus of groans and much rolling of eyes. “Is that all the appreciation I get for a feat of intellectual daring?” Deveney winked at Gemma, and Kincaid saw her look quickly away.
Before anyone could make a proper rejoinder, the barmaid brought their dinners. They tucked in like starving sailors, and for a while the clink of cutlery was the only sound at the table.
Kincaid watched as Gemma ate her chips and plaice with quiet concentration. He was comforted simply by her proximity. She didn’t flinch if his knee occasionally brushed hers under the table, and he wondered if it heralded a thaw. Looking up at him, she gave him an unguarded smile, and he felt a wave of desire so strong it left him shaking.
“You know,” said Deveney, pushing his plate away, “if that’s the chief’s line on this, maybe our village committee was right in refusing to throw Geoff to the wolves.”
“So now we’re the wolves?” asked Kincaid a bit testily. “Would we let someone we thought innocent serve as a scapegoat?”
“Of course not,” said Deveney, “but these political agendas can very easily get out of hand. We’ve all seen it happen.” He looked questioningly around the table and they all nodded grudging confirmation.
Will wiped up the last bit of his shepherd’s pie with his last chip, then pushed his plate away and regarded them gravely. “It seems to me that we’re all mincing around the real question like little ballerinas. And that is, regardless of the nature of the evidence, do we think Geoff did it?”
Watching his tablemates, Kincaid wondered fleetingly if the four of them were just as guilty of star-chamber behavior as the villagers. But they were all good, honest coppers, and none of them could do their jobs without exercising their judgment. Indecision would paralyze them. “No,” he said, breaking the silence. “I’d say it’s highly unlikely, at the very least, and I’ll not stand by and see him go down for a crime he didn’t commit.” Beside him, he felt Gemma relax as she nodded agreement, and Deveney followed suit. “Will?” Kincaid asked, unable to read the constable’s expression.
“Oh, aye, I’d agree with you on that. It’s too tailor-made by half. But I wonder if we won’t wish we’d found such an easy solution by the time this is all over.” He drained his pint and added, “And what about Percy Bainbridge’s mysterious shadow?”
Kincaid shrugged. “Could have been anybody.”
“More likely a product of Percy’s imagination, dredged up purely for the drama,” said Deveney.
“You’re not going to like this,” Gemma said slowly, “and I don’t like it either. But what if Gilbert went ferreting because he didn’t like his stepdaughter having a… relationship with Geoff? And what if he found out that Geoff was responsible for the thefts? And then what if Gilbert told Brian that he intended to turn Geoff in? Brian had good reason to hate him already. What would he do in order to protect his son?”
“You’re right,” Deveney said after a moment. “I don’t like it a bit. But it’s the nearest thing to a motive we’ve come up with so far.”
Kincaid yawned. “Then I suggest the first thing on our list tomorrow should be discovering if Brian can account for himself the whole of Wednesday evening. We’ll keep picking at Malcolm Reid, too. There’s something in that situation that bothers me. I just can’t quite put my finger on it.”
“Let’s call it a night, then,” said Deveney. “I’m knackered. I’ve booked you a couple of rooms in the hotel on the High.” He put his hand over his heart and grinned at Gemma. “And I’ll sleep better knowing you’re near at hand.”
The hotel turned out to be presentable, if a bit fusty. Having bid the lingering Nick Deveney a definite good night, Kincaid followed Gemma up the stairs at a respectable distance. Their rooms were opposite each other, and he waited in the corridor until she’d turned her key in the lock. “Gemma-” he began, then floundered.
She gave him a bright, brittle smile. If she had allowed a chink to show in her defenses at the pub, she’d pulled her armor firmly into place again. “Night, guv. Sleep well.” Her door clicked firmly shut.
He undressed slowly, hanging up his shirt and laying his trousers across the room’s single chair as if his salvation depended upon a perfect crease. The combination of alcohol and exhaustion had produced a numbing effect, and he felt as if he were watching his own actions from a distance, knowing them to be absurd. But still he kept on, order his only defense, and as he hung his overcoat on a peg in the wardrobe a crumpled paper poppy fell to the floor.
He’d worn the poppy last Sunday, a week ago, when he’d walked up to St. John’s, Hampstead, to hear the major sing the Fauré requiem in the Remembrance Day service. The soaring voices had lifted him, stilling all worries and desires for a brief time, and as he climbed into the narrow hotel bed he tried to hold the memory in his mind.
* * *
It came to him as he drifted in the formlessness just before sleep. He scrambled out of bed, upsetting the flimsy lamp on the nightstand in his haste. When he’d righted the lamp, he flicked it on and began digging through his wallet.
He found the card easily enough and sat squinting at it in the dim light that filtered through the pink, fringed lamp shade. He hadn’t been mistaken. The telephone number on the business card he’d picked up at Malcolm Reid’s shop was the same as the one he remembered seeing penciled in Alastair Gilbert’s diary, next to the notation 6:00 on the evening before Gilbert died.
CHAPTER 10
The press had decamped, the constable had been relieved of his post at the gate, and the lane seemed to dream peacefully undisturbed in the morning sun. As they let themselves through the Gilberts’ gate, Kincaid muttered something that sounded to Gemma like “this Eden…”
“What?” she said, turning back to him as he fiddled with the latch.
“Oh, nothing.” He caught her up and they walked abreast along the path. “Just a half-remembered old quote.” As they rounded the corner, Lewis stood up in his run, but his deep intruder-alert bark changed to an excited yipping when Kincaid spoke to him.
“You’ve made a conquest,” Gemma said as he walked to the fence and scratched the dog’s ears through the wiring.
He turned and met her eyes. “One, at least.”
Gemma flushed and cursed herself for having put her foot in it once again. While she was still trying to think of a suitable reply, the kitchen door opened and Lucy called to them. She came out on the step, visible in all the glory of her baggy red jersey, crumpled socks, and a tartan skirt barely long enough to earn its name.
“Claire’s gone to see Gwen before church,” Lucy said as they reached her, and on closer inspection Gemma could see goose bumps on the expanse of bare flesh between hem and sock.
“Gwen?” asked Kincaid.
“You know, Alastair’s mum. Claire always goes on Sunday morning, and she thought it a good idea not to break the routine. Do you want to come in?” Lucy opened the door and made way for them.
Once in the kitchen, she sat down at the table by a half-empty bowl of cereal but made no mov
e to resume eating. “I’m glad you’ve come,” she said a bit awkwardly, clasping her hands in her lap. “I wanted to thank you for what you did yesterday, letting Geoff go home and all.”
“Geoff’s friends were responsible for that. He seems to have quite a few.” Kincaid pulled up a chair in the breakfast nook, and Gemma did the same, but she still found it odd to be sitting so casually in this room.
“I don’t think he realized until last night. He never thinks he deserves people caring about him.”
Watching the expression on the girl’s heart-shaped face, Gemma wondered if Geoff felt he deserved Lucy’s love-for she suddenly had no doubt that love him Lucy did and with all a seventeen-year-old’s capacity for passion.
“Lucy,” said Kincaid, “do you think you could help us out with something, since your mother’s not here?”
“Sure.” She looked at him expectantly.
Gemma wondered how Kincaid meant to handle this. When they’d stopped in at the station, a quick check of Gilbert’s impounded diary had confirmed Kincaid’s memory. When he asked, with exaggerated patience, why he hadn’t been informed of the connection, the constable in charge mumbled something about “just assuming the commander had rung his wife.”
“First rule of a murder investigation, mate,” Kincaid had said, an inch from his face, “which you should have learned at your guv’nor’s knee. Never assume.”
Now he tackled the other, unspoken, assumption first. “Is your mum in the habit of working late, Lucy?”
She shook her head, her hair swinging with the movement. “She likes to be here when I get home from school, and she never misses it by more than a few minutes.”
“What about the night before Alastair died? Was there anything unusual about that?”
“That would have been Tuesday.” Lucy thought a moment. “We were both home by five or so, and then later Mum watched an old movie with me.” She shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Kincaid straightened the table mat, aligning it precisely with the edge of the table. “Did Alastair ever ring your mum at the shop?”
“Alastair?” She looked baffled. “I don’t think so. Sometimes he’d have his secretary ring here and leave a message on the answerphone if he were going to be delayed. And sometimes he didn’t let her know at all. Alastair wasn’t one to put himself out for people,” she added. “Even when Mummy broke her wrist last summer, he didn’t leave work. Geoff went with me to pick her up from hospital. I only had my learner’s permit then.”
“How did it happen?” asked Gemma.
“Driving along the road that runs through the Hurtwood. She said she hit a monster pothole, and the wheel jerked so hard it snapped the bone in her wrist.”
“Ouch.” Gemma winced at the thought.
Grinning, Lucy added, “It was her right hand, too. I had to do everything for her for weeks, and she didn’t like it a bit. Poor Mum. Kept her from biting her nails, though.”
Kincaid glanced at his watch. “I guess we’d better not wait for her any longer. Do you mind if I make a quick call from Alastair’s study, Lucy?”
When he’d gone, Lucy smiled a bit shyly at Gemma. “He’s very nice, isn’t he? You’re lucky you get to work with him every day.”
Nonplussed, Gemma searched for a response. A week ago she would have agreed easily, perhaps even a touch smugly. She felt a pang of loss so sharp that it took her breath, but she managed a smile. “Of course I am. You’re quite right,” she said finally, trying for conviction, then did her best to ignore Lucy’s puzzled expression.
“Well?” said Gemma when they reached the lane again. “I think we can be fairly sure that it was Malcolm Reid that Gilbert called.”
“I should’ve twigged sooner,” Kincaid said, his face set in an irritated frown.
Gemma shrugged. “That’s a bit pointless. Like saying you should remember what you’ve forgotten. What’s next?”
“I’ve got the Reids’ home address, but first, let’s give Brian a try.”
Leaving the car in the lane, they walked to the pub, but found it shut up tight. Kincaid’s knock on the door brought no response. “First thing Sunday morning’s not the best time to beard a publican in his den, I suppose. I remember Brian saying he wasn’t a morning person.” Turning away, he added, “We’ll have to come back, but just now let’s pay a call on Malcolm and the missis.”
“I think that must have been it.” Gemma looked back at the gap in the hedge they’d just shot past. “Hazel Patch Farm. I saw a little hand-lettered sign on the gatepost.”
“Bloody hell.” Kincaid swore under his breath. “There’s no place to reverse.” He shifted down another gear and crept around the hairpin bends, searching for an accessible drive or farm track. They were high in the tree-crowned hills between Holmbury and Shere, and Gemma supposed they’d done well to find the place at all with only the blithe directions of the Holmbury St. Mary garage attendant to guide them.
A passing place presented itself, and with a little judicious maneuvering, Kincaid managed to turn the car about. Soon they were nosing in through the farm gate, and he pulled the car up in a graveled area just inside the hedge.
“Not exactly a working farm, I’d say,” he commented as they got out of the car and looked about. The house stood back beneath the trees, and what little remained visible beneath the cover of the creeping vines seemed unassuming enough.
Malcolm Reid came to the door in frayed jeans and an old sweater, looking considerably less like a Country Living fashion plate than he had in the shop, but perhaps, thought Gemma, even more handsome. If he were surprised to have his Sunday morning at home interrupted by uninvited coppers, he managed to conceal it, and the two sleek springer spaniels at his heels sniffed at them with equal politeness. “Come through to the back,” he said pleasantly and led them down a dim passageway.
Entering before them, he said, “Val, it’s Superintendent Kincaid and Sergeant James.”
Anything else he might have attributed to them, Gemma lost, as she was too busy gaping with delight to take in the conversation. They stood in a terra-cotta-tiled kitchen, and it was much less intimidating than she would have imagined from the high-tech displays in the shop. Dusty-blue cabinets, a sunflower-yellow Aga as well as a gas cooktop, copper pans hanging from a rack in the ceiling, and all open to a solarium whose windows looked down the steep hillside to the Downs rolling away in the distance.
Kincaid gave her a gentle nudge and she focused on the woman rising from amid the pile of newspapers that covered most of a comfortable-looking settee. “You’ve caught us at our Sunday morning vice,” she said, laughing as she came towards them with her hand outstretched. “We read them all-the high, the low, the insufferably middle-brow. I’m Valerie Reid.”
Even barefoot, dressed in leggings and what looked to be one of her husband’s cast-off rugby shirts, the woman radiated sex appeal. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin, and a flash of brilliant white smile made her seem as Mediterranean as her kitchen, but her accent held an incongruous trace of Scots burr. “Do you like it?” she said to Gemma, gesturing at the kitchen. She hadn’t missed Gemma’s rapt stare. “Do you cook-”
“Darling,” said her husband, “they are not here to talk about cooking, as difficult as that may be for you to imagine.” He gave her shoulder an affectionate squeeze.
“Nevertheless, they cannot talk without something to eat and drink. There are wholemeal scones still warm in the oven, and I will make some latte.”
Kincaid opened his mouth to protest. “No, really, that’s quite-”
“Sit,” ordered Valerie, and Kincaid obediently sat in a clear spot on the settee. Gemma lingered in the kitchen, sniffing as Valerie opened the Aga’s warming oven.
“You’re wondering how I manage not to waddle,” said Malcolm as he joined Kincaid. He pointed at the dogs, who had stretched out on the tile floor in a patch of sunlight. “If it weren’t for running those two up and down the bloody hills twice a day, I
probably wouldn’t be able to get through the door, much less into my clothes. Val’s cooking is quite irresistible.”
The hiss of the espresso machine filled the room, and when Valerie had filled cups Gemma helped her carry coffee and scones into the solarium. Once settled in a comfortable slipcovered chair, Gemma tasted her scone as Valerie watched expectantly.
“Wonderful,” said Gemma sincerely. “Better than anything from a bakery.”
“It takes ten minutes to mix these from scratch, yet people buy mixes from the supermarket.” Wrinkling her nose disdainfully, Valerie sounded as if she were talking about black-market racketeering. “Sometimes I think the English are hopeless.”
“But you’re English, aren’t you, Mrs. Reid?” asked Gemma through a mouthful of crumbs.
“Valerie, please,” she said, helping herself to a scone. “My parents are Anglicized Italians. They settled in Scotland and opened the most British of cafés, on the anything-you-can-do-we-can-do-better principle. This they even extended to the naming of their children.” She tapped her chest. “You’d think Valerie was bad enough, but they called my brother Ian. Can you imagine anything less Italian than Ian? And they learned to fry everything in rancid grease, in the best British fashion.
“But I forgave them, because every summer they sent me to Italy to stay with my grandmama, and so I learned to cook.”
“Val.” Malcolm’s voice held amusement. “Give the superintendent a chance, would you?”
“I’m so sorry,” said Valerie, sounding not the least bit abashed. “Do get on with whatever it is you need to get on with.” She settled back into her nest of papers, cup of latte in one hand, scone plate balanced on her knee.
Kincaid smiled and sipped his coffee before replying. “Mr. Reid, I believe you told us that you’d had no contact with Alastair Gilbert before his death?” Before Reid could affirm or deny this rather open-ended question, Kincaid continued, “But I think that in fact you misled us. You had an appointment with Gilbert at six o’clock the evening before he died, which he confirmed by telephone. Just what was Gilbert’s urgent business with you, Mr. Reid?”
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