Mourn Not Your Dead

by Deborah Crombie

  “Gemma, thanks for coming so quickly.”

  Gemma took her outstretched hands and squeezed them. “Susan, I’m so-”

  “I know. Please don’t say it. I haven’t quite reached the point where I can deal with condolences yet. Sit down and let me get you some coffee.” As Gemma started to protest, she added, “It helps if I have something to do with my hands.”

  After Gemma introduced Kincaid, Susan went into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a tray. She made inconsequential small talk while she poured, then sat gazing into her cup.

  “I still can’t believe it,” she said. “I keep expecting her to walk in the door and say something silly, like “It was all a big joke, Suz, ha-ha.’ She liked practical jokes.” Putting down her cup, Susan stood up and began pacing, twisting her hands together. “She left her dressing gown on the floor by her bed again. I was always fussing at her to pick up things, and now it doesn’t matter. Why did I ever think it did? Can you tell me that?” She stopped as they had first seen her, her back to them, facing the terrace. “They’ve given me indefinite ‘compassionate’ leave from work. To do what? Coming home to this empty flat in the evenings will be bad enough; the thought of spending days here alone is unbearable.”

  “What about your sister?” asked Gemma. “Can she stay with you for a bit?”

  Susan nodded. “She’s packed her kids off to Grandma for a few days. She’ll help me go through…Jackie’s things. She… Jackie, I mean… hadn’t any family, so there’s no one else to see to things…” Susan stopped, and for a moment Kincaid thought she would lose control, but she managed to go on. “She didn’t want to be cremated. She actually worried about it, and I used to laugh at her. Do you suppose she knew… I’ll have to try to find a cemetery that will take her. Then I’m going back to work-I don’t care how callous anyone thinks me.”

  She turned around and faced them. “Jackie talked about you a good bit in the last few days, Gemma. It meant a lot to her to see you again. I know there was something she was anxious to talk to you about, but I don’t know what it was-only that I heard her mumble something about a ‘bad apple where you’d least expect it.’”

  “I saw her yesterday. Before her shift. She told me-”

  “You saw her? How did she-what did she-” Susan swallowed and tried again. “She didn’t happen to say anything about me, did she?”

  Kincaid saw Gemma hesitate, then quickly collect herself “She talked about your promotion. She was really proud of you.”

  The front door opened and Cecily came in with a shopping bag full of purchases. Twisting her hands together again, Susan smiled at her sister, then said to Gemma, “You will let me know, won’t you, if you find out… anything?”

  “We’ll be in touch.” Gemma stood and gave her a quick hug. Cecily let them out and they descended the stairs in silence.

  By the time they reached the street, tears were streaming down Gemma’s face. “It’s not bloody fair,” she said furiously as she got into the car. “Susan should have seen her last, not me.” She slammed the door so hard the car shook. “It’s not bloody fair. Jackie shouldn’t be dead-and if it’s because of me, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “We’re treading on very delicate ground here,” Kincaid said as he pulled into the Notting Hill Police Station car park. “We have absolutely no grounds for pursuing inquiries concerning the involvement of a senior Met officer, other than an unsubstantiated rumor. I’d suggest that we begin with discretion.” He pulled the car into an empty space, then thought for a moment, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “I think we’ll have to disclose Jackie’s interest in the Gilbert case in order to justify our poking our noses into her murder, but I don’t know that we need go any further at this point.”

  Gemma nodded, then fished a tissue from her bag and blew her nose.

  “We could just say that Jackie told you she’d heard something dodgy about Gilbert, but that you don’t know what it was. Then in the meantime, let’s see if we can trace Ogilvie’s movements last night and the night of Gilbert’s murder, but in a roundabout way. That’ll be enough to get the wind up him, if he’s dirty.”

  “Chat up his secretary, why don’t you?” Gemma suggested. “She has an eye for a pretty face.”

  Kincaid glanced at her, wondering if the comment was a dig or an attempt at banter, but she was examining her fingernails with great concentration. “Who was the sergeant that Jackie said stonewalled her?” he asked.

  “Talley. I remember him from my days here.”

  “I think we might want to have a word with him, too.” Watching her, Kincaid wished again for something he might say, some comfort he might offer without sounding condescending, but no words seemed adequate. He resisted the urge to touch her shoulder, her cheek. “Are you ready?”

  She nodded. “As I’ll ever be.”

  “This is a stroke of luck,” Kincaid murmured to Gemma as they were shown into Superintendent Marc Lamb’s office. He and Lamb had met during their first development course, but it had been several years since they had bumped into each other.

  “Duncan, old chap.” Lamb came around his desk, beaming, and pumped Kincaid’s hand. “The Yard’s wonder boy in the flesh. Do have a seat.”

  Kincaid introduced Gemma with a small, unworthy spark of satisfaction, for although he and Lamb were the same age, Lamb was decidedly losing his hair and gaining a paunch.

  When they had spent a few minutes chatting about mutual acquaintances, Kincaid explained their interest in Jackie Temple.

  Lamb sobered immediately. “You never think something like that will happen at your station. Brixton, maybe, but not here. Jackie Temple was one of my best officers-levelheaded and well liked by the public as well as her fellow officers. You know how it is-sometimes coppers starting out have a lorry load of good intentions and not a particle of common sense, but Jackie had both from the very beginning.”

  Now Kincaid noticed the hollows under his old friend’s eyes, and the slept-in state of his jacket. He had probably been up all night. “Was there any indication of a burglary in progress?”

  Lamb shook his head. “Sweet eff-all. Nor has forensics turned up anything useful so far.” Glancing at his watch, he added, “We should be getting the autopsy report anytime now, but I’ll guarantee you right now that from the powder burns on the scalp and the size of the entrance wound, she was shot at point-blank range. She never had a chance.”

  Kincaid saw Gemma’s fists clench convulsively in her lap. “So what do you make of it, Marc?” he asked.

  Lamb straightened a picture frame on his cluttered desktop. Wife and kids, thought Kincaid, but he could only see the back of the frame. “This is a tough patch,” Lamb said slowly, “with its gentrified neighborhoods and its ethnic population, but we try to keep it clean.” He looked up and met Kincaid’s eyes. “As much as I hate to admit it about my own territory, this reeks of a gang-style execution.”

  With Lamb’s permission, they found Sergeant Randall Talley having a tea break in the canteen. “That’s him,” said Gemma, nodding in the direction of a small, grizzled man in his fifties who sat alone at a table.

  When they reached him, Gemma held out her hand and introduced herself, adding, “Do you remember me, Sergeant Talley?”

  Studiously avoiding her hand, Talley glanced at her, then looked away. His eyes were a light, faded blue. “Oh, aye. And what if I do?”

  Seeing Gemma’s surprise and confusion, Kincaid pulled out a chair for her and one for himself. Talley was obviously not the sort of man who would allow himself to be questioned by a former subordinate, but perhaps rank would induce a bit more cooperation. “Mind if we sit down, Sergeant?”

  “You can do as you like.” He finished his tea in a deliberately long swallow and pushed his chair back from the table. “Break’s over for me.”

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions, Sergeant. We’ve cleared it with your guv’nor. You were one of the last people to talk with
Jackie Temple, and we thought she might have said something that would give us a lead to her murderer.”

  “She was shot down in the street by a bunch of effing thugs! How the hell should I know anything about that?” He glared at them with bulldog aggressiveness, but there were tears in his eyes. “And you have no bloody jurisdiction over Jackie Temple’s murder.”

  “But we do have jurisdiction over Alastair Gilbert’s,” Kincaid said. “And Jackie had been asking questions about Alastair Gilbert. She told the sergeant here, in fact, that you very nearly boxed her ears for it.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? She had no business digging for dirt on a senior officer, dishonoring his memory. Gilbert was a good man.”

  Kincaid raised an eyebrow. “Ah, a supporter in a legion of detractors. That’s a nice surprise. And what do you think about Detective Chief Inspector David Ogilvie, Sergeant?”

  The whites of Talley’s eyes showed. “I’ve never heard a word said against DCI Ogilvie, not that I’d repeat it if I had.” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Now, I have better things to do with my time than spread scurrilous gossip, even if you do not. Good day to you.” He turned smartly and left them, threading his way through the scattered tables until he reached the door. Watching his rolling gate from behind, Kincaid wondered if Talley had spent his formative years in a less landlocked locale.

  “Well, well,” Kincaid said to Gemma as they looked at each other with wide eyes. “If you ask me, I’d say the man’s bloody terrified.”

  “You don’t suppose…” Gemma said slowly. “The bad apple Jackie mentioned… you don’t suppose it could have been Sergeant Talley?”

  The placard on Ogilvie’s secretary’s desk read HELENE VANDEMEER. Gemma had got it right, for a smile like a beacon lit Mrs. Vandemeer’s middle-aged and unassuming face when Kincaid introduced himself.

  Sounding genuinely regretful, she said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, the chief inspector’s away just now,” when Kincaid asked to see Ogilvie. “He left on Friday to teach a training seminar in the Midlands, and he won’t be back until”-she flipped a page, and then another, on her calendar-“Wednesday. He’ll be so sorry to have missed you.”

  Absolutely heartbroken, thought Kincaid as he smiled back at her. As Gemma took the small cubicle’s only chair, he propped one hip on the corner of Mrs. Vandemeer’s pristine desk. She would have been Gilbert’s secretary as well, he remembered, wondering if she had been hired for her habits, or if she had acquired them through association. “Do you have the number where he might be reached?” he asked. Then he added confidentially, “It’s about Commander Gilbert. You see, we hadn’t really checked into what the commander might have done between the time he left the office that day and the time he arrived home. We thought DCI Ogilvie might be able to throw some light on the matter.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m afraid he won’t be much help to you, then. He had a meeting with a local citizen’s group after lunch that day, and it must have dragged on a bit, because he never made it back to his office. And the commander…” Helene Vandemeer took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose, as if it suddenly hurt. “The commander left here on the dot of five, just like always. He put his head round my door and said, ‘Cheerio, Helene. See you tomorrow’” She looked up at Kincaid, and he saw that her unmasked eyes were a startling, true violet. “Do you think I might have been the last person to speak to him?”

  “That’s difficult to say,” Kincaid temporized. “You’re sure the commander didn’t say anything about what he meant to do that afternoon or anything else unusual?”

  Looking as if she could hardly bear to disappoint him, Helene shook her head. “I wish I could help you, but I can’t think of a thing.”

  “You’ve been terrific,” he said warmly, avoiding Gemma’s derisive glance. “If you could just give us that phone number…” As she wrote, he added nonchalantly, “That citizen’s meeting DCI Ogilvie had that afternoon, you don’t happen to remember what the group was called?”

  “Let me think.” Glasses firmly in place again, Helene frowned, then gave him a brilliant smile. “I’ve got it. The Notting Hill Association for Noise Reduction. NHANR. They’re petitioning for traffic reduction on certain streets.”

  Taking the phone number she’d jotted down for him, he said, “Thanks, love,” and left the room on Gemma’s heels.

  When they were barely out the door, Gemma whispered, “You might as well hand out doggie treats while you’re at it.”

  The suspicion of a dimple intimated that she was taking the mickey, so he answered in mock defense, “Hey, it was your idea. And it got results, didn’t it?”

  He pulled out his phone as he left the building and began to dial, and only when he reached the pavement did he realize that Gemma was no longer by his side. Turning back, he saw her standing just at the top of the steps, looking stricken. “Gemma,” he began, but just then the Yard answered, and by the time he’d finished his call, she had caught up to him.

  “What’s next, guv?” she asked, determinedly businesslike.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Let’s get a bite of lunch. Then I’d like to take a look at something, just to satisfy my curiosity.”

  They stood at the top of a tiny, cobbled mews, not far from the Notting Hill Police Station. Kincaid had finagled David Ogilvie’s address from a mate at the yard. On either side the houses stretched away like chocolate-box confections-peach and yellow, terra-cotta and pale sherbet green. Some had shiny black wrought-iron railings, others windowboxes overflowing with bright flowers, and like Elgin Crescent, every house sported a burglar alarm and a baby satellite dish.

  Kincaid whistled softly. “You can almost smell the money. Which one is number ten?”

  Walking on a bit, Gemma said, “Here.” It was a deeper shade of yellow, with glossy black trim.

  Peering through a gap in the ground-floor curtains, Kincaid caught a glimpse of a sleek contemporary sitting room, and beyond it a garden. He stood back and let Gemma have a look. “I certainly couldn’t have managed this on a chief inspector’s pay. Somehow I doubt if our friend David invites the lads over for a beer after work-what do you think?”

  Gemma looked up at him. “I’d say it’s time we called in C &D.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  Once back at the Yard, they settled into Kincaid’s office for an afternoon of tedious telephoning. First Kincaid checked in with Guildford CID, and finding Deveney still out on the burglary case, spoke to Will Darling. “Go back over everything with a fine-tooth comb, Will. We’re missing something-I can feel it-and it’s probably as obvious as the nose on your face. The lad in charge of effects made a sloppy call on the commander’s diary-let’s make sure that was the only instance.”

  A call to the chairman of the NHANR-“We call it Nanner” the man had cheerfully informed him-confirmed that David Ogilvie had indeed had an appointment with their group after lunch on the day of the commander’s death but revealed that Ogilvie had only stayed half an hour.

  Kincaid raised an eyebrow as he hung up the phone. “So what did he do for the rest of the afternoon? Tell me that,” he demanded as much to himself as to Gemma.

  Next, Gemma rang the Midlands training center and managed to elicit the fact that Ogilvie had not finished his lecture until almost a quarter to ten the previous night. She shook her head as she hung up and relayed the information to Kincaid.

  “He’d have had to fly to make it back to London in time to shoot Jackie,” said Kincaid, “and while he may live above his means, I haven’t seen any evidence of superhuman powers.” He sighed. “Still, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that he might have hired someone to do it. If he’s bent, he’ll have the connections.” He looked at Gemma sitting across the desk, her face lit by the watery, late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the blinds. “Are we chasing our tails, Gemma? If Gilbert found Ogilvie out and threatened to expose him, why the hell would Ogilvie bash his head in his own kitchen, rather
than arranging something much less risky?

  “Should we be back in Surrey grilling Brian Genovase like the Spanish Inquisition? But we’ve no hard evidence, and I still just can’t quite see Brian for it.”

  “There’s Jackie,” she said flatly.

  He rubbed his fingers over his cheekbones, stretching the tired muscles around his eyes. “I haven’t forgotten Jackie, love. Let’s take this whole Ogilvie mess to the chief and let him contact Complaints and Discipline. And I don’t think we’d be amiss in mentioning Sergeant Talley, while we’re at it.”

  Chief Superintendent Denis Childs having agreed that the Ogilvie matter was best turned over to C &D, Kincaid followed Gemma back to his office with a feeling of relief. “Let them put the squeeze on Ogilvie, up the pressure a bit. Then we’ll ask him where he was the afternoon Gilbert died.” He unfastened his collar button. “But for now let’s call it a day.”

  Gemma had hung her bag on the coat stand, and it seemed to him that she stood now a little aimlessly, as if she didn’t quite want to go. “We could go down the pub for a drink, if you like,” he said, trying to banish entreaty from his voice.

  She hesitated and his hopes rose, but after a moment she said, “I suppose I’d better not. I’ve spent little enough time with Toby lately as it is. It’s just that I’m not sure I want to be-”

  The phone rang, startling them both. Kincaid jerked the handset out of the cradle, held it to his ear. “Kincaid.”

  Will Darling’s voice came over the line. “You were right, guv, but I don’t know what it means. There was a number penciled on the back of a dry-cleaning ticket crumpled up in Gilbert’s pocket. I kept looking at it, thinking the sequence was wrong for a phone number. Then, bingo, the old light-bulb went on, and I thought It’s a bloody bank account. I checked it against the Gilberts’ joint account at Lloyd’s-no match. Took me all afternoon, but I found the branch bank that uses that number sequence in Dorking, and I ran a bit of a bluff. Told them I was Darling’s Jewelry in Guildford, and I had a check in my hand for the amount of a thousand pounds and wanted to verify sufficient funds in the account to cover it. Name of Gilbert, account number so-and-so-”