Leave The Grave Green

by Deborah Crombie

  Gemma came out with her case, turning back for a moment to wave good-bye to Tony. The sun sparked from her hair, and it was only then that Kincaid realized it had ventured out from the clouds that had hidden it through the morning.

  “Ready, guv?” asked Gemma as she stowed her things in the boot and slid behind the wheel of her Escort. Kincaid put his speculations aside and got in beside her. She seemed to him refreshingly uncomplicated, and he offered up a silent thanks, as he often did, for her competent cheerfulness.

  Leaving the hills behind, they took the wide road to Henley. They had a glimpse of the river beneath the Henley Bridge, then it vanished behind them as the one-way system shunted them into the center of town. “Can you get back to the pub all right, guv?” Gemma asked as she pulled up to let Kincaid out in Henley’s marketplace.

  “I’ll ask the local lads for a lift. I could pull rank and requisition a car, of course,” he added, grinning at her, “but just now I think I’d rather not be bothered with parking the bloody thing.”

  He stepped out of the car and gave the door a parting thump with his hand, as if he were slapping a horse on its way. Gemma let up on the brake, but before nosing back into the traffic she rolled down the Escort’s driver’s-side window and called to him, “Mind how you go.”

  Turning back, he waved jauntily to her, then watched the car disappear down Hart Street. The sudden note of concern in her voice struck him as odd. It was she who was driving back to London, while he merely intended an unannounced interview and a recce of Connor Swann’s flat. He shrugged and smiled-he’d quite grown to like her occasional solicitousness.

  Henley Police Station lay just across the street, but after a moment’s hesitation he turned and instead climbed the steps to the Town Hall. A cardboard sign taped to the wall informed him that Tourist Information could be found downstairs, and as he descended, he wrinkled his nose at the standard public building accoutrements-cracked lino and the sour smell of urine.

  Fifty pence bought him a street map of the town, and he unfolded it as he walked thankfully back out into the sun. He saw that his way lay down Hart Street and along the river, so tucking the map in his jacket and his hands in his pockets, he strolled down the hill. The square tower of the church seemed to float against the softly colored hills beyond the river, and it drew him on like a lodestone. “St. Mary the Virgin,” he said aloud as he reached it, thinking that for an Anglican Church the syllables rolled off the tongue with a very Catholic resonance. He wondered where they meant to bury Connor Swann. Irish Catholic, Irish Protestant? Could it possibly matter? He didn’t yet know enough about him to hazard a guess.

  Crossing the busy street, he stood for a moment on the Henley Bridge. The Thames spread peacefully before him, so different from the thunder of water through Hambleden Weir. The river course wound north for a bit after Henley, curved to the east before it reached Hambleden, then meandered northeast before turning south toward Windsor. Could Connor have gone in the river here, in Henley, and drifted downstream to Hambleden Lock? He thought it highly unlikely, but made himself a mental note to check with Thames Valley.

  He took a last look at the red-and-white Pimm’s umbrellas beckoning temptingly from the terrace of the Angel pub, but he had other fish to fry.

  A few hundred yards beyond the pub he found the address. Next door to the tearoom a discreet sign announced THE GALLERY, THAMESIDE, and a single painting in an ornate gilded frame adorned the shop window. The door chimed electronically as Kincaid pushed it open, then clicked softly behind him, shutting out the hum of sound from the riverside.

  The silence settled around him. Even his footsteps were muffled by a thickly padded Berber carpet covering the floor. No one seemed to be about. A door stood open in back of the shop, revealing a small walled garden, and beyond that another door.

  Kincaid looked round the room with interest. The paintings, spaced generously around the walls, seemed to be mostly late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century watercolors, and most were river landscapes.

  In the room’s center a pedestal held a sleek bronze of a crouching cat. Kincaid ran his hand over the cool metal and thought of Sid. He had made arrangements with his neighbor, Major Keith, to look after the cat when he was away from home. Although the major professed to dislike cats, he looked after Sid with the same gruff tenderness he had shown to the cat’s former owner. Kincaid thought that for the major, as well as himself, the cat formed a living link to the friend they had lost.

  Near the garden door stood a desk, its cluttered surface a contrast to the spare neatness he saw everywhere else. Kincaid glanced quickly at the untidy papers, then moved into the second small room which lay a step down from the first.

  He caught his breath. The painting on the opposite wall was a long narrow rectangle, perhaps a yard wide and a foot high, and it was lit by a lamp mounted just above it. The girl’s body almost filled the frame. Dressed in shirt and jeans, she lay on her back in a meadow, eyes closed, hat tilted back on her auburn hair, and beside her on the grass a basket of ripe apples spilled over onto an open book.

  A simple-enough composition, almost photographic in its clarity and detail, but it possessed a warmth and depth impossible to capture with a camera. You could feel the sun on the girl’s upturned face, feel her contentment and pleasure in the day.

  Other paintings by the same artist’s hand were hung nearby, portraits and landscapes filled with the same vivid colors and intense light. As Kincaid looked at them he felt a sense of longing, as if such beauty and perfection existed forever just out of his reach, unless he, like Alice, could step through the frame and into the artist’s world.

  He had bent forward to peer at the illegibly scrawled signature when behind him a voice said, “Lovely, aren’t they?”

  Startled, Kincaid straightened and turned. The man stood in the back doorway, his body in shadow as the sun lit the garden behind him. As he stepped into the room, Kincaid saw him more clearly-tall, thin and neat-featured, with a shock of graying hair and glasses that gave him an accountantlike air at odds with the casual pullover and trousers he wore.

  The door chimed as Kincaid started to speak. A young man came in, his face white against the dead-black of his clothes and dyed hair, a large and battered leather portfolio tucked under his arm. His getup would have been laughable if not for the look of supplication on his face. Kincaid nodded to Trevor Simons, for so he assumed the man who had come in from the garden to be, and said, “Go ahead. I’m in no hurry.”

  Rather to Kincaid’s surprise, Simons looked carefully at the drawings. After a few moments he shook his head and tucked them back into the portfolio, but Kincaid heard him give the boy the name of another gallery he might try. “The trouble is,” he said to Kincaid as the door chimed shut, “he can’t paint. It’s a bloody shame. They stopped teaching drawing and painting in the art colleges back in the sixties. Graphic artists-that’s what they all want to be-only no one tells them there aren’t any jobs. So they come out of art college like this wee chappie,” he nodded toward the street, “hawking their wares from gallery to gallery like itinerant peddlers. You saw it-fairly competent airbrushed crap, without a spark of originality. If he’s lucky he’ll find a job frying up chips or driving a delivery van.”

  “You were courteous enough,” said Kincaid.

  “Well, you have to have some sympathy, haven’t you? It’s not their fault they’re ignorant, both in technique and in the realities of life.” He waved a hand dismissively. “I’ve nattered on long enough. What can I do for you?”

  Kincaid gestured toward the watercolors in the second room, “These-”

  “Ah, she’s an exception,” Simons said, smiling. “In many ways. Self-taught, for one, which was probably her salvation, and very successful at it, for another. Not with these,” he added quickly, “although I think she will be, but with the work she does on commission. Stays booked two years in advance. It’s very difficult for an artist who is successful commercially to
find the time to do really creative work, so this show meant a lot to her.”

  Realizing the answer even as he asked and feeling an utter fool, Kincaid said, “The artist-who is she?”

  Trevor Simons looked puzzled. “Julia Swann. I thought you knew.”

  “But…” Kincaid tried to reconcile the flawless but rather emotionally severe perfection of Julia’s flowers with these vibrantly alive paintings. He could see similarities now in technique and execution, but the outcome was astonishingly different. Making an attempt to collect himself, he said, “Look. I think perhaps I ought to go out and come in again, I’ve made such a muddle of things. My name’s Duncan Kincaid,” he extended his warrant card in its folder, “and I came to talk to you about Julia Swann.”

  Trevor Simons looked from the warrant card to Kincaid and back again, then said rather blankly, “It looks like a library permit. I always wondered, you know, when you see them on the telly.” He shook his head, frowning. “I don’t understand. I know Con’s death has been a dreadful shock for everyone, but I thought it was an accident. Why Scotland Yard? And why me?”

  “Thames Valley has treated it as a suspicious death from the beginning, and asked for our assistance at Sir Gerald Asherton’s request.”

  Kincaid had delivered this with no intonation, but Simons raised an eyebrow and said, “Ah.”

  “Indeed,” Kincaid answered, and when their eyes met it occurred to him that he might be friends with this man under other circumstances.

  “And me?” Simons asked again. “Surely you can’t think Julia had anything to do with Con’s death?”

  “Were you with Julia all Thursday evening?” Kincaid said, pushing a bit more aggressively, although the note of incredulity in Simons’s voice had struck him as genuine.

  Unruffled, Simons leaned against his desk and folded his arms. “More or less. It was a bit of a free-for-all in here.” He nodded, indicating the two small rooms. “People were jammed in here like sardines. I suppose Julia might have popped out to the loo or for a smoke and I wouldn’t have noticed, but not much longer than that.”

  “What time did you close the gallery?”

  “Tenish. They’d eaten and drunk everything in sight, and left a wake of litter behind like pillaging Huns. We had to push the last happy stragglers out the door.”

  “We?”

  “Julia helped me tidy up.”

  “And after that?”

  Trevor Simons looked away for the first time. He studied the river for a moment, then turned back to Kincaid with a reluctant expression. “I’m sure you’ve seen Julia already. Did she tell you she spent the night? I can’t imagine her being silly enough to protect my honor.” Simons paused, but before Kincaid could speak he went on. “Well, it’s true enough. She was here in the flat with me until just before daybreak. A small attempt at discretion, creeping out with the dawn,” he added with a humorless smile.

  “She didn’t leave you at any time before that?”

  “I think I would have noticed if she had,” Simons answered, this time with a genuine flash of amusement, then he quickly sobered and added, “Look, Mr. Kincaid, I don’t make a habit of doing this sort of thing. I’m married and I’ve two teenage daughters. I don’t want my family hurt. I know,” he continued hurriedly, as if Kincaid might interrupt him, “I should have considered the consequences beforehand, but one doesn’t, does one?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Kincaid answered in bland policemanese, all the while thinking, Does one not, or does one consider the consequences and choose to act anyway? The image of his ex-wife came to him, her straight flaxen hair falling across her shuttered face. Had Vic considered the consequences?

  “You don’t live here, then?” he asked, breaking the train of thought abruptly. He gestured toward the door across the garden.

  “No. In Sonning, a bit farther upriver. The flat was included in the property when I bought the gallery, and I use it mainly as a studio. Sometimes I stay over when I’m painting, or when I’ve an opening on.”

  “You paint?” asked Kincaid, a little surprised.

  Simons’s smile was rueful. “Am I a practical man, Mr. Kincaid? Or merely a compromised one? You tell me.” The question seemed to be hypothetical only, for he continued, “I knew when I left art school I wasn’t quite good enough, didn’t have that unique combination of talent and luck. So I used a little family money and bought this gallery. I found it a bit ironic that Julia’s opening also marked the anniversary of my twenty-fifth year here.”

  Kincaid wasn’t inclined to let him off the hook, although he suspected his curiosity was more personal than professional. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Yes, I paint, and I feel insulted if I’m referred to as a ‘local artist’ rather than an ‘artist who paints locally’ It’s a fine distinction, you understand,” he added mockingly. “Silly, isn’t it?”

  “What sort of things do you paint?” Kincaid asked, scanning the paintings on the walls of the small room.

  Simons followed his gaze and smiled. “Sometimes I do hang my own work, but I haven’t any up just now. I’ve had to make room for Julia’s paintings, and frankly I’ve other things that sell better than mine, although I do paint Thames landscapes. I use oils-I’m not good enough yet to paint in watercolor, but one day I will be.”

  “Is what Julia does that difficult, then?” Kincaid allowed himself to study Julia’s lamplit painting, and discovered that he had been deliberately resisting doing so. It drew him, as she did, in a way that felt both familiar and perilous. “I always thought that one just made a choice, watercolors or oils, depending on what one liked.”

  “Watercolor is much more difficult,” Simons said patiently. “In oil you can make any number of mistakes and just as easily cover them up, the more the merrier. Watercolor requires a confidence, perhaps even a certain amount of ruthlessness. You must get it right the first time.”

  Kincaid looked at Julia’s paintings with new respect. “You said she was self-taught? Why not art college, with her talent?”

  Simons shrugged. “I suppose her family didn’t take her seriously. Musicians do tend to be rather one-dimensional, even more so than visual artists. Nothing else exists for them. They eat, sleep and breathe music, and I imagine that to Sir Gerald and Dame Caroline, Julia’s paintings were just amusing dabs of color on paper.” He stepped down into the lower room and walked over to the large painting, staring at it. “Whatever the reason, it allowed her to develop in her own way, with no taint of graphic mediocrity.”

  “You have a special relationship,” Kincaid said, watching the way Trevor Simons’s slender body blocked the painting in an almost protective posture. “You admire her-do you also resent her?”

  After a moment Simons answered, his back still to Kincaid. “Perhaps. Can we help but envy those touched by the gods, however briefly?” He turned and the brown eyes behind the spectacles regarded Kincaid candidly. “Yet I have a good life.”

  “Then why have you risked it?” Kincaid said softly. “Your wife, family… perhaps even your business?”

  “I never intended it.” Simons gave a self-mocking bark of laughter. “Famous last words-I never meant to do it. It was just… Julia.”

  “What else didn’t you intend, Trevor? Just how far did your loss of judgment take you?”

  “You think I might have killed Connor?” His eyebrows shot up above the line of his spectacles and he laughed again. “I can’t lay claim to sins of that magnitude, Mr. Kincaid. And why would I want to get rid of the poor bloke? Julia had already chewed him up and spat out the partially digested remains.”

  Kincaid grinned. “Very descriptively put. And will she do the same to you?”

  “Oh, I expect so. I’ve never been able to delude myself sufficiently to think otherwise.”

  Pushing aside an untidy stack of papers, Kincaid sat on the edge of Simons’s desk and stretched out his legs. “Did you know Connor Swann well?”

  Simons put his ha
nds in his pockets and shifted his weight in the manner of a man suddenly territorially displaced. “Only to speak to, really. Before they separated he came in with Julia occasionally.”

  “Was he jealous of you, do you think?”

  “Con? Jealous? That would be the pot calling the kettle black! I never understood why Julia put up with him as long as she did.”

  A passerby stopped and peered at the painting in the window, as had several others since Kincaid had come into the gallery. Beyond her the light had shifted, and the shadows of the willows lay longer on the pavement. “They don’t come in,” Kincaid said as he watched her move toward the tea shop and pass from his view.

  “No. Not often.” Simons gestured at the paintings lining the walls. “The prices are a bit steep for impulse buying. Most of my customers are regulars, collectors. Though sometimes one of those window-shoppers will wander in and fall in love with a painting, then go home and save up pennies out of the housekeeping or the beer money until they have enough to buy it.” He smiled. “Those are the best, the ones that know nothing about art and buy out of love. It’s a genuine response.”

  Kincaid looked at the illuminated painting of the girl in the meadow, her eyes gently closed, her faintly freckled face tilted to the sun, and acknowledged his own experience. “Yes, I can see that.”

  He stood and regarded Trevor Simons, who, whatever his sins, seemed a perceptive and decent man. “A word of advice, Mr. Simons, which I probably shouldn’t give. An investigation like this moves out in ripples-the longer it takes the wider the circle becomes. If I were you I’d do some damage control-tell your wife about Julia if you can. Before we do.”