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?”
He shook his head. “I was once, a long time ago.”
“What happened?”
“She left. Met someone else.” He said the words flatly, with an ease born of years of practice, yet it still amazed him that such simple sentences could contain such betrayal.
Sharon considered that, then nodded. “Con made me supper-‘dinner,’ I mean-he’d always remind me to say ‘dinner.’ Candlelight, best dishes. He’d make me sit while he brought me things-‘Try this,
Shar, try that, Shar.’ Funny things, too.” She smiled at Kincaid. “Sometimes I felt like a kid playing dress-up. Would you do things like that for a girl?”
“I’ve been known to. But I’m afraid I’m not up to Con’s standards-my cooking runs more to omelets and cheese-on-toast.” He didn’t add that he’d never been inclined to play Pygmalion.
The brief animation that had lit Sharon’s face faded. She came slowly back to her chair, empty glass trailing from her fingertips. In a still little voice she said, “It won’t happen to me again.”
“Don’t be silly,” he scolded, hearing the false heartiness in his voice.
“Not like with Con, it won’t.” Looking directly at Kincaid, she said, “I know I’m not what blokes like him go for-always said it was too good to be true. A fairy tale.” She rubbed the sides of her face with her fingers, as if her jaws ached from unshed tears. “There’s not been anything in the papers. Do you know about the… arrangements?”
“No one in the family’s rung you?”
“Rung me?” she said, some of her earlier aggression returning. “Who the hell do you think would’ve rung me?” She sniffed, then added, mincing the names, “Julia? Dame Caroline?”
Kincaid gave the question serious consideration. Julia seemed determined to ignore the fact that her husband had existed, much less died. And Caroline? He could imagine her performing a distasteful, but necessary, duty. “Perhaps, yes. If they had known about you. I take it they didn’t?”
Dropping her gaze to her lap, she said a little sullenly, “How should I know what Con told them-I only know what he told me.” She pushed the hair from her face with chubby fingers, and Kincaid noticed that the nail on her index finger was broken to the quick. When she spoke again the defiance had gone from her voice. “He said he’d take care of us-little Hayley and me.”
“Hayley?” Kincaid said blankly.
“My little girl. She’s four. Had her birthday last week.” Sharon smiled for the first time.
This was a twist he hadn’t expected. “Is she Con’s daughter, too?”
She shook her head vehemently. “Her dad buggered off soon as he knew I was going to have her. Rotten swine. Not heard a word from him since.”
“But Con knew about her?”
“Course he did. What do you take me for, a bloody tart?”
“Of course not,” Kincaid said soothingly, and, eyeing her empty glass, unobtrusively fetched the bottle. “Did Con get on with little Hayley, then?” he asked, dividing the last of the sherry between them.
When she didn’t answer, he thought perhaps he’d gone over the mark with the sherry, but after a moment she said, “Sometimes I wondered… if it was really her he wanted, not me. Look.” Digging in her handbag, she pulled out a worn leather wallet. “That’s Hayley. She’s lovely, isn’t she?”
It was a cheap studio portrait, but even the artificial pose and tatty props couldn’t spoil the little girl’s beauty. As naturally blond as her mother might have been as a child, she had dimples and an angelic, heart-shaped face. “Is she as good as she looks?” Kincaid asked, raising an eyebrow.
Sharon laughed. “No, but you’d never think it to look at her, would you? Con called her his little angel. He’d tease her, call her names in this silly Irish voice. ‘Me little darlin’,” she said in a credible Irish accent. “You know, things like that.” For the first time her eyes filled with tears. She sniffed and wiped the back of her hand across her nose. “Julia didn’t want any kids. That’s why he wanted the divorce, but Julia wouldn’t give it to him.”
“Julia wouldn’t divorce Connor?” Kincaid asked, thinking that although no one had actually said, that wasn’t the impression he’d had from Julia or her family.
“When the two years were up he was going to divorce her-that’s how long it takes, you know, to obtain a divorce without the other party’s consent.” She said the last bit so precisely Kincaid thought she must have memorized it, perhaps repeating something Connor had said in order to comfort herself.
“And you were going to wait for him? Another year, was it?”
“Why shouldn’t I have done?” she said, her voice rising. “Con never gave me reason to think he wouldn’t do what he said.”
Why indeed? thought Kincaid. What better prospect had she? He looked at her, sitting back a little in her chair now, with her lower lip pushed out belligerently and both hands clasped around the stem of the sherry glass. Had she loved Connor Swann, or had she merely seen him as an attractive meal ticket? And how had such an unlikely union taken place? He certainly doubted that they had moved in the same social circles. “Sharon,” he said carefully, “tell me, how did you and Connor meet?”
“In the park,” she said, nodding toward the river. “Just there, in the Meadows. You can see it from the road. In the spring, it was. I was pushing Hayley in the swings and she fell out, skinned her knee. Con came over and talked to her, and before you knew it she’d stopped her bawling and was laughing at him.” She smiled, remembering. “Him and his Irish blarney. He brought us back here to look after her knee.” When Kincaid raised an eyebrow at that, she hurried on. “I know what you’re thinking. At first I was afraid he might be… well, you know, a bit funny. But it wasn’t like that at all.”
Sharon looked relaxed now, and warm, sitting with her feet in their preposterous shoes stretched out in front of her, sherry glass cradled in her lap. “What was it like?” Kincaid asked softly.
She took her time answering, studying her glass, the fan of her darkly mascaraed lashes casting shadows on her cheeks. “Funny. What with his job and all, it seemed like Con knew everybody. Always lunches and dinners and drinks and golfing. Busy, you know, important.” She raised her eyes to Kincaid’s. “I think he was lonely. In between all those engagements, there wasn’t anything.”
Kincaid thought about the desk diary he’d seen upstairs, with its endless round of appointments. “Sharon, what was Con’s job?”
“’E was in advertising.” Wrinkling her brow, she said, “Blakely, Gill… I can never remember. In Reading, it was.”
That certainly made sense of the diary. Remembering the deposit stubs, he recited, “Blackwell, Gillock and Frye.”
“That’s it.” Pleased at his cleverness, she beamed at him.
Kincaid ran back through the checkbook register in his mind. If Connor had helped Sharon out financially, he had done it on a cash basis-there had been no checks made out in her name. Unless he had passed the money through someone else. Casually, he asked, “Do you happen to know someone called Hicks?”
“That Kenneth!” she said furiously, sitting up and sloshing what remained of her drink. “Thought you were him, didn’t I, when I first came in and heard you upstairs. Thought he’d come for what he could get, like a bloody vulture.”
Was that why she’d been so frightened? “Who is he, Sharon? What connection did he have with Con?”
A little apologetically, she said, “Con liked the horses, see? That Kenneth, he worked for a bookie, ran Con’s bets for him. ’E was always hanging about, treated me like I was dirt.”
If that were the case, Connor Swann had not played the ponies lightly. “Do you know what bookmaker Kenneth Hicks worked for?”
She shrugged. “Somebody here in the town. Like I said, he was always hanging about.”
Remembering all the Red Lion notations in the diary, Kincaid wondered if that had been their regular meeting place. “Did Con go to the Red Lion Hotel often? The one next to the chur-?”
Already shaking her head, she interrupted, “All tarted up for the tourists, that one. A posh whore, Con called it, where you couldn’t get a decent pint.”
The girl was a natural mimic, with a good memory for dialogue. When she quoted Con, Kincaid could hear the cadence of his voice, even the faint hint of Irish accent.
“No,” she continued, “it was the Red Lion in Wargrave he liked. A real pub, with good food at a decent price.” She smiled, showing a faint dimple like he
r daughter’s. “The food was the thing, you know-Con wouldn’t go anywhere he didn’t like the food.” Putting her glass to her lips and turning it end up, she drained the last few drops. “’E even took me there, a few times, but mostly he liked to stay at home.”
Kincaid shook his head at the contradictions. The man had lived a boozing, betting life-in-the-fast-lane, by all accounts, but had preferred to stay at home with his mistress and her child. Connor had also, according to his diary, had lunch with his in-laws every single Thursday for the past year.
Kincaid thought back to the aftermath of his own marriage. Although Vic had left him, her parents had somehow managed to cast him as the villain of the piece, and he had never heard from them again, not so much as a card at Christmas or on his birthday. “Do you know what Con did on Thursdays, Sharon?” he asked.
“Why should I? Same as any other day, far as I know,” she added, frowning.
So she hadn’t known about the regular lunch with the in-laws. What else had Connor conveniently not told her? “What about last Thursday, Sharon, the day he died? Were you with him?”
“No. ’E went to London, but I don’t think he’d meant to, beforehand. When I’d given Hayley her supper, I came over and he’d just come in. All wound up he was, too, couldn’t sit still with it.”
“Did he say where he’d been?”
Slowly, she shook her head. “Said he had to go out again for a bit. ‘To see a man about a dog,’ he said, but that was just his way of being silly.”
“And he didn’t tell you where he was going?”
“No. Told me not to get my knickers in a twist, that he’d be back.” Slipping off her high-heeled sandals, she tucked her feet up in the armchair and rubbed at her toes with sudden concentration. She looked up, her eyes magnified by a film of moisture. “But I couldn’t stay, ’cause it were Gran’s bridge night and I had to see to Hayley. I couldn’t…” Wrapping her arms around her calves, she buried her face against her knees. “I didn’t…” she whispered, her voice muffled by the fabric of her jeans “…wouldn’t even give him a kiss when he left.”
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