Leave The Grave Green

by Deborah Crombie

  So she had been pouting, her feelings hurt, and had childishly snubbed him, thought Kincaid. A small failing, an exhibition of ordinary lovers’ behavior, to be laughed about later in bed, but this time there could be no making up. Of such tiny things are made lifetimes of guilt, and what she sought from him was absolution. Well, he would give whatever was in his power to bestow. “Sharon. Look at me.” Slipping forward in his chair, he reached out and patted her clasped hands. “You couldn’t know. We’re none of us perfect enough to live every minute as if it might be our last. Con loved you, and he knew you loved him. That’s all that matters.”

  Her shoulders moved convulsively. He sat back quietly, watching her, until he saw her body relax and begin a barely perceptible rocking, then he said, “Con didn’t say anything else about where he was going or who he meant to see?”

  She shook her head without lifting it. “I’ve thought and thought. Every word he said, every word I said. There’s nothing.”

  “And you didn’t see him again that night?”

  “I said I didn’t, didn’t I?” she said, raising her face from her knees. Weeping had blotched her fair skin, but she sniffed and ran her knuckles under her eyes unselfconsciously. “What do you want to know all this stuff for, anyway?”

  At first her need to talk, to release some of her grief, had been greater than anything else, but now Kincaid saw her natural wariness begin to reassert itself. “Had Con been drinking?” he asked.

  Sharon sat back in her chair, looking puzzled. “I don’t think so-at least he didn’t seem like it, but sometimes you couldn’t tell, at first.”

  “Had a good head, did he?”

  She shrugged. “Con liked his pint, but he wasn’t ever mean with it, like some.”

  “Sharon, what do you think happened to Con?”

  “Silly bugger went for a walk along the lock, fell in and drowned! What do you mean ‘What happened to him?’ How the bloody hell should I know what happened to him?” She was almost shouting, and bright spots of color appeared on her cheekbones.

  Kincaid knew he’d received the tail end of the anger she couldn’t vent on Connor-anger at Connor for dying, for leaving her. “It’s difficult for a grown man to fall in and drown, unless he’s had a heart attack or is falling-down drunk. We won’t be able to rule those possibilities out until after the autopsy, but I think we’ll find that Connor was in good health and at least relatively sober.” As he spoke her eyes widened and she shrank back in her chair, as if she might escape his voice, but he continued relentlessly. “His throat was bruised. I think someone choked him until he lost consciousness and then very conveniently shoved him in the river. Who would have done that to him, Sharon? Do you know?”

  “The bitch,” she said on a breath, her face blanched paper-white beneath her makeup.

  “What-”

  She stood up, propelled by her anger. Staggering, she lost her balance and fell to her knees before Kincaid. “That bitch!”

  A fine spray of spittle reached his face. He smelled the sherry on her breath. “Who, Sharon?”

  “She did everything she could to ruin him and now she’s killed him.”

  “Who, Sharon? Who are you talking about?”

  “Her, of course. Julia.”

  The woman sitting beside Kincaid nudged him. The congregation was rising, lifting and opening hymnals. He’d heard only snippets of the sermon, delivered in a soft and scholarly voice by the balding vicar. Standing quickly, he scrabbled for a hymnal and peeked at his neighbor’s to find the page.

  He sang absently, his mind still replaying his interview with Connor Swann’s mistress. In spite of Sharon’s accusations, he just didn’t think that Julia Swann had the physical strength necessary to choke her husband and shove him into the canal. Nor had she had the time, unless Trevor Simons was willing to lie to protect her. None of it made sense. He wondered how Gemma was getting on in London, if she had found out anything useful in her visit to the opera.

  The service came to a close. Although the congregants greeted one another and chatted cheerfully as they filed out, nowhere did he hear Connor or the Ashertons mentioned. They glanced curiously and a little shyly at Kincaid, but no one spoke to him. He followed the crowd out into the churchyard, but instead of returning to the hotel, he turned his collar up, stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered among the headstones. Distantly, he heard the sounds of car doors slamming and engines starting, but the wind hummed against his ears. Leaves rustled in the thick grass like small brown mice.

  He found what he had been halfway looking for behind the church tower, beneath a spreading oak.

  “The family,” said a voice behind him, “seems to have been more than ordinarily blessed and cursed.”

  Startled, Kincaid turned. Contemplating the headstone, the vicar stood with his hands clasped loosely before him and his feet spread slightly apart. The wind whipped his vestments against his legs and blew the strands of thinning, gray hair across his bony skull.

  The inscription said simply: MATTHEW ASHERTON, BELOVED SON OF GERALD AND CAROLINE, BROTHER OF JULIA. “Did you know him?” Kincaid asked.

  The vicar nodded. “In many ways an ordinary boy, transformed into something beyond himself by the mere act of opening his mouth.” He looked up from the headstone and Kincaid saw that his eyes were a fine, clear gray. “Oh yes, I knew him. He sang in my choir. I taught him his catechism, as well.”

  “And Julia? Did you know Julia, too?”

  Studying Kincaid, the vicar said, “I noticed you earlier, a new face in the congregation, a stranger wandering purposefully about among the headstones, but you did not seem to me to be a mere sensation seeker. Are you a friend of the family?”

  In answer Kincaid removed his warrant card from his pocket and opened the case. “Duncan Kincaid. I’m looking into the death of Connor Swann,” he said, but even as he spoke he wondered if that were now the entire truth.

  The vicar closed his eyes for a moment, as if conducting a private communication, then opened them and blinked before fixing Kincaid with his penetrating stare. “Come across the way, why don’t you, for a cup of tea. We can talk, out of this damnable wind.”

  * * *

  “Brilliance is a difficult enough burden for an adult to bear, much less a child. I don’t know how Matthew Asherton would have turned out, if he had lived to fulfill his promise.”

  They sat in the vicar’s study, drinking tea from mismatched mugs. He had introduced himself as William Mead, and as he switched on the electric kettle and gathered mugs and sugar onto a tray, he told Kincaid that his wife had died the previous year. “Cancer, poor dear,” he’d said, lifting the tray and indicating that Kincaid should follow him. “She was sure I’d never be able to manage on my own, but somehow you muddle through. Although,” he added as he opened the study door, “I must admit that housekeeping was never my strong suit.”

  His study bore him out, but it was a comfortable sort of disorder. The books looked as if they might have leaped off the shelves, spreading out onto every available surface like a friendly, invading army, and the bits of wall space not covered by books contained maps.

  Setting his mug on the small space the vicar had cleared for him on a side table, Kincaid went to examine an ancient-looking specimen which was carefully preserved behind glass.

  “Saxton’s map of the Chilterns, 1574. This is one of the few that show the Chilterns as a whole.” The vicar coughed a little behind his hand, then added, out of what Kincaid thought must be a lifetime’s habit of honesty, “It’s only a copy, of course, but I enjoy it nonetheless. It’s my hobby-the landscape history of the Chilterns.

  “I’m afraid,” he continued with an air of confession, “that it takes up a good deal more of my time and interest than it should, but when one has written a sermon once a week for close on half a century, the novelty pales. And these days, even in a rural parish like this one, for the most part our work is saving bodies, rather than souls. I can’t remember when
I’ve had someone come to me with a question of faith.” He sipped his tea and gave Kincaid a rather rueful smile.

  Kincaid, wondering if he looked as though he needed saving, smiled back and returned to his chair. “You must know the area well, then.”

  “Every footpath, every field, or close enough.” Mead stretched out his legs, exhibiting the trainers he had slipped into upon returning to the house. “My feet must be nearly as well traveled as Paul’s on the road to Damascus. This is an ancient countryside, Mr. Kincaid-ancient in the sense the term is used in landscape history, as opposed to planned countryside. Although these hills are part of the calcareous backbone that underlies much of southern England, they’re much more heavily wooded than most chalk downlands-this, and the layer of clay with flints in the soil, kept the area from extensive agricultural development.”

  Kincaid cradled his warm mug in both hands and positioned his feet near the glowing bars of the electric fire, prepared to listen to whatever dissertation the vicar might offer. “So that’s why so many of the houses here are built from flints,” he said, remembering how incongruous the pale smooth limestone walls of Badger’s End had seemed, glowing in the dusk. “I’d noticed, of course, but hadn’t carried the thought any further.”

  “Indeed. You will also have noticed the pattern of fields and hedgerows in the valleys. Many can be traced back to pre-Roman times. It is the ‘Immanuel’s Land’ of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, ‘…a most pleasant mountainous country, beautiful with woods, vineyards, fruits of all sorts; flowers also with springs and fountains; very delectable to behold.’

  “My point, Mr, Kincaid,” continued the vicar, twinkling at him, “lest you grow impatient with me, is that although this is a lovely countryside, a veritable Eden, if you will, it is also a place where change occurs slowly and things are not easily forgotten. There has been a dwelling of some sort at Badger’s End since medieval times, at the least. The facade of the present house is Victorian, though you wouldn’t think it to look at it, but some of the less visible parts of the house go back much further.”

  “And the Ashertons?” Kincaid asked, intrigued.

  “The family has been there for generations, and their lives are very much intertwined with the fabric of the valley. No one who lives here will forget the November that Matthew Asherton drowned-communal memory, you might say. And now this.” He shook his head, his expression reflecting a genuine compassion unmarred by any guilty pleasure in another’s misfortune.

  “Tell me what you remember about that November.”

  “The rain.” The vicar sipped his tea, then pulled a crumpled, white handkerchief from his breast pocket and gently patted his lips. “I began to think quite seriously about the story of Noah, but spirits sank as the water rose and I remember doubting my parishioners would find a sermon on the subject very uplifting. You’re not familiar with the geography of the area, are you, Mr. Kincaid?”

  Kincaid assumed the question to be rhetorical, as the vicar had gone to his desk and begun rooting among the papers even as he spoke, but he answered anyway. “No, Vicar, I can’t say that I am.”

  The object of the search proved to be a tattered Ordnance Survey map, which the vicar unearthed with obvious delight from beneath a pile of books. Opening it carefully, he spread it before Kincaid. “The Chiltern Hills are a legacy of the last Ice Age. They lie across the land at a horizontal angle, from the northeast to the southwest, do you see?” He traced a darker green oblong with his fingertip. “The north side is the escarpment, the southern the dip-slope, with valleys running down it like fingers. Some of these valleys bear rivers-the Lea, the Bulbourne, the Chess, the Wye, and others-all tributaries of the Thames. In others the springs and surface-flow only break out when the water table reaches the surface-during the winter or other times of particularly heavy rain.” Sighing, he gave the map a gentle tap with a forefinger before folding it again. “Hence their name-winterbournes. It’s quite pretty, isn’t it? Very descriptive. But they can be treacherous in flood, and that, I’m afraid, was the downfall of poor young Matthew.”

  “What exactly happened?” asked Kincaid. “I’ve only really heard the story secondhand.”

  “The only one who will ever know exactly what happened is Julia, as she was with him,” said the vicar, with an attention to detail worthy of a policeman. “But I’ll do my best to piece it together. The children were walking home from school and took a familiar shortcut through the woods. The rain had given us a brief respite, for the first time in days. Matthew, indulging in some horseplay along the bank of the stream, fell in and was caught by the current. Julia tried to reach him, going dangerously far into the water herself, and, failing, ran home for help. It was too late, of course. I think it quite likely that the boy had stopped breathing before Julia left him.”

  “Did Julia tell you the story herself?”

  Mead nodded as he sipped his tea, then set his cup down and continued. “In bits and snatches, rather less than coherently, I’m afraid. You see, she was quite ill afterward, what with the shock and the chill. No one thought to see to her until hours later, and she’d been soaked to the skin. Even that was Mrs. Plumley’s doing-the parents were entirely too distraught to remember her at all.

  “She developed pneumonia. It was touch and go for a bit.” Shaking his head, he held his hands out toward the electric fire, as if the memory had made him cold. “I visited her every day, taking it in turn with Mrs. Plumley to sit with her during the worst of it.”

  “What about her parents?” asked Kincaid, feeling the stirrings of outrage.

  Distress creased the vicar’s gentle face. “The grief in that house was as thick as the water that drowned Matthew, Mr. Kincaid. They had no room in their minds or hearts for anything else.”

  “Not even their daughter?”

  Very quietly, almost to himself, Mead said, “I think they couldn’t bear to look at her, knowing that she was alive and he was not.” He met Kincaid’s eyes, adding more briskly, “There now, I’ve said more than I should. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of it, and Connor’s death has brought it all back.”

  “There’s more you’re not telling me.” Kincaid sat forward in his chair, not willing to let the matter drop.

  “It’s not my place to pass judgment, Mr. Kincaid. It was a difficult time for everyone concerned.”

  Kincaid translated that as meaning that Mead thought the Ashertons had behaved abominably, but wouldn’t allow himself to say so. “Sir Gerald and Dame Caroline are certainly solicitous of their daughter now.”

  “As I said, Mr. Kincaid, it was all a very long time ago. I’m only sorry that Julia has had another such loss.”

  A movement at the window caught Kincaid’s eye. The wind had raised a dervish of leaves on the vicar’s lawn. It spun for a moment, then collapsed. A few leaves drifted toward the window, lightly tapping the panes. “You said you knew Matthew, but you must have come to know Julia quite well, actually.”

  The vicar swirled the dregs of his tea in his mug. “I’m not sure anyone knows Julia well. She was always a quiet child, watching and listening where Matthew would plunge into things. It made the rare response from her all the sweeter, and when she took an interest in something it seemed genuine, not merely the latest enthusiasm.”

  “And later?”

  “She did talk to me, of course, during her illness, but it was a hodgepodge, childish delirium. And when she recovered she became quite withdrawn. The only time I had a glimpse of the child I knew was at her wedding. She had that glow that almost all brides have, and it softened the edges.” His tone affectionate, the vicar’s smile invited Kincaid’s understanding.

  “I can almost imagine that,” Kincaid said, thinking of the smile he’d seen when Julia had opened the door to them, thinking it was Plummy. “You said you married them, Vicar? But I thought-”

  “Connor was Catholic, yes, but he didn’t practice, and Julia preferred to be married here at St. Barts.” He
nodded at the church, its distinctive double tower just visible across the lane. “I counseled Connor as well as Julia before the wedding, and I must say I had my doubts, even then.”

  “Why was that?” Kincaid had developed a considerable regard for the vicar’s perceptions.

  “In some odd way he reminded me of Matthew, or of Matthew as he might have been had he grown up. I don’t know if I can explain it… he was perhaps a bit too glib for my liking-with such outward charm it’s sometimes difficult to tell what runs beneath the surface. An ill-fated match, in any event.”

  “Apparently,” Kincaid agreed wryly. “Although I’m a bit confused as to who wouldn’t divorce whom. Julia certainly seems to have grown to dislike Connor.” He paused, weighing his words. “Do you think she could have killed him, Vicar? Is she capable of it?”

  “We all carry the seeds of violence, Mr. Kincaid. What has always fascinated me is the balance of the equation-what factor is it that allows one person to tip over the edge, and another not?” Mead’s eyes held knowledge accumulated over a lifetime of observing the best and worst of human character, and it occurred to Kincaid once again that their callings were not dissimilar. The vicar blinked and continued, “But to answer your question, no, I do not think Julia capable of killing anyone, no matter what the circumstances.”

  “Why do you say ‘anyone,’ Vicar?” Kincaid asked, puzzled.

  “Only because there were rumors at the time of Matthew’s death, and you are bound to hear them if you poke long enough under rocks. Open accusations might have been refutable, but not the faceless whispers in the dark.”

  “What did they say, the whisperers?” Kincaid said, knowing the answer even as he spoke.

  Mead sighed. “Only what you might expect, human nature being what it is, as well as being fueled by her sometimes obvious jealousy of her brother. They insinuated that she didn’t try to save him… that she might even have pushed him.”

  “She was jealous of him, then?”