Leave the Grave Green (12 page)

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 her 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.”

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.