Kincaid broke two eggs into the skillet next to the bacon and congratulated himself on mastering an unfamiliar cooker. It had taken some adjusting and a grease burn on his thumb to get the temperature just right, but the bacon had come out perfectly. He turned the eggs as the toast sprang up in the toaster, and by the time he’d transferred the bacon and toast to his plate the eggs were ready as well.
The knock came as he was pouring his coffee.
Hannah Alcock leaned against the wall outside his front door, hugging herself in her long, Aran cardigan. She wore no make-up, her lips pale in contrast to the bruised hollows beneath her eyes.
“Hannah. Come in.” Kincaid led the way into the suite and pulled out a chair at the tiny table for her. “Are you all right? You don’t look at all well this morning.”
“Didn’t sleep.” She slumped down in the chair as if it had taken all her effort to stand up.
“Can I get you anything? Toast? Coffee?”
“Coffee would be nice, thanks.”
Kincaid poured another cup and sat down opposite her, pushing the milk and sugar across the table. She stirred her coffee for a moment before meeting his eyes, then tried a wan smile. “I feel an idiot coming here like this. I thought I’d say ‘we need to talk’, but I realized it’s not true, really. It’s I who needs to talk.” Hannah paused and looked away for a moment, moving her shoulders in a little self-deprecating shrug. “I feel I owe you some explanation for the way I’ve behaved. It’s not-”
“Why should you feel that?” Kincaid asked, puzzled. “I’ve no reason to pass judgment on you.”
“Oh god, Duncan, don’t protest. It only makes this more humiliating for me. Then I start to think I was only imagining that there was… I don’t know… some feeling, some rapport… between us. It’s happened to me once or twice before. You meet someone, spend an evening together, find yourselves talking as if you’d known each other for years, saying things you wouldn’t say to people you had known for years.” Her smile was rueful. “It’s a rare gift, an evening like that, and one I hadn’t planned on.”
At least, thought Kincaid, she was more honest than he. There had been some spark of affinity, of possibility, between them and he had felt hurt to find her sharing the same sudden intimacy with Patrick Rennie. Not merely sexual jealousy, although there was a bit of that as well, but more a sense of confidence betrayed. “All right, Hannah. I’ll grant you that.” He looked at her carefully, noted the unaltered porcelain complexion and fine bone structure, noted also the drawn look around the shadowed eyes. “But it’s more than that, isn’t it? You’re not just worrying about my sensitive feelings.”
Hannah was shaking her head before he’d finished the sentence. “No. I mean yes. I don’t know.” Her hand jerked as she spoke, and her undrunk coffee slopped a milky pool on the table’s surface. “About Patrick. It’s not what you think.” The lift of Kincaid’s eyebrows would have done Peter Raskin credit. “I know how it must look.” She met Kincaid’s eyes. “That I’ve gone middle-aged gaga over any man who looks at me twice. It’s not like that at all. Oh, Jesus, I wish it were that simple.” She dropped her face into her hands, fingers splayed across her eyes.
“Hannah…” Kincaid reached out a hand to touch her, drew it back.
Through her fingers she said, “You have to understand. I thought I’d made a perfect life for myself. I was smart, capable, respected. I’d been lucky enough to find work that I loved.” Hannah raised her head. “People usually think I didn’t have a chance to marry. The old sexually deprived spinster stereotype. God!” she said bitterly. “You’d think we’d grown past that, but we haven’t. Women are still judged first as a commodity, a man’s appendage. If you don’t have a man you don’t measure up. Simple. As for sex-” she gave a harsh laugh “-sex is easy. It’s marriage that terrified me. Losing control.” Hannah pushed her cup forward with her fingertips and looked out the French door. “My parents ordered every aspect of my life, what I ate, what I wore, how I cut my hair, who I saw, even what I thought. The one step I might have taken for myself they… took out of my hands. So I swore I would never let anybody else do that to me. Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” Kincaid said softly, “I think so.”
“So I went along for years, captain of my own ship and all that, and then suddenly this last year it all began to seem so empty. Oh, I had lovers all right, but no one with hooks in my life. Maybe,” she sighed, and Kincaid felt some of her tension relax, “I am suffering from menopausal dementia, some hormonal imbalance. But it doesn’t feel that way.” She spoke now more to herself than to Kincaid, her gaze unfocused. “There’s no wholeness, no connection. It feels…” The flow of words stopped. Hannah fell silent for a moment, then focused clearly on Kincaid, “I’ve done it again, haven’t I? Just like that first night, and you thought I’d bored you with my life story then. I’m sorry.”
“Hannah, what does this have to do with Patrick Rennie?”
She chewed her lip, then took a deep breath before she spoke. “I can’t tell you. Not yet. But I will-” She cut off the beginning of his protest. “No, I want you to know. But first I have to explain some things to Patrick. Then you can tell me whether I need a shrink or a solicitor.” She smiled at him with a touch of the humorous directness he’d first found so appealing. “I promise I will tell you. Afterwards.”
“All right.” Kincaid leaned back in his chair and pushed away his plate with its congealing egg.
Hannah’s eyes strayed to his plate. “Oh, god, I’ve spoiled your breakfast. You haven’t touched it.” Her thighs bumped the table as she stood and more coffee joined the drying puddle on the table. “I’d better go. I really am sorry about all this, Duncan.”
“Stop apologizing, for god’s sake. You’ve nothing to be sorry for, and besides, it’s out of character.” He followed her to the door. “And I don’t mind about the bloody breakfast.”
“My whole life is out of character right now.” She laughed, the first sound of spontaneous pleasure he’d heard from her that morning. “Thanks. Just be patient with me. Please. I know I’ve no right to ask.”
“Sure.” Kincaid stood with his hand on the door and spoke to her back as she walked away from him down the hall. “I’m good at that.”
“Sir,” Gemma’s voice practically vibrated with early morning efficiency, “I’ve got some news on those inquiries you wanted.”
Kincaid swallowed a mouthful of makeshift bacon sandwich. His short absence had not improved the eggs, and the cold toast and bacon he’d rescued as an afterthought as he dumped his plate in the sink.
“Gemma. God, I hate people to sound so bloody cheerful in the morning.”
“Sir?”
“Sorry. Never mind. Any trouble getting clearance?”
“No, sir. The Guv’nor oiled the machinery pretty well, I think.”
Kincaid smiled at the thought of his chief having a few discreet words in a few shell-like ears-Gemma’s previous assignments had probably vanished in an eddy of paper in the secretarial pool. “Spill away, then. No, hold on-” he scrambled for a pen and notebook he’d left on the sofa, pulled the phone over to the small table and took a sip of his cold coffee-“okay.”
“I’ve been to Dedham Vale. Dull as dishwater, in my opinion.” Gemma, with the ingrained prejudice of the North Londoner, didn’t find much to recommend in rural villages.
“That doesn’t surprise me. What else?”
“I wandered around for a bit until I found the local G. P.’s office. It seems he took care of the Reverend MacKenzie in his last illness. Knows everyone, of course, even with the National Health sending a lot of his old patients to the new clinic at Ipswich.”
Kincaid couldn’t resist teasing her a bit. “Got quite chatty with him, did we?” He could imagine Gemma’s freckled face turning pink with annoyance. She would probably accuse him of being patronizing if she weren’t on her best professional behavior, but he wasn’t, really. It was just that Gemma was blind to her own assets-the frank openness of her face encouraged people’s confidence in a way that a more sophisticated beauty never would.
Gemma remained silent for a moment, her usual response. When she couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking, Kincaid thought, she ignored him.
“Sir, about the doctor.”
“Sorry, Gemma. Go ahead.”
“Well, it seems he looked after old Mr. MacKenzie for years. And the daughters. The old man was diabetic, very infirm. Lost his eyesight, kidneys failing. The doctor says he just slipped away in his sleep one night, no reason to think there was anything funny about it. But,” Gemma allowed a tinge of satisfaction to creep into her voice, “I found out from the travel agent in the village where your rumor may have originated. Someone else from the village owns time at Followdale House-a retired major who, according to the receptionist at the travel agent’s, is as big a gossip as any malicious old biddy you could find.”
Kincaid considered a moment. “That might explain it. What else?”
“Cassie Whitlake’s parents, in Clapham. The father’s a building contractor’s foreman. They’re very proud of her. Wonderful job, clothes right out of Vogue, her mum says, that smart.”
“I can imagine,” Kincaid said drily.
“But I got the impression she doesn’t visit them often. Tells her mum she can’t take a holiday when other people do, it’s her busiest time. She calls them, though, and her mum says she’s sounded over the moon lately. Says she has a real good prospect, one that would really make people sit up and take notice of her. ‘A job?’ I asked, not sure what she meant. ‘No, a man,’ her mum says, an important man.”
“Doesn’t sound much like Graham Frazer. I wonder what she’s playing at.”
“There’s a sister still at home, Evie. Taking a secretarial course. Evie says she’s just as glad Cassie doesn’t come home-all she does is act like Lady Muck.” Kincaid heard a hint of laughter in Gemma’s voice, some of the formality dropping away in the telling of her story.
“How’d you manage to get her alone? Cup of tea?” Kincaid knew Gemma’s adroitness with the forgotten handbag, the helping out in the kitchen-and her ability to dig out the minutiae of people’s lives.
“Uh huh. Evie says Cassie told her that if she, I mean Evie, played her cards right, she just might do half as well. A bitch, Evie called her. Not exactly what I’d call strong on family loyalty.”
“Um,” Kincaid said, “I can see where Cassie might merit that description. That it?”
“Just about, sir. I’ve written it up.”
“Well, keep at it, Gemma. You never now what you might turn up. What’s next?”
“The Sterrett Clinic, where Hannah Alcock works.”
“Call in when you can. I’ve got to go. There’s someone banging on the bloody door.”
Kincaid yanked the door open, annoyed before he saw who it was, resigned to a thoroughly unpleasant few minutes afterwards. Chief Inspector Nash stood there, a messenger not sent by the gods. His retribution, thought Kincaid, had arrived.
“Well, laddie. Quite the lay-about, aren’t we. Just got up?”
“Chief Inspector Nash. Do come in. What a pleasant surprise.”
“I’m sure it is, laddie.” Nash traded sarcasm for sarcasm, and sat deliberately down on one of the suite’s dining room chairs, uninvited. Kincaid grimaced, repelled by the sight of the few greasy strands of hair stretched across Nash’s shiny scalp.
“What can I do for you, Inspector?” Kincaid asked, not wanting to give Nash the advantage of opening the conversation.
“Pretty fancy accommodation. Must be nice on a superintendent’s salary.” He minced the title.
“Chief Inspector,” Kincaid said slowly. “Come off it.” He propped himself against the arm of the sofa. “What’s up. You didn’t come here to compliment me on my taste.”
Nash considered him, the black eyes glinting with what might have been humor in someone else. “The lab report’s in. No evidence of fingerprints on plug, cord or heater. It seems,” Nash paused for effect, “that you were right. Coroner’s refused to give a verdict of suicide.” Nash settled himself more comfortably on the chair and appeared to change the subject.
“The Chief Constable’s had a word in my ear. How fortunate it is that Superintendent Kincaid just happened to be on the scene and offered to assist us with our inquiries. You’re considered quite the wonder boy with the higher ups, according to him. But you listen to me, laddie,” Nash straightened up in the chair, all the malice in evidence now, “I don’t appreciate wonder boys on my patch. I don’t appreciate you going around with your trumped up condolences to Mrs. Wade so you could poke around where you had no right. Your rank and your fancy opinions,” he jabbed a finger at Kincaid, “don’t mean shit to me, laddie. And if you don’t stay out of my business I’ll see you’re sorry for it.
“As far as I’m concerned, if the little bugger didn’t kill himself, he was blackmailing somebody and got what he deserved. And I don’t need any help from you to find out who.”
Nash put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, poised, Kincaid thought, for his spring at the jugular, when a frantic pounding sounded at the front door. Kincaid pushed himself off the edge of the sofa and went quickly to open it. Three times a charm, he thought hopefully.
Inspector Raskin stood panting at the door, his tie askew, his hair falling almost over one eye in a rakish comma. “Chief Inspector Nash?” he said, in between gasps for breath, and when Kincaid nodded, followed him into the suite. Raskin looked from Nash to Kincaid and spoke, finally, into the distance between them.
“It’s Penny MacKenzie. Down at the tennis court. She’s dead.”