He woke to the sound of Tony’s voice. “Morning tea, Mr. Kincaid,” he said as he tapped on the door and entered. “And a message for you from Sergeant Makepeace at High Wycombe. Something about catching the bird you wanted?”
Kincaid sat up and ran a hand through his hair, then accepted the cup. “Thanks, Tony,” he said to Tony’s departing back. So they had found Kenneth Hicks and brought him in. They wouldn’t be able to hold him long without cause. He should have checked in last night-hot tea sloshed onto his hand as awareness came flooding into his still groggy brain.
Last night. Julia. Oh, bloody hell. What have I done.? How could he have been so unprofessional? With the thought came the memory of Trevor Simons’s words, “I never meant to do it. It was just… Julia,” and of his own rather supercilious comments about the man’s loss of judgment.
He closed his eyes. Never, in all his years on the job, had he crossed that line, hadn’t even thought, really, that he needed to protect himself from the temptation. Yet even in his self-reproach he found that there was a part of him that felt no remorse, for their union had been clean and healing, a solace for old wounds and a destruction of barriers too long held.
It was not until he entered the Chequers’ dining room and saw Gemma seated alone at a table that he remembered the message he’d left for her yesterday. When had she arrived, and how long had she waited for him?
Sitting down across from her, he said, “You’re an early bird,” with as much aplomb as he could manage. “We’ll need to get on to High Wycombe as soon as we can. They’re holding Kenneth Hicks for questioning.”
Gemma answered him without a trace of her usual morning cheeriness. “I know. I’ve spoken to Jack Makepeace already.”
“Are you all right, Gemma?”
“Headache.” She nibbled without much enthusiasm on a piece of dry toast.
“Tony pour you one drink too many?” he said, attempting to humor her, but she merely shrugged. “Look,” he said, wondering if the flush of guilt he felt were visible, “I’m sorry about last night. I was… delayed.” She must have rushed here from London and waited for him, might even have been worried about him, and he had sent no word. “I should have rung you. It was thoughtless of me.” Tilting his head, he studied her, measuring her mood. “Shall I grovel some more? Would a bed of hot coals do?”
This time she smiled and he gave an inward sigh of relief. Searching for a change of subject, he said, “Tell me about Tommy Godwin.” Just then his breakfast arrived, and he tucked into eggs and bacon while Gemma gave him a brief recounting of her interview.
“I took a statement, and I’ve had the forensics lads go over his flat and car.”
“I saw Sharon Doyle again, and Trevor Simons,” he said through a mouthful of toast. “And Julia. Connor went home again after his scuffle with Tommy, Gemma. It looks as though Tommy Godwin’s out of the frame unless we can prove he met Con again later. He did ring someone from the flat, though-problem is, we’ve no earthly idea who it was.”
Julia. There had been a familiarity, an unconscious intimacy, in the way Kincaid said her name. Gemma tried to concentrate on her driving, tried to ignore the certainty that was growing in the pit of her stomach. Surely she was imagining things? And what if it were true? Why should it matter so much to her if Duncan Kincaid had formed a less-than-professional relationship with a suspect in a murder investigation? It was common enough-she’d seen it happen with other officers-and she’d never thought he was infallible. Had she?
“Grow up, Gemma,” she said under her breath. He was human, and male, and she should never have forgotten that even gods sometimes have feet of clay. But those reminders made her feel no less miserable, and she was thankful when the High Wycombe roundabouts claimed all her attention.
“I’ve had Hicks warming up nicely for you the last half-hour,” Jack Makepeace said in greeting when they found him in his office. He shook their hands, and Gemma thought he gave hers an extra little squeeze. “Thought it would do him a world of good. Too bad he didn’t quite manage to finish his breakfast.” Makepeace winked at Gemma. “He’s made his phone call-his mum, or so he says-but the cavalry’s not come to the rescue.”
Having been briefed earlier on the telephone by Makepeace, Kincaid had brought Gemma up to date in the car and suggested that she begin the interview. “He doesn’t care for women,” Kincaid said as Makepeace left them at the nondescript door of Room A. “I want you to upset his balance a bit, prime him for me.”
One interview room seldom differed much from another-they could be expected to meet some variation of small and square, and to smell of stale cigarette smoke and human sweat, but when Gemma entered the room she swallowed convulsively, fighting the instinctive urge to cover her nose. Unshaven and all too obviously unbathed, Kenneth Hicks reeked of fear.
“Christ,” Kincaid muttered in Gemma’s ear as he came in behind her. “We should’ve brought masks.” He coughed, then added at full volume as he pulled out a chair for Gemma, “Hullo, Kenneth. Like the accommodations? Not quite up to the Hilton, I’m afraid, but then what can you do?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Hicks said succinctly. His voice was nasal, and Gemma pegged his accent as South London.
Kincaid shook his head as he sat down beside Gemma, facing Hicks across the narrow laminated table. “I’m disappointed in you, Kenneth. I thought you had better manners. We’ll just record our little conversation,” he said, pushing the switch on the tape recorder. “If you don’t mind, of course. You don’t mind, do you, Kenneth?”
Gemma studied Kenneth Hicks while Kincaid nattered pleasantly on and fiddled with the recorder. Hicks’s narrow, acne-spotted face seemed permanently stamped with a surly expression. In spite of the warmth of the room, he had kept on a black leather bomber jacket, and he rubbed nervously at his nose and chin as Kincaid’s patter continued. There seemed something vaguely familiar about him, and Gemma frowned with frustration as it hovered on the fringe of her mind.
“Sergeant James will be asking you a few questions,” Kincaid said, pushing his chair back from the table a bit. He folded his arms and stretched out his legs, as if he might catnap through the interview.
“Kenneth,” she said pleasantly, when they had completed the recorded preliminaries, “why don’t you make it easy for everyone and tell us exactly what you were doing the night Connor Swann was killed?”
Hicks darted a glance at Kincaid. “I already told the other bloke, the one as brought me in here. Big ginger-haired berk.”
“You told Sergeant Makepeace that you were drinking with friends at the Fox and Hounds in Henley until closing, after which you continued the party in the friends’ flat,” said Gemma, and the sound of her voice brought Hicks’s eyes back to her. “Is that right?” she added a little more forcefully.
“Yeah, that’s right. That’s just like I told him.” Hicks seemed to gain a little confidence from her recital. He relaxed in his chair and stared at Gemma, letting his eyes rest for a long moment on her breasts.
She smiled sweetly at him and made a show of consulting her notebook. “Thames Valley CID took statements last night from the friends you named, Kenneth, and unfortunately none of them seems to remember you being there at all.”
Hicks’s skin turned the color of the room’s nicotine-stained walls as the blood drained from his face. “I’ll kill ’em, the friggin’ little shits. They’re lying their bloody heads off.” He looked from Gemma to Kincaid, and, apparently finding no reassurance in their expressions, said a little more frantically, “You can’t do me for this. I never saw Con after we had that drink at the Fox. I swear I didn’t.”
Gemma flipped another page in her notebook. “You may have to, unless you can come up with a little better accounting of your movements after half-past ten. Connor made a telephone call from his flat around then, and afterward said he meant to go out.”
“Who says he did?” asked Hicks, with more shrewdness than Gemma had credited him.
“Never mind that. Do you want to know what I think, Kenneth?” Gemma asked, leaning toward him and lowering her voice confidentially. “I think Connor rang you and asked you to meet him at the lock. You argued and Connor fell in. It could happen to anybody, couldn’t it, Ken? Did you try to help him, or were you afraid of the water?” Her tone said she understood and would forgive him anything.
“I never!” Hicks pushed his chair back from the table. “That’s a bleedin’ lie. And how the bleedin’ hell am I supposed to have got there without a car?”
“Connor picked you up in his car,” Gemma said reasonably, “and afterward you hitched a ride back to Henley.”
“I didn’t, I tell you, and you can’t prove I did.”
Unfortunately, Gemma knew from Thames Valley’s reports that he was correct-Connor’s car had been freshly washed and vacuumed and forensics had found no significant traces. “Then where were you? Tell the truth this time.”
“I’ve told you already. I was at the Fox, then at this bloke’s. Jackie-he’s called Jackie Fawcett.”
Kincaid recrossed his ankles lazily and spoke for the first time since Gemma had begun. “Then why wouldn’t your mates give you a nice, tidy alibi, Kenneth? I can see two possibilities-the first is that you’re lying, and the second is that they don’t like you, and I must say I don’t know which I think is the more likely. Did you help out other friends the same way you helped Connor?”
“Don’t know what you’re on about.” Hicks pulled a battered cigarette pack from the pocket of his jacket. He shook it, then probed inside it with thumb and forefinger before crumpling it in disgust.
Gemma took up the thread again. “That’s what you argued about, isn’t it, Kenneth? When you met Con after lunch, did you tell him he had to pay up? Did he agree to meet you later that evening? Then when he turned up without the money, you fought with him,” she embroidered as she went along.
An element of pleading crept into Hicks’s voice. “He didn’t owe me nothin’, I told you.” He kept his eyes fixed anxiously on Kincaid, and Gemma wondered what Kincaid had done to put the wind up him like that.
Straightening up in his chair, Kincaid said, “So you’re telling me that Con paid you off, and yet I happen to know that Con was so hard up he couldn’t make the mortgage on the flat. I think you’re lying. I think you said something to Connor over that little social pint at the Fox that sent him over the edge. What was it, Kenneth? Did you threaten to have your boss call out his muscle?” He stood up and leaned forward with his hands on the table.
“I never threatened him. It wasn’t like that,” Hicks squeaked, shrinking away from Kincaid.
“But he did still owe you money?”
Hicks looked at them, sweat beading on his upper lip, and Gemma could see him calculating which way to turn next. Rat in a trap, she thought, and pressed her lips together to conceal her satisfaction. They waited in silence, until finally Hicks said, “Maybe he did. So what? I never threatened him like you said.”
Moving restlessly back and forth in the small space before the table, Kincaid said, “I don’t believe you. Your boss was going to take it out of your skin if you didn’t come up with the ready-I don’t believe you didn’t use a little persuasion.” He smiled at Hicks as he came near him again. “And the trouble with persuasion is that sometimes it gets out of hand. Isn’t that so, Kenneth?”
“No. I don’t know. I mean-”
“Are you saying that it wasn’t an accident? That you intended to kill him?”
“That’s not what I meant.” Hicks swallowed and wiped his hands on his thighs. “I only made him a suggestion, a proposition, like.”
Kincaid stopped pacing and stood very still with his hands in his pockets, watching Hicks. “That sounds very interesting, Kenneth. What sort of proposition?”
Gemma held her breath as Hicks teetered on the edge of confession, afraid any move might nudge him in the wrong direction. Listening to the ragged cadence of his breathing, she offered up a silent little incantation to the god of interviews.
Hicks spoke finally, with the rush of release, and his words were venomous. “I knew about him from the first, him and his hoity-toity Ashertons. You would’ve thought they were the bleedin’ Royals, the way he talked, but I knew better. That Dame Caroline’s just a jumped-up tart, no better than she should be. And all the fuss they made over that kid what drowned, well, he wasn’t even Sir Gerald’s kid, was he, just a bleedin’ little bastard.” Matty. He was talking about Matty, Gemma thought, trying to make sense of it.
Kincaid sat down again, pulling his chair up until he could rest his elbows on the table. “Let’s start over from the beginning, shall we, Kenneth?” he said very quietly, very evenly, and Gemma shivered. “You told Connor that Matthew Asherton was illegitimate, have I got that right?”
Hicks’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his skinny throat as he swallowed and nodded, then looked in appeal at Gemma. He’d got more than he bargained for, she thought, wondering suddenly what Kincaid might have done if she hadn’t been in the room and the tape recorder running.
“How could you possibly know that?” Kincaid asked, still soft as velvet.
“’Cause my uncle Tommy was his bleedin’ dad, that’s how.”
In the silence that followed, Kenneth Hicks’s ragged, adenoidal breathing sounded loud in Gemma’s ears. She opened her mouth, but found she couldn’t quite formulate any words.
“Your uncle Tommy? Do you mean Tommy Godwin?” Kincaid said finally, not quite managing to control his surprise.
Gemma felt as if a giant hand were squeezing her diaphragm. She saw again the silver-framed photograph of Matthew Asherton-the blond hair and the impish grin on his friendly face. She remembered Tommy’s voice as he spoke of Caroline, and she wondered why she had not seen it before.
“I heard him telling me mum about it when the kid drowned,” said Hicks. He must have interpreted the shock in their faces as disbelief, because he added on a rising note of panic, “I swear. I never said nothin’, but after I met Con and he went on about them, I remembered the names.”
Gemma felt a wave of nausea sweep over her as the corollary sank in. “I don’t believe you. You can’t be Tommy Godwin’s nephew, it’s just not possible,” she said hotly, thinking of Tommy’s elegance, and of his courteous patience as she’d taken him through his statement at the Yard, but even as she resisted the idea, she felt again that odd sense of familiarity. Could it be something in the line of the nose, or the set of the jaw?
“You go to Clapham and ask me mum, then. She’ll tell you soon enough-”
“You said you made Connor a proposition,” Kincaid dropped the words into Hicks’s protest like stones in a pool. “Just what was it, exactly?”
Hicks rubbed his nose and sniffed, shifting away from eye contact with them.
“Come on, sunshine, you can tell us all about it,” Kincaid urged him. “Spit it out.”
“Well, the Ashertons have got to be pretty stinking with it, haven’t they, what with their titles and all. Always in the newspapers, in the gossip sections. So I figured they’d not like it put about that their kid was wrong side of the blanket, like.”
The intensity of Kincaid’s anger seemed to have abated. “Do I take it that you suggested to Connor that he should blackmail his own in-laws?” he asked, regarding Hicks with cool amusement. “What about your own family? Did it occur to you that this might damage your uncle and your mother?”
“He wasn’t to say I was the one told him,” Hicks said, as if that absolved him of any culpability.
“In other words, you didn’t care how it might affect your uncle as long as it couldn’t be traced back to you.” Kincaid smiled. “Very noble of you, Kenneth. And how did Connor react to your little proposition?”
“He didn’t believe me,” said Hicks, sounding aggrieved. “Not right away. Then he thought about it a bit and he started to get all strung up. He said how much money was I thinking about, and when I told him ‘start with fifty-thousand quid and we’d split it, we could always ask for more later,’ he bloody laughed at me. Told me to shut my friggin’ face and if I ever said another word about it, he’d kill me.” Hicks blinked his pale lashes and added, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it, “After everything I did for him!”
“He really didn’t understand why Connor was angry with him,” Kincaid said to Gemma as they stood at the zebra crossing separating High Wycombe Station from the carpark where they had left Gemma’s Escort. “He’s more than a few bricks short of a load in the morals department, is our Kenneth. I imagine it’s only the fact that he’s such a ‘timorous wee beastie’ that’s kept him to petty villainy-although I think the comparison does an injustice to the poor mouse,” he added, brushing at the sleeve of his sport jacket.
It was one of his favorites, Gemma noticed with the detachment that had overtaken her, a fine blue-and-gray wool that brought out the color of his eyes. Why was he waffling on as if he’d never come across a small-time crook before?
The oncoming traffic came to a halt and they crossed on the stripes. Kincaid glanced at his watch as they reached the opposite pavement. “I think we can manage a word with Tommy Godwin before lunch if we drive like the hounds of hell are after us. In fact,” he said as they reached the car and Gemma dug the Escort’s keys out of her bag, “since it looks as though we may not need to come back here, we’d better pick up our things and get my car back to London as well.”
Without a word, Gemma started the engine as he slid in beside her. She felt as though a kaleidoscope inside her head had shifted, jumbling the pieces so that they no longer made a recognizable pattern.
Kincaid touched her arm. “Gemma, what is it? You’ve been like this since breakfast. If you really don’t feel well-”
She turned toward him, tasting salt where she had bitten the inside of her lip. “Did you believe him?”
“Who, Kenneth?” asked Kincaid, sounding a bit puzzled. “Well, you have to admit, it does make sense of things that-”
“You haven’t met Tommy. Oh, I can believe that Tommy was Matthew’s dad,” she conceded, “but not the rest of it. It’s a cock-and-bull story if I ever-
“Just improbable enough to be true, I’m afraid,” said Kincaid. “And how else could he have found out about Tommy and Matthew? It gives us the missing piece, Gemma-motive. Connor confronted Tommy over dinner that night with what he’d found out, and Tommy killed him to keep him quiet.”
“I don’t believe it,” Gemma said stubbornly, but even as she spoke little slivers of doubt crept into her mind. Tommy loved Caro, and Julia. You could see that. And Gerald he spoke of with respect and affection. Had protecting them been enough reason for murder? But even if she could swallow that premise, the rest still didn’t make sense to her. “Why would Connor have agreed to meet him at the lock?”
“Tommy promised to bring him money.”
Gemma stared blindly at the drizzle that had begun to coat the windscreen. “Somehow I don’t think that Connor wanted money,” she said with quiet certainty. “And that doesn’t explain why Tommy went to London to see Gerald. It can’t have been to establish an alibi, not if Connor was still alive.”
“I think you’re letting your liking for Tommy Godwin affect your judgment, Gemma. No one else has a shred of motive. Surely you can see-”
The anger that had been building in her all morning broke like a flash flood. “You’re the one that’s blind,” she shouted at him. “You’re so besotted with Julia Swann that you won’t consider that she might be implicated in Connor’s death, when you know as well as I do that the husband or wife is most likely to be involved in a spouse’s murder. How can you be sure Trevor Simons isn’t lying to protect her? How do you know she didn’t meet Connor before his dinner with Tommy, before the gallery opening, and arrange to meet him later that night? Maybe she thought a scandal involving her family would damage her career. Maybe she wanted to protect her parents. Maybe…” She ran down, her fury quickly spent, and sat waiting desolately for the inevitable backlash. This time she had really crossed over the line.
But instead of giving her the dressing-down she expected, Kincaid looked away. In the silence that followed she could hear the swishing of tires on the damp pavement, and a faint ticking that seemed to be inside her own head. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said finally. “Perhaps my judgment can’t be trusted. But unless we come up with some concrete physical evidence, it’s all I have to go on with.”
They made the journey back to London in separate cars, meeting again at Kincaid’s flat as they had arranged. The drizzle had followed them, and Kincaid drew the tarp over the Midget before locking it. As he climbed into Gemma’s car he said, “You really must do something about your tires, Gemma. The right rear is as bald as my granddad’s head.” It was an often-repeated nag, and when she didn’t rise to the bait, he sighed and continued, “I rang LB House on the mobile phone. Tommy Godwin didn’t come in today, said he was unwell. Didn’t you say his flat was in Highgate?”
Gemma nodded. “I have the address in my notebook. It’s quite near here, I think.” A formless anxiety settled over her as she drove, and it was with relief that she spotted the block of flats. She left the car in the circular drive and hopped out, jiggling her foot in impatience as she waited for Kincaid to lock his side of the car and catch her up at the building entrance.
“Christ, Gemma, is there a fire no one bothered to tell me about?” he said, but she ignored the barb and pushed through the frosted-glass doors. When they presented their identification to the doorman, he scowled and grudgingly directed them to take the lift to the fourth floor.
“Nice building,” Kincaid said as they rose creakingly in the lift. “It’s been well maintained, but not overly modernized.” The fourth-floor foyer, tiled in a highly polished black-and-white geometric design, bore him out. “Deco, if I’m not mistaken.”
Gemma, searching for the flat number, had only been listening with half an ear. “What?” she asked, knocking at 4C.
“Art Deco. The building must date from between-”
The door swung open and Tommy Godwin regarded them quizzically. “Mike rang me and said the Bill were paying another call. Very disapproving he was, too. I think he must have had unfortunate dealings with the law in a previous existence.” Godwin wore a paisley silk dressing gown and slippers, and his usually immaculate blond hair stood on end. “You must be Superintendent Kincaid,” he said as he ushered them into the flat.
Having assured herself that Tommy hadn’t gone and put his head in the oven or something equally silly, Gemma felt irrationally angry with him for having worried her. She followed slowly behind the men, looking about her. A small, sleek kitchen lay to her left, done in the same black and white as the foyer. To her right, the sitting room carried on the theme, and through its bank of windows she could see a gray London spread before her. All the lines of the furniture were curved, but without fussiness, and the monochromatic color scheme was accented by a collection of pink frosted glass. Gemma found the room restful, and saw that its gentle order fit Tommy like a second suit of clothes.
A Siamese cat posed on a chair beneath the window. Paws tucked under her chest, she regarded them with unblinking sapphire eyes.
“You’re quite right, Superintendent,” Tommy said as she joined them, “these flats were built in the early thirties, and they were the ultimate in advanced design for their day. They’ve held up remarkably well, unlike most of the postwar monstrosities. Sit down, please,” he added as he seated himself in a fan-shaped chair that complemented the swirling design on his dressing gown. “Although I must say, I think it must have been a bit nerve-racking during the war, as high above the city as we are. You’d have felt like a sitting duck when the German bombers came over. A chink in the blackout and-”
“Tommy,” Gemma interrupted severely, “they said at LB House that you weren’t well. What is it?”
He ran a hand through his hair, and in the clear gray light Gemma saw the skin beginning to pouch a little under his eyes. “Just a bit under the weather, Sergeant. I must admit that yesterday rather took its toll.” He stood and went to the drinks cabinet against the wall. “Will you have a little sherry? It’s appropriately near lunchtime, and I’m sure Rory Allyn always accepted a sherry when he was interrogating suspects.”
“Tommy, this isn’t a detective novel, for heaven’s sake,” said Gemma, unable to contain her exasperation.
He turned to look at her, sherry decanter poised in one hand. “I know, my dear. But it’s my way of whistling in the dark.” The gentleness of his tone told her that he acknowledged her concern and was touched by it.
“I won’t refuse a small one,” said Kincaid, and Tommy placed three glasses and the decanter on a small cocktail tray. The glasses were sensuously scalloped in the same delicate frosted pink as the fluted lampshades and vases Gemma had already noticed, and when she tasted the sherry it seemed to dissolve on her tongue like butter.
“After all,” said Tommy as he filled his own glass and returned to his chair, “if I’m to take the blame for a crime I didn’t commit, I might as well do it with good grace.”
“Yesterday you told me you’d been to Clapham to visit your sister.” Gemma paused to lick a trace of sherry from her lip, then went on more slowly. “You didn’t tell me about Kenneth.”
“Ah.” Tommy leaned against the chair back and closed his eyes. The light etched lines of exhaustion around his mouth and nose, delineated the pulse ticking in his throat. Gemma wondered why she hadn’t seen the gray mixed in with the gold at his temples. “Would you admit to Kenneth, given a choice?” Tommy said, without moving. “No, don’t answer that.” He opened his eyes and gave Gemma a valiant attempt at a smile. “I take it you’ve met him?”
Gemma nodded.
“Then I can also assume that the whole sordid cat is out of the bag.”
“I think so, yes. You lied to me about your dinner with Connor. There wasn’t any question of him going back to his old job. He confronted you with what Kenneth had told him.” This seemed to be her day for making accusations, she thought, finding that she took Tommy’s deception personally, as if she’d been betrayed by a friend.
“A mere taradiddle, my dear-” Catching Gemma’s expression he stopped and sighed. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. You’re quite right. What do you want to know?”
“Start from the beginning. Tell us about Caroline.”
“Ah, you mean from the very beginning.” Tommy swirled the sherry in his glass, watching it reflectively. “I loved Caro, you see, with all the blind, single-minded recklessness of youth. Or perhaps age has nothing to do with it… I don’t know. Our affair ended with Matthew’s conception. I wanted her to leave Gerald and marry me. I would have loved Julia as my own child.” Pausing, he finished his sherry and returned the glass to the tray with deliberate care. “It was a fantasy, of course. Caro was beginning a promising career, she was comfortably ensconced at Badger’s End with the backing of the Asherton name and money. What had I to offer her? And there was Gerald, who has never behaved less than honorably in all the years I’ve known him.
“One makes what adjustments one must,” he said, smiling at Gemma. “I’ve come to the conclusion that great tragedies are created by those who don’t make it through the adjustment stage. We went on. As ‘Uncle Tommy’ I was allowed to watch Matty grow up, and no one knew the truth except Caro and me.
“Then Matty died.”
Kincaid set his empty glass on the cocktail tray, and the click of glass against wood sounded loud as a shot in the silent room. Gemma gave him a startled glance-so focused had she been on Tommy that for a moment she had forgotten his presence. Neither of them spoke, and after a moment, Tommy continued.
“They shut me out. Closed ranks. In their grief Caro and Gerald had no room for anyone else’s. As much as I loved Matty, I also saw that he was an ordinary little boy, with an ordinary little boy’s faults and graces. The fact that he was also extraordinarily gifted meant no more to him than if he’d had an extra finger or been able to do lightning calculus in his head. Not so, Gerald and Caro. Do you understand that? Matty was the embodiment of their dreams, a gift God had sent them to mold in their own image.”
“So how did Kenneth come into this?” asked Gemma.
“My sister is not a bad sort. We all have our crosses-Kenneth is hers. Our mother died while she was still at school. I was barely making ends meet at the time and wasn’t able to do much for her, so I think she married Kenneth’s dad out of desperation. As it turned out, he stayed around just long enough to produce his son and heir, then scarpered, leaving her with a baby to look after as well as herself.”
Gemma saw an echo of her own marriage in Tommy’s account of his sister, and she shuddered at the thought that in spite of all her efforts, her own little son might turn out to be like Kenneth. It didn’t bear thinking of. She finished her sherry in one long swallow, and as the warmth spread to her stomach and suffused her face, she remembered she’d gone without breakfast that morning.
Tommy shifted in his chair and smoothed the fold of his dressing gown across his lap. The cat seemed to take that as an invitation, leaping easily up and settling herself under his hands. His long, slender fingers stroked her chocolate-and-cream fur, and Gemma found she could not force herself to see those hands wrapped around Connor’s throat. She looked up and met Tommy’s eyes.
“After Matty died,” he said, “I went to my sister and poured out the whole story. There was no one else.” Clearing his throat, he reached for the decanter and poured himself a little more sherry. “I don’t remember that time very clearly, you understand, and I’ve just been piecing things together myself. Kenneth can’t have been more than eight or nine, but I think he was born a sneak-possessive of his mother, always hiding and eavesdropping on adult conversations. I had no idea he was even in the house that day. Can you imagine how shocked I was when Connor told me what he had heard, and who had told him?”
“Why did Connor come to you?” asked Kincaid. “Did he ask for money?”
“I don’t think Connor knew what he wanted. He seemed to have got it into his head that Julia would have loved him if it hadn’t been for Matty’s death, and that if Julia had known the truth about Matty, things would have been different between them. I’m afraid he wasn’t very coherent. ‘Bloody liars,’ he kept saying, ‘They’re all bloody hypocrites.’” Tommy laced his fingers together and sighed. “I think Con had bought the Asherton family image lock, stock and barrel, and he couldn’t bear the disillusionment. Or perhaps he just needed someone to blame for his own failure. They had hurt him and he had been powerless, unable to nick even their armor. Kenneth put the perfect weapon into his waiting hands.”
“Couldn’t you have stopped him?” Kincaid asked.
Tommy smiled at him, undeceived by the casual tone. “Not in the way you mean. I begged him, pleaded with him to keep quiet, for Gerald’s and Caro’s sake, and for Julia’s, but that only seemed to make him angrier. In the end I even tussled with him, much to my shame.
“When I walked away from Connor I had made up my mind what to do. The lies had gone on long enough. Connor was right, in a sense-the deception had warped all our lives, whether we realized it or not.”
“I don’t understand,” said Kincaid. “Why did you think killing Connor would put an end to the deception?”
“But I didn’t kill Connor, Superintendent,” Tommy said flatly, weariness evident in the set of his mouth. “I told Gerald the truth.”