From the train window Duncan Kincaid could see the piles of debris in the back gardens and on the occasional common. Lumber, dead branches and twigs, crushed cardboard boxes and the odd bit of broken furniture-anything portable served as fair game for Guy Fawkes bonfires. He rubbed ineffectually at the grimy windowpane with his jacket cuff, hoping for a better view of one particularly splendid monument to British abandon, then sat back in his seat with a sigh. The fine drizzle in the air, combined with British Rail’s standard of cleanliness, reduced visibility to a few hundred yards.
The train slowed as it approached High Wycombe. Kincaid stood and stretched, then collected his overcoat and bag from the rack. He’d gone straight to St. Marleybone from the Yard, grabbing the emergency kit he kept in his office-clean shirt, toiletries, razor, only the necessities needed for an unexpected summons. And most were more welcome than this, a political request from the AC to aid an old school chum in a delicate situation. Kincaid grimaced. Give him an unidentified body in a field any day.
He swayed as the train lurched to a halt. Bending down to peer through the window, he scanned the station carpark for a glimpse of his escort. The unmarked panda car, its shape unmistakable even in the increasing rain, was pulled up next to the platform, its parking lights on, a gray plume of exhaust escaping from its tailpipe.
It looked like the cavalry had been called out to welcome Scotland Yard’s fair-haired boy.
“Jack Makepeace. Sergeant, I should say. Thames Valley CID.” Makepeace smiled, yellowed teeth showing under the sandy bristle of mustache. “Nice to meet you, sir.” He engulfed Kincaid’s hand for an instant in a beefy paw, then took Kincaid’s case and swung it into the panda’s boot. “Climb in, and we can talk as we go.”
The car’s interior smelled of stale cigarettes and wet wool. Kincaid cracked his window, then shifted a bit in his seat so that he could see his companion. A fringe of hair the same color as the mustache, freckles extending from face into shiny scalp, a heavy nose with the disproportionate look that comes of having been smashed-all in all not a prepossessing face, but the pale blue eyes were shrewd, and the voice unexpectedly soft for a man of his bulk.
Makepeace drove competently on the rain-slick streets, snaking his way south and west until they crossed the M40 and left the last terraced houses behind. He glanced at Kincaid, ready to divert some of his attention from the road.
“Tell me about it, then,” Kincaid said.
“What do you know?”
“Not much, and I’d just as soon you start from scratch, if you don’t mind.”
Makepeace looked at him, opened his mouth as if to ask a question, then closed it again. After a moment he said, “Okay. Daybreak this morning the Hambleden lockkeeper, one Perry Smith, opens the sluicegate to fill the lock for an early traveler, and a body rushes through it into the lock. Gave him a terrible shock, as you can imagine. He called Marlow-they sent a panda car and the medics.” He paused as he downshifted into an intersection, then concentrated on overtaking an ancient Morris Minor that was creeping its way up the gradient. “They fished him out, then when it became obvious that the poor chappie was not going to spew up the canal and open his eyes, they called us.”
The windscreen wiper squeaked against dry glass and Kincaid realized that the rain had stopped. Freshly plowed fields rose on either side of the narrow road. The bare, chalky soil was a pale brown, and against it the black dots of foraging rooks looked like pepper on toast. Away to the west a cap of beech trees crowned a hill. “How’d you identify him?”
“Wallet in the poor sod’s back pocket. Connor Swann, aged thirty-five, brown hair, blue eyes, height about six feet, weight around twelve stone. Lived in Henley, just a few miles upstream.”
“Sounds like your lads could have handled it easily enough,” said Kincaid, not bothering to conceal his annoyance. He considered the prospect of spending his Friday evening tramping around the Chiltern Hundreds, damp as a Guy Fawkes bonfire, instead of meeting Gemma for an after-work pint at the pub down Wilfred Street. “Bloke has a few drinks, goes for a stroll on the sluicegate, falls in. Bingo.”
Makepeace was already shaking his head. “Ah, but that’s not the whole story, Mr. Kincaid. Someone left a very nice set of prints on either side of his throat.” He lifted both hands from the wheel for an instant in an eloquently graphic gesture. “It looks like he was strangled, Mr. Kincaid.”
Kincaid shrugged. “A reasonable assumption, I would think. But I don’t quite see why that merits Scotland Yard’s intervention.”
“It’s not the how, Mr. Kincaid, but the who. It seems that the late Mr. Swann was the son-in-law of Sir Gerald Asherton, the conductor, and Dame Caroline Stowe, who I believe is a singer of some repute.” Seeing Kincaid’s blank expression, he continued, “Are you not an opera buff, Mr. Kincaid?”
“Are you?” Kincaid asked before he could clamp down his involuntary surprise, knowing he shouldn’t have judged the man’s cultural taste by his physical characteristics.
“I have some recordings, and I watch it on the telly, but I’ve never been to a performance.”
The wide sloping fields had given way to heavily wooded hills, and now, as the road climbed, the trees encroached upon it.
“We’re coming into the Chiltern Hills,” said Makepeace. “Sir Gerald and Dame Caroline live just a bit farther on, near Fingest. The house is called ‘Badger’s End,’ though you wouldn’t think it to look at it.” He negotiated a hairpin bend, and then they were running downhill again, beside a rocky stream. “We’ve put you up at the pub in Fingest, by the way, the Chequers. Lovely garden in the back, on a fine day. Not that you’re likely to get much use of it,” he added, squinting up at the darkening sky.
The trees enclosed them now. Gold and copper leaves arched tunnel-like overhead, and golden leaves padded the surface of the road. The late afternoon sky was still heavily overcast, yet by some odd trick of light the leaves seemed to take on an eerie, almost phosphorescent glow. Kincaid wondered if just such an enchanting effect had produced the ancient idea of “roads paved with gold.”
“Will you be needing me?” Makepeace asked, breaking the spell. “I’d expected you to have backup.”
“Gemma will be here this evening, and I’m sure I can manage until then.” Seeing Makepeace’s look of incomprehension, he added, “Gemma James, my sergeant.”
“Rather your lot than Thames Valley.” Makepeace gave something halfway between a laugh and a snort. “One of my green constables made the mistake this morning of calling Dame Caroline ‘Lady Asherton.’ The housekeeper took him aside and gave him a tongue- lashing he’ll not soon forget. Informed him that Dame Caroline’s title is hers by right and takes precedence over her title as Sir Gerald’s wife.”
Kincaid smiled. “I’ll try to not put my foot in it. So there’s a housekeeper, too?”
“A Mrs. Plumley. And the widow, Mrs. Julia Swann.” After an amused sideways glance at Kincaid, he continued, “Make what you will of that one. Seems Mrs. Swann lives at Badger’s End with her parents, not with her husband.”
Before Kincaid could form a question, Makepeace held up his hand and said, “Watch now.”
They turned left into a steep, high-banked lane, so narrow that brambles and exposed roots brushed the sides of the car. The sky had darkened perceptibly toward evening and it was dim and shadowed under the trees. “That’s the Wormsley valley off to your right, though you’d hardly know it.” Makepeace pointed, and through a gap in the trees Kincaid caught a glimpse of twilit fields rolling away down the valley. “It’s hard to believe you’re only forty miles or so west of London, isn’t it, Mr. Kincaid?” he added with an air of proprietary pride.
As they reached the lane’s high point, Makepeace turned left into the darkness of the beech woods. The track ran gently downhill, its thick padding of leaves silencing the car wheels. A few hundred yards on they rounded a curve and Kincaid saw the house. Its white stone shone beneath the darkness of the trees, and lamplight beamed welcomingly from its uncurtained windows. He knew immediately what Makepeace had meant about the name-Badger’s End implied a certain rustic, earthy simplicity, and this house, with its smooth white walls and arched windows and doors, had an elegant, almost ecclesiastic presence.
Makepeace pulled the car up on the soft carpet of leaves, but left the engine running as he fished in his pocket. He handed Kincaid a card. “I’ll be off, then. Here’s the number at the local nick. I’ve some business to attend to, but if you’ll ring up when you’ve finished, someone will come and collect you.”
Kincaid waved as Makepeace pulled away, then stood staring at the house as the still silence of the woods settled over him. Grieving widow, distraught in-laws, an imperative for social discretion… not a recipe for an easy evening, or an easy case. He squared his shoulders and stepped forward.
The front door swung open and light poured out to meet him.
“I’m Caroline Stowe. It’s so good of you to come.”
This time the hand that took his was small and soft, and he found himself looking down into the woman’s upturned face. “Duncan Kincaid. Scotland Yard.” With his free hand he pulled his warrant card from his inside jacket pocket, but she ignored it, still grasping his other hand between her own.
His mind having summed up the words Dame and opera as large, he was momentarily taken aback. Caroline Stowe stood a fraction over five feet tall, and while her small body was softly rounded, she could by no stretch of the imagination be described as heavy.
His surprise must have been apparent, because she laughed and said, “I don’t sing Wagner, Mr. Kincaid. My specialty is bel canto. And besides, size is not relevant to strength of voice. It has to do with breath control, among other things.” She released his hand. “Do come in. How rude of me to keep you standing on the threshold like some plumber’s apprentice.”
As she closed the front door, he looked around with interest. A lamp on a side table illuminated the hall, casting shadows on the smooth gray flagstone floor. The walls were a pale gray-green, bare except for a few large gilt-framed watercolors depicting voluptuous, bare-breasted women lounging about Romanesque ruins.
Caroline opened a door on the right and stood aside, gesturing him in with an open palm.
Directly opposite the door a coal fire burned in a grate, and above the mantel he saw himself, framed in an ornate mirror-chestnut hair unruly from the damp, eyes shadowed, their color indistinguishable from across the room. Only the top of Caroline’s dark head showed beneath the level of his shoulder.
He had only an instant to gather an impression of the room. The same gray slate floor, here softened by scattered rugs; comfortable, slightly worn chintz furniture; a jumble of used tea things on a tray-all dwarfed by the baby grand piano. Its dark surface reflected the light from a small lamp, and sheet music stood open behind the keyboard. The bench was pushed back at an angle, as though someone had just stopped playing.
“Gerald, this is Superintendent Kincaid, from Scotland Yard.” Caroline moved to stand beside the large rumpled-looking man rising from the sofa. “Mr. Kincaid, my husband, Sir Gerald Asherton.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Kincaid said, feeling the response inappropriate even as he made it. But if Caroline insisted on treating his visit as a social occasion, he would play along for a bit.
“Sit down.” Sir Gerald gathered a copy of the day’s Times from the seat of an armchair and moved it to a nearby end table.
“Would you like some tea?” asked Caroline. “We’ve just finished, and it’s no trouble to heat up the kettle again.”
Kincaid sniffed the lingering odor of toast in the air and his stomach growled. From where he sat he could see the paintings he’d missed when entering the room-watercolors again, by the same artist’s hand, but this time the women reclined in elegant rooms and their dresses had the sheen of watered silk. A house to tempt the appetites, he thought, and said, “No, thank you.”
“Have a drink, then,” Sir Gerald said. “The sun’s certainly over the yardarm.”
“No, I’m fine. Really.” What an incongruous couple they made, still standing side by side, hovering over him as if he were a royal guest. Caroline, dressed in a peacock-blue silk blouse and dark tailored trousers, looked neat and almost childlike beside her husband’s bulk.
Sir Gerald smiled at Kincaid, a great, infectious grin that showed pink gums. “Geoffrey recommended you very highly, Mr. Kincaid.”
By Geoffrey he must mean Geoffrey Menzies-St. John, Kincaid’s assistant commissioner, and Asherton’s old schoolmate. Though the two men must be of an age, there any outward resemblance ended. But the AC, while dapper and precise enough to appear priggish, possessed a keen intelligence, and Kincaid thought that unless Sir Gerald shared that quality, the two men would not have kept up with one another over the years.
Kincaid leaned forward and took a breath. “Won’t you sit down, please, both of you, and tell me what’s happened.”
They sat obediently, but Caroline perched straight-backed on the sofa’s edge, away from the protective curve of her husband’s arm. “It’s Connor. Our son-in-law. They’ll have told you.” She looked at him, her brown eyes made darker by dilating pupils. “We can’t believe it’s true. Why would someone kill Connor? It doesn’t make sense, Mr. Kincaid.”
“We’ll certainly need more evidence before we can treat this as an official murder inquiry, Dame Caroline.”
“But I thought…” she began, then looked rather helplessly at Kincaid.
“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Was your son-in-law well liked?” Kincaid looked at them both, including Sir Gerald in the question, but it was Caroline who answered.
“Of course. Everyone liked Con. You couldn’t not.”
“Had he been behaving any differently lately? Upset or unhappy for any reason?”
Shaking her head, she said, “Con was always… just Con. You would have to have known…” Her eyes filled. She balled one hand into a fist and held it to her mouth. “I feel such a bloody fool. I’m not usually given to hysterics, Mr. Kincaid. Or incoherence. It’s the shock, I suppose.”
Kincaid thought her definition of hysteria rather exaggerated, but said soothingly, “It’s perfectly all right, Dame Caroline. When did you see Connor last?”
She sniffed and ran a knuckle under one eye. It came away smudged with black. “Lunch. He came for lunch yesterday. He often did.”
“Were you here as well, Sir Gerald?” Kincaid asked, deciding that only a direct question was likely to elicit a response.
Sir Gerald sat with his head back, eyes half closed, his untidy tuft of gray beard thrusting forward. Without moving, he said, “Yes, I was here as well.”
“And your daughter?”
Sir Gerald’s head came up at that, but it was his wife who answered. “Julia was here, but didn’t join us. She usually prefers to lunch in her studio.”
Curiouser and curiouser, thought Kincaid. The son-in-law comes to lunch but his wife refuses to eat with him. “So you don’t know when your daughter saw him last?”
Again the quick, almost conspiratorial glance between husband and wife, then Sir Gerald said, “This has all been very difficult for Julia.” He smiled at Kincaid, but the fingers of his free hand picked at what looked suspiciously like moth holes in his brown woolen sweater. “I’m sure you’ll understand if she’s a bit… prickly.”
“Is your daughter here? I’d like to see her, if I may. And I will want to talk to you both at more length, when I’ve had a chance to review the statements you’ve given Thames Valley.”
“Of course. I’ll take you.” Caroline stood, and Sir Gerald followed suit. Their hesitant expressions amused Kincaid. They’d been expecting a battering, and now didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. They needn’t worry-they’d be glad to see the back of him soon enough.
“Sir Gerald.” Kincaid stood and shook hands.
The watercolors caught his eye again as he turned toward the door. Although most of the women were fair, with delicate rose-flushed skin and lips parted to show small glistening white teeth, he realized that something about them reminded him of the woman he followed.
“This was the children’s nursery,” Caroline said, her breathing steady and even after the three-flight climb. “We made it into a studio for her before she left home. I suppose you might say it’s been useful,” she added, giving him a sideways look he couldn’t interpret.
They’d reached the top of the house and the hall was unornamented, the carpeting threadbare in spots. Caroline turned to the left and stopped before a closed door. “She’ll be expecting you.” She smiled at Kincaid and left him.
He tapped on the door, waited, tapped again and listened, holding his breath to catch any faint sound. The echo of Caroline’s footsteps had died away. From somewhere below he heard a faint cough. Hesitating, he brushed his knuckles against the door once more, then turned the knob and went in.
The woman sat on a high stool with her back to him, her head bent over something he couldn’t see. When Kincaid said, “Uh, hello,” she whipped around toward him and he saw that she held a paintbrush in her hand.
Julia Swann was not beautiful. Even as he formed the thought, quite deliberately and matter-of-factly, he found he couldn’t stop looking at her. Taller, thinner, sharper than her mother, dressed in a white shirt with the tail out and narrow black jeans, she displayed no softly rounded curves in figure or manner. Her chin-length dark hair swung abruptly when she moved her head, punctuating her gestures.
He read his intrusion in her startled posture, felt it in the room’s instantly recognizable air of privacy. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Duncan Kincaid, from Scotland Yard. I did knock.”
“I didn’t hear you. I mean, I suppose I did, but I wasn’t paying attention. I often don’t when I’m working.” Even her voice lacked the velvety resonance of Caroline’s. She slid off the stool, wiping her hands on a bit of rag. “I’m Julia Swann. But then you know all that, don’t you?”
The hand she held out to him was slightly damp from contact with the cloth, but her grasp was quick and hard. He looked around for someplace to sit, saw nothing but a rather tatty and overstuffed armchair which would place him a couple of feet below the level of her stool. Instead he chose to lean against a cluttered workbench.
Although the room was fairly large-probably, he thought, the result of knocking two of the house’s original bedrooms into one-the disorder extended everywhere he looked. The windows, covered with simple white rice-paper shades, provided islands of calm in the jumble, as did the high table Julia Swann had been facing when he entered the room. Its surface was bare except for a piece of white plastic splashed with bright daubs of paint, and a Masonite board propped up at a slight angle. Before she slid onto the stool again and blocked his view, he glimpsed a small sheet of white paper masking-taped to the board.
Glancing at the paintbrush still in her hand, she set it on the table behind her and pulled a packet of cigarettes from her shirt pocket. She held it toward him, and when he shook his head and said, “No, thanks,” she lit one and studied him as she exhaled.
“So, Superintendent Kincaid-it is Superintendent, isn’t it? Mummy seemed to be quite impressed by the title, but then that’s not unusual. What can I do for you?”
“I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Swann.” He tossed out an expected opening gambit, even though he suspected already that her response would not be conventional.
She shrugged, and he could see the movement of her shoulders under the loose fabric of her shirt. Crisply starched, buttons on the left-Kincaid wondered if it might have been her husband’s.
“Call me Julia. I never got used to ‘Mrs. Swann.’ Always sounded to me like Con’s mum.” She leaned toward him and picked up a cheap porcelain ashtray bearing the words Visit the Cheddar Gorge. “She died last year, so that’s one bit of drama we don’t have to deal with.”
“Did you not like your husband’s mother?” Kincaid asked.
“Amateur Irish. All B’gosh and B’gorra.” Then she added more affectionately, “I used to say that her accent increased proportionately to her distance from County Cork.” Julia smiled for the first time. It was her father’s smile, as unmistakable as a brand, and it transformed her face. “Maggie adored Con. She would have been devastated. Con’s dad did a bunk when Con was a baby… if he ever had a dad, that is,” she added, only the corners of her lips quirking up this time at some private humor.
“I had the impression from your parents that you and your husband no longer lived together.”
“Not for…” She spread the fingers of her right hand and touched the tips with her left forefinger as her lips moved. Her fingers were long and slender, and she wore no rings. “Well, more than a year now.”
Kincaid watched as she ground out her cigarette in the ashtray. “It’s a rather odd arrangement, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Do you think so, Mr. Kincaid? It suited us.”
“No plans to divorce?”
Julia shrugged again and crossed her knees, one slender leg swinging jerkily. “No.”
He studied her, wondering just how hard he might push her. If she were grieving for her husband, she was certainly adept at hiding it. She shifted under his scrutiny and patted her shirt pocket, as if reassuring herself that her cigarettes hadn’t vanished, and he thought that perhaps her armor wasn’t quite impenetrable. “Do you always smoke so much?” he said, as if he had every right to ask.
She smiled and pulled the packet out, shaking loose another cigarette.
He noticed that her white shirt wasn’t as immaculate as he’d thought-it had a smudge of violet paint across the breast. “Were you on friendly terms with Connor? See him often?”
“We spoke, yes, if that’s what you mean, but we weren’t exactly what you’d call best mates.”
“Did you see him yesterday, when he came here for lunch?”
“No. I don’t usually break for lunch when I’m working. Ruins my concentration.” Julia stubbed out her newly lit cigarette and slid off the stool. “As you’ve done now. I might as well quit for the day.” She gathered a handful of paintbrushes and crossed the room to an old-fashioned washstand with basin and ewer. “That’s the one drawback up here,” she said, over her shoulder, “no running water.”
His view no longer blocked by her body, Kincaid straightened up and examined the paper taped to the drawing board. It was about the size of a page in a book, smooth-textured, and bore a faint pencil sketch of a spiky flower he didn’t recognize. She had begun to lay in spots of clear, vivid color, lavender and green.
“Tufted vetch,” she said, when she turned and saw him looking. “A climbing plant. Grows in hedgerows. Flowers in-”
“Julia.” He interrupted the rush of words and she stopped, startled by the imperative in his voice. “Your husband died last night. His body was discovered this morning. Wasn’t that enough to interrupt your concentration? Or your work schedule?”
She turned her head away, her dark hair swinging to hide her face, but when she turned back to him her eyes were dry. “You’d better understand, Mr. Kincaid. You’ll hear it from others soon enough. The term ‘bastard’ might have been invented to describe Connor Swann.
“And I despised him.”