Deborah Crombie - Mourn Not Your Dead

Crossing to the desk, Kincaid found the surface as tidy as expected, but a photo in a silver frame made him pause and lift it for a better look. This was an Alastair Gilbert he’d never seen, in shirtsleeves, smiling, with his arm around a small white-haired woman. Mother and son? He replaced the photo, filing in his mind the thought that interviewing the elder Mrs. Gilbert might prove useful.

The top drawer held the usual office paraphernalia, neatly arranged, and the side drawers, tidy ranks of files that would have to wait for someone else to give them a detailed going-over. Unsatisfied with such meager results, Kincaid went through the drawers again, and the more careful search revealed a leather-bound book tucked behind the files in the right-hand drawer. Removing it carefully, he opened it on the blotter. It was a desk diary, with the usual engagement notations and a few unidentified phone numbers written in a neat penciled hand. How like Gilbert not to have risked making a mistake in ink.

Kincaid turned a few more pages. The day before Gilbert’s death held an ambiguous “6:00,” accompanied by a question mark and another penciled phone number. Had Gilbert met someone, and if so, why? He’d have to leave it to Deveney’s team to run checks on all the notations while he concentrated on the interviews. Closing the book, he’d placed it on the desktop when a voice startled him.

“What are you doing?”

Lucy Penmaric stood in the doorway, arms crossed, heart-shaped face creased in a frown. In jeans and sweatshirt she looked younger than she had the night before, less sophisticated, and her pale face bore tiny creases, as though she’d just got up. “I heard a noise-I was looking for my mother,” she said before he could answer.

Not wanting to talk to Lucy from behind Gilbert’s desk, Kincaid closed the drawer and came around it before he said, “I think she’s upstairs having a rest. Can I help?”

“I didn’t think to look there,” she said, rubbing her face as she went to curl up in the corner of the tartan sofa. “I can’t seem to wake up properly-Mum gave me a sleeping pill and it’s made my brain go all fuzzy.”

“They can make you feel a bit hung over,” Kincaid agreed.

Lucy frowned again. “I didn’t want to take it. I only agreed so Mum would rest. Is she… is she all right this morning?”

Kincaid felt no compunction in editing out Claire’s fainting spell in the kitchen. “Coping reasonably well, under the circumstances. She went to visit your grandmother first thing.”

“Gwen? Oh, poor Mum,” said Lucy, shaking her head. “Gwen’s not my real grandmother, you know,” she added in an instructive voice. “Mummy’s parents are dead, and I don’t get to see my dad’s very often.”

“Why not? Doesn’t your mother get on with them?” Kincaid settled himself against the edge of the desk, willing to see where the conversation might lead.

“Alastair always had some reason why I shouldn’t go, but I like them. They live near Sidmouth, in Devon, and you can walk to the beach from their house.” Lucy twirled a strand of hair around her finger as she sat quietly for a moment, then she said, “I remember when my dad died. We lived in London then, in a flat in Elgin Crescent. The building had a bright yellow door-I remember when we came back from walks I could see it from a long way away, like a beacon. We had the top-floor flat, and a cherry tree bloomed just outside my window every spring.”

If he’d thought about Claire Gilbert’s first husband at all, he would have assumed they’d divorced, but then what were the odds that a woman in her forties would find herself twice widowed? “It sounds lovely,” he said softly after Lucy fell silent for so long he feared she’d retreated where he couldn’t follow.

“Oh, it was,” said Lucy, coming back to him with a little shiver. “But cherry blossoms always make me think of death now. I dreamed of them last night. I was covered in them, suffocating, and I couldn’t wake myself up.”

“Is that when your father died? In the spring?”

Lucy nodded, then pushed her hair away from her face and tucked it behind one ear. She had small ears, Kincaid thought, delicate as seashells. “When I was five I was really ill with a high fever one night. Dad went out to the all-night chemist in the Portobello Road to get something for me, and a car hit him at the zebra crossing. Now it’s all mixed up in my head-the police coming to the door, Mum crying, the scent of the cherries from my open window.”

So Claire Gilbert had not only been widowed but had faced a husband’s sudden death once before. Remembering the days when giving an occasional death notification had been part of his duties, he imagined the scene from the officers’ view point-light spilling out from the flat on a soft April evening, the pretty young blond wife at the door, apprehension growing in her face as she took in the uniforms. Then out with it, baldly, “Ma’am, we’re sorry to tell you that your husband is dead,” and she would stagger as if she’d been slapped. They’d been taught to do it that way in the academy, kinder to get it over with, supposedly, but that never made it any easier.

Lucy sat with her hair twined around her finger again, staring at one of the hunting prints behind Gilbert’s desk. When Kincaid said, “I’m sorry,” she didn’t respond, but after a moment began to speak without looking at him, as if continuing a conversation.

“It feels odd, sitting here. Alastair didn’t like us to come in this room, particularly me. His ‘sanctum,’ he called it. I think women somehow spoiled the atmosphere.

“My dad was a writer, a journalist. His name was Stephen Penmaric, and he wrote mostly about conservation for magazines and newspapers.” She looked at Kincaid now, her face animated. “He had his office in the box room of our flat, and there must not have been enough room because I remember there were always stacks of books on the floor. Sometimes if I promised to be really quiet, he’d let me play in there while he worked, and I built things with the books-castles, cities. I liked the way they smelled, the feel of the covers.”

“My parents had a bookshop,” said Kincaid. “Still do, in fact. I played in the stockroom, and I used books for building blocks, too.”

“Really?” Lucy looked up at him, smiling for the first time since she’d described her dog the night before.

“Honestly.” He smiled back, wishing he could keep that expression on her face.

“How lovely for you,” she said a bit wistfully. Tucking her feet up on the sofa, she wrapped her arms around her calves and rested her chin on her knees. “It’s funny. I hadn’t thought about my dad so much in years.”

“I don’t think it’s funny at all. It’s perfectly natural under the circumstances.” He paused, then said carefully, “How do you feel about what’s happened, about your stepfather’s death?”

She looked away, her finger back in her hair again. After a bit she said slowly, “I don’t know. Numb, I suppose. I don’t really believe it, even though I saw him. They say ‘seeing is believing,’ but it’s not really true, is it?” With a quick glance at the door, she added, “I keep expecting him to walk in any minute.” She shifted restlessly, and Kincaid heard voices from the back of the house.

“I think that’s probably Chief Inspector Deveney, looking for me. Will you be all right on your own for a bit?”

With a return of some of the spirit she’d shown last night, she said, “Of course I’ll be all right. And I’ll look after Mummy when she gets up.” She jumped up from the sofa with the fluidity of the very young and had reached the door before he framed a reply.

As she turned back to him, he said, “Lewis will be glad to see you,” and was rewarded by one more brilliant smile.