Deborah Crombie - Mourn Not Your Dead

“Lucy insisted on staying up with him all night. It was only after the vet came an hour ago that I was able to convince her to curl up on the sofa in the conservatory.” Claire hesitated, fingering the silk scarf bunched in the neck of the crisply tailored white shirt she wore. “About David… he was a good man, once. Whatever has happened to him in the last few years, I still can’t imagine him capable of…killing anyone.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” Kincaid said, feeling Gemma’s sharp glance.

Claire gave him a relieved smile. “Thank you for coming to set my mind at rest. Can I get you a coffee or some tea?”

Kincaid took a breath. “Actually, we’d like a word with you. Someplace a bit more private, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Her smile faltered, but she agreed readily enough. “We can use the sitting room. I’d rather not disturb Lucy just now.”

They followed her into the room that had seemed so welcoming the night Alastair Gilbert died, leaving the door just slightly ajar. The fire was cold in the hearth, and the red walls seemed tawdry in the thin daylight streaking through the shutters.

Kincaid sat stiffly on the armchair’s chintz seat. He had rehearsed angle after angle, how he might surprise her, trick her, but in the end he began simply.

“Mrs. Gilbert, I’ve learned several things this last week that have led me to believe your husband physically abused you. Perhaps this happened only on one or two occasions, perhaps it had been going on from the very beginning of your marriage. I don’t know.

“I do know, however, from sources other than David Ogilvie, that your husband suspected you of having an affair. He went so far as to accuse Malcolm Reid, and he threatened him.”

Claire put a hand to her mouth, pressing hard on her lips with her fingers. Reid hadn’t told her, thought Kincaid. What else had Claire Gilbert’s friends kept from her in their desire to protect her? And what had she kept from them?

“But Reid was guilty of no more than helping you hide financial assets, and he told Gilbert where to get off. How close did your husband get to the truth, Claire? Did he threaten Brian, too?”

The silence stretched as Claire twisted her hands together in her lap. This was the watershed, Kincaid knew, and he had to remind himself to breathe. If she denied her relationship with Brian, he had no other lever to use and no evidence against her but his own wild suppositions. Her face seemed shuttered and remote, as if none of this quite touched her, then she took a little breath and said, “David knew, didn’t he?”

Kincaid nodded and made an effort to keep the relief from his voice. “I think so, but he didn’t tell us.”

“It was no great middle-aged passion, you know, Brian and me,” she said with a trace of a smile. “We were lonely, both of us, and needy. He’s been a good friend.

“And Malcolm. I never told Malcolm the whole truth about Alastair, only as much as I could bear. I said I was tired of being condescended to, of being treated like a chattel, and Malcolm helped me any way he could. I was so careful not to take that bankbook home. I even hid it away in a secret place in the shop, in case Alastair managed somehow to search my desk. He was very plausible when he wished it, you know. I imagined that he might come in when he knew I would be out on a consultation, and tell Malcolm I’d rung and asked him to pick up something. What could Malcolm do?

“And then, of course, I wondered if my paranoia had reached epic proportions, if I was becoming mentally ill.” She shook her head and gave a strangled laugh. “But I know now that not even my paranoia did justice to Alastair.”

Her words poured out in a torrent of release, and it seemed to Kincaid that the façade Claire Gilbert had built around herself was cracking before his eyes. Emerging from the splintered shell was the real Claire-frightened, angry, bitter, and no longer the least bit remote.

“It didn’t occur to him to wonder why I brought home so little money, because he didn’t think my work worth anything. That, of course, was the only reason he tolerated my working at all, and I’m not sure that would have lasted much longer.

“I have an old school friend in the States, in North Carolina. I thought that when Lucy finished school I’d have enough money put by, and we would just… disappear.”

“What about Brian?” asked Gemma, sounding as though she’d decided he needed a partisan voice.

Slowly, Claire said, “Brian would have understood. Things with Alastair had… escalated… in the last year. I was afraid.”

Gemma sat forwards, her cheeks pink with indignation. “Why didn’t you just leave him? Tell him you wanted a bloody divorce and be done with it?”

“You still don’t understand, do you? ‘It sounds so easy,’ you’re thinking. ‘No one with half a backbone would put up with that sort of treatment.’ But things never start out that way. It’s a gradual process, like learning a foreign language. One day you wake up and find you’re thinking in Greek, and you hadn’t even realized it. You’ve bought his terms.

“I believed it when he told me I couldn’t manage on my own. It was only when I started working with Malcolm that I began to see it might not be true.” Claire stopped, her face intent, her eyes focused on something they couldn’t see. “It was the beginning of a sort of resurrection, a rebirth of the person I’d had the potential to become before I married Alastair ten years ago.” She sighed and looked at them again. “But I’d learned enough over the years to try to keep those changes to myself.”

Softly, Kincaid said, “It didn’t work, did it? You’ve had two broken bones in a little over a year.”

Claire cradled her right wrist in her left hand, an instinctive, protective gesture. “I suppose he could sense that my center of attention had shifted. I’d ignore the subtle signals that were usually all he needed to manipulate me, until finally he would explode.”

“Was that the beginning of the violence?”

She shook her head, and when she spoke her voice was barely audible. “No. That started almost at the beginning, but little things, things he could laugh off. Pinching… shaking. You see, I discovered as soon as we were married-” Claire stopped and rubbed a hand across her mouth. “I don’t know a delicate way to say this. Sexually, he wanted… he only wanted me to be compliant. If I expressed any desires or needs of my own, or even enjoyment, it made him furious-he wouldn’t come near me. So when I began to find him… distasteful, I would pretend to be eager, and he would leave me alone.

“Do you see? It was a very complicated game, and finally I grew tired of playing. I rejected him outright, and that’s when he began accusing me of having a lover.”

“Did you?” asked Kincaid.

“No, not then. But it made the possibility real for me. If I had sinned in fiction, why not in fact?” She smiled, mocking herself. “Somehow it made it easier to justify.”

Starved, thought Kincaid, remembering the word David Ogilvie had used. Starved for tenderness, starved for affection, in Brian she had found both. But did she count it worth the cost?

“Claire.” He waited until he had her full attention. “Tell me what happened the night Alastair died.”

She didn’t answer, didn’t raise her eyes from her clasped hands.

“Shall I tell you what I think?” Kincaid asked. “Lucy went to the shops in Guildford alone that afternoon. We had a positive identification of her, but no one remembered seeing you. Your husband had told you he had a meeting that evening, but much to your surprise, he walked in only a few minutes past his usual time. He had just met Ogilvie at the Dorking train station, and Ogilvie had told him about your secret bank account.