Deborah Crombie - Leave The Grave Green

Trevor Simons looked from the warrant card to Kincaid and back again, then said rather blankly, “It looks like a library permit. I always wondered, you know, when you see them on the telly.” He shook his head, frowning. “I don’t understand. I know Con’s death has been a dreadful shock for everyone, but I thought it was an accident. Why Scotland Yard? And why me?”

“Thames Valley has treated it as a suspicious death from the beginning, and asked for our assistance at Sir Gerald Asherton’s request.”

Kincaid had delivered this with no intonation, but Simons raised an eyebrow and said, “Ah.”

“Indeed,” Kincaid answered, and when their eyes met it occurred to him that he might be friends with this man under other circumstances.

“And me?” Simons asked again. “Surely you can’t think Julia had anything to do with Con’s death?”

“Were you with Julia all Thursday evening?” Kincaid said, pushing a bit more aggressively, although the note of incredulity in Simons’s voice had struck him as genuine.

Unruffled, Simons leaned against his desk and folded his arms. “More or less. It was a bit of a free-for-all in here.” He nodded, indicating the two small rooms. “People were jammed in here like sardines. I suppose Julia might have popped out to the loo or for a smoke and I wouldn’t have noticed, but not much longer than that.”

“What time did you close the gallery?”

“Tenish. They’d eaten and drunk everything in sight, and left a wake of litter behind like pillaging Huns. We had to push the last happy stragglers out the door.”

“We?”

“Julia helped me tidy up.”

“And after that?”

Trevor Simons looked away for the first time. He studied the river for a moment, then turned back to Kincaid with a reluctant expression. “I’m sure you’ve seen Julia already. Did she tell you she spent the night? I can’t imagine her being silly enough to protect my honor.” Simons paused, but before Kincaid could speak he went on. “Well, it’s true enough. She was here in the flat with me until just before daybreak. A small attempt at discretion, creeping out with the dawn,” he added with a humorless smile.

“She didn’t leave you at any time before that?”

“I think I would have noticed if she had,” Simons answered, this time with a genuine flash of amusement, then he quickly sobered and added, “Look, Mr. Kincaid, I don’t make a habit of doing this sort of thing. I’m married and I’ve two teenage daughters. I don’t want my family hurt. I know,” he continued hurriedly, as if Kincaid might interrupt him, “I should have considered the consequences beforehand, but one doesn’t, does one?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Kincaid answered in bland policemanese, all the while thinking, Does one not, or does one consider the consequences and choose to act anyway? The image of his ex-wife came to him, her straight flaxen hair falling across her shuttered face. Had Vic considered the consequences?

“You don’t live here, then?” he asked, breaking the train of thought abruptly. He gestured toward the door across the garden.

“No. In Sonning, a bit farther upriver. The flat was included in the property when I bought the gallery, and I use it mainly as a studio. Sometimes I stay over when I’m painting, or when I’ve an opening on.”

“You paint?” asked Kincaid, a little surprised.

Simons’s smile was rueful. “Am I a practical man, Mr. Kincaid? Or merely a compromised one? You tell me.” The question seemed to be hypothetical only, for he continued, “I knew when I left art school I wasn’t quite good enough, didn’t have that unique combination of talent and luck. So I used a little family money and bought this gallery. I found it a bit ironic that Julia’s opening also marked the anniversary of my twenty-fifth year here.”

Kincaid wasn’t inclined to let him off the hook, although he suspected his curiosity was more personal than professional. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes, I paint, and I feel insulted if I’m referred to as a ‘local artist’ rather than an ‘artist who paints locally’ It’s a fine distinction, you understand,” he added mockingly. “Silly, isn’t it?”

“What sort of things do you paint?” Kincaid asked, scanning the paintings on the walls of the small room.

Simons followed his gaze and smiled. “Sometimes I do hang my own work, but I haven’t any up just now. I’ve had to make room for Julia’s paintings, and frankly I’ve other things that sell better than mine, although I do paint Thames landscapes. I use oils-I’m not good enough yet to paint in watercolor, but one day I will be.”

“Is what Julia does that difficult, then?” Kincaid allowed himself to study Julia’s lamplit painting, and discovered that he had been deliberately resisting doing so. It drew him, as she did, in a way that felt both familiar and perilous. “I always thought that one just made a choice, watercolors or oils, depending on what one liked.”

“Watercolor is much more difficult,” Simons said patiently. “In oil you can make any number of mistakes and just as easily cover them up, the more the merrier. Watercolor requires a confidence, perhaps even a certain amount of ruthlessness. You must get it right the first time.”

Kincaid looked at Julia’s paintings with new respect. “You said she was self-taught? Why not art college, with her talent?”

Simons shrugged. “I suppose her family didn’t take her seriously. Musicians do tend to be rather one-dimensional, even more so than visual artists. Nothing else exists for them. They eat, sleep and breathe music, and I imagine that to Sir Gerald and Dame Caroline, Julia’s paintings were just amusing dabs of color on paper.” He stepped down into the lower room and walked over to the large painting, staring at it. “Whatever the reason, it allowed her to develop in her own way, with no taint of graphic mediocrity.”

“You have a special relationship,” Kincaid said, watching the way Trevor Simons’s slender body blocked the painting in an almost protective posture. “You admire her-do you also resent her?”

After a moment Simons answered, his back still to Kincaid. “Perhaps. Can we help but envy those touched by the gods, however briefly?” He turned and the brown eyes behind the spectacles regarded Kincaid candidly. “Yet I have a good life.”

“Then why have you risked it?” Kincaid said softly. “Your wife, family… perhaps even your business?”

“I never intended it.” Simons gave a self-mocking bark of laughter. “Famous last words-I never meant to do it. It was just… Julia.”

“What else didn’t you intend, Trevor? Just how far did your loss of judgment take you?”

“You think I might have killed Connor?” His eyebrows shot up above the line of his spectacles and he laughed again. “I can’t lay claim to sins of that magnitude, Mr. Kincaid. And why would I want to get rid of the poor bloke? Julia had already chewed him up and spat out the partially digested remains.”

Kincaid grinned. “Very descriptively put. And will she do the same to you?”

“Oh, I expect so. I’ve never been able to delude myself sufficiently to think otherwise.”

Pushing aside an untidy stack of papers, Kincaid sat on the edge of Simons’s desk and stretched out his legs. “Did you know Connor Swann well?”

Simons put his hands in his pockets and shifted his weight in the manner of a man suddenly territorially displaced. “Only to speak to, really. Before they separated he came in with Julia occasionally.”

“Was he jealous of you, do you think?”

“Con? Jealous? That would be the pot calling the kettle black! I never understood why Julia put up with him as long as she did.”