Deborah Crombie - Leave The Grave Green

Kincaid backed up until he reached the sofa, then sat down on its edge. “Who would say you didn’t?” he asked easily.

Sharon Doyle folded her arms, pushing her breasts up against the thin weave of her sweater. “Her.”

“Her?” Kincaid repeated, resigned to an exercise in patience.

“You know. Her. The wife. Julia ,” she mimicked in an accent considerably more precise than her own. Hostility seemed to be triumphing over fright, but although she moved nearer him, she still stood with her feet planted firmly apart.

“You have a key,” he said, making it a statement rather than a question.

“Con gave it to me.”

Kincaid looked at the softly rounded face, young beneath the makeup and bravado. Gently, he said, “How did you find out Connor was dead?”

She stared at him, her lips pressed together. After a moment her hands dropped to her sides and her body sagged like a rag doll that had lost its stuffing. “Down the pub,” she answered so quietly that he read her lips as much as heard her.

“You’d better sit down.”

Folding into the chair across from him as if unaware of her body, she said, “Last night. I’d gone round to the George. He hadn’t rung me up when he said, so I thought ‘I’m bloody well not going to sit home on my own.’ Some bloke’d buy me a drink, chat me up-serve Con bloody well right.” Her voice wavered at the last and she swallowed, then wet her lips with the pink tip of her tongue. “The regulars were all talking about it. I thought they were havin’ me on, at first.” She fell silent and looked away from him.

“But they convinced you?”

Sharon nodded. “Local lad came in, he’s a constable. They said, ‘Ask Jimmy. He’ll tell you.’”

“Did you?” Kincaid prompted after another moment’s silence, wondering what he might do to loosen her tongue. She sat huddled in her chair, arms folded again across her breasts, and as he studied her he thought he saw a faint blue tinge around her lips. Remembering a drinks trolley he’d seen near the wood-stove as he explored the room, he stood and went over to it. He chose two sherry glasses from the glassware on the top shelf, filling them liberally from a bottle of sherry he found beneath.

On closer inspection he discovered that the stove was laid ready for a fire, so he lit it with a match from the box on the tiled hearth and waited until the flames began to flicker brightly. “This will take the chill off,” he said as he returned and offered the drink to Sharon. She looked up at him dully and lifted her hand, but the glass tipped as she took it, spilling pale gold liquid over the rim. When he wrapped her unresponsive fingers around the stem, he found them icy to the touch. “You’re freezing,” he said, chiding her. “Here, take my jacket.” He slipped off his tweed sport coat and draped it over her shoulders, then circled the room until he found the thermostat for the central heating. The room’s glass-and-tile Mediterranean look made for a pleasant effect, he decided, but it wasn’t too well suited for the English climate.

“Good girl.” He sat down again and lifted his own glass. She’d drunk some of hers, and he thought he saw a faint flush of color on her cheeks. “That’s better. Cheers,” he added, sipping his sherry, then said, “You’ve had a rough time, I think, since last night. Did you ask the constable, then, about Connor?”

She drank again, then wiped her hand across her lips. “He said, ‘Why you want to know, then?’ and gave me this fishy-eyed look, so I knew it was true.”

“Did you tell him why you wanted to know?”

Sharon shook her head and the blond curls bounced with the movement. “Said I just knew him, that’s all. Then they started a slanging match about whose round it was, and I slipped out the door by the loo.”

Her survival instincts had functioned well, even in shock, Kincaid thought, a good indication that she’d had plenty of experience looking out for herself. “What did you do then?” he asked. “Did you come here?”

After a long moment she nodded. “Stood about outside for hours, bloody well freezing it was, too. I still thought, you know, maybe…” She put the fingers of both hands over her mouth quickly, but he’d seen her lip tremble.

“You had a key,” he said gently. “Why didn’t you come in and wait?”

“Didn’t know who might come in here, did I? Might tell me I hadn’t any right.”

“But today you got up your courage.”

“Needed my things, didn’t I?” she said, but she looked away, and Kincaid fancied there was more to it than that.

“Why else did you come, Sharon?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

She met his eyes and seemed to see in them some possibility of empathy, for after a moment she said, “I’m nobody now, do you see? I thought I’d never have another chance just to be here, like… we had some good times here, Con and me. I wanted to remember.”

“Didn’t you think Con might have left you the flat?” Kincaid asked.

Looking down into her glass, she swirled the few remaining drops of sherry. “Couldn’t,” she said so quietly that he had to lean forward to hear.

“Why couldn’t he?”

“Not his.”

The drink didn’t seem to have done much in the way of lubricating her tongue, Kincaid thought. Getting anything out of her was worse than pulling teeth. “Whose is it, then?”

“Hers.”

“Connor was living in Julia’s flat?” He found the idea very odd indeed. Why hadn’t she booted him out and stayed herself, rather than going back home to her parents? It sounded much too amicable an arrangement for a couple who had supposedly not been speaking to one another.

Of course, he added to himself as he considered the girl sitting across from him, it might not have been true. Perhaps Connor had needed a handy excuse. “Is that why Connor didn’t have you move in with him?”

His jacket slipped from Sharon’s shoulders as she shrugged, reexposing the pale swell of her breasts through the weave of the pink fuzzy sweater. “He said it wasn’t right, it being Julia’s house and all.”

Kincaid hadn’t imagined Connor Swann being a great one for moral scruples, but then Connor was proving to be full of surprises. Glancing at the open-plan kitchen, he asked, “Do you cook?”

Sharon looked at him as if he had a slate loose. “Course I can cook. What do you take me for?”

“No, I mean, who did the cooking here, you or Connor?”

She thrust her lower lip out in a pout. “’E wouldn’t let me touch a thing in there, like it was a bloody church or something. Said fry-ups were nasty, and he’d not have anything boiled in his kitchen but eggs and water for the pasta.” Still absently holding her glass, she stood and wandered over to the dining table. She traced a finger across its surface. “’E cooked for me, though. No bloke ever did that. Nobody ever cooked anything for me but me mum and me gran, come to think of it.” Looking up, she stared at Kincaid as if seeing him for the first time. “You married?”

He shook his head. “I was once, a long time ago.”

“What happened?”

“She left. Met someone else.” He said the words flatly, with an ease born of years of practice, yet it still amazed him that such simple sentences could contain such betrayal.

Sharon considered that, then nodded. “Con made me supper-‘dinner,’ I mean-he’d always remind me to say ‘dinner.’ Candlelight, best dishes. He’d make me sit while he brought me things-‘Try this, Shar, try that, Shar.’ Funny things, too.” She smiled at Kincaid. “Sometimes I felt like a kid playing dress-up. Would you do things like that for a girl?”

“I’ve been known to. But I’m afraid I’m not up to Con’s standards-my cooking runs more to omelets and cheese-on-toast.” He didn’t add that he’d never been inclined to play Pygmalion.