Deborah Crombie - A Share In Death

Hannah was shaking her head before he’d finished the sentence. “No. I mean yes. I don’t know.” Her hand jerked as she spoke, and her undrunk coffee slopped a milky pool on the table’s surface. “About Patrick. It’s not what you think.” The lift of Kincaid’s eyebrows would have done Peter Raskin credit. “I know how it must look.” She met Kincaid’s eyes. “That I’ve gone middle-aged gaga over any man who looks at me twice. It’s not like that at all. Oh, Jesus, I wish it were that simple.” She dropped her face into her hands, fingers splayed across her eyes.

“Hannah…” Kincaid reached out a hand to touch her, drew it back.

Through her fingers she said, “You have to understand. I thought I’d made a perfect life for myself. I was smart, capable, respected. I’d been lucky enough to find work that I loved.” Hannah raised her head. “People usually think I didn’t have a chance to marry. The old sexually deprived spinster stereotype. God!” she said bitterly. “You’d think we’d grown past that, but we haven’t. Women are still judged first as a commodity, a man’s appendage. If you don’t have a man you don’t measure up. Simple. As for sex-” she gave a harsh laugh “-sex is easy. It’s marriage that terrified me. Losing control.” Hannah pushed her cup forward with her fingertips and looked out the French door. “My parents ordered every aspect of my life, what I ate, what I wore, how I cut my hair, who I saw, even what I thought. The one step I might have taken for myself they… took out of my hands. So I swore I would never let anybody else do that to me. Can you understand that?”

“Yes,” Kincaid said softly, “I think so.”

“So I went along for years, captain of my own ship and all that, and then suddenly this last year it all began to seem so empty. Oh, I had lovers all right, but no one with hooks in my life. Maybe,” she sighed, and Kincaid felt some of her tension relax, “I am suffering from menopausal dementia, some hormonal imbalance. But it doesn’t feel that way.” She spoke now more to herself than to Kincaid, her gaze unfocused. “There’s no wholeness, no connection. It feels…” The flow of words stopped. Hannah fell silent for a moment, then focused clearly on Kincaid, “I’ve done it again, haven’t I? Just like that first night, and you thought I’d bored you with my life story then. I’m sorry.”

“Hannah, what does this have to do with Patrick Rennie?”

She chewed her lip, then took a deep breath before she spoke. “I can’t tell you. Not yet. But I will-” She cut off the beginning of his protest. “No, I want you to know. But first I have to explain some things to Patrick. Then you can tell me whether I need a shrink or a solicitor.” She smiled at him with a touch of the humorous directness he’d first found so appealing. “I promise I will tell you. Afterwards.”

“All right.” Kincaid leaned back in his chair and pushed away his plate with its congealing egg.

Hannah’s eyes strayed to his plate. “Oh, god, I’ve spoiled your breakfast. You haven’t touched it.” Her thighs bumped the table as she stood and more coffee joined the drying puddle on the table. “I’d better go. I really am sorry about all this, Duncan.”

“Stop apologizing, for god’s sake. You’ve nothing to be sorry for, and besides, it’s out of character.” He followed her to the door. “And I don’t mind about the bloody breakfast.”

“My whole life is out of character right now.” She laughed, the first sound of spontaneous pleasure he’d heard from her that morning. “Thanks. Just be patient with me. Please. I know I’ve no right to ask.”

“Sure.” Kincaid stood with his hand on the door and spoke to her back as she walked away from him down the hall. “I’m good at that.”

“Sir,” Gemma’s voice practically vibrated with early morning efficiency, “I’ve got some news on those inquiries you wanted.”

Kincaid swallowed a mouthful of makeshift bacon sandwich. His short absence had not improved the eggs, and the cold toast and bacon he’d rescued as an afterthought as he dumped his plate in the sink.

“Gemma. God, I hate people to sound so bloody cheerful in the morning.”

“Sir?”

“Sorry. Never mind. Any trouble getting clearance?”

“No, sir. The Guv’nor oiled the machinery pretty well, I think.”

Kincaid smiled at the thought of his chief having a few discreet words in a few shell-like ears-Gemma’s previous assignments had probably vanished in an eddy of paper in the secretarial pool. “Spill away, then. No, hold on-” he scrambled for a pen and notebook he’d left on the sofa, pulled the phone over to the small table and took a sip of his cold coffee-“okay.”

“I’ve been to Dedham Vale. Dull as dishwater, in my opinion.” Gemma, with the ingrained prejudice of the North Londoner, didn’t find much to recommend in rural villages.

“That doesn’t surprise me. What else?”

“I wandered around for a bit until I found the local G. P.’s office. It seems he took care of the Reverend MacKenzie in his last illness. Knows everyone, of course, even with the National Health sending a lot of his old patients to the new clinic at Ipswich.”

Kincaid couldn’t resist teasing her a bit. “Got quite chatty with him, did we?” He could imagine Gemma’s freckled face turning pink with annoyance. She would probably accuse him of being patronizing if she weren’t on her best professional behavior, but he wasn’t, really. It was just that Gemma was blind to her own assets-the frank openness of her face encouraged people’s confidence in a way that a more sophisticated beauty never would.

Gemma remained silent for a moment, her usual response. When she couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking, Kincaid thought, she ignored him.

“Sir, about the doctor.”

“Sorry, Gemma. Go ahead.”

“Well, it seems he looked after old Mr. MacKenzie for years. And the daughters. The old man was diabetic, very infirm. Lost his eyesight, kidneys failing. The doctor says he just slipped away in his sleep one night, no reason to think there was anything funny about it. But,” Gemma allowed a tinge of satisfaction to creep into her voice, “I found out from the travel agent in the village where your rumor may have originated. Someone else from the village owns time at Followdale House-a retired major who, according to the receptionist at the travel agent’s, is as big a gossip as any malicious old biddy you could find.”

Kincaid considered a moment. “That might explain it. What else?”

“Cassie Whitlake’s parents, in Clapham. The father’s a building contractor’s foreman. They’re very proud of her. Wonderful job, clothes right out of Vogue, her mum says, that smart.”

“I can imagine,” Kincaid said drily.

“But I got the impression she doesn’t visit them often. Tells her mum she can’t take a holiday when other people do, it’s her busiest time. She calls them, though, and her mum says she’s sounded over the moon lately. Says she has a real good prospect, one that would really make people sit up and take notice of her. ‘A job?’ I asked, not sure what she meant. ‘No, a man,’ her mum says, an important man.”

“Doesn’t sound much like Graham Frazer. I wonder what she’s playing at.”

“There’s a sister still at home, Evie. Taking a secretarial course. Evie says she’s just as glad Cassie doesn’t come home-all she does is act like Lady Muck.” Kincaid heard a hint of laughter in Gemma’s voice, some of the formality dropping away in the telling of her story.

“How’d you manage to get her alone? Cup of tea?” Kincaid knew Gemma’s adroitness with the forgotten handbag, the helping out in the kitchen-and her ability to dig out the minutiae of people’s lives.