Kincaid shook his head at the contradictions. The man had lived a boozing, betting life-in-the-fast-lane, by all accounts, but had preferred to stay at home with his mistress and her child. Connor had also, according to his diary, had lunch with his in-laws every single Thursday for the past year.
Kincaid thought back to the aftermath of his own marriage. Although Vic had left him, her parents had somehow managed to cast him as the villain of the piece, and he had never heard from them again, not so much as a card at Christmas or on his birthday. “Do you know what Con did on Thursdays, Sharon?” he asked.
“Why should I? Same as any other day, far as I know,” she added, frowning.
So she hadn’t known about the regular lunch with the in-laws. What else had Connor conveniently not told her? “What about last Thursday, Sharon, the day he died? Were you with him?”
“No. ’E went to London, but I don’t think he’d meant to, beforehand. When I’d given Hayley her supper, I came over and he’d just come in. All wound up he was, too, couldn’t sit still with it.”
“Did he say where he’d been?”
Slowly, she shook her head. “Said he had to go out again for a bit. ‘To see a man about a dog,’ he said, but that was just his way of being silly.”
“And he didn’t tell you where he was going?”
“No. Told me not to get my knickers in a twist, that he’d be back.” Slipping off her high-heeled sandals, she tucked her feet up in the armchair and rubbed at her toes with sudden concentration. She looked up, her eyes magnified by a film of moisture. “But I couldn’t stay, ’cause it were Gran’s bridge night and I had to see to Hayley. I couldn’t…” Wrapping her arms around her calves, she buried her face against her knees. “I didn’t…” she whispered, her voice muffled by the fabric of her jeans “…wouldn’t even give him a kiss when he left.”
So she had been pouting, her feelings hurt, and had childishly snubbed him, thought Kincaid. A small failing, an exhibition of ordinary lovers’ behavior, to be laughed about later in bed, but this time there could be no making up. Of such tiny things are made lifetimes of guilt, and what she sought from him was absolution. Well, he would give whatever was in his power to bestow. “Sharon. Look at me.” Slipping forward in his chair, he reached out and patted her clasped hands. “You couldn’t know. We’re none of us perfect enough to live every minute as if it might be our last. Con loved you, and he knew you loved him. That’s all that matters.”
Her shoulders moved convulsively. He sat back quietly, watching her, until he saw her body relax and begin a barely perceptible rocking, then he said, “Con didn’t say anything else about where he was going or who he meant to see?”
She shook her head without lifting it. “I’ve thought and thought. Every word he said, every word I said. There’s nothing.”
“And you didn’t see him again that night?”
“I said I didn’t, didn’t I?” she said, raising her face from her knees. Weeping had blotched her fair skin, but she sniffed and ran her knuckles under her eyes unselfconsciously. “What do you want to know all this stuff for, anyway?”
At first her need to talk, to release some of her grief, had been greater than anything else, but now Kincaid saw her natural wariness begin to reassert itself. “Had Con been drinking?” he asked.
Sharon sat back in her chair, looking puzzled. “I don’t think so—at least he didn’t seem like it, but sometimes you couldn’t tell, at first.”
“Had a good head, did he?”
She shrugged. “Con liked his pint, but he wasn’t ever mean with it, like some.”
“Sharon, what do you think happened to Con?”
“Silly bugger went for a walk along the lock, fell in and drowned! What do you mean ‘What happened to him?’ How the bloody hell should I know what happened to him?” She was almost shouting, and bright spots of color appeared on her cheekbones.
Kincaid knew he’d received the tail end of the anger she couldn’t vent on Connor—anger at Connor for dying, for leaving her. “It’s difficult for a grown man to fall in and drown, unless he’s had a heart attack or is falling-down drunk. We won’t be able to rule those possibilities out until after the autopsy, but I think we’ll find that Connor was in good health and at least relatively sober.” As he spoke her eyes widened and she shrank back in her chair, as if she might escape his voice, but he continued relentlessly. “His throat was bruised. I think someone choked him until he lost consciousness and then very conveniently shoved him in the river. Who would have done that to him, Sharon? Do you know?”
“The bitch,” she said on a breath, her face blanched paper-white beneath her makeup.
“What—”
She stood up, propelled by her anger. Staggering, she lost her balance and fell to her knees before Kincaid. “That bitch!”
A fine spray of spittle reached his face. He smelled the sherry on her breath. “Who, Sharon?”
“She did everything she could to ruin him and now she’s killed him.”
“Who, Sharon? Who are you talking about?”
“Her, of course. Julia.”
The woman sitting beside Kincaid nudged him. The congregation was rising, lifting and opening hymnals. He’d heard only snippets of the sermon, delivered in a soft and scholarly voice by the balding vicar. Standing quickly, he scrabbled for a hymnal and peeked at his neighbor’s to find the page.
He sang absently, his mind still replaying his interview with Connor Swann’s mistress. In spite of Sharon’s accusations, he just didn’t think that Julia Swann had the physical strength necessary to choke her husband and shove him into the canal. Nor had she had the time, unless Trevor Simons was willing to lie to protect her. None of it made sense. He wondered how Gemma was getting on in London, if she had found out anything useful in her visit to the opera.
The service came to a close. Although the congregants greeted one another and chatted cheerfully as they filed
