Frye scraped ham salad and shredded carrot into a neat pile in the center of his plate. “Con’s firm in London handled the ENO account. That’s how he met her—at some reception or other. I suppose she must have attended with her family. So when she left him and he had a…” Looking rather embarrassed, Frye studied his plate and pushed his food around with his fork. “I guess you’d call it an emotional breakdown. Apparently he went quite bonkers—broke down crying in front of clients, that sort of thing. The firm kept it all very hush-hush—I suppose they felt they couldn’t risk offending the Ashertons by publicly turning him out on his ear.”
They had all been very discreet, Kincaid thought. Had compassion entered into it at all? “The firm gave him a recommendation when he came to you?”
“We wouldn’t have taken him on, otherwise,” Frye answered matter-of-factly.
“When did things begin to go wrong?”
An expression of guilt replaced the embarrassment on Frye’s face. “It’s not that Con was a total washout—I didn’t mean to give you that impression.”
“I’m sure you didn’t,” Kincaid said soothingly, hoping to forestall Frye’s
“It was a gradual thing. He missed appointments with clients—always with a good excuse, mind you, but after a few times even good excuses begin to wear thin. He promised things we couldn’t deliver—” He shook his head in remembered dismay. “That’s a creative director’s nightmare. And all those new accounts he was going to bring in, all those connections he had…”
“Didn’t materialize?”
Frye shook his head regretfully. “’Fraid not.”
Kincaid pushed away his empty plate. “Why did you keep him on, Mr. Frye? It certainly sounds as if he became more of a liability than an asset.”
“Call me John, why don’t you,” Frye said. Leaning forward confidentially, he continued, “The funny thing is, a few months ago Gordon and I had just about screwed ourselves up to give him the sack, but then things started to improve. Nothing earth-shaking, but he seemed to become a bit more dependable, a bit more interested.”
“Any idea what prompted the change?” Kincaid asked, thinking of Sharon and little Hayley.
Frye shrugged. “Not a clue.”
“Did you know he had a girlfriend?”
“Girlfriends, you mean. Plural,” Frye said with emphasis. With the resigned air of the much-married, he added, “Once my wife met him a few times, it was more than my life was worth to have a pint with him after work. She was sure he’d lead me into temptation.” He smiled. “Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, I never had Connor’s knack with women.”
The lunchtime crowd had thinned. Relieved from the crush at the bar, Marian came to collect their empty plates. “Anything else, lads? A sweet? There’s some smashing gateau left—”
“Don’t torment me, please.” Frye put his hands over his face with a moan.
Marian scooped up Kincaid’s plate and gave him a most un-icy wink. Smothering a chuckle, he thought that Frye’s wife needn’t have worried about Connor’s influence—her husband’s weaknesses obviously lay in other directions. That train of thought reminded him of a particular weakness they hadn’t addressed. “Were you aware of Connor’s gambling debts?”
“Debts?” Frye asked, draining the last drop of lemonade from his glass. “I knew he liked a bit of racing, but I never knew it was that serious.”
“Ever hear of a chap called Kenneth Hicks?”
Frye wrinkled his brow for a moment, then shook his head. “Can’t say that I have.”
Kincaid pushed his chair back, then stopped as another question occurred to him. “John, did you ever meet Connor’s wife, Julia?”
Frye’s reaction surprised him. After a moment of rather sheepish throat-clearing, he finally looked Kincaid in the eye. “Well, um, I wouldn’t say I exactly met her.”
Kincaid raised an eyebrow. “How can you ‘not exactly’ meet someone?”
“I saw her. That is, I went to see her, and I did.” At Kincaid’s even more doubtful expression he colored and said, “Oh hell, I feel an idiot, a right prat. I was curious about her, after all I’d heard, so when I saw the notice in the paper of her show in Henley…”
“You went to the opening?”
“My wife was away at her mum’s for the night, and I thought, well, why not, there’s no harm in it.”
“Why should there have been?” Kincaid asked, puzzled.
“I want to paint,” Frye said simply. “That’s why I studied art in the first place. My wife thinks it’s frivolous of me—two kids to support and all that—”
“—and artists are bad influences?” Kincaid finished for him.
“Something like that.” He smiled ruefully. “She does get a bit carried away sometimes. Thinks I’d bugger off and leave them to starve, I suppose, if someone waggled a paintbrush under my nose.”
“What happened at the opening, then? Did you meet Julia?”
Frye gazed dreamily past Kincaid’s shoulder. “She’s quite striking, isn’t she? And her paintings… well, if I could paint like that, I wouldn’t spend my life doing print layouts for White’s Plumbing Supply and Carpetland.” He gave a self-deprecating grimace. “But I can’t.” Focusing again on Kincaid, he added, “I didn’t meet her, but not from lack of trying. I’d drunk my cheap champagne—not without a good bit of it knocked down my shirt-front by careless elbows—and had almost made my way through the mob to her when she slipped out the front door.”
“Did you follow her?”
