Leave the Grave Green

corkscrew curls, he would hardly have recognized her. She wore no makeup, not even lipstick, and her bare face looked young and unprotected. The tarted-up clothes and high heels were gone—replaced by a faded sweatshirt, jeans and dirty trainers, and in the few days since he had seen her she seemed visibly thinner. To his surprise, she also seemed rather pathetically glad to see him.

“Superintendent! What are you doing here?” A sticky and disheveled version of the child in the wallet photo Kincaid had seen slipped up beside Sharon and wrapped herself around her mother’s leg.

“Hullo, Hayley,” said Kincaid, squatting at her eye level. He looked up at Sharon and added, “I came to see how you were getting on.”

“Oh, come in,” she said as if making an effort to recall her manners, and she stepped back, hobbled by the child clinging to her like a limpet. “Hayley was just having her tea, weren’t you, love? In the kitchen with Gran.” Now that she had Kincaid in the sitting room, she seemed to have no idea what to do with him, and simply stood there stroking the child’s tangle of fair curls.

Kincaid looked around the small room with interest. Doilies and dark furniture, fringed lampshades and the smell of lavender wax, all as neat and clean as if they had been preserved in a museum. The sound of the television was only a bit louder than it had been when he stood outside, and he surmised that the cottage’s interior walls must be constructed of thick plaster.

“Gran likes the telly in the kitchen,” Sharon said into the silence. “It’s cozier to sit in there, close by the range.”

The front room might have been the scene of some long-ago courtship, thought Kincaid. He imagined young lovers sitting stiltedly on the horsehair chairs, then remembered that these cottages had been built for pensioners, and any wooing must have been done by those old enough to know better. He wondered if Connor had ever come here.

Diplomatically, he said, “If Hayley would like to go in with Gran and finish her tea, perhaps you and I could go outside and have a chat.”

Sharon gave Kincaid a grateful glance and bent down to her daughter. “Did you hear what the superintendent said, love? He needs to have a word with me, so you go along in with Gran and finish your tea. If you eat up all your beans and toast, you can have a biscuit,” she added cajolingly.

Hayley studied her mum as if gauging the sincerity of this pledge.

“I promise,” said Sharon, turning her and giving her a pat on the bottom. “Go on now. Tell Gran I’ll be along in a bit.” She watched the little girl disappear through the door in the back of the room, then said to Kincaid, “Just let me get a cardy.”

The cardy turned out to be a man’s brown wool cardigan, a bit moth-eaten, and ironically reminiscent of the one Sir Gerald Asherton had worn the night Kincaid met him. Seeing Kincaid’s glance, Sharon smiled and said, “It was my granddad’s. Gran keeps it for wearing about the house.” As she followed Kincaid out into the churchyard, she continued, “Actually, she’s my great-gran, but I never knew my real gran. She died when my mum was a baby.”

Although the sun had set in the few minutes Kincaid had been inside the house, the churchyard looked even more inviting in the soft twilight. They walked to a bench across the way from the cottages, and as they sat down Kincaid said, “Is Hayley always so shy?”

“She’s always chattered like a magpie, from the day she learned to talk, even with strangers.” Sharon’s hands lay loosely in her lap, palms turned up. They might have been disembodied, so unanimated were they, and Kincaid noticed that since he’d seen her last, the small pink nails had been bitten to the quick. “It’s only since I told her about Con that she’s been like this.” She looked up at Kincaid in appeal. “I had to tell her, didn’t I, Mr. Kincaid? I couldn’t let her think he just scarpered, could I? I couldn’t let her think he didn’t care about us.”

Kincaid gave the question careful consideration before answering. “I think you did the right thing, Sharon. It would be hard for her now, regardless, and in the long run I’m sure it’s better to tell the truth. Children sense when you’re lying, and then they have that betrayal to deal with as well as the loss.”

Sharon listened intently, then nodded once when he’d finished. She studied her hands for a moment. “Now she wants to know why we can’t see him. My auntie Pearl died last year and Gran took her to the viewing before the funeral.”

“What did you tell her?”

Shrugging, Sharon said, “Different people do things different ways, that’s all. What else could I say?”

“I imagine she wants some concrete evidence that Con is really gone. Perhaps you could take her to see his grave, afterward.” He gestured at the graves laid out so neatly in the green grass of the churchyard. “That should seem familiar enough to her.”

She turned to him again, her hands clenching convulsively. “There’s not been anyone to talk to, see? Gran doesn’t want to know about it—she disapproved of him anyway—”

“Why was that?” asked Kincaid, surprised that the woman would not have been pleased at a better prospect for her great-granddaughter.

“Marriage is marriage in the eyes of the Lord,” mimicked Sharon, and Kincaid had a sudden clear vision of the old lady. “Gran’s very firm in her beliefs. It made no difference that Con wasn’t living with her. And as long as Con was married I had no rights, Gran said. Turned out she knew what she was on about, didn’t she?”

“You must have girlfriends you can talk with,” said Kincaid, as there seemed no helpful answer to the last question.

“They don’t want to know, either. You’d think I’d got leprosy or something all of a sudden—they act like they’re afraid it might rub off on them and spoil their fun.” Sharon sniffed, then added more softly, “I don’t want to talk to them about Con, anyway. What we had was between us, and it doesn’t seem right to air it like last week’s washing.”

“No, I can see that.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes as the lights began to come on in the cottages. Indistinct shapes moved behind the net curtains, and every so often a pensioner would pop out from one door and then another, putting out milk bottles or picking up papers. It made Kincaid think of those elaborate German clocks, the kind in which the little people bob cheerfully in-and-out as the hour chimes. He looked at the girl beside him, her head again bent over her