Masonite board propped up at a slight angle. Before she slid onto the stool again and blocked his view, he glimpsed a small sheet of white paper masking-taped to the board.
Glancing at the paintbrush still in her hand, she set it on the table behind her and pulled a packet of cigarettes from her shirt pocket. She held it toward him, and when he shook his head and said, “No, thanks,” she lit one and studied him as she exhaled.
“So, Superintendent Kincaid—it is Superintendent, isn’t it? Mummy seemed to be quite impressed by the title, but then that’s not unusual. What can I do for you?”
“I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Swann.” He tossed out an expected opening gambit, even though he suspected already that her response would not be conventional.
She shrugged, and he could see the movement of her shoulders under the loose fabric of her shirt. Crisply starched, buttons on the left—Kincaid wondered if it might have been her husband’s.
“Call me Julia. I never got used to ‘Mrs. Swann.’ Always sounded to me like Con’s mum.” She leaned toward him and picked up a cheap porcelain ashtray bearing the words
“Did you not like your husband’s mother?” Kincaid asked.
“Amateur Irish. All B’gosh and B’gorra.” Then she added more affectionately, “I used to say that her accent increased proportionately to her distance from County Cork.” Julia smiled for the first time. It was her father’s smile, as unmistakable as a brand, and it transformed her face. “Maggie adored Con. She would have been devastated. Con’s dad did a bunk when Con was a baby… if he ever had a dad, that is,” she added, only the corners of her lips quirking up this time at some private humor.
“I had the impression from your parents that you and your husband no longer lived together.”
“Not for…” She spread the fingers of her right hand and touched the tips with her left forefinger as her lips moved. Her fingers were long and slender, and she wore no rings. “Well, more than a year now.”
Kincaid watched as she ground out her cigarette in the ashtray. “It’s a rather odd arrangement, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Do you think so, Mr. Kincaid? It suited us.”
“No plans to divorce?”
Julia shrugged again and crossed her knees, one slender leg swinging jerkily. “No.”
He studied her, wondering just how hard he might push her. If she were grieving for her husband, she was certainly adept at hiding it. She shifted under his scrutiny and patted her shirt pocket, as if reassuring herself that her cigarettes hadn’t vanished, and he thought that perhaps her armor wasn’t quite impenetrable. “Do you always smoke so much?” he said, as if he had every right to ask.
She smiled and pulled the packet out, shaking loose another cigarette.
He noticed that her white shirt wasn’t as immaculate as he’d thought—it had a smudge of violet paint across the breast. “Were you on friendly terms with Connor? See him often?”
“We spoke, yes, if that’s what you mean, but we weren’t exactly what you’d call best mates.”
“Did you see him yesterday, when he came here for lunch?”
“No. I don’t usually break for lunch when I’m working. Ruins my concentration.” Julia stubbed out her newly lit cigarette and slid off the stool. “As you’ve done now. I might as well quit for the day.” She gathered a handful of paintbrushes and crossed the room to an old-fashioned washstand with basin and ewer. “That’s the one drawback up here,” she said, over her shoulder, “no running water.”
His view no longer blocked by her body, Kincaid straightened up and examined the paper taped to the drawing board. It was about the size of a page in a book, smooth-textured, and bore a faint pencil sketch of a spiky flower he didn’t recognize. She had begun to lay in spots of clear, vivid color, lavender and green.
“Tufted vetch,” she said, when she turned and saw him looking. “A climbing plant. Grows in hedgerows. Flowers in—”
“Julia.” He interrupted the rush of words and she stopped, startled by the imperative in his voice. “Your husband died last night. His body was discovered this morning. Wasn’t that enough to interrupt your concentration? Or your work schedule?”
She turned her head away, her dark hair swinging to hide her face, but when she turned back to him her eyes were dry. “You’d better understand, Mr. Kincaid. You’ll hear it from others soon enough. The term ‘bastard’ might have been invented to describe Connor Swann.
“And I despised him.”
CHAPTER
2
“A lager and lime, please.” Gemma James smiled at the bartender. If Kincaid were there he would raise an eyebrow at the very least, mocking her preference. So accustomed to his teasing had she become that she actually missed it.
“A raw evening, miss.” The barman set the cool glass before her, aligning it neatly in the center of a beer mat. “Have you come far?”
“Just from London. Beastly traffic getting out, though.” But the sprawl of western London had finally faded behind her, and she left the M40 at Beaconsfield and followed the Thames Valley. Even in the mist she had seen some of the fine Victorian houses fronting the river, relics of the days when Londoners used the upper Thames as a playground.
At Marlow she turned north and wound up into the beech-covered hills, marveling that in a few miles she seemed to have entered a hidden world, dark and leafy and far removed from the broad, peaceful expanse of the river below.
“What are the Chiltern Hundreds?” she asked the barman. “I’ve heard that phrase all my life and never knew
