Hicks’s skin turned the color of the room’s nicotine-stained walls as the blood drained from his face. “I’ll kill ’em, the friggin’ little shits. They’re lying their bloody heads off.” He looked from Gemma to Kincaid, and, apparently finding no reassurance in their expressions, said a little more frantically, “You can’t do me for this. I never saw Con after we had that drink at the Fox. I swear I didn’t.”
Gemma flipped another page in her notebook. “You may have to, unless you can come up with a little better accounting of your movements after half-past ten. Connor made a telephone call from his flat around then, and afterward said he meant to go out.”
“Who says he did?” asked Hicks, with more shrewdness than Gemma had credited him.
“Never mind that. Do you want to know what I think, Kenneth?” Gemma asked, leaning toward him and lowering her voice confidentially. “I think Connor rang you and asked you to meet him at the lock. You argued and Connor fell in. It could happen to anybody, couldn’t it, Ken? Did you try to help him, or were you afraid of the water?” Her tone said she understood and would forgive him anything.
“I never!” Hicks pushed his chair back from the table. “That’s a bleedin’ lie. And how the bleedin’ hell am I supposed to have got there without a car?”
“Connor picked you up in his car,” Gemma said reasonably, “and afterward you hitched a ride back to Henley.”
“I didn’t, I tell you, and you can’t prove I did.”
Unfortunately, Gemma knew from Thames Valley’s reports that he was correct—Connor’s car had been freshly washed and vacuumed and forensics had found no significant traces. “Then where were you? Tell the truth this time.”
“I’ve told you already. I was at the Fox, then at this bloke’s. Jackie—he’s called Jackie Fawcett.”
Kincaid recrossed his ankles lazily and spoke for the first time since Gemma had begun. “Then why wouldn’t your mates give you a nice, tidy alibi, Kenneth? I can see two possibilities—the first is that you’re lying, and the second is that they don’t like you, and I must say I don’t know which I think is the more likely. Did you help out other friends the same way you helped Connor?”
“Don’t know what you’re on about.” Hicks pulled a battered cigarette pack from the pocket of his jacket. He shook it, then probed inside it with thumb and forefinger before crumpling it in disgust.
Gemma took up the thread again. “That’s what you argued about, isn’t it, Kenneth? When you met Con after lunch, did you tell him he had to pay up? Did he agree to meet you later that evening? Then when he turned up without the money, you fought with him,” she embroidered as she went along.
An element of pleading crept into Hicks’s voice. “He didn’t owe me nothin’, I told you.” He kept his eyes fixed anxiously on Kincaid, and Gemma wondered what Kincaid had done to put the wind up him like that.
Straightening up in his chair, Kincaid said, “So you’re telling me that Con paid you off, and yet I happen to know that Con was so hard up he couldn’t make the mortgage on the flat. I think you’re lying. I think you said something to Connor over that little social pint at the Fox that sent him over the edge. What was it, Kenneth? Did you threaten to have your boss call out his muscle?” He stood up and leaned forward with his hands on the table.
“I never threatened him. It wasn’t like that,” Hicks squeaked, shrinking away from Kincaid.
“But he did still owe you money?”
Hicks looked at them, sweat beading on his upper lip, and Gemma could see him calculating which way to turn next.
Moving restlessly back and forth in the small space before the table, Kincaid said, “I don’t believe you. Your boss was going to take it out of your skin if you didn’t come up with the ready—I don’t believe you didn’t use a little persuasion.” He smiled at Hicks as he came near him again. “And the trouble with persuasion is that sometimes it gets out of hand. Isn’t that so, Kenneth?”
“No. I don’t know. I mean—”
“Are you saying that it wasn’t an accident? That you intended to kill him?”
“That’s not what I meant.” Hicks swallowed and wiped his hands on his thighs. “I only made him a suggestion, a proposition, like.”
Kincaid stopped pacing and stood very still with his hands in his pockets, watching Hicks. “That sounds very interesting, Kenneth. What sort of proposition?”
Gemma held her breath as Hicks teetered on the edge of confession, afraid any move might nudge him in the wrong direction. Listening to the ragged cadence of his breathing, she offered up a silent little incantation to the god of interviews.
Hicks spoke finally, with the rush of release, and his words were venomous. “I knew about him from the first, him and his hoity-toity Ashertons. You would’ve thought they were the bleedin’ Royals, the way he talked, but I knew better. That Dame Caroline’s just a jumped-up tart, no better than she should be. And all the fuss they made over that kid what drowned, well, he wasn’t even Sir Gerald’s kid, was he, just a bleedin’ little bastard.” Matty. He was talking about Matty, Gemma thought, trying to make sense of it.
Kincaid sat down again, pulling his chair up until he could rest his elbows on the table. “Let’s start over from the beginning, shall we, Kenneth?” he said very quietly, very evenly, and Gemma shivered. “You told Connor that Matthew Asherton was illegitimate, have I got that right?”
Hicks’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his skinny throat as he swallowed and nodded, then looked in appeal at Gemma. He’d got more than he bargained for, she thought, wondering suddenly what Kincaid might have done if she hadn’t been in the room and the tape recorder running.
“How could you possibly know that?” Kincaid asked, still soft as velvet.
“’Cause my uncle Tommy was his bleedin’ dad, that’s how.”
* * *
In the silence that followed, Kenneth Hicks’s ragged, adenoidal breathing sounded loud in Gemma’s ears. She opened her mouth, but found she couldn’t quite formulate any words.
