“I’m more interested in where you were last Friday night, Mr. Lowell,” said Gemma, keeping herself in check. “Because Annabelle had reason to search you out. She’d learned what sort of poison you’d been feeding your son. Did she come here to have it out with you?”
“I told you, I hadn’t seen her in years. There was a time … just afterwards … but she wouldn’t see me, wouldn’t take my calls.”
“There’s still the little matter of the shares,” said Kincaid. “Annabelle must have drawn up that will before anything happened between you. Did she tell you she’d never changed it, but that she meant to now? You could use the money, couldn’t you?” He gestured round the flat. “It must be hard, paying support for two kids, and all because of her. The temptation would be tremendous.”
Lowell stared at Kincaid, his face blank. “That’s daft. I told you I had no idea about the will. And I didn’t see Annabelle on Friday night.”
“Then you won’t mind telling us your movements.”
“That’s easy enough,” said Lowell, and Gemma thought she detected a hint of relief in his voice. “I was with someone all of Friday evening. I spent the night at her flat.”
“And she’ll vouch for you … this friend?” Kincaid raised an eyebrow. “Is she married?”
“Of course she’ll vouch for me. She just lives round the corner. And no, she’s not married, or I wouldn’t have spent the night with her, would I?” Lowell answered reasonably.
There was a soft tap at the door, then it opened a few inches and, as if on cue, a woman’s voice called, “Marty?”
“Your alibi, by any chance?” guessed Kincaid.
“You might as well speak to her now,” Martin said with a shrug as the woman pushed the door wider and stepped into the sitting room. “This is Brandy.”
Martin’s visitor couldn’t have been more than nineteen. Her bleached hair was curled in a mass of long, tight ringlets, she wore a mini so skimpy Gemma felt sure her knickers would show when she sat down, and her halter top exposed a pierced navel.
“Marty?” the girl said again, looking at them curiously. “I got worried when you didn’t come at six, like you said. You know you promised you’d set up my tanning lamp.”
The corner of Kincaid’s mouth twitched as he glanced at Gemma. He said, “Some guys have all the luck.”
“JANICE IS SENDING A CONSTABLE ROUND to take a formal statement from Martin Lowell’s girlfriend,” Kincaid said as he returned from using the phone and sank gratefully back into his chair on Hazel’s patio. “Too bloody bad we don’t have enough evidence to search his flat—or Reg Mortimer’s, for that matter,” he added, retrieving his beer from the flagstone.
Gemma sat beside him, her legs stretched out in front of her, a bottle of cold cider cradled on her chest. She’d changed from her trousers into shorts and tank top, and had pulled her hair up off her neck with a flower-patterned scrunchy.
Hazel had invited them to stay for tabouli and a green salad, insisting that it was too hot for a cooked meal, or for Gemma to attempt preparing anything in her flat’s tiny kitchen, and she’d sent them out to the patio with cool drinks while she finished putting things together.
The children were running in circles on the square of lawn, seemingly oblivious to the heat, their half-naked bodies lit in flashes by the long, low shafts of sunlight streaking through the trees.
Sipping her cider, Gemma said, “I think it’s generous of you to elevate Brandy to the status of girlfriend. Martin Lowell should be ashamed of himself—and so should you for ogling her.”
“I didn’t ogle.”
“You did so. But I suppose you should get some dispensation, as she might as well have been going about in her bra and knickers.”
“You’d have thought Lowell would be more discriminating, after Jo and Annabelle,” Kincaid said, hoping to redeem himself in the matter of Brandy. “But how does a thirty-something banker manage to pull half-naked teenaged birds, tasteful or not?”
“I thought surely Martin Lowell couldn’t be as bad as Jo made him sound, but he’s a forty-carat bastard if I’ve ever met one,” Gemma said with feeling.
Kincaid glanced at her, amused. “I rather got the impression you didn’t take to him.”
“You noticed?” She smiled and settled a bit further down in her chair. “The odd thing is, I can see why they were attracted to him. Jo and Annabelle, I mean, and even Brandy.”
“The Heathcliff-in-a-suit looks?”
“He made me feel like a butterfly pinned to a board. If you didn’t know what a rotter he was …” She took a contemplative sip of cider. “Or for some women, he might be appealing even if they did.”
“Including Annabelle?” Kincaid asked. The sun dropped behind the roof of the house next door, and the garden seemed instantly cooler.
“Mrs. Pargeter, Jo’s neighbor, said she thought that Annabelle was so devastated by her mother’s death that she grabbed the first thing that looked like love. But if that’s the case, I think she must have realized fairly quickly what Martin Lowell was really like.” Gemma scowled. “What I don’t understand is why she told Jo. In spite of what Lowell says, Annabelle hasn’t struck me as a righteous sort, or as someone who deliberately hurt people.”
“Lowell seemed to want to have his cake and eat it, too, so Jo need never have known—”
“But he might have threatened Annabelle, told her he’d confess to Jo if she tried to end things. I don’t think he’d have let her go easily, and maybe Annabelle saw telling Jo as the only option.”
It seemed to Kincaid that Gemma was going to great lengths to whitewash Annabelle Hammond’s behavior. “What about her affairs with Gordon and Lewis Finch? Surely she knew Mortimer would be hurt if he learned the truth about those.”
