Kissed a Sad Goodbye

people what to do all the time.”

“So?” Irene stuck her tongue out at him. “I could do any of those things just as well as you.”

Mr. Cuddy looked up from the book he was reading. “Don’t squabble. I think Irene’s perfectly capable of telling people what to do. In fact,” he continued, warming to his subject, “has it ever occurred to you that we might have won the war by this time if all the generals were women? Think about Artemis, the hunter goddess.”

Lewis and William looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Now she’d got old Cuddy started on one of his tears, and they’d get the entire Greek mythology if they weren’t careful.

“And what about Boadicea—the ancient British warrior queen who led her forces against the Romans. That’s a bit closer to home.” Mr. Cuddy smiled at Irene. “And she had red hair.”

“I’ll bet people told her she couldn’t be a general, either,” Irene said, tossing her head with irritating smugness.

But Lewis was willing to let the matter drop for the sake of peace, because he had a feeling that if they kept on at her, Mr. Cuddy would get really cross.

Their tutor had seemed different since he came back from his long Cornish holiday, but Lewis had not quite been able to put his finger on what it was. At first he’d thought that maybe Mr. Cuddy didn’t like Irene, but that didn’t seem to be it, as he was much less likely to snap at her than at William and him. But something had changed, and the small, nagging worry this caused Lewis was the only thing to mar his contentment.

AS KINCAID PULLED THE CAR INTO a shady spot across from Gordon Finch’s flat, Gemma saw Gordon walking down East Ferry Road from the direction of Mudchute Station, clarinet case in his hand, Sam at his side. They waited until he had almost reached his flat, then got out of the car and crossed the road to intercept him.

“We’d like a word, Mr. Finch, if you don’t mind,” Kincaid said, showing his warrant card as if Gordon might have forgotten who they were.

“And if I do?” Gordon said easily, but his eyes flicked towards Gemma. He wore his military gear again today, and looked disreputable beside Kincaid, who wore khakis and a blue chambray shirt, his collar unbuttoned beneath the knot of his tie.

“We can have a chat somewhere less comfortable.”

Gemma felt the tension mount between the two men, then Gordon shrugged without speaking and led them up the stairs to his flat. Once inside, he looked at Gemma and threw down a challenge. “You know your way round, I think.” The physical presence of the two men, so close together in the small room and radiating dislike, made her feel she’d got caught in the middle of a pissing contest.

She held her ground. “We want to know exactly what Annabelle said to you in the tunnel. Word for word.”

“I’ve told you—”

“A very small piece—that she wanted to mend things between you. What you didn’t say was that Annabelle had just found out that your father had lied to her, betrayed her, just as she meant to betray her own father.”

“My father doesn’t lie,” Gordon said sharply.

“Then why did he tell Annabelle he would preserve the Hammond’s warehouse if she sold it to him, when all along he meant to tear it down?”

“Tear it down?” he repeated, frowning.

“She didn’t tell you? She must have been terribly angry with him.”

“She said …” He looked down as if surprised at the clarinet case he continued to hold in his right hand, then he knelt and set it carefully by the music stand. “She said something about loyalties that no longer mattered. I’d heard rumors, back in the spring, about Lewis’s interest in the warehouse, and that they’d been seen together a good bit. But when I asked her about it, she denied either a business interest or an affair.” He looked up and met Gemma’s eyes. “So I followed her. She spent the night at his flat. When I confronted her with it, she never even tried to justify herself. She said I wouldn’t understand.… And then she let me walk away.”

“But you didn’t stop loving her.”

Gordon rose, his hands looking awkwardly empty. “No.”

“And that night, she told you she loved you. She wanted to work things out. In the video in the tunnel, she was pleading.”

“She said … she said she’d realized that she’d thrown away what mattered to her most … but that my being there meant it wasn’t too late—we could still work things out, if we loved each other.”

Gemma sensed Kincaid move restlessly behind her, but he didn’t speak. “You turned her away,” she said softly, not taking her eyes from Gordon. “You didn’t believe her.” She heard her words fall flat as stones in a pool, and as she looked at Gordon Finch she thought the desolation on his face far worse than weeping. “There was something else, wasn’t there? What else did she say, Gordon?”

When he didn’t speak, she said it for him. “She said she meant to prove it, didn’t she? In the video, I saw her turn back for a last word, and she was still angry, defiant even. She meant to prove she loved you.”

“IT LOOKS LIKE LEWIS FINCH, DOESN’T it?” Gemma felt no sense of elation at the prospect. For Gordon to have to face the guilt of a father he obviously cared for more than he admitted was bad enough, but she herself had liked and admired Lewis Finch.

“It wasn’t her engagement she said she was going to break off when she rang him that night,” Kincaid said as he eased the Rover into the northbound traffic on East Ferry Road. “It was their deal. That’s why he sounded angry in the message he left on her answering machine.”

“And not just the deal, but her relationship with him as well—how could she keep seeing him after what she’d learned?”

“It sounds as though she was using Lewis from the beginning—”

“As he was using her.” Gemma glanced up at the high banks of the Mudchute to the right as they passed, and