way he’d leered at her last night.
Sighing, Kincaid ran a hand through his hair. There was nothing for it but to get on with things as best he could. Glancing automatically at his watch, he shrugged in irritation. He bloody well knew what time it was, and as long as he had to wait for Nick Deveney and had the ground floor of the house to himself, he might as well have a look round.
Entering the hall, he stood quietly for a moment, orienting himself. For the first time he noticed the higgledy- piggledy nature of the house—a step up here, a step down there—every room seemed to exist on a different level. The exposed beams in the walls were canted at slightly tipsy angles. For a moment he fancied he heard an echo of the kitchen clock, then traced the insistent ticking to a longcase clock half hidden in an alcove beneath the stairs. To his untrained eye, it looked old and probably quite valuable. A family heirloom, perhaps?
Nearest the kitchen lay the sitting room they had used last night, and a quick glance showed it quiet and empty, the fire burnt down to cold ash. Continuing down the hall towards the front of the house, he opened the next door and peered in.
A green-shaded lamp cast a pool of light on a massive desk. Lucy must have forgotten to switch it off when she collected the dog last night, thought Kincaid, as he entered and looked about. The room seemed almost a parody of a masculine retreat—the walls not covered with bookshelves were dark-paneled, and the sofa set before the heavily curtained windows was covered in a deep red tartan. Moving closer, he studied the pale oblongs on the dark walls —hunting prints, of course. The sound of the heavy clock on the desk mimicked his heartbeat, and for a moment he imagined the entire house ticking to its own internal rhythm. “Bloody hell!” Swearing aloud broke the spell, and he banished thoughts of the Edgar Allan Poe story from his mind.
Crossing to the desk, Kincaid found the surface as tidy as expected, but a photo in a silver frame made him pause and lift it for a better look. This was an Alastair Gilbert he’d never seen, in shirtsleeves, smiling, with his arm around a small white-haired woman. Mother and son? He replaced the photo, filing in his mind the thought that interviewing the elder Mrs. Gilbert might prove useful.
The top drawer held the usual office paraphernalia, neatly arranged, and the side drawers, tidy ranks of files that would have to wait for someone else to give them a detailed going-over. Unsatisfied with such meager results, Kincaid went through the drawers again, and the more careful search revealed a leather-bound book tucked behind the files in the right-hand drawer. Removing it carefully, he opened it on the blotter. It was a desk diary, with the usual engagement notations and a few unidentified phone numbers written in a neat penciled hand. How like Gilbert not to have risked making a mistake in ink.
Kincaid turned a few more pages. The day before Gilbert’s death held an ambiguous “6:00,” accompanied by a question mark and another penciled phone number. Had Gilbert met someone, and if so, why? He’d have to leave it to Deveney’s team to run checks on all the notations while he concentrated on the interviews. Closing the book, he’d placed it on the desktop when a voice startled him.
“What are you doing?”
Lucy Penmaric stood in the doorway, arms crossed, heart-shaped face creased in a frown. In jeans and sweatshirt she looked younger than she had the night before, less sophisticated, and her pale face bore tiny creases, as though she’d just got up. “I heard a noise—I was looking for my mother,” she said before he could answer.
Not wanting to talk to Lucy from behind Gilbert’s desk, Kincaid closed the drawer and came around it before he said, “I think she’s upstairs having a rest. Can I help?”
“I didn’t think to look there,” she said, rubbing her face as she went to curl up in the corner of the tartan sofa. “I can’t seem to wake up properly—Mum gave me a sleeping pill and it’s made my brain go all fuzzy.”
“They can make you feel a bit hung over,” Kincaid agreed.
Lucy frowned again. “I didn’t want to take it. I only agreed so Mum would rest. Is she … is she all right this morning?”
Kincaid felt no compunction in editing out Claire’s fainting spell in the kitchen. “Coping reasonably well, under the circumstances. She went to visit your grandmother first thing.”
“Gwen? Oh, poor Mum,” said Lucy, shaking her head. “Gwen’s not my real grandmother, you know,” she added in an instructive voice. “Mummy’s parents are dead, and I don’t get to see my dad’s very often.”
“Why not? Doesn’t your mother get on with them?” Kincaid settled himself against the edge of the desk, willing to see where the conversation might lead.
“Alastair always had some reason why I shouldn’t go, but I like them. They live near Sidmouth, in Devon, and you can walk to the beach from their house.” Lucy twirled a strand of hair around her finger as she sat quietly for a moment, then she said, “I remember when my dad died. We lived in London then, in a flat in Elgin Crescent. The building had a bright yellow door—I remember when we came back from walks I could see it from a long way away, like a beacon. We had the top-floor flat, and a cherry tree bloomed just outside my window every spring.”
If he’d thought about Claire Gilbert’s first husband at all, he would have assumed they’d divorced, but then what were the odds that a woman in her forties would find herself twice widowed? “It sounds lovely,” he said softly after Lucy fell silent for so long he feared she’d retreated where he couldn’t follow.
“Oh, it was,” said Lucy, coming back to him with a little shiver. “But cherry blossoms always make me think of death now. I dreamed of them last night. I was covered in them, suffocating, and I couldn’t wake myself up.”
“Is that when your father died? In the spring?”
Lucy nodded, then pushed her hair away from her face and tucked it behind one ear. She had small ears, Kincaid thought, delicate as seashells. “When I was five I was really ill with a high fever one night. Dad went out to the all-night chemist in the Portobello Road to get something for me, and a car hit him at the zebra crossing. Now it’s all mixed up in my head—the police coming to the door, Mum crying, the scent of the cherries from my open window.”
So Claire Gilbert had not only been widowed but had faced a husband’s sudden death once before. Remembering the days when giving an occasional death notification had been part of his duties, he imagined the scene from the officers’ view point—light spilling out from the flat on a soft April evening, the pretty young blond wife at the door, apprehension growing in her face as she took in the uniforms. Then out with it, baldly, “Ma’am, we’re sorry to tell you that your husband is dead,” and she would stagger as if she’d been slapped. They’d been taught to do it that way in the academy, kinder to get it over with, supposedly, but that never made it any easier.
Lucy sat with her hair twined around her finger again, staring at one of the hunting prints behind Gilbert’s desk.
