“Gilbert was livid, beyond anything you’d seen before. How dared you go behind his back, make a fool of him?” Kincaid paused. He had seen the quickly aborted gesture, the nervous raising of her hand towards her throat. “Untie your scarf, please, Claire.”
“Wh-what?” She cleared her throat.
“Untie your scarf. You were hoarse that night—I remember feeling surprised at the huskiness of your voice. This morning I realized you’ve kept your throat covered all this last week with scarves and turtleneck jumpers. Let me see it now.”
He thought she might refuse, but after a moment she reached slowly up and untied the tag ends of the scarf. She unwound the two loops around her throat, then pulled, and the silk cascaded to her lap.
The thumbprints were clear, either side of her windpipe, the purple fading into an unlovely shade of yellow.
Kincaid heard the intake of Gemma’s breath. Slowly, deliberately, he said, “Alastair came home and put his hands around your throat, squeezing until things began to go dark. Then something distracted him for a moment, and he turned away from you. He wasn’t afraid of you, after all. But you knew this time he had lost all reason, and you were afraid for your life. You picked up the closest thing to hand and hit him. There was another hammer, wasn’t there, Claire, lying handy in the kitchen?
“And when you realized what you’d done, you put on that old black mac hanging in the mudroom and carried the hammer up the lane. Percy Bainbridge saw you, a dark shadow slipping by. Where did you put the hammer, Claire? In the ashes of the bonfire?”
Still she didn’t speak, didn’t look up from her hands. Kincaid went on, gently. “I don’t believe you’ll let anyone else take the blame for this—not Geoff, not Brian, not David Ogilvie. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t claim self-defense in the first place.” He gestured at her throat. “You had irrefutable evidence.”
“I didn’t think anyone would believe me.” Claire’s words came so softly she might have been speaking to herself. “He was a policeman, after all. It didn’t occur to me that I had proof.” She raised her head and smiled at them. “I suppose I wasn’t thinking very clearly. It happened just as you said, only I didn’t mean to kill him. I only wanted to stop him hurting me.”
She sat up on the edge of the sofa and her voice grew louder, as if practice made it easier to say the words. “But yes, I did kill him. I killed Alastair.”
She’s too calm, thought Kincaid, then he saw that her hands were still clenched in her lap. Her knuckles were white from the pressure, as were her short-bitten nails. An odd habit for such a well-groomed woman, he thought, and then it came to him with sickening clarity.
The pathologist, Kate Ling, describing the tiny rips in the shoulders of Gilbert’s shirt. Rips Claire couldn’t have made. And Claire hadn’t been protecting herself at all with her manufactured story of missing jewelry and open doors.
He swallowed against the sudden lurch of nausea, then looked at Gemma. Did she see the truth? If only he knew; should he, could he, let Claire get away with her deception?
The door opened and Lucy came in, shutting it carefully behind her. In her green dress, with her dark-honey hair sleep tangled and her feet bare, she looked like a wood nymph.
“I’ve been listening,” she said as she came to stand beside Kincaid, facing her mother. “And it’s not true. Mummy didn’t kill Alastair. I did.”
“Lucy, no!” Claire started to rise. “Stop it this minute. Go to your room.”
Gemma put out a restraining hand, and Claire sank back to the edge of the sofa, looking up at her daughter. When Lucy stood implacable beside Kincaid, Claire turned to him, hands outstretched in entreaty. “Don’t pay her any attention. She’s upset, distraught. She’s just trying to protect me.”
“It happened just the way she said,” Lucy continued. “Except that I came home from Guildford. I wondered why Alastair’s car was in the garage when Mummy had said he’d be late and why the mudroom door wasn’t quite shut.
“They didn’t hear me come in. He had his hands around her neck and he was shouting at her in a sort of hoarse whisper. His face was red and the veins on his neck were standing out. I thought she was dead, at first. She looked limp, and her face had gone a funny color. I screamed at him and grabbed him by the shoulders, trying to pull him away.” Lucy stopped and swallowed, as though her mouth were dry, but she didn’t take her eyes from her mother’s face. “He swatted me off like I was a fly and went right back to choking her.
“I’d left the hammer out on the worktop. I’d been hanging a new piece Geoff had framed for me. I picked it up and hit him—Alastair, I mean. After the second or third time he fell.”
Lucy swayed slightly. She reached out and rested light fingers on Kincaid’s shoulder, as if the mere human contact were enough to keep her steady. Her mother watched her, transfixed, powerless to stop her now.
“I don’t remember much after that. When Mummy could breathe again, she made me strip off my clothes and my trainers. We put them in the washer with some other dirty things and some enzyme liquid—you know, the sort of stuff that takes the bloodstains out. She told me to dip my hands in it, too, before I went upstairs for clean clothes.
“When I came down again, the hammer was gone. She told me we’d say we’d found the door open, and some of her jewelry missing. When the washer finished its cycle we put the clothes in the dryer, then she called the police.”
“She’s a child,” Claire said, looking at Gemma, then Kincaid. “She can’t be held responsible for this.”
Lucy’s fingers tightened on Kincaid’s shoulder. “I’m seventeen, Mum. I’m legally an adult. I don’t think I
Claire put her face in her hands and sobbed.
Lucy went to her mother and put her arms around her, but she looked at Kincaid as she spoke. “I tried not to think about it, to pretend it hadn’t happened. But that’s what I’d done for years. I knew about Alastair, and Mummy knew I knew, but we didn’t talk about it. Maybe none of this would have happened if we had.”
“Sir.” Gemma’s whisper was urgently formal. “I’d like a word with you.” She nodded towards the door, and they left mother and daughter together as they rose and went into the hall.
