Leave the Grave Green

He never came to Reading without thinking of Vic. She had grown up here, gone to school here, and as he’d entered the city from the north, he made a quick detour down the street where her parents had lived. The suburb boasted comfortable semidetached houses and well-tended gardens, with an occasional garden gnome peeking tastefully from behind a hedge. He had found the neighborhood dreadful then, and he discovered that time had done nothing to soften his opinion.

Easing the car to a halt, he let the engine idle while he studied the house. So unaltered did it appear that he wondered if it had been held in some sort of stasis while time eddied around it, and he had changed and aged. He saw it as he’d seen it the first time Vic took him home to meet her parents, down to the determined shine on the brass letterbox. They had looked upon him with well-bred disapproval, dismayed that their beautiful and scholarly daughter should have taken up with a policeman, and with a stab of discomfort he remembered that he had felt faintly ashamed of his less-than-conventional family. His parents had always cared more for books and ideas than the acquisition of middleclass possessions, and his childhood in their rambling house in the Cheshire countryside had been far removed from this tidy, ordered world.

He slipped the Midget into first gear and eased out the clutch, listening to the engine’s familiar sputtering response. Perhaps Vic had chosen someone more suitable for the second go-round. He, at least, was well out of it. With that thought came a sense of release and the welcome realization that he did, actually, finally, mean it.

The snarl of Reading traffic hadn’t improved since his last visit, and as he sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in the queue for city-center parking, he remembered how much he had always disliked the place. It combined the worst of modern architecture with bad city planning, and the results were enough to make anyone’s blood pressure rise.

Once he’d parked the car he found the modern block of offices which housed the advertising agency without too much difficulty. A pretty receptionist greeted him with a smile as he entered the third-floor suite. “Can I help you, sir?” she asked, and her voice held a hint of curiosity.

He knew she must be trying to catalogue him—not a familiar client or supplier, no briefcase or samples to mark him as a commercial traveler—and he couldn’t resist teasing her a bit. Her short bobbed dark hair and heart-shaped face gave her an appealing innocence. “Nice office,” he said, looking slowly around the reception area. Modular furniture, dramatic lighting, art-deco advertising prints carefully framed and placed—it added up, he thought, to clever use of limited funds.

“Yes, sir. Is there someone you wanted to see?” she asked a little more forcefully, her smile fading.

He removed his warrant card and handed her the open folder. “Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, Scotland Yard. I’d like to speak to someone about Connor Swann.”

“Oh.” She looked from his face to the card and back again, then her brown eyes filled with tears. “Isn’t it just awful? We only heard this morning.”

“Really? Who notified you?” he asked, casually retrieving his card.

She sniffed. “His father-in-law, Sir Gerald Asherton. He rang John—that’s Mr. Frye—”

A door opened in the hallway behind her desk and a man came out, shrugging into a sport jacket. “Melissa, love, I’m off to the—” His hand up to tighten his tie, he stopped as he saw Kincaid.

“Here’s Mr. Frye now,” she said to Kincaid, then added to her boss, “A man from Scotland Yard, here about Connor, John.”

“Scotland Yard? Connor?” Frye repeated, and his momentary bewilderment gave Kincaid a chance to study him. He judged him to be about his own age, but short, dark, and already acquiring that extra layer of padding that comes with desk-bound affluence.

Kincaid introduced himself, and Frye recovered enough to shake hands. “What can I do for you, Superintendent? I mean, from what Sir Gerald said, I didn’t expect…”

Smiling disarmingly, Kincaid said, “I just have a few routine questions about Mr. Swann and his work.”

Frye seemed to relax a bit. “Well, look, I was just going round to the pub for some lunch, and I’ve got a client meeting as soon as I get back. Could we talk and grab a bite at the same time?”

“Suits me.” Kincaid realized that he was ravenously hungry, a not unexpected side effect of attending an autopsy, but the prospect of the culinary delights to be found in a Reading pub didn’t fill him with anticipation.

As they walked the block to the pub, Kincaid glanced at his companion. Three-piece suit in charcoal gray, expensively cut, but the waistcoat strained its buttons; midday beard shadow; hair slicked back in the latest yuppie fashion; and as Kincaid matched his stride to the shorter man’s, he caught the scent of musky aftershave. He thought Connor had given the same attention to his appearance—and advertising was, after all, a business of image.