Leave the Grave Green

Julia Swann was not beautiful. Even as he formed the thought, quite deliberately and matter-of-factly, he found he couldn’t stop looking at her. Taller, thinner, sharper than her mother, dressed in a white shirt with the tail out and narrow black jeans, she displayed no softly rounded curves in figure or manner. Her chin-length dark hair swung abruptly when she moved her head, punctuating her gestures.

He read his intrusion in her startled posture, felt it in the room’s instantly recognizable air of privacy. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Duncan Kincaid, from Scotland Yard. I did knock.”

“I didn’t hear you. I mean, I suppose I did, but I wasn’t paying attention. I often don’t when I’m working.” Even her voice lacked the velvety resonance of Caroline’s. She slid off the stool, wiping her hands on a bit of rag. “I’m Julia Swann. But then you know all that, don’t you?”

The hand she held out to him was slightly damp from contact with the cloth, but her grasp was quick and hard. He looked around for someplace to sit, saw nothing but a rather tatty and overstuffed armchair which would place him a couple of feet below the level of her stool. Instead he chose to lean against a cluttered workbench.

Although the room was fairly large—probably, he thought, the result of knocking two of the house’s original bedrooms into one—the disorder extended everywhere he looked. The windows, covered with simple white rice-paper shades, provided islands of calm in the jumble, as did the high table Julia Swann had been facing when he entered the room. Its surface was bare except for a piece of white plastic splashed with bright daubs of paint, and a Masonite board propped up at a slight angle. Before she slid onto the stool again and blocked his view, he glimpsed a small sheet of white paper masking-taped to the board.

Glancing at the paintbrush still in her hand, she set it on the table behind her and pulled a packet of cigarettes from her shirt pocket. She held it toward him, and when he shook his head and said, “No, thanks,” she lit one and studied him as she exhaled.

“So, Superintendent Kincaid—it is Superintendent, isn’t it? Mummy seemed to be quite impressed by the title, but then that’s not unusual. What can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Swann.” He tossed out an expected opening gambit, even though he suspected already that her response would not be conventional.

She shrugged, and he could see the movement of her shoulders under the loose fabric of her shirt. Crisply starched, buttons on the left—Kincaid wondered if it might have been her husband’s.

“Call me Julia. I never got used to ‘Mrs. Swann.’ Always sounded to me like Con’s mum.” She leaned toward him and picked up a cheap porcelain ashtray bearing the words Visit the Cheddar Gorge. “She died last year, so that’s one bit of drama we don’t have to deal with.”

“Did you not like your husband’s mother?” Kincaid asked.

“Amateur Irish. All B’gosh and B’gorra.” Then she added more affectionately, “I used to say that her accent increased proportionately to her distance from County Cork.” Julia smiled for the first time. It was her father’s smile, as unmistakable as a brand, and it transformed her face. “Maggie adored Con. She would have been devastated. Con’s dad did a bunk when Con was a baby… if he ever had a dad, that is,” she added, only the corners of her lips quirking up this time at some private humor.

“I had the impression from your parents that you and your husband no longer lived together.”

“Not for…” She spread the fingers of her right hand and touched the tips with her left forefinger as her lips moved. Her fingers were long and slender, and she wore no rings. “Well, more than a year now.”

Kincaid watched as she ground out her cigarette in the ashtray. “It’s a rather odd arrangement, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Do you think so, Mr. Kincaid? It suited us.”

“No plans to divorce?”

Julia shrugged again and crossed her knees, one slender leg swinging jerkily. “No.”

He studied her, wondering just how hard he might push her. If she were grieving for her husband, she was certainly adept at hiding it. She shifted under his scrutiny and patted her shirt pocket, as if reassuring herself that her cigarettes hadn’t vanished, and he thought that perhaps her armor wasn’t quite impenetrable. “Do you always smoke so much?” he said, as if he had every right to ask.

She smiled and pulled the packet out, shaking loose another cigarette.

He noticed that her white shirt wasn’t as immaculate as he’d thought—it had a smudge of violet paint across the breast. “Were you on friendly terms with Connor? See him often?”

“We spoke, yes, if that’s what you mean, but we weren’t exactly what you’d call best mates.”

“Did you see him yesterday, when he came here for lunch?”