Leave the Grave Green

“Take my compass,” Tony called out as Kincaid turned away, producing it from the palm of his hand like a conjurer. “It’ll come in handy.”

At the top of the first long climb, some thoughtful citizen had placed a bench on which the winded walker could sit and enjoy the view. Kincaid took brief advantage of it, then toiled on, through woods and fields and over stiles. At first the vicar’s brief history rolled through his mind, and as he walked he imagined the progression of Celts, Romans, Saxons and Normans settling these hills, all leaving their own particular imprint upon the land.

After a while the combination of fresh air, exercise and solitude worked its magic, and his mind returned freely to the question of Connor Swann’s death, sorting the facts and impressions that he had gathered so far. The pathologist’s evidence made it highly unlikely that Tommy Godwin had killed Connor outside the Red Lion in Wargrave. He might, of course, have knocked Connor unconscious and killed him a couple of hours later after returning from London—but like Gemma, Kincaid could come up with no logical scenario for the later removal of the body from the car to the lock.

Dr. Winstead’s report also meant that Julia could not have killed Con during her brief absence from the gallery, and David’s statement placing Connor in Wargrave until at least ten o’clock made it impossible for her to have met him along the River Terrace and made an assignation for later. Kincaid shied away from the feeling of relief that this conclusion brought him, and forced himself to consider the next possibility—that she had met Connor much later and that Trevor Simons had lied to protect her.

So caught up was he in these ruminations that he failed to see the cowpat until he had put his foot in it. Swearing, he wiped his trainer as best he could on the grass. Motive was like that, he mused as he walked on more carefully—sometimes you just couldn’t see it until you fell into it. Hard as he tried, he couldn’t come up with a likely reason why Julia would have wanted to kill Con, nor did he believe that having had one row with him that day, she would have agreed to meet him later in order to have another.

Had that lunchtime argument with Julia been the trigger for Connor’s increasingly odd behavior during the rest of that day? Yet it was only after he had left Kenneth that Con had visibly deviated from an expected pattern. And that brought Kincaid to Kenneth—where had Kenneth been on Thursday evening, and why had asking him about his movements sent him from reluctant cooperation into complete and obstinate withdrawal? As he pictured Kenneth, huddled in his bomber jacket as if it were armor, he remembered the female witness Makepeace had mentioned. “A boy in leather,” she’d said… Kenneth was slightly built and Makepeace had described him as five foot eight or nine. Next to Connor he might easily have been mistaken for a boy. It was certainly a possibility worth pursuing.

The woods enclosed him again as he left Skirmett. He walked in a dim and soundless world, his footfalls absorbed by the leaf mold. Not even birdsong broke the stillness, and when he stopped, staring after a flash of white that might have been a deer bounding away, he could hear the rush of his own blood in his ears.

Kincaid walked on, following the next tendril that shot out from the amoebic mass of speculation—if Connor had driven away from the Red Lion after his scuffle with Tommy Godwin, where had he gone? Sharon Doyle’s face came into his mind—she, like Kenneth, had become belligerent when Kincaid had pushed her about her movements later that evening.

As he came into Turville he looked northwest, toward Northend, up the hill where Badger’s End lay hidden under the dark canopy of the beeches. What had brought Julia back to that house, as if drawn by an unseen umbilical cord?

He stopped at the Northend turning and frowned. Some thread ran through this case that he couldn’t quite grasp—he felt it move away whenever he approached it too closely, like some dark underwater creature always swimming just out of reach.

Nestled among Turville’s cluster of cottages, The Bull and Butcher beckoned, but Kincaid declared himself immune to the temptation of Brakspear’s ales and pushed on into the fields again.

He soon came out onto the road that led to Fingest. The sun had dropped beneath the tops of the trees, and the light slanted through the boles, illuminating dust motes and flickering on his clothes like a faulty film projector.

By the time the now-familiar twin-gabled tower of Fingest church came into view, Kincaid found he had made two decisions. He would ask Thames Valley to pick up Kenneth Hicks, and then they’d see how well Hicks’s bravado held up in an interview room in the local nick.

And he would pay another visit to Sharon Doyle.