Leave the Grave Green

Straightening up in his chair, Kincaid said, “So you’re telling me that Con paid you off, and yet I happen to know that Con was so hard up he couldn’t make the mortgage on the flat. I think you’re lying. I think you said something to Connor over that little social pint at the Fox that sent him over the edge. What was it, Kenneth? Did you threaten to have your boss call out his muscle?” He stood up and leaned forward with his hands on the table.

“I never threatened him. It wasn’t like that,” Hicks squeaked, shrinking away from Kincaid.

“But he did still owe you money?”

Hicks looked at them, sweat beading on his upper lip, and Gemma could see him calculating which way to turn next. Rat in a trap, she thought, and pressed her lips together to conceal her satisfaction. They waited in silence, until finally Hicks said, “Maybe he did. So what? I never threatened him like you said.”

Moving restlessly back and forth in the small space before the table, Kincaid said, “I don’t believe you. Your boss was going to take it out of your skin if you didn’t come up with the ready—I don’t believe you didn’t use a little persuasion.” He smiled at Hicks as he came near him again. “And the trouble with persuasion is that sometimes it gets out of hand. Isn’t that so, Kenneth?”

“No. I don’t know. I mean—”

“Are you saying that it wasn’t an accident? That you intended to kill him?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Hicks swallowed and wiped his hands on his thighs. “I only made him a suggestion, a proposition, like.”

Kincaid stopped pacing and stood very still with his hands in his pockets, watching Hicks. “That sounds very interesting, Kenneth. What sort of proposition?”

Gemma held her breath as Hicks teetered on the edge of confession, afraid any move might nudge him in the wrong direction. Listening to the ragged cadence of his breathing, she offered up a silent little incantation to the god of interviews.

Hicks spoke finally, with the rush of release, and his words were venomous. “I knew about him from the first, him and his hoity-toity Ashertons. You would’ve thought they were the bleedin’ Royals, the way he talked, but I knew better. That Dame Caroline’s just a jumped-up tart, no better than she should be. And all the fuss they made over that kid what drowned, well, he wasn’t even Sir Gerald’s kid, was he, just a bleedin’ little bastard.” Matty. He was talking about Matty, Gemma thought, trying to make sense of it.

Kincaid sat down again, pulling his chair up until he could rest his elbows on the table. “Let’s start over from the beginning, shall we, Kenneth?” he said very quietly, very evenly, and Gemma shivered. “You told Connor that Matthew Asherton was illegitimate, have I got that right?”

Hicks’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his skinny throat as he swallowed and nodded, then looked in appeal at Gemma. He’d got more than he bargained for, she thought, wondering suddenly what Kincaid might have done if she hadn’t been in the room and the tape recorder running.

“How could you possibly know that?” Kincaid asked, still soft as velvet.

“’Cause my uncle Tommy was his bleedin’ dad, that’s how.”

*      *      *

In the silence that followed, Kenneth Hicks’s ragged, adenoidal breathing sounded loud in Gemma’s ears. She opened her mouth, but found she couldn’t quite formulate any words.

“Your uncle Tommy? Do you mean Tommy Godwin?” Kincaid said finally, not quite managing to control his surprise.

Gemma felt as if a giant hand were squeezing her diaphragm. She saw again the silver-framed photograph of Matthew Asherton—the blond hair and the impish grin on his friendly face. She remembered Tommy’s voice as he spoke of Caroline, and she wondered why she had not seen it before.

“I heard him telling me mum about it when the kid drowned,” said Hicks. He must have interpreted the shock in their faces as disbelief, because he added on a rising note of panic, “I swear. I never said nothin’, but after I met Con and he went on about them, I remembered the names.”

Gemma felt a wave of nausea sweep over her as the corollary sank in. “I don’t believe you. You can’t be Tommy Godwin’s nephew, it’s just not possible,” she said hotly, thinking of Tommy’s elegance, and of his courteous patience as she’d taken him through his statement at the Yard, but even as she resisted the idea, she felt again that odd sense of familiarity. Could it be something in the line of the nose, or the set of the jaw?

“You go to Clapham and ask me mum, then. She’ll tell you soon enough—”

“You said you made Connor a proposition,” Kincaid dropped the words into Hicks’s protest like stones in a pool. “Just what was it, exactly?”

Hicks rubbed his nose and sniffed, shifting away from eye contact with them.

“Come on, sunshine, you can tell us all about it,” Kincaid urged him. “Spit it out.”