“And Malcolm. I never told Malcolm the whole truth about Alastair, only as much as I could bear. I said I was tired of being condescended to, of being treated like a chattel, and Malcolm helped me any way he could. I was so careful not to take that bankbook home. I even hid it away in a secret place in the shop, in case Alastair managed somehow to search my desk. He was very plausible when he wished it, you know. I imagined that he might come in when he knew I would be out on a consultation, and tell Malcolm I’d rung and asked him to pick up something. What could Malcolm do?
“And then, of course, I wondered if my paranoia had reached epic proportions, if I was becoming mentally ill.” She shook her head and gave a strangled laugh. “But I know now that not even my paranoia did justice to Alastair.”
Her words poured out in a torrent of release, and it seemed to Kincaid that the façade Claire Gilbert had built around herself was cracking before his eyes. Emerging from the splintered shell was the real Claire—frightened, angry, bitter, and no longer the least bit remote.
“It didn’t occur to him to wonder why I brought home so little money, because he didn’t think my work worth anything. That, of course, was the only reason he tolerated my working at all, and I’m not sure that would have lasted much longer.
“I have an old school friend in the States, in North Carolina. I thought that when Lucy finished school I’d have enough money put by, and we would just… disappear.”
“What about Brian?” asked Gemma, sounding as though she’d decided he needed a partisan voice.
Slowly, Claire said, “Brian would have understood. Things with Alastair had … escalated … in the last year. I was afraid.”
Gemma sat forwards, her cheeks pink with indignation. “Why didn’t you just leave him? Tell him you wanted a bloody divorce and be done with it?”
“You still don’t understand, do you? ‘It sounds so easy,’ you’re thinking. ‘No one with half a backbone would put up with that sort of treatment.’ But things never start out that way. It’s a gradual process, like learning a foreign language. One day you wake up and find you’re thinking in Greek, and you hadn’t even realized it. You’ve bought his terms.
“I believed it when he told me I couldn’t manage on my own. It was only when I started working with Malcolm that I began to see it might not be true.” Claire stopped, her face intent, her eyes focused on something they couldn’t see. “It was the beginning of a sort of resurrection, a rebirth of the person I’d had the potential to become before I married Alastair ten years ago.” She sighed and looked at them again. “But I’d learned enough over the years to try to keep those changes to myself.”
Softly, Kincaid said, “It didn’t work, did it? You’ve had two broken bones in a little over a year.”
Claire cradled her right wrist in her left hand, an instinctive, protective gesture. “I suppose he could sense that my center of attention had shifted. I’d ignore the subtle signals that were usually all he needed to manipulate me, until finally he would explode.”
“Was that the beginning of the violence?”
She shook her head, and when she spoke her voice was barely audible. “No. That started almost at the beginning, but little things, things he could laugh off. Pinching … shaking. You see, I discovered as soon as we were married—” Claire stopped and rubbed a hand across her mouth. “I don’t know a delicate way to say this. Sexually, he wanted … he only wanted me to be compliant. If I expressed any desires or needs of my own, or even enjoyment, it made him furious—he wouldn’t come near me. So when I began to find him … distasteful, I would pretend to be eager, and he would leave me alone.
“Do you see? It was a very complicated game, and finally I grew tired of playing. I rejected him outright, and that’s when he began accusing me of having a lover.”
“Did you?” asked Kincaid.
“No, not then. But it made the possibility real for me. If I had sinned in fiction, why not in fact?” She smiled, mocking herself. “Somehow it made it easier to justify.”
Starved, thought Kincaid, remembering the word David Ogilvie had used. Starved for tenderness, starved for affection, in Brian she had found both. But did she count it worth the cost?
“Claire.” He waited until he had her full attention. “Tell me what happened the night Alastair died.”
She didn’t answer, didn’t raise her eyes from her clasped hands.
“Shall I tell you what I think?” Kincaid asked. “Lucy went to the shops in Guildford alone that afternoon. We had a positive identification of her, but no one remembered seeing you. Your husband had told you he had a meeting that evening, but much to your surprise, he walked in only a few minutes past his usual time. He had just met Ogilvie at the Dorking train station, and Ogilvie had told him about your secret bank account.
“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?