The door opened and Lucy came in, shutting it carefully behind her. In her green dress, with her dark-honey hair sleep tangled and her feet bare, she looked like a wood nymph.
“I’ve been listening,” she said as she came to stand beside Kincaid, facing her mother. “And it’s not true. Mummy didn’t kill Alastair. I did.”
“Lucy, no!” Claire started to rise. “Stop it this minute. Go to your room.”
Gemma put out a restraining hand, and Claire sank back to the edge of the sofa, looking up at her daughter. When Lucy stood implacable beside Kincaid, Claire turned to him, hands outstretched in entreaty. “Don’t pay her any attention. She’s upset, distraught. She’s just trying to protect me.”
“It happened just the way she said,” Lucy continued. “Except that I came home from Guildford. I wondered why Alastair’s car was in the garage when Mummy had said he’d be late and why the mudroom door wasn’t quite shut.
“They didn’t hear me come in. He had his hands around her neck and he was shouting at her in a sort of hoarse whisper. His face was red and the veins on his neck were standing out. I thought she was dead, at first. She looked limp, and her face had gone a funny color. I screamed at him and grabbed him by the shoulders, trying to pull him away.” Lucy stopped and swallowed, as though her mouth were dry, but she didn’t take her eyes from her mother’s face. “He swatted me off like I was a fly and went right back to choking her.
“I’d left the hammer out on the worktop. I’d been hanging a new piece Geoff had framed for me. I picked it up and hit him—Alastair, I mean. After the second or third time he fell.”
Lucy swayed slightly. She reached out and rested light fingers on Kincaid’s shoulder, as if the mere human contact were enough to keep her steady. Her mother watched her, transfixed, powerless to stop her now.
“I don’t remember much after that. When Mummy could breathe again, she made me strip off my clothes and my trainers. We put them in the washer with some other dirty things and some enzyme liquid—you know, the sort of stuff that takes the bloodstains out. She told me to dip my hands in it, too, before I went upstairs for clean clothes.
“When I came down again, the hammer was gone. She told me we’d say we’d found the door open, and some of her jewelry missing. When the washer finished its cycle we put the clothes in the dryer, then she called the police.”
“She’s a child,” Claire said, looking at Gemma, then Kincaid. “She can’t be held responsible for this.”
Lucy’s fingers tightened on Kincaid’s shoulder. “I’m seventeen, Mum. I’m legally an adult. I don’t think I meant to kill Alastair. But the fact is that I did.”
Claire put her face in her hands and sobbed.
Lucy went to her mother and put her arms around her, but she looked at Kincaid as she spoke. “I tried not to think about it, to pretend it hadn’t happened. But that’s what I’d done for years. I knew about Alastair, and Mummy knew I knew, but we didn’t talk about it. Maybe none of this would have happened if we had.”
“Sir.” Gemma’s whisper was urgently formal. “I’d like a word with you.” She nodded towards the door, and they left mother and daughter together as they rose and went into the hall.
“How can we let her do this?” she hissed at him when they’d closed the sitting room door behind them. “Gilbert was a beast. She only did what anyone might have done in the circumstances, but this will ruin her life. She’s paying for Claire’s mistakes.”
Kincaid took her by the shoulders. He loved her then, for her prickly defense of the underdog, for her generous spirit, for her readiness to question the status quo, but he couldn’t tell her.
Instead, he said, “I thought the same thing, when I realized what had happened. But Lucy’s right, and she’s taken it out of our hands. We have to let her make her reparation. It’s the only way she’ll be able to live with herself.”
He let her go and leaned against the wall, tiredly. “And we can’t compromise ourselves, not even for Lucy. We swore to uphold the law, not to pass sentence, and we dare not cross that line, no matter how good our intentions. I don’t want Lucy to suffer any more than you do, but we have no choice. We must charge her.”
CHAPTER
17
Leaving Gemma with Claire, Kincaid had taken Lucy into the station himself Having changed into jeans and sweater and said a brief good-bye to Lewis, she sat quietly resolute beside him.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said as they came into the outskirts of Guildford, “that maybe now I can finish the game.” She’d looked at him and seemed to hesitate. “You know,” she said slowly, “if you’d been more like him, it would have been much easier to go on pretending, not facing up to things. But you remind me a bit of my dad.” And having given him the highest compliment in her vocabulary, she administered the coup de grace. “Will you come and visit me, wherever I am?”
Now, having taken on, not unwillingly, an obligation of honor to Lucy, he had given her into the capable hands of Nick Deveney and her family solicitor. He doubted a jury would do more than slap her wrist—abused women had been known to get probation for shooting their sleeping husbands—or the Crown Prosecution Service might throw it out altogether. Her toughest battle would be with herself, but she would have the support of those who cared for her, he felt sure.
As he drove the winding road to Holmbury St. Mary to pick up Gemma, he couldn’t shake the aching, persistent sadness lodged under his breastbone. It was all mixed up together—his regret for Lucy, for Claire, even for David Ogilvie.
And Gemma. The thought of working with her every day, of being so close and yet not close enough, was like rubbing salt in a wound. But the alternative, not seeing her at all … He thought of David Ogilvie’s admonition against bitterness, and knew that for a path he would not allow himself to follow.
A recklessness possessed him as he thought of the way he’d lived for so long, isolated behind walls of his own making. He wouldn’t give up on Gemma, nor would he go back to what he had been before he took her into his bed.
As he reached the green, he had a sudden desire to see Madeleine Wade one last time. He passed the Gilberts’ lane and drove through the village, turning into the street that led up the hill to Madeleine’s shop, and past that, the Hurtwood.
He saw from the window that Madeleine presided over the shop counter herself, and he felt a pang of disappointment that he would not see her flat again. She looked up as the bell jangled, said, “I’m so sorry.”
“The news has traveled already, I take it?”
“Like the proverbial wildfire.”
“I came to say good-bye.”
She came around the counter and held out her hand to him. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Lucy. She’s strong, and she’ll manage to be what she wants to be.”
“I know.” Her fingers felt warm in his grasp. “You could give her a lesson or two.”
Madeleine smiled. “I might just do that.”
He drove with such precision, thought Gemma, watching his absorbed face in the flickering light of the street lamps. It seemed to her that they were always coming and going together in cars, while their lives remained stuck in a sort of limbo between journeys.
She’d spent the quiet hours of the afternoon with Claire, sitting at the kitchen table drinking endless cups of weak tea, talking mostly of inconsequential things. Once, though, Claire had looked up from the dregs in her cup and said, “I’ll be charged, too, won’t I, as an accessory after the fact?”
Gemma nodded. “I’m afraid so. They’ll be sending someone for you from Guildford Station.”