Mourn Not Your Dead (32 page)

“And the nature of the activities in which you were involved?”

“That as well.”

“Jackie Temple believed you were taking protection money from the big-time drug dealers. Is that why you had her killed?”

“I told you before. I had nothing to do with PC Temple’s death, and that’s all I intend to say on the matter.” Ogilvie’s mouth was set in a stubborn line.

Deveney moved restively in his chair. “Tell us about the day Commander Gilbert died,” he said. “What happened after you went to the bank?”

“The bank?” Ogilvie repeated, sounding unsure of himself for the first time.

Sweat, goddammit, thought Kincaid, and smiled at him. “The bank. The bank where you conned the manager into letting you see Claire’s file.”

“How in bloody hell …” Ogilvie shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, I suppose.” He sipped at his water again and seemed to collect himself before continuing. “The problem with following Claire was that I couldn’t take a chance on her recognizing me, so I could never get too close. I’d seen her make stops at that bank several times, and I knew they did their personal banking at the Midlands in Guildford. For all I knew she was simply running errands for Gilbert’s mother, but I noticed that she always came from work and returned there, and that made me wonder. By that time the game had grown a bit stale, and I was intrigued.

“Oh, it was a game at first, I admit, a chance to use old skills, feel the edge of things again. And it was a challenge—give Alastair enough to keep him off my back, yet not enough to compromise Claire too badly. He should have blackmailed a less biased snoop.”

Deveney rubbed one thumb with the other. “I should think you’d have relished the opportunity to get even with her, after she threw you over for him.”

“And satisfy bloody Alastair Gilbert in the process? He
wanted
me to tell him his wife was cheating on him. He seemed to get some sort of perverse satisfaction out of it.”

Kincaid leaned forwards. “Was she?”

“I don’t intend to tell you that, either. What Claire did was her business.”

“But you told Gilbert about the bank account.”

“It seemed harmless enough. I called him that afternoon, told him I wanted to talk to him and that I’d meet his train in Dorking. I gave him the information and told him I was finished. In months of watching Claire, that was the only thing
I’d come up with, and for all I knew she was saving up to buy him a bloody birthday present. I’d had enough.”

“And that was that?” Kincaid raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“He agreed,” said Ogilvie, his eyes shuttered.

Kincaid leaned forwards and thumped his fist on the table. “Bollocks! Gilbert would never have agreed. I know that for a fact, and I didn’t know him half as well as you. I think he laughed at you, told you he’d never let you off. And you believed him, didn’t you?” Kincaid sat back again and stared at Ogilvie, playing out the scenario in his head. “I think you followed him home from Dorking that evening, hoping for an opportunity. You left your car in the pub car park, where it would be unremarkable, or up at the end of the lane. You rang the doorbell and made an excuse, told him there was something you’d forgotten to mention, while you saw that no one else was home.

“And I think it was
you
Gilbert underestimated. He turned his back on you, and that was the end of it.”

The silence in the room grew thick. Kincaid imagined he heard their hearts beating in opposition and the sound of the blood pumping through their veins. Sweat stood out now on Ogilvie’s brow, glistening like oil.

Ogilvie moved, wiping his hand across his face impatiently. “No. I did not kill Alastair Gilbert. And I can prove it. I drove straight back to London, as I had an evening appointment with a painter to discuss the decorating of my flat.” He smiled. “An alibi from an unbiased witness, Superintendent. You’ll find it stands up.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Deveney. “Anyone is susceptible to a payoff. As you should know.”

“A dirty blow,” said Ogilvie. “Touché, Chief Inspector. But if we’re trading points here, I must say that in my old nick we at least gave the accused a cup of coffee. Do you think you could manage that?”

Deveney glanced at Kincaid, grimaced. “I suppose so.” He
spoke into the tape recorder, giving the time and noting that they would take a brief recess, then switched it off.

When the door had closed behind him, Ogilvie gave Kincaid a considering look. “Off the record, Superintendent?”

“I can’t promise that.”

Ogilvie shrugged. “I’m not about to make a grand confession. I have nothing to confess, except that I’m tired.
You
seem like a sensible man. Let me give you a bit of advice, Duncan. It’s Duncan, isn’t it?” When Kincaid nodded, he went on. “Don’t let bitterness damage your judgment. I should have had Gilbert’s job. I was the better qualified, but he was better at sucking up to the powers that be, and he sabotaged me.

“After that I started to feel I deserved more, that the system owed it to me, and that was how I excused the little infractions. Then you begin to justify it in other ways—the stuff goes on no matter what we do, you say, so why not benefit from it?” Ogilvie paused and drained his water glass, then wiped his mouth. “After a while it wears on you, though, like a sickness. I knew I needed to get out, but I kept putting it off. I never meant for anyone to get hurt. That constable—how is he?”

“They say he’s in surgery, but it sounds as though he’ll be all right.” How easy it was to fall from grace by increments. Kincaid looked at Ogilvie, wished he’d met him a dozen years ago, untarnished. “But that doesn’t excuse what you did. And Jackie Temple—you may not have ordered her death, but she was killed because she asked questions about you. In my book that makes you guilty as hell.”

Ogilvie met his eyes. “I’ll have to live with that, won’t I?”

No matter how hard they tried to make the waiting room look comfortable and homelike, they couldn’t disguise a hospital. The smell crept under the doors and through the ventilation system, as pervasive as smoke. Gemma sat alone in the corner of the sofa, waiting. She felt very odd. Time seemed
fluid, erratically arbitrary Her eyes trained on the pattern in the wallpaper, she heard the gunshot and saw Will fall, again and again, as if a film were looping inside her head.

She remembered a kind-faced sister ordering her down to the cafeteria for a supper she hadn’t been able to eat, but she had no idea how long ago that had been. Surely Will must be out of the theater soon, and someone would come.

Her trousers were splattered with mud and streaked with blood across the knees and thighs. Still huddled in Kincaid’s anorak, she was grateful for its warmth, but she kept fingering the stiff, stained cuffs, a voice in her head repeating
Will’s blood, Will’s blood
, like an incantation.

Her head jerked up. Had she been asleep? The voices and footsteps were real; she hadn’t been dreaming. She stood up, her heart racing, as Kincaid and Nick Deveney came through the door.

“Gemma, are you all right?” Kincaid asked. “It’s not bad news about Will, is it?”

Weak-kneed, she sat again, and Kincaid took the chair beside her. She shook her head. “No. It’s just… I thought it must be the doctor…. Sorry. You didn’t see anyone as you came in?”

“No, love.” Kincaid glanced around the empty room. “Doesn’t Will have family?”

“He told me his parents died,” said Gemma.

Deveney made a face. “He won’t have told you how.” When Gemma and Kincaid looked at him expectantly, he sighed and examined his fingernails. “They were devoted to each other, his parents. And to Will. They took it hard when he was posted to Ulster. Just after Will came home his mum was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and a few months later, his dad with terminal cancer.

“His dad shot his mother, then himself. Will found them, curled up on the bed like lovers.” Deveney cleared his throat and looked away.

Kincaid said, “Oh, Christ,” but Gemma found herself unable to speak at all. Poor Will. And now this. It wasn’t fair. The door opened and her heart jerked again. This time she couldn’t stand.

The doctor still wore his pale green scrubs, and he’d pulled his mask down below his chin like a bib. Tubby and balding, with spectacles that glinted in the light, he smiled at them. “It was quite a job patching your boy up. He lost a lot of blood, but I think we’ve got him stabilized. I’m afraid it will be tomorrow before you can see him.”

The wave of weakness that washed through her made Gemma feel faint. She let Kincaid and Deveney thank the doctor and guide her, unresisting, towards the hall.

“Ogilvie’s solicitor showed up,” Deveney said to Gemma as they walked. “Slick as an American politician, and probably as rich. He shut Ogilvie up in a hurry, but we’ll get him for this. And for Gilbert, no matter what he says about an alibi.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Kincaid said slowly, and they stopped, looking at him. “You remember, Nick, Ogilvie saying that Gilbert underestimated Claire? I think perhaps we have, too.”

Gemma woke before daybreak. For a moment she felt disoriented, and then the patch of light beside the strange bed solidified into a net-curtained window, lit by a street lamp. The hotel on the High Street in Guildford, of course. The events of the previous day began to click into place. Will, lying in hospital. David Ogilvie had shot him.

She lay in bed, watching the window pale to pearl gray. Getting up, she washed, then dressed in the change of clothes she carried in her bag. Slipping a note under Kincaid’s door, she left the hotel and started walking down the High towards the bus station. No cars passed, no pedestrians peered into the windows of the shut-up shops, and Gemma felt eerily alone, as though she were the last person in the world.

Then she passed a greengrocer’s van unloading, and the driver called out a cheerful greeting. Turning into Friary Street, she looked up and saw a brilliant rose stain spreading across the sky from the east. Her spirits lifted, her step quickened, and soon she reached the station and found a taxi to take her across the mist-shrouded river and up the hill to the hospital.

“You’re too early, love,” the sister said kindly. “We haven’t finished our morning routine yet. Just have a seat and I’ll fetch you when you can see him. Or better yet, go downstairs and get yourself some breakfast.”

Gemma hadn’t realized until the sister spoke that she was starving. She took the advice, eating bacon and eggs and fried bread without a twinge of guilt, and when she went back upstairs the sister took her into the ward. “Not too long, now,” the sister cautioned. “He’s lost quite a bit of blood, and he’ll tire easily.”

Will’s bed stood at the end of the ward, the curtains half drawn. He appeared to be asleep, pale and vulnerable beneath the white sheet. Slipping quietly into the chair beside the bed, Gemma found herself feeling unexpectedly awkward.

He opened his eyes and smiled at her. “Gemma.”

“How are you feeling, Will?”

“I’ll not be able to get through airport security without a medical card—they put a pin in my leg.” The smile widened almost to a grin, then he sobered. “They haven’t let anyone tell me anything. That was Ogilvie, wasn’t it, Gemma? Will they get him for Gilbert and your friend, too?”

“I don’t know. They’re checking his statement now.”

“Is Claire all right?” He shook his head in admiration. “Wasn’t she a cracker, the way she stood up to him?”

“You were the brave one, Will. I’m glad you’re all right. I should have—”

“Gemma.” He raised his hand from the sheet to halt her. “Bits of last night are fuzzy, but I remember what you did. The doctor said you saved my life.”

“Will, I only—”

“Don’t argue. I owe you, and I won’t forget it. Now, tell me everything from the beginning, blow by blow.”

She hadn’t reached his own part in the drama when his eyelids drooped, fluttered, drooped again. Leaning over, she kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll be back, Will.”

“How is he?” Kincaid asked as they left Guildford Police Station. Gemma had met him there after her visit to hospital, looking considerably brighter than the evening before. For a
moment he felt jealous of her concern for Will, then he chided himself for such small-mindedness, wondering if he were not compensating for his own sense of failure.

“Game enough, even if a bit thin around the edges,” answered Gemma, smiling. “But the sister told me afterwards it’ll be a slow job, mending that leg.”

“You mean to visit him,” Kincaid said as he opened the Rover’s door, making every effort to sound casually unconcerned.

“As often as I can”—she glanced at him as she buckled herself into the passenger seat—“once this case is finished.”

Ogilvie’s painter had been found and interviewed first thing that morning, and he had, indeed, confirmed Ogilvie’s alibi. Deveney was now digging with bulldog determination, trying to find a hole in the man’s story or a connection between the two men. A second futile search of Gilbert’s study had been made after Ogilvie had been taken into custody, and they could only hope that C&D would have better luck turning up Gilbert’s evidence of Ogilvie’s corruption.

As if aware of his thoughts, Gemma said, “You believe Ogilvie, don’t you, guv?” as they swung around the roundabout and headed towards Holmbury St. Mary. “Why?”

Shrugging, Kincaid said, “I’m not sure I know.” Then he grinned at her. “The infamous gut feeling. Seriously … he lied about some things, and I could tell. Gilbert’s response when he told him he’d not do his dirty work anymore, for instance. But I don’t think he’s lying about Gilbert or Jackie.”

“Even if you’re right about that, and I don’t grant it to you, why Claire?”

He thought he heard a trace of resentment in her voice. Sighing, he thought he couldn’t blame her. He liked Claire Gilbert, too—admired her, even. And maybe, just maybe, he was wrong. “In the first place, there’s no physical evidence to place him there—not a hair nor a fiber in that kitchen.

“Then think about everything we’ve learned about Alastair
Gilbert. He was a jealous and vindictive man with a megalomaniac’s thirst for power. He enjoyed inflicting pain on others, whether physical or emotional. Who would have borne the brunt of it?” He glanced at Gemma’s profile, then said emphatically, “His wife. I’ve always said this murder was committed in rage, and I think Claire Gilbert hated her husband.”