This time she smiled and he gave an inward sigh of relief. Searching for a change of subject, he said, “Tell me about Tommy Godwin.” Just then his breakfast arrived, and he tucked into eggs and bacon while Gemma gave him a brief recounting of her interview.
“I took a statement, and I’ve had the forensics lads go over his flat and car.”
“I saw Sharon Doyle again, and Trevor Simons,” he said through a mouthful of toast. “And Julia. Connor went home again after his scuffle with Tommy, Gemma. It looks as though Tommy Godwin’s out of the frame unless we can prove he met Con again later. He did ring someone from the flat, though-problem is, we’ve no earthly idea who it was.”
Julia. There had been a familiarity, an unconscious intimacy, in the way Kincaid said her name. Gemma tried to concentrate on her driving, tried to ignore the certainty that was growing in the pit of her stomach. Surely she was imagining things? And what if it were true? Why should it matter so much to her if Duncan Kincaid had formed a less-than-professional relationship with a suspect in a murder investigation? It was common enough-she’d seen it happen with other officers-and she’d never thought he was infallible. Had she?
“Grow up, Gemma,” she said under her breath. He was human, and male, and she should never have forgotten that even gods sometimes have feet of clay. But those reminders made her feel no less miserable, and she was thankful when the High Wycombe roundabouts claimed all her attention.
“I’ve had Hicks warming up nicely for you the last half-hour,” Jack Makepeace said in greeting when they found him in his office. He shook their hands, and Gemma thought he gave hers an extra little squeeze. “Thought it would do him a world of good. Too bad he didn’t quite manage to finish his breakfast.” Makepeace winked at Gemma. “He’s made his phone call-his mum, or so he says-but the cavalry’s not come to the rescue.”
Having been briefed earlier on the telephone by Makepeace, Kincaid had brought Gemma up to date in the car and suggested that she begin the interview. “He doesn’t care for women,” Kincaid said as Makepeace left them at the nondescript door of Room A. “I want you to upset his balance a bit, prime him for me.”
One interview room seldom differed much from another-they could be expected to meet some variation of small and square, and to smell of stale cigarette smoke and human sweat, but when Gemma entered the room she swallowed convulsively, fighting the instinctive urge to cover her nose. Unshaven and all too obviously unbathed, Kenneth Hicks reeked of fear.
“Christ,” Kincaid muttered in Gemma’s ear as he came in behind her. “We should’ve brought masks.” He coughed, then added at full volume as he pulled out a chair for Gemma, “Hullo, Kenneth. Like the accommodations? Not quite up to the Hilton, I’m afraid, but then what can you do?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Hicks said succinctly. His voice was nasal, and Gemma pegged his accent as South London.
Kincaid shook his head as he sat down beside Gemma, facing Hicks across the narrow laminated table. “I’m disappointed in you, Kenneth. I thought you had better manners. We’ll just record our little conversation,” he said, pushing the switch on the tape recorder. “If you don’t mind, of course. You don’t mind, do you, Kenneth?”
Gemma studied Kenneth Hicks while Kincaid nattered pleasantly on and fiddled with the recorder. Hicks’s narrow, acne-spotted face seemed permanently stamped with a surly expression. In spite of the warmth of the room, he had kept on a black leather bomber jacket, and he rubbed nervously at his nose and chin as Kincaid’s patter continued. There seemed something vaguely familiar about him, and Gemma frowned with frustration as it hovered on the fringe of her mind.
“Sergeant James will be asking you a few questions,” Kincaid said, pushing his chair back from the table a bit. He folded his arms and stretched out his legs, as if he might catnap through the interview.
“Kenneth,” she said pleasantly, when they had completed the recorded preliminaries, “why don’t you make it easy for everyone and tell us exactly what you were doing the night Connor Swann was killed?”
Hicks darted a glance at Kincaid. “I already told the other bloke, the one as brought me in here. Big ginger-haired berk.”
“You told Sergeant Makepeace that you were drinking with friends at the Fox and Hounds in Henley until closing, after which you continued the party in the friends’ flat,” said Gemma, and the sound of her voice brought Hicks’s eyes back to her. “Is that right?” she added a little more forcefully.
“Yeah, that’s right. That’s just like I told him.” Hicks seemed to gain a little confidence from her recital. He relaxed in his chair and stared at Gemma, letting his eyes rest for a long moment on her breasts.
She smiled sweetly at him and made a show of consulting her notebook. “Thames Valley CID took statements last night from the friends you named, Kenneth, and unfortunately none of them seems to remember you being there at all.”
Hicks’s skin turned the color of the room’s nicotine-stained walls as the blood drained from his face. “I’ll kill ’em, the friggin’ little shits. They’re lying their bloody heads off.” He looked from Gemma to Kincaid, and, apparently finding no reassurance in their expressions, said a little more frantically, “You can’t do me for this. I never saw Con after we had that drink at the Fox. I swear I didn’t.”
Gemma flipped another page in her notebook. “You may have to, unless you can come up with a little better accounting of your movements after half-past ten. Connor made a telephone call from his flat around then, and afterward said he meant to go out.”
“Who says he did?” asked Hicks, with more shrewdness than Gemma had credited him.
“Never mind that. Do you want to know what I think, Kenneth?” Gemma asked, leaning toward him and lowering her voice confidentially. “I think Connor rang you and asked you to meet him at the lock. You argued and Connor fell in. It could happen to anybody, couldn’t it, Ken? Did you try to help him, or were you afraid of the water?” Her tone said she understood and would forgive him anything.
“I never!” Hicks pushed his chair back from the table. “That’s a bleedin’ lie. And how the bleedin’ hell am I supposed to have got there without a car?”
“Connor picked you up in his car,” Gemma said reasonably, “and afterward you hitched a ride back to Henley.”
“I didn’t, I tell you, and you can’t prove I did.”
Unfortunately, Gemma knew from Thames Valley’s reports that he was correct-Connor’s car had been freshly washed and vacuumed and forensics had found no significant traces. “Then where were you? Tell the truth this time.”
“I’ve told you already. I was at the Fox, then at this bloke’s. Jackie-he’s called Jackie Fawcett.”
Kincaid recrossed his ankles lazily and spoke for the first time since Gemma had begun. “Then why wouldn’t your mates give you a nice, tidy alibi, Kenneth? I can see two possibilities-the first is that you’re lying, and the second is that they don’t like you, and I must say I don’t know which I think is the more likely. Did you help out other friends the same way you helped Connor?”
“Don’t know what you’re on about.” Hicks pulled a battered cigarette pack from the pocket of his jacket. He shook it, then probed inside it with thumb and forefinger before crumpling it in disgust.
Gemma took up the thread again. “That’s what you argued about, isn’t it, Kenneth? When you met Con after lunch, did you tell him he had to pay up? Did he agree to meet you later that evening? Then when he turned up without the money, you fought with him,” she embroidered as she went along.
An element of pleading crept into Hicks’s voice. “He didn’t owe me nothin’, I told you.” He kept his eyes fixed anxiously on Kincaid, and Gemma wondered what Kincaid had done to put the wind up him like that.