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.
