Kissed a Sad Goodbye

sharply.
    “Then why did he tell Annabelle he would preserve the Hammond’s warehouse if she sold it to him, when all along he meant to tear it down?”
    “Tear it down?” he repeated, frowning.
    “She didn’t tell you? She must have been terribly angry with him.”
    “She said...” He looked down as if surprised at the clarinet case he continued to hold in his right hand, then he knelt and set it carefully by the music stand. “She said something about loyalties that no longer mattered. I’d heard rumors, back in the spring, about Lewis’s interest in the warehouse, and that they’d been seen together a good bit. But when I asked her about it, she denied either a business interest or an affair.” He looked up and met Gemma’s eyes. “So I followed her. She spent the night at his flat. When I confronted her with it, she never even tried to justify herself. She said I wouldn’t understand.... And then she let me walk away.”
    “But you didn’t stop loving her.”
    Gordon rose, his hands looking awkw'ardly empty. “No.”
    “And that night, she told you she loved you. She wanted to work things out. In the video in the tunnel, she was pleading.”
    “She said... she said she’d realized that she’d thrown away what mattered to her most... but that my being there meant it wasn’t too late—we could still work things out, if we loved each other.”
    Gemma sensed Kincaid move restlessly behind her, but he didn’t speak. “You turned her away,” she said softly, not taking her eyes from Gordon. “You didn’t believe her.” She heard her words fall flat as stones in a pool, and as she looked at Gordon Finch she thought the desolation on his face far worse than weeping. “There was something else, wasn’t there? What else did she say, Gordon?”
    When he didn’t speak, she said it for him. “She said she meant to prove it, didn’t she? In the video, I saw her turn back for a last word, and she was still angry, defiant even. She meant to prove she loved you.”
     
    “IT LOOKS LIKE LEWIS FINCH, DOESN’T IT?” Gemma felt no sense of elation at the prospect. For Gordon to have to face the guilt of a father he obviously cared for more than he admitted was bad enough, but she herself had liked and admired Lewis Finch.
    “It wasn’t her engagement she said she was going to break off when she rang him that night,” Kincaid said as he eased the Rover into the northbound traffic on East Ferry Road. “It was their deal. That’s why he sounded angry in the message he left on her answering machine.”
    “And not just the deal, but her relationship with him as well—how could she keep seeing him after what she’d learned?”
    “It sounds as though she was using Lewis from the beginning—”
    “As he was using her.” Gemma glanced up at the high banks of the Mudchute to the right as they passed, and on the left the sun glinted off the water of Millwall Dock. “But that doesn’t solve the problem of where and how they met that night, or how Lewis Finch could have got her body into the park.”
    “Or his motive,” Kincaid mused. “It seems apparent why Annabelle was willing to defy her father’s wishes in selling the warehouse. The business was more important to her than anything, and if she believed that was the only way she could keep it afloat—”
    “But why was Lewis Finch willing to pay any price for the property? And why was he determined to tear it down once he had it, a contradiction of everything he believes in?”
    “Did he think killing Annabelle would stop the sale from falling through?” Kincaid asked.
    “He couldn’t have been sure what would happen.” Gemma frowned and glanced at her watch. “Do you want to try to catch him at his office? He said he’s usually out on site in the afternoons.”
    Kincaid drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited for a light to change. “No. Not until we have enough to nail him. We’ll ask Janice to have a discreet word with his neighbors, see if they noticed any unusual comings and goings.”
    “So what do we do in the meantime?” asked Gemma, a little surprised, but conceding the logic of his approach.
    “The reason we can’t make sense of Lewis Finch’s behavior is because we haven’t got at the root of it,” Kincaid said slowly. “And I think that root lies in the past—I can’t believe it’s mere coincidence that William Hammond and Lewis Finch knew each other during the war, or that Annabelle