Mourn not your Dead

“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.”
     

Sixteen
     
    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