Mourn not your Dead

imagined that he might come in when he knew I would be out on a consultation, and tell Malcolm I’d rung and asked him to pick up something. What could Malcolm do?
    “And then, of course, I wondered if my paranoia had reached epic proportions, if I was becoming mentally ill.” She shook her head and gave a strangled laugh. “But I know now that not even my paranoia did justice to Alastair.”
    Her words poured out in a torrent of release, and it seemed to Kincaid that the façade Claire Gilbert had built around herself was cracking before his eyes. Emerging from the splintered shell was the real Claire—frightened, angry, bitter, and no longer the least bit remote.
    “It didn’t occur to him to wonder why I brought home so little money, because he didn’t think my work worth anything. That, of course, was the only reason he tolerated my working at all, and I’m not sure that would have lasted much longer.
    “I have an old school friend in the States, in North Carolina. I thought that when Lucy finished school I’d have enough money put by, and we would just... disappear.”
    “What about Brian?” asked Gemma, sounding as though she’d decided he needed a partisan voice.
    Slowly, Claire said, “Brian would have understood. Things with Alastair had... escalated... in the last year. I was afraid.”
    Gemma sat forwards, her cheeks pink with indignation. “Why didn’t you just leave him? Tell him you wanted a bloody divorce and be done with it?”
    “You still don’t understand, do you? ‘It sounds so easy,’ you’re thinking. ‘No one with half a backbone would put up with that sort of treatment.’ But things never start out that way. It’s a gradual process, like learning a foreign language. One day you wake up and find you’re thinking in Greek, and you hadn’t even realized it. You’ve bought his terms.
    “I believed it when he told me I couldn’t manage on my own. It was only when I started working with Malcolm that I began to see it might not be true.” Claire stopped, her face intent, her eyes focused on something they couldn’t see. “It was the beginning of a sort of resurrection, a rebirth of the person I’d had the potential to become before I married Alastair ten years ago.” She sighed and looked at them again. “But I’d learned enough over the years to try to keep those changes to myself.”
    Softly, Kincaid said, “It didn’t work, did it? You’ve had two broken bones in a little over a year.”
    Claire cradled her right wrist in her left hand, an instinctive, protective gesture. “I suppose he could sense that my center of attention had shifted. I’d ignore the subtle signals that were usually all he needed to manipulate me, until finally he would explode.”
    “Was that the beginning of the violence?”
    She shook her head, and when she spoke her voice was barely audible. “No. That started almost at the beginning, but little things, things he could laugh off. Pinching... shaking. You see, I discovered as soon as we were married—” Claire stopped and rubbed a hand across her mouth. “I don’t know a delicate way to say this. Sexually, he wanted... he only wanted me to be compliant. If I expressed any desires or needs of my own, or even enjoyment, it made him furious—he wouldn’t come near me. So when I began to find him... distasteful, I would pretend to be eager, and he would leave me alone.
    “Do you see? It was a very complicated game, and finally I grew tired of playing. I rejected him outright, and that’s when he began accusing me of having a lover.”
    “Did you?” asked Kincaid.
    “No, not then. But it made the possibility real for me. If I had sinned in fiction, why not in fact?” She smiled, mocking herself. “Somehow it made it easier to justify.”
    Starved, thought Kincaid, remembering the word David Ogilvie had used. Starved for tenderness, starved for affection, in Brian she had found both. But did she count it worth the cost?
    “Claire.” He waited until he had her full attention. “Tell me what happened the night Alastair died.”
    She didn’t answer, didn’t raise her eyes from her clasped hands.
    “Shall I tell you what I think?” Kincaid asked. “Lucy went to the shops in Guildford alone that afternoon. We had a positive identification of her, but no one remembered seeing you. Your husband had told you he had a meeting that evening, but much to your surprise, he walked in only a few minutes past his usual time. He had