Mourn not your Dead

looked limp, and her face had gone a funny color. I screamed at him and grabbed him by the shoulders, trying to pull him away.” Lucy stopped and swallowed, as though her mouth were dry, but she didn’t take her eyes from her mother’s face. “He swatted me off like I was a fly and went right back to choking her.
    “I’d left the hammer out on the worktop. I’d been hanging a new piece Geoff had framed for me. I picked it up and hit him—Alastair, I mean. After the second or third time he fell.”
    Lucy swayed slightly. She reached out and rested light fingers on Kincaid’s shoulder, as if the mere human contact were enough to keep her steady. Her mother watched her, transfixed, powerless to stop her now.
    “I don’t remember much after that. When Mummy could breathe again, she made me strip off my clothes and my trainers. We put them in the washer with some other dirty things and some enzyme liquid—you know, the sort of stuff that takes the bloodstains out. She told me to dip my hands in it, too, before I went upstairs for clean clothes.
    “When I came down again, the hammer was gone. She told me we’d say we’d found the door open, and some of her jewelry missing. When the washer finished its cycle we put the clothes in the dryer, then she called the police.”
    “She’s a child,” Claire said, looking at Gemma, then Kincaid. “She can’t be held responsible for this.”
    Lucy’s fingers tightened on Kincaid’s shoulder. “I’m seventeen, Mum. I’m legally an adult. I don’t think I meant to kill Alastair. But the fact is that I did.”
    Claire put her face in her hands and sobbed.
    Lucy went to her mother and put her arms around her, but she looked at Kincaid as she spoke. “I tried not to think about it, to pretend it hadn’t happened. But that’s what I’d done for years. I knew about Alastair, and Mummy knew I knew, but we didn’t talk about it. Maybe none of this would have happened if we had.”
    “Sir.” Gemma’s whisper was urgently formal. “I’d like a word with you.” She nodded towards the door, and they left mother and daughter together as they rose and went into the hall.
    “How can we let her do this?” she hissed at him when they’d closed the sitting room door behind them. “Gilbert was a beast. She only did what anyone might have done in the circumstances, but this will ruin her life. She’s paying for Claire’s mistakes.”
    Kincaid took her by the shoulders. He loved her then, for her prickly defense of the underdog, for her generous spirit, for her readiness to question the status quo, but he couldn’t tell her.
    Instead, he said, “I thought the same thing, when I realized what had happened. But Lucy’s right, and she’s taken it out of our hands. We have to let her make her reparation. It’s the only way she’ll be able to live with herself.”
    He let her go and leaned against the wall, tiredly. “And we can’t compromise ourselves, not even for Lucy. We swore to uphold the law, not to pass sentence, and we dare not cross that line, no matter how good our intentions. I don’t want Lucy to suffer any more than you do, but we have no choice. We must charge her.”
     

Seventeen
     
    LEAVING GEMMA WITH CLAIRE, KINCAID HAD TAKEN LUCY into the station himself. Having changed into jeans and sweater and said a brief good-bye to Lewis, she sat quietly resolute beside him.
    “I’ve been thinking,” she said as they came into the outskirts of Guildford, “that maybe now I can finish the game.” She’d looked at him and seemed to hesitate. “You know,” she said slowly, “if you’d been more like him, it would have been much easier to go on pretending, not facing up to things. But you remind me a bit of my dad.” And having given him the highest compliment in her vocabulary, she administered the coup de grace. “Will you come and visit me, wherever I am?”
    Now, having taken on, not unwillingly, an obligation of honor to Lucy, he had given her into the capable hands of Nick Deveney and her family solicitor. He doubted a jury would do more than slap her wrist—abused women had been known to get probation for shooting their sleeping husbands—or the Crown Prosecution Service might throw it out altogether. Her toughest battle would be with herself, but she would have the support of those who cared for her, he felt sure.
    As he drove the winding road to Holmbury St. Mary to pick up Gemma, he couldn’t shake the aching, persistent sadness