Second Shot

Rosalind shook her head. “It wasn’t like that,” she said, softly bitter. “He started to gather up a few essentials, waiting for Pam to get home. He heard something upstairs and, when he went up to see, he found Lucas coming out of Simone’s bedroom, carrying the child. She was terrified.”

Rosalind paused again as we made another turn, each junction bringing us onto a larger road, heading towards the middle of North Conway. It was snowing harder now, big flakes that rushed towards the beams of the headlights like distant stars. The luxury of the Range Rover closed out the elements, separating us. We crossed a series of bridges over frozen water, the ice showing a dull gray between the pale snow of the banks.

“So he killed him,” I said again. “How?”

She flicked me a fast glance and the tail of it cracked like a whip. “Lucas attacked him,” she said, dogged, her speech becoming jerky, staccato. “Greg just defended himself, as best he could. Lucas was a trained killer, for God’s sake, and Greg didn’t want Simone to get hurt. They struggled. It was a tiny cottage and there was hardly any room. Lucas tripped, fell down the stairs, and Simone fell with him. She was screaming, but she didn’t have a mark on her. His neck was broken. It was an accident, but what could Greg do?”

“He could have called the police and taken the consequences — if indeed there were consequences,” I said. Self-defense was a plea that was sometimes accepted by the courts, as I had cause to know only too well.

If it was genuine.

“He panicked,” Rosalind said, as though she had a bad taste in her mouth. “He and Lucas were similar enough in looks to pass for each other. He told me he sometimes wondered if that was what Pam saw in him-almost the same face but without the brutality”

“What about the body?” I said. “What happened to that?”

“Apparently, the cottage was pretty isolated,” Rosalind said. “Greg knew there were plenty of places in the Scotch countryside to hide a body where it wouldn’t be found easily”

“So he buried the real Lucas, took the dead man’s identity and scarpered over here,” I said flatly. “That takes some forethought and planning. That’s not just something you can do on the spur of the moment.”

“Lucas had already planned it,” Rosalind said. “Greg said that he found Lucas’s car nearby. In the trunk was a bag, all packed, with his passport and airline tickets already booked for a flight the next day. Greg said he knew that Lucas had come north solely to kill Simone and his ex-wife-his last act before he left the country.”

“I don’t know how he could just walk out and leave Simone-an

infant-on her own in the house, after she’d just witnessed a murder,” Matt said, his voice paled with shock.

“She was young,” Rosalind dismissed, braking for the traffic lights onto the main road now. She indicated right and edged out of the junction, even though it was on red. I still couldn’t get used to the idea that you were allowed to do that over here. “Young enough to forget what she’d seen.”

Blanked it out, more like. The human mind has a way of blanketing trauma, like growing a scab over an open wound. But all it took was a careless nudge and suddenly the scab was off and the wound was bleeding afresh. …

“She remembered, didn’t she?” I said quietly “When Jakes took a tumble down your staircase and broke his neck, Simone remembered.”

We were on the main street now, heading east, passing the Eastern Slope Inn and the old-fashioned Zeb’s General Store, draped with lights that spoke of Christmas celebrations overrunning. I’d never felt less like celebrating anything.

“It was all my fault,” Rosalind said quietly then. “Greg didn’t tell me about the DNA test. I didn’t want them to take it. I thought it would ruin everything. Greg never told me Lucas’s daughter really was his, after all,” she muttered, almost to herself. “He should have told me!”

I glanced across and found her face was filled with sorrow. I remembered her words that day at the house when we’d talked about her childless marriage. It was never to be, she’d said, wistful. Her grief now was not caused by her husband’s sins of omission, I realized, but by her own. It was not the fact that the man she’d called Greg Lucas really did turn out to have a child. It was the fact that she did not.

“So how did you find out they’d taken the test?” I asked.

“The results arrived back by courier. Greg was out. I didn’t know what they were and I was curious, so I opened them … and then I knew he’d lied to me, all these years.”

You should have been expecting that, Rosalind. His whole life’s been a lie since before he ever met you.…