Ha'penny by Jo Walton Read Free Book Online Page A

Lauria Gilmore was killed in the blast. There was a man with her. He was also killed, killed instantly. We have good reason to believe he was Mr. Kinnerson.”
    She didn’t collapse into hysterics as he had half-expected. She sat silent there for a moment. “No,” she said. “He was going to work, he wasn’t going to see Lauria today.” Then she began to weep, hopelessly. “She was always pestering him when there was trouble. The burglary last year, and when she was ill in the winter, and now this I suppose.”
    The maid came in with the tea, and left, giving only one look to her weeping mistress. Royston poured a cup for her, adding milk and plenty of sugar. “Drink it,” Carmichael said. “It’ll do you good.”
    She took the cup. Her hand was shaking so much that her teeth chattered against the rim and she slopped half of it into the saucer.
    “Have you any idea why anyone would want to bomb your husband, or Miss Gilmore?” Carmichael asked, as gently as he could.
    She looked at him incredulously. “Reason? What reason could there be? My husband works for the Jews, they wouldn’t want to murder him. It must have been left over from the war. That would have been just like Lauria. She’d find a bomb left from the war in her garden, and she’d have called Matthew to sort it out for her, called him at work, instead of the police. And he’d have gone round straight away, and, oh God!” She began to cry again.
    “Did your husband know about bombs?” Royston asked. “Was he in the sappers in the war? Or the ARP?”
    “No, he was in the Navy. He wouldn’t have known anything.” Mrs. Kinnerson blew her nose, noisily.
    Carmichael wanted to know about Kinnerson’s relationship with Gilmore, but couldn’t think of a way to approach the subject.
    “How long has Mr. Kinnerson owned the house in Hampstead?” he asked.
    “How long—” She pushed back her hair with both hands. “Years. Years and years. I think he bought it right after the war. Before we were married, anyway.”
    “So Mr. Kinnerson and Miss Gilmore have been friends a long time?” he asked, gently. Before he married? And had she known about it all the time but continued to deny it?
    “Friends?” she asked, and then began to laugh, peal after peal of hysterical laughter. Carmichael considered slapping her face, but settled for offering her more tea. He sat down beside her on the sofa. She drained the cup. “Did you think they were lovers?” she asked, hiccuping. “That’s just her theater manner. No, Inspector, though she dressed like lamb and called him darling or sweetheart every few words, Lauria Gilmore was my husband’s mother.”
    “Well, that explains why he bought a house for her,” Royston said, calmly.
    Carmichael thought that he’d flay Griffith the next time he saw him for so misleading him. How could he have built so much on the impressions of an insensitive Hampstead sergeant? “Who was his father?” he asked.
    “Oh, it all was perfectly ordinary,” Mrs. Kinnerson said. She wiped her eyes. The clock struck six. “Matthew’s father was a naval officer called Harold Kinnerson. He was married to Lauria Gilmore briefly. Matthew was born, and the marriage foundered because she cared more about her career. She went back to the stage, and Matthew was brought up by his father, when he wasn’t at sea, and by his Aunt May, who is still alive and the sweetest old lady imaginable. She lives in Leigh-on-Sea, in Essex. This is going to break her heart. I always said Matthew should think of her as his mother, not Lauria. But Lauria had the glamour. She didn’t want him as a child, but as an adult he was useful to her, someone at her beck and call. He adored her. His father was killed in the war, sunk with his ship in Norway. Matthew was twenty, twenty-one. He sold his father’s house and he used most of the capital to buy that place in Hampstead for Lauria. After that it was a case of her lifting her little finger and