Theo didn’t speak until he had poured her tea and pulled up a seat for himself, then he said, “No, and it was in part an affectation, a vanity. It made her different.” He smiled. “I, on the other hand, never wanted to be different, but I suppose I find things that remind me of my childhood comforting.”
“You never knew your mother, did you?”
“No. Only Jasmine.” Cup in mid-air, he gazed at some point behind Meg’s head. “It’s odd to look back on one’s childhood from an adult’s perspective. Jasmine was only five when Mummy died having me. I see now that taking complete responsibility for me must have been her childish way of dealing with her own grief and loss, but to me it seemed the most natural thing in the world. I thought all families were like ours.” He sipped his tea and returned his cup to the saucer.
Meg gathered her courage. “Theo, it’s Jasmine I’ve come about.” Seeing his lips purse to form a question, she hurried on. “Or rather, it’s Jasmine’s money. You see, I want to help with the shop.”
He was shaking his head before she’d finished. “I couldn’t let you do that. It wouldn’t be right. Jasmine did what she thought best for both of us—”
“Theo, I’m not talking about a loan. I want to come in as a working partner. I’ll have capital to invest from the sale of the flat, and I’m good with figures. I think we could—” She stopped herself, feeling an idiot. Theo’s mouth had formed a perfect round ‘O’ of astonishment, making his resemblance to a teddy-bear more marked than ever. “I’m sorry. It was stupid of me.” She finished her tea and stood up, glad she hadn’t taken off her coat. The awkwardness of getting into it again would have delayed her exit. “Thanks for the—”
“Wait, Meg,” Theo said, standing so quickly he sloshed his tea into the saucer as he tried to set it down. He touched her arm. “You’re quite serious, aren’t you?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“I thought you were joking at first. You’d really be interested in this place?” His tone expressed his disbelief, and when she nodded again he said, “Why? What about your job? Your life in London?”
He meant Roger, she thought, but was too tactful to say it. “I quit my job. And Jasmine was the only thing in my life that really mattered.” She struggled to find words that would make him understand what she wasn’t sure she understood herself They both sat down again without quite realizing it, Meg on the edge of her chair, Theo leaning forward on his stool. “I didn’t count, Theo. Anyone could have done my job, rented my room—and Roger will find a better prospect soon enough. My family complained when I left because it left more work for them, but they didn’t miss me.
“I want …” She looked down at her hands, extended toward him palm upwards, then balled them into fists again and tucked them into her lap. “I can’t …”
“You don’t have to explain.” Theo smiled, and she read in it understanding, but not pity. “I’ll make us some more tea, shall I? I forgot the biscuits before.” He gathered up the tea things, and as he started toward the kitchen alcove a thought seemed to strike him. He paused, turning back to her. “I say, Meg. You don’t happen to like old films, do you?”
He’d done all the Saturday chores—cleaned the flat, trundled the laundry down to the service laundromat on East Heath Road, brought in some groceries, even carried bucket and sponges downstairs and washed the Midget where it stood at the curb. A more glorious spring day couldn’t be imagined—a day for drives in the country, sipping lemonade at cricket matches, picnics by the Serpentine—yet Kincaid stood in his clean sitting room, staring at the shoebox that still stood accusingly on his coffee table. Beneath the grief that had dogged his morning like a hangover lay the knowledge that he had missed something yesterday. A connection, a word, a memory slumbered in his brain, awaiting the cue that would allow it to make the synaptic leap into his consciousness. He knew he couldn’t force it, yet he couldn’t rest.
He went downstairs, folded back the Midget’s top, and drove to the Yard.
The corridor was quiet, lacking the weekday hum of voices and keyboards. He waved a greeting into the few occupied offices, then absently pushed open his own door. A familiar figure sat at his desk, copper head bent over a file. “Gemma!”
“Hullo. Didn’t expect to see you in today.” She smiled at him and he thought she looked tired and a little pale.
“What are you doing here?” He sat on his desk, taking in her jeans and trainers, and the bright blue pullover that made the color of her hair shine like a new penny.
Gesturing at the file, she said, “Hunting for needles in haystacks, I suppose.” She pushed back the chair, propping her feet on the handle of his bottom drawer. “I spent yesterday learning more about Roger Leveson-Gower, and his friends, and his habits than I or anyone else ever wanted to know, and I came up with nothing. A big, fat zero. A couple of his yobbo friends swear he was drinking with them until the wee hours of the morning, when he supposedly fell into bed with Meg. And I turned up corroborating witnesses.” Sighing, she rubbed her face with her hands, stretching the skin over her cheekbones. “How did you get on?”
“Dorset was a wash-out.” He acknowledged her I-told-you-so expression with a grin. “And I talked to the Major,” he added more seriously, finding himself reluctant to recount the Major’s tale even to Gemma. “I don’t think he could have killed Jasmine. Of course, he hasn’t an alibi, but there is no physical evidence to indicate him, either.”
“But didn’t he leave practice early, an unusual occurrence for him?”
Kincaid shrugged. “I suppose he really didn’t feel well. A coincidence.”
Gemma raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t ask him?”
“Somehow I didn’t feel I could, after what he’d told me. And coincidences do happen, inconvenient as they may be,” he added a little defensively.
“We’re not getting anywhere, and you know the Guv isn’t going to let us slide any longer. Our caseload has suffered this past week.” She righted the chair. “The odd thing is that I’ve suddenly found I care in more than the ordinary way—I feel I’ve come to know Jasmine, through you, through Meg and the others, and I hate to think of her death going in the unsolved file.”
“Anything useful come in overnight?” He tapped the open file with a forefinger.
Gemma shook her head. “Only for elimination purposes. There’s not a breath of evidence that Theo Dent left Abinger Hammer by car, train, horse, bus, or bicycle on the night Jasmine died. And …” she hunted through the loose pages, “a reply came from the nursing school in Dorchester where Felicity Howarth did her specialized training. A clean bill of health, an ‘exceptional student,’ according to a note from the dean. They included her transcripts.” Gemma frowned as she read. “She must have been married twice. She applied to her initial training college as Felicity Jane Heggerty, nee Atkins, giving an address in Blandford Forum.” Gemma looked up at Kincaid, puzzled. “Isn’t that where …”
Kincaid didn’t hear the rest. The pieces snicked into place in his mind with blinding clarity. “Gemma, call Martha Trevellyan and find out if Felicity’s scheduled to work today.” Gemma raised an eyebrow, but looked the number up in the file and complied without question. She replaced the receiver and said, “Felicity called in ill. Martha’s just now found someone to cover for her, and she sounded very put out—said it was not like Felicity at all.”
“I think I’ll pay Felicity a visit, ill or not.”
“Do you want me to call her first?”
He shook his head. “No, best not.”
“I’ll come with you.” She stood and shrugged into a cardigan she’d hung over the back of his chair.
Kincaid stopped her with a hand on her arm as she came around the desk. “Go home, Gemma. You’ve done more than necessary already. Spend your Saturday properly, with Toby.” He smiled. “And it would be discreet on your part not to be associated with this, because it’s quite likely I’ve just lost every marble I ever possessed.”<
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CHAPTER
20
The April sun lent an air of industrious festivity even to Felicity Howarth’s run-down street. The uncollected rubbish had disappeared, a few residents washed cars or worked in their tiny front gardens.
Kincaid rang Felicity’s bell and waited, hands in pockets, until the echoes died away, then rang again. He had reached for the bell for the third time when the door opened. “Mr. Kincaid.”
“Hello, Felicity. Can you spare me a few minutes?” She did indeed look unwell, wrapped in an old, pink dressing gown that clashed with the faded red-gold of her hair, her face scrubbed free of makeup and lined with exhaustion.
She stepped aside without speaking and he followed her into the sitting room. Pulling the dressing gown more tightly around her body, she sank into a chair, the crisp authority that he associated with her missing entirely.
“I called the service. Martha said you weren’t well.”
After a moment in which he thought she wouldn’t respond, she said, “No. Poor Martha. She doesn’t expect me to let her down.”
Kincaid looked around the neat sitting room, checking details against his memory. There were no photographs among the ornaments and knick-knacks. “Felicity, how old is your son?”
“My son?” she said blankly.
“I understand from Martha Trevellyan that you have a son in a nursing home.”
“Barry. His name is Barry.” A trace of anger came through her lethargy. “He’s twenty-nine.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you came from Dorset? You and Jasmine must have shared a common bond.”
“I didn’t think of it. I’ve lived in London for years, and Jasmine and I never spoke of it.”
“But you were aware that Jasmine had lived in Dorset, even though you never discussed it.”
Felicity pleated a fold of her dressing gown between her fingers. “She must have mentioned it, but I can’t remember that we ever actually talked about it. I have a lot of patients, Mr. Kincaid. I can’t be expected to keep the details of their life stories straight in my mind.”
A little progress, he thought, pleased to have moved her from apathy to a more revealing defensive posture. “But surely the parallel was unusual enough to be remarked upon? After all, during the time you lived in Blandford Forum, Jasmine worked in the solicitor’s office on the market square. Do you know the one, next to the bank? It’s still there.”
He left the sofa and shifted the chair from Felicity’s desk around so that he could sit facing her, their knees almost touching. “Tell me exactly what’s wrong with your son, Felicity. Why is he kept in a nursing home?” Kincaid held his breath, knowing he had not a shred of evidence, only a wild surmise that had blossomed suddenly in his brain.
Felicity studied the fold of dressing gown now scrunched in both hands. After a moment she looked up and met Kincaid’s eyes. “He’s almost completely blind and deaf. He responds to very little stimulus, but he does know me.”
“Martha Trevellyan said something about a childhood injury. What happened to Barry, Felicity?”
Her hands became still in her lap. “Now they call it DAI, diffuse axonal injury, but when Barry was a baby so little was known about profound head injuries that they were often misdiagnosed.”
Kincaid sighed and sat back. “I think,” he said slowly, “that you didn’t need to be told that Jasmine came from Dorset because you remembered her very well. What I don’t understand is Jasmine not mentioning in her journals that she knew you.”
Felicity stood up and went to the window. Since Kincaid’s last visit, clusters of pale green leaves had burst out along the bramble shoots and a few late daffodils had pushed their heads through the grass. “I always mean to do something with the garden,” she said, her back to him. “Then I work extra shifts and visit Barry on my days off, and somehow I never get around to it.”
Kincaid waited. After a moment he saw her shoulders relax, and he knew she had made up her mind. She continued as if she hadn’t interrupted the thread of the conversation. “Perhaps she saw it as a judgement. Retribution. And at first I think she wasn’t sure, didn’t trust her own memory. My name was different.” She turned to face him, but with the light behind her he couldn’t read her eyes. “I went by Janey in those days—my first husband thought Felicity too Victorian, and I humored him—and I later remarried, so my last name changed as well. It was almost thirty years ago, after all, and people do change physically, as hard as we try to prevent it.” The corners of her mouth turned up.
“How did you come to know Jasmine then?”
Felicity smiled again. “I considered myself very lucky to have found her to look after Barry. She was only a couple of years younger than I, responsible, ambitious, wanted to get on in the world. Evenings and weekends when she wasn’t working in old Mr. Rawlinson’s office she liked to pick up a bit extra.”
She moved back to the chair, her dressing gown falling open at the knees to reveal a sliver of nylon nightdress as she sat, carelessly now. “It was an ordinary Saturday. I’d gone shopping. Jasmine met me at the door, her face white and stiff with fright. She said she’d called for the doctor, she thought Barry was having some kind of a seizure. I remember putting my parcels down carefully before I went to him. He lay rigid in his cot, his face contorted, making little circles around his head with his fists.” She fell silent, her gaze fixed on her fingers intertwined in her lap.
“Felicity—”
“There was never any proof. Small town doctors … no one was sure what had happened to him. One doctor said he’d seen damage like that when a child had been shaken, but he wouldn’t swear to it. But I played detective.” She looked up and smiled at him. “You would have been proud of me. A neighbor said she’d seen Jasmine let a young man into the flat, and that Jasmine had later left for a few minutes. I checked round all the shops in the street. She’d bought something at the chemist to rub in the baby’s gums—he was teething and had been horribly fussy.
“I rode the bus to Jasmine’s village and made some excuse to gossip with the post mistress. There was talk of Jasmine going around with a boy who wasn’t quite right in the head.”
“Timmy Franklin?”
Felicity nodded. “I never believed Jasmine knew he would hurt Barry. But she was responsible for him, wasn’t she?” For the first time Felicity seemed to lose confidence. “She should never have left him alone.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing.” She lifted her hands in a gesture of defeat. “For a while we thought Barry might get better. When it became obvious that there would be no change my husband began to drift even further away—he’d never wanted a baby anyway and he couldn’t cope. He stayed just long enough for me to finish my nurse’s training. At first I managed to have Barry cared for at home, but it became more and more difficult, and when we moved to London I had to place him in a nursing home.”
“And Jasmine?” Kincaid asked. “What happened to Jasmine?”
“She disappeared. Didn’t even come back for her aunt’s funeral. I never thought to see her again.”
“You didn’t look for her?”
Felicity shook her head. “I thought I’d stopped hating her, over the years. I didn’t even think of her often. I couldn’t believe it when I saw her name in Martha’s case files. And dying of cancer—how suitable. I had to see her, I couldn’t rest until I did.”
“She must have become certain who you were, after a time.”
“But I didn’t speak of it, so she didn’t either. I thought it would torment her, make her doubt her sanity.” Felicity shivered and rubbed her hands over her upper arms. “The absurd thing was that she seemed to trust me, to depend on me. My job is comforting and reassuring the dying, yet I told her how much she would hurt, how pitiful her existence would become. And she accepted it.
“When I saw the suicide literature I didn’t discourage her. It seemed fitting that she should take her own life.”
“But she did
n’t, did she? What happened the day Jasmine died?”
Closing her eyes, she spoke slowly, as if reliving events in her mind. “She’d been very quiet for a few days. I thought she was working herself up to suicide. But when I arrived that Thursday morning she seemed different. Calm, with a brightness about her. Sometimes the dying acquire a certain grace. You can’t predict it, and it doesn’t always happen, but it had happened for Jasmine. She told me she felt she could face anything.” Felicity looked at Kincaid, imploring. “I couldn’t bear it. Do you understand? I couldn’t bear it.”
“What did you do?” Kincaid asked gently.
“Oh, the ordinary things. Helped her with her bath, changed her bed. Made her comfortable.” Felicity gave a ghost of a laugh at the irony of it. “The rest of the day was a nightmare. I must have seen my other patients, but I don’t remember doing it.”
“But you went back.”
“Yes.”
Kincaid heard a clock ticking somewhere in the house, and it seemed to counterpoint the rise and fall of his own breath.
“I didn’t know until I walked in and she smiled at me from the bed what I intended to do. And then it seemed so right, so simple. It was time for her evening medication and I offered to fix it for her. I used her own supply and put the empty vials in my bag. I never thought anyone would question that she’d slipped away in her sleep.” Looking out into the garden, she said after a moment, “After I’d given her the morphine she took my hand and thanked me for my kindness to her.”
Felicity leaned forward, clasping her knees, and the top of her dressing gown gapped enough to reveal the pale swell of her breast. The exposure made her seem even more vulnerable, and pity warred with necessity in his heart. “You stayed, didn’t you?”
“Until she lost consciousness. I found I couldn’t leave her.”
He watched her as she sat lost in her thoughts, and he knew he could not escape his obligation to his job, or to Jasmine. “Felicity, you know I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”
All Shall Be Well Page 22
