All Shall Be Well

Praise for A SHARE IN DEATH:

"Crombie handles the elements of the traditional mystery with the skill of an experienced writer."

—Peter Robinson, author of Wednesday's Child

"[Crombie] scrupulously observes all the dear old genre conventions, from the intricate puzzle plot to the closed circle of suspicious parties who are caught up in its machinations… Well-calculated… pays off smartly."

—The New York Times Book Review

"[A] ruthless murderer… [A] surprising motive… A thoroughly entertaining mystery… Kincaid is a likable, intelligent, and perceptive chap."

—Booklist

"If you love the classic mystery form—and I certainly do—you must meet Superintendent Duncan Kincaid… He's a winner!"

—Barbara D'Amato, author of Hard Women

"An energetic 'British' mystery… Great continuity, clever plotting, and hidden agendas all contribute to a successful novel."

—Library Journal

"Reminiscent of Agatha Christie."

—Chicago Sun-Times

"Deserves consideration for the year's major mystery awards."

—Mostly Murder

ALL SHALL BE WELL

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.

PRINTING HISTORY

Charles Scribner's Sons edition published 1994

Berkley Prime Crime edition / September 1995

Copyright © 1994 by Deborah Darden Crombie.

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

http://www.penguinputnam.com

ISBN: 0-425-14771-1

For Katie

Acknowledgments

As always, appreciation is due to The Every Other Tuesday Night Writers: Diane Sullivan, Dale Den-ton, Jim Evans, Viqui Litman, John Hardie, and Aaron Goldblatt, with special thanks to Terry Mayeux, who gave me much needed encouragement through the last chapters of this book.

I'd like to thank my editor, Susanne Kirk, and my agent, Nancy Yost, for their friendship as well as their professional expertise; and last but by no means least, my parents, Mary and Charlie Darden, for their unwavering support.

It is sooth that sin is cause of all this pain, But all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

—Julian of Norwich, 15th century

Chapter One

Jasmine Dent let her head fall back against the pillows and closed her eyes. Morphine coats the mind like fuzz on a peach, she thought sleepily, and smiled a little at her metaphor. For a while she floated between sleeping and waking, aware of faint sounds drifting in through the open window, aware of the sunlight flowing across the foot of her bed, but unable to rouse herself.

Her earliest memories were of heat and dust, and the unseasonable warmth of the April afternoon conjured up smells and sounds that danced in her mind like long-forgotten wraiths. Jasmine wondered if the long, slow hours of her childhood lay buried somewhere in the cells of her brain, waiting to explode upon her consciousness with that particular lucidity attributed to the memories of the dying.

She was born in India, in Mayapore, a child of the dissolution of the Raj. Her father, a minor civil servant, had sat out the war in an obscure office. In 1947, he had chosen to stay on in India, scraping a living from his ICS pension.

Of her mother she had little recollection. Five years after Jasmine's birth, she had borne Theo and passed away, making as little fuss in dying as she had in living. She left behind only a faint scent of English roses that mingled in Jasmine's mind with the click of closing shutters and the sound of insects singing.

A soft thump on the bed jerked Jasmine's mind back to consciousness. She lifted her hand and buried her fingers in Sidhi's plush coat, opening her eyes to gaze at her fingers, the knobby joints held together by fragile bridges of skin and muscle. The cat's body, a black splash against the red-orange of the coverlet, vibrated against her hip.

After a few moments Jasmine gave the cat's sleek head one last stroke and maneuvered herself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, her fingers automatically checking the catheter in her chest. Installing a hospital bed in the sitting room had eliminated the claustrophobia she'd felt as she became confined for longer periods to the small bedroom. Surrounded by her things, with the large windows open to the garden and the afternoon sun, the shrinking of her world seemed more bearable.

Tea first, then whatever she could manage of the dinner Meg left, and afterwards she could settle down for the evening with the telly. Plan in small increments, giving equal weight to each event—that was the technique she had adopted for getting through the day.

She levered herself up from the bed and shuffled toward the kitchen, wrapping about her the brilliant colors of an Indian silk caftan. No drab British flannels for her—only now the folds of the caftan hung on her like washing hung out on a line. Some accident of genetics had endowed her with an appearance more exotic than her English parentage warranted—the dark hair and eyes and delicate frame had made her an object of derision with the English schoolgirls remaining in Calcutta—but now, with the dark hair cropped short and the eyes enormous in her thin face, she looked elfin, and in spite of her illness, younger than her years.

She put the kettle on to boil and leaned against the kitchen windowsill, pushing the casement out and peering into the garden below.

She was not disappointed. The Major, clippers in hand, patrolled the postage-stamp garden in his uniform of baggy, gray cardigan and flannels, ready to pluck out any insubordinate sprig. He looked up and raised his clippers in salute. Jasmine mimed "Cup of tea?" When he nodded acceptance she returned to the hob and moved carefully through the ritual of making tea.

Jasmine carried the mugs out to the steps that led from her flat down to the garden. The Major had the basement flat and he considered the garden his territory. She and Duncan, in the flat above hers, were only privileged spectators. The planks of the top step grated against her bones as she eased into a sitting position.

The Major climbed the steps and sat beside her, accepting his cup with a grunt. "Lovely day," he said by way of thanks. "Like to think it would last." He sipped his tea, making a small swishing sound through his mustache. "You been keeping all right today?" He glanced at her for a second only, his attention drawn back to the rioting daffodils and tulips.

"Yes," Jasmine answered, smiling, for the Major was a man of few words under the best of circumstances. Those brief comments were his equivalent of a monologue, and his usual query was the only reference he ever made to her illness. They drank in silence, the tea warming them as much as the late afternoon sun soaking into their skins, until Jasmine spoke. "I don't think I've ever seen the garden look as lovely as it has this spring, Major. Is it just that I appreciate things more these days, or is it really more beautiful this year?"

"Hummff," he muttered into his cup, then cleared his throat for the difficult business of replying. "Could be. Weather's been bonny enough." He frowned and ran his fingers over the tips of his clippers, checking for rust. "Tulips're almost gone, though." The tulips wouldn't be allowed to linger past their prime. At the first fallen petal the Major would sever heads from stalks with a quick, merciful slash.

Jasmine's mouth twitched at the thought—too bad there was no one to perform such a service for her. She herself had failed in the final determination, whether from cowardice or courage, she couldn't say. And Meg… it had been too much to ask of Meg, she'd had no right to ask it of Meg. Jasmine wondered now how she had ever considered it.

Meg had arrived today looking even more untended than usual, her wide brow rumpled with distress. It took all Jasmine's strength to convince Meg that she'd changed her mind, and all the while the irony of it taunted her. It was she who was dying, after all, yet it was Meg who needed reassurance measured out in palliative doses.

She couldn't explain to Meg the reckoning she had reached somewhere between last night's sleeping and this morning's waking. She knew only that she had crossed some meridian in her swift progress toward death. The pain held no more terror for her. With acceptance came the ability to hold and savor each moment, as well as a strange new contentment.

The sun dipped behind the square Victorian house across the garden, and its stone faded from gold to gray in an instant. The air felt chill against Jasmine's skin and she heard the faint bustle of traffic from Rosslyn Hill, evidence that life still eddied about her.

The Major stood, his knees creaking. "I'd best finish up. The light'll be gone soon." He reached down and hoisted Jasmine to her feet as easily as if she'd been a sack of potting soil. "In with you, now. Mustn't catch a chill."

Jasmine almost laughed at the absurdity of her catching a chill, as if an exterior circumstance could compare with the havoc her body had wreaked from within, but she let him help her inside and rinse the cups.

She locked the garden door after him and closed the casements, but hesitated a few minutes before drawing the blinds. The light was fading above the rooftops, and the leaves on the birch tree in the garden shivered in the evening breeze. From Duncan's terrace she might have watched the sun set over West London. For that privilege he paid dearly, and he had been kind enough to share it a few times before the stairs defeated her.

Duncan—now that was another thing she couldn't explain very well to Meg—at least not without hurting her feelings. She hadn't wanted Meg to meet him, had wanted to keep him separate from the rest of her existence, separate from her illness. Meg looked after her so zealously, tracking the progress of every symptom, monitoring her care and medication as if Jasmine's disease had become her personal responsibility. Duncan brought in the outside world, sharp and acid, and if he dealt with death it was at least far removed from hers.

As she sighed and lowered the blind, Sidhi rubbed against her ankles. The distinction between Duncan and Meg was all nonsense anyway—if Meg had immersed herself in her illness, her illness also made her a safe prospect for Duncan's friendship. No older woman-younger man scenario possible: dying made one acceptably non-threatening.

She found him a contradictory man, at once reserved and engaging, and she never quite knew what to expect. "Ice cream tonight?" she could hear him asking in one of his playful moods, a remnant of his Cheshire drawl surviving years in London. He'd jog up Rosslyn Hill to the Häagen-Dazs shop and return panting and grinning like a six-year-old. Those nights he'd cajole her with games and conversation, rousing in her an energy she thought she no longer possessed.

Other evenings he seemed to draw into himself, content to sit quietly beside her in the flickering light of the telly, and she didn't dare breach his reserve. Nor did she dare depend too much on his companionship, or so she told herself often enough. It surprised her that he spent as much time with her as he did, but before her mind could wander down the path of analyzing his motivation she silenced it, fearing pity. She straightened as briskly as she was able and turned to the fridge.

The food Margaret left turned out to be a vegetable curry— Meg's idea of something nourishing. Jasmine managed a few bites, finding it easier to sniff and roll about on her tongue than to swallow, the smell and taste recalling her childhood as vividly as her afternoon dream. An accumulation of coincidence, she told herself, odd but meaningless.

She dozed in front of the television, half listening for Duncan's knock on the door. Sidhi narrowed his eyes against the blue-white glare and kneaded his paws against her thigh. What would happen to Sidhi? She'd made no provision for him, hadn't been able to face disposing of him like a piece of furniture. Her own brother Theo despised cats, the Major complained when Sidhi dug in his flower beds, Duncan treated him with polite indifference, Felicity pronounced him unsanitary, and Meg lived in a bed-sit in Kilburn with a landlady she described as ferocious—no good prospects there. Perhaps Sidhi would manage his next life without her intervention. He had certainly been fortunate enough in this one—she'd rescued him, a scrawny six-week-old kitten, from a rubbish bin.

She drifted off again, waking with a start to find the program she'd been watching finished. She wondered if, as her morphine dosage increased, her awareness would fade in and out like the reception on a poor telly. She wondered if she would mind.

Jasmine wondered, as the night drew in, if she had made the right decision after all, yet she knew somehow that once she had crossed that invisible line, there could be no going back.

Duncan Kincaid emerged from the bowels of Hampstead tube station and blinked in the brilliant light. He turned the corner into the High, and the colors jostled before him with an almost physical force. All Hampstead seemed to have turned out in its shirt sleeves to greet the spring morning. Shoppers bumped and smiled instead of snarling, restaurants set up impromptu sidewalk cafes, and the smell of fresh coffee mingled with exhaust fumes.

Kincaid plunged down the hill, untempted by the effervescent atmosphere. Coffee didn't appeal to him—his mouth tasted like dirty washing-up water from drinking endless, stale cups, his eyes stung from other people's cigarette smoke, and having solved the case offered little solace for a long and dismal night's work. The body of a child found in a nearby field, the crime traced to a neighbor who, when confronted, sobbingly confessed he couldn't help himself, hadn't meant to hurt her.

Kincaid wanted merely to wash his face and collapse head first into bed.

By the time he reached Rosslyn Hill a little of the seasonal mood had infected him, and the sight of the flower seller at the corner of Pilgrim's Lane brought him up with a start. Jasmine. He'd meant to stop in and see her last night—he usually did if he could—but the relationship wasn't intimate enough for calling with excuses, and she would never mention that he hadn't come.

He bought freesias, because he remembered that Jasmine loved their heady perfume.

The silence in Carlingford Road seemed intense after the main thoroughfares, and the air in the shadow of his building still held the night's chill. Kincaid passed the Major coming up the steps from his basement entrance, and received the expected "Harummf. Mornin'," and a sharp nod of the head in response to his greeting. After several months of nodding acquaintance, Kincaid, intrigued by the brass nameplate on the Major's door, ventured a query regarding the "H." before "Keith." The Major had looked sideways, looked over Kincaid's head, groomed his mustache, and finally grumbled "Harley." The matter was never referred to again.

He heard the knocking as soon as he entered the stairwell. First a gentle tapping, then a more urgent tattoo. A woman—tall, with expensively bobbed, red-gold hair graying at the temples, and wearing a well-cut, dark suit— turned to him as he topped the landing before Jasmine's flat. He would have taken her for a solicitor if it hadn't been for the bag she carried.

"Is she not in?" Kincaid asked as he came up to her.

"She must be. She's too weak to be out on her own." The woman considered Kincaid and seemed to decide he looked useful. She stuck out her hand and pumped his crisply. "I'm Felicity Howarth, the home-help nurse. I come about this time every day. Are you a neighbor?"

Kincaid nodded. "Upstairs. Could she be having a bath?"

"No. I help her with it."

They looked at one another for a moment, and a spark of fear jumped between them. Kincaid turned and pounded on the door, calling, "Jasmine! Open up!" He listened, ear to the door, then turned to Felicity. "Have you a key?"

"No. She still gets herself up in the morning and lets me in. Have you?"

Kincaid shook his head, thinking. The lock mechanism was simple enough, a cheap standard pushbutton, but he knew Jasmine had a chain and deadbolt. Were they fastened? "Have you a hairpin? A paperclip?"

Felicity dug in her bag, came up with a sheaf of papers clipped together. "This do?"

He thrust the bouquet into her hands in exchange for the clip, twisting the ends out as he turned to the door. The lock clicked after a few seconds probing, a burglar's dream. Kincaid twisted the knob and the door swung easily open.

The only light in the room filtered through the white rice-paper shades drawn over the windows. The flat was silent, except for a faint humming sound coming from the vicinity of Jasmine's bed. Kincaid and Felicity Howarth stepped forward to the foot of the bed in an almost synchronized movement, not speaking, some quality in the room's silence sealing their tongues.

No movement came from the body lying swathed in the bed's swirl of colors, no breath gave rhythmic rise and fall to the chest on which the black cat crouched, purring.

The freesias fell, forgotten, scattering like pick-up sticks across the counterpane.

Chapter Two

"Stupid bloody cow." Roger's voice rose, echoing ominously in the small room. Margaret imagined the heavy clump of her landlady's feet mounting the stairs and reached toward him, as if her gesture might hush him. Mrs. Wilson had threatened more than once to evict Margaret if she caught Roger staying the night, and if she heard them quarrelling at half-past seven in the morning she wouldn't have much doubt about the circumstances.

"Roger, please, for heaven's sake. Mrs. Wilson'll hear you, and you know what she's like—"

"Heaven hasn't much to do with it, my dear Meg, except for the fact that your friend Jasmine's no nearer to it today than she was yesterday, thanks to you." The opportunity for sarcasm kept his volume down, but Margaret felt the coffee she'd gulped rise sourly in her throat.

"Roger, you can't mean that—have you gone mad? I told you she changed her mind. I'm glad she changed her mind—"

"So you can spend every spare second of your time fussing and cooing over her like some dumpy Florence Nightingale? It makes me sick. Why should I hang around? Tell me that, Meg, dear—"

"Shut up, Roger. I've told you not—"

"—to call you that. It's her pet name for you. How sweet." He took a step closer and grabbed her elbow, squeezing it between his fingers. Margaret could smell her soap on his skin, and the herbal shampoo he used on his hair, and see the light glinting off the red-brown patch of stubble he'd missed on his jaw. "Tell me why I should stick around, Margaret," he spoke softly now, almost whispering, "when you haven't any time for me, and she could hang on for months?"

Margaret jerked her arm free. "Why don't you go, then," she hissed at him, and she felt a distant surprise, as if the words came from somewhere outside herself. "Just bloody well bugger off, all right?"

They faced each other in silence for a long moment, the sound of their breathing audible over the background noise of Radio Four, and then Roger laughed. He lifted his hand and cupped it under Margaret's chin, tilting her head back. "Is that what you want, love?" Roger leaned closer, his mouth inches from hers. "Because you won't get it. I'll leave when I'm good and ready, not before, and don't you even think about clearing out on me."

The number eighty-nine bus bounced and rattled its way up the hill through Camden Town. Margaret Bellamy sat in the forward seat on the upper deck, her bulging shopping bag placed beside her as a bastion against intruders.

She needn't have worried. The only other occupant to venture climbing the stairs was a toothless old man absorbed in a racing paper. The seat's cracked upholstery stank of cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes, but Margaret found the familiar odor comforting. She gnawed her knuckle, the latest in a series of displacement behaviors designed to prevent her from biting her nails. An infantile habit, Jasmine called it. Jasmine…

Margaret's thoughts veered away, jumping to another track like a needle skipping on an old phonograph. She'd had to get out of the office, even if Mrs. Washburn had given her that fishy-eyed stare and said, "Dentist again?"

"Bitch," Margaret said aloud, then looked around to see if the smelly old man had heard her. And what if he had, she asked herself? It seemed like she'd spent her whole life trying not to offend anybody, and it had landed her in an awful bloody mess.

She should have told Jasmine about Roger, that was her first mistake. But when he'd first started asking her out she hadn't quite believed it herself, and didn't want to risk the humiliation if he dropped her as quickly as he'd picked her up. Afterwards, the right moment never seemed to materialize, and the guilt she felt for keeping it secret compounded her embarrassment. She rehearsed all sorts of "There's something I've been meaning to tell you" scenarios, and finally remained silent.

Actually, Roger hadn't really taken her out. Looking back on it, she saw that he merely had provided his presence and attention while she paid for almost everything. A small price it seemed at the time, to bask in the glow of Roger's looks, his connections, his air of knowing all the right people and the right places.

Still, it had been a small error of vanity, a forgivable mistake. The ones she had made since were not dismissed so easily. She never should have told Roger what Jasmine had asked her to do. And she never should have told him about the money.

The bus shuddered to a stop at South End Green. Balancing her bag against her hip, Margaret picked her way down the stairs and came blinking out into the sunshine. The huge, old plane trees and willows of the South Heath marched away to her right as she started up the hill. Sun sparkled on the waters of the ponds, and people flowed around her with that festive air that an unexpectedly warm spring day gives the English.

The unsettled feeling that had been nagging her since last night coiled more tightly in the pit of her stomach.

From Willow Road she turned away from the Heath and trudged up Pilgrim's Lane. Just as she reached Carlingford Road she looked up and saw the rear of an ambulance disappear as it turned left into Rosslyn Hill. Margaret's stomach spasmed and her knees threatened to give way beneath her.

Felicity stripped the bed, then straightened the spread over the bare mattress, tucking the corners with precision. Kincaid, having raised the blinds, stood staring down into the patch of garden. After a moment he shook himself and ran his fingers through his hair, then turned to face her. "Who's next of kin, do you know?"

"A brother, I think, called Theo," Felicity answered, giving the spread a final smoothing across the pillow. She surveyed the bed for a moment, gave a satisfied nod and turned to the sink. "Although I'm not sure they got on well," she continued over her shoulder as she washed her hands before filling the copper kettle from the tap. "She mentioned him several times. He lives in Surrey, or Sussex, but I never met him." Felicity nodded toward the small, inlaid secretary Jasmine had used for her papers. "I imagine you'll find his number and address in that lot."

Kincaid was a bit taken aback by her assumption that he would be responsible for notifying Jasmine's relatives, but he had no idea who else might perform the unpleasant task. He didn't relish the prospect.

"It does take them like that sometimes—suddenly, you know." Felicity turned and examined him with concern, and Kincaid marveled at the speed with which she had regained her equilibrium. A few seconds shock—eyes closed, face wiped blank—then she had taken over with brisk professional competency. A common enough occurrence for her, he supposed, the loss of a patient.

"But she didn't seem—"

"No. I'd have given her another month or two, at the least, but we're not God… our predictions aren't infallible." The kettle whistled and Felicity turned away, scooping mugs off a rack and pouring boiling water over tea bags in one smooth motion. The dark, business-like suit seemed at odds with such household proficiency, and Felicity herself, soberly neat against the welter of Jasmine's exotic belongings, reminded Kincaid of a hawk among peacocks.

"She never spoke about it… her illness, I mean," Kincaid said. "I didn't realize it was so far—"

The front door swung open and bounced against the wall. Kincaid and Felicity Howarth spun around, startled. A woman stood framed in the doorway, clutching a shopping bag to her breast.

"Where is she? Where have they taken her?" She took in the neatly made bed and their arrested postures, and the bag slipped as she swayed.

Felicity was quicker off the mark than Kincaid. She had the bag safely on the floor and her hand under the woman's elbow before Kincaid reached them.

They guided her toward a chair and she slumped into it, unresisting. Not yet thirty, Kincaid judged her, a trifle plump, with wayward brown hair and painfully fair skin, and a round face now crumpled with distress.

"Margaret? It is Margaret, isn't it?" Felicity asked gently. She glanced at Kincaid and explained, "She's a friend of Jasmine's."

"Tell me where they've taken her. She won't want to be alone. Oh, I knew I shouldn't have left her last night—" The sentence disintegrated into a wail and she turned her head from side to side as if searching for Jasmine in the flat, her hands twisting in her lap. Kincaid and Felicity looked at one another over Margaret's head.

Felicity knelt and took Margaret's hands in hers. "Margaret, look at me. Jasmine's dead. She died in her sleep last night. I'm sorry."

"No." Margaret looked at Felicity in appeal. "She can't be. She promised."

The words struck an odd note and Kincaid felt a prickle of alarm. He dropped down on one knee beside Felicity. "Promised? What did Jasmine promise, Margaret?"

Margaret focused on Kincaid for the first time. "She changed her mind. I was so relieved. I didn't think I could go through—" A hiccupping sob interrupted her and she shivered. "Jasmine wouldn't go back on a promise. She always kept her word."

Felicity had let go of Margaret's hands and they moved restlessly again in her lap. Kincaid captured one and held it between his own. "Margaret. What exactly did Jasmine want you to do?"

She went still and blinked at him, puzzled. "She wanted me to help her kill herself, of course." She blinked again and the tears spilled over, and the words came so softly Kincaid had to strain to hear them. "Whatever will I do now?"

Felicity rose, fetched a mug of luke-warm tea from the kitchen, stirred in some sugar, and carefully wrapped both Margaret's hands around the cup. "Drink up, love. You'll feel more yourself." Margaret drank greedily until the cup was empty, unmindful of the tears slipping down her face.

Kincaid pulled up a dining chair and sat facing her, waiting as she fished a wad of tissue from her skirt pocket and mopped at her eyes. Her pale eyelashes gave her a defenseless look, like a rabbit caught in a lamp. "Tell me exactly what happened, please, Margaret. I'd like to know."

"I know who you are," she said, sniffing, studying him. "Duncan. You're much better—" Then red blotches stained her fair skin and she looked down at her hands. "I mean…"

"Did Jasmine tell you about me, then?" Jasmine had been very good at keeping her life compartmentalized, thought Kincaid. She had never mentioned Margaret to him.

"Just that you lived upstairs, and came to visit her sometimes. I used to say she'd made you up, like a child's imaginary friend, because I'd never—" the word ended on a sob and the tissues came up again, "seen you."

"Margaret" Kincaid leaned forward and touched her arm, bringing her attention back to his face. "Are you sure that Jasmine meant to kill herself? She might have just been whistling in the wind, talking about it to make herself feel she had an option."

"Oh, no." Margaret shook her head and hiccupped. "As soon as the reports came back mat her therapy wasn't successful, she wrote to Exit. She said she couldn't face the feeding tube—all pipes and plugs, she called it—said she wouldn't feel human any—" Margaret screwed up her face and pressed her fingers to her lips with the effort of holding back tears.

Kincaid leaned forward encouragingly. "It's okay. Go on."

"They sent all the information and we planned it out— how much she should take, exactly what she should do. Last night. It was to be last night."

"But she changed her mind?" Kincaid prompted when she didn't continue.

"I came as soon as I could get off work. I'd screwed myself up to tell her I couldn't go through with it, but she didn't even let me finish, it's all right, Meg," she said. "Don't worry. I've changed my mind, too." She looked… different somehow… happy. Margaret looked at him with entreaty. "I believed her. I'd never have left her if I hadn't."

Kincaid turned to Felicity. "Is it possible? Would she have been able to manage it herself?"

"Of course, with these self-medicating patients it's always a possibility," she answered matter-of-factly. "That's one of the risks you take with home care."

No one spoke for a moment. Margaret sat with her shoulders slumped, red-eyed and spent. Kincaid sighed and rubbed his face, debating. If he alone had heard Margaret's disclosure, he might have ignored it, let Jasmine go unquestioned and undisturbed. But Felicity Howarth's presence complicated matters. She would be as aware of correct procedure as he, and to ignore indications of suspicious death smacked of collusion. And although his own grief and exhaustion kept him from isolating it, a sense of unease still hovered at the edge of his consciousness.

He looked up and found Felicity watching him. "I suppose," he said reluctantly, "I had better order a post mortem."

"You?" Felicity said, her brows drawing together, and Kincaid realized what he hadn't told her.

"Sorry. I'm a policeman. Detective Superintendent, Scotland Yard." Watching Felicity, Kincaid had the same fleeting impression he'd had when they found Jasmine's body. Her face went smooth and blank, as if she'd scrubbed it free of emotion.

"Unless you'd rather do the honors?" he asked, thinking he might have offended her by usurping her authority.

Felicity's attention came back to him, and she shook her head. "No. I think it's best if you take care of it." She nodded toward Margaret, who still sat unresponsive. "I've other matters to see to." She went to Margaret and touched her shoulder. "I'll see you home, love. My car's just outside."

Margaret followed her without protest, taking the shopping bag Felicity gathered up for her and cradling it against her chest. At the door, she turned back to Kincaid. "She shouldn't have been alone," she whispered, and the words seemed almost an accusation, as if he, too, were somehow responsible.

The door closed behind them. Kincaid stood in the silent flat, suddenly remembering that he hadn't slept for almost forty-eight hours. A thread of a cry broke the stillness and he spun around, heart jumping.

The cat, of course. He had forgotten all about the cat. He dropped to his knees beside the bed and peered underneath. Green eyes shone back at him.

"Here kitty, kitty," he called coaxingly. The cat blinked, and he saw a movement which might have been a twitch of its tail. "Here kitty. Good kitty." No response. Kincaid felt like an idiot. He brushed himself off and rooted around in the kitchen until he found a tin of catfood and a tin opener. He spooned the revolting stuff into a bowl and set it on the floor. "Okay, cat. You'll have to shift for yourself. I'm going home."

Exhaustion swept over him again, but he had a few more things to do. He checked the fridge, finding two nearly-full vials of morphine. Then he pulled the rubbish bin from under the sink and sifted through it. No empties.

He found Jasmine's address book easily enough, however, neatly stowed in a slot in the secretary. Her brother was listed with a phone number and address in Surrey. He had pocketed the book and put a hand on the doorknob when a thought brought him up short.

Jasmine had been a very methodical person. Whenever he'd visited her he always heard her draw the bolt and put up the chain behind him. Would she have lain quietly down to die without securing her door? Consideration for those entering the next day, perhaps? He shook his head. Access would have been easy enough through the garden door. And yet, if she'd died naturally in her sleep she would have locked up as usual the evening before.

The doubt irritated him, and he stepped into the hall and closed the door more smartly than it warranted. It was then he realized he'd forgotten to look for a key.

Chapter Three

The midday sun poured through the uncurtained southern windows of Kincaid's flat, creating a stifling greenhouse effect. He pushed open the casements and the balcony door, shedding his jacket and tossing it over the back of the armchair in the process. Sweat broke out under his arms and beaded his upper lip, and the telephone receiver felt slippery in his fingers as he dialed the coroner's office.

Kincaid identified himself and explained the situation. Yes, the body had been sent to hospital as there was no doctor in attendance to certify death. No, he'd not questioned the cause of death at the time, but had since learned something that made it suspicious. Would the coroner ask the hospital histopathologist to do a post mortem? Yes, he supposed it was an official request. Would they please let him know the results as soon as possible?

He thanked them and hung up, satisfied that he had at least started proceedings. The paperwork could wait until tomorrow. He stood looking irresolutely around the flat, dreading the call to Jasmine's brother.

Days-old dirty dishes cluttered the kitchen sink, cups containing sticky dregs smudged the dust on the coffee table while books and clothes littered the furniture. Kincaid sighed and sank into a chair, rubbing his face absentmindedly. Even his skin felt rubbery and slack with exhaustion. Leaning back and closing his eyes, he felt a hard lump beneath his shoulder blade—his jacket, Jasmine's address book in the breast pocket. He pulled the slender book out and sat studying it. It suited Jasmine, he thought—emerald green leather stamped with small, gold dragons, elegant and a little exotic. It crossed his mind that he must ask her where she got it, then he shook his head. He had yet to accept it.

The gilt-edged pages of the small book fluttered through his fingers like butterflies' wings and he caught glimpses of Jasmine's tiny italic script. Names jumped out at him. Margaret Bellamy, with an address in Kilburn. Felicity Howarth, Highgate. Theo he discovered under the T's, simply the first name and phone number.

He punched the numbers in more slowly this time. The repeated burring of the phone sounded tinny and distant, and he had almost given up when a man's voice said "Trifles."

"I beg your pardon?" Kincaid answered, startled.

"Trifles. Can I help you?" The voice sounded a little peevish this time.

Kincaid collected himself. "Mr. Dent?"

"Yes. What can I do for you?" Peevishness became definite annoyance.

"Mr. Dent, my name is Duncan Kincaid. I live in the same building as your sister, Jasmine. I'm sorry to have to tell you that she died last night." The hollow silence on the other end of the line lasted so long that Kincaid wondered if the man were still there. "Mr. Dent?"

"Jasmine? Are you sure?" Theo Dent sounded bewildered. "Of course, you're sure," he continued with a little more strength. "What an idiotic question. It's just that… I didn't expect—"

"I don't think anyone—"

"Was she… I mean, did she…"

Kincaid answered gently. "She seemed very peaceful. Mr. Dent, I'm afraid you'll have to come and make arrangements."

"Oh, of course." A plan of action seemed to galvanize him into disjointed efficiency. "Where have they… where is she? I can't come until this evening. I'll have to close the shop. I don't drive, you see. I'll have to get the train in—"

Kincaid interrupted him. "I could meet you if you like, here at the flat, and give you the details then." He didn't want to explain over the telephone why the funeral arrangements might be delayed.

Theo gave an audible sigh of relief. "Could you? That's very kind of you. I'll get the five o'clock train up. Are you upstairs or down? Jasmine never—"

"Up." Theo's ignorance didn't surprise Kincaid—after all, he hadn't even known that Jasmine had a brother.

They rang off and Kincaid closed his eyes for a moment, the worst of his immediate responsibilities finished. It hadn't been as bad as he'd expected. Jasmine's brother sounded more bewildered than grief-stricken. Perhaps they hadn't been close, although he was finding that Jasmine's silence on a subject was not necessarily indicative. Feeling too fuzzy to think clearly about it, he wandered into the kitchen and peered into the refrigerator—eggs, a shriveled tomato, a suspicious bit of cheese, a few cans of beer. He popped open a beer and took a sip, grimaced and set it down again.

He had his shirt half unbuttoned and had reached the bedroom door when the knock came—sharply official, two raps. Kincaid opened his front door and blinked. He didn't often see Major Keith dressed in anything except his gardening gear, and today he looked particularly natty—tweed suit with regimental tie, shoes polished to a looking-glass shine, neatly creased trilby in his hand, and an anxious expression puckering his round face.

"Major?"

"I just spoke to the postman. He said he'd seen an ambulance pull away from the building when he came past earlier and I wondered—there was no answer when I knocked downstairs just now. Is she all right?"

Oh, lord! Kincaid sagged against the doorjamb. How could he have forgotten that the Major didn't know? And they were friends, not just passing acquaintances—her comfortable afternoon visits with the Major were one thing, at least, mat Jasmine had discussed. "I'm not sure you'd call them 'chats'," she'd said, laughing. "Mostly we just sit, like two old dogs in the sun."

Kincaid pulled himself together, sure that his face was stamped with dismay. "Come in, Major, do." He ushered the Major in and waved vaguely in the direction of a chair, but the Major turned and stood quietly facing him, waiting. His eyes were a surprisingly sharp, pale blue.

"You'd best tell me, then," he said, finally.

Kincaid sighed. "She didn't answer the door to her nurse this morning. I came along and forced the lock. We found her in bed. She seemed to have died peacefully in her sleep."

The Major nodded, and an expression flickered across his face that Kincaid couldn't quite place. "A good lass, in spite of—" He broke off and focused on Kincaid. "Well, never mind that now." The remnants of his Scots burr became more pronounced. "Will you be seeing to things, then?"

Another assumption of an intimacy with Jasmine he hadn't felt he merited, Kincaid thought curiously. "Temporarily, at least. Her brother's coming up tonight."

The Major merely nodded again and turned toward the door. "I'll leave you to get on with it."

"Major?" Kincaid stopped him as he reached the door. "Did Jasmine ever mention a brother to you?"

The Major turned in the act of jamming his hat over the thinning hair brushed across his skull. Thoughtfully, he fingered the gray bristles that lay on his upper lip like thatch on a cottage roof. "Well now, I can't say as she did. She never said much. Remarkable for a female." The blue eyes crinkled at the corners.

After watching the Major descend the stairs, Kincaid shut his door and leaned against the inside. Even working all night on a nasty case didn't account for the leaden feeling in his limbs and the cotton-wool in his head. Shock, he supposed, the mind's way of holding grief at bay.

He fastened the chain on the door, rammed home the bolt, and lifted the phone out of its cradle as he passed. Shedding clothes, he stumbled into the bedroom. Flies buzzed heavily in and out of the open window. A bar of sunlight lay diagonally across the bed, as substantial as stone. Kincaid fell into it and slept before his face touched the rumpled sheet.

The temperature dropped quickly as the sun set and Kincaid woke with the draft of cool air against his skin. The bit of southern sky he could see through the still-open window was charcoal tinged faintly with pink. He rolled over and looked at the clock, swore, and stumbled out of bed in the direction of the shower.

Fifteen minutes later he'd managed to get himself into jeans and a pullover and was dragging a comb through his damp hair when the bell rang. All his expectations of a male version of Jasmine Dent vanished when he opened the door.

"Mr. Kincaid?" The man's question was hesitant, as if he were afraid he might be rebuffed.

Kincaid examined him, taking in the oval face and small bone structure, but there any resemblance to Jasmine ended. Theo Dent wore an extra layer of padding on his small frame, had a halo of curly brown hair shot with gray, round John Lennon specs, and eyes that were blue rather than brown.

"Mr. Dent." Kincaid held out his hand and Theo gave it a quick jerk. His palm felt damp and Kincaid had the impression that his hand trembled. "Do you have a key to your sister's flat, Mr. Dent?"

Theo shook his head. "No. No, I'm afraid not."

Kincaid thought for a moment. "You'd better come in while I hunt something up." He left Theo standing with his hands clasped in front of him, rocking on his heels, while he rooted around in the bedroom bureau drawer. When he'd worked Theft one of his regulars had given him a set of lockpicks which he had never had occasion to use.

He held up the ring of delicate wires as he returned to the sitting room, and Theo's eyebrows rose questioningly above the rims of his spectacles. "I didn't mink to look for a key when I locked up again earlier," Kincaid said in explanation. "These ought to do the trick."

"But how… I mean, it was you that found…" "Yes. I picked it a little less elegantly this morning, I'm afraid. With a paperclip." If Theo Dent wondered how Kincaid came by a set of lockpicks, he didn't ask.

They descended the stairs and Kincaid made short work of the cheap lock. As he opened the door and stepped aside, his arm brushed against Theo's, and he felt the tremor running through it. He paused and touched Theo's shoulder. "Listen. It's all right, you know. There's nothing to see. You don't even have to go in if you'd rather not. I just thought you might need to look through her papers."

Theo looked up at him, his blue eyes blinking earnestly. "No, I want to go in. I must. Forgive my being silly." He stepped past Kincaid into Jasmine's flat. His momentum carried him to the center of the sitting room, where he came to a halt, his arms hanging at his sides. He gazed at his sister's things, the jade and brass, the brightly colored silk hangings, and the neatly tucked hospital bed taking up more than its share of space.

To Kincaid's consternation tears began to slip beneath the gold spectacles and run unchecked down Theo's face. Standing among his sister's belongings he looked both pathetic and incongruous—the tweedy jacket over the pinstriped shirt and red braces seemed almost a parody of Englishness. He reminded Kincaid of the dressed-up teddy bears in shop windows.

"Here." He took Theo's arm and guided his unresisting body over to a dining chair. "Sit down." Kincaid hunted for some tissues on the table by the bed, and the sight of Jasmine's book and reading glasses sitting tidily next to the tissue box made him feel rather hollow himself. "Jasmine kept some whiskey in the cupboard," he said as he handed Theo the tissues. "We could both use something to drink."

Theo shook his head. "I'm not much of a drinker." He sniffed, took off his spectacles and wiped his face, then blew his nose. "But I suppose just a small one won't hurt."

Kincaid splashed a half-inch of whiskey in two glasses and handed one to Theo. "Cheers."

"Thanks. And please call me Theo. Under the circumstances anything else is rather absurd." They drank in silence for a few minutes, some of Theo's color returning. He buried his face in the tissues and blew, then pulled a rumpled handkerchief from his pocket and gently patted the tip of his nose.

"It's just that I didn't quite believe it," Theo spoke suddenly, as if continuing a conversation Kincaid hadn't begun, "until I came in and saw the flat empty, and the bed here in the sitting room. I didn't know about the bed."

Kincaid frowned. Jasmine had ordered the hospital bed several months ago. "How long since you'd seen your sister, Theo?"

Theo took another sip of the whiskey and contemplated the question. "Six months, I think. About that." He saw Kincaid's look of surprise. "Please don't get the wrong impression—what did you say your name was? I wasn't quite taking things in when you phoned."

"Duncan."

Theo nodded a little owlishly, and Kincaid thought he had not exaggerated his low tolerance for alcohol. "It's not that I didn't want to see my sister, Duncan, but that she didn't want to see me. Or rather," he leaned forward and waved his glass at Kincaid in emphasis, "she didn't want me to see her. After she knew she was ill she didn't en-courage me to visit." Theo leaned back in his chair and sighed. "God! She could be so stubborn. I rang up every week. Once, when I phoned and begged her to let me come she said, "Theo, I'm losing my hair. I don't want you to see me." I can't imagine her without it. Was she—"

"She did lose her hair, but it grew in again when they stopped the treatments. Quite thick and dark, like a boy's."

Theo considered this, nodded. "She always wore it long, since she was a girl. She was quite proud of it." He fell silent and closed his eyes for so long that Kincaid began to think he had dozed off. Kincaid had reached over to take the tilting glass from Theo's hand when he opened his eyes and continued as if he hadn't paused.

"Jasmine always looked after me, you see. Our mother died when I was born, our father when I was ten and Jasmine fifteen. But Father wasn't much use. It was always just the two of us, really." Theo took another sip of his drink and patted his nose again with the handkerchief. "She told me that the treatments had helped, that she was doing all right. I should have known better." He leaned back and closed his eyes again for a moment. When he opened them and spoke, his words were surprisingly bitter. "I think she couldn't bear to be at a disadvantage, couldn't bear not to be in charge. She robbed me of my only chance to repay her, to look after her the way she looked after me."

"Surely she didn't want to distress you," Kincaid suggested gently.

Theo sniffed. "Perhaps. But it would have been easier than this… this leaving things unfinished."

Deciding it unwise to offer a refill, Kincaid gathered up Theo's empty glass along with his own and washed them out in the sink. He felt unexpectedly light-headed himself, and remembered that the last thing he'd eaten had been stale sandwiches at his desk in the early morning hours. Theo's voice interrupted his thoughts before they wandered too far in the direction of food.

"The really odd thing is that she phoned me yesterday— that was odd in itself as she almost always waited for me to ring her—and said she wanted to see me this weekend. I thought she must be improving. She really sounded quite well. We made arrangements for Sunday, as I couldn't close the shop on Saturday."

A cruel trick to play on her brother, Kincaid thought, if Jasmine had intended to kill herself. He hadn't thought her capable of malice. Still, what did he know of the relationship between them, or about Theo, for that matter? He turned around and leaned against the sink, folding his arms across his chest. "What do you sell, Theo? Jasmine never said."

Theo smiled. "Junk, really. As in j-u-n-q-u-e. Things not quite old enough to be considered antiques and not expensive enough to be considered much else. Anything from buttons to butter dishes." His face fell. "Jasmine helped set me up." He stood and began walking restlessly about the room, touching things. "I don't know what I shall do now." He shook his head, then turned and faced Kincaid again, holding a small porcelain elephant from Jasmine's writing desk. "What's to be done, about Jasmine, I mean? There will have to be arrangements made… I'm afraid I don't know where to start. Do you know what she wanted?" Theo's brow creased and he continued before Kincaid could speak. "Were you a close friend of my sister? I'm sorry—I've been so caught up in myself—I ought to have realized. It must have been very difficult for you."

Kincaid hadn't been prepared for sympathy. "Yes," he said, answering both question and statement, then took a breath and straightened up. It couldn't be put off indefinitely. "I was a friend of Jasmine's, but I'm also a policeman. When Jasmine's nurse and I found her this morning we assumed she had died of natural causes. Then Jasmine's friend Margaret arrived and told us that she had agreed to help Jasmine commit suicide."

Theo's pacing had taken him back to the dining chair. He collapsed in it as suddenly as if his legs had been cut from under him. "Suicide?"

"Margaret said that yesterday Jasmine told her she'd changed her mind, but now she thinks Jasmine just intended releasing her from her obligation."

"But why? Why would she kill herself?"

"Perhaps she didn't want to become too dependent on anyone, or suffer any more than necessary."

"Of course. Stupid of me." Theo's eyes had lost their focus, and he absently stroked the porcelain elephant he still held. "That would be like her."

"Theo, I had the coroner's office request a post mortem." Seeing Theo's look of incomprehension, Kincaid continued. "In a situation like this it's necessary to find out exactly what did happen."

"Is it?" Theo asked, still sounding puzzled.

"Well, it's the usual procedure if there's any uncertainty as to cause of death." It seemed to Kincaid that the second shock had rendered Theo unable to cope, and the whiskey probably hadn't improved matters. "I'm afraid the funeral arrangements will have to wait until afterwards. Perhaps you could get in touch with her solicitor?" Theo looked at him blankly. "Do you know her solicitor's name?" Kincaid asked.

Theo made an effort to collect himself. "Thomas… Thompson… I'm not sure." He stood up, still clutching the elephant. "Look. You've been very kind. Would you mind looking after things here a bit longer? I think I'd like to go home."

Kincaid wondered if he would make it. "Shall I walk with you to the tube station?"

Theo shook his head. "No. I'm fine, really." He stood up, and only as he held out his hand to Kincaid did he seem to realize he still held the small elephant. "It was mine as a child," he said in answer to Kincaid's questioning look. "I gave it to Jasmine when I moved into my first digs. Didn't think it fashionable, or grown-up, I suppose." He gave a self-deprecating snort and placed the elephant very carefully back in its position on Jasmine's desk. "You'll let me know?" he asked, turning to Kincaid and shaking his hand.

"Yes. As soon as I hear."

Theo turned and let himself out, leaving Kincaid in doubtful possession of Jasmine's flat.

Kincaid stood for a moment organizing his thoughts, determined to ignore the rumblings of his stomach a bit longer. Theo Dent's revelation that Jasmine had arranged to see him this weekend, after a six month hiatus, made Kincaid feel even more uneasy about the whole business. Had Jasmine lied to both Margaret and Theo? In Margaret's case it might have been motivated by kindness, but surely not in Theo's.

Kincaid stuck his hands in his pockets and sighed as he looked around the familiar room. It seemed to him that Jasmine's quiet presence had provided an anchor in more than one life—both Margaret and Theo had wailed "What shall I do now?" as bereft as abandoned children, yet he had no idea what Jasmine had felt for them, or anyone else, for that matter. Her presence was already as elusive as smoke, and he thought he had known her quite well.

He went to the kitchen sink, intending to dry and put away the whiskey tumblers. His foot nudged something and he looked down curiously. It was the bowl of food he had put out that morning for the cat—untouched, dried, and crusted over. "Damn and blast," Kincaid swore. He had forgotten about the cat. He'd meant to speak to Theo about it, hoping Theo would take the beast home, or make arrangements for it.

He knelt and peered under Jasmine's bed. The dark, hunched shape of the cat remained exactly where he had seen it last, and he wondered if it had moved at all. "Kitty, kitty, kitty," he coaxed, which elicited as little response as before. Returning to the sink, Kincaid scraped the dried food into the bin and refilled the bowl. He shoved this offering as far under the bed as he could reach, then stayed down on knees and elbows, contemplating the cat. He felt guilty as well as helpless in the face of the animal's grief, and he had no experience with cats.

"Look," he addressed the cat, "that's all I can do for now. Whether or not you eat is up to you. I can't go on calling you "kitty," and I'm not going to call you 'Sidhi' or anything equally absurd." The cat closed its eyes, whether from relaxation or boredom Kincaid couldn't guess. "Sid. From now on you're just plain Sid, okay?" He took silence as assent and got up, dusting off his knees.

He must find a key if he were to continue looking after the cat—he couldn't go on playing the amateur burglar.

Where had Jasmine kept her keys? He thought she hadn't often used them since she became ill, but they must have been easily accessible. The small secretary seemed the obvious choice, and his search did not take more than a few minutes. He found a single key on a monogrammed brass key ring, tucked away in a wooden catch-all box on the desk's surface.

As he turned away a flash of color in one of the secretary's slots caught his attention. It was a weekly engagement calendar of the type sold by museum shops—each week's page accompanied by a Constable painting. He flipped through the last few months, finding visits to the clinic, birthdays, and his own name entered with increasing regularity. In the weeks of March he began to see botanical notations; the blooming of the japonica and forsythia, the daffodils, and as he turned to April, the flowering of the pears and plums, and the first tulip in the garden. All were things visible from the windows of the flat, and Kincaid felt that this had not been Jasmine's yearly ritual, but rather a cataloguing of a last spring. In yesterday's space, opposite Constable's "View from Hampstead Heath," she had written "Theo—Sunday?" and then, in very careful script "my fiftieth birthday."

He hadn't known.

Chapter Four

Kincaid woke slowly on Saturday morning, feeling drowsy and content until memory returned. The sense of loss descended heavily, weighing on his chest He pulled himself up, shaking his head like a swimmer emerging from deep water.

If he had dreamed he had no recollection of it, but his mind was clear and he found he had come to a decision in his sleep. If the pathologist reported that Jasmine had indeed died of natural causes, then he would gladly lay aside his suspicions. But if not, he felt a need to be better prepared. Suicide was the obvious assumption—he had no concrete reason for feeling uncomfortable with it, yet he did. Perhaps he was guilty of bringing his job home, of attributing violence to the natural and peaceful death of a friend. Or perhaps he was resisting the idea of suicide because it made him feel culpable, as if he had failed her. But whatever the source of his unease, Kincaid had learned from experience to trust his instincts, and something about Jasmine's death didn't feel right.

The weekend would give him a grace period. He was off duty, and Jasmine's flat would be the logical place to start He found, however, that the idea of going through Jasmine's personal effects alone depressed him. Even though Theo had pretty well given him carte blanche, he felt an uncomfortable sense of invading her privacy.

His sergeant's open, freckled face sprang easily to his mind. She was also off duty this weekend. He'd give her a ring and ask for her help. His snooping would seem less personal, and Gemma's brisk good sense would keep him from thinking too much. He rolled over in bed and reached for the phone.

Gemma sounded uncharacteristically cross until she recognized his voice. Even then she hesitated after he explained what he wanted, but he put it down to concern about her small son and assured her she could bring him along.

Satisfied with the arrangement, he got up and headed toward the kitchen and coffee. The sight of his sitting room jolted him to a stop, arousing something akin to panic. Although Gemma had dropped him off or picked him up on occasion, she had never been up to his flat. She'd think him an absolute slob if she saw this shambles. A major tidying-up was definitely in the offing.

Gemma James pulled her Ford Escort into a space before Kincaid's building by midmorning. She killed the engine and sat for a moment, listening. The silence in Carlingford Road always surprised her. At her own house in Leyton, the traffic noise from Lea Bridge Road never dropped below a muted roar. It must be the Victorians' solid construction, she thought, looking up at the still shadowed faces of the flats. They were all red brick, rescued from severity by white trim on the windows and from conformity by the brightly colored ground-floor doors. Toby began squirming in his car seat and she moved a little reluctantly, unbuckling him and wincing as he climbed across her and began bouncing on her lap. "Oof!" she said, and he giggled with delight. "You'll soon be too heavy to get in Mummy's lap at all. I'll have to stop feeding you." She tickled him until he squealed, then slipped her arms around his chubby body and nuzzled his straight, fair hair. At two, he was already looking more like a little boy than a baby and she begrudged any infringement on her time with him.

Her earlier annoyance flooded back. Did Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid think she had nothing better to do with her Saturday than help him with some vague personal problem? Then she frowned, admitting to herself that her reluctance had more to do with her own discomfort at crossing the carefully drawn line between her personal and professional lives than with his presumption. She had come because she was flattered that he had thought of her, and because she was curious.

Kincaid opened his door and stared at her, appreciation lighting his face.

"You said personal," she reminded him sharply, looking down at her burnt-orange T-shirt which she had fancied made her hair look more copper than ginger, then at the printed-cotton skirt and sandals.

"I'm glad I did. Gemma unstarched." He grinned at her, then swung Toby up in the air.

"You're not exactly a picture of sartorial elegance yourself," she added, looking pointedly at his faded jeans and Phantom T-shirt.

"Granted. Been tidying in your honor." He stepped back and waved her into the flat with a mock flourish.

"It's lovely," Gemma said, and heard the echo of surprise in her voice. Walls painted white to make the most of the southern light, blond Danish furniture with colorful cotton covers, one wall lined with books and another holding stereo equipment and framed London Transport posters—the overall effect was bright and comfortable and spoke of a man confident in his own taste.

"What were you expecting, squalid bachelor digs furnished with jumble-sale castoffs?" Kincaid sounded pleased.

"I suppose so. My ex-husband's idea of designer decorating was leaving the labels on the orange crates," Gemma said a little absently, her attention on the room's real draw—the view of North London's rooftops from the balcony doors. She crossed the room as if pulled by an invisible string, and Kincaid quickly opened the door for her. They stepped out together, Gemma unconsciously hooking a hand through Toby's braces.

Her delight and envy must have shown on her face because Kincaid said contritely, "I should have invited you up before now."

Gemma judged the balcony Toby-proof and let him go, then leaned against the rail with her eyes closed and her face turned up to the sun. She felt a sense of peace here, of retreat, that she never found at home. She didn't wonder that he guarded it jealously. Sighing, she turned to face him and found him watching her. "You didn't ring me just so that I could admire the scenery. What's up?"

Kincaid explained the circumstances of Jasmine's death, and more hesitantly, his doubts. As he spoke he watched Toby digging happily with a stick in his sole pot of pansies. "Stupid of me, I suppose, but I feel somehow responsible, as if I let her down without knowing it."

In the clear light Gemma saw the shadows under his eyes and new lines framing his mouth. She looked out across the rooftops again, thinking. "You were close friends?"

"Yes. At least I thought so."

"Well," Gemma turned reluctantly from the view, "let's go have a look then, shall we?"

"Afterwards, I'll take you and Toby for lunch at the pub, and then maybe a walk on the Heath?" His tone was light but Gemma sensed entreaty, and it occurred to her that her usually self-contained superior dreaded spending the day alone.

"A bribe?"

He smiled. "If you like."

The first thing Gemma noticed about Jasmine Dent's flat was the smell—faintly elusive, sweet and spicy at once. She wrinkled her nose, trying to place it, then her face cleared. "It's incense. I haven't smelled incense since I left school."

Kincaid looked blank. "What?"

"You don't smell it?"

He sniffed, shook his head. "Must be used to it, I suppose."

Gemma squelched an illogical flare of jealousy that he had spent so many hours in this flat, with this woman she'd known nothing about. It was none of her business how he spent his time.

She looked around, while keeping a wary eye on Toby. A lifetime's accumulation, she thought, of a woman who had cared about things—things loved for their color and texture and their associations rather than their material value.

One wall held prints and Gemma went closer to study them. The center of the grouping was a sepia-tinted photograph of Edward VIII as a young man in Scouting uniform, smiling and handsome, long before the cares of Mrs. Simpson and abdication. A memento of Jasmine's parents, perhaps? Beside it a delicate, gold-washed print portrayed two turbaned Indian princes on elephants charging one another, their armies ranged behind them. The artist apparently had no knowledge of perspective and the elephants appeared to be floating in mid-air, giving the whole composition a stylized and whimsical air.

Gemma moved to the sitting room window and ran her fingers lightly over the carved wooden elephants parading across the sill. "Aren't elephants supposed to be lucky? Here, Toby, come and look. Aren't they lovely?" She turned to Kincaid and asked, "Do you think he might play with them? They seem sturdy enough."

"I don't see why not." He came across to her and lifted the window sash, and they leaned out and looked down into the garden together.

"Ohhh." Gemma exhaled the word as she took in the square of lawn, emerald green, smooth as a bowling green, bordered by ranks of multi-colored tulips, crowned with springing forsythia and the opening buds of the plum trees. "It is lovely." She thought of her shriveled patch of garden, usually more mud than grass, and looked at Toby intently lining the elephants up nose to tail. "Could he—"

"Better not." Kincaid shook his head. "Not until we can go down with him. If he trampled the tulips the Major might eat him." He grinned and ruffled Toby's fair hair. "Do you think we should divide up the—"

They both heard the mewing, faint even in the quiet flat.

They turned and watched as the black cat crept from under Jasmine's bed and crouched, ready to retreat. "A cat! You didn't tell me she had a cat."

"I keep forgetting," Kincaid said, a little shamefaced.

Gemma knelt and called to him. After a moment's hesitation he padded toward her and she scooped him up, holding him under her chin. "What's he called?"

"Sid. He wouldn't come for me." Kincaid sounded aggrieved.

"Maybe my voice reminded him of her," Gemma suggested.

Kincaid knelt and checked the food he'd left under the bed. "He's still not eating, though."

"No wonder." Gemma wrinkled her nose in disgust at the crusted food. "You'll have to do better than that." She put the cat down and rummaged through the kitchen cupboards until she found a tin of tuna. "This might do the trick." She opened the tin and spooned a little tuna into a clean dish, then set it before the cat. Sidhi sniffed and looked at her, then settled over the dish and took a tentative bite.

Kincaid had wandered back into the sitting room, touching objects absently before moving on to something else. "This won't do at all," Gemma said under her breath, remembering his normal assertiveness. "He couldn't find a haystack in the middle of the sitting room in this state, could he, Sid?" The cat ignored her, intent now on his food.

Kincaid stopped in front of the solid, oak bookcase and contemplated the spines as if they might reveal something if he stared long enough. Books were jammed in every which way, taking up every inch of available space.

Gemma joined him and scanned the titles. Scott, Forster, Delderfield, Galsworthy, a much worn, leather set of Jane Austen. "There aren't any new ones," said Gemma, realizing what struck her as odd. "No paperbacks, no bestsellers, no mysteries or romances."

"She reread these. Like old friends."

Gemma studied him as intently as he studied the books, deciding to take matters in hand. "Look. You start with the desk, all right? And I'll tackle the bedroom."

Kincaid nodded and crossed to the secretary. He sat in the chair, which looked much too delicate to bear his six-foot frame, and gingerly opened the top drawer.

Jasmine's small bedroom faced north, toward the street, and Gemma turned on the shaded dressing table lamp. The room held a narrow single bed with an old chenille spread stretched tightly over it, the dresser, a nightstand, and a heavy wardrobe—and unlike the sitting room, it reflected none of its owner's personality. Gemma sensed that the room had been used for sleeping and storage only, not inhabited in the same sense as the rest of the flat.

She started with the dressing table, working her way gently through layers of underclothes and bottles of half-empty cosmetics. Under slips and stockings in a bottom drawer lay a picture frame, face down. Gemma lifted it out and turned it over. A dark-eyed young woman stared back at her from a black-and-white studio photograph. Slipping the backing from the frame, she examined the back of the photograph itself. Neatly penciled letters read "Jasmine, 1962." Gemma turned the photo over again. The dark hair was long and straight, parted in the center, the face small and oval, the mouth held a hint of a smile at some secret not shared with the observer. In spite of the date on the back, the girl had an old-fashioned look—she might have modeled for a Renaissance Madonna.

Gemma opened her mouth to call Kincaid, hesitated, then carefully placed the photo back in the top of its drawer, facedown.

She moved to the wardrobe and swung open the heavy doors. It held mostly good business suits, dresses, and a few silk caftans. Gemma ran her hands appreciatively over the fabrics, then lifted the trousers and sweaters in the drawers.

The wardrobe's top shelf held rows of neatly stacked shoe boxes. Gemma slipped off her shoes, stepped up on the bottom shelf and lifted the top off a box, peering inside. Quickly she pulled the boxes off the shelves and laid them on the bed, removing the tops.

"Guv. You'd better come and look at these."

He came to the doorway, dusting off his hands. "What's up?"

"Composition books. Lots of them, all alike." Gemma opened one and showed him the pages covered with the same neat, italic script she'd seen on the back of the photo. She was suddenly very aware of his nearness in the small room, his quick breathing, the smell of aftershave and warm skin. She stepped back and said more loudly than she intended, "It looks like Jasmine kept a journal."

They sorted the boxes, checking the first page of each book for the date. "1952 is the earliest date I've found," Gemma said, rubbing her nose that itched from the dust. Her fingertips felt dry and papery.

Kincaid calculated a moment. "She would have been ten years old." They kept on in silence until Kincaid looked up and frowned. "The last entry seems to have been made a week ago."

"Did you find anything in the sitting room?"

He shook his head. "No."

"Do you suppose she stopped writing because she knew she was dying?" Gemma ventured.

"Someone with a lifetime's habit of recording their thoughts? Doesn't seem likely."

"Or," Gemma continued slowly, "did it somehow go missing?"

They sat in the garden at the Freemason's Arms, eating brown bread with cheese and pickle, and drinking lager. They'd had to wait for one of the white plastic tables, but judged it worth it for the sun and the view across Willow Road to the Heath.

Toby, having mangled a soft cheese roll and most of the chips in his basket, sat in the grass at their feet. He was pulling things from Gemma's bag, muttering a running catalogue to himself—"keys, stick, Toby's horsey"—here he held a tattered stuffed horse up for their inspection. Kincaid thought blackly of the listing of a victim's effects, then pushed the thought away. He pulled a chip from Toby's basket and held it out to him. "Here, Toby. Feed the birds."

Toby looked from Kincaid to the house sparrows pecking in the grass. "Birdies?" he said, interested, then launched himself toward the sparrows, chip extended before him like a rapier. The birds took flight.

"Now look what you've done," said Gemma, laughing. "He'll be frustrated."

"Good for his emotional development," Kincaid intoned with mock seriousness, men grinned at her. "Sorry." He liked seeing Gemma this way, relaxed and thoughtful. At work she was often too quick off the mark with assumptions, and he had more than once accused her of talking faster than she thought.

Good with Toby, too, he thought, attentive without fussing. He watched Gemma reel the toddler back in and plop him in the grass at her feet. She put a piece of her bread in the grass a few feet from Toby. "Here, lovey. Be very, very still and maybe they'll come to you." The sun had reddened the bridge of her nose and darkened the dusting of freckles on her pale skin. She became aware of Kincaid's scrutiny, looked up and flushed.

"You should wear a sun hat, you know, like a good Victorian girl."

"Ow. You sound just like my mum. "You'll blister in that sun, Gem. You mark my words, you'll look like a navvy by the time you're thirty"," Gemma mimicked. "It can't last, anyway, this weather." She tilted her head and looked at the flat blue sky.

"No." No, but he could sure as hell sit here in the sun as long as it did, not thinking, listening to the sparrows and the hum of traffic from East Heath Road, watching the sun send golden flares from Gemma's hair.

"Duncan." Gemma's tone was unusually tentative. Kincaid sat up and squinted at her as he sipped from his pint. "Duncan, tell me why you don't think Jasmine committed suicide."

He looked away from her, then picked up a scrap of bread from his plate and began to shred it. "You think I'm manufacturing this to salve my wounded vanity. Maybe I am." He leaned forward and met her eyes again. "But I just can't believe she wouldn't have left something—some indication, some message."

"For you?"

"For me. Or for her friend Margaret. Or her brother." The doubt he saw in Gemma's hazel eyes made him defensive. "I knew her, damn it."

"She was ill, dying. People don't always behave rationally. Maybe she wanted you all to think it was natural."

Kincaid sat up, vehement. "She'd know Margaret wouldn't. Not after what passed between them."

"According to Margaret."

"Point taken." Kincaid ran a hand through his already unruly hair. "But still—"

"Look," Gemma interrupted him, her face beginning to flush with her enthusiasm for playing devil's advocate. "You say you don't think she died naturally in her sleep because in that case she would have bolted the door. But what if she felt too ill, perhaps lay down thinking she'd have a rest first—"

"No. She was too… composed. Everything was just too bloody perfect."

"So why couldn't she have drifted off during the evening, lost consciousness before she realized what was happening?"

Kincaid shook his head. "No lights. No telly. No book open across her chest or fallen to the floor. No reading glasses. Gemma," he gave a sharp, uncomfortable shrug, "I think that's what bothered me from the first, even before Margaret came and threw a spanner in the works with the suicide pact. It was almost as if she'd been laid out." He uttered this last remark a little sheepishly, looking sideways at her to gauge her reaction. Finding no expression of ridicule, he added, "The bedclothes weren't even rumpled a bit."

"That's all consistent with suicide," Gemma said, and her gentle tone made Kincaid suspect he was being humored.

"I suppose so." He stretched his legs out under the table and regarded her over the rim of his almost-empty pint. "I know you think I'm daft."

Gemma merely lifted an eyebrow. She picked up Toby, who was getting restless, and jiggled him on her knee until he laughed. "So what if the p.m. findings are positive?" she said between bounces. "The coroner's sure to rule suicide. There's no evidence to support opening an investigation."

"Lack of written or verbal communication of intent?"

Gemma shrugged. "Very iffy. And Margaret's story would be used to support suicide, not vice versa."

Kincaid watched a kite hovering over the Heath and didn't answer. Margaret. Now there was a thing. Why should he take Margaret's story at face value? Yesterday he had been too shocked and exhausted to question anything, but it occurred to him now that Margaret couldn't have invented a better story if she'd wanted it thought that Jasmine committed suicide, and it also absolved her of any guilt in not intervening.

"You've got that look," Gemma said accusingly. "What are you hatching?"

"Right." Kincaid drained his pint and sat up. "I'd like to have a word with Jasmine's solicitor, but I haven't a hope of seeing him till Monday."

"What else?" Gemma said, and Kincaid thought she looked inexplicably pleased with herself.

"Talk to Margaret. Maybe talk to Theo again."

"And the books?"

For an instant asking Gemma to help him crossed Kincaid's mind, but he rejected it as quickly as it came. That was one task he couldn't share. "I'll make a start on them."

They walked slowly back to Carlingford Road, holding Toby's hands and swinging him over the curbs. "No walk on the Heath, then?" Kincaid asked, for he'd seen Gemma glance at her watch more than once.

Gemma shook her head. "I'd better not. I promised my mum we'd visit—she says we don't come often enough."

Kincaid heard something in her voice, a shade of worry or aggravation, and remembered how she'd sounded on the phone that morning. Probably some bloke, he thought, and realized how little he knew about Gemma's life. Only that she'd divorced shortly after Toby was born; she lived in a semi-detached house in Leyton; she'd grown up and gone to school in North London. That was all. He'd never even been to Leyton—she always picked him up or met him at the Yard.

Suddenly the extent of his own myopia astounded him. He thought of her as reliable, attractive, intelligent, and often opinionated, with a special gift for putting people at ease in an interview—he'd looked no further than the qualities that made her valuable as an assistant. Did she date (this with a twinge of unidentified irritation)? Did she get on with her parents? What were her friends like?

He studied her as she walked beside him. She brushed a wisp of red hair from her face as she bent her head to answer Toby, but her expression was abstracted. "Gemma," he said a little hesitantly, "is anything the matter?"

She looked up at him, startled, then smiled. "No, of course not. Everything's fine."

Somehow Kincaid felt unconvinced, but he let it go. Her manner didn't invite further probing.

The blossom-laden branches of a plum tree overhung the walk, and as they passed beneath, petals showered them like confetti. They laughed, the momentary awkwardness dissolved, and then they were saying good-bye before the flat.

Kincaid climbed the stairs alone, feeling the afternoon stretching before him like a desert. The red light on his answering machine flashed a greeting as he entered the flat and his spirits wilted even further. "Great," he said under his breath, and punched playback.

The duty sergeant's voice demanded to know just what the hell he thought he was playing at—hospital had called about a post mortem he'd requested—and if he didn't put his paperwork through the proper channels there'd be hell to pay. The remainder of the message he added almost as an afterthought, before ringing off abruptly.

Jasmine Dent's system had contained a lethal amount of morphine.

Chapter Five

Kincaid unsnapped the Midget's tarp and folded it from front to back, then unlocked the boot and stowed it away. He accomplished the maneuver neatly and quickly, having perfected it with much practice. The car's red paintwork gleamed cheerily at him, inviting dalliance in the midafternoon sun, but Kincaid shook his head and slid into the driver's seat. An idle down country lanes was not what he had in mind, tourist-poster day or not. He fished his sunglasses out of the door pocket, and put the car in gear.

After he crossed Rosslyn Hill, Kincaid made his way through the back streets of South Hampstead until he came into Kilburn High Road, just north of Maida Vale. He found Margaret Bellamy's address without difficulty, a dingy, terraced house in a block that had avoided gentrification. The front door was the dark red-brown of dried blood, but its peeling paint showed blotches of brighter colors beneath—lime-green, yellow, royal-blue—testimony to previous owners with more cheerful dispositions. He rang the bell and waited, wrinkling his nose against the odor drifting up from the rubbish bins below the basement railing.

The woman who opened the door wore polyester trousers stretched precariously over her bulky thighs, and a shiny jersey endured equal punishment across her bosom. She eyed Kincaid disapprovingly.

"Margaret Bellamy?" Kincaid tried out his best smile, wondering if she could hear him over the canned laughter bellowing from the back of the house.

The woman studied him a bit longer, then jerked her head toward the stairs. "Top of the house. On the right."

Kincaid thanked her and started up the steps, feeling her eyes on his back until he rounded the first landing. The smell of grease and the raucous sounds of the television followed him up three more flights, where the stairs ended in a dim hallway with streakily distempered walls. The two doors were unmarked and he tapped lightly on the right-hand one.

The sound of the downstairs' television switched off, and in the sudden silence Kincaid heard the creak of bedsprings. Margaret Bellamy opened the door with an expectant half-smile. "Oh. It's you," she said, disappointment evident in her swollen face. She made an effort to smile again. "You'd better come in." Jerking her head toward the hall as she drew him in, she added, "She's listening, the horrid old snoop. That's why she turned the telly off." Margaret closed the door and stood awkwardly, as if she didn't know what to do with Kincaid now that she'd shut him in. She looked round the small room and grimaced.

He took in the small bed with its rumpled covers sagging to the floor, a single, stained armchair, a wardrobe, and an old deal table which seemed to serve as desk, dresser, and kitchen.

Margaret made a small, circular motion with her hand and said, "I'm sorry." Kincaid thought the apology covered both herself and the room.

He smiled at her. "I lived in a bedsit myself, when I was training at the Academy. It was pretty dreadful, though I don't think my landlady could've held a candle to yours." This brought an answering smile from Margaret, and she moved to clear the chair for him. As she bent to scoop up a pile of clothes, she staggered and had to steady herself against the chair back.

"Are you all right?" Kincaid asked, and studied her more carefully. Her soft, brown hair was matted, and her eyelids were puffy from weeping. She wore a large T-shirt which had a section of its tail bunched in the waistband of faded gray sweatpants—probably the result of pulling them on hastily when he knocked on the door.

"Have you been out today at all?" he asked.

Margaret shook her head.

"Eaten?"

"No."

"I thought as much. Have you anything here?"

Another negative shake. "Just some tea, really."

Kincaid thought for a moment, then said briskly, "You make us some tea. I'll go down and ask your landlady to put together some sandwiches."

Margaret looked horrified. "She'd never… She wouldn't—"

"She will." He stopped at the door. "Though if Saint George is going to conquer the dragon, he'd better know her name."

"Oh." A flicker of amusement lit Margaret's face. "It's Mrs. Wilson."

The door from which Kincaid guessed Mrs. Wilson had emerged earlier stood slightly ajar. He tapped smartly. The television still played very faintly, and over it he heard the shuffle of slipper-clad feet. The door opened a moment later and Mrs. Wilson squinted at him through the cigarette smoke which trickled from her nostrils. A dragon indeed.

"Mrs. Wilson?"

She glared at him suspiciously. "What of it?"

"Can I talk to you for a minute?"

"Not if you're aimin' to sell me something." The door began to inch closed. "I don't hold with solicitation."

Kincaid wondered what she thought he could be selling. "No. It's about Margaret. Please."

She snorted with annoyance, but stepped back enough to let Kincaid into the room. He surveyed Mrs. Wilson's lair with interest. It apparently served as sitting room as well as kitchen—a small sofa was jammed between the fittings, and large color television held pride of place next to the fridge.

Mrs. Wilson sat down at the Formica-topped table and picked up the cigarette which lay smoldering in the ashtray. An open tabloid and a half-drunk cup of tea were evidence of her afternoon's activity. She didn't invite Kincaid to sit down.

"She's all wet, that girl," Mrs. Wilson pronounced disgustedly. "What's up now? More trouble with the boyfriend?"

Boyfriend? That was a complication he somehow hadn't expected, but it explained Margaret's dashed hopes when she'd opened the door. Kincaid thought quickly. What story would satisfy this harridan? From the looks of the headline in her paper—"Eleven-year-old mum fights authorities for baby!"—Mrs. Wilson's sympathies were aroused by melodrama, but the truth seemed a betrayal of both Margaret and Jasmine.

He improvised. "It's her uncle. Died suddenly yesterday, and Margaret's not taken it well at all."

Mrs. Wilson's heavy face remained as unmoved as her stiffly permed hair. "Figures." She looked at Kincaid suspiciously. "What do you have to do with it, anyway?"

"I'm a friend of the family. Duncan Kincaid." He held out his hand and Mrs. Wilson condescended to touch her pudgy fingertips to his before retrieving her half-smoked cigarette.

"So what's it to me?"

"She's not eaten anything since yesterday. I thought you might make her up some sandwiches?" Kincaid made the last remark with a raised eyebrow and as much persuasion as he could muster.

Mrs. Wilson opened her mouth to refuse, then stopped and eyed Kincaid speculatively. Desire for gossip warred with her natural inclination to do as little for anyone as possible, and maliciousness triumphed over sloth. "Well, I suppose I could just put something together, but I don't want her getting any ideas, mind you." She levered herself out of the chair, then jerked her head toward the vacant seat. "You'd better sit down." She continued over her shoulder as she opened the fridge, "Would this be her mother's brother or her father's that passed away?"

"Her mother's youngest brother, not much older than Margaret, in fact," Kincaid said glibly. "They were very close."

Mrs. Wilson spoke with her back to Kincaid, slicing something he couldn't see. "No family's ever had anything to do with her since she came here. Might as well be an orphan."

"Well, at least she's had her boyfriend to look after her," Kincaid threw out.

"Him!" Mrs. Wilson turned around and fixed Kincaid with a beady stare. "That one never looked after anything but himself, I can tell you. Sponging, more like it." She turned back to her slicing. "Too pretty for his own good, and oily with it. What he sees in her," she lifted her head toward the ceiling, "I don't know." She wiped her hands on her apron and presented Kincaid with a plate of squashy, if edible looking, ham and tomato sandwiches. "That do?"

"Admirably, thanks."

Having finished her task, Mrs. Wilson seemed disinclined to let him go. She lit another cigarette and propped her hip up on the edge of the table. Kincaid looked away from the sight of her spreading thigh and settled his weight back into the chair.

Mrs. Wilson took up her train of thought again. "I've told her I don't want him hanging around here, nor spending the night. Gives my house a bad name, don't it?"

Kincaid assumed the question was rhetorical, but answered it placatingly anyway. "I'm sure no one would think such a thing, Mrs. Wilson."

Mrs. Wilson preened a bit at this, and leaned toward him conspiratorially. "She thinks I don't know what's going on, but I do. I hear him come padding down the stairs at all hours of the night, like a thief. And I hear the rows, too," a pause while she inhaled and sent a cloud of smoke in the direction of Kincaid's face, "mostly him shouting and her wailing like a lamb led to slaughter. Silly cow," Mrs. Wilson finished with a snort. "I imagine she puts up with it 'cause she thinks she won't do any better."

Charitable old bitch, Kincaid thought, and smiled at her. "Then I don't suppose he's much comfort to her, at a time like this?"

"Not been here to comfort, or for anything else. Not since…" Mrs. Wilson squinted and drew on the last of her cigarette, then ground it out in the cheap tin ashtray. "Oh, must have been Thursday tea-time. He stormed out of here in a terrible temper. Near ripped the door off its hinges. But then," she shifted her weight as she thought and the table creaked in protest, "Thursday night is Ladies' Night down at the pub and I was out till closing. If he came back later they were quiet enough making it up."

Kincaid decided he'd exhausted Mrs. Wilson's information for the time being, as well as his patience. He stood up and retrieved the sandwiches. "I don't want these to go stale, and I'd better be seeing about Margaret. I'm sure she'll appreciate your help, Mrs. Wilson. You've been very kind."

"Ta," she said, and wiggled her fingers at him coquettishly.

"Success," Kincaid said when Margaret let him in again. In his absence she had tidied the bed and the scattered clothing, brushed her hair, and put on some pale pink lipstick. Her smile was less tentative, and he thought the time spent alone had brought her some composure.

Margaret's eyes widened as she saw the plate of sandwiches. "I can't believe it! She's never so much as loaned me a tea bag."

"I appealed to her better instincts."

"Didn't know she had any," Margaret snorted, taking the plate from Kincaid. Then she froze, her face crumpling with distress. "You didn't tell her—"

"No." Kincaid rescued the tilting plate and set it on the table. "I told a pack of lies. You've just lost your favorite uncle, your mother's youngest brother, in case Mrs. W. asks."

"But she doesn't have—" Margaret's face cleared. "Oh. Sorry." She smiled at Kincaid. "I guess I'm a little dense today. Thanks."

"Partly hunger, I imagine. Let's get you fed." The electric kettle whistled. Two mugs with tea bags sat ready be-side it. Kincaid poured the tea and settled Margaret in the armchair, then pulled up the sash of the single window and leaned against the sill. As Margaret started on a sandwich, he said, "You'd better tell me about your family, after all the terrible things I made up."

"Woking," said Margaret, through a mouthful of ham and tomato. She swallowed and tried again. "Dorking. Sorry. I didn't realize I was so hungry." She took a smaller bite and chewed a moment before continuing. "I'm from Dorking. My dad owns a garage. I kept his books for him, looked after things."

Kincaid could easily imagine her managing a smaller, more familiar world, where here in London she seemed so vulnerable. "What happened?"

Margaret shrugged and wiped the corner of her mouth with a finger. "Nothing ever changed. I could see myself doing the same thing in twenty years, living bits and pieces of other people's lives. My dad's business, my sister's kids—"

"How did they take it?"

Margaret smiled, mocking herself. "I'm the plain one, so they never expected me to want anything different. I should have been content to have Dad's customers pat me and pay me stupid compliments, to be Aunt Meg and look after Kath's kids whenever she had something better to do."

"They were furious." Kincaid grinned and Margaret smiled back a little unwillingly.

"Yes."

"How long has it been?"

Margaret finished the last sandwich and licked the tips of her fingers, then rubbed them dry on her sweatpants. "Eighteen months now."

"And no one's been to see you in all that time?"

She flushed and said hotly, "That malicious old biddy. I'd swear she keeps a list of anyone who—" Margaret dropped her head into her hands and leaned forward. "Oh Christ, what difference does it make? I feel sick."

Too much food, thought Kincaid, eaten too quickly on an empty stomach. "Keep your head down. It'll pass." He spied a worn face flannel and towel, folded on a shelf above the bed. "Where's the loo?" he asked Margaret.

"Next landing," she said indistinctly, her face now pressed against her knees.

Kincaid took the flannel downstairs and soaked it in cold water, and when he returned Margaret raised her head just long enough to press the cloth against her face. He moved restlessly to the window, wishing he had Gemma's skill at offering practical comfort.

The view—a small, weedy garden with an enormous pair of overalls swinging on the line—didn't hold his attention for long. Turning back to the room, Kincaid took note of Margaret's few possessions. The table held a handful of cheap jewelry in a dish, and a few cosmetic and lotion bottles. Next to the gas ring were a chipped plate and bowl, a saucepan and some cutlery. All the utensils were jumble sale quality, the cheapest necessities for a first move from home. The shelf above the bed held a radio, some dogeared paperbacks, and a framed photograph.

Kincaid stepped closer to study it. An older man, balding and hearty-looking in a tweed jacket, arm around his wife's slender shoulders, the three grown children grouped before them. A brother and sister, blond, good-looking, both radiating assurance, and between them Margaret, hair askew, smile lopsided.

"Mum and Dad, Kathleen, and my brother, Tommy."

Kincaid made an effort to wipe any sympathy from his face before he turned. Margaret watched him, waiting, he sensed, for some expected comment. Instead, he sat down on the bed and said, "It must have been tough, those first few months on your own."

"It was." Margaret looked down at the damp flannel in her hands and began folding it into smaller and smaller squares. "There wasn't anyone until I met Jasmine. I got a job in the typing pool in the Planning Office. When I did work for her she was always kind to me, but not"—a pause while she thought—"familiar, if you know what I mean." She looked up at Kincaid for assent, and he nodded. "A little distant. But then she got ill. She took leave for treatment, and when she came back you could tell she'd gone down, but no one spoke to her about it. They all acted like her illness didn't exist." Margaret looked up at him through her pale lashes and smiled a little at her own nerve. "So I asked her. Every day I'd say "How are you?" or "What are they giving you now?" and after a while she began to tell me."

"And when she left work?" Kincaid prompted.

"I went to see her. Every day if I could. No one else did." Margaret sounded indignant even now. "Oh, they'd club together on cards or a basket, but no one ever put themselves out to visit her."

"Did Jasmine mind?"

Margaret's wide brow creased as she thought about it. "I don't think so. She didn't seem to have any really close friends at work. No one disliked her, but they weren't chummy either." Margaret smiled at Kincaid a bit ironically. "She talked about you most often."

Kincaid stood up and took the few steps to the window.

He had put off telling her the p.m. results long enough, and he tried to frame a gentle way to tell her that Jasmine had not died quietly in her sleep.

"Look." Margaret's voice came from behind him. "I know you didn't come here just to look after me. Jasmine didn't keep her promise, did she?"

Kincaid thought Margaret might have read his mind. He sat down opposite her again and searched her face. "I don't know. Her system contained a massive amount of morphine."

Margaret slumped back in the chair and closed her eyes. Tears welled from beneath her eyelids and ran down the sides of her nose. After a moment she leaned forward and rubbed her face with the crumpled flannel. "I should never have believed her." She barely whispered the words as she rocked her body backwards and forwards.

"Look, Meg. If Jasmine were determined to kill herself, there's no way you could have prevented her. Oh, for one night, maybe, but not indefinitely." When Margaret continued rocking, eyes closed, he leaned closer. "Listen, Meg. There are some things I need to know, and you're the only one who can help me."

The rocking slowed, then stopped. Margaret opened her eyes but stayed hunched over, arms crossed protectively over her stomach.

"Tell me why Jasmine needed your help."

"She didn't—" Margaret's voice caught. She reached for the cold dregs of her tea and swallowed convulsively, then tried again. "She didn't. Not really. I helped her figure the dosage—she was morphine dependent so we knew it would take a lot—but she could have done it herself. There was enough morphine, because she'd been maintaining the level she actually used while telling the nurse she needed her dosage increased. And the catheter would have held traces anyway."

"Then why?" Kincaid asked again, holding her gaze with his.

"I don't know. I suppose she just didn't want to be alone at the last."

Had Jasmine given in to weakness by asking Margaret's help, wondered Kincaid, and then found unexpected strength? He shook his head. It was possible, probable, logical, and yet he still couldn't believe it.

"What is it?" asked Margaret, sitting up a bit.

"Did Jasmine have—" Kincaid stopped as the door opened soundlessly. A man stepped into the room, regarding Kincaid and Margaret with an expression of amused contempt.

Margaret, sitting with her back to the door, frowned at Kincaid in bewilderment and said, "What's the—"

"Well." The man spoke, the single syllable dripping with unsavory implications.

Margaret jerked at the sound of his voice and leapt to her feet, her face flushing an unbecoming, splotchy scarlet. "Rog—"

"Don't get up, Meg. I didn't expect you to be entertaining." Apart from a brief glance in Margaret's direction, all his attention was fixed on Kincaid.

Returning the scrutiny with interest and an immediate dislike, Kincaid saw a slender man of middle height, in perhaps his late twenties, wearing designer jeans and an expensive white cotton shirt open part way down the chest, cuffs turned back. He wore his light red-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and his features were clearly cut. He was, Kincaid thought wryly, smashingly good-looking.

Margaret stood rigidly, gripping the back of her chair, and when she spoke her voice was high and uncontrolled. "Roger, where have you been? I've been wait—"

"Why the panic, Meg?" Roger didn't move from his slouching stance in the middle of the room, and made no effort to touch or comfort Margaret. "Don't you think introductions are in order?"

Kincaid took the initiative before Margaret could blurt anything out. "My name's Kincaid." He stood and held his hand out to Roger, who shook it with no great enthusiasm. "I'm a neighbor of Margaret's friend Jasmine Dent."

"Jasmine's dead, Rog. She died on Thursday night. I couldn't reach you anywhere." Margaret trembled visibly.

Roger's eyebrows lifted. "Is that so? And you came to tell Margaret?"

"I came to see how she was getting on," Kincaid said mildly, leaning back against the edge of the table and folding his arms.

"How kind of you." Roger's public-school accent expressed sarcasm well. "Poor Meg." For the first time he took a step toward her, reaching out and pulling her stiff body to him in a brief embrace. He swiveled her around toward Kincaid again and rested a hand lightly on the back of her neck. "It must have been a shock, her going sooner than anyone expected."

"It wasn't like that. Jasmine died from an overdose of morphine," Margaret said, watching Kincaid's face as she spoke, seeking support. Roger let her go abruptly and she moved away from him.

"That's too bad, Meg. I'm sorry she—"

"Duncan knows about the suicide," she jerked her head toward Kincaid, "so don't bother to say you're sorry, Rog. I know you're not. No need for you to worry now."

"Worry? Don't be absurd, Meg."

Roger's voice was light, almost playful, but Kincaid sensed wariness replacing the nonchalance. "There is another possibility, you know," Kincaid said into the tension that vibrated in the room. Both faces turned toward him, Meg's bewildered, Roger's alert. "Someone might have given Jasmine help she didn't want."

"I don't…" Margaret began, then looked at Roger who, Kincaid thought, understood all too well.

The silence lengthened, until Kincaid straightened up and stretched. "I'm afraid I never caught your last name," he said to Roger.

Roger hesitated, then volunteered grudgingly, "It's Leveson-Gower." He pronounced it "Loos-n-gor."

How fittingly posh, Kincaid thought. He moved toward the door, then turned back to Margaret. "I'll be off, then. Are you sure you'll be all right, Meg?"

Margaret nodded uncertainly. Roger wrapped an arm around her waist, and with the other ran his fingernails slowly up her bare arm. Kincaid saw her nipples grow hard under her thin cotton shirt. She looked away from him, flushing.

"Meg will be just fine, won't you, love?" said Roger.

Kincaid turned back to them as he opened the door. "By the way, Roger, where were you on Thursday night?"

Roger still held Margaret before him, part shield, part possession. "What's it to you?"

"I've a bad habit of liking people to account for themselves. I'm a copper." Kincaid smiled at them both and let himself out.

Chapter Six

The east side of Carlingford Road lay in deep shadow when Kincaid drew the Midget up to the curb. He rolled up the windows and snapped the soft top shut, then stood for a moment looking up at his building. It seemed unnaturally still and silent, the windows showing no light or signs of movement. Kincaid shrugged and put it down to his own skewed perception, but halfway up the stairs to his flat he realized he hadn't seen the Major since yesterday evening.

His heart gave a little lurch of alarm and he told himself not to be an ass—there was no reason anything should have happened to the Major. Death hadn't stayed lurking in the building like some gothic specter. Nevertheless, he found himself back downstairs, knocking on the Major's door.

No answer. Kincaid turned back to the street, thinking to go through Jasmine's flat to check the garden, when he saw the Major turn the corner into the road. He walked slowly, hampered by the two shrubs he carried, a plastic tub tucked under each arm.

Kincaid went quickly to meet him. "Thought you might need some help."

"Much obliged."

Kincaid, accepting one of the five-gallon tubs, heard the breath whistling through the Major's nostrils.

"Long pull uphill from the bus."

"What are they?" Kincaid asked, shortening his stride to match his step to the Major's.

"Roses. Antiques. From a nursery in Bucks."

"Today?" Kincaid asked in some surprise. "You've carried these from Buckinghamshire on the bus?"

They had reached the steps leading down to the Major's door. Setting down his tub, the Major pulled off his cap and wiped his perspiring head with a handkerchief. "Only place to get 'em. Himalayan Musk, they're called."

As he set down his own tub, Kincaid looked doubtfully at the bare, thorny stems. "But couldn't—"

The Major shook his head vigorously. "Wrong time of year, of course. But it had to be something special." At Kincaid's even more perplexed expression, he wiped his face and continued, "For Jasmine. It's the scent, you see, not like those modern hybrid teas. She loved the scented flowers, said she didn't care what they looked like. These bloom once, late in spring. Masses of pale pink blooms, smell like heaven."

It took Kincaid a moment to respond, never having heard the Major make such a long speech, nor say anything remotely poetic. "Yes, you're right. I think she would have liked them."

The Major unlocked his door and stooped for the tubs. "Let me give you a hand," Kincaid said, lifting one easily.

The Major opened his mouth to refuse, hesitated, then said, "Right. Thanks."

Kincaid followed him through the door of the flat. His first impression was of unrelieved brown. The Major flipped on a light switch and the impression expanded into neat, clean, and brown. A faded floral wallpaper in tints of rose and brown, brown carpet, brown covers on the inexpensive settee and armchair. No paintings, no photographs, no books that Kincaid could see as he followed the Major through the sitting room. The only splash of bright color came from the gardening magazines and catalogs stacked tidily on the pine coffee table.

The Major led Kincaid through the kitchen and opened a door into the concreted area which ran beneath the steps descending from Jasmine's flat. To the right, in the corner formed by the fence and the wall of the building, the Major had built a covered potting area. Kincaid stuck his head in the door and was rewarded with a rich, humic smell so strong it caught in his throat.

The Major climbed the steps to lawn level and put down his tub. Kincaid did the same and stood looking at the garden, struck by the contrast between the Major's flat and this small oasis of color and perfection. He wondered what sustained the Major during the winter months when nothing grew except a few sturdy perennials.

After a moment in which the Major seemed lost in contemplation as well, Kincaid asked, "Where are you going to put them?"

"There, I think." He pointed at the brick wall at the rear of the garden, the only unoccupied territory that Kincaid could see. "They're climbers. They'll take it over."

"Let me help." Kincaid was suddenly moved by a desire to participate in this memorial, more fitting than any service spoken by a stranger.

The Major hesitated before replying, a habit, Kincaid began to think, when anyone threatened to disrupt his solitary routine. "Oh, aye. There's another old spade in the shed."

Kincaid moved the tubs to the back of the garden, and when the Major returned with the spades and pointed out a spot among the pansies and snapdragons, he started to dig. They worked in silence as the shadows moved along the garden.

When the Major judged the holes deep enough, they placed the roses carefully, filling in around them and tamping down the earth with their hands. After years of living in city flats, Kincaid felt a grubby satisfaction he hadn't experienced since making mud forts in his Cheshire childhood.

The Major stood leaning on his spade, surveying their handiwork with satisfaction. "That's done, and done well. She'd be pleased, I'll wager."

Kincaid nodded, looking up at the darkened windows of Jasmine's flat. A level above, the sun flashed off his own. "I'm famished. Come out with me and have something to eat," he said impulsively, telling himself he was taking advantage of an opportunity to question the Major, and not influenced by the thought of his empty flat. He waited patiently now for the Major's reply, counting the seconds to himself.

The Major looked all around the garden, consulting the tulips and forsythia. "Aye. We'd best wash up, then."

They chose the coffee bar around the corner on Rosslyn Hill, settling in to the vinyl booth and ordering omelets with chips and salad. The Major had brushed his sparse hair until his scalp shone as pink as his face, and Kincaid marveled at the generation which still put on a tie for a casual Saturday night meal. He himself had swapped his cotton shirt for a long-sleeved rugby shirt, his concession to the cooling temperature.

When their beer arrived and they had drunk the top off, the Major wiped the foam from his mustache and asked, "Did the brother come and take charge of the arrangements, for the funeral and such?"

"The brother came, all right, but he didn't feel up to taking over much of anything. And there won't be a funeral just yet."

The Major's pale blue eyes widened in surprise. "No funeral? Why ever not?"

"Because I ordered a post mortem, Major. There were indications that Jasmine might have committed suicide."

The Major stared at him for a heartbeat of shocked silence, then thumped his glass down so hard beer sloshed over the lip. "Why couldn't you just let her go in peace, man? What difference did it make to anybody if the poor wee soul made things a bit easier for herself?"

Kincaid shrugged. "None, Major, and I would have let it go, if that were all there was to it. But some things weren't consistent with suicide, and I'm sure now that her death wasn't natural. I've had the p.m. report."

"What things?" asked the Major, fastening on the pertinent statement.

"Jasmine did intend suicide, we know that. She asked her friend Margaret to help her, but then she told Margaret she felt differently and had changed her mind. She left no note, no explanation. Surely she would have done that for Margaret. And," Kincaid paused long enough to sip from his pint, "she made arrangements to see her brother, whom she hadn't seen in six months, tomorrow."

The Major nodded along with every point, but when Kincaid finished said, "I canna believe someone would've harmed the poor lassie. She wouldn't have hung on much longer anyway." His blue eyes were surprisingly sharp in his round face.

The waitress arrived bearing their plates, giving Kincaid a reprieve. The Major doused his chips in vinegar, then poured HP sauce on his omelet. Kincaid wrinkled his nose as the vinegar fumes reached him. Bachelor habits, he thought. He'd be doing that himself in a few years.

"What do you think, Major? You knew her, maybe better than I did."

The Major speared a bite of egg with his fork and swabbed it through the pool of brown sauce on his plate. "Canna say I knew her well, not really. We only talked about," he forked egg and chips into his mouth and continued, "everyday things. The garden, the telly. Now Margaret I never met, but I'd see her coming and going, and sometimes she'd come out to the steps and wave at me when I was in the garden. A friendly lass. Not like Jasmine. I don't mean," he corrected himself, "to say that Jasmine was unfriendly, just that she kept herself to herself, if you know what I mean." As if surprised by his own garrulity, the Major looked away from Kincaid and concentrated on his dinner.

The espresso machine hissed and gurgled like some subterranean monster as Kincaid took a bite of his own omelet. "Did you ever see anyone come with Margaret? A boyfriend?"

The Major frowned and shook his head. "Canna say as I did."

Kincaid felt sure he would have remembered Roger. "Did you ever meet Theo, her brother?"

"Not that I recall. She didn't have much in the way of visitors, except that nurse the last few months. Now that," he leaned forward confidentially as he scooped up the last of his egg and chips, "is one fine-looking woman."

Kincaid noted with amusement that the Major's passion for things vegetable didn't extend to the edible—most of his watercress and cucumber garnish lay limply abandoned on the side of his plate. "What about Thursday night? Did you see anyone visit then?"

"Not in. Never in on a Thursday. Choir."

"You sing?" Kincaid asked. He pushed his empty plate away and leaned forward, elbows on the table.

"Since I was a boy. Won prizes as a tenor, before my voice changed."

Kincaid thought the Major's complexion looked even more florid than usual. So that was the other sustaining passion. "I wouldn't have guessed. Where do you sing?"

The Major finished his beer and patted his mustache with his napkin. "St. John's. Sunday services. Wednesday Evensong. Practice on Thursdays."

"Were you back late on Thursday?"

"No. Tenish, if I remember."

"And you didn't see or hear anything unusual?"

Kincaid didn't hold his breath in expectation. It was the kind of question he had to ask, but fate was not usually generous in replying. If people saw something really unusual they spoke up right away, minor discrepancies would come back to them only when something jogged their memories.

The Major shook his head. " 'Fraid not."

The waitress whisked away Kincaid's empty plate and returned a moment later with their checks. The noise level in the cafe had risen steadily. Kincaid looked around and saw every table full and prospective customers standing in the doorway—fine weather combining with Saturday night to bring out the crowds. He drained the last of his pint reluctantly. "I guess we'd better make way for the mob."

As they reached the turning into Pilgrims Lane, the shadow of Hampstead Police Station loomed over them. Kincaid found it rather ironic that he had chosen to live a few short blocks from that most evocative of buildings, designed by J. Dixon Butler, the architect who collaborated with Norman Shaw on New Scotland Yard. In Kincaid's imagination fog always swirled around its Queen Anne gables, and Victorian bobbies marched briskly to the rescue.

When they reached Carlingford Road the Major spoke, breaking the silence that had fallen between them. "And what about the wee moggie? Have you made provision for it?"

"Moggie?" Kincaid said blankly. "Oh, the cat. No. No, I haven't. I don't suppose you'd—"

The Major was already shaking his head. "Canna abide the beasts in the house. Make me sneeze. And wouldn't have it digging in my flower beds." His mustache bristled in distaste. "But somethin' should be done."

Kincaid sighed. "I know. I'll see to it. Goodnight, Major."

"Mr. Kincaid." The words stopped Kincaid as he mounted the steps to the front door. "I think you'll do more harm than good digging into this business. Some things are best left alone."

Kincaid paced restlessly around the sitting room of his flat. It was still early, not yet nine o'clock, and he felt tired but edgy, unable to settle to anything. He flipped through the channels on the telly, then switched it off in disgust. None of his usual tapes or CD's appealed to him, nor any of the books he hadn't found time to read.

When he found himself studying the photographs on his walls, he turned and faced the brown cardboard box on his coffee table squarely. Classic avoidance, refusal to face a disagreeable task. Or to be more honest, he thought, he was afraid that Jasmine would jump out of the pages of her journals, fresh and painfully real.

Kincaid allowed himself one more small delay—time enough to make a cup of coffee. Carrying the mug back to the sitting room, he settled himself on the sofa in the pool of light cast by the reading lamp. He pulled the cardboard box a little nearer and ran his fingers across the neat blue spines of the composition books. They came away streaked with a fine, dry dust.

If he must do it, then he would start chronologically— in the earlier books the Jasmine he knew would be less immediate, and he'd already glanced briefly through the last book and found nothing immediately useful. He pulled the most faded book from the back of the box and opened it. The pages were yellow and crackly and smelled a bit musty. Kincaid stifled a sneeze.

The entries began in 1951. Jasmine's ten-year-old handwriting was small and carefully looped, the entries trite and equally self-conscious: Theo's accomplishments (the proprietary interest already evident), prizes won at school, a tennis lesson, a ride on a neighbor's horse.

Kincaid flipped easily through the pages of one book, a second, a third. As the years flowed by the writing changed, developing into Jasmine's recognizable idiosyncratic script. Sometimes entries skipped weeks, sometimes months, and although they became more natural, they remained emotionally unrevealing. He'd started the fourth book when an entry dated in March, 1956, brought him up short. He went back to the beginning and began to read more carefully.

March 9

Theo's tenth birthday. The usual celebration. Same as last year and all the years before. The three of us round the dining table in our best clothes, stifling with the shutters closed, no one speaking at all. Cook made his idea of an English birthday cake. Awful (it's always awful), but Father just sat there looking like doom and Theo didn't even snicker. I could've screamed.

Father gave Theo a model airplane kit which, of course, Theo doesn't care about at all. I'll end up helping him put it together, can't hurt Father's feelings. Exercised Mrs. bloody Savarkar's horse for a month to earn enough to buy Theo a new tennis racket. Not that I minded the horse, but Mrs. S. is a bitch, always lording it over us just because we're "poor English".

Do I really remember the night Theo was born, or have I just heard the ayah's stories so many times I can't tell where her stories leave off and my memories begin. I remember shouting and smoke and the smell of burning, but I think that this all happened later and is somehow confused in my mind with the doctor pounding on the door and my mother's screams.

May 22

Mr. Patel pinched my arm again in class. He walks up and down the rows, making a dry-leaf rustly noise, looking over our shoulders while we're working. I can feel him coming up behind me, the back of my neck gets hot.

Today he grabbed my arm just below the shoulder and dug his fingers in, squeezing until I bit my lip to keep from crying out. He said I hadn't done my assignment properly, but it's just an excuse to keep me after and everyone knows it. I could hear the other girls sniggering behind my back.

"Jasssmine," he said when he'd let everyone else go, hissing the "s" in my name until my skin crawls. "Do you remember your English mother, Jasmine? You need someone to teach you things, Jasmine." He moved around his desk and I backed up against the doorframe, holding my books against my chest so he couldn't look there. "You know you shouldn't go out in the sun, don't you? It makes you look like a native girl." He smiled at me then. He looked like a bald tortoise, with his stringy neck quivering and his eyes blinking. I ran before he could touch me again, ran all the way home and threw up. I wish I could kill him.

The finger marks on my arm turned purple by the time I got home. I changed into a long-sleeved blouse before Theo or Father could see. No point in telling Father. I tried once before. He just got that vague look of his like he wishes he were somewhere else, and said my imagination was running away with me.

I know why Mr. Patel asked me about Mummy. They think I'm half-caste, because of my coloring, and that Mummy wasn't English at all.

I remember my mother. I remember the slippery feel of her dresses and the way she smelled of roses. I remember the dolls she had sent to me from England and the stories we made up about them. "Grow up to be a proper English girl, Jasmine," she'd say, "so you'll know how things are done when we go home." That was all she talked about, going home. She must have hated it here. Is it possible for someone to die of homesickness?

June 5

Theo, the little toad, told Father I stayed out of school while he was away. Father put on his miserable face and said I was just trying to make life difficult for him, and now he'll have to speak to the head.

June 30

Father died yesterday. The doctor said it was his heart, something to do with the fevers he had when he first came out.

He was just reading the newspaper at dinner. Said he didn't feel well, in a surprised sort of way, then slumped over the table.

I can't believe it. What will become of Theo and me?

Chapter Seven

Gemma sat at the kitchen table, huddled in Rob's old terry-cloth dressing gown. It was his color, not hers—the deep wine shade turned her hair ginger. She knew she should throw it out, or give it to Oxfam, along with all the other odds and ends of her married life that cluttered the house. But sometimes, if she pressed the dressing gown's nubby fabric to her face, she imagined it still smelled of Rob.

"Silly cow," she said aloud. What had Rob left her that she should want any reminders of him? It surprised her that she still missed his physical presence. Not just sex (although that had been scarce enough since that day two years ago when she'd come home to find Rob's things gone and a note on the kitchen table), but the quick touch, the hand on her hair, having something other than a hot-water bottle to warm her feet against at night. Work and looking after Toby left not much time for becoming reacquainted with dating.

The thought of Toby brought her attention back to the untidy pile of bills before her on the kitchen table. Gemma got up and poured herself more coffee, wrapping her hands around the chipped Thistle mug (a souvenir of her honeymoon in Inverness). Nearly nine o'clock on Sunday morning and Toby not up yet—last night's visit to her mum and dad's had exhausted him. Her sister's three wild ones had wound him to a fever pitch and Gemma had carried him kicking and screaming to the car, only to have him fall asleep in mid-shriek a few minutes later.

She contemplated the bills again, then carried her mug to the back door and stood looking out into the garden. Toby's plastic tricycle lay overturned in a muddy patch. Rob hadn't sent his support check for three months now, and the fees for Toby's day care were becoming more than she could manage. The mortgage on the house was steep, and she paid a sitter for Toby when she worked overtime as well. Rob's last phone had been disconnected, and when Gemma checked his flat she found he'd moved and left no forwarding address. The car dealership where he'd worked as a salesman gave her the same story, he'd given notice and disappeared.

Gemma felt panic hovering at the edge of her thoughts, waiting to pounce when she let her guard down. She'd taken such pride in her self-sufficiency, ignoring the importance of Rob's help because it didn't fit with the super-mum image she'd built for herself. Now she was reaping the consequences. Be practical, she told herself, look at your options. Selling the house and finding less expensive care for Toby didn't mean the end of the world, yet she still felt the weight of failure like a stone on her chest.

The loud burring of the kitchen phone jerked her out of the doldrums. She set her coffee on the countertop and grabbed the receiver off the extension, hoping not to wake Toby.

"Gemma? I'm sure ringing you two mornings in a row is a right nuisance, but I wondered if you'd like to make a couple of visits with me today."

She found that another early morning call from Kincaid didn't surprise her, nor did his off-duty voice. It held a trace of hesitancy she never heard at work. "Still unofficial?" she asked.

"Um, until tomorrow, at least. But I've had the p.m. result. Morphine overdose."

Gemma retrieved her cup and took a sip of tepid coffee. So he had been right about that, at least, and she'd been wrong in thinking his closeness to the situation might have clouded his judgement.

"I know you still think I'm making mountains out of molehills," he said into her silence, and Gemma heard the trace of amusement in his voice.

"Who did you have in mind?"

"Felicity Howarth, Jasmine's nurse, in Kew. And brother Theo, down in Surrey. It's a lovely day for a run," he added, cajoling.

"Mummy." Toby had padded into the kitchen on bare feet and stood sleep-flushed and tousled, holding his blanket.

"Come here, love." Gemma knelt and hugged him.

"Sorry?" Kincaid said, sounding startled.

Gemma laughed. "It's Toby. He's just got up." This wouldn't be an expedition for Toby—she'd have to ask her mum to keep him, and then her overworked conscience would give her hell for neglecting him.

"Gemma?"

"I'd have to make arrangements for Toby."

"I'll pick you up. What time?"

"No." She'd never had Kincaid to her house, and after seeing his flat yesterday she felt even more reluctant. "I mean," she said, realizing how abrupt she'd sounded, "I'll have to run Toby to my mum's and then I might as well come to the flat."

They rang off, and Gemma lauded Kincaid's tact in not reminding her that running Toby up to Leyton High Street hardly made it necessary for her to drive to Hampstead.

It seemed that Kew had tempted a good portion of London's populace to initiate rites of spring. Gemma, sitting in the passenger seat of Kincaid's MG with her face turned up to the sun, included herself in the observation. She had to keep reminding herself that she hadn't come along for her own indulgence, and made an effort to keep her eyes on the road rather than Kincaid's profile. Normally she preferred to drive him, but when she'd reached the Hampstead flat he'd insisted she leave her car and had loaded her briskly into the Midget, saying, "Relax, Gemma. It's your day off, after all." She had given in without too much difficulty.

They circled Kew Green, jockeying for position in the traffic. The roads leading off to Kew Gardens and the river were chock-a-block with cars, but once they cleared the Green's south end they left some of the congestion behind. They wound their way south and east through the side streets toward Felicity Howarth's address, moving past large detached houses with gardens, then less elegant semidetached, arriving finally in a cul-de-sac of terraced houses. Uncollected litter cluttered the sidewalks, and the houses had an air of mean shabbiness, as if their owners had given up making an effort.

Gemma looked at Kincaid in surprise. "She's a private nurse? Have you got the right address?"

He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "Let's give it a try."

Felicity Howarth's basement flat, unlike most of its neighbors, showed signs of some attention. The steps were swept, the door painted a glossy, dark green and the brass knocker polished. Kincaid rang the bell and after a few moments Felicity opened the door.

She stared at Kincaid as if she couldn't quite place him, then her face cleared. "Mr. Kincaid?"

Gemma, who from Kincaid's description had been expecting an elegant and uniformed model of starched efficiency, had her perceptions abruptly altered. Although Felicity Howarth's height and coloring might be striking under other circumstances, today found her not at her best. She wore faded sweats, no make-up, had a smudge of dirt across her forehead, and Gemma thought she looked tired and not overly pleased to see them.

"Doing a bit in the garden," she said apologetically, wiping more dirt across her forehead in an effort to rub off the smudge.

Kincaid introduced Gemma simply by her name, then said, "I'd like to talk to you about Jasmine."

"I guess you'd better come in." Felicity led them into her sitting room, said, "Let me wash up," then hesitated as she was turning away and added, "Like some coffee? I was just about to make some for myself."

Gemma and Kincaid took advantage of the opportunity to look around the room. It was neat and scrupulously clean, as Gemma could testify after she surreptitiously ran a finger along the edge of a bookshelf—it came away without a smudge of dust. The furniture was of good quality but not new, and the ornaments more likely to be family hand-me-downs, it seemed to Gemma, than chosen with a particular decorating scheme in mind. A Sunday Observer lay scattered across the sofa, the only evidence of untidy occupation.

Kincaid moved to the windows at the rear of the room and stood looking into the brambly garden that lay at eye level. "She lives alone?" Gemma asked softly as she joined him.

"Looks that way, doesn't it?"

Felicity returned, carrying coffee pot and china cups on a tray. Setting the tray down on the coffee table, she scooped the offending newspaper from the sofa and tucked it out of sight beneath an end table. She seemed to have regained authority along with clean face and hands, directing Gemma and Kincaid to sit on the sofa while she poured for them, then pulling up a straight-backed chair for herself. The sofa was squashy in the center and Gemma found herself sinking, trying to keep her thigh from brushing against Kincaid's, and looking up at Felicity perched commandingly on her hard chair. She saw the corner of Kincaid's mouth twitch with amusement at her predicament. Felicity had performed a clever and practiced maneuver, thought Gemma, and was not a bit surprised when she took charge of the interview.

"You've had your post mortem results, then?" Felicity said to Kincaid, crossing her legs and balancing her cup on her knee.

"The pathologist found considerably more morphine than her prescribed pain dosage would have allowed. Could she—"

"Look," Felicity interrupted, leaning toward him, "I know how you must be feeling about this. You're shocked because you weren't expecting it, but I see this all the time. It's not unusual."

"Margaret believed—"

"You and I both know, Mr. Kincaid, that assisted suicide is a felony offense. I'm sure Jasmine decided she couldn't risk implicating Margaret, and credited Margaret with enough sense to keep her mouth shut about their previous agreement. Jasmine didn't really need any help, not with access to liquid morphine."

Kincaid sat back and sipped his coffee, temporarily giving up the offensive and taking another tack. "Why liquid morphine rather than tablets?"

"Difficulty swallowing. The tumor pressed against the esophagus as it grew. Jasmine was managing very little soft food as it was, and if she'd gone on much longer a feeding tube would have become necessary." Felicity sighed and relaxed a little in her chair. "Her pain would have increased considerably, too, perhaps beyond manageability with drugs. I've seen similar tumors crack the patient's ribs."

"Did Jasmine know this?" Gemma asked, horrified by the description.

"I imagine so. Jasmine was an informed patient, she kept up with things." Felicity smiled and fell silent, and Gemma saw weariness beneath the crisp exterior.

"How can you bear to do what you do, to watch people suffer so?"

This time Felicity's shrug was almost Gallic in its eloquence. "Somebody has to. And I'm good at it. I make them comfortable, and I reassure them."

Kincaid finished his coffee, leaned forward and set his empty cup down deliberately on the table. "Felicity, how could Jasmine have accumulated enough morphine to kill herself? Didn't you supply the prescription for her?"

"She requested a dosage increase weeks ago. We don't make an effort to limit terminal patients' opiate consumption, we simply try to keep them comfortable. It's quite possible that she told me she needed more morphine and then maintained the same dosage." Felicity studied Kincaid. "That's all I can tell you, I'm afraid."

Felicity obviously intended this as a dismissal, but Kincaid crossed his ankle over his knee and smiled at her. "You say you met Margaret a few times. Did her boyfriend ever come around? His name's Roger—I'm sure you'd remember him."

"No, Margaret always came alone when I was there, and Jasmine never mentioned meeting any friend."

"Did Jasmine say anything to you about making arrangements to see her brother?"

Felicity shook her head and began stacking their coffee cups on the tray. "We never talked about personal matters. Some patients like to tell you their life story, but not Jasmine."

"Did anyone visit her at all? Or did you see anyone unfamiliar in the building recently?"

"No. I'm sorry."

Kincaid gave in gracefully. He stood up and shook Felicity's hand. "Thank you. You've been very helpful."

Gemma quickly followed suit. "Thanks for your time."

"It may be necessary for you to appear at the inquest," Kincaid added as an afterthought as they moved toward the door.

"All right. You'll notify me?"

Kincaid nodded and held the door open for Gemma. "Good-bye."

Gemma, turning back as the door closed to echo his farewell, had a last glimpse of Felicity Howarth standing alone in her sitting room.

They had joined the A24 toward Surrey before either of them spoke. Gemma glanced at Kincaid. He drove easily, hand resting lightly on the gear shift, his expression obscured by the sunglasses he'd pulled from the door pocket. "You're still not convinced, are you?" she asked.

He answered without taking his eyes from the road. "No. Perhaps I'm just being stubborn."

"You think she would have left a note for Margaret or Theo," said Gemma, and added "or you," silently. She found herself increasingly curious about this woman who had occupied such a large portion of Kincaid's life, and of whom she had known nothing. He'd made some passing references to visiting a neighbor, but she had somehow assumed the neighbor to be male—a going-down-to-the-pub sort of thing. Just what had been his relationship with Jasmine Dent? Were they lovers, with Jasmine so ill with cancer?

Stealing a glance at Kincaid's abstracted face, Gemma was shocked to realize how little she knew of his personal life. It had seemed to her that he moved through life with a graceful ease which she both admired and resented. But perhaps not everything came as easily to him as she'd supposed—he was obviously suffering both grief and guilt over Jasmine's death.

Now that she thought about it, when had she ever given him much chance to talk about what he did away from work? She had nattered on about Toby, and Kincaid had listened as if the activities of a two-year-old were absolutely fascinating. That she would have to attribute to natural good manners, and resolved to be less obtuse in the future.

"Gemma?"

She focused on Kincaid and flushed, feeling transparent. "Sorry?"

"You looked a bit glazed. I thought maybe my driving terrified you."

"No," Gemma answered, smiling. "I was just thinking," she scrambled for the first thing that popped into her head, "um, about Felicity. Wouldn't you think that if you spent your life caring for the dying, trying to offer some comfort, that you would need a very strong faith?"

"Possibly. Go on."

Gemma heard the frown she couldn't see behind Kincaid's sunglasses. "Eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning and Felicity was working in the garden—she hadn't been to church."

"Maybe she's R.C. and goes to early mass," Kincaid said, amused.

"No makeup," Gemma countered, "not even a trace of lipstick. Don't tell me a good-looking woman like Felicity gets up and goes to church on Sunday morning without a stitch of make-up."

"Very observant." Kincaid grinned at that, then sobered. "Maybe whatever faith sustains Felicity isn't the visible sort."

They were entering the outskirts of Dorking. Kincaid pulled a map from his door pocket and handed it to Gemma. "Make sure it's the A25 we want to Abinger Hammer, would you?" As Gemma rustled the map, he continued, "Meg comes from here. Says her father owns a garage. It's not far from London for her family to have cut her off so completely. You'd think—"

"Junction coming up," Gemma interrupted. "A25 west toward Guildford." After Kincaid navigated the roundabout she said, "Sorry. What were you saying?"

"Never mind. Let's think about lunch."

Abinger Hammer was more hamlet than village, a few shops, and a park with a stream running through it. Theo Dent's shop, Trifles, stood at the crook in the road, across from the tea room and the village clock with its distinctive wooden bell-ringer.

Gemma and Kincaid ate tomato and cheese sandwiches, sitting in the sun in the tea shop's tiny walled garden. The sandwiches came garnished with watercress, and were cheerfully delivered by a teenage waitress sporting pink hair and multiple earrings.

"Village punk," Kincaid said, tucking stray sprigs of cress into his mouth with a finger.

"Can't be much in the way of night life around here, surely?" Gemma hadn't conquered her Londoner's disdain for village life.

"Disco in the village hall, I imagine. Or video games in the pub for those old enough."

Gemma pulled a face. "Ugh!"

Kincaid laughed. "Think about it, Gemma. Isn't that just what you'd want for Toby when he's older? No trouble to get into?"

She shook her head. "I'm not willing to contemplate that yet." Gemma finished her sandwich and swatted at a fat bumblebee which was making bombing runs at their table. "Did you grow up in a place this small?"

"Not this small, no. Relatively civilized, by your standards. We had a coffee bar. No video games in those days, though, just darts." A flash of his grin told Gemma he was pulling her leg a bit. The persistent bee blundered into Kincaid's teacup. Kincaid dumped him out and stretched. "Let's go see what Theo Dent found to occupy himself last Thursday night."

Chimes rang somewhere in the back of the shop as Gemma and Kincaid stepped inside Trifles and closed the door behind them. The "Closed" sign hanging on the inside of the door bounced and swung rhythmically, a counterpoint to the fading bells.

It took a moment for their eyes to adjust after the brilliant sunlight outside. "Looks like we have the place to ourselves," Kincaid said softly as he looked around. "Not much trade for a Sunday afternoon."

"Too pretty outside," Gemma offered. The shop seemed unbearably warm and stuffy. Sheets of light slanted in through the uncurtained front windows, illuminating dusty objects. Gemma turned, surveying shelves and cluttered tables which held, among other things, mismatched china tea sets, brass knickknacks, faded hunting prints, and a glass case filled with antique buttons. "This stuff needs a rainy day for poking about in," she said, holding a willow-pattern butter dish up to the light and squinting at it. "Oh, it's cracked. Too bad."

They heard the thump of quick footsteps on stair treads and a door in the back of the shop flew open. "Sorry. I was just finishing my—" Theo Dent stopped in the act of pushing his spectacles up on the bridge of his nose, staring in bewilderment at Kincaid. "Mr. Kincaid? I didn't recognize… I wasn't expecting…"

"Hello, Theo. Didn't mean to startle you. Should have called first, I expect, but it was a nice day for a run."

Hogwash, thought Gemma, listening to Kincaid's disarming patter. She knew him well enough to be sure he'd had every intention of catching Theo off-guard. This might as yet be unofficial nosiness, but Kincaid's working techniques were in full play.

Kincaid introduced Gemma, again leaving their relationship open to the most likely assumption, and Theo shook her hand. Gemma studied him, seeing a small man with an oval face and a cap of brown, curly hair shot with gray, wearing gold-rimmed, round spectacles that gave him a dated look. His hand was small and softer than her own. "Nice to meet you. You've some lovely things here." Gemma gestured around the room, then picked up the first thing that came to hand, a small porcelain pot in the shape of a beehive.

"Do you really think so?" Theo sounded inordinately pleased. He beamed at Gemma, showing small, even, white teeth. "Do you like honey pots? Here, look at this one," he scooped a thatched porcelain cottage from a shelf, "and this," white porcelain this time, decorated with mice peeping from a tangle of brambles. "Did you know that the Egyptians believed honey came from the tears of the sun god Ra? No pharaoh was buried without a sealed honey—"

"Theo," Kincaid interrupted the enthusiastic monologue, "is there someplace we could talk?"

"Talk?" Theo sounded baffled. He looked hopefully around the shop, and when no chairs appeared, said, "Uh, sure. We could go upstairs, I guess." He turned and led the way, glancing back over his shoulder anxiously. "It's not much, you know… I hope you won't mind…"

The upstairs flat obviously served as both living quarters and office—the office consisting of a scarred wooden desk covered with scraps of paper and an old, black Bakelite telephone. Living quarters fared not much better, in Gemma's opinion. A day bed, hastily made, and a cracked leather easy-chair dominated the furnishings, both positioned with a good view of a new color television and VCR. A curtained alcove hid what Gemma assumed to be cooking and bathing facilities.

"Lunch," Theo said apologetically, scooping up a plate which held bread crusts and a paper instant-soup container, and placing it behind the curtain. He gestured Kincaid into the leather chair and pulled up the desk chair for Gemma. That left him standing awkwardly, until he spied an empty packing crate, turned it over and used it as an impromptu stool. Some of his anxious manner seemed to leave him and he smiled self-deprecatingly. "I don't do much entertaining, as you might have gathered. I would have tidied the place up a bit for Jasmine, if she had come." Theo took a deep breath. "Now, Mr. Kincaid, what did you want to see me about? You obviously didn't bring this pretty young lady to admire my stock." He nodded toward Gemma as he spoke, and, again, she had the impression of a slightly old-fashioned quality.

"I've heard your sister's post mortem results, Theo. She died from an overdose of morphine." Kincaid spoke softly, unemphatically.

Theo's eyes lost their focus and he sat so quietly that Gemma looked questioningly at Kincaid, but after a moment he sighed and spoke. "Thank you. It's what I've been expecting since you spoke to me about it on Friday night. It was kind of you to come all this way to tell me."

Gemma, knowing that kindness had not been his intention, saw Kincaid color faintly.

"Theo— "

"It was the shock that upset me so, you know. I've had a bit of time to get used to the idea now, and I see that it was just the sort of thing Jasmine would do. But what I still don't understand," Theo looked from Kincaid to Gemma, including her in the question, "is why she phoned and told me to visit her today."

"Theo," Kincaid tried again, "there is another possibility. The coroner will most likely return a verdict of suicide, unless we find evidence to the contrary."

"Contrary? What do you mean, contrary?" Theo's brows drew together over the gold rims of his spectacles.

Kincaid sat up and leaned toward Theo, speaking more urgently now. "Someone else could have given her the morphine, Theo. Maybe Jasmine told Margaret the truth— maybe she had changed her mind about suicide, and maybe someone didn't like that decision at all."

"You're not serious?" Theo searched Kincaid's expression for some hint of a joke, and finding none, turned to Gemma for confirmation.

She nodded. "I'm afraid he is."

"But why?" Theo's voice rose to a squeak. "Why would anybody want to kill Jasmine? She was dying, for Christ's sake! You said yourself she'd only a few months left." He took a breath and shoved his spectacles up on the bridge of his nose, then shook his finger accusingly at Kincaid. "And how could somebody give her that much morphine without her knowing?"

A good point, thought Gemma, and one that Kincaid hadn't tackled.

"I don't know, Theo. I'd assume it would have been someone she trusted. As to why," Kincaid's tone became less conciliatory, "someone could have been in a hurry for something. What do you know about Jasmine's estate, Theo?"

"Estate?" Theo's face was blank with incomprehension.

"Come on, man. Don't look so bloody baffled." Kincaid rose and paced the small room. "Surely you must have some idea how Jasmine intended to dispose of her property. She told me she'd made some good investments over the years, and she had a good bit of equity in the flat. Will it all come to you?"

"I don't know." Theo looked up at Kincaid, and it seemed to Gemma as if he had shrunk before her eyes. "She made the down payment on the mortgage here. I was broke, really down on my luck." He turned and spoke to Gemma, seeking understanding. "Some things hadn't worked out, you know? I never really thought about what would happen if she died."

Kincaid's eyebrows shot up in disbelief and he opened his mouth to protest, then changed his tack. "What were you doing on Thursday evening?"

"Thursday?"

"The night Jasmine died, Theo," Kincaid prompted.

"I was here, of course. Where else would I be?" Theo sounded thoroughly frightened now, near to tears.

"Start at the beginning," said Gemma, moved to bail Theo out. "What time do you close the shop?"

"About half-five, usually."

"So you closed up that day about half-past five? And then what did you do?"

"Well, I tidied up a bit and locked the till, and then I went across the road for my supper." Theo, visibly relaxing, looked expectantly to Gemma for his catechism. Kincaid had moved to the window and stood gazing down into the street.

"Across the street? I don't remember seeing a restaurant—"

"No, no. There's only the pub at night. The tea shop closes at five. I always go across to the pub for my supper. Good food, and I can't cook much here," he gestured toward the curtain, "just a hot-plate, really."

"I thought you said you didn't drink much," said Kincaid from the window.

Theo flushed. "I don't. Just the odd half-pint of sweet cider."

Gemma took charge again. "What did you do when you finished your meal? Have you a car?"

The question seemed to anger Theo. "No, I don't have a bloody car, if it's anyone else's business. I came back here. There's not much else to do in Abinger Hammer. And besides," he smiled at Gemma, his brief spurt of temper evaporating, and nodded toward the VCR, "I had a new film. Arrived at the shop that afternoon. Random Harvest, 1942, Ronald Coleman and Greer Garson. Great stuff. There's this shell-shocked World War I officer and he's saved from spending his life in an asylum by this music-hall sing—never mind."

"That's it. I watched the film. I read a bit, then I went to sleep." He looked at Kincaid, who had come back to perch on the arm of the easy-chair. "Satisfied?"

"Sorry," said Kincaid, standing and holding out his hand to Theo, "I just like to get things straight. I'm afraid you'll have to appear at the inquest. I'll let you know the details."

"It was nice to meet you, Theo. I'm sorry about your sister." Gemma took Theo's hand, surprised to find it ice-cold in the overheated room.

Theo followed them down the steep stairs, and Gemma had a last glance at the brambly honey pot before Theo shut the shop door behind them.

They left the shop without speaking and started down the footpath toward the river. Kincaid walked with his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets, not looking at Gemma.

"You suckered me into playing good cop-bad cop with that poor man. And after he was so touchingly grateful to you. Is that what you had in mind when you asked me to come?" Gemma stopped, forcing him to turn and meet her eyes.

"No. Partly habit, I suppose. I feel like I've beaten a child. But Christ, Gemma. How could anyone really be so bloody gormless? You can't believe he never gave a thought to what would happen to Jasmine's money."

"Oh, I don't think he's stupid, Duncan." Gemma started walking again and Kincaid followed. "Innocent, maybe, and a bit fragile. Surely you can't think Theo had anything to do with Jasmine's death?"

"It's that helpless quality of his," Kincaid said with the beginning of a grin. "It's aroused your protective instincts. Somebody probably felt the same way about Crippen."

"You've no reason not to believe him," Gemma countered, stung. "Do you think about what would happen to your parents' money, or your sister's, if they were to die suddenly?"

"No. But they've not been ill, and they don't support me. It looks to me like Theo still needs all the help he can get. His business doesn't exactly seem to be flourishing." They turned now and followed the watercourse toward the bridge at the village end. Cress, dappled green in the sunlight, grew thickly in the stream's running water. The children's play equipment stood deserted in the meadow, an empty swing moving gently in the breeze, and Gemma found herself wishing intensely that the afternoon had held no motive more sinister than a walk by the water's edge.

"It's nearly three o'clock, and by my count that's the only pub in the village." Kincaid pointed toward the low, white-washed building standing at the T-junction on the other side of the bridge. "I guess that qualifies as across the road. If we want to have a friendly chat with the landlord of the Bull and Whistle before closing time, we'd better get to it. And," the grin was back in full force, "I'll buy you a sweet cider."

The affable landlord of the Bull and Whistle confirmed that Theo had indeed eaten his supper there on Thursday evening. "Comes in every evening, about the same time. More likely I'd notice if he weren't here than if he were. Vegetarian lasagna on Thursday, I remember he looked pleased as punch when he saw the board." The publican replaced Gemma's coaster and eyed her appreciatively. "Anything else, Miss?"

"This is fine, thanks."

Gemma had ordered a dry cider with a quelling look at Kincaid, from which he deduced she was fed up with being teased about her preference for sweet drinks. She sat next to him at the bar, her expression inscrutable, looking crisp and as cool as her coloring would allow in pale trousers and a cinnamon cotton shirt. Looking at her, Kincaid felt rather rumpled and worse for wear.

The blackboard above the bar bore nothing but a few chalky streaks. "Nothing on today?" asked Kincaid.

"Wife takes Sunday off. Just cold pies and sausage rolls, or scotch eggs, if you like."

Kincaid shook his head. "Can you remember what time Theo Dent left here on Thursday?"

The landlord scratched his head. " 'Bout half past seven, I should think. Nothing special on that evening. Sometimes he'll have another half of cider if there's a darts match, or a good crowd."

"Gets on with the locals, does he?" asked Kincaid with some surprise.

"Well, I wouldn't exactly say that. But he's friendly enough. Shy, maybe. More likely to watch than to join in, if you know what I mean."

"Have any idea where he went when he left here?"

The landlord laughed. "In Abinger Hammer? There's not much choice, is there? And he's not got a car. Went home, as far as I know."

"Thanks." Kincaid drained his pint and looked at Gemma.

"Satisfied?" she asked acidly.

Kincaid grinned. "Not yet. Let's do a recce at the video shop."

Shop turned out to be an exaggerated description. Newsagent, post office, and video rental were squeezed into a space about the size of Kincaid's bathroom. The young woman behind the counter chewed her gum slowly while she considered Kincaid's query, contributing to a rather unfortunate bovine resemblance.

Carefully, she counted the days backwards on her fingers. "Yeah. It was Thursday Random Harvest came in. Special ordered it for him." She revolved her index finger around her ear. "Weird guy. Nutty about old films. I tried to turn him on to some really good stuff, you know, The Terminator, Lethal Weapon, like that, but he wasn't having any. Only watches dusty old things. The week before he wanted, uh, what's it called with Cary Grant? Arsenic and Old Ladies?"

"Arsenic and Old Lace," Kincaid corrected, smothering a grin. "And did he return Random Harvest the next day?"

"First thing," the girl answered, puzzled.

"Thanks."

"You wouldn't dare make anything of it." Gemma had glared at him as they got in the car. "Lots of people love that film and don't go about poisoning their relatives."

Kincaid had to admit he found it difficult to imagine that Theo had got himself inconspicuously to London, murdered his sister, and managed to return home in time to watch a much anticipated video. He mulled it over as he drove, playing out various unlikely scenarios.

By the time they reached Hampstead he'd come up with nothing more definite than a resolve to discover if Theo were really as unaware of Jasmine's affairs as he claimed. He'd see Jasmine's solicitor straight away.

Kincaid couldn't persuade Gemma to stay when they reached the Hampstead flat, not even by tempting her with an offer of a drink on the balcony. She'd been restive on the drive back from Surrey, checking her watch often. What had started as a pleasant day had gradually deteriorated, and Kincaid had the feeling he'd failed her in some unknown expectation.

Perhaps she was still cross with him for bullying Theo, and truthfully he couldn't blame her. He'd only intended to gather a little information, but the man's helplessness made him feel awkward and inadequate, and that in turn irritated him.

Kincaid opened Gemma's car door and closed it as she got in. He stood, resting his hands on the open windowsill, so that she had to tilt her head to look up at him. "Thanks for coming with me, Gemma."

"Not much help, I'm afraid." She smiled and turned the key in the ignition. "Mind now, don't forget to look after the cat," she said as she pulled away, but Kincaid thought both the smile and the admonition seemed absent-minded.

He took the reminder to heart. After retrieving a beer and a stack of blue journals from his flat, he quietly let himself in Jasmine's door. Sid, curled in the middle of the hospital bed, began a nimbly purr when Kincaid stepped into the room "Actually glad to see me this time, are you?" Kincaid addressed him. "Or just hungry, more likely." He spooned some tinned food into a bowl and set it down. The cat unbent enough to allow Kincaid to scratch behind his ears before turning all his attention to the bowl.

Beer in hand and journals tucked under his arm, Kincaid opened the French doors and sat down on the top step overlooking the empty garden. Leaning against the rail, as Jasmine had so often done, he began to read.

September 22, 1957

It's cold here. Cold all the bloody time, even though Aunt May says it's a "fair autumn." My hands and feet hurt from the chill and these stupid woolen clothes itch. I've come up in little red bumps all over. At least I'll never be as pale as these English, with their skin like raw potatoes, faces blank as shuttered windows, voices like rusty saws scraping.

May's given me a bed in the cottage attic, Theo the spare room. She says it's because he's the youngest, but she favors him. Me she disliked from the moment she set eyes on my face.

I lie in the little bed at night and listen to the sound the wind makes in the rafters, and think about going barefoot in the dust, about cool, cotton dresses, and coconut milk, and pomegranates, and passionfruit, and the way the sunlight came through the green bamboo blinds in the Mohur Street house and made my room look like it was under water.

She says I've got to stay in school till I'm sixteen, it's the law. The girls don't speak to me except to make rude remarks. The boys just look.

Theo's fared better. He goes out with some of the boys after school. He's even starting to sound a bit like them.

I'd leave here the day I'm sixteen but I can't leave Theo in May's clutches. She's got plans for him, she's already worried about his marks, filling his head with talk about university.

We did fine, Theo and I, without any interference from her, and we will again, I swear it.

Chapter Eight

Monday dawned cold and blustery, ending the idyllic weather that had accompanied Jasmine's death. Kincaid knotted his tie and shrugged into a wool jacket with a sense of relief mingled with anticipation. He studied his reflection in the bathroom mirror, expecting to find some visible mark of the weekend's slow passage, but the blue eyes staring back at him looked ordinary and not quite awake. With a last pass of the hairbrush, he judged himself presentable. Pausing only to pick up keys and wallet and to dump his unfinished coffee in the sink, he left the flat.

He took the tube, and exited at St. James Park. A few minutes walk brought him into the cold shadow of the steel and concrete tower which housed New Scotland Yard. The pavements were deserted except for the uniformed guard standing sentinel before the glass doors. Litter rattled as it blew in the gutter. Not exactly a comforting sight, the Yard, but then Kincaid didn't suppose the architects had succor in mind. He gave a casual wave to the guard and entered the building.

The short walk had given him time to marshal his arguments and he went straight to his Chief Superintendent's office. Denis Childs's secretary, a plump, dark-haired girl, looked up from her typing and beamed at him. "Morning, Mr. Kincaid. What can I do for you?"

The Chief Superintendent had a talent for choosing staff both good natured and efficient, and they kept his political machinery well-oiled. "Is he in, Holly?" Kincaid nodded toward the closed door of the inner office.

"Reading his reports, I should think. Nothing pressing on this morning. Just give the door a tap." She'd turned back to the keyboard before she finished her sentence, her fingers flying over the keys.

The Chief Superintendent had done his office in Scandinavian Modern, all blond wood, cane, and greenery, and Kincaid suspected his motivation was more a matter of playing against convention than strong preference.

Denis Childs reclined in the chair behind his desk, report propped on his crossed knee, cigarette smoldering in the ashtray on the desk's edge. Childs's bulk made the furniture seem insubstantial, the subtle color scheme paling to anemic against his dark hair and lively brown eyes.

"What's up, Duncan? Pull up a chair." He flicked over the last page of the report and tossed it into his out-tray, stubbed out the cigarette and folded his hands across his middle, preparing to listen, as he usually did, with his attention fully engaged.

After settling himself in the visitor's armchair, Kincaid recounted the details of Jasmine's death and his subsequent actions.

"I'd like to make an official inquiry," he concluded. "Shouldn't require much manpower, just Gemma and myself, really."

Childs considered a moment before he spoke, steepling his fingers over his belly. "Sounds like a fairly straightforward suicide. You know we usually look the other way in these cases—nothing to be gained by pursuing the matter, particularly for the family. However, if there is any direct evidence that the young woman—what was her name?"

"Margaret Bellamy."

"—that Margaret Bellamy was present and physically assisted your friend's suicide in any way, we would have to press charges."

"I can't rule that out. She says she wasn't there that evening, but she has no corroboration." Kincaid shifted in his seat and the chair creaked alarmingly. "But that doesn't make any sense. Why mention the suicide pact? She need never have said anything, and I doubt I would have felt uneasy enough to order an autopsy."

"Shock?" Childs suggested, lighting a Player's from the pack on his desk and squinting at Kincaid through the smoke.

Kincaid shrugged in irritation. "She was shocked, yes, and probably not emotionally competent at the best of times, but she's not stupid. She must know the law. And that," he sat forward in the chair and gripped the arms, "is what really bothers me. Jasmine would have known the risk involved for Meg. I've read Exit's literature"— Kincaid ignored his chiefs raised eyebrows at that —"and they recommend most strongly that one let friends and family know one's intentions, and leave indemnifying documents in case of suspicion."

"Suicide note?"

"Not necessarily… not if she wanted it to be thought a natural death. But Exit suggests a detailed statement of intent, signed and dated, in case the death is questioned. We're not talking about a scrawled 'just can't cope any-more' note. Jasmine left not a shred that I've been able to find."

Childs sighed and gently swiveled his chair back and forth. "And you feel that's not in character? When people are ill they don't always behave—"

"You're not the first to suggest that, but I doubt I ever met anyone more rational than Jasmine, and you could certainly consider suicide as a rational decision for someone terminally ill."

"Have you spoken to her solicitor? She might have left the indemnifying documents with him."

"First on my list," Kincaid said, relieved at the interview's direction. He knew how reluctantly his chief let go a problem once he started to worry at it.

"I'll authorize a warrant to access the solicitor's files. Anything left for the forensics lads?"

Kincaid snorted. "It'd take a miracle, would have even in the first place. The place is clean. There are a couple of nearly full vials of morphine in the fridge, very unlikely there's enough missing to account for Jasmine's death. I'll bring them in, but I doubt very much we'll find anyone's prints who didn't have normal access. If it was murder, it was done very carefully." He chewed his thumb for a moment while he thought. "If Jasmine killed herself, what did she do with the empty morphine vial? I've done a fairly thorough search."

Childs tilted his chair forward and ground out the stub of his cigarette. "I can spare you a few days, if nothing major comes in. I'll put Sullivan on this morning's lot, he's due for a headache." The wickedly benign smile accompanying the last comment made Kincaid glad not to be in Bill Sullivan's shoes.

"Gemma?" Kincaid asked.

"The last time I assigned her to Sullivan I got a right bollicking. Two redheads do not a team make, at least not these two. You can have her for a couple of days, if she'll put up with you—and mind you, this is only as long as I can spare you."

"Right," Kincaid said, standing up to go. "Thanks, guv."

Kincaid found Gemma already in his office, ensconced in the chair behind his desk. When she started to rise, he waved her back into the chair and propped himself on the edge of his battered desk. His office decor had never progressed beyond functional—he never seemed to get around to requisitioning more than bookcases from the Yard.

Every available inch of space in the small cubicle housed books. His mother's book graveyard, Kincaid thought as he surveyed the volumes jammed into the shelves without rhyme or classification. They arrived regularly in the post from Cheshire, always something she had 'just happened to come across' in the shop. From do-it-yourself plumbing manuals to Russian sci-fi, they ran the gamut of his mother's enthusiasms. In her battle for his continuing education Kincaid saw his mother's disappointment in his refusal to attend university, and he could never quite bring himself to return the books or give them away. And although he teased his mum about her obsessions, one couldn't grow up with books as he had and not love them for their own sakes.

Gemma closed the folder she'd been scanning and handed it to Kincaid. "Jasmine's p.m. report. No evidence of puncture marks, so the morphine must have been administered through the catheter."

"No surprise there."

"And I've been to the coroner's office. The inquest is set for Wednesday." Gemma stood up and brushed some crumbs off the blotter, then picked up a coffee mug bearing lipstick traces on its rim. She'd traded her usual tailored outfit for a long, navy cardigan and a printed skirt in some soft material.

"Quick off the mark this morning, aren't you?" Kincaid grinned at her. "Second breakfast?"

Gemma ignored the dig. "I heard you'd gone straight in to see the boss. Did he okay it?"

Kincaid sobered. "We've a couple of days, if nothing comes in that Sullivan can't handle. The rest are up to their eyeballs." He went around the desk and took the chair Gemma had vacated, leaning back and ticking items off on his fingers. "Jasmine's solicitor first off—I'll take that one. I'd like you to go round the borough planning office where Meg and Jasmine worked and see Meg. Find out what Jasmine told her about the legality of assisted suicide. Then interview whoever else seems likely. But first I want you to trace the lovely Roger Leveson-Gower. See what you make of him." Smiling at the thought of pitting Gemma's temper against Leveson-Gower's snide sarcasm, Kincaid added, "Maybe he'll tell you where he was on Thursday evening. He bloody well won't tell me."

Kincaid found the Bayswater address, a ground floor flat in a once-residential townhouse, without difficulty. To his surprise, the brass nameplate simply bore the legend "Antony Thomas, Solicitor." Somehow he'd expected a high-powered string of names.

The receptionist took Kincaid's name, her dark eyes widening as she looked at his warrant card. Very young, very pretty, very likely Pakistani, Kincaid thought. She glanced at him nervously every so often as he waited patiently in the straight-backed chair. When her intercom buzzed she ushered him into the inner office with obvious relief.

"What can I do for you, Superintendent?" Antony Thomas greeted Kincaid with a smile and a handshake. "Do have a seat. Though if it's police business I can't imagine how I could help."

Kincaid sat in the wing chair angled comfortably in front of the desk and considered Thomas. Another preconception shattered, although why his knowledge of Jasmine should have led him to expect a gruff old family retainer, he didn't know. Antony Thomas was slender, middle-aged, with a fringe of dark hair surrounding a shiny, bald pate, and a trace of Welsh lilt in his voice.

"Not entirely official business, Mr. Thomas," Kincaid began, and proceeded to tell him the circumstances of Jasmine Dent's death.

Thomas absorbed the tale in silence, and when Kincaid had finished sat a few moments longer, pulling at his chin with his thumb and forefinger. When he spoke his voice was soft, the lilt more pronounced. "I'm very sorry to hear that, Mr. Kincaid. I knew her situation, of course, but still one is never quite prepared. Had you known Jasmine long?"

The question surprised Kincaid. "Not long, no. Just since her illness forced her to leave work."

Thomas sighed and looked down as he straightened the pens on his blotter. "I knew her a very long time, Mr. Kincaid. More than twenty years. My office was in the same street as the chartered accountant she worked for at the time—Jasmine always had a head for figures. She first came to me over the settlement of her aunt's estate. What a lovely girl she was then, you should have seen her." He raised his head, his brown eyes engaging Kincaid's. "I was already married, with two small children," he passed a hand over the top of his head and smiled, "and hair, if you can believe that, but I must admit I was sorely tempted. Not to give you the wrong impression—I'm sure the fantasy was strictly on my part. But we did become friends over the years."

"Did she talk to you about suicide, Mr. Thomas? Or give you any documents stating her intent to commit suicide?"

Thomas shook his head. "No, she did not. I would have been very distressed."

Kincaid crossed his foot over his knee and straightened the crease in his trouser leg, thinking how best to approach the next bit. "I know it's a delicate matter, Mr. Thomas, but I need to know how Jasmine left her affairs, and if she carried any life insurance. I found no copy of a will or insurance policy in the flat." He pulled the warrant from his inside jacket pocket, unfolded it and handed it across the desk to Thomas. "I think you'll find everything in order."

Thomas scanned the paper, then pushed his intercom. "Hareem, bring in the files for Jasmine Dent, would you please." Clicking off, he spoke to Kincaid. "I don't like it, but I'll give you what I can."

Hareem came in with the file, giving Kincaid another curious glance from under her lashes before shutting the door.

Thomas shuffled through the papers, nodding as he found the familiar drafts, then looked up at Kincaid with an expression of surprise. "She's named you executor, Mr. Kincaid. I thought your name seemed familiar."

"Me?" Kincaid said more loudly than he intended. "But why—" He stopped himself. There had been no one else she had trusted as competent and impartial. "Didn't she have to inform me?"

"No. But you can refuse, if you want."

Kincaid shook his head. "No. I'll carry out her wishes, though it does complicate things a bit."

Antony Thomas smiled. "Good. Let me give it to you as simply as I can, then."

"Jasmine made a new will in the autumn. She arranged to pay off the mortgage on her brother's business. Except for a couple of small bequests, the remainder of her estate goes to Miss Margaret Bellamy."

"Is there quite a bit?" Kincaid asked, a little surprised.

"Well, Jasmine had a knack for these things. It includes stocks and shares and the equity in the Carlingford Road flat. She and her brother both received a tidy nest egg when their aunt died. Jasmine invested it well, and she made a good income from her work. I don't believe she spent much on herself—in fact, except for the disbursements to her brother, I don't think she spent much at all."

Kincaid sat up a little straighter in his chair. "You mean financing Theo's shop wasn't the first time she'd lent him money?"

Thomas shook his head emphatically. "Oh, no. Not by any means. In fact, after I had helped her settle her aunt's affairs, she retained me to salvage some of his investment in a psychedelic nightclub. In Chelsea, I think it was."

"Theo? A psychedelic club?" Kincaid said, astonished.

"Nineteen sixty-seven or sixty-eight, that would have been. I had very little success, I'm afraid, and if I remember correctly, that was the last of a string of bad investments with his aunt's money." Thomas snapped his fingers. "All gone, and in a very short time, too. After that, Jasmine funded him in various schemes—he went to art school and she supported him for a while, but his painting wasn't terribly successful."

Kincaid found the idea of Theo painting less ludicrous than Theo running a trendy disco. "Have you ever met Theo?"

"A few times, when he came in with Jasmine to sign papers, but I haven't seen him in several years."

"Did Jasmine give you any idea how the shop was doing?"

Thomas shook his head, the corners of his mouth turning down. "I only saw her the one time after her illness was diagnosed, and she didn't stay longer than necessary. I found her very… reticent."

Not wanting to discuss her illness with an old friend, Kincaid wondered, or not wanting to explain the change in her will? "Did you not find it odd, Mr. Thomas, Jasmine not making better provision for Theo?"

"Well, yes, as a matter of fact. She did say something rather cryptic, now that I think about it. Something about it 'being a bit late to cut the strings, but necessary all the same'. And then there was the life insur—"

"Jasmine carried life insurance?" Kincaid leaned forward, hands on the edge of the chair seat.

Shrinking back a bit, Thomas said, "Yes, she—"

"Theo the beneficiary?"

Thomas nodded. "But it wasn't all that much, Mr. Kincaid, only twenty thousand pounds."

Kincaid deliberately relaxed again, leaning back in the chair and resting his chin on his joined fingertips. "Mr. Thomas," he said carefully, "does that policy carry a suicide exclusion clause?"

Frowning, Thomas turned the pages in the folder. "Here it is." He read for a few minutes, then looked up at Kincaid. "Yes. A two-year exclusion clause. And the policy was issued two years ago last month."

They looked at each other in silence until Thomas spoke, distress in his voice. "Surely Jasmine can't have planned… she wouldn't have known she was ill…"

"Perhaps she felt something wasn't quite as it should be." The first nagging symptoms, Kincaid thought, and the fear of seeing a doctor. "Did Theo know about the policy?" And, Kincaid wondered, did he know it carried an exclusion clause?

Chapter Nine

As a child, Gemma had been intrigued by the idea of St. John's Wood. Pop stars lived there, and television celebrities. The name itself had fairy-tale connotations, and made her think of dark, arching trees and hidden cottages.

The reality, as she discovered when she was a bit older, was quite a disappointment. Ordinary upper-middle-class homes in ordinary streets, rapidly encroached upon by complexes of luxury, high-rise flats. She found the address Kincaid had coaxed from Margaret Bellamy on the phone, and a not-too-distant parking space for her car.

The house, built of white stone with pseudo-Greek columns fronting it, looked expensive and not terribly well-kept. Close-up the whitewash revealed scaly, diseased patches and weeds flourished in the cracked walk. Gemma rang the bell and held her cardigan closed against the wind as she waited. The hollow echo of the bell died away and Gemma had raised her hand to ring again when she heard the staccato click of heels on a hard floor. The door flew open, revealing a thin woman with a helmet of bottle-blond hair. She wore a white denim jumpsuit, the front of which displayed a starburst pattern in gold braids.

"What is it?" The woman's foot, clad in a gold sandal with spike heels, began a furious tapping against the tile.

Gemma, thrusting away speculation as to how anyone could walk in stilts like that without permanent spinal damage, brought her eyes back to the woman's face and smiled as she flipped open her warrant card. "Police. I'd like to ask you a few questions." Kincaid had said that Roger Leveson-Gower lived with his mum. While the woman was opening her mouth to retort, Gemma continued. "Are you Mrs. Leveson-Gower?"

"Of course I am. Whatever it is you—"

"If I could just come in for a few minutes." Gemma had already inserted her navy pump into the hall, her body following smoothly. "I'm sure this won't take much of your time." She shut the door with a decisive click, thinking that if she ever decided to give up police work she'd have a hell of an edge selling vacuum cleaners.

Mrs. Leveson-Gower opened her mouth to protest, then shrugged. "All right, if you must. But make it quick—I've an appointment." She glanced pointedly at her watch as she led Gemma through an open door on the right.

White, white, and more white—the room's mirrored walls reflected white, linen-covered furniture and white, plush carpet, a snow queen's lair, thought Gemma, suitable for a not-so-enchanted wood. Mrs. Leveson-Gower sank down on one of the white sofas, crossed her knees and propped a foot on the edge of a glass and chrome coffee table. She did not invite Gemma to sit.

Gemma perched on the edge of the opposite sofa and took notebook and pen from her handbag, refusing to be rushed by the woman's obvious impatience. "Mrs. Leveson-Gower," Gemma said, pronouncing it "Loos-n-gor" as Kincaid had coached her. "They'll sneer at you if you get it wrong," he'd said, "and you can't afford to let Roger have the upper hand." "Does your son Roger live here with you?"

The scarlet toenails on Mrs. Leveson-Gower's sandaled foot began a rhythmic jiggling, but her tone remained belligerent. "Roger? Why on earth do you want to know?"

"Just a routine inquiry, Mrs.—"

"Inquiry into what, for heaven's sake?" The errant foot stilled suddenly.

If not for the mask of irritation etched into her features, Mrs. Leveson-Gower would have been a strikingly beautiful woman. An extremely well-preserved late forties, Gemma guessed, and the tautness of the skin over the bones spoke of expensive lifts and tucks. "An acquaintance of your son's died in questionable circumstances last Thursday evening. We're simply corroborating statements. Is heat—"

"What station did you say you were from, Sergeant? Let me see your identification again."

Gemma obligingly pulled the folder from her bag and handed it across. "Not your local station, ma'am. New Scotland Yard."

"What division?"

Gemma hadn't expected such a knowledgeable question. "C1, homicide." Mrs. Leveson-Gower went very still, and Gemma could almost hear the gears clicking in her brain.

"You're not going to speak to my son without our solicitor present." She stood up and started toward the door, speaking over her shoulder. "You can call and make an appointment at his conven—"

"Making arrangements for me, Mummy? I'm sure it's not necessary."

The man entered the room with such smooth timing that Gemma felt sure he had been listening outside the louvered doors. He smiled at Gemma, showing even, white teeth, then turned his attention back to his mother. They faced each other silently across the expanse of white carpet like participants in a duel, then Mrs. Leveson-Gower left the room, without word or look to Gemma.

Roger, for Gemma had no doubt as to his identity, crossed the room and stood looking casually down at Gemma. She closed her mouth with a snap. Kincaid might have warned her, the sod, before she made a ninny of herself. Roger Leveson-Gower was stunningly good-looking. She could see the resemblance to his mother in his coloring—his mother must have had the same tawny hair before she resorted to bleach—but in him every line and angle had combined to perfection.

"I'm sure it's not worth the bother of a solicitor, whatever it is, Constable." He sat on the arm of the sofa facing Gemma, so that she still had to look up at him.

"Sergeant," she said sharply, dropping her eyes and flipping open her notebook in an effort to regain control of the interview. "Last Thursday evening, Mr. Leveson-Gower. Can you tell me where you were?"

"What's it in aid of?" Roger asked in a tone of mild interest.

"Jasmine Dent's death, and your friend Margaret Bellamy's involvement. Miss Bellamy says she agreed to help Jasmine commit suicide, but that Jasmine changed her mind and she didn't see her after late afternoon on Thursday. Can you confirm that?"

"Last Thursday?" Roger frowned in concentration. "No. I was on a job and then out with my mates. But Meg would never have gone through with it, you know. Hadn't the nerve."

"She discussed it with you?"

Roger smiled, including Gemma in the joke. "Noble as hell about it, too, worrying about her ethical duty to ease suffering."

"And that didn't worry you? You didn't try to talk her out of it? Assisted suicide is a criminal offense."

"It was all just talk, like I said, Sergeant. Meg couldn't kill a wounded bird. There's a yawning gap between planning and execution." He stood and gave a cat-like stretch, then settled again on the sofa arm.

"Just what is it you do in the evenings, Mr. Leveson-Gower?"

Roger gave a bark of laughter. "Good god, you make it sound like I'm a ponce. Why so indignant, Sergeant?"

Gemma felt her color rising. She sounded pompous even to herself, but the man made her throw up a full battery of defenses. Taking a breath to focus on her interview technique, she smiled at him sweetly and put the emphasis on her first word. "Are you a ponce, Mr. Leveson-Gower?"

"Nothing so glamorous as that, Sergeant, more's the pity." He still sounded amused. "I set up for clubs and discos. Lights, sound equipment, you know the sort of thing. The hours suit me."

"And that's where you were on Thursday evening?"

"Yeah. Dive called The Blue Angel." Roger raised one eyebrow with much practiced ease. "I suppose you'll want the address? And the names of my mates?"

"If you wouldn't mind."

He gave her an address in Hammersmith, then added, "Jimmy Dawson you can find at the petrol station just off Shepherd's Bush roundabout. We hung around at the bar till the show finished."

"What time would that have been?" Gemma asked, pen ready.

Roger shrugged. "I've no idea. I'd had a few pints, and I don't wear a watch." His shirt cuffs were turned back to just below his elbow, and he held up a tanned, bare wrist for Gemma's examination.

"And then what?"

"I came home and put my head on the pillow, just like a good little boy."

Gemma allowed her skepticism to show. "Is that so? And can your mother vouch for you?"

"I am not in the habit of registering my comings and goings with my mother. And besides, if I remember correctly, she was out that evening."

Under the smooth and slightly condescending reply, Gemma sensed irritation—so he was sensitive about living in his mum's house. She pushed her advantage. "You didn't check in with Margaret either? Not even by phone?"

"No. We don't have that kind of relationship, Sergeant." Condescension triumphed over irritation. His tone implied Gemma was a fool for expecting him to be accountable to anyone. He stood with the same easy grace as before. "Is that it, Sergeant?"

Gemma remained planted on the sofa, notebook in hand, determined not to let him terminate the interview. "Are you sure, Mr. Leveson-Gower, that you didn't go to Carlingford Road when you left the club that night? That you didn't visit Jasmine yourself?"

Roger smiled and Gemma had the unpleasant feeling the joke was on her. "No. I've never been to the Carlingford Road flat. You see, Sergeant, I never met Jasmine Dent at all."

Jimmy Dawson wore his hair in a ponytail and looked to be in his late twenties, but those were the only similarities immediately apparent between Dawson and his friend Roger Leveson-Gower. Dawson's accent made it obvious they hadn't gone to the same schools.

"Ere, wot's all this about?" he said warily, after Gemma had fished him from under a car in a service bay and identified herself.

"Roger Leveson-Gower."

"Oh, him," Dawson said dismissively, and Gemma saw the tension drain from him. He jerked his head toward the glass-enclosed office and she followed, thankful when the door muted the roar of Shepherd's Bush roundabout. Dawson gestured her into a cracked leather chair, wiped his hands on a greasy rag and lit a Marlboro from a pack in his shirt pocket. "What's 'e done, then?"

Gemma ignored the question. "Was he with you last Thursday evening, Mr. Dawson?"

Dawson leaned against the desk and exhaled smoke from his nose while he thought about it. "Aye. And I can tell you when he left, too, 'cause he buggered off when it was his turn to buy a round."

"What time was that?"

"Band took a break around nine… not long after that, I'd say."

"Did he say where he was going?" Gemma asked, but without much hope. Even on such brief acquaintance she didn't expect Roger to slip up so easily.

"Nah. We was takin' the mickey out of 'im about his bird, but 'e wasn't havin' any."

"You've met Margaret, then?" Gemma asked, surprised.

Dawson shrugged. "She's all right. He brings her around sometimes."

"How do you know him, Jimmy—can I call you Jimmy?" asked Gemma, finding the friendship more and more unlikely.

"I play in a band, see?" Dawson grinned, showing teeth already beginning to yellow with nicotine, and played a little air-guitar riff. "And he sets up for us at some of the clubs."

"So you're not really close mates?"

"Nah. He's just around, you know? Has a way of weaselin' out of things, our Roger, always talking about what 'e's going to do when he's flush."

"Flush?" repeated Gemma.

"Aye." Jimmy Dawson ground out the stub of his cigarette in the metal ashtray on the desk, and the metallic smell stung Gemma's nose. "When he comes into 'is money, like."

Chapter Ten

The stale cheese roll sat heavily in the pit of Gemma's stomach. She'd returned to the Yard just long enough to exchange information with Kincaid and grab a snack in the canteen.

Now, as she struggled to parallel park the Escort in a space a size too small, and a taxi missed removing her right front fender by centimeters, she regretted the sandwich. Visions of leisurely lunches in cheerful cafes ran through her mind as she killed the engine and took a breath. Her mother's voice spoke insistently in her ear. "Why don't you get a nice job, love? One with a bit of class. You could be a solicitor's assistant, or a hairdresser like your sister."

Gemma shook her head and got out of the car, slamming the door loudly enough to shut out any more imaginary admonitions. She'd settle for stale cheese rolls, thank you very much. Dodging traffic a little more recklessly than usual, she crossed the street and studied the entrance to the borough planning office.

The location near Holland Park, scrubbed white stone and a glossy black door gave the building an image befitting its function. Gemma adjusted her shoulder bag and opened the door. She stood in the hallway a moment, listening, sensing the threshold hum of a busy office—the murmur of voices and the faint tapping of fingers against keyboards. To her right a door stood open. Light from the bay window fronting the street illuminated the girl behind the simple desk. Except for the telephone glued to her ear, the girl might have stepped out of a Whistler portrait, dressed all in white, hair dark against milk-white skin. "Hang on a minute," she said, looking expectantly at Gemma but not bothering to remove the receiver from her ear.

"I'd like to speak to whoever's in charge of the office." Gemma showed her warrant card.

The girl shrugged and rolled her eyes. "You'll be wanting Mrs. Washburn, I expect. Up the stairs, first on the right," she said, and went back to her interrupted conversation. As Gemma reached the door she heard the girl say with exaggerated weariness, "He could go on all night, he could. I'm that worn out."

Poor thing, thought Gemma with a smile. And curiosity deficient, too—most people rated crime over sex.

She knocked on the indicated door and this time received a sharp reply. "Yes? What is it?"

Gemma's first glance at Mrs. Washburn's irritated expression did not inspire confidence in an easy interview. The woman's heavy middle-aged features were made more forbidding by dark-framed spectacles and hennaed hair.

Smiling as pleasantly as she could manage, Gemma introduced herself while handing her identification across the desk, then pulled the visitor's chair to the edge of the desk and sat down, crossing her legs.

"What do you think you're—"

"I'd like to talk to you about Jasmine Dent, Mrs. Washburn."

Mrs. Washburn sat a moment with her mouth open, whatever grievance she'd been about to air forgotten.

Score one for me, Gemma said to herself, and continued before her adversary could recover. "I understand you worked quite closely with Miss Dent, Mrs. Washburn. I'm sure you'll be able to help me." She smiled in an encouraging manner, glancing at the brass name plate on the desk's edge. "Beatrice Washburn" it stated in black, block letters. Gemma wondered if Jasmine had felt the need to demonstrate her importance in such a visible way, and if so, what had happened to it? In fact, what had happened to the personal effects Jasmine must have kept at the office?

"Well, I… Yes, of course I worked with Jasmine, such a tragedy, but I don't see how I can—"

"We have some questions regarding the circumstances of Miss Dent's death. As I'm sure you realize, interviewing friends and associates is routine procedure." Gemma leaned forward confidentially. "Since you assumed her position upon her death, Mrs. Washburn, I thought you would be most knowledgeable about Miss Dent's work and her personal relationships."

Denial carried too great a loss of face. Mrs. Washburn swallowed and took the bait. "I came here only a short time before Jasmine's illness forced her to resign, so I really didn't know her at all well."

"But she must have trained you?"

Mrs. Washburn puffed up with injured dignity. "I had considerable experience as a planning officer before I came here. I was with—"

"Surely there are always things to learn in any new situation. Every office has its own special way of doing things, its own personality, and Miss Dent would have been most familiar with it."

"She was helpful, yes, but she didn't believe personal confidences had a place in the office, and I agreed with her."

Mrs. Washburn finished the sentence with such an acid expression that Gemma guessed she might have approached Jasmine, angling for gossip, and been rebuffed. "Did Miss Dent have a special relationship with anyone else in the office?"

"It doesn't do to socialize with the clerical staff. I'm sure Jasmine was aware of that."

The old trout, thought Gemma. She'd bet all the girls in the office made faces at her behind her back. "What about Margaret Bellamy?"

"Margaret?" Irritation creased Mrs. Washburn's heavy face. "I believe Margaret did visit her at home a few times after she retired, but I don't know that they were particularly friendly before then."

Gemma stood up. "I'd like to see Margaret, if you can spare her a few minutes?"

"You're welcome to her, if you can find her." Mrs. Washburn snorted in disgust and looked at her watch. "That girl can find more excuses for taking long lunches and coming late in to work. She's half-an-hour late again and I'll have her on the carpet for it. She'll not last much longer under me, I can tell you."

"I'll wait," said Gemma, when Mrs. Washburn didn't offer. She found it very odd indeed that Mrs. Washburn hadn't asked why the police were looking into Jasmine's death. Curiosity was a natural human condition, and, to Gemma, Beatrice Washburn's lack signalled either a secret or an absorbing self-interest. "Mrs. Washburn," Gemma turned back when she reached the door, "who informed the office of Jasmine's death?"

The heavy face remained blank. "I don't know. One of the typists buzzed up and told me. Carla. You'll have to ask her." She turned back to the file on her desk before Gemma shut the door.

Gemma followed the faint sound of voices to the end of the hall, then opened the door and stuck her head round it. The conversation stopped as if it had been sliced off. Two girls sat at computer terminals, their desks shoved together to make room for the jumble of filing cabinets and drafting tables in the room. A third desk, its chair empty, stood under the window.

The girls looked up at Gemma, their warily blank faces making it evident they knew who she was. So she'd underestimated the little receptionist—the office grapevine worked, after all. "I'm looking for Margaret Bellamy," she said innocently, stepping into the room and closing the door.

The nearest girl pushed her roller chair away from her desk and swiveled toward Gemma. "Not in." She smiled tentatively, showing a chipped tooth.