All Shall Be Well

by Deborah Crombie

  Gemma sipped her watered-down tea and waited. When Margaret didn’t speak again, she asked gently, “Did she give you an exact date?”

  “The day before her birthday. I’d lie awake nights and think about watching her die. How would she look? How would I know when it was over? I couldn’t bear it. And I couldn’t tell her.”

  When Margaret looked up, Gemma saw that her eyes looked bruised and swollen, as if she’d been weeping for days. “Did you tell her?”

  “I thought that was the most terrible day I’d ever spent. I didn’t know it could get worse.” Margaret rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth. “Most of the day at work I spent throwing up in the loo. I worked myself up to tell her as soon as I walked in.” Her lips twisted in a smile at the irony of it. “She didn’t even let me finish. ‘Don’t worry, Meg,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I’ve found my courage or if I’ve lost it, but I’m going to stick it out.’”

  “What made you believe her?” asked Gemma. “Why didn’t you think she was just trying to let you off the hook?”

  Margaret’s wide brow creased as she thought about it. “I don’t know if I can explain, exactly. There wasn’t any … tension in her. No screwing herself up for something, no excitement. Do you see?”

  Gemma considered. “Yes, I think I do. She didn’t ask you to stay?”

  “Just for a bit. I did all the things I usually did for her—fed the cat, tidied up. Then I walked down to the Indian take-away and got a curry for her supper. She couldn’t eat much, really, but she still made the effort.”

  “Margaret,” Gemma said, treading carefully now, “didn’t Jasmine ever talk to you about the legal implications of assisted suicide?”

  Margaret nodded eagerly. “She said as long as I didn’t actually touch her or give her anything, I’d be all right. And we didn’t think anyone would ever know. Jasmine said we’d make sure it looked natural—she didn’t want complications.”

  Had Jasmine simply made things easy for Margaret? Had her calm that day come from resolution rather than acceptance? Was she such a skilled actress that she had lied easily to the people who knew her best? And if so, why? Gemma thought of the girl in the photograph, with her delicate beauty and her closed, almost secretive, expression. A clever woman, an organizer, a planner—had her request to see Theo on Sunday been just an unnecessary bit of stage management? Gemma shook her head. She couldn’t see Jasmine elaborating just for the sake of it.

  And there was one question she hadn’t asked Margaret. “Jasmine left a will, Meg.” Gemma used the diminutive Jasmine had chosen. “Did she tell you about it?”

  Margaret stared into her empty teacup as if the answer might lie in the tea leaves’ random design.

  Gemma waited, not offering any encouragement, not breaking the tension that grew in the silence.

  “We argued.” The tips of Margaret’s fingers turned white as she pressed them against the cup. “I told her it was terribly unfair, but she wouldn’t listen—she said she’d done all she could for Theo. I didn’t want to benefit from her death. It made me feel awful, like I’d loved her for a price.” She looked up at Gemma, her eyes reddening and glazing with tears. “You do understand, don’t you?”

  Reaching across the table and laying her fingers on the back of Margaret’s hand, Gemma said, “Did you tell anybody else about the will, Meg, anyone at all?”

  Margaret jerked her hand away from Gemma’s and the empty cup rocked in its saucer. “No! Of course not. I didn’t tell anybody.”

  Gathering up her handbag and cardigan, Margaret pushed her cup away, and after a moment Gemma caught the sharp, acrid odor of fear.

  CHAPTER

  11

  “Cut and dried.”

  “All right. Justify it.” Kincaid pushed his chair away from his desk and propped his feet up on the open bottom drawer. He’d gone bleary-eyed from an afternoon’s paperwork when Gemma, smelling of cold air and crackling with excitement, had charged back into the office.

  “She’s bloody terrified, poor little rabbit.” Gemma stopped pacing and sat on the arm of the visitor’s chair, hands beneath her bottom. “I don’t mean I think she knew beforehand, but she let that boyfriend in on the will, and now she’s sweating it.” She leaned forward for emphasis, reaching up with quick fingers to tuck back hair that the wind had teased from the clip at the nape of her neck. “Let’s say Roger was waiting for Margaret that afternoon when she left Jasmine’s, and she told him Jasmine had changed her mind. They have a row, and Roger goes off to do his set-up. Later on he makes some excuse to push off early, then pops round to Jasmine’s flat.”

  “I thought he said he’d never been there.”

  Shoulders lifting in a tiny shrug, Gemma said, “So maybe he lied. Who’s going to contradict him? Margaret?” She paused for a moment, then continued more thoughtfully. “Or maybe he told the truth. That wouldn’t have stopped him showing up at her door, making some kind of excuse. He could be very … plausible, I think.”

  Kincaid leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, and grinned. “Not immune to our Roger, then?”

  Gemma shivered. “Like being locked up with a snake. Gave me the creeps, he did. I’d not put anything past him. What if,” she stood and began pacing the small confines of the office again, “somehow he found out about Jasmine’s will before he ever met Margaret? Why else would he chat up Margaret in the first place? He must have women queuing up to go out with him. And don’t tell me,” she added, coloring as she saw Kincaid smile, “that he sees the purity of her soul or something, because I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t either, but it may not be that simple, all the same.” Kincaid remembered the scene he’d witnessed in Margaret’s room—Roger enjoyed displaying his sexual hold over her, and that was probably only the tip of the iceberg. “Just suppose you’re right, Gemma, far-fetched as it is, how could Roger have known about Jasmine?”

  “Bribed her solicitor?”

  Kincaid shook his head, thinking of Antony Thomas’s gentle outrage. “Not likely. But what if you’re right about the first part and Roger did go to Jasmine’s flat that night? He’s never met her, he makes some excuse for coming, and then what? Does he say ‘Excuse me, let me give you an overdose of morphine?’” He jabbed a finger at Gemma. “I’d swear there was no struggle.”

  “Maybe he told her Margaret had just been using her, and then Jasmine decided to kill herself after all.”

  “All he had to do was wait. Why would he risk the final outcome?”

  “Perhaps he thought he was losing his hold over Margaret, and made one last-ditch attempt,” said Gemma, settling back into the chair and crossing her legs.

  They looked at each other a moment, speculating, then Kincaid straightened up his chair and kicked his desk drawer shut. “No evidence, Gemma. Not a shred. I’ll admit Roger looks a likely suspect, but we’ll have to keep digging. And I’m not at all happy about Theo.” He looked at his watch and stretched, then pulled down the knot on his tie and unbuttoned his collar. “Let’s call it a day. I’m knackered. Fancy a drink before you go home?”

  Gemma hesitated, then made a face. “Better not. I’ve played truant enough lately. See you tomorrow.” She went out with a wave, then stuck her head round the door again. “Don’t forget to look after the cat, now.”

  The weather change had driven the weekend hordes from Hampstead Heath. Spring had flaunted her true colors and driven them scurrying back into pubs and parlors, except for a few solitary dog-walkers and resolute joggers. Litter left behind from the warm-weather festivities blew fitfully across the grass. Stopping at the flat only long enough to change into jeans and anorak, Kincaid crossed East Heath Road at the bottom of Worsley and plunged onto the Heath itself near the Mixed Bathing Pond. He felt a need to work the kinks out of mind and body. Running required too much focus, or at least that’s what he told himself, so he turned north and walked, letting his thoughts wander where they would.

  Gemma�
�s theories worried him more than he’d admitted. He trusted her instincts, and if she said Margaret Bellamy was dead scared, he believed her. But he couldn’t make a logical construction out of the rest of it—there were just too many holes.

  He smiled, thinking of Gemma’s arguments. Sometimes her enthusiasm amused him, sometimes it irritated him, but that was one reason they worked well together—she charged into ideas headlong while he tended to worry at them, and often together they came to a satisfactory conclusion.

  The path crossed the viaduct pond and he stopped a moment, hands in pockets, admiring the view. New-leafed branches formed mirror images of themselves in the water, and to the west the spire of Hampstead’s Christ Church rose above the still-bare fingers of the taller trees. Gemma had been different at the weekend, some of the fiery energy banked down to a lazy contentment. Bright cotton clothes against skin faintly flushed from the sun, an elusive scent of peaches when he’d stood next to her in Theo’s dusty shop—Kincaid blinked and shook himself like a dog coming out of water.

  He started walking again, head down into the wind, beginning the long climb to the Heath-top. Somehow, in the course of the weekend, the atmosphere between them had shifted. Today they’d worked together in their usual way, and he’d begun to think he was imagining things, but then he sensed her uncharacteristic hesitation when he suggested they stop for an after-work drink. They often did that, talking over the day’s progress and planning the next, and only now did he realize how much he looked forward to it. Maybe he demanded too much of her time, and she resented it. He’d be more careful in future.

  Twigs of gorse, heavy with yellow blossom, scratched and snagged at his sleeve as he absentmindedly passed too near. Beautiful and irritatingly prickly, like Gemma—and like Gemma, it needed to be handled with caution. He smiled.

  His path dead-ended at the top of Heath Street, just across from Jack Straw’s Castle. The parking lot of the old pub was already full, and when the door swung open the wind carried a faint drift of music to Kincaid’s ears. The boisterous crowd didn’t appeal to him and he turned left down Heath Street, feeling the pull in his calf muscles as he made the steep descent. When he reached the tube station, an impulse sent him straight ahead rather than left into Hampstead High Street. Church Row came up shortly on his right, and he turned into the narrow lane, the spire of St. John’s leading him on like a compass needle.

  Kincaid entered the churchyard through the massive wrought-iron gates. A drunk snored on a bench by the church door, disturbing the silence. Kincaid turned left, into the dim greenness of the tomb-covered hillside, which even in early spring was tangled and overgrown with vegetation. The path wound under the heavy boughs of evergreens, passing damp, gray stone slabs, splotched with lichens. He stopped at his favorite spot, just before the lower boundary wall.

  “John Constable, Esq., R.A., 1837,” read the carved inscription on the side of the tomb. Constable lay with his wife, Mary Elizabeth, and the marker also bore witness to the death of their son, John Charles, age twenty-three. Constable’s name was associated with the history of almost every part of Hampstead, as he rented one house after another from 1819 until his death, and was said to have asked to ‘take his everlasting rest’ in the village he immortalized in his paintings.

  Why Kincaid found the Victorian monument comforting he couldn’t have said, but since he’d lived in Hampstead he had developed a habit of coming here to think when he couldn’t quite sort something out. He sat on a rock and rubbed a twig between his fingers, crumbling the dry bark to dust. Frowning, he tried to clear his mind, concentrate. His gut-instinct told him that Meg really had loved Jasmine, would not have harmed her against her wishes. Roger, however, was a different kettle of fish, and a smelly one at that. Sex was a powerful and often twisted force, and he wasn’t sure how blind an eye Meg might have persuaded herself to turn in order to preserve her relationship with Roger.

  And Theo? Had Theo resented his sister more than he loved her? He certainly had reason to be grateful to her, but the contrariness of human nature could make gratitude a difficult burden to bear.

  He began to see Jasmine sitting in the center of a radiating web of relationships, inviolate. What had she felt for anyone? Had she moved through her life untouched and untouching? She’d faced her illness with such equanimity. He couldn’t reconcile the passionate girl in the journals with the woman he’d known—charming, witty, intelligent, and more guarded than he ever had imagined.

  Kincaid sighed and stood up. The light was fast fading, the graves had no secrets to impart, and if he weren’t careful he’d be blundering his way back up the hill. He realized that the wind had died, and beyond the boundary hedge the lights of the city glowed in the gathering dusk.

  The drunk was gone when Kincaid reached the church again. From within the building, muffled by the heavy doors, voices sang in familiar cadence. “Evensong,” Kincaid said aloud. When had he last heard an Evensong service? The sound took him back to the sturdy red-brick church of his Cheshire childhood. His parents had deemed the Evensong service the only compromise between their Anglican upbringing and their liberal philosophies, and while the family often attended Evensong, Kincaid could not remember being inside the church on a Sunday.

  Inching open the scuffed, blue-leather-padded door and slipping through, Kincaid made his way to the last pew and eased into it. Only a few scattered forms filled the seats in front of him. He wondered that the service, so lightly attended, was held at all.

  Voices rose, the sound filling the hollow space inside the church, and the notes of the massive organ vibrated through the pew into his bones. Kincaid relaxed, idly watching the choir director. The man used his hands like blunt instruments, chopping and jabbing his signals to the choir. He looked, in fact, more like a rugby forward than a choir director—well over six-feet tall, with massive shoulders under his surplice and a square, heavy-jawed head.

  The director moved a step to the right and Kincaid caught a glimpse of a familiar face in the choir’s back row. A fringe of gray hair around a balding head and a ruddy face, a clipped gray mustache—so accustomed was Kincaid to the Major’s usual tweedy attire that the full, white fabric of the surplice had disoriented him for a moment. How could he have forgotten the Major telling him he sang with the St. John’s choir? Kincaid watched, fascinated by the sight of his taciturn neighbor raising his voice in a joyous, open-mouthed bass.

  The service drew to a close. The final ‘amen’ hung trembling, then the choir filed out. The other congregants passed Kincaid on their way to the door, smiling and glancing curiously at him. Regulars, he thought, wondering just who the hell he was. When the porch door closed on the last straggler, Kincaid stood and walked toward the altar.

  “Excuse me.”

  The director had his hand on a door which Kincaid thought must lead to the vestry. He swung around, startled, his movements surprisingly graceful for such a large man. “Yes?”

  “Could I speak to you for a minute? My name’s Duncan Kincaid.” Kincaid thought fast. He didn’t want to make a professional inquiry of a friend and neighbor just yet, only set his own mind at ease. Perhaps his jeans, anorak and wind-blown hair weren’t a disadvantage after all.

  Hand outstretched, the choir director came toward Kincaid. “I’m Paul Grisham. What can I do for you?”

  Kincaid heard in his voice a familiar lilt. “You’re Welsh,” he said, making it a statement. Paul Grisham’s face broke into a grin, showing large, crooked teeth. His nose, Kincaid saw, had been broken, and probably more than once.

  “That I am. From Llangynog.” Grisham cocked his head, studying Kincaid. “And you?”

  “A near neighbor, across the border. I grew up in Nantwich.”

  “Thought you didn’t sound London born and bred.”

  “You play rugby?” Kincaid touched a finger to his own nose.

  “I did, yes, when my bones knitted quicker. Wrexham Union.”

  Kincaid shifted a bit and leaned a
gainst the altar rail. He sensed Grisham waiting for him to get to the point, and said casually, “I just happened by, quite by accident. I’d no idea you had Evensong service.” He nodded his head toward the choir stall behind Grisham. “Was that Major Keith I saw?”

  Grisham smiled. “You know the Major? One of our mainstays, he is, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him, the crusty old devil. Regular as clockwork, never misses a practice.”

  “Twice a week?” Kincaid hazarded.

  “Sunday and Thursday evenings.”

  “He’s my downstairs neighbor. I’d no idea he sang, but I had wondered where he disappeared to so regularly. Figured he was off for a pint.” Kincaid straightened up as Grisham hiked up his robe and fished a set of keys out of his trouser pocket. “I was just startled to see him, that’s all.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll let you out the front before I lock up. Vandals, you know,” he added apologetically.

  “Not at all.” Kincaid turned and together they walked up the aisle. “Didn’t mean to take so much of your time.”

  When they reached the vestibule Grisham stopped and turned to face Kincaid, seeming to hesitate. In the dim light, Kincaid had to look up to read his expression. The man overreached him by a head—he must be nearly as big as the Super.

  “You said you were his neighbor—the Major?”

  Kincaid nodded. “Since I bought my flat, three years ago.”

  “Know him well?”

  Shrugging, Kincaid answered, “Not really. I’m not sure anyone does.” Jasmine came suddenly to mind, with her tales of afternoon tea with the Major, and he thought of the rosebushes planted in her memory. “I don’t know. There was someone, perhaps. Our neighbor, but she died just last week.”

  Grisham reached for the heavy porch door, swinging it open as if it were cardboard. “That explains it, then. Last Thursday night he left practice early, said he felt ill. First time I’ve ever known him to do that, and I was a bit worried about him, living alone and all. But he’s not the sort of person you could ask.”