“No,” Kincaid agreed, stepping out into the darkness. “I don’t suppose you could. Thanks for your time. I’ll come back,” he said, meaning it, and as the door closed he saw a flash of John Grisham’s white teeth.
What he didn’t add was that Jasmine could not have accounted for the Major’s sudden indisposition. He hadn’t learned of her death until Kincaid told him, mid-day on Friday.
He stopped for a pie and a pint at the King George, halfway down the High. When he came out into the street again the still air felt damp against his skin. Rain tomorrow, or he’d be buggered. Turning up his collar and shoving his hands in his pockets against the chill, he walked home slowly, looking in the lighted windows of the empty shops.
His footsteps led him naturally to Jasmine’s door, and he let himself in with the key he’d attached to his keyring. When Kincaid turned on the lamp Sid blinked at him from the center of the bed, then seemed to levitate himself into a stretch.
“Hullo, Sid. Glad to see me this time? Or just hungry?”
The cat followed him into the kitchen and sat watching expectantly as Kincaid rooted in the drawer for the tin opener. “Not going to wind about my ankles, are you, mate?” Kincaid said, thinking of how he’d seen the cat wrap himself around Jasmine’s slender ankles at feeding time. As she grew more fragile he’d been afraid the cat would make her fall, but he hadn’t said anything.
“Let’s not get too familiar, okay?” He set the dish on the floor, then ran his fingers down Sid’s smooth back as the cat came to the food. Remembering Gemma’s instructions, he found the litter box tucked away under the bathroom sink, emptied it into the rubbish bin and refilled it from a sack he found in the cupboard. He lifted the rubbish bag free of the bin and tied it up for collection.
Feeling virtuous, he refilled Sid’s water bowl and stood watching the cat eat. “What’s going to become of you, eh, mate?” As Sid polished the empty dish with his tongue, Kincaid added, “Looks like you’ve done the worst of your grieving.” Human or animal, in most cases the body reasserted itself soon enough. You drank cups of tea, or whiskey. You ate what was put in front of you, and life went on. “See you tomorrow, mate.”
He left a lamp lit for the cat and went upstairs to Jasmine’s journals.
June 5th, 1963
All I can think about is how I feel when he touches me. My skin burns. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I feel a little sick with it all the time but I don’t want it to stop, and there’s this hard knot in my belly that aches and won’t go away no matter what I do. I know what people say about him, but it’s not true. He’s different with me, gentle. They just don’t understand him. He doesn’t belong here, any more than I do. We’re throwbacks, both of us, to something darker, less English. Aunt May says some of my mother’s family were French and that’s why I look the way I do, but you can tell from the way she says it that she despised my mum. “Rose Hollis,” she says, “didn’t have the sense God gave a child. I don’t know what your father was thinking of when he married her and took her to India.” Poor mummy. He killed her, as surely as if he’d stuck a knife in her heart, and I’m afraid. I don’t want the same thing to happen to me, but it’s out of control already and I don’t see any way to turn it back.
We’ll go away, soon as I’ve saved enough working for old Mr. Rawlinson. London, where nobody will know us, where we can be together all the time. Get a flat somewhere. I know I promised I’d not go without Theo, but he can leave school after this year and maybe by that time I’ll be able to look after him, too.
I dream about him when I can sleep. When I close my eyes I see his face against my eyelids. His dark hair lies like silk against my hand when I run my fingers through it. Last night we met behind the social club as soon as it was dark. It was bingo night, and I could hear them calling inside, numbers and letters. “Jasmine?” he says, in that questioning way, as if he can’t quite believe in me, and then his mouth turns up at the corners when he smiles. But the light lasts longer every evening, and there’s nowhere we can go to be alone, where he can kiss me, put his hands where I want him to touch me. Aunt May would kill me if she found out, and his old mum’s even worse. Dry and shriveled as old prunes, both of them, and sick with envy.
I have an idea, though, and if I can carry it through, there won’t be anything that can come between us.
CHAPTER
12
The previous evening’s promise of rain fulfilled itself. Kincaid peered through the Midget’s windscreen in the gray light, straining to see the road, while the wipers clicked monotonously back and forth, scrubbing at the drizzle. He’d left the M3 at Basingstoke, heading west on the two-lane A roads, toward Dorset.
The decision, made somewhere between finishing his coffee and leaving his flat for the Yard, had taken him by surprise. He’d dreamed of Jasmine—the fierce girl of the journals, not the Jasmine of unbreachable reserve, fragile from her illness—and awakened with an imprinted image of her scribbling in her tiny attic room.
There’d been a gap after the entry about the boy, and when she wrote again it was of living in London, finding a flat, adjusting to a new job. Compared to the earlier entries these were strangely emotionless, as if the journals had been relegated to trivial record keeping.
Kincaid had given up, exhausted, but found himself worrying at it again this morning. He’d done some quick arithmetic—Jasmine had been twenty-one at the time of that last entry, and to him she seemed oddly immature. If he hadn’t grown accustomed to her taking charge of Theo and coping with whatever life threw her way, perhaps the fact that she’d survived her teens still sexually inexperienced wouldn’t have struck him so forcibly. But the more he thought about it, the less surprising it seemed. Mature beyond her years in some ways, Jasmine had still been very much the outcast. She wouldn’t have fit in comfortably with teen-age flirtations and rough camaraderie, and life in a small English village didn’t leave much room for exploration.
Behind his unexpected pilgrimage lay the hope that he might find some answers in the hamlet of Briantspuddle—that some trace of Jasmine Dent’s passage from childhood to adulthood remained.
The lane ran tunnel-like between the high hedges, dipping and twisting like a rabbit’s burrow. Occasional gaps in the green walls revealed only muddy farmyards. Kincaid had rechecked his map when he’d stopped for a quick lunch in Blandford Forum, but he’d begun to wonder if he’d read the last signpost right when the lane crossed a stream, took a sudden right-angle turn and ejected him into a clearing. A string of white-washed cottages straddled the road and a signpost at the central fork proclaimed “Briantspuddle”.
Kincaid stopped at the intersection. No church … no pub—not having either repository of village information would make his task more difficult. He took the west fork of the lane, hoping to find a likely source of gossip.
A few hundred yards farther on he came upon another smattering of cottages, even smaller than Briantspuddle. These cottages were washed in pale colors, rather than white, but except for wisps of smoke escaping from a few of the chimneys, the smaller hamlet appeared just as deserted. A stone cross, a carved madonna-like figure imprisoned within its stem, seemed to draw the surrounding cottages to it like congregants facing a preacher.
Kincaid stopped the car and got out. The rain had earlier diminished to a mist just fine enough to make his wipers squeak, and now he realized it had stopped. He walked around the cross, examining its unusual construction. The design reminded him of a traditional market cross, but it was somehow very modern in feel. In the front, the Madonna crouched under a peaked roof at the bottom of the spire, while in the back a larger, unidentifiable figure seemed to float midway up the column. An inscription ran around the cross’s square base, and Kincaid read as he circled the cross once again: 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.
Kincaid returned to the car and headed back the way he’d come. When he
reached Briantspuddle again he pulled the Midget onto the verge and killed the engine. Stretching, he levered himself up out of the car and felt the cool air settle on his skin like a cloak. He took a deep breath, invigorated by the clean, damp silence.
A faint rhythmic sound broke the quiet and Kincaid turned, searching for its source. Something moved behind the shrubby border of the best-kept cottage, beneath a row of flowering plums and brilliant yellow sprays of forsythia. He took a few steps closer and the movement resolved into the top of a gray head. Nearer still, an elderly woman kneeling, weeding her flower bed.
She looked up, unsurprised, and smiled at him. “Have to take advantage,” she said, nodding at the low, gray clouds. “Won’t hold off long.” Her voice was cultured, with only a faint trace of Dorset burr.
Kincaid stuck his hands in his pockets and smiled his most charming smile. “Nice border.” On closer inspection she looked quite frail, in her eighties, perhaps, and wore a tweed skirt and twin-set under an old, oiled jacket. Her thin gray hair was twisted into a neat knot on top of her head, and on her feet she sported, not the expected heavy leather brogues, but a pair of neon nylon trainers.
Frowning at him, she gave the comment serious consideration, and finally shook her head. “You’ve missed the rhododendrons, you see. Another month, that’s when it’s glorious. These,” she gestured with her trowel toward the pansies and daffodils in the bed, “are just the opening act.”
This time Kincaid grinned from pleasure, liking her grave humor. “A little soft shoe?”
“Exactly.” She smiled back at him, resting her gloved hands on her knees, and Kincaid decided she had once been very beautiful. Her glance held curiosity now as she searched his face. “Are you passing through?” she asked, then added, “What a silly question. Briantspuddle isn’t on the way to anywhere.”
“No, not exactly. Have you lived here long?”
“Depends on what you call long. Since before the War. That was Briantspuddle’s heyday, you know. Ernest Debenham, the department store magnate, decided to make it a model farming village. These cottages he either built or restored.” She raised a coquettish eyebrow. “You do know which war I mean, young man?”
“You wouldn’t have been around for the first one, much less remember it.”
“Now you’re flattering me.” She brushed her gloved hands together and pushed herself up with a grimace. Kincaid stretched out a hand to her and she nodded her thanks.
“Would you remember a woman called May Dent, by any chance?”
Her face went blank with surprise. “May? Of course. We were neighbors for years. She lived just across the road, there.” Kincaid turned and looked where she pointed. The cottage sat back from the road at the end of a shrub-bordered walk. No flowers brightened its black and white severity, and high windows peeking from beneath the thatched eaves gave it a secretive air.
Extracting his warrant card from his jacket pocket, he opened it to the woman’s puzzled glance. “My name’s Duncan Kincaid.”
She looked from the card to his face, her brow furrowing. “You don’t look like such a big cheese.”
Kincaid laughed. “Thank you. I think.”
Coloring, she said, “I’m making an idiot of myself. I never meant to be one of these tiresome old women who thinks anyone younger than sixty ought to be in nappies. I’m Alice Finney, by the way.” She held out her hand to Kincaid and he took it, feeling the lightness of her bones between his fingers.
“Mrs. Finney, do you remember May Dent’s niece and nephew, who came from India to live with her?”
She stared at him in consternation. “Of course I remember Jasmine and Theo, as well as I do my own name. But that’s been thirty years if it’s been a day. Why on earth would you want to know about them?”
Taking a breath, he tried to organize his approach. “It’s about—”
Alice Finney shook her head. “No, no.” She nodded toward the blank faces of the cottages. “I can tell this isn’t going to be a ‘middle-of-the-village’ matter. You’d better come in. I’ll make us some tea, and you can tell me properly, from the beginning.”
“Yes, Mrs. Finney,” Kincaid answered, meek as a schoolboy, and followed her up the walk.
* * *
Saucer balanced on his knee, Kincaid lifted a china cup so delicate he was afraid his breath might crack it. Outside the sitting room windows, mist had settled in again, fading the plum blossom to a pale wash of color. Alice Finney knelt at her grate, lighting a small, coal fire. When Kincaid moved to help her, she waved him back. “I’ve done it myself for nearly fifty years. No use being coddled now.”
She sat down opposite him in a brocade armchair, its seat-cover a bit shiny with wear. At Kincaid’s inquisitive glance, she picked up her cup and continued. “My Jack and I would have been married fifty-five years this spring. He was a pilot, so he died a little more gloriously than some—in the air rather than the trenches. Not that it was much comfort to him, I imagine.” She smiled at him, suddenly, impishly. “Don’t look so properly funereal, Mr. Kincaid. To tell you the truth there are days I can’t remember what he looked like, it’s been so long ago. And at my age remembering is just a sentimental indulgence. Tell me about Jasmine and Theo Dent.”
In the warmth and comfort of Alice Finney’s faded sitting room, all of Kincaid’s rehearsed introduction dissolved. “Jasmine Dent was my neighbor. And my friend. She was terminally ill with lung cancer, so when she died at first we assumed that the disease had progressed faster than expected.”
Alice Finney listened intently, not taking her eyes from Kincaid’s face even to sip her tea. At the mention of Jasmine’s death she pinched her lips together in a small grimace.
“Then we discovered that Jasmine had asked a young friend to help her commit suicide, but had backed out at the last minute. I ordered an autopsy.” Kincaid paused, but Alice didn’t interrupt. “She died from a morphine overdose, and I don’t believe it was self-administered.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I could give you lots of logical reasons, but it’s more gut-reaction than anything else, to tell you the truth. I just don’t believe it.”
“And it’s brought you here.” Alice leaned forward and lifted the teapot from the small, oval table, then refilled both their cups. “I’ll tell you what I can.” She sat quietly for a moment, her eyes unfocused as she gathered her thoughts, then she sighed. “It was a bad business from the very beginning. May Dent was never meant to have children. She hadn’t the capacity to love them, thought to give her credit, perhaps she tried with Theo. She was a bitter woman, one of those people who always feel life has short-changed them. Perhaps she loved her brother more than she should, though in those days,” the corners of Alice’s mouth turned up in amusement, “one didn’t speculate about such things. Whatever the cause, she despised her sister-in-law, never had a good word to say about her.”
“And Jasmine?” Kincaid got up, went to the grate and banked the settling fire.
“Jasmine must have reminded May of her mother. Whatever the cause, those two rubbed each other the wrong way from the moment they set eyes on one another. And Jasmine … Jasmine was difficult. I’d retired from teaching when they closed the village school—the children went to the nearest comprehensive—but I still had connections, privy to gossip, you might say.”
“You were the village schoolmistress?” Kincaid was enchanted with a vision of a younger Alice, guiding her charges with the same gentle humor.
“I had two young children to raise by myself, and neither the luxury nor the inclination to be idle,” she answered crisply. “Jasmine,” she continued as if he hadn’t interrupted, “was not liked. Not actively disliked, perhaps, but she didn’t fit in, she made the other children uncomfortable.” Alice paused, frowning. “Jasmine was a beautiful girl, but in a haunting sort of way. Different. They didn’t know what to make of her. I tried to befriend her myself—I thought she might need someone to confide in, and it certainl
y wouldn’t have been May—but she wasn’t having any. There was a reserve about her, a secretiveness, that one couldn’t penetrate.”
Kincaid nodded. “What about Theo? Did he fit in any better?”
Alice leaned back in her chair and stretched her legs toward the fire. Kincaid noted that her ankles, above the padded tongues of the trainers, were still trim.
“I suppose you could say Theo adjusted more easily. He looked more English, for a start. He lost his colonial accent as quickly as he could. I don’t imagine Jasmine ever did, completely?” Alice inquired of Kincaid. “She had that very precise enunciation, and a trace of the sing-song that comes from speaking the Hindustani dialects.”
“No, she never lost it. And it grew more pronounced with her illness.” Kincaid realized that Jasmine’s voice had been one of the things that had attracted him to her—that, and her intelligence, and her sharp, dry humor.
“Theo did make friends with the local children, or was at least allowed to tag along. And May coddled him a bit in the beginning. He was only ten when they came, after all. Still practically an infant. But he always had this lost-puppy air about him, as if he might be kicked any minute.”
“And as they got older?”
“What always surprised me,” said Alice, “was that Jasmine stayed as long as she did. I imagine it was her sense of duty to Theo that kept her here. She was very protective of him, and very jealous of May. Especially when Theo began to get into trouble.”
“Trouble? Theo?” Kincaid straightened up, his interest quickening.
Alice moderated her comment. “Well, I don’t think Theo ever did anything wrong in a malicious sense. He was just one of those boys that attract bad luck, and unsavory friends, and it began to tell. Always in the wrong place at the wrong time, if you know what I mean.”
Kincaid smiled. “I’ve heard that once or twice before. And how did May react to Theo’s little escapades?”
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