All Shall Be Well (14 page)

“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.

“Do you think she’ll be back soon? I’ll wait.”

The girls exchanged glances, then the first one spoke again. “She’d better be. The old ba—Mrs. Washburn’ll have her knickers as it is.”

“Late, is she?” Gemma crossed to the first girl and held out her hand. “I’m Gemma James.”

“I’m Carla. She’s Jennifer.” A nod toward the other girl, who had not yet spoken.

Carla had a mop of frizzed brown hair pulled up with a band, and a square-jawed, pleasant face. Her legs, very visible under a spandex mini-skirt, looked like tree trunks. The other girl, Jennifer, Gemma pegged as carrying what she called the perfection gene. Some women were born with it—if not, there was no point in trying to achieve it: Flawless skin, perfect features, fashion-model’s body, hair that always did just what it was supposed to, clothes the latest trend. It would be nice if she could talk as well, thought Gemma, then chided herself for being catty.

“Have any idea where she might be?” Gemma propped a hip on a low filing cabinet and looked at her watch—nearly half-past one.

The girls looked at each other again, and this time an unspoken signal must have passed between them because Jennifer spoke. “Out with her boyfriend, maybe.” Her soft voice held a trace of an accent Gemma thought might be West Country, and her blue eyes showed surprising intelligence. “She was awfully upset this morning. About Miss Dent. You’re here about Miss Dent, aren’t you?”

The grapevine not only worked, it worked wonders. “In a way,” Gemma answered noncommittally. “Do you know Margaret’s boyfriend?”

The girls smiled with shared amusement. “Roger?” said Jennifer. “We should be so lucky.” She glanced at Carla, who pulled a face. “No, really,” she continued, “I was with her when she met him.”

Gemma folded her arms and tilted her head, looking as if she had all day. “Really? When was that?”

Jennifer thought about it, creasing her smooth brow and pulling her Cupid’s-bow lips into a little moue. “About October, I think. I took her round the clubs with me one night. I felt a bit sorry for her, see,” she flicked another look at Carla from under her lashes and Carla nodded agreement. “She never did anything but go home by herself to that dreadful bedsit. So I thought … well, you know.”

“That was very kind of you, I’m sure.” Gemma’s voice was warm with approval. “So then what happened?”

Jennifer smiled at her, showing teeth as small and even as a child’s. “Nothing. We sat at the bar in this place and nobody even talked to us. You’d have thought we had the plague or something. And then this gorgeous guy comes up. I mean really gorgeous, like a …” Jennifer ran her tongue around her lips while she struggled for a descriptive phrase. “Like an American telly star or something. I thought wow, get ready for this one,” her shoulders gave a little wiggle, “and then he chats up
Margaret.” Remembered consternation puckered her face and she shook her head in disbelief.

Jennifer’s remarks seemed bare of conceit in the usual sense, it was more as if her universe had simply stopped behaving in its expected way. Men looked at Jennifer—men did not look at Margaret, and you didn’t mess about with the laws of physics.

“Just as well, as it turned out,” said Carla. “Our Roger didn’t turn out to be such a great prize.”

“Why ever not?” asked Gemma.

This time Carla looked at her friend for encouragement, and Jennifer gave a tiny nod. Carla looked down at her lap, still hesitant, and stretched her skirt down a bit over her thighs. “Oh … he never takes her anywhere, never spends any money on her. He just goes to her bedsitter and … you know.” Color flooded up to the roots of Carla’s frizzy hair and she didn’t meet Gemma’s eyes.

“How do you know?” Gemma asked softly. She shifted her behind a little where it had gone numb against the filing cabinet. “Does Margaret confide in you?”

“No,” Carla answered, the blush not receding. “Some days you can just … tell. Look, I shouldn’t have said—”

“Never mind.” Gemma cut her off, not wanting to let her dwell on what would feel to her like disloyalty. “About Miss Dent. Were she and Margaret special friends at work?”

Carla answered after a moment, when Jennifer didn’t speak. “Not really. Miss Dent was always fair—not like some I could name,” she shot a black look in the direction of Mrs. Washburn’s office, “and friendly in a distant sort of way, but she didn’t take her tea breaks with us or anything like that. It was only after she left,” Carla said slowly, thinking about it, “that Margaret started to visit her. ‘I saw Jasmine yesterday’ she’d say, all puffed up about it, like calling Miss Dent ‘Jasmine’ made her better than us.”

“Was this before she met Roger, or after?”

The girls looked at each other, concentrating. “Before,” said Jennifer, and Carla nodded.

“Yeah. That’s right, ’cause Miss Dent left just before August Bank Holiday, and it wasn’t long—”

The door opened and Carla stopped dead, flushing again. Jennifer merely assumed a blank expression and went back to her typing.

A woman stumbled breathlessly into the room, her fair skin pink with exertion, her fine, brown hair awry and the tail of her blouse slipping out of her skirt. “Sorry I’m late. I didn’t mean—” The sheaf of papers she clutched in her hand slipped to the floor as she became aware of Gemma. Squatting, she shuffled the papers awkwardly into a stack, and kept her eyes cast down.

“You’re Margaret,” Gemma said, making it a statement. A flash of pale blue eyes through pale lashes, then Margaret bent her head again to her papers. The skin on the back of Gemma’s neck tightened as she realized that Margaret Bellamy was very frightened indeed. “I’m a friend of Duncan Kincaid’s. Is there somewhere we could go and have a cup of tea?”

“Mrs. Washburn’ll kill me. I’ll lose my job.” Margaret twisted nervously in the red plastic booth.

“It’ll be all right. I’ll square it with her, I promise.” Gemma leaned across the table and touched Margaret’s hand. A sturdy hand, Gemma saw, with short fingers, and nails bitten to the quick. It was also ice-cold and damp, and Gemma felt a faint trembling under her fingers.

A harried waitress slammed cups of industrial-strength tea on the Formica table, sloshing it into the saucers. Gemma had remembered passing the busy cafe around the corner from the planning office. The atmosphere was not exactly soothing, but
Margaret seemed unaware of the noise and the sharp smell of hot grease drifting from the kitchen.

“Margaret—”

“I’m really in trouble, aren’t I?” Margaret said, the words so near a whisper that Gemma had to lean forward again to catch them. “Roger says I could go to prison. And it’s all my fault. I should never have said anything to your friend …”

“I think,” Gemma paused, stirring generous helpings of milk and sugar into her tea in an effort to make it taste less like cleaning fluid, “that if you told the truth, you did exactly the right thing. Duncan just wants to be sure that it really was Jasmine’s choice.”

Margaret shook her head slowly from side to side, tracing her finger through the puddle of tea on the table. “I still can’t believe she lied to me. I thought I’d accepted it, but I hadn’t. That day … I was so relieved when she said she’d changed her mind—” she looked up at Gemma, “do you think I fooled myself into thinking she really meant it, just because that’s what I wanted to hear?”

Out of the corner of her eye Gemma saw the waitress approaching with a couple of tattered plastic menus. Gemma raised her hand and waved the woman away without ever taking her eyes from Margaret’s face. “If you were so frightened, why did you ever agree to help her?”

“Oh, it was different at first. I felt so special.” Margaret sat up a bit straighter in the booth and smiled for the first time. “For someone to want to spend their last minutes on this earth with you, to trust you that much—especially Jasmine. She didn’t get close to people very easily. Nobody had ever felt that way about me, you know?”

Gemma nodded but didn’t speak.

“And it was exciting. Planning, organizing. Having a secret that nobody knew. Life and death.” Margaret smiled again,
remembering. “Sometimes I imagined telling everyone at work, but I knew I couldn’t. It was too personal, just between Jasmine and me.” She took a sip of the tea, then made a face as the tannic acid bit into her tongue and she looked into the cup for the first time.

“Then what happened?”

Margaret shrugged. “It got closer. And I got scared.” She gave Gemma a look of entreaty. “She looked so good at first. Her hair had grown again from the treatments. I knew she tired easily, but she didn’t really seem ill. Then her flesh just started to melt away from her bones. And every day she grew a little weaker, every day she’d ask me to do some little thing she’d been able to do for herself the day before. The chest catheter went in. She started liquid morphine, even though she never talked about the pain.”

This time Gemma caught the waitress’s eye and mouthed ‘hot water’. The cafe was beginning to empty and the noise level had dropped enough that she could hear Margaret’s soft voice without straining. When the steaming, tin pot arrived, Gemma poured hot water into Margaret’s half-empty cup without asking, then settled back to wait.

“She never set a time,” Margaret continued as if there’d been no interruption, eyes focused on the circle her hands made around the hot cup. “I started to dread it—every day when I’d visit her I’d think ‘Is this the day’? Is she going to say ‘I’m ready, Meg, let’s do it now’? My stomach knotted up. I felt sick all the time. I started to think about having to put the plastic bag over her head if the morphine didn’t work.

“One day she seemed very calm, less restless than usual. I wondered if she’d increased the morphine. Then ‘I’ll not see fifty, Meg,’ she says. ‘There’s no point.’ And I knew she’d made up her mind.”

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.”