All Shall Be Well (24 page)

Kincaid decided this man wouldn’t appreciate wasted words. “One of your former students, Roger Leveson-Gower—do you remember him? I’m afraid it’s been a good ten years.”

Martin Farrow didn’t ask them to sit. Kincaid thought the omission was probably not due to a lack of courtesy, but that it simply didn’t occur to Farrow that anyone would not prefer to stand.

Farrow limited himself to rocking on the balls of his feet while he thought about the question. “Oh, I remember him, all right. I was assistant head then, so most of the discipline problems came to me. What’s Roger gone in for? A career in forgery? Insurance fraud? Conning little old ladies out of their life savings?”

“Nothing so glamorous. I take it Roger showed criminal promise early. Why didn’t you chuck him?”

“Would have if it’d been up to me.” Farrow began to move around the room as he talked, straightening sofa cushions,
adjusting chairs by a millimeter, so that Kincaid and Gemma had to turn like tops to follow him. “We run a good school here, progressive, none of that medieval boy-bashing and gruel for supper nonsense, and turning out students like Roger Leveson-Gower does nothing for one’s reputation.”

Kincaid, accustomed to their usual give-and-take in an interview, looked expectantly at Gemma. Her face was expressionless, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the back of Martin Farrow’s head. “Uh,” he said, before the gap in the conversation lengthened, “so what was his ace in the hole?”

Farrow came to rest with his hands on the back of a wing-back chair, and Kincaid suddenly saw him behind a lectern, his perpetual motion stilled by a physical anchor. “His father contributed generously to our building fund.” He shrugged. “The usual thing. And as thorough a rotter as Leveson-Gower was, he was too sly to get caught at anything really serious. But I was certainly glad to see the back of him.”

“Either his father’s funds or his generosity have dried up, because these days Roger seems to be scrounging a living off a woman who probably doesn’t make much more than minimum wage.”

Farrow smiled. “Sounds right up his alley. He bullied the junior boys—they were terrified of him, and he always managed things so that they took the fall for his schemes.”

“Did you ever see any indication that he might be violent?”

“No.” Farrow shook his head. “Too bloody calculating by half, too concerned with his own skin.” He thought for a moment. “If Roger Leveson-Gower ever took to violence, I’d say he’d make very sure he couldn’t be found out.”

“Satisfied?” Kincaid asked, when Farrow had swept them out the door and seen them into their car with a cheerful wave.

“He was a bright boy,” had been Farrow’s last comment. “Always hate to see a good mind go to waste.”

“You were expecting him to have been Best Boy?” Gemma said as she put the Rover in gear and pulled out into the road.

“Would Jasmine’s death have been foolproof enough to tempt him, do you suppose? Would he have felt safe?”

Gemma shrugged, her eyes on the road. “He wouldn’t have counted on you. You were the unforeseen ingredient, the spanner in the works. Without you Jasmine’s death would have gone unremarked.”

He waited for her to push home her point, take advantage of every tempting possibility to make her case against Roger, but she remained silent. As they entered Richmond again, he spoke. “Gemma, what’s wrong? I thought you’d got lockjaw during that interview, and now you’re shutting me out. Come to think of it, you haven’t been quite right all day.”

She glanced at him, then back at the traffic. “Bloody hell.” The second’s distraction had left her no room to maneuver into the right-hand lane, and the left shunted them off the main road and into a narrow one-way side street. “Now what?”

Kincaid smiled. “Not much choice is there? Follow it and see where it goes.”

The street twisted and turned, narrowing into a cobbled alleyway that snaked between rows of warehouses. Suddenly, they shot out into the sun. The Thames lay before them, beyond a wide expanse of brick paving and a post-and-chain railing. “Pull up there.” Kincaid pointed to a spot near the railing. “Let’s get out for a bit.” Up to their right traffic sped busily across the hump-backed bridge they had crossed just before they’d derailed.

The sun felt warm on their faces, and the air moved just enough to ruffle their hair. Across the water, budding willows
trailed lazy fronds in the water. A moored houseboat bobbed against its gaudy reflection in the current, and a pelican stood dreaming one-legged on a post. Even the sound of the traffic seemed muted by the river’s peaceful sway.

“That was a fortuitous wrong-turning. Come on.” Kincaid turned and began walking along the railing. “Too bad fate doesn’t prepare you for these little gifts. We should have brought a picnic.” He paused as Gemma stopped and turned her face up to the sun, her eyes half closed. “So what’s up?”

Sighing, she answered without looking at him. “Privilege. The place reeked of privilege. Generations of it, progressive or not. I don’t expect you to understand.” She faced him, arms folded across her chest, and in the light he could see gold flecks in the hazel irises of her eyes. “Money by itself doesn’t faze me. The Leveson-Gowers, for instance—they may be rolling in the stuff but they’re trash. They’ve no taste, and I can beat them at their own game. It’s the in-bred assurance that makes my skin crawl—that instinctive knowledge of the right thing to say, the right thing to do. And it’s as natural to you as breathing.”

“I’m no public school product. You know that, Gemma. My parents considered themselves much too liberal to send their children to such a bastion of conservatism, even if they could have afforded it. They thought the local comprehensive was good enough for us, and I dare say it was.” He put his hands in his pockets and moved on. Gemma fell in step with him again, and when she didn’t respond he continued. “There’s something else, isn’t there? You usually take on the ranks of male privilege without turning a hair. I’ve seen you hold your own at the Yard, and stomp on a few toes while you’re at it.”

“That’s different,” she shot back at him. “I know the rules.” Then she smiled a little sheepishly. “I suppose I am a bit on the defensive today. Sorry. Shouldn’t take it out on you just because you fit the general description.”

“Is it Rob?” Kincaid asked noncommittally. He had gathered from her occasional dropped comments that her ex-husband showed little interest in Toby or in maintaining a cordial relationship, and he hadn’t liked to pry further.

The pavement narrowed to a single-file width on the bank’s edge. Gemma stopped and looked out across the river, resting her hands on the railing’s last iron post. “I think he’s skipped out on me. No checks, no phone, no forwarding address. Brilliant deduction.”

“Have you tried to trace him?”

“As much as I could without raising eyebrows in the department. I’ve called in some favors.” She paused, her knuckles white where she gripped the post. “The bastard! I try not to feel angry but sometimes it seeps through the cracks. How could he do this to us?”

Kincaid waited until she blew out her breath in a gusty sigh and her hands relaxed their stranglehold on the post. “Except he didn’t,” she said. “I did. I chose to marry Rob James against my better judgement and now I’m reaping the consequences. Complaining about it doesn’t do a bloody bit of good, and besides, we can’t spend our lives second-guessing every decision. We just do the best we can at the time.”

“And there’s Toby,” Kincaid said gently.

“Yes. I can’t imagine my life without Toby. But that brings me right back to the starting point—how am I going to manage?”

“Surely—”

“Toby’s care is eating me up. It’s bad enough even under ordinary circumstances, but when I work long hours on a case … I just barely made ends meet as it was.”

“Can you cut corners anywhere else?” He kept his tone as casual as he could, sensing that if he displayed the sympathy he felt, Gemma wouldn’t feel comfortable later with having confided in him.

“Rob insisted on buying the house when interest was high, an investment for our future.” Her smile was bitter. “A bloody great millstone around my neck is more like it, and a tatty one at that. Rob was full of ideas for all these do-it-yourself projects—of course they never got—” Stopping, she rubbed her face with both hands. “Oh god, just listen to me. And I said I wouldn’t take it out on you. I’m sorry.” She smiled, this time ruefully. “I’ve seen enough people pour out their life stories to you without any encouragement. I should be more wary.”

“What are you going to do, Gemma?”

“I don’t know. My mum’s offered to help out with Toby—”

“That’s great. That would—”

She was already shaking her head. “I don’t want to be obligated to them. I’ve managed on my own since I left school and I don’t intend—”

“So who suffers for your stubbornness? Toby? Don’t you think refusing help in a really rough spot is a kind of false pride?”

“It’s not just that. It’s … They don’t really approve of what I do.” A cloud covered the sun and Gemma hugged her arms against her chest. The wind had risen, driving tiny ripples along the surface of the water. “I’m afraid they’ll pass that along to Toby, not deliberately, but that he’ll pick it up in insidious little ways.
Good mums don’t work nights and weekends. Good mums stay married. Good mums don’t do men’s jobs.”

Kincaid put his hand on her elbow and turned her toward the car. “Let’s go back.” Through the soft flesh of her arm he felt firm, delicate bone, and a faint shiver as the wind whipped into their faces. He dropped his hand. “Give yourself credit, Gemma. He’s your son, and your influence is stronger than that.” He smiled a little wickedly at her doubtful expression. “And you might give them a little credit as well—after all, they raised you and you didn’t turn out too badly.”

CHAPTER
17

Kincaid woke before dawn on Friday morning. He’d not drawn his curtains the night before, and he lay in bed watching the faint gray light steal into the eastern sky. The days of the past week ran through his mind, each one toppling the next like falling dominoes, and he felt no nearer to solving the riddle of Jasmine’s death than he’d been a week ago. Frustration finally drove him to throw off the covers, but shower, toast and coffee didn’t take the edge off his nagging sense of failure.

It would be easy enough to nominate Roger Leveson-Gower as the most likely candidate, but he had not one smidgen of hard evidence. And no matter how well Roger might fit the emotional profile of a murderer, it didn’t feel right. The idea of Jasmine complacently letting someone she didn’t know and wouldn’t have been at all likely to trust give her a fatal dose of morphine was a logical stumbling block Kincaid couldn’t get over.

He dawdled over shaving and dressing, but when he reached the street the milk float was just making its silent rounds and no sounds of slamming doors and starting cars marred Carlingford Road’s early morning repose. The sky was clear, the air still, and on impulse he pulled the tarp from the Midget. He loved driving through London late at night or early in the morning, when the traffic was at its ebb. It gave him a
sense of being at peace with the city, of being a part of it rather than at war with it.

A stack of slick, flimsy fax paper filled his in-tray. Kincaid took possession of his own chair, having arrived well before Gemma, and began to read.

Major Harley Keith had indeed been posted to India just after the War, in 1945, sporting a new commission and a new bride. He’d been stationed in Calcutta during the outbreak of 1946, and had lost both wife and baby daughter in the rioting. From what Kincaid could deduce from the unfamiliar military jargon, Keith’s promotion had been minimal after that time, a once promising career stalled in mediocrity. Posted back to Britain in 1948, the Major seemed to have spent the remainder of his career pushing paper for senior officers.

Kincaid sighed and reached for the next sheet in the pile. A brief report from Dorset Constabulary informed him that one Timothy Franklin had been institutionalized twenty-five years previously in the Farrington Center for Mental Health, or as it had previously been known, the Farrington Asylum. Committal papers had been signed by Althea Franklin, the patient’s mother. Franklin’s condition had been listed upon admittance as schizophrenic, and he had never been released. Althea Franklin had died in Bladen Valley in 1977.

A handwritten note added by the officer compiling the report informed Kincaid that the Farrington Center was two miles north of Dorchester and a bit hard to find.

Gemma came in as he was finishing the report and his second cup of coffee. Disappointment flashed across her face before she smiled and said, “You’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning, Sir.”

“Beat you to it, didn’t I?” A silly game of one-upmanship, but he enjoyed it, and he contrived to lose more often than he
won because he knew Gemma liked the sense of power conferred by a few minutes alone in his office.

“Anything interesting?” she asked as she sat down across from him.

He handed her the reports and waited silently while she read. Her brow creased as she read Major Keith’s, and when she finished she looked up, shaking her head. “It looks as though he never recovered from the deaths of his wife and daughter. It’s frightening, isn’t it, that someone who seems as ordinary and commonplace as the Major could have suffered such a tragedy?”

Kincaid understood what she meant—in some way it made one’s own life seem less immune.
If it could happen to someone as unremarkable as the Major it could happen to me
. “I’ll have to ask him about it.” Without quite intending it, he found himself confiding his discomfort to Gemma. “It’s awkward—I can’t leave it alone, yet I have to go on being neighbors with him after I’ve pried into the most painful part of his life. And it’s more difficult because he seems such an intensely private person.” He thought for a moment. “Jasmine gave the same impression. You wouldn’t have dreamed of asking her anything about her life she hadn’t volunteered. She and the Major must have formed an odd sort of bond.”