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.
