Deborah Crombie - All Shall Be Well

Felicity studied the fold of dressing gown now scrunched in both hands. After a moment she looked up and met Kincaid's eyes. "He's almost completely blind and deaf. He responds to very little stimulus, but he does know me."

"Martha Trevellyan said something about a childhood injury. What happened to Barry, Felicity?"

Her hands became still in her lap. "Now they call it DAI, diffuse axonal injury, but when Barry was a baby so little was known about profound head injuries that they were often misdiagnosed."

Kincaid sighed and sat back. "I think," he said slowly, "that you didn't need to be told that Jasmine came from Dorset because you remembered her very well. What I don't understand is Jasmine not mentioning in her journals that she knew you."

Felicity stood up and went to the window. Since Kincaid's last visit, clusters of pale green leaves had burst out along the bramble shoots and a few late daffodils had pushed their heads through the grass. "I always mean to do something with the garden," she said, her back to him. "Then I work extra shifts and visit Barry on my days off, and somehow I never get around to it."

Kincaid waited. After a moment he saw her shoulders relax, and he knew she had made up her mind. She continued as if she hadn't interrupted the thread of the conversation. "Perhaps she saw it as a judgement. Retribution. And at first I think she wasn't sure, didn't trust her own memory. My name was different." She turned to face him, but with the light behind her he couldn't read her eyes. "I went by Janey in those days-my first husband thought Felicity too Victorian, and I humored him-and I later remarried, so my last name changed as well. It was almost thirty years ago, after all, and people do change physically, as hard as we try to prevent it." The corners of her mouth turned up.

"How did you come to know Jasmine then?"

Felicity smiled again. "I considered myself very lucky to have found her to look after Barry. She was only a couple of years younger than I, responsible, ambitious, wanted to get on in the world. Evenings and weekends when she wasn't working in old Mr. Rawlinson's office she liked to pick up a bit extra."

She moved back to the chair, her dressing gown falling open at the knees to reveal a sliver of nylon nightdress as she sat, carelessly now. "It was an ordinary Saturday. I'd gone shopping. Jasmine met me at the door, her face white and stiff with fright. She said she'd called for the doctor, she thought Barry was having some kind of seizure. I remember putting my parcels down carefully before I went to him. He lay rigid in his cot, his face contorted, making little circles around his head with his fists." She fell silent, her gaze fixed on her fingers intertwined in her lap.

"Felicity-"

"There was never any proof. Small town doctors… no one was sure what had happened to him. One doctor said he'd seen damage like that when a child had been shaken, but he wouldn't swear to it. But I played detective." She looked up and smiled at him. "You would have been proud of me. A neighbor said she'd seen Jasmine let a young man into the flat, and that Jasmine had later left for a few minutes. I checked round all the shops in the street. She'd bought something at the chemist to rub in the baby's gums-he was teething and had been horribly fussy."

"I rode the bus to Jasmine's village and made some excuse to gossip with the post mistress. There was talk of Jasmine going around with a boy who wasn't quite right in the head."

"Timmy Franklin?"

Felicity nodded. "I never believed Jasmine knew he would hurt Barry. But she was responsible for him, wasn't she?" For the first time Felicity seemed to lose confidence. "She should never have left him alone."

"What happened then?"

"Nothing." She lifted her hands in a gesture of defeat. "For a while we thought Barry might get better. When it became obvious that there would be no change my husband began to drift even further away-he'd never wanted a baby anyway and he couldn't cope. He stayed just long enough for me to finish my nurse's training. At first I managed to have Barry cared for at home, but it became more and more difficult, and when we moved to London I had to place him in a nursing home."

"And Jasmine?" Kincaid asked. "What happened to Jasmine?"

"She disappeared. Didn't even come back for her aunt's funeral. I never thought to see her again."

"You didn't look for her?"

Felicity shook her head. "I thought I'd stopped hating her, over the years. I didn't even mink of her often. I couldn't believe it when I saw her name in Martha's case files. And dying of cancer-how suitable. I had to see her, I couldn't rest until I did."

"She must have become certain who you were, after a time."

"But I didn't speak of it, so she didn't either. I thought it would torment her, make her doubt her sanity." Felicity shivered and rubbed her hands over her upper arms. "The absurd thing was that she seemed to trust me, to depend on me. My job is comforting and reassuring the dying, yet I told her how much she would hurt, how pitiful her existence would become. And she accepted it."

"When I saw the suicide literature I didn't discourage her. It seemed fitting that she should take her own life."

"But she didn't, did she? What happened the day Jasmine died?"

Closing her eyes, she spoke slowly, as if reliving events in her mind. "She'd been very quiet for a few days. I thought she was working herself up to suicide. But when I arrived that Thursday morning she seemed different. Calm, with a brightness about her. Sometimes the dying acquire a certain grace. You can't predict it, and it doesn't always happen, but it had happened for Jasmine. She told me she felt she could face anything." Felicity looked at Kincaid, imploring. "I couldn't bear it. Do you understand? I couldn't bear it."

"What did you do?" Kincaid asked gently.

"Oh, the ordinary things. Helped her with her bath, changed her bed. Made her comfortable." Felicity gave a ghost of a laugh at the irony of it. "The rest of the day was a nightmare. I must have seen my other patients, but I don't remember doing it."

"But you went back."

"Yes."

Kincaid heard a clock ticking somewhere in the house, and it seemed to counterpoint the rise and fall of his own breath.

"I didn't know until I walked in and she smiled at me from the bed what I intended to do. And then it seemed so right, so simple. It was time for her evening medication and I offered to fix it for her. I used her own supply and put the empty vials in my bag. I never thought anyone would question that she'd slipped away in her sleep." Looking out into the garden, she said after a moment, "After I'd given her the morphine she took my hand and thanked me for my kindness to her."

Felicity leaned forward, clasping her knees, and the top of her dressing gown gapped enough to reveal the pale swell of her breast. The exposure made her seem even more vulnerable, and pity warred with necessity in his heart. "You stayed, didn't you?"

"Until she lost consciousness. I found I couldn't leave her."

He watched her as she sat lost in her thoughts, and he knew he could not escape his obligation to his job, or to Jasmine. "Felicity, you know I'm going to have to ask you to come with me."

"Let me put on something a little more suitable."

Felicity returned from the bedroom wearing the navy suit in which he'd first seen her. In her hand she held a blue composition book. "Jasmine kept this under her pillow. I took it as an afterthought, only because I thought it might contain some reference to me." She collected her handbag and keys, then paused with her hand on the door. "And once I'd read it I knew I'd never be able to live with what I'd done."

Kincaid saw her as he turned the corner into Carlingford Road. She sat on his front step, elbows on knees, chin in hands. The street lay in shadow, and the air was fast losing the day's warmth. The process of charging Felicity Howarth with the murder of Jasmine Dent had taken most of the afternoon and what remained of his energy.