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"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 Je
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 Je
Gemma folded her arms and tilted her head, looking as if she had all day. "Really? When was that?"
Je
"That was very kind of you, I'm sure." Gemma's voice was warm with approval. "So then what happened?"
Je
Je
"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 Je
"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 Je
"Was this before she met Roger, or after?"
The girls looked at each other, concentrating. "Before," said Je
"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. Je
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 pla
"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. Pla
"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."