Gemma James 02 - All Shall Be Well by Crombie Deborah

Author:Crombie, Deborah
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter Twelve

The previous evening's promise of rain fulfilled itself. Kincaid peered through the Midget's windscreen in the gray light, straining to see the road, while the wipers clicked monotonously back and forth, scrubbing at the drizzle. He'd left the M3 at Basingstoke, heading west on the two-lane A roads, toward Dorset.

The decision, made somewhere between finishing his coffee and leaving his flat for the Yard, had taken him by surprise. He'd dreamed of Jasmine—the fierce girl of the journals, not the Jasmine of unbreachable reserve, fragile from her illness—and awakened with an imprinted image of her scribbling in her tiny attic room.

There'd been a gap after the entry about the boy, and when she wrote again it was of living in London, finding a flat, adjusting to a new job. Compared to the earlier entries these were strangely emotionless, as if the journals had been relegated to trivial record keeping.

Kincaid had given up, exhausted, but found himself worrying at it again this morning. He'd done some quick arithmetic—Jasmine had been twenty-one at the time of that last entry, and to him she seemed oddly immature. If he hadn't grown accustomed to her taking charge of Theo and coping with whatever life threw her way, perhaps the fact that she'd survived her teens still sexually inexperienced wouldn't have struck him so forcibly. But the more he thought about it, the less surprising it seemed. Mature beyond her years in some ways, Jasmine had still been very much the outcast. She wouldn't have fit in comfortably with teenage flirtations and rough camaraderie, and life in a small English village didn't leave much room for exploration.

Behind his unexpected pilgrimage lay the hope that he might find some answers in the hamlet of Briantspuddle— that some trace of Jasmine Dent's passage from childhood to adulthood remained.

The lane ran tunnel-like between the high hedges, dipping and twisting like a rabbit's burrow. Occasional gaps in the green walls revealed only muddy farmyards. Kincaid had rechecked his map when he'd stopped for a quick lunch in Blandford Forum, but he'd begun to wonder if he'd read the last signpost right when the lane crossed a stream, took a sudden right-angle turn and ejected him into a clearing. A string of white-washed cottages straddled the road and a signpost at the central fork proclaimed “Briantspuddle.”

Kincaid stopped at the intersection. No church… no pub—not having either repository of village information would make his task more difficult. He took the west fork of the lane, hoping to find a likely source of gossip.

A few hundred yards farther on he came upon another smattering of cottages, even smaller than Briantspuddle. These cottages were washed in pale colors, rather than white, but except for wisps of smoke escaping from a few of the chimneys, the smaller hamlet appeared just as deserted. A stone cross, a carved madonna-like figure imprisoned within its stem, seemed to draw the surrounding cottages to it like congregants facing a preacher.

Kincaid stopped the car and got out. The

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