"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 Jennifer spoke. "Out with her boyfriend, maybe." Her soft voice held a trace of an accent Gemma thought might be West Country, and her blue eyes showed surprising intelligence. "She was awfully upset this morning. About Miss Dent. You're here about Miss Dent, aren't you?"

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 Jennifer. "We should be so lucky." She glanced at Carla, who pulled a face. "No, really," she continued, "I was with her when she met him."

Gemma folded her arms and tilted her head, looking as if she had all day. "Really? When was that?"

Jennifer thought about it, creasing her smooth brow and pulling her Cupid's-bow lips into a little moue. "About October, I think. I took her round the clubs with me one night. I felt a bit sorry for her, see." She flicked another look at Carla from under her lashes and Carla nodded agreement. "She never did anything but go home by herself to that dreadful bedsit. So I thought… well, you know."

"That was very kind of you, I'm sure." Gemma's voice was warm with approval. "So then what happened?"

Jennifer smiled at her, showing teeth as small and even as a child's. "Nothing. We sat at the bar in this place and nobody even talked to us. You'd have thought we had the plague or something. And then this gorgeous guy comes up. I mean really gorgeous, like a…" Jennifer ran her tongue around her lips while she struggled for a descriptive phrase. "Like an American telly star or something. I thought wow, get ready for this one," her shoulders gave a little wiggle, "and then he chats up Margaret." Remembered consternation puckered her face and she shook her head in disbelief.

Jennifer's remarks seemed bare of conceit in the usual sense; it was more as if her universe had simply stopped behaving in its expected way. Men looked at Jennifer- men did not look at Margaret, and you didn't mess about with the laws of physics.

"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 Jennifer gave a tiny nod. Carla looked down at her lap, still hesitant, and stretched her skirt down a bit over her thighs. "Oh… he never takes her anywhere, never spends any money on her. He just goes to her bedsitter and… you know." Color flooded up to the roots of Carla's frizzy hair and she didn't meet Gemma's eyes.

"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 Jennifer didn't speak. "Not really. Miss Dent was always fair-not like some I could name," she shot a black look in the direction of Mrs. Washburn's office, "and friendly in a distant sort of way, but she didn't take her tea breaks with us or anything like that. It was only after she left," Carla said slowly, thinking about it, "that Margaret started to visit her. "I saw Jasmine yesterday," she'd say, all puffed up about it, like calling Miss Dent 'Jasmine' made her better than us."

"Was this before she met Roger, or after?"

The girls looked at each other, concentrating. "Before," said Jennifer, and Carla nodded.

"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. Jennifer merely assumed a blank expression and went back to her typing.

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 planning office. The atmosphere was not exactly soothing, but Margaret seemed unaware of the noise and the sharp smell of hot grease drifting from the kitchen.

"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. Planning, organizing. Having a secret that nobody knew. Life and death." Margaret smiled again, remembering. "Sometimes I imagined telling everyone at work, but I knew I couldn't. It was too personal, just between Jasmine and me." She took a sip of the tea, then made a face as the tannic acid bit into her tongue and she looked into the cup for the first time.

"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."