A Finer End

CHAPTER ONE

Imagination is a great gift, a Divine power of the mind, and may be trained and educated to create and to receive only that which is true.
-Frederick Bligh Bond, from The Gate of Remembrance

The shadows crept into Jack Montfort s small office, filling the corners with a comfortable dimness. He d come to look forward to his time alone at the day s end, he told himself he got more done without phones ringing and the occasional client calling in, but perhaps, he thought wryly, it was merely that he had little enough reason to go home.

Standing at his window, he gazed down at the pedestrians hurrying along either side of Magdalene Street, and wondered idly where they were all scurrying off to so urgently on a Wednesday evening. Across the street the Abbey gates had shut at five, and as he watched, the guard let the last few stragglers out from the grounds. The March day had been bright with a biting wind, and Jack imagined that anyone who d been enticed by the sun into wandering around the Abbey s fishpond would be chilled to the bone. Now the remaining buttresses of the great church would be silhouetted against the clear rose of the eastern sky, a fitting reward for those who had braved the cold.

He d counted himself lucky to get the two-room office suite with its first-floor view over the Market Square and the Abbey gate. It was a prime spot, and the restrictions involved in renovating a listed building hadn t daunted him. His years in London had given him experience enough in working round constraints, and he d managed to up- date the rooms to his satisfaction without going over his budget. He d hired a secretary to preside over his new reception area, and begun the slow task of building an architectural practice.

And if a small voice still occasionally whispered, Why bother? he did his best to ignore it and get on with things the best way he knew how, although he d learned in the last few years that plans were ephemeral

Deborah Crombie's Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James novels have been nominated for the Agatha, Macavity, and Edgar Awards. She lives with her family in a small North Texas town, where she is at work on the next book of the series, And Justice There Is None.

CROMBIE has laid claim to the literary territory of moody psychological suspense owned by P. D. James and Barbara Vine.
-The Washington Post

Intricately layered.
-The New York Times

A finely nuanced novel complete with multilayered characters...CROMBIE at the top of her form.
-Publishers Weekly

Splendid entertainment.
-Chicago Tribune