Dreaming of the Bones (44 page)

Shivering a little, Gemma imagined them running through the woods in the darkness, laughing at their own daring like children playing hide-and-seek. Wood nymphs, possessed by Pan … Had their calling on pagan gods unleashed more than they’d bargained for?

She focused her mind on the practical. “If it wasn’t Lydia who killed Verity, it must have been one of the boys,” she said, knowing she couldn’t refute it. She thought of the sweetness of Adam’s smile, of his competent concern for Nathan—and she thought of Nathan’s ravaging grief over Vic’s death. Surely that was no act. “But could it be
grief and
guilt?” she wondered aloud.

“What?” Kincaid glanced at her, then focused again on the road.

“Nathan. What if he killed Vic, and it’s guilt he’s feeling now?”

Kincaid thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t believe it. I don’t think that someone who’d committed two murders as calculated and cold-blooded as these would suddenly be overcome with remorse. It’s not emotionally consistent. And why would Nathan have shown us the poems?”

“Adam, then?” she suggested reluctantly. “Vic was killed after she saw Adam. She might have told him what she’d discovered—”

“Vic told us herself that she only found the poems in the book later that night,” argued Kincaid. “So he couldn’t have known about them.”

“But what if Lydia rejected Adam all those years because she knew he’d murdered Verity? He’d have built up a lot of anger and resentment towards her, and when he saw the poems she’d written, it all boiled over.”

“And what about Vic?” asked Kincaid, sounding skeptical. “Why would he kill her?”

“We can’t know what Vic said to him that day. Something might have triggered memories or made him feel threatened.”

Kincaid shrugged. “I suppose that’s possible. But let’s go back to the poems. If we assume that the murderer was frightened by what Lydia revealed in them, we have to assume that the murderer had read them. Right?” He glanced at her. “Then why wait until Lydia had turned in the manuscript to kill her?”

“Unless … they only had access to the poems
after
Lydia gave them to Ralph Peregrine to publish,” Gemma said slowly. “That would rule out Daphne on another count, wouldn’t it? She must have read the poems as Lydia was writing them.”

He thought for a moment, then asked, “So who would have seen the poems after Lydia delivered them to the publisher?”

Gemma chewed on her fingertip. “Ralph, of course. Probably Margery Lester.”

The light blinked amber, then green. “Margery Lester gallivanting naked in the woods with her son, Darcy, and his friends? And Ralph was still at school then. There’s no evidence that he even knew the others at this point.” Kincaid shook his head as he shifted into first gear. After a moment, he said, “It’s too complicated. Let’s try another tack. If Lydia was killed with her own heart medication—an opportunity taken—then when the murderer began to feel nervous about Vic, he went back to the tested method. But where did he get the digoxin this time?”

Gemma gazed out at the North London suburbs passing by. The halogen street lamps glowed yellow, haloed by the moisture in the air.
Margery and Ralph
… What did that make her think of? The scene in Ralph’s office came back to her again. Margery, breathless from her climb up the stairs, her skin and lips faintly tinged with blue. “I’ll bet Margery Lester has a heart condition,” she said, suddenly breathless herself. “Probably congestive heart failure, from her color. I’m sure of it. And isn’t digoxin the usual—”

“Quinine!” Kincaid thumped his hand on the steering wheel. “Remember the list of potentiators Winnie gave us? Quinidine was one of them, and tonic contains quinine. Margery refused the gin and tonic Ralph offered her—something about it being against doctor’s orders—so she knew that certain substances strengthened the effect of the digoxin. She could easily have known about Vic’s teas, and next to Ralph, she’s the most likely person to have seen the manuscript.” Frowning, he shook his head. “But we’ve said it’s not likely Margery killed Verity—and it doesn’t fit the poem.”

“What if…” Gemma tried to collect the feather wisps of ideas floating in her mind into something cohesive. She thought of Margery, elegant, gracious, successful—what could possibly drive a woman like that to commit murder? Slowly, she said, “What if Margery killed Lydia and Vic to protect Verity’s killer?”
And who would Margery protect but her own son?
She saw it then, in its blinding simplicity, as the pieces came together in her mind.

“You’re saying Margery killed them to protect Darcy?” Kincaid glanced at her, his brow creased in concentration.

She shook her head. “No. It’s easier than that. Everything we’ve said about Margery holds true for Darcy as well. Access to his mother’s medication would have been easy—all he had to do was offer to pick it up at the chemist for her.”

They’d reached the motorway. As Gemma stared out the window, the damp surface of the tarmac glistened like oil, reflecting light back into her eyes. “Margery doesn’t drink gin and tonic, but Darcy does,” she said, remembering his easy hospitality and the dish of cut limes in his flat. “And he would have known about the quinine—”

“And keeps a bottle of gin in his desk,” said Kincaid. “We were wrong about the tea. He dissolved the tablets in a gin and tonic, counting on the tonic’s bitterness to disguise the taste, and the quinine to increase the poison’s effectiveness.”

“But how did he get Vic to drink it? She wasn’t in the habit of drinking at lunch.”

“She can’t have learned the truth about him, or she’d never have accepted the drink. But he must have feared she was close. I think he made her an unprecedented apology for his behavior. Vic would have felt she couldn’t refuse a peace offering. And once he’d got her to drink the poison, he waited, then cycled to the cottage when he thought he’d given it enough time.”

“Kit’s shadow at the bottom of the garden,” said Gemma. “Darcy took a terrible risk.”

“Oh, he’s quite capable of risk. Vic must have still been alive when he searched the cottage, then afterwards he went straight to his mother’s dinner party as if nothing had happened.” Kincaid’s voice was flat, and a look at his profile in the intermittent light from passing headlamps made Gemma feel uneasy. “Darcy’s objections to Vic’s biography of Lydia had nothing to do with his aesthetic principles and everything to do with keeping the past buried,” he continued. “When he couldn’t do that, he tried misdirection. It was he who put us on to Lydia’s relationship with Daphne, remember?”

“But what about Lydia’s manuscript?” asked Gemma. “How would he have known about the poems?”

“Perhaps Lydia had said enough to make him suspicious. Writing the poems may have been Lydia’s way of working herself up to a
public denouncement. Remember, she’d rung Nathan that day, saying she wanted to talk to him about something.”

“Or maybe Darcy ran across it lying about in Ralph’s office, quite by chance, and couldn’t resist having a look,” said Gemma. “The poems would have screamed betrayal to him, so he removed the most damaging ones.”

“And once he’d done that, he’d have realized that Lydia had to be silenced. Either way, access to the manuscript would have been easy enough,” Kincaid said. “I’d guess Darcy’s always had carte blanche at the Peregrine Press, considering his mother’s position, and it’s not as if the manuscripts were kept in a vault.”

“Easier than that, even,” said Gemma, remembering the Peregrine logo she’d seen on the spine of one of Darcy’s books in his flat, “if Ralph published his books as well. He might have been in and out of the office working on one of his own manuscripts.”

“He removed the poems after assuring himself that Ralph hadn’t read them, then paid an unexpected visit to Lydia,” Kincaid said with certainty. “It must have seemed foolproof to him, and it very nearly was. He unscrewed the porch light so that he wouldn’t be seen leaving, then offered Lydia a gin and tonic. What could be more welcome after a warm day of working in the garden? Perhaps he left for a while, then came back to set the stage for her apparent suicide. Music, and candles, and the poem in the typewriter.”

“Why Rupert Brooke, though?” asked Gemma. “Why not fake a suicide note?”

“My guess is he got carried away with his own sense of drama. It was misdirection again, making it look as though she still grieved over Morgan Ashby.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Gemma, frowning, “is why the others protected him after Verity’s death.”

“They must have felt culpable, guilt by association. And they had a strong sense of group identity. No one could tell what Darcy had done without betraying the others.” Kincaid paused as he overtook a slow-moving lorry. “But I think that’s come to an end. Only Nathan and Adam are left, and Nathan has nothing to lose. You’d better ring Alec Byrne. Ask him if quinine showed up in Vic’s routine toxicology scan, then tell him he’d better meet us in Grant—”

“The poems,” Gemma said, smacking her palm against her forehead. “Nathan only read the poems for the first time this afternoon, just as we did. And if we figured out what happened to Lydia and Vic, how much easier will it have been for him?”

Then in some garden hushed from wind…
How had it gone?
Warm in a sunset’s afterglow…
After that had come something about lovers, but Nathan couldn’t quite bring it back. Rupert had been big on gardens and sunsets and moonlight, he remembered, and Lydia had loved the dreamlike quality of those poems.

He might be dreaming now, he thought as he watched the deep green shadows moving under the stillness of the trees. The air had a shimmering translucence to it, almost as if
it
were underwater, and it smelled of springs long past.

But he felt the cold steel weight of his father’s old shotgun across his knees, and he knew himself to be awake, sitting in the dusk at the bottom of his garden. When it was full dark he would go.

His feet would remember the path …
the leaf-thick path …
the way they had gone more than thirty years ago… He had tried for so long to forget what happened that night, buried it in his love for Jean and for his daughters, his work, his gardens. And yet he had come back here, to this house by the river, and his reckoning.

How had he not seen what monster they’d created with their silence? First Lydia, then Vic … Dear God, his blindness had condemned her as surely as if his own hand had slipped the poison into her drink.

Nathan rose and stood by the gate a moment, one hand on the latch, the other clasped loosely round the worn grip of the gun.
The poets wait…for her coming…
Lydia had not allowed herself to forget; she’d kept it sharp and clear, then distilled it into words. The poem had been intended for him, for Adam, for Darcy. When he’d read it that afternoon, after Kincaid and his sergeant left, he’d known that as surely as if Lydia had spoken to him. Was that why she’d rung him the day she died? Had she waited until the girls were grown and gone, and Jean dead, so that he would be free of his need to protect them?

Unlatching the gate, he began to pick his way across the pasture
in the light of the rising moon …
the old pulse quickens in the dappled light …
There had been moonlight that night.
And the girls wore white, floating dresses, they always wore white …
No, that was another time, another memory. On this night, Daphne had not come; she’d been called away unexpectedly, and her absence had spared her.

The river path felt smooth and familiar beneath his feet. He needed the familiarity now, even welcomed the memories as tinder to his purpose.
They’d bicycled from Cambridge, he and Lydia and Adam. Lydia wore a gypsy dress, and dangling earrings. She’d pinched a rose from the college garden and fastened it in her dark hair. She’d bought shirts for him and Adam at a jumble sale, white with flowing sleeves, and when they put them on she kissed them and called them her lords. It was Darcy who waited for Verity and brought her in his mother’s car. He’d fancied her, and they’d laughed about it
.

To his right as he passed he saw the gleam of the Orchard’s gate, and behind it the gnarled silhouettes of the apple trees.
White blossom falling, the air heavy with wasps … They sat in the low canvas chairs, eating tea and cake and discussing the merits of free verse … tawny-haired Rupert, stuffing cake in his mouth, laughing as the crumbs spilled … No, that was only an old photo, it was just the four of them, Nathan, Adam, Daphne, Lydia … It was May Week, and the blossom was long gone … They were punchy tired from swotting for exams, silly and sentimental with it, and as he looked round the table at each of their faces he thought how much he loved them, wished he could stop time… Lydia knew, she always knew, “Let’s celebrate,” she said. “We don’t have to grow old. We’ll swim naked in Byron’s Pool tonight.” Rupert hadn’t wanted to grow old, and Rupert had the last laugh…

He’d reached the Old Vicarage now …
Rupert sat in a chair in the tangled garden, dressed in tennis whites, books spread before him on a table. They hovered over him like ghosts, did he sense them there? He’d known how fragile was the boundary between the living and the dead… Rupert stands on the bank and sheds his clothes, body golden, awkward hands and feet… Is the water sweet and cool, gentle and brown, above the pool?

Byron’s Pool…
Still in the dawnlit waters cool his ghostly lordship swims…. The night is warm and close, heavy with moisture, Nathan and Adam and Lydia wait for her in a bower among the pink-petaled mallow, they pass round a bottle of wine, a joint Lydia’s begged from a musician
friend … sight, sound, and touch so sharp and intense, time stretches … Verity comes, so lovely and unfinished, the thick straight honey of her hair smells of roses … They undress her among the soft leaves, moonlight slides over her skin and she laughs at the lightness of their fingers as they caress her… Adam sings a snatch of “Till There Was You,” they collapse into hysterical giggles while Darcy watches in impatient arousal, his breath rasping in Nathan’s ear… “Come,” Darcy coaxes her, “I’ll be Rupert, you be Virginia, we’ll have a midnight swim,” and he eases her down into the dark water…
.