Deborah Crombie - Dreaming of the bones

“Tell me about Vic’s teas,” Kincaid said when she’d blown her nose.

Laura smiled and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “She drank this awful stuff-lovage, which is some sort of herbal diuretic, because she had trouble with… you know… water retention.”

Kincaid thought her hesitation rather quaintly old-fashioned. “I think I get the picture,” he said, grinning.

“Well, we teased her mercilessly because we could always tell what time of the month it was by what kind of tea she was drinking. I suppose it all sounds a bit silly now.”

“Did she drink any of the special tea on Tuesday?”

“I don’t know,” said Laura, her eyes widening. “You don’t think-”

I don’t think anything at this point,” said Kincaid reassuringly. “I’m just curious.”

“Vic left early, so we didn’t have tea together that day. We usually do-did-round the middle of the afternoon.”

“Could she have had some on her own?”

“She kept an electric kettle in her office. She might have had a cup with her lunch, if not earlier.”

“She didn’t go out for her lunch?” Kincaid asked.

Laura shook her head. “We’d planned to go out that day, but that morning she said she’d changed her mind. She needed to work through lunch because she meant to leave early.”

Kincaid felt a pulse of excitement, and an irrational urge to free his hands. He found a bare spot on Laura’s desk for his cup. “Where did she go? When did you last see her?”

“I’m sure it wasn’t anything,” said Laura, distressed. “I got the impression she was a bit miffed about something that had happened at Kit’s school, that’s all.”

“She didn’t say what?”

“Vic didn’t like to talk about things until she’d worked them out herself. You know, like with Ian. She never said a word about having problems, then one day she walked in and said, ‘Oh, by the way, Ian’s moved out.’ You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

Kincaid remembered that trait of Vic’s all too well, except in his case it had been she who had moved out. “Well, maybe we can come at this from the other end,” he said. “What time did she leave here?”

Laura frowned and stared into her cup for a moment, then looked up. “Half past two. I remember because Darcy’s supervision was late.”

“Matthews?”

She smiled. “Matthews. Poor boy.”

“Did Vic actually say she was going to Kit’s school?” Kincaid asked.

“No, not in so many words. But I could call the Head and find out if she did.” Laura brightened at the prospect of doing some thing. When Kincaid nodded, she picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory.

He listened to the one-sided conversation with increasing disappointment, then Laura said an apologetic good-bye and rang off.

She stared at him blankly. “I don’t understand. I could’ve sworn that’s what she meant to do, but the Head says he not only didn’t see her, but he has absolutely no idea what she might have been upset about.”

“Perhaps something happened to change her mind?” Kincaid offered. “Did she say anything else when she left?”

Laura closed her eyes, remembering, and when she opened them again a flush stained her cheeks. “She came downstairs all in a rush, getting into her coat and trying to balance her briefcase at the same time, and she said, ‘Men. They’re all bloody great infants, aren’t they? Too bad we can’t do away with them all together.’ Then she waved and said, ‘Cheerio, ducks. See you in the morning.’ “

He smiled at the vivid picture. “Sounds like vintage Vic, in good form. Had she heard something from Ian, do you suppose? Anything odd in her mail?”

“Not that I noticed when I took the post up to her. And her phone is a direct line, so I wouldn’t know about calls.”

A task for the local boys, thought Kincaid, a list of incoming and outgoing phone calls. “So nothing unusual happened that day, and she felt well when she left here,” he said.

“Yet less than three hours later she was dead,” said Laura, staring soberly at him.

Kincaid gazed back, only half aware of her, and thought aloud, “So where did she go, and how did someone poison her between half past two and five o’clock?”

The day of Victoria McClellan’s funeral dawned clear and cold. Gemma dressed with particular care, in a black skirt and matching short jacket, and took the time to plait her hair.

She’d spent the remainder of the previous afternoon walking round Cambridge, familiarizing herself with the city and its colleges, and returning home late had found a message from Kincaid on her answer phone. He’d given her the details of the funeral and asked her to ring back, but she hadn’t done so.

What she had to say needed to be said face-to-face, not on the telephone, and so she had arrived early in Grantchester, intending to wait for him at the church. She found a parking spot on the High Street, below Vic’s cottage, and as she climbed out she took a deep breath to clear her head of the sun-induced stuffiness of the drive. The day had warmed enough that she was able to leave her coat in the car, and the air held the unmistakable softness of spring.

From where she stood, she could see the church tower rising above the trees, and much to her disappointment, its clock did not stand at ten to three as in Rupert Brooke’s poem. It read a correct quarter to twelve, which ought to give her time to pay a visit to the Old Vicarage itself, the house where Brooke had lived and worked, and which he had immortalized in “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.” Perhaps it would live up to expectations.

A short walk downhill on the curving High Street brought her to its wrought iron gates. Gemma wrapped her hands round two of the cold spikes and peered into the garden. She felt a bit like a spying schoolgirl, but then she imagined the owners must be used to the public’s curiosity.

The house, which had ceased to be a vicarage even before Brooke’s time, had been bought several years earlier by a well-known writer and his wife, a distinguished scientist. They had restored the comfortable-looking house with much respect for the Brooke legend, but the beautifully landscaped grounds bore little resemblance to the tangled and arbitrary garden of the photos Gemma had seen in Hazel’s books. Rupert, she thought, would have been disappointed in its taming, for he had loved it in its wild and secretive state.

Last night she’d looked at a photo of him sitting in the sun in the garden, with his head bent over his papers as he wrote. Now she recalled it as she gazed through the fence, and the pictures coalesced for an instant, the past superimposing itself upon the present.

She blinked and took a breath, banishing Rupert’s image from the quiet and ordinary garden. A large woman with a shockingly blond mop of permed hair moved into view-the gardener, Gemma realized when the woman knelt beside a bed, trowel in hand. It must have been the peripheral sight of the light-clothed figure that had given her such a start.

Gemma moved away from the gate, and from her less conspicuous position she could glimpse the tennis court where Rupert had played, and beyond that the garden of the Orchard tea room next door.

Retracing her steps to the Orchard’s drive, she walked towards the river until she could see the orchard itself, with its tea tables and canvas chairs grouped under the gnarled apple trees. They had sat under these same white-blossomed trees, Rupert Brooke and his friends, in those distant Edwardian Aprils, laughing and talking and planning futures that for many of them would never come to pass.