Deborah Crombie - Dreaming of the bones

“Dear God,” breathed Hazel. “The poor child. And her parents…”

“Lydia married Morgan in September of 1963.” Gemma felt a sense of the inevitable, as if she were powerless to stop the unfolding of the past. “Within weeks of Verity’s disappearance, she not only got herself dangerously involved with a man she’d refused to have anything to do with during the previous year-she gave up what had mattered to her above all else. She left university.” She met Kincaid’s eyes. “What could have been so terrible that it caused her to alter her life forever?” she asked, but even as she spoke, the truth felt cold and heavy inside her.

The gentle trill of Kincaid’s phone made them all jump. He fumbled for it, then barked, “Kincaid.” His mouth tightened as he listened. “We’ll be there as soon as we can,” he said, and rang off.

Gemma felt a jerk of fear. “What’s happened?”

“That was Adam Lamb. He says Father Denny rang him and said Nathan’s shotgun has disappeared from the vicarage. Then Adam tried to ring Nathan. There was no reply.”

“What if we’re wrong?” Gemma felt a stab of doubt as she buckled herself into the passenger seat of her Escort. “What if Verity Whitecliff really did run away? We haven’t a smidgen of proof that she didn’t.”

Kincaid maneuvered out into the Liverpool Road traffic, heading north towards the Ring Road. Gemma had handed him the keys without protest, knowing he’d push the car harder than she dared. “It’s a bloody great assumption, all right,” he said. “But it’s the only thing we’ve come up with that makes sense out of what we do know. It wasn’t only Lydia’s life that changed after that summer. Nathan married Jean and apparently severed all but the occasional connection with the rest of the group. And Adam decided to go into the church.”

“What about Daphne and Darcy?” said Gemma. “They seem to have kept on pretty much as before.”

“Maybe they weren’t involved. I doubt Daphne would have mentioned that summer to us if she’d anything to hide.” He glanced at Gemma. “What’s wrong?”

“What if…” she began slowly. “You don’t suppose… What if it was Lydia who killed Verity? And she kept attempting suicide until she finally succeeded?”

“And Vic just happened to die from an overdose of a heart medication she didn’t take?” Kincaid raised an eyebrow. “That won’t wash. I think Lydia was silenced, and Vic as well when she got too close to the truth.”

“Then what really happened the night Verity disappeared?” Gemma thought of the time a boy had convinced her to climb out the window of her bedroom in the flat over the bakery. She’d been afraid to go farther than the corner, and her father had caught her sneaking back in the bakery door. All in all, it had hardly been worth a few furtive kisses. “Which of them enticed her out?” she wondered aloud.

“She might have known any of them,” said Kincaid. “Lydia and Darcy were reading English, but they were all interested in poetry and would surely have been acquainted with Henry Whitecliff.”

“They must have seemed glamorous to Verity-reciting poetry, all that sort of thing. She’d have felt flattered to be included. They were older, the boys were all good-looking-”

“And Lydia had the allure of sexual experience,” Kincaid finished for her. “I can understand why Verity might have found them irresistible, but what did they see in her?”

“Sophistication is never so much fun as when you’re impressing somebody with it. Verity would have provided an audience. Perhaps they planned a harmless prank that night to impress her… an initiation.” Gemma closed her eyes and thought of the lines of the poem. “They waited for her in the woods,” she said softly. “Maybe they even wore Edwardian costumes. When she came, they told her they were going to pretend to be Rupert Brooke and his friends. They undressed her and took her into the water… then somehow it all went wrong.”

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-”