Deborah Crombie - Dreaming of the bones

“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?