Dreaming of the bones Read online

  Kincaid stood outside the police station, watching squirrels chase one another across the green expanse of Parker’s Piece. Two young men played a desultory game of Frisbee with a mongrel dog, and a woman pushing a pram crossed the space slowly on the diagonal.

  Reluctantly, Kincaid pulled his phone from his breast pocket and punched in Vic’s number. He supposed he might as well get it over with, see her while he was in Cambridge and tell her he’d done what he could. Alec Byrne was right, of course: a few unanswered questions were not going to arouse the local lads’ interest in an old case more conveniently let lie.

  As he listened to the distant ringing, a cloud skittered across the sun, momentarily erasing the long afternoon shadows. He heard a click, then Vic’s voice, and so immediate and natural did she sound that it took him a moment to realize he’d reached her answer phone. At the beep he hesitated, then hung up without leaving a message. He glanced at his watch before again consulting his notebook. There might still be time to catch her at her office, but he realized she hadn’t given him the number. Glancing up, he saw a taxi rounding the corner. If he hurried, he might just make it in person.

  * * *

  A black cab delivered him swiftly to a Victorian house across the river. He stood a moment after paying the driver, regarding the sign near the gate that informed him that this was the UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE FACULTY OF ENGLISH, NO UNAUTHORIZED PARKING ALLOWED. A heavy screen of evergreens partially concealed a graveled car park, but in a sheltered spot near the house he could see a battered Renault and an N registration Volvo. It looked as though he might find someone lingering past the stroke of five.

  The gray-brick, peaked-roof house had seen grander days. Overgrown shrubbery and a swath of dead creeper across the facade gave it a desolate air, alleviated only by clean white trim round the windows and a glossy navy blue door. Kincaid knocked lightly, then turned the knob and stepped inside. He found himself in a small reception area that originally must have functioned as the entrance hall, and as he stood for a moment wondering which door he should try, the one on the left opened and a woman looked round the edge at him.

  “Thought I heard someone come in, and I didn’t recognize the tread.” She smiled and came through into the hall, and he saw that she was plump and pleasant-looking, with wavy brown hair and glasses that slid down the bridge of her nose. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Um, I was hoping I might catch Dr. McClellan before she left for the day,” said Kincaid, wondering a bit late about the advisability of intruding unannounced into Vic’s life.

  “Oh, too bad. You’ve just missed her by a few minutes. Kit had a soccer match this afternoon and she does like to be there if she can.” The woman held her hand out. “I’m Laura Miller, by the way, the department secretary. Can I give her a message?”

  “Duncan Kincaid,” he said, shaking her hand. “Just tell her I dropped by, if you wouldn’t-” He paused as a door slammed above, then came the sound of quick, heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  “Damn it, Laura, I can’t find that bloody fax anywhere. Are you sure it’s not gone out with the rubbish?” A man-large, leonine, and flushed with the high color that derives from quick temper-followed the voice round the last landing of the stairs. “You know what liberties Iris takes with other people’s papers, it’s a wonder one ever finds any-” He stopped in midtirade as he reached the bottom of the stairs and saw Kincaid. “Oh, hullo. Sorry, sorry, didn’t know anyone else was about. You’d think we had pixies, the way things disappear in this place.” A lock of the thick gray-brown hair flopped over his brow as he gave Kincaid an apologetic grin. “And poor Laura bears the brunt of our frustration, I’m afraid.”

  The secretary gave him a sharp look, but answered easily. “For once it is on Dr. Winslow’s desk, Dr. Eliot. But since it concerned the entire department…” She glanced at Kincaid, then amended whatever she’d been about to say. “I’ll just get it for you. I’m sure she won’t mind you taking care of it.”

  With a smile for Kincaid, she slipped back into the office on the left and returned a moment later with a flimsy sheet of fax paper. “Iris Winslow is our Head of Department,” she explained. “We’ve been in a bit of a bother over a change in some of the University exam procedures. Dr. Eliot”-she nodded at the large man by way of introduction-“teaches the history of literary criticism, among other things. Dr. Eliot, this is Mr. Kincaid. He was asking after Vic.”

  Kincaid felt the level of interest rise in the room as Eliot eyed him speculatively.

  “You don’t say. Is it anything we can help with?” The urgent fax apparently forgotten, Eliot slipped a hand inside his jacket, resting it against his plum-colored knitted waistcoat in a vaguely Napoleonic gesture.

  The waistcoat, Kincaid thought at second glance, looked to be cashmere, and the jacket Harris Tweed. Eliot and the secretary watched him expectantly, smiles hovering, eyes bright, and he had the sudden feeling he’d wandered into a tank of barracuda. “No, thanks. Please don’t trouble yourselves over it. I’ll just give her a ring.” He nodded and went out.

  He walked slowly down West Road until he reached Queens’ Road again. The crossing light was red and he looked about him as he waited, hands in pockets. The way to the train station lay to his right, across the river. The carriages would be jam-packed this time of day, stuffy with the remnants of the afternoon’s warmth, and he found the prospect of fighting the crowds unappealing. He cursed himself doubly for not bringing the car-as well as avoiding rush hour on British rail, it would have allowed him to drive to Grantchester and wait for Vic at her cottage.

  But even though he couldn’t fulfill his main objective, he thought, shrugging, why should he hurry back to London? Since Sunday, Gemma had treated him with studied politeness at work and had been conveniently busy afterwards, and he had no reason to suppose this evening would be any different.

  The light flashed yellow and he crossed with the flow of pedestrian traffic, then paused on the opposite pavement. With sudden decisiveness he turned left, taking the path that meandered along the Backs. He could see King’s College Chapel across the river, and as he walked, the clouds parted and the last of the sun’s rays gilded the tips of the spires. Did one take such sights for granted, he wondered, if one saw them every day?

  Had Lydia Brooke grown accustomed to them as she went about Cambridge on her business, her head full of lectures and love? And most likely in reverse order, he added to himself, smiling, then he sobered as he thought of the report he’d read that afternoon. He understood Alec Byrne’s defensiveness, but the case had an unfinished feel, and he thought if it had been his he would not have been satisfied with such a pat solution. Had anyone tried to discover what she’d been doing that day? Or whom she’d seen, and what she might have said to them? And if she’d been gardening, as seemed obvious, had there been anything unusual about that day’s tasks? Had she done what looked to be a final planting, for instance, or some sort of grand tidying up, as if she were taking her leave of the garden?

  The business about the porch light nagged at him as well. Had anyone checked to see if it had been out for some time, or had it just coincidentally expired on the night of Lydia’s death?

  Kincaid stopped and consulted his pocket map of Cambridge. To his right a lane led to an arched bridge over the river, and Vic’s college lay just the other side. He took the turning, and when he reached the summit of the bridge he paused for a moment and leaned on the railing, gazing downstream at the willows, whose drooping fronds reached out to touch their own reflections. The tightly furled pale yellow buds dotting the branches might have been painted there by Seurat, and the tethered punts provided contrast, solid blocks of green and umber, gently rocking.

  Across the river a sturdy redbrick building stood guard over a walled garden. It would be All Saints’ Fellows Garden, he supposed, thinking it unlikely that the dons would allow mere students the best view.

  As he turned to continue on his way, a bicycle whizzed
soundlessly by him, nearly clipping his shoulder. He went on more warily after that, staying close to the railing and checking behind him for oncoming cyclists. The lane narrowed the other side of the bridge, with the walls of All Saints’ rising on the right and those of Trinity College on the left. At the first All Saints’ gate he stopped and peered into the manicured quad curiously. Didn’t Lydia’s file mention that the Nathan Winter who discovered her body was a don at All Saints’? And hadn’t Vic mentioned a friend called Nathan? Cambridge was indeed a small world, he thought, if the two were the same, and he wondered if Vic had met him in the course of her college duties, or as a result of her research on Lydia Brooke. Winter was a botanist, according to the file, and he vaguely remembered Vic referring to Nathan when they’d talked about her garden. It seemed a bit odd, now that he thought of it, that Lydia had named a botanist as her literary executor.

  He shrugged and walked on, rounding the corner into Trinity Lane. And yet there was something odder still, he thought as he went over his conversation with Vic. He could only recall her mentioning one marriage, and that quite early in Lydia’s life. Why would Lydia have left everything to a man from whom she’d been divorced for almost twenty years?

  He hugged the wall as another cluster of cyclists shot by, then he stumbled into a bicycle left standing outside a shop. Bloody bikes, he thought. You could hardly move for them in this town.

  Newnham

  16 November 1961

  Darling Mother,

  Your birthday gift was much appreciated, and was just enough to purchase a good secondhand bike. It has a few dents in the fenders and scrapes in the paint, but those just add character in my opinion. You’d be proud of me-I’ve got quite good already, and cycle my way round almost as easily as if I were navigating the lanes at home on Auntie Nan’s old clunker. I was sure you wouldn’t mind my spending the money before my actual birthday, as the bike was so sorely needed.

  I can’t imagine Cambridge without bicycles. They fly by, the student’s black gowns flapping like crows’ wings, or stand riderless, clumped together in mute and inebriated herds. Even if undergraduates were allowed cars, there would be no place to park them, so I suppose the system works rather well.

  Thanks to the bike I venture a bit farther afield each day, so that I am beginning to feel I own this place, with its narrow twisty streets and forests of chimney pots. I seem to find a fascinating little shop round every new corner. I gaze at knitting wools, and jumpers, and cookware, but I spend my pocket money in the secondhand bookshops. I love the dry, musty smell of the volumes, the tissue-thin feel of the paper. Even the typefaces speak of vanished elegance. Already the books are accumulating in my room, and nothing, I think, makes a place more like home. In the evenings I curl up in my window seat and look out over the rooftops as the light fades. Sometimes I read, sometimes I just hold a book, and I feel the strongest sense of contented elation.

  If it sounds as though I’ve been leading a solitary life, I assure you that’s not the case. Cambridge has societies representing everything from doily making to penguin equality-well, maybe they’re not quite that outrageous, but some of them are certainly bizarre-and they are all enthusiastically recruiting. The major inducement at these functions is free drink, so one has to be rather carefully abstemious, and not carry one’s checkbook just in case one is too easily persuaded. The only thing that does NOT seem to be well represented is writing, but I’m fast making like-minded friends and perhaps we can create our own sort of society. In the meantime I am seriously considering joining the University paper. That should at least give me a creative outlet until I can schedule time for my own writing.

  I’ve been invited out and about so much that I’ve decided it’s time I should reciprocate, so therefore I’m hosting my first sherry party in my room on Thursday. I’ve invited Adam, the boy I told you about meeting at King’s. He’s a Trinity man, reading philosophy, and he seems to see poetry primarily as a vehicle for expressing social views. On this matter we have already had some wonderfully heated discussions.

  Adam took me to a Labour Club dance last Saturday, where I met a delightful boy called Nathan, whom I’ve invited as well. He’s sturdily built, with fair skin, dark hair, and the merriest brown eyes I’ve ever seen. A natural sciences student, he means to be a poet as well as a botanist, in the manner of Loren Eisley.

  Daphne from across the hall will make up a fourth, and I intend to serve them decent sherry and biscuits, and feel oh so sophisticated.

  And in case you think from this account that I’ve done nothing but swan about, I assure you, Mummy dear, that I have been a model student. I’ve chosen the three exams I will read for, and have begun the lectures Miss Barrett and I decided would be most helpful in preparing me. My lecture schedule is about eleven hours during the week and includes such luminaries as F. R. Leavis on criticism, and I must admit I feel quite intimidated, being lectured to by men whose books are filling my shelves. Most of my lectures are in the morning, and there are surprisingly few women. I usually cycle back to Newnham for lunch in Hall, then most afternoons are divided between supervisions and reading either in the library or in my room. Such order makes me feel as though I might possibly grasp all this, if only I am disciplined and dedicated enough.

  I’ve chosen to celebrate my birthday this evening alone in my room. This is not because I’m feeling sorry for myself, mind you, but because this is the way I feel closest to home, and you. It’s a lovely crisp evening with the hint of wood smoke in the air, and I picture you and Nan sitting by the fire after tea, reading, talking now and again, perhaps deciding whether or not to make cocoa and listen to a program on the wireless. I know your thoughts are reaching out to me as mine are reaching out to you, and I think if I close my eyes and concentrate hard enough I could almost… be there.

  Love,

  Lydia

  Vic pulled her old cardigan from the hook and slipped out the back door as soundlessly as possible, reminding herself to lubricate the hinges. She’d tucked Kit into bed at ten, amid the nightly routine of his protests. He thought eleven much too grown up to have a set bedtime, in spite of the fact that if she let him stay up much past ten o’clock, he’d sleep straight through his alarm the next morning.

  Shrugging into her cardigan, Vic stood on the terrace a moment, looking up at the sky. The clear day had become a crisp night, but the stars looked blurred round the edges from moisture in the air, and to the north they faded against the pink glow that was Cambridge. She doubted tomorrow would be as fine.

  When her eyes had adjusted, she stepped from the terrace onto the lawn, crossed it swiftly, and let herself out the gate at the bottom of the garden. There was no moon, but she knew the path to the river almost by instinct. A shadow moved beneath the chestnuts at the water’s edge. As she drew closer the shape coalesced into a man, stocky, starlight gleaming faintly from the surface of his oiled jacket and his silver hair.

  “Nathan.”

  “I thought you might come. Kit giving you fits again?” So rich was his voice in the dark that it seemed to her it might stand alone, disembodied, a condensation of personality.

  “It’s these dreams,” she said, huddling a bit more tightly into her sweater as she felt the chill rising from the river. “It’s odd-he never had nightmares when he was small.” She sighed. “I suppose it has to do with Ian, although if he misses Ian he never says so. And he won’t tell me what the dreams are about.”

  “Children’s capacity for forming little hedgehog balls round their suffering never ceases to amaze me. Our adult propensity for exposing all our traumas to the world must be a learned behavior,” he said, chuckling, but she heard the sympathy in it.

  “It’s silly of me, but sometimes I forget you’ve been through all this. I just see you as Nathan, complete in yourself, without all these family appendages that most of us carry round.” Then, as she realized what she’d said, she gasped and put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Nathan, I’m so sorry. That was
incredibly thoughtless of me.”

  This time he laughed outright. “On the contrary, I take it as a compliment. Have you any idea how hard I’ve worked these last few years to achieve that sort of self-sufficient independence? At first it was merely a defense against the well-meaning-I couldn’t bear being fussed over-and then it became something I needed to do for myself. I’d had twenty years of operating as one half of a whole, and there were times when the task seemed insurmountable.” He paused, as if aware of the weariness that had crept into his voice, then added more heartily, “And as for my girls, you just haven’t met them yet. You’ll have no doubt that I’m fully parentally qualified, though I have to admit I sometimes find it difficult to believe they’re my biological offspring. Perhaps all parents feel that way.”

  How little she knew him, thought Vic, and how odd that she felt so comfortable with him, as she had never been one to form easy alliances. She must have come to All Saints’ shortly after his wife died, and she remembered having a vague awareness of him as an attractive, if somewhat abstracted, man with whom she exchanged occasional pleasantries over sherry in the SCR. But their paths rarely crossed outside college functions, and it was not until she began her preliminary research on Lydia Brooke that she’d learned Nathan was Brooke’s literary executor.

  When approached, he’d been helpful enough in supplying Lydia’s materials, but he had not offered any reminiscences. It was only when she’d mentioned living in Grantchester by chance one day that he’d responded in a more personal way, and since Ian’s disappearance they had spent more and more time together.