Dreaming Of The Bones

“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.”