Dreaming Of The Bones

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,