“Then why bother to teach something you see as inherently useless?” Kincaid asked, wondering if he’d missed something in Eliot’s argument.
“Well, one must do something, mustn’t one?” Eliot said, still looking pleased with himself. “And I find it more amusing than any other occupation which springs to mind.”
“Do I take it that Vic didn’t subscribe to your theory?”
Eliot shook his head, pursing his lips in an expression of regret. “Victoria insisted on cobbling together feminist criticism with some sort of updated version of liberal humanism-producing a hideous hybrid which was illogical at best, and smacked of metaphysics at worst.” He closed his eyes in mock dismay.
“What you’re telling me is that Vic had the temerity to assign value to literature?” Kincaid said, raising his eyebrow.
Eliot clapped his hands together. “Bravo, Mr. Kincaid. Very well put. Although you’ve given yourself away in the process. I did think the vague copper bit was overdone, especially in light of your accent and your bearing-you’re obviously well educated.”
And you’re a condescending bastard, thought Kincaid, and smiled. He did not feel inclined to share the particulars of his background with Darcy Eliot. The man must’ve given Vic a chronic case of the pip. “Now that I understand the theoretical repercussions of Vic’s biography, Dr. Eliot, do you know of anyone who might have had a personal objection to Vic’s researching Lydia Brooke’s life?”
“Lydia was a minor poet whose early work was pleasantly facile, if derivative,” Eliot said tartly. “She flirted with mental illness all her life, and her later poems combined a ‘confessional’ exploration of her illness with the most trite elements of feminism. I can think of any number of people she might have offended with her poems, but I doubt her life provided the requisite drama.”
“But you knew her personally,” said Kincaid. “You were friends at Cambridge.”
“Do you still find yourself in sympathy with everyone you were at school with, Mr. Kincaid?” Eliot raised one massive eyebrow. “I find that one often outgrows such relationships. Although in Lydia’s case…” He paused and gave Kincaid a considering look.
“Don’t hesitate to express your opinion, Dr. Eliot,” said Kincaid.
Eliot smiled at the thinly veiled sarcasm. “I daresay such tact would be out of character, wouldn’t it? It occurred to me that there might be one person who would prefer that not all the details of Lydia’s private life be made public. Lydia flirted with more than mental illness, and at a time when lesbianism was not considered quite as politically correct as it is these days.”
“Lydia had a homosexual relationship?” Kincaid asked, surprised. If Vic had been aware of it, she hadn’t mentioned it to him. “One can never be sure of the details unless one is personally involved, but that was the operative rumor. And as the lady in question is now headmistress of a prestigious girls’ school…” Eliot made a tut-tut sound with his tongue. “I doubt the school governors would find the story too amusing.”
“Who was the other woman, Dr. Eliot?”
Darcy Eliot looked uncomfortable. It seemed that repeating unsubstantiated titillating rumors was all in a day’s work, but naming names might press the limits of his public school code of honor. “Why should I tell you, Mr. Kincaid?”
Kincaid had expected the challenge. He leaned forwards and met Eliot’s gaze. “Because Victoria McClellan is dead, and I want to know who had reason to kill her.”
Eliot looked away first. “Well, I suppose that’s reason enough, if you put it that way. Though I can’t imagine Daphne killing anyone-”
“Daphne Morris? Lydia’s friend from Newnham?” Kincaid had a clear image of the girl as Vic had written of her, but that was years ago. “Headmistress of a girls’ school?”
“Here in Cambridge. Just on the Hills Road, in-” There was a tentative tap at the door, and an acne-scarred boy put his head round.
“Give me a minute more, will you, Matthews?” Eliot said testily, and the boy scuttled apologetically backwards, closing the door with a snap.
“Just one more thing, Dr. Eliot,” said Kincaid as he rose. “Did you see Vic at all on Tuesday?”
“It was an ordinary day,” Eliot said slowly. “One doesn’t think about it at the time, and that makes it difficult to piece things together again. We passed on the stairs, we passed in the corridor, but I’d be hard put to tell you what time.”
“Do you remember anything in particular she said?”
Eliot gave a frustrated shake of his head. “Only the most mundane of things. ‘Morning, Darcy’ ‘Do let me use the photocopier first this morning, Darcy’” He frowned. “I believe she said something about having a sandwich at her desk while she prepared for a supervision at half past one-but I can’t tell you if she actually did, as I was out to lunch, then had supervisions myself the rest of the afternoon.” Looking up at Kincaid, he added, without his usual air of supercilious amusement, “I’m sorry. I suppose that’s in the way of a condolence. Sometimes one finds it difficult to say these things.”
“Old habits?” asked Kincaid.
“Indeed.”
The door to Vic’s office was shut, but not, Kincaid discovered, locked. He opened it slowly and went in, feeling a sense of trespass that he had not felt in her office at the cottage. He wished suddenly that he’d seen her here, in her element, doing what she loved-that he’d shared this part of her life in however small a way.
The fine hand of the local police was in evidence. The desk had been stripped bare, and its emptied drawers hung open like gaping mouths. They had left the books and the personal photographs atop the bookshelves. Those of Kit he had expected-baby pictures, a first bicycle, awkward school photos with his hair slicked into submission, a fairly recent print of him handling a punt pole with great concentration.
There was no trace of Ian. It was as if Vic had not hesitated to erase him from her life here, where his absence would not further distress Kit.
Something familiar caught his eye as he turned away-a snapshot propped behind one of the frames.
It was his parents’ garden, in full summer bloom. He and Vic sat sprawled in the grass, laughing, his mother’s spaniel half in Vic’s lap. They had been married just a few months, and he had taken her to Cheshire for a visit.
He looked away, out of the window. Vic’s office lay across the corridor from Darcy Eliot’s, and her window faced south, towards Newnham. Lydia’s college. Vic, he thought, would have liked that.
Kincaid found Laura Miller waiting for him at her desk.
“You look a bit battered,” she said. “I put the kettle on when I saw Darcy’s supervision go up. I thought you might need a cuppa.”
He sank into the now familiar visitor’s chair and loosened the knot on his tie. “Thanks.”
Laura disappeared into a small pantry and returned a moment later with two mismatched mugs. “Milk and sugar all right?”
“Lovely.” Wrapping his hands round the mug’s warmth, he said quietly, “Are you sure Dr. Winslow’s all right? She seems to be feeling a bit off-color.”
Laura made a face as she scorched her tongue on the hot tea. “I’ve been nagging at her the last two days to see someone about her headache, but she’s that stubborn.” She glanced at Dr. Winslow’s door and lowered her voice further. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been worried about her since Dr. Whitecliff’s death last June. It seemed to take the starch out of her, if you know what I mean, and she hasn’t been the same since. We were always teasing her about trying one of Vic’s teas-” She broke off, looking stricken, and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, damn and blast,” she muttered, scrabbling in her desk drawer for a tissue.
“Tell me about Vic’s teas,” Kincaid said when she’d blown her nose.
Laura smiled and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “She drank this awful stuff-lovage, which is some sort of herbal diuretic, because she had trouble with… you know… water retention.”
Ki
ncaid thought her hesitation rather quaintly old-fashioned. “I think I get the picture,” he said, grinning.
“Well, we teased her mercilessly because we could always tell what time of the month it was by what kind of tea she was drinking. I suppose it all sounds a bit silly now.”
“Did she drink any of the special tea on Tuesday?”
“I don’t know,” said Laura, her eyes widening. “You don’t think-”
I don’t think anything at this point,” said Kincaid reassuringly. “I’m just curious.”
“Vic left early, so we didn’t have tea together that day. We usually do-did-round the middle of the afternoon.”
“Could she have had some on her own?”
“She kept an electric kettle in her office. She might have had a cup with her lunch, if not earlier.”
“She didn’t go out for her lunch?” Kincaid asked.
Laura shook her head. “We’d planned to go out that day, but that morning she said she’d changed her mind. She needed to work through lunch because she meant to leave early.”
Kincaid felt a pulse of excitement, and an irrational urge to free his hands. He found a bare spot on Laura’s desk for his cup. “Where did she go? When did you last see her?”
“I’m sure it wasn’t anything,” said Laura, distressed. “I got the impression she was a bit miffed about something that had happened at Kit’s school, that’s all.”
“She didn’t say what?”
“Vic didn’t like to talk about things until she’d worked them out herself. You know, like with Ian. She never said a word about having problems, then one day she walked in and said, ‘Oh, by the way, Ian’s moved out.’ You could have knocked me over with a feather.”
Kincaid remembered that trait of Vic’s all too well, except in his case it had been she who had moved out. “Well, maybe we can come at this from the other end,” he said. “What time did she leave here?”
Laura frowned and stared into her cup for a moment, then looked up. “Half past two. I remember because Darcy’s supervision was late.”
“Matthews?”
She smiled. “Matthews. Poor boy.”
“Did Vic actually say she was going to Kit’s school?” Kincaid asked.
“No, not in so many words. But I could call the Head and find out if she did.” Laura brightened at the prospect of doing some thing. When Kincaid nodded, she picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory.
He listened to the one-sided conversation with increasing disappointment, then Laura said an apologetic good-bye and rang off.
She stared at him blankly. “I don’t understand. I could’ve sworn that’s what she meant to do, but the Head says he not only didn’t see her, but he has absolutely no idea what she might have been upset about.”
“Perhaps something happened to change her mind?” Kincaid offered. “Did she say anything else when she left?”
Laura closed her eyes, remembering, and when she opened them again a flush stained her cheeks. “She came downstairs all in a rush, getting into her coat and trying to balance her briefcase at the same time, and she said, ‘Men. They’re all bloody great infants, aren’t they? Too bad we can’t do away with them all together.’ Then she waved and said, ‘Cheerio, ducks. See you in the morning.’ “
He smiled at the vivid picture. “Sounds like vintage Vic, in good form. Had she heard something from Ian, do you suppose? Anything odd in her mail?”
“Not that I noticed when I took the post up to her. And her phone is a direct line, so I wouldn’t know about calls.”
A task for the local boys, thought Kincaid, a list of incoming and outgoing phone calls. “So nothing unusual happened that day, and she felt well when she left here,” he said.
“Yet less than three hours later she was dead,” said Laura, staring soberly at him.
Kincaid gazed back, only half aware of her, and thought aloud, “So where did she go, and how did someone poison her between half past two and five o’clock?”
CHAPTER 13
Helpless I lie.
And round me the feet of thy watchers tread.
There is a rumour and a radiance of wings above my
head,
An intolerable radiance of wings…
RUPERT BROOKE,
from “Sleeping Out: Full Moon”
The day of Victoria McClellan’s funeral dawned clear and cold. Gemma dressed with particular care, in a black skirt and matching short jacket, and took the time to plait her hair.
She’d spent the remainder of the previous afternoon walking round Cambridge, familiarizing herself with the city and its colleges, and returning home late had found a message from Kincaid on her answer phone. He’d given her the details of the funeral and asked her to ring back, but she hadn’t done so.
What she had to say needed to be said face-to-face, not on the telephone, and so she had arrived early in Grantchester, intending to wait for him at the church. She found a parking spot on the High Street, below Vic’s cottage, and as she climbed out she took a deep breath to clear her head of the sun-induced stuffiness of the drive. The day had warmed enough that she was able to leave her coat in the car, and the air held the unmistakable softness of spring.
From where she stood, she could see the church tower rising above the trees, and much to her disappointment, its clock did not stand at ten to three as in Rupert Brooke’s poem. It read a correct quarter to twelve, which ought to give her time to pay a visit to the Old Vicarage itself, the house where Brooke had lived and worked, and which he had immortalized in “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.” Perhaps it would live up to expectations.
A short walk downhill on the curving High Street brought her to its wrought iron gates. Gemma wrapped her hands round two of the cold spikes and peered into the garden. She felt a bit like a spying schoolgirl, but then she imagined the owners must be used to the public’s curiosity.
The house, which had ceased to be a vicarage even before Brooke’s time, had been bought several years earlier by a well-known writer and his wife, a distinguished scientist. They had restored the comfortable-looking house with much respect for the Brooke legend, but the beautifully landscaped grounds bore little resemblance to the tangled and arbitrary garden of the photos Gemma had seen in Hazel’s books. Rupert, she thought, would have been disappointed in its taming, for he had loved it in its wild and secretive state.
Last night she’d looked at a photo of him sitting in the sun in the garden, with his head bent over his papers as he wrote. Now she recalled it as she gazed through the fence, and the pictures coalesced for an instant, the past superimposing itself upon the present.
She blinked and took a breath, banishing Rupert’s image from the quiet and ordinary garden. A large woman with a shockingly blond mop of permed hair moved into view-the gardener, Gemma realized when the woman knelt beside a bed, trowel in hand. It must have been the peripheral sight of the light-clothed figure that had given her such a start.
Gemma moved away from the gate, and from her less conspicuous position she could glimpse the tennis court where Rupert had played, and beyond that the garden of the Orchard tea room next door.
Retracing her steps to the Orchard’s drive, she walked towards the river until she could see the orchard itself, with its tea tables and canvas chairs grouped under the gnarled apple trees. They had sat under these same white-blossomed trees, Rupert Brooke and his friends, in those distant Edwardian Aprils, laughing and talking and planning futures that for many of them would never come to pass.
Someone had placed a bowl of yellow daffodils and white crocuses at the base of the memorial in the churchyard. Gemma traced the words chiseled into the granite obelisk with a forefinger.
TO THE GLORY OF GOD IN LOVING AND GRATEFUL MEMORY
** 1914-1918**
MEN WITH SPLENDID HEARTS
She walked round to the other side and read carved there the names of the young men of the village who had given their lives in the War to End
All Wars. Rupert Brooke’s was among them.
She stood with her hand on the warm stone until Kincaid’s voice roused her. “Gemma. I thought you weren’t coming.”
Turning, she watched him walk towards her across the grass. She seldom saw him in a suit-he preferred the more casual sports jacket-but today he wore severe charcoal gray with a starched white shirt and muted tie. He looked tired.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “Before the funeral. That’s why I didn’t ring.”
He raised an eyebrow at that, but glanced accommodatingly at his watch. “It’s early yet. Let’s walk a bit.”
They went through the lych-gate into the churchyard proper and picked their way round the lichen-covered headstones. No point in beating about the bush, she thought, glancing up at him. “I owe you an apology for the other day,” she said. “I had no right telling you how to handle this.”
His lips curved in a smile. “And when has that ever been a deterrent?”
Gemma ignored the quip. “Especially since I know how you feel.” There was nothing he could say to that, and she knew it. A friend of hers had been killed a few months before, and though Gemma hadn’t been directly responsible for her death, she would carry the weight of it with her always, just as he would carry Vic’s.
She turned and looked back towards the church. An ornamental peach tree grew near the churchyard wall, and its puffy round blossoms looked impossibly pink against the emerald grass. Beyond the wall the square church tower rose, a massive counterpoint to the tree’s delicacy. “I understand why you have to find out who killed Vic, and I’m going to help you.”
Kincaid turned her towards him with a touch on her shoulder. “Gemma, no. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I can’t let you risk your job for me.”
“It’s not just for you-it’s for Vic, too. And I’m already involved-you can’t change that now. Besides”-she grinned at him and held the back of her hand to her forehead-“I’ve got a dreadful case of flu. I’m sure I’ll be off work for at least a few more days.”
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