Dreaming of the Bones

have provided an audience. Perhaps they planned a harmless prank that night to impress her... an initiation.” Gemma closed her eyes and thought of the lines of the poem. ”They waited for her in the woods,” she said softly. ”Maybe they even wore Edwardian costumes. When she came, they told her they were going to pretend to be Rupert Brooke and his friends. They undressed her and took her into the water... then somehow it all went wrong.”
    Shivering a little, Gemma imagined them running through the woods in the darkness, laughing at their own daring like children playing hide-and-seek. Wood nymphs, possessed by Pan... Had their calling on pagan gods unleashed more than they’d bargained for?
    She focused her mind on the practical. ”If it wasn’t Lydia who killed Verity, it must have been one of the boys,” she said, knowing she couldn’t refute it. She thought of the sweetness of Adam’s smile, of his competent concern for Nathan—and she thought of Nathan’s ravaging grief over Vic’s death. Surely that was no act. ”But could it be grief and guilt?” she wondered aloud.
    ”What?” Kincaid glanced at her, then focused again on the road.
    ”Nathan. What if he killed Vic, and it’s guilt he’s feeling now?”
    Kincaid thought for a moment, then shook his head. ”I don’t believe it. I don’t think that someone who’d committed two murders as calculated and cold-blooded as these would suddenly be overcome with remorse. It’s not emotionally consistent. And why would Nathan have shown us the poems?”
    ”Adam, then?” she suggested reluctantly. ”Vic was killed after she saw Adam. She might have told him what she’d discovered—”
    ”Vic told us herself that she only found the poems in the book later that night,” argued Kincaid. ”So he couldn’t have known about them.”
    ”But what if Lydia rejected Adam all those years because she knew he’d murdered Verity? He’d have built up a lot of anger and resentment towards her, and when he saw the poems she’d written, it all boiled over.”
    ”And what about Vic?” asked Kincaid, sounding skeptical. ”Why would he kill her?”
    ”We can’t know what Vic said to him that day. Something might have triggered memories or made him feel threatened.”
    Kincaid shrugged. ”I suppose that’s possible. But let’s go back to the poems. If we assume that the murderer was frightened by what Lydia revealed in them, we have to assume that the murderer had read them. Right?” He glanced at her. ”Then why wait until Lydia had turned in the manuscript to kill her?”
    ”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 streetlamps 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