Dreaming of the Bones

to set the stage for her apparent suicide. Music, and candles, and the poem in the typewriter.”
    ”Why Rupert Brooke, though?” asked Gemma. ”Why not fake a suicide note?”
    ”My guess is he got carried away with his own sense of drama. It was misdirection again, making it look as though she still grieved over Morgan Ashby.”
    ”What I don’t understand,” said Gemma, frowning, ”is why the others protected him after Verity’s death.”
    ”They must have felt culpable, guilt by association. And they had a strong sense of group identity. No one could tell what Darcy had done without betraying the others.” Kincaid paused as he overtook a slow-moving lorry. ”But I think that’s come to an end. Only Nathan and Adam are left, and Nathan has nothing to lose. You’d better ring Alec Byrne. Ask him if quinine showed up in Vic’s routine toxicology scan, then tell him he’d better meet us in Grant—”
    ”The poems,” Gemma said, smacking her palm against her forehead. ”Nathan only read the poems for the first time this afternoon, just as we did. And if we figured out what happened to Lydia and Vic, how much easier will it have been for him?”

    Then in some garden hushed from wind... How had it gone? Warm in a sunset’s afterglow... After that had come something about lovers, but Nathan couldn’t quite bring it back. Rupert had been big on gardens and sunsets and moonlight, he remembered, and Lydia had loved the dreamlike quality of those poems.
    He might be dreaming now, he thought as he watched the deep green shadows moving under the stillness of the trees. The air had a shimmering translucence to it, almost as if it were underwater, and it smelled of springs long past.
    But he felt the cold steel weight of his father’s old shotgun across his knees, and he knew himself to be awake, sitting in the dusk at the bottom of his garden. When it was full dark he would go.
    His feet would remember the path... the leaf-thick path ... the way they had gone more than thirty years ago... He had tried for so long to forget what happened that night, buried it in his love for Jean and for his daughters, his work, his gardens. And yet he had come back here, to this house by the river, and his reckoning.
    How had he not seen what monster they’d created with their silence? First Lydia , then Vic... Dear God, his blindness had condemned her as surely as if his own hand had slipped the poison into her drink.
    Nathan rose and stood by the gate a moment, one hand on the latch, the other clasped loosely round the worn grip of the gun. The poets wait...for her coming... Lydia had not allowed herself to forget; she’d kept it sharp and clear, then distilled it into words. The poem had been intended for him, for Adam, for Darcy. When he’d read it that afternoon, after Kincaid and his sergeant left, he’d known that as surely as if Lydia had spoken to him. Was that why she’d rung him the day she died? Had she waited until the girls were grown and gone, and Jean dead, so that he would be free of his need to protect them?
    Unlatching the gate, he began to pick his way across the pasture in the light of the rising moon... the old pulse quickens in the dappled light... There had been moonlight that night. And the girls wore white, floating dresses, they always wore white... No, that was another time, another memory. On this night, Daphne had not come; she’d been called away unexpectedly, and her absence had spared her.
    The river path felt smooth and familiar beneath his feet. He needed the familiarity now, even welcomed the memories as tinder to his purpose. They’d bicycled from Cambridge , he and Lydia and Adam. Lydia wore a gypsy dress, and dangling earrings. She’d pinched a rose from the college garden and fastened it in her dark hair. She’d bought shirts for him and Adam at a jumble sale, white with flowing sleeves, and when they put them on she kissed them and called them her lords. It was Darcy who waited for Verity and brought her in his mother’s car. He’d fancied her, and they’d laughed about it.
    To his right as he passed he saw the gleam of the Orchard’s gate, and behind it the gnarled silhouettes of the apple trees. White blossom falling, the air heavy with wasps... They sat in the low canvas chairs, eating tea and cake and discussing the merits of free verse... tawny — haired Rupert, stuffing cake in his mouth, laughing as the crumbs spilled... No, that was only an old photo, it was