Dreaming of the Bones

was, Byrne had informed him zealously, the only nonsmoking pub in Britain , at least as far as he knew.
    ”No, the Brooke case was Bill Fitzgerald’s, one of his last before he took his peptic ulcer and his pension off to a bungalow in Spain . He sends us a postcard occasionally.” Byrne raised his pint to Kincaid. ”Cheers. May we someday do the same.”
    ”I’ll drink to that.” For the first time in years, Kincaid had a brief vision of his honeymoon with Vic in Majorca . Sun and rocks and scarlet bougainvillea climbing on stuccoed walls... He shook himself back to reality. ”About Lydia Brooke—did you know her when you were at Cambridge ?”
    Byrne shook his head. ”No, she left a few years before I came up, but I heard the occasional odd thing about her. I remember the ease well enough, though. Just about this time of year, wasn’t it, five years ago? She died from an overdose of the medication she took for her heart arrhythmia, leaving everything to her ex-husband. It seemed a fairly obvious suicide, and it at least got her a mention on the local news. You know—’tragic death of award-winning Cambridge poet’—that sort of thing.”
    Kincaid pulled his notebook from his breast pocket and flipped it open, then drank off a bit of his pint. He’d taken the bench, putting the wall at his back, and from where he sat he could see the day’s specials carefully lettered on the chalkboard over the bar. ”Mushroom stroganoff,” it read, and ”Courgette flan.” It followed, he supposed, that a smoke-free pub would also be vegetarian. Glancing at the notebook, he said, ”I understand that Brooke had a history of more violent suicide attempts.”
    ”She had a reputation as a bit of a hysteric, if I remember correctly. All part of the artistic persona.”
    ”What crap,” Kincaid said. ”In my experience, artists are more likely to be driven like furies, and are a hell of a lot more disciplined than your average accountant.” He sat back and lifted his pint once more. ”Do you remember the details of the previous attempts?”
    Byrne shook his head. ”Not really, except that they seem to have been rather elaborately staged, as was this one.”
    ”Yes... except there were one or two things about this one that seemed a bit odd to me. Her clothes, for instance.”
    ”Clothes? I don’t remember that there was anything unusual about them.”
    ”That’s the point. Lydia Brooke seems to have had a heightened sense of the dramatic, I will give you that.” Kincaid smiled at Byrne, then glanced again at his notes. ”According to her file, there was music repeating on the stereo when her body was discovered, Elgar’s cello concerto, to be exact. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the piece at all, but I’d say it’s probably the most wrenchingly sad music I’ve ever heard.”
    ”I know the piece,” Byrne said. He closed his eyes for a moment, then hummed a few bars, keeping time with his finger. ”And I’d be inclined to agree with you. It’s quite powerful stuff.”
    ”So picture this,” Kincaid continued. ”She lay on the sofa in her study, arms crossed on her breast, a candle burning on the table beside her. In her typewriter there was a fragment of a poem about death, and the music playing.” He pushed his pint aside and leaned forwards. ”But she was wearing khaki trousers and a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Eat Organic Food.’ She had dirt under her fingernails. For Christ’s sake, Alec, she’d been gardening. Are we to surmise that Lydia Brooke had a particularly difficult encounter with her herbaceous border and decided to end it all?”
    Byrne tapped his long fingers on the tabletop. ”I take your point. After she went to so much trouble to set the scene, you’d think she’d have worn something more suitable to the occasion. But I think you’re stretching it a bit— suicides aren’t always so logical.”
    Kincaid shrugged. ”Perhaps. It just struck me, that’s all. I don’t suppose anyone checked to see if she’d left her gardening tools out?”
    ”Haven’t the foggiest. I wouldn’t be willing to wager on it.”
    ”Do you remember the statement of the man who found the body?”
    ”No,” Byrne answered, beginning to sound a bit exasperated. ”I can’t say that I ever actually read the file. I only know what was circulating in the department at the time.”
    Consulting his notes again, Kincaid said, ”His name was Nathan Winter. He was a friend,