Dreaming of the Bones

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?”

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 tearoom 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