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 street lamps glowed yellow, haloed by the moisture in the air.
“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 digoxin. She could easily have known about Vic’s teas, and next to Ralph, she’s the most likely person to have seen the manuscript.” Frowning, he shook his head. “But we’ve said it’s not likely Margery killed Verity—and it doesn’t fit the poem.”
“What if…” Gemma tried to collect the feather wisps of ideas floating in her mind into something cohesive. She thought of Margery, elegant, gracious, successful—what could possibly drive a woman like that to commit murder? Slowly, she said, “What if Margery killed Lydia and Vic to protect Verity’s killer?”
“You’re saying Margery killed them to protect Darcy?” Kincaid glanced at her, his brow creased in concentration.
She shook her head. “No. It’s easier than that. Everything we’ve said about Margery holds true for Darcy as well. Access to his mother’s medication would have been easy—all he had to do was offer to pick it up at the chemist for her.”
They’d reached the motorway. As Gemma stared out the window, the damp surface of the tarmac glistened like oil, reflecting light back into her eyes. “Margery doesn’t drink gin and tonic, but Darcy does,” she said, remembering his easy hospitality and the dish of cut limes in his flat. “And he would have known about the quinine—”
“And keeps a bottle of gin in his desk,” said Kincaid. “We were wrong about the tea. He dissolved the tablets in a gin and tonic, counting on the tonic’s bitterness to disguise the taste, and the quinine to increase the poison’s effectiveness.”
“But how did he get Vic to drink it? She wasn’t in the habit of drinking at lunch.”
“She can’t have learned the truth about him, or she’d never have accepted the drink. But he must have feared she was close. I think he made her an unprecedented apology for his behavior. Vic would have felt she couldn’t refuse a peace offering. And once he’d got her to drink the poison, he waited, then cycled to the cottage when he thought he’d given it enough time.”
“Kit’s shadow at the bottom of the garden,” said Gemma. “Darcy took a terrible risk.”
“Oh, he’s quite capable of risk. Vic must have still been alive when he searched the cottage, then afterwards he went straight to his mother’s dinner party as if nothing had happened.” Kincaid’s voice was flat, and a look at his profile in the intermittent light from passing headlamps made Gemma feel uneasy. “Darcy’s objections to Vic’s biography of Lydia had nothing to do with his aesthetic principles and everything to do with keeping the past buried,” he continued. “When he couldn’t do that, he tried misdirection. It was he who put us on to Lydia’s relationship with Daphne, remember?”
“But what about Lydia’s manuscript?” asked Gemma. “How would he have known about the poems?”
“Perhaps Lydia had said enough to make him suspicious. Writing the poems may have been Lydia’s way of working herself up to a public denouncement. Remember, she’d rung Nathan that day, saying she wanted to talk to him about something.”
“Or maybe Darcy ran across it lying about in Ralph’s office, quite by chance, and couldn’t resist having a look,” said Gemma. “The poems would have screamed betrayal to him, so he removed the most damaging ones.”
“And once he’d done that, he’d have realized that Lydia had to be silenced. Either way, access to the manuscript would have been easy enough,” Kincaid said. “I’d guess Darcy’s always had carte blanche at the Peregrine Press, considering his mother’s position, and it’s not as if the manuscripts were kept in a vault.”
“Easier than that, even,” said Gemma, remembering the Peregrine logo she’d seen on the spine of one of Darcy’s books in his flat, “if Ralph published his books as well. He might have been in and out of the office working on one of his own manuscripts.”
“He removed the poems after assuring himself that Ralph hadn’t read them, then paid an unexpected visit to Lydia,” Kincaid said with certainty. “It must have seemed foolproof to him, and it very nearly was. He unscrewed the porch light so that he wouldn’t be seen leaving, then offered Lydia a gin and tonic. What could be more welcome after a warm day of working in the garden? Perhaps he left for a while, then came back 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
