anymore. Giving a gentle tug to Tess’s lead, he stepped out into the sunlight of Nathan’s back garden.
Nathan knelt at the edge of the knot bed, digging in the earth with a trowel. He looked up, smiling, as Kit and Tess came across the grass. “Hullo, Kit. Is this your dog, then?”
“Her name’s Tess,” said Kit, dropping to his knees beside him.
“She’s lovely,” said Nathan, scratching her rough coat and the pink insides of her ears. “Why don’t you let her have a run in the garden?” he suggested. “It’s secure enough.”
“What are you planting?” asked Kit as he unhooked Tess’s lead and watched her bound across the grass towards the robins feeding near the hedge. “They’re not very pretty.”
Nathan sat back on his heels, resting the trowel on his knee as he looked at the bedraggled row of herbs. “No, I suppose they’re not. I was ill, you see, and I dug them up. But my friend Adam came along afterwards and put them in water for me. They’d have died if he hadn’t.”
Kit frowned. “Why did you pull them up, if they weren’t dead?”
Nathan reached out and smoothed the soil round the last herb with the palm of his hand, then said, slowly, “I planted these for your mother. I thought that if I pulled them up, I wouldn’t miss her so much. But I was wrong. Sometimes it helps to remember.”
Kit stared at him with a flash of adult understanding. “You loved my mum, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I did.” Nathan watched him carefully. “Do you mind?”
“I don’t know,” said Kit, for his brief spasm of jealousy had been replaced by the thought that Nathan, at least, might understand how he felt. “No… I suppose not.” He looked again at the neat row of plants, then held out the plastic carrier bag. “I brought your books back.”
Nathan glanced at the bag but didn’t reach for it. After a moment, he said, “I want you to have them. We can talk about them when you come to visit. Will you come to see me?”
Kit watched Tess happily rooting about at the bottom of the garden, felt the heat from the midday sun soaking into his hair like warm honey, and for an instant, in that bright place, he felt his mother’s presence a little nearer.
He nodded.
CHAPTER
22
He wears
The ungathered blossom of quiet; stiller he
Than a deep well at noon, or lovers met;
Than sleep, or the heart after wrath. He is
The silence following great words of peace.
RUPERT BROOKE,
from a fragment of an elegy
found in his notebook
after his death
Kincaid and Gemma stood at the end of the bridge over the dike at Sutton Gault, the expanse of the East Anglian sky stretching gray and limitless above them. Below, the forensics team worked carefully in the soft ground at the water’s edge. They’d begun yesterday, under Adam Lamb’s direction, but the failing light had forced them to postpone until this morning.
“I’ve brought you some coffee,” said the local inspector, crossing the grass towards them with two steaming polystyrene cups. “Why don’t you go in and have some lunch while you wait?” He gestured over his shoulder at the neat pub tucked in the hollow of land below the road. “It’s early enough you might get in without a booking. Folks come all the way from London for the food here, believe it or not; it’s that good.”
“Some other time, thanks,” said Kincaid. “I think we’ll just wait here for now.” Coppers became callous enough over the finding of bodies—he couldn’t count the times he’d grabbed a take-away en route to a crime scene—but lingering over a posh lunch while the forensics lads dug for Verity Whitecliff’s bones didn’t seem right to him. It had become a personal matter.
As the inspector scrambled down the steep bank to rejoin the team, Gemma moved nearer to Kincaid. She’d wrapped her hands round the hot cup to warm them, for the wind that whipped along the top of the dike was vicious. “I keep thinking of what it must have been like for them that night, burying her. I’ve even dreamt of it.”
Kincaid glanced at her. She’d replaced the bloodstained scarf she’d used to tie Darcy’s hands with a new one in dull plum, and the color made her hair blaze in contrast. “It must have seemed a nightmare,” he said. “But all their suffering doesn’t excuse their silence.”
“No,” she answered softly, so that he had to bend his head to hear her against the wind. “But she didn’t go unmourned … and the truth will be told.” Frowning, she added, “I’m not sure I’d have Dame Margery’s strength.”
He thought of their visit to Margery Lester the previous afternoon. She’d received them in her dove gray drawing room, as impeccably dressed as when they’d seen her last, but she looked impossibly fragile, as though she’d aged years since that day a mere week ago in Ralph Peregrine’s office. Since then she had borne the news of her friend Iris Winslow’s brain tumor, as well as her son’s arrest for murder.
While the police had not found Kincaid’s missing case notes, they had discovered a small enameled box containing digoxin tablets in Darcy’s possession. When questioned, he claimed he carried them in case his mother should need them.
“Was your son in the habit of keeping your medication for you, Dame Margery?” Kincaid asked, when they’d refused her offer of tea or sherry.
“I have never asked him to do so,” she said carefully, disguising a tremble in her hands by folding them in her lap.
