“Have you ever known him to carry your medication?” Kincaid said, narrowing it down.
“No. No, I have not. It’s not like nitroglycerin, Mr. Kincaid, to be used in the event of pain. Digoxin is taken on a regular basis.” She spoke calmly, evenly, and yet Kincaid knew she must be aware of the implications.
“Dame Margery, have you noticed any discrepancies in your prescriptions lately?”
She looked away. “Yes. I had to have my last bottle replaced several days earlier than usual.”
Gemma made a small movement of surprise.
Margery turned to her. “Did you think I would lie, Miss James? That would be pointless—the chemist’s records will tell you the same thing—and it would be wrong. I will not deliberately discredit my son, nor will I protect him.” Her hands clenched in a spasm, and she looked at them in unexpected appeal. “Did I fail as a mother? Would my son have turned out differently if I had put him before my work?”
“Dame Margery—”
She shook her head. “You can’t answer that, Mr. Kincaid. No one can. It was unfair of me to ask.” Gazing through the French doors at the early roses in her garden, she said quietly, “He was a lovely child. But even then he liked his own way.”
After a moment, Margery unclasped her hands and fixed her direct gaze on them. She sat as still and straight as when they had come in, and in her eyes he saw a formidable determination. “I’m going to finish Victoria McClellan’s book,” she said. “I will not allow her work to be wasted … regardless of the personal… difficulty. She and Lydia deserve to be heard. And Verity…” For the first time, her voice wavered. “I owe a debt to Verity I can never repay.”
Gemma’s touch brought Kincaid back to the present. “Will you tell Kit about Lydia and Verity?” she asked.
Nodding, he said, “I suppose I must. He deserves to know why his mother died.”
“Duncan.” To his surprise, Gemma slipped her arm through his as if she didn’t mind who saw. “What are you going to do about Kit?”
He looked out into the flat distance, saw endless changing possibilities he could neither predict nor control. He could only feel his way, action by action, circumstance by circumstance, into new and uncharted territory. “I’ll ring him every day if I can. See him as often as possible. Then, when he’s had time to get used to me …”
“You’ll tell him the truth?”
“Yes. No secrets. And we’ll go from there.”
Gemma tightened her grip on his arm. After a moment, she said, “It frightens me a bit. It will change things between us. For better or worse, I don’t know. Maybe it will just be different.”
He grinned at her. “It scares the hell out of me.”
A shout came from below. The inspector beckoned to them, and they began the precarious climb down the bank. When they reached the bottom, they picked their way to a dry tussock near the excavation site and squatted to see what the forensics specialist held in his gloved hands.
“You were bang on,” he said, looking pleased with himself. “Human scapula. And there’s more. But the decomposition’s quite advanced. It’s going to be a job getting her out.”
The fragment of bone looked too small, too delicate to be human, thought Kincaid, and the leaching soil had stained it the color of old ivory.
Gemma reached out, her fingers hovering over the bone as if she might caress it. She looked up at him. “It seems Lydia was the voice of vengeance, after all.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An Agatha and Macavity nominee, Deborah Crombie received international acclaim for her first four mysteries,
