to lunch, then had supervisions myself the rest of the afternoon.” Looking up at Kincaid, he added, without his usual air of supercilious amusement, “I’m sorry. I suppose that’s in the way of a condolence. Sometimes one finds it difficult to say these things.”
“Old habits?” asked Kincaid.
“Indeed.”
The door to Vic’s office was shut, but not, Kincaid discovered, locked. He opened it slowly and went in, feeling a sense of trespass that he had not felt in her office at the cottage. He wished suddenly that he’d seen her here, in her element, doing what she loved—that he’d shared this part of her life in however small a way.
The fine hand of the local police was in evidence. The desk had been stripped bare, and its emptied drawers hung open like gaping mouths. They had left the books and the personal photographs atop the bookshelves. Those of Kit he had expected—baby pictures, a first bicycle, awkward school photos with his hair slicked into submission, a fairly recent print of him handling a punt pole with great concentration.
There was no trace of Ian. It was as if Vic had not hesitated to erase him from her life here, where his absence would not further distress Kit.
Something familiar caught his eye as he turned away—a snapshot propped behind one of the frames.
It was his parents’ garden, in full summer bloom. He and Vic sat sprawled in the grass, laughing, his mother’s spaniel half in Vic’s lap. They had been married just a few months, and he had taken her to Cheshire for a visit.
He looked away, out of the window. Vic’s office lay across the corridor from Darcy Eliot’s, and her window faced south, towards Newnham. Lydia’s college. Vic, he thought, would have liked that.
Kincaid found Laura Miller waiting for him at her desk.
“You look a bit battered,” she said. “I put the kettle on when I saw Darcy’s supervision go up. I thought you might need a cuppa.”
He sank into the now familiar visitor’s chair and loosened the knot on his tie. “Thanks.”
Laura disappeared into a small pantry and returned a moment later with two mismatched mugs. “Milk and sugar all right?”
“Lovely.” Wrapping his hands round the mug’s warmth, he said quietly, “Are you sure Dr. Winslow’s all right? She seems to be feeling a bit off-color.”
Laura made a face as she scorched her tongue on the hot tea. “I’ve been nagging at her the last two days to see someone about her headache, but she’s that stubborn.” She glanced at Dr. Winslow’s door and lowered her voice further. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been worried about her since Dr. Whitecliff’s death last June. It seemed to take the starch out of her, if you know what I mean, and she hasn’t been the same since. We were always teasing her about trying one of Vic’s teas—” She broke off, looking stricken, and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, damn and blast,” she muttered, scrabbling in her desk drawer for a tissue.
“Tell me about Vic’s teas,” Kincaid said when she’d blown her nose.
Laura smiled and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “She drank this awful stuff—lovage, which is some sort of herbal diuretic, because she had trouble with … you know… water retention.”
Kincaid thought her hesitation rather quaintly old-fashioned. “I think I get the picture,” he said, grinning.
“Well, we teased her mercilessly because we could always tell what time of the month it was by what kind of tea she was drinking. I suppose it all sounds a bit silly now.”
“Did she drink any of the special tea on Tuesday?”
“I don’t know,” said Laura, her eyes widening. “You don’t think—”
I don’t think anything at this point,” said Kincaid reassuringly. “I’m just curious.”
“Vic left early, so we didn’t have tea together that day. We usually do—did—round the middle of the afternoon.”
“Could she have had some on her own?”
“She kept an electric kettle in her office. She might have had a cup with her lunch, if not earlier.”
“She didn’t go out for her lunch?” Kincaid asked.
Laura shook her head. “We’d planned to go out that day, but that morning she said she’d changed her mind. She needed to work through lunch because she meant to leave early.”
Kincaid felt a pulse of excitement, and an irrational urge to free his hands. He found a bare spot on Laura’s desk for his cup. “Where did she go? When did you last see her?”
“I’m sure it wasn’t anything,” said Laura, distressed. “I got the impression she was a bit miffed about something that had happened at Kit’s school, that’s all.”
“She didn’t say what?”
“Vic didn’t like to talk about things until she’d worked them out herself. You know, like with Ian. She never said a word about having problems, then one day she walked in and said, ‘Oh, by the way, Ian’s moved out.’ You could have knocked me over with a feather.”
Kincaid remembered that trait of Vic’s all too well, except in his case it had been she who had moved out. “Well, maybe we can come at this from the other end,” he said. “What time did she leave here?”
Laura frowned and stared into her cup for a moment, then looked up. “Half past two. I remember because Darcy’s supervision was late.”
“Matthews?”
She smiled. “Matthews. Poor boy.”
