“Thought I heard someone come in, and I didn’t recognize the tread.” She smiled and came through into the hall, and he saw that she was plump and pleasant-looking, with wavy brown hair and glasses that slid down the bridge of her nose. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“Um, I was hoping I might catch Dr. McClellan before she left for the day,” said Kincaid, wondering a bit late about the advisability of intruding unannounced into Vic’s life.
“Oh, too bad. You’ve just missed her by a few minutes. Kit had a soccer match this afternoon and she does like to be there if she can.” The woman held her hand out. “I’m Laura Miller, by the way, the department secretary. Can I give her a message?”
“Duncan Kincaid,” he said, shaking her hand. “Just tell her I dropped by, if you wouldn’t-” He paused as a door slammed above, then came the sound of quick, heavy footsteps on the stairs.
“Damn it, Laura, I can’t find that bloody fax anywhere. Are you sure it’s not gone out with the rubbish?” A man-large, leonine, and flushed with the high color that derives from quick temper-followed the voice round the last landing of the stairs. “You know what liberties Iris takes with other people’s papers, it’s a wonder one ever finds any-” He stopped in midtirade as he reached the bottom of the stairs and saw Kincaid. “Oh, hullo. Sorry, sorry, didn’t know anyone else was about. You’d think we had pixies, the way things disappear in this place.” A lock of the thick gray-brown hair flopped over his brow as he gave Kincaid an apologetic grin. “And poor Laura bears the brunt of our frustration, I’m afraid.”
The secretary gave him a sharp look, but answered easily. “For once it is on Dr. Winslow’s desk, Dr. Eliot. But since it concerned the entire department…” She glanced at Kincaid, then amended whatever she’d been about to say. “I’ll just get it for you. I’m sure she won’t mind you taking care of it.”
With a smile for Kincaid, she slipped back into the office on the left and returned a moment later with a flimsy sheet of fax paper. “Iris Winslow is our Head of Department,” she explained. “We’ve been in a bit of a bother over a change in some of the University exam procedures. Dr. Eliot”-she nodded at the large man by way of introduction-“teaches the history of literary criticism, among other things. Dr. Eliot, this is Mr. Kincaid. He was asking after Vic.”
Kincaid felt the level of interest rise in the room as Eliot eyed him speculatively.
“You don’t say. Is it anything we can help with?” The urgent fax apparently forgotten, Eliot slipped a hand inside his jacket, resting it against his plum-colored knitted waistcoat in a vaguely Napoleonic gesture.
The waistcoat, Kincaid thought at second glance, looked to be cashmere, and the jacket Harris Tweed. Eliot and the secretary watched him expectantly, smiles hovering, eyes bright, and he had the sudden feeling he’d wandered into a tank of barracuda. “No, thanks. Please don’t trouble yourselves over it. I’ll just give her a ring.” He nodded and went out.
He walked slowly down West Road until he reached Queens’ Road again. The crossing light was red and he looked about him as he waited, hands in pockets. The way to the train station lay to his right, across the river. The carriages would be jam-packed this time of day, stuffy with the remnants of the afternoon’s warmth, and he found the prospect of fighting the crowds unappealing. He cursed himself doubly for not bringing the car-as well as avoiding rush hour on British rail, it would have allowed him to drive to Grantchester and wait for Vic at her cottage.
But even though he couldn’t fulfill his main objective, he thought, shrugging, why should he hurry back to London? Since Sunday, Gemma had treated him with studied politeness at work and had been conveniently busy afterwards, and he had no reason to suppose this evening would be any different.
The light flashed yellow and he crossed with the flow of pedestrian traffic, then paused on the opposite pavement. With sudden decisiveness he turned left, taking the path that meandered along the Backs. He could see King’s College Chapel across the river, and as he walked, the clouds parted and the last of the sun’s rays gilded the tips of the spires. Did one take such sights for granted, he wondered, if one saw them every day?
Had Lydia Brooke grown accustomed to them as she went about Cambridge on her business, her head full of lectures and love? And most likely in reverse order, he added to himself, smiling, then he sobered as he thought of the report he’d read that afternoon. He understood Alec Byrne’s defensiveness, but the case had an unfinished feel, and he thought if it had been his he would not have been satisfied with such a pat solution. Had anyone tried to discover what she’d been doing that day? Or whom she’d seen, and what she might have said to them? And if she’d been gardening, as seemed obvious, had there been anything unusual about that day’s tasks? Had she done what looked to be a final planting, for instance, or some sort of grand tidying up, as if she were taking her leave of the garden?
The business about the porch light nagged at him as well. Had anyone checked to see if it had been out for some time, or had it just coincidentally expired on the night of Lydia’s death?
Kincaid stopped and consulted his pocket map of Cambridge. To his right a lane led to an arched bridge over the river, and Vic’s college lay just the other side. He took the turning, and when he reached the summit of the bridge he paused for a moment and leaned on the railing, gazing downstream at the willows, whose drooping fronds reached out to touch their own reflections. The tightly furled pale yellow buds dotting the branches might have been painted there by Seurat, and the tethered punts provided contrast, solid blocks of green and umber, gently rocking.
Across the river a sturdy redbrick building stood guard over a walled garden. It would be All Saints’ Fellows Garden, he supposed, thinking it unlikely that the dons would allow mere students the best view.
As he turned to continue on his way, a bicycle whizzed soundlessly by him, nearly clipping his shoulder. He went on more warily after that, staying close to the railing and checking behind him for oncoming cyclists. The lane narrowed the other side of the bridge, with the walls of All Saints’ rising on the right and those of Trinity College on the left. At the first All Saints’ gate he stopped and peered into the manicured quad curiously. Didn’t Lydia’s file mention that the Nathan Winter who discovered her body was a don at All Saints’? And hadn’t Vic mentioned a friend called Nathan? Cambridge was indeed a small world, he thought, if the two were the same, and he wondered if Vic had met him in the course of her college duties, or as a result of her research on Lydia Brooke. Winter was a botanist, according to the file, and he vaguely remembered Vic referring to Nathan when they’d talked about her garden. It seemed a bit odd, now that he thought of it, that Lydia had named a botanist as her literary executor.
He shrugged and walked on, rounding the corner into Trinity Lane. And yet there was something odder still, he thought as he went over his conversation with Vic. He could only recall her mentioning one marriage, and that quite early in Lydia’s life. Why would Lydia have left everything to a man from whom she’d been divorced for almost twenty years?
He hugged the wall as another cluster of cyclists shot by, then he stumbled into a bicycle left standing outside a shop. Bloody bikes, he thought. You could hardly move for them in this town.
Newnham
16 November 1961
Darling Mother,
Your birthday gift was much appreciated, and was just enough to purchase a good secondhand bike. It has a few dents in the fenders and scrapes in the paint, but those just add character in my opinion. You’d be proud of me-I’ve got quite good already, and cycle my way round almost as easily as if I were navigating the lanes at home on Auntie Nan’s old clunker. I was sure you wouldn’t mind my spending the money before my actual birthday, as the bike was so sorely needed.