“No!” Daphne stood up, gripping the edge of her desk. “You don’t understand. Morgan was a raging paranoid. He imagined things, and if Lydia told him anything it was because he frightened her. They were poison for each other, and he drove her-”
“Why did she marry him, then?” asked Kincaid, and Gemma thought of Morgan thirty years ago, dark and dangerously handsome. The intensity of his need for her must have seemed flattering at first, and she doubted Lydia would have had the judgment to see what might lie behind it.
“I don’t know,” said Daphne. “I never knew. All I can tell you is that something happened that summer. Lydia was never the same after that.”
“Morgan says it was you who changed Lydia-drove her over the edge-you and the others.” Kincaid leaned forwards and jabbed his finger at her for emphasis. “She slept with all of you-you and Adam and Nathan and Darcy-and the strain of it made her ill.”
“We’ve seen Darcy, too, and he confirms the story,” said Gemma, gently. “You may be right about Morgan’s paranoia, but we have no reason not to believe Darcy when he says you and Lydia were lovers. Why should he lie about it?”
Daphne stared down at her white-knuckled hands, and after a moment she let go of the desk and walked slowly to the window. With her back to them, she said, “Darcy is a right bastard. What would he know about lovers-or love-when he never understood anything but his own gratification? And it was so much more complicated than that.” She fell silent and stood looking out into the manicured school grounds.
“More complicated than what?” Gemma prompted.
“Lydia…” Daphne shook her head. “I loved Lydia from the very first moment I saw her, running up the staircase at Newnham with her arms full of books, laughing. She seemed so much more alive, more intense than other people. You thought if you could just get close enough to her, some of that specialness would rub off on you, like fairy dust.
“But there was a vulnerability about her, too, and I suppose that’s what made her a good victim for Morgan.” Turning to face them, Daphne continued, “I’ll tell you what you want to know because I’m tired of hiding things. It’s gone on far too long…” She closed her eyes for a moment, then began on the exhalation of a breath. “We’d experimented a bit at college, but it was just that for Lydia-experimenting. It wasn’t until she came back to Cambridge after her suicide attempt that we began to have a serious affair, but even then she had a different agenda. She was only seeking comfort, emotional support. She’d decided she couldn’t risk another relationship with a man, and I was safe.” Daphne’s smile held little humor.
“Even at college she’d only really enjoyed it when the boys were watching, and so she was more or less doing me a favor in return for stability and companionship.”
“And you knew it,” said Gemma.
“Oh, I tried to fool myself at first, but you can’t keep that up for very long. And as Lydia found her footing again she began to find me… tiresome. Her work was becoming quite successful and she was moving in much more sophisticated circles than her old friends could offer.” Daphne paused, staring past them with an unfocused gaze.
“So she broke off your relationship, and you started planning your revenge,” said Kincaid.
Daphne gave him a startled look, then tilted her head back and laughed aloud. “Don’t be absurd, Mr. Kincaid. It was I who broke things off between us. I didn’t care for feeling like a burden to anyone, so I left Lydia.” More soberly, she added, “But I didn’t foresee the consequences.”
“What happened?” asked Gemma, with a quelling look at Kincaid.
“Lydia was utterly and absolutely devastated.” Daphne paused, but there was no tension in it. She leaned back against the windowsill, her arms folded loosely across her chest, as if the telling of her story had released her. “She wrote to me, saying she drove away everyone who mattered to her because she hated herself. The letter came in the post after she’d crashed her car into a tree outside Grantchester.”
This had been the second suicide attempt, thought Gemma, the one for which Vic had found no explanation. “And after that?”
“She recovered slowly, and I supported her. I stopped asking for more than she could give me, and we became friends in a different way. Those were the best years of my life, from that time until Lydia died.” The certainty and the complete lack of self-pity in Daphne’s words made Gemma feel chilled.
“And nothing else happened before she died?” asked Kincaid. “No rows, no odd behavior?”
Daphne shook her head. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Kincaid, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. And I certainly didn’t kill Lydia to protect my reputation, if that’s what you’re getting at. Nor your Dr. McClellan. I’d been considering early retirement even before Lydia’s death. That’s why I bought the weekend cottage, you see, so that Lydia and I could work together, her on her poetry, I on my novel.”
Pausing, Daphne seemed to come to some decision. “All weekend I thought about what you said, that Lydia may have been murdered. I don’t know who would have done such a thing, and I hate the idea of someone taking her life before she was ready to let it go. But it’s also a sort of release, because it lets me believe that I wasn’t wrong about her happiness, about what we had together those last years. And if that’s the case, I owe it to her to finish what we began. I’m going to write that novel, and I had better get started. I think I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that Lydia won’t be there to listen to it.”
“Who besides Daphne really grieved for Lydia?” asked Gemma as they walked down the school’s curving drive towards the car park. “I mean the Lydia of the present, as she was when she died, rather than the Lydia of the past.” It was a bright, blowy day, and the wind whipped her skirt, wrapping it round her legs. She had to stop and brush a wayward strand of hair from her face before she could see to unlock the car.
“Vic,” Kincaid said when they had sealed themselves in the car’s calm interior. “I think Vic grieved for her.”
Gemma glanced at him as she fastened her seat belt. He’d been unusually silent all morning, and she didn’t know if worry over Kit or the case occupied him the most. “You don’t really think Daphne Morris had anything to do with Lydia’s death, do you? Or Vic’s?”
After a moment, he shook his head. “What motive could she have had, other than concealment? And then why reveal anything to us? We had no proof. They must have been very careful to leave no evidence of their relationship. I don’t think Vic even guessed.”
Gemma turned the key in the ignition and listened to the Escort’s engine cough and sputter its way to life. “What now?” she asked. “We seem to have come to a bit of a dead end.”
“I think we need to have a word with the very tactless Miss Pope,” said Kincaid, his face grim. “I rang Laura last night. She said the boys’ school is in Comberton, just the other side of the motorway from Grantchester.”
After a brief consultation of the map, they were once again circling the Newnham roundabout. But this time they stayed on the Barton Road, bypassing the Grantchester cutoff, and had soon run through Barton and into Comberton. The village had none of the charm of Grantchester but seemed rather a suburban enclave, with its quiet clusters of semidetached houses. It looked, thought Gemma, a nice place for children.
They found the secondary school without difficulty, a large, sprawling building just off the main road. An inquiry at the office sent them to the staff room, where they were told they might be lucky enough to catch Miss Pope between classes.
The corridors were filled with uniformed children changing classes. They parted round Gemma and Kincaid as if the adults were of no more interest than stones, and their voices echoed from the walls and ceilings like cannon fire. Gemma thought of Kit here a week ago, as silly and raucous as the boys she saw now, an ordinary child thinking of exam papers and football.