The break room contained half a dozen teachers in various stages of correcting papers and drinking coffee. When Kincaid asked for Miss Pope, the woman sitting alone and unoccupied except for a coffee raised her head. A dishwater blonde with prominent roots, she was a little plump and a little overly made up. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been weeping.
She looked up at them uncertainly. “Yes, I’m Miss Pope. Can I help you?”
Kincaid introduced them and asked if there were somewhere they might talk alone.
“You’re from Scotland Yard? But what-I mean… Why me? What is this about?” She twisted her hands together, shredding the tissue she held.
“It won’t take long, Miss Pope,” Gemma reassured her. “We just have a few routine questions we’d like to ask you.”
“Well… I suppose it’s all right,” she said, frowning. “There’s an empty classroom just down the hall that we could use, but I’ve a class in five minutes.”
The man at the next table had been making little pretense of ignoring their conversation, and after glancing again from Kincaid to Gemma, Miss Pope said, “Shelley, would you take register for me if I’m a bit late?” She then led them down the corridor to an empty classroom.
Kincaid closed the door, shutting out the sound of the children’s last scramble for their rooms before the bell. “Miss Pope, did Vic McClellan come to see you last Tuesday afternoon?”
Elizabeth Pope’s mouth began to tremble and her eyes filled with tears. “I never meant any harm, honestly I didn’t. I told her I never meant to hurt poor Kit…” She pulled another bedraggled tissue from the sleeve of her ruffled blue dress and dabbed at her eyes.
“Do you mean the conversation Kit overheard?” asked Gemma, pulling a fresh tissue from her handbag and offering it.
Miss Pope gave her a grateful smile and blew her nose. “It’s just that I’ve an awful habit of running my mouth without thinking, and he’s such a lovely man… Dr. McClellan, that is, so good-looking, and always so charming when he came to the school. I didn’t see how she could let him go like that…”
“What exactly did Vic say to you?” asked Kincaid a little more gently, with an obvious effort to control his impatience.
“She was angry, of course. I couldn’t blame her. She said Kit was very distressed, and would I please…” Miss Pope winced and hesitated, but after a glance at Kincaid she went on. “She said the separation had been difficult enough for Kit as it was, and would I please not gossip about things that were none of my business. Then she said that no one ever knew the truth of a relationship except the people in it.” She’d begun wringing her hands again, and the tissue joined the remains of the others. “When I think that a few hours later she was dead, and that I should have upset her when she wasn’t feeling well… And oh, poor Kit. What’s to become of him now?”
“What do you mean, she wasn’t feeling well?” Kincaid asked quietly, but at his tone Miss Pope looked up and stilled her hands.
“She was pale. At first I thought it was because she was angry, but then after we’d talked she said she felt a bit under the weather. A headache, she said. And she was sweating, I remember that. I offered her some paracetemol, but she said she’d go home and have a cuppa.”
Kincaid looked at Gemma. “If we’d known she was already ill-”
His beeper went off, shrill in the empty classroom. Removing it from his belt, he glanced at the message. “Nathan Winter wants us to ring him right away.”
“It couldn’t have been Nathan Winter, do you see?” Kincaid pulled his cell phone from his pocket as they pushed through the school’s swinging front doors. “She must have been poisoned before she left work, not after she got home. And it can’t have been foxglove-the digitoxin in it acts too quickly.” He’d been transferring the number from his pager to his phone as he talked, and as they reached the car he pushed SEND.
“Nathan, it’s Duncan Kin-” He stopped, listening, then said, “Bloody hell. Can you stall him until we get there? Good man. Ten minutes.”
He disconnected and looked at Gemma. “Ian McClellan’s at the cottage, loading things into his car.”
CHAPTER 19
Love wakens love! I felt your hot wrist shiver,
And suddenly the mad victory I planned
Flashed real, in your burning bending head…
My conqueror’s blood was cool as a deep river
In shadow; and my heart beneath your hand
Quieter than a dead man on a bed.
RUPERT BROOKE,
from “Lust”
“It still doesn’t make sense,” said Kincaid as Gemma reversed the car from the school car park. “If it wasn’t digitoxin, it must have been digoxin. But the expected reaction time for digoxin is five to six hours. According to Laura, Vic showed no symptoms of illness when she left the English Faculty at half past two-and yet she died just after five o’clock. So it was too slow for digitoxin, and too quick for digoxin.” With part of his mind he heard himself speaking, as if Vic’s death had been something removed from him, a statistic, a simple problem to be solved-yet he knew his detachment was essential if he were going to find her killer. He would have to hold on to it… for now.
Glancing at Gemma, he found her scowling at the rear end of the farm tractor creeping along ahead of them. They were not going to make record time to Grantchester. He thought a moment, then opened his notebook and checked a number. Dr. Winstead, the pathologist at High Wycombe General Hospital, had proved helpful to Kincaid on several occasions since they’d met during an earlier investigation, and if Kincaid remembered correctly, he was something of an expert on poisons.
“Hullo, Winnie?” he said when the direct number rang through. “Duncan Kincaid here.”
After responding to Winstead’s cheerful greeting, Kincaid gave him a rough outline of the case, adding, “Do you know of anything that might potentiate digoxin, making it act more quickly than expected?” He rolled his eyes as Winstead began a lecture on the metabolic breakdown of poisons derived from digitalis. “Wait, Winnie, I don’t have much time. Just give me a list, okay? Reserpine… quinidine… succinylcholine…” he repeated as he wrote in his notebook. “Laxative abuse… calcium or potassium loss due to diuretics-” Giving Gemma a startled look, he said, “Winnie, what kind of diuretic? Does it matter if it was natural or pharmaceutical? She drank diuretic herbal teas.” He listened a moment. “Could someone have put the tablets in her tea? How many would it have taken? She had no history of heart trouble, but Lydia did. Right. Right. Okay, thanks, Winnie. I’ll let you know.”
“What?” Gemma asked as he rang off. Just then the road widened and she zipped round the tractor. “Bloody nuisance,” she muttered.
“Winnie said the tea might have potentiated the digoxin, although he doesn’t know if it would have disguised the taste of the tablets. The tablets are small, though, and very soluble. Lydia would have needed very few, as she was already sensitized to the medication-Vic maybe twice that.”
“So it probably would’ve tasted bitter,” said Gemma, but Kincaid didn’t answer. They’d crossed the motorway and would be in Grantchester within minutes. He supposed he hadn’t really expected Ian McClellan to come back… and he supposed he’d expected to feel relieved if McClellan did… surely that would be best for Kit, after all, to stay where he’d been happy and secure…
And it was all absolute bollocks, Kincaid thought as they reached the High Street junction. What he really felt at the prospect of confronting Ian McClellan was a deep and simmering anger, and the thought of McClellan taking Kit out of his life brought with it a frightening sense of loss.