Dreaming of the Bones

by Crombie, Deborah

• ISBN13: 9780553579314
• ISBN10: 0553579312
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: Bantam

Summary

After twelve years, the last person Scotland Yard Superintendent Duncan Kincaid expects to hear from is his ex-wife Victoria. But this is no social call. In her biographical research on troubled poet Lydia Brooke, Vic's uncovered reasons to believe Lydia's death five years ago was not suicide. Much to Kincaid's surprise--and the unease of his partner and lover, Sergeant Gemma James--he finds he can't refuse Vic's request to look into the long-closed case. The police report raises questions, but not enough to reopen the investigation--until a second death occurs, this one clearly murder. Now Duncan and Gemma must sift through a tangle of relationships, secrets, and lies to find not just a killer, but a secret which will change their own lives forever.

Excerpts

Where Beauty and Beauty meet
All naked, fair to fair,
The earth is crying-sweet,
And scattering bright the air,
Eddying, dizzying, closing round,
With soft and drunken laughter;
Veiling all that may befall
After--after


The post slid through the letter box, cascading onto the tile floor of  the entry hall with a sound like the wind rustling through bamboo. Lydia  Brooke heard the sound from the breakfast room, where she sat with her  hands wrapped round her teacup. With her morning tea long gone cold, she  lingered, unable to choose between the small actions that would decide the  direction of her day.

Through the French doors at the far end of the room, she could see  chaffinches pecking at the ground beneath the yellow blaze of forsythia,  and in her mind she tried to put the picture into words. It was habit,  almost as automatic as breathing, this search for pattern, meter, cadence,  but today it eluded her. Closing her eyes, she tilted her face up towards  the weak March sun slanting through the windows set high in the vaulted  room.

She and Morgan had used his small inheritance to add this combination  kitchen/dining area to the Victorian terraced house. It jutted into the  back garden, all glass and clean lines and pale wood, a monument to failed  hopes. The plans they'd had to modernize the rest of the house had somehow  never materialized. The plumbing still leaked, the rose-patterned  wallpaper peeled delicately from the walls in the entry hall, the cracks  in the plasterwork spread like aging veins, the radiator hissed and  rumbled like some subterranean beast. Lydia had grown used to the defects,  had come to find an almost perverse sort of comfort in them. It meant she  was coping, getting on with things, and that was, after all, what was  expected of one, even when the day stretching ahead seemed an  eternity.

She pushed away her cold cup and rose, tightening the belt of her  dressing gown around her slight body as she padded barefoot towards the  front of the house. The tile felt gritty beneath her feet and she curled  her toes as she knelt to gather the post. One envelope outweighed the  rest, and the serviceable brown paper bore her solicitor's return address.  She dropped the other letters in the basket on the hall table and ran her  thumb carefully under the envelope's seal as she walked towards the back  of the house.

Freed from its wrapping, the thick sheaf of papers unfolded in her hands  and the words leapt out at her: IN THE MATTER OF THE MARRIAGE OF LYDIA LOVELACE BROOKE ASHBY AND MORGAN GABRIEL ASHBY...She  reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped as her brain picked out words from among the legalese.  FINAL DECREE...PETITION OF DIVORCE  GRANTED THIS DAY...The pages slipped from her numb fingers, and it seemed to her that they drifted downwards, cradled on the air like feathers.

She had known it would come, had even thought herself prepared. Now she  saw her hollow bravado with a sudden sickening clarity--her shell of  acceptance had been fragile as the skin of algae on a pond.

After a long moment she began to climb the stairs slowly, her calves and  thighs aching with the burden of each step. When she reached the first  floor, she held on to the wall like an unsteady drunk as she made her way  to the bathroom.

Shivering, shallow-breathed, she closed and locked the door. The motions  required a deliberate concentration; her hands still felt oddly  disconnected from her body. The bath taps next; she adjusted the  temperature with the same care. Tepid--she'd read somewhere that the water  should be tepid--and salts, yes, of course, she added the bath salts, now  the water would be warm and saline, satin as blood.

Satisfied, she stood, and the deep blue silk of the dressing gown puddled  at her feet. She stepped in and sank into the water, Aphrodite returning  from whence she came, razor in hand.

* * *

Victoria McClellan lifted her hands from the keyboard, took a breath, and  shook herself. What in hell had just happened to her? She was a  biographer, for Christ's sake, not a novelist, and she'd never experienced  anything like this, certainly never written anything like this. She had  felt the water slide against her skin, had known the seductive terror of  the razor.

She shivered. It was all absolute rubbish, of course. The whole passage  would have to go. It was full of supposition, conjecture, and the loss of  objectivity that was fatal to a good biography. Swiftly, she blocked the  text, then hesitated with her finger poised over the delete key. And yet .  . . maybe the more rational light of morning would reveal something  salvageable. Rubbing her stinging eyes, she tried to focus on the clock  above her desk. Almost midnight. The central heating in her drafty  Cambridgeshire cottage had shut off almost an hour ago and she suddenly  realized she was achingly cold. She flexed her stiff fingers and looked  about her, seeking reassurance in familiarity.

The small room overflowed with the flotsam of Lydia Brooke's life, and  Vic, tidy by nature, sometimes felt powerless before the onslaught of  paper--letters, journals, photographs, manuscript pages, and her own index  cards--all of which defied organization. But biography was an unavoidably  messy job, and Brooke had seemed a biographer's dream, tailor-made to  advance Vic's position in the English Faculty. A poet whose brilliance was  surpassed only by the havoc of a personal life strewn with difficult  relationships and frequent suicide attempts, Brooke survived the  late-sixties episode in the bath for more than twenty years. Then, having  completed her finest work, she died quietly from an overdose of heart  medication.

The fact that Brooke had died just five years before allowed Vic access  to Lydia's friends and colleagues as well as her papers. And while Vic had  expected to be fascinated, she hadn't been prepared for Lydia to come  alive. She'd seen Lydia's house--left to Morgan Ashby, the former husband,  who'd leased it to a doctor with four small children. Littered with Legos  and hobbyhorses, it had seemed to Vic to retain some indefinable imprint  of Lydia's personality--yet even that odd phenomenon provided no  explanation for what had begun to seem perilously close to possession.

Lydia Lovelace Brooke Ashby . . . Vic repeated the names in her  mind, then added her own with an ironic smile. Victoria Potts  Kincaid McClellan. Not as lyrical as Lydia's, but if you left  off the Potts it had a bit of elegance. She hadn't thought much about her  own divorce in the past few years--but perhaps her recent marital  difficulties had caused her to identify so strongly with Lydia's pain.  Recent marital difficulties, bloody hell, she thought with a sudden  flash of anger. Couldn't she be honest even with herself? She'd been left,  abandoned, just as Lydia had been left by Morgan Ashby, but at least Lydia  had known where Morgan was--and Lydia hadn't a child to consider, she  added as she heard the creak of Kit's bedroom door.

"Mum?" he called softly from the top of the stairs. Since Ian's  disappearance, Kit had begun checking on her, as if afraid she might  vanish, too. And he'd been having nightmares. She'd heard him whimper in  his sleep, but when she questioned him about it he'd merely shaken his  head in stoic pride.

"Be up in a tic. Go back to sleep, love." The old house groaned,  responding to his footsteps, then seemed to settle itself to sleep again.  With a sigh Vic turned back to the computer and pulled her hair from her  face. If she didn't stop she wouldn't be able to get up for her early  tutorial, but she couldn't seem to let go of that last image of Lydia.  Something was nagging at her, something that didn't quite fit, and then  with a feeling of quiet surprise she realized what it was, and what she  must do about it.

Now. Tonight. Before she lost her nerve.

Pulling a London telephone book from the shelf above her desk, she looked  up the number and wrote it down, deliberately, conscious of breathing in  and out through her nose, conscious of her heart beating. She picked up  the phone and dialed.


Gemma James put down the pen and wiggled her fingers, then raised her  hand to her mouth to cover a yawn. She'd never thought she'd get her  report finished, and now the tension flowed from her muscles. It had been  a hard day, at the end of a difficult case, yet she felt a surprising  surge of contentment. She sat curled at one end of Duncan Kincaid's sofa  while he occupied the other. He'd shed his jacket, unbuttoned his collar,  pulled down the knot on his tie, and he wrote with his legs stretched out,  feet rather precariously balanced on the coffee table between the empty  containers from the Chinese take-away.

Sid took up all the intervening sofa space, stretched on his back, eyes  half-slitted, an advert for feline contentment. Gemma reached out to  scratch the cat's exposed stomach, and at her movement Kincaid looked up  and smiled. "Finished, love?" he asked, and when she nodded he added,  "You'd think I'd learn not to nitpick. You always beat me."

She grinned. "It's calculated. Can't let you get the upper hand too  often." Yawning again, she glanced at her watch. "Oh, Lord, is that the  time? I must go." She swung her feet to the floor and slid them into her  shoes.

Kincaid put his papers on the coffee table, gently deposited Sid on the  floor, and slid over next to Gemma. "Don't be daft. Hazel's not expecting  you, and you'll not get any good mum awards for waking Toby just to carry  him home in the middle of the night." With his right hand he began  kneading Gemma's back, just below the shoulder blades. "You've got knots  again."

"Ouch . . . Mmmm . . . That's not fair." Gemma gave a halfhearted protest  as she turned slightly away from him, allowing him better access to the  tender spot.

"Of course it is." He scooted a bit closer and moved his hand to the back  of her neck. "You can go first thing in the morning, give Toby his  breakfast. And in the meantime--" The telephone rang and Kincaid froze,  fingers resting lightly on Gemma's shoulder. "Bloody hell."

Gemma groaned. "Oh, no. Not another one, not tonight. Surely someone else  can take it." But she reached for her handbag and made sure her beeper was  switched on.

"Might as well know the worst, I suppose." With a sigh Kincaid pushed  himself up from the sofa and went to the kitchen. Gemma heard him say  brusquely, "Kincaid," after he lifted the cordless phone from its cradle,  then with puzzled intonation, "Yes? Hullo?"

Wrong number, thought Gemma, sinking back into the cushions. But Kincaid  came into the sitting room, phone still held to his ear, his brow creased  in a frown.

"Yes," he said, then, "No, that's quite all right. I was just surprised.  It has been a long time," he added, a touch of irony in his voice.  He walked to the balcony door and pulled aside the curtain, looking into  the night as he listened. Gemma could see the tension in the line of his  back. "Yes, I'm well, thanks. But I don't see how I can possibly help you.  If it's a police matter, you should call your local--" He listened once  more, the pause longer this time. Gemma sat forwards, a tingle of  apprehension running through her body.

"All right," he said finally, giving in to some entreaty. "Right. Hang  on." Coming back to the coffee table, he picked up his notepad and  scribbled something Gemma couldn't decipher upside down. "Right. On  Sunday, then. Good-bye." He pressed the disconnect button and stood  looking at Gemma, phone in hand as if he didn't know what to do with  it.

Gemma could contain herself no longer. "Who was it?"

Kincaid raised his eyebrow and gave her a lopsided smile. "My  ex-wife."

---

Excerpted from Dreaming of the Bones by Deborah Crombie
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.