Free Dreaming of the Bones by Deborah Crombie

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 comer 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.
    I can’t imagine Cambridge without bicycles. They fly by, the students’ black gowns flapping like crows’ wings, or stand riderless, clumped together in mute and inebriated herds. Even if undergraduates were allowed cars, there would be no place to park them, so I suppose the system works rather well.
    Thanks to the bike I venture a bit farther afield each day, so that I am beginning to feel I own this place, with its narrow twisty streets and forests of chimney pots. I seem to find a fascinating little shop round every new comer. I gaze at knitting wools, and jumpers, and cookware, but I