The visitor was Superintendent Nies. He was waiting in the lounge, three empty pint glasses on a table nearby and a cardboard carton at his feet. He was standing, not sitting, a man wary and watchful and never relaxed. His lips thinned at the sight of Lynley, and his nostrils pinched as if he smelled something foul. He was contempt personified.
“You wanted everything, Inspector,” he snapped. “Here it is.” He gave the carton a sharp kick, not so much to move it as to direct the other man’s attention to it.
No one stirred. It was as if the raw hatred behind Nies’s words immobilised them all. Next to her, Barbara felt Lynley’s tension tightening his muscles like a whipcord. His face, however, was without expression as he took the measure of the other man.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Nies persisted nastily. He picked up the carton, dumping its contents onto the carpet. “I expect, when you ask for everything, that you do mean everything, Inspector. Something about you tells me you’re a man of your word. Or were you hoping that I’d send it all with someone else so you might avoid having any further chats with me?”
Lynley’s eyes dropped to the objects on the floor. A woman’s clothing, by their appearance.
“Perhaps you’ve had too much to drink,” he suggested.
Nies took a step forward. Blood rushed to his face. “You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to see me giving it over to drink, in my cups with flaming regret for having you in the nick for a few days over Davenport’s death. Not exactly the digs his precious lordship was used to, were they?”
Barbara had never recognised so acutely one man’s need to strike another or the atavistic savagery that often drives that need to completion. She saw it in Nies now, in his posture, in his hands with their talon-like fi ngers halfway drawn into a fist, in the cords that stood out on his neck. What she couldn’t understand was Lynley’s reaction. After the initial flash of tension, he’d become unnaturally unperturbed. That seemed to be the source of Nies’s increasing rage.
“Have you solved this case, Inspector?” Nies sneered. “Made any arrests? No, of course not. Not without having all the facts. So let me give you a few and save you a little time. Roberta Teys killed her father. She chopped off his miserable head, sat herself down, and waited to be discovered. And no bloody evidence you can dig out of the blue is ever going to prove this case otherwise. Not for Kerridge. Not for Webberly. Not for anyone. But you have a fine time digging for it, laddie. You’ll get nothing more from me. Now, get out of my way.”
Nies shoved past them, flung open the outer door, and stormed to his car. It roared into life. He ground the gears viciously and was gone.
Lynley looked at the two women. Stepha was very pale, Havers was stoic, but both clearly expected some kind of response from him. He found he couldn’t make one. Whatever devils were driving Nies’s behaviour, he didn’t care to discuss them. He longed to hang labels on the man: paranoid, psychopath, madman came to mind. But he knew too well what it felt like to be brought to the breaking point through sheer endeavour and exhaustion during a case. Lynley could see that Nies was a hair’s-breadth from breaking under the stress of the Scotland Yard scrutiny of his competence. So if it gave the man even a moment’s relief to rail wildly about their run-in fi ve years ago, he was more than happy to give Nies free rein.
“Would you get the Teys file from my room, Sergeant?” he asked Havers. “You’ll find it on the chest of drawers.”
Havers gawked at him. “Sir, that man just-”
“It’s on the chest of drawers,” Lynley repeated. He crossed the room to the heap of garments on the floor, picked up the dress, and laid it like a collapsed tent across the couch. It was a pale pastel print with a white sailor collar and long sleeves that ended in upturned white cuffs.
The left sleeve of the garment was heavily stained with a solid mass of brown. Another solid mass formed an irregular pool from thighs to knees. The bottom of the skirt was speckled with it. Blood.
He fingered the material and recognised the texture without looking to see if a label revealed it: a delicate lawn.
Shoes had been part of the package as well: large black high-heeled pumps with mud encrusted along the ridge where left sole met shoe body. These too were flecked with the same brown substance. Petticoat and underclothes completed the lot.
“That’s her church dress,” Stepha Odell said and added tonelessly, “She had two. One for winter and one for spring.”
“Her best dress?” Lynley asked.
“As far as I know.”
He was beginning to understand the villagers’ stubborn refusal to believe that the girl had committed the crime. With each new piece of information, it made less and less sense. Havers returned with the file, her face without expression. Before he began leafi ng through it, he was convinced that the information he wanted wouldn’t be there. It wasn’t.
“Damn the man,” Lynley muttered fruitlessly and looked at Havers. “He’s given us no analysis of the stains.”
“He’d have to have done them, wouldn’t he?” Havers asked.
“He’s done them. But he has no intention of giving them to us. Not if that would make our job easier.” Lynley uttered an oath beneath his breath and swept the garments back into their cardboard container.
“What’s to do?” Havers asked.
Lynley knew the answer. He needed St. James: the mechanical precision of his highly trained mind; the quick, clean certainty of his finely wrought skill. He needed a laboratory where tests could be made and a forensic expert he could trust who would make them. It was a maddening, circular sort of problem because in any direction the trail curved unquestionably back to St. James.
He regarded the open carton at his feet and gave himself the ephemeral pleasure of cursing the man from Richmond. Webberly was wrong, he thought. I’m the last person he should have involved in this. Nies reads the London condemnation too clearly. He sees in me his single serious mistake.
He considered his options. He could turn the case over to another DI: MacPherson could certainly come sailing into Keldale and have the matter taken care of within two days. But MacPherson was caught up in the Ripper murders. It would be inconceivable to move him from the one case where his expertise was so desperately needed simply because Nies couldn’t come to terms with his past. He could telephone Kerridge in Newby Wiske. Kerridge, after all, was Nies’s superior offi cer. But to have Kerridge involved, chomping at the bit to make up for the Romanivs in any way he could, was even more absurd. Besides, Kerridge didn’t have the paperwork, the results of the lab tests, the depositions. All he had was an overwhelming hatred of Nies and an inability to get along with the man. The entire situation was an irritating, howling, political maelstrom of thwarted ambition, error, and revenge. He was sick of it.
A glass was placed before him on the table. He looked up into Stepha’s serene eyes. “A bit of Odell’s is called for, I think.”
He laughed shortly. “Sergeant,” he said, “would you care to indulge?”
“No, sir,” she replied, and just when he thought she would go on in her former, exasperating I’m-on-duty manner, she added, “but I could do with a smoke, if you don’t mind.”
He handed her his gold case and silver lighter. “Have as many as you like.”
She lit her cigarette. “Got all dressed up to chop off Dad’s head? It doesn’t make sense.”
“The dress does,” Stepha said.
“Why?”
“Because it was Sunday. She was ready for church.”
Lynley and Havers looked up, realising simultaneously the import of Stephia’s words. “But Teys was killed on Saturday night.” Havers said.
“So Roberta must have got up as usual on Sunday morning, put her church clothes on, and waited for her father.” Lynley eyed the dress heaped in the carton. “He wasn’t in the house, so she probably assumed he was somewhere on the farm. She wouldn’t worry, of course, because he’d be back in time to take her to church. He probably never missed church in his life. But when he didn’t show up, she began to get worried. She went out to look for him.”
“And she found him in the barn,” Havers concluded. “But the blood on her dress-how do you think it came to be there?”
“I’d guess she was in shock. She must have picked up the body and cradled it in her lap.” “But he had no head! How could she-” Lynley went on. “She lowered the body back down to the floor and, still in shock, sat there until Father Hart came and found her.” “But then why say she killed him?” “She never said that,” Lynley replied. “What do you mean?” “What she said was, ‘I did it. I’m not sorry.’”
Lynley’s voice held a note of decision. “That sounds like a confession to me.” “Not necessarily.” He ran his fi ngers round the edges of the stain on the dress and tested the spacing of the spatters on the skirt. “But it does sound like something.”
“What?” “That Roberta knows quite well who murdered her father.”
Lynley awoke with a jolt. Early morning light filtered into the room in delicate bands that streaked across the floor to the bed. A chill breeze blew back the curtains and carried upon it the pleasant sounds of waking birds and the distant cries of sheep. But none of this touched his awareness. He lay in the bed and knew only depression, overwhelming desperation, and the burning of desire. He longed to turn on his side and fi nd her there, her wealth of hair spread across the bedclothes, her eyes closed in sleep. He longed to arouse her to wakefulness, his mouth and tongue feeling the subtle, familiar changes in her body that betrayed her desire.
He flung back the covers. Madness, he thought. He began pulling on clothing mindlessly, furiously, any article that first came to hand. Escape was the exigency.
He grabbed an Aran sweater and ran from the room, thundering down the stairs and out into the street. There, he finally noticed the time. It was half past six.
A heavy mist lay on the dale, swirling delicately round the edges of buildings and blanketing the river. To his right the high street was shuttered, abandoned. Not even the greengrocer was stirring his boxes out onto the pavement. Sinji’s windows were darkened, the Wesleyan chapel was barred, and the tea room looked back at him with blank disinterest.
He walked to the bridge, wasted fi ve minutes restlessly tossing pebbles into the river, and was finally distracted by the sight of the church.
On its hillock, St. Catherine’s looked peacefully down upon the village, the very exorcist he needed for the demons of his past. He began to walk towards it.
It was a proud little church. Surrounded by trees and an ancient, crumbling graveyard, it lifted its splendid Norman exterior to the sky. Its apse housed a semicircle of stained glass windows, while its bell tower at the opposite end played host to a whispering band of doves. For a moment he watched them rustling at the edges of the roof, then he walked up the gravel path to the lych gate. He entered, and the peace of the graveyard settled round him.
Idly, he began to wander among the graves, looking at tombstones made barely legible by the ravages of time. The yard was overgrown with weeds and grass, dampened by morning mist. Gravestones bent into thick vegetation. Moss flourished on surfaces that never saw sun, and trees sheltered fi nal resting places of people long forgotten.
A curious group of twisting Italian cypresses arched over a few toppled tombstones some distance from the church. Their contortions were mystifying, oddly humanoid, as if they were attempting to protect the graves beneath them. Intrigued, he walked in their direction and saw her.
How completely like her to have rolled up the legs of her faded blue jeans, to have removed her shoes and plunged barefoot into the tall, damp growth so as to capture the graves in the best angle and light. How like her as well to be utterly oblivious to her surroundings: oblivious to the streak of mud that snaked from ankle to calf, to the torn crimson leaf that had somehow become tangled in her hair, to the fact that he stood less than ten yards away and drank in her every movement and longed quite hopelessly for her to be again what she once had been in his life.
The low ground fog hid and revealed in alternate patches. The early sunlight weakly dappled the stones. An inquisitive bird watched with bright eyes from a grave nearby. He was only dimly aware of this, but he knew that with her camera she would capture it all.
He looked for St. James. Surely the man would be sitting somewhere nearby, fondly watching his wife work. But he was nowhere in sight. She was very much alone.
He felt immediately as if the church had betrayed him with its early promise of comfort and peace. It’s no good, Deb, he thought as he watched her. Nothing makes it go away. I want you to leave him. Betray him. Come back to me. It’s where you belong.
She looked up, brushed her hair off her face, and saw him. He knew from her expression that he might as well have said everything aloud. She read it at once.
“Oh, Tommy.”
Of course she wouldn’t pretend, wouldn’t fill the awkward moment with amusing chatter that, Helen-like, would serve to get them through the encounter. Instead she bit her lip, looking very much as if he had struck her, and turned back to her tripod, making unnecessary adjustments.
He walked to her side. “I’m so sorry,” he said. She continued to fumble uselessly with her equipment, her head bent, her hair hiding her face. “I can’t get past it. I try to see my way clear, but it’s just no good.” Her face was averted. She seemed to be examining the pattern of the hills. “I tell myself that it’s ended the right way for us all, but I don’t believe that. I still want you, Deb.”
She turned to him then, her face quite white, her eyes gleaming with tears. “You can’t. You’ve got to let that go.”
“My mind accepts that, but nothing else does.” A tear escaped and descended her cheek. He put out his hand to wipe it away but remembered himself and dropped his arm to his side. “I woke up this morning so desperate to make love with you again that I thought if I didn’t get out of the room at once I should begin clawing at the walls in pure, adolescent frustration. I thought the church would be a balm to me. What I didn’t think was that you would be wandering round its graveyard at dawn.” He looked at her equipment. “What are you doing here? Where’s Simon?”
“He’s still at the hall. I…I woke up early and came out to see the village.”
It didn’t ring true. “Is he ill?” he asked sharply.
She scanned the branches of the cypresses. A shallowness in Simon’s breathing had immediately awakened her shortly before six. He was lying so still that for one horrifying moment she thought he was dying. He was drawing in each breath carefully, and she knew all at once that his only thought had been not to awaken her. But when she reached for his hand, his fingers closed bruisingly round her own. “Let me get your medicine,” she whispered, and had done so, and then had watched his determined face as he battled to be master of the pain. “Can you…for an hour, my love?” It was the part of his life that brooked no companion. It was the part of his life she could never share. She had left him.
“He had…there was some pain this morning.”
Lynley felt the full impact of Deborah’s words. He understood so well everything that they implied. “Christ, there’s no escaping it, is there?” he asked bitterly. “Even that’s part of the miserable account.”
“No!” Raw horror tore her voice. “Don’t say that! Don’t you ever! Don’t you do that to yourself! It isn’t your fault!” Having spoken so quickly, really without thinking of the impression that her words would have upon Lynley, it was suddenly as if she had said too much- far more than she had intended to say-and she went back to fumbling with her camera, taking it apart this time, detaching lens from body and body from tripod, putting everything away.
He watched her. Her movements were jerky, like an old-time motion picture run at the wrong speed. Perhaps sensing this and realising what her discomfort revealed, she stopped what she was doing, her head bent, one hand at her eyes. Her hair was caught in a shaft of sunlight. It was the colour of autumn. Summer’s death.
“Is he still at the hall? Did you leave him there, Deb?” It wasn’t that he wanted to know but that she needed to tell him. Even now he couldn’t let that need go unanswered.
“He wanted…it was the pain. He doesn’t want me to see it. He thinks he’s protecting me if he makes me leave.” She looked up at the sky, as if for some sort of sign. The delicate muscles worked in her throat. “Being cut out like this. It’s so hard. I hate it.”
He understood. “That’s because you love him.”
She stared at him for a moment before she replied. “I do. I do love him, Tommy. He’s half of myself. He’s part of my soul.” She put a tentative hand on his arm, a mere whisper of a touch. “I want you to find someone to love you like that. It’s what you need. It’s what you deserve. But I…I can’t be that someone for you. I don’t even want to be.”
His face blanched at her words. His spirit despaired at the fi nality behind them. Seeking composure, he found a distraction in the grave at their feet. “Is this the source of your morning’s inspiration?” he asked lightly.
“Yes.” She deliberately matched her tone to his. “I’ve heard so much about the baby in the abbey that I thought I’d have a peek at its grave.”
“‘As Flame to Smoke,’” he read. “Bizarre epitaph for a child.”
“I’m rather attached to Shakespeare,” a thin voice said behind them. They swung around. Father Hart, looking like a spiritual gnome in his cassock and surplice, stood on the gravel path a few feet away, hands folded demurely over his stomach. He’d managed to come upon them noiselessly, like an apparition taking its form from the mist.
“Left to my own devices I always think Shakespeare’s just the thing for a grave. Timeless. Poetic. He gives life and death meaning.” He patted the pockets of his cassock and brought out a packet of Dunhills, lighting one absently and pinching the match between his fingers before pocketing it. It was a dream-like movement, as if he were unaware that he was doing it at all.
Lynley noticed the yellow pallour of his skin and the rheumy quality of his eyes. “This is Mrs. St. James, Father Hart,” he said gently. “She’s taking photographs of your most famous grave.”
Father Hart stirred from his reverie. “Most famous…?” Puzzled, he looked from man to woman before his eyes fell on the grave and clouded. His cigarette burned, ignored, between his stained fingers. “Oh, yes. I see.” He frowned. “What a horrible thing to have done to an infant, leaving it out naked in the cold to die. I needed special permission to bury the poor thing here.”
“Special permission?”
“She was unbaptized. But I call her Marina.” He blinked quickly, moving on to other things. “But if it’s famous graves that you’ve come to see, Mrs. St. James, then what you really want is the crypt.”
“Sounds like something from Edgar Allan Poe,” Lynley remarked.
“Not at all. It’s a holy place.” The priest dropped his cigarette to the path and crushed it out. He stooped unselfconsciously for the extinguished butt, put it into his pocket, and began to walk in the direction of the church. Lynley picked up Deborah’s camera equipment, and they followed.
“It’s the burial place of St. Cedd,” Father Hart was saying. “Do come in. I was just getting ready for daily Mass but I’ll show it to you first.” He unlocked the doors of the church with an enormous key and motioned them inside. “Weekday Mass is a bit of a bygone now. No one much bothers unless it’s a Sunday. William Teys was my only consistent daily attendant, and with William gone…well, I’ve found myself more often than not saying Mass in an empty church during the week.”
“He was a close friend of yours, wasn’t he?” Lynley asked.
The priest’s hand wavered over the light switch. “He was…like a son.”
“Did he ever talk to you about the trouble he had sleeping? About his need for sleeping pills?”
The hand wavered again. The priest hesitated. It was too long a pause, Lynley decided, and adjusted his position in the dim light to see the old man’s face more clearly. His eyes were on the light switch but his lips moved as if in prayer.
“Are you all right, Father Hart?”
“I…yes, fine. I just…so often the memory of him.” The priest pulled himself up with an effort, like someone drawing the scattered pieces of a puzzle into one disjointed pile. “William was a good man, Inspector, but a troubled spirit. He…he never spoke to me about having difficulty sleeping, but it doesn’t surprise me at all to hear it.”
“Why?”
“Because unlike so many troubled souls who drown themselves in alcohol or escape their difficulties some other way, William always faced them head on and did the best he could. He was strong and decent, but his burdens were tremendous.”
“Burdens like Tessa leaving and Gillian running away?”
On the second name, the priest’s eyes closed. He swallowed with difficulty: it was a rasping sound. “Tessa hurt him. But Gillian devastated him. He was never the same once she’d gone.”
“What was she like?”
“She…she was an angel, Inspector. Sunshine.” The shaking hand moved quickly to the lights and switched them on, and the priest gestured towards the church. “Well. What do you think of it?”
It was decidedly not the expected interior of a village church. Village churches tend to be small, square, purely functional affairs with an absence of colour, line, or beauty. This was none of that. Whoever had built it had cathedrals in mind, for two great pillars at the west end had been intended to bear more tremendous weight than that of St. Catherine’s roof.
“Ah, so you’ve noticed,” Father Hart murmured, following the direction of Lynley’s gaze from pillars to apse. “This was to have been the site of the abbey; St. Catherine’s was to have been the great abbey church. But a conflict among the monks resulted in the other location by Keldale Hall. It was a miracle.”
“A miracle?” Deborah asked.
“A real miracle. If they’d built the abbey here, where the remains of St. Cedd are, it would all have been destroyed in the time of Henry VIII. Can you imagine destroying the very church where St. Cedd lay buried?” The priest’s voice managed to convey his complete revulsion. “No, it was an act of God that brought about the disagreement among the monks. And since the foundation for this church was already laid and the crypt complete, there was no reason to disinter the body of the saint. So they left him here with just a small chapel.” He moved with painful slowness to a stone stairway that led from the main aisle down into darkness. “It’s just this way,” he beckoned them.
The crypt was a second tiny church deep within the main church of St. Catherine’s. It was a vault, arched in Norman style, and pillared with columns that had meagre ornamentation. At its far end a simple stone altar was adorned with two candles and a crucifi x, and along its sides stones from an earlier version of the church-crossheads and cross shafts and pieces from vesicular windows-lay preserved for posterity. It was a damp and musty place, poorly lit and smelling of loam. Green mould clung to the walls.
Deborah shivered. “Poor man. It’s so cold here. One would think he might prefer to be buried somewhere in the sun.”
“He’s safer here,” the priest answered. He moved reverently to the altar rail, knelt, and spent the next few moments in meditation.
They watched him. His lips moved and then he paused for a moment as if in communion with an unknown god. His prayer completed, he smiled angelically and got to his feet.
“I speak to him daily,” Father Hart whispered, “because we owe him everything.”
“Why is that?” Lynley asked.
“He saved us. The village, the church, the life of Catholicism here in Keldale.” As he spoke, the priest’s face began to glow.
Lynley thought fleetingly of Montressor and restrained himself from looking for the mortar and bricks. “The man himself or the relics?” he asked.
“The man, his presence, his relics, all of it.” The priest flung out his arms and encompassed the crypt, and his voice rose in zealous jubilation. “He gave them courage to keep their faith, Inspector, to remain true to Rome during the terrible days of the Reformation. The priests hid here then. The stairway was covered with a false floor, and the village priests remained in hiding for years. But the saint was with them all the time, and St. Catherine’s never fell to the Protestants.” There were tears in his eyes. He fumbled for his handkerchief. “You…I’m…please excuse me. When I talk about Cedd…to be so privileged to have his relics here. To be in communion with him. I’m not quite sure you could understand.”
To be on a first-name basis with an early Christian saint was obviously too much for the old man. Lynley sought a diversion. “The confessionals above look like Elizabethan carvings,” he said kindly. “Are they?”
The man wiped his eyes, cleared his throat, and gave them a shaky smile. “Yes. They weren’t originally intended for confessionals. That’s why they have such a secular theme. One doesn’t generally expect to see young men and women entwined in dance on the wood carving in a church, but they’re lovely, aren’t they? I think the light in that part of the church is too poor for the penitents to see the doors clearly. I expect some of them think it’s a depiction of the Hebrews left on their own while Moses went up to Sinai.”
“What does it depict?” Deborah asked as they followed the little priest up the stairs and into the larger church once again.
“A pagan bacchanal, I’m afraid,” he replied. He smiled apologetically as he said it, bid them good morning, and disappeared through a carved door near the altar.
They watched it close behind him. “What an odd little man. How do you know him, Tommy?”
Lynley followed Deborah out of the church into the light. “He brought us all the information on the case. He found the body.” He told her briefly about the murder, and she listened as she always had, her soft green eyes never moving from his face.
“Nies!” she cried when he had completed the tale. “How dreadful for you! Tommy, how completely unfair!”
It was like her, he thought, to cut to the quick of the matter, to see beneath the surface to the issue that plagued him at the heart of the case.
“Webberly thought my presence might make him more cooperative, God knows how,” he said drily. “Unfortunately, I seem to be having the opposite effect on the man.”
“But how awful for you! After what Nies put you through in Richmond, why did they assign you to this case? Couldn’t you have turned it down?”
He smiled at her white-faced indignation. “We’re not usually given that option, Deb. May I drive you back to the hall?”
She responded in an instant. “Oh no, you don’t need to. I’ve-”
“Of course. I wasn’t thinking.” Lynley set down her camera case and bleakly watched the doves grooming and settling themselves on the bell tower of the church. Her hand touched his arm.
“It isn’t that,” she said gently. “I’ve a car just over there. You probably didn’t notice it.”
Now he saw the blue Escort parked under a chestnut that was blanketing the ground with crisp, autumn leaves. He picked up her case and carried it to the car. She followed some paces behind.
She unlocked the boot and watched as he put the case inside. She took more time than was necessary to arrange it in a safe travelling position for the short mile back to the hall. And then, because it could no longer be avoided, she looked at him.
He was watching her, making a passionate study of her features as if she were about to vanish forever and all he would have left was the image in his mind.
“I remember the flat in Paddington,” he said. “Making love to you there in the afternoon.”
“I haven’t forgotten that, Tommy.”
Her voice was tender. For some reason that did nothing but hurt him further. He looked away. “Will you tell him you saw me?”
“Of course I will.”
“And what we talked about? Will you tell him of that?”
“Simon knows how you feel. He’s your friend. So am I.”
“I don’t want your friendship, Deborah,” he said.
“I know. But I hope you will someday. It’ll be there when you do.”
He felt her fingers on his arm again. They tightened, then loosened in farewell. She opened the car door, slipped inside, and was gone.
Alone, he walked back towards the lodge, feeling the cloak of desolation settle more firmly round his shoulders. He had just reached the Odell house when the garden door opened and a little figure hurtled determinedly down the steps. She was followed moments later by her duck.
“You wait here, Dougal!” Bridie shouted. “Mummy put your new food in the shed yesterday.”
The duck, unable to navigate the steps anyway, sat patiently waiting as the child tugged open the shed door and disappeared inside. She was back in a moment, lugging a large sack behind her. Lynley noticed that she wore a school uniform, but it was badly rumpled and not particularly clean.
“Hello, Bridie,” he called.
Her head darted up. Her hair, he noticed, had been managed somewhat more expertly since yesterday’s fiasco. He wondered who had done it.
“Got to feed Dougal,” she said. “Got to go to school today as well. I hate school.”
He joined her in the yard. The duck watched his approach warily, one brown eye on him and the other on the promised breakfast. Bridie poured a gargantuan portion onto the ground and the duck flapped his wings eagerly.
“Okay, Dougal, here you go,” Bridie said. She lifted the bird lovingly from the steps and placed him on the damp ground, watching fondly as he plunged headfirst into the food. “He likes breakfast best,” she confided to Lynley, taking an accustomed place on the top step. She rested her chin on her knees and gazed adoringly at the mallard. Lynley joined her on the step.
“You’ve fixed your hair quite nicely,” he commented. “Did Sinji do it for you?”
She shook her head, eyes still on duck. “Nope. Aunt Stepha did it.”
“Did she? She did a very nice job.”
“She’s good at stuff like that,” Bridie acknowledged in a tone that indicated there were other things that Aunt Stepha was not at all good at. “But now I have to go to school. Mummy wouldn’t let me go yesterday. She said it was ‘too humiliating for words.’” Bridie tossed her head scornfully. “It’s my hair, not hers,” she added, practically.
“Well, mothers have a way of taking things a bit personally. Haven’t you noticed?”
“She could’ve taken it the way Aunt Stepha did. She just laughed when she saw me.” She hopped off the steps and filled a shallow pan with water. “Here, Dougal,” she called. The duck ignored her. There was a chance the food might be taken away if he did not eat it all as fast as he could. Dougal was a duck who never took chances. Water could wait. Bridie rejoined Lynley. Companionably, they watched as the duck gorged himself. Bridie sighed. She was inspecting the scuffed tops of her shoes and she rubbed at them ineffectually with a dirty finger. “Don’t know why I have to go to school anyway. William never did.”
“Never?”
“Well…not after he was twelve years old. If Mummy’d married William I wouldn’t’ve had to go to school. Bobba didn’t go.”
“Ever?”
Bridie adjusted her information. “William never made her go after she was sixteen. I don’t know what I’ll do if I have t’ wait till I’m sixteen. Mummy’ll make me go. She wants me to go to university, but I don’t want to.”
“What would you rather do?”
“Take care of Dougal.”
“Ah. Not that he doesn’t look like the picture of complete health, Bridie, but ducks don’t live forever. It’s always nice to have something to fall back on.”
“I can always help Aunt Stepha.”
“At the lodge?”
She nodded. Dougal had finished his breakfast and was now beak deep into the water pan. “I tell Mummy that, but it’s no use. ‘I don’t want you spending your life at that lodge.’” She did a disconcertingly fair imitation of Olivia Odell’s distracted voice. She shook her head darkly. “If William and Mummy had married, it would all be different. I could leave school and do all my learning at home. William was awfully clever. He could have taught me. He would have. I know it.”
“How do you know it?”
“’Cause he always would read to me and Dougal.” The duck, hearing his name, waddled contentedly back to them in his peculiar, lopsided fashion. “Mostly Bible stuff, though.” Bridie polished one shoe on the back of her sock. “I don’t much like the Bible. Old Testament especially. William said it was because I didn’t understand it, and he told Mummy I ought to have religious ’structions. He was real nice and explained stories to me, but I didn’t understand ’em very well. It’s mostly ’cause no one ever got in trouble for their lies.”
“How’s that?” Lynley sought fruitlessly through his own limited religious instruction for successful biblical liars.
“Everybody was always lying with other people. Least, that’s what the stories said. And no one ever got told it was wrong.”
“Ah. Yes. Lying.” Lynley studied the mallard, who was examining his shoelaces with a knowing beak. “Well, things are a bit symbolic in the Bible,” he said breezily. “What else did you read?”
“Nothing. Just the Bible. I think that’s all William and Bobba ever read. I tried to like it, but I didn’t. I didn’t tell William that ’cause he was trying to be nice, and I didn’t want to be rude. I think he was trying to get to know me,” she added wisely. “’Cause if he married Mummy, I’d be round all the time.”
“Did you want him to marry your mummy?”
She scooped the bird up and placed it on the step between them. With a level, dispassionate look at Lynley, Dougal began grooming his shining feathers.
“Daddy read to me,” Bridie said in answer. Her voice was a shade lower and her concentration on her shoe tops was total. “And then he went away.”
“Went away?” Lynley wondered if this was a euphemism for his death.
“He went away one day.” Bridie rested her cheek on her knee, pulled the bird to her side, and stared at the river. “He didn’t even say goodbye.” She turned and kissed the duck’s smooth head. He pecked at her cheek in return. “I would’ve said goodbye,” she whispered.
“Would you use the word angel or sunshine to describe someone who drank, swore, and ran around like mad?” Lynley asked.
Sergeant Havers looked up from her morning eggs, stirred sugar into her coffee, and thought about it. “I suppose it depends on your definition of rain, doesn’t it?”
He smiled. “I suppose so.” He pushed his plate away from him and regarded Havers thoughtfully. She wasn’t looking half bad this morning: there was a hint of colour on her eyelids, cheeks, and lips, and her hair had a noticeable curl to it. Even her clothes had distinctly improved, for she wore a brown tweed skirt and matching pullover which, even if they weren’t exactly the best colour for her skin tone, at least were a marked improvement over yesterday’s ghastly blue suit.
“Why the question?” she asked.
“Stepha described Gillian as wild. A drinker.”
“Who ran around like mad.”
“Yes. But Father Hart said she was sunshine.”
“That is peculiar.”
“He said Teys was devastated when she ran away.”
Havers knotted her thick eyebrows and, without thinking about how the action redefined their relationship, poured Lynley a second cup of coffee. “Well, that does explain why her photos are gone, doesn’t it? He’d devoted his life to his children and look at his reward for the effort. One of the two vanishes into the night.”
The last four words struck a chord in Lynley. He rummaged through the file on the table between them and brought out the picture of Russell Mowrey that Tessa had given them.
“I’d like you to take this round the village today,” he said.
Havers took the photograph, but her expression was quizzical. “But you said he was in London.”
“Now, yes. Not necessarily three weeks ago. If Mowrey was here then, he would have had to ask someone for directions to the farm. Someone would have had to see him. Concentrate on the high and the patrons of the pubs. You might go to the hall as well. If no one’s seen him-”
“We’re back to Tessa, then,” she fi nished.
“Or someone else with a motive. There seem to be several.”
Madeline Gibson answered the door to Lynley’s knock. He’d climbed his way over two quarrelling children in the war-torn front garden, manoeuvred past a broken tricycle and a dismembered doll, and avoided a plate of congealing fried eggs on the front steps. She surveyed all this with a bored glance and adjusted an emerald green peignoir over high, pointed breasts. She wore nothing under it and made no secret of the fact that he couldn’t have arrived at a more inconvenient time.
“Dick,” she called, her sultry eyes on Lynley, “put it back in your trousers. It’s Scotland Yard.” She gave him a lazy smile and held the door open wider. “Do come in, Inspector.” She left him in the tiny entryway among the toys and the dirty clothes and strolled to the stairwell. “Dick!” she called again. She turned, folded her arms across her breasts, and kept her eyes on Lynley. A smile played over her features. A well-formed knee and thigh showed themselves between the folds of thin satin.
There was movement above them, a man’s mumbling, and Richard Gibson appeared. He clattered noisily to the bottom of the stairs and caught sight of his wife. “Jesus Christ, put on some clothes, Mad,” he said.
“You didn’t want them on five minutes ago,” she replied, looked him over with a knowing smile, and made her way deliberately-revealing as much of her slim body as possible-up the stairs.
Gibson watched her with wry amusement. “You should see what she’s like when she really wants it,” he confided. “She’s just teasing now.”
“Ah. Yes. I see.”
The farmer laughed through his nose. “At least it keeps her happy, Inspector. For a while.” He scrutinised the chaos of the cottage and added, “Let’s go out in front.”
Lynley thought the front garden was even less appealing a place for their encounter than the malodorous cottage, but he held his tongue and followed the other man.
“Go in to your mother,” Gibson ordered his two wrangling children. With his foot, he pushed the plate to the edge of the front step. In a moment, the family’s mangy cat appeared from the tangle of dry and dying bushes and began to devour the remains of the eggs and toast. It was the greedy, surreptitious eating of a scavenger, and it reminded Lynley of the woman upstairs.
“I saw Roberta yesterday,” he said to Gibson. The other man had sat down on the step and was lacing his work shoes tightly.
“How was she? Any improvement?”
“No. When we first met, you didn’t mention the fact that you’d signed Roberta into the asylum, Mr. Gibson.”
“You didn’t ask, Inspector.” He finished with the boots and got to his feet. “Did you expect me to leave her with the police in Richmond?”
“Not especially. Have you arranged for a solicitor as well?”
Gibson, Lynley saw, wasn’t a man who expected the police to concern themselves with the legal representation of confessed murderesses. The question surprised him. His eyelids quivered and he spent a moment tucking his flannel shirt into his blue jeans. He took his time about answering.
“A solicitor? No.”
“Intriguing that you’d make arrangements to have her put into hospital but not make arrangements for her legal interests. Convenient as well, wouldn’t you say?”
A muscle worked in Gibson’s jaw. “No, I wouldn’t say.”
“Can you explain yourself, then?”
“I don’t think I need to explain myself to you,” Gibson said tersely. “But it seems to me that Bobby’s mental problems were a wee bit more pressing than her legal ones.” His swarthy skin had darkened.
“Indeed. And if she’s found incompetent to stand trial-as no doubt she will be-you’re in a good position, aren’t you?”
Gibson faced him. “By God, I am, yes,” he retorted angrily. “Free to take the damn farm, free to have the damn house, free to screw my damn wife on the dining room table if I want. And all without Bobby hulking about. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it, Inspector?” He thrust his face forward belligerently, but when Lynley offered no reaction to this aggression, he backed away. His words, however, were no less angry. “I’ve just about had it with people believing I’d hurt Bobby, with people believing Madeline and I would be only too happy to see her put away for life. You think I don’t know that’s what everyone believes? You think Madeline doesn’t know it?” He laughed bitterly. “No, I didn’t get her a solicitor. I got one myself. And if I can get her certifi ed mentally incompetent, I intend to do so. Do you think that’s worse than seeing she ends up in prison?”
“So you think she did kill her father?” Lynley asked.
Gibson’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know what to think. All I know is Bobby’s not the same girl that I knew when I left Keldale. That girl wouldn’t have hurt a fly. But this new girl…she’s a stranger.”
“Perhaps that has to do with Gillian’s disappearance.”
“Gillian?” Gibson laughed incredulously. “I’d say Gilly’s leaving was a relief to all concerned.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say Gilly was advanced for her years, shall we?” He glanced back at the house. “Let’s just say she’d have made Madeline look like the Virgin Mary. Am I making myself clear?”
“Perfectly. Did she seduce you?”
“You are direct, aren’t you? Give me a fag and I’ll tell you about it.” He lit the cigarette that Lynley offered from his case and looked off into the fields that began just across the unpaved street. Beyond them, the trail to High Kel Moor weaved into the trees. “I was nineteen years old when I left Keldale, Inspector. I didn’t want to leave. God knows that was the last thing I wanted to do. But I knew if I didn’t, there’d be hell to pay eventually.”
“But you slept with your cousin Gillian before you left?”
Gibson snorted. “Hardly. Slept isn’t exactly the word I’d use with a girl like Gilly. She wanted control and she had it, Inspector. She could do things to a man…better than a highclass tart. She made me crazy just about four times a day.”
“How old was she?”
“She was twelve when she first locked her eyes on me in an uncousinly fashion, thirteen the first time she…performed. Then for the next two years she drove me wild.”
“Are you telling me you left to escape her?”
“I’m hardly that noble. I left to escape William. It was only a matter of time before he caught her going at me. I didn’t want that to happen to either of us. I wanted it to end.”
“Why did you never just speak to William about it?”
Gibson’s eyes widened. “As far as he was concerned, neither of those girls could do anything wrong. How was I supposed to tell him that Gilly, the proverbial apple of his eye, was rubbing up to me like a cat in heat and taking me on like a whore? He’d never have believed it. Half the time, I didn’t myself.”
“She left Keldale a year after you, didn’t she?”
He tossed his cigarette into the street. “That’s what they tell me,” he replied.
“Did you ever see her again?”
Gibson’s eyes slid away. “I never did,” he replied. “And it was a blessing.”
Marsha Fitzalan was a bent, withered woman with a face that reminded Lynley of the kind on American dolls carved from apples: it was a mass of delicate wrinkles that traced a pattern across her cheeks up to her eyes. These were blue. They danced in her face with interest and amusement and told anyone who looked at her that the body was indeed old but the heart and the mind had not changed from youth.
“Good morning,” she smiled, and then with a look at her watch, “or nearly afternoon. You’re Inspector Lynley, aren’t you? I thought you might be by sooner or later. I’ve lemon pie made.”
“For the occasion?” Lynley asked.
“Indeed,” she replied. “Come in.”
Although she lived in one of the council houses on St. Chad’s Lane, its appearance couldn’t have been more different from the Gibsons’. The front garden was planted, parterre-like, with neat patterns of flowers: in the spring there would be alyssum and primrose, snapdragons and geraniums. They had been trimmed back for the coming of winter, the soil turned over lovingly round each plant. On two of the stepping stones leading to the door, birdseed had been fashioned into small, accessible piles, and a set of metal wind chimes hung near a window, its six notes still managing to be heard over the din of the Gibson children next door.
The contrast to the Gibsons’ small cottage continued indoors, where the smell of potpourri in the air reminded Lynley of long afternoons spent in his grandmother’s bedroom at Howenstow. The tiny sitting room was comfortably if inexpensively furnished and two of its walls were lined from fl oor to ceiling with books. A small table under the single window was covered by a collection of photographs, and several needlepoint tapestries hung above an ancient television set.
“Will you come into the kitchen, Inspector?” Marsha Fitzalan asked. “I know it’s dreadful to entertain in the kitchen, but I’ve always been far more comfortable there. My friends tell me it’s because I grew up on a farm, and the life of a farm always centres itself in the kitchen, doesn’t it? I suppose I never got over that. Here, please sit at the table. Coffee and pie? You do look hungry. I imagine you’re a bachelor. Bachelors never eat as well as they should, do they?”
Again there was the memory of his grandmother, that unmistakable security of unconditional love. As he watched her busily putting together a tray, her hands sure and unshaking, Lynley knew for a certainty that Marsha Fitzalan held the answer.
“Can you tell me about Gillian Teys?” he asked.
Her hands stopped. She turned to him with a smile. “Gilly?” she said. “What a pleasure that shall be. Gillian Teys was the loveliest creature I’ve ever known.”