Nonplussed, he stared at her. He waited for his smooth persona to click into place, for the arrival of that illusory man who laughed and danced and had a quick-witted answer for everything. But nothing happened. Stepha’s appearance in his room, materialising for all he knew out of nowhere, seemed to have destroyed his only line of defence, and all that was left in his repertoire of engaging behav iours was the ability to meet, without wavering, her beautiful eyes.
He needed to give reality to the moment, to make her something he hadn’t dreamt up from the mist of his dispirited memory, so he reached out and touched the fall of her hair. Soft, he thought wonderingly.
She caught his hand and kissed the palm, the wrist. Her tongue lightly traced the length of his fingers. “Let me love you tonight. Let me drive away the shadows.”
She spoke on the merest breath of a whisper, and he wondered if her voice were a part of the dream. But her smooth hands played across his cheeks and jaw and throat, and when she bent to him and he tasted the sweetness of her mouth, felt the caress of her tongue, he knew she was part of a searing reality, a present calmly laying siege to the castellated walls of his past.
He wanted to flee from the onslaught, to escape to that haven of bliss-charged remembrance that had kept him well armoured in the year that had passed, a year during which all desire had been absent, all longing dead, all life incomplete. But she allowed no evasion, and as she purposefully destroyed the ramparts that shielded him, he felt once again not a sweet liberation but that terrifying need to possess another person, body and soul.
He couldn’t. He wouldn’t allow it to happen. He desperately sought out last, shattered defences, uselessly willing back into being an insensate creature who no longer lived. In its place was reborn-quiet and vulnerable-the man who had been there, inside, all along.
“Tell me about Paul.”
She raised herself on one elbow, touched her finger to his lips, traced their shape. The light struck her hair, her shoulders, her breasts. She was fire and cream, scented almost imperceptibly with the sweetness of Devon violets.
“Why?”
“Because I want to know about you. Because he was your brother. Because he died.”
Her eyes moved from his. “What did Nigel say?”
“That Paul’s death changed everyone.”
“It did.”
“Bridie said that he went away, that he never said goodbye.”
Stepha lowered herself next to him, into his arms. “Paul killed himself, Thomas,” she whispered. Her body trembled on the words. He held her closer. “Bridie’s not been told. We say he died of Huntington’s, and he did, in a way. It was Huntington’s that killed him. Have you ever seen people with the disease? St. Vitus’ dance. They’ve no control over their bodies. They twitch and stagger and leap and fall. And then their minds go at the last. But not Paul. By God, not Paul.” Her voice caught. She drew in a breath. His hand found its way to her hair and he pressed his lips to the top of her head.
“I’m sorry.”
“He had just enough mind left to know that he no longer recognised his wife, no longer knew the name of his child, no longer had any control over his body. He had just enough mind left to decide it was time for him to die.” She swallowed. “I helped him. I had to. He was my twin.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Nigel didn’t tell you?”
“No. Nigel’s in love with you, isn’t he?”
“Yes.” She answered without artifi ce.
“Did he come to Keldale to be near you?”
She nodded. “We were all at university together: Nigel, Paul, and I. I might have married Nigel at one time. He was less mad then, less angry. I’m the source of his madness, I’m afraid. But I’ll never marry now.”
“Why not?”
“Because Huntington’s is a hereditary disease. I’m a carrier. I don’t want to pass it on to a child. It’s bad enough seeing Bridie every day and thinking every time she stumbles or drops something that she’s got the bloody disease herself. I don’t know what I’d do if I had a child of my own. Probably drive myself mad with worry.”
“You don’t have to have children. Or you could adopt.”
“Men say that, of course. Nigel does all the time. But there’s no point to marriage as far as I’m concerned if I can’t have my own child. My own healthy child.”
“Was the baby in the abbey a healthy child?”
She drew herself up to look at him. “On duty, Inspector? An odd time and place for it, wouldn’t you say?”
He smiled wryly. “Sorry. Reflex action, I’m afraid.” And then he added, unrepentant, “Was she?”
“Wherever did you hear about the baby in the abbey? No, don’t tell me. Keldale Hall.”
“I understand it was a bit of a legend come true.”
“Of sorts. The legend-fanned by the Burton-Thomases at every opportunity-is that sometimes one can hear a baby cry from the abbey at night. The reality, I’m afraid, is much as you’d expect. It’s a trick of wind when it’s blowing with just the right force from the north through a crack in the wall between the north transept and nave. It happens several times a year.”
“How do you know?”
“When we were teenagers, my brother and I camped there for a fortnight one spring until we’d tracked the sound down. Of course, we didn’t disappoint the Burton-Thomases by telling them the truth. But to be honest, even that wind doesn’t sound a great deal like a baby.”
“And the real baby?”
“Ah, back to that, are we?” She rested her cheek on his chest. “I don’t know much about it. It was just over three years ago. Father Hart found her, managed to stir up a great deal of local outrage about her, and it fell to Gabriel Langston to sort it all out. Poor Gabriel. He never was able to discover anything at all. The furor died down after a few weeks. There was a funeral that everyone of conscience attended and that was the end of it, I’m afraid. It was all rather grim.”
“And you were glad when it was over?”
“I was. I don’t like grimness. I don’t want it in my life. I want life filled with laughter and wild, crazy joy.”
“Perhaps you’re afraid of feeling anything else.”
“I am. But I’m mostly afraid of ending up lost like Olivia, of loving someone so much and then having that person ripped out of my life. I can’t bear to be near her any longer. After Paul died, she went into a fog bank and never emerged. I don’t want to be like that. Ever.” She spoke the last word on a hard note of anger, but when she raised her head her eyes shone with tears. “Please. Thomas,” she whispered, and his body responded with the quicksilver fl ame of desire.
He pulled her to him roughly, felt her heat and passion, heard her cry of pleasure, felt the shadows drift away.
“What about Bridie?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s like a little lost soul. Just Bridie and that duck.”
Stepha laughed. She curled on her side, her smooth back a pleasant pressure against him. “Bridie’s special, isn’t she?”
“Olivia seems oddly detached from her. It’s as if Bridie’s growing up without parents at all.”
“Liv wasn’t always that way. But Bridie’s like Paul. So exactly like. I think it hurts Olivia even to see her. She’s not really over Paul yet. I doubt she ever will be.”
“Then why on earth was she going to remarry?”
“For Bridie’s sake. Paul was a very strong father. Olivia seems to have felt duty bound to replace him with someone else. And William was eager to be the replacement, I suppose.” Her voice was growing sleepy. “I don’t quite know what she thought it was going to be like for herself. But I think she was more interested in getting Bridie under control. It would have worked well, too. William was very good to Bridie. So was Roberta.”
“Bridie says you are as well.”
She yawned. “Does she? I fixed her hair, poor little pumpkin. I’m not certain I’m good at anything else.”
“You chase ghosts away,” he whispered. “You’re very good at that.” But she was asleep.
He awoke to find the reality this time. She lay, childlike, curled with her knees drawn up, with both of her fi sts under her chin. She was frowning with her dream, and a strand of hair was caught between her lips. He smiled at the sight.
A glance at his watch told him it was nearly seven. He bent and kissed her bare shoulder. She awoke at once, coming fully awake in an instant, not the least bit confused about where she was. She raised her hand, touching his cheek, pulling him down to her.
He kissed her mouth, then her neck, and heard the delicate change in her breathing that signalled her pleasure when he reached her breast. His hand slid the length of her body. She sighed.
“Thomas.” He lifted his head. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright. “I must go.”
“Not just yet.”
“Look at the time.”
“In a moment.” He bent to her, felt her hands in his hair.
“You…I…Oh Lord.” She laughed as she realised how her body was betraying her.
He smiled. “Go if you must, then.”
She sat up, kissed him a last time, and crossed to the bathroom. He lay there, fi lled with a contentment that he had thought was entirely lost to him, and listened to the familiar noises she made. He found himself wondering how he’d survived the last year of isolation. Then she was returning to him, smiling, running his hairbrush through her tangled hair. She reached for her grey dressing gown and began to put it on, lifting one arm gracefully as she did so.
And it was in that movement in the early morning light that he saw the unmistakable evidence on her body that she had borne a child.
Barbara finally got up when she heard Lynley’s door open and close softly. She’d been lying on her side, her eyes fi xed desperately upon a single spot on the wall, her teeth grinding together so fiercely that her entire jaw ached. She had willed conscious feeling into absolute death for the last seven hours, ever since the first moment when she’d heard them together in his room.
She walked now to the window on legs that felt numb. She stared stonily out into the Keldale morning. The village seemed lifeless, a place without colour or sound. How appropriate, she thought.
The real agony was the bed: the unmistakable, rhythmic creaking of his bed. It went on and on until she wanted to scream, to pound her fists against the wall to bring it to an end. But the silence that fell just as suddenly was worse. It beat against her eardrums in angry pulsations that she finally came to recognise as the pounding of her heart. And then the bed again, endlessly. And the woman’s muffl ed cry.
She put a dry, hot hand onto the windowpane and felt with listless surprise the damp, cool glass. Her fingers slipped, left streaks. She examined them meticulously.
So much for his unrequited love for Deborah, Barbara thought acidly. Christ, I must have been absolutely out of my mind! When had he ever been more than what he’d been last night: a real stud, a bona fide bull, a hard, hot stallion of a man who had to prove his virility between the legs of every woman he met.
Well, you proved it last night, Inspector. Took her directly up to heaven three or four times, didn’t you? You’ve got solid gold talent, all right.
She laughed soundlessly, mirthlessly. It was a pleasure, really, to discover that he was just what she’d always assumed him to be: an alley cat on the prowl for any female in heat, cleverly disguised under a refulgent veneer of upper-class breeding. But what a thin veneer it was after all! Scratch the surface of the man and the truth oozed out.
The bath began running noisily in the next room, a rushing of water that sounded to Barbara like a burst of applause. She stirred, turned from the window, and made her decision about how to face the day.
“We’re going to have to take the house apart one room at a time,” Lynley said.
They were in the study. Havers had gone to the bookshelves and was sullenly flipping through a dog-eared Brontë. He watched her. Other than monosyllabic, expressionless replies to every remark he’d made at breakfast, she had said nothing at all. The fragile thread of communication they had established between them seemed to be utterly broken. To make matters worse, she’d returned to her hideous light blue suit and ridiculous, coloured tights.
“Havers,” he said sharply. “Are you listening to me?”
Her head turned with slow insolence. “To every word…Inspector.”
“Then start with the kitchen.”
“One of the two places where a little woman belongs.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Not a thing.” She left the room.
His eyes followed her, perplexed. What in God’s name had got into the woman? They had been working so well together, but now she was acting as if she could hardly wait to throw it all away and return to uniform. It made no sense. Webberly was offering her a chance to redeem herself. Given that, why would she deliberately attempt to prove justifi able every prejudice held against her by the other DIs at the Yard? He muttered an oath and summarily dismissed her from his thoughts.
St. James would be in Newby Wiske by now, the corpse of the dog wrapped in a polystyrene shroud in the boot of the Escort and Roberta’s clothing in a cardboard carton on the rear seat. He would perform the autopsy, supervise the tests, and report the results with his usual efficiency. Thank God. St. James’s involvement would ensure that at least something in the case was handled correctly.
Chief Constable Kerridge of the Yorkshire Constabulary had been only too delighted to hear that Allcourt-St. James would be coming to use their well-equipped lab. Anything, Lynley thought, to put another nail in Nies’s coffin. He shook his head in disgust, went to William Teys’s desk, and opened the top drawer.
It held no secrets. There were scissors, pencils, a wrinkled map of the county, a typewriter ribbon, and a roll of tape. The map caused a flurry of short-lived interest and he unfolded it eagerly: perhaps it marked out a careful search for Teys’s older daughter. But it was unmarred by any cryptogrammic message that indicated the location of a missing girl.
The other drawers were as devoid of pertinent facts as the first: a pot of glue, two boxes of unused Christmas cards, three packets of photographs taken on the farm, account books, records of lambing, a roll of aging breath mints. But nothing of Gillian.
He leaned back in the chair. His eyes fell on the bookstand and the Bible it held. Struck by a thought, he opened it to the previously marked page. “And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, ‘Forasmuch as God hath showed thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art. Thou shalt be over my house, and according unto thy word shall all my people be ruled: only in the throne will I be greater than thou.’ And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, ‘See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt.’ And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it on Joseph’s hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck; and he made him to ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried before him, ‘Bow the knee’: and he made him ruler over all the land of Egypt.”
“Seeking guidance from the Lord?”
Lynley looked up. Havers was leaning against the study door, her shapeless body silhouetted sharply by the morning light, her face a blank.
“Have you finished the kitchen?” he asked.
“Thought I’d take a break.” She sauntered into the room. “Got a smoke on you?”
He handed her his cigarette case absently and went to the bookshelves, running his eyes over them, seeking a volume of Shakespeare. He found it and began looking.
“Is Daze a redhead, Inspector?”
It took a moment for the odd question to strike him. When he looked up, Havers was back at the door, running her fi ngers meditatively against the wood, apparently indifferent to whatever answer he might give. “I beg your pardon?”
She flipped open the cigarette case and read its inscription. “‘Darling Thomas. We’ll always have Paris, won’t we? Daze.’” Coldly, she met his eyes. It was then that he noticed how pale she was, how the skin beneath her eyes was dark with fatigue, how the gold case shook in her hand. “Aside from her rather hackneyed use of Bogart, is she a redhead?” Havers repeated. “I only ask because you seem to prefer them. Or is the truth that anyone will do?”
Horrified, Lynley realised too late what the change in her was and his own responsibility for having brought it about. There was nothing he could say. There was no quick answer he could give. But he could tell at once that none was necessary, for she had every intention of continuing without his response.
“Havers-”
She held up a hand to stop him. She was deathly white. Her features looked fl at. Her voice was tight. “You know, it’s really poor form not to go to the woman’s room for your trysts, Inspector. I’m surprised you didn’t know that. With your experience I should think that a little social nicety like that would be the last thing you’d forget. Of course, it’s just a small lapse, and it probably doesn’t really bother a woman at all, not when it’s compared with the ecstatic experience of fucking you.”
He recoiled from the brutal ugliness that her tone gave the word. “I’m sorry, Barbara,” he said.
“Why be sorry?” She forced a guttural laugh. “No one thinks about listeners in the heat of passion. I know I never do.” She gave a brittle smile. “And it certainly was the old heat of passion last night, wasn’t it? I couldn’t believe it when you two started banging away on a second go. And so soon! Lord, you barely gave it a rest.”
He watched her move to the shelf and run a finger along the spine of a book. “I didn’t know you could hear us. I apologise, Barbara. I’m terribly sorry.”
She swung back to him quickly. “Why be sorry?” she repeated, her voice louder this time. “You aren’t on duty twenty-four hours a day. And besides, it’s not really your fault, is it? How were you to know Stepha would howl like a banshee?”
“Nonetheless, it was never my intention to hurt your feelings-”
“You haven’t hurt my feelings at all!” She laughed shrilly. “Where on earth did you get an idea like that? Let’s say you’ve merely piqued my interest. As I listened to you sending Stepha to the moon-was it three times or four?-I wondered if Deborah used to howl as well.”
It was a wild shot in the dark, but the barb had gone home. He knew that she saw it, for her face blazed with triumph. “That’s hardly your concern, is it?”
“Of course not! I know that! But during your second session with Stepha-it was at least an hour, wasn’t it?-I couldn’t help thinking about poor old Simon. He must have to struggle like hell to follow your act.”
“You’ve certainly done your homework, Havers. I’ll say that much for you. And when you take off the gloves, you do shoot to kill. Or am I mixing my metaphors?”
“Don’t you patronise me. Don’t you dare!” she shouted. “Just who the hell do you think you are?”
“Your superior officer, for a start.”
“Oh, that’s right, Inspector. Now’s the time to pull rank. Well, what shall I do? Shall I get to work in here? Don’t mind if I’m not quite up to par. I didn’t sleep well last night.” She pulled a book angrily from the shelf. It toppled to the floor. He could see she was struggling not to cry.
“Barbara-” She continued to pull books down, to turn the pages savagely, to drop them to the floor. They were mildewed and damp, filling the air with the unpleasant odour of neglect. “Listen to me. You’ve done good work so far. Don’t be foolish now.”
She pivoted, trembling. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You have a chance to be back in CID. Don’t throw it away because you’re angry with me.”
“I’m not angry with you! I don’t give a shit about you.”
“Of course not. I didn’t mean to imply that you did.”
“We both know why I was assigned to you anyway. They wanted a woman on the case and they knew I was safe.” She spat the word out. “The minute this is over, I’m back on the street.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Inspector, I’m not stupid. I’ve looked in a few mirrors.”
He was astonished at the implication behind her words. “Do you think you’ve been brought back to CID because Webberly believes I’d take any other female officer to bed?” She didn’t respond. “Is that what you think?” he repeated. The silence continued. “Dammit, Havers-”
“It’s what I know!” she shouted. “But what Webberly doesn’t know is that any blonde or brunette is safe with you these days, not just pigs like me. It’s redheads you’ve a taste for, redheads like Stepha, replacements for the one that you’ve lost.”
“That has nothing to do with this conversation!”
“It has everything to do with it! If you weren’t so desperate to have Deborah back, you wouldn’t have spent half the night pounding Stepha into pulp and we wouldn’t be having this whole, bleeding discussion!”
“Then let’s drop it, shall we? I’ve apologised. You’ve made your feelings and beliefs- bizarre as they are-absolutely clear. I think we’ve said enough.”
“Oh, that’s damned convenient to call me bizarre,” she cried bitterly. “What about you? You won’t marry a woman because her father’s in service, you watch your very own friend fall in love with her instead, you spend the rest of your life racked with misery over it, and then you decide to call me bizarre.”
“Your facts aren’t quite straight,” he said icily.
“Oh, I’ve got all the facts I need. And when I string them together, bizarre is just the word I’d use to describe them. Fact one: you’re in love with Deborah St. James, and don’t bother to deny it. Fact two: she’s married to someone else. Fact three: you obviously had a love affair with her, which leads us inescapably to fact four: you damn well could have married her but you chose not to and you’re going to pay for that stupid, narrow-minded upper-class decision for the rest of your bleeding, god-damn life!”
“You seem to have a great deal of confi dence in my fatal attraction for women. Any woman who sleeps with me is only too willing to become my wife. Is that correct?”
“Don’t you laugh at me!” she shrieked, her eyes squeezed shut in rage.
“I’m not laughing at you. I’m also not spending another moment discussing this with you.” He started for the door.
“Oh that’s it! Run away! That’s just what I’d expect of you, Lynley! Go have it off with Stepha again! Or what about Helen? Does she pop a red wig on so you can get it up? Does she let you call her Deb?”
He felt anger like a current shooting through his veins. He drove himself towards calm by looking at his watch. “Havers, I’m going to Newby Wiske to see the results of St. James’s tests. That gives you about-shall we say- three hours to tear this house apart and fi nd me something-anything, Havers-that leads me to Gillian Teys. Since you have such a remarkable ability to gather facts out of thin air, that should prove to be no problem whatsoever for you. If, however, you have nothing to report within three hours, consider yourself sacked. Is that clear?”
“Why not sack me right now and have done with it then?” she shrilled.
“Because I like to look forward to my pleasures.” He walked over to her, took his cigarette case from her limp hand. “Daze is blonde,” he said.
She snorted. “I fi nd that hard to believe. Does she wear a red wig for those intimate moments?”
“I don’t know.” He turned the cigarette case over in his hand so that the old ornate A engraved on its cover was face up. “But it’s an interesting question. If my father were still alive, I’d ask him. This was his. Daze is my mother.” He picked up the volume of Shakespeare and left.
Barbara stared after him, motionless, waiting for the pounding of her blood to stop, slowly coming to terms with ther terrible enormity of what she had done.
You’ve done good work so far… You have a chance to be back on CID. Don’t throw it away because you’re angry with me.
And isn’t that exactly what she had done? The need to rage at him, to castigate him, to rail against his attraction to a beautiful woman had overcome every good intention that she had ever possessed in setting to work on the case. What in God’s name had come over her?
Was she jealous? Had there been one insane moment when she had been so foolish as to think that Lynley might ever look at her and not see her for what she truly was: a plain, dumpy woman, angry at the world, bitter and friendless and terribly alone? Had she possibly harboured a secret hope that he might come to care for her? Is that what had driven her to attack him this morning? The thought was patently absurd.
It couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. She knew enough about him not to be that ignorant.
She felt drained. It was this house, she decided. It was having to come and work in this dwelling place of ghouls. Five minutes here and she was ready to snap and snarl, to climb the walls, to tear wildly at her hair.
She went to the study door and looked across the sitting room to Tessa’s shrine. The woman smiled at her kindly. But wasn’t there just a touch of victory in her eyes? Wasn’t it as if Tessa had known all along that she could do nothing but fail once she walked into this house and felt its silence and chill?
Three hours, he’d said. Three hours to fi nd the secret of Gillian Teys.
She laughed bitterly at the thought, tasting the sound in the empty air. He knew that she would fail, that he would have the enjoyment of sending her back to London, back to uniform, back to disgrace. So what was the point of trying at all? Why not leave now rather than give him the pleasure?
She threw herself down on the sitting-room couch. Tessa’s image watched her sympathetically. But…what if she could find Gillian? What if, where Lynley himself had failed, she was able to succeed? Would it really matter then if he sent her back to the streets? Wouldn’t she know, once and for all, that she was good for something, that she could have been part of a working team?
It was a thought. She picked idly at the worn upholstery of the couch. The sound of her fi ngers scratching at the threads was the only noise in the house. Except for the rustling and burrowing of mice at the edge of her consciousness, like a half-formed thought.
She looked at the stairway refl ectively.
They sat at a table in the corner of the Keys and Candle, Newby Wiske’s central and most thriving pub. Most of the lunchtime crowd had thinned out and, aside from themselves, only the regulars remained, hunched over the bar to nurse pints of bitters.
They pushed their plates to one side of the table, and Deborah poured the coffee that had just been placed before them. Outside, the cook and the dishwasher dumped rubbish into the bin, arguing loudly over the merits of a three-year-old who would be running at New-market and upon whom the cook had evidently invested a considerable sum of his most recent week’s wages.
St. James ministered to his coffee with his usual amount of sugar. Lynley spoke after the fourth teaspoonful was dumped absently into the cup.
“Does he count?”
“Not that I’ve ever noticed,” Deborah replied.
“St. James, that’s appalling. How can you stand it?”
“Just sugaring ‘o’er the devil himself,’” his friend replied. He pulled the test results towards him. “I need to do something to recover from the smell of that dog. You owe me for this one, Tommy.”
“In spades. What do you have?”
“The animal bled to death from a wound in the neck. It appeared to have been infl icted with a knife the blade of which was fi ve inches long.”
“Not a pocketknife, then.”
“I should guess a kitchen knife. A butcher knife. Something along that line. Did forensics see to all the knives on the farm?”
Lynley fingered through the material from the file he had brought with him. “Apparently. But the knife in question was nowhere to be found.”
St. James looked thoughtful. “That’s intriguing. It almost suggests…” He paused, brushing aside the idea. “Well, they have the girl admitting to killing her father, they have the axe sitting right there on the fl oor-”
“With no fingerprints on it,” Lynley interjected.
“Given. But unless the RSPCA wants to make a case for cruelty to animals, there’s no real necessity to have the weapon that killed the dog.”
“You’re starting to sound like Nies.”
“Perish the thought.” St. James stirred his coffee and was about to apply more sugar to it when, with a beatific smile, his wife moved the bowl out of his reach. He grumbled goodnaturedly and continued his conversation. “However, there was something else. Barbiturates.”
“What?”
“Barbiturates,” St. James repeated. “They showed up in the drug screen. Here.” He passed the toxicology report across the table.
Lynley read it, amazed. “Are you telling me the dog was drugged?”
“Yes. The amount of residual drug that showed up in the tests indicates that the animal was unconscious when his throat was slit.”
“Unconscious!” Lynley scanned the report and tossed it down on the table. “Then he couldn’t have been killed to silence him.”
“Hardly. He wouldn’t have been making a sound.”
“Was there enough barbiturate to kill him? Had someone attempted to kill him with the drug and then, having botched it, decided to take a knife to the poor creature?”
“That’s possible, I suppose. Except that with everything you’ve told me about the case, it doesn’t make much sense.”
“Why not?”
“Because this unknown person would have had to get into the house first, get the drug, administer it to the dog, wait for it to do the trick, realise that it wasn’t going to kill him, go back for a knife, and finish the job off. What was the dog doing all this time? Cooperatively waiting to have his throat slit? Wouldn’t he have been barking, raising the devil?”
“Wait. You’re too far ahead of me. Why would the person have to go into the house for the drug?”
“Because it was the very same drug that William Teys had taken, and he kept his sleeping pills in the house, not in the barn, I should think.”
Lynley assimilated this. “Perhaps someone brought it with him.”
“Perhaps. I suppose the person could have administered it to the dog, waited for it to take effect, slit the dog’s throat, and waited for Teys to come out to the barn.”
“Between ten and midnight? What would Teys be doing in the barn between ten and midnight?”
“Looking for the dog?”
“Why? Why the barn? Why not in the village where the dog always went? Why look for him at all, in fact? Everyone says that the dog wandered freely. Why would he have suddenly been worried about him on this one night?”
St. James shrugged. “What Teys was up to is a moot point, if your attention is fi xed on finding the killer of the animal. Only one person could have killed that dog-Roberta.”
Outside the pub, St. James spread the tent-like dress over the boot of Lynley’s car, oblivious of the curious stares of a group of elderly tourists who passed, in pursuit of pictorial souvenirs, cameras slung round their necks. He pointed to the stain on the inside elbow of the left sleeve, to the pool-like stain between waist and knees, and to the same substance on the right, white cuff.
“All of these test as the dog’s blood, Tommy.” He turned to his wife. “My love, will you demonstrate? As you did in the lab? On this bit of lawn?”
Deborah cooperatively dropped to her knees, resting back on her heels. Her rich, umber dress billowed out and spread on the ground like a mantle. St. James moved behind her.
“A willing dog would make this easier to imagine, but we’ll do our best. Roberta-who had access to her father’s sleeping pills, I should guess-would have given the dog the drug earlier. In his dinner, perhaps. She would have had to make sure the animal stayed in the barn. It wouldn’t have done to have had the creature keel over in the village somewhere. Once the dog was unconscious, she would kneel down on the ground just as Deborah has done. Only that particular posture could give us the stains in the precise places they appear on her dress. She would lift the dog’s head and hold it in the crook of her arm.” He gently bent Deborah’s arm to demonstrate. “Then, with her right hand, she would cut the dog’s throat.”
“That’s insane,” Lynley said hoarsely. “Why?”
“Wait a moment, Tommy. The dog’s head is turned away from her. She drives the knife into his throat, which results in the pool of blood on the skirt of her dress. She pulls the knife upward with her right hand until the job is done.” He pointed to specific areas on Deborah’s dress. “We have blood on the elbow where the head was cradled, blood on the skirt where it poured from the neck, and blood on the right sleeve and cuff from where she drove the knife in and continued the path of the slash.” St. James touched his wife’s hair lightly. “Thank you, my love.” He helped her to her feet.
Lynley walked back to the car and examined the dress. “Frankly, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Why on earth would she do it? Are you saying the girl dressed herself up on a Saturday night in her best Sunday clothes, calmly went out to the barn, and slit the throat of a dog she’d loved since childhood?” He looked up. “Why?”
“I can’t answer that. I can’t tell you what she was thinking, only what she had to have done.”
“But couldn’t she have gone out to the barn, found the dog dead, and, in her panic, picked him up, cradled him, and got the blood all over herself then?”
There was a fractional pause. “Possibly. But unlikely.”
“But it’s possible. It is possible?”
“Yes. But unlikely, Tommy.”
“What scenario do you have then?”
Deborah and St. James exchanged uneasy glances in which Lynley saw that they had discussed the case and were of a mutual opinion they were reluctant to share. “Well?” he demanded. “Are you saying that Roberta killed her dog, that her father came to the barn and discovered the deed, that they got into a tremendous row, and then she beheaded him?”
“No, no. It’s quite possible that Roberta didn’t kill her father at all. But she was defi nitely present when it happened. She had to have been.”
“Why?”
“Because his blood is all over the bottom of her dress.”
“Perhaps she went to the barn, found his body, and fell to her knees in shock.”
St. James shook his head. “That idea doesn’t wash.”
“Why not?”
He pointed to the garment on the back of the car. “Look at the pattern. Teys’s blood is in splatters. You know what that means as well as I. It only got there one way.”
Lynley was silent for a moment. “She was standing by when it happened,” he concluded.
“She had to have been. If indeed she didn’t do it herself, then she was standing right there when someone else did.”
“Is she protecting someone, Tommy?” Deborah asked, seeing the expression on Lynley’s face.
He didn’t reply at once. He was thinking of patterns: patterns of words, patterns of images, patterns of behaviours. He was thinking of what a person learns, and when he learns it, and when it emerges into practical use. He was thinking of knowledge and how it ultimately, inevitably combines with experience and points to what is incontrovertible truth.
He roused himself to answer the question with one of his own. “St. James, what would you do, how far would you go, to save Deborah?” It was a dangerous query. Its risk was deadly. These were waters, perhaps, best left unexplored.
“‘Forty thousand brothers?’ Is that where we are with it now?” St. James’ voice was unchanged, but the angles of his face were a warning, finely drawn and grim.
“How far would you go?” Lynley insisted.
“Tommy, don’t!” Deborah put out her hand, a gesture to stop him from going any further, to stop him from doing irreparable damage to the delicate crystal of their friable peace.
“Would you hold back the truth? Would you lay down your life? How far would you go to save Deborah?”
St. James looked at his wife. The colour had completely drained from her face; her sprinkling of freckles danced across her nose; her eyes were haunted with tears. And he understood. This was no grappling in an Elsinore grave, but the question primeval.
“I’d do anything,” he replied, his eyes on his wife. “By God, yes, I would. I’d do anything.”
Lynley nodded. “People generally do, don’t they, for the ones they love most.”
He chose Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6, Pathetique. He smiled as the swelling of the first movement filled the car. Helen would never have allowed it.
“Darling Tommy, absolutely not!” she would have protested. “Let’s not drive our mutual depression right into suicide!” Then she would have resolutely rooted through all of his tapes to find something suitably uplifting: invariably Strauss, played at full volume with Helen making her usual assortment of amusing remarks over the din. “Just picture them, Tommy, flitting through the woods in their little tutus. It’s positively religious!”
Today, however, the heavy theme of Pathetique with its relentless exploration of man’s spiritual suffering suited his mood. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so burdened by a case. It felt as if a tremendous weight, having nothing whatsoever to do with the responsibility of getting to the bottom of the matter, were pressing upon his heart. He knew the source. Murder-its atavistic nature and ineffable consequences-was a hydra. Each head, ruthlessly cut off in an effort to reach the “prodigious dog-like body” of culpability, left in its place two heads more venomous than the last. But unlike so many of his previous cases, in which mere rote suffi ced to see him sear his way to the core of evil-stopping the flow of blood, allowing no further growth, and leaving him personally untouched by the encounter-this case spoke to him far more intimately. He knew instinctively that the death of William Teys was merely one of the heads of the serpent, and the knowledge that eight others waited to do battle with him-and, more than that, that he had not even come to know the true nature of the evil he faced-filled him with a sense of trepidation. But he knew himself well enough to know that there was more to his desolation and despair than the death of a man in a Keldale barn.
There was Havers to be dealt with. But beyond Havers, there was the truth. For underneath her bitter, unfounded accusations, her ugliness and hurt, the words she spoke rang with veracity. Had he not indeed spent the last year of his life fruitlessly seeking a replacement for Deborah? Not in the way Havers had suggested, but in a way far more dishonest than an inconsequential coupling in which two bodies meet, experience momentary pleasure, and separate to lead their individual lives, untouched and unchanged by the encounter. That, at least, was an expression of some sort, a giving of the moment no matter how brief. But for the last year of his life he had given nothing to anyone.
Behind his behaviour, wasn’t the reality that he had maintained his isolated celibacy this last, long year not because of Deborah but because he had become high priest in a religion of one: a celebrant caught up in devotion to the past? In this twisted religion, he had held up every woman in his life to unforgiving scrutiny and had found each one wanting in comparison to Deborah, not the real Deborah but a mystical goddess who lived only in his mind.
He saw now that he had not wished to forget the past, that he had done everything instead to keep it alive, as if his intention had always been to make it, not Deborah, his bride. He was sick at heart.
With the sickness came the realisation that there were facts to be faced about Stepha as well. But he could not bring himself to them. Not yet.
As the final movement of the symphony came to a close, he turned down the winding road from the moors into Keldale. Autumn leaves flew from under the car’s wheels, leaving a cloud of red, gold, and yellow billowing behind him, promising winter. He pulled in front of the lodge and spent a moment gazing at the windows, numbly wondering how and when he was going to piece together the fragments of his life.
Havers must have been watching for him from the lounge, for she came to the door as soon as he switched off the car’s ignition. He groaned and steeled himself to another confrontation, but she gave him no chance to make preliminary remarks.
“I’ve found Gillian,” she announced.