As if under water, Gillian turned slowly from the door at the sound of her sister’s husky voice. “Tell me,” she whispered. She walked back to her chair, moved it closer to the other, and sat down.
Roberta’s eyes, heavy-lidded under their protective folds of fat, were fi xed but unfocused on her sister. Her lips worked convulsively. The fingers of one hand flexed. “It was music. Loud. He would take off my clothes.” And then the girl’s voice altered. It became honey-toned, insinuatingly persuasive, chillingly male. “Pretty baby. Pretty baby and Time to march, pretty baby. Time to march for Papa. And he would…it was in his hand…Watch what Papa does while you march, pretty baby.”
“I left the key for you, Bobby,” Gillian said brokenly. “When he fell asleep that night in my bed, I went to his room and I found the key. What happened to it? I left it for you.”
Roberta struggled with information buried so long beneath the weight of her childhood terrors. “I didn’t…didn’t know. I locked the door. But you never said why. You never said to keep the key.”
“Oh God.” Gillian’s voice was anguished. “Are you saying that you locked the door at night but in the day you left the key in the keyhole? Bobby, is that what you mean?”
Roberta drew her arm across her damp face. It was like a shield, and behind its protection she nodded. Her body heaved with a repressed cry. “I didn’t know.”
“So he found it and took it away.”
“He put it in his wardrobe. All the keys were there. It was locked. I couldn’t get it. Don’t need keys, pretty baby. Pretty baby, march for Papa.”
“When did you march?”
“Daytime, nighttime. Come here, pretty baby, Papa wants to help you march.”
“How?”
Roberta’s arm dropped. Her face was quickly shuttered. Her fingers picked and pulled at her lower lip.
“Bobby, tell me how,” Gillian insisted. “Tell me what he did.”
“I love Papa. I love Papa.”
“Don’t say that!” She reached out, grabbed her sister’s arm. “Tell me what he did to you!”
“Love, Love Papa.”
“Don’t say that! He was evil!”
Roberta shrank from the word. “No. I was evil.”
“How?”
“What I made him…he couldn’t help…he prayed and prayed and couldn’t help…you weren’t there…Gilly knew what I wanted. Gilly knew how to do me. You’re no good, pretty baby. March for Papa. March on Papa.”
“‘March on Papa’?” Gillian gasped. “Up and down in one place. Up and down.
That’s nice, pretty baby. Papa big between your legs.”
“Bobby. Bobby.” Gillian averted her face. “How old were you?”
“Eight. Mmmmm, Papa likes to feel all over. Likes to feel and feel and feel.”
“Didn’t you tell anyone? Wasn’t there anyone?”
“Miss Fitzalan. I told. But she didn’t…she couldn’t…”
“She didn’t do anything? She didn’t help?”
“She didn’t understand. I said whiskers… his face when he rubbed me. Didn’t understand. Did you tell, pretty baby? Did you try to tell on Papa?”
“Oh God, she told him?”
“Gilly never told. Gilly never told on Papa. Very bad, pretty baby. Papa needs to punish you.”
“How?”
Roberta gave no answer. Instead, she began to rock, began to return to the place she had inhabited so long.
“You were only eight years old!” Gillian began to cry. “Bobby, I’m sorry! I didn’t know! I didn’t think he would. You didn’t look like me. You didn’t look like Mummy.”
“Hurt Bobby in the bad place. Not like Gilly. Not like Gilly.”
“Not like Gilly?”
“Turn over, pretty baby. Papa has to punish you.”
“Oh my God!” Gillian fell to her knees, took her sister into her arms. She sobbed against her breast, but the girl did not respond. Instead, her arms hung limply at her sides and her body tensed as if the proximity of her sister was frightening or distasteful. “Why didn’t you come to Harrogate? Didn’t you see the message? Why didn’t you come? I thought you were all right! I thought he left you alone! Why didn’t you come?”
“Bobby died. Bobby died.”
“Don’t say that! You’re alive. Don’t let him kill you now!”
Roberta shrank back, freeing herself fi ercely. “Papa never kill, Papa never kill, Papa never kill!” Her voice grew high with panic.
The psychiatrist leaned forward in his chair. “Kill what, Roberta?” he asked quickly, and pressed the advantage. “What did Papa never kill?”
“Baby. Papa didn’t kill the baby.”
“What did he do?”
“Found me in the barn. Cried and prayed and cried.”
“Is that where you had the baby? In the barn?”
“No one knew. Fat and ugly. No one knew.”
Gillian’s eyes were transfixed in horror, not on her sister’s face, but on the psychiatrist. She rocked on her heels, a hand at her mouth, biting down on her fingers as if to keep from screaming. “You were pregnant? Bobby! He didn’t know you were pregnant?”
“No one knew. Not like Gilly. Fat and ugly. No one knew.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“Bobby died.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“Bobby died.”
“What happened to the baby!” Gillian’s voice rose to a scream.
“Did you kill the baby, Roberta?” Dr. Samuels asked.
Nothing. She began to rock. It was a rapid movement, as if she were hurtling back into madness.
Gillian watched her, watched the panic that drove her and the unassailable armour of psychosis that protected her. And she knew. “Papa killed the baby,” she asserted numbly. “He found you in the barn, he cried and prayed, read the Bible for guidance, and then he killed the baby.” She touched her sister’s hair. “What did he do with it?”
“Don’t know.”
“Did you ever see it?”
“Never saw the baby. Boy or girl. Don’t know.”
“Is that why you didn’t come to Harrogate? Were you pregnant then?”
The rocking slowed to a stop. It was affi rmation.
“Baby died. Bobby died. It didn’t matter. Papa sorry, pretty baby. Papa never hurt again. Pretty baby march for Papa. Papa never hurt again.”
“He didn’t have intercourse with you again, Roberta?” Dr. Samuels asked. “But everything else stayed the same?”
“Pretty baby march for Papa.”
“Did you march for Papa, Roberta?” the doctor continued. “After the baby, did you march for him?”
“Marched for Papa. Had to march.”
“Why? Why did you have to?”
She looked about furtively, an odd smile of twisted satisfaction dancing on her face. And then began to rock. “Papa happy.”
“It was important that Papa be happy,” Dr. Samuels said refl ectively.
“Yes, yes. Very happy. Happy Papa won’t touch…” She cut the words off. The rocking increased in intensity.
“No, Bobby,” Gillian said. “Don’t you leave. You mustn’t leave now. You marched for Papa to keep him happy so that he wouldn’t touch someone. Who?”
In the darkened observation room, the terrible realisation cut like a sword’s swath down Lynley’s spine. The knowledge had been there before him all along. A nine-year-old girl being schooled in the Bible, being read the Old Testament, learning the lessons of Lot’s daughters.
“Bridie!” he said savagely and understood everything at last. He could have told the rest of the story himself, but he listened instead to the purgation of a tortured soul.
“Papa wanted Gilly not a cow like Roberta.”
“Your father wanted a child, didn’t he?” Dr. Samuels asked. “He needed a child’s body to arouse him. Like Gillian’s. Like your mother’s.”
“Found a child.”
“And what happened?”
Roberta pressed her cracked lips together as if to stop herself from speaking. The corners of her mouth were spotted with blood. She gave a ragged cry and a flurry of words escaped as if of their own volition. “The Pharaoh put a chain on his neck and dressed him in fine linen and he ruled over Egypt and Joseph’s brothers came to see him and Joseph said I am supposed to save your lives by a great deliverance.”
Gillian spoke through her tears. “The Bible told you what to do, just as it always told Papa.”
“Dress in linens. Wear a chain.”
“What happened?”
“Got him in the barn.”
“How did you do that?” Dr. Samuels’s voice was low.
Roberta’s face quivered. Her eyes fi lled with tears. They began to spill down her acne-covered cheeks. “Tried twice. Didn’t work. Then…Whiskers,” she replied.
“You killed Whiskers to get your father to the barn?” the doctor asked.
“Whiskers didn’t know. Gave him pills. Papa’s pills. He was asleep. Cut…cut his throat. Called for Papa. Papa ran. Knelt by Whiskers.” She began to rock furiously, cradling her bloated body, accompanying the movement with low, tuneless humming. She was in retreat.
“And then, Roberta?” the psychiatrist asked. “You can take the last step, can’t you? With Gillian here?”
Rocking. Rocking. Savage and furious. Blindly determined. Her eyes on the wall. “Love Papa. Love Papa. Don’t remember. Don’t remember.”
“Of course you remember.” The psychiatrist’s voice was gentle but relentless. “The Bible told you what to do. If you hadn’t done it, your father would have done to that little girl all the things he had done to you and Gillian through the years. He would have molested her. He would have sodomised her. He would have raped her. But you stopped him, Roberta. You saved that child. You dressed in fine linens. You put on the gold chain. You killed the dog. You called your father to the barn. He ran in, didn’t he? He knelt down and-”
Roberta jumped off her chair. It fl ew across the room, striking the cabinet, and she went after it, moving like the wind. She picked it up, hurled it against the wall, dumped over the cabinet, and began to scream.
“I chopped off his head! He knelt down. He bent to pick up Whiskers. And I chopped off his head! I don’t care that I did it! I wanted him to die! I wouldn’t let him touch Bridie! He wanted to. He read to her just like he’d done to me. He talked to her just like he’d done to me. He was going to do it! I knew the signs! I killed him! I killed him and I don’t care! I’m not sorry! He deserved to die!” Slumping to the floor, she wept into her hands, large grey doughlike hands that covered her face, but pinched and brutalised it even as they protected. “I saw his head on the fl oor. And I didn’t care. And the rat came out of nowhere. And he sniffed at the blood. And he ate at the brains and I didn’t care!”
With a strangled cry, Sergeant Havers leapt to her feet and staggered from the room.
Barbara crashed into the lavatory, fell blindly into a stall, and began to vomit. The room swam round her. She was so ragingly hot that she was sure she would faint, but she continued, instead, to vomit. And as she retched- painfully, spasmodically-she knew that what was spewing forth from her body was the turbid mass of her own despair.
She clung to the smooth porcelain bowl, fought for breath to redeem her, and vomited. It was as if she had never seen life clearly until the last two hours and, suddenly faced with its filth, she had to get away from it, had to get it out of her system.
In that dark, stifling room the voices had come to her relentlessly. Not just the voices of the sisters who had lived the nightmare, but the voices of her own past and of the nightmare that remained. It was too much. She could no longer live with it; she could no longer bear it.
I can’t, she sobbed inwardly. Tony, I can’t any longer! God forgive me, but I can’t!
Footsteps entered the room. She struggled to pull herself together but the illness continued and she knew she would have to endure the further humiliation of being mortally ill in front of the fashionable competence of Lady Helen Clyde.
Water was turned on. More footsteps. The stall door opened and a damp cloth was pressed to the back of her neck, folded quickly, and then wiped across her burning cheeks.
“Please. No! Go away!” She was sick again and, what was even more despicable, she began to cry. “I can’t!” she wept. “I can’t! Please. Please! Leave me alone!”
A cool hand pushed her hair off her face and supported her forehead. “Life’s rotten, Barb. And the hell of it is that it doesn’t get much better,” Lynley’s voice said.
Horrified, she spun around. But it was Lynley, and in his eyes the compassion she had seen before: in his treatment of Roberta, in his conversation with Bridie, in his questioning of Tessa. And she suddenly saw what it was that Webberly had known she could learn from Lynley-the source of his strength, the centre of what she knew quite well was tremendous personal courage. It was that quiet compassion, nothing else, that finally broke her.
“How could he?” she sobbed. “If it’s your child…you’re supposed to love, not hurt. Not let him die. Never let him die! And that’s what they did!” Her voice spiralled hysterically and all the time Lynley’s dark eyes were on her face. “I hate…I can’t…They were supposed to be there for him. He was their son! They were supposed to love him and they didn’t. He was sick for four years, the last year in hospital.
They wouldn’t even go to see him! They said they couldn’t bear it, that it hurt too much. But I went. I went every day. And he asked for them. He asked why Mum and Dad wouldn’t come to see him. And I lied. I went every day and I lied. And when he died, he was all alone. I was in school. I didn’t get there in time. He was my little brother! He was only ten years old! And all of us-all of us-let him die alone.”
“I’m so sorry,” Lynley said.
“I swore that I would never let them forget what they’d done. I asked his teachers for the letters. I framed the death certificate. I made the shrine. I kept them in the house. I closed the doors and the windows. And every single day I made sure they had to sit there and stare at Tony. I drove them mad! I wanted to do it! I destroyed them. I destroyed myself!”
She put her head down on the porcelain and wept. She wept for the hate that had fi lled her life, for the guilt and the jealousy that had been her companions, for the loneliness that she had brought upon herself, for the contempt and disgust that she had directed towards others.
At the last, when Lynley wordlessly took her into his arms, she wept against his chest, mourning most of all the death of the friendship that could have lived between them.
Through the transom windows in Dr. Samuels’s orderly office, they could see the rose garden. It was designed in plots and descending terraces, the plants segregated by colour of flower and type. A few bushes still had blooms on them, despite the lateness of the year, the cold nights, the rare frost in the mornings. Soon, however, the heavy blossoms would die. Gardeners would cut the bushes back for a dormant winter. But they would renew themselves in the spring, and the circle of life would continue.
They watched the little party wander on the gravel paths among the plants. They were a study in contrasts: Gillian and her sister, Lady Helen and Sergeant Havers, and far behind them the two nurses, their forms hidden beneath the long capes they wore against the wind-blown afternoon.
Lynley turned from the sight and saw Dr. Samuels watching him thoughtfully from behind his desk, his intelligent face carefully devoid of expression.
“You knew she’d had a baby,” Lynley said. “From her admission physical, I should guess.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t trust you,” Samuels replied and added, “then. Whatever fragile bond I could hope to develop with Roberta by keeping that to myself was far more important than sharing the information with you and running the risk of your blurting it out to her.” He tempered his words. “It was, after all, privileged information.”
“What’s going to happen to them?” Lynley asked.
“They’re going to survive.”
“How can you know that?”
“They’re beginning to understand that they were his victims. That’s the fi rst step.” Samuels took off his spectacles and polished them on the interior of his jacket. His lean face was tired. He had heard it all before.
“I don’t understand how they survived this long.”
“They coped.”
“How?”
The doctor gave a final glance to his spectacles and put them back on. He adjusted their position carefully. He’d worn them for years, and deep, painful indentations had been created on either side of his nose from their pressure. “For Gillian it appears to have been what we call dissociation, a way of subdividing the self so that she could pretend to have or be those things which she couldn’t really have or couldn’t really be.”
“Such as?”
“Normal feelings, for one. Normal relationships for another. She called it being a mirror, just reflecting the behaviour of those round her. It’s a defence. It protected her from feeling anything about what was happening to her.”
“How?”
“She wasn’t a ‘real person,’ so nothing her father did could really touch or hurt her.”
“Everyone in the village describes her in an entirely different way.”
“Yes. That’s the behaviour. Gillian simply mirrored them. Taking it to its furthest extreme, it becomes multiple personalities, but she seems to have prevented that from occurring. In itself, that’s remarkable, considering what she went through.”
“What about Roberta?”
The psychiatrist frowned. “She didn’t cope as well as Gillian,” he admitted.
Lynley gave a last glance out the window and returned to his seat, a worn upholstered chair: resting place, no doubt, for hundreds of tormented psyches. “Is that why she ate?”
“As a way of escaping? No, I don’t think so. I’d say it was more an act of self-destruction.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The abused child feels he or she has done something wrong and is being punished for it. Roberta may well have eaten because the abuse led her to despise herself-her ‘wicked-ness’-and destroying her body was a scourging. That’s one explanation.” The doctor hesitated.
“And the other?”
“Hard to say. It could be that she tried to stop the abuse the only way she knew how. Short of suicide, what better way than to destroy her body, to make herself as un-Gillylike as possible. That way, her father wouldn’t want her sexually.”
“But it didn’t work.”
“Unfortunately, no. He merely turned to perversions to arouse himself, making her part of it. That would feed his need for power.”
“I feel as if I’d like to tear Teys apart,” Lynley said.
“I feel that way all the time,” the doctor responded.
“How could anyone…I don’t understand it.”
“It’s a deviant behaviour, a sickness. Teys was aroused by children. His marriage to a sixteen-year-old girl-not a voluptuous, womanly sixteen-year-old, but a late-maturing sixteen-year-old-would have been a glaring sign to anyone looking for aberrant behaviour. But he was able to mask it well with his devotion to religion and his persona of the strong, loving father. That’s so typical, Inspector Lynley. I can’t tell you how typical it is.”
“And no one ever knew? I can’t believe it.”
“If you consider the situation, it’s easy to believe. Teys projected a very successful image in his community. At the same time, his daughters were tricked into self-blame and secrecy. Gillian believed she had been responsible for her mother’s desertion of her father and was making reparation for that by, in Teys’s words, ‘being a mummy’ to him. Roberta believed that Gillian had pleased her father and that she was supposed to do the same.
And both of them, of course, were taught from the Bible-Teys’s careful selection of passages and his twisted interpretations of them-that what they were doing was not only right but written by the hand of God as their duty as his daughters.”
“It makes me sick.”
“It is sick. He was sick. Consider his sickness: He chose a child to be his bride. That was safe. He was threatened by the adult world and in the person of this sixteen-year-old girl, he saw someone who could arouse him with her childlike body and, at the same time, gratify his need for the self-respect that a marriage would give him.”
“Then why did he turn to his children?”
“When Tessa-this childlike bride of his- produced a baby, Teys had frightening and irrefutable evidence that the creature who had been arousing him and upon whose body he had taken such gratification was not a child at all, but a woman. And he was threatened by women, I should guess, the feminine representation of the entire adult world that he feared.”
“She said he stopped sleeping with her.”
“I’ve no doubt of that. If he had slept with her and failed to perform, imagine his humiliation. Why risk that kind of failure when there in his house was a helpless infant from whom he could get immense pleasure and satisfaction?”
Lynley felt his throat close. “Infant?” he asked. “Do you mean…”
Dr. Samuels took the measure of Lynley’s reaction and nodded in sad recognition of an outrage he himself had felt for many years. “I should think that the abuse of Gillian began in infancy. She remembers the fi rst incident when she was four or five, but Teys was unlikely to have waited that long unless his religion was providing him with self-control for those years. It’s possible.”
His religion. Each piece was falling into place more tidily than the last, but as each did, Lynley felt an anger that needed free rein. He controlled it with an effort. “She’ll stand trial.”
“Eventually. Roberta’s going to recover. She’ll be found competent to stand trial.” The doctor turned in his chair to watch the group in the garden. “But you know as well as I, Inspector, that no jury in the world is going to convict her of anything when the truth is told. So perhaps we can believe that there will be a form of justice after all.”
The trees that towered above St. Catherine’s Church cast long shadows on the exterior of the building so that, even though it was still light outside, the interior was dim. The deep reds and purples from stained glass windows poured forth bloody pools of light which faded slowly on the cracked tile floor, and votive candles flickered under statues who watched his movement in the aisle. The air within the building was heavy and dead, and as Lynley made his way to the Elizabethan confessional, he shivered.
He opened the door, went inside the booth, knelt, and waited. The darkness was complete, the tranquillity absolute. A suitable ambience for meditating upon one’s sins, Lynley thought.
A grill was moved in the darkness. A gentle voice murmured incantations to a nonexistent god. Then, “Yes, my child?”
At the last moment, he wondered if he would be able to do it. But he found his voice.
“He came to you here,” Lynley said. “This was the place where he confessed his sins. Did you absolve him, Father? Did you make some sort of mystical configuration in the air that told William Teys he was free of the sin of abusing his children? What did you tell him? Did you give him your blessing? Did you release him from the confessional, his soul purged once more, to go home to his farm and begin it again? Is that how it was?”
In response, he only heard breathing, harsh and rapid, that told him a living creature was on the other side of the grill.
“And did Gillian confess? Or was she too frightened? Did you talk to her about what her father did to her? Did you try to help her?”
“I…” The voice sounded as if it were coming from a great distance. “Understand and forgive.”
“That’s what you told her? Understand? Forgive? What about Roberta? Was she supposed to understand and forgive as well? Was a sixteen-year-old girl supposed to learn to accept the fact that her father raped her, made her pregnant, that he then murdered her child? Or was that your idea, Father?”
“I didn’t know about the baby. I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” The voice was frantic.
“But you knew once you found it in the abbey. You damn well knew. You chose Pericles, Father Hart. You damn well knew.”
“He…he never confessed to that. Never!”
“And what would you have done if he had? What exactly would his penance have been for the murder of his child? And it was murder. You know it was murder.”
“No. No!”
“William Teys carried that baby from Gembler Farm to the abbey. He couldn’t wrap it in anything because anything he used might have been traced back to him. So he carried it naked. And it died. You knew when you saw it whose baby it was, how it got to the abbey. You chose Pericles for the epitaph. Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke. You damn well knew.”
“He said…after that…he swore he was cured.”
“Cured? A miraculous recovery from sexual deviance, nicely engineered by the death of his infant child? Is that what you thought? Is that what you wanted to think? He was recovered, all right. His idea of recovery was that he’d stopped raping Roberta. But listen to me, Father, because this is on your conscience and by God you shall hear me, he stopped nothing else.”
“No!”
“You know it’s the truth. He was addicted. The only problem was that he needed a fresh young fix for his habit. He needed Bridie. And you were going to let it happen.”
He swore to me-”
“He swore? On what? The Bible that he used to make Gillian believe she had to give her body to her father? Is that what he swore on?”
“He stopped confessing. I didn’t know. I-”
“You knew. From the moment he started on Bridie, you knew. And when you went to the farm and saw what Roberta had done, the real truth came crashing right down, didn’t it?”
There was a stifled sob. And then growing out of it a keening of grief that rose like the wail of Jacob and broke on the utterance of three nearly incoherent words. “Mea…mea culpa!”
“Yes!” Lynley hissed. “Through your fault, Father.”
“I couldn’t…it was the silence of the confessional. It’s a holy oath.”
“There is no oath more important than life. There is no oath more important than the ruin of a child. You saw that, didn’t you, when you went to the farm? You knew that it was finally time to break the silence. So you wiped off the axe, you got rid of the knife, and you came to Scotland Yard. You knew the real truth would come out that way, the truth you lacked the courage to reveal.”
“Oh God, I…understand and forgive.” The whisper was broken.
“Not for this. Not for twenty-seven years of physical abuse. For two ruined lives. For the death of their dreams. There is no understanding. There is no forgiveness. By God, not for this.” He shoved open the door of the confessional and left.
Behind him a querulous voice rose in agonising prayer. “‘Fret not thyself because of evildoers…they shall soon be cut down like the grass…trust in the Lord…he shall give thee the desires of thy heart…evildoers shall be cut off…’”
Scarcely able to breathe, Lynley fl ung open the church door and stepped out into the air.
Lady Helen was leaning against the edge of a lichened sarcophagus, watching Gillian, who stood at the small, distant grave under the cypress trees, her cropped blonde head bent in contemplation or prayer. She heard Lynley’s footsteps but did not stir, not even when he joined her and she felt the sure, steady pressure of his arm against her own.
“I saw Deborah,” he said at last.
“Ah.” Her eyes remained on Gillian’s slight form. “I thought you might see her, Tommy. I hoped you wouldn’t but I did think you might.”
“You knew they were here in Keldale. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Still she looked away from him, but for a moment she lowered her eyes. “What was there to say, really? We’d said it already. So many times.” She hesitated, wanting to let it go, to let the subject die between them once and for all. But the backward abysm of time that constituted the many years of their friendship would not allow her to do so. “Was it dreadful for you?” she made herself ask.
“At fi rst.”
“And then?”
“Then I saw that she loves him. As you did once.”
A regretful smile touched her lips briefl y. “Yes. As I did once.”
“Where did you find the strength to let St. James go, Helen? How on earth did you survive it?”
“Oh, I muddled through somehow. Besides, you were always there for me, Tommy. You helped me. You were always my friend.”
“As you’ve been mine. My very best friend.”
She laughed softly at that. “Men say that about their dogs, you know. I’m not sure I ought to be flattered by the appellation.”
“But are you?” he asked.
“Most decidedly,” she replied. She turned to him then and searched his face. The exhaustion was there as it had been before, but the weight of sorrow was lessened. Not gone, that would not happen quickly, but dissolving and leading him out of the past. “You’re beyond the worst of it now, aren’t you?”
“I’m beyond the worst. I think, in fact, I’m ready to go on.” He touched the fall of her hair and smiled.
The lych-gate opened and over Lynley’s shoulder Lady Helen saw Sergeant Havers coming into the graveyard. Her steps slowed momentarily when she saw them talking tranquilly together, but she cleared her throat as if in warning of her intrusion and strode towards them quickly, her shoulders squared.
“Sir, you’ve a message from Webberly,” she said to Lynley. “Stepha had it at the lodge.”
“A message? What sort?”
“His usual cryptogram, I’m afraid.” She handed the paper to him. “‘ID positive. London verifies. York informed last P.M.,’” she recited. “Does it make sense to you?”
He read the message over, folded the paper, and looked bleakly off through the graveyard to the hills beyond. “Yes,” he replied, but the words were not coming easily to him, “it makes perfect sense.”
“Russell Mowrey?” Havers asked perceptively. When he nodded, she went on. “So he did go to London to turn Tessa in to Scotland Yard. How strange. Why not turn her in to the York police? What could Scotland Yard-”
“No. He’d gone to London to see his family, just as Tessa guessed. But he never made it farther than King’s Cross Station.”
“King’s Cross Station?” Havers repeated.
“That’s where the Ripper got him, Havers. His picture was on the wall in Webberly’s office.”
He went to the lodge alone. He walked down Church Street and stood for a moment on the bridge as he had done only the night before. The village was hushed, but, as he took a final look at Keldale, a door slammed nearby. A little red-haired girl hurtled down the back steps of her house and darted to a shed. She disappeared, emerging moments later, dragging a large sack of feed on the ground.
“Where’s Dougal?” he called.
Bridie looked up. Her curly hair trapped the sunlight, burning an autumn contrast against the bright green pullover-several sizes too large-that she wore. “Inside. He has a stomachache today.”
Lynley wondered idly how one diagnosed a stomachache in a mallard and wisely thought better of asking. “Why are you feeding him, then?” he asked.
She pondered the question, scratching her left leg with the top of her right foot. “Mummy says I ought to. She’s been keeping him warm all day and she says she thinks he can eat something now.”
“Sounds like a good nurse.”
“She is.” She waved a grubby hand at him and disappeared into the house, a small package of life with her dreams intact.
He walked across the bridge and into the lodge. Behind the reception desk, Stepha stood up, her lips parted to speak.
“It was Ezra Farmington’s baby that you had, wasn’t it?” he asked her. “He was part of the wild, crazy laughter you wanted after your brother died, wasn’t he?”
“Thomas-”
“Wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Do you watch when he and Nigel torment each other over you? Are you amused when Nigel drinks himself blind at the Dove and Whistle, hoping to catch you spending time with Ezra at his house across the street? Or do you escape the whole confl ict with Richard Gibson’s help?”
“That’s really unfair.”
“Is it? Do you know that Ezra doesn’t believe he can paint any longer? Are you interested, Stepha? He’s destroyed his work. The only pieces left are his paintings of you.”
“I can’t help him.”
“You won’t help him.”
“That’s not true.”
“You won’t help him,” Lynley repeated. “For some reason, he still wants you. He wants the child as well. He wants to know where it is. He wants to know what you did with it, who has it. Have you even bothered to tell him if it’s a boy or girl?”
She dropped her eyes. “She’s…she was adopted by a family in Durham. That’s the way it had to be.”
“And that’s to be his punishment, I take it?”
Her eyes flew up. “For what? Why would I punish him?”
“For stopping the laughter. For insisting on having something more with you. For being willing to take chances. For being all the things you’re too afraid to be.”
She didn’t reply. There was no need for her to do so when he could read the answer so clearly on her face.
She had not wanted to go to the farm. The scene of so many of her childhood terrors, the farm was a place she wished to bury in the past. All she had wanted to see was the baby’s grave. That done, she was ready to leave. The others, this group of kind strangers who had come into her life, did not question her. Rather, they bundled her into the large, silver car and drove her out of Keldale.
She had no idea where they were taking her, and she didn’t much care. Jonah was gone. Nell was dead. And whoever Gillian was remained to be discovered. She was simply a shell. There was nothing else left.
Lynley glanced at Gillian in the mirror. He wasn’t sure what would happen. He wasn’t sure that it was the right thing to do. He was working on instinct, a blind instinct which insisted that something good had to rise, like a phoenix triumphant, from the ashes of the day.
He knew that he was looking for meaning, that he couldn’t accept the senselessness of Russell Mowrey’s death in King’s Cross Station at the hands of an unknown killer. He raged against it, against its vile brutality, against its diabolical ugliness, against its terrible waste.
He would give meaning to it all. He would not accept that these fragmented lives could not somehow conjoin, could not reach across the chasm of nineteen years and find peace at last.
It was a risk. He didn’t care. He would take it. It was six o’clock when he pulled in front of the house in York.
“I’ll just be a moment,” he said to the others in the car and reached for his door handle.
Sergeant Havers touched his shoulder. “Let me, sir. Please.”
He hesitated. She watched him.
“Please,” she repeated.
He glanced at the closed front door of the house, knowing that he couldn’t possibly face the responsibility of putting the matter into Havers’s incapable hands. Not here. Not now. Not with so much at stake.
“Havers-”
“I can do it,” she replied. “Please. Believe me.”
He saw then that she was giving him the final say over her future, that she was allowing him to be the one to decide whether she would stay in CID or return once and for all to the street. It was represented in the matter before them.
“Sir?”
He wanted desperately to refuse her permission, to tell her to stay where she was in the car, to condemn her to the pavements she had walked in uniform. But none of that had been Webberly’s plan. He understood that now, and as he looked at her trusting, resolute face, he saw that Havers-reading his intention in their destination-had built the funeral pyre herself and was perfectly determined to strike the match that would put to the test the promise of the phoenix.
“All right,” he fi nally replied.
“Thank you, sir.” She got out of the car and went to the front door. It was opened. She stepped inside the house. And the waiting began.
He had never thought of himself much as a praying man, but as he sat in the car in the growing darkness and the minutes passed, he knew what it was to pray. It was to will goodness out of evil, hope out of despair, life out of death. It was to will dreams into existence and spectres into reality. It was to will an end to anguish and a beginning to joy.
Gillian stirred in the back seat. “Whose house-” Her voice died as the door fl ew open and Tessa ran outside, hesitating on the front path, peering towards the car. “Mummy.” Gillian said it on a breath. She said nothing else. She got out of the car slowly and stared at the woman as if she were an apparition, clinging to the door for support. “Mummy?”
“Gilly! Oh my God, Gilly!” Tessa cried and began coming towards her.
It was all Gillian needed. She ran up the slope into her mother’s arms, and they entered the house together.