Lynley was positively white with rage, but there was not the slightest indication of that emotion in his voice. Barbara watched his performance on the telephone with grudging admiration. A virtuoso, she admitted.
“The name of the admitting psychiatrist?… There wasn’t one? What a fascinating procedure. Then upon whose authority…When exactly did you expect me to stumble upon this information, Superintendent, since you’ve conveniently left it out of the report?…No, you’ve got things backwards, I’m afraid. You don’t move a suspect to an institution without formal paperwork…It’s unfortunate that your police matron is on holiday, but you fi nd a replacement. You don’t move a nineteen-yearold girl into a mental hospital for the simple reason that she refuses to speak to anyone.”
Barbara wondered if he would allow himself to explode, if he would show even a crack in that well-tailored Savile Row armour of his.
“I’m afraid that bathing daily is not the preeminent indication of unshakable sanity, either… Don’t pull rank on me, Superintendent. If this is any indication of the manner in which you’ve handled this case, there’s no wonder to me that Kerridge is after your skin… Who’s her solicitor?…Shouldn’t you be getting her one yourself, then?…Don’t tell me what you have no intention of doing. I’ve been brought in on this case and henceforth it shall be conducted correctly. Am I being quite clear? Now please listen carefully. You have exactly two hours to get everything to me in Keldale: every warrant, every paper, every deposition, every note that was taken by every officer on this case. Do you understand? Two hours…Webberly. W-e-b-b-e-r-l-y. Phone him then and have done with it.” Stone-faced, Lynley handed the telephone back to Stepha Odell.
She replaced it behind the reception counter and ran a finger along the receiver several times before looking up. “Should I have said nothing?” she asked, a trace of anxiety in her voice. “I don’t want to cause trouble between you and your superiors.”
Lynley flipped open his pocket watch and checked the time. “Nies is not my superior. And yes, you should have told me. Thank you for doing so. You saved me a needless trip to Richmond that no doubt Nies was longing to force me to make.”
Stepha didn’t pretend to understand. Instead, she gestured vaguely to a door on their right. “I…May I offer you a drink, Inspector? You as well, Sergeant? We’ve got a real ale that, as Nigel Parrish is fond of saying, ‘sets you to rights.’ Come this way.”
She led them into a typical English country inn lounge, whose air was heavy with the scent of a recent fire. The room had been cleverly designed with enough home-like qualities to keep residents comfortable while maintaining a formal enough atmosphere to keep villagers out. There were a variety of plump, chintz-covered couches and chairs decorated with petit point pillows; tables spread out in no particular arrangement were maple, well used and ringed on their tops where too many glasses had been placed on the wood without protection; the carpet was a floral design, patchy with darker colours in some sections where furniture had recently been moved; suitably tedious prints hung on the walls: riding to hounds, a day at Newmarket, a view of the village. But behind the bar at the far side of the room and over the fireplace were two watercolours that displayed a distinctive talent and remarkable taste. Both were views of a ruined abbey.
Lynley wandered to one of these as Stepha worked behind the bar. “This is lovely,” he remarked. “A local artist?”
“A young man named Ezra Farmington does them,” she replied. “They’re of our abbey. Those two are how he paid for his board here one autumn. He lives in the village permanently now.”
Barbara watched the redheaded woman deftly work the taps and scoop the foam from the churning brew that was developing a life of its own in the glass. Stepha laughed in a breathless, charming way when the foam slipped over the side and onto her hand, and she unconsciously raised her fingers to her lips to lick the residue. Barbara idly wondered how long it would take Lynley to get her into bed.
“Sergeant?” Stepha asked. “An ale for you as well?”
“Tonic water, if you have it,” Barbara replied. She looked out the window. On the common, the old priest who had been to see them in London was having an anxious conversation with another man. From the gesturing and pointing at the silver Bentley, the news of their arrival was apparently the topic of the village. A woman crossed from the bridge to join them. She was wispy-looking, an effect produced by a dress too gauzy for the season and by baby-fine hair which the smallest air current ruffled. She rubbed her arms for warmth, and, rather than joining in the conversation of the two men, she merely listened as if waiting for one or the other of them to walk off. In a moment the priest said a few final words and meandered back towards the church. The other two remained standing together. Their conversation went in fi ts and starts, with the man saying something with a quick look at the woman and then away and the woman replying briefly. There were long silences in which the woman looked at the bank of the river next to the common and the man focused his attention on the lodge-or perhaps the car in front of it. Someone was significantly interested in the arrival of the police, Barbara decided.
“A tonic water and an ale,” Stepha was saying as she placed both glasses on the bar. “It’s a home brew, my father’s recipe. We call it Odell’s. You must tell me what you think of it, Inspector.”
It was a rich, brown liquid shot through with gold. “Has a bit of a kick, doesn’t it?” Lynley said when he tasted it. “Are you sure you won’t have one, Havers?”
“Just the tonic water, thank you, sir.”
He joined her at the couch in front of which he had earlier spilled out the contents of the report on the Teys murder and had icily flipped through every paper looking for the explanation of Roberta Teys’s placement in Barnstingham Mental Asylum. There had been none. That had set him off on the telephone to Richmond. Now he began to go through the paperwork again, stacking things in categorical fashion. From the bar, Stepha Odell watched them with friendly interest, sipping an ale that she’d poured for herself.
“We’ve got the original warrants, the forensics report, the signed depositions, the photographs.” Lynley fingered the materials as he named them. He looked up at Barbara. “No keys to the farmhouse. Damn the man.”
“Richard has a set of those if you need them,” Stepha said quickly, as if hoping to make up for her remark about Roberta that had set Lynley off on a collision course with the Richmond police in the fi rst place. “Richard Gibson. He was…is William Teys’s nephew. He lives in the council cottages on St. Chad’s Lane. It’s just off the high street.”
Lynley looked up. “How does he come to have keys to the farmhouse?”
“Having arrested Roberta…well, I suppose they just gave them to Richard. He’s to inherit it anyway once the estate’s all settled,” she added. “In William’s will. I suppose he’s seeing to the place in the meantime. Someone must.”
“He’s to inherit? How was Roberta treated in the will?”
Stepha gave the bar a thoughtful sweep with a cloth. “It was fixed between Richard and William that the farm would go to Richard. It was a sensible arrangement. He works there with William… Worked there,” she corrected herself, “ever since he returned to Keldale two years ago. Once they got over their row about Roberta, it all worked out to everyone’s advantage. William had someone to help him, Richard had a job and a future, and Roberta had a place to live for life.”
“Sergeant.” Lynley nodded at her notebook, which was lying unused next to her tonic water. “If you would please…”
Stepha flushed as she saw Barbara reach for her pen. “Is this an interview then?” she asked, flashing an anxious smile. “I don’t know how much I can help you, Inspector.”
“Tell us about the row and Roberta.”
She came round the bar and joined them, pulling a comfortable, cushioned chair to the other side of the table. She sat down, tucking her legs to one side, and glanced at the stack of photographs in front of her. She looked away quickly.
“I’ll tell you what I can, but it isn’t much. Olivia’s the one who can tell you more.”
“Olivia Odell…your…”
“Sister-in-law. My brother Paul’s widow.” Stepha placed her glass of ale on the table and used the same movement to cover the photographs with a pile of forensic reports. “If you don’t mind…”
“Sorry,” Lynley said quickly. “We get so used to looking at horrors like that that we become immune.” He replaced it all in the folder. “Why did they have a row about Roberta?”
“Olivia told me later-she was with them at the Dove and Whistle when it happened-that it was all due to the way Roberta looks.” She fingered her glass, made a pattern of lace on the moisture of its surface. “Richard’s from Keldale, you see, but he’d been gone a good few years trying his luck with barley in the fens. He’d married down there, had two children as well. When the farming didn’t work out, he returned to the Kel.” She smiled at them. “They say that the Kel never lets one go easily, and that was the case for Richard. He was gone for eight or nine years and, when he returned, he was quite a bit shocked to see the change in Roberta.”
“You said it was all due to the way she looks?”
“She didn’t always look as she does now. She was always a big girl, of course, even at eight when Richard left. But she was never…”
Stepha hesitated, clearly searching delicately for the right word, for a euphemism that would be factual at the same time as it was noncommittal.
“Obese,” Barbara fi nished. Like a cow.
“Yes,” Stepha went on gratefully. “Richard had always been great friends with Roberta, for all he’s twelve years her senior. And to come back and find his cousin so sadly deteriorated-physically, I mean, she was much the same otherwise-was a terrible shock to him. He blamed William for ignoring the girl. Said she had done it to herself to try to get his attention. William raged at that. Olivia said she’d never seen him so angry. Poor man, there’d been problems enough in his life without an accusation like that from his own nephew. But they got it sorted out. Richard apologised the very next day. William wouldn’t take Roberta to a doctor-he wouldn’t bend that far-but Olivia found a diet for the girl, and from that time on, all went well.”
“Until three weeks ago,” Lynley observed.
“If you choose to believe that Roberta killed her father, then yes, it all went well until three weeks back. But I don’t believe she killed him. Not for one blessed moment.”
Lynley looked surprised at the force behind her words. “Why not?”
“Because aside from Richard-who heaven knows has enough trouble just dealing with that family of his own-William was all that Roberta had. Besides her reading and dreams, there was only her father.”
“She’d no friends her own age? No other girls nearby on the farms or in the village?”
Stepha shook her head. “She kept to herself. When she wasn’t working on the farm with her father, mostly she read. She was here every day for the Guardian, in fact, for years on end. They never did take a paper on the farm, so she’d come every afternoon once everyone’d seen it and we’d let her take it home with her. I think she’d read every book of her mother’s in the house, all of Marsha Fitzalan’s, and the newspaper was the only thing left for her. We’ve no lending library, you see.” She frowned down at the glass in her hands. “She stopped looking at the paper a few years back, though. When my brother died. I couldn’t help thinking…” Her grey-blue eyes darkened. “That perhaps Roberta was in love with Paul. After he died four years ago, we saw nothing of the girl for quite some time. And she never came again to ask for the Guardian.”
If a village as small as Keldale could even have an undesirable area out of which residents aspired to escape, St. Chad’s Lane would have been that spot. It was more like an alley than a street, an unpaved thoroughfare to nowhere, having the one distinction of a pub on the corner. This was the Dove and Whistle, its doors and woodwork painted a blinding shade of purple, itself looking very much as if it wished it could have had the good fortune to be settled somewhere-anywhere- else.
Richard Gibson and his brood lived in the last attached house in this lane, a pinched stone building with chipped window sashes and a front door that had once been painted royal blue but now was fading to a decided grey. This stood open to the late afternoon, mindless of the rapidly dropping temperature in the dale, and from within the confi nes of the tiny house came the noise of a family quarrelling passionately.
“God damn you, do something with him, then. He’s your son as well. Jesus Christ! You’d think he was a miraculous little version of virgin birth from all the interest you take in his upbringing!” It was a woman speaking, a shrieking that sounded as if at any moment it would choose hysteria or cachinnation as a second line of attack.
A man’s voice rumbled in answer, indistinguishable in the general uproar.
“Oh, it will be better then? That’s a fine laugh, Dick. When you’ve the whole bleeding farm to use as an excuse? Just like last night! You couldn’t wait to get there, could you? So don’t tell me about the farm! We’ll never see you then when you’ve five hundred acres to hide in!”
Lynley rapped sharply with the rust-grimed knocker on the open door, and the scene froze before them.
With a plate on his knee, obviously attempting to eat some sort of utterly unappetising afternoon meal, a man sat on a sagging couch in a cramped sitting room while in front of him a woman stood, her arm upraised, a hairbrush in her hand. Both stared at the unexpected visitors.
“You’ve caught us at our very best moment. It was straight to bed next,” Richard Gibson said.
★ ★ ★
The Gibsons were a portrait of contrasts: the man was enormous, nearly six and a half feet, with black hair, swarthy skin, and sardonic, brown eyes. He was bullnecked, with the thick limbs of a labourer. His wife, on the other hand, was a scrap of a blonde, sharp-featured and, at the moment, white to the lips with rage. But there was an electricity in the air between them that gave credence to what the man had said. Here was a relationship where every argument and discussion was merely a skirmish before the major battle of who would be master between the sheets. And the answer to that, judging from what Lynley and Havers could see before them, was clearly a toss-up.
Shooting a final, smouldering look at her husband that spoke of desire as much as rage, Madeline Gibson left the room, slamming the kitchen door behind her. The big man chuckled when she was gone.
“Eight stone of tiger,” he commented, getting to his feet. “One hell of a woman.” He extended a large paw. “Richard Gibson,” he said genially. “You must be Scotland Yard.” When Lynley had made the introductions, Gibson went on. “Sundays are always the worst round here.” He jerked his head towards the kitchen, from which a steady wailing indicated the state of the relationship between mother and what sounded like fourteen children. “Roberta used to help out. But we’re without her now. Of course you know that. That’s why you’ve come.” He hospitably indicated two antiquated chairs that were belching stuffing onto the floor. Lynley and Havers picked their way across the room to them, avoiding broken toys, scattered newspapers, and at least three plates of half-consumed food that lay on the bare floor. Somewhere, a glass of milk had been left too long in the room, for its sour smell overcame even the other odours of poorly cooked food and plumbing gone bad.
“You’ve inherited the farm, Mr. Gibson,” Lynley began. “Will you move there soon?”
“It can’t be soon enough for me. I’m not sure my marriage can survive another month of this place.” Gibson toed his plate away from the couch. A scrawny cat slid out of nowhere, sniffed at the dried bread and pungent sardines, and rejected the offering by attempting to bury it. Gibson watched the animal, his face amused.
“You’ve lived here several years, haven’t you?”
“Two to be exact. Two years, four months, and two days, to be even more precise. I could probably get it down to the hours as well, but you get the idea.”
“I couldn’t help overhearing the fact that your wife doesn’t seem to be enthused about the Teys farm.”
Gibson laughed. “You’re well bred, Inspector Lynley. I like that sort of thing when the police come calling.” He ran his hands through his thick hair, looked at the fl oor beneath his feet, and found a bottle of ale that, in the general confusion, had become positioned precariously against the side of the couch. He picked it up and drained it before going on, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. It was the gesture of a man used to taking his meals out in the fi elds. “No. Madeline wants the fens again. She wants the open spaces, the water and the sky. But I can’t give that to her. So I’ve got to give her what I can.” Gibson’s eyes flicked over Sergeant Havers, who kept her head bent over her notebook. “Sound like the words of a man who would kill his uncle, don’t they?” he asked pleasantly.
★ ★ ★
Hank finally caught up with them in the novices’ room. St. James looked up from kissing his wife-her skin smelled intoxicatingly of lilies, her fingers moved silkily through his hair, her murmured “my love” against his mouth fired his blood-and there was the American, grinning wickedly down at them from his perch on the wall of the day room.
“Cotcha.” Hank winked.
St. James contemplated murder. Deborah gasped in surprise. Hank hopped down, unbidden, to join them. “Hey, Bean,” he shouted. “Found the lovebirds in here.”
JoJo Watson appeared only moments later, struggling through the doorway in the ruined abbey, teetering dangerously on high heels. Round her neck, as a complement to the chains and trinkets, hung an Instamatic camera.
“Taking some shots,” Hank said in explanation, nodding towards the camera. “A few minutes more and we’d’ve had a few sweet ones-a you!” He snorted with laughter, slapping St. James affectionately on the shoulder. “Don’t blame you a bit, fella! If she belonged to me, I couldn’t keep my mitts off her.” He gave brief attention to his wife. “Dammit, Bean, be careful, woman! Break your neck in this place.” He turned back to the other two and noticed Deborah’s equipment-camera case, tripod, discarded lenses. “Hey, you taking shots, too? Got sidetracked, huh? That’s honeymooners for you. Come on down here, Bean. Join the party.”
“Back from Richmond so soon?” St. James finally managed to ask with strangled courtesy. Deborah, he noted, was surreptitiously trying to straighten her clothes. Her eyes met his, full of laughter and mischief, alive with desire. What in God’s name were the Americans doing here now?
“Well,” Hank admitted as JoJo reached them at last, “I gotta tell you, fella, Richmond wasn’t quite everything that you promised it’d be. Not that we didn’t get a bang outa the drive. Whatsay, JoJo-bean? Didn’t we love it?”
“Hank loves driving on the wrong side of the road,” JoJo explained. Her nose twitched. Her eyes caught the exchange of looks between the two younger people. “Hank, why don’t we take a nice, long walk toward Bishop Furthing Road? Wouldn’t that be a sweet way to end the afternoon?” She put her bejewelled hand on her husband’s arm, attempting to draw him out onto the abbey grounds.
“Hellsapoppin, no,” Hank answered pleasantly. “I have done e-n-u-f-f walking on this trip to last me a lifetime.” He cocked his head at St. James shrewdly. “That was some m-a-p you gave us, fella! If the Bean here wasn’t so fast at reading road signs, we’d be in Edinburgh by now.” He pronounced it Ed-in-berg. “Well, there’s no harm done, is there? We got here in time to show you the death hole itself.”
There was nothing for it but to go along. “Death hole?” Deborah enquired. She had knelt and was replacing her equipment-forgotten for a few moments in the lovely blue of Simon’s eyes-in its case.
“The baby, remember?” Hank said patiently. “Although considering what you two’s up to in here, I can see the baby story didn’t exactly scare the livin’ hell outa you, did it?” He winked lasciviously.
“Ah, the baby,” St. James responded. He picked up Deborah’s case.
“Now I got your interest!” Hank approved. “I could tell at first you mighta been a little peeved at me popping in on you like that. But now I got you, I can tell.”
“Yes, indeed,” Deborah responded, but her thoughts were elsewhere. Curious, how it had all happened in a moment. She loved him, had loved him from her childhood. But in a dizzying lightning-bolt moment of time, she’d realised that it had changed somehow, becoming quite different between them from what it had been before. He’d all of a sudden become not that gentle Simon whose tender presence had filled her heart with joy but a whip-bodied lover whose very look aroused her. Good heavens, Deborah, you’ve become quite silly with lust, she thought.
St. James heard his wife’s bubble of laughter. “Deborah?” he asked.
Hank nudged him in the ribs with a knowing elbow. “Don’t worry about the bride,” he confided. “They’re all shy at first.” He strutted on ahead like Stanley with Livingston in sight, pointing out areas of interest to his wife with a “Catch that, Bean. Get it in the lens!”
“Sorry, my love,” St. James murmured as they followed the progress of the other two through the ruined day room, across court and warming house and into the cloister. “I thought I had him taken care of until midnight at least. Five minutes more and I’m afraid he would have caught me getting you into some truly serious trouble.”
“What a thought!” she laughed. “Oh, Simon, what if he had! He would have shouted, ‘Get it in the lens, Bean!’ and our love life might have been destroyed forever!” Her eyes danced and sparkled. Her hair gleamed brightly in the afternoon sun, blowing about her throat and shoulders carelessly.
St. James drew in a sharp breath. It was like a pain. “I don’t think so,” he said evenly.
The death hole was in what remained of the vestry. This was no more than a narrow roofless hallway, overgrown with grass and wildflowers, just beyond the south transept of the ancient church. Here, a series of four arched recesses lined the wall, and it was to these that Hank pointed with ghoulish drama.
“In one-a them,” he announced. “Get it in the lens, Bean.” He tromped through the grass and posed toothily. “Seems this was the place where the monks kept their church duds. Sorta a cupboard or something. And on the night in question, the baby was plopped right in and left to die. Pretty sickening when you think about it, huh?” He bounced back to their sides. “Just the right size for a kid, though,” he added thoughtfully. “Like a whatdaya-call-it? Sacrifi cial offering.”
“I’m not sure the Cistercian monks were in that line of business,” St. James commented. “And human sacrifices have been out of fashion for a good number of years.”
“Well, whatdaya think, then? Whose baby was it?”
“I couldn’t even begin to guess,” St. James replied, knowing full well the theory was forthcoming.
“Then lemme tell you how it happened, because the Bean and I figgered it out the fi rst day. Didn’t we, Bean?” A wait for the woman to nod her head loyally. “Come on over here. Lemme show you two lovebirds a thing or two.”
Hank led them through the south transept, across the uneven paving of the presbytery, and out onto the abbey grounds through a gap in the wall. “There you have it!” He pointed triumphantly to a narrow track that led to the north through the woods.
“I see indeed,” St. James replied.
“Got it fi ggered out too?”
“Ah, no.”
Hank hooted. “Sure you don’t. That’s ’cause you haven’t thought it through like me ‘n’ the Bean have, right, Sugarplum?” Sugarplum nodded mournfully, moving her bunny eyes from St. James to Deborah in silent contrition. “Gypsies!” her spouse went on. “Okay, okay, I admit it. Bean and I didn’t get the full handle on this till we saw them today. You know who I mean. Those trailers parked on the side-a the road. Well, we figgered out that there musta been some-a the same here that night. It had to be a baby-a theirs.”
“I understand gypsies are inordinately fond of their children,” St. James noted drily.
“Well, not-a this kid, anyway,” Hank replied, undeterred. “So get the pitcher here, fella. Danny and Ezra are over there somewhere”- he waved vaguely in the direction from which they had come-“getting ready for the plunge, you know? And tippy-toeing along this path comes some old crone with a kid.”
“Old crone?”
“Well sure, don’t you see it?”
“‘Ditch-delivered,’ no doubt,” St. James said.
“Ditch-who?” Hank shrugged off the literary allusion like lint from his coat. “The old crone looks around, right and left,” Hank demonstrated, “and slips into the abbey. Looks around for a deposit box and bingo, Bob’s-yer-uncle.”
“It certainly is an interesting theory,” Deborah put in. “But I always feel just a bit sorry for the gypsies. They seem to get blamed for everything, don’t they?”
“That, little bride, brings me right on up to theory number two.”
JoJo-bean blinked her apologies.
Gembler Farm was in excellent condition, a fact unsurprising since Richard Gibson had continued to work it throughout the three weeks since his uncle’s death. Opening the well-oiled gates that hung between two stone posts, Lynley and Havers entered and surveyed it.
It would be quite an inheritance. To their left stood the farmhouse, an old building constructed from the common brown bricks of the district, with freshly painted white woodwork and frail clematis conscientiously trimmed and trellised over windows and door.
It was set back from Gembler Road, and a well-tended garden, fenced to keep out the sheep, separated the two. Next to the house was a low outbuilding, and, forming another side to the quadrangle that comprised the yard, the barn loomed to their right.
Like the house, it was constructed of brick with a heavily tiled roof. It was two fl oors high, with gaping windows on the second floor through which the tops of ladders could be seen. Dutch doors were used on the ground level of the barn, for this was a building for tools and animals only. Vehicles would be kept in the outbuilding to the far side of the house.
They walked across the well-swept yard, and Lynley inserted a key into the rusting lock that hung on the barn door. It swung noiselessly open. Inside, it was eerily still, dim, musty, and overcold, too much the place where a man had met a violent end.
“Quiet,” Havers observed. She hesitated at the door while Lynley entered.
“Hmm,” he responded from the third stall. “Expect that’s due to the sheep.”
“Sir?”
He looked up at her from where he had squatted on the pockmarked stone fl oor. She was quite pale. “Sheep, Sergeant,” he said. “They’re in the upper meadow, remember? That’s why it’s so quiet. Have a look here, will you?” Seeing that she was reluctant to approach, he added, “You were right.”
She came forward at that and passed her eyes over the stall. At the far end was heaped a mouldly pile of hay. To the centre was a not overlarge pool of dried blood-brown, not red. There was nothing else.
“Right, sir?” Havers asked.
“Dead on the bottom, if you’ll pardon the expression. Not a drop of blood on the walls. I don’t think we had any body-slinging here. No crime-scene arrangement done after the fact. Nice thinking, Havers.” He looked up in time to see the surprise on her face.
She reddened in confusion. “Thank you, sir.”
He stood up and directed his attention back to the stall. The overturned bucket upon which Roberta had been sitting when the priest found her was still in its place. The hay into which the head had rolled remained untouched. The pool of dried blood had scraping marks from the forensic team and the axe was gone, but otherwise everything remained as it had been originally photographed. Except for the bodies. The bodies. Good God. Feeling like the fool Nies intended him to be, Lynley gaped numbly at the outer edge of the stain where a heelprint matted several black and white hairs into the coagulated blood. He swung to Havers.
“The dog,” he said.
“Inspector?”
“Havers, what in God’s name did Nies do with the dog?”
Her eyes went to the same heelprint, saw the same hairs. “It was in the report, wasn’t it?”
“It wasn’t,” he replied with a muttered curse and knew that he was going to have to drag every scrap of information out of Nies as if he were a surgeon probing for shrapnel. It would be absolute hell. “Let’s look at the house,” he said grimly.
They entered as the family would, through an enclosed porch-like hallway in which old coats and mackintoshes hung on pegs and workboots stood beneath a single-plank bench along the wall. The house had gone unheated for three weeks, so the air was tomb-like. A car rumbled past on Gembler Road, but the sound was muffl ed and distant.
The hall took them immediately into the kitchen. It was a large room, with a red linoleum floor, dark ash cabinets, and brilliantly white appliances that looked as if they were still polished daily. Nothing whatsoever was out of place. Not a dish was out of a single cupboard; not a crumb lay on a single work top; not a stain marred the surface of the white, cast-iron sink. In the centre of the room stood a worktable of unpainted pine, its top scarred with the slashings of thousands of knives cutting thousands of vegetables, with the discolouration of generations of cooking.
“No wonder Gibson is eager for the place,” Lynley remarked as he looked it over. “Certainly a far cry from St. Chad’s Lane.”
“Did you believe him, sir?” Havers asked.
Lynley paused in his inspection of the cupboards. “That he was in bed with his wife when Teys was killed? Considering the nature of their relationship, it’s a credible alibi, wouldn’t you say?”
“I…I suppose so, sir.”
He glanced at her. “But you don’t believe it.”
“It’s only that…well, she looked like she was lying. Like she was angry with him as well. Or maybe angry with us.”
Lynley considered Havers’s statement. Madeline Gibson had indeed spoken to them grudgingly, spitting the words out with barely a glance of corroboration at her husband. For his part, the farmer had smoked stolidly during her recitation, a blank expression of disinterest on his face but, unmistakably, a lurking touch of amusement behind his dark eyes. “There’s something not quite right there, I’ll agree. Let’s go through here.”
They went through a heavy door into the dining room, where a mahogany table was covered with clean, cream-coloured lace. On it, yellow roses in a vase had long since died, weeping petals onto the fret of the cloth. A matching sideboard stood to one side with a silver epergne placed in its exact centre, as if someone with a measuring tool had made certain it was equidistant from each end. A china cabinet held a beautiful collection of dishes obviously unused by the inhabitants of the house. They were antique Belleek pieces, each one stacked or tilted or turned in some way to display it best. As in the kitchen, nothing was out of place. Save for the flowers, they might have been wandering through a museum.
It was across the hall from the dining room, however, where they first found signs of the life of the house. For here in the sitting room the Teyses had kept their shrine.
Havers preceded Lynley into the room, but at the sight she cried out involuntarily, and stepped back quickly, one arm raised as if to ward off a blow.
“Something wrong, Sergeant?” Lynley inspected the room to see what had startled her, observing nothing but furniture and a collection of photographs in one corner.
“Excuse me. I think…” She produced an unnatural grimace to pass for a smile. “Sorry, sir. I…I think I must be hungry or something. A little light-headed. I’m fi ne.” She walked to the corner of the room in which the photographs hung, before which the candles rested, underneath which the flowers had died. “This must be the mother,” she said. “Quite a tribute.”
Lynley joined her at a three-cornered table that backed into the wall. “Beautiful girl,” he replied softly, studying the pictures. “She really wasn’t much more than that, was she? Look at the wedding picture. She looks as if she were ten years old! Such a little creature.”
It was unspoken between them. How had she produced a cow like Roberta?
“Don’t you think it’s a bit…” Havers paused and he glanced at her. She clasped her hands stiffly behind her. “I mean, if he was planning to marry Olivia, sir.”
Lynley set down what was obviously the final portrait of the woman. She looked about twenty-four: a fresh, smiling face; golden freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her nose; long, gleaming blonde hair tied back and curled. Beguiling. He stepped back from the collection.
“It’s as if Teys established a new religion in the corner of this room,” he said. “Macabre, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I…” She tore her eyes from the picture. “Yes, sir.”
Lynley turned his attention to the rest of the room. Everyday living had gone on in it. There were a comfortably worn couch, several chairs, a rack holding numerous magazines, a television set, and a woman’s escritoire. Lynley opened this. Neatly stacked stationery, a tin of postage stamps, three unpaid bills. He glanced at them: a chemist’s receipt for Teys’s sleeping pills, the electricity, the telephone. He looked at the last, but there was nothing of interest. No long distance calls. Everything neat and clean.
Beyond the sitting room was a small library-office and they opened the door to this, looked at each other in surprise, and walked into the room. Three of the four walls had shelves that climbed to the ceiling, and every shelf was littered with books. Books stacked. Books piled. Books falling loosely to one side. Books standing up at rigid attention. Books everywhere.
“But Stepha Odell said-”
“That there was no lending library so Roberta came for the newspaper,” Lynley fi nished. “She’d read all of her own books-how was that possible?-and all of Marsha Fitzalan’s. Who, by the way, is Marsha Fitzalan?”
“Schoolteacher,” Havers responded. “She lives on St. Chad’s Lane. Next door to the Gibsons.”
“Thank you,” Lynley murmured, inspecting the shelves. He put on his spectacles. “Hmm. A bit of everything. But heavily into the Brontës, weren’t they?”
Havers joined him. “Austen,” she read, “Dickens, bit of Lawrence. They went in for the classics.” She pulled down Pride and Prejudice and opened it. Tessa’s! was scrawled childishly across the flyleaf. This same declaration was in Dickens and Shakespeare, two Norton anthologies, and all the Brontës.
Lynley moved to a book stand that was fi xed underneath the room’s only window. It was the kind used for large dictionaries, but on its top rested an immense, illuminated Bible. He ran his fingers down the page to which the book was open. “‘I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt,’” he read. “‘Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither. For God did send me before you to preserve life. For these two years hath the famine been in the land: and yet there are five years, in the which there shall neither be earing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance.’” He looked up at Havers.
“I’ll never understand why he forgave his brothers,” she said. “After what they’d done to him, they deserved to die.”
The bitterness behind her words burned. He closed the book slowly, marking the place with a scrap of paper from the desk. “But he had something they needed.”
“Food,” she scoffed.
He removed his spectacles. “I don’t think it had anything at all to do with food. Not really,” he noted. “What’s above stairs?”
The second floor of the house was simple: four bedrooms, lavatory, bathroom, all opening off a central, square landing illuminated by a skylight of opaque glass. An obvious modernisation to the house, this last architectural feature gave the effect of being in a greenhouse. Not altogether unpleasant, but unusual on a farm.
The room on their right appeared to be a guest room. A neatly made, pink-counterpaned bed, a rather smallish affair considering the size of the house’s occupants, stood against one wall on a rug printed with a design of roses and ferns. It was obviously quite old, and the once brilliant reds and greens were muted now, bleeding one into the other in a soothing rust. The walls were hung with paper on which tiny flowers-dairies and marigolds-sprinkled down. On the bedside table a small lamp stood upon a circle of lace. The chest of drawers held nothing, as did the wardrobe.
“Reminds me of a room in an inn,” Lynley remarked.
Barbara noted the view from the window: an uninteresting panorama of the barn and the yard. “Looks as if no one’s ever used it.”
Lynley was examining the counterpane across the bed. He pulled it back to reveal a badly stained mattress and a yellowing pillow. “No guests expected here. Odd to leave a bed unmade, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not at all. Why put sheets on it if it’s never going to be used?”
“Except that-”
“Look, shall I go on to the next room, Inspector?” Barbara asked impatiently. The house was oppressing her.
Lynley glanced up at the tone of her voice. He drew the counterpane back over the bed exactly as it had been placed before and sat on the edge. “What is it, Barbara?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she replied, but she heard the edge of panic in her voice. “I’d just like to get on with it. This room obviously hasn’t been used in years. Why examine every inch of it like Sherlock Holmes, as if the murderer were going to pop out of the fl oorboards?”
He didn’t reply at once, so the shrillness of her voice seemed to linger in the room long after she had spoken. “What’s wrong?” he repeated. “May I help?” His eyes were on her, dark with their concern, so infi nitely kind. It would indeed be easy-
“There’s nothing wrong!” she exploded. “I just don’t want to have to follow you around like a spaniel dog. I don’t know what you expect of me. I feel like an idiot. I’ve a brain, goddammit! Give me something to do!”
He got to his feet, his eyes still on her. “Why don’t you go across the landing and deal with the next room,” he suggested.
She opened her mouth to say more, decided against it, and left him, pausing for a moment in the greenish light of the landing. She could hear her own breathing, harsh and loud, and knew he must be able to hear it as well.
That damnable shrine! The farm itself was bad enough with its ghastly lifelessness, but the shrine had completely unnerved her. It had been set up in the very fi nest corner of the room. With a view of the garden, Barbara thought weakly. Tony has the telly and she has the damn garden!
What had Lynley called it? A religion. Yes, sweet Jesus! A temple to Tony! She compelled her breathing to return to normal, crossed the landing, and went into the next room.
That’s torn it, Barb, she told herself. What happened to agreement, to obedience, to cooperation? How will you feel back in uniform next week?
She looked about furiously, her lips quivering in disgust. Well, who bloody well cared? After all, it was a preordained failure. Had she really expected this to be a success?
She crossed the room to the window and fumbled with the latch. What had he said? What is it? May I help? The insanity was that for just a moment, she had actually thought about talking to him, about telling him everything there was to tell. But, of course, it was unthinkable. No one could help, least of all Lynley.
She unlocked the window, threw it open to feel the fresh air on her burning cheeks, then turned back, determined to do her job.
This was Roberta’s room, neat like the other, but with a lived-in air about it. A largae four-poster was covered by a quilt, a patchwork affair with a bright, cheerfu design of sun, clouds, and rainbow on a sapphire background sky. Clothes hung in the wardrobe. Sturdy shoes-work shoes, walking shoes, slippers-stood lined beneath them. There were a dressing table with a wavy cheval glass, and a chest of drawers on which a framed photograph lay, face down, as if it had toppled over. Barbara glanced at it curiously. Mother, father, and a newborn Roberta in the father’s arms. But the picture itself, slightly distended, was crowded into its frame as if it didn’t quite fit. She turned the frame in her hands and prised off the backing.
She was correct in her guess. The photograph had been too large for the purchased frame, so it had been folded back. Unfolded, the picture was very much different, for to the left of the father, hands clasped behind her, stood the mirror image of the baby’s mother, a smaller version, certainly, but undoubtedly the offspring of Tessa Teys.
Barbara was about to call out to Lynley when he came to the door, a photograph album in his hands. He paused as if trying to decide how to get their relationship back in order.
“I’ve found the strangest thing, Sergeant,” he said.
“As have I,” she replied, as determined as he to forget her outburst. They exchanged their items.
“Yours explains mine, I dare say,” Lynley remarked.
She gave curious attention to the open pages of the album. It was a pictorial family record, the kind that documents weddings and births, Christmas, Easter, and birthdays. But every picture that had more than one child in it had been cut up in some way, oddly defaced, so that pictures had central slices missing or wedges cut into them, and the size of the family was systematically reduced in every one. The effect was chilling.
“A sister of Tessa’s, I’d say,” Lynley observed.
“Perhaps her first child,” Barbara offered.
“Surely she’s too old to be a first child unless Tessa produced her when she was a child herself.” He set the frame down, slipped the photograph into his pocket, and turned his attention to the drawers. “Ah,” he said, “at least we know why Roberta was so anxious for the Guardian. She’s lined her drawers with it. And…Havers, look at this.” From the bottom drawer, beneath a pile of worn jerseys, he pulled something which had been placed face down, hidden. “The mystery girl once again.”
Barbara looked at the photograph he handed to her. It was the same girl, but older this time, a teenager. She and Roberta were standing in the snow in St. Catherine’s churchyard, both grinning at the camera. The older girl had her hands on Roberta’s shoulders, pulling her back against her. She had bent over- although certainly not far, for Roberta was nearly as tall as she-and had pressed her cheek to the other girl’s. Her dark gold hair touched Roberta’s brown curls. In front of them, with Roberta’s hand clutched into his fur, was a border collie who looked very much as if he were grinning as well. Whiskers.
“Roberta doesn’t look half bad there,” Barbara said, handing the picture to Lynley. “Big, but not fat.”
“Then this must have been taken sometime before Gibson left. Remember what Stepha said? She’d not been fat then, not until Richard was gone.” He pocketed the additional photograph and looked round the room. “Anything else?” he asked.
“Clothes in the wardrobe. Nothing much of interest.” As he had done in the other room, she drew back the quilt from the bed. Unlike the other, however, this bed was made, and its fresh, laundered linen gave off the scent of jasmine. But underneath it, as if the jasmine were incense subtly burning to hide the odour of cannabis, was the cloying smell of something more. Barbara looked at Lynley. “Do you-”
“Absolutely,” he replied. “Help me pull off the mattress.”
She did so, covering her mouth and nose when the stench filled the room and they saw what lay beneath the old mattress. The box-spring covering had been cut away in the far corner of the bed, and resting within was a storehouse of food. Rotting fruit, bread grey with mould, biscuits and candy, pastries half-eaten, bags of crisps.
“Oh, Jesus,” Barbara murmured. It was more prayer than exclamation and, in spite of the catalogue of gruesome sights she had seen as a member of the force, her stomach heaved uneasily and she backed away. “Sorry,” she gasped with a shaky laugh. “Bit of a surprise.”
Lynley dropped the mattress back into place. His face was expressionless. “It’s sabotage,” he said to himself.
“Sir?”
“Stepha said something about a diet.”
As Barbara had done before, Lynley walked to the window. Evening was drawing on, and in a fading patch of the dying light he withdrew the photographs from his coat pocket and examined them. He stood motionless, perhaps in the hope that an uninterrupted, undisturbed study of the two girls would tell him who killed William Teys and why, and what a storehouse of rotting food had to do with anything. Watching him, Barbara was struck by how a trick of light falling across hair, cheek, and brow made him look vastly younger than his thirty-two years. And yet nothing altered or obscured the man’s intelligence or the wit behind his eyes, not even the shadows. The only noise in the room was his breathing, steady and calm, very sure. He turned, found her watching him, and began to speak.
She stopped him. “Well,” she said forcefully, pushing her hair behind her ears in a pugnacious gesture, “see anything else in the other rooms?”
“Just a box of old keys in the wardrobe and a veritable museum of Tessa,” he replied. “Clothing, photographs, locks of hair. Among Teys’s own things, of course.” He replaced the photographs in his pocket. “I wonder if Olivia Odell knew what she was in for.”
They had walked the three-quarters of a mile from the village down Gembler Road to the Teys’s farm. As they returned, Lynley began to wish that he had driven his car. It was not so much concern that darkness had fallen but a longing for music to distract him. Without it, he found himself glancing at the woman walking wordlessly at his side, and he reluctantly considered what he had heard about her.
“One angry vairgin,” MacPherson had said. “What she needs is a faer toss i’ the hay.” Then he roared with laughter and lifted his pint in his big, bear’s grasp. “But no’ me, laddies. I’ll not test those waters. I leave tha’ plaisure to a young’r man!”
But MacPherson was wrong, Lynley thought. There was no question of angry virginity here. It was something else.
This wasn’t Havers’s first murder investigation, so he could not understand her reaction to the farm: her initial reluctance to enter the barn, her strange behaviour in the sitting room, her inexplicable outburst upstairs.
For the second time he wondered what on earth Webberly had in mind in creating their partnership, but he found he was too weary to attempt an explanation.
The lights of the Dove and Whistle came in sight upon the final curve of the road. “Lets get something to eat,” he said.
“Roast chicken,” the proprietor announced. “It’s our Sunday night dinner. Get you some up quick if you have a seat in the lounge.”
The Dove and Whistle was doing a brisk evening’s business. In the public bar, which had fallen into stillness upon their entrance, a pall of cigarette smoke hung like a heavy rain cloud over the room. Farmers gathered in conversation in a corner, their mud-encrusted boots placed on rungs of ladder-backed chairs, two younger men played a boisterous game of darts near a door marked TOILETS, while a group of middle-aged women compared the Sunday evening remnants of Saturday’s crimps and curls, courtesy of Sinji’s Beauty Shoppe. The bar itself was surrounded by patrons, most of whom were joking with the girl who worked the taps behind it.
She was clearly the village anomaly. Jet black hair rose out of her scalp in spikes, her eyes were heavily outlined in purple, and her clothes were nighttime-in-Soho explicit: short black leather skirt, white plunging blouse, black lace stockings with holes held together by safety pins, black laced shoes of the sort that grandmothers wear. Each of her ears- pierced four times-wore the dubious decoration of a line of stud earrings, except for the bottom right hole, which sported a feather dangling to her shoulder.
“Fancies herself a rock singer,” the publican said, following their glance. “She’s m’ daughter, but I try not to let the word out often.” He thumped a pint of ale on the wobbly table in front of Lynley, gave a tonic water to Barbara, and grinned. “Hannah!” he shouted back into the public bar. “Stop making a spectacle of yourself, girl! Y’re driving every man present insane with lust!” He winked at them wickedly.
“Oh Dad!” she laughed. The others did as well.
“Tell him off, Hannah!” somebody called. And another, “What’s the poor bloke ever known about style?”
“Style, is it?” the publican called back cheerfully. “She’s a cheap one to dress, all right. But she’s running through my fortune buying gunk for her hair.”
“How d’you keep them spikes up, Han?”
“Got scared in the abbey, I’d say.”
“Heard the baby howl, did you, Han?”
Laughter. A playful swing at the speaker. The statement made: See, we’re all friends here. Barbara wondered if they’d rehearsed the whole thing.
She and Lynley were the only occupants of the lounge, and once the door closed behind the publican, she longed for the noise of the public bar again, but Lynley was speaking.
“She must have been a compulsive eater.”
“Who murdered her father because he put her on a diet?” It slipped out before Barbara could stop herself. Sarcasm was rich in her voice.
“Who obviously did a lot of eating in secret,” Lynley went on. His own voice was unperturbed.
“Well, it doesn’t look that way to me,” she argued. She was pushing him, and she knew it. It was defensive and stupid. But she couldn’t help it.
“What does it look like to you?”
“That food’s been forgotten. Who knows how long it’s been there?”
“I think we can agree that it’s been there three weeks and that any food that’s left out for three weeks is likely to spoil.”
“All right, I’ll accept that,” Barbara said. “But not the compulsive eating.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t prove it, dammit!”
He ticked off items on his fi ngers. “We have two rotting apples, three black bananas, something that at one time might have been a ripe pear, a loaf of bread, sixteen biscuits, three half-eaten pastries, and three bags of crisps. Now you tell me what we have here, Sergeant.”
“I’ve no idea,” she replied.
“Then if you’ve no idea, perhaps you’ll consider mine.” He paused. “Barbara-”
She knew at once from his tone that she had to stop him. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t understand. “I’m sorry, Inspector,” she said swiftly. “I got spooked at the farm and I…I’ve jumped all over you for it ever since. I…I’m sorry.”
He appeared to be taken aback. “All right. Let’s start again, shall we?”
The publican approached and plopped two plates down onto the table. “Chicken and peas,” he announced proudly.
Barbara got up and stumbled from the room.