“No! Ezra, stop! I can’t!”
With a deliberately unstifled curse, Ezra Farmington lifted himself off the struggling girl beneath him, swung to the edge of the bed, and sat there, fighting for breath and composure, his entire body-but most particularly, he noticed sardonically, his head- throbbing. He lowered this to his hands, burying his fingers in honey-coloured hair. Now she would cry, he thought. “All right, all right!” he said and added savagely, “I’m not a rapist, for God’s sake!”
She did begin to cry at that, a fist at her mouth, dry hot sobs erupting from deep within her. He reached for the lamp. “No!” Her voice stopped him.
“Danny,” he said, trying to speak calmly but aware that he was forcing words out between clenched teeth. He couldn’t look at her.
“I’m sorry!” she wept.
It was all too familiar. It couldn’t go on. “This is ridiculous, you know.” He reached for his watch, saw from the luminous dial that it was nearly eight, and put it on. He began to dress.
At that, the crying increased. A hand reached for him, touched his naked back. He flinched. The sobbing continued. He picked up the rest of his clothes, left the room, went into the lavatory, and, after dressing, stared morosely at his reflection in the dusky mirror while his watch ticked away fi ve minutes.
When he returned, the weeping had stopped. She still lay on the bed, her ivory body shimmering in the moonlight, and stared at the ceiling. Her hair was darkness; the rest of her was light. His artist’s eyes travelled the length of her: the curve of cheek, the fullness of breast, the swelling of hip, the softness of thigh. An objective study in black and white, translated quickly to canvas. It was an exercise he often engaged in, one which disassociated mind from body, something he most particularly wanted to do right now. His eyes fell on the curling triangle of darkness. Objectivity shot out the window.
“For God’s sake, get dressed,” he snapped. “Am I supposed to stand here staring at you as retribution?”
“You know why ’tis,” she whispered. She made no other move. “You know why.”
“That I do,” he replied. He stayed across the room by the lavatory door. It was safer there. A few feet closer and he’d be on her again, and there’d be no stopping it. He felt his jaw tighten, felt every muscle coil with a life of its own. “You don’t lose a chance to remind me.”
Danny sat up, swung on him. “Why should I?” she shouted. “You know wha’ you did!”
“Be quiet! Do you want Fitzalan to report back to your aunt? Have some sense, won’t you?”
“Why should I? When did you?”
“If you won’t let it go, then what’s the point, Danny? Why see me at all?”
“You c’n ask that? Even now? When everyone knows?”
He crossed his arms in front of him, steeling himself to the sight of her. Her hair was tangled round her shoulders; her lips were parted; her cheeks were wet with tears, glistening in the dull light. Her breasts…He forced his eyes to remain on her face.
“You know what happened. We’ve been over it a thousand times. Going over it a thousand times more won’t change the past. If you can’t let it go, then we’ve got to stop seeing each other.”
More tears welled up and spilled down her cheeks. He hated to see her cry. It made him want to cross the room and crush her in his arms, but what was the use? It would only begin again and end in disaster.
“No.” She was still crying, but her voice was low. She hung her head. “I don’ want that.”
“Then what do you want? I need to know because I know very well what I want, Danny, and if we both don’t want the same thing, then there’s really no use, is there?” He was struggling to summon up control but what little he had was vanishing quickly. He thought he might actually cry with frustration.
“I want you,” she whispered.
Oh God, that cuts it. That really does. “You don’t want that,” he replied miserably. “Because even if you did, and even if you had me, at every juncture you’d throw the past in my face. And I can’t bear that, Danny. I’ve had enough.” To his horror, his voice caught on the last word.
Her head flew up. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. She slipped off the bed and came across the room, her body sculpted by moonlight. He looked away. Her smooth fingers found their way to his cheek, across it, into his hair. “I never do think o’ your pain,” she said. “Only my own. I’m so sorry, Ezra.”
He drove his gaze to the wall, the ceiling, the square of night sky beyond the window. If he met her eyes, he knew he was lost.
“Ezra?” Her voice was like a caress in the darkness. She smoothed back his hair, took a step closer.
He could smell her musky fragrance, feel the tips of her breasts sear his chest. Her hand dropped to his shoulder and pulled him closer. “Don’t you think,” she continued, “we both have t’forgive?”
It was finally too much. There was nowhere else to look. His last sane thought was: Better lost than alone.
Nigel Parrish waited until they returned from the lounge to the public bar. He was still sitting in his usual corner, taking his time about nursing a Courvoisier, when they fi nished their meal.
He regarded them with the kind of interest he usually reserved for the village inhabitants, quite as if they were going to be around for the next few years. They were certainly worth the time and consideration, he decided, for they were so deliciously bizarre a couple.
The man’s dressed absolutely to kill, Nigel thought and chuckled inwardly at his tasteless pun. Charcoal suit, hand-tailored and fairly shrieking Savile Row, gold pocket watch looped across waistcoat, Burberry tossed casually onto the back of a chair-why is it that people with the money to buy Burberries always toss them about without a second thought?-shoes polished to a sombre, unscuffed shine. This was Scotland Yard?
Somehow the woman was more what he had in mind. She was short and dumpy, sort of a walking rubbish-bin type. She wore a wrinkled, stained suit that fitted her badly. Entirely the wrong colour for her as well, Nigel noted. Baby blue’s a lovely colour, but not on you, dumpling. Her blouse was yellow and did distressing things to her sallow complexion, not to mention the fact that it was very badly tucked in all around. And the shoes! Sensible brogues were what one would expect of the police and indeed she wore them. But with blue tights to match the suit? Lord, what a vision the poor woman was. He clucked his disapproval and got to his feet.
He sauntered over to the table they had chosen near the door. “Scotland Yard?” he began chattily, without introduction. “Has anyone told you about Ezra?”
As he lifted his head to look at the newcomer Lynley’s first thought was, No, but I should guess you’re about to. A man stood there, brandy glass in hand, obviously waiting for an invitation to sit. When Sergeant Havers automatically opened her notebook, he considered himself a member of their party and pulled out a chair.
“Nigel Parrish,” he introduced himself.
The organist, Lynley recalled. He guessed that the man was somewhere in his forties, and he was blessed with features that middle age enhanced. Thinning brown hair, touched by grey at the temples, was combed neatly off an intelligent brow; a firm, straight nose gave Parrish’s face distinction; a strong jaw and chin were indications of strength. He was slender, not particularly tall, and striking rather than handsome.
“Ezra?” Lynley prompted him.
Parrish’s brown eyes darted from person to person in the room, as if he were waiting for someone to enter. “Farmington. Our resident artist. Doesn’t every village have a resident artist, poet, novelist, or something? I thought that was a virtual requirement of country life.” Parrish shrugged narrow shoulders. “Ezra’s ours. Watercolours. The occasional oil. Not bad, actually. He even sells some of them in a gallery in London. He used to come here for just a month or so each year, but he’s become one of us now.” He smiled down at his drink. “Dear, dear Ezra,” he mused.
Lynley was not about to be played like a fi sh on the line. “What is it you’d like us to know about Ezra Farmington, Mr. Parrish?”
Parrish’s startled glance betrayed that he hadn’t quite been expecting so direct an approach. “Aside from the fact that he’s just the teeniest bit of a village Lothario, there’s what happened on the Teys’s place that you ought to know.”
Lynley found Ezra’s romantic inclinations to be neither here nor there, although obviously they were of interest to Parrish. “What happened on the Teys’s place?” he asked, ignoring the other dangling line.
“Well…” Parrish warmed to his topic but a sad glance at his empty glass cooled the fi res of the story.
“Sergeant,” Lynley said tonelessly, his eyes on the other man, “would you get Mr. Parrish another-”
“Courvoisier,” Parrish said with a smile.
“And one for me.”
Havers obediently left the table. “Nothing for her?” Nigel asked, face wrinkled with concern.
“She doesn’t drink.”
“What a bore!” When Havers returned, Parrish treated her to a sympathetic smile, took a genteel sip of the cognac, and settled down to his story. “As to Ezra,” he said, leaning into the table confidentially, “it was a nasty little scene. The only reason I know about it is that I was out that way. Whiskers, you see.”
Lynley had gone in this direction once before. “The musical dog.”
“Pardon?”
“Father Hart told us that Whiskers liked to lie on the common and listen to you play the organ.”
Parrish laughed. “Isn’t it the absolute devil? I practise my fingers to the bone, dear ones, and my most enthusiastic audience is a farm dog.” His words dealt with the matter in a lambent fashion-as if nothing on earth could really be more amusing. Yet Lynley could see it was a brittle performance, a facade made frangible by the force of a current of bitterness that ran, swift and sure, just beneath the surface. Parrish was working at joviality and rather too industriously.
“Well, there you have it,” he continued. He turned the snifter in his hands, admiring the variety of colours that the cognac produced as it caught the light. “A virtual Sahara of musical appreciation in the village. In fact, the only reason I play at St. Catherine’s on Sundays is to please myself. God knows no one else can tell a fugue from a scherzo. D’you know that St. Catherine’s has the finest organ in York-shire? Typical, isn’t it? I’m sure Rome purchased it personally to keep the RCs in control in Keldale. I’m C of E, myself.
“And Farmington?” Lynley asked.
“Ezra? I don’t think Ezra’s religious at all. Except,” seeing no amused appreciation on Lynley’s face, “what you probably mean is what do I have to say about Ezra.”
“You’ve certainly read me, Mr. Parrish.”
“Ezra.” Parrish smiled and took a drink, perhaps for courage, perhaps for solace. It was difficult to tell. He lowered his voice momentarily, however, and as he did so, a brief glimmer of the real man emerged, brooding and moody. But the chatty gossip replaced him almost at once. “Let me see, loves, it must have been about a month ago when William Teys ran Ezra off the farm.”
“Was he trespassing?”
“Absolutely. But according to Ezra, he has some sort of ‘artistic licence’ that allows him to trespass everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. He was doing what he call ‘light studies’ of High Kel Moor. Your basic Rouen Cathedral sort of thing. Start a new picture every fi fteen minutes.”
“I’m familiar with Monet.”
“Then you know what I mean. Well, the only way-let’s say the quickest way-up to High Kel Moor is right through the woods behind Gembler Farm. And the way to the woods-”
“Was across Teys’s land,” Lynley fi nished.
“Exactly. I was trotting along the road with Whiskers in tow. He’d put in his usual appearance on the common and, as it seemed late to let the old boy find his own way home, I was taking him there myself. I had hoped our darling Stepha might be willing to do the job in her Mini, but she was nowhere to be found. So I had to drag the old thing out there on these poor, stiff legs.”
“You don’t own a car?”
“Not one that runs with any reliablity, I’m afraid. Anyway, I got to the farm and there they were, right in the road having the most god-awful row I’ve ever seen. There was William in his jimjams-”
“Excuse me?”
“His pyjamas, Inspector. Or was it his dressing gown?” Parrish squinted at the ceiling and considered his own question. “It was his dressing gown. I remember thinking, ‘Lord, what hairy legs old William has,’ when I saw him. Quite like a gorilla.”
“I see.”
“And Ezra was standing there, shouting at him, waving his arms, and cursing in ways that must have made poor sainted William’s hair stand on end. The dog got hot into the action and took quite a piece out of Ezra’s trousers. While he was doing that, William ripped three of Ezra’s precious watercolours into shreds and dumped the rest of the portfolio right onto the verge. It was dreadful.” Parrish looked down as he concluded his story, a mournful note to his voice, but when he lifted his head his eyes said clearly that Ezra had got what he’d long deserved.
Lynley watched Sergeant Havers climb the stairs and disappear from view. He rubbed his temples and walked into the lounge, where a light at the far end of the room illuminated the bent head of Stepha Odell. She looked up from her book at his footsteps.
“Have we kept you up to lock the door?” Lynley asked. “I’m terribly sorry.”
She smiled and stretched her arms languidly over her head. “Not at all,” she replied pleasantly. “I was nodding a bit over my novel, however.”
“What are you reading?”
“A cheap romance.” She laughed easily and got to her feet, which, he noticed, were bare. She had changed from her grey church dress into a simple tweed skirt and sweater. A single freshwater pearl on a silver chain hung between her breasts. “It’s my way of escaping. Everyone always lives happily ever after in a romance novel.” He remained where he was, near the door. “How do you escape, Inspector?”
“I don’t, I’m afraid.”
“Then what do you do about the shadows in your life?”
“The shadows?”
“Chasing murderers down. It can’t be a pleasant job. Why do you do it?”
There was the question, he admitted, and knew the answer. It’s penance, Stepha, an expiation for sins committed that you couldn’t understand. “I never stopped to think about it.”
“Ah.” She nodded thoughtfully and let it go. “Well, you’ve a package that’s come. Brought by a rather nasty man from Richmond. He wouldn’t give me his name, but he smelled like a large digestive tablet.”
An apt description of Nies, Lynley thought, as she went behind the bar. He followed. She had evidently been working in the lounge in the late afternoon, for the room was scented richly with beeswax and the yeasty smell of ale. That combination took him right back to Cornwall, a ten-year-old boy hurriedly wolfing down pasties in the kitchen of the Trefallen farm. Such delicacies they were to him, meat and onions folded into a flaky shell, fruit forbidden and unheard of in the formal dining room of Howenstow. “Common,” his father would snort contemptuously. And indeed they were, which was why he loved them.
Stepha placed a large envelope on the counter. “Here it is. Will you join me for a nightcap?”
“Thank you. I’d like that.”
She smiled. He noticed how it curved her cheeks, how the tiny lines round her eyes seemed to vanish. “Good. Sit down then. You look exhausted.”
He went to one of the couches and opened the envelope. Nies had made no effort to put the material in any sort of order. There were three notebooks of information, some additional photographs of Roberta, forensic reports identical to the ones he already had, and nothing whatsoever on Whiskers.
Stepha Odell placed a glass on the table and sat opposite him, drawing her legs up into the seat of the chair.
“What happened to Whiskers?” Lynley asked himself. “Why is there nothing about that dog?”
“Gabriel knows,” Stepha responded.
For a moment he thought it was some sort of village expression until he recalled the constable’s name. “Constable Langston?”
She nodded, sipping her drink. Her fi ngers on the glass were long and slender, unencumbered by rings. “He buried Whiskers.”
“Where?”
She shrugged a shoulder and pushed her hair back off her face. Unlike the ugliness of the gesture by Havers, in Stepha it was a lovely movement, chasing shadows away. “I’m not sure. I expect it was somewhere on the farm.”
“But why was no forensic study done on the dog?” Lynley mused.
“I suppose they didn’t need one. They could see how the poor thing died.”
“How?”
“His throat was slit, Inspector.”
He fumbled back through the material, looking for the pictures. No wonder he had failed to see it before. Teys’s body, sprawled right over the dog’s corpse, obscured the view. He considered the photograph.
“You see the problem now, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can you imagine Roberta slitting Whiskers’s throat?” An expression of distaste passed across Stepha’s face. “It’s impossible. I’m sorry, but it’s just impossible. Beyond that, no weapon was ever found. Surely she didn’t slit the poor animal’s throat with an axe!”
As she spoke, Lynley found himself beginning to wonder for the first time exactly who the real target of the crime had been: William Teys or his dog.
Suppose a robbery had been in the works, he thought. The dog would need to be silenced. He was old, certainly incapable of attacking someone, but well enough able to make a din if a foreign presence were found in his territory. So the dog would have to be dealt with. But perhaps not quickly enough, so that when Teys rushed out to the barn to see what the yelping was all about, he would have to be dealt with as well. Perhaps, thought Lynley, we have no premeditated murder here, but a crime of an entirely different nature.
“Stepha,” he said thoughtfully. He reached in his pocket. “Who is this?” He handed her the photograph that he and Havers had found in Roberta’s chest of drawers.”
“Where on earth did you get this?”
“In Roberta’s bedroom. Who is it?”
“It’s Gillian Teys, Roberta’s sister.” She tapped the photograph lightly for emphasis, studying it as she spoke. “Roberta must have kept this well hidden from William.”
“Why?”
“Because after Gillian ran off, she was dead to William. He threw away her clothes, got rid of her books, and even destroyed every picture that she was in. Burnt her birth certifi cate as well as everything else in a great bonfi re right in the middle of the yard. How on earth,” she asked, more to herself than to him, her eyes on the photograph, “did Roberta manage to save this?”
“More importantly perhaps, why did she save it?”
“That’s easy enough. Roberta adored Gillian. God knows why. Gillian was the great disaster in the family. She turned out quite wild. She drank and swore and ran around like mad, having the time of her life, off to a party in Whitby one night, out with some hellion God-knows-where the next. Picking up men and giving them a run for their money. Then one night, some eleven years ago, she left. And she never came back.”
Lynley caught the word. “Left? Or disappeared?”
Stepha’s body backed into the chair. One of her hands rose to her throat, but she stopped the gesture as if it were betraying her. “Left,” she said fi rmly.
He went along. “Why?”
“I imagine because she was at odds with William. He was fairly straitlaced and Gillian was nothing if not after a good time. But Rich-ard-her cousin-could probably tell you more. The two of them were rather thick before he left for the fens.” Stepha got to her feet, stretched, and walked to the door, where she paused. “Inspector,” she said slowly. Lynley looked up from the photograph, half-expecting her to say more about Gillian Teys. She hesitated. “Would you like…anything else tonight?”
The light from the reception area behind her cast a glow upon her hair. Her skin looked smooth and lovely. Her eyes were kind. It would be so easy. An hour of bliss. Impassioned acceptance. A simple, longed-for forgetting. “No, thank you, Stepha,” he made himself say.
The River Kel was a peaceful tributary unlike many of the rivers that debouched frantically from the hillsides down into the dales. Silently, it wended its way through Keldale, flowing past the ruined abbey on its way to the sea. It loved the village, treating it well, seldom overflowing in destruction. It welcomed the lodge to exist on its banks, splashed greetings onto the village common, and listened to the lives of the people who lived in the houses built at its very edge.
Olivia Odell had one of these houses, across the bridge from the lodge, with a sweeping view of the common and of St. Catherine’s Church. It was the finest home in the village, with a lovely front garden and a lawn that sloped down to the river.
It was still early morning when Lynley and Havers pushed open the gate, but the steady wailing of a child, coming from behind the house, told them that the inhabitants were already up and about. They followed the grief-stricken ululation to its source.
On the back steps of the house sat the youthful mourner. She was huddled in a ball of woe, head bent to her knees, a crumpled magazine photograph beneath her grubby shoes. To her left sat her audience, a solemn male mallard who watched her sympathetically. Upon her head was the ostensible source of her grief, for she’d cut her hair-or rather somebody had- and had plastered it onto her skull with grease. It once had been red and, from the look of the locks escaping their confi nement, decidedly curly. But now, giving off the malodourous waft of cheap pomade, it was nothing but dreadful to behold.
Havers and Lynley exchanged a look. “Good morning,” the inspector said pleasantly. “You must be Bridie.”
The child looked up, grabbing the photograph and clutching it to her chest in a motherly gesture. The duck merely blinked.
“What’s wrong?” Lynley asked kindly.
Bridie’s defiant posture was completely deflated at the gentle sound of the tall man’s voice. “I cut my hair!” she wailed. “I saved my money to go to Sinji’s but she said she couldn’t make my hair go this way and she wouldn’t cut it so I cut it myself and now look at me and Mummy’s crying as well. I tried to straighten it all out with this stuff of Hannah’s but it’ll never come right!” She hiccupped pathetically on the last word.
Lynley nodded. “I see. It does look a bit awful, Bridie. Exactly what sort of effect were you going after?” He quailed inwardly at the thought of Hannah’s black spikes.
“This!” She waved the photograph at him, wailing anew.
He took it from her and looked at the smiling, smooth coiffured semblance of the Princess of Wales, elegant in black evening gown and diamonds, not a hair out of place. “Of course,” he muttered.
Bereft of her picture, Bridie took comfort in the presence of her duck, slinging an arm round him and pulling him to her side. “You don’t care, Dougal, do you?” she demanded of the bird. In reply, Dougal blinked and investigated Bridie’s hair for its edible propensities.
“Dougal the Duck?” Lynley enquired.
“Angus McDougal McDuck,” Bridie responded. The formal introduction made, she wiped her nose on the sleeve of her tattered pullover and looked fearfully over her shoulder at the closed door behind her. A single tear rolled down her cheek as she went on. “An’ he’s hungry. But I can’t go inside to get his food. All I got’s these marshmallows. They’re all right for a treat, but his real food’s inside and I can’t go in.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause Mummy said she didn’t want to see me again till I’d done something about my hair and I don’t know what to do!” The child began to cry again, real tears of anguish. Dougal would apparently starve-an unlikely prospect, considering his size-unless some quick thinking were applied to the situation.
It appeared, however, that a plan of attack would be unnecessary, for at that moment the back door was jerked open angrily. Olivia Odell took one look at her daughter-her second only that day-and burst into tears.
“I can’t believe you would do it! I just can’t believe it! Get in the house and wash your hair!” Her voice rose higher with each word, climbing the peak to hysteria.
“But Dougal-”
“Take Dougal with you,” the woman said, weeping. “But do as I say!” The duck was scooped into nine-year-old arms and the two offenders disappeared. Olivia tugged a tissue from the pocket of her cardigan, blew her nose, and smiled shakily at the two adults. “What a dreadful scene,” she said. But as she spoke she began to cry again and walked into the kitchen, leaving them standing at the open back door. She stumbled to the table and buried her face in her hands.
Lynley and Havers looked at each other and, decision made, entered the house.
Unlike Gembler Farm, there was not the slightest doubt that this house was lived in. The kitchen was in total disarray: the stove top cluttered with pots and pans, appliances gaping open to be cleaned, flowers waiting to be put into water, dishes piled in the sink. The floor was sticky under their feet, the walls badly needed paint, and the entire room reeked with the charcoal bouquet of burnt toast. The offending source of this odour was lying on a plate, a sodden black lump that looked as if it has been hastily extinguished by a cup of tea.
Beyond the kitchen, what little they could see of the sitting room indicated that its condition was much the same. Housekeeping was certainly not Olivia Odell’s strong point. Neither was child rearing, if the morning’s confrontation were any indication.
“She’s out of my control!” Olivia wept. “Nine years old and she’s out of my control!” She tore the tissue to shreds, looked dazedly about for another, and, seeing none, cried harder still.
Lynley removed a handkerchief from his pocket. “Take this,” he offered.
“Ta,” she responded. “Oh my God, what a morning!” She blew her nose, dried her eyes, ran her fingers through her brown hair, and looked at her reflection in the toaster. She moaned when she saw herself, and her bloodshot brown eyes filled again but didn’t spill over. “I look fifty years old. Wouldn’t Paul have laughed!” And then disjointedly, “She wants to look like the Princess of Wales.”
“So she showed us,” Lynley responded impassively. He drew a chair out from the table, picked the newspapers off of it, and sat down. After a pause, Havers did likewise.
“Why?” Olivia asked, directing the question more to the ceiling than to her companions. “What have I done that my daughter believes the key to happiness is to look exactly like the Princess of Wales?” She squeezed her fingers into her forehead. “William would have known what to do. What a mess I am without him.”
Wishing to avoid a fresh onslaught of tears, Lynley spoke quickly to divert her. “Little girls always have someone they admire, don’t they?”
“Yes,” Olivia said. “Oh yes, how true that is.” She’d begun twisting his handkerchief into an appalling little rope. Lynley winced as he saw it mangled. “But I never seem to have the right thing to say to the child. Everything I try seems to end in hysterics. William always knew what to say and do. Whenever he was here, everything went smoothly. But the moment he was gone, we’d begin to fi ght like cats and dogs! And now he’s really gone! What’s to become of us?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s her hair. She hates having red hair. She’s hated it ever since she learned to speak. I can’t understand it. Why is a nineyear-old girl so damned passionate about her hair!”
“Redheads,” Lynley noted, “are generally passionate about everything.”
“Oh, that’s it! That’s it! Stepha’s quite the same. You’d think Bridie was her clone, not her niece.” She drew in a breath and sat up in her chair. Footsteps came running down the hall. “Lord, give me strength,” Olivia murmured.
Bridie entered the room, a towel wrapped precariously round her head, her pullover- which she hadn’t bothered to remove in her haste to obey her mother’s instructions-thoroughly soaked round her shoulders and down most of her back. She was followed by her duck, who walked like a seaman, with a peculiar rolling gait.
“He’s crippled,” Bridie announced, noticing Lynley’s inspection of the fowl. “When he swims, he jus’ goes round in a big circle, so I don’t let him swim unless I’m there. We took him swimming lots last summer, though. In the river. We made a dam just outside and he had ever so much fun. He’d plunk himself in the water and go round and round. Huh, Dougal?” The mallard blinked his agreement and searched on the floor for something to eat.
“Here, let me see you, MacBride,” her mother said. The daughter came forward, the towel was removed, the damage was surveyed. Olivia’s eyes welled with tears again above her daughter’s head. She bit her lip.
“Looks like it just needs a bit of a trim,” Lynley interposed hastily. “What do you think, Sergeant?”
“A trim ought to do it,” Havers agreed.
“I think the thing to do, Bridie, is to give up on the Princess of Wales idea. Now,” Lynley added as the child’s bottom lip trembled, “you’ve got to remember that your hair is curly. Hers is quite straight. And when Sinji told you that she couldn’t make it go in that style, she was telling you the truth.”
“But she’s so pretty,” Bridie protested. Tears threatened once again.
“She is. Absolutely. But it would be a fairly strange world if every woman were exactly like her, wouldn’t it? Believe me, there are many women who are very pretty and look nothing like her.”
“There are?” Bridie gave a longing glance to the crumpled photograph again. A large smear of grease was sitting on the Princess’s nose.
“You can believe the inspector when he says that, Bridie,” Havers added, and her tone implied the rest: He’s a bit of an expert on the subject.
Bridie looked from woman to man, sensing undercurrents that she didn’t understand. “Well,” she announced, “I s’pose I got to feed Dougal.”
The duck, at least, looked as if he approved.
The Odell sitting room was only a slight improvement over the kitchen. It was hard to believe that one woman and one child could produce such disarray. Clothes lay piled over chairs as if mother and daughter were in the process of moving; knickknacks perched in unlikely positions on the edges of tables and window sills; an ironing board was set up in what looked like permanent residence; an upright piano spat sheet music onto the fl oor. It was havoc, with dust so thick that it gave the air fl avour.
Olivia appeared to be unaware of the mess as she absently gestured them towards seats, but she looked about as she took her own and sighed in unembarrassed resignation. “It’s usually not this bad. I’ve been…it’s been…” She cleared her throat and shook her head as if to get her thoughts in order. Once again the fingers went through the wispy, windblown-looking hair. It was a girlish gesture, oddly incongruous in a woman who so plainly was no longer a girl. She had paper-fi ne skin and delicate features, but the ageing process was not dealing with her kindly. She was lined and, although thin, her flesh lacked resiliency, as if she had lost too much weight too quickly. Bones jutted from her cheeks and wrists.
“You know,” she said suddenly, “when Paul died, it wasn’t this bad. I can’t come to grips with what’s happened to me over William.”
“The suddenness,” Lynley offered. “The shock.”
She nodded. “Perhaps you’re right. My husband Paul was ill for several years. I had time to prepare myself. And Bridie, of course, was too young to understand. But William…” She made an effort at control, fixing her eyes on the wall, sitting up tall. “William was such a presence in our lives, such a strength. I think we both started to depend on him and then he was gone. But it’s selfish of me to be reacting like this. How can I be so awful when there’s Bobba to consider?”
“Roberta?”
She glanced at him, then away. “She always came here with William.”
“What was she like?”
“Very quiet. Very nice. Not an attractive girl. Heavy, you know. But she was always very good to Bridie.”
“Her weight caused a problem between Richard Gibson and his uncle, though, didn’t it?”
Olivia’s brow furrowed. “A problem? How do you mean?”
“Their argument over it. At the Dove and Whistle. Will you tell us about it?”
“Oh that. Stepha must have told you. But that has nothing to do with William’s death.”
This as she saw Sergeant Havers write a few lines in her notebook.
“One can never be sure. Will you tell us about it?”
A hand fluttered up as if in protest but resettled in her lap. “Richard hadn’t been back from the fens for long. He ran into us at the Dove and Whistle. There were words. Silly. Over in a minute. That’s all.” She smiled vaguely.
“What sort of words?”
“It really had nothing to do with Roberta initially. We were all sitting together at a table and William, I’m afraid, made a comment about Hannah. The barmaid. Have you seen her?”
“Last night.”
“Then you know she looks…different. William didn’t at all approve of her, nor of the way her father deals with her. You know-as if he’s just amused by it all. So William said something about it. Something like, ‘Why her dad lets her walk about looking like a tart is a mystery to me.’ That sort of thing. Nothing really serious. Richard was just a bit in his cups. He’d a terrible set of scratches on his face, so I think he’d been at it with his wife as well. His mood was foul. He said something about not being such a fool as to judge by appearances, that-as I recall-an angel could be wearing a streetwalker’s guise and the sweetest blonde-headed little face could hide a whore.”
“And William took that to mean what?”
She produced a tired smile. “As a reference to Gillian, his older daughter. Rather immediately, I’m afraid. He demanded to know what Richard meant by his remark. Richard and Gilly had been great friends, you see. I think- to avoid having to explain-Richard sidetracked onto Roberta.”
“How?”
“As an example of not judging by appearances. Of course, it went on from there. Richard demanded to know why Roberta had been allowed to get into such an unattractive state. In turn, William demanded to know what he had meant by his insinuation about Gilly. Richard demanded that William answer. William demanded that Richard answer. You know the sort of thing.”
“And then?”
She laughed. It was a tittering sound, like that of a trapped bird. “I thought they might fight. Richard said no child of his would ever be allowed to eat her way into an early grave and that William ought to be ashamed of the job he’d done as a father. William became so angry that he said something about Richard being ashamed of the job he was doing as a husband. He made a…well, a bit of a crude reference to Madeline going unsatisfi ed-she’s Richard’s wife, have you met her?-and frankly just when I thought Richard might truly hit his uncle, instead he just laughed. He said something about being a fool to waste his time worrying about Roberta and left us.”
“That was all?”
“Yes.”
“What do you suppose Richard meant?”
“By being a fool?” As if seeing the direction his question was taking her, she frowned. “You want me to say that he felt he was being a fool because if Roberta died, he’d get the farm.”
“Is that what he meant?”
“No, of course not. William rewrote his will shortly after Richard returned from the fens. Richard knew very well that the farm had been left to him, not to Roberta.”
“But if you and William married, then the will would most likely have been rewritten once again. Isn’t that true?”
Clearly, she saw the trap. “Yes but…I know what you’re thinking. It was to Richard’s advantage that William should die before we could marry. But isn’t that always the case when there’s an inheritance involved? And people don’t generally kill one another just because they’re to inherit something in a will.”
“On the contrary, Mrs. Odell,” Lynley objected politely, “people do it all the time.”
“That wasn’t the case here. I just think… well, that Richard’s not very happy. And unhappy people say lots of things that they really don’t mean and do lots of things that they wouldn’t otherwise do just to try to forget their unhappiness, don’t they?”
Neither Lynley nor Havers replied at once. Olivia moved restlessly in her chair. Outside, Bridie’s voice rose as she called to her duck.
“Did Roberta know about this conversation?” Lynley asked.
“If she did, she never mentioned it. When she was here she mostly talked-in that low-voiced way of hers-about the wedding. I think she was eager for William and me to marry. To have a sister in Bridie. To have what she once had with Gillian. She missed her sister dreadfully. I don’t believe she ever got over Gillian’s running away.” Her nervous fi ngers found a loose thread on the hem of her skirt, and she twisted it compulsively until it broke. Then she looked at it mutely, as if wondering how it came to be wrapped round her fi nger. “Bobba-that’s what William always called her, and we did as well-would take Bridie off so that William and I could have time alone. She and Bridie and Whiskers and that duck would go off together. Can you imagine what they looked like?” She smiled and smoothed the creases in her skirt. “They’d go to the river, across the common, or down to the abbey for a picnic. The four of them. And then William and I would be able to talk.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Tessa, mostly. Of course, it was a problem, but the last time he was here-the day of his death-he said it had fi nally been overcome.”
“I’m not certain that I understand,” Lynley remarked. “What kind of a problem? Emotional, you mean? An unwillingness to come to terms with her death?”
Olivia had been looking out the window, but she turned to them upon the last word. “Death?” she asked, perplexed. “Tessa’s not dead, Inspector. She deserted William a short time after Roberta was born. He’d hired a detective to find her so that he could have their marriage annulled by the Church, and Saturday afternoon he came to tell me she’d been found at last.”
“York,” the man said. “And I’m not obligated to tell you anything more. I’ve yet to be paid for my services, you know.”
Lynley gripped the telephone in his hand. He could feel the anger burning in his chest. “How does a court order sound?” he asked pleasantly.
“Listen here, old chap, don’t try to pull that kind of shit on me-”
“Mr. Houseman, may I remind you that, in spite of what you may think, you are not part of a Dashiell Hammett novel.” Lynley could just picture the man, feet up on his desk, a bottle of bourbon in the filing drawer, a gun tossed from hand to hand as he balanced the telephone receiver on his shoulder. He wasn’t too far from the truth.
Harry Houseman looked out the grimy window of his office above Jackie’s Barber Shop in Richmond’s Trinity Church Square. A light rain was falling, not enough to clean off his window, just enough to emphasise its fi lth. What a dreary day, he thought. He’d intended to spend it on a drive to the coast-a little lady in Whitby was only too eager to do some serious private investigating with him-but this kind of weather didn’t put him in the mood. And God knows he needed to be in the mood more and more these days before anything happened in the land down under. He grinned, showing a badly capped front tooth. It added a piratical dimension to his otherwise mundane appearance: dull brown hair, muddycoloured eyes, cadaverous skin, and the incongruity of full, sensual lips.
He played with a well-chewed pencil on the top of his scarred desk. His eyes caught the thin-lipped glance of his wife’s shrewish face peering moodily out at him from the photograph nearby. He reached out with his pencil and toppled it over, face down.
“I’m sure we can reach some sort of mutual agreement,” Houseman said into the phone. “Let me see. Miss Doalson?” A suitable pause for dramatic effect. “Do I have time today to…Well, cancel that. It can certainly wait until I see…” Back to the phone. “What did you say your name was?”
“We aren’t going to see each other,” Lynley responded patiently. “You’re going to give me the address in York and that’s going to be the end of our relationship.”
“Oh, I don’t see how I can-”
“Certainly you do.” Lynley’s voice was steel. “Because, as you said, you haven’t been paid yet. And in order for you ever to get paid once the estate is settled-which may, incidentally, take years if we don’t get to the bottom of this-you’re going to have to give me Tessa Teys’s address.”
A pause for consideration. “What is that, Miss Doalson?” the infuriating voice asked in saccharine tones. “On the other line? Well, put him off, will you?” A martyred sigh. “I can see, Inspector, that you’re not an easy man to deal with. We all have to make a living, you know.”
“Believe me, I know,” Lynley replied curtly. “The address?”
“I’ll just have to find it in my fi les. May I give you a ring in…say an hour or so?”
“No.”
“Well, good God, man-”
“I’m on my way to Richmond.”
“No, no, that won’t be necessary. Just wait a moment, old chap.” Houseman leaned back in his chair, eyeing the grey sky for a minute. He reached over to his dented filing cabinet, opening and closing a few drawers for effect. “What’s that, Miss Doalson?” he called. “No, put her off till tomorrow, will you? I don’t care if she’s weeping buckets, sweetheart, I don’t have time to spend with her today.” He picked the scrap of memo paper off his desk. “Ah, here it is, Inspector,” he said and gave Lynley the address. “But don’t expect her to welcome you with open arms, will you?”
“I don’t particularly care how she welcomes me, Mr. Houseman. Good-”
“Oh, but you ought to, Inspector. Just a bit, you know. Hubby went mad when he heard the news. Thought he’d strangle me right on the spot, so God knows what he’ll do when Scotland Yard shows up. He’s one of those scholarly types, big words and thick specs. But trust me, Inspector, that man is deep. There’s an animal inside him.”
Lynley’s eyes narrowed. It was a cast upon the waters, an expert manoeuvre. He wanted to swim past it but admitted defeat. “What are you talking about? What news did he hear?”
“The news about hubby number one, of course.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Houseman?”
“That Tessa Teys is a bigamist, old boy,” Houseman finished with delight. “Married up with number two without seeing to the formal bye-byes to our William. Can you imagine her surprise when I popped up on her doorstep?”
The house wasn’t at all what he had expected. Women who desert husband and children should somehow end up in tenement buildings pungent with the odours of garlic and urine. They should daily subdue a bucking, quarrelsome conscience with liberal applications of soporific gin. They should be faded and worn, their looks quite destroyed by the ravages of shame. Whatever they should be, Lynley was certain they shouldn’t be Tessa Teys Mowrey.
He’d parked in front of the house, and they stared at it silently until Havers fi nally spoke. “Not exactly gone downhill, has she?” she asked.
They’d found it easily, a new, middle-class neighbourhood a few miles from the city centre, the kind of place where houses have numbers as well as coy little names. The Mowreys’ home was called Jorvik View. It was the concrete reality of every mediocre dream: a facade of brick covered the poured-block construction; red tiles swept up to form steep gables; white-curtained bay windows showed off sitting and dining rooms on either side of a polished front door. A single-car, attached garage was topped by a white iron-fenced roof terrace, and a door opened onto this from the upper floor of the house. It was on this terrace that they had their first glimpse of Tessa.
She came out of the door, blonde hair blowing lightly in the breeze, to water potted plants: spider chrysanthemums, dahlias, and marigolds that made an autumn wall of colour against the white iron. She saw the Bentley and hesitated, watering can poised in midair, appearing every bit in the late morning light as if Renoir had captured her by surprise.
And she looked, Lynley noted grimly, not a day older than her photograph taken nineteen years before and religiously enshrined at Gembler Farm.
“So much for the wages of sin,” he muttered.