Missing Joseph

CHAPTER SIX

THE SINGLE MOST PROMISING sign was that when he reached out to touch her — smoothing his hand along the bare pathway of her spine — she neither flinched nor shrugged off the caress in irritation. This gave him hope. True, she neither spoke to him nor discontinued her dressing, but at the moment Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley was willing to accept anything that wasn’t an outright rejection leading to her departure. It was, he thought, decidedly the down side of intimacy with a woman. If there was supposed to be a happilyever-after associated with falling in love and having that love returned, he and Helen Clyde had not yet managed to fi nd it.

Early days, he tried to tell himself. They were still unused to the role of lover in each other’s life after having, for more than fi fteen years, been resolutely living the role of friend. Still, he wished she would stop dressing and come back to bed where the sheets were still warm from her body and the scent of her hair still clung to his pillow.

She hadn’t switched on a lamp. Nor had she opened the curtains to the watery morning light of a London winter. But despite these facts, he could see her plainly in what little sun managed to seep first through the clouds and then through the curtains. Even if this had not been the case, he had long ago committed to memory her face, each one of her gestures, and every part of her body. Had the room been dark, he could have described with his hands the curve of her waist, the precise angle at which she dipped her head a moment before she shook back her hair, the shape of her calves, her heels, and her ankles, the swell of her breasts.

He had loved before, more often in his thirty-six years than he would have liked to admit to anyone. But never before had he felt such a curious, utterly Neanderthal need to master and possess a woman. For the last two months since Helen had become his lover, he’d been telling himself that this need would dissolve if she agreed to marry him. The desire to dominate — and to have her submit — could hardly flourish in an atmosphere of power sharing, equality, and dialogue. And if these were the hallmarks of the sort of relationship he wanted with her, then the part of him that needed to control how things would be in the here and now was the part of him that was going to have to be immolated soon.

The problem was that even now when he knew that she was upset, when he knew the reason why and could not begin with any degree of honesty to fault her for it, he still found himself irrationally wanting to browbeat her into a submissive and apologetic admission of error, one for which the most logical expiation would be her willing return to bed. Which was, in and of itself, the second and more imperative problem. He’d awakened at dawn, aroused by the warmth of her sleeping body pressed against his. He’d run his hand along the curve of her hip, and even in sleep she’d turned into his arms to make slow, early-in-the-morning love. Afterwards, they’d lain among the pillows and the tousled blankets, and with her head on his chest and her hand on his breast and her chestnut hair spilling like silk between his fingers, she’d said:

“I can hear your heart.”

To which he’d answered: “I’m glad. That means you’ve not broken it yet.”

To which she’d chuckled, gently bitten his nipple, then yawned and asked her question.

To which, like the utterly besotted fool he was, he’d given an answer. No prevarication. No equivocation. Just a hem and a haw, a clearing of the throat, and then the truth. From which rose their argument — if the accusation of “objectifying women, objectifying me, me, Tommy, whom you claim to love” could be called an argument. From which rose Helen’s present determination to be dressed and be gone without further discussion. Not in anger, to be sure, but in yet another instance of her need to “think things out for myself.”

God, how sex makes fools of us, he thought. One moment of release, and a lifetime to regret it. And the hell of it was that, as he watched her dressing — hooking together the bits of silk and lace that posed as women’s underwear— he felt the heat and tightening of his own desire. His body was itself the most damning evidence of the basic truth behind her indictment of him. For him, the curse of being male seemed to be entrenched inextricably in dealing with the aggressive, mindless, animal hunger that made a man want a woman no matter the circumstances and sometimes — to his shame — because of the circumstances, as if a half hour’s successful seduction were actually proof of something beyond the body’s ability to betray the mind.

“Helen,” he said.

She walked to the serpentine chest of drawers and used his heavy silver-backed brush to see to her hair. A small cheval mirror stood in the midst of his family photographs, and she adjusted it from his height to hers.

He didn’t want to argue with her, but he felt compelled to defend himself. Unfortunately, because of the subject she’d chosen for their disagreement — or if the truth be admitted, the subject which his behaviour and then his words had ultimately propelled her into choosing — his only defence appeared to have its roots in a thorough examination of her. Her past, after all, was no more unsullied than was his own.

“Helen,” he said, “we’re two adults. We have history together. But we each have separate histories as well, and I don’t think we gain anything by making the mistake of forgetting that. Or by making judgements based upon situations that might have existed prior to our involvement with each other. I mean, this current involvement. The physical aspect.” Inwardly, he grimaced at his bumbling attempt at putting an end to their contretemps. God-damn it, we’re lovers, he wanted to say. I want you, I love you, and you bloody well feel the same about me. So stop being so blasted sensitive about something which has nothing whatsoever to do with you, or how I feel about you, or what I want from you and with you for the rest of our lives. Is that clear, Helen? Is it? Is it clear? Good. I’m glad of it. Now get back into bed.

She replaced the hairbrush, rested her hand upon it, and didn’t turn from the chest of drawers. She hadn’t yet put on her shoes, and Lynley took additional, if tenuous, hope from that. As he did from the certainty of his belief that she no more wanted any form of estrangement between them than did he. To be sure, Helen was exasperated with him — perhaps only marginally more than he was exasperated with himself — but she hadn’t written him off entirely. Surely she could be made to see reason, if only through being urged to consider how in the past two months he himself could have easily misconstrued her own erstwhile romantic attachments should he ever have been so idiotic as to evoke the spectral presence of her former lovers as she had done with his. She would argue, of course, that she wasn’t concerned with his former lovers at all, that she hadn’t, as a matter of fact, even brought them up. It was women in general and his attitude towards them and the great ho-ho-ho-I’m-havinganother-hot-one-tonight that she believed was implied by the act of draping a tie on the outer knob of his bedroom door.

He said, “I haven’t lived as a celibate any more than have you. We’ve always known that about each other, haven’t we?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s just a fact. And if we start trying to walk a tightrope between the past and the future in our life together, we’re going to fall off. It can’t be done. What we have is now. Beyond that, the future. To my way of thinking, that ought to be our primary concern.”

“This has nothing to do with the past, Tommy.”

“It does. You said not ten minutes ago that you felt just like ‘his lordship’s squalid little Sunday-night score.’”

“You’ve misunderstood my concern.”

“Have I?” He leaned over the edge of the bed and scooped up his dressing gown which had fallen to the floor in a heap of blue paisley sometime during the night. “Are you angrier about a tie on the door knob—”

“About what the tie implies.”

“—or more specifically about the fact that, by my own extremely cretinous admission, it’s a device I’ve used before?”

“I think you know me well enough not to have to ask a question like that.”

He stood, shrugged his way into the dressing gown, and spent a moment picking up the clothing he’d been in such a tearing hurry to divest himself of at half past eleven on the previous night. “And I think you’re at heart more honest with yourself than you’re being at the moment with me.”

“You’re making an accusation. I don’t much like that. Nor do I like its connotation of egocentricity.”

“Yours or mine?”

“You know what I mean, Tommy.”

He crossed the room and pulled open the curtains. It was a bleak day outside. A gusty wind was scudding heavy clouds from east to west in the sky above, while on the ground a thin crust of frost lay like fresh gauze on the lawn and the rose bushes that comprised his rear garden. One of the neighbourhood cats perched atop the brick wall against which heavy solanum climbed. He was hunched into dual humps of head and body with his calico fur rippling and his face looking shuttered, demonstrating that singularly feline quality of being at once imperious and untouchable. Lynley wished he could say the same about himself.

He turned from the window to see that Helen was watching his movements in the mirror. He went to stand behind her.

“If I choose,” he said, “I could drive myself mad with thinking of the men you’ve had as your lovers. Then in direct avoidance of the madness, I could accuse you of using them to meet your own ends, to gratify your ego, to build your self-esteem. But my madness would still be there all the time, just beneath the surface, no matter the strength of my accusations. I’d merely be diverting and denying it by focusing all my attention — not to mention the force of my righteous indignation — on you.”

“Clever,” she said. Her eyes were on his.

“What?”

“This way of avoiding the central issue.”

“Which is?”

“What I don’t want to be.”

“My wife.”

“No. Lord Asherton’s little dolly bird. Detective Inspector Lynley’s hot new piece. The cause of a little wink and a smirk between you and Denton when he sets out your breakfast or brings you your tea.”

“Fine. Understandable. Then marry me. I’ve wanted that for the last twelve months and I want it now. If you’ll agree to legitimatising this affair in the conventional manner — which is what I’ve proposed from the first and you know it — then you’ll hardly have to concern yourself with idle gossip and potential derogation.”

“It’s not as easy as that. Idle gossip’s not even the point.”

“You don’t love me?”

“Of course I love you. You know that I love you.”

“Then?”

“I won’t be made an object. I won’t.”

He nodded slowly. “And you’ve felt like an object these past two months? When we’ve been together? Last night perhaps?”

Her glance faltered. He saw her fi ngers close round the handle of the brush. “No. Of course not.”

“But this morning?”

She blinked. “God, how I hate to argue with you.”

“We’re not arguing, Helen.”

“You’re trying to trap me.”

“I’m trying to look at the truth.” He wanted to run his fingers the length of her hair, turn her to him, cup her face in his hands. He settled for resting his hands on her shoulders. “If we can’t live with each other’s past, then we have no future. That’s the real bottom line no matter what else you claim it to be. I can live with your past: St. James, Cusick, Rhys Davies-Jones, and whomever else you’ve slept with for a night or a year. The question is: Can you live with mine? Because that’s really what this is all about. It has nothing to do with how I feel about women.”

“It has everything to do with it.”

He heard the intensity in her tone and saw the resignation on her face. He turned her to him then, understanding and mourning the fact at once. “Oh God, Helen,” he sighed. “I haven’t had another woman. I haven’t even wanted one.”

“I know,” she said, resting her head against him. “Why doesn’t that help?”

After reading it, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers crumpled up the second page of Chief Superintendent Sir David Hillier’s lengthy memorandum, rolled it into a ball, and lobbed it neatly across the width of Inspector Lynley’s office, where it joined the previous page in the rubbish bin which she’d placed, for a bit of an athletic challenge, next to the door. She yawned, rubbed her fi ngers vigorously against her scalp, rested her head on her fist, and continued reading. “Pope Davy’s Encyclical on Keeping Yer Nose Clean,” MacPherson had called the memorandum sotto voce in the offi cers’ mess.

Everyone agreed that they had better things to do than to read Hillier’s epistle on the Serious Obligations Of The National Police Force When Investigating A Case With Possible Connection To The Irish Republican Army. While they all recognised that Hillier was taking his inspiration from the release of the Birmingham Six — and while few of them had any sympathy for those members of the West Midlands police force who had been the focus of Her Majesty’s Investigation as a result — the fact remained that they were far too burdened by their individual workloads to spend time committing to memory their Chief Superintendent’s prescriptive treatise.

Barbara, however, wasn’t currently fl oundering in the middle of half a dozen cases, as were some of her colleagues. Rather, she was engaged in experiencing a long-anticipated two-week holiday. During this time, she had planned to work on her childhood home in Acton, preparing to hand it over to an estate agent and move herself to a tiny studio-cumcottage she’d managed to find in Chalk Farm, tucked behind a large Edwardian house in Eton Villas. The house itself had been subdivided into four flats and a spacious ground floor bed-sit, none of which were within Barbara’s limited budget. But the cottage, sitting in the rear of the garden beneath a false acacia tree, was practically too small for anyone but a dwarf to live in comfortably. And while Barbara was not a dwarf, her living aspirations were defi nitely dwarfish: She did not look to entertain visitors, she did not anticipate marriage and family, she worked long hours and simply needed a place to lay her head at night. The cottage would do.

She had signed the lease with no little excitement. This would be the first home she had had away from Acton in the last twenty of her thirty-three years. She thought of how she would decorate it, where she would buy her furniture, what photographs and prints she would hang on the walls. She went to a garden centre and looked at plants, making note of what grew well in window boxes and what needed sun. She paced the length of the cottage and then the width, she measured the windows and examined the door. And she returned to Acton with her mind awash with plans and ideas, all of which seemed unrealistic and impossible to attain when she was confronted with the amount of work that needed to be done to her family’s home.

Interior painting, exterior repairs, replacing wallpaper, refinishing woodwork, extirpating an entire rear garden of weeds, cleaning old carpets…the list seemed endless. And beyond the fact that she was only one person attempting to see to the renovation of a house that had gone uncared for since she’d left secondary school — which was depressing enough in and of itself — there was the vague sense of unease that she felt each time a project was actually completed.

At issue was her mother. For the past two months, she had been living in Greenford, some distance out of London on the Central line. She’d made the adjustment to Hawthorn Lodge fairly well, but Barbara still wondered how much she would be tempting fate if she sold the old house in Acton and set herself up in a more desirable neighbourhood, in an intriguingly bohemian little cottage that wore the label new life — enter hopes and dreams, in which her mother would have no real place. For wasn’t she doing more than merely selling an overlarge house in order to fi nance what might be her mother’s lengthy stay in Green-ford? Indeed, wasn’t the very idea of selling the house in order to do that merely a blind for her own selfishness? Or were these occasional twinges of conscience that accompanied her pursuit of freedom really nothing more than a convenient focal point for her attention so that she didn’t have to face what lay beneath them?

You have your own life, she’d been telling herself stoutly more than a dozen times each day. There’s no crime in getting on with it, Barbara. But it felt like a crime, when the project itself didn’t feel more overwhelming than she could bear. She fluctuated among making lists of everything that needed to be done, despairing that she would be able to do it, and fearing the day when the work was completed and the house was sold and she was finally on her own.

In her rare introspective moments, Barbara admitted that the house gave her something to cling to, a last vestige of security in a world in which she no longer had relations into whom she could sink even the slightest hook of emotional dependence. No matter that she had not been able to sink a hook into any relation’s empathy or reliability for years — her father’s lingering illness and her mother’s mental deterioration had long precluded that — living in the same old house in the same old neighbourhood at least bore the appearance of security. To give it up and forge ahead into the unknown…Sometimes Acton seemed infinitely preferable.

There are no easy answers, Inspector Lynley would have said, there’s only living through the questions. But the thought of Lynley made Barbara shift restlessly in his desk chair and force herself to read the first paragraph on the third page of Hillier’s memorandum.

The words meant nothing. She couldn’t concentrate. Having inadvertently conjured up the presence of her superior offi cer, she was going to have to deal with him.

How to do so? She squirmed, lay the memorandum down among the various reports and folders that were stacking up during his absence, and sank her hand into her shoulder bag in search of her cigarettes. She lit one and blew smoke at the ceiling, eyes narrowed against the smoke’s acrid sting.

She was in Lynley’s debt. He would deny it, naturally, no doubt with an expression of such bemusement that she would momentarily distrust her own deductions. But scanty as they were, she had the facts, and she didn’t much like the position in which they placed her. How to repay him when he would never allow it as long as their circumstances were so imbalanced? He would never begin to entertain the word debt as a given between them.

Damn him, she thought, he sees too much, he knows too much, he’s too fl aming clever to get caught in the act. She swivelled the chair to face a cabinet on top of which sat a picture of Lynley and Lady Helen Clyde. She scowled at him.

“Get knotted,” she said, flicking ash to the floor. “Stay out of my life, Inspector.”

“Now, Sergeant? Or will later do as well?”

Barbara spun round quickly. Lynley stood in the doorway, his cashmere overcoat slung over one shoulder and Dorothea Harriman— their divisional superintendent ’s secretary — bobbing up and down behind him. Sorry, Harriman mouthed at Barbara with wildly exaggerated and decidedly apologetic movements of her arms, I didn’t see him coming. I couldn’t warn you. When Lynley glanced over his shoulder, Harriman waggled her fi ngers, smiled brilliantly at him, and disappeared in a blaze of heavily lacquered blonde hair.

Barbara got to her feet at once. “You’re on holiday,” she said.

“As are you.”

“So what’re you…?”

“What are you?”

She dragged long on her cigarette. “Thought I’d stop by. I was in the area.”

“Ah.”

“You?”

“The same.” He entered and hung his coat on the rack. Unlike herself, who had at least kept up the I’m-on-holiday pretence by coming to the Yard wearing blue jeans and a tatty sweat shirt across which had been stencilled Buy British, By George beneath a faded depiction of that saint making hash of an extremely dispirited-looking dragon, Barbara saw that Lynley was dressed for work in his customary fashion: three-piece suit, crisp shirt, silk maroon tie, with the ubiquitous watch chain looped across his waistcoat. He went to his desk — the immediate vicinity of which she quickly vacated — favoured the smouldering tip of her cigarette with a look of displeasure as he passed her, and began sorting through the folders, reports, envelopes, and numerous departmental directives. “What’s this?” he asked, holding up the remaining eight pages of the memorandum which Barbara had been reading.

“Hillier’s thoughts on working with the IRA.”

He patted his jacket pocket, brought out his spectacles, and ran his eyes down the page. “Odd. Is Hillier losing his touch? It appears to start in the middle,” he noted.

Sheepishly, she reached into the rubbish and rescued the two top pages which she smoothed out against her chunky thigh and handed to him, dropping cigarette ash on the cuff of his suit jacket in the process.

“Havers…” His voice was patience itself.

“Sorry.” She flicked the ash off. A spot of it remained. She rubbed it into the material. “Good for it,” she said. “Old wives’ tale.”

“Put out that blasted thing, will you?”

She sighed and squashed the remaining stub of tobacco against the heel of her left plimsoll. She flicked the butt in the direction of the rubbish bin, but it missed its mark and landed on the floor. Lynley lifted his head from Hillier’s memorandum, observed the butt over the tops of his spectacles, and raised a single, querying eyebrow.

“Sorry,” Havers said and went to place the offending article in the rubbish. She returned the bin to its original position at the side of his desk. He murmured his thanks. She plopped onto one of the visitor chairs and began to worry an incipient hole in the right knee of her jeans. She stole a look or two at him while he continued to read.

He appeared perfectly refreshed and entirely untroubled. His blond hair lay neatly against his head in its usual well-scissored fashion— she’d always wanted to know who saw to the miraculous cutting that produced the effect of its never growing so much as a millimetre beyond an established length — his brown eyes were clear, no circles darkened the skin beneath them, no new lines of fatigue or worry had joined the age lines on his brow. But the fact remained that he was supposed to be on a holiday that had long been arranged with Lady Helen Clyde. They were off to Corfu. They were supposed to be leaving, in fact, at eleven. But it was now a quarter past ten, and unless the Inspector was planning on a trip to Heathrow via helicopter within the next ten minutes, he wasn’t going anywhere. At least not to Greece. At least not today.

“So,” she said breezily, “is Helen with you, sir? Did she stop to chat up MacPherson in the mess?”

“No to both.” He continued reading. He’d just concluded the third page of the tract, and he was balling it up as she had done with the first two, although in his case, the action appeared to be unconscious, merely something to do with his hands. He’d made it a full year off the evil weed, but there were times when his fingers seemed to need something to do in place of holding the cigarette he’d been used to.

“She’s not ill? I mean, weren’t you two heading off to—”

“We were supposed to, yes. Plans change sometimes.” He looked at her over the rims of his spectacles. It was one of his now-thatwe’re-getting-down-to-it looks. “And what about your plans, Sergeant? Have they changed as well?”

“Just taking a break. You know how it is. Work, work, work and a girl’s hands just start to look like dead lobsters. I’m giving them a rest.”

“I see.”

“Not that I need to give them a rest from painting.”

“What?”

“Painting. You know. The interior of the house. Three blokes showed up at my place two days ago. Contractors, they were. Had a deal all drawn up and signed to paint the inside of my house. Odd, that was, you know, because I hadn’t called a contractor. Odder still when you think the job had been paid for in advance.”

Lynley frowned and placed the memorandum on top of a bound PSI report on the relationship between civilians and police in London. “Decidedly odd,” he said. “You’re certain they were at the right house.”

“Dead certain,” she said. “One hundred percent certain. They even knew my name. They even called me sergeant. They even asked what it was like for a woman to work in CID. Chatty blokes, they were. But I did wonder how they could ever have known I work here at the Met.”

As expected, Lynley’s face was a study in wonderment. She half-expected him to go all Miranda on her, exclaiming on the braveness and newness of a world they both knew to be generally corrupt and largely hopeless. “And you read the contract? You made certain they were in the right place?”

“Oh yes. And they were bloody good, sir, the lot of them. Two days and the house was painted like new.”

“How intriguing.” He went back to the report.

She let him read for the amount of time it took her to count from one to one hundred. Then, “Sir.”

“Hmm.”

“What’d you pay them?”

“Whom?”

“The painters.”

“What painters?”

“Give over, Inspector. You know what I’m talking about.”

“The chaps who painted your house?”

“What’d you pay them? Because I know you did, don’t bother to lie about it. Besides you, only MacPherson, Stewart, and Hale know that I’m working on the place during my holiday, and they can’t exactly put their hands on the kind of lolly we’re talking about to do this job. So what’d you pay them and how much time do I have to pay you back?”

Lynley set the report aside and allowed his fi ngers to play with his watch chain. They removed the watch from his pocket, flipped it open, and he made a show of examining the time.

“I don’t want your bleeding charity,” she said. “I don’t want to feel like anyone’s pet project. I don’t want to owe.”

“It does make demands on one, owing,” he said. “One always ends up putting the debt onto a scale in which future behaviours are weighed. How can I lash out in anger when I owe him something? How can I go my own way without discussion when I’m in his debt? How can I maintain a safe businesslike distance from the rest of the world if I have a connection somewhere?”

“Owing money isn’t a connection, sir.”

“No. But gratitude generally is.”

“So you were buying me? Is that it?”

“Assuming I had anything to do with it in the first place — which, I feel compelled to warn you, is not an inference that will be supported by any evidence you may attempt to glean — I generally don’t purchase my friendships, Sergeant.”

“Which is your way of saying that you paid them cash, and you probably paid them a bonus as well to keep their mouths shut.” She leaned forward, slapping her hand lightly against his desk. “I don’t want your help, sir, not in this way. I don’t want anything from you that I can’t return. And besides…Even if that wasn’t the case, I’m not exactly ready—” She blew out her breath in a gust of sudden nerve loss.

Sometimes she forgot he was her superior officer. Worse, sometimes she forgot the one thing she’d once sworn to keep in the forefront of her mind every instant she was with him: The man was an earl, he had a title, there were people in his life who actually called him my lord. Given, none of his colleagues at the Yard had considered him anything other than Lynley for more than ten years, but she didn’t possess the sort of sang-froid that allowed her to feel on equal footing with someone whose family had been rubbing elbows with the sort of blokes who were used to being referred to as your highness and your grace. It gave her the crawlies when she thought about it, it raised her hackles when she dwelt upon it. And when it caught her unawares — such as now — it made her feel like a perfect fool. One didn’t unburden one’s soul to a blue blood. One wasn’t really sure that blue bloods were possessed of souls themselves.

“And even if that weren’t the case,” Lynley picked up her thought with an unconscious— if typical — correction of her grammar, “I expect as the day when you leave Acton looms closer, the prospect looms larger. It’s one thing to have a dream, isn’t it? It’s quite another when it becomes reality.”

She sank back in her chair, staring at him. “Christ,” she said. “How the hell does Helen put up with you?”

He smiled briefly and removed his spectacles which he returned to his pocket. “She doesn’t, at the moment, actually.”

“No trip to Corfu?”

“I’m afraid not. Unless she goes alone. Which, as we both know, she’s been perfectly willing to do before.”

“Why?”

“I upset her equilibrium.”

“I don’t mean why then. I mean why now.”

“I see.” He swivelled the chair, not towards the cabinet and the picture of Helen, but towards the window where the upper fl oors of the dreary post-war construction that was the Home Office nearly matched the colour of the leaden sky. He steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “We fell out over a tie, I’m afraid.”

“A tie?”

As a means of clarification, he gestured to the one he was wearing. “I’d hung a tie on the door knob last night.”

Barbara frowned. “Force of habit, you mean? Like squeezing toothpaste from the middle of the tube? Something that gets on one’s nerves once the stars of romance start twinkling less brightly?”

“I only wish.”

“Then what?”

He sighed. She could tell he didn’t want to go into it. She said, “Never mind. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I mean the holiday. I know you were looking forward to it.”

He played with the knot at his throat. “I’d left my tie on the door knob — outside the door — before we went to bed.”

“So?”

“I didn’t pause to think she might notice, and beyond that it’s something I’m used to doing on occasion.”

“So?”

“And she didn’t notice, actually. But she did ask how it was that Denton has never once disturbed us in the morning since we’ve been…together.”

Barbara saw the dawn. “Oh. I get it. He sees the tie. It’s a signal. He knows that someone’s with you.”

“Well…yes.”

“And you told her that? Jesus, what an idiot, Inspector.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I was wandering like a schoolboy in that blithering state of sexual euphoria when no one thinks. She said, ‘Tommy, how is it that Denton has never once stumbled in with your morning tea on the nights I’ve stayed?’ And I actually told her the truth.”

“That you’d been using the tie to tell Den-ton that Helen was in the bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“And that you’d done it with other women in the past?”

“God no. I’m not that much of an idiot. Although it wouldn’t have made any difference had I said it. She assumed I’d been using it that way for years.”

“And had you?”

“Yes. No. Well, not recently, for God’s sake. I mean, only with her. Which isn’t meant to imply that I didn’t put a tie on the knob for someone else. But there hasn’t been anyone else since she and I…Oh blast it.” He waved off the rest.

Barbara nodded solemnly. “I’m certainly getting the idea of how the old grave was dug.”

“She claims it’s an example of my inherent misogyny: my valet and I exchanging a lubricious chuckle over breakfast about who’s been moaning the loudest in my bed.”

“Which you’ve never done, of course.”

He swung his chair back to her. “What exactly do you take me for, Sergeant?”

“Nothing. Just yourself.” She poked at the hole on her knee with more interest. “Of course, you always could have given up early morning tea all together. I mean, once you started having women spend the night. That way you’d never have needed a signal. Or you could have started brewing morning tea yourself and nipping back up to your bedroom with the tray.” She pressed her lips together at the thought of Lynley stumbling round his kitchen — assuming he even knew where it was in the first place — trying to find the kettle and to work the cooker. “I mean, it would have been sort of liberating for you, sir. You might even have ultimately ventured into toast.”

And then she giggled, although it sounded more like a snort, slipping out from between her pressed lips. She covered her mouth and watched him over the top of her hand, half in shame at her making a joke of his situation and half in amusement at the thought of him — in the midst of frenzied, determined seduction — surreptitiously hanging a tie on his door knob in such a way that his lady love wouldn’t notice and question why he was doing it.

His face was wooden. He shook his head. He fingered the rest of Hillier’s report. “I don’t know,” he said gravely. “I don’t see how I could ever manage toast.”

She guffawed. He chuckled.

“At least we don’t have that sort of trouble in Acton.” Barbara laughed.

“Which is, no doubt, partially why you’re reluctant to leave.”

What a marksman, she thought. He wouldn’t miss an opening if he was wearing a blindfold. She got up from her chair and walked to the window, slipping her fingers into the rear

pockets of her jeans.

“Isn’t that why you’re here?” he asked her.

“I told you why. I was in the area.”

“You were looking for distraction, Havers. As was I.”

She gazed out the window. She could see the tops of the trees in St. James’s Park. Completely bare, rustling in the wind, they looked like sketchings against the sky.

“I don’t know, Inspector,” she said. “It seems like a case of be-careful-what-you-wishfor. I know what I want to do. I’m scared to do it.”

The telephone rang on Lynley’s desk. She started to answer it.

“Leave it,” he said. “We’re not here, remember?” They both watched it as it continued to ring, the way people do when they expect their collective will to have some small infl uence over another’s actions. It fi nally stopped.

“But I suppose you can relate to that,” Barbara went on as if the telephone had not interrupted them.

“It’s something about the gods,” Lynley said. “When they want to make you mad, they give you what you most desire.”

“Helen,” she said.

“Freedom,” he said.

“We’re one hell of a pair.”

“Detective Inspector Lynley?” Dorothea Harriman stood in the doorway, wearing a trim black suit relieved by grey piping on collar and lapels. A pillbox hat was perched on her head. She looked ready for an appearance on the balcony of Buck House on Remembrance Sunday should she be summoned to dwell among the royals. Only the poppy was missing.

“Yes, Dee?” Lynley asked.

“Telephone.”

“I’m not here.”

“But—”

“The sergeant and I are unavailable, Dee.”

“But it’s Mr. St. James. He’s phoning from Lancashire.”

“St. James?” Lynley looked at Barbara. “Haven’t he and Deborah gone on holiday?”

Barbara raised her shoulders. “Haven’t we all?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

LYNLEY WAS DRIVING UP THE acclivity of the Clitheroe Road towards the village of Winslough by late afternoon. Mellow sunlight, fading as day drew towards night, pierced the winter mist that lay over the land. In narrow bands, it glanced against the old stone structures— church, school, houses, and shops that rose in a serried display of Lancashire’s stalwart architecture — and it changed the colour of the buildings to ochre, from their normally sombre tan-soaked-with-soot. Beneath the tyres of the Bentley, the road was wet, as it always seemed to be in the North at this time of year, and pools of water from both ice and frost, which gathered and melted and gathered again on a nightly basis, glimmered in the light. Upon their surfaces the sky was refl ected, as were the vertebral forms of hedges and trees.

He slowed the car some fifty yards from the church. He parked on the verge and got out into the knife-sharp air. He could smell the smoke from a fresh, dry-wood fire nearby. This argued for dominance with the prevalent odours of manure, turned earth, wet and rotting vegetation which emanated from the expanse of open land lying just beyond the brambly hedge that bordered the road. He looked past this. To his left, the hedge curved northeast with the road, giving way to the church and then, perhaps a quarter of a mile farther on, to the village itself. To his far right, a stand of trees thickened into an old oak wood above which rose a hill that was sided by frost and topped by a wavering wreath of mist. And directly in front of him, the open fi eld dipped languidly down to a crooked stream from which the land lifted again on the other side in a patchwork of drystone walls. Among these stood farms, and from them even at this distance Lynley could hear the bleating of sheep.

He leaned against the side of the car and gazed at St. John the Baptist’s. Like the village itself, the church was a plain structure, roofed in slate and ornamented only by its clock-faced bell tower and Norman crenellation. Surrounded by a graveyard and chestnut trees, backdropped by a misty egg-shell sky, it didn’t much look like a player in a set piece with murder at its core.

Priests, after all, were supposed to be minor characters in the drama of life and death. Theirs was the role of conciliator, counsellor, and general intermediary between the penitent, the petitioner, and the Lord. They offered a service elevated both in effi cacy and importance as a result of its connection to the divine, but because of this fact there was a measured distance between them and the members of their congregation, one which seemed to preclude the sort of intimacy that led to murder.

Yet this chain of thought was sophistry, Lynley knew. Everything from the monitory aphorism about the wolf in sheep’s clothing to that time-worn hypocrite the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale bore evidence of that. Even if this were not the case, Lynley had been a policeman long enough to know that the most guileless exterior — not to mention the most exalted position — had the fullest potential to hide culpability, sin, and shame. Thus, if murder had shattered the peace of this somnolent countryside, the fault did not lie in the stars or in the ceaseless movement of the planets, but rather at the centre of a guarded heart.

“There’s something peculiar going on,” St. James had said on the phone that morning. “From what I’ve been able to gather, the local constable apparently managed to avoid calling in his divisional CID for anything more than a cursory investigation. And he seems to be involved with the woman who fed this priest— Robin Sage — the hemlock in the fi rst place.”

“Surely there was an inquest, St. James.”

“There was. The woman — she’s called Juliet Spence — admitted doing it and claimed it was an accident.”

“Well, if the case went no further and the coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of accidental poisoning, we have to assume that the autopsy and whatever other evidence there was — no matter who gathered it — verifi ed her account.”

“But when you consider the fact that she’s a herbalist—”

“People make mistakes. Consider how many deaths have risen from a putative fungi expert’s picking the wrong sort of wild mushroom in the woods and cooking it up for dinner and death.”

“This isn’t quite the same.”

“You said she mistook it for wild parsnip, didn’t you?”

“I did. And that’s where the story goes bad.”

St. James set forth the facts. While it was true, he said, that the plant was not immediately distinguishable from a number of other members of its family — the Umbelliferae—the similarities among the genera and the species were confi ned largely to the parts of the plant that one wouldn’t be drawn to eating in the first place: the leaves, the stems, the fl owers, and the fruit.

Why not the fruit, Lynley wanted to know. Didn’t this entire situation arise from the act of picking, cooking, and eating the fruit?

Not at all, St. James told him. Although the fruit was as poisonous as the rest of the plant, it consisted of dry, two-part capsules that, unlike a peach or an apple, weren’t fleshy and hence gastronomically attractive. Someone harvesting water hemlock, thinking it was wild parsnip, would not be eating the fruit at all. Rather, he’d be digging up the plant and using the root.

“And that’s the rub,” St. James said.

“The root bears the distinguishing characteristics, I take it.”

“It does.”

Lynley had to admit that, while the characteristics weren’t legion, they were enough to rouse his own sleeping disquiet. This was, in part, why he unpacked the clothing he’d put in his suitcase for a week in the mild winter of Corfu, repacked it for the insidious bone-chill of the North, and made his way up the M1 to the M6 and thence deep into Lancashire with its desolate moors, its cloud-covered fells, and its antique villages from which more than three hundred years ago had sprung his country’s ugliest fascination with witchcraft.

Roughlee, Blacko, and Pendle Hill were none of them too distant in either miles or memory from the village of Winslough. Nor was the Trough of Bowland through which twenty women were marched to their trials and their deaths at Lancaster Castle. It was historical fact that persecution raised its nasty head most often when tensions rose and a scapegoat was needed to diffuse and displace them. Lynley wondered idly if the death of the local vicar at the hands of a woman was tension enough.

He turned from his contemplation of the church and went back to the Bentley. He switched on the ignition, and the tape he’d been listening to since Clitheroe resumed. Mozart’s Requiem. Its sombre combination of strings and woodwinds, accompanying the solemn, low intonation of the choir, seemed appropriate to the circumstances. He guided the car back into the road.

If it wasn’t a mistake that killed Robin Sage, it was something else, and the facts suggested that something else was murder. As did the plant, that conclusion grew from the root.

“One distinguishes water hemlock from other members of the Umbelliferae by the root,” St. James had explained. “Wild parsnip has a single root stock. Water hemlock has a tuberous bundle of roots.”

“But isn’t it within the realm of possibility that this particular plant had only one root stock?”

“It’s possible, yes. Just as another sort of plant might have its opposite: two or three adventitious roots. But statistically speaking, it’s unlikely, Tommy.”

“Still, one can’t discount it.”

“Agreed. But even if this particular plant had been an anomaly of that sort, there are other characteristics to the underground portion of the stem that one would think a herbalist would notice. When cut open lengthwise, the stem of water hemlock displays nodes and internodes.”

“Help me out here, Simon. Science isn’t my fi eld.”

“Sorry. I suppose you’d call them chambers. They’re hollow, with a diaphragm of pith tissue running horizontally across the cavity.”

“And wild parsnip doesn’t have these chambers?”

“Nor does it exude a yellow oily liquid when its stem is cut.”

“But would she have cut the stem? Would she have opened it lengthwise?”

“The latter, no. I admit it’s doubtful. But as to the former: How could she have removed the root — even if it was the anomaly, a single one — without cutting the stem in some way?

Even breaking the root off from the stem would have produced that singular oil.”

“And you believe that’s enough of a warning to a herbalist? Isn’t it possible that she might have been distracted from noticing? What if someone was with her when she was digging it up? What if she were talking to a friend or arguing with her lover or distracted in some way? Perhaps even deliberately distracted.”

“Those are possibilities. And they bear looking into, don’t they?”

“Let me make a few phone calls.”

He had done so. The nature of the answers he’d managed to dig up had piqued his interest. Since the holiday in Corfu had turned into another one of life’s promises unkept, he threw tweeds, blue jeans, and sweaters in his suitcase and stowed that along with gumboots, hiking shoes, and anorak into the boot of his car. He’d been wanting to get out of London for weeks. While he’d have preferred his escape to be effected by a flight to Corfu with Helen Clyde, Crofters Inn and Lancashire would have to do.

He rolled past the terraced houses that signalled entry into the village proper and found the inn at the junction of the three roads, just where St. James had told him it would be. St. James himself, along with Deborah, Lynley found in the pub.

The pub itself was not yet open for its evening business. The iron wall sconces with their small tasselled shades hadn’t been lit. Near the bar, someone had set out a blackboard upon which the night’s specialities had been printed in a hand that employed oddly pointed letters, sloping lines, and a devotion to fuchsia-coloured chalk. Lasagnia was offered, as were Minuet Steak and Steamed Toffy Pudding. If the spelling was any indication of the cooking, things didn’t look promising. Lynley made a mental note to try the restaurant in lieu of the pub.

St. James and Deborah were seated beneath one of the two windows that looked out onto the street. On the table between them, the remains of an afternoon tea mixed with beer mats and a stapled sheaf of papers that St. James was in the act of folding and stuffing into his inside jacket pocket. He was saying:

“Listen to me, Deborah,” to which she was replying, “I won’t. You’re breaking our agreement.” She crossed her arms. Lynley knew that gesture. He slowed his steps.

Three logs burned in the fi replace next to their table. Deborah turned in her chair and looked into the fl ames.

St. James said, “Be reasonable.”

She said, “Be fair.”

Then one of the logs shifted and a shower of sparks rained onto the hearth. St. James worked the fire brush. Deborah moved away. She caught sight of Lynley. She said, “Tommy” with a smile and looked a mixture of saved and relieved as he stepped into the greater light that the fire provided. He set his suitcase by the stairway and went to join them.

“You’ve made excellent time,” St. James said as Lynley offered his hand in greeting and then brushed a kiss against Deborah’s cheek.

“The wind at my back.”

“And no trouble getting away from the Yard?”

“You’ve forgotten. I’m on holiday. I’d just gone into the office to clear off my desk.”

“And we’ve taken you from your holiday?” Deborah asked. “Simon! That’s dreadful.”

Lynley smiled. “A mercy, Deb.”

“But surely you and Helen had plans.”

“We did. She changed her mind. I was at a loose end. It was either a drive to Lancashire or a prolonged rattle round my house in London. Lancashire seemed to hold infi nitely more promise. It’s a diversion, at least.”

Deborah shrewdly assessed the fi nal statement. “Does Helen know you’ve come?”

“I’ll phone her tonight.”

“Tommy…”

“I know. I’ve not behaved well. I’ve picked up my marbles and run away.”

He dropped into the seat next to Deborah and picked up a shortbread still left on the plate. He poured some tea for himself into her empty cup and stirred in sugar as he munched. He looked about. The door to the restaurant was shut. The lights behind the bar were switched off. The office door was open a crack, but no movement came from within, and while a third door — set at an angle behind the bar — was open far enough to emit a lance of light that pierced the labels of the spirit bottles that hung upside down awaiting use, no sound came from beyond it.

“No one’s here?” Lynley asked.

“They’re about somewhere. There’s a bell on the bar.”

He nodded but made no move to go to it.

“They know you’re the Yard, Tommy.”

Lynley raised an eyebrow. “How?”

“You had a phone message during lunch. It was the talk of the pub.”

“So much for incognito.”

“It probably wouldn’t have served us well, anyway.”

“Who knows?”

“That you’re CID?” St. James leaned back and let his glance wander, as if trying to remember who had been in the pub when the call came through. “The owners, certainly. Six or seven locals. A group of hikers who’re no doubt long gone.”

“You’re certain about the locals?”

“Ben Wragg — he’s the owner — was chatting some of them up at the bar when his wife brought the news from the office. The rest got the information with their lunches. At least Deborah and I did.”

“I hope the Wraggs charged extra.”

St. James smiled. “They didn’t, that. But they did give us the message. They gave everyone the message. Sergeant Dick Hawkins, Clitheroe Police, phoning for Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley.”

“‘I asked him where this Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley was from, I did,’” Deborah added in her best Lancashire accent. “‘And wouldn’t you know’—with a wonderfully dramatic pause, Tommy—‘he’s from New Scotland Yard! Staying right here at the inn, he’ll be. He booked a room hisself not three hours past. I took the call. Now what you s’pose he’s come to look into?’” Deborah’s nose wrinkled with her smile. “You’re the week’s excitement. You’ve turned Winslough into St. Mary Mead.”

Lynley chuckled. St. James said pensively, “Clitheroe’s not the regional constabulary for Winslough, is it? And this Hawkins said nothing about being attached to anyone’s CID, because if he had, we surely would have heard that bit of news along with everything else.”

“Clitheroe’s just the divisional police centre,” Lynley said. “Hawkins is the local constable’s superior officer. I spoke to him this morning.”

“But he’s not CID?”

“No. And you were right in your conclusions about that, St. James. When I spoke to Hawkins earlier, he affirmed the fact that Clitheroe’s CID did nothing more than photograph the body, examine the crime scene, collect physical evidence, and arrange for autopsy. Shepherd himself did the rest: investigation and interviews. But he didn’t do them alone.”

“Who assisted?”

“His father.”

“That’s deucedly odd.”

“Odd and irregular but not illegal. From what Sergeant Hawkins told me earlier, Shepherd’s father was Detective Chief Inspector at the regional constabulary in Hutton-Preston at the time. Evidently he pulled rank on Sergeant Hawkins and gave the order how things would be.”

“Was Detective Chief Inspector?”

“This Sage affair was his last police case. He retired shortly after the inquest.”

“So Colin Shepherd must have arranged with his father to keep Clitheroe’s CID out of it,” Deborah said.

“Or his father wanted it that way.”

“But why?” St. James mused.

“I dare say that’s what we’re here to fi nd out.”

They walked down the Clitheroe Road together, in the direction of the church, past the front of terraced houses whose white, transomed windows were edged by a hundred years of grime that no mere washing could ever remove.

They found Colin Shepherd’s house next to the vicarage, just across the street from St. John the Baptist Church. Here, they separated, Deborah crossing to the church itself with a quiet “I haven’t seen it yet anyway,” leaving St. James and Lynley to conduct their interview with the constable on their own.

Two cars stood on the drive in front of the sorrel brick building, a muddy Land Rover at least ten years old and a splattered Golf that looked relatively new. No car stood on the neighbouring drive, but as they skirted past the Rover and the Golf on their way to Colin Shepherd’s door, a woman came to one of the front windows in the vicarage, and she watched their progress with no attempt to hide herself from view. One hand was freeing kinky, car-rot-coloured hair from a scarf that bound it at the base of her neck. The other was buttoning a navy coat. She didn’t move from the window even when it was obvious that Lynley and St. James had seen her.

A narrow, rectangular sign jutted from the side of Colin Shepherd’s house. Blue and white, it was printed with the single word POLICE. As was the case in most villages, the local constable’s home was also the business centre of his policing area. Lynley wondered idly if Shepherd had brought the Spence woman here to do his questioning of her.

A dog began to bark in answer to their ringing of the bell. It was a sound that started at one end of the house, rapidly approached the front door, and took up a raucous position behind it. A large dog by the sound of it, and none too friendly.

A man’s voice said, “Quiet, Leo. Sit,” and the barking ceased at once. The porch light flicked on — although it wasn’t yet completely dark — and the door swung open.

With a large black retriever sitting at attention at his side, Colin Shepherd looked them over. His face reflected neither the anticipation attendant to greeting a request for his professional services nor the general curiosity attached to finding strangers at one’s door. His words explained why. He said them with a quick, formal nod. “Scotland Yard CID. Sergeant Hawkins said you might pay me a call today.”

Lynley produced his warrant card and introduced St. James, to whom Shepherd said after an evaluative glance, “You’re staying at the inn, aren’t you? I saw you last night.”

“My wife and I came to see Mr. Sage.”

“The red-headed woman. She was out by the reservoir this morning.”

“She’d gone there to walk on the moor.”

“The mist comes down fast in these parts. It’s no place for a walk if you don’t know the land.”

“I’ll tell her.”

Shepherd stepped back from the door. The dog rose in response, a rumbling in his throat. Shepherd said, “Be quiet. Go back to the fi re,” and the dog trotted obediently into another room.

“Use him for your work?” Lynley asked.

“No. Just for hunting.”

Shepherd nodded to a coat rack that stood at one end of the elongated entry. Beneath it, three pairs of gumboots lined up, two of them smeared with fresh mud on the sides. Next to these, a metal milk basket stood, with an empty cocoon of some long-departed insect dangling by a thread from one of its bars. Shepherd waited while Lynley and St. James hung up their coats. Then he led the way down the corridor in the direction the retriever had taken.

They went into a sitting room where a fi re burned and an older man was laying a small log on top of the flames. Despite the years that separated them in age, it was obvious that this was Colin Shepherd’s father. They shared many similarities: the height, the muscular chest, the narrow hips. Their hair was different, thinning in the father and fading to the colour of sand in the way that blonds do as they move towards grey. And the long fi ngers, sensitivity, and sureness of the hands in the son had in the father become large knuckles and split nails with age.

The latter man slapped his palms together briskly as if to rid them of wood dust. He offered his hand in greeting. “Kenneth Shepherd,” he said. “Detective Chief Inspector, retired. Hutton-Preston CID. But I expect you know that already, don’t you?”

“Sergeant Hawkins passed the information on to me.”

“As well he ought. It’s good to meet you both.” He shot a glance at his son. “Have you something to offer these good gentlemen, Col?”

The constable’s face did not change its expression despite the affability of his father’s tone. Behind his tortoiseshell spectacles, his eyes remained guarded. “Beer,” he said. “Whisky. Brandy. I’ve a sherry here that’s been collecting dust for the last six years.”

“Your Annie was a one for her sherry, wasn’t she?” the Chief Inspector said. “God rest her sweet soul. I’ll have a go with that. And you?” to the others.

“Nothing,” said Lynley.

“Nor for me,” St. James said.

From a small fruitwood side table, Shepherd poured the drink for his father and something from a spirit decanter for himself. As he did so, Lynley glanced round the room.

It was sparsely furnished, in the manner of a man who shops at jumble sales when a pressing need arises and doesn’t give much thought to the look of his possessions. The back of a beleaguered sofa was covered by a handknit blanket of multicoloured squares that managed to hide most of the large but mercifully faded pink anemones that decorated its fabric. Nothing beyond their own worn upholstery covered either of the two mismatched wing chairs, the arms of which were threadbare and the backs of which were permanently dented from serving as the resting place for generations of heads. Aside from a bentwood coffee table, a brass floor lamp, and the side table on which the liquor bottles stood, the only other item of interest hung on the wall. This was a cabinet that housed a collection of rifl es and shotguns. They were the only things in the room that looked cared for, no doubt companion pieces to the retriever who had sunk onto an ancient, stained duvet in front of the fi re. His paws, like the gumboots in the hall, were clotted with mud.

“Game birds?” Lynley asked with a look at the guns.

“Deer at one time as well. But I’ve given that up. The killing never lived up to the stalking.”

“It seems that it should. But it never does, does it?”

His sherry glass in hand, the Chief Inspector gestured towards the sofa and chairs. “Sit,” he said, sinking into the sofa. “We’ve just come in from a tramp ourselves and can do with taking a load off our feet. I’m off in about a quarter of an hour. I’ve got a sweet young thing of fifty-eight years waiting dinner for me at the pensioner’s flat. But there’s time enough for a natter fi rst.”

“You don’t live here in Winslough?” St. James asked.

“Haven’t in years. I like a bit of action and a bit of willing, soft girl-flesh to go with it. There’s none of the first to be found in Win-slough and what there is of the second’s long been tied up.”

The constable took his drink to the fire, squatted down on his haunches, and ran his hand over the retriever’s head. In response, Leo opened his eyes and moved to rest his chin against Shepherd’s shoe. His tail skittered in contentment against the fl oor.

“Got yourself in the mud,” Shepherd said, giving a gentle tug to the retriever’s ears. “A fine mess you are.”

His father snorted. “Dogs. Christ. They get under your skin about as bad as do women.”

It was an opening from which Lynley’s question rose naturally, although he was as certain the Chief Inspector hadn’t intended it to be used that way as he was certain the man’s visit to his son had little to do with an afternoon’s hike on the moors. “What can you tell us about Mrs. Spence and the death of Robin Sage?”

“Not exactly a Yard concern, is it?” Although he said it in a friendly enough fashion, the Chief Inspector’s response came too quickly upon the heels of the question. It spoke of having been prepared in advance.

“Formally? No.”

“But informally?”

“Surely you’re not blind to the irregularity of the investigation, Chief Inspector. No CID. Your son’s attachment to the perpetrator of the crime.”

“Accident, not crime.” Colin Shepherd looked up from the dog, his glass clasped in an easy grip in his hand. He remained squatting next to the fire. A countryman born and bred, he could no doubt maintain the position for hours without the slightest discomfort.

“An irregular decision, but not illegal,” the Chief Inspector said. “Colin felt he could handle it. I agreed. Handle it he did. I was with him through most of it, so if it’s the lack of CID input that’s got the Yard in a dither, CID was here all the time.”

“You sat in on all the interviews?”

“The ones that mattered.”

“Chief Inspector, you know that’s more than irregular. I don’t need to tell you that when a crime’s been committed—”

“But no crime was,” the constable said. He kept one hand on the dog, but his eyes were on Lynley. He didn’t move them. “The crime-scene team came out to crawl round the moors and overturn stones, and they saw the situation well enough in an hour. This wasn’t a crime. It was a clear-cut accident. I saw it that way. The coroner saw it that way. The jury saw it that way. End of story.”

“You were certain of that from the fi rst?”

The dog stirred restlessly as the hand on him tightened. “Of course not.”

“Yet aside from the initial presence of the crime-scene team, you made the decision not to involve your divisional CID, the very people who are trained to determine if a death is an accident, a suicide, or murder.”

“I made the decision,” the Chief Inspector said.

“Based upon?”

“A phone call from me,” his son said.

“You reported the death to your father? Not to the divisional headquarters in Clitheroe?”

“I reported to both. I told Hawkins I would handle it. Pa confi rmed. Everything seemed straightforward enough once I’d talked to Juliet…to Mrs. Spence.”

“And Mr. Spence?” Lynley asked.

“There is none.”

“I see.”

The constable dropped his eyes, swirled the liquor in his glass. “This has nothing to do with our relationship.”

“But it adds a complication. I’m sure you see that.”

“It wasn’t a murder.”

St. James leaned forward in the wing chair he’d chosen. “What makes you so certain? What made you so certain a month ago, Constable?”

“She had no motive. She didn’t know the man. It was only the third time they’d even met. He was after her to start going to church. And he wanted to talk about Maggie.”

“Maggie?” Lynley asked.

“Her daughter. Juliet had been having some trouble with her and the vicar got involved. He wanted to help. Mediate between them.

Offer advice. That’s it. That’s their relationship in a nutshell. Should I have called in CID and had them read her the caution over that? Or would you have preferred a motive fi rst?”

“Means and opportunity are powerful indicators in themselves,” Lynley said.

“That’s a lot of balls and you know it,” the Chief Inspector put in.

“Pa…”

Shepherd’s father waved him off with his sherry glass. “I have the means for murder every time I get behind the wheel of my car. I have opportunity when I step on the pedal. Is it murder, Inspector, if I hit someone who dodges into the path of my car? Do we need to call in CID for that, or can we deem it an accident?”

“Pa…”

“If that’s your argument — and I can’t deny its ten-ability at the moment — why involve CID in the person of yourself?”

“Because he is involved with the woman, for God’s sake. He wanted me here to make sure he kept his mind clear. And he did. Every moment.”

“Every moment you were here. And by your own admission, you weren’t here for each interview.”

“I damn well didn’t need—”

“Pa.” Shepherd’s voice was sharp. It altered to quiet reason when he went on. “Obviously it looked bad when Sage died. Juliet knows her plants, and it was hard to believe she could have mistaken water hemlock for wild parsnip. But that’s what happened.”

“You’re certain of that?” St. James asked.

“Of course I am. She got ill herself the night Mr. Sage died. She was burning with fever. She was sick four or five times, until two the next morning. Now you can’t tell me that without having a blessed motive in the world she’d knowingly eat a few bites of the deadliest natural poison there is in order to paint a murder an accident. Hemlock’s not like arsenic, Inspector Lynley. One doesn’t build up an immunity to it. If Juliet wanted to kill Mr. Sage, she bloody well wouldn’t have been such a fool as to deliberately eat part of the hemlock herself. She could have died. She was lucky she didn’t.”

“You know for a fact she was ill?” Lynley asked.

“I was there.”

“At the dinner?”

“Later. I stopped by.”

“What time?”

“Towards eleven. After I made my last patrol.”

“Why?”

Shepherd tossed back the rest of his drink and placed the glass on the floor. He took off his spectacles and spent a moment polishing the outer right lens against the sleeve of his fl annel shirt.

“Constable?”

“Tell him, lad,” the Chief Inspector said. “It’s the only way he’s going to be satisfi ed.”

Shepherd gave a shrug, replacing the spectacles. “I wanted to see if she was alone. Maggie’d gone to spend the night with one of her mates…” He sighed, shifted his weight.

“And you thought Sage might be doing the same with Mrs. Spence?”

“He’d been there three times. Juliet gave me no reason to think she’d taken him as a lover. I wondered. That’s all. I wondered. It’s nothing I’m proud of.”

“Would it be likely that she’d take on a lover after so brief an acquaintance, Constable?”

Shepherd picked up his glass, saw it was empty, put it back down. A spring creaked on the sofa as the Chief Inspector stirred.

“Would she, Mr. Shepherd?”

The constable’s spectacles fl ashed briefl y in the light as he lifted his head to meet Lynley’s gaze. “That’s hard to know about any woman, isn’t it? Especially a woman you love.”

There was truth to that, Lynley admitted. More than he liked to think about. People expatiated on the virtues of trust all the time. He wondered how many of them actually lived by it, with no doubts ever camping like restless gypsies just at the edge of their consciousness.

He said: “I take it Sage was gone when you arrived?”

“Yes. She said he’d left at nine.”

“Where was she?”

“In bed.”

“Ill?”

“Yes.”

“But she let you in?”

“I knocked. She didn’t answer. I let myself in.”

“The door was unlocked?”

“I have a set of keys.” He saw St. James glance quickly in Lynley’s direction. He added, “She didn’t give them to me. Townley-Young did. Keys to the cottage, Cotes Hall, the whole estate. He owns it. She’s the care

taker.”

“She knows you have the keys?”

“Yes.”

“As a security precaution?”

“I suppose.”

“Do you use them often? As part of your evening patrol?”

“Not generally, no.”

Lynley saw that St. James was looking thoughtfully at the constable, his brows drawn together as he pulled at his chin. He said: “It was a bit risky, that, wouldn’t you say, letting yourself into her cottage at night? What if she had been in bed with Mr. Sage?”

Shepherd’s jaw tightened but he answered easily. “I suppose I would have killed him myself.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

DEBORAH SPENT THE FIRST quarter of an hour inside St. John the Baptist Church. Beneath the hammer-beam ceiling, she wandered down the central aisle towards the chancel, tracing a mittened finger along the scrollwork that edged each pew. On the far side of the pulpit, one of them was boxed, separated from the rest by a gate of barley-sugar columns on the top of which a small bronze plaque bore blackened letters reading Townley-Young. Deborah lifted its latch and stepped inside, wondering what sort of people would want to maintain the unpleasant, centuries-old custom of segregating themselves from those they considered their social inferiors.

She sat on the narrow bench and looked about. The air in the church was musty and frigid, and when she exhaled, her breath hung whitely before her face for a moment, then dissipated like a cirrus in the wind. On a pillar nearby, the hymnboard hung, listing a selection for some previous service. Number 388 was at the top, and idly she opened one of the hymnals to it, reading

Lord Christ, who on thy heart didst bear the burden of our shame and sin, and now on high dost stoop to share the fight without, the fear within,

after which she dropped her eyes to

that we may care, as thou hast cared, for sick and lame, for deaf and blind, and freely share, as thou hast shared, in all the sorrows of mankind

and then stared at the words with her throat aching-tight, as if they had been written precisely for her.Which they had not.Which they had not.

She slapped the book closed. To the left of the pulpit a banner hung limply from a metal rod, and she scrutinised this. Winslough was stitched across a faded blue background in letters of yellow. Below them St. John the Baptist Church was rendered in quilted patchwork from which several tufts of stuffing leaked like snow against the bell tower and on the face of the clock. She wondered what the banner was used for, when it had been hung, if it had ever seen the light of day, how old it was, who had made it and why. She pictured an elderly woman of the parish at work on the design, stitching her way into the good graces of the Lord by making an offering for His place of worship. How long had it taken her? What sort of thread had she used for the quilting? Did anyone help? Did anyone know? Was there anyone who kept that sort of history of a church?

Such games, Deborah thought. What an effort she made to keep her mind in check. How important it was to feel the tranquillity suggested by a visit to a church and communion with the Lord.

She hadn’t come here for that. She had come because a walk down the Clitheroe Road in the late afternoon with her husband and the man who was his closest friend, who was her own former lover, who was the father of the child she might have had — would never have — seemed the best way to escape the feeling of having been betrayed.

Dragged up to Lancashire on false pretences, she thought and gave a weak chuckle at the idea, she who had been the ultimate betrayer.

She had found the sheaf of adoption papers tucked between his pyjamas and his socks, and she’d felt indignation pinch at her spine at the thought of his deception and at this intrusion into their time away from their real life in London. He wanted to talk about it, he explained when she flung the papers on the chest of drawers. He felt it was time that they sorted things out.

There was nothing to sort. To talk about it was to engage in the kind of conversation that spun like a cyclone, gathering speed and energy from misunderstanding, wreaking destruction from words hurled in anger and self-defence. A family isn’t blood, he would say so reasonably because God knew that Simon Allcourt-St. James was scientist, scholar, and reason incarnate. A family is people. People bond to one another out of time, exposure, and experience, Deborah. We form our connections from the give and take of emotion, from the growing sensitivity to another’s needs, from mutual support. A child’s attachment to his parents has nothing to do with who gave him birth. It comes from living day to day, from being nurtured, from being guided, from having someone there— someone consistent — that he can trust. You know this. You do.

It isn’t that, it isn’t that, she would want to say, even as she felt the tears which she so much despised cutting off her ability to speak.

Then what is it? Tell me. Help me understand.

Mine…it wouldn’t be…yours. It wouldn’t be us. Can’t you see that? Why won’t you see?

He would look at her without speaking for a moment, not to punish her with withdrawal as she’d once thought his silences meant, but to think and to problem-solve. He would be considering a recommendation on a course of action for them to take when all she wanted was that he too would weep and display through his tears that he understood her grief.

Because he’d never do that, she couldn’t say the final unsayable to him. She hadn’t even yet said it to herself. She didn’t want to feel the sorrow that would accompany the words. So she fought against their encroachment on her consciousness and she fended them off by railing against what she knew very well was his greatest strength: that he never allowed a single circumstance to defeat him, that he took life as he found it and bent it to his will.

You don’t even care, would be the words she chose. This means nothing to you. You don’t want to understand me.

What a convenience a cyclone-argument was.

She’d gone walking that morning to avoid confrontation. Out on the moors with the wind in her face, hiking across the uneven ground, dodging the occasional spines of furze and tramping through heather gone brown with winter, she’d kept everything at bay but the exercise itself.

Now, however, the quiet church admitted no such means of avoidance. She could examine the memorials, watch the dying light darken the colours in the windows, read the bronze Ten Commandments that formed the reredos and decide how many she’d broken so far. She could scrape her feet across the age-warped fl oor of the Townley-Young pew and count the moth holes dotting the red mantle on the pulpit. She could admire the woodwork of the rood screen and the tester. She could wonder about the tonal quality of the bells. But she could not avoid the voice of her conscience that spoke the truth and forced her to hear it:

Filling out those papers means I’m giving up. It’s admitting defeat. It tells me I’m a failure, not a woman at all. It says the ache will fade but it’ll never end. And it isn’t fair. This is the one thing that I want…this single, simple, unattainable thing.

Deborah stood and pushed open the boxpew’s gate. With the sound of its creaking came Simon’s words:

Are you punishing yourself, Deborah? Does your conscience say you’ve sinned and the only expiation is to replace one life with another which you yourself create? Is that what you’re doing? And are you doing it for me? Do you think you owe me that?

Perhaps, in part. For he was, if anything, forgiveness itself. If he had been some other kind of man — railing occasionally or throwing into her face the fact that she was at fault in this failure — she might have been able to bear it more easily. It was because he did nothing save look for solutions and express his growing alarm about her health that she found it so difficult to forgive herself.

On the worn red carpet, she retraced her steps down the aisle to the north door of the church. She stepped outside. She shivered in the growing cold and tucked her scarf inside the collar of her coat. Across the street, two cars were still parked in the constable’s drive. A light was on in the porch. But no one was stirring behind the front window.

Deborah turned away and entered the graveyard. It was lumpy like the moorland, tangled at the edges with blackberry and bramble, the stark red of dogwood growing in a thicket round one tomb. On top of this an angel stood with head bowed and arms extended, as if in final readiness to throw himself into the fi re-coloured stems.

Nothing much had been done to see to the upkeep of the graves. Mr. Sage had been dead for a month, but the lack of concern for the church’s immediate surroundings seemed to have its genesis further back in time than that. The path was overgrown with weeds. The graves were mottled with black, dead leaves. The stones were splattered with mud and green with lichen.

Among them, one grave lay like a soundless reproach to the state to which time and lack of interest had reduced the others. It was swept clean. Its blanket of tough, moorland grass was clipped. Its stone was unblemished. Deborah went to inspect it.

Anne Alice Shepherd, the carving read. She’d been twenty-seven years old at her death. She’d also been someone’s dearest wife in life, and if the condition of her grave was any indication, she was someone’s dearest wife in death as well.

A glint of colour caught Deborah’s eye. It seemed as misplaced as did the red dogwood in the otherwise chromatic congruence of the graveyard, and she bent to examine the base of the gravestone where two bright pink interlocking ovals shone against a nest of something grey. Upon her first inspection, the grey seemed to flow out of the marble marker as if the stone were disintegrating to dust. But on a closer look, she saw that it was a small mound of ashes into whose centre an even smaller, smooth stone had been carefully laid. On this were painted the interlocking ovals which had first caught her eye, two rings of neon pink, perfectly executed, each the same size.

It seemed an odd offering to make to the dead. Winter called for holly wreaths and made do with juniper. At the worst, it accepted those ghastly plastic flowers encased in plastic cases that grew mildew inside. But ashes and stone and, she now saw, four slivers of wood holding the stone in place?

She touched her finger to it. It was smooth as glass. It was almost perfectly flat as well. It had been placed on the ground directly at the centre of the gravestone, but it lay among the ashes like a message for the living and not a fond remembrance of the dead.

Two rings, interlocked. Gently, without disturbing the ashes in which the stone lay, Deborah picked it up, its size and weight no more than that of a pound coin in her hand. She removed one mitten and she felt the stone lie cold, like a pool of standing water in her palm.

Despite their odd colour, the rings reminded her of wedding bands, the sort one saw engraved in gold or embossed on invitations. Like their counterparts on paper, they were the same sort of perfect circles that priests always seemed to speak of, perfect circles of both the union and the unity that a strong marriage was supposed to embody. “A union of bodies, of souls, and of minds,” the minister had said at her own wedding more than two years ago. “These two before us shall now become one.”

Except that it never quite happened that way in anyone’s life, as far as Deborah could tell. There was love, and with it came growing trust. There was intimacy, and with it came the warmth of assurance. There was passion, and with it came moments of joy. But if two hearts were to beat as one and if two minds were to think in like manner, such integration had not occurred between herself and Simon. Or if it had, the triumph of its accomplishment had been evanescent.

Yet there was love between them. It was vast, subsuming most of her life. She could not imagine a world without it. What she wondered was if the love between them was enough to forge through fear in order to reach understanding.

Her fingers closed round the stone with its two pink rings painted brightly upon it. She would keep it as a talisman. It would serve as a fetish for what the unity of marriage was supposed to produce.

“You’ve made a real cock-up of things this time. You know that, don’t you? They’ve settled themselves in to reinvestigate the death and you’ve not got yourself a sinner’s chance in hell of stopping them. You understand that, don’t you?”

Colin carried his whisky glass into the kitchen. He placed it directly beneath the tap. Although there were no other dishes in the sink and none at the moment that wanted washing on either the work top or the table, he squirted a lemon-scented detergent into the glass and ran water into it until soap bubbles frothed. They slid over the rim and down one side while the water churned up more like foam in a Guinness.

“Your career’s on the line now. Everyone from Constable Nit chasing boys from Borstal to Hutton-Preston’s CC is going to hear about this. You realise that, don’t you? You’ve a blot on you, Col, and when next there’s an opening in CID, no one’s likely to forget it. You see that, don’t you?”

Colin unwound the striped dish cloth from the base of the tap and lowered it into the glass with the sort of precision he might have used when cleaning one of his shotguns. He knuckled it into a wad, shimmied it round and round, and ran it carefully along the rim. Funny, how he could still miss Annie at an unexpected moment like this. It always came without warning — a quick surge of grief and longing that rose from his loins and ended near his heart — and it always came from something so ordinary that he never considered how insidious was the action that precipitated it. He was always unarmed and never unaffected.

He blinked. A tremor shook him. He rubbed the glass harder.

“You think I can help you at this point, don’t you, boy?” his father was continuing. “I stepped in once—”

“Because you wanted to step in. I didn’t need you here, Pa.”

“Are you out of your mind? Have you bloody gone daft? Has she got you in blinkers or just smiling like a prat with your trousers unzipped?”

Colin rinsed the glass, dried it with the same care he’d used in washing it, and placed it next to the toaster which, he noted, was dusty and littered on its top with crumbs. Only then did he look at his father.

The Chief Inspector was standing in the doorway as was his habit, blocking escape. The only way to avoid conversation was to push past him, to find employment in the pantry off the kitchen, or to mess about in the garage. In any case, his father would follow. Colin recognised when the Chief Inspector was building up a good head of steam.

“What in hell were you thinking of?” his father asked. “What in God’s-name-bloodystinking hell were you thinking of?”

“We’ve been through this before. It was an accident. I told Hawkins. I followed procedure.”

“Bleeding hell you did! You had a corpse on your hands with the stench of murder oozing from every pore. Tongue chewed to shreds. Body bloated like a pig. The whole area beat down like he’d been wrestling with the devil. And you call it an accident? You report that to your superior officer? Christ, I can’t think why they haven’t sacked you by now.”

Colin folded his arms across his chest, leaned against the work top, and made his breathing slow. They both knew why. He put the answer into words. “You didn’t give them the chance, Pa. But for that matter, you didn’t give me a chance, either.”

His father’s face flamed. “Jesus God! A chance? This isn’t a game. This is life and death. It’s still life and death. Only this time, boy-o, you’re on your own.” He’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt upon entering the house when they’d returned from their hike. Now he began unrolling them, shoving the material down his arms and battering it into place. On the wall to his right, Annie’s cat clock wagged its black pendulum tail as its eyes shifted with every tick and tock. It was just about time for him to leave. He had his sweet piece of girl-flesh to see to. All Colin had to do was wait him out.

“Suspicious circumstances call for CID. You know that, boy, don’t you?”

“I had CID.”

“You had their bleeding photographer!”

“The crime team came. They saw what I saw. There was no indication that anyone other than Mr. Sage had been there. No footprints in the snow but his. No witness who saw anyone else on the footpath that night. The ground was thrashed up because he’d had convulsions. It was obvious from the look of him that he’d had some sort of seizure. I didn’t need any DI to tell me that.”

His father’s fists clenched. He raised his arms then dropped them. “You’re as stubborn an ass as you were twenty years ago. As stupid as well.”

Colin shrugged.

“You have no choice now. You know that, don’t you? You’ve the whole sodding village in a quagmire over this wet fanny you’ve got such a fancy for.”

Colin’s own fist clenched. He forced himself to release it. “That’s it, Pa. Be on your way. As I recall, you’ve a fanny of your own waiting somewhere this evening.”

“You’re not too old to be beaten, boy.”

“True. But this time, you’d probably lose.”

“After what I did—”

“You didn’t need to do anything. I didn’t ask you to be here. I didn’t ask you to follow me round like a hound with a good scent of fox up his nose. I had it under control.”

His father gave a sharp, derisive nod. “Stubborn, stupid, and blind as well.” He left the kitchen and went to the front door where he battled his way into his jacket and shoved his left foot into one of his boots. “You’re lucky they’ve come.”

“I don’t need them. She did nothing.”

“Save poison the vicar.”

“By accident, Pa.”

His father jerked on the second boot and straightened up. “You’d better pray on that, son. Because there’s one hell of a cloud hanging over you now. In the village. In Clitheroe. All the way to Hutton-Preston. And the only way it’s about to clear off is if the Yard’s CID don’t smell something nasty in your lady friend’s bed.”

He fished his leather gloves from his pocket and began to pull them on. He didn’t speak again until he’d squashed his peaked cap on his head. Then he peered at his son sharply.

“You’ve been straight with me, haven’t you? You’ve done no holding back?”

“Pa—”

“Because if you’ve covered up for her, you’re through. You’re sacked. You’re indicted. That’s the number. You understand that, don’t you?”

Colin saw the anxiety in his father’s eyes and heard it beneath the anger in his voice. He knew there was a measure of paternal solicitude in it, but he also knew that beyond the reality that a cover-up would lead to an investigation and a trial, it was the complete incomprehensibility of the fact that he wasn’t hungry that picked at his father’s peace. He had never been restless. He didn’t yearn for a higher rank and the right to sit comfortably behind a desk. He was thirty-four years old and still a village constable and as far as his father was concerned, there had to be a good reason why. I like it wasn’t good enough. I love the countryside would never do. The Chief Inspector might have bought I can’t leave my Annie a year ago, but he’d fly into a rage if Colin spoke of Annie while Juliet Spence was part of his life.

And now, there was the potential humiliation of his son’s involvement in the cover-up of a crime. He’d rested easy when the coroner’s jury had reached their verdict. He’d be in a hornets’ nest of dread until Scotland Yard completed their investigation and verifi ed that there had been no crime.

“Colin,” his father said again. “You’ve been straight with me, haven’t you? Nothing held back?”

Colin met his gaze directly. He was proud he could do so. “Nothing held back,” he said.

It was only when he’d closed the door upon his father that Colin felt his legs weaken. He grasped onto the knob and leaned his forehead against the wood.

It was nothing to concern himself with. No one would ever need to know. He’d not even thought of it himself until the Scotland Yard DI had asked his question and triggered the memory of Juliet and the gun.

He’d gone to speak to her after receiving three angry phone calls from three frightened sets of parents whose sons had been out for a frolic on the grounds of Cotes Hall. She’d been living at the Hall in the caretaker’s cottage just a year then, a tall, angular woman who kept to herself, made her money from growing herbs and brewing up potions, hiked vigorously across the moors with her daughter, and seldom came into the village for anything. She bought groceries in Clitheroe.

She bought gardening supplies in Burnley. She examined crafts and sold plants and dried herbs in Laneshawbridge. She took her daughter on the occasional excursion, but her choices were always a margin off-beat, like the Lewis Textile Museum rather than Lancaster Castle, like Hoghton Tower’s collection of dolls’ houses rather than Blackpool’s diversions by the sea. But these were things he discovered later. At first, bucking down the rutted lane in his old Land Rover, he thought only of the idiocy of a woman who’d shoot into the darkness at three young boys making animal noises at the edge of the woods. And a shotgun at that. Anything could have happened.

The sun was filtering through the oak wood on that afternoon. Beads of green lined the branches of trees as a late winter day gave way to spring. He was rounding a bend in the blasted road that the Townley-Youngs had been refusing to repair for the better part of a decade when through the open window came the sharp scent of cut lavender and with it one of those stabbing memories of Annie. So blinding it was, so momentarily real that he trod on the brake, half expecting her to come at a run from the woods, there where the lavender had been planted thickly at the edge of the road more than one hundred years ago when Cotes Hall lay in readiness for its bridegroom who had never arrived.

They’d been out here a thousand times, he and Annie, and she usually plucked at the lavender bushes as she made her way along the lane, filling the air with the scent of both the flowers and the foliage, collecting the buds to use in sachets among the wools and the linens at home. He remembered those sachets as well, clumsy little gauze pouches tied with frayed purple ribbon. They always came apart within a week. He was always picking bits of lavender out of his socks and brushing them off the sheets. And despite his protest of “Come on, girl. What good do they do?” she kept industriously tucking the pouches into every corner of the house, even once into his shoes, saying, “Moths, Col. We can’t have moths, can we?”

After she died, he rid the house of them in an ineffective attempt to rid the house of her. Directly he swept her medicines from the bedside table, directly he pulled her clothes from their hangers and pushed her shoes into rubbish bags, directly he took her scent bottles into the rear garden and smashed them one by one with a hammer as if by that action he could smash away the rage, he went on a search for Annie’s sachets.

But the smell of lavender always thrust her before him. It was worse than at night when his dreams allowed him to see her, remember, and long for what she once had been. In the day, with only the scent to haunt him, she was just out of reach, like a whisper carried past him on the wind.

He thought Annie, Annie and stared at the lane with his hands gripping the steering wheel.

So he didn’t see Juliet Spence at once, and thus she had the initial advantage over him, which he sometimes thought she maintained to this day. She said, “Are you quite all right, Constable?” and he snapped his head to the open window to see that she had come out of the woods with a basket on her arm and the knees of her blue jeans crusted with mud.

It didn’t seem the least odd that Mrs. Spence should know who he was. The village was small. She would have seen him before now even though they had never been introduced. Beyond that, Townley-Young would have told her that he made periodic visits to the Hall as part of his evening rounds. She might even have noticed him on occasion from her cottage window when he rumbled through the courtyard and shone his torch here and there against the boarded windows of the mansion, checking to make sure that its crumble to ruin stayed in the hands of nature and was not usurped by man.

He ignored her question and got out of the Rover. He said, although he knew the answer already, “It’s Mrs. Spence, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Are you aware of the fact that last night you discharged your shotgun in the direction of three twelve-year-old boys? In the direction of children, Mrs. Spence?”

She had odd bits of greenery, roots, and twigs in her basket, along with a trowel and a pair of secateurs. She picked up the trowel, dislodged a heavy clod of mud from its tip, and rubbed her fingers along the side of her jeans. Her hands were large and dirty. Her fingernails were clipped. They looked like a man’s. She said, “Come to the cottage, Mr. Shepherd.”

She turned on her heel and walked back into the woods, leaving him to jostle and jolt the last half mile along the road. By the time he’d crunched into the courtyard across the gravel and pulled to a halt in the shadow of the Hall, she’d got rid of her basket, brushed the mud from her jeans, washed her hands so thoroughly that her skin looked abraded, and set a kettle to boil on the cooker.

The front door stood open and when he mounted the single step that did for a porch, she said, “I’m in the kitchen, Constable. Come in.”

Tea, he thought. Questions and answers all controlled through the ritual of pouring, passing sugar and milk, shaking Hob Nobs onto a chipped floral plate. Clever, he thought.

But instead of making tea, she poured the boiling water slowly into a large metal pan in which glass jars stood in water of their own. She set the pan onto the cooker as well.

“Things need to be sterile,” she said. “People die so easily when someone is foolish and thinks of making preserves without sterilising fi rst.”

He looked round the kitchen and tried to get a glimpse of the larder beyond it. The time of year seemed decidedly odd for what she was proposing. “What are you preserving?”

“I might ask the same of you.”

She went to a cupboard and took down two glasses and a decanter from which she poured a liquid that was in colour somewhere just between dirt-toned and amber. It was cloudy, and when she placed a glass in front of him on the table where he’d gone to sit unbidden in an attempt to establish some sort of authority over her, he picked it up suspiciously and sniffed. What did it smell like? Bark? Old cheese?

She chuckled and swallowed a healthy portion of her own. She put the decanter on the table, sat down across from him, and circled her hands round her glass. “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s made from dandelion and elder. I drink it every day.”

“What’s it for?”

“I use it for purging.” She smiled and drank again.

He lifted the glass. She watched. Not his hands as he lifted, not his mouth as he drank, but his eyes. That was what struck him later when he thought about their fi rst encounter: how she never took her eyes from his. He himself was curious and gathered quick impressions about her: she wore no make-up; her hair was greying but her skin was lined only faintly so she couldn’t be that much older than he; she smelled vaguely of sweat and earth, and a smudge of dirt made a patch above her eye like an oval birth mark; her shirt was a man’s, over-large, frayed at the collar and ripped at the cuffs; at the V made where it buttoned, he could see the initial arc of one breast; her wrists were large; her shoulders were broad; he imagined the two of them could wear each other’s clothes.

“This is what it’s like,” she said quietly. Dark eyes she had, with pupils so large that the eyes themselves looked black. “At fi rst it’s the fear of something larger than yourself— something over which you have no control and only limited understanding — that’s inside her body with a power of its own. Then it’s the anger that some rotten disease cut into her life and yours and made a mess out of both. And then it’s the panic because no one has any answers that you can believe in and everyone’s answer is different from everyone else’s anyway. Then it’s the misery of being saddled with her and her illness when what you wanted — signed up for, made your vows to cherish — was a wife and a family and normality. Then it’s the horror of being trapped in your house with the sights and the smells and the sounds of her dying. But oddly enough, in the end it all becomes the fabric of your life, simply the way you live as man and wife. You become accustomed to the crises and to the moments of relief. You become accustomed to the grim realities of bed pans, commodes, vomit, and urine. You realise how important you are to her. You’re her anchor and her saviour, her sanity. And whatever needs you have of your own, they become secondary — unimportant, selfish, nasty even — in light of the role you play for her. So when it’s over and she’s gone, you don’t feel released the way everyone thinks you probably feel. Instead, you feel like a form of madness. They tell you it’s a blessing that God finally took her. But you know there isn’t a God at all. There’s just this gaping wound in your life, the hole that was the space she took up, the way she needed you, and how she fi lled your days.”

She poured more of the liquid into his glass. He wanted to make some sort of response, but he wanted even more to run so that he wouldn’t have to. He removed his spectacles — turning his head away from them rather than simply drawing them off the bridge of his nose — and in doing so he managed to remove his eyes from hers.

She said, “Death isn’t a release for anyone but the dying. For the living it’s a hell whose face just keeps on changing all the time. You think you’ll feel better. You think you’ll let the grief go someday. But you never do. Not completely. And the only people who can understand are the ones who’ve gone through it as well.”

Of course, he thought. Her husband. He said, “I loved her. Then I hated her. Then I loved her again. She needed more than I had to give.”

“You gave what you could.”

“Not in the end. I wasn’t strong when I should have been. I put myself first. While she was dying.”

“Perhaps you’d borne enough.”

“She knew what I’d done. She never said a word, but she knew.” He felt confined, the walls too close. He put on his spectacles. He pushed away from the table and walked to the sink where he rinsed out his glass. He looked out the window. It faced not the Hall but the woods. She’d planted an extensive garden, he saw. She’d repaired the old greenhouse. A wheelbarrow stood to one side of it, filled with what looked like manure. He imagined her shoveling it into the earth, with the strong, bold movements that her shoulders promised. She’d sweat as she did it. She’d pause to wipe her forehead on her sleeve. She wouldn’t wear gloves — she’d want to feel the wooden handle of the shovel and the sunlit heat of the earth — and when she was thirsty the water she drank would pour down the sides of her mouth to dampen her neck. A slow trickle of it would run between her breasts.

He made himself turn from the window to face her. “You own a shotgun, Mrs. Spence.”

“Yes.” She stayed where she was, although she changed her position, one elbow on the table, one hand curved round her knee.

“And you discharged it last night?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“The land’s posted, Constable. Approximately every one hundred yards.”

“There’s a public footpath superseding any posting. You know that very well. As does Townley-Young.”

“These boys weren’t on the path to Cotes Fell. Nor were they headed back towards the village. They were in the woods behind the cottage, circling up towards the Hall.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“From the sound of their voices, of course I’m sure.”

“And you warned them off verbally?”

“Twice.”

“You didn’t think to phone for help?”

“I didn’t need help. I just needed to be rid of them. Which, you must admit, I did fairly well.”

“With a shotgun. Blasting into the trees with pellets that—”

“With salt.” She ran her thumb and middle finger back through her hair. It was a gesture that spoke more of impatience than vanity. “The gun was loaded with salt, Mr. Shepherd.”

“And do you ever load it with anything else?”

“On occasion, yes. But when I do, I don’t shoot at children.”

He noticed for the first time that she was wearing earrings, small gold studs that caught the light when she turned her head. They were her only jewellery, save for a wedding band that, like his own, was unadorned and nearly as thin as the lead of a pencil. It too caught the light when her fi ngers tapped restlessly against her knee. Her legs were long. He saw that she’d taken off her boots somewhere and wore nothing now but grey socks on her feet.

He said, because he needed to say something to keep his focus, “Mrs. Spence, guns are dangerous in the hands of the inexperienced.”

She said, “If I had wanted to hurt someone, believe me, I would have done, Mr. Shepherd.”

She stood. He expected her to cross the kitchen, bringing her glass to the sink, returning the decanter to the cupboard, invading his territory. Instead, she said, “Come with me.”

He followed her into the sitting room, which he’d passed earlier on his way to the kitchen. The late afternoon’s light fell in bands on the carpet, flashed light and dark against her as she walked to an old pine dresser against one wall. She pulled open the left top drawer. She took out a small package of towelling that was done up with twine. Uncoiled and unwrapped, the towelling fell away to expose a handgun. A

revolver, looking particularly well-oiled.

She said again, “Come with me.”

He followed her to the front door. It still stood open, and the March air was crisp with a breeze that lifted her hair. Across the courtyard, the Hall stood empty — broken windows boarded, old rainpipes rusted, stone walls chipped. She said, “Second chimney pot from the right, I think. Its left corner.” She lifted her arm, aimed the gun, and fired. A wedge of terra cotta shot off the second chimney like a missile launched.

She said once again, “If I had wanted to hurt someone, I would have done, Mr. Shepherd.” She returned to the sitting room and placed the gun on its wrapping which lay on the dresser top, between a basket of sewing and a collection of photographs of her daughter.

“Do you have a licence for that?” he asked her.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It wasn’t necessary.”

“It’s the law.”

“Not for the way I bought it.”

She was standing with her back against the dresser. He stayed in the doorway. He thought about saying what he ought to say. He considered doing what the law required of him. The weapon was illegal, she was in possession of it, and he was supposed to remove it from the premises and charge her with the crime. Instead, he said:

“What do you use it for?”

“Target practice mostly. But otherwise protection.”

“From whom?”

“From anyone who isn’t warned off by a shouting voice or a shotgun blast. It’s a form of security.”

“You don’t seem insecure.”

“Anyone with a child in the house is insecure. Especially a woman on her own.”

“Do you always keep it loaded?”

“Yes.”

“That’s foolish. That’s asking for trouble.”

A smile fl ickered briefly round her mouth. “Perhaps. But I’ve never fired it in the company of anyone other than Maggie before today.”

“It was foolish of you to show it to me.”

“Yes. It was.”

“Why did you?”

“For the same reason I own it. Protection, Constable.”

He stared at her across the room, feeling his heart beating rapidly and wondering when it had begun to do so. From somewhere in the house he heard water dripping, from out-ofdoors the sharp trill of a bird. He saw the rise and fall of her chest, the V of her shirt where her skin seemed to glisten, the stretch of blue jeans across her hips. She was gangly and sweaty. She was more than unkempt. He couldn’t have left her.

Without a single coherent thought, he took two strides, and she met him in the centre of the room. He pulled her into his arms, his fi ngers diving through her hair, his mouth on hers. He hadn’t known that such hunger for a woman could even exist. Had she resisted in the least, he knew he would have forced her, but she didn’t resist and she clearly didn’t want to. Her hands were in his hair, at his throat, against his chest and then her arms encircled him as he pulled her closer, cradling her buttocks and grinding grinding grinding against her. He heard the snap of buttons falling away as he pulled off her shirt, seeking her breasts. And then his own shirt was off and her mouth was on him, kissing and biting a trail to his waist where she knelt, fumbled with his belt, and pushed down his trousers.

Jesus God, he thought. Jesus Jesus Jesus. He knew only two terrors: that he might actually explode into her mouth, that she might release him before he could do so.

CHAPTER NINE

SHE COULDN’T POSSIBLY have been less like Annie. Perhaps that had been the initial attraction. In place of Annie’s soft, willing compliance, he had put Juliet’s independence and strength. She was easily taken and eager to be taken, but not easily known. During the fi rst hour of their lovemaking on that March afternoon, she’d said only two words: God and harder, the second of which she repeated three times. And when they’d had enough of each other — long after they’d moved from the sitting room up the stairs to her bedroom where they’d tried out both the floor and the bed — she turned on her side with one arm cradling her head, and she said, “What’s your Christian name, Mr. Shepherd, or am I to go on calling you Mr. Shepherd?”

He traced the faint lightning bolt of skin that puckered her stomach and was the only indication — besides the child herself — that she’d given birth. He felt there wasn’t suffi cient time in his life to come to know every inch of her body well enough, and as he lay beside her, having had her four times already, he began to ache to have her again. He’d never made love to Annie more than once in any twenty-four-hour period. He’d never thought to try. And while the loving of his wife had been tender and sweet, leaving him feeling at once at peace and somehow in her debt, the loving of Juliet had ignited his senses, unearthing a desire that no amount of having her seemed to sate. After an evening, a night, an afternoon together, he could catch the scent of her — on his hands, on his clothes, when he combed his hair — and find himself wanting her, driven to telephone her, saying only her name to which her low voice would respond, “Yes. When.”

But to her first question, he merely said, “Colin.”

“What did your wife call you?”

“Col. And your husband?”

“I’m called Juliet.”

“And your husband?”

“His name?”

“What did he call you?”

She ran her fingers along his eyebrows, the curve of his ear, his lips. “You’re terribly young,” was her reply.

“I’m thirty-three. And you?”

She smiled, a small, sad movement of her mouth. “I’m older than thirty-three. Old enough to be…”

“What?”

“Wiser than I am. Far wiser than I’ve been this afternoon.”

His ego replied. “You wanted it, didn’t you?”

“Oh yes. As soon as I saw you sitting in the Rover. Yes. I wanted. It. You. Whatever.”

“Was that some sort of potion you had me drink?”

She raised his hand to her mouth, took his index finger between her lips, sucked on it gently. He caught his breath. She released him and chuckled. “You don’t need a potion, Mr. Shepherd.”

“How old are you?”

“Too old for this to be anything more than a single afternoon.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I have to.”

Over time, he’d chipped away at her reluctance. She revealed her age, forty-three, and she surrendered time and again to desire. But when he talked of the future, she turned to stone. Her answer was always the same.

“You need a family. Children to raise. You were meant to be a father. I can’t give that to you.”

“Rot. Women older than you have babies.”

“I’ve had my baby, Colin.”

Indeed. Maggie was the equation to be solved if he was to win her mother, and he knew it. But she was elusive, a sprite-child who had watched him solemnly from across the courtyard when he left the cottage on that first afternoon. She was clutching a mangy cat in her arms, and her eyes were solemn. She knows, he thought. He said hello and her name, but she disappeared round the side of the Hall. And ever since then, she’d been polite — a very model of good breeding — but he could see the judgement on her face and he could have predicted the manner in which she would exact retribution from her mother long before Juliet realised where Maggie’s infatuation with Nick Ware was heading.

He could have interceded in some way. He knew Nick Ware, after all. He was well-acquainted with the boy’s parents. He could have been useful, had Juliet let him.

Instead, she’d allowed the vicar to enter their lives. And it hadn’t taken Robin Sage long to forge what Colin himself had been unable to create: a fragile bond with Maggie. He saw them talking together outside the church, strolling into the village with the vicar’s heavy hand at rest on the girl’s shoulder. He watched them perched on the graveyard wall with their backs to the road, their faces towards Cotes Fell, and the vicar’s arm arcing out to illustrate the curve of the land or some point he was making. He noted the visits Maggie had paid to the vicarage. And he used these last to broach the subject with Juliet.

“It’s nothing,” Juliet said. “She’s looking for her father. She knows it can’t be you — she thinks you’re too young and besides you’ve never left Lancashire, have you — so she’s trying out Mr. Sage for the role. She thinks her father’s out searching for her somewhere. Why not as a vicar?”

Which gave him the opening: “Who is her father?”

Her face settled into the familiar, firm lines of withdrawal. He sometimes wondered if her silence was a way she maintained his level of passion for her, keeping herself more intriguing than other women and thus challenging him to prove an entirely nonexistent dominance over her by cooperatively continuing to perform in her bed. But she seemed unaffected by that as well, saying only, “Nothing lasts forever, does it, Colin,” whenever his desperation to know the truth forced him to allude to leaving her. Which he never would, which he knew he never could.

“Who is he, Juliet? He isn’t dead, is he?”

The most she had ever said, she said in bed one June night with a wash of moonlight against her skin, making a dappled pattern from the summer leaves outside the window.

She said, “Maggie wants to think that.”

“Is it the truth?”

She closed her eyes briefly. He lifted her hand, kissed its palm, rested it against his chest. “Juliet, is it the truth?”

“I think it is.”

“Think…? Are you married to him still?”

“Colin. Please.”

“Were you ever married to him?”

Her eyes closed again. He could see the faint glimmer of tears beneath the lashes, and for a mindless moment he couldn’t understand the source of either her pain or her sadness. Then he said, “Oh God. Juliet. Juliet, were you raped? Is Maggie…Did someone—”

She whispered. “Don’t humiliate me.”

“You were never married, were you?”

“Please, Colin.”

But that fact made no difference. Still she wouldn’t marry him. Too old for you was the excuse she gave.

Not, however, too old for the vicar.

Standing in his house, his head pressed against the cool front door, the sound of his father’s departure long faded, Colin Shepherd felt Inspector Lynley’s question bouncing

round his skull like a persistent echo of all his doubts. Was it likely she’d take on a lover after so brief an acquaintance?

He squeezed his eyes shut.

What difference did it make that Mr. Sage had gone out to Cotes Hall just to talk about Maggie? The village constable had merely gone out there to caution a woman about discharging a shotgun, only to find himself tearing off her clothes in a fever to mate after less than an hour in her company. And she didn’t protest. She didn’t try to stop him. If anything, she was as aggressive as he. When one considered it, what kind of a woman was that?

A siren, he thought and he tried to turn away from his father’s voice. You got to take the upper hand with a woman, boy-o, and you got to keep it. Right from the first. They’ll make you a ninny, give ’em the chance.

Had she done that with him? With Sage as well? She’d said he was visiting her to talk about Maggie. He meant well, she said, and she ought to listen. She’d declared herself at the end of her rope when it came to reasonable discussion with the girl, so if the vicar had ideas, who was she to turn a deaf ear to them?

And then she’d searched his face. “You don’t trust me, Colin, do you?”

No. Not an inch. Not a moment of being alone with another man in that isolated cottage where the solitude itself was a call for seduction. Nonetheless, he’d said, “Of course I do.”

“You can come as well, if you’d like. Sit between us at the table. Make certain I don’t take off my shoe and rub my foot against his leg.”

“I don’t want that.”

“Then what?”

“I just want things settled between us. I want people to know.”

“Things can’t be settled in the way you’d like.”

And now they never would be, unless and until Scotland Yard cleared her name. Because all her protests of their age difference aside, he knew he couldn’t marry Juliet Spence and maintain his position in Winslough while so many doubts filled the atmosphere with whispered speculations whenever they appeared in public together. And he couldn’t leave Win-slough married to Juliet if he hoped to keep peace with her daughter. He was caught in a trap of his own devising. Only New Scotland Yard CID could spring him.

The doorbell rang above his head, so shrill and unexpected a sound that he started. The dog began barking. Colin waited for him to trot out of the sitting room.

“Quiet,” he said. “Sit.” Leo complied, head cocked to one side, waiting. Colin opened the door.

The sun was gone. Dusk was drawing quickly towards night. The light on the porch which he’d switched on to welcome New Scotland Yard now shone on the wiry hair of Polly Yarkin.

She was clutching a scarf twined between her fingers and pinching closed the collar of her old navy coat. Her felt skirt dangled overlong to her ankles which were themselves encased in battered boots. She moved uneasily from foot to foot. She offered a quick smile.

“I was finishing up in the vicarage, wasn’t I, and I couldn’t help but notice…” She cast a look back in the direction of the Clitheroe Road. “I saw th’ two gentlemen leave. Ben at the pub said Scotland Yard. I wouldn’t have known except Ben phoned — him being a church warden, you know — and told me they’d probably want to have themselves a poke through the vicarage. He said for me to wait. But they didn’t come. Is everything all right?”

One hand squeezed her collar more tightly, and the other grappled with the loose ends of the scarf. He could see her mother’s name upon it, and he recognised it as a souvenir advertising her business in Blackpool. She’d gone through scarves, beer mats, printed matchbook covers — like she was running some posh hotel — and she’d even given out free chopsticks for a while when she was “purely truly positive” that tourism from the Orient was about to reach an all-time high. Rita Yarkin — aka Rita Rularski — was nothing if not a born entrepreneur.

“Colin?”

He realised he was staring at the scarf, wondering why Rita had chosen neon lime green and decorated that colour with crimson diamonds. He stirred, glanced down, saw that Leo was wagging his tail in welcome. The dog recognised Polly.

“Is everything all right?” she asked again. “I saw your dad leave as well and I spoke to him — I was sweeping the porch — but he didn’t seem to hear because he didn’t say anything. So I wondered is everything all right?”

He knew he couldn’t leave her standing on the porch in the cold. He’d known her from childhood after all, and even if that had not been the case, she’d come on an errand that at least wore the guise of a friend’s concern. “Come in.”

He closed the door behind her. She stood in the entry, balling up her scarf, rolling it round and round in her hands before shoving it into her pocket. She said, “I’ve got these muddy old boots on, don’t I?”

“It’s all right.”

“Sh’ll I leave them here?”

“Not if you’ve just put them on at the vicarage.”

He returned to the sitting room with the dog at his heels. The fire was still burning, and he added another log to it, watching fresh wood settle into flame. He felt the heat reaching out in waves towards his face. He remained where he was and let it bake his skin.

Behind him, he heard Polly’s hesitant footsteps. Her boots squeaked. Her clothing rustled.

“Haven’t been here in a while,” she said diffi dently.

She would find it considerably changed: Annie’s chintz-covered furniture gone, Annie’s prints off the wall, Annie’s carpet torn out, and everything replaced helter-skelter without taste, merely to meet need. It was functional, which was all he’d required of the house and its furnishings once Annie had died.

He expected her to remark upon it, but she said nothing. He finally turned from the fi re. She hadn’t removed her coat. She had only come three paces into the room. She smiled at him tremulously.

“Bit cold in here,” she said.

“Stand by the fi re.”

“Ta. Think I will.” She held her hands out towards the flames, then unbuttoned her coat but didn’t remove it. She was wearing an overlarge lavender pullover that clashed with both the rust of her hair and the magenta of her skirt. A faint odour of mothballs seemed to rise from its wool. “You all right, Colin?”

He knew her well enough to realise she’d go on asking the question until he answered it. She’d never been one to make the connection between refusal to respond and reluctance to

reveal. “Fine. Would you like a drink?”

Her face lit. “Oh, yes. Ta.”

“Sherry?”

She nodded. He went to the table and poured her some, taking nothing for himself. She knelt by the fire and petted the dog. When she took the glass from him, she stayed where she was, on her knees, resting on the heels of her boots. There was a substantial crust of dried mud upon them. Speckles of it had settled on the fl oor.

He didn’t want to join her, although it would have been the natural thing to do. They’d sat with Annie in a ring before this fi replace many times before she died, but their circumstances had been different then: No sin made a lie of their friendship. So he chose the armchair and sat on the edge of it, resting his arms against his knees, his hands clasped loosely like a barrier in front of him.

“Who phoned them?” she asked.

“Scotland Yard? The crippled man phoned for the other, I imagine. He’d come to see Mr. Sage.”

“What do they want?”

“To re-open the case.”

“They said?”

“They didn’t have to say it.”

“But do they know something…Has something new come up?”

“They don’t need anything new. They just need to have doubts. They share them with Clitheroe CID or Hutton-Preston Constabulary. They start nosing about.”

“Are you worried?”

“Should I be?”

She dropped her gaze from him to her glass. She had yet to take a drink of the sherry. He wondered when she would.

“Your dad’s a bit hard on you is all,” she said. “He’s always been that, hasn’t he? I thought he might use this to ride you rough. He looked real cheesed off when he left.”

“I’m not worried about Pa’s reaction, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s good then, isn’t it?” She pivoted the small sherry glass on her palm. Next to her, Leo yawned and settled his head on her thighs. “He’s always liked me,” she said, “ever since he’s a pup. He’s a nice dog, is Leo.”

Colin made no reply. He watched the fl ames dance the light against her hair and cast a golden hue on her skin. She was attractive in a quirky sort of way. The fact that she didn’t seem to realise this had at one time been part of her charm. Now it served as the key to a memory he’d long tried to forget.

She looked up. He moved his eyes away. She said in a low, uncertain voice, “I cast the circle for you last night, Colin. To Mars. For strength. Rita wanted me to petition for myself, but I didn’t. I did it for you. I want the best for you, Colin.”

“Polly…”

“I remember things. We used to be such friends, didn’t we? We’d hike out by the reservoir. We’d see films in Burnley. We went to Blackpool once.”

“With Annie.”

“But we were friends as well, me and you.”

He gazed at his hands so that he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. “We were. But we made a mess of it all.”

“We didn’t. We only—”

“Annie knew. Directly I walked into the bedroom, she knew. She could read it all over me. And I could see that reading on her face. She said, How was your picnic, did you have a nice time, did you get some fresh air, Col? She knew.”

“We didn’t mean to hurt her.”

“She never asked me to be faithful. Did you know that? She didn’t expect it once she knew she was going to die. She reached for my hand one night in bed and she said, Take care of yourself, Col, I know how you’re feeling, I wish we could be that way again with each other but we can’t, dear lover, so you must take care of yourself, it’s all right.”

“Then why don’t you see—”

“Because that night I swore to myself that whatever it took, I wouldn’t betray her. And I did it anyway. With you. Her friend.”

“We didn’t intend it. It wasn’t like it was planned.”

He looked at her again, a sharp movement of lifting his head that she apparently didn’t expect him to make because she fl inched in response. A bit of the sherry she held slopped over the side of her glass and onto her skirt. Leo sniffed at it curiously.

“What does it matter?” he said. “Annie was dying. You and I were fucking in a barn on the moors. We can’t change either one of those facts. We can’t make them pretty and we can’t tart them up.”

“But if she told you—”

“No. Not…with…her…friend.”

Polly’s eyes grew bright, but she didn’t shed the tears. “You closed your eyes that day, Colin, you turned your head away, you never touched me and barely spoke to me ever again. How much more do you want me to suffer for what happened? And now you…” She gulped for breath.

“Now I?”

She dropped her eyes.

“Now I? What now?”

Her answer sounded like a chant. “I burnt cedar for you, Colin. I put the ashes on her grave. I put the ring stone with them. I gave Annie the ring stone. It’s sitting on her grave. You can see it if you want. I gave up the ring stone. I did it for Annie.”

“What now?” he asked again.

She bent to the dog, rubbed her cheek against his head.

“Answer me, Polly.”

She raised her head. “Now you’re punishing me more.”

“How?”

“And it isn’t fair because I love you, Colin. I loved you first. I’ve loved you longer than her.”

“Her? Who? How am I punishing you?”

“I know you better than anyone ever could. You need me. You’ll see. Mr. Sage even told me.”

Her final statement brought gooseflesh upon him. “Told you what?”

“That you need me, that you don’t know it yet but you will soon enough if I just stay true. And I have been true. All these years. Always. I live for you, Colin.”

Her avowal of devotion was less than important when the implication behind Mr. Sage even told me demanded exploration and action.

“Sage talked to you about Juliet, didn’t he?” Colin asked. “What did he say? What did he tell you?”

“Nothing.”

“He gave you some sort of assurance. What was it? That she would end things between us?”

“No.”

“You know something.”

“I don’t.”

“Tell me.”

“There’s nothing—”

He stood. He was three feet from her but still she shrank back. Leo raised his head, his ears perking up, a growl in his throat as he sensed the tension. Polly set her sherry glass on the hearth and kept her eyes and one hand on its base, as if it might take flight should she not keep watch.

“What do you know about Juliet?”

“Nothing. I told you. I said that already.”

“About Maggie?”

“Nothing.”

“About her father? What did Robin Sage tell you?”

“Nothing!”

“But you were sure enough about me and Juliet, weren’t you? He made you sure. What did you do to get the information from him, Polly?”

Her hair sailed round her shoulders as her head flew up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Did you sleep with him? You were alone with the man for hours in the vicarage every day. Did you try some kind of spell?”

“I never!”

“Did you see a way to ruin things between us? Did he give you an idea?”

“No! Colin—”

“Did you kill him, Polly? Is Juliet taking the blame?”

She jumped to her feet, planted them apart, punched her fists to her hips. “Just listen to yourself. You talk about me. She’s got you bewitched. She put you in place, got you eating from her hand, murdered the vicar, and got away with it clean. And you’re so blinded by your own stupid lust that you can’t even see how she’s used you.”

“It was an accident.”

“It was murder, murder, murder and she did it and everyone knows she did it. No one can think you could be such a fool as to believe a single word that she says. Except we all know why you believe her, don’t we, we all know what you’re getting, we even know when, so don’t you imagine she might have been giving our precious little vicar just a bit of the same?”

The vicar…the vicar…Colin felt it all at once: bones, blood, and heat. His muscles coiling and his mother’s voice shouting No, Ken, don’t! as his arm soared up right palm to left shoulder and he made the primary lunge to strike. Lungs full, heart raging, wanting contact and pain and retribution and—

Polly cried out, staggered back. Her boot hit the sherry glass. It flew towards the fi re and broke on the fender. The sherry dripped and sizzled. The dog began to bark.

And Colin stood there at the ready, aching to strike. With Polly not Polly and himself not himself and the past and the present howling round him like the wind. Arm raised, features twisted into an expression he’d seen a thousand times but never felt on his face, never thought to feel, never dreamed to feel. Because he couldn’t actually be the man he’d sworn to himself would never exist.

Leo’s barking turned to yelps. They sounded wild and fearful.

“Quiet!” Colin snapped.

Polly cringed. She took another step backwards. Her skirt skimmed the fl ames. Colin grabbed her arm to draw her from the fi re. She jerked away. Leo backed off. His nails scraped on the floor. Aside from the fi re and Colin’s torn breathing, they made the only sound in the room.

Colin held his hand up at the level of his chest. He stared at the shaking fi ngers and palm. He’d never struck a woman in his life. He wouldn’t have thought he was even capable of doing so. His arm dropped like a weight.

“Polly.”

“I cast the circle for you. For Annie as well.”

“Polly, I’m sorry. I’m not thinking right. I’m not thinking at all.”

She began to button her coat. He could see that her hands were trembling worse than his, and he made a move to help her but stopped when she cried No! as if with the expectation of being struck.

“Polly…” His voice sounded desperate, even to himself. But he didn’t know what he wanted to say.

“She’s got you not thinking,” Polly said. “That’s what it is. But you don’t see that, do you? You don’t even want to. ’Cause how can you face it if the very same thing that makes you hate me is what keeps you from seeing the truth about her.” She took out her scarf, made a shaky attempt to fold it into a triangle, and fl ipped it over her head to hold down her hair. She knotted its ends beneath her chin. She moved past him without a glance, squeaking across the room in her ancient boots. She paused at the door and spoke without looking back.

“While you were fucking that day in the barn,” she said quite clearly, “I was making love.”

“On the sitting room sofa?” Josie Wragg asked incredulously. “You mean right here? With your mum and dad in the house? You never!” She got as close as she could to the mirror above the basin and applied the eyeliner with an inexpert hand. A blob of it went into her lashes. She blinked, then squinted when it made contact with her eyeball. “Ooooh. It stings. Oh crikey Moses. Now look what I’ve done.” She’d given herself a makeup black eye. She rubbed it with a tissue and spread the mess across her cheek. “You didn’t really,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

Pam Rice balanced on the edge of the bathtub and blew cigarette smoke towards the ceiling. To do it, she let her head hang back on her neck in a lazy movement that Maggie was sure she’d seen in an old American film. Bette Davis. Joan Crawford. Maybe Lauren Bacall.

“Want to see the stain for yourself?” Pam asked.

Josie frowned. “What stain?”

Pam flicked ash into the bathtub and shook her head. “Lord. You don’t know anything, do you, Josephine Bean?”

“I most certainly do.”

“Really? Great. You tell me what stain.”

Josie worked this one over. Maggie could tell she was trying to think up a reasonable answer even though she pretended to be concentrating on the mess she’d made of her eyes. This was second to the mess she’d already made of her nails last night, having purchased a do-it-yourself acrylic nail kit through the post when her mother had refused to allow her to make a trip to Blackpool in order to have artificial nails put on by a stylist. The result of Josie’s attempt to extend her own stubs to what she called drive-men-wild length looked like elephant-man-of-the-fi ngers.

They were in the upstairs and only bathroom of Pam Rice’s terraced house, across the street from Crofters Inn. While directly below them in the kitchen Pam’s mummy fed the twins an afternoon tea of scrambled eggs and beans on toast — to the accompaniment of Edward’s happy shouting and Alan’s laugh-ter — they watched Josie experiment with her most recent cosmetic acquisition: a half-bottle of eyeliner purchased from a fifth former who’d pinched it from his sister’s chest of drawers.

“Gin,” Josie finally announced. “Everyone knows you drink it. We’ve seen the fl ask.”

Pam laughed and did her smoke-at-the-ceiling routine again. She flipped her cigarette into the toilet. It made a sound like psst as it sank. She held on to the edge of the bathtub and leaned back again, farther this time so that her breasts jutted towards the ceiling. She still wore her school uniform — all three of them did — but she’d removed the jersey, unbuttoned the blouse to expose her cleavage, and rolled up the sleeves. Pam had the ability to make an inanimate white cotton blouse just scream to be stripped from her body.

“God, I’m horny as a she-goat,” she said. “If Todd doesn’t want to do it tonight, I’m getting it off with some other bloke.” She swivelled her head in the direction of the door where Maggie sat on the fl oor, cross-legged. “How’s our Nickie?” she asked, casual and cool.

Maggie rolled her cigarette in her fi ngers. She’d taken six obligatory puffs — in by the mouth, out through the nose, nothing in the lungs — and was waiting for the rest to burn itself down so that she could let it join Pam’s in the toilet. “Fine,” she said.

“And big?” Pam asked, swinging her head so that her hair moved like a single curtain of blonde. “Just like a salami, that’s what I’ve heard. Is it true?”

Maggie looked at Josie’s reflection in the mirror. She made a wordless plea for rescue.

“Well, is it?” Josie said in Pam’s direction.

“What?”

“The stain. Gin. Like I said.”

“Semen,” Pam said, looking largely bored.

“See-what?”

“Come.”

“Where?”

“Christ alive, you’re a twit. That’s what it is.”

“What?”

“The stain! It’s from him, okay? It drips out, all right? When you’re done, understand?”

Josie studied her reflection, making another heroic attempt with the eyeliner. “Oh that,” she said and dipped the brush into the bottle. “From the way you were talking, I thought it was s’posed to be something weird.”

Pam snagged up her shoulder bag that lay on the floor. She pulled out her cigarettes and lit up again. “Mum was frothing like a dog when she saw it. She even smelled it. Do you believe that? She started in with ‘You miserable little tart,’ went on to ‘You’re a real cheap piece for any one of these blokes,’ and fi nished with ‘I can’t hold my head up in the village any longer. Neither can your dad.’ I told her if I had my own bedroom, I wouldn’t have to use the sofa and she wouldn’t have to see the stains.” She smiled and stretched. “Todd goes on and on so long, he must come a bloody quart every time.” And with a sly look at Maggie, “What about Nick?”

“All I can say’s I hope you’re taking precautions,” Josie put in quickly, ever Maggie’s friend. “Because if he does it as many times as you said and if he makes you — well, you know — get fulfilled each time, then you’re heading for trouble, Pam Rice.”

Pam’s cigarette stopped midway to her lips. “What’re you talking about?”

“You know. Don’t act like you don’t.”

“I don’t, Jose. Explain it to me.” She took a deep drag, but Maggie could see that she did it mostly to hide her smile.

Josie took the bait. “If you have a—you know—”

“Orgasm?”

“Right.”

“What about it?”

“It helps the swimmy things get up inside you more easy. Which is why lots of women don’t — you know—”

“Have an orgasm?”

“Because they don’t want the swimmy things. Oh, and they can’t relax. That too. I read it in a book.”

Pam hooted. She swung off the bathtub and opened the window through which she shouted, “Josephine Eugene, the brains of a bean,” before dissolving into laughter and sliding down the wall to sit on the fl oor. She took another hit from her cigarette, pausing now and then to give in to the giggles.

Maggie was glad she’d opened the window. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. Part of her knew it was just because of the amount of cigarette smoke in the little room. The other part knew it was because of Nick. She wanted to say something to rescue Josie from Pam’s fun-making. But she wasn’t sure what would serve to deflect the ridicule at the same time as it revealed nothing about herself.

“When was the last time you read anything about it?” Josie asked, recapping her bottle of eyeliner and examining in the mirror the fruits of her labour.

“I don’t need to read. I experience,” Pam replied.

“Research is as important as experience, Pam.”

“Really? And exactly what sort have you done?”

“I know things.” Josie was combing her hair. It made no difference. No matter what she did to it, it flopped right back into the same frightful style: fringe high on the forehead, bristles on the neck. She should never have tried to cut it herself.

“You know things from books.”

“And observation. Imperial evidence, that’s called.”

“Provided by?”

“Mum and Mr. Wragg.”

This piece of information seemed to strike Pam’s fancy. She kicked off her shoes and drew her legs beneath her. She fl icked her cigarette into the toilet and made no comment when Maggie took the opportunity of doing the same. “What?” she asked, eyes dancing happily at the potential for gossip. “How?”

“I listen at the door when they’re having relations. He keeps saying, ‘Come on, Dora, come on, come on, come on, baby, come on, love’ and she never makes a sound. Which is also, by the way, how I know for a fact that he isn’t my dad.” When Pam and Maggie greeted this news blankly, she went on with, “Well, he can’t be, can he? Look at the evidence. She’s never once been — you know, fulfilled by him. I’m her only kid. I was born six months after they got married. I found this old letter from a bloke called Paddy Lewis—”

“Where?”

“In the drawer where she keeps her knickers. And I could tell she’d done it with him. And been fulfilled. Lots. Before she married Mr. Wragg.”

“How long before?”

“Two years.”

“So what were you?” Pam asked. “The longest pregnancy on record?”

“I don’t mean they only did it once, Pam Rice. I mean they were doing it regular two years before she married Mr. Wragg. And she kept the letter, didn’t she? She must still love him.”

“But you look exactly like your dad,” Pam said.

“He isn’t—”

“All right, all right. You look like Mr. Wragg.”

“That’s just coincidence,” Josie said. “Paddy Lewis must look like Mr. Wragg as well. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? She’d be looking for someone to remind her of Paddy.”

“So then Maggie’s dad must look like Mr. Shepherd,” Pam announced. “All her mum’s lovers must have looked like him.”

Josie said, “Pam,” in a pained fashion. Fair was only fair. One could speculate indefi nitely about one’s own parents, but it wasn’t proper to do the same about anyone else’s. Not that Pam ever worried much about what was proper before she opened her mouth.

Maggie said softly, “Mummy never had a lover before Mr. Shepherd.”

“She had at least one,” Pam corrected.

“She didn’t.”

“She did. Where else did you come from?”

“From my dad. And Mummy.”

“Right. Her lover.”

“Her husband.”

“Really? What was his name?”

Maggie picked at a loose thread on her jersey. She tried to poke it through the knitting to the other side.

“What was his name?”

Maggie shrugged.

“You don’t know because he didn’t have a name. Or maybe she didn’t know it. Because you’re a bastard.”

“Pam!” Josie took a quick step forward, with the eyeliner bottle closed in her fi st.

“What?”

“Watch your mouth.”

Pam flipped back her hair with a languid movement of her hand. “Oh, stop the drama, Josie. You can’t tell me that you believe all this rot about race car drivers and mummies running off and daddies out looking for their darling little girls for the next thirteen years.”

Maggie felt the room growing larger about her, felt herself shrinking with a hollowness inside. She looked at Josie but couldn’t quite see her because she seemed to be standing in a mist.

“If they were married at all,” Pam was continuing conversationally, “she probably gave him his cards along with some parsnip at dinner one night.”

“Pam!”

Maggie pushed herself against the door and from there to her feet. She said, “I have to be going, I think. Mummy will be wondering— ”

“God knows we wouldn’t want that,” Pam said.

Their coats were in a pile on the fl oor. Maggie pulled hers out but could not make her fingers and hands work well enough to get it on. It didn’t matter. She was feeling rather hot.

She threw open the door and hurried down the stairs. She heard Pam saying with a laugh, “Nick Ware better watch he doesn’t cross Maggie’s mum.”

And Josie responding, “Oh, shove it, won’t you?” before she came clattering down the stairs herself. “Maggie!” she called.

Out on the street it was dark. A cold breeze from the west funnelled down the road from north Yorkshire and turned into a gust at the centre of the village where Crofters Inn and Pam’s house stood. Maggie blinked and wiped the wet from beneath her eyes as she thrust one arm into her coat and started walking.

“Maggie!” Josie caught her up less than ten steps from Pam’s front door. “It’s not what you think. I mean it is, but it isn’t. I didn’t know you good then. Pam and I talked. I told her about your dad, it’s true, but that’s all I ever told her. I swear it.”

“It was wrong of you to tell.”

Josie dragged her to a halt. “It was. Yes, yes. But I didn’t tell her in fun. I wasn’t making fun. I told her ’cause it made us alike, you and me.”

“We aren’t alike. Mr. Wragg’s your father, and you know it, Josie.”

“Oh, maybe he is. That would be my luck, wouldn’t it? Mum running off with Paddy Lewis and me stuck in Winslough with Mr. Wragg. But that’s not what I mean. I mean we dream. We’re different. We think bigger thoughts. We got our sights set on stuff bigger than this village. I used you as a point of illustration, see? I said, I’m not the only one, Pamela Bammela. Maggie has thoughts about her dad too. And she wanted to know what your thoughts were and I told her and I shouldn’t have. But I wasn’t making fun.”

“She knows about Nick.”

“Never! Not from me. I never said a word and I never will.”

“Then why does she ask?”

“Because she thinks she knows something. She keeps hoping she can make you say.”

Maggie scrutinised her friend. There wasn’t much light, but in what little shed itself upon Josie’s face from a single street lamp that stood at the drive of the Crofters Inn car park across the road, she looked earnest enough. She looked a little odd as well. The eyeliner hadn’t dried thoroughly when she opened her eyes after having applied it, so her eyelids were streaked in the way ink runs when water pours over it.

“I didn’t tell her about Nick,” Josie said again. “That’s between me and you. Always. I promise.”

Maggie looked down at her shoes. They were scuffed. Above them her navy tights were speckled with mud.

“Maggie. It’s true. Really.”

“He came over last night. We…It happened again. Mummy knows.”

“No!” Josie grasped her arm and led her across the street and into the car park. They side-stepped a glossy silver Bentley and headed down the path that led to the river. “You never said.”

“I wanted to tell you. I was waiting all day to tell you. But she kept hanging about.”

“That Pam,” Josie said as they went through the gate. “She’s just like a bloodhound when it comes to gossip.”

A narrow path angled away from the inn and descended towards the river. Josie led the way. Some thirty yards along, an old ice-house stood, built into the bank where the river plunged sharply through a fall of limestone, sending up a spray that kept the air cool on the hottest days of summer. It was fashioned from the same stone used in the rest of the village, and like the rest of the village its roof was slate. But it had no windows, just a door whose lock Josie had long ago broken, turning the ice-house into her lair.

She shouldered her way inside. “Just a sec,” she said, ducking beneath the lintel. She fumbled about, bumped into something, said, “Holy hell on wheels,” and struck a match. Light flared a moment later. Maggie entered.

A lantern stood atop an old nail barrel, sending out an arc of hissing yellow light. This fell upon a patchwork of carpet — worn through here and there to its straw-coloured backing — two three-legged milking stools, a cot covered by a purple eiderdown, and an up-ended crate overhung by a mirror. This last made do for a dressing table, and into it Josie placed the bottle of eyeliner, new companion to her contraband mascara, blusher, lipstick, nail polish, and assorted hair-goo.

She hustled up a bottle of toilet water and sprayed it liberally on walls and floor like a libation offered to the goddess of cosmetics. It served to mask the odours of must and mildew that hung in the air.

“Want a smoke?” she asked, once she made sure the door was closed snugly upon them.

Maggie shook her head. She shivered. It was clear why the ice-house had been built in this spot.

Josie lit a Gauloise from a packet she took from among her cosmetics. She fl opped onto the cot and said, “What’d your mum say? How’d she fi nd out?”

Maggie pulled one of the two stools closer to the lantern. It gave off a substantial amount of heat. “She just knew. Like before.”

“And?”

“I don’t care what she thinks. I won’t stop. I love him.”

“Well, she can’t follow you everywhere, can she?” Josie lay on her back, one arm behind her head. She raised her bony knees, crossed one leg over the other, and bounced her foot. “God, you’re so lucky.” She sighed. The tip of her cigarette glowed fire-red. “Is he…well, you know…like they say? Does he…fulfi ll you?”

“I don’t know. It goes sort of fast.”

“Oh. But is he…you know what I mean. Like Pam wanted to know.”

“Yes.”

“God. No wonder you don’t want to stop.” She squirmed deeper into the eiderdown and held out her arms to an imaginary lover. “Come ’n’ get me, baby,” she said past the cigarette that bobbed in her lips. “It’s waiting right here and it’s all — for — you.” And then squirming on her side, “You’re taking precautions, aren’t you?”

“Not really.”

Her eyes became saucers. “Maggie! I never! You got to take precautions. Or he does at least. Does he wear a rubber?”

Maggie cocked her head at the oddity of the question. A rubber? What on earth…. “I don’t think so. Where would he…? I mean, he may have one in his pocket from school.”

Josie bit her lip but didn’t quite manage to catch the grin. “Not that kind of rubber. Don’t you know what it is?”

Maggie stirred uneasily on the stool. “I know. Of course I do. I know.”

“Right. Look, it’s like this squishy plastic stuff he puts on his Thing. Before he puts it in you. So you don’t get pregnant. Is he using that?”

“Oh.” Maggie twisted a lock of her hair. “That. No. I don’t want him to use it.”

“Don’t want…Are you crazy? He has to use one.”

“Why?”

“Because if he doesn’t, you’ll have a baby.”

“But you said before that a woman needs to be—”

“Forget what I said. There are always exceptions. I’m here, aren’t I? I’m Mr. Wragg’s, aren’t I? Mum was panting and moaning with this bloke Paddy Lewis, but I came along when she was cold as ice. That’s pretty much proof that anything can happen no matter if you get fulfi lled or not.”

Maggie thought this over, running her fi nger round and round the last button on her coat. “Good then,” she said.

“Good? Maggie, bleeding saints on the altar, you can’t—”

“I want a baby,” she said. “I want Nick’s baby. If he tries to use a rubber, I won’t even let him.”

Josie goggled at her. “You’re not yet fourteen.”

“So?”

“So you can’t be a mummy when you haven’t fi nished school.”

“Why not?”

“What would you do with a baby? Where would you go?”

“Nick and I would get married. Then we’d have the baby. Then we’d be a family.”

“You can’t want that.”

Maggie smiled with real pleasure. “Oh yes I can.”

CHAPTER TEN

LYNLEY MURMURED, “GOOD God,” AT the sudden drop in temperature when he crossed the threshold between the pub and the dining room of Crofters Inn. In the pub, the large fireplace had managed to disperse enough heat to create pools of at least moderate warmth in its farthest corners, but the weak central heating of the dining room did little more than provide the uncertain promise that the side of one’s body closest to the wall heater would not go numb. He joined Deborah and St. James at their corner table, ducking his head each time he passed beneath one of the low ceiling’s great oak beams. At the table, an additional electric fire had been thoughtfully provided by the Wraggs, and from it semisubstantial waves of heat lapped against their ankles and floated towards their knees.

Enough tables were laid with white linen, silverware, and inexpensive crystal to accommodate at least thirty diners. But it appeared that the three of them would be sharing the room only with its unusual display of artwork. This consisted of a series of gilt-framed prints which depicted Lancashire’s most prominent claim to fame: the Good Friday gathering at Malkin Tower and the charges of witchcraft that both preceded and followed it. The artist had depicted the principals in an admirably subjective fashion. Roger Nowell, the magistrate, looked suitably grim and barrel-chested, with wrath, vengeance, and the power of Christian Justice incised upon his features. Chattox looked appropriately decrepit: wizened, bent, and dressed in rags. Elizabeth Davies, with her rolling eyes uncontrolled by ocular muscles, looked deformed enough to have sold herself for the devil’s kiss. The rest of them comprised a leering group of demon-lovers, with the exception of Alice Nutter who stood apart, eyes lowered, ostensibly maintaining the silence she had taken with her to her grave, the only convicted witch among them who had sprung from the upper class.

“Ah,” Lynley said in acknowledgement of the prints as he shook out his table napkin, “Lancashire’s celebrities. Dinner and the prospect of disputation. Did they or didn’t they? Were they or weren’t they?”

“More likely the prospect of loss of appetite,” St. James said. He poured a glass of fumé blanc for his friend.

“There’s truth in that, I suppose. Hanging half-witted girls and helpless old women on the strength of a single man’s apopleptic seizure does give one pause, doesn’t it? How can we eat, drink, and be merry when dying’s as close as the dining room wall?”

“Who are they exactly?” Deborah asked as Lynley took an appreciative sip of the wine and reached for one of the rolls which Josie Wragg had only moments before deposited on the table. “I know they’re the witches, but do you recognise them, Tommy?”

“Only because they’re in caricature. I doubt I’d know them if the artist had done a less Hogarthian job of it.” Lynley gestured with his butter knife. “You have the God-fearing magistrate and those he brought to justice. Demdike and Chattox — they’re the shrivelled ones, I should think. Then Alizon and Elizabeth Davies, the mother-daughter team. The others I’ve forgotten, save Alice Nutter. She’s the one who looks so decidedly out of place.”

“Frankly, I thought she looked like your aunt Augusta.”

Lynley paused in buttering a portion of roll. He gave the print of Alice Nutter a fair examination. “There’s something in that. They have the same nose.” He grinned. “I’ll have to think twice about dining at aunt’s next Christmas Eve. God knows what she’ll serve in disguise for wassail.”

“Is that what they did? Mix some sort of potion? Cast a spell on someone? Make it rain toads?”

“That last sounds vaguely Australian,” Lynley said. He looked the other prints over as he munched on his roll and sifted through his memory for the details. One of his papers at Oxford had touched upon the seventeenth-century hue and cry over witchcraft. He remembered the lecturer vividly — twenty-six years old and a strident feminist who was as beautiful a woman as he had ever seen and approximately as approachable as a feeding shark.

“We’d call it the domino effect today,” he said. “One of them burgled Malkin Tower, the home of one of the others, and then had the audacity to wear in public something she’d stolen. When she was brought before the magistrate, she defended herself by accusing the Malkin Tower family of witchcraft. The magistrate might have concluded that this was a ridiculous stab at deflecting culpability, but a few days later, Alizon Davies of that same tower cursed a man who within minutes was stricken with an apopleptic seizure. From that point on, the hunt for witches was on.”

“Successfully, it seems,” Deborah said, gazing at the prints herself.

“Quite. Women began confessing to all sorts of ludicrous misbehaviours once they were brought before the magistrate: having familiars in the form of cats, dogs, and bears; making clay dolls in the persons of their enemies and stabbing thorns into them; killing off cows; making milk go bad; ruining good ale—”

“Now there’s crime worthy of punishment,” St. James noted.

“Was there proof?” Deborah asked.

“If an old woman mumbling to her cat is proof. If a curse overheard by a villager is proof.”

“But then why did they confess? Why would anyone confess?”

“Social pressure. Fear. They were uneducated women brought before a magistrate from another class. They were taught to bow before their betters — if only metaphorically. What more effective way to do it than to agree with what their betters were suggesting?”

“Even though it meant their death?”

“Even though.”

“But they could have denied it. They could have kept silent.”

“Alice Nutter did. They hanged her anyway.”

Deborah frowned. “What an odd thing to celebrate with prints on the walls.”

“Tourism,” Lynley said. “Don’t people pay to see the Queen of Scots’ death mask?”

“Not to mention some of the grimmer spots in the Tower of London,” St. James said. “The Chapel Royal, Wakefi eld Tower.”

“Why bother with the Crown Jewels when you can see the chopping block?” Lynley added. “Crime doesn’t pay, but death brings them running to part with a few quid.”

“Is this irony from the man who’s made at least five pilgrimages to Bosworth Field on the twenty-second of August?” Deborah asked blithely. “An old cow pasture in the back of beyond where you drink from the well and swear to Richard’s ghost you would have fought for the Yorks?”

“That’s not death,” Lynley said with some dignity, lifting his glass to salute her. “That’s history, my girl. Someone’s got to be willing to set the record straight.”

The door that led to the kitchen swung open, and Josie Wragg presented them with their starters, muttering, “Smoked salmon here, pâté here, prawn cocktail here,” as she set each item on the table, after which she hid both the tray and her hands behind her back. “Enough rolls?” She asked the question of everyone in general, but she made a poor job of surreptitiously examining Lynley.

“Fine,” St. James said.

“Get you more butter?”

“I don’t think so. Thanks.”

“Wine okay? Mr. Wragg’s got a cellarful if that’s gone off. Wine does that sometimes, you know. You got to be careful. If you don’t store it right, the cork gets all dried up and shrivelled and the air gets in and the wine turns salty. Or something.”

“The wine’s fine, Josie. We’re looking forward to the bordeaux as well.”

“Mr. Wragg, he’s a connoisseur of wine.” She pronounced it con-NOY-ser and bent to scratch her ankle, from which activity she looked up at Lynley. “You’re not here on holiday, are you?”

“Not exactly.”

She straightened up, reclasping the tray behind her. “That’s what I thought. Mum said you were a detective from London and I thought at first you’d come to tell her something about Paddy Lewis which she, of course, wouldn’t be likely to share with me for fear I’d spread it to Mr. Wragg which, of course, I would definitely not do even if it meant she was to run off with him — Paddy, that is — and leave me here with Mr. Wragg. I know what true love’s about, after all. But you’re not that

kind of detective, are you?”

“What kind is that?”

“You know. Like on the telly. Someone you hire.”

“A private detective? No.”

“I thought that’s what you were at first. Then I heard you talking on the phone just now. I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping. Only, your door was open a crack and I was taking fresh towels to the rooms and I happened to hear.” Her fingers scratched against the tray as she grasped it more tightly behind her before going on. “She’s my best friend’s mum, you see. She didn’t mean any harm. It’s like if someone is making preserves and they put in the wrong stuff and a bunch of people get ill. Say they buy the preserves at a church fête even. Strawberry or blackberry. Well, they might do that, huh? And then they take them home and spread them on their toast the next morning. Or on their scones at tea. Then they get sick. And everyone knows it was an accident. See?”

“Naturally. That could happen.”

“And that’s what happened here. Only it wasn’t a fête. And it wasn’t preserves.”

None of them replied. St. James was idly twirling his wineglass by the stem, Lynley had stopped tearing apart his roll, and Deborah was looking from the men to the girl, waiting for one of them to respond. When they didn’t, Josie went on.

“It’s just that Maggie’s my best mate, see. And I’ve never had a best mate before. Her mum — Missus Spence — she keeps to herself lots. People call that queer, and they want to make something of it. But there’s nothing to make. You got to remember that, don’t you think?”

Lynley nodded. “That’s wise. I’d agree with that.”

“Well then…” She bobbed her ill-clipped head and looked for a moment as if she intended to dip into a curtsy. Instead, she backed away from the table in the direction of the kitchen door. “You’ll want to start eating, won’t you? The pâté’s mum’s own recipe, you know. The smoked salmon’s real fresh. And if you want anything…” Her voice faded when the door closed behind her.

“That’s Josie,” St. James said, “in case you haven’t been introduced. A strong advocate of the accident theory.”

“So I noticed.”

“What did Sergeant Hawkins have to say? I take it that’s the conversation Josie overheard you having.”

“It was.” Lynley speared a piece of salmon and was pleasantly surprised to find it — as Josie had declared — quite fresh. “He wanted to restate that he was following Hutton-Preston’s orders from the first. Hutton-Preston Constabulary got involved through Shepherd’s father, and as far as Hawkins was concerned, everything from that moment was on the up and up. Still is, in fact. So he’s backing his man in Shepherd, and he’s none too pleased that we’re poking about.”

“That’s reasonable enough. He’s responsible for Shepherd, after all. What falls on the village constable’s head isn’t going to look good on Hawkins’ record either.”

“He also wanted me to know that Mr. Sage’s bishop had been entirely satisfied with the investigation, the inquest, and the verdict.”

St. James looked up from his prawn cocktail. “He attended the inquest?”

“He sent someone, evidently. And Hawkins seems to feel that if the investigation and inquest had the blessing of the Church, they damn well ought to have the Yard’s blessing as

well.”

“He won’t cooperate, then?”

Lynley speared more salmon onto his fork. “It isn’t a question of cooperation, St. James. He knows the investigation was a bit irregular and the best way to defend it, himself, and his man is to allow us to prove their conclusions correct. But he doesn’t have to like any of it. None of them do.”

“They’re going to start liking it a great deal less when we take a closer look at Juliet Spence’s condition that night.”

“What condition?” Deborah asked.

Lynley explained what the constable had told them about the woman’s own illness on the night the vicar died. He explained the ostensible relationship between the constable and Juliet Spence. He concluded with, “And I have to admit, St. James, that you might have got me here on a fool’s errand after all. It looks bad that Colin Shepherd handled the case by himself with only his father’s intermittent assistance and a cursory glance at the scene by Clitheroe CID. But if she was ill too, then the accident theory bears far more weight than we originally thought.”

“Unless,” Deborah said, “the constable’s lying to protect her and she wasn’t ill at all.”

“There’s that, of course. We can’t discount it. Although it does suggest collusion between them. But if alone she had no motive to murder the man — a point, of course, which we know is moot — what on earth would theirs together have been?”

“There’s more to it than uncovering motives if we’re looking for culpability,” St. James said. He pushed his plate to one side. “There’s something peculiar about her illness that night. It doesn’t hold together.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shepherd told us that she was repeatedly sick. She was burning with fever as well.”

“And?”

“And those aren’t symptoms of hemlock poisoning.”

Lynley toyed a moment with the last piece of salmon, squeezed some lemon on top of it, but then decided against eating. After their conversation with Constable Shepherd, he’d been on the path to dismissing most of St. James’ earlier concerns regarding the vicar’s death. Indeed, he’d been well on his way to chalking the entire adventure up to one hell of a long drive away from London to cool himself off from his morning’s altercation with Helen. But now…“Tell me,” he said.

St. James listed the symptoms for him: excessive salivation, tremors, convulsions, abdominal pain, dilation of the pupils, delirium, respiratory failure, complete paralysis. “It acts on the central nervous system,” he concluded. “A single mouthful can kill a man.”

“So Shepherd’s lying?”

“Not necessarily. She’s a herbalist. Josie told us that last night.”

“And you told me this morning. It was largely the reason why you had me tearing up the motorway like Nemesis on wheels. But I don’t see what—”

“Herbs are just like drugs, Tommy, and they act like drugs. They’re circulatory stimulants, cardioactives, relaxants, expectorants…Their functions run the virtual gamut of what a chemist supplies under a doctor’s prescription.”

“You’re proposing she took something to make herself ill?”

“Something to induce fever. Something to induce vomiting.”

“But isn’t it possible that she ate some of the hemlock thinking it was wild parsnip, began to feel ill once the vicar left, and mixed herself a purgative to relieve her discomfort, without connecting her discomfort to what she thought was wild parsnip? That would account for the constant vomiting. And couldn’t the constant vomiting have raised her temperature?”

“It’s possible, yes. Marginally so. But if that’s the case — and frankly, I wouldn’t lay money on it, Tommy, considering how quickly water hemlock works on the system — wouldn’t she have told the constable that she’d drunk a purgative after eating something that didn’t agree with her? And wouldn’t the constable have passed that message on to us today?”

Lynley raised his head once again to the prints on the wall. There was Alice Nutter as before, maintaining her obdurate silence, her complexion becoming more perfect gallows with every moment she refused to speak. A woman of secrets, she carried all of them to her grave. If it was an outlawed Roman Catholicism which held her tongue, if it was pride, if it was the angry knowledge that she had been framed by a magistrate with whom she had quarrelled, no one knew. But in an isolated village, there was always an aura of mystery about a woman with secrets who was unwilling to share them. There was always a pernicious little need to smoke the creature out in an unrelated fashion and make her pay for what she kept to herself.

“One way or another, something’s not right here,” St. James was saying. “I tend to think Juliet Spence dug up the water hemlock, knew exactly what it was, and cooked it up for the vicar. For whatever reason.”

“And if she had no reason?” Lynley asked.

“Then someone else surely did.”

After Polly had gone, Colin Shepherd drank the first of the whiskies. Got to get the hands to stop shaking, he thought. He gulped the initial shot down. It raced fire through his gullet. But when he set the glass upon the side table, it chattered like a woodpecker knocking bark for its food. Another, he decided. The decanter shivered against the glass.

The next he drank to make himself think of it. The Great Stone of Fourstones, then Back End Barn. The Great Stone was a hulking oblong of granite, an unexplained country oddity sitting on the rough grassland of Loftshaw Moss a number of miles to the north of Winslough. There they had gone for their picnic on that fine spring day when the harsh moor’s wind blew only as a breeze and the sky was brilliant with its fleece of clouds and its blue forever. Back End Barn was the object of their walk when the meal was eaten and the wine was drunk. Hiking had been Polly’s suggestion. But he’d chosen the direction, and he knew what was there. He, who had walked on these moors since his childhood. He, who recognised every spring and rivulet, knew the name of every hill, and could fi nd the location of each pile of stones. He’d led them directly towards Back End Barn, and he’d been the one to suggest they have a look inside.

The third whisky he drank to bring all of it back. The feel of a splinter piercing his shoulder as he pushed open the weather-pitted door. The strong scent of sheep and the feathery tufts of wool clinging to the mortar between the stones that made up the walls. The two shafts of light that fell from gaps in the old slate roof, making a perfect V at whose point Polly had gone to stand with a laugh, saying, “Looks like a spotlight, doesn’t it, Colin?”

When he shut the door, the rest of the barn seemed to recede with the dimming of the light. With the barn, receded the world so that all that was left were those two, simple, yellow-gold shafts provided by the sun, and at their juncture Polly.

She looked from him to the door he’d closed. Then she ran her hands down the sides of her skirt and said, “Like a secret place, isn’t it? With the door shut and all. D’you and Annie come here? I mean, did you come here? Before. You know.”

He shook his head. She must have taken his quiet for a reminder of the anguish that waited for him back in Winslough. She said impulsively, “I’ve brought the stones. Let me cast them for you.”

Before he could reply, she dropped to her knees and from her skirt pocket she brought forth a little black velvet bag embroidered with red and silver stars. She unloosed its drawstrings and poured the eight rune stones into her hand.

“I don’t believe in that,” he said.

“That’s because you don’t understand it.” She settled onto her heels and patted the fl oor at her side. It was stone, uneven, rutted, and pock-marked from the hooves of ten thousand sheep. It was utterly filthy. He knelt to join her. “What d’you want to know?”

He made no reply. Her hair was all ablaze in the light. Her cheeks were fl ushed.

“Come on with you, Colin,” she said. “There must be something.”

“There’s nothing.”

“There must be.”

“Well, there isn’t.”

“Then I shall cast them for myself.” She shook the stones like dice in her hand and closed her eyes, head cocked to one side. “Now. What shall I ask?” The stones clicked and rattled. Finally she said in a rush, “If I stay in Winslough, shall I meet my true love?” And then to Colin with an impish smile, “’Cause if he’s there, he’s being a bit skittish about introducing himself.” With a snap of her wrist, she threw the stones away from her. They clattered and skipped across the fl oor. Three stones showed their decorated sides. Polly leaned forward to see them and clasped her hands at her bosom in delight. “You see,” she said, “the omens are good. Here’s the ring stone farthest. That’s for love and marriage. And the Lucky stone next. See how it looks like an ear of corn? That means wealth. And the three birds in flight nearest to me. That means sudden change.”

“So you’ll have a sudden marriage to someone with money? That sounds like you’re heading for Townley-Young.”

She laughed. “Wouldn’t he be in a fright to know that, our Mr. St. John?” She scooped up the stones. “Your turn now.”

It didn’t mean anything. He didn’t believe. But he asked it anyway, the only question he wanted to ask. It was the one he asked each morning when he rose, each night when he finally made his way to bed. “Will Annie’s new chemotherapy help her?”

Polly’s brow furrowed. “Are you sure?”

“Throw the stones.”

“No. If it’s your question, you throw them.”

He did so, casting them away as she had done, but looking to see that only one stone showed its decorated side, painted with a black

H. Like the ring stone that Polly had thrown, this one lay farthest from him.

She gazed upon them. He saw her left hand begin to gather the material of her skirt. She reached forward as if to sweep the stones into a single pile. “You can’t read only one stone, I’m afraid. You’ll have to try again.”

He clasped her wrist to stop her. “That isn’t the truth, is it? What’s it mean?”

“Nothing. You can’t read one stone.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not.”

“It says no, doesn’t it? Only we didn’t have to ask the question to know the answer.” He released her hand.

She picked up the stones one by one and replaced them in the bag until only the black one remained on the fl oor.

“What’s it mean?” he asked once again.

“Grief.” Her voice was hushed. “Parting. Bereavement.”

“Yes. Well. Right.” He raised his head to gaze at the roof, trying to relieve the odd pressure behind his eyes, concentrating on how many slates it would take to obliterate the sunlight that streamed to the fl oor. One? Twenty? Could it even be done? If one stepped on the roof to repair the damage, wouldn’t the entire structure collapse?

“I’m sorry,” Polly said. “It was stupid of me. I’m stupid like that. I don’t think when I ought.”

“It’s not your fault. She’s dying. We both know it.”

“But I wanted today to be special for you. Just a few hours away from everything. So you wouldn’t have to think about it for a while. And then I brought out the stones. I didn’t think you’d ask…But what else would you ask. I’m so stupid. Stupid.”

“Stop it.”

“I made it worse.”

“It can’t be any worse.”

“It can. I made it.”

“You didn’t.”

“Oh, Col…”

He lowered his head. He was surprised to see his own pain reflected in her face. His eyes were hers, his tears were hers, the lines and shadows that betrayed his grief were etched on her skin and shaded onto her temples and along her jaw.

He thought, No I can’t, even as he reached out to cup her face. He thought, No I won’t, even as he began to kiss her. He thought, Annie Annie, as he pulled her to the fl oor, felt her hovering over him, felt his mouth seek the breasts that she freed for him — freed for him — even as his hands slid up her skirt, slipped off her panties, pulled down his own trousers, urged her down to him, down to him, needing her, wanting her, the heat, so soft, and that first night together what a wonder she was, not timid at all like he’d thought she’d be but open to him, loving him, gasping at first at the strangeness of it before she moved with his body and rose to meet him and caressed the length of his naked back and cradled his buttocks and forced him deeper inside her with each thrust deeper and all the time all the time her eyes on his liquid with happiness and love as all his energy gathered its force from the pleasure of her body from the heat from the wet from the silky prison that held him that wanted him even as he wanted and wanted and wanted, crying “Annie! Annie!” as he reached his orgasm inside the body of Annie’s friend.

Colin drank a fourth whisky to try to forget. He wanted to blame her when he knew the responsibility was his. Slut, he’d thought, she didn’t have the decency to be loyal to Annie. She was ready and willing, she didn’t try to stop him, she even pulled off her blouse and took off her bra, and when she knew that he wanted inside, she let him without a murmur of protest or afterwards even a word of regret.

Except he’d seen her expression when he opened his eyes only moments after crying out Annie’s name. He’d recognised the magnitude of the blow he had dealt her. And selfi shly he’d considered it her just deserts for that afternoon’s seduction of a married man. She brought the stones deliberately, he’d thought. She planned it all. No matter how they fell when he cast them to the floor, she would have interpreted them in such a way that fucking her would be the logical outcome. She was a witch, was Polly. Every moment, every day, she knew what she was doing. She had it all planned.

Colin knew that I’m sorry did nothing to mitigate his sins committed against Polly Yarkin on that spring afternoon in Back End Barn and every day since then. She had reached out to him with the hand of friendship — no matter how complicated it might have been by the fact of her love — and time and again, he had turned away, caught up in the need to punish her, because he lacked the courage to admit the worst that he was to himself.

And now she’d given up the ring stone, laying it and all her simple hopes for the future on Annie’s grave. He knew she’d done it as yet another act of contrition, attempting to pay for a sin in which she’d played only a minor role. It wasn’t right.

“Leo,” Colin said. By the fire, the dog perked up his head, expectant. “Come.”

He grabbed a torch and his heavy jacket from the entry. He went out into the night. Leo walked at his side, unleashed, his nose quivering with the scents of the icy winter air: woodsmoke, damp earth, the lingering exhaust fumes of a car that passed, a faint smell of frying fish. For him, a walk at night lacked the excitement of a walk in the day when there were birds to chase and the occasional ewe to startle with his bark. But still, it was a walk.

They crossed the road and entered the graveyard. They wound their way towards the chestnut tree, Colin directing them with the torch’s cone of light, Leo snuffling along just ahead of him, to the right, out of its beam. The dog knew where they were going. They’d been there often enough before. So he reached Annie’s grave before his master and he was sniffing round the marker — and sneezing— when Colin said, “Leo. No.”

He shone the light on the grave. And then all round it. He squatted to get a better look.

What had she said? I burnt cedar for you, Colin. I put the ashes on her grave. I put the ring stone with them. I gave Annie the ring stone. But it wasn’t here. And the only thing that could possibly be interpreted as ashes from cedar was a faint coating of grey flecks on the frost. While he admitted that these could have come from the ashes if they’d been blown by the wind and disturbed by the dog’s snuffling through them, the rune stone itself couldn’t have been blown away. And if that was the case…

He walked round the grave slowly, wanting to believe Polly, willing to give her every chance. He thought the dog might have knocked it to one side, so he searched with the light and turned over every stone that appeared the right size, looking upon each for the interlocking pink rings. He fi nally gave up.

He chuckled with derision at his own gullibility. How guilt makes us want to believe in redemption. Obviously, she had offered the first thought that had come into her head, putting herself forward, trying as always to make him take the blame. And — as everyone appeared to be doing — at the same time she was giving it her all to wrest him away from Juliet. It wasn’t going to work.

He lowered the torch to shine in a white, bright circle on the ground. He gazed fi rst to the north in the direction of the village where lights climbed the hillside in a pattern so familiar that he could have named each family behind every point of illumination. He gazed then to the south where the oak wood grew and where, beyond it, Cotes Fell rose like a black-cloaked figure against the night sky. And at the base of the fell, across the meadow, tucked into a clearing that had long ago been made among the trees, Cotes Hall stood, and with it the cottage and Juliet Spence.

What a damn fool’s errand he had come on to the churchyard. He stepped over Annie’s grave, reached the wall in two strides. With a third he was over it, calling for the dog and swiftly moving in the direction of the public footpath that led from the village to the top of Cotes Fell. He could have gone back for the Rover. It would have been faster. But he told himself that he wanted the walk, needing to feel completely grounded in the choice he was making. And what better way to do that than to have the solid earth beneath his feet, to have his muscles working and his blood at the fl ow?

He brushed aside the thought that fl uttered against his mind like a wet-winged moth as he strode along the path: In his position, going the back way to the cottage implied not only a clandestine visit to Juliet but also collusion between them as well. Why was he using the back way to the cottage when he had nothing whatsoever to hide? When he had a car? When it was faster in a car? When the night was cold?

As it had been in December when Robin Sage made the identical walk, with the identical destination in mind. Robin Sage, who had a car, who could have driven, who chose to walk, despite the snow that already lay upon the ground and in ignorance of or indifference to the fact that more had been promised before morning. Why had Robin Sage walked that night?

He liked exercise, fresh air, a ramble on the moors, Colin told himself. In the two months Sage had lived in the village prior to his death, he’d seen the vicar often enough in his crusty Wellingtons with a walking stick stabbing into the ground. He called upon all the villagers by foot. He went to the common by foot when he fed the ducks. What reason was there to conclude he would have done anything but walk when it came to the cottage?

The distance, the weather, the time of year, the growing cold, the night. The answers presented themselves to Colin, as rose the one fact he kept trying to discount. He’d never seen Sage do his walking at night. If the vicar made a call outside the village after dark, he took his car. He’d done as much the single time he’d gone out to Skelshaw Farm to meet Nick Ware’s family. He’d done the same when he’d made the rounds of the other farms.

He’d even driven to dine at the Townley-Young estate shortly after his arrival in Winslough, before St. John Andrew Townley-Young had fully comprehended the extent of the vicar’s low church leanings and cut him off his list of acceptable acquaintances. So why had Sage walked to see Juliet?

The same moth fluttered its wet-winged answer. Sage hadn’t wanted to be seen, just as Colin himself didn’t want to be seen paying a call at the cottage on the very night of the day that New Scotland Yard had come to the village. Admit it, admit it…

No, Colin thought. That was the venomous, green-eyed monster making its attack on trust and belief. Surrendering to it in any way meant a sure death to love and a certain extinction of his hopes for the future.

He determined to think no more about it, and made good that promise by turning off the torch. Although he had walked the footpath for nearly thirty years, he had to concentrate on something beyond Robin Sage in order to anticipate a sudden dip in the land and to find his way over the occasional stile. The stars assisted. They were brilliant in the sky, a dome of crystals that fl ickered like beacons on a distant landmass, across an ocean of night.

Leo led the way. Colin couldn’t see him, but he could hear the dog’s feet breaking through the skin of frost on the ground, and the sound of him scrambling over a wall with a happy yelp made Colin smile. A moment later the dog began to bark in earnest. And then a man’s voice called, “No! Hey, there! Steady on!”

Colin switched on the torch and picked up the pace. Against the next wall, Leo was bounding back and forth, leaping up towards a man who sat atop the stile. Colin shone the light on his face. The man squinted and shrank back in response. It was Brendan Power. The solicitor had a torch with him, but he wasn’t using it. Instead, it lay next to him, its light extinguished.

Colin ordered the dog down. Leo obeyed, although he lifted one front leg and pawed rapidly at the wall’s rough stones as if greeting the other man. “Sorry,” Colin said. “He must have given you a start.”

He saw that the dog had interrupted Power in the midst of a sit and a smoke, which explained why he hadn’t been using his torch. His pipe still glowed weakly, and what was left of the burning tobacco gave off the odour of cherries.

Bum-boy’s tobacco, Colin’s father would have called it with a scoff. If you’re going to smoke, boy-o, at least have the sense to choose something that makes you smell like a man.

“Quite all right,” Power said, extending his hand to let the dog sniff his fingers. “I was out for a walk. I like to get out in the evening if I can. Get in a bit of exercise after sitting behind a desk all day. Keep myself in shape. That sort of thing.” He sucked on the pipe and seemed to be waiting for Colin to make some sort of similar reply.

“Out to the Hall?”

“The Hall?” Power reached in his jacket and brought forth a pouch which he opened and sank the pipe into, packing it with fresh tobacco without having cleared the bowl of the old. Colin watched him curiously. “Yes. The Hall. Right. Checking things. The work and all. Becky’s getting anxious. Things haven’t gone well. But you know that already.”

“There’s been no more trouble since the weekend?”

“No. Nothing. But one can’t be too careful. She likes me to check. And I don’t mind the walk. Fresh air. Breeze. Good for the lungs.” He took a deep breath as if to prove his point. Then he tried to light the pipe with only a moment’s success. The tobacco caught, but the clogged bowl prevented the stem from drawing. He gave up the effort after two tries and replaced pipe, pouch, and matches in his jacket. He hopped off the wall. “Becky’ll be wondering where I’ve got off to. I suppose. Good evening, Constable.” He began to walk off.

“Mr. Power.”

The man turned abruptly. He kept himself clear of the light which Colin was directing his way. “Yes?”

Colin picked up the torch which still lay on the wall. “You’ve forgotten this.”

Power bared his teeth in what passed for a smile. He gave a short laugh. “Fresh air must have gone right to my head. Thanks.”

When he reached for the torch, Colin held on a moment longer than was absolutely necessary. Testing the waters because they needed to be tested, because New Scotland Yard would be doing its own testing soon enough, he said, “Do you know this is the spot where Mr. Sage died? Just on the other side of the stile?”

Power’s Adam’s apple seemed to travel the length of his neck. He said, “I say…”

“He did his best to make it over but he was having convulsions. Did you know? He hit his head on the lower step.”

Power’s glance shifted quickly from Colin to the wall. “I didn’t know. Only that he was found…that you found him somewhere on the footpath.”

“You saw him the morning before he died, didn’t you? You and Miss Townley-Young.”

“Yes. But you know that already. So—”

“That was you with Polly in the lane last night, wasn’t it? Outside the lodge?”

Power didn’t answer at once. He looked at Colin with some curiosity and when he replied, the answer came slowly, as if with some thought as to why the question had been asked in the fi rst place. He was, after all, a solicitor. “I was on my way out to the Hall. Polly was on her way home. We walked together. Is there a problem with that?”

“And the pub?”

“The pub?”

“Crofters. You’ve been there with her. Drinking in the evenings.”

“Once or twice, while I was out for a walk. When I stopped by the pub on my way home, Polly was there. I joined her.” He played the torch from one hand to the other. “What of it, anyway?”

“You met Polly before your marriage. You met her at the vicarage. Did she treat you well?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Did she seek you out? Ask you any favours?”

“No. Of course not. What are you getting at?”

“You’ve access to keys to the Hall, haven’t you? To the caretaker’s cottage as well? She never asked to borrow them? She never made any offer in return for the loan of them?”

“That’s some bloody cheek. What in hell are you trying to suggest? That Polly…?” As his words died, Power looked towards Cotes Fell. “What’s all this about? I thought it was over.”

“No,” Colin said. “Scotland Yard’s come to call.”

Power’s head turned. His gaze was even. “And you’re looking to misdirect them.”

“I’m looking for the truth.”

“I thought you did that already. I thought we heard it at the inquest.” Power removed his pipe from his jacket. He tapped the bowl against the heel of his shoe, dislodged the tobacco, and all the time kept his eyes on Colin. “You’re in hot water, aren’t you, Constable Shepherd? Well, let me make a suggestion. Don’t look to pour any of it on Polly Yarkin.” He strode off without another word, pausing some twenty yards away to repack and relight his pipe. The match fl ared, and from the glow that followed, it was clear that the tobacco had caught.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

COLIN KEPT THE TORCH LIT for the rest of the walk to the cottage. Using darkness as a means of distraction was futile at this point. Brendan Power’s final words had made further avoidance impossible.

He was hedging his bets and he knew it, setting up a secondary set of possibilities, and arranging an unexamined point of departure. He was looking for a viable direction in which he could lead the London police.

Just in case, he told himself. Because the what if’s were increasing their restless murmur inside his skull, and he had to do something to quell them. He had to take an action that was well within his purview, called for under the circumstances, and guaranteed to set his mind at rest.

He hadn’t considered what that direction would be until he saw Brendan Power and realised — with a rush of intuition so powerful that he could feel its certainty in the hollow of his gut — what could have happened, what must have happened, and how Juliet was blaming herself for a death she had only indirectly caused.

Right from the start, he’d believed that the death was accidental because he couldn’t consider any other explanation and continue to look at himself in the mirror every morning. But now he saw how wrong he might have been and what an injustice he had done to Juliet in those dark and isolated moments when he — like everyone else in the village— wondered how she of all people could possibly have made such a fatal mistake. Now he saw how she might have been manipulated into believing that she had made a mistake in the first place. Now he saw how it all had been done.

That thought and the rising desire to avenge the wrong committed against her drove him forward at new speed along the footpath, with Leo happily loping ahead. They veered off into the oak wood a short distance beyond the lodge in which Polly Yarkin and her mother lived. How easy it was to slip from the lodge to Cotes Hall, Colin realised. One didn’t even need to walk along the gouged disaster of a lane to get there.

The path led him beneath the trees, across two footbridges whose wood was mossy and slowly rotting with each winter’s damp, and over a spongy drugget of leaves that lay in sodden decomposition under a delicate coating of frost. It ended where the trees made way for the rear garden of the cottage, and when Colin reached this point, he watched Leo bound through the piles of compost and the fallow earth to scratch at the base of the cottage door. He himself directed the torchlight here and there, assessing the details: the greenhouse to his immediate left, detached from the cottage, no lock on its door; the shed beyond it, four wooden walls and a tarpaper roof where she kept the tools which she used for her gardening and for the forays she made into the woods for her plants and roots; the cottage itself with the green cellar door — its thick paint fl aking away in large chips — that led to the dark, loam-scented cavity beneath the cottage where she stored her roots. He fixed the torchlight on this and kept it fixed steadily as he crossed the garden. He gazed down at the padlock that held the door closed. Leo joined him, bumping his head against Colin’s thigh. The dog walked across the sloping surface of the door. His nails scraped the wood, and a hinge creaked in answer.

Colin flashed the light to this. It was old and rusty, quite loose against the wooden jamb that was itself bolted to the angled stone plinth that served as its base. He played the hinge in his fingers, back and forth, up and down. He dropped his hand to the lower hinge. It held firmly to the wood. He shone the light against it, examined it closely, wondering if the marks he saw could be construed as scratches against the screws or merely an indication of some sort of abrasive used against the metal to remove the stains left by a slipshod worker when he painted the wood.

He should have seen all this before, he realised. He shouldn’t have been so desperate to hear “death by accidental poisoning” that he overlooked the signs which might have told him that Robin Sage’s death had been something else. Had he argued with Juliet’s own frantic conclusions, had his mind been clear, had he trusted her loyalty, he could have spared her the stain of suspicion, the subsequent gossip, and her own distorted belief that she had killed a man.

He turned off the torch and walked to the back door. He knocked. No one answered. He knocked a second time, and then tried the knob. The door swung open.

He said, “Stay,” to Leo who obediently sank onto his haunches. He entered the cottage.

The kitchen smelled of dinner — the fragrance of roasted chicken and newly baked bread, of garlic sautéed in olive oil. The odour of the food reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since the previous night. He’d lost appetite along with self-assurance the moment Sergeant Hawkins phoned him this morning and told him to expect a visit from New Scotland Yard.

“Juliet?” He flipped on the kitchen light. A pot was on the cooker, a salad on the work top, two places laid on the old Formica table with its burn mark shaped like a crescent moon. Two glasses held liquid — one milk, one water — but no one had eaten, and when he touched his fingers to the glass filled with milk, he could feel from its temperature that it had stood there, undrunk, for quite some time. He called her name again and went through the passage to the sitting room.

She was by the window in the dark, just a shadow herself, standing with her arms crossed beneath her breasts, looking out at the night. He said her name. She replied without turning from the glass.

“She hasn’t come home. I’ve phoned around. She was with Pam Rice earlier. Then with Josie. And now—” She let out her breath in a brief, bitter laugh. “I can guess where she’s gone. And what she’s up to. He was here last night, Colin. Nick Ware. Again.”

“Shall I go out and have a look for her?”

“What would be the point? She’s made up her mind. We can drag her back now and lock her in her room, but that would only be post

poning the inevitable.”

“What?”

“She means to get herself pregnant.” Juliet pressed the tips of her fingers against her forehead, rubbed them up to her hairline, grasped the front of her hair and pulled hard as if to give herself pain. “She doesn’t know anything about anything. God in heaven, neither do I. Why did I ever think I’d be good for a child?”

He crossed the room, stood behind her, and reached round her to loose her fi ngers from her hair. “You are good for her. This is just a stage she’s in.”

“One I’ve set in motion.”

“How?”

“With you.”

He felt an odd settling within him, one churn of the stomach and nothing more, presage of a future he wouldn’t consider. “Juliet,” he said. But he had no idea of what would reassure her.

Along with her blue jeans, she was wearing an old work shirt. It smelled faintly like a herb. Rosemary, he thought. He didn’t want to think of anything else. He pressed his cheek against her shoulder and felt the material, soft, against his skin.

“If her mummy can take a lover, why can’t she?” Juliet said. “I let you into my life and now I’m to pay.”

“She’ll grow past this. Give it time.”

“While she’s having regular sex with a fi f-teen-year-old boy?” She pulled away from him. He felt the cold sweep in to take the place of the pressure of her body against his. “There isn’t time. And even if there were, what she’s doing — what she’s after — is complicated by the fact that she wants her father, and if I can’t produce him in double quick time, she’ll make a father out of Nick.”

“Let me be her father.”

“That isn’t the point. She wants him, the real thing. Not a stars-in-his-eyes substitute ten years too young who’s blithering with some sort of idiotic love, who thinks marriage and babies are the answer to everything, who—” She stopped herself. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

He tried to sound unaffected. “It’s a fair enough description. We both know that.”

“It wasn’t. It was cruel. She hasn’t been home. I’ve been phoning everywhere. I feel caught on the edge and…” She balled her hands together and pressed them to her chin. In the meagre light that came from the kitchen, she looked like a child herself. “Colin, you can’t understand what she’s like — or what I’m like. The fact that you love me won’t change that.”

“And you?”

“What?”

“Don’t love me in return?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “Love you? What a joke on the both of us. Of course, I love you. And look where it’s brought me to with Maggie.”

“Maggie can’t run your life.”

“Maggie is my life. Why can’t you see that? This isn’t about us — about you and me, Colin. This isn’t about our future because we don’t have a future. But Maggie does. I won’t let her destroy it.”

He heard only part of her words and said in careful repetition to make certain he’d understood, “We don’t have a future.”

“You’ve known that from the fi rst. You just haven’t wanted to admit it to yourself.”

“Why?”

“Because love makes us blind to the real world. It makes us feel so complete — so much part of someone else — that we can’t see its equal power to destroy.”

“I didn’t mean why haven’t I wanted to admit it. I meant why don’t we have a future,” he said.

“Because even if I weren’t too old, even if I wanted to give you babies, even if Maggie could live with the idea of our getting married—”

“You don’t know she can’t.”

“Let me finish. Please. This once. And listen.” She waited for a moment, perhaps to bring herself under control. She held her hands out towards him, cupped together, as if she would give him the information. “I killed a man, Colin. I can’t stay here in Winslough any longer. And I won’t let you leave this place you love.”

“The police have come,” he said in answer. “From London.”

At once, she dropped her hands to her sides. Her face altered, as if she were drawing a mask into place. He could feel the distance it created between them. She was invulnerable and unreachable, her armour secure. When she spoke, her voice was utterly calm.

“From London. What do they want?”

“To find out who killed Robin Sage.”

“But who…? How…?”

“It doesn’t matter who phoned them. Or why. It only matters that they’re here. They want the truth.”

She lifted her chin fractionally. “Then I’ll tell it. This time.”

“Don’t make yourself look guilty. There isn’t any need.”

“I said what you wanted me to say before. I won’t do that again.”

“You’re not hearing me, Juliet. There isn’t any need for self-sacrifice in this. You’re no more guilty than I am.”

“I…killed…this…man.”

“You fed him wild parsnip.”

“What I thought was wild parsnip. Which I myself dug up.”

“You can’t know that for sure.”

“Of course I know it for sure. I dug it up that very day.”

“All of it?”

“All…? What are you asking?”

“Juliet, did you take some parsnip from the root cellar that evening? Was it part of what you cooked?”

She took a step backwards, as if to distance herself from what his words implied. The action cast her into deeper shadow. “Yes.”

“Don’t you see what that means?”

“It means nothing. There were only two roots left when I checked the cellar that morning. That’s why I went out for more. I…”

He could hear her swallow as she began to understand. He went to her. “So you see, don’t you?”

“Colin…”

“You’ve taken the blame without cause.”

“No. I haven’t. I didn’t. You can’t believe that. You mustn’t.”

He smoothed his thumb along her cheekbone, ran his fingers round the curve of her jaw. God, she was like an infusion of life. “You don’t see it, do you? That’s the goodness of you. You don’t even want to see it.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t Robin Sage at all. It was never Robin Sage. Juliet, how can you be responsible for the vicar’s death when you were the one who was meant to die?”

Her eyes grew wide. She began to speak. He stopped her words — and the fear which he knew lay behind them — with his kiss.

They were scarcely out of the dining room, making their way through the pub to the residents’ lounge, when the older man accosted them. He gave Deborah a cursory glance that took in everything from her hair — always somewhere in the evolutionary cycle between haphazardly disarrayed and absolutely dishevelled — to the splotchy stains of ageing on her grey suede shoes. Then he moved his attention to St. James and Lynley, both of whom he scrutinised with the sort of care one generally gives to assessing a stranger’s potential for committing a felony.

“Scotland Yard?” he asked. His tone was peremptory. It managed to suggest that only a hand-wringing, obsequious response to the question would do. At the same time it implied, “I know your sort,” “Walk two steps to the rear,” and “Pull at your forelock.” It was a lord-of-the-manor voice, the sort that Lynley himself had spent years trying to shed, and thus it was guaranteed to raise his hackles the moment he heard it. Which it did.

St. James said quietly, “I’m having a brandy. You, Deborah? Tommy?”

“Yes. Thank you.” Lynley allowed his gaze to follow St. James and Deborah to the bar.

The pub appeared to be serving its regulars, none of whom seemed to be paying much attention to the older man who stood before Lynley waiting for a response. Yet everyone seemed at the same time to be aware of him. Their effort to ignore his presence was too studied, their eyes darting towards him then just as quickly fl itting away.

Lynley looked him over. He was tall and spare, with thinning grey hair and a fair complexion made ruddy round the cheeks through an exposure to the out-of-doors. But this was a hunting-and-fi shing exposure, for there was nothing about the man to suggest that the time he spent exposed to the elements was anything other than leisure’s employment. He wore good tweeds; his hands looked manicured; his air was sure. And from the expression of distaste he cast in the direction of Ben Wragg who was slapping the bar and laughing heartily at a joke he himself had just told St. James, it was clear that coming to Crofters Inn constituted something of a descent from on high.

“Look here,” the man said. “I asked a question. I want an answer. Now. Is that clear? Which of you is from the Yard?”

Lynley took the brandy that St. James brought him. “I am,” he said. “Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. And something tells me that you’re Townley-Young.”

He loathed himself even as he did it. The man would have had no way of determining a thing about him or about his background from a simple examination of his clothes because he hadn’t bothered much about dressing for dinner. He wore a burgundy pullover over his pin-striped shirt, a pair of grey wool trousers, and shoes that still had a thin crease of mud along the seam. So until Lynley spoke — until he made the decision to employ the Voice whose every inflection shouted public school educated, blue blood born, and bred to possess a series of cumbersome, useless titles — Townley-Young would have had no way of knowing that he was addressing his questions to a belted earl. He still didn’t, exactly. No one was whispering Eighth Earl of Asherton into his ear. No one was listing the accoutrements of fortune, class, and birth: the town house in London, the estate in Cornwall, a seat in the House of Lords if he wished to take it, which he decidedly did not.

Into Townley-Young’s startled silence, Lynley introduced the St. Jameses. Then he sipped his brandy and observed Townley-Young over the rim of his glass.

The man was undergoing a major adjustment in attitude. The nostrils were unpinching, and the spine was loosening. It was clear that he wanted to ask half a dozen questions absolutely verboten in the situation and that he was attempting to look as if he’d known from the first that Lynley was less them and more us than Townley-Young himself would ever be.

“May I speak to you privately?” he said and then added hastily with a glance at the St. Jameses, “I mean out of the pub. I should hope your friends would join us.” He managed the request with considerable dignity. He may have been surprised to discover that more than one class of individual could rest at ease beneath the title of Detective Inspector, but he wasn’t about to go all Uriah Heepish in an effort to mitigate the scorn with which he’d fi rst spoken.

Lynley nodded towards the door to the residents’ lounge at the far side of the pub. Townley-Young led the way. The lounge was, if anything, colder than the dining room had been and without the extra electric fi res placed strategically to cut the chill.

Deborah switched on a lamp, straightened its shade, and did the same to another. St. James removed an unfolded newspaper from one of the armchairs, tossed it to the sideboard on which Crofters Inn kept its supply of other reading material — mostly ancient copies of Country Life that looked as if they’d crumble if opened precipitately — and sat in one of the armchairs. Deborah chose a nearby ottoman for her own seat.

Lynley noted that Townley-Young glanced once at St. James’ disability, a swift look of curiosity that moved quickly on its way to fi nd a place for himself in the room. He chose the sofa above which hung a dismal reproduction of The Potato Eaters.

“I’ve come to you for help,” Townley-Young said. “I’d got the word at dinner that you’d appeared in the village — that sort of news passes like a blaze in Winslough — and I decided to come round and see you myself.

You’re not here on holiday, I take it?”

“Not exactly.”

“This Sage business, then?”

Comrades in class did not constitute an invitation to professional disclosure as far as Lynley was concerned. He answered with a question of his own. “Do you have something to tell me about Mr. Sage’s death?”

Townley-Young pinched the knot of his kelly-green tie. “Not directly.”

“Then?”

“He was a good enough chap in his way, I suppose. We just didn’t see eye-to-eye on matters of ritual.”

“Low church versus high?”

“Indeed.”

“Surely not a motive for his murder, however.”

“A motive…?” Townley-Young’s hand dropped from his tie. His tone remained icily polite. “I’ve not come here to confess, Inspector, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t much like Sage, and I didn’t much like the austerity of his services. No flowers, no candles, just the bare bones. Not what I was used to. But he wasn’t a bad sort for a vicar, and his heart was in the right place as far as church-going was concerned.”

Lynley took up his brandy and let the balloon glass warm in the palm of his hand. “You weren’t part of the church council who interviewed him?”

“I was. I dissented.” Townley-Young’s ruddy cheeks grew momentarily ruddier. That the apparent Lord of the Manor had held no sway with the council on which he was undoubtedly the most important member went leagues to reveal his position in the hearts of the villagers.

“I dare say you don’t especially mourn his passing, then.”

“He wasn’t a friend, if that’s what you’re getting at. Even if friendship had been possible between us, he’d only been in the village for two months when he died. I realise that two months count for two decades in some arenas of our society these days, but frankly, I’m not of the generation that takes to calling its fellows by their Christian names on a moment’s notice, Inspector.”

Lynley smiled. Since his father had been dead for some fourteen years and since his mother was nothing if not decidedly given to breaking her way past traditional barriers, he sometimes had occasion to forget the older generation’s reliance upon the choice of name as an indicator of intimacy. It always caught him off-guard and amused him mildly to come up against it in his work. What’s in a name indeed, he thought.

“You mentioned that you had something to tell me that was indirectly involved with Mr. Sage’s death,” Lynley reminded Townley-Young, who looked as if he was about to embellish upon his nominal theme.

“In that he was a visitor on the grounds of Cotes Hall several times prior to his death.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I’ve come about the Hall.”

“The Hall?” Lynley glanced at St. James. The other man lifted one hand fractionally in a don’t-ask-me gesture.

“I’d like you to look into what’s been happening out there. Malicious mischief being made. Pranks being pulled. I’ve been trying to renovate it for the past four months, and some group of little hooligans keep getting in the way. A quart of paint spilled here. A roll of wallpaper ruined there. Water left running. Graffiti on the doors.”

“Are you assuming that Mr. Sage was involved? That hardly seems likely for a clergyman.”

“I’m assuming someone with a bone to pick with me is involved. I’m assuming you — a policeman — will get to the bottom of it and see that it’s stopped.”

“Ah.” As he felt himself bristle beneath the final, imperious statement — their relative positions in an ostensibly classless society brushed aside in the man’s exigent need to have his personal problems resolved post-haste — Lynley wondered how many people in the immediate vicinity felt they had serious bones to pick with Townley-Young. “You’ve a local constable to see to things of this sort.”

Townley-Young snorted. “He’s been deal-ing”—the word heavy with the weight of Townley-Young’s sarcasm—“with this from the first. He’s done his investigating after every incident. And after every incident, he’s turned up nothing.”

“Have you given no thought to hiring a guard until the work is fi nished?”

“I pay my bloody taxes, Inspector. What else are they to be used for if I can’t call upon the assistance of the police when I have a

need?”

“What about your caretaker?”

“The Spence woman? She frightened off a group of young thugs once — and quite competently, if you want my opinion, despite the ruckus it caused round here — but whoever’s at the bottom of this current rash of mischief has managed to do it with a great deal more finesse. No sign of forced entry, no trace left behind save for the damage.”

“Someone with a key, I dare say. Who has them?”

“Myself. Mrs. Spence. The constable. My daughter and her husband.”

“Any of you wishing that the house go unfinished? Who’s supposed to live there?”

“Becky…My daughter and her husband. Their baby in June.”

“Does Mrs. Spence know them?” St. James asked. He’d been listening, his chin in his palm.

“Know Becky and Brendan? Why?”

“Might she prefer it if they didn’t move in? Might the constable prefer it? Might they be using the house themselves? We’ve been given to understand they’re involved with each other.”

Lynley found that this line of questioning did indeed lead in an interesting direction, if not exactly the one intended by St. James. “Has someone dossed there in the past?” he asked.

“The place was locked and boarded.”

“A board is fairly easy to loosen if one needs entry.”

St. James added, obviously continuing with his own line of thought, “And if a couple were using the place for an assignation, they might not take lightly to having it denied them.”

“I don’t much care who’s using it and for what. I just want it stopped. And if Scotland Yard can’t do it—”

“What sort of ruckus?” Lynley asked.

Townley-Young gaped at him blankly. “What the devil…?”

“You mentioned that Mrs. Spence caused a ruckus when she frightened someone off the property. What sort of ruckus?”

“Discharging a shotgun. Got the little beasts’ parents in a snit over that.” He gave another snort. “Let their lads run about like hooligans, they do, this lot of parents in the village. And when someone tries to show them a touch of discipline, you’d think Armageddon had begun.”

“A shotgun’s rather heavy discipline,” St. James remarked.

“Aimed at children,” Deborah added.

“Thesearen’t exactly children and even if they were—”

“Is it with your permission — or perhaps your advice — that Mrs. Spence uses a shotgun to carry out her duties as caretaker of Cotes Hall?” Lynley asked.

Townley-Young’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t particularly appreciate your efforts to turn this round on me. I came here for your assistance, Inspector, and if you’re unwilling to give it, then I’ll be on my way.” He made a movement as if to rise.

Lynley raised a hand briefly to stop him, saying, “How long has the Spence woman worked for you?”

“More than two years now. Nearly three.”

“And her background?”

“What of it?”

“What do you know about her? Why did you hire her?”

“Because she wanted peace and quiet and I wanted someone out there who wanted peace and quiet. The location’s isolated. I didn’t want to employ as caretaker anyone who felt compelled to mingle with the rest of the village on a nightly basis. That would hardly have served my interests, would it?”

“Where did she come from?”

“Cumbria.”

“Where?”

“Outside of Wigton.”

“Where?”

Townley-Young sat forward with a snap. “Look here, Lynley, let’s get one thing straight. I came here to employ you, not the opposite. I won’t be spoken to as if I’m a suspect, no matter who you are or where you’re from. Is that clear?”

Lynley placed his balloon glass on the birch side table next to his chair. He regarded Townley-Young evenly. The man’s lips had fl attened to broom-straw width and his chin jutted out pugnaciously. If Sergeant Havers had been in the residents’ lounge with them, she would have yawned widely at this point, fl ipped her thumb towards Townley-Young, said, “Get this bloke, will you?” and followed that up with a less-than-friendly and more-thanbored “Answer the question before we have you in the nick for failure to cooperate in a police investigation.” It was always Havers’ way to stretch the truth to serve her purposes when hot on the scent of a piece of information. Lynley wondered whether that approach would have worked with someone like Townley-Young. If nothing else, it would have afforded him a moment of pleasure just to see Townley-Young’s reaction to being spoken to in such a way and with such an accent as Havers’. She didn’t have the Voice by any stretch of the imagination, and she generally made the most of that fact when confronted with someone who did.

Deborah moved restlessly on the ottoman. Out of the corner of his eye, Lynley saw St. James’ hand move to her shoulder.

“I realise why you’ve come to see me,” Lynley said at last.

“Good. Then—”

“And it’s one of those unfortunate quirks of fate, that you’ve walked into the middle of an investigation. You can, of course, telephone your solicitor if you’d prefer to have him here while you answer the question. Where, exactly, did Mrs. Spence come from?” It bent the truth only partially. Lynley gave a mental salute to his sergeant. He could live with that.

The question was whether Townley-Young could do also. They engaged in a silent skirmish of wills, their eyes locked in combat. Townley-Young fi nally blinked.

“Aspatria,” he said.

“In Cumbria?”

“Yes.”

“How did she come to work for you?”

“I advertised. She applied. She came to interview. I liked her. She’s got common sense, she’s independent, she’s fully capable of taking whatever action is necessary to protect my property.”

“And Mr. Sage?”

“What about him?”

“Where was he from?”

“Cornwall.” And before Lynley could press the point with a further question, “Via Bradford. That’s all I recall.”

“Thank you.” Lynley got to his feet.

Townley-Young did likewise. “As to the Hall…”

“I’ll be speaking to Mrs. Spence,” Lynley said. “But my suggestion is to follow the keys and to think about who might not want your daughter and her husband to move into the Hall.”

Townley-Young hesitated at the door to the residents’ lounge, his hand on the knob. He seemed to be studying it because he kept his head bent for a moment and his forehead was creased as if with thought. He said, “The wedding.”

“Sorry?”

“Sage died the night before my daughter’s wedding. He was to perform the ceremony. We none of us knew where to find him, and we had the devil of a time fi nding someone else.” He looked up. “Someone who doesn’t want Becky at the Hall could be someone who didn’t want her to marry in the fi rst place.”

“Why?”

“Jealousy. Revenge. Thwarted desire.”

“For?”

Townley-Young gazed back at the door, an act of seeing through it to the pub beyond. “For what Becky already has,” he said.

Brendan found Polly Yarkin in the pub. He went to the bar for his gin and bitters, bobbed his head in good evening to three farmers and two maintenance men from Fork Reservoir, and joined her at her table near the fi replace where she was toeing the bark from a piece of birch at her feet. He didn’t wait for an invitation to sit with her. Tonight, at least, he had an excuse.

She looked up as he decisively placed his glass on the table and lowered himself onto the three-legged stool. Her eyes moved from him to the far door that gave way to the residents’ lounge. She kept them fixed on it as she said, “Bren, you mustn’t sit here. You best go on home.”

She didn’t look well. Although she was sitting right next to the fire, she hadn’t removed either her coat or her scarf, and as he unbuttoned his jacket and slid his stool closer to hers, she seemed to draw her body inward protectively. She said, “Bren,” in a low, insistent voice, “mind what I say.”

Brendan cast a casual glance round the pub. His conversation with Colin Shepherd — and especially the parting remark he’d shot at the constable as he sauntered off — had given Brendan a surge of confidence he hadn’t experienced in months. He felt invulnerable to stares or gossip or even direct confrontation itself. “What have we got here, Polly? Day labourers, farmers, a few housewives, the local teen gang. I don’t care what they think. They’ll think what they want no matter what, won’t they?”

“It’s not just them, all right? Di’n’t you see his car?”

“Whose?”

“His. Mr. Townley-Young’s. He’s in there.” She gave a nod in the direction of the residents’ lounge, her eyes still averted. “With them.”

“With whom?”

“The London police. So be off with you before he comes out and—”

“And what? What?”

She replied with a shrug. He could see what she thought of him in the movement of her shoulders and the settling of her mouth. It was the very same thing that Rebecca thought. It was what they all thought: every man jack of them in the whole bloody village. They saw him under Townley-Young’s thumb, under everyone’s thumb. Like a cart horse in bridle and blinkers for life.

He took an irritated gulp of his drink. The liquor washed back in his throat too quickly, misdirected itself, and made him cough. He fished in his pocket for a handkerchief. His pipe, tobacco, and matches spilled onto the fl oor.

“God damn.” He snatched them back. He coughed and hacked. He could see Polly looking round the pub, smoothing her scarf, trying to achieve some distance by ignoring his plight. He found his handkerchief and pressed it to his mouth. He took a second, slower sip of the gin. It roared across his tongue and down his throat, leaving fire in its wake. But it warmed him this time, both to his topic and to the situation.

“I’m not afraid of my father-in-law,” he said tersely. “Despite what everyone thinks, I’m fully capable of standing my ground with him. I’m fully capable of a hell of a lot more than this lot round here gives me credit for.” He considered adding an if-they-only-knew innuendo to give his assertion an air of credibility. But Polly Yarkin was nobody’s fool. She’d question and probe and he’d end up revealing what he most wanted to keep to himself. So instead he said, “I have a right to be here. I have a right to sit wherever I please. I have a right to speak to whomever I like.”

“You’re acting the fool.”

“Besides, this is business.” He threw back more gin. It went down smoothly. He considered a trip to the bar for a second glass. He’d toss that down and perhaps have a third and bugger anyone who tried to stop him.

Polly was toying with a stack of beer mats, concentrating on them as if by that action she could continue to avoid an open acknowledgement of his presence. He wanted her to look at him. He wanted her to reach over and touch his arm. He was important in her life now and she didn’t even know it. But she would soon enough. He would make her see.

“I was out at Cotes Hall,” he said.

She didn’t reply.

“I came back on the footpath.”

She stirred on the stool as if to leave. One hand went to the back of her neck. Her fi ngers dug into its nape.

“I saw Constable Shepherd.”

Her movement ceased. Her eyelids seemed to tremble, as if she wanted to look at him but couldn’t allow herself even that much contact. “So?” she said.

“So you’d better watch where you’re stepping, all right?”

Contact at last. She met his gaze. But it wasn’t curiosity he read in her face. It wasn’t a need to possess information or obtain clarity. A slow, ugly flush was climbing her neck and spreading streaks of crimson up from her jaw.

He was disconcerted. She was supposed to ask what he meant by his statement, which was supposed to lead to a request for his advice, which he would be only too happy to give, which would lead to her gratitude. Gratitude would prompt her to establish a place for him in her life. Obtaining that would lead her to love. And if it wasn’t love exactly that she ended up feeling, desire would do.

Except that his statement wasn’t engendering anything close to that primary domino of curiosity that would topple the defences she’d kept raised against him from the instant he’d met her. She looked enraged.

“I’ve done nothing to her or to anyone,” she hissed. “I don’t know nothing about her, all right?”

He drew back. She leaned forward. “About her?” he said blankly.

“Nothing,” she repeated. “And if a chat with Constable Shepherd on the footpath makes you think Mr. Sage told me something

I could use to—”

“Kill him,” Brendan said.

“What?”

“He thinks you’re responsible. For the vicar’s death. He’s looking for evidence Shepherd is.”

She sat back on her stool. Her mouth opened and closed, opened again. She said, “Evidence.”

“Yes. So watch where you’re stepping. And if he questions you, Polly, you phone me at once. You’ve got the number of my office, don’t you? Don’t talk to him alone. Don’t be with him alone. Do you understand?”

“Evidence.” She said it as if to convince herself, as if to try out the word for size. The menace behind it didn’t seem to reach her.

“Polly, answer me. Do you understand? The constable’s looking for evidence to establish the fact that you’re responsible for the vicar’s death. He was heading out towards Cotes Hall when I saw him.”

She stared at him without appearing to see him. “But Col was only angry,” she said. “He didn’t mean it. I pushed him too far — I do that sometimes — and he said something he didn’t really mean. I knew that. He knew it as well.”

She was speaking Greek as far as Brendan was concerned. She was drifting in space. He needed to bring her back to earth, and more importantly, back to him. He took her hand. Eyes still unfocussed, she didn’t withdraw it. He twined his fingers with hers.

“Polly, you’ve got to listen.”

“No, it’s nothing. He didn’t mean a thing.”

“He asked me about keys,” Brendan said. “Whether I’d given a set of keys to you, whether you’d asked for them.”

She frowned, said nothing.

“I didn’t answer him, Polly. I told him that line of enquiry wasn’t on. I told him to bugger off as well. So if he comes to see you—”

“He can’t think that.” She spoke so low that Brendan had to lean forward to hear her. “He knows me, does Colin. He knows me, Brendan.”

Her hand tightened round his, pulled his towards her breast. He was startled, delighted, and more than ready to be of whatever assistance he could.

“How can he think I would ever, ever…No matter what…Brendan!” She fl ung his hand to one side. She backed her stool into the corner. She said, “Now it’s worse,” and just as Brendan was about to question her, seeking to understand how anything could possibly be worse if she’d finally started to accept him, a heavy hand descended on his shoulder.

Brendan looked up into the face of his father-in-law. “Flaming bloody hell,” St. John Andrew Townley-Young said concisely. “Get outside before I thrash you to pieces, you miserable worm.”

Lynley shut the door of his room and stood with his back to it, his eyes on the telephone next to the bed. On the wall above it, the Wraggs continued to display their love affair with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists: Monet’s tender Madame Monet and Child made an odd companion piece to ToulouseLautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge, both of them mounted and framed with more enthusiasm than care, the latter hanging at an angle that suggested all of Montmartre had been hit by an earthquake just as the artist was rendering immortal its most famous nightclub. Lynley straightened the Toulouse-Lautrec. He pinched a cobweb that seemed to be dangling from Madame Monet’s hair. But neither a contemplation of the prints nor a few minutes’ consideration of their quixotic pairing was sufficient to prevent his reaching for the telephone and punching in her number.

He dug in his pocket for his watch. It was just after nine. She wouldn’t be in bed. He couldn’t even use the hour as a plausible reason for avoidance. He had no excuse for not placing the call.

Except cowardice, which he had in spades whenever it came to dealing with Helen. Did I really want love, he wondered wryly, and if so when did I want it? And wouldn’t an affair — a dozen affairs — be less diffi cult and more convenient than this? He sighed. What a monstrosity love was; it was nothing so simple as the beast with two backs.

The sex part had been effortless between them from the first. He’d driven her home from Cambridge on a Friday in November. They’d not stirred from her flat until Sunday morning. They didn’t even have a meal until Saturday night. He could close his eyes — even now as he thought of it — and still look up into her face, see the way her hair framed it in a colour not so different from the brandy he’d just drunk, feel her moving against him, sense the warmth beneath his palms as he ran them from her breasts to her waist to her thighs, and hear the way her breathing caught then changed altogether as it rose with her climax and she cried out his name. He’d touched his fingers beneath her breast and felt her heart pounding. She laughed, a little embarrassed at the ease of it all between them.

She was what he wanted. Together, they were what he wanted. But life never took a permanent definition from the hours they spent with each other in bed.

Because one could love a woman, make love to her, and have her make love completely in return and, with considerable care and a refusal to reveal, still never be touched at the core of one’s being. For that was a fi nal breaking of barriers from which one never walked away the same. And both of them knew it, because both of them had crossed all conceivable boundaries with other people before.

How do we learn to trust, he wondered. How do we ever develop the courage to make the heart vulnerable a second or third time, exposing it to yet another chance of breaking? Helen didn’t want to do that, and he couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t always certain that he could risk it himself.

He thought with chagrin about his behaviour that day. He’d been eager enough to take the first opportunity to dash out of London this morning. He knew his motivations well enough to admit that, in part, he’d snatched at the promise of distance from Helen as well as the chance to punish her. Her doubts and fears exasperated him, perhaps because they so accurately mirrored his own.

Wearily, he sank onto the edge of the bed and listened to the steady plink…plink of water dripping from the tap in the bath. In the way of all night noises, it dominated as it could never do at any other time, and he knew that if he didn’t do something to stop it, he would toss, turn, and fight with the pillow once he put out the light and attempted to sleep. He decided it probably wanted a washer, if bath taps had washers the way basin taps did. Ben Wragg could no doubt provide him with one. All he needed to do was pick up the phone and ask. What would it take to repair the thing, anyway? Five minutes? Four? And he could think while he did it, taking the time to engage his hands with an odd job so that his mind was free to make a decision regarding Helen. He couldn’t, after all, telephone her without knowing what his objective was in doing so. Five minutes would prevent him from rushing in thoughtlessly and just as thoughtlessly taking the risk of exposing him-self — not to mention Helen who was far more sensitive than he — to…He paused in the mental colloquy with himself. To what? What? Love? Commitment? Honesty? Trust? God alone knew how either one of them might survive the challenges of that.

He laughed sourly at his own capacity for self-deception and reached for the telephone just as it rang.

“Denton told me where to find you,” was the first thing she said.

The first thing he said was, “Helen. Hullo, darling. I was just about to phone you,” realising that she probably wouldn’t believe him and that he couldn’t blame her if that was the case.

But she said, “I’m glad of it.”

And then they grappled with the silence. In it, he could imagine where she was — in her bedroom in the Onslow Square flat, on the bed, with her legs curled beneath her and the ivory-and-yellow counterpane acting as contrast to her hair and her eyes. He could see how she was holding the phone — two-handed and cradled as if she would protect it, herself, or the conversation she was having. He could guess at her jewellery — earrings that she’d already removed and placed on the walnut table by the bed, a thin gold bracelet still encircling her wrist, a matching chain round her neck that her fingers touched talisman-like when they moved the scant inches from the phone to her throat. And there at the hollow of her throat was the scent she wore, something between flowers and citrus.

They both spoke at once, saying,

“I shouldn’t have—”

“I’ve been feeling—”

— and then breaking off with the quick laughter of nerves that serves as the underpinning of a conversation between lovers who are both afraid of losing what they’ve so recently found. Which is why in an instant Lynley mentally abjured every plan he’d just been pondering before she had phoned.

He said, “I love you, darling. I’m sorry about all this.”

“Were you running away?”

“This time, I was. Yes. After a fashion.”

“I can’t be angry over that, can I? I’ve done it often enough myself.”

Another silence. She would be wearing a silk blouse, wool trousers, or a skirt. Her jacket would be lying where she’d laid it, at the foot of the bed. Her shoes would be sitting nearby on the floor. The light would be on, casting its inverted triangular glow against the blossoms and stripes of the wallpaper at the same time as it diffused through the lampshade to touch her skin.

“But you’ve never run away to hurt me,” he said.

“Is that why you’ve gone off? To hurt me?”

“Again, after a fashion. It’s nothing I’m proud of.” He reached for the cord of the telephone and twined it between his fingers, restless for something of substance to touch since he’d placed himself more than two hundred and fifty miles to the north, and he couldn’t touch her. He said, “Helen, about that blasted tie this morning…”

“That wasn’t the issue. You knew it at the time. I didn’t want to admit it. It was just an excuse.”

“For?”

“Fear.”

“Of what?”

“Moving forward, I suppose. Loving you more than I do at the moment. Making you too much of my life.”

“Helen—”

“I could easily lose myself in the love of you. The problem is I don’t know if I want to.”

“How can something like that be bad? How can it be wrong?”

“It’s neither. But grief comes with love, eventually. It has to. It’s only the timing that no one can be sure of. And that’s what I’ve been trying to come to terms with: whether I want the grief and in what proportion. Sometimes…” She hesitated. He could see her fingers move to rest on her collar bone — her gesture of protection — before she went on. “It’s closer to pain than anything I’ve ever experienced. Isn’t that mad? I’m afraid of that. I suppose I’m actually afraid of you.”

“You have to trust me, Helen, at some point in all this, if we’re ever to go on.”

“I know that.”

“I won’t cause you grief.”

“Not deliberately. You won’t. I know that as well.”

“Then?”

“If I lose you, Tommy.”

“You won’t. How could you? Why?”

“In a thousand different ways.”

“Because of my job.”

“Because of who you are.”

He felt the sensation of being swept away from everything, but most of all from her. “So it is the tie after all,” he said.

“Other women?” she said. “Yes. Marginally. But it’s more a worry over the day-to-day, the business of living, the way people grind at each other and wear the best parts down over time. I don’t want that. I don’t want to wake up some morning and discover I stopped loving you five years in the past. I don’t want to look up from dinner one night and fi nd you watching me and read on your face the very same thing.”

“That’s the risk, Helen. It all comes down to a leap of faith. Although God knows what’s in store for us if we can’t even manage to get to Corfu together for a week’s holiday.”

“I’m sorry about that. About me as well. I was feeling boxed in this morning.”

“Well, you’re free of that now.”

“And I don’t want to be. Free of that. Free of you. I don’t want that, Tommy.” She sighed. It caught on the edge of what he wanted to believe was a stifled sob. Except that Helen had only sobbed once in her life that he knew of — as a girl of twenty-one with her world smashed to bits by a car which he himself had driven — and he seriously doubted that she would begin sobbing again for his benefi t now. “I wish you were here.”

“My wish as well.”

“Will you come back? Tomorrow?”

“I can’t. Denton didn’t tell you? There’s a case, of sorts.”

“Then you won’t want me there to bother with, either.”

“You wouldn’t be a bother. But it wouldn’t work.”

“Will anything ever? Work, that is.”

That was the question. Indeed it was. He looked down at the floor, at the mud on his shoes, at the floral carpet, at the patterns it made. “I don’t know,” he said. “And that’s the full hell of it. I can ask you to risk it all with a jump into the void. I simply can’t guarantee

what you’ll fi nd there.”

“But then no one can.”

“No one who’s truthful. That’s the bottom line. We can’t predict the future. We can only use the present to guide us hopefully in its direction.”

“Do you believe that, Tommy?”

“With all my heart.”

“I love you.”

“I know. That’s why I believe.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

MAGGIE WAS LUCKY. HE CAME out of the pub alone. She’d been hoping he would ever since she saw his bicycle propped against the white gates that led into the Crofters Inn car park. It was hard to miss it, an odd girl’s bike with big balloon tyres, once the treasure of his older sister but since her marriage appropriated by Nick without a care in the world as to the queer sight he made on it, pedalling through the village towards Skelshaw Farm with his old leather bomber’s jacket flapping round his waist and the radio-tape player hanging from one of the handlebars. Usually something by Depeche Mode was rock-and-rolling from the speakers. Nick was particularly fond of them.

He was fiddling with the radio as he left the pub, all his concentration apparently given to finding a station that he could tune in with minimum static and maximum volume. Simple Minds, UB40, an ancient piece by Fairground Attraction all bleeped by like people interrupted in the midst of a conversation before he found something that he settled with. It consisted mostly of high, screeching notes on an electric guitar. She heard Nick say, “Clapton. All right,” as he slipped the radio’s grip piece over the bicycle’s handlebars. He stooped to tie his left shoelace, and as he did so, Maggie melted out of the doorway shadows of The Pentagram Tearoom across the street from the inn.

She’d stayed in Josie’s lair by the river long after the other girl had left to set the tables in the restaurant and to act the part of waitress there. She’d intended to go home eventually, when dinner was long past ruined and her continuing absence couldn’t be rationally assigned to anything other than murder, abduction, or in-your-face rebellion. Two hours past dinner would do nicely for that. Mummy deserved it.

Despite what had happened between them last night, she’d put another cup of that horrid tea on the table in front of Maggie this morning, saying, “Drink this, Margaret. Now. Before you leave.” She sounded hard — not like Mummy at all — but at least there was no more of her saying it was good for her bones no matter the taste, filled to the brim with the vitamins and minerals that a woman’s developing body had to have. That lie was gone. But Mummy’s determination was not.

Neither was Maggie’s, however. “I won’t. You can’t make me. You did it before. But you can’t make me drink it again.” Her words were high and shrill. Even to her own ears, she sounded like a mouse being swung by its tail. And when Mummy had held the cup to her lips, with her other hand locked on the back of Maggie’s neck, saying, “You will drink this, Margaret. You’ll sit here till you do,” Maggie had flung up her arms, dashing the cup and its liquid, hot and steaming, against Mummy’s chest.

Her wool jersey soaked it up like a desert in June and moulded itself into a scalding second skin. Mummy cried out and rushed to the sink. Maggie watched in horror.

She said, “Mummy, I didn’t—”

“Get out of here. Get out,” Mummy gasped. And when Maggie didn’t move, she dashed back to the table and yanked her chair away from it. “You heard me. Get out.”

It wasn’t Mummy’s voice. It wasn’t anybody’s voice that she’d ever known. It wasn’t Mummy at the sink with the ice-cold water flooding out of the tap, taking handfuls, throwing them against the wool jersey, with her teeth clamped over her lower lip. She was making noises like she couldn’t breathe. At last when she was through and the jersey was soaked with new water over old, she bent over and began to pull it off. Her body shuddered.

“Mummy,” Maggie had said in that same mouse voice.

“Get out. I don’t even know who you are,” the reply.

She’d stumbled into the grey morning, had sat by herself in a corner of the bus all the way to school. She had slowly come to terms with the extent of her loss over the course of the day. She recovered. She developed a brittle little shell to protect herself from the whole situation. If Mummy wanted her out, she would get out. She would. And it wouldn’t be hard to do at all.

Nick loved her. Hadn’t he said it over and over again? Didn’t he say it every day, when he had the chance? She didn’t need Mummy. How dim it was to think she ever had. And Mummy didn’t need her. When she was gone, Mummy could have her nice private life with Mr. Shepherd, which is probably what she wanted in the fi rst place. In fact, maybe that’s why she kept trying to make Maggie drink that tea. Maybe…

Maggie shivered. No. Mummy was good. She was. She was.

It was half past seven when Maggie left the river lair. It would be after eight by the time she made the walk home to the cottage. She’d go inside, majestic and silent. She’d go up to her room and close the door. She’d never once speak to Mummy again. What was the point?

Then the sight of Nick’s bicycle had changed her purpose, taking her across the street to the tearoom with its recessed doorway out of the wind. She would wait for him there.

She hadn’t thought the wait would be so long. Somehow, she’d believed that Nick would sense she was lingering outside and would leave his mates to fi nd her. She couldn’t go in to him in case Mummy phoned the pub on a search for her, but she didn’t mind waiting. He’d be out soon enough.

Nearly two hours later, he’d emerged. And when she sneaked up beside him and slipped her arm round his waist, he jumped with the shock of it and gave a cat’s yowl. He whirled around. The movement and the wind caught his hair and flung it into his eyes. He fl ipped it back, saw her.

“Mag!” He grinned. The guitar on the radio climbed a few high, wild notes.

“I was waiting for you. Over there.”

He turned his head. The wind dashed his hair about his head once again. “Where?”

“The tearoom.”

“Outside? Mag, are you daft? In this weather? I bet you’ve gone all ice. Why di’n’t you come in?” He glanced at the lighted windows of the inn, nodded once, and said, “Because of the police. That’s it, isn’t it?”

She frowned. “Police?”

“New Scotland Yard. Got here round fi ve, from what Ben Wragg was saying. Di’n’t you know? I thought for certain you would.”

“Why?”

“Your mum.”

“Mummy? What…?”

“They’re here to sniff round Mr. Sage’s death. Look, we need to talk.” His eyes darted down the road to North Yorkshire in the direction of the common where the car park across the street was supplied with an old stone shed of public toilets. There was shelter there from the wind, if not the cold, but Maggie had a better idea.

“Come with me,” she said and with a pause for him to grab the radio — whose volume he lowered as if in understanding of the clandestine nature of their movements — she led him through the gates of the Crofters Inn car park. They wove between the cars. Nick low-whistled his admiration of the same silver Bentley that had been parked there several hours before when Josie and Maggie had walked to the river.

“Where are we—”

“Special place,” Maggie said. “It’s Josie’s. She won’t mind. Have you a match? We’ll need one for the lantern.”

They descended the path carefully. It was slick with the night’s developing coat of ice, with rushes and weeds made constantly damp by the river that tumbled through the limestone boulders below. Nick said, “Let me,” and went on ahead, his hand extended back to her, to keep her steady and on her feet. Each time he slid an inch or two, he said, “Steady on, Mag,” and firmed up his grip. He was taking care of her, and the thought of that made her warm inside to out.

“Here,” she said as they reached the old icehouse. She pushed against the door. It creaked on its hinges and scraped against the fl oor, rucking up part of the patchwork carpet. “This is Josie’s secret place,” Maggie said. “You won’t tell anyone about it, Nick?”

He ducked inside the door as Maggie fumbled for the nail barrel and the lantern on top of it. She said, “I’ll need the matches,” and felt him press a book of them into her hand. She lit the lantern, lowered its glow to a candle’s softness, and turned back to him.

He was gazing about. “Wizard,” he said with a smile.

She moved past him to shut the door and, as she had seen Josie do earlier, she sprayed the floor and the walls with toilet water.

“It’s colder in here than outside,” Nick said. He zipped his bomber’s jacket and beat his hands against his arms.

“Here,” she said. She sat on the cot and patted the spot next to her. When he dropped down beside her, she took up the eiderdown that served as a coverlet, and they wore it like a cape.

He loosed himself from it long enough to produce the Marlboros he favoured. Maggie returned him his matches and he lit two cigarettes at once, one for each of them. He inhaled deeply and held his breath. Maggie pretended to do the same.

More than anything, she liked the nearness of him. The sound of his leather jacket rustling, the pressure of his leg against hers, the heat of his body, and — when she gave a quick look — the length of his eyelashes and the heavily lidded, sleepy shape of his eyes. “Bedroom eyes,” she’d heard one of the teachers call them. “Bet that bloke’ll be giving the ladies something nice to remember in a few more years.” Another had added, “I wouldn’t mind something nice from him now, actually,” and they all had laughed, stopping abruptly when they realised Maggie was close enough to hear. Not that they knew anything about Maggie and Nick. No one knew about them except Josie and Mummy. And Mr. Sage.

“There was an inquest,” Maggie said reasonably. “They said it was an accident, didn’t they? And once the inquest says it’s an accident, no one can say anything else. Isn’t that it? They can’t do another. Don’t the police know that?”

Nick shook his head. The cigarette glowed. He tapped ash onto the carpet and ground it in with the toe of his shoe. “That’s the trial part, Mag. You can’t be tried twice for the same crime, unless there’s new evidence. Sort of. I think. But that doesn’t matter because there wasn’t any trial in the first place. An inquest’s not a trial.”

“Will there be one? Now?”

“Depends on what they fi nd.”

“Find? Where? Are they looking for something? Will they come to the cottage?”

“They’ll be talking to your mum, that’s for sure. They’ve already been holed up tonight with Mr. Townley-Young. I got money says he must’ve phoned for them in the fi rst place.” Nick gave a little chuckle. “You should’ve been there, Mag, when he came out of the lounge. Poor ol’ Brendan was having a gin with Polly Yarkin and T-Y went white to his lips and dead-cod stiff when he saw them. They weren’t doing nothing but drinking, but T-Y had Bren outa that pub faster ’n anything. His eyes just sort of shot laser blasts at him. Like in a fi lm.”

“But Mummy didn’t do anything,” Maggie said. She felt a small, burning point of fear in her chest. “It wasn’t on purpose. That’s what she said. The jury agreed.”

“Sure. Based on what they were told. But someone might’ve lied.”

“Mummy didn’t lie!”

Nick seemed to recognise her fears immediately. He said, “It’s okay, Mag. There’s nothing to worry about. Except that they’ll probably want to talk to you.”

“The police?”

“Right. You knew Mr. Sage. You and him were mates in a way. When the police investigate, they always talk to all the dead bloke’s mates.”

“But Mr. Shepherd never talked to me. The inquest man didn’t. I wasn’t there that night. I don’t know what happened. I can’t tell them anything. I—”

“Hey.” He took a final, deep drag of his cigarette before he squashed it against the stone wall behind them and did the same to hers. He put his arm round her waist. At the far side of the ice-house, Nick’s radio was hissing spasmodically, its station lost. “It’s okay, Mag. It’s nothing to worry about. It’s nothing to do with you at all. I mean, you didn’t exactly kill the vicar, did you?” He chuckled at the very impossibility of the thought.

Maggie didn’t join him. At heart, it was all about responsibility, wasn’t it? Responsibility with a capital R.

She could remember Mummy’s anger when she’d been told of Maggie’s visits to Mr. Sage’s house. To the shrill, outraged defence of “Who told you? Who’s been spying on me?”—which Mummy wouldn’t answer but it didn’t really matter, did it, because Maggie knew precisely who had done the spying — Mummy had said, “Listen to me, Maggie. Have some common sense. You don’t actually know this man. And he is a man, not a boy. He’s at least forty-fi ve years old. Are you aware of that? What are you doing paying visits alone to a forty-fi ve-year-old man? Even if he’s a vicar. Especially because he’s a vicar. Can’t you see the position you’re putting him in?” And to the explanation “But he said I could come for tea when I wanted. And he gave me a book. And—,” her mother said, “I don’t care what he gave you. I don’t want you to see him. Not in his house. Not alone. Not at all.” When Maggie had felt the tears rise in her eyes, when she let them trickle down her cheeks while she said, “He’s my friend. He says so. You don’t want me to have any friends, do you,” Mummy had grabbed her arm in a grip that meant listen-and-don’t-you-dare-argue-withme-missy, saying, “You stay away from him.” To the petulant question “Why,” she released her and said only, “Anything could happen. Everything does happen. That’s the way of the world, and if you don’t know what I mean, start reading the newspaper.” Those words closed the discussion between them that night. But there were others:

“You were with him today. Don’t lie about it, Maggie, because I know it’s the truth. As from now, you’re gated.”

“That’s not fair!”

“What did he want with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t be sullen with me or you’ll regret it more than having disobeyed in the fi rst place. Is that clear? What did he want with you?”

“Nothing.”

“What did he say? What did he do?”

“We just talked. We ate some Jaffa Cakes. Polly made tea.”

“She was there?”

“Yes. She’s always—”

“In the room?”

“No. But—”

“What did you talk about?”

“Stuff.”

“Such as?”

“School. God.” Mummy made a noise through her nose. Maggie countered it with “He asked did I ever go to London? Do I think I’d like to see it? He said I’d like London. He said he’s been there lots. He even went for a two days’ holiday last week. He says people who get tired of London oughtn’t be alive. Or something like that.”

Mummy didn’t reply. Instead, she watched her hands grating and grating and grating some cheese. So fast she held the block of cheddar that her knuckles were white. But not as white as her face.

Maggie felt comfortable with the advantage indicated by Mummy’s silence, and she pressed it. “He said we might go to London sometime on an excursion with the youth group. He said there’s families in London who’d let us stay so we wouldn’t even have to find a hotel. He said London’s grand and we could go to museums and see the Tower and go to Hyde Park and have lunch at Harrod’s. He said—”

“Go to your room.”

“Mummy!”

“You heard me.”

“But I was only—”

Mummy’s hand stopped her words. It moved in less than an eye-blink to slap her face. Shock and surprise, far more than pain, brought the tears to her eyes. Anger came with them, as did the desire to hurt back in kind.

“He’s my friend,” she cried. “He’s my friend and we talk and you don’t want him to like me. You never want me to have any friends at all. That’s why we move, isn’t it? Over and over. So no one will like me. So I’ll always be alone. And if Daddy—”

“Stop it!”

“I won’t, I won’t! If Daddy fi nds me, I’ll go with him. I will. Wait and see. You won’t be able to stop me, no matter what.”

“I wouldn’t depend on that, Margaret.”

Then Mr. Sage died, just four days later. Who was really responsible? And what was the crime?

“Mummy’s good,” she said in a low voice to Nick. “She didn’t mean anything bad to happen to the vicar.”

“I believe you, Mag,” Nick replied. “But someone round here doesn’t.”

“What if they put her on trial? What if she goes to gaol?”

“I’ll take care of you.”

“Truly?”

“A fact.”

He sounded strong and certain. He was strong and certain. He felt good to be near. She worked one arm round his waist and rested her head on his chest.

“I want us to be like this always,” she said.

“Then that’s the way it’ll be.”

“Really?”

“Really. You’re my number one, Mag. You’re the only one. Don’t worry about your mum.”

She slid her hand from his knee to his thigh. “Cold,” she said and snuggled closer to him. “You cold, Nick?”

“Bit. Yeah.”

“I can warm you nice.”

She could feel his smile. “Bet you can at that.”

“Want me to?”

“Wouldn’t say no.”

“I can. I like to.” She did it just the way he had shown her, her hand making the slow, sinuous friction. She could feel It growing hard in response. “Feel good, Nick?”

“Hmm.”

She rubbed the heel of her hand from base to tip. Then her fingers lightly retraced the pathway. Nick gave a shaky sigh. He stirred.

“What?”

He was reaching in his jacket. There was crackling in his hand. “Got this from one of the blokes,” he said. “We can’t do it any more without a Durex, Mag. It’s crazy. Too risky.”

She kissed his cheek and then his neck. Her fingers sank between his legs where she remembered he felt the most. He lost his breath in a groan.

He lay back on the cot. He said, “We got to use the Durex this time.”

She worked the zip of his blue jeans, worked the jeans below his hips. She slipped off her tights, lay down next to him, and lifted her skirt.

“Mag, we got to use—”

“Not yet, though, Nick. In a minute. All right?”

She draped a leg over his. She began to kiss him. She began to caress and caress and caress It without using her hands.

“That good?” she whispered.

His head was thrown back. His eyes were closed. He moaned for reply.

A minute was more than enough time, she found.

St. James sat in the bedroom’s only chair, an overstuffed wingback. Aside from the bed, it was the most comfortable piece of furniture he’d yet to encounter at Crofters Inn. He drew his dressing gown round him against the pervasive chill descending from the glass of the bedroom’s two skylights and settled himself.

Behind the closed door of the bathroom, he could hear Deborah splashing away in the tub. She usually hummed or sang as she bathed, for some reason invariably choosing either Cole Porter or one of the Gershwins and rendering them with the enthusiasm of an undiscovered Edith Piaf and all the talent of a street hawker. She couldn’t carry a tune if King’s College Choir were trying to assist her. Tonight, however, she bathed in silence.

Normally, he would have welcomed any extended interlude between “Anything Goes” and “Summertime,” especially if he was trying to read in their bedroom while she was paying tribute to old American musicals in the adjoining bath. But tonight he would have preferred to hear her cheerful dissonance rather than listen to her quiet bathing and be forced to consider not only how best to interrupt it but also whether he wanted to do so.

Aside from a brief skirmish over tea, they’d declared and maintained an unspoken truce upon her return from her extended tramp on the moors that morning. It had been easy enough to effect, with Mr. Sage’s death to consider and Lynley’s arrival to anticipate. But now that Lynley was with them and the machinery of an investigation oiled and ready, St. James found that his thoughts kept returning to the unease in his marriage and what he himself was doing to contribute to it.

Where Deborah was all passion, he was all reason. He had liked to believe this basic difference in their natures constituted the bedrock of fire and ice upon which their marriage was soundly fixed. But they had entered an arena in which his ability to reason seemed not only a disadvantage but also the very spark that ignited her refusal to approach confl ict in any way other than pig-headedly. The words about this adoption business, Deborah were enough to send up every one of her defences against him. She moved from anger to accusation to tears with such dizzying speed that he didn’t know where to begin to contend with it or with her. And because of this, when discussions concluded with her banging out of the room, the house, or this morning the hotel, he more often breathed a sigh of relief than did he wonder what he himself could do to approach the problem from another angle. I tried, he would think, when the reality was that he’d gone through the motions without trying much at all.

He rubbed the stiff muscles at the base of his neck. They were always the primary indicator of the amount of stress he was currently refusing to acknowledge. He shifted in the chair. His dressing gown slid partially open with his movement. The cold air climbed his good right leg and forced his attention to his left, which as always felt nothing. He made a disinterested observation of it, an activity in which he’d engaged only rarely in the past several years, but one which he’d obsessively pursued day after day in the years before his marriage.

The object was always the same: to inspect the muscles for their degree of atrophy, intent upon fending off the disintegration that was the eventual by-product of paralysis. He’d regained the use of his left arm over time and through months of teeth-grating physical therapy. But the leg had been a different creature altogether, resistant to every effort at rehabilitation, like a soldier unable to heal from psychic war wounds as if they alone could prove he’d seen action.

“Many of the workings of the brain are still veiled in mystery,” the doctors had said in contemplative explanation of why the use of his arm would return but not that of his leg. “When the head undergoes as serious an injury as yours did, the prognosis for a full recovery has to be couched in the most guarded terms.”

Which was their way of beginning the list of perhapses. Perhaps he would regain complete use of it over time. Perhaps he would walk unassisted one day. Perhaps he would awaken one morning and have sensation restored, flexing muscles, moving toes, and bending the knee. But after twelve years, it wasn’t likely. So he held on to what was left after the fi rst four years of obstinate delusion had been stripped away: the appearance of normality. As long as he could keep atrophy from doing its worst to the muscles, he’d declare himself satisfied and dismiss the dream.

He’d fended off the disintegration with electrical current. The fact that this was an act of vanity was something which he never denied, telling himself that it wasn’t such a sin to want to look like a perfect physical specimen, even if he could no longer be one.

Still, he hated the oddity of his gait, and despite the number of years that he had lived with it, he sometimes still grew momentarily sticky on the palms when exposed to the curiosity in a stranger’s eyes. Different, they said, not quite one of us. And while he was different in the limited fashion described by his disability and he couldn’t deny it, in a stranger’s presence it was always underscored — even for an instant — a hundredfold.

We have certain expectations of people, he thought as he idly evaluated the leg. They’ll be able to walk, to talk, to see, and to hear. If they can’t — or if they do it in a way that defi es our preconceived notions about them — we label them, we shy away from contact, we force them to want to be part of a whole that is in itself without distinction.

The water in the bathroom began to drain, and he glanced at the door, wondering if that’s what was at the root of the diffi culty he and his wife were having. She wanted what was her due, the norm. He had long believed normality had little intrinsic value.

He pushed himself to his feet and listened to her movements. The surge of water told him she had just stood. She would be stepping out of the tub, reaching for a towel, and wrapping it round her. He tapped against the door and opened it.

She was wiping the mirror free of steam, her hair spilling tendrils against her neck from the turban she’d fashioned from a second towel. Her back was to him, and from where he stood, he could see that her back was lightly beaded with moisture. As were her legs, which looked smooth and sleek, softened by the bath oil that filled the room with the scent of lilies.

She looked at his reflection and smiled. Her expression was fond. “I suppose it’s well and truly over between us.”

“Why?”

“You didn’t join me in the bath.”

“You didn’t invite me.”

“I was sending you mental invitations all through dinner. Didn’t you get them?”

“Was that your foot under the table, then? It didn’t feel much like Tommy’s, come to think of it.”

She chuckled and uncapped her lotion. He watched her smooth it against her face. Muscles moved with the circular motion of her fingers, and he made an exercise out of identification: trapezius, levator scapulae, splenius cervicis. It was a form of discipline to keep his mind heading in the direction in which he wished it to go. The prospect of deferring conversation with Deborah till another time was always heightened by the sight of her, freshly out of her bath.

“I’m sorry about bringing the adoption papers,” he said. “We made a bargain and I didn’t keep my part of it. I was hoping to romance you into talking about the problem while we were here. Ascribe it to male ego and forgive me, if you will.”

“Forgiven,” she said. “But there isn’t a problem.”

She capped the lotion and began to towel herself off with rather more energy than the task required. Seeing this, he felt the palm of caution fl atten itself against his chest. He said nothing else until she had slid into her dressing gown and freed her hair from its towel. She was bent from the waist, combing her fi ngers through the tangles in lieu of using a brush, when he spoke again. He chose his words carefully.

“That’s an issue of semantics. What else can we call what’s been happening between us? Disagreement? Dispute? Those don’t seem to hit the mark particularly well.”

“And God knows we can’t stumble in the process of applying scientifi c labels.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“No?” She raised herself and rooted through her make-up case to produce the slender jacket of pills. She popped one from its plastic casing, held it up in presentation to him between her thumb and index finger, and put it into her mouth. She turned on the tap with such decided force that the water hit the bottom of the basin and rose up like spume.

“Deborah.”

She ignored him. She drank the pill down. “There. Now you can set your mind at rest. I’ve just eliminated the problem.”

“Taking the pills or not is going to be your decision, not mine. I can stand over you. I can attempt to force you. I choose not to do so. I choose only to make certain you understand my concern.”

“Which is?”

“Your health.”

“You’ve made that clear for two months now. So I’ve done what you wanted, and I’ve taken my pills. I won’t be getting pregnant. Aren’t you satisfi ed with that?”

Her skin was beginning to mottle, always a primary sign that she was feeling backed into a corner. Her movements were becoming clumsy as well. He didn’t want to be the cause of her panic, but at the same time he wanted to clear the air between them. He knew he was being as obstinate as she was, but still he pressed on. “You make it sound as if we don’t want the same thing.”

“We don’t. Are you asking me to pretend I don’t realise that?” She moved past him into the bedroom where she went to the electric heater and made an adjustment that took too much time and concentration. He followed her, keeping his distance by resuming his place in the wingback chair, a careful three feet away.

“It’s family,” he said. “Children. Two of them. Perhaps three. Isn’t that the goal? Wasn’t that what we wanted?”

“Our children, Simon. Not two that Social Services condescends to give us, but two that we have. That’s what I want.”

“Why?”

She looked up. Her posture stiffened and he realised he had somehow cut to the quick with a question he’d simply not thought to ask before. In their every discussion, he’d been too intent upon pressing home his own points to wonder at her single-minded determination to have a baby no matter the cost.

“Why?” he asked again, leaning towards her, his elbows on his knees. “Can’t you talk about it with me?”

She looked back at the heater, reached for one of its knobs, twisted it fi ercely. “Don’t patronise me. You know I can’t stand that.”

“I’m not patronising you.”

“You are. You psychologise everything. You probe and twist. Why can’t I just feel what I feel and want what I want without having to examine myself under one of your damned microscopes?”

“Deborah…”

“I want to have a baby. Is that some sort of crime?”

“I’m not suggesting that.”

“Does it make me a madwoman?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Am I pathetic because I want that baby to be ours? Because I want it to be the way we send down roots? Because I want to know we created it — you and I? Because I want to be connected to it? Why does this have to be such a crime?”

“It isn’t.”

“I want to be a real mother. I want to experience it. I want the child.”

“It shouldn’t be an act of ego,” he said. “And if it is for you, then I think you’ve mistaken what being a parent is all about.”

Her head turned back to him. Her face was aflame. “That’s a nasty thing to say. I hope you enjoyed it.”

“Oh God, Deborah.” He reached out to her but couldn’t manage to bridge the space between them. “I don’t mean to hurt you.”

“You’ve a fine way of hiding it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes. Well. It’s been said.”

“No. Not everything.” He sought the words with a fair degree of desperation, walking the line between trying not to hurt her further and trying himself to understand. “It seems to me that if being a parent is more than just producing a baby, then you can have that experience with any child — one you have, one you merely take under your wing, or one you adopt. If the act of parenting and not simply producing is indeed what you want in the fi rst place. Is it?”

She didn’t reply. But she also didn’t look away. He felt it safe to go on.

“I think a great many people go into it without the slightest consideration given to what will be asked of them over the course of their children’s lives. I think they go into it without consideration given to anything at all. But seeing an infant through to adulthood and beyond takes its own special kind of toll on a person. And you have to be prepared for that. You have to want the entire experience. Not simply the act of producing a baby because you feel otherwise incomplete without having done so.”

He didn’t need to add the rest: that he’d had the experience of parenting a child to back up his words, that he’d had it with her. She knew the facts of their shared history: Eleven years her senior, he’d made her one of his primary responsibilities from the time he was eighteen years old. Who she was today was in large part due to the influence he’d had in shaping her life. The fact that he’d been a second father of sorts was part blessing in their marriage, and large part curse.

He drew upon the blessing of it now, hoping that she could fight her way through the fear or anger or whatever it was that kept getting in the way of their reaching each other, banking on their shared past to help them fi nd a way into the future.

“Deborah,” he said, “you don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Not to the world. And certainly not to me. Never to me. So if this is all about proving, for God’s sake let it go before it destroys you.”

“It’s not about proving.”

“What then, if not that?”

“It’s just that…I always pictured what it would be like.” Her lower lip trembled. She pressed her fingertips to it. “It would grow inside me all those months. I’d feel it kick and I’d put your hand on my stomach. You’d feel it as well. We’d talk about names and make a nursery ready. And when I delivered, you’d be there with me. It would be just like an act of forever between us, because we’d made this… this little person together. I wanted that.”

“But that’s fiction, Deborah. That’s not the binding. The stuff of life is the binding. This — between us now — this is the binding. And we’re the forever.” He held out his hand once again. This time she took it, although she remained where she was, those careful three feet away. “Come back to me,” he said. “Race up and down the stairs with your knapsack and your cameras. Clutter up the house with your photographs. Play music too loudly.

Leave your clothes on the floor. Talk to me and argue and be curious about everything. Be alive to your fingertips. I want you back.”

Her tears spilled over. “I’ve forgotten the way.”

“I don’t believe that. It’s all there inside you. But somehow — for some reason — the idea of a baby has taken its place. Why, Deborah?”

She lowered her head and shook it. Her fi ngers loosened in his. Their hands dropped to their sides. And he realised that, despite his intentions and all of his words, there was more to be said that his wife wasn’t saying.