Missing Joseph

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

AN EARLY START, INITIATED long before the sun rose above the slopes of Cotes Fell, got Lynley to the outskirts of London by noon. The city’s traffic, which daily seemed to become ever more like a Gordian knot on wheels, added another hour to his travel time. It was just after one when he pulled into Onslow Square and claimed a parking space that was being vacated by a Mercedes-Benz with its driver’s door crumpled like a defeated accordion and a scowling driver harnessed into a neck brace.

He hadn’t phoned her, either from Win-slough or from the Bentley. He’d told himself at first that it was far too early — when, after all, had Helen ever risen before nine in the morning if she wasn’t compelled to do so? — but as the hour grew later, he changed his reasoning to the fact that he didn’t want her to rearrange her schedule just to accommodate him. She wasn’t a woman who liked being at any man’s beck and call, and he wasn’t about to foist that role upon her. Her flat wasn’t that far from his own home, after all. If she’d gone out for the afternoon, he could simply toddle onwards to Eaton Terrace and have lunch there. He flattered himself with thinking how liberated all these considerations were. It was far easier than admitting the more obvious truth: He wanted to see her, but he didn’t want to be disappointed by Helen’s having an engagement that excluded him.

He rang the bell and waited, observing a sky the approximate colour of a ten-pence coin and wondering how long the rain would hold off and if rain in London meant snow in Lancashire. He rang a second time and heard her voice crackle with static from the speaker.

“You’re home,” he said.

“Tommy,” she said and rang him in.

She met him at the door to her fl at. Without makeup, with her hair pulled back from her face and held in place with an ingenious combination of elastic and satin ribbon, she looked like a teenager. Her choice of conversation emphasised the similarity.

“I’ve had the most tremendous row with Daddy this morning,” she said as he kissed her. “I was supposed to meet Sidney and Hortense for lunch — Sid’s discovered an Armenian restaurant in Chiswick that she swears is absolutely heaven on earth, if the combination of Armenian food, Chiswick, and heaven is even possible — but Daddy came to town yesterday on business, spent the night here, and we sank to new depths in our mutual loathing of each other this morning.”

Lynley removed his overcoat. She’d been consoling herself with the rare luxury of a midday fire, he saw. On a coffee table in front of it were spread out the morning’s paper, two cups and saucers, and the remains of a breakfast that appeared to consist mostly of overboiled and half-eaten eggs and deeply charcoaled toast.

“I didn’t know you and your father loathed each other,” he said. “Is this something new? I’d always got the impression you were rather his favourite.”

“Oh, we don’t and I am, how true,” she said. “Which is why it’s so utterly disagreeable of him to have such expectations of me. ‘Now don’t misunderstand me, darling. Your mother and I don’t for a moment begrudge you the use of this flat,’ he says in that sonorous way he has of talking. You know what I mean.”

“Baritone, yes. Does he want you out of the fl at?”

“‘Your grandmother intended it for the family, and as you’re part of the family, we can’t accuse you or ourselves of ignoring her wishes. Nonetheless, when your mother and I reflect upon the manner in which you spend your time,’ and all the etceteras at which he so excels. I hate it when he blackmails me about the fl at.”

“You mean ‘Tell me how uselessly you’ve been spending your days, Helen darling’?” Lynley asked.

“That’s just exactly it.” She went to the coffee table and began folding the newspaper and stacking the dishes. “And it all came about because Caroline wasn’t here to cook his breakfast. She’s back in Cornwall — she’s defi nitely decided to return and isn’t that the decade’s best news, the blame for which, frankly, I lay directly on Denton’s doorstep, Tommy. And because Cybele is such a model of connubial bliss, and because Iris is as happy as a pig in the muck with Montana, cattle, and her cowboy. But mostly it was because his egg wasn’t boiled the way he wanted it and I burnt his toast — well, heavens, how was I supposed to know one had to hang over the toaster like a woman in love? — and that set him off. He’s always been as prickly as a hedgehog in the morning anyway.”

Lynley weeded through the information for the one point on which he had at least a degree of expertise. He couldn’t comment on the marital choices that two of Helen’s sisters had made — Cybele to an Italian industrialist and Iris to a rancher in the United States — but he felt conversant with at least one area of her life. For the past several years, Caroline had acted the role of maid, companion, housekeeper, cook, dresser, and general angel of mercy for Helen. But she was Cornwall born and Cornwall bred and he’d known London would wear uneasily upon her in the long run. “You couldn’t have hoped to hold on to Caroline forever,” he noted. “Her family’s at Howenstow, after all.”

“I could have done if Denton hadn’t seen fi t to break her heart every month or so. I don’t understand why you can’t do something about your own valet. He’s simply unconscionable when it comes to women.”

Lynley followed her into the kitchen. They set the dishes on the work top, and Helen went to the refrigerator. She brought out a carton of lemon yogurt and prised it open with the end of a spoon.

“I was going to ask you to lunch,” he said hastily as she dipped into it and leaned against the work top.

“Were you? Thank you, darling. I couldn’t possibly. I’m afraid I’m too occupied with trying to decide how to make something of my life in a fashion both Daddy and I can live with.” She knelt and rooted through the refrigerator a second time, bringing forth three more cartons. “Strawberry, banana, another lemon,” she said. “Which would you like?”

“None of them, actually. I had visions of smoked salmon followed by veal. Champagne cocktails fore, claret with, brandy aft.”

“Banana, then,” Helen decided for him and handed him the carton and a spoon. “It’s just the very thing. Quite refreshing. You’ll see. I’ll make some fresh coffee.”

Lynley examined the yogurt with a grimace. “Can I actually eat this without feeling like little Miss Muffet?” He wandered to a circular table of birch and glass that fitted neatly into an alcove in the kitchen. At least three days of post lay unopened upon it, along with two fashion magazines with corners turned down to mark pages of interest. He fl ipped through these as Helen poured coffee beans into a grinder and set it to roar. Her choice of reading material was intriguing. She’d been investigating bridal gowns and weddings. Satin versus silk versus linen versus cotton. Flowers in the hair versus hats versus veils. Receptions and breakfasts. The registry offi ce versus the church.

He glanced up to see that she was watching him. She spun away and dealt with the ground coffee intently. But he had seen the momentary confusion in her eyes — when on earth had Helen ever been nonplussed about anything? — and he wondered how much, if any, of her current interest in weddings had to do with him and how much of it had to do with her father’s criticism. She seemed to read his mind.

“He always goes on about Cybele,” she said, “which puts him into a state about me. There she is: mother of four, wife of one, the grande dame of Milano, patroness of the arts, on the board of the opera, the head of the museum of modern art, chairwoman of every committee known to mankind. And she speaks Italian like a native. What a wretched sort of oldest sister she is. She could at least have had the decency to be miserable. Or to be married to a lout. But no, Carlo adores her, worships her, calls her his fragile little English rose.” Helen slammed the glass carafe under the spout of the coffee maker. “Cybele’s as fragile as a horse and he knows it.”

She opened a cupboard and began pulling out an assortment of tins, jars, and cartons, which she carried to the table. Cheese biscuits took up position on a plate with a wedge of brie. Olives and sweet pickles went into a bowl. To these, she added a splash of cocktail onions.

She finished off the array with a hunk of salami and a cutting board.

“Lunch,” she said and sat down opposite him as the coffee brewed.

“Eclectic gastronomy,” he noted. “What could I have been thinking of, suggesting smoked salmon and veal?”

Lady Helen cut herself some brie and smoothed it onto a biscuit. “He sees no need for me to have a career — honestly, what a Victorian Daddy is — but he thinks I ought to be doing something useful.”

“You are.” Lynley tucked into his banana yogurt and tried to think of it as something one could chew rather than simply gum and swallow. “What about everything you do for Simon when he gets swamped?”

“That’s a particularly sore spot with Daddy. What on earth is one of his daughters doing dusting and photographing latent fi ngerprints, placing hairs on microscope slides, typing up reports about decomposing flesh? My God, is this the sort of life he expected the fruit of his loins to be living? Is this what he sent me to finishing school for? To spend the rest of my days — intermittently, of course, I don’t pretend to be doing anything far removed from frivolity on a regular basis — in a laboratory? If I were a man, at least I could fritter away my time at the club. He’d approve of that. It’s what he spent most of his youth doing, after all.”

Lynley raised an eyebrow. “I seem to recall your father chairing three or four rather successful investment corporations. I seem to recall that he still chairs one.”

“Oh, don’t remind me. He spent the morning doing so, when he wasn’t listing the charitable organisations to which I ought to be giving my time. Really, Tommy, sometimes I think he and his attitudes stepped right out of a Jane Austen novel.”

Lynley fingered the magazine he’d been looking through. “There are, of course, other ways to appease him, aside from giving your time to charity. Not that he needs to be appeased, of course, but supposing you wish to. You might, for instance, give your time to something else he considered worthwhile.”

“Naturally. There’s fund raising for medical research, home visits to the elderly, working on one hot line or another. I know I ought to do something with myself. And I keep intending to, but things just get in the way.”

“I wasn’t talking about becoming a volunteer.”

She paused in the act of slicing herself a piece of salami. She placed the knife down, wiped her fingers on a peach linen napkin, and didn’t respond.

“Think how many birds the single stone of marriage would kill, Helen. This flat could go back to the use of your whole family.”

“They can come here any time as it is. They know that.”

“You could declare yourself too busy with your husband’s egocentric interests to be able to live a life of social and cultural responsibility as Cybele does.”

“I need to start being more involved in things, anyway. Daddy’s right about that, although I hate to admit it.”

“And once you had children, you could use their needs as a shield against whatever judgement your father might cast upon you for inactivity. Not that he’d cast any judgements at that point. He’d be too pleased.”

“About what?”

“About having you…settled, I suppose.”

“Settled?” Lady Helen speared a sweet pickle and chewed it thoughtfully, watching him.

“My God, don’t tell me you’re really that pro

vincial.”

“I didn’t intend—”

“You can’t honestly believe that a woman’s place is to be settled, Tommy. Or,” she asked shrewdly, “is it just my place?”

“No. Sorry. It was a poor choice of words.”

“Choose again, then.”

He placed his yogurt carton on the table. Its contents had tasted fairly good for the first few spoonfuls, but they didn’t wear well on the palate after that. “We’re dancing round the issue and we may as well stop. Your father knows that I want to marry you, Helen.”

“Yes. What of it?”

He crossed his legs, uncrossed them. He lifted his hand to loosen the knot of his tie, only to discover and recall that he wasn’t wearing one. He sighed. “Damn it all. Nothing of it. It merely seems to me that marriage between us wouldn’t be such a miserable thing.”

“And God knows that it would please Daddy well enough.”

He felt stung by her sarcasm and answered in kind. “I have no idea about pleasing your father, but there are—”

“You used the word pleased less than a minute ago. Or have you conveniently forgotten?”

“But there are moments — and frankly this isn’t turning out to be one of them — when I’m actually blind enough to think that it might please me.”

She looked stung in turn. She sat back in her chair. They stared at each other. The telephone, mercifully, began to ring.

“Let it go,” he said. “We need to thrash this out, and we need to do it now.”

“I don’t think so.” She got up. The phone was on the work top, next to the coffee maker. She poured them each a cup as she spoke to her caller, saying, “What a good guess. He’s sitting right here in my kitchen, eating salami and yogurt…” She laughed. “Truro? Well, I hope you’re running his credit cards to the limit…No, here he is…Really, Barbara, don’t give it a thought. We weren’t discussing anything more earthshaking than the merits of sweet pickles over dill.”

She had a way of knowing when he felt most betrayed by her levity, so Lynley wasn’t surprised when Helen didn’t meet his eyes as she handed him the phone and said, unnecessarily, “It’s Sergeant Havers. For you.”

He caught her fingers under his when he took the receiver. He didn’t release her until she looked at him. And even then, he said nothing, because, damn it all, she was at fault and he wasn’t going to apologise for lashing out when she drove him to it.

When he said hello to his sergeant, he realised that Havers must have heard more in his voice than he intended to convey, for she launched into her report without prefatory remarks of any kind, saying, “You’ll be chuffed to know that the C of E take police work dead to heart down here in Truro. The bishop’s secretary kindly gave me an appointment to see him a week from tomorrow, thank you very much. Busy as a bee in the roses, the bishop, if his secretary’s to be believed.” She blew out a long, loud breath. She’d be smoking, as usual. “And you should see the digs these two blokes live in. Sodding bloody hell. Remind me to hold on to my money the next time the collection plate is passed round in church. They should be supporting me, not vice versa.”

“So it’s been a waste.” Lynley watched Helen return to the table where she sat and began unfolding the corners of the magazine pages she’d previously folded down. She was pressing each one deliberately flat and smoothing it with her fingers. She wanted him to see the activity. He knew that as well as he knew her. Realising this, he felt the momentary grip of an anger so irrationally powerful that he wanted to kick the table through the wall.

Havers was saying, “So evidently the term ‘boating accident’ was a euphemism.”

Lynley tore his eyes from Helen. “What?”

“Haven’t you been listening?” Havers asked. “Never mind. Don’t answer. When did you tune in?”

“With the boating accident.”

“Right.” She began again.

Once she had realised that the bishop of Truro wasn’t going to be of help, she’d gone to the newspaper office, where she’d spent the morning reading back issues. There she discovered that the boating accident that had claimed the life of Robin Sage’s wife—

“Her name was Susanna, by the way.”

— hadn’t occurred on a boat in the first place and hadn’t been deemed an accident in the second.

“It was the ferry that runs from Plymouth to Roscoff,” Havers said. “And it was suicide, according to the newspaper.”

Havers sketched in the story with the details she’d gathered from her perusal of the newspaper accounts. The Sages had been making a crossing in bad weather, on their way to begin a two-week holiday in France. After a meal midway through the crossing—

“It’s a six-hour ride, you know.”

— Susanna had gone off to the Ladies’ while her husband returned to the lounge with his book. It was more than an hour before he realised that she ought to have turned up, but as she’d been feeling a bit low, he assumed she wanted some time alone.

“He said he had a tendency to hover when she was in a mood,” Havers explained. “And he wanted to give her some space. My words, not his.”

According to the information Havers had been able to gather, Robin Sage had left the lounge two or three times during the remainder of the crossing, to stretch his legs, to get a drink, to purchase a chocolate bar, but not to look for his wife about whose continued absence, it seemed, he did not appear to be worried. When they docked in France, he went below to the car, assuming that she would be there waiting. When she failed to show up as the passengers began to leave, he set about looking for her.

“He didn’t raise the alarm until he noticed that her handbag was on the front passenger seat of the car,” Havers said. “There was a note inside. Here, let me…” Lynley heard the noise of pages turning. “It said, ‘Robin, I’m sorry. I can’t find the light.’ There was no name but the writing was hers.”

“Not much of a suicide note,” Lynley remarked.

“You’re not the only one who thought that,” Havers said.

The crossing had been made in bad weather after all. It was dark for the latter half of it. It was cold, as well, so no one had been on deck to see a woman throw herself from the railing.

“Or be thrown?” Lynley asked.

Havers agreed obliquely. “The truth is that it could have been suicide, but it could have been something else as well. Which is, apparently, what the rozzers on both sides of the Channel thought. Sage was put through the wringer twice. He came up clean. Or as clean as he could because no one witnessed anything at all, including Sage’s trip to the bar or his saunters to stretch his legs.”

“And the wife couldn’t simply have slipped off the boat when it docked?” Lynley asked.

“An international crossing, Inspector. Her passport was in her handbag, along with her money, her driving licence, credit cards, and the whole bloody bit. She couldn’t have got off the boat at either end. And they searched every inch of it in France and in England.”

“What about the body? Where was she found? Who identifi ed her?”

“I don’t know yet, but I’m working that angle. D’you want to place any bets?”

“Sage liked to talk about the woman taken in adultery,” Lynley said, more to himself than to her.

“And since there were no stones handy on the boat, he gave her the old heave-ho as her just deserts?”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, whatever happened, they’re sleeping in the bosom of Jesus right now. In the graveyard in Tresillian. They all are, in fact. I went to check.”

“They all are?”

“Susanna, Sage, and the kid. All of them. Lying in a tidy little row.”

“The kid?”

“Yeah. The kid. Joseph. Their son.”

Lynley frowned, listening to his sergeant and watching Helen. The former was supplying the rest of the details. The latter was playing a knife across the wedge of brie in an aimless pattern, her magazines closed and set to one side.

“He was three months old when he died,” Havers said. “And then her death…let me see…here it is. She died six months later. That supports the suicide theory, doesn’t it? She’d have been depressed as hell, I’d guess, to have her baby die. And how did she put it? She couldn’t find the light.”

“What was his cause of death?”

“Don’t know.”

“Find out.”

“Right.” She rustled some papers, jotting down instructions in her notebook, probably. She said suddenly, “Hell, Inspector, he was three months old. D’you think this bloke Sage might’ve…or even the wife…”

“I don’t know, Sergeant.” On the other end of the line, he heard the brief, distinct snap of a match being struck. She was lighting up again. He longed to do so himself. He said, “Dig a little deeper on Susanna as well. See if you can find anything at all about her relationship to Juliet Spence.”

“Spence…Got it.” More paper crinkled. “I’ve made copies of the newspaper articles for you. They’re not much, but shall I fax them to the Yard?”

“For what they’re worth, I suppose so.” It seemed little enough.

“Right. Well.” He could hear her drawing on the cigarette. “Inspector…” The word was not so much spoken as drawled.

“What?”

“Soldier on up there. You know. Helen.”

Easy to say, he thought as he replaced the phone. He returned to the table, saw that Helen had cross-hatched the entire top of the brie. She’d given up eating her yogurt, and the salami was still only partially cut. At the moment, she was using a fork to roll a black olive round her plate. Her expression was disconsolate. He felt oddly moved to compassion.

“I expect your father wouldn’t approve of your playing with your food, either,” he said quietly.

“No. Cybele never plays with her food. And Iris never eats, as far as I know.”

He sat and looked without hunger at the brie he’d spread on a biscuit. He picked it up, put it down, reached for the pickle bowl, pushed it away.

He finally said, “Right. I’ll be off. I must go out to—” just as she said quickly, “I’m so sorry, Tommy. I don’t mean to keep hurting you. I don’t know what comes over me or why I do it.”

He said, “I push you. We push each other.”

She took the ribboned elastic from her hair and played the elastic round her hand. She said, “I think I’m looking for evidence, and when it isn’t there, I create it from nothing.”

“This is a relationship, Helen, not a court of law. What are you trying to prove?”

“Unworthiness.”

“I see. Mine.” He tried to sound objective but knew he didn’t manage it.

She looked up. Her eyes were dry, but her skin was blotched. “Yours. Yes. Because God knows I already feel my own.”

He reached for the ribbon she’d twisted in her hands. She’d bound them loosely together, and he unwove the binding. “If you’re waiting for me to end things between us, it’s not going to happen. So you’ll have to do the ending yourself.”

“I can, if you ask me.”

“I don’t intend to.”

“It would be so much easier.”

“Yes. It would. But only at first.” He stood. “I must go out to Kent for the afternoon. Will you have dinner with me?” He smiled. “Will you have breakfast as well?”

“Love-making isn’t what I’m avoiding, Tommy.”

“No,” he agreed. “Making love is easy enough. It’s living with it that’s the devil.”

Lynley pulled into the car park of the train station in Sevenoaks just as the fi rst raindrops hit the windscreen of the Bentley. He fumbled in his overcoat pocket for the directions they’d found among the vicar’s belongings in Lancashire.

They were simple enough, taking him to the high street for a brief jaunt before heading out of the town altogether. A few turns past the point where the prehurricane, eponymous oaks of the town had once stood, and he was in the country. Down two more lanes and up a slight rise, and he found himself following a short drive labelled Wealdon Oast. This led to a house, with white tile cladding above and brick below, decorated by the distinctive, bent-chimneyed oast roundel attached to the building at its north end. The house had a view of Sevenoaks to the west and a mixture of farmland and woodland to the south. The land and the trees were winter-drab now, but the rest of the year, they would provide an ever-changing palette of colour.

As he parked between a Sierra and a Metro, Lynley wondered if Robin Sage had walked this distance out from the town. He wouldn’t have driven all the way from Lancashire, and the set of directions seemed to indicate two facts: He had arrived by train with no intention of taking a taxi from the station, and no one had met him or intended to meet him, either at the station or somewhere in the town.

A wooden sign, neatly lettered in yellow and affixed to the left of the front door, identifi ed the oast house not as a home but as a place of business. Gitterman Temps, it read. And beneath that in smaller letters of yellow, Katherine Gitterman, Prop.

Kate, Lynley thought. Another answer was emerging to the questions that had arisen from Sage’s engagement diary and the odd bits carton.

A young woman looked up from a reception desk as Lynley entered the house. What had once been the sitting room was now an offi ce with ivory walls, green carpeting, and modern oak furniture that smelled faintly of lemon oil. The girl nodded at him, as she said into the thin wire headpiece of a telephone receiver,

“I can let you have Sandy again, Mr. Coatsworth. She got on well with your staff and her skills…Well, yes, she’s the one with the braces on her teeth.” She rolled her eyes at Lynley. They were, he noted, skilfully shaded with an aquamarine shadow that exactly matched the jumper she wore. “Yes, of course, Mr. Coatsworth. Let me see…” On her desk, which was otherwise free of clutter, lay six manila folders. She opened the first. “It’s no trouble, Mr. Coatsworth. Really. Please, don’t give it a thought.” She riffled through the second. “You’ve not tried Joy, have you?…No, she doesn’t wear braces. And she types…let me see…”

Lynley glanced to his left through the door that opened into the roundel. Into its circular wall a half-dozen neat cubicles had been built. At two of them, girls were pecking at electric typewriters while a timer ticked to one side. In a third, a young man worked upon a word processor, shaking his head at the screen and saying, “Jesus, this is screwed for sure. I’ll bet a hundred quid it was another power surge.” He leaned towards the floor and rattled through a repair case filled with circuit boards and arcane equipment. “Disk crash city,” he murmured. “I sure as hell hope she was backing up.”

“May I help you, sir?”

Lynley swung back to the reception desk. Aquamarine held a pencil poised as if to take notes. She’d cleared the desk of the folders and replaced them with a yellow legal pad. Behind her, from a vase on a glistening credenza, a single petal fell from a spray of hot-house roses. Lynley expected a harried custodian with dustpan in hand to appear from nowhere and whisk the offending bit of fl oribunda from sight.

“I’m looking for Katherine Gitterman,” he said, and produced his warrant card. “Scotland Yard CID.”

“You want Kate?” The young woman’s incredulity apparently prevented her from giving his warrant card any attention at all. “Kate?”

“Is she available?”

Eyes still on him, she nodded, lifted a finger to keep him in place, and punched in three numbers on the telephone. After a brief and muffled conversation which she conducted with her chair swivelled in the direction of the credenza, she led him past a second desk on which a maroon leather blotter held the day’s post, arranged artfully into a fan with a letter opener acting the part of its handle. She opened the door beyond the desk and gestured towards a stairway.

“Up there,” she said and added with a smile, “You’ve put a spanner in her day. She doesn’t much like surprises.”

Kate Gitterman met him at the top of the stairs, a tall woman dressed in a tailored, plaid flannel dressing gown whose belt was tied in a perfectly symmetrical bow. The predominant colour of the garment was the same green as the carpeting, and she wore beneath it pyjamas of an identical shade.

“Flu,” she said. “I’m battling the last of it. I hope you don’t mind.” She didn’t give him the opportunity to respond. “I’ll see you in here.”

She led him down a narrow corridor that gave way to the sitting room of a modern, well-appointed flat. A kettle was whistling as they entered and with a “Just a moment, please,” she left him. The soles of her slim leather slippers clattered against the linoleum as she moved about the kitchen.

Lynley glanced round the sitting room. Like the offices below, it was compulsively neat, with shelves, racks, and holders in which every possession appeared to have its designated place. The pillows on the sofa and on the armchairs were poised at identical angles. A small Persian rug before the fireplace lay centred perfectly. The fireplace itself burned neither wood nor coal but a pyramid of artifi cial nuggets that were glowing in a semblance of embers.

He was reading the titles of her video-tapes — lined up like guardsmen beneath a television — when she returned.

“I like to stay fit,” she said, in apparent explanation of the fact that beyond a copy of Olivier’s Wuthering Heights, the cassettes all contained exercise tapes, featuring one fi lm actress or another.

He could see that fitness was approximately as important to her as neatness, for aside from the fact that she was herself slender, solid, and athletic looking, the room’s only photograph was a framed, poster-sized enlargement of her running in a race with the number 194 on her chest. She was wearing a red headband and sweating profusely, but she’d managed a dazzling smile for the camera.

“My first marathon,” she said. “Everyone’s first is rather special.”

“I’d imagine that to be the case.”

“Yes. Well.” She brushed her thumb and middle finger through her hair. Light brown carefully streaked with blonde, it was cut quite short and blown back from her face in a fashionable style that suggested frequent trips to a hairdresser who wielded scissors and colour with equal skill. From the lining round her eyes and in the room’s daylight, despite the rain that was beginning to streak the fl at’s casement windows, Lynley would have placed her in mid to late forties. But he imagined that dressed for business or pleasure, made up, and seen in the forgiving artificial light of one restaurant or another, she looked at least ten years younger.

She was holding a mug from which steam rose aromatically. “Chicken broth,” she said. “I suppose I should offer you something, but I’m not well versed in how one behaves when the police come to call. And you are the police?”

He offered her his warrant card. Unlike the receptionist below, she studied it before handing it back.

“I hope this isn’t about one of my girls.” She walked to the sofa and sat on the edge with her mug of chicken broth balanced on her left knee. She had, he saw, the shoulders of a swimmer and the unbending posture of a Victorian woman cinched into a corset. “I check into their backgrounds thoroughly when they first apply. No one gets into my fi les without at least three references. If they get a bad report from more than two of their employers, I let them go. So I never have trouble. Never.”

Lynley joined her, sitting in one of the armchairs. He said, “I’ve come about a man called Robin Sage. He had the directions to this oast house among his belongings and a reference to Kate in his engagement diary. Do you know him? Did he come to see you?”

“Robin? Yes.”

“When?”

She drew her eyebrows together. “I don’t recall exactly. It was sometime in the autumn. Perhaps late September?”

“The eleventh of October?”

“It could have been. Shall I check that for you?”

“Did he have an appointment?”

“One could call it that. Why? Has he got into trouble?”

“He’s dead.”

She adjusted her grip on the mug slightly, but that was the only reaction that Lynley could read. “This an investigation?”

“The circumstances were rather irregular.” He waited for her to do the normal thing, to ask what the circumstances were. When she didn’t, he said, “Sage lived in Lancashire. May I take it that he didn’t come to see you about hiring a temporary employee?”

She sipped her chicken bouillon. “He came to talk about Susanna.”

“His wife.”

“My sister.” She pulled a square of white linen from her pocket, dabbed it against the corners of her mouth, and replaced it neatly. “I hadn’t seen or heard a word from him since the day of her funeral. He wasn’t exactly welcome here. Not after everything that had happened.”

“Between him and his wife.”

“And the baby. That dreadful business about Joseph.”

“He was an infant when he died, as I understand.”

“Just three months. It was a cot death. Susanna went to get him up one morning, thinking that he’d actually slept through the night for the first time. He’d been dead for hours. He was stiff with rigor. She broke three of his ribs between the kiss of life and trying to give him CPR. There was an investigation, of course. And there were questions of abuse when the word got out about his ribs.”

“Police questions?” Lynley asked in some surprise. “If the bones were broken after death—”

“They would have known. I’m aware of that. It wasn’t the police. Naturally, they questioned her, but once they had the pathologist’s report, they were satisfied. Still, there were whispers in the community. And Susanna was in an exposed position.”

Kate got up and walked to the window where she pushed back the curtains. The rain was pattering against the glass. She said contemplatively but without much ferocity, “I blamed him. I still do. But Susanna only blamed herself.”

“I’d think that’s a fairly normal reaction.”

“Normal?” Kate laughed softly. “There was nothing normal about her situation.”

Lynley waited without reply or question. The rain snaked in rivulets against the window-panes. A telephone rang in the office below.

“Joseph slept in their bedroom the fi rst two months.”

“Hardly abnormal.”

She seemed not to hear. “Then Robin insisted he be given a room of his own. Susanna wanted him near her, but she cooperated with Robin. That was her way. And he was very convincing.”

“About what?”

“He kept insisting that a child could be irrevocably damaged by witnessing at any age, even in infancy, what Robin in his infi nite wisdom called ‘the primal scene’ between his parents.” Kate turned from the window and sipped more broth. “Robin refused to have sex as long as the baby was in the room. When Susanna wanted to… resume relations, she had to go along with Robin’s wishes. But I suppose you can imagine what little Joseph’s death did to any future primal scenes between them.”

The marriage quickly fell apart, she said. Robin flung himself into his work as a means of distraction. Susanna drifted into depression.

“I was living and working in London at the time,” Kate said, “so I had her come to stay with me. I had her go to galleries. I gave her books to identify the birds in the parks. I mapped out city walks and had her take one each day. Someone had to do something, after

all. I tried.”

“To…?”

“To get her back into life. What do you think? She was wallowing in grief. She was luxuriating in guilt and self-loathing. It wasn’t healthy. And Robin wasn’t helping matters at all.”

“He’d have been feeling his own grief, I dare say.”

“She wouldn’t put it behind her. Every day I’d come home and there she would be, sitting on the bed, holding the baby’s picture against her breast, wanting to talk and relive it all. Day after day. As if talking about it would have done any good.” Kate returned to the sofa and placed her mug on a round of mosaic that served as a mat on the side table. “She was torturing herself. She wouldn’t let it go. I told her she had to. She was young. She’d have another baby, after all. Joseph was dead. He was gone. He was buried. And if she didn’t snap out of it and take care of herself, she’d be buried with him.”

“Which she eventually was.”

“I blame him for that. With his primal scenes and his miserable belief in God’s judgement in our lives. That’s what he told her, you know. That Joseph’s death was the hand of God at work. What a beastly man. Susanna didn’t need to hear that sort of rubbish. She didn’t need to believe she was being punished. And for what? For what?”

Kate pulled out her handkerchief a second time. She pressed it against her forehead although she didn’t appear to be perspiring.

“Sorry,” she said. “There are some things in life that don’t bear remembering.”

“Is that why Robin Sage came to see you? To share memories?”

“He was suddenly interested in her,” she said. “He hadn’t been the least involved in her life in the six months that led up to her death. But suddenly he cared. What did she do while she was with you, he wanted to know. Where did she go? What did she talk about? How did she act? Whom did she meet?” She chuckled bitterly. “After all these years. I wanted to smack his mournful little face. He’d been eager enough to see her buried.”

“What do you mean?”

“He kept identifying bodies washed up on the coast. There were two or three of them he said were Susanna. The wrong height, the wrong hair colour when there was hair left on them at all, the wrong weight. It didn’t matter. He was in such a nasty rush about it all.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought at first he had some woman lined up to marry and he needed to have Susanna declared officially dead in order to get on with it.”

“But he didn’t marry.”

“He didn’t. I assume the woman gave him the brush-off, whoever she was.”

“Does the name Juliet Spence mean anything to you? Did he mention a woman called Juliet Spence when he was here? Did Susanna ever mention Juliet Spence?”

She shook her head. “Why?”

“She poisoned Robin Sage. Last month in Lancashire.”

Kate raised a hand as if to touch it to her perfectly brushed hair. She dropped it, however, before it made contact. Her eyes grew momentarily distant. “How odd. I fi nd I’m glad of the fact.”

Lynley wasn’t surprised. “Did your sister ever mention any other men when she was staying with you? Did she see other men once things began to go wrong in her marriage? Could her husband have discovered that?”

“She didn’t talk about men. She talked only about babies.”

“There is, of course, an unavoidable connection between the two.”

“I’ve always found that a rather unfortunate quirk in our species. Everyone pants towards orgasm without pausing to realise that it’s merely a biological trap designed for the purpose of reproduction. What utter nonsense.”

“People get involved with one another. They pursue intimacy along with love.”

“More fools, they,” Kate said.

Lynley got to his feet. Kate moved behind him and made an adjustment to the position of the pillow on his chair. She brushed her fi ngers across the chair’s back.

He watched her, wondering what it had been like for her sister. Grief calls for acceptance and understanding. No doubt she’d felt herself cut off from mankind.

He said, “Have you any idea why Robin Sage might have telephoned Social Services in London?”

Kate picked a hair from the lapel of her dressing gown. “He’d have been looking for me, no doubt.”

“You supply them with temps?”

“No. I’ve had this business only eight years. Before that, I worked for Social Services. He’d have phoned there fi rst.”

“But your name was in his diary before his calls or visits to Social Services. Why would that be?”

“I couldn’t say. Perhaps he wanted to go through Susanna’s paperwork in the trip down memory lane he’d been taking. Social Services in Truro would have been involved when the baby died. Perhaps he was tracking her paperwork to London.”

“Why?”

“To read it? To set the record straight?”

“To discover if Social Services knew what someone else claimed to know?”

“About Joseph’s death?”

“Is it a possibility?”

She folded her arms beneath her breasts. “I can’t see how. If there had been something suspicious about his death, it would have been acted upon, Inspector.”

“Perhaps it was something borderline, something that could have been interpreted either way.”

“But why would he take a sudden interest in that now? From the moment Joseph died, Robin showed no interest in anything other than his ministry. ‘We’ll get through this by the grace of God,’ he told Susanna.” Kate’s lips pressed into a line of distaste. “Frankly, I wouldn’t have blamed her in the least if she’d had the luck to find someone else. Just to forget about Robin for a few hours would have been heaven.”

“Could she have done? Did you get a sense of that?”

“Not from her conversation. When she wasn’t talking about Joseph, she was trying to get me to talk about my cases. It was just another way to punish herself.”

“You were a social worker, then. I’d thought—” He gestured in the general direction of the stairway.

“That I was a secretary. No. I had much larger aspirations. I once believed I could actually help people. Change lives. Make things better. What an amusing laugh. Ten years in Social Services took care of that.”

“What sort of work did you do?”

“Mothers and infants,” she said. “Home visits. And the more I did it, the more I understood what a myth our culture has created about childbirth, depicting it as woman’s highest purpose fulfilled. What contemptible rot, all of it generated by men. Most of the women I saw were utterly miserable when they weren’t too uneducated or too impossibly ignorant to be able to recognise the extent of their plight.”

“But your sister believed in the myth.”

“She did. And it killed her, Inspector.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

IT’S THE NASTY LITTLE FACT that he kept misidentifying bodies,” Lynley said. He nodded to the offi cer on duty at the kiosk, flashed his identification, and descended the ramp into the underground car park of New Scotland Yard. “Why keep saying defi nitively that each one was his wife? Why not say he wasn’t certain? It didn’t matter, after all. A postmortem would have been performed on the bodies in any case. And he must have known that.”

“It sounds like shades of Max de Winter to me,” Helen replied.

Lynley pulled into a space conveniently close to the lift now that the day was long over and the vast clerical staff was gone. He thought about the idea. “We’re meant to believe she deserved to die,” he mused.

“Susanna Sage?”

He got out of the car and opened her door. “Rebecca,” he said. “She was evil, lewd, lubricious, lascivious—”

“Just the sort of person one longs to have at a dinner party to liven things up.”

“—and she pushed him into killing her by telling him a lie.”

“Did she? I can’t remember the whole story.”

Lynley took her arm and led her towards the lift. He rang for it. They waited as the machinery creaked and groaned. “She had cancer. She wanted to commit suicide, but she lacked the courage to kill herself. So, because she hated him, she pushed him into doing it for her, destroying him and herself at the same time. And when the deed was done and he’d sunk her boat in the Manderley cove, he had to wait until a female body washed ashore somewhere along the coast so that he could identify it as Rebecca, gone missing in a storm.”

“Poor thing.”

“Which one?”

Lady Helen tapped her cheek. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? We’re meant to feel compassion for someone, but it does leave one a bit tarnished, doesn’t it, to be siding with the murderer?”

“Rebecca was wanton, entirely without conscience. We’re meant to think it was justifi able homicide.”

“And was it? Is it ever?”

“That’s the question,” he said.

They took the lift in silence. The rain had begun falling in earnest on his drive back into the city. A snarl of traffic in Blackheath had made him despair of ever getting back across the Thames. But he’d managed to reach Onslow Square by seven, they’d made it to Green’s for dinner by a quarter past eight, and now at twenty minutes before eleven, they were heading up to his office for a look at whatever Sergeant Havers had managed to fax from Truro.

They were operating under an undeclared ceasefire. They’d discussed the weather, his sister’s decision to sell her land and her sheep in West Yorkshire and return to the south to be near his mother, a curious revival of Heartbreak House that Shavians were denouncing and critics were beatifying, and a Winslow Homer exhibition that was coming to London. He could sense her need to hold him at a distance, and he cooperated without much liking it. Helen’s timeline for opening her heart to him wasn’t what he would like it to be. But he knew that he stood a better chance of winning her confidence through patience rather than confrontation.

The lift doors slid open. Even in CID, the night staff was significantly smaller than the day, so the floor seemed deserted. But two of Lynley’s fellow DI’s were standing in the doorway to one of their offices, drinking from plastic cups, smoking, and talking about the latest government minister to get caught with his trousers down behind King’s Cross Station.

“There he was, poking some tart while the country goes to hell,” Phillip Hale was remarking blackly. “What is it with these blokes, I ask you?”

John Stewart flicked cigarette ash onto the fl oor. “Stuffing some dolly in a leather skirt’s more immediately gratifying than solving a fiscal crisis, I’d guess.”

“But this wasn’t a call girl. This was a ten-quid whore. Good Christ, you saw her.”

“I’ve also seen his wife.”

The two men laughed. Lynley glanced at Helen. Her face was unreadable. He guided her past his colleagues with a nod.

“Aren’t you on holiday?” Hale called after them.

“We’re in Greece,” Lynley said.

In his office, he waited for her reaction as he took off his coat and hung it on the back of the door. But she said nothing about the brief exchange they’d heard. Instead, she went back to their previous topic, although, when he evaluated it, he realised that she wasn’t digressing too far thematically from her central concern.

“Do you think Robin Sage killed her, Tommy?”

“It was night, a rough crossing. There were no witnesses who saw his wife throw herself from the ferry, nor was there anyone who came forward to support his claim of going to the bar for a drink when he left the lounge.”

“But a priest? Not only to do it in the fi rst place but then to manage carrying on with his ministry afterwards?”

“He didn’t carry on, exactly. He left his position in Truro directly she died. He took up a different sort of ministry as well. And he took it up in places where he wasn’t known to the congregation.”

“So if he had something to hide from them, they wouldn’t necessarily recognise that fact from a changed behaviour since they didn’t know him in the fi rst place?”

“Possibly.”

“But why kill her? What would have been his motive? Jealousy? Anger? Revenge? An inheritance?”

Lynley reached for the telephone. “There seem to be three possibilities. They’d lost their only child six months before.”

“But you said it was a cot death.”

“He may have held her responsible. Or he may have been involved with another woman and knew as a priest he couldn’t divorce and expect his career to go anywhere.”

“Or she may have been involved with another man and he found out about it and acted in rage?”

“Or the final alternative: The truth is what it appears to be, a suicide combined with an honest mistake made by a grieving widower in misidentifying bodies. But no conjecture satisfactorily explains why he went to see Susanna’s sister in October. And where in the maze does Juliet Spence fit?” He picked up the phone. “You know where the fax is, don’t you, Helen? Would you see if Havers sent the newspaper articles?”

She left to do so, and he phoned Crofters Inn.

“I left a message with Denton,” St. James told him when Dora Wragg rang through to their room. “He said he hadn’t seen a hair of you all day and hadn’t expected to. I imagine about now he’s phoning every hospital between London and Manchester, thinking you’ve had a crash somewhere.”

“I’ll check in. How was Aspatria?”

St. James gave him the facts they’d managed to gather during their day in Cumbria, where, he informed Lynley, the snow had begun falling at noon and followed them all the way back to Lancashire.

Prior to moving to Winslough, Juliet Spence had been employed as a caretaker at Sewart House, a large estate some four miles outside of Aspatria. Like Cotes Hall, it was in an isolated location and, at the time, inhabited only during August when the son of the owner came up from London with his family for an extended holiday.

“Was she sacked for some reason?” Lynley asked.

Not at all, St. James told him. The house was deeded over to the National Trust when the owner died. The Trust asked Juliet Spence to stay on once they’d opened the grounds and the buildings for public viewing. She moved on to Winslough instead.

“Any problems while she was in Aspatria?”

“None. I spoke to the owner’s son, and he had nothing but unqualified praise for her and great affection for Maggie.”

“So there’s nothing,” Lynley mused.

“Not quite. Deborah and I have been working the phones for you most of the day.”

Before Aspatria, St. James said, she’d worked in Northumberland, outside the small village of Holystone. There, she’d been a combination of housekeeper and companion to an elderly invalid called Mrs. Soames-West, who lived alone in a small Georgian mansion to the north of the village.

“Mrs. Soames-West had no family in England,” St. James said. “And she didn’t sound as if she’d had a visitor in years. But she thought a great deal of Juliet Spence, hated to lose her, and wanted to be remembered to her.”

“Why did the Spence woman leave?”

“She gave no reason. Just that she’d found another job and she thought it was time.”

“How long had she been there?”

“Two years there. Two years in Aspatria.”

“And before that?” Lynley glanced up as Helen returned with at least a metre’s worth of fax hanging over her arm. She handed it to him. He laid it on the desk.

“Two years on Tiree.”

“The Hebrides?”

“Yes. And before that Benbecula. You’re seeing the pattern, I take it?”

He was. Each location was more remote than the last. At this rate, he expected her fi rst place of employment to be Iceland.

“That’s where the trail went cold,” St. James said. “She worked in a small guesthouse on Benbecula, but no one there could tell me where she’d been employed before that.”

“Curious.”

“Considering how long ago it was, I can’t say there’s great cause for suspicion in the fact. On the other hand, her life-style itself sounds rather suspect to me, but I suppose I’m more tied to home and hearth than most.”

Helen sat down in the chair facing Lynley’s desk. He’d turned on the desk lamp rather than the fluorescent lights overhead, so she was partially in shadow with a streak of brightness falling mostly across her hands. She was wearing, he noted, a pearl ring he’d given her for her twentieth birthday. Odd that he’d not noticed before now.

St. James was saying, “So despite their wanderlust, at least they won’t be going anywhere for the moment.”

“Who?”

“Juliet Spence and Maggie. She wasn’t at school today, according to Josie, which made us think at first that they’d heard you’d gone to London and done a bunk as a result.”

“You’re sure they’re still in Winslough?”

“They’re here. Josie told us at considerable length over dinner that she’d spoken with Maggie for nearly an hour on the phone round five o’clock. Maggie claims to have fl u, which may or may not be the case since she also appears to have had a falling out with her boyfriend and according to Josie, she may have been skipping out on school for that reason. But even if she isn’t ill and they’re getting ready to run, the snow’s been coming down for more than six hours and the roads are hell. They’re not going anywhere unless they plan to do it on skis.” Deborah said something quietly in the background after which St. James added, “Right. Deborah says you might want to hire a Range Rover rather than drive the Bentley back up here. If the snow keeps up, you won’t be able to get in any more than anyone else will be able to get out.”

Lynley rang off with a promise to think about it.

“Anything?” Helen asked as he picked up the fax and spread it across the desk.

“It’s curiouser and curiouser,” he replied. He pulled out his spectacles and began to read. The amalgamation of facts were out of order — the first article was about the funeral— and he realised that, with an inattention to detail unusual in her, his sergeant had fed the copies of the newspaper articles into the facsimile machine haphazardly. Irritated, he took a pair of scissors, cut the articles, and was reassembling them by date, when the telephone rang.

“Denton thinks you’re dead,” Sergeant Havers said.

“Havers, why in God’s name did you fax me this mess out of order?”

“Did I? I must have got distracted by the bloke using the copy machine next to me. He looked just like Ken Branagh. Although what Ken Branagh would be doing making copies of a handout for an antiques fair is well beyond me. He says you drive too fast, by the way.”

“Kenneth Branagh?”

“Denton, Inspector. And since you haven’t phoned him, he assumes you’re squashed bug-like somewhere on the M1 or M6. If you’d move in with Helen or she’d move in with you, you’d be making things a hell of a lot easier on all of us.”

“I’m working on it, Sergeant.”

“Good. Give the poor bloke a call, will you? I told him you were alive at one o’clock, but he wasn’t buying that since I hadn’t actually seen your face. What’s a voice on the phone, after all? Someone could have been impersonating you.”

“I’ll check in,” Lynley said. “What do you have? I know Joseph’s was a cot death—”

“You’ve been a busy bloke, haven’t you? Make that a double and you’ll have put your finger on Juliet Spence as well.”

“What?”

“Cot death.”

“She had a child die of cot death?”

“No. She died of it herself.”

“Havers, for God’s sake. This is the woman in Winslough.”

“That may be the case, but the Juliet Spence connected to the Sages in Cornwall is buried in the same graveyard as they are, Inspector. She died forty-four years ago. Make that forty-four years, three months, and sixteen days.”

Lynley pulled the stack of clipped and sorted faxes towards him as Helen said, “What is it?” and Havers continued to speak.

“The connection you wanted wasn’t between Juliet Spence and Susanna. It was between Susanna and Juliet’s mother, Gladys. She’s still in Tresillian, as a matter of fact. I had late tea with her this afternoon.”

He scanned the information in the fi rst article at the same time as he prolonged the moment when he would have to examine the dark, grainy photograph that accompanied it and make a decision.

“She knew the entire family — Robin grew up in Tresillian, by the by, and she used to keep house for his parents — and she still does the flowers for the church here. She looks about seventy and my guess is she could take us both on in tennis and rout us in a minute. Anyway, she got close to Susanna for a time when Joseph died. Since she’d been through the same thing herself, she wanted to help her, as much as Susanna would let her which, obviously, wasn’t a great deal.”

He reached in the drawer for a magnifying glass, played it over the faxed photograph, and wished uselessly that he had the original. The woman in the photograph was fuller of face than was Juliet Spence, with darker hair that curled loosely round her head to her shoulders and below. But more than a decade had passed since it had been taken. This woman’s youth might have given way to another’s middle-age, thinning the face and greying the hair. The shape of the mouth looked right. The eyes seemed similar.

Havers was continuing. “She said she and Susanna spent some time together after they buried him. She said it’s something a woman never gets over, losing a child and particularly losing an infant that way. She said she still thinks of her Juliet every day and never forgets her birthday. She always wonders what she might have turned out like. She said she still has dreams about the afternoon when the baby never woke up from her nap.”

It was a possibility, as indistinct as the photograph itself, but still undeniably real.

“She had two more children after Juliet, did Gladys. She tried to use that fact to help Susanna see that the worst of her grief would pass when other babies came. But Gladys’d had one other before Juliet as well and that one lived, so she could never break through to her completely because Susanna’d always remind her of that.”

He set down the magnifying glass and the photograph. There was only one fact he needed to confirm before he moved forward.

“Havers,” he said, “what about Susanna’s body? Who found it? Where?”

“According to Gladys, she was fi sh bait. No one ever found her. They had a funeral service, but there’s sod all in the grave. Not even a coffi n.”

He replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle and removed his spectacles. Carefully, he polished them on a handkerchief before returning them to his nose. He looked at his notes — Aspatria, Holystone, Tiree, Benbecula — and saw what she had attempted to do. The why of it all, he was certain, remained where it always had been, with Maggie.

“They’re the same person, aren’t they?” Helen left her chair and came to stand behind his where she could look over his shoulder at the material spread out before him. She put her hand on his shoulder.

He reached for it. “I think they are,” he said.

“What does it mean?”

He spoke contemplatively. “She would have needed a birth certificate for a different passport so that she could slip off the ferry when it docked in France. She could have got a copy of the Spence child’s certificate at St. Catherine’s House — no, it would have been Somerset House then — or she could have pinched the original from Gladys without her knowledge. She’d been visiting her sister in London before her ‘suicide.’ She would have had time to set everything up.”

“But why?” Helen asked. “Why did she do it?”

“Because she may have been the woman taken in adultery after all.”

A stealthy movement of the bed awakened Helen the next morning, and she cracked open one eye. A grey light was sifting through the curtains and falling upon her favourite armchair across whose back an overcoat was fl ung. The clock on the bedside table said just before eight. She murmured, “God,” and plumped her pillow. She closed her eyes with some deliberation. The bed moved again.

“Tommy,” she said, fumbling for the clock and turning it to face the wall, “I don’t think it’s even dawn yet. Truly, darling. You need to get more sleep. What time did we fi nally get to bed? Was it two?”

“Damn,” he said quietly. “I know it. I know it.”

“Good. Then lie down.”

“The rest of the answer’s right here, Helen. Somewhere.”

She frowned and rolled over to see that he was sitting against the headboard with his spectacles perched on the end of his nose, letting his eyes travel over piles of paper scraps, handouts, tickets, programmes, and other miscellanea that he’d spread across her bed. She yawned and simultaneously recognised the piles. They’d pawed through Robin Sage’s odd bits carton three times before giving it up and going to bed last night. But Tommy wasn’t done with it, it seemed. He leaned forward, riffl ed through one of the piles, and rested against the headboard once more, as if awaiting inspiration to strike.

“The answer’s here,” he said. “I know it.”

Helen stretched out an arm beneath the covers and rested her hand on his thigh. “Sherlock Holmes would have solved it by now,” she noted.

“Please don’t remind me.”

“Hmmm. You’re warm.”

“Helen, I’m making an attempt at deductive thought.”

“Am I getting in the way?”

“What do you think?”

She chuckled, reached for her dressing gown, draped it round her shoulders, and joined him against the headboard. She picked up one of the piles at random and leafed through it. “I thought you had the answer last night. If Susanna knew she was pregnant, and if the baby wasn’t his, and if there was no way she could pass it off as his because they’d stopped having sex, which according to her sister appears to have been the case…What more do you want?”

“I want a reason she’d kill him. What we have right now is a reason he’d kill her.”

“Perhaps he wanted her back and she didn’t want to go.”

“He could hardly force her.”

“But if he decided to claim the child was his? To force her hand through Maggie?”

“A genetic test would take the wind out of that plan.”

“Then perhaps Maggie was his after all. Perhaps he was responsible for Joseph’s death. Or perhaps Susanna thought he was, so when she discovered she was pregnant again, she wasn’t about to let him have a go with another child.”

Lynley made a noise of dismissal and reached for Robin Sage’s engagement diary. Helen noticed that, while she slept, he’d also rummaged round the flat for the telephone directory, which was lying open at the foot of the bed.

“Then…Let me see.” She fl ipped through her small stack of papers and wondered why on earth anyone would have kept these grimy handouts, the sort that were continually thrust at pedestrians on the street. She would have dropped them into the nearest dustbin. She hated to refuse to take them altogether when the people passing them out always looked so earnest. But to save them…

She yawned. “It’s rather like a reverse trail of bread crumbs, isn’t it?”

He was flipping to the back of the telephone directory and running his finger down the page. “Six,” he said. “Thank God it wasn’t Smith.” He glanced at his pocket watch, which lay open on the table next to his side of the bed, and threw back the covers. The odd bits went flying like debris in the wind.

“Was it Hansel and Gretel who left a trail of crumbs or Little Red Riding Hood?” Helen asked.

He was rooting through his suitcase, which gaped open on the fl oor and spilled out clothing in a fashion that Denton would have found teeth-jarring. “What are you talking about, Helen?”

“These papers. They’re like a trail of crumbs. Except he didn’t drop them. He picked them up.”

Tying the belt of his dressing gown, Lynley rejoined her at the bed, sitting on her side of it and reading the handouts once again. She read them along with him: the first for a concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields; the second for a car dealership in Lambeth; the third for a meeting at Camden Town Hall; the fourth for a hairdresser in Clapham High Street.

“He came by train,” Lynley said thoughtfully and began to rearrange the handouts. He said, “Give me that underground map, Helen.”

With the map in one hand, he continued to rearrange the handouts until he had the Cam-den Town Hall meeting first, the concert second, the car dealership third, and the hairdresser fourth. “He would have picked up the first at Euston Station,” he noted.

“And if he was going to Lambeth, he’d have got on the Northern Line and changed at Charing Cross,” Helen said.

“Which is where he’d have got the second, for the concert. But where does that leave Clapham High Street?”

“Perhaps he went there last, after Lambeth. Does it say in his diary?”

“On his last day in London, it says only Yanapapoulis.”

“Yanapapoulis,” she said with a sigh. “Greek.” She felt a tugging of sadness with the saying of the name. “I spoiled this week for us. We could have been there. On Corfu. Right this moment.”

He put his arm round her and kissed the side of her head. “It doesn’t matter. We’d be doing the same thing there as we are right now.”

“Talking about Clapham High Street? I doubt it.”

He smiled and lay his spectacles on the table. He brushed her hair back and kissed her neck. “Not exactly,” he murmured. “We’ll talk about Clapham High Street in a while…”

Which is what they did, a little more than an hour later.

Lynley agreed to Helen’s making the coffee, but after her presentation of lunch yesterday, he wasn’t willing to endure whatever she might bring forth from cupboards and refrigerator to serve as their breakfast. He scrambled the six eggs he found in the refrigerator and threw in cream cheese, stoned black olives, and mushrooms for good measure. He opened a tin of grapefruit wedges, dished them out, topped them with a maraschino cherry, and set about making toast.

In the meantime, Helen manned the telephone. By the time he had the breakfast ready, she’d gone through five of the six entries for the name Yanapapoulis, made a list of four Greek restaurants she’d not yet tried, received one recipe for a poppy-seed cake soaked in ouzo—“Goodness, that sounds rather terrifyingly inflammable, my dear”—promised to pass along to her “superiors” a complaint about police mishandling of a burglary near Notting Hill Gate, and defended her honour against the accusations of a shrieking woman who assumed she was the mistress of her errant husband.

Lynley was setting their plates on the table and pouring coffee and orange juice when Helen struck gold with her final call. She had asked to speak to Mummy or Daddy. The reply went on at some length. Lynley was spooning orange marmalade onto his plate when Helen said,

“I am sorry to hear that, my dear. What about Mummy? Is she there?…But you aren’t home alone, are you? Shouldn’t you be in school?… Oh. Well, of course, someone must see to Linus’ headcold…. Do you have Meggezones? They work awfully well for a sore throat.”

“Helen, what in God’s name—”

She held up a hand to stop him. “She’s where?…I see. Can you give me the name, dear?” Lynley saw her eyes widen, saw the smile begin to curve her lips. “Lovely,” she said. “That’s wonderful, Philip. You’ve been such a help. Thank you so much…Yes, dear, you give him the chicken soup.” She hung up the phone and left the kitchen.

“Helen, I’ve got breakfast—”

“Just a moment, darling.”

He grumbled and forked up a portion of eggs. They weren’t half-bad. It wasn’t a combination of flavours that Denton would have either served or approved of, but then Denton had always possessed tunnel vision when it came to food.

“Here. Look.” With her dressing gown fl ying round in a whirl of burgundy silk, Helen clattered back into the kitchen — she was the only woman Lynley knew who actually wore high-heeled slippers with snowball tufts dyed to match the rest of her nightly ensembles— and presented him with one of the handouts they’d been looking at earlier.

“What?”

“The Hair Apparent,” she said. “Clapham High Street. Lord, what a ghastly name for a hairdresser. I always hate these puns: Shear Ecstasy, The Mane Attraction. Who comes up with them?”

He spread some marmalade on a wedge of toast as Helen slid into her seat and spooned up three pieces of grapefruit with “Tommy, darling, you can actually cook. I might think about keeping you.”

“That warms my heart.” He squinted at the paper in his hand. “‘Unisex styling,’” he read. “‘Discount prices. Ask for Sheelah.’”

“Yanapapoulis,” Helen said. “What’ve you put in these eggs? They’re wonderful.”

“Sheelah Yanapapoulis?”

“The very same. And she must be the Yanapapoulis we’re looking for, Tommy. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise that Robin Sage would have gone to see one Yanapapoulis and just happened to have in his possession a handout with the place of employment of an entirely different Yanapapoulis printed upon it. Don’t you agree?” She didn’t wait, merely went on, saying, “That was her son I was speaking to on the phone, by the way. He said to ring her at work. He said to ask for Sheelah.”

Lynley smiled. “You’re a marvel.”

“And you’re a fine cook. If you’d only been here to do Daddy’s breakfast yesterday morning…”

He set the handout to one side and went back to his eggs. “That can always be remedied,” he said casually.

“I suppose.” She added milk to her coffee and spooned in sugar. “Do you vacuum carpets and wash windows, as well?”

“If put to the test.”

“Heavens, I might actually be getting the better part of the bargain.”

“Is it, then?”

“What?”

“A bargain.”

“Tommy, you’re absolutely ruthless.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

ALTHOUGH THE SON OF SHE elah yanapapoulis had recommended a telephone call to The Hair Apparent, Lynley decided upon a personal visit. He found the hairdresser’s on the ground floor of a narrow soot-stained Victorian building that was shoe-horned between an Indian take-away and an appliance repair shop on Clapham High Street. He’d driven across the river on Albert Bridge and skirted Clapham Common upon whose north side Samuel Pepys had come to be lovingly tended in his declining years. The area had been referred to as “Paradisian Clapham” during Pepys’ time, but it had been a country village then, with its buildings and cottages spread out in a curve from the northeast corner of the common, and with fields and market gardens in place of the closely packed streets that had accompanied the arrival of the railway. The common remained, essentially inviolate, but many of the pleasant villas that once looked upon it had long since been demolished and replaced by the smaller and less inspired buildings of the nineteenth century.

The rain that had begun on the previous day was continuing to fall as Lynley drove along the high street. It rendered the usual kerbside collection of wrappers, sacks, newspapers, and assorted rubbish into sodden lumps that seemed bled of all colour. It also had the effect of eliminating virtually all pedestrian traffic. Aside from an unshaven man in a threadbare tweed coat who shuffl ed along, talking to himself and holding a newspaper spread over his head, the only other creature on the pavement at the moment was a mongrel dog sniffing at a shoe that lay on top of an upended wooden crate.

Lynley found a place to park on St. Luke’s Avenue, grabbed his coat and umbrella, and walked back to the hairdresser’s where he discovered that the rain had evidently put a damper on the hair business as well. He opened the door, was assailed by the eye-smarting odour that accompanies someone inflicting a perm upon another’s innocent head of hair, and saw that this malodorous operation of beauty was being performed on the hairdresser’s single customer. She was a plump woman perhaps fifty years old who clutched a copy of Royalty Monthly in her fi sts and said, “Cor, lookit this, will you, Stace? That dress she wore to the Royal Ballet must of cost four hundred quid.”

“Gloriamus on toast,” was Stace’s reply, delivered somewhere between polite enthusiasm and heavy ennui. She squirted a chemical onto one of the tiny pink rolls on her client’s head and gazed at her own reflection in the mirror. She smoothed her eyebrows, which came to curious points on her forehead and exactly matched the colour of her ramrod, coal hair. Doing this allowed her to catch sight of Lynley, who stood behind the glass counter dividing the tiny waiting area from the rest of the shop.

“We don’t do men, luv.” She tossed her head in the direction of the next work station, a movement that clicked her long jet earrings like small castanets. “I know it says unisex in all the adverts, but that’s Mondays and Wednesdays when our Rog is here. Which he isn’t, as you can see. Today, I mean. It’s just me and Sheel. Sorry.”

“Actually, I’m looking for Sheelah Yanapapoulis,” Lynley said.

“Are you? She doesn’t do men either. I mean”—with a wink—“she doesn’t do them that way. As for the other…well, she’s always been lucky, that girl, hasn’t she?” She called towards the rear of the shop: “Sheelah! Get out here. This is your lucky day.”

“Stace, I tol’ you I was heading out, din’t I? Linus’s got a bad throat and I was up all night. I got no one on the book coming in this afternoon so there’s no point to me staying.” Movement in a back room accompanied the voice, which sounded plaintive and tired. A handbag clicked closed with a metallic snick; a garment snapped as it was shaken out; galoshes slapped against the fl oor.

“He’s good-looking, Sheel,” Stace said with another wink. “You wouldn’t want to miss him. Trust me, luv.”

“Is that my Harold, then, having a bit of fun with you? ’Cause if it is…”

She came out of the room, drawing a black scarf across hair that was short, artfully cut, and coloured a white blonde that came only from bleaching or being born an albino. She hesitated when she saw Lynley. Her blue eyes fl icked over him, taking in and evaluating the coat, the umbrella, and the cut of his hair. Her face became immediately wary; the birdlike features of her nose and chin seemed to recede. But only for a moment before she lifted her head sharply, saying,

“I’m Sheelah Yanapapoulis. Who is it exactly wants to make my acquaintance?”

Lynley produced his warrant card. “Scotland Yard CID.”

She’d been in the process of buttoning a green mackintosh, and although she slowed when Lynley identified himself, she did not stop. She said, “Police, then?”

“Yes.”

“I got nothing to say to you lot about anything.” She adjusted her handbag on her arm.

“It won’t take long,” said Lynley. “And I’m afraid it’s essential.”

The other hairdresser had turned from her client. She said with some alarm, “Sheel, want me to ring Harold for you?”

Sheelah ignored her, saying, “Essential to what? Did one of my boys get up to something this morning? I’ve kept them home today if that’s supposed to be a crime. The whole lot of them got colds. Did they get up to mischief?”

“Not that I know.”

“They’re always playing with the phone, that lot. Gino dialed 999 and yelled fi re last month. Got thrashed for it, he did. But he’s nothing so much as pig-headed, like his dad. I wouldn’t put it by him to do it again for a giggle.”

“I’m not here about your children, Mrs. Yanapapoulis, although Philip did tell me where to fi nd you.”

She was fastening the galoshes round her ankles. She straightened with a grunt and drove her fists into the small of her back. In that position, Lynley saw what he had not noticed before. She was pregnant.

He said, “May we go somewhere to talk?”

“About what?”

“About a man called Robin Sage.”

Her hands flew to her stomach.

“You do know him,” he said.

“And what if I do?”

“Sheel, I’m ringing Harold,” Stace said. “He won’t want you talking to the coppers and you know it.”

Lynley said to Sheelah, “If you’re going home anyway, let me drive you there. We can talk on the way.”

“You listen. I’m a good mother, Mister. No one says different. You just ask anyone around. You c’n ask Stace here.”

“She’s a bleeding saint,” Stace said. “How many times you gone without shoes so those kids of yours could have the trainers they wanted? How many times, Sheel? And when was the last time you had a meal out? And who does the ironing if it isn’t you? And how many new frocks d’you buy last year?” Stace drew a breath. Lynley seized the moment.

“This is a murder investigation,” he said.

The shop’s sole client lowered her magazine. Stace drew her chemical bottle to her breast. Sheelah stared at Lynley and seemed to weigh his words.

“Whose?” she asked.

“His. Robin Sage.”

Her features softened and bravado disappeared. She took a long breath. “Right, then. I’m in Lambeth, and my boys are waiting. If you want to talk, we got to do it there.”

“I’ve a car outside,” Lynley said, and as they left the shop, Stace shouted after them, “I’m still ringing Harold!”

A new cloudburst erupted as Lynley shut the door behind them. He opened his umbrella, and although it was large enough for them both, Sheelah kept her distance from him by opening a small, collapsible one that she took from the pocket of her mackintosh. She didn’t say a word until they were in the car and heading towards Clapham Road and Lambeth.

And then it was only “Some motor, mister. I hope it’s got an alarm system on it, else there won’t be a bolt left when you leave my fl at.” She gave the leather seat a caress. “They’d like this, my boys.”

“You have three children?”

“Five.” She pulled up the collar of her mackintosh and looked out the window.

Lynley gave her a glance. Her attitude was streetwise and her concerns were adult, but she didn’t look old enough to have borne fi ve children. She couldn’t yet have been thirty.

“Five,” he repeated. “They must keep you busy.”

She said, “Go left here. You need to take the South Lambeth Road.”

They drove in the direction of Albert Embankment and when they hit congestion near Vauxhall Station, she directed him through a maze of back streets that finally took them to the tower block in which she and her family lived. Twenty floors high, it was steel and concrete, unadorned and surrounded by more steel and concrete. Its dominant colours were a rusting gun metal and a yellowing beige.

The lift they rode in smelled of wet nap-pies. Its rear wall was papered with announcements about community meetings, crime-stopping organisations, and crisis hot lines covering every topic from rape to AIDS. Its side walls were cracked mirrors. Its doors comprised a snake nest of illegible graffi ti in the middle of which the words Hector sucks cock were painted in brilliant and unavoidable red.

Sheelah spent the ride shaking off her umbrella, collapsing it, putting it into her pocket, removing her scarf, and fl uffi ng up the top of her hair. She did this by pulling it forward from the crown. In defiance of gravity, it formed a drooping cockscomb.

When the lift doors opened, Sheelah said, “It’s this way,” and led him towards the back of the building, down a narrow corridor. Numbered doors lined each side. Behind them music played, televisions chattered, voices rose and fell. A woman shrieked, “Billy, you let me go!” A baby wailed.

From Sheelah’s flat came the sound of a child shouting, “No, I won’t! You can’t make me!” and the rattle of a snare drum being beaten by someone with only moderate talent for the occupation. Sheelah unlocked the door and swung it open, calling, “Which o’ my blokes got a kiss for Mummy?”

She was instantly surrounded by three of her children, all of them little boys eager to oblige, each one shouting louder than the other. Their conversation consisted of:

“Philip says we have to mind and we don’t, Mum, do we?”

“He made Linus eat chicken soup for breakfast!”

“Hermes has my socks and he won’t take them off and Philip says—”

“Where is he, Gino?” Sheelah asked. “Philip! Come give your mummy what for.”

A slender maple-skinned boy perhaps twelve years old came to the kitchen door with a wooden spoon in one hand and a pot in the other. “Making mash,” he said. “These lousy potatoes keep boiling over. I got to keep watch.”

“You got to kiss your mum fi rst.”

“Aw, come on.”

“You come on.” Sheelah pointed to her cheek. Philip trudged over and pecked at his duty. She cuffed him lightly and grabbed on to his hair in which the pick he used to comb it stuck up like a plastic headdress. She plucked it out. “Stop acting like your dad. Makes me crazy, that, Philip.” She shoved it into the rear pocket of his jeans and slapped his bottom. “These’re my boys,” she said to Lynley. “These are my extra-special blokes. And this here is a policeman, you lot. So watch yourselfs, hear?”

The boys stared at Lynley. He did his best not to stare back at them. They looked more like a miniature United Nations than they did the members of a family, and it was obvious that the words your dad had a different meaning for every one of the children.

Sheelah was introducing them, giving a pinch here, a kiss there, a nibble on the neck, a noisy spluttering against a cheek. Philip, Gino, Hermes, Linus.

“My lamb chop, Linus,” she said. “Him with the throat that kept me up all night.” “And Peanut,” Linus said, patting his mother’s stomach. “Right. And how many does that make, luv?” Linus held up his hand, the fi ngers spread, a grin on his face and his nose running freely. “And how many are those?” his mother asked him.

“Five.”

“Lovely.” She tickled his stomach. “And how old are you?” “Five!” “Tha’s right.” She took off her mackintosh

and handed it to Gino, saying, “Let’s move this

confab into the kitchen. If Philip’s making mash, I got to see to the bangers. Hermes, put that drum away and help Linus with his nose. Christ, don’t use your bleeding shirttail to do it!”

The boys trailed her into the kitchen, which was one of four rooms that opened off the sitting room, along with two bedrooms and a bathroom jammed with plastic lorries, balls, two bicycles, and a pile of dirty clothes. The bedrooms, Lynley saw, looked out on the companion tower block next door, and furniture made movement impossible in either: two sets of bunkbeds in one of the rooms, a double bed and a baby cot in the other.

“Harold ring this A.M.?” Sheelah was asking Philip when Lynley entered the kitchen.

“Naw.” Philip scrubbed at the kitchen table with a dish cloth that was decidedly grey. “You got to cut that bloke loose, Mum. He’s bad news, he is.”

She lit a cigarette and, without inhaling, set it in an ashtray and stood over its plume of smoke, breathing deeply. “Can’t do that, luv. Peanut needs her dad.”

“Yeah. Well, smoking’s not good for her, is it?”

“I’m not smoking, am I? D’you see me smoking? D’you see a fag hanging out of this mouth?”

“That’s just as bad. You’re breathing it, aren’t you? Breathing it’s bad. We could all die from cancer.”

“You think you know everything. Just—”

“Like my dad.”

She pulled a frying pan from one of the cupboards and went to the refrigerator. Two lists hung upon it, held in place with yellowing cello tape. RULES was printed at the top of one, JOBS at the top of the other. Diagonally across both, someone had scrawled Sod You, Mummy! Sheelah ripped the lists off and swung round on the boys. Philip was at the cooker seeing to his potatoes. Gino and Hermes were scrambling round the legs of the table. Linus was dipping his hand into a carton of corn flakes that had been left on the fl oor.

“Which of you lot did this?” Sheelah demanded. “Come on. I want to know. Which of you bloody did this?”

Silence fell. The boys looked at Lynley, as if he’d come to arrest them for the crime.

She crumpled the papers and threw them on the table. “What’s rule number one? What’s always been rule number one? Gino?”

He stuck his hands behind his back as if afraid they’d be smacked. “Respecting property,” he said.

“And whose property was that? Whose property did you decide to write all over?”

“I didn’t!”

“You didn’t? Don’t give me that rubbish. Whoever causes trouble if it isn’t you? You take these lists to the bedroom and write them over ten times.”

“But Mum—”

“And no bangers and mash till you do. You got it?”

“I didn’t—”

She grabbed his arm and thrust him in the direction of the bedrooms. “I don’t want to see you till the lists are done.”

The other boys shot sly looks at one another when he’d gone. Sheelah went to the work top and breathed in more smoke. “I couldn’t go it cold turkey,” she said to Lynley in reference to the cigarette. “I could do with other stuff, but not with this.”

“I used to smoke myself,” he said.

“Yeah? Then you know.” She took the bangers from the refrigerator and slid them into the frying pan. She turned on the burner, looped her arm round Philip’s neck and kissed him soundly on the temple. “Jesus, you’re a handsome little bloke, you know that? Five more years and the girls’ll be mad for you. You’ll be beating them off you like they was fl ies.”

Philip grinned and shrugged her arm off him. “Mum!”

“Yeah, you’ll like that plenty when you get a bit older. Just—”

“Like my dad.”

She pinched his bottom. “Little sod.” She turned to the table. “Hermes, watch these bangers. Bring your chair here. Linus, set the table. I got to talk to this gentleman.”

“I want cornflakes,” Linus said.

“Not for lunch.”

“I want them!”

“And I said not for lunch.” She snatched the box away and threw it into a cupboard. Linus began to cry. She said, “Stow it!” And then to Lynley, “It’s his dad. Those damn Greeks. They’ll let their sons do anything. They’re worse than Italians. Let’s talk out here.”

She took her cigarette back into the sitting room, pausing by an ironing board to wrap a frayed cord round the bottom of an iron. She used her foot to shove to one side an enormous laundry basket spilling clothes onto the fl oor.

“Good to sit down.” She sighed as she sank into a sofa. Its cushions wore pink slipcovers. Burn holes in them showed the original green beneath. Behind her, the wall was decorated with a large collage of photographs. Most of them were snapshots. They grew out in a star-burst pattern from a professional studio portrait in the centre. Although adults were featured in some of them, all of them showed at least one of her children. Even photographs of Sheelah’s wedding — she stood at the side of a swarthy man in wire-rimmed spectacles with a noticeable gap between his front teeth— also contained two of her children, a much younger Philip dressed as ring bearer and Gino, who could not have been more than two.

“Is that your work?” Lynley asked, nodding at the collage.

She craned her neck to look at it. “You mean did I make it? Yeah. The boys helped. But mostly it was me. Gino!” She leaned forward on the sofa. “Get back to the kitchen. Eat your

lunch.”

“But the lists—”

“Do what I tell you. Help your brothers and shut up.”

Gino plodded back into the kitchen, casting a chary look at his mother and hanging his head. The cooking noises became subdued.

Sheelah knocked ash from her cigarette and held it under her nose for a moment. When she replaced it in the ashtray, Lynley said, “You saw Robin Sage in December, didn’t you?”

“Just before Christmas. He came to the shop, like you. I thought he wanted a hair-cut — he could of used a new style — but he wanted to talk. Not there. Here. Like you.”

“Did he tell you he was an Anglican priest?”

“He was all done up in a priest uniform or whatever it’s called, but I figured that was just a disguise. It’d be like Social Services, wouldn’t it, to send someone snooping round dressed up like a priest on the prowl for sinners. I’ve had my fill of that lot, I can tell you. They’re here at least twice a month, waiting like vultures to see if I’ll knock about one of my boys so they can take ’em away and put ’em in what they think’s a proper home.” She laughed bitterly. “They can wait till they’re grey. Fucking old biddies.”

“What made you think he was from Social Services? Did he have some sort of referral from them? Did he show you a card?”

“It was the way he acted once he got here. He said he wanted to talk about religious instructions. Like: Where was I sending my kids to learn about Jesus? And: Did we go to church and where? But all the time he kept looking round the flat like he was measuring it up to see was it fit for Peanut when she comes. And he wanted to talk about being a mother and how if I loved my kids did I show them regular and how did I show them and how did I discipline. The sort of rot social workers always talk about.” She leaned over and turned on a lamp. Its shade had been covered somewhat haphazardly with a purple scarf. When the lightbulb glowed, great splodges of glue looked like the Americas beneath the material. “So I thought he was going to be my new social worker and this was his not-so-clever way of getting to know me.”

“But he never told you that.”

“He just looked at me the way they always do, with his face all wrinkled and his eyebrows squished.” She gave a fair imitation of factitious empathy. Lynley tried not to smile, and failed. She nodded. “I’ve had that lot coming round since I had my first kid, mister. They never help out and they never change a thing. They don’t believe you’re trying to do your best and if something happens, they blame you first. I hate the lot of them. They’re why I lost my Tracey Joan.”

“Tracey Jones?”

“Tracey Joan. Tracey Joan Cotton.” She shifted her position and pointed to the studio photograph at the centre of her collage. In it, a laughing baby in pink held a stuffed grey elephant. Sheelah touched her fingers to the baby’s face. “My little girl,” she said. “This is my Tracey that was.”

Lynley felt hair rise on the back of his hands. She’d said five children. Because she was pregnant, he had misunderstood. He got up from his chair and took a closer look at the picture. The baby didn’t look more than four or fi ve months old. “What happened to her?” he asked.

“She got snatched one night. Right outa my car.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.” Sheelah went hastily on when she saw his expression. “I went into the pub to meet her dad. I left her sleeping in the car ’cause she’d been feverish and she’d fi nally stopped her squalling. When I came out, she was gone.”

“I meant how long ago did this happen?” Lynley asked.

“Twelve years last November.” Sheelah shifted again, away from the photograph. She brushed at her eyes. “She was six months old, was my Tracey Joan, and when she got snatched, Social bleeding Services did nothing about it but hand me over to the local police.”

Lynley sat in the Bentley. He thought about taking up cigarettes again. He remembered the prayer from Ezekiel that had been marked off in Robin Sage’s book: “When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.” He understood.

That’s what it all came down to in the end: He had wanted to save her soul. But she had wanted to save the child.

Lynley wondered what sort of moral dilemma the priest had faced when he fi nally traced down Sheelah Yanapapoulis. For surely, his wife would have told him the truth. The truth was her only defence and her best chance of convincing him to turn a blind eye to the crime she had committed so many years in the past.

Listen to me, she would have said to him. I saved her, Robin. Do you want to know what Kate’s records said about her parents, her background, and what happened to her? Do you want to know everything, or are you just going to condemn me without the facts?

He would have wanted to know. He was at heart a decent man, concerned with doing what was right, not just what was prescribed by law. So he would have listened to the facts and then he would have verified them himself, in London. First by going to see Kate Gitterman and trying to discover if his wife had indeed had access to her sister’s case reports in that long-ago time when she worked for Social Services. Then by going to Social Services itself to track down the girl whose baby had had a fractured skull and a broken leg before she was even two months old and then had been kidnapped off a street in Shoreditch. It wouldn’t have been a difficult project to gather the information.

Her mother was fifteen years old, Susanna would have told him. Her father was thirteen. She didn’t stand a chance in a life with them. Can’t you see that? Can’t you? Yes, I took her, Robin. And I’d do it again.

He would have come to London. He would have seen what Lynley saw. He would have met her. Perhaps as he sat talking with her in the crowded flat, Harold would have arrived as well, saying, “How’s my baby? How’s my sweet mama?” as he spread his dusky hand across her belly, a hand on which the gold wedding band glittered. Perhaps he too would have heard Harold whispering, “Can’t make it tonight, babe. Now don’t cause a scene, Sheel, I just can’t do it,” in the corridor as he left.

Do you have any idea how many second chances Social Services give an abusive mother before they take a child? she would have demanded. Do you know how difficult it is to prove abuse in the first place if the child can’t talk and there appears to be a reasonable explanation behind the accident?

“I never touched a hair of her head,” Sheelah had said to Lynley. “But they didn’t believe me. Oh, they let me keep her ’cause they couldn’t prove nothing, but they made me go to classes and I had to check with them every week and—” She smashed out her cigarette. “All the time it was Jimmy. Her bleeding stupid dad. She was crying and he didn’t know how to get her to stop and I’d left her with him for only an hour and Jimmy hurt my baby. He lost his temper…He threw her…The wall…I never. I wouldn’t. But no one believed me and he wouldn’t say.”

So when the baby vanished and young Sheelah Cotton-not-yet-Yanapapoulis swore she’d been kidnapped, Kate Gitterman phoned the police and gave them her professional assessment of the situation. They’d eyed the mother, measured the level of her hysteria, and searched for a corpse instead of looking for a potential trail left by the baby’s abductor. And no one involved in the investigation ever connected the suicide of a young woman off the coast of France with a kidnapping in London nearly three weeks later.

“But they couldn’t find a body, could they?” Sheelah had said, wiping at her cheeks. “Because I never hurt her and I never would. She was my baby. I loved her. I did.” The boys had come to the door of the kitchen as she wept, and Linus crept across the sitting room and crawled onto the sofa beside her. She hugged him to her and rocked him, her cheek pressed against the top of his head. “I’m a good mother, I am. I take care of my boys. No one says I don’t. And no one — bloody no one — is goin’ to take my kids away.”

Sitting in the Bentley with the windows steaming and the traffic hissing by on the Lambeth street, Lynley remembered the end of the story of the woman taken in adultery. It was about casting stones: Only the man without sin — and interesting, he thought, that it was men and not women who would do the stoning — could stand in judgement and administer punishment. Anyone whose soul was not unblemished had to move aside.

You go to London if you don’t believe me, she would have said to her husband. You check on the story. You see if she’d be better off living with a woman who fractured her skull.

So he had come. He had met her. And then he had faced the decision. He was not without sin, he would have realised. His inability to help his wife come to terms with her grief when their own child died had been part of what led her to commit this crime. How could he now begin to lift a stone against her when he was responsible, if only in part, for what she had done? How could he begin a process that would destroy her forever at the same time as it ran the risk of also harming the child? Was she, in truth, better for Maggie than this white-haired woman with her rainbow children and their absent fathers? And if she was, could he turn away from a crime by calling its retribution a greater injustice?

He had prayed to know the difference between that which is moral and that which is right. His telephone conversation with his wife on that final day of his life had telegraphed what his decision would be: You can’t judge what happened then. You can’t know what’s right now. That’s in God’s hands, not yours.

Lynley glanced at his pocket watch. It was half past one. He would fly to Manchester and hire a Range Rover. That would get him to Winslough sometime in the evening.

He picked up the car phone and punched in Helen’s number. She heard it all when he said her name.

“Shall I come with you?” she asked.

“No. I’m not fit company now. I won’t be later.”

“That doesn’t matter, Tommy.”

“It does. To me.”

“I want to help in some way.”

“Then be here for me when I get back.”

“How?”

“I want to come home and have home mean you.”

Her hesitation was prolonged. He thought he could hear her breathing but knew it was impossible, considering the connection. He was probably only listening to himself.

“What will we do?” she asked.

“We’ll love each other. Marry. Have children. Hope for the best. God, I don’t know any longer, Helen.”

“You sound horrible.” Her own voice was bereft. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to love you.”

“I don’t mean here. I mean Winslough. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to wish to be Solomon and be Nemesis instead.”

“Oh, Tommy.”

“Say it. You’ve got to say it sometime. It might as well be now.”

“I’ll be here. Always. When it’s over. You know that.”

Slowly, with great care, he replaced the phone.