A Great Deliverance

14

Clean. Clean! Have to do it. Have to get it. Fast, fast, fast! It will happen now if I don’t get clean. Shouting, pounding, shouting, pounding. Ceaseless, endless. Shouting, pounding. But they’ll both go away-God, they must go away-once I’m clean, clean, clean.

Water hot. Very hot. Steam gushing forth in clouds. Feel it on my face. Breathe it deeply to be clean.

“Nell!”

No, no, no!

Cupboard handles slippery. Get it open. Pull it open. Get the shaking hands to fi nd them, hidden safely under towels. Stiff, hard brushes. Wooden backs, metal bristles. Good brushes, strong brushes. Brushes make me clean.

“Mrs. Clarence!”

No, no, no!

Ugly breathing, tortured breathing. Fills the room, pounds in ears. Stop it, stop it! Hands at head can’t stop the echo, fists on face can’t kill the sound.

“Nellie, please. Open the door!”

No, no, no! No doors open now. No escape can come that way. Only one way to escape it. And that’s clean, clean, clean. Shoes off fi rst. Kick them off. Shove them quickly out of sight. Socks come next. Hands don’t work. Tear it! Fast, fast, fast!

“Mrs. Clarence, do you hear me? Are you listening to what I’m saying?”

Can’t hear, can’t see. Won’t hear, won’t see. Clouds of steam to fill me up. Clouds of steam to burn and sear. Clouds of steam to make me clean!

“Is that what you want to happen, Mrs. Clarence? Because that’s exactly what’s going to happen to your sister if she continues not to speak. For life, Mrs. Clarence. For the rest of her life.”

No! Tell them no! Tell them nothing matters now. Can’t think, can’t act. Just hurry up, water. Hurry up and make me clean. Feel it on my hands. No, it’s still not hot enough! Can’t feel, can’t see. Never, never be clean.

She called his name Moab, father of Moabites unto this day. She called his name Ben-ammi, father of the children of Ammon unto this day. The smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. They went up out of Zoar and dwelled in the mountain. For they were afraid.

“How is it locked? Is it a bolt? A key? How?”

“I just…”

“Pull yourself together. We’re going to have to break it.”

“No!”

Pounding, pounding, loud, relentless. Make them, make them go away!

“Nell, Nell!”

Water all over. Can’t feel it, can’t see it, won’t be hot enough to make me clean, clean, clean! Soap and brushes, soap and brushes. Rub hard, hard, hard. Slip and slither, slip and slither. Make me clean, clean, clean!

“It’s either that or call for help. Is that what you want? The whole bloody police force breaking down the door?”

“Shut up! Look at what you’ve done to her! Nell!”

Bless me father. I have sinned. Understand and forgive. Brushes digging, brushes digging, brushes dig to make me clean.

“You don’t have any choice! This is a police matter, not some marital squabble, Mr. Clarence.”

“What are you doing? Damn you, stay away from that phone!”

Pounding, pounding.

“Nell!”

Reader, I married him a quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present when we got back from church I went into the kitchen of the manor house where Mary was cooking the dinner and John cleaning the knives and I said Mary I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning.

“Then you have exactly two minutes to get her out of there or you’re going to have more police than you’ve ever laid eyes on crawling through this place. Is that clear?”

You are some little cat. Not again! Not so soon! God, Gilly, God!

Gilly’s dead, Gilly’s dead. But Nell is clean, clean, clean, Scrub her hard, dig in deep, make her clean, clean, clean!

“I’ve got to come in, Nell. Do you hear me? I’m going to break the lock. Don’t be frightened.”

Come on, Gilly girl. I want nothing serious tonight. Let’s laugh and be wild and be absolutely mad. We’ll have drinks, dance till dawn. We’ll find men and go to Whitby. We’ll take wine. We’ll take food. We’ll dance nude on the abbey walls. They can try to catch us, Gilly. We’ll be absolutely wild.

Pounding louder now. Pounding hard, hard, hard! Bursting ears, bursting heart. Rub her skin all clean.

“That’s not going to work, Mr. Clarence. I’m going to have to-”

“No! Shut up, damn you!”

Late at night. I said goodbye. Did you hear me? Did you see me? Did you find it where I left it? Bobby, did you find it? Did you fi nditfi nditfi ndit?

Shrieking wood, splintering wood. Never safe anymore. One last chance before Lot finds me. One last chance to make me clean.

“Oh God! Oh my God, Nell.”

“I’m going to phone for an ambulance.”

“No! Just leave us alone!”

Hands gripping. Hands sliding. Water pink and rich with blood. Arms holding. Someone crying. Wrapping warm and holding near.

“Nellie. Oh God. Nell.”

Pressed against him. Hear him sobbing. Is it over? Am I clean?

“Bring her out here, Mr. Clarence.”

“Go away! Leave us alone!”

“I can’t do that. She’s accessory in a murder. You know that as well as I. If nothing else, her reaction to all this should have-”

“She isn’t! She couldn’t be! I was with her!”

“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

“Nell! I won’t let them. I won’t let them!”

Weeping, weeping. Aching tears. Body racked with pain and sorrow. Make it end. Make it end. “Jonah-”

“Yes, darling. What is it?”

“Nell’s dead.”

“So he broke down the door,” Havers said.

Lynley rubbed his throbbing forehead. The last three hours had given him an appalling headache. The conversation with Havers was making it worse. “And?”

There was a pause.

“Havers?” he demanded. He knew that his voice was abrupt, that it would sound like anger instead of the fatigue that it was. He heard her catch her breath. Was she crying?

“It was…She had…” She cleared her throat. “It was a bath.”

“She’d taken a bath?” He wondered if Havers was aware of the fact that she was making no sense. Good God, what had happened?

“Yes. Except…she’d used brushes on herself. They were metal brushes. She was bleeding.”

“God in heaven,” he muttered. “Where is she, Havers? Is she all right?”

“I wanted to phone for an ambulance.”

“Why didn’t you, for God’s sake?”

“Her husband…he was…It was my fault, Inspector. I thought that I should be tough with her. I…It was my fault.” Her voice broke.

“Havers, for God’s sake. Pull yourself together.”

“There was blood. She’d used the brushes all over her body. He wrapped her up. He wouldn’t let go of her. He was crying. She said she was dead.”

“Christ,” he whispered.

“I went to the phone. He came after me. He-”

“Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

“He pushed me outside. I fell. I’m all right. I…It was my fault. She came out of the bedroom. I remembered everything we’d said about her. It seemed best to be firm with her. I didn’t think. I didn’t realise she would-”

“Havers, listen to me.”

“But she locked herself in. There was blood in the water. It was so hot. There was steam… How could she have stood the water that hot?”

“Havers!”

“I thought I could do something right. This time. I’ve destroyed the case, haven’t I?”

“Of course not,” he replied, although he was absolutely unconvinced that she hadn’t blown their chances right into oblivion. “Are they still at their fl at?”

“Yes. Shall I get someone from the Yard?”

“No!” He thought rapidly. The situation could not possibly have been any worse. To have found the woman after all these years and then to have this happen was infuriating. He knew quite well that she represented their only hope of reaching the bottom of the case.

No matter the reality that insinuated itself from the pages of Shakespeare, only Gillian could give it substance.

“Then what shall I-”

“Go home. Go to bed. I’ll handle this.”

“Please, sir.” He could hear the despair in her voice. He couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t worry about it now.

“Just do as I say, Havers. Go home. Go to bed. Do not ring the Yard, and do not return to that flat. Is that clear?”

“Am I-”

“Then get a train back here in the morning.”

“What about Gillian?”

“I’ll worry about Gillian,” he said grimly and hung up the telephone.

He gazed down at the book in his lap. He’d spent the last four hours dredging up from his memory every single exposure he’d had to Shakespeare. It was limited. His interest in the Elizabethans had been historical, not literary, and more than once during the evening he had cursed the educational path he had taken all those years ago at Oxford, wishing for expertise in an area that, at the time, had hardly seemed relevant to his interests.

He had found it at last, however, and now he read and reread the lines, trying to wring a twentieth-century meaning from the seventeeth-century verse.

One sin, I know, another doth provoke.

Murder’s as near to lust as fl ame to smoke.

He gives life and death meaning, the priest had said. So what did the words of the Prince of Tyre have to do with an abandoned grave in Keldale? And what did a grave have to do with the death of a farmer?

Absolutely nothing, his intellect insisted. Absolutely everything, his intuition replied.

He snapped the book closed. It was imprisoned in Gillian: the meaning and the truth. He picked up the telephone and dialled.

It was after ten when she trudged down the ill-lit street in Acton. Webberly had been surprised to see her, but the surprise had faded when he opened the envelope Lynley had sent. He glanced at the message, turned it over, and picked up the phone. After barking an order for Edwards to come at once, he dismissed her without a question as to why she had suddenly appeared in London without Lynley. It was quite as if she didn’t exist for him. And she didn’t, did she? Not any longer.

Who gives a shit, she thought. Who bloody cares what happens? It was inevitable. Fat, stupid little pig, snorting around trying to play the detective. Thought you knew everything about Gillian Teys, didn’t you? Heard her humming in the next room and even then you weren’t smart enough to figure it out.

She looked up at the house. The windows were dark. Mrs. Gustafson’s television blared from next door, but not a sign of life glimmered from the interior of the building in front of which she stood. If its inhabitants were disturbed by the neighborhood noise, there was no indication. There was nothing.

Nothing. That’s really it, isn’t it, she thought. There’s nothing inside, not a single thing and espe cially not the one thing that you want to be in there. All these years you’ve been incubating a chi mera, Barb. And what a bloody waste it’s been.

She steeled herself against the thought, refused to accept it, and unlocked the door. In the quiet house the smell assailed her, a smell of unwashed bodies, of trapped cooking odours, of dead air, of ponderous despair. It was foul and unhealthy, and she welcomed it. She breathed it in deeply, finding it fi tting, finding it just.

She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. Here it is, Barb. It all began here. Let it bring you back to life.

She put her handbag down on the splintered table next to the door and forced herself towards the stairs. But as she reached them her eyes were caught by a flash of light from the sitting room. She walked to the door curiously to fi nd the room empty, the fl ash only a brief flicker of a passing car’s lights hitting the glass of the picture. His picture. Tony’s picture.

She was drawn into the room, and she sat in her father’s chair, which, along with her mother’s, faced the shrine. Tony’s face grinned its impish grin at her; his wiry body twisted with life.

She was weary and numb, but she forced herself to keep her eyes on the picture, forced herself back to the deepest reaches of her memory where Tony still lay, wizened and gaunt, in a narrow white hospital bed. He was branded into her consciousness as he always would be, tubes and needles sprouting from him everywhere, his fingers plucking spasmodically at the covers. His thin neck no longer supported a head that appeared by contrast to have grown immense. His eyelids were heavy, crusted and closed. His cracked lips bled.

“Coma,” they had said. “It’s nearly time now.”

But it hadn’t been. Not yet. Not until he’d opened his eyes, managed a fleeting elf’s smile, and murmured, “I’m not scared when you’re here, Barbie. You won’t leave me, will you?”

He might have actually spoken to her in the sitting room’s darkness, for she felt it all again as she always did: the swelling of grief and then-blasting it away like a breath from hell-the rage. That single reality that was keeping her alive.

“I won’t leave you,” she swore. “I’ll never forget.”

“Lovey?”

She cried out in surprise, brought back to the shattering present.

“Lovey? Is that you?”

Past the pounding of her heart, she forced her voice to sound pleasant. No problem, really, after so many years of practise. “Yes, Mum. Just having a sit.”

“In the dark, lovey? Here, let me turn on the light so-”

“No!” Her voice rasped. She cleared her throat. “No, Mum. Just leave it off.”

“But I don’t like the dark, lovey. It…it frightens me so.”

“Why are you up?”

“I heard the door open. I thought it might be…” She moved into Barbara’s line of vision, a ghostly figure in a stained pink dressing gown. “Sometimes I think he’s come back to us, lovey. But he never will, will he?”

Barbara got to her feet abruptly. “Go back to bed, Mum.” She heard the roughness of her voice, and she tried unsuccessfully to modulate it. “How’s Dad?” She took her mother’s bony arm and firmly led her from the sitting room.

“He had a good day today. We thought about Switzerland. You know, the air is so fresh and pure there. We thought Switzerland would be the nicest place next. Of course, back so soon from Greece, it doesn’t seem quite right to go off again, but he thinks it sounds a good idea. Will you like Switzerland, lovey? Because if you don’t think you’ll like it, we can always choose someplace else. I want you to be happy.”

Happy? Happy? “Switzerland’s fi ne, Mum.”

She felt her mother’s bird-claw hand grip her arm tightly. They started up the stairs. “Good. I thought you’d like it. I think Zurich would be the best place to begin. We’ll do a tour this time, with a hired car. I long to see the Alps.”

“Sounds fi ne, Mum.”

“Dad thought so, lovey. He even went to Empress Tours to get me the brochures.”

Barbara’s steps slowed. “Did he see Mr. Patel?”

Her mother’s hand fluttered on her arm. “Oh, I don’t know, lovey. He didn’t mention Mr. Patel. I’m certain he would have said something if he had.”

They reached the top of the stairs. Her mother paused at the door to her bedroom. “He’s such a new man when he goes out for a bit in the afternoon, lovey. Such a new man.”

Barbara’s stomach turned on the thought of what her mother might mean.

Jonah Clarence opened the bedroom door softly, an unnecessary precaution, for she was awake. She turned her head at the sound of his movement and smiled wanly at her husband.

“I’ve made you some soup,” he said.

“Jo-” Her voice was so small, so weak, that he went hurriedly on.

“It’s just the tinned stuff from the pantry. I’ve some bread and butter here as well.” He placed the tray on the bed and helped her into a sitting position. At the movement, several of the deeper cuts began to bleed again. He took a towel and pressed it firmly against her skin, a movement not only to stem the flow of the blood but also to block out the memory of what had happened to their lives that evening.

“I don’t-”

“Not now, darling,” he said. “You need to eat something fi rst.”

“Will we talk then?”

His eyes moved from her face. Slashes covered her hands, her arms, her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. At the sight, he felt such a burden of anguish that he wasn’t sure he could answer her. But she was watching him, her beautiful eyes trusting, fi lled with love, waiting for his reply.

“Yes,” he whispered. “We’ll talk then.”

She smiled tremulously, and he felt his heart wrench. He put the tray across her lap, but when she tried to spoon the soup, he saw that her weakness had become so pronounced that no effort would make it possible for her to feed herself. Gently, he took the spoon from her and began to help her eat, a slow process in which every bit swallowed seemed an individual act of triumph.

He wouldn’t let her talk. He was too afraid of what she might say. Instead he soothed her with whispered words of love and encouragement and wondered who she was and what kind of terrible grief she had brought into his life.

They had been married for less than a year, but it seemed to him that they had always been together, that they had been meant for each other from the moment when his father brought her to Testament House from King’s Cross Station-a solemn little waif of a girl who looked twelve years old. She’s all eyes, he had thought when he saw her. But when she smiled, she was sunlight. He knew within the first few weeks that he loved her, but it took nearly ten years to make her his own.

During that time he had been ordained, had made his decision to be part of his father’s work, had laboured like Jacob in pursuit of a Rachel he could never be certain of winning. Yet that thought had not discouraged him. Like a crusader, he had set on a quest, and Nell was his Grail. No one else would do.

Except she’s not Nell, he thought. I don’t know who she is. And the worst of it is, I’m not certain I want to know.

He had always seen himself as a man of action, one of courage, a man powered by the force of his inner convictions, yet still, intimately, a man of peace. All that had died tonight. The sight of her in the bath-mindlessly lacerating her flesh, staining the water with her blood-had demolished that carefully constructed facade in two short minutes: the time it had taken to pull her, frail and screaming, from the tub, to try frantically to stop the bleeding, to throw the shouting police officer from their fl at.

In two short minutes he had become not the cheek-turning, sincere minister of God that had long been his guise, but a maniacal stranger who could have killed, without impunity, anyone seeking to harm his wife. He was shaken to the core, even more so when he considered that, in protecting her from enemies, he couldn’t think of how he was going to protect Nell from herself.

Except she’s not Nell, he thought.

She was finished eating, had been fi nished, in fact, for several minutes and lay back against the pillows. They were stained with her blood. He got to his feet.

“Jo-”

“I’m going to get something for the cuts. I’ll just be a moment.”

He tried not to see the gruesome condition of the bathroom as he rooted in the cupboard. The tub looked and smelled as if they had been butchering livestock in it. Blood was everywhere, in every crevice and crack. His hands weakened as he grabbed the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He felt faint.

“Jonah?”

He took several deep breaths and went back to the bedroom. “Delayed reaction.” He tried to smile, clutched the bottle so tightly he thought it might break in his hands, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Mostly surface cuts,” he said conversationally. “We’ll see what it looks like in the morning. If they’re bad, we’ll go to hospital then. How does that sound?”

He didn’t wait for a response. Rather, he washed the abrasions with the chemical and continued speaking determinedly. “I thought we might go to Penzance this weekend, darling. It would be good to get away for a few days, don’t you think so? I was talking to one of the kids about a hotel down there that she’d stayed at as a child. If it’s still there, it should be wonderful. A view of St. Michael’s Mount. I thought we’d take the train down and hire a car when we got there. Or bicycles. Would you like to hire bicycles, Nell?”

He felt her hand on his cheek. At the touch, his heart swelled, and he knew he was horribly close to tears. “Jo,” she whispered. “Nell’s dead.”

“Don’t say that!” he returned fi ercely.

“I’ve done terrible things. I can’t bear for you to know. I thought I was safe from them, that I’d run from them right into forever.”

“No!” He continued mindlessly, passionately to see to her wounds.

“I love you, Jonah.”

That stopped him. His face sank into his hands. “What do I call you?” he whispered. “I don’t even know who you are!”

“Jo, Jonah, my love, my only love-”

Her voice was a torment he could barely endure, and when she reached out for him, he was broken and ran from the room, slamming the door firmly, and irrevocably, behind him.

He stumbled to a chair, hearing his own breathing tear at the air, feeling wedges of panic drive themselves into his stomach and groin. He sat, staring unseeing at the material objects that comprised their home, and desperately pushed away from him the one piece of information that was at the core of his terror.

Three weeks ago, the police sergeant had said. He had lied to her, an immediate response rising from the horror of her incomprehensible allegation. He had not been in London with his wife at that time but rather at a four-day conference in Exeter, followed by two additional days of fundraisers for Testament House. Nell was supposed to have gone with him but at the last moment had begged off with flu. So she said. Had she been ill? Or had she seen it as an opportunity to travel to York-shire?

“No!” The word came out involuntarily, from between his teeth. Despising himself for even considering the question for a moment, Jonah willed his breathing to calm, willed his muscles to relax.

He reached for his guitar, not to play it but to reaffirm its reality and to reestablish the meaning it had in his life, for he had been sitting on the back stairs of Testament House, in the semi-darkness, playing strains of the music he loved when she first spoke to him.

“That’s so nice. D’you think anyone could learn?” She came to crouch next to him on the step, her eyes on his fingers as they moved expertly among the strings, and she smiled, a child’s smile, lit with pleasure.

It had been simple to teach her to play, for she was a natural mimic: something seen or heard was never forgotten. Now she played as often to him as he did to her, not with his assurance or passion but with a melancholy sweetness that long ago should have told him what he didn’t want to face now.

He stood abruptly. To assure himself, he opened book after book and saw the name, Nell Graham, written in each volume in her neat script. To show ownership, he wondered, or to convince herself?

“No!”

He picked up a photograph album from the bottom shelf and hugged it to his chest. It was a document of Nell, a verification of the fact that she was real, that she had no other life but the one she shared with him. He didn’t even need to open the album to know what lay within its pages: a pictorial history of the love they shared, of the memories that were an integral part of the tapestry of their lives being woven together. In a park, on a trail, dreaming quietly at dawn, laughing at the antics of birds on the beach. All of these bore testimony, were illustrations of Nell’s life and the things she loved.

His eyes drifted, for more assurance, to her plants in the window. The African violets had always reminded him the most of her. The beautiful flowers poised themselves delicately, precariously, at the tips of their stalks. The heavy green leaves protected and surrounded them. They were plants that looked as if they could never survive in the rigours of the London weather, but in spite of their appearance, they were deceptive plants really, plants of remarkable strength.

Looking at them, he knew at last and fought fruitlessly to deny it. Tears, long in coming, broke the surface and a sob escaped him. He made his way back to the chair, fell into it, and wept inconsolably.

It was then that he heard the knocking at the door.

“Go away!” he sobbed.

The knocking persisted.

“Go away!”

There was no other sound. The knocking continued. Like the voice of his conscience. It would never end.

“Damn you, go away!” he screamed and threw himself at the door. He fl ung it open.

A woman stood there. She wore a neat black suit and a white silk blouse with a froth of lace at her throat. She carried a black shoulder bag and a leatherbound book. But it was her face that riveted his attention. It was calm, clear-eyed, and masked by tenderness. She might have been a missionary. She might have been a vision. But she extended her hand and made it clear that she was real.

“My name is Helen Clyde,” she said quietly.

Lynley chose a corner. Candles fl ickered some distance away, but where he was darkness shrouded the church. The building smelled vaguely of incense, but more strongly of age, of guttering candles, of the burnt ends of matches, of dust. It was utterly peaceful. Even the doves, who had been stirred into momentary rustling upon his approach, had fallen back into stillness, and no night wind made tree branches creak and scratch against the windows.

He was alone. His only companions were the youths and maidens, entwined Grecian urn-like in a soundless eternal dance of truth and beauty on the doors of the Elizabethan confessionals nearby.

His heart felt heavy and sore. It was an old story, a Roman legend from the fi fth century, but as real at this moment as it had been to Shakespeare when he used it as the foundation for his drama. The Prince of Tyre went to Antioch, pursuing a riddle and marriage to a princess. But he came away with nothing, fl eeing for his life.

Lynley knelt. He thought about prayer, but nothing came.

He knew he was near the body of the hydra, but the knowledge gave him neither triumph nor satisfaction. Instead, he wanted to flee from the final confrontation with the monster, knowing now that, although the heads were destroyed and the trunk well seared, he could not hope to emerge unscathed from the encounter.

“‘Fret not thyself because of evil-doers.’” It was an insubstantial, disembodied, wavering voice. It came out of nowhere, tremulous and uncertain, and it hovered mistily in the frigid air. It was some moments before Lynley located its black-robed source.

Father Hart knelt at the foot of the altar. He was bent over double, his forehead pressed to the floor. “‘Neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. For they shall be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; Trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass. Evil-doers shall be cut off; But those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth. For yet a little while and the wicked shall not be.’”

Lynley listened to the words, anguished, and tried to deny their meaning. As a hush swept over the darkened church once more- broken only by the priest’s stertorous breath-ing-he sorted through himself, trying to fi nd the detachment he needed to carry him, disinterested, to the end of the case.

“Have you come to confess?”

He started at the voice. Unseen to him, the priest had materialised from the dark. Lynley stood. “No, I’m not a Catholic,” he replied. “I was just gathering my thoughts.”

“Churches are good places for that, aren’t they?” Father Hart smiled. “I always stop for a prayer before locking up for the night. I always check first, as well, to make sure no one is still inside. It wouldn’t do to be locked up in St. Catherine’s in this kind of cold, would it?”

“No,” Lynley agreed. “It wouldn’t do at all.” He followed the little priest to the end of the aisle and out into the night. Clouds obscured moon and stars. The other man was merely a shadow, without form or feature.

“How well do you know Pericles, Father Hart?”

The priest didn’t answer at first as he fumbled with his keys and locked the church door. “Pericles?” he repeated musingly. He moved past the other man, out into the graveyard. “It’s Shakespeare, isn’t it?”

“‘As flame to smoke.’ Yes, it’s Shakespeare.”

“I…well, I suppose I know it fairly well.”

“Well enough to know why Pericles fled from Antiochus? Why Antiochus wanted to have him killed?”

“I…” The priest groped in his pockets. “I don’t think I quite remember all the details of the play.”

“You remember enough, I daresay. Good night, Father Hart,” Lynley replied and left the graveyard.

He descended the hillock by the gravel path, his footsteps sounding unnaturally loud in the nighttime peace. On the bridge, he paused to gather his thoughts, and he leaned against its stone side, surveying the village. To his right, Olivia Odell’s house was dark, and woman and child slept in innocent safety within. Across the street, organ music fl oated eerily from Nigel Parrish’s cottage on the edge of the common. To his left the lodge awaited his entry, and beyond that the high street curved in the direction of the pub. From where he stood, he couldn’t see St. Chad’s Lane with its council houses. But he could imagine them. Not wanting to do that, he returned to the lodge.

He’d been gone less than an hour, but he knew as soon as he walked in the door that, during his absence, Stepha had returned. The building held its breath, waiting for him to discover and know. His feet felt like lead.

He wasn’t entirely sure where Stepha’s rooms would be, but his instinct told him that they were somewhere on the ground fl oor of the old building, past the reception desk, in the direction of the kitchen. He went through the door.

As he did so, he had his answers, palpably alive in the atmosphere that surrounded him. He could smell the cigarette smoke. He could almost taste the liquor in the air. He could hear the laughter, the whispered passion, the delight. He could feel the hands drawing him relentlessly forward. All that was left was to see the truth.

He knocked on the door. There was immediate quiet.

“Stepha?”

Movement within, hurried and suppressed. Stepha’s soft laugh hung in the air. At the last moment, he nearly stopped himself, but then he turned the knob, to enter and to know.

“Perhaps now you can give me an alibi that sticks,” laughed Richard Gibson, giving the woman a proprietary slap on her naked thigh. “I don’t think the inspector believed my little Madeline for a moment.”