A Great Deliverance

8

“Maybe there’s a portrait in the attic,” Havers replied.

Lynley glanced at her in surprise. Thus far today, she had been so markedly diligent about behaving appropriately, about cooperating completely and promptly with his every order, that to hear her break away from that and say something amusing was a bit of a shock. A nice one, in fact. “Honours to you, Sergeant,” he chuckled. “Let’s see what Mrs. Mowrey has to say.”

She met them at the front door, looking from one to the other in confusion and-was it veiled just behind the eyes?-a touch of fear. “Good morning,” she said. Down from the roof terrace, she looked at least more like a woman approaching middle age. But the hair was still sunny-blonde, the fi gure slight, the skin lightly freckled and virtually unlined.

Lynley showed her his warrant card. “Scotland Yard CID. May we come in, Mrs. Mowrey?”

She looked from Lynley to Havers’s grim face and back again. “Of course.” Her voice was quite even, polite and warm. But there was a hesitation, a rigidity in her movements, that suggested strong emotion withheld.

She led them to the left, through an open door that took them into the sitting room, where she gestured wordlessly at the furniture, beckoning them to sit. It was a well-furnished, tasteful room, with pieces of a modern design, pine and walnut that mingled with subdued autumn colours. A clock was ticking somewhere, light and rapid like a racing pulse. Here was none of the riotous disorder of Olivia Odell nor the mechanical precision of Gembler Farm. Rather, this room was obviously the gathering place for a congenial family, with informal photographs displayed, souvenirs of trips, and a stack of boxed games and cards shelved among books.

Tessa Mowrey chose a chair in the farthest corner where the light was weakest. She sat down on its edge, her back upright, her legs crossed, her hands folded in her lap. She wore a plain gold wedding band. She didn’t ask why Scotland Yard had come calling. Rather, she followed Lynley with her eyes as he walked to the mantel and took note of the photographs that were its display.

“Your children?” he asked. There were two of them, a girl and a boy, pictures taken on a family holiday in St. Ives. He recognised the familiar sweep of the bay, the grey and white buildings on the shore, and the assortment of boats left beached at low tide.

“Yes,” she responded. She volunteered nothing else. Quiescent, she awaited the inevitable. The silence continued. Lynley allowed it to do so. Eventually, sheer nervousness compelled her to go on.

“Has Russell telephoned you?” There was an edge of despair in her voice. It was dull-sounding, as if she’d experienced the full range of grief and there was nothing left in her, no depth of emotion to plummet further. “I thought he might. Of course, it’s been three weeks. I’d begun to hope he was only punishing me till we sorted everything out.” She stirred uneasily when Sergeant Havers took out her notebook. “Oh, must you?” she asked faintly.

“I’m afraid so,” Lynley replied.

“Then I’ll tell you everything. It’s best.” She looked down at her hands and tightened their grip on each other.

Odd, Lynley thought, how as members of the same species we inevitably rely on the same set of gestures for our nonverbal signals of distress. A hand raised to the throat, arms cradling the body protectively, a quick adjustment of clothing, a flinching to ward off a psychic blow. Tessa, he saw, was gathering strength now to get through this ordeal, as if one hand could give the other a transfusion of courage through the simple expedient of fi ngers intertwined. It seemed to work. She looked up, her expression defi ant.

“I had just turned sixteen when I married him. Can you understand what it’s like to be married to a man eighteen years older than yourself when you’re only sixteen? Of course you can’t. No one can. Not even Russell.”

“You didn’t want to stay on in school?”

“I’d planned to. But I’d left school to help on the farm for a few weeks when Dad’s back went bad. It was only a temporary arrangement. I was supposed to return in a month. Marsha Fitzalan gave me work to do so that I wouldn’t fall behind. But I fell behind, and there was William.”

“How do you mean?”

“He’d come to buy a ram from Dad. I took him out to see it. William was…very handsome. I was romantic. He was Heathcliff come to claim Cathy at last, as far as I was concerned.”

“Surely your father had some concern about his sixteen-year-old daughter wanting to marry? And to marry a man so much older than herself?”

He did. Mother as well. But I was stubborn, and William was responsible, respectable, and strong. I think they believed that if they didn’t let me marry him, I would turn out wild and go desperately bad in one way or another. So they gave their consent, and we married.”

“What happened to the marriage?”

“What does a sixteen-year-old girl know about marriage, Inspector?” she asked in answer. “I wasn’t even certain how babies got themselves born when I married William. You’d think a farm girl would have a bit more sense, but you have to remember that I spent most of my free time with the Brontës. Charlotte, Anne, and Emily were always a bit vague when it came down to the details. But I found out quickly enough. Gillian was born before my seventeenth birthday. William was thrilled. He adored her. It was as if his life began the moment he saw Gilly.”

“Yet a number of years passed before you had a second child.”

“That’s because Gilly changed everything between us.”

“How?”

“Somehow she-this tiny, fragile baby- made William discover religion and nothing was quite the same after that.”

“I’ve somehow got the impression he was always religious.”

“Oh no. Not till Gillian. It was as if he couldn’t quite be a good enough father, as if he had to purify his soul to be worthy of a child.”

“How did he do it?”

She laughed shortly at the memory, but the sound was regretful and unamused. “The Bible, confession, daily communion. Within a year of our marriage, he became the backbone of St. Catherine’s and a devoted father.”

“And there you were, a teenager, trying to live with a baby and a saint.”

“That’s exactly what it was like. Except that I didn’t have to worry so much about the baby. I wasn’t quite good enough to care for William’s child. Or perhaps not holy enough because, at any rate, he mostly cared for her himself.”

“What did you do?”

“I retreated to my books.” She had sat nearly motionless through the initial part of their conversation, but now she moved restlessly, getting up and pacing across the room to look out the bay window where York Minster loomed in the distance. But instead of the cathedral, Lynley guessed that Tessa saw the past. “I dreamt that William would become Mr. Darcy. I dreamt that Mr. Knightley would sweep me off my feet. I hoped that any day I might meet Edward Rochester if I only believed enough that my dreams were real.” She crossed her arms in front of her as if that could ward off the pain of that time. “I wanted desperately to be loved. How I wanted to be loved! Can you possibly understand that, Inspector?”

“Who couldn’t understand?” Lynley replied.

“I thought that if we had a second child, we would each have someone special to love. So I…I seduced William back to our bed.”

“Back?”

“Oh yes, back. He’d left me shortly after Gilly was born and had begun to sleep elsewhere. On the couch, in the sewing room, anywhere but with me.”

“Why?”

“He used as an excuse the fact that Gilly’s birth had been so hard on me. He didn’t want me to become pregnant and go through the torture again.”

“There are contraceptives-”

“William’s Catholic, Inspector. There are no contraceptives.” She turned from the window to face them again. The light bled colour from her cheeks, effaced eyebrows and lashes, and deepened the creases from nose to mouth. If she sensed this, she made no move to avoid it. Rather, she remained, as if willing to allow her age to be exposed. She went on.

“But I really think, looking back on it, that it was sex, not conception, that frightened William. At any rate, I got him back to my bed eventually. And eight years after Gilly, Roberta was born.”

“If you had what you wanted-a second baby to love-why did you leave?”

“Because it began again. All of it. She wasn’t mine any more than Gillian had been. I loved my little girls, but I wasn’t allowed near them, not the way I wanted to be. I had nothing.” Although her voice quavered on the last word, she drew herself in, cradling her body tighter, and found control. “All I had once again was Darcy. My books.”

“So you left.”

“I woke up one morning just a few weeks after Roberta was born and I knew that if I stayed I would shrivel to nothing. I was nearly twenty-five. I had two children I wasn’t allowed to love and a husband who had begun to consult the Bible before dressing in the morning. I looked out the window, saw the trail leading to High Kel Moor, and knew I would leave that day.”

“Didn’t he try to stop you?”

“No. Of course I wanted him to. But he didn’t. I walked out of the door and out of his life, carrying just one valise and thirty-four pounds. I came to York.”

“He never came to see you? Never tried to follow you?”

She shook her head. “I never told him where I was. I just ceased to exist. But I’d ceased to exist so many years before for William that what did it matter.”

“Why didn’t you divorce him?”

“Because I never intended to marry again. I came to York longing for an education, not a husband. I planned to work for a while, to save money, to go to London or even emigrate to the States. But six weeks after I arrived in York, everything changed. I met Russell Mowrey.”

“How did you meet?”

She smiled at the memory. “They’d fenced off part of the city when they began the Viking digs.”

“Yes, I recall that.”

“Russell was a graduate student from London. He was part of the excavation team. I’d stuck my head through a bit of a hole in the fence to have a look at the work. And there was Russell. His first words to me were, ‘Jesus, a Norse goddess!’ and then he blushed to the roots of his hair. I think I fell in love with him then. He was twenty-six years old. He wore spectacles that kept slipping down his nose, absolutely filthy trousers, and a university jersey. When he walked over to speak to me, he slipped in the mud and fell directly onto his bottom.”

“Not much of a Darcy,” Lynley said kindly.

“No. So much more. We were married four weeks later.”

“Why didn’t you tell him about William?”

She knotted her brows, appeared to be searching for words that would enable them to understand. “Russell was an innocent. He had such…such an image of me. He saw me as a kind of Viking princess, a snow queen. How could I tell him I had two children and a husband that I’d left on a farm in the dales?”

“What would have changed if he’d known?”

“Nothing, I suppose. But at the time, I believed everything would have. I believed that he wouldn’t want me if he knew, that he wouldn’t be willing to wait for me through a divorce. I’d been looking for love, Inspector. And finally, here it was. Could I take a chance that it might escape me?”

“But you’re only two hours from Keldale here. Were you never worried that William might one day show up in your life? Even as a chance encounter on the street?”

“William never left the dales. Not once in the years that I knew him. He had everything there: his children, his religion, his farm. Why on earth would he ever come to York? Besides, I thought at first that we’d go to London. Russell’s family is there. I’d no idea that he’d want to settle here. But here we stayed. We had Rebecca five years later. Then William eighteen months after that.”

“William?”

“You can imagine how I felt when Russell wanted to call him William. It’s his father’s name. What could I do but agree?”

“And you’ve been here, then, for nineteen years?”

“Yes,” she replied. “First in a small fl at in the city centre, then a row house near Bishopthorpe Road, and last year we bought this house. We’d…saved for so long. Russell worked two jobs and I’ve my job at the museum as well. We’ve been,” she blinked back her fi rst tears, “so happy. God, so happy. Until now. You’ve come for me, haven’t you? Or have you brought me word?”

“No one’s told you? You haven’t read about it?”

“Read about it? Has something…He isn’t…” Tessa looked from Lynley to Havers. It was obvious that she saw something in their faces, for her own face flashed fear before she went on. “The night Russell left, he was terribly angry. I thought that if only I said nothing, did nothing, it would work itself out. He’d come home and-”

Lynley suddenly understood that they were talking about two entirely different things. “Mrs. Mowrey,” he said, “do you not know about your husband?”

Her eyes widened, growing dark with apprehension. “Russell,” she whispered. “He left that Saturday the investigator found me. Three weeks ago. He’s not been home since.”

“Mrs. Mowrey,” Lynley said carefully, “William Teys was murdered three weeks ago. On Saturday night between ten and midnight. Your daughter Roberta was charged with the crime.”

If they had thought she might faint, they were wrong. She stared at them without speaking for nearly a minute, then turned back to the window. “Rebecca will be home soon,” she said tonelessly. “She comes home for lunch. She’ll ask about her father. She does every day. She knows something’s wrong, but I’ve managed to keep most of it from her.” A trembling hand touched her cheek. “I know Russell’s gone to London. I haven’t phoned his family because, of course, I didn’t want them to know anything was wrong. But I know he’s gone to them in London. I know.”

“Do you have a photograph of your husband?” Lynley asked. “His family’s London address?”

She swung on him. “He wouldn’t!” she cried passionately. “This is a man who has never lifted his hand to strike one of his own children! He was angry-yes, I’ve said that- but his anger was with me, not with William! He wouldn’t have gone, he couldn’t have-” She began to cry, horribly, shedding what were probably her first tears in three agonising weeks. Pressing her forehead against the window glass, she wept bitterly, as if she would never be consoled.

Havers got to her feet and left the room. Good God, where is she going? Lynley wondered, half-expecting a repeat of her disappearing act in the pub last night. But she returned moments later with a pitcher of orange juice and a glass.

“Thank you, Barbara,” he said.

She nodded, shot him a diffi dent smile, and poured the woman a glass of the liquid.

Tessa Mowrey took it but rather than drink, she clutched it as if it were a talisman. “Rebecca mustn’t see me like this. I’ve got to pull myself together. Must be stronger than this.” She saw the glass in her hand, took a sip, and grimaced. “I can’t abide tinned orange juice. Why do I have it in the house? Oh, Russell says that it’s not that bad. I suppose it isn’t, really.” When she turned back to Lynley, she looked, he saw, every single day of her forty-three years. “He did not kill William.”

“That’s what everyone in Keldale says of Roberta.”

She flinched. “I don’t think of her as my daughter. I’m sorry. I never knew her.”

“She’s been placed in a mental asylum, Mrs. Mowrey. When William was found, she claimed to have killed him.”

“Then if she’s admitted to the crime, why have you come to see me? If she says she killed William then certainly Russell…” Her voice drifted off. It was as if she had suddenly heard her own words and realised how eager she was to trade daughter for husband.

He could hardly blame her. Lynley thought of the barn stall, the ornate Bible, the photograph albums, the cool silence of the melancholy house. “Did you never see Gillian again?” he asked abruptly, waiting for a sign, the smallest indication that Tessa knew of Gillian’s disappearance. There was none.

“Never.”

“She never contacted you in any way?”

“Of course not. Even if she’d wanted to, William wouldn’t have allowed it, I’m sure.”

Probably not, thought Lynley. But once she ran off, once she cut the ties with her father, why had she not sought her mother then?

“Religious fanatic,” Havers declared decisively. She shoved her hair back behind her ears and gave her attention to the photograph she held. “But this one’s not half bad. She did okay on her second time round. Too bad she didn’t bother with a divorce.” Russell Mowrey smiled up at her from the photograph Tessa had given them. He was a nice-looking man in a three-piece suit, wife on his arm. Easter Sunday. Havers put it in the manila folder and gave herself back to the passing scenery. “At least we know why Gillian left.”

“Because of the father’s religion?”

“That’s the way I see it,” Havers replied. “Obviously, a combination of that and the second baby. There she’d been, for eight years the centre of her father’s life-Mum doesn’t appear to have counted for much-when all of a sudden a new baby arrives. It’s supposed to be Mummy’s, but Dad doesn’t trust Mummy to do right by her children, so he takes this one over as well. Mummy leaves and Gillian follows.”

“Not exactly, Havers. She waited eight years to go wherever she went.”

“Well, you can’t expect her to have run off when she was eight years old! She bided her time, probably hating little Roberta every second for stealing her dad.”

“That doesn’t make sense. First you say that Gillian left because she couldn’t abide her father’s religious fanaticism. Then you say she left because she’d lost his love to Roberta. Now what is it? She either loves him and wants to be his favourite again, or she can’t abide his religious devotion and feels she has to escape. You can’t have it both ways.”

“It’s not black and white!” Havers protested loudly. “These things never are!”

Lynley glanced at her, amazed by the affront in her voice. Her stubby features looked like paste. “Barbara-”

“I’m sorry! Dammit! I’m doing it all over again! Why do I bother? I’m no good at this. I always do it. I never-”

“Barbara,” he interrupted fi rmly.

She stared straight ahead. “Yes, sir?”

“We’re discussing the case, not arguing before a bar of justice. It’s fine to have an opinion. I want you to, in fact. I’ve always found it extremely helpful to talk a case over with someone.” But it was more than that, really. It was arguing, laughing, hearing the sweet voice say Oh, you think you’re right, Tommy, but I shall prove you wrong! He felt loneliness settle on him like a cold, wet shroud.

Havers moved restlessly in her seat. With no music playing, the tension was screaming to be heard.

“I don’t know what it is,” she said at last. “I get into the fray and forget what I’m doing.”

“I understand.” He let the matter drop, his eyes following the meandering pattern that the stone walls made on the hillside across the dale from the road on which they travelled.

He thought about Tessa. He knew that he was trying to understand her and that he was ill-equipped to do so. Nothing in his life of Cornwall and Howenstow, of Oxford and Belgravia, even of Scotland Yard, explained the paucity of experience of life on a remote farm that would drive a girl of sixteen to believe that her only future lay in immediate marriage. And yet surely that was the foundation of what had happened. No romantic interpretation of the facts at hand-no reflections upon Heathcliff, no matter how apt-could hide the real explanation. The drudgery and sheer ennui of those weeks when she had been forced to stay home and help out had made an otherwise simple Yorkshire farmer look arresting by comparison. Thus, she merely moved from one trap into another. Married at sixteen, a mother before her seventeenth birthday. Wouldn’t any woman have wanted to escape such a life? Yet, if that was the case, why marry again in such a hurry?

Havers broke into his thoughts. An underlying note of urgency in her voice made Lynley glance at her curiously. Tiny beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. She swallowed noisily. “What I can’t see is the…Tessa’s shrine. The woman walks out on him-not that she didn’t appear to have every right to- and he sets up a virtual Taj Mahal of photographs in a corner of the sitting room.”

It suddenly dawned on Lynley. “How do we know William set up the shrine?”

Havers came to her own quick terms with the knowledge. “Either of the girls could have done it,” she responded.

“Who do you imagine?”

“It had to be Gillian.”

“As a bit of revenge? A little daily reminder to William that Mummy’d run off? A little knife inserted between the ribs since he’d started to favour Roberta?”

“Bet on it, sir,” Havers agreed.

They drove on for several miles before Lynley spoke again. “She could have done it, Havers. Something tells me she was desperate enough.”

“Tessa, d’you mean?”

“Russell was gone that night. She says she took aspirin and went directly to bed, but no one can verify it. She could have gone to Keldale.”

“Why kill the dog?”

“He wouldn’t have known her. He wasn’t there nineteen years ago. Who was Tessa to him? A stranger.”

“But decapitate her first husband?” Havers frowned. “Would have been easier to divorce him, I’d think.”

“No. Not for a Catholic.”

“Even so, Russell’s a better candidate if you ask me. Who knows where he went?” When Lynley didn’t reply, she added, “Sir?”

“I…” Lynley hesitated, studying the road ahead. “Tessa’s right. He’s gone to London.”

“How can you be certain of that?”

“Because I think I saw him, Havers. At the Yard.”

“So he did go to turn her in. I suppose she knew all along that he would.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

Havers offered a new thought. “Well, then there’s Ezra.”

Lynley flashed her a smile. “William in his jimjams in the middle of the road ripping up Ezra’s watercolours while Ezra curses him to hell and back? We could have a motive for murder there. I don’t think an artist would take lightly to having someone rip up his work.”

Havers opened her mouth, stopped. She reflected for a moment. “But it wasn’t his pyjamas.”

“Yes, it was.”

“It wasn’t. It was his dressing gown. Remember? Nigel said his legs reminded him of a gorilla. So what was he doing in his dressing gown? It was still light out. It wasn’t time for bed.”

“Changing for dinner, I dare say. He’s up in his room, looks out the window, sees Ezra trespassing, and comes charging into the yard.”

“I suppose that could be it.”

“What else?”

“Exercising, perhaps?”

“Deep knee bends in his underwear? That’s hard to picture.”

“Or…perhaps with Olivia?”

Lynley smiled. “Not if everything we’ve heard about him is true. William sounds to me like a strictly after-marriage man. I don’t think he’d try any funny business with Olivia beforehand.”

“What about Nigel Parrish?”

“What about him?”

“Walking the dog back to the farm out of the goodness of his heart, like a card-carrying member of the RSPCA? Doesn’t that whole story seem a bit off to you?”

“It does. But do you really think Parrish would want to get his hands dirty with a bit of William Teys’s blood? Not to mention his head rolling across the stall fl oor.”

“To be honest, he seems the type to faint at the sight.”

They laughed, a fi rst shared communication. It dropped almost immediately into an uncomfortable silence at the sudden realisation that they could become friends.

The decision to go to Barnstingham Mental Asylum grew out of Lynley’s belief that Roberta held all the cards in the current game they were playing: the identity of the murderer, the motive behind the crime, and the disappearance of Gillian Teys. He’d stopped an hour out of York to make the arrangements by telephone, and now, pulling the car to a stop on the gravel drive in front of the building, he turned to Barbara.

“Cigarette?” He offered his gold case.

“No, sir. Thank you.”

He nodded, glanced at the imposing building, then back at her. “Rather wait here, Sergeant?” he asked as he lit his cigarette with the silver lighter. He took a few moments about replacing all the impedimenta of his habit.

She watched him with speculative eyes. “Why?”

He shrugged casually. Too casually, she noted. “You look fagged out. I thought you might want a bit of a rest.”

Fagged out. It was his public-school-fop act. She’d begun to notice how he used it occasionally to serve the need of the moment. He’d dropped it earlier. Why was he picking it up now?

“If we’re talking about exhaustion, Inspector, you look just about ready to drop. What’s up?”

He examined himself in the mirror at her words, his cigarette dangling from his lips, his eyes narrowed against the smoke, part Sam Spade, part Algernon Moncrieff. “I do look a sight.” He busied himself about his appearance for a moment: straightening his tie, examining his hair, brushing at nonexistent lint on the lapels of his jacket. She waited. Finally he met her eyes. The fop, as well as the other personae, was gone. “The farm upset you a bit yesterday,” he said frankly. “I have an idea that what we’ll find in here is going to be a hell of a lot worse than the farm.”

For a moment she couldn’t take her eyes from his, but she pressed her hand to the door and flung it open. “I can deal with it, sir,” she said abruptly and got out into the brisk autumn air.

“We’ve kept her confined,” Dr. Samuels was saying to Lynley as they walked down the transverse passage that ran straight through the building from east to west.

Barbara followed behind them, relieved to find that Barnstingham was not exactly what she had pictured when she first heard the words mental asylum. It was really not very hospital-like at all, an English baroque building laid out on cross-axes. They had entered through a front hall that rose two storeys, with fluted pilasters standing on plinths against the walls. Light and colour were the operative words here, for the room was painted a calming shade of peach, the decorative plasterwork was white, the ankle-thick carpeting was merely a shade off rust, and while the portraits were dark and moody, of the Flemish school, their subjects managed to look suitably apologetic about the fact.

All this was a relief, for when Lynley had first mentioned the need to see Roberta, to come to this place, Barbara had become quite faint, that old insidious panic setting in. Lynley had seen it, of course. Damn the man. He didn’t miss a trick.

Now that she was inside the building, she felt steadier, a feeling that improved once they left the great central hall and began their journey down the passage. Here conviviality expressed itself in soothing Constable landscapes and vases of fresh flowers and quiet voices in the air. The sound of music and singing came from a distance.

“The choir,” Dr. Samuels explained. “Here, it’s just this way.”

Samuels himself had been a secondary source of both surprise and relief. Outside the walls of the hospital, Barbara wouldn’t have known he was a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist somehow conjured up images of Freud: a bearded Victorian face, a cigar, and those speculative eyes. But Samuels had the look of a man who was more at home on horseback or hiking across the moors than probing disturbed psyches. He was well-built, loose limbed, and clean shaven, with a tendency, Barbara guessed, to be less than patient with anyone whose intelligence did not match his own. He was probably the devil on a tennis court as well.

She’d begun to feel quite at ease with the hospital when Dr. Samuels opened a narrow door-funny how it had been concealed by some panelling-and led them into the new wing of the building. This was the locked ward, looking and smelling exactly as Barbara had supposed a locked ward would. The carpeting was a very dark, serviceable brown. The walls were the colour of sunbaked sand, unadorned and broken only by doors into which small windows were set at eye level. The air was filled with that medicinal smell of antiseptics and detergents and drugs. And it was cut by a low moaning that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. It could have been the wind. It could have been anything.

Here it is, she told herself. The place for psychos, for girls who decapitate daddies, for girls who murder. Lots of things are murder, Barb.

“There’s been absolutely nothing since her original statement,” Dr. Samuels was saying to Lynley. “She’s not catatonic. She’s merely said what she intends to say, I think.” He glanced at the clipboard he was carrying. “‘I did it. I’m sorry.’ On the day the body was found. She’s not spoken since.”

“There’s no medical cause? She’s been examined?”

Dr. Samuel’s lips tightened in offence. It was clear that this Scotland Yard intrusion bordered on insult, and if he had to impart information, it would be minimal at best.

“She’s been examined,” he said. “No seizure, no stroke. She can speak. She chooses not to.”

If he was bothered by the clipped nature of the doctor’s response, Lynley didn’t let it show. He was used to encountering attitudes like the psychiatrist’s, attitudes proclaiming that the police were antagonists to be thwarted rather than allies to be helped. He slowed his steps and told Dr. Samuel about Roberta’s cache of food. This, at least, caught the man’s attention. When he next spoke, his words walked the line between frustration and deeper thought.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Inspector. The food could, as you guess, be a compulsion. It could be a stimulus or a response. It could be a source of gratification or a form of sublimation. Until Roberta’s willing to give us something to go on, it could be damn well anything.”

Lynley shifted to another area. “Why did you take her from the Richmond police? Isn’t that a bit irregular?”

“Not when the responsible party’s signed her in,” Dr. Samuels replied. “We’re a private hospital.”

“The responsible party. Was that Superintendent Nies?”

Samuels shook his head impatiently. “Not at all. We don’t take people at random from the police.” He scanned Roberta’s chart. “It was…let me see where…Gibson, Richard Gibson. He names himself as her closest relative. He’s the one who got the court to agree and filled out the paperwork.”

“Richard Gibson?”

“That’s the name on the form, Inspector,” Samuels replied tersely. “He’s signed her in for treatment pending the trial. She’s in therapy daily. There’s no progress yet, but that isn’t to say there never will be any.”

“But why would Gibson-” Lynley was speaking more to himself than the other two, but Samuels went on, perhaps in the assumption that he was being addressed.

“She’s his cousin, after all. And the sooner she’s better, the sooner the trial. That is, unless she’s proven incompetent to stand trial at all.”

“And in that case,” Lynley fi nished, his eyes fixed grimly on the doctor’s face, “she’s in for life, isn’t she?”

“Until she recovers.” Samuels led them up to a heavy, locked door. “She’s just in here. It’s unfortunate that she has to be alone, but considering the circumstances…” He gestured with his hands, unlocked the door, and swung it open. “Roberta, you’ve visitors,” he said.

He’d chosen Prokofi ev-Romeo and Juliet- and the music had begun almost immediately when he started the car. Thank God, Barbara thought brokenly. Thank God. Let the music of violins, cellos and violas drive thought away, drive memory away, drive everything completely, irreversibly away so that there is no existence but that of audition, so that she needn’t think of the girl in the room and, even more frightening, of the man in the car.

Even staring steadfastly ahead, she could still see his hands on the wheel, could see the gold hair on them-lighter even than the hair on his head-could see each finger, note its movement, as he guided the car back to Keldale.

When he leaned forward to make an adjustment in the sound, she could see his profi le. He was very lightly tanned. Gold and brown. Skin, hair, and eyes. Straight, classical nose. The fi rm line of jaw. A face that spoke clearly of tremendous inner strength, of resources of character that she couldn’t comprehend.

How had he done it?

She’d been by a window, not looking out but rather staring fixedly at the wall, a lummox of a girl nearly six feet tall who must have weighed well over fifteen stone. She sat on a stool, her back hunched over in an arc of defeat, and she rocked.

“Roberta, my name is Thomas Lynley. I’ve come to talk to you about your father.”

The rocking continued. The eyes looked at nothing, saw nothing. If she heard at all, she gave absolutely no sign.

Her hair was filthy, foul-smelling. It was pulled back from her broad, moon-shaped face with an elastic band, but greasy tendrils had escaped imprisonment and hung forward stiffl y, kissing on her neck the pockets of fl esh that encased in their folds the incongruous ornament of a single, slender gold chain.

“Father Hart came to London, Roberta. He’s asked us to help you. He says he knows you didn’t hurt anyone.”

Nothing. The broad face was expressionless. Suppurating pimples covered cheeks and chin. Bloated skin stretched over layers of fat that had long ago erased whatever defi nition her features might have had. She was dough-like, grey and unclean.

“We’ve been talking to a great many people in Keldale. We’ve seen your cousin Richard, and Olivia, and Bridie. Bridie cut her hair, Roberta. She’s made quite a mess of it, unfortunately, in an effort to look like the Princess of Wales. Her mother was quite upset about it. She said how good you always were to Bridie.”

No response. Roberta was dressed in a too-short skirt that revealed white, fl abby thighs upon which the flesh, dotted by red pustules, quivered when she rocked. There were hospital slippers on her feet, but they were too small, and her sausage toes hung out, their uncut nails curling around them.

“We’ve been to the house. Have you read all those books? Stepha Odell said that you’d read them all. We were amazed at how many you have. We saw the pictures of your mother, Roberta. She was lovely, wasn’t she?”

Silence. Her arms hung at her sides. Her enormous breasts strained against the cheap material of her blouse. Its buttons struggled to hold the thin garment closed as the pressure of the rocking continued, each movement causing the flesh to heave to and fro in a rebarbative pavane.

“I think this may be a bit difficult for you to hear, Roberta, but we saw your mother today. Do you know that she lives in York? You have another brother and sister there. She told us how much your father loved you and Gillian.”

The movement ceased. The face neither acknowledged nor changed, but the tears began. They were silent, ugly rivers of mute pain dipping and plunging through the crevices of fat, climbing the peaks of acne. With the tears came the mucus. It began its descent from her nose in a slimy cord, touched her lips, and crawled onto her chin.

Lynley squatted before her. He removed a snowy handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her face clean. He took her pulpy, lifeless hand in his own and pressed it fi rmly.

“Roberta.” There was no response. “I’ll find Gillian.” He stood, folded the elegant, monogrammed linen square, and returned it to his pocket.

What had Webberly said? Barbara thought. There’s a lot you might learn from working with Lynley.

And now she knew. She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She knew what would be there and the thought of its existence in this man she had been determined to believe was an absolute fop of an upper-class snob chilled her entirely.

He was supposed to be the man who danced in nightclubs, who dispensed sexual favours, laughter, and good cheer, who moved effortlessly in a gilt-edged world of money and privilege. But he was not supposed to be-never supposed to be-the man she had seen today.

He’d stepped neatly out of the mould she’d created and destroyed it without a backward glance. She had to fit him back into it somehow. If she didn’t, the fires within her that for so many years had kept her alive would be swiftly extinguished. And then, she knew well, she would die in the cold.

That was the thought that carried her to Keldale, longing to fly from his presence. But when the Bentley made the final turn into the village, she knew immediately that there would be no quick escape. For Nigel Parrish and another man were having a violent quarrel upon the bridge, directly in the path of the car.