Missing Joseph

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IN BEST VICTORIAN FASHION, Cotes Hall was a structure that seemed to consist solely of weather-vanes, chimneys, and gables from which bay and oriel windows reflected the ashen morning sky. It was built of limestone, and the combination of neglect and exposure to weather had caused the exterior to grow unappealingly lichenous, with streaks of grey-green descending from the roof in a pattern that resembled a vertical alluvial fan. The land that immediately surrounded the Hall had been taken over by weeds, and while it commanded an impressive view of the forest and the hills to its west and its east, the bleak winter landscape in conjunction with the property’s general condition made the idea of living there more repellent than welcome.

Lynley eased the Bentley over the last of the ruts and into the courtyard round which the Hall loomed like the house of Usher. He gave a moment’s thought to St. John TownleyYoung’s appearance at Crofters Inn on the previous night. On the way out he’d encountered his son-in-law plainly having a drink with a woman who was not his wife, and from Townley-Young’s reaction it appeared that this was not the younger man’s first such transgression. At the time, Lynley had thought that they’d unwittingly stumbled upon the motive behind the pranks at the Hall as well as the identity of the prankster. A woman who was the third point of a love-triangle might go to extreme lengths to disrupt the tranquillity and the marriage of a man she wanted for herself. However, as he ran his eyes from the Hall’s rusting weathervanes to the great gaps in its rainpipes to the snarl of weeds and patches of damp where the base of the structure met the ground, Lynley was forced to admit that that had been a facile and largely chauvinistic conclusion. He, who didn’t even have to face it, shuddered at the thought of having to live here. No matter the renovation inside, the exterior of the Hall, as well as its gardens and park, would take years of devoted labour to turn round. He couldn’t blame anyone, wedded blissfully or otherwise, for trying to avoid it in whatever way he could.

He parked the car between an open-back lorry stacked high with lumber and a minivan with Crackwell and Sons, Plumbing, Ltd. emblazoned in orange letters on its side. From inside the house came the mixed sounds of hammer, saw, cursing, and “March of the Toreadors” at medium volume. In unconscious time to the music, an elderly man in rust-stained coveralls teetered out a rear door, balancing a roll of carpet on his shoulder. It appeared to be sodden. He dumped it along the side of the lorry, nodding at Lynley. He said, “Help you with something, mate?” and lit a cigarette while waiting for the answer.

“The caretaker’s cottage,” Lynley said. “I’m looking for Mrs. Spence.”

The man lifted his bristly chin in the direction of a carriage house across the courtyard. Abutting it was a smaller building, an architectural miniature of the Hall itself. But unlike the Hall, its limestone exterior had been scrubbed clean and there were curtains in the windows. Round the front door someone had planted winter irises. Their blooms made a bright screen of yellow and purple against the grey walls.

The door was closed. When Lynley knocked and no one answered, the man called out, “Try the garden. The greenhouse,” before he trudged back into the Hall.

The garden proved to be a plot of land behind the cottage, separated from the courtyard by a wall into which a green gate was recessed. This opened easily despite the rust on its hinges, and it gave way to what was clearly Juliet Spence’s demesne. Here the earth was ploughed and free of weeds. The air smelled of compost. In a flower bed along the side of the cottage, twigs crisscrossed over a covering of straw that protected the crowns of perennials from the frost. It was clear that Mrs. Spence was preparing to do some sort of planting at the far side of the garden, for a large vegetable patch had been marked out with boards pounded into the earth, and pine-wood stakes stood at the head and the foot of what would be rows of plants some six months from now.

The greenhouse was just beyond this. Its door was closed. Its glass panes were opaque. Behind these, Lynley could see the form of a woman moving, her arms extended to tend to some sort of plant that was hanging on a level with her head. He crossed the garden. His Wellingtons sank into damp soil that formed a path from the cottage to the greenhouse and ultimately into the wood beyond.

The door wasn’t latched. The pressure of a single, light tap swung it soundlessly open. Mrs. Spence apparently neither heard the tap nor immediately noticed the influx of cooler air, because she went on with her work, giving him the welcome opportunity to observe.

The hanging plants were fuchsias. They grew from wire baskets lined with some sort of moss. They’d been trimmed for the winter but not stripped of all their leaves, and it was these that Mrs. Spence appeared to be attending to. She was pumping a malodorous spray upon them, pausing to turn each basket so that she doused the plant thoroughly before moving on to the next one. She was saying, “Take that, you little bastards,” and working the pump swiftly.

She looked harmless enough, poking round the greenhouse among her plants. True, her choice of headgear was a little bit odd, but one couldn’t judge and condemn a woman for wearing a faded red bandana round her forehead. If anything, it made her look like an American Navajo. And it served its purpose, anchoring her hair away from her face. This bore smudges of dirt, which she further smeared by rubbing the back of her hand— protected by a frayed and fingerless mitten — across one cheek. She was middle-aged, but her activity had the concentration of youth, and watching her, Lynley found it difficult to call her murderess.

This marked hesitation made him uneasy. It forced him to consider not only the facts he already had but also those in the process of unveiling themselves as he stood in the doorway. The greenhouse was a hotchpotch of plants. They stood in both clay and plastic pots along a central table. They lined the two work tops that ran the length of the greenhouse sides. They came in all shapes and sizes, in every imaginable type of container, and as he worked his eyes through them, he wondered how much of Colin Shepherd’s investigating had gone on in here.

Juliet Spence turned from the last of the hanging baskets of fuchsias. She started when she saw him. Her right hand reached instinctively for the loose cowl-neck of her black pullover in an inherently female defensive manoeuvre. Her left hand still held the pump, however. Obviously, she had the presence of mind not to set it down when she could use it on him if necessary.

“What do you want?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I knocked. You didn’t hear me. Detective Inspector Lynley. New Scotland Yard.”

“I see.”

He reached for his identifi cation. She waved him off, revealing a large hole in her pullover’s armpit. It acted as companion, evidently, to the threadbare condition of her muddy jeans.

“That’s unnecessary,” she said. “I believe you. Colin told me you’d probably come round this morning.” She placed the pump on the work top amid the plants and fingered the remaining leaves of the nearest fuchsia. He could see that they were abnormally ragged. “Capsids,” she said in explanation. “They’re insidious. Like thrips. You generally can’t tell they’re attacking the plant until the damage is evident.”

“Isn’t that always the case?”

She shook her head, giving another blast of insecticide to one of the plants. “Sometimes the pest leaves a calling card. Other times you don’t know he’s come for a visit until it’s too late to do anything but kill him and hope you don’t kill the plant in the process. Except that I don’t suppose I ought to be talking to you about killing as if I enjoy it, even when I do.”

“Perhaps when a creature is the instrument of another’s destruction, it has to be killed.”

“That’s certainly my feeling. I’ve never been one to welcome aphids into my garden, Inspector.”

He started to enter the greenhouse. She said, “In there first, please,” and pointed to a shallow plastic tray of green powder just inside the door. “Disinfectant,” she explained. “It kills micro-organisms. There’s no sense in bringing other unwelcome visitors inside on the soles of one’s shoes.”

He obliged her, closing the door and stepping into the tray in which her own footprints had already left their mark. He could see the residue of disinfectant speckling the sides and crusting the seams of her round-toed boots.

“You spend a great deal of time in here,” he noted.

“I like to grow things.”

“A hobby?”

“It’s very peaceful — raising plants. A few minutes with one’s hands in the soil and the rest of the world seems to fade away. It’s a form of escape.”

“And you need to escape?”

“Doesn’t everyone at one time or another? Don’t you?”

“I can’t deny it.”

The floor consisted of gravel and a slightly elevated path of brick. He walked along this between the central table and the peripheral work top and joined her. With the door closed, the air in the greenhouse was some degrees warmer than the air outside. It was heavily tinctured with the scent of potting soil, fi sh emulsion, and the odour of the insecticide she’d been pumping.

“What sorts of plants do you grow in here?” he asked. “Aside from the fuchsias.”

She leaned against the work top as she spoke, pointing out the examples with a hand whose nails were clipped like a man’s and crusted with dirt. She didn’t appear to mind or even to notice. “I’ve been babying along some cyclamen for ages. They’re the ones with the stems that look nearly transparent, lined up over there in the yellow pots. The others are philodendrons, grape ivy, amaryllis. I’ve got African violets, ferns, and palms, but something tells me you probably recognise them well enough. And these”—she moved to a shelf above which a grow-light glowed over four wide, black trays where tiny plants were sprouting—“are my seedlings.”

“Seedlings?”

“I start my garden in here in the winter. Green beans, cucumbers, peas, lettuce, tomatoes. These are carrots and onions. I’m trying Vidalias although every gardening book I’ve read predicts utter failure there.”

“What do you do with it all?”

“The plants I generally offer in Preston’s car-boot sale. The vegetables we eat. My daughter and I.”

“And parsnips? Do you grow those as well?”

“No,” she said and folded her arms. “But we’ve come to it, haven’t we?”

“We have. Yes. I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologise, Inspector. You’ve a job to do. But I hope you won’t mind if I work while we talk.” She gave him little choice in the minding. She picked up a small cultivator from among the clutter of gardening utensils which filled a tin pail underneath the central table. She began to move along the potted houseplants, gently loosening their soil.

“Have you eaten wild parsnip from this area before?”

“Several times.”

“So you know it when you see it.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“But you didn’t last month.”

“I thought I did.”

“Tell me about it.”

“The plant, the dinner? What?”

“Both. Where did the water hemlock come from?”

She pinched a straggly stem from one of the larger philodendrons and threw it into a plastic sack of rubbish beneath the table. “I thought it was wild parsnip,” she clarifi ed.

“Accepted for the moment. Where did it come from?”

“Not far from the Hall. There’s a pond on the grounds. It’s terribly overgrown — you probably noticed the state things are in — and I found a stand of wild parsnip there. What I thought was parsnip.”

“Had you eaten parsnip from the pond before?”

“From the grounds. But not from that location by the pond. I’d only seen the plants.”

“What was the root stock like?”

“Like parsnip, obviously.”

“A single root? A bundle?”

She bent over a particularly verdant fern, parted its fronds, examined its base, and then lifted the plant to the work top opposite. She went on with her cultivating. “It must have been a single, but I don’t actually recall the look of it.”

“You know what it should have been.”

“A single root. Yes. I know that, Inspector. And it would make it far easier on both of us if I just lied and declared it was definitely a single root I dug up. But the fact is I was in a rush that day. I’d gone to the cellar, discovered I had only two small parsnips, and hurried out to the pond where I thought I’d seen more. I dug one up and came back to the cottage. I assume the root I brought with me was a single, but I can’t recall for a fact that it was. I can’t picture it dangling from my hand.”

“Odd, wouldn’t you say? It is, after all, one of the most important details.”

“I can’t help that. But I would appreciate being given some credit for telling the truth. Believe me, a lie would be far more convenient.”

“And your illness?”

She set down her cultivator and pressed the back of her wrist to the faded red headband. She dislodged upon it a speckling of soil. “What illness?”

“Constable Shepherd said you were ill yourself that night. He said you’d eaten some of the hemlock as well. He claimed to have dropped by that evening and found you—”

“Colin’s trying to protect me. He’s afraid. He’s worried.”

“Now?”

“Then as well.” She replaced the cultivator among the other tools and went to adjust a dial on what appeared to be the irrigation system. The slow dripping of water began a moment later, somewhere to their right. She kept her eyes and her hand on the dial as she continued. “That was part of the convenience, Inspector, Colin’s saying he’d just dropped by.”

Lynley followed the previously established euphemism. “I take it he didn’t drop by at all.”

“Oh, he did. He was here. But it wasn’t a coincidence. He didn’t just happen to be on his rounds. That’s what he told the inquest. That’s what he told his father and Sergeant Hawkins. That’s what he told everyone. But that’s not what happened.”

“You arranged for him to come?”

“I telephoned him.”

“I see. The alibi.”

She looked up at that. Her expression seemed resigned rather than culpable or afraid. She took a moment to strip off her tattered mittens and tuck them into the sleeves of her sweater before saying, “That’s exactly what Colin said people would think: that I was phoning him to establish a form of innocence. ‘She ate the stuff as well,’ he’d have to say at the inquest. ‘I was at the cottage. I saw for myself.’”

“Which is what he said, as I understand it.”

“He’d have said the rest, if I’d had my way. But I couldn’t convince him of the necessity of saying I’d phoned him because I’d been sick three times, I wasn’t handling the pain of it very well, and I wanted him near. So he ended up putting himself at risk by colouring the truth. And I don’t much like living with that knowledge.”

“He’s at risk in any number of ways at this point, Mrs. Spence. The investigation is fi lled with irregularities. He needed to hand the case over to a CID team from Clitheroe. Since he didn’t do that, he’d have been wise to conduct any interrogations with an offi cial witness present. And considering his involvement with you, he should have stepped out of the process altogether.”

“He wants to protect me.”

“That may be the case but it looks a far sight nastier than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“It looks as if Shepherd’s covering up his own crime. Whatever that may have been.”

She pushed herself abruptly from the central table against which she had been leaning. She walked two paces away from him, then back again, pulling off her headband. “Look. Please. These are the facts.” Her words were terse. “I went out to the pond. I dug up water hemlock. I thought it was parsnip. I cooked it. I served it. Mr. Sage died. Colin Shepherd had no part of this.”

“Did he know Mr. Sage was coming to dinner?”

“I said he had no part of this.”

“Did he ever ask you about your relationship with Sage?”

“Colin’s done nothing!”

“Is there a Mr. Spence?”

She balled the bandana into her fi st. “I… No.”

“And your daughter’s father?”

“That’s none of your business. This has absolutely nothing to do with Maggie. Not at all. She wasn’t even here.”

“That day?”

“For the dinner. She was in the village, spending the night with the Wraggs.”

“But she was here that day, earlier, when you went out to look for the wild parsnip in the first place? Perhaps while you were cooking?”

Her face seemed rigid. “Hear me, Inspector. Maggie isn’t involved.”

“You’re avoiding the questions. That tends to suggest you’ve something to hide. Something about your daughter?”

She moved past him towards the door of the greenhouse. The space was confi ned. Her arm brushed against him as she passed, and it would have taken little enough effort to detain her, but he chose not to do so. He followed her out. Before he could ask another question, she spoke.

“I’d gone to the root cellar. There were only two left. I needed more. That’s the extent of it.”

“Show me, if you will.”

She led him across the garden to the cottage where she opened the door to what appeared to be the kitchen and removed a key from a hook just inside. Not ten feet away, she unfastened the padlock on the sloping cellar door and lifted it.

“A moment,” he said. He lowered and lifted it for himself. Like the gate in the wall, it moved easily enough. And like the gate, it moved without noise. He nodded and she descended the steps.

There was no electricity in the root cellar. Light was supplied from the doorway and from a single small window at the level of the ground. This was the size of a shoe carton and partially obstructed by the straw which covered the plants outside. The result was a chamber of moisture and shadow, comprising perhaps an eight-foot square. Its walls were an unfinished mixture of stone and earth. Its floor was the same, although some effort had been expended at one time to make it even.

Mrs. Spence gestured towards one of four roughly hewn shelves bolted to the wall that was farthest from the light. Aside from a neat stack of bushel baskets, the shelves were all the room contained save what they themselves held. On the top three sat rows of canning jars, their labels indecipherable in the gloom. On the bottom stood five small wire bins.

Potatoes, carrots, and onions fi lled three. The other two held nothing.

Lynley said, “You’ve not replenished your supply.”

“I don’t think much of eating parsnips any longer. And certainly not wild ones.”

He touched the rim of one of the empty bins. He moved his hand to the shelf that held it. There was no sign of either dust or disuse.

He said, “Why do you keep the cellar door locked? Have you always done?”

When she didn’t reply at once, he turned from the shelves to look at her. Her back was to the muted light of morning that shone through the door, so he couldn’t read her expression.

“Mrs. Spence?”

“I’ve kept it locked since October last.”

“Why?”

“It has nothing to do with any of this.”

“I’d appreciate an answer nonetheless.”

“I’ve just given one.”

“Mrs. Spence, shall we pause to look at the facts? A man is dead at your hands. You’ve a relationship with the police offi cial who investigated the death. If either of you thinks—”

“All right. Because of Maggie, Inspector. I wanted to give her one less place to have sex with her boyfriend. She’d already used the Hall. I’d put a stop to that. I was trying to eliminate the rest of the possibilities. This seemed to be one of them, so I locked it up. Not that it mattered, as I’ve since discovered.”

“But you kept the key on a hook in the kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“In plain sight?”

“Yes.”

“Where she could get to it?”

“Where I could get to it quickly as well.” She ran an impatient hand back through her hair. “Inspector, please. You don’t know my daughter. Maggie tries to be good. She thought she’d been wicked enough already. She gave me her word that she wouldn’t have sex with Nick Ware again, and I told her I’d help her keep the promise. The lock itself was suffi cient to keep her out.”

“I wasn’t thinking about Maggie and sex,” Lynley said. He saw her glance move from his face to the shelves behind him. He knew what she was looking at largely because she didn’t allow her eyes to rest upon it longer than an instant. “When you go out, do you lock your

doors?”

“Yes.”

“When you’re in the greenhouse? When you make your rounds of the Hall? When you leave to look for wild parsnips?”

“No. But then I’m not out for long. And I’d know if someone were prowling round.”

“Do you take your handbag? Your car keys? The keys to the cottage? The cellar key?”

“No.”

“So you didn’t lock up when you went out to look for parsnips on the day that Mr. Sage died?”

“No. But I know where you’re heading and it isn’t going to work. People can’t come and go here without my knowing. That simply doesn’t happen. It’s like a sixth sense. Whenever Maggie met with Nick, I knew.”

“Yes,” Lynley said. “Quite. Please show me where you found the water hemlock, Mrs. Spence.”

“I’ve told you I thought it was—”

“Indeed. Wild parsnip.”

She hesitated, one hand lifted as if there was a point she wanted to make. She dropped both, saying, “This way,” quietly.

They went out through the gate. Across the courtyard, three of the workers were having morning coffee in the bed of the open-back lorry. Their Thermos jugs were lined up on one stack of lumber. Another they used as their chairs. They watched Lynley and Mrs. Spence with undisguised curiosity. It was clear that this visit was going to be fuel for the fi res of gossip by the end of the day.

In the better light, Lynley took a moment to evaluate Mrs. Spence as they crossed the courtyard and walked round the gabled east wing of the Hall. She was blinking rapidly as if in an effort to free her eyes of soot, but the cowl-neck of her pullover showed how the muscles of her neck were straining. He realised that she was trying not to cry.

The worst part of policework lay buried in the effort it took not to empathise. An investigation required a heart that attached itself to the victim alone or to a crime whose commission called out for justice. While Lynley’s sergeant had mastered the ability to wear emotional blinkers when it came to a case, Lynley found himself, more often than not, torn in a dozen unlikely directions as he gathered information and came to know the facts and the principals involved. They were rarely black or white, he had come to find. It was, inconveniently, not a black-or-white world.

He paused on the terrace outside the east wing. The paving stones here were cracked and clotted with winter-dead weeds and the view was of a frost-coated hillside. This sloped down to a pond beyond which another hillside rose steeply, its summit hidden by the mist.

He said, “You’ve had trouble here, as I understand. Work disrupted. That sort of thing. It sounds as if someone doesn’t want the newlyweds to take over the Hall.”

She seemed to misunderstand his intentions in speaking, seeing it as another attempt at accusation rather than as an opportunity for a moment’s reprieve. She cleared her throat and rebounded from whatever distress she was feeling. “Maggie used it less than half a dozen times. That’s all.”

He briefly toyed with the idea of reassuring her about the nature of his comments. He rejected it, and followed her lead. “How did she get in?”

“Nick — her boyfriend — loosened a board covering one of the windows in the west wing.

I’ve nailed it shut since. Unfortunately, that hasn’t put a stop to the mischief.”

“You didn’t know at once that Maggie and her friend were using the Hall? You couldn’t tell someone had been prowling round?”

“I was referring to someone prowling round the cottage, Inspector Lynley. Surely you yourself would be aware if some sort of intruder had been in your own home.”

“If he conducted a search or took something, yes. Otherwise, I’m not certain.”

“Believe me, I am.”

With the toe of her boot, she dislodged a tangle of flowerless dandelions from between two of the terrace stones. She picked up the weed, examined several rosettes of the scratchy, toothed leaves, and hurled it aside.

“But you’ve never managed to catch the prankster here? He — or she — has never made a sound to attract your attention, never stumbled into your garden by mistake?”

“No.”

“You’ve never heard a car or a motorbike?”

“I haven’t.”

“And your rounds have been varied enough that someone bent on mischief wouldn’t be able to predict when you’d be likely to take another turn round the grounds?”

Impatiently, she shoved her hair behind her ears. “That’s correct, Inspector. May I ask what this has to do with what happened to Mr. Sage?”

He smiled affably. “I’m not entirely sure.” She looked in the direction of the pond at the base of the hill, her intention clear. But he found that he wasn’t quite ready to move on. He gave his attention to the east wing of the house. Its lower bay windows were boarded over. Two of the upper ones bore seamlike cracks. “It looks as if it’s stood vacant for years.”

“It’s never been lived in, aside from three months shortly after it was built.”

“Why not?”

“It’s haunted.”

“By whom?”

“The sister-in-law of Mr. Townley-Young’s great-grandfather. What does that make her? His great-grandaunt?” She didn’t wait for reply. “She killed herself here. They thought she’d gone out for a walk. When she didn’t return by evening, they began a search. It was five days before they thought of searching the

house.”

“And?”

“She’d hanged herself from a beam in the luggage room. Next to the garret. It was summer. The servants were tracking down the smell.”

“Her husband couldn’t face continuing life here?”

“A romantic thought, but he was dead already. He’d been killed on their wedding trip. They said it was a hunting accident, but no one was ever particularly forthcoming about how it happened. His wife returned alone, so everyone thought. They didn’t know at first she brought syphilis with her, his gift to their marriage, evidently.” She smiled without humour, not at him but at the house. “According to legend, she walks the upper corridor, weeping. The Townley-Youngs like to think it’s with remorse for having killed her husband. I like to think it’s with regret for having married the man in the first place. It was 1853 after all. There was no easy cure.”

“For syphilis.”

“Or for marriage.”

She strode off the terrace in the direction of the pond. He watched her for a moment. She took long steps despite her heavy boots. Her hair lifted with her movement, in two greying arcs sweeping back from her face.

The slope he followed her down was icy, its grass long defeated by purslane and furze. At its base, the pond lay in the shape of a kidney bean. It was thickly overgrown, resembling a marsh, with water that was murky and, no doubt in the summer, a breeding ground for everything from insects to disease. Unkempt reeds and denuded weeds grew waist-tall round it. The latter sent out tendrils to grasp at clothes. But Mrs. Spence seemed oblivious of this. She waded into their midst and brushed the clinging bits of them aside.

She stopped less than a yard from the water’s edge. “Here,” she said.

As far as Lynley could tell, the vegetation she indicated was indistinguishable from the vegetation everywhere else. In the spring or summer, perhaps, flowers or fruit might give an indication of the genera — if not the species — that now appeared to be little more than skeletal shrubs and brambles. He recognised nettle easily enough because its toothed leaves still clung to the stem of the plant. And reeds were the same in shape and size from season to season. But as for the rest, he was mystifi ed.

She apparently saw this, for she said, “Part of it is knowing where the plants grow when they’re in season, Inspector. If you’re looking for roots, they’re still in the ground even when the stems, leaves, and flowers are gone.” She pointed to her left where an oblong of ground resembled nothing more than a mat of dead leaves from which a spindly bush grew. “Meadowsweet and wolfbane grow there in the summer. Farther up there’s a fine patch of chamomile.” She bent and rooted through the weeds at her feet, saying, “And if you’re in doubt, the leaves of the plant don’t go much farther than the ground beneath it. They disintegrate ultimately, but the process takes ages and in the meantime, you’ve got your source of identifi cation right here.” She extended her hand. In it she held the remains of a feathery leaf not unlike parsley in appearance. “This tells you where to dig,” she said.

“Show me.”

She did so. No trowel or hoe was necessary. The earth was damp. It was simple enough for her to uproot a plant by pulling on the crown and the stems that remained of it above the ground. She knocked the root stock sharply against her knee to dislodge the clods of earth that were still clinging to it, and both of them stared, without speaking, at the result. She was holding a thickened stock of the plant from which a bundle of tubers grew. She dropped it immediately, as if, without even being ingested, it still had the power to kill.

“Tell me about Mr. Sage,” Lynley said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

HER EYES COULDN’T SEEM to move from the hemlock she had dropped. “Surely I would have seen the multiple tubers,” she said. “I would have known. Even now, I’d remember.”

“Were you distracted? Did someone see you? Did someone call out to you while you were digging?”

Still she didn’t look at him. “I was in a rush. I came down the slope, made for this spot, cleared away the snow, and found the parsnip.”

“The hemlock, Mrs. Spence. Just as you did now.”

“It had to have been a single root. I would have seen otherwise. I would have known.”

“Tell me about Mr. Sage,” he repeated.

She raised her head. Her expression seemed bleak. “He came to the cottage several times. He wanted to talk about the Church. And Maggie.”

“Why Maggie?”

“She’d grown fond of him. He’d taken an interest in her.”

“What sort of interest?”

“He knew she and I were having our troubles. What mother and daughter don’t? He wanted to intercede.”

“Did you object to this?”

“I didn’t particularly enjoy feeling inadequate as a mother, if that’s what you mean. But I let him come. And I let him talk. Maggie wanted me to see him. I wanted to make Maggie happy.”

“And the night he died? What happened then?”

“Nothing more than had happened before. He wanted to counsel me.”

“About religion? About Maggie?”

“About both, actually. He wanted me to join the Church, and he wanted me to let Maggie do the same.”

“That was the extent of it?”

“Not exactly.” She wiped her hands on the faded bandana which she took from the pocket of her jeans. She balled it up, tucked it into the sleeve of her sweater to join her mittens, and shivered. Her pullover was heavy, but it would not be enough protection against the cold. Seeing this, Lynley decided to continue the interview right where they were. Her uprooting of the water hemlock had given him the whip hand, if only momentarily. He was determined to use it and to strengthen it by whatever means were available. Cold was one of them.

“Then what?” he asked.

“He wanted to talk to me about parenthood, Inspector. He felt I was keeping too tight a rein on my daughter. It was his belief that the more I insisted upon chastity from Maggie, the more I’d drive her away. He felt if she was having sex, she should be taking precautions against pregnancy. I felt she shouldn’t be having sex at all, precautions or not. She’s thirteen years old. She’s little more than a child.”

“Did you argue about her?”

“Did I poison him because he disagreed with how I was bringing her up?” She was trembling, but not from distress, he thought. Aside from the earlier tears which she had managed to control within moments of being tested by them, she didn’t really appear to be the sort of woman who would allow herself an overt display of anxiety in the presence of the police. “He didn’t have children. He wasn’t even married. It’s one thing to express an opinion growing out of a mutual experience. It’s quite another to offer advice having no basis in anything but reading psychology texts and possessing a glorified ideal of family life. How could I possibly take his concerns to heart?”

“Despite this, you didn’t argue with him.”

“No. As I said, I was willing to hear him out. I did that much for Maggie because she was fond of him. And that’s the extent of it. I had my beliefs. He had his. He wanted Maggie to use contraceptives. I wanted her to stop complicating her life by having sex in the fi rst place. I didn’t think she was ready for it. He thought it was too late to turn her behaviour around. We chose to disagree.”

“And Maggie?”

“What?”

“Where did she stand in this disagreement?”

“We didn’t discuss it.”

“Did she discuss it with Sage?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“But they were close.”

“She was fond of him.”

“Did she see him often?”

“Now and again.”

“With your knowledge and approval?”

She lowered her head. Her right foot dug at the weeds in a spasmodic, kicking motion. “We’ve always been close, Maggie and I, until this business with Nick. So I knew about it when she saw the vicar.”

The nature of the answer said everything. Dread, love, and anxiety. He wondered if they went hand in hand with motherhood.

“What did you serve him for dinner that night?”

“Lamb. Mint jelly. Peas. Parsnips.”

“What happened?”

“We talked. He left shortly after nine.”

“Was he feeling ill?”

“He didn’t say. Only that he had a walk ahead of him and since it had been snowing, he ought to be off.”

“You didn’t offer to drive him.”

“I wasn’t feeling well. I thought it was fl u. I was just as happy to have him leave, frankly.”

“Could he have stopped somewhere along the way home?”

Her eyes moved to the Hall on its crest of land, from there to the oak wood beyond it. She appeared to be evaluating this as a possibility, but then she said fi rmly, “No. There’s the lodge — his housekeeper lives there, Polly Yarkin — but that would have taken him out of his way, and I can’t see what reason he’d have to stop by and visit with Polly when he saw her every day at the vicarage. Beyond that, it’s easier to get back to the village on the footpath. And Colin found him on the footpath the next morning.”

“You didn’t think to phone him that night when you yourself were being sick?”

“I didn’t attach my condition to the food. I said already, I thought I’d got flu. If he’d mentioned feeling unwell before he left, I might have phoned him. But he hadn’t mentioned it. So I didn’t make the connection.”

“Yet he died on the footpath. How far is that from here? A mile? Less? He’d have been stricken rather quickly, wouldn’t you say?”

“He must have been. Yes.”

“I wonder how it was that he died and you didn’t.”

She met his gaze squarely. “I couldn’t say.”

He gave her a long ten seconds of silence in which to move her eyes off him. When she didn’t do so, he finally nodded and directed his own attention to the pond. The edges, he saw, wore a dingy skin of ice like a coating of wax that encircled the reeds. Each night and day of continued cold weather would extend the skin farther towards the centre of the water. When entirely covered, the pond would look like the frosty ground that surrounded it, appearing to be an uneven but nonetheless innocuous smear of land. The wary would avoid it, seeing it clearly for what it was. The innocent or oblivious would attempt to cross it, breaking through its false and fragile surface to encounter the foul stagnation beneath.

“How are things between you and your daughter now, Mrs. Spence?” he asked. “Does she listen to you now that the vicar’s gone?”

Mrs. Spence took the mittens from the sleeves of her pullover. She thrust her hands into them, her fingers bare. It was clear she intended to go back to work. “Maggie isn’t listening to anyone,” she said.

Lynley slipped the cassette into the Bentley’s tape player and turned up the volume. Helen would have been pleased with the choice, Haydn’s Concerto in E-flat Major, with Wynton Marsalis on the trumpet. Uplifting and joyful, with violins supplying the counterpoint to the trumpet’s pure notes, it was utterly unlike his usual selection of “some grim Russian. Good Lord, Tommy, didn’t they compose anything just the merest bit listener-friendly? What made them so ghoulish? D’you think it was the weather?” He smiled at the thought of her. “Johann Strauss,” she would request. “Oh, all right. I know. Simply too pedestrian for your lofty taste. Then compromise. Mozart.” And in would pop Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the only piece by Mozart which Helen could invariably identify, announcing that her ability to do so kept her free of the epithet absolute philistine.

He drove south, away from the village. He put the thought of Helen aside.

He passed beneath the bare tree branches and headed for the moors, thinking about one of the basic tenets of criminology: There is always a relationship between the killer and the victim in a premeditated murder. This is not the case in a serial killing where the killer is driven by rages and urges incomprehensible to the society in which he lives. Nor is it always the case in a crime of passion when a murder grows out of an unexpected, transitory, but nonetheless virulent blaze of anger, jealousy, revenge, or hate. Nor is it like an accidental death in which the forces of coincidence bring the killer and the victim together for one moment of inalterable time. Premeditated murder grows out of a relationship. Sort through the relationships that the victim has had, and inevitably the killer turns up.

This bit of knowlege was part of every policeman’s bible. It went hand in glove with the fact that most victims know their killers. It was second cousin to the additional fact that most killings are committed by one of the victim’s immediate relatives. Juliet Spence may well have poisoned Robin Sage in a horrible accident the consequences of which she would have to wrestle with for the rest of her life. It would not be the first time someone with a bent towards the natural and organic life picked up a wild-grown bit of root or fungi, flowers or fruit and ended up killing himself or someone else as a result of an error in identification. But if St. James was correct — if Juliet Spence couldn’t have realistically survived even the smallest ingestion of water hemlock, if the symptoms of fever and vomiting couldn’t be attached to hemlock poisoning in the first place — then there had to be a connection between Juliet Spence and the man who had died at her hands. If this was the case, then the superficial connection appeared to be Juliet’s daughter, Maggie.

The grammar school, an uninteresting brick building that sat at the triangle created by the juncture of two converging streets, was not far from the centre of Clitheroe. It was eleven-forty when he pulled into the car park and slid carefully into the space left between an antique Austin-Healey and a conventional Golf of recent vintage with an infant’s safety seat riding as passenger. A small homemade sticker reading Mind The Baby was affixed to the Golf’s rear window.

Lessons were in progress inside the school, judging from both the emptiness of the long linoleum-floored corridors and the closed doors that lined them. The administration offices were just inside, facing one another to the left and the right of the entrance. At one time suitable titles had been painted in black upon the opaque glass that comprised the upper half of their doors, but the passing years had reduced the letters to speckles the approximate colour of wet soot, from which one could barely make out the words headmistress, bursar, masters’ common room, and second master in self-important Graeco-Roman printing.

He chose the headmistress. After a few minutes’ loud and repetitive conversation with an octogenarian secretary whom he found nodding over a strip of knitting that appeared to be the sleeve of a sweater appropriate in size for a male gorilla, he was shown into the headmistress’ study. Mrs. Crone was engraved across a placard that sat on her desk. An unfortunate name, Lynley thought. He spent the moments until her arrival considering all the possible sobriquets the pupils probably had invented for her. They seemed infi nite in both variety and connotation.

She turned out to be the antithesis of all of them, in a pencil-tight skirt hemmed a good five inches above the knee and an over-long cardigan with padded shoulders and enormous buttons. She wore discoidal gold earrings, a necklace to match, and shoes whose skyscraper heels directed the eye inexorably to an outstanding pair of ankles. She was the sort of woman who asked for the once-over twice or more, and as he forced his eyes to remain on her face, Lynley wondered how the school’s board of governors had ever settled upon such a creature for the job. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight years old.

He managed to make his request with the minimum of time given to speculating what she looked like naked, forgiving himself for the instant of fantasy by telling himself it was the curse of being male. In the presence of a beautiful woman, he had always experienced that knee-jerk reaction of being reduced — if only momentarily — to skin, bone, and testosterone. He liked to believe that this response to an exposure to feminine stimuli had nothing to do with who he really was and where his loyalties lay. But he could imagine Helen’s reaction to this minor and assuredly inconsequential battle with lust-in-the-heart, so he engaged in a mental explanation of his behaviour, using terms like idle curiosity and scientifi c study and for God’s sake stop overreacting to things, Helen, as if she were present, standing in the corner, silently watching, and knowing his thoughts.

Maggie Spence was in a Latin lesson, Mrs. Crone told him. Couldn’t this wait until lunch? A quarter of an hour?

It couldn’t, actually. And even if it could, he’d prefer to make contact with the girl in complete privacy. At lunch, with other pupils milling about, there was the chance they’d be seen. He’d like to spare the girl whatever potential embarrassment he could. It couldn’t be easy for her, after all, with her mother having been under police scrutiny once already and now under it again. Did Mrs. Crone know her mother, by the way?

She’d met her on Speech Day in Easter term last year. A very nice woman. A fi rm disciplinarian, but very loving towards Maggie, obviously devoted to the child’s every interest. Society could use a few more parents like Mrs. Spence behind our nation’s youth, couldn’t it, Inspector.

Indeed. Mrs. Crone would get no disagreement from him. Now about seeing Maggie…?

Did her mother know he’d come?

If Mrs. Crone would like to phone her…

The headmistress eyed him carefully and scrutinised his warrant card with such attention that he thought she was going to try it for gold between her teeth. At last she handed it back to him and said she would send for the girl if the Inspector would be so good as to wait here. They could use this study as well, she informed him, as she herself was on her way to the dining hall where she would remain on duty while the pupils had their lunch. But she expected the Inspector to allow Maggie time for hers, she warned in parting, and if the girl wasn’t in the dining hall by a quarter past twelve, Mrs. Crone would send someone to fetch her. Was that clear? Did they under

stand each other?

They certainly did.

In less than five minutes, the study door opened and Lynley stood as Maggie Spence came into the room. She shut the door behind her with unnecessary care, turning the knob to make certain the activity was done in perfect silence. She faced him across the room, hands clasped behind her back, head lowered.

He knew that in comparison with today’s youth, his own introduction to sexual activity — enthusiastically orchestrated by the mother of one of his friends during the half-term at Lent in his final year at Eton — had been relatively late. He’d just turned eighteen. But despite the change in mores and the bent towards youthful profligacy, he found it diffi cult to believe that this girl was engaged in sexual experimentation of any kind.

She looked too like a child. Part of this was her height. She couldn’t have been much more than an inch over five feet tall. Part was her posture and demeanour. She stood slightly pigeon-toed with her navy stockings bunched a bit at her ankles, and she shuffled on her feet, bent her ankles outwards, and looked as if she expected to be caned. The rest was personal appearance. The rules of the school may have forbidden the wearing of make-up, but surely nothing prevented her from taking a more adult approach with her hair. This was thick, the only attribute she shared with her mother. It fell to her waist in a wavy mass and was drawn back from her face and held in place with a large amber barrette shaped like a bow. She wore no bob, no shelf-cut, no sophisticated French braid. She made no attempt to emulate an actress or a rock-and-roll star.

“Hello,” he said to her, fi nding that he spoke as gently as he would have done to a frightened kitten. “Has Mrs. Crone told you who I am, Maggie?”

“Yes. But she needn’t have done. I knew already.” Her arms moved. She seemed to be twisting her hands behind her back. “Nick said last night you’d come to the village. He saw you in the pub. He said you’d be wanting to talk to all of Mr. Sage’s good mates.”

“And you’re one of them, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“It’s rough to lose a friend.”

She made no reply, merely shuffl ed again on her feet. This appeared to be another similarity to her mother. He was reminded of Mrs. Spence’s digging at the terrace weeds with the toe of her boot.

“Join me,” he said. “I’d prefer to sit down, if you don’t mind.”

He drew a second chair to the window, and when she sat, she finally looked up at him. Her sky-blue eyes regarded him frankly, with hesitant curiosity but no trace of guile. She was sucking on the inside of her lower lip. The action deepened a dimple in her cheek.

Now that she was closer to him, he could more easily recognise the budding woman that was altering forever the shell of the child. She had a generous mouth. Her breasts were full. Her hips were just wide enough to be welcoming. Hers was the sort of body that was probably going to fight off weight in middle age. But now, under the staid school uniform of skirt, blouse, and jumper, it was ripe and ready. If it was at the insistence of Juliet Spence that Maggie used no make-up and wore a hairstyle more suited to a ten-year-old than to a teenager, Lynley found he couldn’t blame her.

“You weren’t at the cottage the night that Mr. Sage died, were you?” he asked her.

She shook her head.

“But you were there during the day?”

“Off and on. It was Christmas hols, see.”

“You didn’t want to have dinner with Mr. Sage? He was your mate, after all. I wonder you didn’t welcome the chance.”

Her left hand covered her right. She held them balled in her lap. “It was the night of the monthly doss-round,” she said. “Josie, Pam, and me. We spent the night with each other.”

“Something you do every month?”

“In alphabetical order. Josie, Maggie, Pam. It was Josie’s turn. That’s always the funnest because if they aren’t booked up, Josie’s mum lets us choose whatever room in the inn we fancy. We took the skylight room. It’s up under the eaves. It was snowing and we liked to watch it settle on the glass.” She was sitting up straight, her ankles properly crossed. Wisps of russet hair uncontrolled by the barrette curled against her cheeks and her forehead. “Dossing at Pam’s is the worse because we have to sleep in the sitting room. That’s on account of her brothers. They have the upstairs bedroom. They’re twins. Pam doesn’t like them much. She thinks it’s disgusting that her mummy and dad made more babies at their age.

They’re forty-two, Pam’s mummy and dad. Pam says it gives her the creeps to think of her mum and dad like that. But I think they’re sweet. The twins, I mean.”

“How do you organise the doss-round?” Lynley asked.

“We don’t, ac’shully. We just do it.”

“With no plan?”

“Well, we know it’s the third Friday of the month, don’t we? And we just follow the alphabet like I said. Josie-Maggie-Pam. Pam’s next. We did my house this month already. I thought maybe Josie and Pam’s mummies wouldn’t let them doss with me this time round. But they did.”

“You were worried because of the inquest?”

“It was over, wasn’t it, but people in the village…” She looked out the window. Two grey-hooded jackdaws had landed on the sill and were pecking furiously at three crusts of bread, each bird trying to jockey the other from the perch and hence claim the remaining crust. “Mrs. Crone likes to feed the birds. She’s got a big cage-thing in her garden where she raises finches. And she always puts seed or something else to eat on the window-sill here.

I think that’s nice. Except birds quarrel over food. Have you ever noticed? They always act like there won’t be enough. I can’t think why.”

“And the people in the village?”

She said, “I see them watching me sometimes. They stop talking when I pass. But Josie and Pam’s mummies don’t do that.” She dismissed the birds and offered him a smile. The dimple made her face both lopsided and endearing. “Last spring we had a doss-round in the Hall. Mummy said we could, so long as we didn’t mess anything about. We took sleeping bags. We dossed in the dining room. Pam wanted to go upstairs but Josie and I were afraid we’d see the ghost. So Pam went up the stairs with a torch ’n slept by herself in the west wing. Only we found out later she wasn’t by herself at all. Josie didn’t think much of that, did she? She said this was supposed to be just for us, Pamela. No men allowed. Pam said you’re just jealous because you’ve never had a man, have you? Josie said I’ve had plenty of men, Miss-Any-Bloke’s-Scrubber — which wasn’t exactly the truth — and they had such a quarrel that for the next two months Pam wouldn’t come to the doss-round at all. But then she did again.”

“Do all of your mums know which night the doss-round is set for?”

“The third Friday of the month. Everyone knows.”

“Did you know you’d be missing a dinner with the vicar if you went to Josie’s for the December doss-round?”

She nodded. “But I sort of thought he wanted to see Mummy alone.”

“Why?”

She played her thumb back and forth against the sleeve of her jumper, rolling and unrolling it against her white blouse. “Mr. Shepherd does, doesn’t he. I thought p’rhaps it would be like that.”

“Thought or hoped?”

She looked at him earnestly. “He’d come before, Mr. Sage. Mummy sent me to visit with Josie, so I thought she was interested. They talked, him and Mummy. Then he came again. I thought if he fancied her, I could help out by being off. But then I found out he didn’t fancy her at all. Not Mummy. And she didn’t fancy him.”

Lynley frowned. A small alarm was buzzing in his head. He didn’t like the sound of it.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they didn’t do anything, did they. Not like her and Mr. Shepherd.”

“They’d only seen each other a few times, though. Isn’t that the case?”

Her head bobbed in agreement. “But he never talked about Mummy when I saw him. And he never asked after her like I thought he would if he fancied her.”

“What did he talk about?”

“He liked films and books. He talked about them. And the Bible. Sometimes he read me stories from the Bible. He liked the one about the old men who watched the lady taking a bath in the bushes. I mean the old men were in the bushes, not the lady. They wanted to have sex with her because she was so young and beautiful and even though they were old, it wasn’t like they’d stopped feeling desires themselves. Mr. Sage explained it. He was good at that.”

“What other things did he explain?”

“Mostly about me. Like why I was feeling how I felt about…” She gave the wrist of her jumper a little twist. “Oh, just stuff.”

“Your boyfriend? Having intercourse with him?”

She dropped her head and concentrated on the jumper. Her stomach growled. “Hungry,” she mumbled. Still, she didn’t look up.

“You must have been close to the vicar,” Lynley said.

“He said it wasn’t bad, what I felt for Nick. He said desire was natural. He said everyone felt it. He even felt it, he said.”

Again the buzzing, that insidious alarm. Lynley observed the girl carefully, trying to read behind every word she was uttering, wondering how much she was leaving unsaid. “Where did you have these conversations, Maggie?”

“In the vicarage. Polly’d make tea and bring it into the study. We’d eat Jaffa Cakes and talk.”

“Alone?”

She nodded. “Polly didn’t much like to talk about the Bible. She doesn’t go to church. Course, we don’t either.”

“But he talked about the Bible with you.”

“Mostly because we were friends. You can talk about stuff with your friends, he said. You can tell who your friends are because they listen.”

“You listened to him. He listened to you. You were special to each other.”

“We were mates.” She smiled. “Josie said the vicar liked me better’n anyone in the parish and I didn’t even go to church. She was miffed at that, was Josie. She said why does he want you for tea and for walks on the moors, Miss Maggie Spence? I said he was lonely and I was his friend.”

“Did he tell you he was lonely?”

“He didn’t have to. I knew. He was always glad to see me. He always gave me a hug when I left. He was good at hugs.”

“You liked them.”

“Yes.”

He let a moment pass as he considered how best to approach the subject without frightening her off. Mr. Sage had been her friend, her trusted companion. Whatever they had shared had been sacred to the girl.

“It’s nice to be hugged,” he said musingly. “Few things are nicer, if you ask me.” He could tell she was watching him, and he wondered if she sensed his hesitation. This type of interview wasn’t his forte. It required the surgical skill of a psychologist, touching as it did upon fear and taboo. He was feeling his way forward on precarious ground and not particularly happy about being there. “Friends have secrets sometimes, Maggie, things they know about each other, things they say, things they do together. Sometimes it’s the secrets and the promise of keeping them that make them friends in the first place. Was that how it was between you and Mr. Sage?”

She was silent. He saw that she had gone back to sucking on the inside of her lower lip. A wedge of mud had fallen to the fl oor from between the heel and the sole of one of her shoes. In her restless movement on the chair, she had crushed the mud to brown shards on the Axminster carpet. Mrs. Crone wouldn’t be pleased with that.

“Were they a worry to your mum, Maggie? The promises perhaps? The secrets?”

“He liked me better’n anyone,” she said.

“Did your mum know that?”

“He wanted me to be in the social club. He said he’d speak with her so she would let me join. They were going to take an excursion to London. He asked me special did I want to go. They were going to have a Christmas party as well. He said surely Mummy would let me come to that. They talked on the phone.”

“The day he died?”

It was too quick a question. She blinked rapidly and said, “Mummy didn’t do anything. Mummy wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Did she ask him for dinner that night, Maggie?”

The girl shook her head. “Mummy didn’t say.”

“She didn’t invite him?”

“She didn’t say she asked him.”

“But she told you he was coming.”

Maggie weighed an answer. He could see her doing so, the action evident from the manner in which her eyes lowered to the level of his chest. He needed no additional reply.

“How did you know he was coming if she didn’t tell you?”

“He phoned. I heard.”

“What?”

“It was about the social club, the party, like I said. Mummy sounded cross. ‘I have no intention of letting her go. There’s no point in discussing this any further.’ That’s what she said. Then he said something. He went on and on. And she said he could come for dinner and they’d talk about it then. But I didn’t think she was going to change her mind.”

“That very night?”

“Mr. Sage always said one had to strike while the poker could get to the wood.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Or something like that. He never took a first no to mean an always no. He knew I wanted to be in the club. He thought it was important.”

“Who directs the club?”

“No one. Not now that Mr. Sage’s dead.”

“Who was in it?”

“Pam and Josie. Girls from the village. Some from the farms.”

“No boys?”

“Just two.” She wrinkled her nose. “The boys were being stubborn about joining. ‘But we shall win them over in the end,’ Mr. Sage said. ‘We shall put our heads together and develop a plan.’ That’s part of the reason why he wanted me in the club, you see.”

“So that you could put your heads together?” Lynley asked blandly.

She didn’t react. “So that Nick would join. ’Cause if Nick joined, the rest would follow. Mr. Sage knew that. Mr. Sage knew everything.”

Rule One: Trust your intuition. Rule Two: Back it up with the facts. Rule Three: Make an arrest. Rule Four had something to do with where

an officer of the law should relieve himself after consuming four pints of Guinness at the conclusion of a case, and Rule Five referred to the single activity most highly recommended as a form of celebration once the guilty party was brought to justice. Detective Inspector Angus MacPherson had handed out the rules, printed on garish hot-pink cards with suitable illustrations, during a divisional meeting at New Scotland Yard one day, and while the fourth and fifth rules had been the cause of general guffawing and lewd remarks, the first three Lynley had clipped from the rest during an idle moment while waiting on hold on the telephone. He used them for a bookmark. He considered them an addendum to the Judges’ Rules.

The intuitive deduction that Maggie was central to Mr. Sage’s death had brought him to the Clitheroe grammar school in the fi rst place. Nothing she had said during their conversation disabused him of that belief.

A lonely, middle-aged man and a young girl poised on the brink of womanhood made for an uneasy combination, no matter the man’s ostensible rectitude and the girl’s overt naiveté. If sifting through the ashes of Robin Sage’s death disclosed a meticulous approach to the seduction of a child, Lynley would not be at all surprised. It wouldn’t be the first time molestation had worn the guise of friendship and sanctity. It wouldn’t be the last. The fact that the violation was perpetrated upon a child was part of its insidious allure. And in this case, because the child was already sexual, whatever guilt might otherwise stay the hand of captivation could be easily ignored.

She was eager for friendship and approval. She yearned for the warmth of contact. What better fodder could possibly exist to satiate a man’s mere physical desire? It wouldn’t necessarily have been an issue of power with Robin Sage. Nor would it have naturally been a demonstration of his inability to forge or maintain an adult relationship. It could have been human temptation, pure and simple. He was good at hugs, as Maggie had said. She was a child who welcomed them. That she was actually far more than a child might have been something the vicar discovered to his own surprise.

And what then, Lynley wondered. Arousal and Sage’s failure to master it? The itch in the palms to peel back clothing and expose bare flesh? Those two traitors to detachment — heat and blood — pulsing in the groin and demanding action? And that clever whisper in the back of the brain: What difference does it make, she’s already doing it, she’s nobody’s innocent, it’s not as if you’re seducing a virgin, if she doesn’t like it she can tell you to stop, just hug her close so she can feel you and know, graze her breasts quickly, glide a hand between her thighs, talk about how nice it is to be cuddled, just the two of us, Maggie, our special secret, my fi nest little mate…

It all could have happened over a few short weeks. She was at odds with her mother. She needed a friend.

Lynley pulled the Bentley into the street, drove to the corner, and made the turn to head back into the centre of the town. It was possible, he thought. But at this point so was anything else. He was running before his horse to market. Rule One was crucial. There was no doubting that. But it could not overshadow Rule Two.

He began to look for a phone.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HEAR THE SUMMIT OF COTES Fell, from above the standing stone they called Great North, Colin Shepherd gathered what he hadn’t previously added to his storehouse of facts surrounding the death of Robin Sage: When the mist dissipated or when the wind made it drift, one could see the grounds of Cotes Hall quite clearly, especially in winter when the trees bore no leaves. A few yards below, leaning against the stone for a smoke or a rest, one was limited to viewing the old mansion’s roof with its mishmash of chimney-pots, dormer windows, and weathervanes. But climb a bit higher to the summit and sit in the shelter of that limestone outcropping that curved like the punctuation of a question which no one would ask, and one could see everything, from the Hall itself in all its ghoulish decrepitude, to the courtyard it surrounded on three sides, from the grounds that crept out from it, reclaimed by nature, to the outbuildings intended to serve its needs. Among these last was the cottage, and it was to the cottage and into its garden that Colin had watched Inspector Lynley go.

While Leo dashed from one point of canine interest to another at the summit of the fell, led by his nose into a happy exploration of scent, Colin followed Lynley’s movements across the garden and into the greenhouse, marvelling at the clear vista he had. From below, the mist had looked much like a solid wall, impedimentary to movement and impenetrable to vision. But here, what had seemed both impassable and opaque proved to have the substance of cobwebs. It was damp and cold but otherwise of little account.

He watched everything, counting the minutes they spent inside the greenhouse, taking note of their exploration of the cellar. He fi led away the fact that the kitchen door of the cottage had been left unlocked behind them when they made their way into the courtyard and across the grounds, just as it had been unlocked while Juliet worked in solitude in her greenhouse and when she opened it to fetch the cellar key. He saw them pause for conversation upon the terrace, and when Juliet gestured towards the pond, he could have predicted what would follow.

Throughout it all, he could hear as well. Not their conversation, but the distinct sound of music. Even when a sudden gust of wind altered the density of the mist, he could still hear that spritely march playing.

Anyone who took the trouble to climb Cotes Fell would know of the comings and goings at the Hall and at the cottage. It wasn’t even necessary to take the risk of trespassing on the Townley-Young land. The hike to the summit was a public footpath, after all. While the going was occasionally steep — especially the last stretch above Great North — it wasn’t enough to tax the endurance of anyone Lancashire born and bred. It was especially not enough to tax the endurance of a woman who made it a regular climb.

When Lynley had reversed his monster of a car out of the courtyard in preparation for the return drive through the potholes and mud that kept most visitors away, Colin turned from the view and walked over to the question-mark limestone outcropping. He squatted in its shelter, thoughtfully scooped up a handful of shards and pebbles, and let them spill back onto the ground from his loosened fi st. Leo joined him, giving the exterior of the outcropping a thorough olfactory examination and dislodging a miniature landslide of shale. From his jacket pocket, Colin removed a chewed-up tennis ball. He played it back and forth beneath Leo’s nose, hurled it into the mist, and watched the dog trot happily in pursuit. He moved with perfect sure-footed grace, did Leo. He knew his job and had no trouble doing it.

A short distance from the outcropping, Colin could see a thin, earthen scar marking the hardy grass that was indigenous to the moors and the hillsides. It formed a circle approximately nine feet in diameter, its circumference delineated by stones that were spaced out evenly, perhaps twelve inches apart. At the circle’s centre lay an oblong of granite, and he didn’t need to approach and examine it to know it would bear the leavings of melted wax, the scratches made by a gypsy-pot, and the distinct etching of a fi ve-pointed star.

It was no secret to anyone in the village that the top of Cotes Fell was a sacred place. It was heralded by Great North, long reputed to be capable of giving psychic answers to questions if the questioner both asked and listened with a pure heart and a receptive mind. Its oddly shaped outcropping of limestone was seen by some as a fertility symbol, the stomach of a mother, swollen with life. And its finial of granite — so like an altar that the similarities could not be easily ignored — had been well-established as a geological oddity in the early decades of the last century. This, then, was a place of ancients where the old ways endured.

The Yarkins had been chief practitioners of the Craft and worshippers of the Goddess for as long as Colin could remember. They had never made a secret of it. They went about the business of chants, rituals, candle or cord spells, and incantations with a devotion that had garnered them, if not respect, at least a higher degree of toleration than one would normally expect from villagers whose circumscribed lives and limited experience often promoted a conservative bias towards God, monarch, country, and nothing else. But in times of desperation, anyone’s infl uence with any Almighty was generally welcome. So if illness struck a beloved child, if a farmer’s sheep were dropping with disease, if a soldier was due to be posted in Northern Ireland, no one ever declined Rita or Polly Yarkin’s offer to cast the circle and petition the Goddess. Who really knew, after all, which Deity listened? Why not hedge one’s religious bets, cover every one of the supernatural bases, and hope for the best?

He’d even done it himself, allowing Polly to climb this hill time and again for Annie’s sake. She wore a gold robe. She carried laurel branches in a basket. She burned them along with cloves for incense. With an alphabet he couldn’t read and didn’t truly believe was real, she carved her request into a thick orange candle and burned it down, asking for a miracle, telling him that anything was possible if the heart of the witch was pure. After all, hadn’t Nick Ware’s mum got her boy-child at last, and her all of forty-nine years old when she had him? Hadn’t Mr. Townley-Young seen fit to grant an unheard of pension to the men who worked his farms? Hadn’t Fork Reservoir been developed to provide new jobs for the county? These, Polly said, were the boons of the Goddess.

She never permitted him to watch a ritual. He wasn’t a practitioner, after all. Nor was he an initiate. Some things, she said, couldn’t be allowed. So if the truth be faced, he never knew what she actually did when she reached the top of the fell. He had never once heard her make a request.

But from the top of the fell, where from the wax drippings on the granite altar Colin knew she still was practising the Craft, Polly could see Cotes Hall. She would have been able to monitor movements in the courtyard, on the grounds, and in the cottage garden. No arrival or departure would have gone unnoticed, and even if someone headed from the cottage into the wood, she could see that from here.

Colin stood and whistled for Leo. The dog came bounding out of the mist. He carried the tennis ball in his mouth and dropped it playfully at Colin’s feet, his snout a mere inch or two away, ready to snatch it back should his master reach for it. Colin entertained the retriever with the bit of tug-and-pull that he wanted, smiling at the artificiality of the dog’s protective growls. Finally, Leo released the ball, backed off a few steps, and waited for the throw. Colin hurled it down the hillside in the direction of the Hall and watched as the dog gambolled after it.

Colin followed slowly, keeping to the footpath. He paused by Great North and put his hand against it, feeling the quick shock of cold that the ancients would have called the rock’s magical power.

“Did she?” he asked and closed his eyes for the answer. He could feel it in his fingers. Yes…yes…

The descent wasn’t consistently sharp. The walk was a cold one, but it wasn’t impossible. So many feet had carved out the track over time that the grass, which was slippery with frost in other areas, was worn through to the earth and stones on the path. The resulting friction against the soles of one’s shoes eliminated much risk. Anyone could make the walk up Cotes Fell. One could walk it in the mist. One could walk it at night.

It switched back on itself three times so that the vista it provided was continually changing. A view of the Hall became one of the dale with Skelshaw Farm in the distance. A moment later, the sight of Skelshaw Farm gave way to the church and cottages of Winslough. And finally, as the slope became pasture at the bottom of the fell, the footpath edged the grounds of Cotes Hall.

Colin paused here. There was no stile in the drystone wall to allow a hiker easy access to the Hall. But like many areas of the countryside that have gone untended, the wall was in marginal disrepair. Brambles overgrew it in some sections. Others gaped open with small pyramids of rubble lying beneath them. It would take little effort to climb through the gap. He did it himself, whistling for the dog who followed.

The land here dipped a second time, in a gradual slope that ended at the pond, some twenty yards away. Reaching this, Colin looked back the way he had come. He could make out Great North, but beyond it nothing. The mist and the sky were monochromatic, and the frost on the land provided no contrast. They hid without even appearing to hide. An observer couldn’t have asked for more.

He skirted the pond with the dog at his heels, stopping to crouch and examine the root that Juliet had unearthed for Lynley. He rubbed its surface, disclosing the dirty-ivory flesh, and he pressed his thumbnail against the stem. A thin bleeding of oil the width of a needle oozed out. Yes…yes.

He fl ung it into the middle of the pond and watched it sink. The water undulated in growing circles that lapped at the edges of the grimy ice. He said, “Leo. No,” when the dog’s instincts to fetch took him too close to the water’s edge. He took the tennis ball from him, threw it the distance to the terrace, and followed him after it.

She would be back in the greenhouse. He’d seen her return there when Lynley left, and he knew she’d be seeking the release that came from potting, trimming, and otherwise working with her plants. He thought about stopping. He felt the urge to share with her what he knew so far. But she wouldn’t want to hear it. She would protest and fi nd the idea repellent. So instead of crossing the courtyard and entering the garden, he headed down the lane. When he came to the first gap in the bordering lavender, he slipped through it with the dog and went into the wood.

A quarter of an hour’s walk brought him to the rear of the lodge. There was no garden, just an open plot of land comprising leaves, mud, and one anemic Italian cypress that appeared to be longing for transplantation. This leaned at a windblown angle against the lodge’s only outbuilding, a ramshackle shed with gaps in the roof.

The door bore no lock. It also possessed neither knob nor handle, just a rusty ring, survivor of neglect and the vicissitudes of weather. When he pushed upon it, one hinge came apart from the frame, screws tumbled out of the rotten wood, and the door sagged into a narrow depression in the soggy ground where it fit quite naturally as if used to the place. The resulting aperture was large enough for him to slip through.

He waited for his eyes to adjust to the change in light. There was no window, just the gray illumination of the day, filtering through the poorly sealed walls and streaking in a thin seam from the door. Outside, he heard the dog sniffing round the base of the cypress. Inside, he heard nothing save the sound of his own breathing, amplified as it struck the wall in front of him and returned.

Forms began to emerge. What was fi rst a slab of wood at waist height, jammed with an odd assortment of shapes, became a workbench holding sealed gallon tins of paint. Among these lay stiffened brushes, petrifi ed rollers, and a stack of aluminum trays. Two cartons of nails lay behind the paint, along with a quart jar on its side, spilling out an assortment of screws, nuts, and bolts. Everything was covered with what appeared to be at least a decade of grime.

Between two of the paint tins, a spider’s web hung. It trembled with his movement but held no spider lying in wait at its centre. Colin passed his hand through it, feeling the ghost-touch of the strands against his skin. They bore no trace of the mucilage produced to trap flying insects. The web’s solitary architect was long since gone.

None of that mattered. One could enter the shed without disturbing its appearance of disuse and its air of decay. He had done so himself.

He ran his eyes over the walls where nails held tools and gardening implements: a rusty saw, a hoe, a rake, two shovels, and one balding broom. Beneath them a green hose pipe coiled. At its centre stood a dented pail. He looked inside. The pail held only a pair of gardening gloves with thumb and index fi nger worn through on the right hand. He examined these. They were large, a man’s. They fi tted his own hands. And in the spot where they had laid at the bottom of the pail, the metal shone bright and winked clean in the light. He returned them and went back to the search.

A sack of lawnseed, another of fertiliser, and a third of peat leaned against a black wheelbarrow which was upended into the farthest corner. He moved these to one side and pulled the barrow away from the wall to look behind it. A small wooden crate fi lled with rags gave off a faint odour of rodents. He upended the crate, saw two small creatures scurry for cover under the workbench, and rustled through the rags with the toe of his boot. He found nothing. But the barrow and the bags had looked as undisturbed as the rest of the objects in the shed, so he wasn’t surprised, just thoughtful.

There were two possibilities, and he mulled them over as he returned everything to its appropriate place. One was implied by the unmistakable absence of small handtools. He had seen no hammer for the nails, no driver for the screws, no spanner for the nuts and the bolts. More importantly, he had seen neither trowel nor cultivator despite the presence of rake, hoe, and shovels. Disposing of either the trowel or the cultivator would have been too obvious, of course. Disposing of them all was decidedly clever.

The second possibility was that there had been no handtools in the first place, that the long-departed Mr. Yarkin had removed them along with himself upon his hasty fl ight from Winslough more than twenty-five years ago. They would have made an odd addition to his baggage, to be sure, but perhaps he’d wanted them for his work. What had it been? Colin tried to recall. Was it carpentry? Then why leave the saw, if that was the case?

He carried his developing scenario further. If there were no handtools here at the lodge, she would have known where to borrow what she needed. She would have known when to do the borrowing since she could have waited for the moment from her perch on Cotes Fell. For that matter, she could even have watched for her moment from the lodge. It sat on the edge of the estate grounds, after all. She would have heard any car pass, and a quick trip to the window would have told her who was driving.

That made the most sense. Even if she had her own tools, why would she run the risk of using them when she could use Juliet’s and replace them in the greenhouse with no one’s being the wiser? She’d have to go into the garden anyway, in order to get to the cellar. Yes. That was it. She had motive, means, and opportunity, and although Colin felt certainty quicken his pulse, he knew he couldn’t afford to proceed along this line of suspicion without making solid a few more facts.

He eased the door closed and tramped through the mud to the lodge. Leo trotted out of the wood, a picture of complete dog bliss with his coat hung with small clods of humus and his ears decorated with blackened, dead leaves. This was a day to be celebrated for the dog: a hike up the fell, a bit of run-and-chase, a chance to get thoroughly filthy in the wood. Forget retrieving when he could root round the oaks like a pig after truffl es.

“Stay,” Colin said to him, pointing to a beaten-down patch of weeds by the door. He knocked and hoped the day would be one of celebration for himself as well.

He heard her before she opened the door. The sound of her footsteps rumbled on the floor. The sound of her wheezing accompanied her action of unfastening bolts. Then she stood before him like a walrus on ice, one hand spread out on her massive chest as if its pressure could relieve her breathing. He could see that he had interrupted her in the process of painting her nails. Two were aquamarine, three were uncoloured. All were inhumanly long.

She said, “By the stars and sun, if it a’nt Mr. C. Shepherd hisself,” and she looked him over from head to foot, her eyes lingering longest upon his groin. Under her gaze, he felt the oddest sensation of heat throbbing in his testicles. As if she knew this, Rita Yarkin smiled and emitted a sigh of what appeared to be pleasure. “So. What’re you about, Mr. C. Shepherd? You here as the hopeful answer to a maiden’s prayers? Myself being the maiden, of course. Wouldn’t want you to misapprehend my meaning.”

“I’d like to come in, if that’s all right,” he said.

“Would you now?” She shifted her bulk against the door-jamb. The wood groaned. She reached out — at least a dozen bangles rattling like manacles round her wrist — and ran her fingers over his hair. He did his best not to cringe. “Cobwebs,” she said. “Mmmmm. Here’s another. Where you been putting this pretty head, luv?”

“May I come inside, Mrs. Yarkin?”

“Rita.” She looked him over. “I s’pose it depends on what you mean by ‘come inside.’ Now there’s lots of women would welcome you coming wherever you want and just about whenever the fancy takes you. But me? Well, I’m just a bit p’rticular about my toy boys. Always have been.”

“Is Polly here?”

“It’s Polly you’re after, is it, Mr. C. Shepherd? Now I wonder why? Is she good enough for you, all of a sudden? Did you get thrown over by her up the lane?”

“Look, Rita, I don’t want a row with you. Are you going to let me in or shall I come back later?”

She played with one of the three necklaces she wore. It was beads and feathers with the wooden head of a goat as its pendant. “I can’t think we got anything here as will interest you.”

“Perhaps. When did you come this year?” He saw his error in vocabulary from the way her mouth twitched in response. He headed her off by saying, “When did you arrive in Winslough?”

“Twenty-fourth of December. Same as always.”

“After the vicar’s death.”

“Yeah. Never got to meet the bloke. From the way Polly talked about him and everything that happened, I would’ve liked to read his palm.” She reached for Colin’s hand. “Have yours done, luv?” And when he freed himself from her grip, “Scared to know the future, are you? So’s most people. Let’s have a look. The news is good, you pay. The news is bad, I keep my mug tight shut. Sound like a deal?”

“If you’ll let me in.”

She smiled and waddled back from the door. “Have at me, luv. Have you ever poked a woman weighing twenty stone? I got more places you can stick it than you got time to explore.”

“Right,” Colin said. He squeezed past her. She was wearing enough perfume to permeate the entire lodge. It came off her in waves, like heat from a coal fire. He tried not to breathe.

They stood in a narrow entrance that did duty as a service porch. He untied his muddy boots and left them among the Wellingtons, umbrellas, and mackintoshes. He took his time about this process of untying and removing, using the activity as a means of observing what the porch held. He made particular note of what stood next to a rubbish bin of mouldy brussels sprouts, mutton bones, four empty packets for Custard Cremes, the remains of a breakfast of fried bread and bacon, and a broken lamp without its shade. This was a basket, and it contained potatoes, carrots, marrows, and a head of lettuce.

“Polly’s done the shopping?” he asked.

“That’s day before yesterday’s. Brought it by at noon, she did.”

“Does she bring you parsnips for dinner occasionally?”

“Sure. ’Long with everything else. Why?”

“Because one doesn’t need to buy them. They grow wild hereabouts. Did you know that?”

Rita’s talon nail was tracing the pendant-head of the goat. She played with one horn, then the other. She gave a sensual stroke to the beard. She regarded Colin thoughtfully. “And what if I do?”

“Did you tell Polly, I wonder. It would be a waste of money to have her buy from the greengrocer what she could dig up herself.”

“True. But my Polly’s not much for rooting, Mr. Constable. We like the natural life, make no mistake there, but Polly’s a girl who draws the line at grubbing round the wood on her hands and knees. Unlike some as I could name, she’s got better things to do, does Polly.”

“But she knows her plants. It’s part of the Craft. You have to know all the different woods for burning. You’d have to recognise your herbs as well. Doesn’t the ritual call for their use?”

Rita’s face became blank. “Ritual calls for the use of more’n you know or understand, Mr. C. Shepherd. And none of it I’ll be likely to share with you.”

“But there’s magic in herbs?”

“There’s magic in lots of things. But all of it springs from the will of the Goddess, praised be Her name, whether you’re using the moon, the stars, the earth, or the sun.”

“Or the plants.”

“Or water or fire or anything. It’s the mind of the petitioner and the will of the Goddess that make the magic. It’s not to be found in mixing potions and drinking’m down.” She lumbered through the far doorway and into the kitchen where she went to the tap and held a kettle beneath a dismal trickle of water.

Colin took the opportunity to complete his examination of the service porch. It held a bizarre variety of Yarkin possessions, everything from two bicycle wheels minus their tyres to a rusty anchor with one prong missing. A basket for a long-departed cat occupied one corner, and it was heaped with a mound of tattered paperback books whose covers appeared to feature women of impressive bosom caught up in the arms of men on the verge of ravishing them. Love’s Savage Desperation blazed across one cover. Passion’s Lost Child adorned another. If a set of handtools were secreted in the porch among the cardboard cartons of old clothes, the antique Hoover, and the ironing board, it would take a thirteenth labour of Heracles in order to fi nd them.

Colin joined Rita in the kitchen. She’d gone to the table where, among the remains of her mid-morning coffee and crumpets, she had returned to painting her nails. The scent of the polish was making a valiant effort to dominate both her perfume and the smell of bacon grease that seemed to be crackling in a frying pan on the cooker. Colin switched the pan’s place with the kettle of water. Rita gestured her thanks with the nail-polish brush, and he wondered what had inspired her choice of colour and where she had managed to purchase it in the fi rst place.

He said by way of edging cagily towards the purpose of his visit, “I came in the back way.”

“So I noticed, sweet face.”

“I mean through the garden. I had a look at your shed. It’s in bad shape, Rita. The door’s come off its hinges. Shall I fix it for you?”

“Why, that’s a first-rate, bang-on idea, Mr. Constable.”

“Have you any tools?”

“Must have. Somewhere.” She examined her right hand, languidly holding it out at arm’s length.

“Where?”

“Don’t know, sweet.”

“Would Polly?”

She waggled her hand.

“Does she use them, Rita?”

“Could be. Could not. But it’s not like we’re dead interested in home improvement, is it?”

“That’s typical, I’d think. When women don’t have a man in the house for a long period of time, they—”

“I didn’t mean me and Polly,” she said. “I mean me and you. Or is that part of your job these days, popping through back gardens and checking on sheds and offering to fix them for helpless ladies?”

“We’re old friends. I’m happy to be of help.”

She sputtered with a laugh. “I bet you are. Happy as a ram at the rut, Mr. Constable, just being helpful. Bet if I ask Polly, she’ll tell me you been stopping by once or twice a week for years, ready to help her out with her chores.” She laid her left hand on the table and reached for her polish.

The kettle began to boil. He fetched it from the cooker. She had already prepared two thick mugs for the water. A glittering heap of what appeared to be instant coffee crystals lay at the bottom of each. One mug had already been used, if the ring of red lipstick was any indication. The other — printed with the word Pisces above which a silvery green fi sh swam in a current of cracked azure glaze — apparently was intended for him. He hesitated fractionally before pouring the water, tilting the mug towards him as surreptitiously as possible for examination.

Rita eyed him and gave him a wink. “G’on, luv-bunny. Take a little chance. We all got to go sometime, don’t we?” She chuckled and bent her head to the work of painting her nails.

He poured the water. There was only one teaspoon on the table, already used by the look of it. His stomach felt queasy at the thought of putting it into his mug, but considering the boiling water as a steriliser, he dipped it in quickly and made a few rapid, conciliatory revolutions. He drank. It was defi nitely coffee.

He said, “I’ll have a look for those tools now,” and took the mug with him to the dining room, where he placed it on the table and intended to forget it.

“You have a look for whatever you like,” Rita called after him. “We got nothing much to hide but what’s under our skirts. Let me know if you want a look there.”

Her shriek of laughter followed him from the dining room, where a hasty exploration through a dresser disclosed a set of dishes and several tablecloths redolent of moth balls. At the foot of the stairs, a battle-weary Canter-bury held yellowing copies of a London tabloid. A quick glance proved that one of the Yarkins had saved only the more delectable issues, featuring two-headed babies, corpses giving birth inside coffi ns, wolf-children of the circus, and the authorised account of extra-terrestrial visitations to a convent in Southend-on-Sea. He pulled out the single drawer and found himself fi ngering through small chunks of wood. He recognised the scent of cedar and pine. A leaf was still attached to the laurel. The others he would have been hard pressed to name. But Polly and her mother would have no trouble with the identification. They would know by the colour, the density, the scent.

He climbed the stairs, moving quickly, knowing that Rita was bound to put an end to his search as soon as she’d discovered its limit in amusement value. He looked right and left, assessing the possibilities presented by a bath and two bedrooms. Immediately in front of him stood a leatherbound chest upon which sat an unappealing squat bronze of someone male, priapic, and horned. Across the passage from this a cupboard gaped open, spilling forth linens and assorted jumble. Fourteenth labour of Heracles, he thought. He went for the first bedroom as Rita called his name.

He ignored her, stood in the doorway, and cursed. The woman was a sloth. She’d been in the lodge for more than a month, and she was still living from her mammoth suitcase. What wasn’t oozing from this was lying on the fl oor, on the backs of two chairs, and at the foot of the unmade bed. A dressing table next to the window looked as if it had once been a set-piece in a criminal investigation. Cosmetics and a colour wheel of nail-polish bottles crowded its surface, with an impressive patina of face powder dashed across everything, much like fingerprint dust. Necklaces hung from the door knob and from one of the posters of the bed. Scarves snaked on the fl oor through discarded shoes. And every inch of the room seemed to emanate Rita’s characteristic scent: part ripe fruit on the verge of going bad, part ageing woman in need of a bath.

He made a cursory check of the chest of drawers. He moved on to the wardrobe and then knelt to examine the space beneath the bed. His sole discovery was that the latter served as repository for an extensive array of slut’s wool as well as one stuffed black cat with its back arched, its fur at the bristle, and Rita Knows And Sees printed on a banner that extended from its tail.

He went to the bath. Rita called his name a second time. He made no reply. He shoved his hands through to the rear of a stack of towels that sat on one of the recessed shelves along with cleanser, scrubbing rags, two kinds of disinfectant, a half-torn print of some Lady Godiva type standing in a clam shell — covering her privates and looking coy — and a pottery toad.

Somewhere in the lodge there had to be something. He felt the fact’s certainty just as solidly as he felt the lumpy green linoleum beneath his feet. And if it wasn’t the tools, whatever else it might be, he would be able to recognise its signifi cance.

He slid open the mirror of the medicine chest and rooted through aspirin, mouth wash, toothpaste, and laxatives. He went through the pockets of a terry bathrobe that hung limply on the back of the door. He picked up a stack of paperback books on the top of the toilet’s cistern, fl ipped through them, and set them on the edge of the tub. And then he found it.

The colour caught his eye first: a streak of lavender against the yellow bathroom wall, wedged behind the cistern to keep it out of sight. A book, not large, perhaps five by nine inches, and thin, with its title worn from the spine. He used a toothbrush from the medicine chest to force the book upwards. It flopped onto the floor face up, next to a balled-up washing flannel, and for a moment he merely read its title, savouring the sensation of having his suspicions vindicated.

Alchemical Magic: Herbs, Spices, and Plants.

Why had he thought the proof might be a trowel, a three-pronged cultivator, or a box of tools? Had she used any of those, had she even owned them in the first place, what a simple thing it would have been to dispose of them somewhere. Dig a hole on the estate grounds, bury them in the wood. But this slim volume of incrimination spoke to the truth of what had happened.

He flipped the book open haphazardly, reading chapter titles and feeling each moment ever more sure. “The Harvest’s Magic Potential,” “Planets and Plants,” “Magical Attribution and Application.” His eye fell upon descriptions of use. He read the warnings appended as well.

“Hemlock, hemlock,” he murmured and riffled through the pages. His hunger for information grew, and facts about hemlock leapt out as if they’d only been waiting for the opportunity to sate him. He read, turned more pages, read again. The words flew up at him, glowed as if rendered in neon against a night sky. And finally the phrase when the moon is full stopped him.

He stared at this, unprepared for memory, thinking no, no, no. He felt rage and grief make a knot in his chest.

She’d been lying in bed, she’d asked him to open the curtains wide, she’d watched the moon. It was the bloody orange of autumn, a lunar disc so huge it looked within grasp. Harvest moon best, Col, Annie had whispered. And when he turned from the window, she had sunk into the coma that led to her death.

“No,” he whispered. “Not Annie. No.”

“Mr. C. Shepherd?” Rita’s voice, calling imperiously from below, closer than before. She was near the stairs. “You having a bit of fun with me undies?”

He fumbled with the buttons of his woollen shirt, slipped the book inside, flat against his stomach, and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers. He felt dizzy. A glance in the mirror and he saw the high colour smearing palm prints across his cheeks. He removed his spectacles and bathed his face, holding the icy water against his skin until, from out of the pain of the chill, anaesthesia spread.

He dried his face and studied his refl ection. He ran both hands through his hair. He looked at his skin and examined his eyes, and when he was ready to face her with equanimity, he went to the stairs.

She was standing at the bottom, and she slapped the banister. Her bangles rattled. Her triple chin bounced.

“What’re you up to, Mr. Constable Shepherd? This a’nt about shed doors and it a’nt a social call.”

“Do you know the signs of the zodiac?” he asked her as he descended. He marvelled at the calm of his words.

“Why? Want to see if me and you’s compatible? Sure, I know’m. Aries, Cancer, Virgo, Sagi—”

“Capricorn,” he said.

“That’s you?”

“No. I’m Libra.”

“The scales. Nice one, that. Just the thing for your line of work.”

“Libra’s October. When does Capricorn fall in the calendar year? Do you know, Rita?”

“Course I know. Who d’you think you’re jawing, some yobbo on the street? It’s December.”

“When?”

“Starts the twenty-second, runs for a month. Why? Is her up the lane more goat than you thought?”

“It’s just a fancy I had.”

“I’ve one or two of my own.” She trundled her enormous weight around and headed back in the direction of the kitchen where she positioned herself at the door to the service porch and wiggled her fingers at him in a come-tomama gesture made awkward by her care to make certain that the still-tacky nail polish didn’t smudge. “Your half of the bargain,” she said.

The thought of what she might mean made his legs quiver unexpectedly. “Bargain?” he asked.

“C’mere, luv-bunny. Nothing to fear. I only bite fellahs whose sign is the bull. Give us your palm.”

He remembered. “Rita, I don’t believe in—”

“The palm.” Again, she gestured, more come-hither than come-to-mama this time.

He cooperated. She was, after all, blocking the only reasonable access to his boots.

“Oh, nice hand, this.” She ran her fi ngers the length of his and crossed his palm with a feathery touch. She whispered a circular caress on his wrist. “Very nice,” she said, her eyes fluttering closed. “Very nice indeed. A man’s hands, these. Hands that belong on a woman’s body. Pleasure hands, these. They light fi res in the fl esh.”

“This doesn’t sound much like a fortune to me.” He tried to pull away. She tightened her grip, one hand on his wrist and the other holding his fi ngers fl at.

She turned his hand and placed it on one of her mounds of flesh that he took to be her breast. She forced his fingers to squeeze. “Like some of that, wouldn’t you, Mr. Constable-person. Never had anything quite like it, have you?”

There was truth in that. She didn’t feel like a woman. She felt like a quadruple batch of lumpy bread dough. The caress had the approximate appeal of gripping onto a fi stful of drying clay.

“Make you want more, luv-bunny? Mmm?” Her eyelashes were painted thick with mascara. They made a crescent of spider legs against her cheek. Her chest rose and fell with a tremulous sigh, and the odour of onions whiffed into his face. “Horned God make him ready,” Rita murmured. “Man to a woman, plough to a field, giver of pleasure and the force of life. Aaahhi-oooo-uuuu.”

He could feel her nipple, huge and erect, and his body was responding despite the revolting prospect of the two of them…himself and Rita Yarkin…this whale in a turban of scarlet and pink…this mass of fat with fi ngers that slid up his arm, cast a blessing on his face, and began a suggestive descent down his chest…

He pulled his hand away. Her eyes popped open. They seemed dazed and unfocussed, but a shake of her head cleared them. She studied his face and seemed to read what he couldn’t hide. She chuckled, then guffawed, then leaned against the kitchen work top and howled.

“You thought…You thought…Me and you…” Between the words, more laughter spewed forth. Tears formed in the creases near her eyes. When she finally controlled herself, she said, “I told you, Mr. C. Shepherd. When I want it from a man, I get it from a bull.” She blew her nose on a grimy-looking tea towel and held out her hand. “C’mere. Give it. No more prayers to get your poor little bowels in an uproar.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Don’t you, though.” She snapped her fi ngers for his hand. She was still blocking egress, so he offered it to her. He made certain his expression telegraphed how little to his liking this game-playing was.

She pulled him to the sink where the light was better. “Good lines,” she said. “Nice indication of birth and marriage. Love is—” She hesitated, frowning, absently pulling at one of her eyebrows. “Get behind me,” she said.

“What?”

“Do it. Slip your hand beneath my arm so I can get a better look at this right side up.” When he hesitated, she snapped, “I don’t mean no funny business. Just do it. Now.”

He did so. Because of her girth, he couldn’t see what she was doing, but he could feel her fingernails tracing his palm. Finally, she balled up his hand and released it.

“So,” she said briskly. “Not much to see, after all your grumbling. Just the regular bit. Nothing of importance. Nothing to worry you.” She turned on the tap in the sink and made a project out of rinsing out three glasses on which a residue of milk had formed a skin.

“You’re keeping your part of the bargain, aren’t you?” Colin asked.

“Wha’s that, pretty face?”

“Your mug’s shut tight.”

“’S nothing, is it? You don’t believe in it anyways.”

“But you do, Rita.”

“I believe in lots of things. Don’t mean they’re real.”

“Given. So tell me. I’ll be the judge.”

“I thought you had important stuff to do, Mr. Constable. Wasn’t that you in a rush to be gone?”

“You’re avoiding the answer.”

She shrugged.

“I want it.”

“You can’t have everything you want, sugar pie, much as you’ve been currently getting it.” She held the glass up to the light of the window. It was nearly as dirty as when she began. She reached for some liquid detergent and poured a few drops in. She returned to the water and used a sponge, exerting some rather serious pressure.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t ask ninny questions. You’re a clever enough bloke. You figure it out.”

“That’s the reading? Convenient for you, the phrasing of it, Rita. Is that the sort of thing you tell the twits who pay you for their fortunes in Blackpool?”

“Steady on,” she said.

“It all follows the same pattern, this mumbo-jumbo that you and Polly play at. Stones, palms, and tarot cards. None of it’s anything more than a game. You look for a weakness and use it to benefit yourselves with money.”

“Your ignorance a’nt worth the effort of response.”

“And that’s a manoeuvre as well, isn’t it? Turn the other cheek but still score a hit. Is that what the Craft’s all about? Dried-up women with nothing to live for but the thought of damaging others’ lives? A spell here, a curse there, and what does it matter because if someone gets hurt only another member of the Craft will know. And you all hold your tongues, don’t you, Rita? Isn’t that the blessing of a coven?”

She continued washing one glass after another. She’d chipped one nail. The polish was scarred on another. “Love and death,” she said. “Love and death. Three times.”

“What?”

“Your palm. A single marriage. But love and death three times. Death. Everywhere. You belong to the priesthood of death, Mr. Constable.”

“Oh, quite.”

She turned her head from the sink, but her hands went on washing. “It’s on your palm, my boy. And the lines don’t lie.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ST. JAMES HAD BEEN AT A LOSS the previous night. Lying in bed and gazing through the skylight at the stars, he thought about the maddening futility of marriage. He knew that the slow-motion, running-towards-each-other-along-thebeach-for-the-passionate-embrace-before-fadeout celluloid depiction of relationships led the romantic in everyone to anticipate a lifetime of happily-ever-after. He also knew that the reality taught, inch by merciless inch, that if there was a happily of any kind, it never came for an extended stay, and when one opened the door to its ostensible knock, one faced the possibility of admitting instead grumpily, angrily, or a host of others all clamouring for attention. It was sometimes extremely disheartening to have to contend with the messiness of life. He’d been at the point of deciding that the only reasonable way to deal with a woman was not at all when Deborah moved towards him from across the bed.

“I’m sorry,” she had whispered and slipped her arm across his chest. “You’re my number-one bloke.”

He turned to her. She buried her forehead against his shoulder. He put his hand on the back of her neck, feeling the heavy weight of her hair as well as the childlike softness of her skin.

“I’m glad of it,” he whispered in return. “Because you’re my number-one bit of fl uff. Always have been, you know. Always will be.”

He could feel her yawn. “It’s hard for me,” she murmured. “The path’s there, isn’t it, but it’s the first step that’s difficult. It keeps messing me up.”

“That’s the way of things. I suppose it’s how we learn.” He cradled her. He felt the sleep start to take her. He wanted to call her back from it, but he kissed her head and let her go.

Over breakfast, he’d still maintained caution, however, telling himself that while she was his Deborah, she was also a woman, more mercurial than most. Part of what he savoured about life with her was the unexpected. A newspaper editorial alluding to the possibility of the police manufacturing a case against an IRA suspect was enough to send her into a fury out of which she might decide to organise a photographic odyssey to Belfast or Derry to “find out what’s what for myself, by God.” A report about cruelty to animals took her to the streets to join in a protest. Discrimination against sufferers from AIDS dispatched her to the first hospice she could fi nd which accepted volunteers to read to patients, to talk, and to be a friend. Because of this, from one day to the next, he was never quite certain what sort of mood he might find her in when he descended the stairs from his lab to join her for lunch or for dinner. The only certainty about life with Deborah was that nothing was particularly certain at all.

He generally revelled in her passionate nature. She was more alive than anyone he knew. But living completely demanded that she feel completely as well, so while her highs were delirious, infused with excitement, her lows were correspondingly empty of hope. And it was the lows that worried him, making him want to advise her to rein herself in. Try not to feel so deeply was the counsel he always found himself ready to voice. He’d learned long ago to keep that prescription to himself, however. Telling her not to feel was as good as telling her not to breathe. Besides, he liked the whirl of emotion in which she lived. If nothing else, it kept him from ever being bored.

So when she said, finishing up her grapefruit wedges, “Here’s what it is. I need a direction. I don’t like the way I’ve been fl oundering about. It’s time I narrowed my fi eld of vision. I need to make a commitment and go with it,” he made a vaguely supportive reply as he wondered what on earth she was talking about.

He said, “Good. That’s important.” He buttered a triangle of toast. She nodded vigorously at his approval and, with gastronomical enthusiasm, tapped her spoon against the top of her boiled egg. When she didn’t appear to be forthcoming with any additional information, he said, in a tentative reconnaissance of her meaning, “Floundering makes one feel as if there’s no foundation, don’t you think?”

“Simon, that’s just exactly it. You always understand.”

He mentally patted himself on the back, saying, “A decision about direction gives the foundation, doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely.” She munched happily on her toast. She was looking out the window at the grey day, damp street, and bleak, sooty buildings. Her eyes were alight with whatever obscure possibilities the icy weather and dismal surroundings promised.

“So,” he said, walking a fi ne line between expansive conclusion and information gathering, “what have you narrowed your vision to?”

“I haven’t entirely decided,” she said.

“Oh.”

She reached for the strawberry jam and plopped a teaspoonful onto her plate. “Except just look at what I’ve been doing so far. Landscapes, still lifes, portraits. Buildings, bridges, the interior of hotels. I’ve been eclecticism personified. No wonder I’m not developing a reputation.” She smeared jam on the toast and waved it at him. “It’s this. I need to make a decision about what sort of photography gives me the most pleasure. I need to follow my heart. I’ve got to stop striking out in every direction whenever someone offers me work. I can’t excel at everything. No one does, really. But I can excel at something. I thought it would be portraits at first, when I was in school, d’you know. Then I got sidetracked onto landscapes and still lifes. Now I’m just dabbling in whatever commercial assignment comes to hand. But that’s no good. It’s time to commit.”

So during their morning walk to the common where Deborah took the ducks the rest of her toast, and while they examined the World War I memorial with its solitary soldier, head bowed, rifle extended, she chatted about her art. Still lifes presented a wealth of opportunity — did he know what the Americans were currently doing with flowers and paint? had he seen the studies of metal scored, heated, and treated with acid? was he aware of Yoshida’s depictions of fruit? — but on the other hand, they did seem rather distant, didn’t they? Not much emotional risk involved in shooting a tulip or a pear. Landscapes were lovely — what a treat to be a travel photographer and go on assignment to Africa or the Orient, wouldn’t that be smashing? — but they demanded only an eye for composition, the skill for lighting, the knowledge of fi lters and film, all of it technique. Whereas portraits— well, there was an element of trust that had to be established between artist and subject. And trust required risk. Portraits forced both parties to come out of themselves. You took a picture of a body, but if you were good, you captured the personality beneath. Now there was real living, didn’t he think so, engaging the heart and mind of the sitter, earning his trust, capturing his realness.

Something of a cynic, St. James wouldn’t have put money on most people having much “realness” under their surface personae. But he was happy enough to be involved in Deborah’s conversation. When she first began chatting, he tried to evaluate her words, tone, and expression for the likelihood of their being avoidance. She’d been upset last night with his intrusion into her territory. She wouldn’t want a repeat of that. But the more she talked — weighing this possibility, rejecting that, exploring her motivations for each — the more he felt reassured. There was an energy to her that he hadn’t seen in the last ten months. Whatever her reasons for entering into a discussion of her professional future, the mood it seemed to engender in her was a far sight better than her previous depression. So when she set up her tripod and Hasselblad, saying, “The light’s good right now,” and wanted him to pose in the deserted beer garden of Crofters Inn so that she might test her regard for portraits, he let her snap away at every possible angle, for more than an hour despite the cold, until they received Lynley’s call.

She was saying, “You see, I don’t think I want to do conventional studio portraits. I mean, I don’t want people coming in and posing for their anniversary snaps. I wouldn’t mind being called out to do something special, but largely I think I want to work on the street and in public places. I want to fi nd interesting faces, and let the art grow from there,” when Ben Wragg announced from the rear door of the inn that Inspector Lynley was wanting to speak to Mr. St. James.

The result of that conversation — Lynley shouting over the noise of some sort of roadwork that appeared to call for minor explosives — was a drive to the cathedral at Bradford.

“We’re looking for a connection between them,” Lynley had said. “Perhaps the bishop can provide it.”

“And you?”

“I’ve an appointment with Clitheroe CID. After that, the forensic pathologist. It’s formality mostly, but it’s got to be done.”

“You saw Mrs. Spence?”

“The daughter as well.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. I’m uneasy. I’ve not much doubt that the Spence woman did it and knew what she was doing. I’ve plenty of doubt it was conventional murder. We need to know more about Sage. We need to unearth the reason he left Cornwall.”

“Are you on to something?”

He heard Lynley sigh. “In this case, I hope not, St. James.”

Thus, with Deborah at the wheel of their hired car and a phone call made to ensure their reception, they drove the considerable distance to Bradford, skirting Pendle Hill and swinging to the north of Keighley Moor.

The secretary to the Lord Bishop of Bradford admitted them into the offi cial residence not far from the fi fteenth-century cathedral that was the seat of his ministry. He was a toothy young man who carried a maroon leather diary under one arm and continually riffled through its gold-edged pages as if to remind them how limited was the bishop’s time and how fortunate were they that a half-hour had been carved out for them. He led the way not into a study, library, or conference room, but through the wood-panelled residence to a rear stairway that descended to a small, personal gym. In addition to a wall-size mirror, the room contained an exercise bike, a rowing machine, and a complicated contraption for lifting weights. It also contained Robert Glennaven, Bishop of Bradford, who was occupied with pushing, shoving, climbing, and otherwise tormenting his body on a fourth machine that consisted of moving stairs and rods.

“My Lord Bishop,” the secretary said. He made the introductions, snapped a turn on his heel, and went to sit in a straight-backed chair by the foot of the stairs. He folded his hands over the diary — now opened meaningfully to the appropriate page — took his watch off his wrist and balanced it on his knee, and placed his narrow feet flat on the fl oor.

Glennaven nodded at them brusquely and wiped a rag across the top of his sweat-sheened bald head. He was wearing the trousers to a grey sweat suit along with a faded black T-shirt on which TENTH UNICEF JOG-ATHON was printed above the date 4 May. Both trousers and shirt were mottled by rings and streaks of perspiration.

“This is His Grace’s exercise time,” the secretary announced unnecessarily. “He has another appointment in an hour, and he’ll need an opportunity to shower prior to that. If you’ll be so good as to keep it in mind.”

There were no other seats in the room aside from those provided by the equipment. St. James wondered how many other unexpected or unwanted guests were encouraged to limit their visits to the bishop by having to conduct them standing up.

“Heart,” Glennaven said, jabbing his thumb to his chest before he adjusted a dial on the stair machine. He puffed and grimaced as he spoke, no exercise enthusiast but a man without options. “I’ve another quarter of an hour. Sorry. Can’t let up or the benefits diminish. So the cardiologist tells me. Sometimes I think he has profi t sharing going with the sadists who create these infernal machines.” He pumped, lunged, and continued to sweat. “According to the deacon”—with a tilt of his head to indicate his secretary—“Scotland Yard wants information in the usual fashion of people wanting something in this new age. By yesterday, if possible.”

“True enough,” St. James said.

“Don’t know that I can tell you anything useful. Dominic here”—another head tilt towards the stairs—”could probably tell you more. He attended the inquest.”

“At your request, I take it.”

The bishop nodded. He grunted with the effort of addressing the additional tension he’d added to the machine. The veins became swollen on his forehead and arms.

“Is that your usual procedure, sending someone to an inquest?”

He shook his head. “Never had one of my priests poisoned before. I had no procedure.”

“Would you do it again if another priest died under questionable circumstances?”

“Depends on the priest. If he was like Sage, yes.”

Glennaven’s introduction of the topic made St. James’ job easier. He celebrated this fact by taking a seat on the bench of the weight machine. Deborah went to the exercise bike and made it her perch. At their movement, Dominic looked disapprovingly at the bishop. The best-laid plans gone awry, his expression said. He tapped the face of his watch as if to make sure it was still in working order.

“You mean a man likely to be deliberately poisoned,” St. James said.

“We want priests who are dedicated to their ministry,” the bishop said between grunts, “especially in parishes where the temporal rewards are minimal at best. But zeal has its negatives. People find it offensive. Zealots hold up mirrors and ask people to look at their own refl ections.”

“Sage was a zealot?”

“In some eyes.”

“In yours?”

“Yes. But not offensively so. I’ve a high tolerance for religious activism. Even when it’s not politically sound. He was a decent sort. He had a good mind. He wanted to use it. Still, zeal causes problems. So I sent Dominic to the inquest.”

“I’ve been given to understand that you were satisfied by what you heard,” St. James said to the deacon.

“Nothing that was recorded by the adjudicating party indicated Mr. Sage’s ministry to be wanting in any way.” The deacon’s monotone, a demonstration of hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil, and step-on-no-toes, no doubt served him well in the political-religious arena in which he worked. It did little to add to their knowledge, however.

“As to Mr. Sage himself?” St. James asked.

The deacon ran his tongue over his protruding teeth and picked a piece of lint from the lapel of his black suit jacket. “Yes?”

“Was he himself wanting?”

“As far as the parish was concerned, and from the information I was able to gather from my attendance at the inquest—”

“I mean in your eyes. Was he wanting? You must have known him as well as heard about him at the inquest.”

“We none of us are capable of achieving perfection,” was the deacon’s prim response.

“Actually, non sequiturs aren’t of much help in examining an untimely death,” St. James said.

The deacon’s neck seemed to lengthen as he lifted his chin. “If you’re hoping for more— perhaps something detrimental — then I must tell you I am not in the habit of sitting in judgement upon fellow clerics.”

The bishop chuckled. “What balderdash, Dominic. Most days you sit in judgement like St. Peter himself. Tell the man what you know.”

“Your Grace—”

“Dominic, you gossip like a ten-year-old schoolgirl. Always have done. Now, stop equivocating before I climb off this damnable machine and box your bloody ears. Pardon me, dear madam,” to Deborah who smiled.

The deacon looked as if he smelled something unpleasant but had just been told to pretend it was roses. “All right,” he said. “It seemed to me that Mr. Sage had a rather narrow field of vision. His every reference point was specifi cally biblical.”

“I shouldn’t think that a limitation in a priest,” St. James noted.

“It is perhaps the most serious limitation a priest can take with him into his ministry. A strict interpretation of and consequent adherence to the Bible can be perfectly blinding, not to mention severely alienating to the very flock whose membership one might be trying to increase. We are not Puritans, Mr. St. James. We do not harangue from the pulpit any longer. Nor do we encourage religious devotion based upon fear.”

“Nothing we’ve heard about Sage indicates that he was doing that either.”

“Not yet in Winslough, perhaps. But our last meeting with him here in Bradford certainly stands as monumental evidence of the direction in which he was determined to head. There was trouble brewing all round that man. One sensed it was just a matter of time before it came to a boil.”

“Trouble? Between Sage and the parish? Or a member of the parish? Do you know something specifi c?”

“For someone who’d spent years in the ministry, he had no essential grasp of the concrete problems faced by his parishioners or anyone else. Example: He took part in a conference on marriage and the family not a month before he died and while a professional — a psychologist, mind you, here in Bradford — attempted to give our brothers some guidance on how to deal with parishioners having marital problems, Mr. Sage wanted to engage in a discussion of the woman taken in adultery.”

“The woman…?”

“John, chapter eight,” the bishop said. “‘And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery…’ etcetera, etcetera. You know the story: Feel free to throw stones, if you’ve not sinned yourself.”

The deacon continued as if the bishop hadn’t spoken. “There we were in the middle of discussing the best approach to take with a couple whose ability to communicate is clouded by the need to control each other, and Sage wanted to talk about what was moral versus what was right. Because the laws of the Hebrews declared it to be so, it was moral to stone this woman, he said. But was it necessarily right? And oughtn’t that be what we explore in our conferences together, brothers: the dilemma we face between that which is moral in the eyes of our society and that which is right in the eyes of God? It was all perfect rubbish. He didn’t want to talk about anything concrete because he lacked the ability to do so. If he could keep our heads up in the air and fill up our time with nebulous discussions, his own weaknesses as a priest — not to mention his defi ciencies as a man — might never be revealed.” In conclusion, the deacon waved his hand in front of his face as if whisking away a pesky fl y. He gave a derisive tut. “The woman taken in adultery. Should we or shouldn’t we stone sinners in the market-place. My God. What drivel. This is the twentieth century. Nearly the twenty-fi rst.”

“Dominic always has his fingers on the pulse of the obvious,” the bishop noted. The deacon looked miffed.

“You disagree with his assessment of Mr. Sage?”

“No. It’s accurate. Unfortunate, but true. His zealotry had a distinctly biblical fl avour. And frankly, that’s off-putting, even for clerics.”

The deacon bowed his head briefly in humble acceptance of the bishop’s laconic approbation.

Glennaven continued to pump away on the stair machine, adding ever more to the increasing stains of sweat on his clothes. It clicked and whirred. The bishop panted. St. James thought about the oddity of religion.

All forms of Christianity sprang from the same source, the life and words of the Nazarene. Yet the ways of celebrating that life and those words seemed as infinite in variety as the individuals who were the celebrants. While St. James recognised the fact that tempers could flare and dislikes could brew over interpretations and styles of worship, it seemed more likely that a priest whose mode of devotion irritated parishioners would be replaced rather than eliminated. St. John Townley-Young may have found Mr. Sage too low church for his taste. The deacon may have found him too fundamental. The parish may have been irked by his passion. But none of these seemed significant enough reasons to murder him. The truth had to lie in another direction. Biblical zealotry did not appear to be the connection that Lynley was hoping to unearth between killer and victim.

“He came to you from Cornwall, as I understand it,” St. James said.

“He did.” The bishop used the rag to scour his face and to sponge the sweat from his neck. “Nearly twenty years there. Round three months here. Part of it with me whilst he went on his interviews. The rest in Winslough.”

“Is that the ordinary procedure, to have a priest stay here with you during the interview process?”

“Special case,” Glennaven said.

“Why?”

“A favour to Ludlow.”

St. James frowned. “The town?”

“Michael Ludlow,” Dominic clarified. “Bishop of Truro. He asked His Grace to see to it that Mr. Sage was…” The deacon made much of sifting through the chaff of his thoughts for a wheat-like euphemism. “He felt Mr. Sage needed a change of environment. He thought a new location might increase his chance of success.”

“I had no idea a bishop might be so involved in the work of an individual cleric. Is that typical?”

“In the work of this cleric, yes.” A buzzer sounded from the stair machine. Glennaven said, “Saints be praised,” and reached for a knob that he turned anticlockwise. He slowed his pace for a cool-down period. His breathing began to return to normal. “Robin Sage was Michael Ludlow’s archdeacon originally,” he said. “He’d spent the first seven years of his ministry climbing to that position. He was only thirty-two when he received the appointment. He was an unqualified success. He made carpe diem his personal watchword.”

“That doesn’t sound at all like the man from Winslough,” Deborah murmured.

Glennaven acknowledged her point with a nod. “He made himself indispensable to Michael. He served on committees, involved himself in political action—”

“Church-approved political action,” Dominic added.

“He lectured at theological colleges. He raised thousands of pounds for the maintenance of the cathedral and for the local churches. And he was fully capable of mingling without either effort or discomfort in any level of society.”

“A jewel. A real catch, in other words,” Dominic said. He didn’t seem overly pleased with the thought.

“It’s odd to think a man like that would suddenly be satisfied, living the life of a village cleric,” St. James said.

“That was Michael’s thought exactly. He hated to lose him, but he let him go. It was Sage’s request. He went to Boscastle for his fi rst posting.”

“Why?”

The bishop wiped his hands on the rag and folded it. “Perhaps he’d been to the village on holiday.”

“But why the sudden change? Why the desire to go from a position of power and influence to one of relative obscurity? That’s hardly the norm. Even for a priest, I dare say.”

“He’d travelled on a personal road to Damascus a short time before, evidently. He’d lost his wife.”

“His wife?”

“Killed in a boating accident. According to Michael, he was never the same afterwards. He saw her death as a punishment from God for his temporal interests, and he decided to eschew them.”

St. James looked at Deborah across the room. He could tell she was thinking his very same thought. They’d all of them made an uninformed assumption based upon limited information. They had assumed the vicar hadn’t been married because no one in Win-slough had mentioned a wife. He could see from Deborah’s thoughtful expression that she was reflecting upon the day in November when she’d had her only conversation with the man.

“So I assume that his passion for success was replaced with a passion to make up for his past in some way,” St. James said to the bishop.

“But the problem was that the latter passion didn’t translate as well as the former had. He went through nine placements.”

“In what period of time?”

The bishop looked at his secretary. “Some ten to fifteen years, wasn’t it?” Dominic nodded.

“With no success anywhere? A man with his talents?”

“As I said, the passion didn’t translate well. He became the zealot we spoke of earlier, vehement about everything from the decline in church attendance to what he called the secularisation of the clergy. He lived the Sermon on the Mount, and he wasn’t accepting of a fellow clergyman or even a parishioner who failed to do the same. If that wasn’t enough to cause him problems, he firmly believed that God shows His will through what happens to people in their lives. Frankly, that’s a difficult draught of medicine to swallow if you’re the victim of a senseless tragedy.”

“Which he himself was.”

“And which he believed to be his just deserts.”

“‘I was self-centred,’ he’d say,” the deacon intoned. “‘I cared only for my own need for glory. God’s hand moved to change me. You can change as well.’”

“Unfortunately, true though his words may have been, they didn’t constitute a recipe for success,” the bishop said.

“And when you heard that he was dead, did you think there was a connection?”

“I couldn’t avoid considering it,” the bishop replied. “That’s why Dominic went to the inquest.”

“The man had inner demons,” Dominic said. “He chose to wrestle them in a public forum. The only way he could make expiation for his own worldliness was to castigate everyone he met for theirs. Is that a motive for murder?” He snapped closed the bishop’s appointment diary. It was clear that their interview was at an end. “I suppose it depends upon how one reacts when confronted with a man who seemed to feel that his was the only correct way to live.”

“I’ve never been good at this, Simon. You know that.” They’d finally stopped for a rest in Downham, on the other side of the Forest of Pendle. They parked by the post offi ce and walked down the sloping lane. They circled round a storm-stricken oak that had been reduced to trunk and truncated branches and headed back towards the narrow stone bridge they’d just crossed in the car. Pendle Hill’s grey-green slopes hulked in the distance with fingers of frost curling down from the summit, but they were not intent upon a hike towards this. Rather they had spied a small green on the near side of the bridge, where a stream cut a scythe’s curve along the lane and flowed behind a neat line of cottages. Here a worn bench backed up to a drystone wall, and perhaps two dozen mallards quacked happily on the grass, explored the roadside, and paddled in the water.

“Don’t worry about it. This isn’t a contest. Remember what you can. The rest will come when it comes.”

“Why are you so obnoxiously undemanding?”

He smiled. “I’ve always thought it was part of my charm.”

The ducks came to greet them with the expectation of food on their minds. They quacked and set about examining footwear, investigating and rejecting Deborah’s boots, moving on to St. James’ shoelaces. These caused a flurry of interest, as did the metal crosspiece of his brace. However, when none of this produced the tiniest, edible morsel, the ducks fluffed and resettled their feathers reproachfully and from that moment displayed a disappointed aloofness to the human presence altogether.

Deborah sat on the bench. She nodded a hello to a parka-clad woman who trudged by them in red Wellingtons with an energetic black terrier on a lead. Then she rested her chin on her fist. St. James joined her. He touched his fingers to the ridge that she was creating between her eyebrows.

“I’m thinking,” she said. “I’m trying to remember.”

“So I noticed.” He put up the collar of his coat. “I’m merely wondering if it’s a requirement of the process that it be conducted in temperatures falling below ten degrees.”

“What a baby you are. It’s not even that cold.”

“Tell that to your lips. They’re turning blue.”

“Pooh. I’m not shivering.”

“I’m not surprised. You’ve gone far beyond that. You’re in the final stages of hypothermia and you don’t even know it. Let’s go back to that pub. There’s smoke coming from the chimney.”

“Too many distractions.”

“Deborah, it’s cold. Doesn’t brandy sound comforting?”

“I’m thinking.”

St. James shoved his hands into his overcoat pockets and gloomily gave his refrigerated attention to the ducks. They seemed oblivious of the cold. But then, they’d had a whole summer and autumn to fatten themselves up in preparation for it. Besides, they were naturally insulated with down, weren’t they? Lucky little devils.

“St. Joseph,” Deborah fi nally announced. “That’s what I remember. Simon, he was devoted to St. Joseph.”

St. James raised a doubtful eyebrow and hunched further into his coat. “It’s a start, I suppose.” He tried to sound encouraging.

“No, really. It’s important. It must be.” Deborah went on to explain her meeting with the vicar in Room 7 of the National Gallery. “I was admiring the da Vinci — Simon, why is it that you’ve never taken me to see it before?”

“Because you hate museums. I tried when you were nine. Don’t you recall? You preferred to go rowing on the Serpentine and became quite unruly when I took you to the British Museum instead.”

“But those were mummies. Simon, you wanted me to look at the mummies. I had nightmares for weeks.”

“So did I.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have let a little bit of temper defeat you so easily.”

“I’ll keep that in mind for the future. Back to Sage.”

She used the sleeves of her coat as a muff, tucking her hands inside. “He pointed out that the da Vinci cartoon didn’t have St. Joseph in it. He said that St. Joseph hardly ever was in a painting with the Virgin and wasn’t that sad? Or something like that.”

“Well, Joseph was just the breadwinner, after all. The good old bloke, the right-hand man.”

“But he seemed so…so sad about it. He seemed to take it personally.”

St. James nodded. “It’s the meal-ticket syndrome. Men like to think they’re more important than that in the general scheme of their women’s lives. What else do you recall?”

She sank her chin to her chest. “He didn’t want to be there.”

“In London?”

“In the gallery. He’d been heading somewhere else — was it Hyde Park? — when it started to rain. He liked nature. He liked the country. He said it helped him think.”

“About what?”

“St. Joseph?”

“Now there’s a subject for ample consideration.”

“I told you I wasn’t any good at this. I don’t have a memory for conversation. Ask me what he wore, what he looked like, the colour of his hair, the shape of his mouth. But don’t ask me to tell you what he said. Even if I could remember every word, I’d never be able to delve for hidden meanings. I’m no good at verbal delving. I’m no good at any delving. I meet someone. We talk. I like him or I don’t. I think: This is someone who might be a friend. And that’s the end of it. I don’t expect him to turn up dead when I come to call, so I don’t remember every detail of our first encounter. Do you? Would you?”

“Only if I’m conversing with a beautiful woman. And even then I find I’m distracted by details having nothing to do with what she has to say.”

She eyed him. “What sort of details?”

He cocked his head thoughtfully and examined her face. “The mouth.”

“The mouth?”

“I find women’s mouths a study. I’ve been readying myself for the last several years to posit a scientific theory on them.” He settled back against the bench and regarded the ducks. He could feel her bristling. He contained a smile.

“Well, I won’t even ask what the theory is. You want me to. I can tell by your expression. So I won’t.”

“Just as well.”

“Good.” She wriggled next to him, duplicating his position on the bench. She held out her feet and scrutinised the tops of her boots. She clicked her heels together. She did the same with her toes. She said, “Oh all right. Damn it. Tell me. Tell me.”

“Is there a correlation between size and significance of utterance?” he asked solemnly.

“You’re joking.”

“Not at all. Have you never noticed that women with small mouths invariably have little of importance to say?”

“What sexist rubbish.”

“Take Virginia Woolf as an example. Now there was a woman with a generous mouth.”

“Simon!”

“Look at Antonia Fraser, Margaret Drabble, Jane Goodall—”

“Margaret Thatcher?”

“Well, there are always exceptions. But the general rule, and I argue that the facts will uphold it absolutely, is that the correlation

exists. I intend to research it.”

“How?”

“Personally. In fact, I thought I’d begin with you. Size, shape, dimension, pliability, sensuality…” He kissed her. “Why is it I’ve a feeling you’re the best of the lot?”

She smiled. “I don’t think your mother beat you enough when you were a child.”

“We’re even then. I know for a fact that your father never laid a hand upon you.” He got to his feet and extended his hand to her. She slipped hers into the crook of his arm. “How does a brandy sound?”

She declared it sounded fine, and they began to retrace their steps up the lane. Much like Winslough, just beyond the village the open land rose and fell in gentle hills parcelled out in farms. Where the farms ended, the moors began. Sheep grazed here. Among them, the occasional border collie moved. The occasional farmer worked.

Deborah paused on the threshold of the pub. St. James, holding the door for her, turned back to find her staring at the moors and tapping the knuckle of her index fi nger contemplatively against her chin.

“What is it?”

“Walking. Simon, he said he liked to walk on the moors. He liked to be outside when he had to make a decision. That’s why he wanted to go to the park. St. James’s Park. He’d planned to feed the sparrows from the bridge. And he knew about the bridge. Simon, he must have been there before.”

St. James smiled and drew her into the doorway of the pub.

“D’you think it’s important?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“D’you think perhaps he had a reason for talking about the Hebrews wanting to stone that woman? Because we know he was married. We know his wife met with an accident…Simon!”

“Now you’re delving,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“FOR SPENCE. DIDN’T YOU hear?”

“The headmistress sent for her and…”

“…see his car?”

“It was about her mum.”

Maggie hesitated on the school steps when she realised that more than one speculative glance was being directed her way. She’d always liked the time between the last lesson and the departure of the school bus. It presented the best opportunity to gossip with the pupils who lived in other villages and in the town. But she’d never considered that the giggles and whispers that accompanied the afternoon chit-chat might one day be about her.

Everything had seemed outwardly normal at first. Pupils were gathered on the tarmac in front of the school in their usual fashion. Some were lingering by the school bus. Others were lounging against cars. Girls were combing their hair and comparing shades of contraband lipstick. Boys were sparring with each other or trying to look cool. When Maggie came through the doors, threaded her way down the steps, and searched the assembly for Josie or Nick, her mind was engaged with the questions the London detective had asked her. She didn’t even stop to wonder about it when a ripple of whispers slid through the crowd. She’d been feeling rather dirty ever since the conversation in Mrs. Crone’s study, and she couldn’t exactly understand why. So her mind was taken up with turning over every possible reason as if each were a stone, and she was mostly conscious of waiting to see if a slug of previously unconscious guilt would slither away from exposure to the light.

She was used to feeling guilty. She kept on sinning, she tried to convince herself she wasn’t sinning, she even excused the worst of her behaviour by telling herself it was Mummy’s fault. Nick loves me, Mummy, even if you don’t. See how he loves me? See? See?

In reply, her mother had never used look-ateverything-I’ve-done-for-you-Margaret in the sort of play upon conscience that Pam Rice’s mother tried with no effect. She never talked in terms of deep disappointment as Josie reported her mother had done on more than one occasion. Nonetheless, prior to this very day, her mother had been the consistent, major source of Maggie’s guilt: She was disappointing Mummy; she was causing Mummy’s anger; she was adding torture to Mummy’s pain. Maggie knew all this without having to hear it. She had always been extremely adept at reading reactions on her mother’s face.

Which was why Maggie had come to realise last night precisely how much power she had in this war with her mother. She had power to punish, to hurt, to warn, to avenge…the list stretched on to forever. She wanted to feel triumphant in the knowledge that she’d wrested the ship’s wheel of her life away from her mother’s controlling hands. But the truth was, she felt troubled about it. So when she arrived home late the previous night — outwardly proud of the purple love bruises which Nick had sucked to the surface of her neck — the flames of pleasure Maggie had expected to warm her at Mummy’s frantic worry were instantly extinguished at the sight of her face. She made no reproach. She just came to the door of the darkened sitting room, and she gazed upon her as if from a place where she couldn’t be reached. She looked a hundred years old.

Maggie had said, “Mummy?”

Mummy had placed her fingers on Maggie’s chin, had turned it gently to expose the bruises, had then released her and climbed the stairs. Maggie heard her door click shut softly behind her. It was a sound that hurt more than the slap she deserved.

She was bad. She knew it. Even when she felt warmest and closest to Nick, even when he loved her with his hands and his mouth, when he was pressing It to her, holding her, opening her, saying Maggie, Mag, Mag, she was black and she was bad. She was fi lled with blame. She was becoming every day more used to the shame of her behaviour, except that she had never expected to be made to feel it over her friendship with Mr. Sage.

What she felt was like the prickles from nettle leaves. But they scratched at her spirit instead of her skin. She kept hearing the detective ask about secrets, and that made her feel dry and itchy inside. Mr. Sage had said, You’re a good girl, Maggie, don’t ever forget that, believe it completely. He said, We get confused, we lose our way, but we can always fi nd our way back to God through our prayers. God listens, he said, God forgives everything. Whatever we do, Maggie, God will forgive.

He was comfort itself, was Mr. Sage. He was understanding. He was goodness and love.

Maggie had never betrayed the confi dence of their times together. She had held them precious. And now she was faced with the London detective’s suspicions that what was most special about her friendship with the vicar was also what had led to his death.

This was the slug that writhed beneath the last stone of implication she turned over in her mind. The fault was hers. And if that was the case, then Mummy had known all along what she was doing when she fed the vicar dinner that night.

No. Maggie argued the point with herself. Mummy couldn’t have known she was feeding him hemlock. She took care of people. She didn’t hurt them. She made unguents and poultices. She mixed special teas. She brewed decoctions, infusions, and tinctures. Everything she did was to help, not to harm.

Then the whispers of her schoolmates rising round her made delicate fissures in the shell of her thoughts.

“She poisoned the bloke.”

“…didn’t get away with it after all.”

“The police came from London.”

“…devil-worshippers, I heard and…”

Maggie was startled into sudden comprehension. Dozens of eyes were on her. Faces were bright with speculation. She clutched her rucksack of schoolbooks to her chest and looked about for a friend. Her head felt weightless, oddly and suddenly divorced from her body. All at once it was the most important thing in the world to pretend she didn’t realise what they were talking about.

“Seen Nick?” she asked. Her lips felt chapped. “Seen Josie?”

A fox-faced girl with a large pimple on the side of her nose became the group spokesman. “They don’t want to hang about with you, Maggie. They’re not so dim they can’t see the risk.”

A murmur of approval lapped round the girl like a small wave, then receded in kind. The faces seemed to move closer to Maggie.

She held her rucksack tighter. A book’s sharp corner dug into her hand. She knew they were teasing — didn’t one’s mates always like to tease whenever they could? — and she drew herself taller to meet the challenge. “Right,” she said with a smile as if she herself approved of whatever joke they were trying to make. “Quite. Come on. Where’s Josie? Where’s Nick?”

“They’ve gone off already,” Fox-face said.

“But the bus…” It was sitting where it always sat, waiting for departure, just a few yards away, inside the gate. There were faces at the windows, but from the steps of the school, Maggie couldn’t tell if her friends were among them.

“They made their own arrangements. During lunch. When they knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Who you were with.”

“I wasn’t with anyone.”

“Oh right. Whatever you say. You lie about as good as your mum.”

Maggie tried to swallow, but her tongue got stuck on the roof of her mouth. She took a step towards the bus. The group let her go but closed ranks right behind her. She could hear them talking as if to each other, but all of it intended for her.

“They went off in a car, did you know?”

“Nick and Josie?”

“And that girl who’s been after him. You know who I mean.”

Teasing. They were teasing. Maggie walked faster. But the schoolbus seemed farther and farther away. There was a shimmer of light dancing in front of it. It started as a beam and turned into bright speckles.

“He’ll stay clear of her now.”

“If he’s got any brains. Who wouldn’t?”

“It’s true. If her mum doesn’t take a fancy to her mates, she just invites them for dinner.”

“Like that fairy story. Have an apple, dearie? It’ll help you sleep.”

Laughter.

“Only you won’t wake up real soon.”

Laughter. Laughter. The bus was too far.

“Here, eat this. I cooked it up special. Just for you.”

“Now, don’t be shy about second helpings. I can see you’re just dying for more.”

Maggie felt a hot ember at the back of her throat. The bus glimmered, got small, became the size of her shoe. The air closed round it and swallowed it up. Only the wrought iron gates of the school were left.

“It’s my own recipe. Parsnip pie, I call it. People say it’s dead good.”

Beyond the gates lay the street—

“They call me Crippen, but don’t let that put you off your dinner.”

— and escape. Maggie began to run.

She was pounding towards the centre of town when she heard him calling her. She kept going, dashing up to the high street and then across it, tearing towards the car park at the base of the hill. What she was planning to do there, she couldn’t have said. It was only important to get away.

Her heart was slamming into her chest. She had a folding and pulling pain in her side. She skidded on a patch of slick pavement and wobbled, but she caught herself against a lamppost and ran on.

“Watch yourself, luv,” warned a farmer who was getting out of his Escort next to the kerb.

“Maggie!” shouted someone else.

She heard herself sob. She saw the street blur. She kept rushing forwards.

She passed the bank, the post offi ce, some shops, a tea room. She dodged a young woman pushing a pram. She heard the thud of footsteps behind her, and then another shout of her name. She gulped away tears and plunged on.

Fear pumped energy and speed through her body. They were following her, she thought. They were laughing and pointing. They were only waiting for the opportunity to encircle her and begin the whispers all over again: What her mum did…do you know, do you know…Maggie and the vicar…a vicar?…that bloke?…Cor, he was old enough to be…

No! Drop the thought, trample it, bury it, shove it away. Maggie hurtled down the pavement. She didn’t stop until a blue sign hanging from a squat brick building brought her up short. She wouldn’t have seen it at all had she not lifted her head to make her eyes stop watering. And even then the word swam, but she could still make it out. Police. She stumbled to a halt against a rubbish bin. The sign seemed to grow larger. The word glittered and throbbed.

She shrank away from it, half crouched on the pavement, trying to breathe and trying not to cry. Her hands were numb. Her fingers were tangled in the straps of her rucksack. Her ears felt so cold that steel spikes of pain were shooting down her neck. It was the end of the day, the temperature was dropping, and never in her life had she felt so alone.

She didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t, Maggie thought.

But somewhere shouted a chorus: She did.

“Maggie!”

She cried out. She tried to make herself small, like a mouse. She hid her face in her arms and slid down the side of the rubbish bin until she was sitting on the pavement, balling herself up as if reducing her size somehow served as a form of protection.

“Maggie, what’s going on? Why’d you run off? Didn’t you hear me calling?” A body joined her on the pavement. An arm went round her.

She smelled the old leather of his jacket before she processed the fact that the voice was Nick’s. She thought in nonsensical but nonetheless rapid succession how he always kept the jacket crumpled up in his rucksack during school hours when he had to be in uniform, how he always took it out during lunch to “give it a breather,” how he always wore it the minute he was able, before and after school. It was odd to think she would know the smell of him before she’d recognise the sound of his voice. She gripped his knee.

“You went off. You and Josie.”

“Went off? Where?”

“They said you’d gone. You were with…You and Josie. They said.”

“We were on the bus like always. We saw you run off. You looked dead cut up about something, so I came after you.”

She lifted her head. She’d lost her barrette somewhere in the flight from the school, so her hair hung round her face and partially screened him from her.

He smiled. “You look done in, Mag.” He thrust his hand inside his jacket and brought out his cigarettes. “You look like a ghost was

chasing you.”

“I won’t go back,” she said.

He bent his head to shelter cigarette and flame, and he flipped the used match into the street. “No point to that.” He inhaled with the deep satisfaction of someone for whom a change in circumstances has allowed a smoke sooner rather than later. “Bus is gone anyway.”

“I mean back to school. Tomorrow. To lessons. I won’t go. Ever.”

He eyed her, brushing his hair back from his cheeks. “This about that bloke from London, Mag? The one with the big motor that got all the chappies in a fuss today?”

“You’ll say forget it. You’ll say ignore them. But they won’t let up. I’m never going back.”

“Why? What’s it to you what those twits think?”

She twisted the strap of her rucksack round her fingers until she saw that her nails were turning blue.

“Who cares what they say?” he asked. “You know what’s what. That’s all that matters.”

She squeezed her eyes shut against the truth and pressed her lips together to keep from saying it. She felt more tears leak out from beneath her eyelids, and she hated herself for the sob which she tried to disguise with a cough.

“Mag?” he said. “You know the truth, right? So what those loobies say in the schoolyard don’t amount to nothing but twaddle, right? What they say’s not important. What you know is.”

“I don’t know.” The admission burst from her like a sickness she could no longer contain. “The truth. What she…I don’t know. I don’t know.” Even more tears spilled out. She hid her face on her knees.

Nick whistled low, between his teeth. “You never said before now.”

“We always move. Every two years. Only this time I wanted to stay. I said I’d be good, I’d make her proud, I’d do good in school. If we could just stay. This once. Just stay. And she said yes. And then I met the vicar after you and I…after what we did and how hateful Mummy was and how bad I felt. And he made me feel better and…She was in a rage about that.” She sobbed.

Nick flung his cigarette into the street and held her with the other arm as well.

“He found me. That’s what it is, Nick. He finally found me. She didn’t want that. It’s why we always ran. But this time we didn’t and he had enough time. He came. He came like I always knew he would.”

Nick was silent for a moment. She could hear him draw a breath. “Maggie, you’re thinking the vicar was your dad?”

“She didn’t want me to see him and I saw him anyway.” She raised her head and grabbed onto his jacket. “And now she doesn’t want me to see you. So I won’t go back there. I won’t. You can’t make me. No one can. If you try—”

“Is there a problem here, kids?”

They both drew back from the sound of a voice. They turned to see the speaker. A rail-thin policewoman stood above them, heavily cloaked for the weather and wearing her hat at a rakish angle. She carried a notebook in one hand and a plastic cup of something steaming in the other. She sipped from this as she waited for response.

“A blow-up at school,” Nick said. “It’s nothing much.”

“Needing some help?”

“Nah. It’s girl stuff. She’ll be okay.”

The policewoman studied Maggie with what looked more like curiosity than empathy.

She shifted her attention to Nick. She made a show out of watching them over the rim of her cup — its lazy cat’s-tail of steam fogging up her spectacles — as she took another sip of whatever was in it. Then she nodded and said, “You’d best be off home then,” and held her ground.

“Yeah, right,” Nick said. He urged Maggie to her feet. “C’mon then. We’re off.”

“Live round here?” the policewoman asked.

“Just a ways from the high.”

“I’ve not seen you before.”

“No? I’ve seen you lots. You have a dog, right?”

“A Corgi, yes.”

“See. I knew. Seen you out for your walk.” Nick tapped his index finger out from his temple in a form of salute. “Afternoon,” he said. Arm round Maggie, he shepherded her back in the direction of the high street. Neither of them looked to see if the policewoman was watching.

At the first corner, they ducked right. A short distance down the street and another right led through a walkway that lay between the back of the public buildings and the overgrown rear gardens of a line of council cottages. Then they were heading down the slope once more. They emerged in less than five minutes into Clitheroe’s car park. It was largely empty of vehicles at this time of day.

“How’d you know about her dog?” Maggie asked.

“I just went with the odds. A lucky break for us.”

“You’re clever. And good. I love you, Nick. You take care of me.”

They stopped in the shelter of the public lavatory. Nick blew on his hands and tucked them underneath his arms. “Going to be cold tonight,” he said. He looked in the direction of the town where smoke feathered up from chimneys, becoming lost against the sky. “You hungry, Mag?”

Maggie read the desire beneath the words. “You c’n go on home.”

“I won’t. Not ’less you—”

“I’m not going.”

“Then neither am I.”

They were at an impasse. The evening wind was starting to blow, and it had an easy time of finding them. It gusted across the car park, unimpeded, and scattered bits of trash about their feet. A Moment’s bag glittered greenly against Maggie’s leg. She used her foot to brush it away, leaving a streak of brown against the navy of her tights.

Nick brought out a handful of coins from his pocket. He counted.

“Two pounds sixty-seven,” he said. “What about you?”

She dropped her eyes, said, “Nothing,” then raised them in a hurry. She tried to make her voice sound proud. “So you don’t have to stay. Go on. I can manage.”

“I already said—”

“If she finds me with you, it’ll go that much worse on us both. Go home.”

“Won’t happen. I’m staying. I said.”

“No. I don’t want to be at fault. I’m already… because of Mr. Sage…” She wiped her face on her coat sleeve. She was tired to the bone and longing for sleep. She wondered about trying the lavatory door. She did so. It was locked. She sighed. “Go on,” she said again. “You know what c’n happen if you don’t.”

Nick joined her in the doorway of the ladies’. It was recessed about six inches so they gained some ground against the cold. “You believe that, Mag?”

She hung her head. She felt the misery of the knowledge lie across her shoulders, heavy and cumbersome, like sacks of sand.

“You think she killed him because he came for you? Because he was your dad?”

“She never talked about my dad. She wouldn’t ever say.”

Nick’s hand touched her head. His fi ngers made an attempt at caressing, but they were thwarted by the snarls in her hair. “I don’t think he was, Mag. Your dad, that is.”

“Sure, because—”

“No. Listen.” He took a step closer. He put his arms round her. He spoke into her hair. “His eyes were brown, Mag. So’s your mum’s.”

“So?”

“So he can’t be your dad, can he? Because of the odds.” She stirred to speak but he continued. “Look, it’s like sheep. My dad explained it. They’re all white, right? Well, sort of white. But every once in a while out pops a black one. Didn’t you ever wonder how? It’s a recessive gene, see? It’s something inherited. The lamb’s mum and dad both had a black gene somewhere inside them, and when they mated out came a black lamb instead of a white one, even though they were white themselves. But the odds are against it happening. Which is why most sheep are white.”

“I don’t—”

“You’re like the black sheep because your eyes are blue. Mag, what d’you think the odds are of two brown-eyed people having a kid with blue eyes?”

“What?”

“Must be a million to one. Maybe more. Maybe a billion to one.”

“You think?”

“I know. The vicar wasn’t your dad. And if he wasn’t your dad, then your mum didn’t kill him. And if she didn’t kill him, she won’t be trying to kill anyone else.”

There was a that’s that quality to his voice that urged her to accept his words. Maggie wanted to believe him. It would make everything so much easier to live with if she knew that his theory comprised the truth. She would be able to go home. She would be able to face Mummy. She wouldn’t think about the shape of her nose and her hands — were they like the vicar’s, were they? — nor would she wonder about why he had held her out at arm’s length and studied her so. It would be a relief to know something for certain, even if it didn’t answer her prayers. So she wanted to believe. And she would have believed if Nick’s stomach hadn’t rumbled noisily, if he hadn’t shivered, if she hadn’t seen in her mind’s eye his father’s enormous flock of sheep, drifting like slightly soiled clouds against a green Lancashire hillside sky. She pushed him away.

“What?” he said.

“There’s more’n one black sheep born in a fl ock, Nick Ware.”

“So?”

“So those aren’t any billion to one odds.”

“It isn’t like sheep. Not exactly. We’re people.”

“You want to go home. Go on. Go home. You’re lying to me, and I don’t want to see you.”

“Mag, I’m not. I’m trying to explain.”

“You don’t love me.”

“I do.”

“You just want your tea.”

“I was only saying—”

“And your scones and your jam. Well, go ahead. Get them. I can take care of myself.”

“With no money?”

“I don’t need money. I’ll get a job.”

“Tonight?”

“I’ll do something. See if I won’t. But I’m not going home and I’m not going back to school and you can’t talk about sheep like I was so dim I couldn’t figure it out. Because if two white sheep could have a black one then two brown-eyed people could have me and you know it. Isn’t that right? Well, isn’t that right?”

He drove his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t say it wasn’t possible. I just said the odds—”

“I don’t care about the odds. This isn’t like some horse race. This is me. We’re talking about my mum and dad. And she killed him. You know it. You’re just lording it over me and trying to make me go back.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I said I wouldn’t leave you and I won’t. Okay?” He looked about. He squinted against the cold. He stamped his feet to warm them. “Look, we need something to eat. You wait here.”

“Where’re you going? We don’t have even three pounds. What kind of—”

“We can get some crisps. Some biscuits and stuff. You’re not hungry now but you will be later and we won’t be near any shop by then.”

“We?” She made him look at her. “You don’t have to go,” she said a last time.

“Do you want me?”

“To go?”

“And other stuff.”

“Yes.”

“Do you love me? Trust me?”

She tried to read his face. He was anxious to be off. But perhaps he was only hungry after all. And once they started walking, he would be warm enough. They could even run.

“Mag?” he said.

“Yes.”

He smiled, brushed his mouth against hers. His lips were dry. It didn’t feel like a kiss. “Then wait here,” he said. “I’ll be right back. If we’re gonna bunk off, it’s best that no one see us together in town and remember for when your mum phones the police.”

“Mummy won’t. She won’t dare.”

“I wouldn’t take odds on that.” He turned up the collar of his jacket. He looked at her earnestly. “You okay here, then?”

She felt her heart warm. “Okay.”

“Don’t mind sleeping rough tonight?”

“Not so long as I’m sleeping with you.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

COLIN ATE HIS TEA AT THE kitchen sink. Sardines on toast, with the oil slipping through his fi ngers and splatting onto the potscarred porcelain. He didn’t feel hungry in the least, but he’d been light-headed and weak in the limbs for the past thirty minutes. Food seemed the obvious solution.

He’d made his walk back to the village along the Clitheroe Road, which was closer to the lodge than was the Cotes Fell footpath. His pace was brisk. He told himself that a need to avenge was what drove him so rapidly onwards. He kept repeating her name in his head as he walked: Annie, Annie, Annie my girl. It was a way to avoid hearing the words love and death three times pulse with the blood in his skull. By the time he reached his house, he was hot in the chest but ice to the bone in his hands and feet. He could hear his heart’s erratic thumping inside his eardrums, and his lungs couldn’t seem to get enough air. He ignored the symptoms for a good three hours but when there was no improvement, he decided to eat. Teatime, he thought in irrational response to his body’s behaviour, that’ll take care of it, must have a bite to eat.

He washed down the fish with three bottles of Watney’s, drinking the first one while the bread was toasting. He pitched the bottle into the rubbish and opened another as he rooted in the cupboard for the sardines. The tin gave him trouble. Curling the metal lid round the key required a steadiness that he wasn’t able to muster. He got it halfway unrolled when his fingers slipped and the sharp edge of the top sliced into his hand. Blood spurted out. It mixed with the fish oil, started to sink, then formed perfect small beads that fl oated like scarlet lures for the fish. He felt no pain. He wrapped his hand in a tea towel, used the end of it to sop the blood off the surface of the oil, and tilted the beer bottle up to his mouth with the hand that was free.

When the toast was ready, he dug the fi sh from the tin with his fingers. He lined them up on the bread. He added salt and pepper and a thick slice of onion. He began to eat.

There was no particular taste or smell to it, which he found rather odd because he could distinctly remember how his wife once complained about the scent of sardines. Makes my eyes water, she would say, that fish smell in the air, Col, it makes my stomach go peculiar.

Her cat clock ticked on the wall above the AGA, wagging its tail and moving its eyes. It seemed to be repeating her name with the sound of its clicking wheels and gears: No longer tick-tock but An-nie, An-nie, Annie, it said. Colin concentrated intently on this. Just like the rhythm of his earlier footsteps, the repetition of her name drove other thoughts away.

He used the third beer to clear his mouth of the fish that he couldn’t taste. Then he poured a small whisky and drank that down in two swallows to try to bring back feeling to his limbs. But still he couldn’t quite vanquish the cold. This caused him confusion because the furnace was on, he still wore his heavy jacket, and by all rights he should have been soaking in sweat.

Which he was, in a manner of speaking. His face was so fiery that his skin was throbbing. But the rest of him trembled like a birch in the wind. He drank another whisky. He moved from the sink to the kitchen window. He looked across to the vicar’s house.

And then he heard it again, as distinctly as if Rita were standing directly behind him. Love and death three times. The words were so clear that he swung round with a cry which he strangled the instant he saw that he was alone. He cursed aloud. The sodding words meant nothing. They were merely a stimulus of the sort used by every palm-reader in the world, giving you a small piece of a nonexistent life jigsaw and whetting your incipient desire to have more.

Love and death three times needed no elucidation from anyone as far as Colin was concerned. It translated to pounds and pence each week, hard-earned coins pressed into the palm of the palmist by dried-up spinsters, naive housewives, and lonely widows, all seeking meaningless reassurance that their lives weren’t as futile as they appeared to be.

He turned back to the window. Across his drive, across the vicar’s, the other house watched him in return. Polly was within, as she had continued to be in the weeks since Robin Sage’s death. She was no doubt doing what she always did — scrubbing, polishing, dusting, and waxing in a fervent display of her utility. But that wasn’t all, as he fi nally understood. For Polly was also biding her time, patiently waiting for the moment when Juliet Spence’s blind need to take blame resulted in her incarceration. While Juliet in gaol wasn’t quite the same as Juliet dead, it was better than nothing. And Polly was too clever in her ways to make another attempt on Juliet’s life.

Colin wasn’t a religious man. He’d given up on God during the second year of Annie’s dying. Still, he had to acknowledge that the hand of a greater power than his own had been active in the Cotes Hall cottage on that night in December when the vicar had died. By all rights, it should have been Juliet eating alone in the vicar’s place. And if it had been, the coroner would have affixed the label accidental poisoning/self-administered to her dying, with no one wise to the manner in which that convenient accident had been brought about.

She would have rushed in to minister to his grief, would have Polly. More than anyone he knew, she excelled at sympathy and fellow-feeling.

Roughly, he rubbed his hands clean of sardine oil and used two plasters to cover the cut. He paused to pour himself one more swallow of whisky which he gulped down before heading out the door.

Bitch, he thought. Love and death three times.

She didn’t come to the door when he knocked, so he pressed his finger to the bell and held it. He took some satisfaction from the shrill jangle it made. The sound grated on the nerves.

The inner door opened. He could see her form, behind the opaque glass. Top-heavy and inflated by too many garments, she looked like a miniature of her mother. He heard her say, “Glory. Get off the bell, will you,” and she yanked the door open, ready to speak.

She didn’t, when she saw him. Instead, she looked beyond him to his house, and he wondered if she’d been watching as usual, if she’d stepped away from the window for a moment and thus missed his approach. She’d missed little else in the past few years.

He didn’t wait for her to ask him in. He squeezed past her. She shut both the outer and the inner doors behind him.

He followed the narrow corridor to the right and walked straight along to the sitting room. She’d been working in here. The furniture gleamed. A tin of beeswax, a bottle of lemon oil, and a box of rags sat in front of an empty bookshelf. There wasn’t a trace of dust anywhere. The carpet was vacuumed. The lace window curtains hung crisp and clean.

He turned to face her, unzipping his jacket. She stood awkwardly in the doorway — the sole of one sock-clad foot pressed to the other’s ankle, the toes moving in an unconscious scratch — and she followed his movements with her eyes. He threw his jacket on the sofa. It fell just short and slid to the fl oor. She moved towards it, eager to put everything in its rightful place. Just doing her job, was Polly.

“Leave it be.”

She stopped. Her fingers gripped the ribbing on the bottom edge of her bulky, brown pullover. It hung, loose and misshapen, to her hips.

Her lips parted when he began to unbutton his shirt. He saw her catch her tongue between her teeth. He knew well enough what she was thinking and wanting, and he took a distinctly gut-warming pleasure from the knowledge that he was about to disappoint her. He drew out the book from against his stomach and flipped it to the floor between them. She didn’t look at it immediately. Instead, her fingers moved from her pullover to grasp the folds of the insubstantial gypsy skirt hanging unevenly beneath it. Its colours — bright red, gold, and green — caught the light of a floor lamp standing next to the sofa.

“Yours?” he said.

Alchemical Magic: Herbs, Spices, and Plants. He saw her lips form the first two words.

She said, “Glory. Where’d you get that ol’ thing?” sounding all the world full of curious confusion and nothing more.

“Where you left it.”

“Where I—?” Her gaze moved from the book to him. “Col, what’re you about?”

Col. He felt his hand tremble with the need to strike. Her show of guilelessness seemed less of an outrage than did the familiarity implied by her saying that name.

“Is it yours?”

“Was. I mean I s’pose it still is. Except I haven’t seen it for ages.”

“I’d expect that,” he said. “It was well enough out of sight,”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Behind the cistern.”

The light flickered in the lamp, a bulb going bad. It made a tiny hissing sound and went out, inviting the day’s exterior gloom to seep past the lace curtains. Polly didn’t react, didn’t seem to notice. She appeared to be mulling over his words.

He said, “You would have been wiser to throw it away. Like the tools.”

“Tools?”

“Or did you use hers?”

“Whose tools? What’re you about here, Colin?” Her voice was wary. She inched away from him so subtly that he might not have noticed had he not been anticipating every sign of her guilt. Her fingers even stopped themselves in the midst of flexing. He found that of interest. She knew better than to allow them to fi st.

“Or perhaps you didn’t use any tools at all. Perhaps you loosened the plant — gently, you know how I mean, you know how to do it— and then lifted it from the soil, root and all. Is that what you did? Because you’d know the plant, wouldn’t you, you’d recognise it just as well as she’d do.”

“This is about Missus Spence.” She spoke slowly, as if to herself, and she didn’t appear to be seeing him although she was looking in his direction.

“How often do you use the footpath?”

“Which one?”

“Don’t play games with me. You know why I’m here. You didn’t expect it. And Juliet’s taking the blame made it unlikely that anyone would ever come looking for you. But I’ve smoked you out, and I want the truth. How often do you use the footpath?”

“You’re mad.” She managed to put another inch between them. Her back was to the door, and she was clever enough to know that a glance over her shoulder would announce her intentions and give him the advantage which she currently seemed to believe was hers.

“Once a month at least, I should guess,” he said. “Is that right? Doesn’t the ritual have more power if it’s performed when the moon is full? And isn’t the power more potent if the ritual takes place in the direct light of that moon? And isn’t it true that communication with the Goddess is more profound if you perform the ritual on a holy site? Like the top of Cotes Fell?”

“You know I worship on the top of Cotes Fell. I make no secret of that.”

“But you’ve other secrets, haven’t you? Here. In this book.”

“I haven’t.” Her voice was weak. She seemed to realise what weakness implied, because she roused herself to say, “And you’re frightening me, you are, Colin Shepherd,” with an edge of defi ance.

“I was up there today.”

“Where?”

“Cotes Fell. The summit. I hadn’t been in years, not since before Annie. I’d forgotten how well you can see from there, Polly, and what you can see.”

“I go there to worship. That’s all and you know it.” She put another inch between them, saying more quickly, “I burned the laurel for Annie. I let the candle melt down. I used cloves. I prayed—”

“And she died. That very night. How convenient.”

“No!”

“During the harvest moon, while you prayed on Cotes Fell. And before you prayed, you brought her soup to drink. Do you remember that? You called it your special soup. You said to make sure she ate every bit.”

“It was only vegetables, for both of you. What’re you thinking? I had some myself. It wasn’t—”

“Did you know that plants are most potent when the moon is full? The book says that. You must harvest them then, no matter what part you want, even the root.”

“I don’t use plants that way. No one does in the Craft. It’s not about evil. You know that. P’rhaps we find herbs for incense, yes, but that’s all. Incense. For part of the ritual.”

“It’s all in the book. What to use for revenge, what will alter the mind, what to use for poison. I’ve read it.”

“No!”

“And the book was behind the cistern where you’ve kept it hidden…how long has it been?”

“It wasn’t hidden. If it was there, it just fell. There was lots of things on the cistern, wasn’t there? A whole stack of books and magazines. I didn’t hide this—” She touched it with her toe and withdrew, gaining yet another inch of distance from him. “I didn’t hide a thing.”

“What about Capricorn, Polly?”

That stopped her cold. She repeated the word without making a sound. He could see the panic beginning to take hold of her as he forced her closer and closer to the truth. She was like a rogue dog when at last it’s cornered. He could feel her spine stiffening and her legs wanting to splay.

“Hemlock’s strength is in Capricorn,” he said.

Her tongue whisked across her lower lip. Fear was a scent on her, sour and strong.

“The twenty-second of December,” he said.

“What about it?”

“You know.”

“I don’t. Colin, I don’t.”

“The first day of Capricorn. The night the vicar died.”

“This is—”

“And one thing more. The moon was full that night. And the night before. So it all fi ts together. You had the instructions, your how-to for murder, printed in the book: dig the root out when the plant is dormant; know its strength is in Capricorn; know it’s deadly poison; know it’s most potent when the moon is full. Shall I read it all for you? Or would you prefer to read it yourself? Look under H in the index. For hemlock.”

“No! She put you up to this, didn’t she? Missus Spence. I c’n see it on your face as big as c’n be. She said go see that Polly, go ask her what she knows, go ask her where she’s been. And she left it to you to think up the rest. That’s how it is, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Colin?”

“Don’t even say her name.”

“Oh, I’ll say it all right. I’ll say it and more.” She stooped and snatched the book from the floor. “Yes, it’s mine. Yes, I bought it. I used it as well. And she knows that — damn her— because I was fool enough once — more’n two years back when she first came to Winslough— to ask her about making a tincture from bryony. And more the fool I was, I even told her why.” She shook the book at him. “Love, Colin Shepherd. Bryony’s for love. So’s apple in a charm. Here, want to see?” She fl ipped a silver chain from beneath her pullover. A small globe hung from it, its surface fi ligree. She yanked it from her neck and threw it to the floor where it bounced against his foot. He could see the dried bits of the fruit inside. “And aloe for sachets and benzoins for perfume. And cinquefoil for a potion that you wouldn’t ever drink. It’s all in the book, with everything else. But you only see what you want to see, don’t you? That’s the way it is now. That’s the way it’s always been. Even with Annie.”

“I won’t talk about Annie with you.”

“Oh, won’t you? AnnieAnnieAnnie with a halo on her head. I’ll talk about her just as much as I want because I know what it was like. I was there just like you. And she wasn’t a saint. She wasn’t a noble patient suffering in silence with you sitting at the bedside, putting flannels on her brow. That wasn’t how it was.”

He took a step towards her. She held her ground.

“Annie said, Go ahead, Col, you take care of yourself, my precious love. And she never let you forget it when you did.”

“She never said—”

“She didn’t need to say. Why won’t you see it? She lay in her bed with all the lights off. She said, I was too ill to reach for the lamp. She said, I thought I would die today, Col, but it’s all right now because you’re home and you’re not to worry a jot about me. She said, I understand why you need a woman, my love, you do what you must do and don’t think about me in this house, in this room, in this bed. Without you.”

“That’s not how it was.”

“And when the pain was bad, she didn’t lie there like a martyr. Don’t you remember? She screamed. She cursed you. She cursed the doctors. She threw things at the wall. And when it was worst, she said, You did this to me, you made me rot, and I’m dying and I hate you, I hate you, I wish you were dying instead.”

He made no response. It felt as if a siren were sounding in his head. Polly was there, mere inches away, but she seemed to be speaking from behind a red veil.

“So I prayed on the top of Cotes Fell, I did. At first for her health. And then for…And then for you alone after she died, hoping that you would see…would know…Yes, I got this book”—She shook it again—“but it was because I loved you and I wanted you to love me back and I was willing to try anything to make you whole. Because you weren’t whole with Annie. You hadn’t been for years. She bled you in her dying, but you don’t want to face it because then you might have to face what living with Annie was like as well. And it wasn’t perfect. Because nothing is.”

“You don’t know the first thing about Annie’s dying.”

“That you emptied her bedpans and hated the thought of it. Don’t I know that? That you wiped her bum with your stomach at the boil. Don’t I know that? That just when you needed most to get out of the house for a breath of air, she knew and would cry and take a bad turn and you always felt guilty because you weren’t ill, were you? You didn’t have the cancer. You weren’t going to die.”

“She was my life. I loved her.”

“At the end? Don’t make me laugh in your face. At the end was bitterness and a rage of anger. Because no one lives without joy for that long and feels anything else at the end of it.”

“You bloody bitch.”

“Yes, all right. That and more, if you like. But I face the truth, Colin. I don’t tart it up with hearts and fl owers like you.”

“Then let’s take the truth another step, all right?” He reduced the distance between them another few inches when he kicked the amulet to one side. It clattered against the wall and broke open, spilling its contents onto the carpet. The bits of apple looked like shrivelled skin. Human skin, even. And he wouldn’t put its collection past her. He’d put nothing past Polly Yarkin. “You prayed for her to die, not to live. When it didn’t come quick, you helped it along. And when her dying didn’t get you what you wanted the moment you wanted it— and when was that, Polly? Was I supposed to fuck you the day of the funeral? — you decided to try potions and charms instead. Then Juliet came. She threw your plans awry. You tried to use her. And it was bloody clever to let her know I wasn’t truly available just in case she was interested and got in your way. But we found each other anyway — Juliet and I — and you couldn’t bear that. Annie was gone. The final barrier to your happiness was buried in the churchyard. And here was another. You saw what was happening between us, didn’t you? The only solution was to bury her as well.”

“No.”

“You knew where to fi nd the hemlock. You walk by the pond each time you hike Cotes Fell. You dug it up, you put it in the root cellar, and you waited for Juliet to eat it and die. And if Maggie died as well, that would have been a shame, but she’s expendable, isn’t she? Everyone is. You just didn’t count on the vicar’s presence. That was the misfortune. I imagine you had a few uneasy days once he was poisoned, while you waited for Juliet to take the blame.”

“So what did I gain, if that’s how it happened? Coroner said it was an accident, Colin. She’s free. So are you. And you’ve been stuffing her like some randy farmboy eyeing his daddy’s ewes ever since. So what did I gain?”

“What you’ve waited and hoped for, ever since the vicar died by mistake. The London police. The case re-opened. With every bit of circumstantial evidence pointing to Juliet.” He snatched the book from her fi ngers. “Except this, Polly. You forgot about this.” She made a lunge for it. He threw the book to the corner of the room and caught her arm. “And when Juliet’s safely put away for good, you’ll have what you want, what you tried to get while Annie was alive, what you prayed for when you prayed for her death, what you mixed your potions and wore your amulets for, what you’ve been after for years.” He took a step closer. He felt her trying to pull away. He experienced a distinct tingling of pleasure at the thought of her fear. It shot down his legs. It began to work unexpected magic in his groin.

“You’re hurting m’ arm.”

“This isn’t about love. This was never about love.”

“Colin!”

“Love has no part in what you’ve been after since that day—”

“No!”

“You remember it, then, don’t you? Don’t you, Polly?”

“Let me go.” She twisted beneath him. She was breathing in tiny baby gasps. No more than a child, so easy to subdue. Squirming and writhing. Tears in her eyes. She knew what was coming. He liked her knowing.

“On the floor of the barn. Where the animals do it. You remember that.”

She wrenched her arm away and spun around to run. He caught her skirt as it fl ared with her movement. He jerked her towards him. The material ripped. He twirled it round his hand and pulled harder. She stumbled but didn’t fall.

“With my cock inside and you grunting like a sow. You remember that.”

“Please. No.” She was starting to cry and he found that the sight of her tears infl amed him more than had the thought of her fear. She was penitent sinner. He was avenging god. And her punishment would be a godly justice.

He grabbed more of the skirt, pulled on it savagely, and heard the satisfactory sound of it giving way. Another pull. Then another. And every time Polly struggled to escape him, the skirt ripped more. “Just like that day in the barn,” he said. “Just what you want.”

“No. I don’t. Not like this. Col. Please.”

The name. The name. His hands shot out and tore the rest of the skirt from her body. But she seized the moment of release and ran. She made it to the corridor. She was close to the door. Another three feet and she would escape.

He leapt and tackled her as her hand grasped the knob of the inner door. They crashed to the fl oor. She began to flail at him wildly. She didn’t speak. Her arms and legs thrashed. Her body convulsed.

He struggled to pin down her arms, grunting, “Fuck…you…so…hard.”

She screamed, “No! Colin!” but he cut her off with his mouth. He drove his tongue inside her, with one hand on her neck pressing and pressing while the other ripped at her underwear. He used his knee to force her legs apart. Her hands tore at his face. She found his spectacles, flung them off. She sought his eyes. But he was close on her, powering his face into hers, filling her mouth with his tongue and then spitting, spitting and every moment fi red more and more with the need to show, to master, to punish. She would crawl and beg. She would pray for mercy. She would call upon her Goddess. But he was her god.

“Cunt,” he grunted into her mouth. “Bitch…cow.” He fumbled with his trousers while she rolled and struggled, kicking against him, her every breath a shriek. She drove her knee upwards, missing his testicles by less than an inch. He slapped her. He liked the feel of the slap — how it brought life and power back to his hand. He hit her again, harder this time. He used his knuckles and admired the red bruising they brought to her skin.

She was weeping and ugly. Her mouth hung open. Her eyes squeezed shut. Mucous dripped from her nose. He liked her that way. He wanted her weeping. Her terror was a drug. He shoved her legs apart and he fell upon her. He celebrated her punishment like the god he was.

She thought, This is what it’s like to die. She lay as he had left her, one leg crooked and the other extended, her pullover shoved up beneath her armpits, her bra jerked down to bare one breast where his bite still throbbed like a brand. A sheer piece of nylon edged with lace—“Got yerself some fancies I see,” Rita had chuckled. “Looking for a bloke who likes it wrapped up pretty?”—looped round her left ankle. A shredded ribbon of skirt draped across her neck.

She stared upwards and followed the threading of a crack that began above the door and spread out like veins against the skin of the ceiling. Somewhere in the house a metallic crank-rattle sounded, followed by a whirring that was steady and low. The boiler, she thought. She wondered why it was heating water since she couldn’t recall having used any that day. She pondered everything she had done in the vicarage, taking each project one step at a time because it seemed so important to know why the boiler was heating water right now. It couldn’t realise, after all, how filthy she was. It was just a machine. Machines didn’t anticipate a body’s needs.

She made a list. Newspapers first. She’d bound them up like she’d promised herself and discarded them all in the rubbish bin. She’d phoned and cancelled the subscription as well. Potted plants next. There were only four of them, but they were looking poorly and one had lost nearly all of its leaves. She’d been giving them water religiously every day, so she couldn’t understand why they were turning all yellow. She’d taken them to the rear garden and set them on the porch, thinking the poor little things might like some sun, if it ever came out which it hadn’t. Bedding after that. She’d changed the sheets on all three beds— two singles, one double — just like she’d been doing every week since she’d first come to work. Didn’t make any difference that no one used the beds. One had to change the linen to keep it fresh. But she hadn’t done any laundry, so the boiler shouldn’t be at work over that. What was it, then?

She tried to picture each of her movements that day. She tried to make them appear among the cracks in the ceiling. Newspapers. Telephone. Plants on the porch. And after that…It was too much effort to think beyond the plants. Why? Was it water? Was she frightened of water? Had something happened with water? No, how silly. Think of rooms with water.

She remembered. She smiled but it hurt because her skin felt stiff like glue had dried upon it so she hurried in her mind from the bedrooms to the kitchen. Because that was it. She’d washed all the dishes, the glassware, the pots, and the pans. She’d scrubbed the cupboards as well. Which is why the boiler was working now. And anyway, didn’t a boiler always work? Didn’t it fire itself up when it felt the water inside start to cool? No one switched it on. It just worked. Like magic.

Magic. The book. No. She must have no thoughts like that. They painted nightmare pictures in the back of her head. She didn’t want to see.

The kitchen, the kitchen, she thought. Washing dishes and cupboards and then on to the sitting room which was already clean and tidy as could be but she polished the furniture because she couldn’t seem to make herself leave this place, let go, find another way to live, and then he was with her. And his face wasn’t right. His back seemed too stiff. His arms didn’t hang, they just waited.

Polly rolled to her side, drew her legs up, and tried to cradle herself. Hurts, she thought. Her legs felt torn away from her body. A hammer pounded down low where he’d slammed and slammed her. And inside, acid burned at her flesh. She felt throbbing and scraped. She was nothing.

Slowly, she became aware of the cold, a thin current of air that fl owed insistently against her bare skin. She shivered. She realised he’d left the inner door open upon his leaving, and the outer door was not completely latched. Her fingers plucked aimlessly at the pullover, and she tried to work it down as a cover, but she got it no farther than beneath her breasts before giving up. It didn’t feel right. The wool abraded her skin.

From where she lay she could see the stairway, and she began to inch towards it with no thought in mind but to get out of the draught, to find somewhere safe that was dark. But once she rested her head on the bottom stair, she looked up and the light seemed brighter at the top. She thought, Bright means warm, better than dark. It was getting late, but the sun must have come out one final time. It would be a winter sun — milky and distant— but if it fell on the carpet in one of the bedrooms, she could curl within its golden boundaries and let her dying continue there.

She began to climb. She found she couldn’t manage her legs, so she pulled herself up, hand over hand on the banister. Her knees bumped on the stairs. When she lolled to one side, her hip thudded against the wall which is how she saw the blood. She interrupted her progress to look at it curiously, to touch a fi nger to its crimson smear, marvelling at how quickly it was able to dry, and how it turned to mahogany when mixed with air. She saw that it was oozing from between her legs, and that it had been oozing quite long enough to create palmate patterns on her inner thighs and crooked rivulets down one leg.

Dirty, she thought. She would have to bathe.

The idea of washing inflated in her mind, driving the nightmare pictures away. Holding on to the thought of water and its warmth, she made it to the top of the stairs and crawled to the bath. She shut the door and sat on the cold white tile with her head against the wall, her knees drawn up, and the blood seeping out against the fist she pressed between her legs.

After a moment, she rolled her shoulders against the wall, flipped herself two feet, and thus gained the tub. She lowered her head to its side and reached one hand to the tap. Her fingers grappled with it, failed to make it turn, and slipped off altogether.

She knew somehow she’d be whole again if she could only wash. If she could wash off the scent of him and scrub away the touch of his hands, if the soap could cleanse the inside of her mouth. And as long as she could think about washing — what it would feel like, how the water would rise to her breasts, how long she would lie in the tub and just dream — she wouldn’t have to think about anything else. If she could only make the water run.

She reached again for the tap. Again she failed. She was doing it by feel because she didn’t want to open her eyes and have to see herself in the mirror that she knew was hanging on the back of the bathroom door. If she saw the mirror, she would have to think, and she was determined not to think again. Except about washing.

She’d get into the tub and never come out, just letting the water rise and fall. She’d watch its bubbles, she’d listen to its flow. She’d feel it glide between her fi ngers and toes. She’d love it, hold it, be good to it. That’s what she’d do.

Only, nothing was forever, not even the washing, and when it was over she would have to feel, which is the one thing she didn’t want to do, didn’t want to face, didn’t want to live through. Because this was dying no matter what she pretended, this was the real ending of things. How funny to think she’d always expected it to come in old age with her lying in a bed all snowy with linens and her grandchildren there and someone who loved her holding her hand so she wouldn’t do her leaving all alone. She saw now that it was all about being alone in the first place, living was. And if living was all about being alone, dying wouldn’t be anything different.

She could deal with that. Dying alone. But only if it was here and now. Because then it would be over. She wouldn’t have to get up, get into the water, wash him away, and walk out the door. She’d never have to make her way home — oh Goddess, the long walk — and face her mother. More, she would never have to see him, never have to look in his eyes, and never remember over and over, like a fi lm running back and forth in her brain, the moment when she knew he was going to hurt her.

I don’t know what it means to love anyone, she realised. I thought it was goodness, a wanting to share. I thought it meant like you hold out your hand and someone takes it, holds it hard, and pulls you safe from the river. You talk. You tell him bits of yourself. You say here’s where I hurt and you give it to him and he holds it and gives you where he hurts in return and you hold it and that’s how you learn to love. You lean where he’s strong. He leans where you’re strong. And there’s a joining somewhere. But it’s not like this, not like it was today, here, in this house, it’s not like this.

That was the worst of it, the filth of loving him that no amount of washing could cleanse. Even through the terror, even in the instant when she knew exactly what he meant to do, even when she begged him not to and he did it anyway — ramming her, tearing her fl esh from her flesh, and leaving her lying like used rags on the floor — the worst was that he was the man she loved. And if the man she loved could know that she loved him and still do this to her and grunt with the pleasure of showing her who would dominate and who would submit, then what she had thought was love was nothing. Because it seemed to her that if you loved someone and if he knew you loved him, he’d take care not to hurt you. Even if he didn’t love you full in return, he’d cherish your feelings, hold them to his heart, and feel a fondness of some kind. Because that was what one did for people.

Only if that wasn’t the truth of living, then she didn’t want to live any more. She’d get into the bath and let the water take her. Let it cleanse her and kill her and carry her off.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

TAKE A LOOK AT THESE.”

Lynley passed the folder of photo graphs across the coffee table to St. James. He picked up his pint of Guinness and thought about straightening The Potato Eaters or cleaning the dust from both the frame and the glass of Rouen Cathedral in order to see if it was actually in Full Sunlight as it appeared to be. Deborah seemed to read his mind at least partially. She muttered, “Oh bother, this is driving me crazy,” and dealt with the Van Gogh print before plopping back down on the sofa next to her husband. Lynley said, “Bless you, my child,” and waited for St. James’ reaction to the crime-scene material which Lynley had brought back with him from Clitheroe.

Dora Wragg had been good enough to see to their needs in the residents’ lounge. While the pub was already closed for the latter part of the afternoon, two elderly women in heavy tweeds and hiking boots had still been sitting by what remained of the fire when Lynley returned from his visits with Maggie, the police, and the medical examiner. Although the two women had been engaged in a sombre but enthusiastic discussion about “Hilda’s sciatica…and isn’t the poor dear a martyr to it, luvvie?” and seemed unlikely to eavesdrop on any conversation unconnected to Hilda’s hips, Lynley had taken one look at their eager, sharp faces and decided that discretion was the better part of conversing openly about anyone’s death.

So he waited until Dora placed a Guinness, a Harp, and an orange juice on the coffee table in the residents’ lounge and took herself off to the nether regions of the inn before he handed over the folder to his friend. St. James studied the photographs first. Deborah gave them a glance, suffered a frisson of aversion, and quickly looked away. Lynley couldn’t blame her.

The photographs of this particular death seemed more disquieting than many others he had seen, and at first he couldn’t understand why. He was, after all, no stranger to the myriad ways in which an unexpected death occurs. He was used to the result of strangulations— the cyanosed face, the bulging eyes, the blood-froth at the mouth. He had seen his share of blows to the head. He’d examined a variety of knife wounds — from cut throats to one virtual disembowelment not unlike the Whitechapel murder of Mary Kelly. He’d seen victims of bombings and victims of shootings, their limbs torn off and their bodies mutilated. But there was something personally horrifying about this death, and he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. Deborah did it for him.

“It went on and on,” she murmured. “It took some time, didn’t it? Poor man.”

And that was it. Death hadn’t come in an instant for Robin Sage, a moment’s violent visitation via gun, knife, or garrotte with oblivion following hard on its heels. It had taken him slowly enough for him to realise what was happening and for his physical suffering to be acute. The crime-scene pictures illustrated that.

They’d been taken in colour by the Clitheroe police, but what they captured was predominantly black and white. The latter constituted a good six inches of newly fallen snow covering the ground and powdering the wall next to which the body lay. The former constituted the body itself, dressed in black clerical garb beneath a black overcoat that was bunched round the waist and hips as if the vicar had tried to slither out of it. But even here the black did not achieve complete ascendancy over the white, for the body itself — like the wall its hand reached towards — wore a thin but thorough membrane of snow. This had been documented in seven photographs before the crime-scene team had brushed the snow from the body into the collection jars that would later be deemed non-evidential, considering the circumstances of the death. And once the body was brushed free of snow, the photographer had gone to work once again.

The rest of the pictures spelled out the nature of Robin Sage’s death agony. Dozens of deep arcing gouges in the ground, thick mud on his heels, earth and fl akes of grass beneath his nails testified to the manner in which he had tried to escape the convulsions. Blood on his left temple, three slits on his cheek, one shattered eyeball, and a heavily ensanguined stone beneath his head suggested the strength of those same convulsions and how little he was able to do to master them once he understood there was no escape. The position of his head and neck — thrown back so far that it seemed inconceivable no vertebrae were broken — indicated a frantic battle for air. And the tongue, a swollen mass chewed nearly in half, protruded from the mouth in an eloquent statement about the man’s fi nal moments.

St. James went through the pictures twice. He set two aside, a close-up of the face and a second of one of the hands. He said, “It’s heart failure if you’re lucky. Asphyxia if you’re not. Poor bastard. He was unlucky as the devil.”

Lynley didn’t need to examine the photographs St. James had chosen to support his point. He’d seen the bluish colour of the lips and ears. He’d noted the same of the fi ngernails. The undamaged eye was prominent.

Lividity was well-developed. All were indications of respiratory failure.

“How long do you suppose it took him to die?” Deborah asked.

“Too long by half.” St. James glanced at Lynley over the autopsy report. “You spoke with the pathologist?”

“Everything was consistent with hemlock poisoning. No specific lesions of the stomach’s mucous membrane. Gastric irritation and oedema of the lungs. Time of death between ten that night and two the next morning.”

“What did Sergeant Hawkins have to say? Why did Clitheroe CID buy the accidental-poisoning conclusion so quickly and back off from an investigation? Why did they let Shepherd handle it on his own?”

“CID had been at the site while Sage’s body was still there. It was clear that, the external injuries he’d done to his face aside, his death was caused by some sort of seizure. They didn’t know what sort. The detective constable on the scene actually thought it was epilepsy when he saw the tongue—”

“Good God,” St. James muttered.

Lynley nodded agreement. “So after they took the photographs, they left it up to Shepherd to gather the details leading up to Sage’s death. Essentially, it was his call. At the time, they didn’t even know Sage had been out in the snow all night as no one had even reported him missing until he failed to show up to perform the Townley-Young wedding.”

“But once they knew he’d been to dinner at the cottage? Why didn’t they step in?”

“According to Hawkins — who frankly was a bit more forthcoming when I was standing before him, warrant card in hand, than when I had him on the phone — three factors infl uenced the decision: the involvement of Shepherd’s father in the constable’s investigation, what Hawkins honestly assumed to be the pure coincidence of Shepherd’s visit to the cottage on the night Sage died, and some additional input from forensic.”

“The visit wasn’t a coincidence?” St. James asked. “Shepherd wasn’t making rounds?”

“Mrs. Spence phoned him to come to her,” Lynley replied. “She told me she wanted to testify as much for the coroner’s jury at the inquest, but Shepherd insisted on claiming he’d just dropped by on his rounds. She said he lied because he wanted to protect her from local gossip and unfriendly speculation after the verdict was in.”

“That doesn’t seem to have worked, if the other night in the pub is any indication.”

“Quite. But here’s what I fi nd intriguing, St. James: She was perfectly willing to admit to the truth of phoning Shepherd when I spoke to her this morning. Why bother to do that? Why didn’t she stick with the story they’d agreed on, one that was generally accepted and believed, even if the villagers aren’t particularly in love with it?”

“Perhaps she never agreed to Shepherd’s story in the first place,” St. James offered. “If he testified before she did at the inquest, I doubt she would have wanted to perjure him by telling the truth.”

“But why not agree to the story? Her daughter wasn’t home. If only the two of them — she and Shepherd — knew that she’d phoned him, what possible reason could she have now for telling me a different story, even if it’s the truth? She’s damning herself by the admission.”

“You won’t think I’m guilty if I admit I’m guilty,” Deborah murmured.

“Christ, but that’s a dangerous game to play.”

“It worked on Shepherd,” St. James said. “Why not on you? She fixed in his mind the image of her vomiting. He believed her and he took her part.”

“That was the third factor that infl uenced Hawkins’ decision to call off the CID. The sickness. According to forensic…” Lynley set down his glass, put on his spectacles, and picked up the report. He scanned the first page, the second, and found what he was looking for on the third, saying, “Ah, here it is. ‘Prognosis for recovering from hemlock poisoning is good if vomition can be obtained.’ So the fact that she was sick supports Shepherd’s contention that she ate some of the hemlock accidentally.”

“Purposely. Or, what’s more likely, not at all.” St. James took up his pint of Harp. “Obtained is the operative word, Tommy. It indicates that vomition isn’t a natural by-product of ingestion. It must be induced. So she’d have had to take a purgative of some sort. Which means she would have had to know that she’d ingested poison in the fi rst place. And if that’s the case, why didn’t she phone Sage to warn him or send someone out looking for him?”

“Could she have known something was wrong with her but not that it was hemlock? Could she have assumed it was something else? Some milk gone bad? A bad piece of meat?”

“She could have assumed anything, if she’s innocent. We can’t get away from that.”

Lynley sailed the report back to the coffee table, removed his spectacles, ran his hand through his hair. “Then we’re nowhere, essentially. It’s a case of yes-you-did, no-I-didn’t unless there’s a motive somewhere. Can I hope the bishop gave you one in Bradford?”

“Robin Sage was married,” St. James said.

“He wanted to talk to his fellow priests about the woman taken in adultery,” Deborah added.

Lynley leaned forward in his chair. “No one’s said…”

“Which seems to mean no one knew.”

“What happened to the wife? Was Sage divorced? That would be an odd thing for a priest, surely.”

“She died some ten or fifteen years ago. A boating accident in Cornwall.”

“What sort?”

“Glennaven — he’s Bradford’s bishop— didn’t know. I phoned Truro but couldn’t get through to the bishop there. And his secretary wasn’t forthcoming with anything other than the basic fact: a boating accident. He wasn’t free to give out information on the telephone, he said. What sort of boat it was, what the circumstances were, where the accident occurred, what the weather was like, if Sage was with her when it happened…nothing.”

“Protecting one of their own?”

“He didn’t know who I was, after all. And even if he did, I hardly have the right to the information. I’m not CID. And what we’re engaged in here is hardly an offi cial endeavour, even if I were.”

“But what do you think?”

“About the idea that they’re protecting Sage?”

“And through him the reputation of the Church.”

“It’s a possibility. The connection to the woman taken in adultery is hard to ignore, isn’t it?”

“If he killed her…” Lynley mused.

“Someone else might have waited for an opportunity for revenge.”

“Two people alone on a sailboat. A rough day. A sudden squall. The boom shifts in the wind, cracks the woman on the head, and she’s overboard in an instant.”

“Could that sort of death be faked?” St. James asked.

“A murder posing as an accident, you mean? No boom at all but a blow to the head? Of course.”

“What poetic justice,” Deborah said. “A second murder posing as an accident. It’s symmetrical, isn’t it?”

“It’s a perfect sort of vengeance,” Lynley said. “There’s truth to that.”

“But then who is Mrs. Spence?” Deborah asked.

St. James listed possibilities. “A former housekeeper who knew the truth, a neighbour, an old friend of the wife.”

“The wife’s sister,” Deborah said. “His own sister even.”

“Being urged back to the Church here in Winslough and finding him a hypocrite she couldn’t endure?”

“Perhaps a cousin, Simon. Or someone who worked for the Bishop of Truro as well.”

“Why not someone who was involved with Sage? Adultery cuts both ways, doesn’t it?”

“He killed his wife to be with Mrs. Spence but once she discovered the truth, she wouldn’t have him? She ran off?”

“The possibilities are endless. Her background’s the key.”

Lynley turned his pint glass thoughtfully on the table. Concentric rings of moisture marked its every position. He’d been listening but felt disinclined to dismiss all his previous conjectures. He said, “Nothing else peculiar in his background, St. James? Alcohol, drugs, an unseemly interest in something disreputable, immoral, or illegal?”

“He had a passion for Scripture, but that doesn’t seem out of character in a priest. What are you looking for?”

“Something about children?”

“Paedophilia?” When Lynley nodded, St. James went on. “Not a hint of that.”

“But would there be a hint, if the Church was protecting him and saving its own reputation to boot? Can you see the bishop admitting to the fact that Robin Sage had a penchant for choirboys, that he had to be moved—”

“And he moved continually, according to the Bishop of Bradford,” Deborah noted.

“—because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself? They’d get him help, they’d insist upon that. But would they ever admit to the truth in public?”

“I suppose it’s as likely as anything else. But it seems the least plausible of the explanations. Who are the choirboys here?”

“Perhaps it wasn’t boys.”

“You’re thinking of Maggie. And Mrs. Spence killing him to put an end to…what? Molestation? Seduction? If that’s the case, why wouldn’t she say?”

“It’s still murder, St. James. She’s the girl’s only parent. Could she depend upon a jury seeing it her way, acquitting, and leaving her free to care for the child who depends upon her? Would she take that risk? Would anyone? Would you?”

“Why not report him to the police? To the Church?”

“It’s her word against his.”

“But the daughter’s word…”

“What if Maggie chose to protect the man? What if she wanted the involvement in the first place? What if she fancied herself in love with him? Or fancied he loved her?”

St. James rubbed the back of his neck. Deborah sank her chin into the palm of her hand. Both of them sighed. Deborah said, “I feel like the Red Queen in Alice. We need to run twice as fast, and I’m already out of breath.”

“It’s not looking good,” St. James agreed. “We need to know more, and all they need to do is hold their tongues to keep us permanently in the dark.”

“Not necessarily,” Lynley said. “There’s still Truro to consider. We’ve plenty of room to manoeuvre there. We’ve got the wife’s death to dig into, as well as Robin Sage’s background.”

“God, that’s a hike. Will you go there, Tommy?”

“I won’t.”

“Then who?”

Lynley smiled. “Someone on holiday. Just like the rest of us.”

In Acton, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers turned on the radio that sat on the top of the refrigerator, and interrupted Sting in the midst of warbling about his father’s hands. She said, “Yeah, baby. Sing it, you hunk,” and chuckled at herself. She liked listening to Sting. Lynley claimed her interest was rooted solely in the fact that Sting appeared to shave only once a fortnight, in a display of putative virility that was geared to attract a largely feminine following. Barbara pooh-poohed this. She argued that, for his part, Lynley was a musical snob, saying that if a piece had been composed within the last eighty years, he wouldn’t offend his aristocratic ears by exposing them to it. She herself had no real predilection for rock and roll, but given her preference, she always chose it over classical, jazz, blues, or what Constable Nkata referred to as “honky Grandma tunes” which usually featured something from the forties inoffensively rendered by a full orchestra with a heavy emphasis on the strings. Nkata himself was devoted to blues, although Havers knew he’d sell his soul in an instant — not to mention his growing collection of CD’s — for just fi ve minutes alone with Tina Turner. “Never you mind she’s old enough to be my mum,” he’d say to his colleagues. “My mum look like that, I’d’a never left home.”

Barbara turned up the volume and opened the refrigerator. She was hoping that the sight of something inside would stimulate her appetite. Instead the odour of fi ve-day-old plaice made her retreat to the other side of the kitchen, saying, “Jesus bloody hell,” with some considerable reverence while she considered how best to be rid of the leaking package of fi sh without having to touch it. She wondered what other malodorous surprises were waiting for discovery, wrapped in foil, stored in plastic cases, or brought home in cartons for a hasty meal and long since forgotten. From her position of safety, she spied something green climbing the edges of one container. She wanted to believe it was leftover mushy peas. The colour seemed right, but the fi brous consistency suggested mould. Next to it, a new life-form seemed to be evolving from what once had been a plate of spaghetti. In fact, the entire refrigerator looked like an unsavoury experiment-in-progress, conducted by Alexander Fleming with another trip to Stockholm in mind.

With her eyes fastened suspiciously on this mess and the back of one index fi nger pressed beneath her nose to breathe against shallowly, Barbara edged over to the kitchen sink. She rustled through cleansers, scrubbing pads, brushes, and a few stiffened lumps that had once been dish-cloths. She unearthed a carton of rubbish bags. Armed with one of these and a spatula, she advanced to do battle. The plaice went into the sack fi rst, splatting against the floor and sending up a death howl in the form of an odour that made Barbara shudder. The mushy peas-cum-antibiotic went next, followed by the spaghetti, a wedge of double Gloucester that appeared to have grown some sort of interesting beard, a plate of petrifi ed bangers and mash, and a carton of pizza which she could not get up the nerve to open. Leftover chow mein joined the mess, as did the spongy remains of half a tomato, three grapefruit halves, and a carton of milk she distinctly remembered having purchased last June.

Once Barbara developed a rhythm to this catharsis of comestibles, she decided to carry it to its logical conclusion. Anything that wasn’t sealed in a jar, permanently and professionally pickled, or posing as a condiment unaffected by the passage of time — out with the mayonnaise, in with the ketchup — joined the plaice and its companions-in-decomposition. By the time she was done, the refrigerator shelves were bare of anything that made even the smallest promise of a meal, but she wasn’t a mourner for the edible loss. Whatever appetite she may have been trying to stimulate with her sentimental journey through the territory of ptomaine had long since disappeared.

She slammed the door home and tied up the rubbish bag with its length of wire. She opened the back door, shoved the bag outside and waited for a moment to see if it would develop legs and slither off to join the rest of the household rubbish on its own. When it didn’t, she made a mental note to handle it later.

She lit a cigarette. The scent of the match and of the burning tobacco did much to mask the residual foul odour of food gone bad. She lit a second match and then a third, while all the time she inhaled the smoke from the cigarette as deeply as she could.

Not a total loss, she thought, nothing for tea or supper, but look at it this way: another job’s done. All she had to do was scrub down the shelves and wash out the single drawer and the refrigerator would be ready to sell, a little old, a bit unreliable, but priced accordingly. She couldn’t take it with her when she moved to Chalk Farm — the studio was far too tiny to accommodate anything larger than munchkin size — so she was going to have to clean it out eventually, sooner or later…when she was ready to move…

She went to the table and sat, her chair noisily scraping one bare metal foot against the sticky linoleum floor. She twirled the end of her cigarette between thumb and index fi nger and idly watched the progress of the paper burning, as the tobacco it held continued to smoulder. The occasion of having to deal with this refrigerated putrefaction had, she realised, informed against her. One more job done meant one more item ticked off the list, which put her one step closer to shutting the house, selling it, and taking herself off to an unknown new life.

By alternate days she felt ready for the move and unaccountably terrified of the change it implied. She’d been to Chalk Farm half a dozen times already, she’d paid her deposit on the little studio, she’d talked to the landlord about different curtains and about the installation of the telephone. She’d even got a brief glimpse of one of her fellow tenants, sitting in a pleasant square of sun at the window of his lower ground-level flat. Yet even while that part of her life — marked FUTURE — drew her steadily onwards, the larger part — marked PAST — kept her standing in place. She knew that there was no turning back once this house in Acton was sold. One of the last ties to her mother would be severed.

Barbara had spent the morning with her. They’d walked to the hawthorn-lined common in Greenford and sat on one of the benches that surrounded the play area, watching a young mother twirling a laughing toddler on a round-about.

It had been one of her mother’s good days. She recognised Barbara, and although she slipped three times and called her Doris, she didn’t argue the point when Barbara gently reminded her that Auntie Doris had been dead and gone for nearly fifty years. She merely said with a wispy smile, “I forget, Barbie. But I’m good today. Shall I come home soon?”

“Don’t you like it here?” Barbara asked. “Mrs. Flo likes you. And you get on well with Mrs. Pendlebury and Mrs. Salkild, don’t you?”

Her mother scrabbled at the ground beneath her feet, then held her legs out straight, like a child. She said, “Like my new shoes, Barbie.”

“I thought you might.” They were high-top trainers, lavender with silver stripes on the side. Barbara had found them in a rainbow selection in Camden Lock Market. She’d bought a pair for herself in red and gold— snickering at the thought of Inspector Lynley’s horrified face when he saw them on her feet— and although they hadn’t had any in her mother’s size, she’d bought the lavender ones anyway because they were the most outrageous and consequently the most likely to please. She’d thrown in two pairs of purpleand-black argyle socks to fill up the space between her mother’s feet and the shoes, and she’d smiled at the pleasure Mrs. Havers had taken at unwrapping the package and fi shing through the tissue for her “supprise.”

Barbara had got into the habit of bringing a little something with her on these biweekly visits to Hawthorn Lodge where, for the past two months, her mother had been living with two other elderly women and Mrs. Florence Magentry — Mrs. Flo — who cared for them. Barbara told herself that she did it for the joy of seeing her mother’s face brighten at the sight of a gift. But she knew each package served as coin to purchase her freedom from guilt.

She said again, “You like it here with Mrs. Flo, don’t you, Mum?”

Mrs. Havers was watching the toddler in the round-about. She was swaying to some interior tune. “Mrs. Salkild messed her pants last night,” she said confi dentially. “But Mrs. Flo didn’t even get crossed, Barbie. She said, ‘These things happen, dearie, as we get older so you mustn’t worry yourself to bits.’ I didn’t mess my pants.”

“That’s good, Mum.”

“I helped as well. I got the washing fl annel and the plastic basin and I held it just so, so Mrs. Flo could clean her. Mrs. Salkild cried. She said, ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know.’ I felt bad for her. I gave her some of my chocolates after. I didn’t mess my pants, Barbie.”

“You’re a big help to Mrs. Flo, Mum. She probably couldn’t get along without you.”

“She does say that, doesn’t she? She’ll be sad when I leave. Am I coming home today?”

“Not today, Mum.”

“Soon though?”

“But not today.”

Barbara sometimes wondered if it would be better to leave her mother in Mrs. Flo’s more-than-capable hands, if she should simply pay her expenses, disappear, and hope that her mother would forget in time that she had a daughter not far away. She did continual fl ipflops on the efficacy of these visits to Greenford. She went from believing they did nothing more than put momentary plasters on the sores of her own guilt at the expense of disrupting Mrs. Havers’ routine to convincing herself that her steady presence in her mother’s life would keep her from complete mental disintegration. There was no literature available on either position as far as Barbara knew. And even if she had tried to find it — which she couldn’t bring herself to do — what difference would some conveniently removed social scientist’s theories make? This was her mother, after all. She couldn’t abandon her.

Barbara stabbed her cigarette into the ashtray on the kitchen table and counted the stubs that lay crushed there already. Eighteen cigarettes she’d smoked since this morning. She had to quit. It was unclean, unhealthy, and disgusting. She lit another.

From her chair, she could see down the corridor all the way to the front door. She could see the stairway to the right, the sitting room to the left. It was impossible to avoid noticing how far along the renovation of the house had moved. The interior was painted. New carpet was laid. Fixtures were repaired or replaced in the bathroom and the kitchen. The stove and oven were cleaner than they had been in twenty years. The linoleum fl oor still needed to be stripped completely and then rewaxed, and wallpaper still waited to be hung. But once those two jobs were taken care of, along with washing or replacing the curtains which hadn’t been touched as far as Barbara knew since her family’s move to the house in her childhood, she could turn her efforts to the exterior.

The back garden was a nightmare. The front garden was nonexistent. And the house itself needed massive effort: There were gutters to replace, woodwork to paint, windows to wash, a front door to refi nish. And while her savings were rapidly dwindling and her own time was limited because of her job, things were still moving slowly forward according to her original plan. If she didn’t do something to slow down the wheels of this entire project — initially taken on to guarantee she would have sufficient funds to keep her mother at Hawthorn Lodge indefi nitely — the time for being on her own would be fast upon her.

Barbara wanted that independence, or so she kept telling herself. She was thirty-three years old, she’d never established a life of her own unattached to her family and their infi nite needs. That she could do so now ought to have been a cause for jubilation at a release from bondage. But somehow it wasn’t and it hadn’t been since the morning she’d driven her mother to Greenford and settled her into a crisp, new life with Mrs. Flo.

Mrs. Flo had prepared for their arrival in a way that should have set every worry to rest. A welcome sign draped over the narrow stairway’s banister, and there were flowers in the entry. Upstairs in her mother’s room a porcelain carousel spun round slowly, playing “The Entertainer” in light chiming notes.

“Oh Barbie, Barbie, look!” her mother had breathed, and she rested her chin on the chest of drawers and watched the tiny horses rise and fall.

There were flowers in the bedroom as well, irises in a tall white vase.

“I thought she might need a special moment,” Mrs. Flo said, smoothing her hands against the bodice of her pin-striped shirtwaister. “Ease her in gentle so she knows we mean to make her welcome. I’ve coffee and poppy seed cakes down below. Bit early for elevenses, isn’t it, but I thought you might have to be off fairly quick.”

Barbara nodded. “I’m working on a case in Cambridge.” She looked round the room. It was so clean, crisp, and warm, with the sunlight falling across the daisy carpet. “Thank you,” she said. She wasn’t referring to the coffee and cakes.

Mrs. Flo patted her hand. “Don’t you worry about Mum. We’ll do right by her, Barbie. May I call you Barbie?”

Barbara wanted to tell her that no one but her parents had ever used that name, that it made her feel childlike and in need of care. She was about to correct her, saying, “It’s Barbara, please,” when she realised that to do so would be to break the illusion that somehow this was home and these women — her mother, Mrs. Flo, Mrs. Salkild, and Mrs. Pendlebury, one of whom was blind and the other another victim of dementia — constituted a family into which she herself was being offered membership if she cared to accept it. And she did.

So it wasn’t so much the prospect of permanently abandoning her mother that caused Barbara to drag her feet from time to time as it became more apparent that her dream of being on her own was about to become reality. It was the prospect of her own abandonment.

For two months now, she had been coming home to an empty house, something she had longed for during the years of her father’s lingering illness, something she had deemed completely indispensable when she found herself left to deal with her mother after his death. For what seemed like ages she had sought a solution to caring for her mother, and now that she had one apparently designed by heaven — God, was there another Mrs. Flo anywhere else on earth? — the focus of her plans had shifted from dealing with an ageing parent to dealing with the house. And when the house offered her nothing more to deal with, she’d be face to face with dealing with herself.

Alone, she would have to start thinking about her isolation. And when the King’s Arms emptied of her colleagues in the eve-ning — when MacPherson went home to his wife and five children, when Hale went to do increasingly dubious battle with the solicitor who was handling his divorce, when Lynley dashed off to have dinner with Helen, and Nkata drifted off to take one of his six squabbling girlfriends to bed — she’d meander slowly to St. James’s Park Station, kicking at rubbish that blew in her path. She’d ride to Waterloo, change to the Northern Line, and hunch on a seat with a copy of The Times, feigning interest in national and world events to disguise her growing panic at being alone.

It’s no crime to feel this way, she kept telling herself. You’ve been under someone’s thumb for thirty-three years. What else would you expect to feel when the pressure’s gone? What do prisoners feel when they’re let out of gaol? How about liberated, she answered herself, how about like dancing in the street, like having their hair worked over by one of those posh hairdressers in Knightsbridge who have their windows all draped in black to show off blowup snaps of gorgeous women with geometric haircuts that never grow out scraggly or get blown by the wind.

Anyone else in her position, she decided, would probably be brimming with plans, working feverishly to get this house in shape to sell so that she could start a new life which, no doubt, would begin with a wardrobe change, a body make-over courtesy of a personal trainer who looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger with better teeth, a sudden interest in make-up, and a telephone answering machine to keep track of the messages from a score of admirers all waiting to entwine their lives with hers.

But Barbara had always been a bit more practical than that. She knew change came slowly if it came at all. So right now, the move to Chalk Farm represented nothing more than unknown shops to get used to, unknown streets to navigate, unknown neighbours to meet. All of it would be done on her own, with no voice to hear in the morning save her own, no friendly noise of someone puttering about, and especially no sympathetic companion both ready and eager to listen to her assessment of how things had gone on a given day.

Of course, she’d never had a sympathetic companion involved in her life in the past, only her parents who awaited her nightly arrival, not to engage her in avid conversation but to wolf down supper and get back to the telly where they watched a succession of American melodramas.

Still, her parents had been a human presence in her life for thirty-three long and unbroken years. While they hadn’t exactly filled her life with joy and a sense that the future was an unwritten slate, they had been there, needing her. And now no one did.

She realised that she wasn’t so much afraid of being alone as she was of becoming one of the nation’s invisibles, a woman whose presence in anyone’s life had no particular importance. This house in Acton — especially if she brought her mother back to it — would eliminate the chance of her discovering that she was an unnecessary fixture in the world, eating, sleeping, bathing, and eliminating like the rest of mankind, but otherwise expendable. Locking the door, handing over the key to the estate agent, and going on her way meant risking the revelation of her own unimportance. She wanted to avoid that as long as she could.

She crushed out her cigarette, got to her feet, and stretched. Eating Greek food sounded better than did stripping and waxing the kitchen floor. Lamb souvlakia on rice, dolmades, and a half-bottle of Aristide’s marginally drinkable wine. But first the rubbish bag.

It was where she had left it, outside the back door. Barbara was grateful to see that its contents hadn’t managed to climb the evolutionary scale from mould and algae to anything with legs. She hoisted it up and trudged along the weed-sprung path to the rubbish bins. She lowered the bag inside just as the telephone began to ring.

“What d’you know, my date for next New Year’s,” she muttered. And then, “All right, I’m coming,” as if the caller were telegraphing impatience.

She caught it on the eighth double ring, picking it up to hear a man say, “Ah. Good. You’re there. I thought I might have missed you.”

“You mean you don’t miss me?” Barbara asked. “And here I was worried you’d be incapable of sleeping with the two of us so many miles apart.”

Lynley chuckled. “How goes the holiday, Sergeant?”

“In fi ts and starts.”

“You need a change of scenery to take your mind off things.”

“Could be. But why do I think this is heading in a direction I might learn to regret?”

“If the direction’s Cornwall?”

“That doesn’t sound half bad. Who’s buying?”

“I am.”

“You’re on, Inspector. When do I leave?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

IT WAS A QUARTER TO FIVE when Lynley and St. James walked up the short drive to the vicarage. No car was parked there, but a light burned in what appeared to be the kitchen. Another shone behind the curtains from a fi rst-fl oor room, making a tawny glow against which they could see a figure moving in silhouette, distorted Quasimodo-like from the way the material hung behind the glass. Next to the front door, a collection of rubbish waited to be carted away. It seemed to consist mostly of newspapers, empty containers for household cleaning agents, and dirty rags. These last gave off the distinct and eye-watering smell of ammonia, as if testifying to the victory of antisepsis in whatever war of cleanliness had been waged inside the house.

Lynley rang the bell. St. James looked across the street and frowned thoughtfully at the church. He said, “My guess is that she’ll probably have to dig through the local newspapers to get some sort of account of the death, Tommy. I can’t think the Bishop of Truro will tell Barbara anything more than his secretary told me. And that’s counting on her ability to get in to see him in the first place. He could put her off for days, especially if there is something to hide and if Glennaven reported our visit.”

“Havers’ll deal with it in one fashion or another. I certainly wouldn’t put strong-arming a bishop past her. That sort of thing is her stock in trade.” Lynley rang the bell again.

“But as to Truro’s admitting to any nasty proclivities on the part of Sage…”

“That’s a problem. But nasty proclivities are only one possibility. We’ve already seen there are dozens of others, some applying to Sage, some to Mrs. Spence. If Havers uncovers anything questionable, no matter what it is, at least we’ll have more to work with than we have at the moment.” Lynley peered through the kitchen window. The light that was on came from a small bulb above the cooker. The room was empty. “Ben Wragg said there was a housekeeper at work here, didn’t he?” He rang the bell a third time.

A voice finally responded from behind the door, hesitant and low. “Who’s there, please?”

“Scotland Yard CID,” Lynley replied. “I’ve identification if you’d like to see it.”

The door cracked open, then closed quickly once Lynley had passed the warrant card through. Nearly a minute passed. A tractor rumbled by in the street. A school bus disgorged six uniformed pupils at the edge of the car park in front of St. John the Baptist Church before trundling up the incline with its indicator flashing for the Trough of Bowland.

The door opened again. A woman stood in the entry. She was holding the warrant card mostly enclosed in one fist while her other hand grabbed at the crew neck of her pullover and bunched it up as if she were concerned that it might not be covering her suffi ciently. Her hair — a long crinkly mass that looked electrically charged — hid more than half of her face. The shadows hid the rest.

“Vicar’s dead, you know,” she said in not much more than a mumble. “Died last month. Constable found him on the footpath. He ate something bad. It was an accident.”

She was stating what she must have known they’d already been told, as if she had no idea at all that New Scotland Yard had been prowling round the village for the last twenty-four hours on the trail of this death. It was diffi cult to believe that she wouldn’t have heard of their presence before this, especially, Lynley realised as he studied her, since she certainly had been sitting in the pub with a male companion on the previous night when St. John Townley-Young had paid his call. Townley-Young had accosted the man with her, in fact.

She didn’t move away from the doorway to let them in. But she shivered from the cold, and Lynley looked down to see that her feet were bare. He also saw that she was wearing trousers, fine grey herring bone.

“May we come in?”

“It was an accident,” she said. “Everyone knows that.”

“We won’t stay long. And you ought to get out of the cold.”

She gripped her pullover’s neck more tightly. She looked from him to St. James and back to him before she stepped away from the door and admitted them into the house.

“You’re the housekeeper?” Lynley asked.

“Polly Yarkin,” she said.

Lynley introduced St. James and went on to say, “May we talk to you?” He felt the curious need to be gentle with her, and he couldn’t determine exactly why. There was something both frightened and defeated in her air, like a horse that’s been broken by an ill-tempered hand. She seemed ready to bolt in an instant.

She led them into the sitting room where she turned the switch on a floor lamp to no effect. She said, “Bulb’s gone, isn’t it,” and left them alone.

In the diminishing light of dusk, they could see that whatever personal possessions the vicar had owned, they were gone. What was left was a sofa, an ottoman, and two chairs arranged round a coffee table. Across from them a bookshelf reached from floor to ceiling, empty of books. Something glittered on the floor next to this, and Lynley went to investigate. St. James strolled to the window and pushed the curtains to one side, saying, “Nothing much out there. The shrubs look bad. There’re plants on the step,” mostly to himself.

Lynley picked up a small globe of silver that lay, unhinged and open, on the carpet. Scattered round it were the desiccated remains of triangular fleshy bits that appeared to be fruit. He picked up one of these as well. It had no scent. Its texture was like a dried sponge. The globe was connected to a matching silver chain. Its clasp was broken.

“That’s mine.” Polly Yarkin had returned, lightbulb in hand. “I wondered where it got itself off to.”

“What is it?”

“Amulet. For health. Mum likes me to wear it. Silly. Like garlic. But you can’t tell Mum that. She’s ever one to believe in charms.”

Lynley handed it to her. She returned his warrant card. Her fingers felt feverish. She went to the floor lamp, changed the bulb, switched it on, and retreated to one of the chairs which she stood behind, her hands curved round its back.

Lynley went to the sofa. St. James joined him. She nodded at them to sit, although it seemed clear that she had no intention of sitting herself. Lynley gestured to the chair, said, “This won’t take long,” and waited for her to move.

She did so reluctantly, one hand holding on to the back of the chair as if she would pull herself behind it again. Sitting, she was more fully in the light, and it appeared that light and not their company was what she wished to avoid.

He saw for the first time that the trousers she wore belonged to a man’s suit. They were far too long. She’d rolled the bottoms into bulky cuffs.

“Vicar’s,” she said in hesitant explanation. “I don’t think anyone will mind, do you? I tripped on the back step just a bit ago. Ripped my skirt up proper. Clumsy as an old cow, I am.”

He raised his eyes to her face. An angry red welt curved from under the protective curtain of her hair, marking a path that ended at the corner of her mouth.

“Clumsy,” she said again, and she gave a little laugh. “I’m always running into things.

Mum should’ve gave me an amulet to keep me steady on my feet.”

She pushed her hair forward a bit more. Lynley wondered what else she was trying to hide on her face. Her skin was shiny across what he could see of her forehead, perspiration either from nerves or from illness. It wasn’t warm enough in the house for the sheen of sweat to be realistically from anything else. He said, “Are you quite all right? May we phone a doctor for you?”

She rolled the trouser cuffs down to cover her feet and tucked the extra material round them. “I never seen a doctor these past ten years. I just fell. I’m all right.”

“But if you’ve hit your head—”

“Just banged up my face on that silly door, didn’t I?” She backed herself cautiously into the chair and put one hand on each arm. Her movement was slow and it looked deliberate, as if she were digging out of her memory the appropriate way to sit and behave when someone came to call. But something about her manner — perhaps it was the way her arms moved, like mechanical extensions of her body, or the way her fingers uncurled with an effort and lay flat against the chair’s upholstery — suggested that she really wanted nothing so much as to cradle herself, doubled over, until some interior pain went away. When neither Lynley nor St. James spoke at once, she said, “Church wardens asked me to keep the place up and get it ready for another vicar. I’ve been cleaning. Sometimes I work too hard and get a bit sore. You know.”

“You’ve been working on the house since the vicar died?” It seemed unlikely. The place wasn’t that large.

“It takes time, doesn’t it, to get things sorted out proper and to make them tidy when someone passes on.”

“You’ve done a good job.”

“It’s just that they always look the vicarage over, don’t they, the new ones? It helps them make a decision if they get offered the job.”

“Is that how it worked with Mr. Sage? Did he come to look the vicarage over before he took the position?”

“He didn’t mind what it was like. I s’pose it was because he didn’t have a family so it didn’t much matter about the house. There was only him in it.”

“Did he ever speak of a wife?” St. James asked.

Polly reached for the amulet which lay in her lap. “Wife? Was he thinking of getting married?”

“He’d been married. He was a widower.”

“He never said. I thought…Well, he didn’t seem much interested in women, did he?”

Lynley and St. James exchanged a glance. Lynley said, “How do you mean?”

Polly picked up the amulet and closed her fingers round it, returning her hand to the arm of the chair. “He never acted any different with the church-cleaning ladies than he did with the blokes that ring the bells. I always thought…I thought, well, maybe the vicar’s too holy. Maybe he doesn’t think about ladies and such. He read the Bible lots, after all. He prayed. He wanted me to pray with him. He’d always say, Let’s start the day with a prayer, dear Polly.”

“What sort of prayer?”

“‘God, help us to know Your will and to find the way.’”

“That was the prayer?”

“Mostly. But it was longer’n that. I always wondered what way I was s’posed to find.” Her lips curved briefly. “Find the way to cook the meat proper, I guess. Except he never complained about my cooking, the vicar. He said, You cook like Saint Somebody-or-other, dear Polly. I forget who. St. Michael? Did he cook?”

“I think he fought the devil.”

“Oh. Well. I’m not religious. I mean the kind of religion with churches and such. Vicar didn’t know that, which is just as well.”

“If he admired your cooking, he must have told you he’d not be home for dinner the night he died.”

“He only said that he wouldn’t be wanting any dinner. I didn’t know he was going out. I just thought maybe he wasn’t feeling right.”

“Why?”

“He’d been holed up in his bedroom all day, hadn’t he, and he didn’t eat his lunch. He came out once round tea time to use the phone in the study, but he went right back to his room when he was done.”

“What time was this?”

“Round three, I guess.”

“Did you hear his conversation?”

She opened her palm and looked at the amulet. She rolled her fingers against it. “I was a tad worried about him. It wasn’t like Mr. Sage not to eat.”

“So you heard his conversation.”

“Just a tad is all. And only because I was worried. It wasn’t like I was listening to hear. I mean, he wasn’t sleeping well, the vicar. His bed was always thrashed up in the morning like he was wrestling with the sheets. And he—”

Lynley leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He said, “It’s all right, Polly. You had good intentions. No one’s about to judge you for listening at a door.”

She didn’t look convinced. Distrust fl ickered behind the skittish movement of her eyes from Lynley to St. James back to Lynley.

“What did he say?” Lynley asked. “Who was he talking to?”

“You can’t judge what happened then. You can’t know what’s right now. That’s in God’s hands, not yours.”

“We aren’t here to judge. That’s up to—”

“No,” Polly said. “That’s what I heard. That’s what the vicar said. You can’t judge what happened then. You can’t know what’s right now. That’s in God’s hands, not yours.”

“Was that the only phone call he made that day?”

“Far’s I know.”

“Was he angry? Was he shouting, raising his voice?”

“He sounded tired, mostly.”

“You didn’t see him afterwards?”

She shook her head. Afterwards, she said, she took tea to the study, only to fi nd that he’d gone back up to his bedroom. She followed him there and knocked on the door, offering him the food which he refused.

“I said, You haven’t had a bite all day, Vicar, and you must eat something, and I’m not leaving this spot until you have a bite of these nice toast fingers I’ve got here. So he fi nally opened the door. He was dressed, and the bed was made but I knew what he’d been doing.”

“What?”

“Praying. He had this little prayer place in a corner of the room with a Bible on it and a place to kneel. That’s where he’d been.”

“How do you know?”

She rubbed her fingers against her knee in explanation. “Trousers. The crease was gone from right here. There were wrinkle places as well, where his leg bent to kneel.”

“What did he say to you?”

“That I was a good soul but I mustn’t worry. I asked him was he ill. He said no.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I said, You’re wearing yourself out, Vicar, with these trips to London. He’d just got back the day before, see. And every time he went to London, he looked a bit worse than the last time he went. And every time he went, he came home and prayed. Sometimes I wondered…Well, what was he up to in London that he came back so tired and peaky looking? But then, he went on the train, didn’t he, so I thought maybe it was just the aggravation of travel and such. Getting to the station, buying all the tickets, switching trains here and there. That sort of thing. Makes you tired, a trip like that.”

“Where did he go in London?”

Polly didn’t know. Nor could she say what he’d been doing. Whether it was Church business, whether it was personal, the vicar kept the information to himself. The only thing Polly was able to tell them for sure was that he stayed in a hotel not far from Euston Station. It was the same hotel each time. She remembered that. Did they want the name?

Yes, if she had it.

She started to rise, then caught her breath with something like surprise when the movement didn’t come easily to her. She disguised a small cry by coughing. It did little enough to hide her pain.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m silly to fall. Got myself real banged up. Clumsy old cow.” She inched her way forward in the chair and pushed herself up when she got to the edge.

Lynley watched her, frowning, noting the odd manner in which she held her pullover bunched in front of her with both hands. She didn’t stand up straight. When she walked she favoured her right leg.

He said abruptly, “Who’s been to see you today, Polly?”

Just as abruptly she stopped. “No one. Least no one that I recall.” She made a show of thinking the question over, creasing her brow and concentrating on the carpet as if she would see the answer there. “Nope. No one at all.”

“I don’t believe you. You didn’t fall, did you?”

“I did. Out back.”

“Who was it? Has Mr. Townley-Young been to see you? Did he want to talk to you about the pranks at Cotes Hall?”

She seemed genuinely surprised. “The Hall? No.”

“About last night in the pub, then? About the man you were with? That was his son-inlaw, wasn’t it?”

“No. I mean it was. It was Brendan, true. But Mr. Townley-Young hasn’t been here.”

“Then who—”

“I fell. I got banged up. It’ll teach me to be more careful.” She left the room.

Lynley pushed himself to his feet and walked to the window. From there he paced to the bookcase. Then back to the window. A wall radiator was hissing beneath it, insistent and irritating. He tried to turn the knob. It seemed permanently stuck. He clenched it, fought with it, burnt his hand, and cursed.

“Tommy.”

He swung round to St. James, who hadn’t moved from the sofa. “Who?” he asked.

“Perhaps more importantly, why?”

“Why? For God’s sake—”

St. James’ voice was low and perfectly calm. “Consider the situation. Scotland Yard arrives and begins asking questions. Everyone’s meant to toe the already established line. Perhaps Polly doesn’t want to. Perhaps someone knows that.”

“Christ, that’s not even the point, St. James. Someone beat her up. Someone out there. Someone—”

“Your hands are full and she doesn’t want to talk. She could be afraid. She could be merely protective. We don’t know. The larger issue at the moment is whether what happened to her is connected to what happened to Robin Sage.”

“You sound like Barbara Havers.”

“Someone has to.”

Polly returned, a slip of paper in her hand. “Hamilton House,” she said. “Here’s the phone as well.”

Lynley put the slip of paper into his pocket. “How many times did Mr. Sage go to London?”

“Four. Perhaps five. I can look in his diary if you want to know for certain.”

“His diary’s still here?”

“All his things’s here. His will said to give all his belongings to charity, but it didn’t say which. The church council said to pack everything up until they decide where to send them. Would you like to look through it?”

“If we may.”

“In the study.”

She led them back along the corridor, past the stairway. She’d apparently been cleaning spots in the carpet sometime that day because Lynley noticed patches of damp that he hadn’t seen when they first entered the house: near the door and in an uneven trail to the stairs where one of the walls had been washed as well. Beneath a bare urn stand opposite the stairway, a strip of multicoloured material curled. As Polly walked on, oblivious, Lynley picked it up. It was flimsy, he discovered, similar to gauze, with threads of metallic gold running through it. It reminded him of the Indian dresses and skirts he’d often seen for sale in outdoor markets. Thoughtfully, he twisted it round his finger, felt an unusual stiffness to it, and held it up to the ceiling light which Polly had turned on in their progress towards the front of the house. The material was heavily blotched with a rusty stain. It was frayed on the edges, ripped from a larger piece, not cut with scissors. Lynley examined it with little surprise. He put it into his pocket and followed St. James into the vicar’s study.

Polly stood next to the desk. She’d lit the lamp on it, but positioned herself so that her hair cast an oblique shadow across her face.

The room was crowded with cartons, all of them labelled, one of them open. This contained clothes, obviously the source of Polly’s trousers.

Lynley said, “He had a lot of possessions.”

“Not a lot of important stuff. It’s just that he was a bit of a hoarder. When I wanted to throw something away, I had to put it in his work tray on the desk and let him decide. Mostly he kept things, especially London things. Tickets to museums, a day pass for the underground. Like they were souvenirs. He just collected odd bits, did the vicar. Some people are like that, aren’t they.”

Lynley wandered among the cartons, reading the labels. Just books, loo, parish business, sitting room, vestments, shoes, study, desk, bedroom, sermons, magazines, odd bits… “What’s in this?” he asked of the last.

“Things from his pockets, scraps. Theatre programmes. That sort of thing.”

“And the diary? Where would we fi nd it?”

She pointed to the cartons marked study, desk, and books. There were at least a dozen. Lynley began moving them for easier access. He said, “Who’s been through the vicar’s belongings, besides yourself?”

“No one,” she said. “The church council told me to pack everything up and seal it and mark it, but they haven’t looked things over yet. I expect they’ll want to keep the parish business carton, won’t they, and they might want to offer his sermons to the new vicar as well. The clothes can go to—”

“And prior to your packing things into cartons?” Lynley asked. “Who went through his things then?”

She hesitated. She was standing near him. He could smell the odour of her perspiration soaking into the wool of her pullover.

“After the vicar died,” Lynley clarified, “during the investigation, did anyone look through his belongings?”

“Constable,” she said.

“Did he go through the vicar’s things alone? Were you with him? Was his father?”

Her tongue darted out to dampen her upper lip. “I brought him tea. Every day. I was in and out.”

“So he worked alone?” When she nodded, he said, “I see,” and unsealed the fi rst carton as St. James did the same to another. He said, “Maggie Spence was a frequent visitor to the vicarage, as I understand. She was a great

favourite of the vicar.”

“I suppose.”

“Did they meet alone?”

“Alone?” Polly picked at a rough spot on the side of her thumb.

“The vicar and Maggie. Did they meet alone? In here? In the sitting room? Somewhere else? Upstairs?”

Polly surveyed the room as if looking for the memory. “In here mostly, I’d say.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Was the door open or shut?”

She began to unseal one of the cartons. “Shut. Mostly.” Before Lynley could ask another question, she went on. “They liked to talk. Bible stuff. They loved the Bible. I’d bring them their tea. He’d be sitting in that chair”—she pointed to an overstuffed chair on which three more cartons were piled—“and Maggie’d be on the stool. There. In front of the desk.”

A discreet four feet away, Lynley noted. He wondered who placed it there: Sage, Maggie, or Polly herself. He said, “Did the vicar meet with other young people from the

parish?”

“No. Just Maggie.”

“Did you think that unusual? After all, there was a social club for the teenagers, as I understand. He never met with any of them?”

“When he first got here there was a meeting in the church for the young people. To form the club. I made them scones. I remember that.”

“But only Maggie came here? What about her mother?”

“Missus Spence?” Polly shuffl ed through the material in the carton. She made a show of examining it. It seemed to consist mostly of loose papers filled with typescript. “She never was here, Missus Spence.”

“Did she phone?”

Polly considered the question. Across from her, St. James was going through a sheaf of papers and a stack of pamphlets. “Once. Near supper. Maggie was still here. She wanted her at home.”

“Was she angry?”

“We didn’t speak very long, so I couldn’t say. She just asked was Maggie here, sort of snippy, I guess. I said yes and fetched her. Maggie talked on the phone, mostly Yes, Mummy, No, Mummy, and Please listen,

Mummy. Then she went on home.”

“Upset?”

“A bit grey in the face and dragging her feet. Like she was caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to. She was fond of the vicar, Maggie was. He was fond of her. But her mum didn’t want that. So Maggie came to see him on the sly.”

“And her mother found out. How?”

“People see things. They talk. There’s no secrets in a village like Winslough.”

It seemed a wildly facile statement to Lynley. As far as he had been able to ascertain, there were secrets layered upon secrets in Winslough and nearly all of them had to do with the vicar, Maggie, the constable, and Juliet Spence.

St. James said, “Is this what we’re looking for?” and Lynley saw that he was holding a small engagement diary with a black plastic cover and a spiral spine. St. James handed it over and went on rooting through the carton that he had opened.

Polly said, “I’ll leave you to it, then” and left them. In a moment, they could hear water running in the kitchen.

Lynley put on his spectacles and flipped through the diary from December, backwards, noting first that although the twenty-third was marked with the Townley-Young wedding and the morning of the twenty-second had Power/ Townley-Young scrawled at half past ten, there was no reference on that same day to having dinner with Juliet Spence. The day before had a notation, however. The name Yanapapoulis made a diagonal across the lines for appointments.

“When did Deborah meet him?” Lynley asked.

“When you and I were in Cambridge. November. A Thursday. Was it round the twentieth?”

Lynley flipped the pages forward. They were filled with notations about the vicar’s life. Meetings of the altar society, visitations to the sick, the assembling of his fl edgling teen club, baptisms, three funerals, two weddings, sessions that looked like marital counseling, presentations before the church council, two clerical gatherings in Bradford.

He found what he was looking for on Thursday the sixteenth, SS next to one o’clock. But at that point, the trail went cold. There were names listed next to times further back, all the way to the vicar’s arrival in Winslough. Some were Christian names, some were surnames. But it was impossible to tell if they belonged to parishioners or if they indicated Sage’s business in London.

He looked up. “SS,” he said to St. James. “Does that suggest anything to you?”

“Someone’s initials.”

“Possibly. Except that he’s not used initials any place else. It’s always names except this once. What does that suggest?”

“An organisation?” St. James looked refl ective. “Nazis come to mind.”

“Robin Sage, neo-Nazi? A closet skinhead?”

“Secret Service, perhaps?”

“Robin Sage, Winslough’s budding James Bond?”

“No, it would have been MI5 or 6 then, wouldn’t it? Or SIS.” St. James began replacing items in the carton. “Nothing much in here aside from the diary. Stationery, business cards — his own, Tommy — part of a sermon on the lilies of the field, ink, pens, pencils, farming guides, two packets of seeds for tomatoes, a file of correspondence fi lled with letters of dismissal, letters of application, letters of acceptance. An application for—” St. James frowned.

“What?”

“Cambridge. Partially filled out. Doctor of theology.”

“And?”

“It isn’t that. It’s the application, any application. Partially filled out. It reminded me of what Deborah and I have been…Never mind that. It brings to mind SS. What about Social Services?”

Lynley saw the leap his friend had made from his own life. “He wanted to adopt a child?”

“Or to place a child?”

“Christ. Maggie?”

“Perhaps he saw Juliet Spence as an unfi t mother.”

“That might push her to violence.”

“It’s certainly a thought.”

“But there hasn’t been the slightest whisper of that from any quarter.”

“There usually isn’t if the situation’s abusive. You know how it goes. The child’s afraid to speak, trusting no one. When she fi nally finds someone she can trust…” St. James refolded the carton’s flaps and pressed the tape back down to seal them.

“We may have been looking at Robin Sage through the wrong sort of window,” Lynley said. “All those meetings with Maggie alone. Instead of seduction, he might have been trying to get to the truth.” Lynley sat in the desk chair and set the diary down. “But this is pointless speculation. We don’t know enough. We don’t even know when he went to London because you can’t tell from the diary where he was. It has names and times listed, scores of appointments, but aside from Bradford, there’s no place mentioned.”

“He kept the receipts.” Polly Yarkin spoke from the doorway. She was carrying a tray on which she’d assembled a teapot, two cups and saucers, and a half-crushed package of chocolate digestives. She put the tray on the desk and said, “Hotel receipts. He kept them. You can match up the dates.”

They found the file of Robin Sage’s hotel receipts in the third box they tried. These documented five visits to London, beginning in October and ending just two days before he died, 21 December, when Yanapapoulis was written. Lynley matched the receipt dates to the diary, but he came up with only three more pieces of information that looked even marginally promising: the name Kate next to noon on Sage’s first London visit of 11 October; a telephone number on his second; SS again on his third.

Lynley tried the number. It was a London exchange. An exhausted end-of-the-workingday voice said, “Social Services,” and Lynley smiled and gave St. James a thumb’s-up. His conversation was unprofitable, however. There was no way to ascertain the purpose of any telephone call Robin Sage may have made to Social Services. There was no one there by the name of Yanapapoulis, and it was otherwise impossible to track down the social worker to whom Sage had spoken when, and if, he had made the call. Additionally, if he had paid anyone a visit at Social Services on one of his trips to London, he took that secret with him to his grave. But at least they had something to work with, however little it was.

Lynley said, “Did Mr. Sage mention Social Services to you, Polly? Did Social Services ever phone him here?”

“Social Services? You mean about taking care of old folks or something?”

“For any reason, really.” When she shook her head, Lynley asked, “Did he speak about visiting Social Services in London? Did he ever bring anything back with him? Documents, paperwork?”

“There might be something with the odd bits,” she said.

“What?”

“If he brought anything back and left it round the study, it’ll be in the odd bits carton.”

When he opened it, Lynley found that the odd bits carton appeared to be a hotchpotch display of Robin Sage’s life. It contained everything from pre-Jubilee-Line maps of the London underground to a yellowing collection of the sort of historical pamphlets one can purchase for ten pence in country churches. A stack of book reviews clipped from The Times looked fragile enough to suggest they’d been gathered over a period of years, and going through them revealed that the vicar’s taste tended towards biography, philosophy, and whatever had been nominated for the Booker Prize in a given year. Lynley handed a stack of papers to St. James and sank back in the desk chair to peruse another. Polly moved gingerly round them, realigning some cartons, checking the seals on others. Lynley felt her glance repeatedly resting upon him then fl itting away.

He looked through his stack. Explanations of museum exhibits; a guide to the Turner Gallery at the Tate; receipts for lunches, dinners, and teas; manuals explaining the use of an electric saw, the assembly of a bicycle’s basket, the cleaning of a steam iron; advertisements extolling the benefits of joining an exercise club; and handouts one collects when strolling along a London street. These consisted of offers for hairstyling (The Hair Apparent, Clapham High Street, Ask for Sheelah); grainy photographs of automobiles (Drive The New Metro From Lambeth Ford); political announcements (Labour Speaks Tonight 8:0 °Camden Town Hall); along with assorted advertisements and solicitations for charities from the RSPCA to Homeless Relief. A brochure from the Hare Krishnas played the roll of a bookmark inside a copy of the Book of Common Prayer. Lynley flipped it open and read the prayer marked, from Ezekiel: “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 read it again, aloud, and looked up at St. James. “What was it Glennaven said that the vicar liked to discuss?”

“The difference between that which is moral — prescribed by law — and that which is right.”

“Yet according to this, the Church seems to feel they’re one in the same.”

“That’s the wonderful way of churches, isn’t it?” St. James unfolded a piece of paper, read it, set it to one side, picked it up again.

Lynley said, “Was it logic chopping on his part, talking about moral versus right? Was it a form of avoidance in which he engaged his fellow clerics in meaningless discussion?”

“That’s certainly what Glennaven’s secretary thought.”

“Or was he himself on the horns of a dilemma?” Lynley gave the prayer a second look. “‘…he shall save his soul alive.’”

“Here’s something,” St. James said. “There’s a date on the top. It says only the eleventh, but the paper looks at least relatively fresh, so it might match up to one of the London visits.” He handed it over.

Lynley read the scrawled words. “Charing Cross to Sevenoaks, High Street left towards…

These appear to be a set of directions, St. James.”

“Does the date match up with one of the London visits?”

Lynley went back to the diary. “The fi rst. The eleventh of October, where the name Kate is listed.”

“He could have gone to see her. Perhaps that visit set in motion the rest of the trips. To Social Services. Even to…what was that name in December?”

“Yanapapoulis.”

St. James cast a quick look at Polly Yarkin and finished obliquely with, “And any of those visits could have served as instigation.”

It was all conjecture, based upon air, and Lynley knew it. Each interview, fact, conversation, or step in the investigation was taking their thoughts in a new direction. They had no hard evidence, and from what he could tell, unless someone had removed it, there had never been hard evidence in the fi rst place. No weapon left at the scene of the crime, no incriminating fingerprint, no wisp of hair. There was nothing, in fact, to connect the alleged killer and her victim at all save a telephone call overheard by Maggie and inadvertently corroborated by Polly, and a dinner after which both parties became ill.

Lynley knew that he and St. James were engaged in piecing together a tapestry of guilt from the thinnest of threads. He didn’t like it. Nor did he like the indications of interest and curiosity that Polly Yarkin was attempting to hide, shuffling a carton here, moving a second one there, rubbing her sleeve across the base of the lamp to remove spots of dust that didn’t exist.

“Did you go to the inquest?” he asked her.

She withdrew her arm from the vicinity of the lamp, as if caught in an act of misbehaviour. “Me? Yes. Everyone went.”

“Why? Did you have evidence to give?”

“No.”

“Then…?”

“Just…I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to hear.”

“What?”

She lifted her shoulders slightly, allowed them to drop. “What she had to say. Once I knew the vicar had been with her that night. Everyone went,” she repeated.

“Because it was the vicar? And a woman? Or this particular woman, Juliet Spence?”

“Can’t say,” she said.

“About everyone else? Or about yourself?”

She dropped her eyes. The simple action was enough to tell him why she’d brought them the tea and why, after seeing to its pouring, she’d remained in the study shifting cartons and watching them sift through the vicar’s possessions long after it was necessary for her to do so.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

WHEN POLLY HAD SHUT THE door behind them, St. James and Lynley got as far as the end of the drive before Lynley stopped and gave his concentration to the silhouette of St. John the Baptist Church. Complete darkness had fallen. Street lamps were lit along the incline that led through the village. They beamed ochreous rays through an evening mist and cast their shadows within the elongated pools of their own light on the damp street below.

Here by the church, however, outside the boundary of the village proper, a full moon— rising past the summit of Cotes Fell — and its companion stars provided the sole illumination.

“I could use a cigarette,” Lynley said absently. “When do you expect I’ll stop feeling the need to light up?”

“Probably never.”

“That’s certainly a comforting reassurance, St. James.”

“It’s merely statistical probability combined with scientifi c and medical likelihood. Tobacco’s a drug. One never completely recovers from addiction.”

“How did you escape it? There we all were, sneaking a smoke after games, lighting up the very instant we crossed the bridge into Windsor, impressing ourselves — and trying like the devil to impress everyone else — with our individual, nicotinic adulthood. What happened to you?”

“Exposure to an early allergic reaction, I suppose.” When Lynley glanced his way, St. James continued. “My mother caught David with a packet of Dunhills when he was twelve. She shut him up in the lavatory and made him smoke them all. She shut the rest of us in there

with him.”

“To smoke?”

“To watch. Mother’s always been a strong believer in the power of an object lesson.”

“It worked.”

“With me, yes. With Andrew as well. Sid and David, however, always found the thrill of displeasing Mother more than equal to whatever discomfort they themselves might incur as a result. Sid smoked like a chimney until she was twenty-three. David still does.”

“But your mother was right. About the tobacco.”

“Of course. But I’m not sure her methods of educating her offspring were particularly sound. She could be a real termagant when pushed to the edge. Sid always claimed it was her name: What else can you expect from someone called Hortense, Sidney’d demand after we’d suffered a whipping for one infraction or another. I, on the other hand, tended to believe she was saddled rather than blessed by motherhood. My father kept late hours, after all. She was on her own, despite the presence of whatever nanny David and Sid hadn’t managed to terrorise into leaving yet.”

“Did you feel yourself abused?”

St. James buttoned his topcoat against the chill. There was little breeze here — the church acted as a break against the wind that otherwise funnelled through the dale — but the falling mist was frost in the making, and it lay upon his skin in a clammy webbing that seemed to seep through muscle and blood to the bone. He stifled a shiver and thought about the question.

His mother’s anger had always been terrifying to behold. She was Medea incarnate when crossed. She was quick to strike, quicker to shout, and generally unapproachable for hours — sometimes days — after a transgression had been committed. She never acted without cause; she never punished without explanation. Yet in some eyes, he knew, and especially in modern eyes, she would have been seen as extremely wanting.

“No,” he said and felt it to be the truth. “We tended to be an unruly lot, given half a chance. I think she was doing the best she could.”

Lynley nodded and went back to his study of the church. As far as St. James could tell, there wasn’t much to see. Moonlight glinted off the crenellated roofline and sketched in silver the contour of a tree in the graveyard. The rest was one variation or another of darkness and shadow: the clock in the belltower, the peaked roof of the lych-gate, the small north porch. It would be growing close to the time for evensong, but no one was readying the church for prayers.

St. James waited, watching his friend. They’d brought away from the study the odd bits carton, which St. James was carrying under his arm. He set it on the ground and blew on his hands to warm them. The action roused Lynley, who looked his way and said, “Sorry. We should be off. Deborah will be wondering what’s happened to us.” Still he didn’t move. “I was thinking.”

“About abusive mothers?”

“In part. But more about how it all fits. If it all fits. If there’s the slightest possibility that anything fi ts.”

“The girl didn’t say anything to suggest abuse when she spoke to you today?”

“Maggie? No. But she wouldn’t, would she? If the truth is that she revealed something to Sage — something he felt he had to act upon and something that cost him his life at her mother’s hands — she wouldn’t be likely to reveal it a second time to anyone else. She’d be feeling responsible as hell for what happened.”

“You don’t sound as if you’re keen on that idea, despite the phone call to Social Services.”

Lynley nodded. The mist made a penumbra of the moonlight in which his expression was moody, with shadows drawn beneath his eyes. “‘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.’ Did Sage intend the prayer to refer to Juliet Spence or to himself?”

“Perhaps neither. You may be making too much of nothing. It may have merely been a chance marking in the book. Or it may have referred to someone else entirely. It could be a piece of Scripture that Sage was using to comfort someone who had come to him to confess. For that matter, since we know he was trying to woo people back to the Church, he could have been using the prayer for that. Doeth that which is lawful and right: Worship God on Sundays.”

“Confession’s something I hadn’t thought of,” Lynley admitted. “I keep the worst of my sins to myself, and I can’t imagine anyone else doing otherwise. But what if someone did confess to Sage and then regretted having done so?”

St. James mulled the idea over. “The possibilities are so narrow that I think it unlikely, Tommy. According to what you’re attempting to set up, the regretful penitent would have to be someone who knew Sage was going to Juliet Spence’s that night for dinner. Who knew?” He began to list. “We have Mrs. Spence herself. We have Maggie—”

A door slammed with an echo that bounded across the street. They turned at the sound of hurried footsteps. Colin Shepherd was opening the door to his Land Rover, but he hesitated when he caught sight of them.

“And the constable, of course,” Lynley murmured and moved to intercept Shepherd before he left.

At first, St. James remained where he was at the end of the drive, a few yards away. He saw Lynley pause fractionally at the edge of the cone of light cast by the interior of the Rover. He saw him remove his hands from his pockets, and he noted, with some uneasy confusion, that his right hand was balled. St. James knew his friend well enough to realise that it might be wise to join them.

Lynley was saying in a chillingly pleasant tone, “You’ve apparently had an accident, Constable?”

“No,” Shepherd said.

“Your face?”

St. James reached the edge of the light. The constable’s face was abraded on both the forehead and the cheeks. Shepherd’s fingers touched one of the scratches. “This? Roughhousing with the dog. Up on Cotes Fell. You were there yourself today.”

“I? On Cotes Fell?”

“At the Hall. You can see it from the fell. Anyone up there can see anything, in fact. The Hall, the cottage, the garden. Anything. Do you know that, Inspector? Anyone who chooses can see anything below.”

“I prefer less indirection in my conversations, Constable. Are you trying to tell me something, aside from what happened to your face, of course?”

“You can see anyone’s movements, the comings and goings, whether the cottage is locked, who’s working at the Hall.”

“And, no doubt,” Lynley finished for him, “when the cottage is vacant and where the key to the root cellar is kept. Which is, I take it, the point you’re trying to make, however obliquely. Have you an accusation you’d like to share?”

Shepherd was carrying a torch. He threw it into the front seat of the Rover. “Why don’t you start asking what the summit is used for? Why don’t you ask who goes hiking up the fell?”

“You do yourself, by your own admission. And it’s a rather damning one, wouldn’t you say?” The constable made a sound of disdain and began to climb into the car. Lynley stopped him by noting, “You seem to have eschewed the accident theory you were espousing yesterday. Might I know why? Has something caused you to decide your initial investigation was incomplete?”

“Those are your words, not mine. You’re here at your own desire, no one else’s. I’ll thank you to remember that.” He put his hand on the steering wheel, a prefatory movement to entering the car.

“Did you look into his trip to London?” Lynley asked.

Shepherd hesitated, his expression guarded. “Whose?”

“Mr. Sage went to London in the days before he died. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Polly Yarkin didn’t tell you? Did you interview Polly? She was his housekeeper, after all. She’d know more about the vicar than anyone else. She’d be the one who—”

“I spoke to Polly. But I didn’t interview her. Not offi cially.”

“Then unofficially? And recently, perhaps? Today?”

The questions hung between them. In the silence, Shepherd removed his spectacles. The mist that was falling had sheened them lightly. He rubbed them against the front of his jacket.

“You’ve broken your glasses as well,” Lynley noted. They were, St. James saw, held together across the bridge by a small piece of tape. “That’s quite a bit of rough-housing with the dog. Up on Cotes Fell.”

Shepherd replaced them. He dug in his pocket and brought out a set of keys. He faced Lynley squarely. “Maggie Spence has run off,” he said. “So if there’s nothing else you’d care to remark on, Inspector, Juliet’s expecting me. She’s a bit upset. Evidently you didn’t tell her you’d be going by the school to talk to Maggie. Headmistress thought otherwise, as I understand. And you spoke with the girl alone. Is that how the Yard operates these days?”

Touché, St. James thought. The constable wasn’t about to be intimidated. He had weapons of his own and the nerve to use them.

“Did you look for a connection between them, Mr. Shepherd? Did you ever dig for a less salubrious truth than the one you came up with?”

“My investigation stood firm on its own,” he said. “Clitheroe saw it that way. Coroner saw it that way. Whatever connection I may have failed to see, I’ll put money on its linking someone else to his death, not Juliet Spence. Now if you’ll excuse me…” He swung himself into the car and jammed the key into the ignition. The engine roared. The headlamps flared. He ground the gears as he shifted to reverse.

Lynley leaned into the car for another few words, which St. James couldn’t hear beyond “…this with you…” as he pressed something into Shepherd’s hand. Then the car slid down the driveway to the street, the gears ground another time, and the constable soared off.

Lynley watched him go. St. James watched Lynley. His face was grim. “I’m not enough like my father,” Lynley said. “He would have dragged him bodily into the street, stepped on his face, and probably broken six or eight of his fingers. He did that once, you know, outside a pub in St. Just. He was twenty-two. Someone had made fast and loose with Augusta’s affections and he took care of the situation. ‘No one breaks my sister’s heart,’ he said.”

“That doesn’t solve much.”

“No.” Lynley sighed. “But I’ve always thought it would feel so damn good.”

“Anything atavistic generally does, for the moment. It’s what follows that causes complications.”

They went back down the drive where Lynley picked up the odd bits carton. Perhaps a quarter of a mile down the road, they could see the tail lights of the Land Rover gleaming. Shepherd had pulled to the verge for some reason. His headlamps illuminated the gnarled form of a hedgerow. They watched for a moment to see if he would drive on. When he didn’t, they began their walk back to the inn.

“What next?” St. James asked.

“London,” Lynley said. “It’s the only direction I can think of at the moment, as strong-arming suspects doesn’t appear to be something that’s going to have any appreciable effect.”

“Will you use Havers?”

“Speaking of strong-arming.” Lynley chuckled. “No, I’ll have to see to it myself. Since I’ve sent her to Truro on my credit cards, I don’t imagine she’ll be hell-bent on getting down there and back in the customary twenty-four police hours. I’d say three days… with first-class accommodations all the way, no doubt. So I’ll handle London.”

“What can we do to help?”

“Enjoy your holiday. Take Deborah on a drive. Cumbria, perhaps.”

“The lakes?”

“That’s a thought. But I understand Aspatria’s quite nice in January.”

St. James smiled. “That’s going to be one hell of a day trip. We’ll have to be up by fi ve. You’ll owe me for this. And if there’s nothing to be uncovered about the Spence woman there, you’ll owe me in spades.”

“As always.”

Ahead of them, a black cat slinked out from between two buildings, something grey and limp between its jaws. This the animal deposited on the pavement and began tapping gently in the mindlessly cruel way of all cats, hoping for more tormenting play before a fi nal pounce ended the captive’s fruitless hope for survival. As they approached, the animal froze, hunched over its prize, fur bristling, waiting. St. James glanced down to see a small rat blinking hopelessly from between the cat’s paws. He thought about frightening the cat away. The game of death it played was unnecessarily heartless. But rats, he knew, were breeders of disease. It was best — if not most merciful — to let the cat continue.

“What would you have done had Polly named Shepherd?” St. James asked.

“Arrested the bastard. Turned him over to Clitheroe CID. Had his job.”

“And since she didn’t name him?”

“I’ll have to come at it from another direction.”

“To step on his face?”

“Metaphorically. I’m my father’s own son in wish, if not in deed. It’s nothing I’m proud of. But there it is.”

“So what did you give Shepherd just before he drove off?”

Lynley adjusted the carton beneath his arm. “I gave him something to think about.”

Colin remembered with perfect clarity the final time his father had struck him. He was sixteen years old. Foolish, too hot-headed to think of the consequences of defi ance, he had risen angrily and bodily to his mother’s defence. Shoving his chair back from the dinner table — he could still recall the sound it made as it scraped across the floor and slammed into the wall — he’d shouted, Just leave her alone, Pa! and grabbed his father’s arms to keep him from slapping her face another time.

Pa’s rage always took root in something inconsequential, and because they never knew when to expect his anger to fl are into violence, he was that much more terrifying. Anything could set him off: the condition of a beef joint at dinner, a button missing from his shirt, a request for money to pay the gas bill, a comment about the hour at which he had arrived home the previous night. This particular evening it was a telephone call from Colin’s biology master. Another exam failed, lessons incomplete, was there a problem at home, Mr. Tranville wondered.

His mother had revealed that much over the dinner table, tentatively, as if attempting to telegraph her husband a message she was unwilling to say in front of their child. “Colin’s teacher asked if there were problems, Ken. Here at home. He said counselling might—”

Which was as far as she’d got. Pa said, “Counselling? Did I hear you right? Counselling?” in a tone that should have told her that she’d have been wiser to eat quietly and keep the telephone call to herself.

But instead, she said, “He can’t study, Ken, if things are in chaos. You see that, don’t you?” in a voice that pleaded for reason but only succeeded in betraying her fear.

Pa thrived on fear. He loved to feed twigs of intimidation into its fire. He set down his knife first, then his fork. He pushed back his chair from the table. He said, “Tell me about all this chaos, Clare.” When she read his intentions and said she supposed it was nothing, really, his father said, “No. Tell me. I want to hear.” When she didn’t cooperate, he got up. He said, “Answer me, Clare,” and when she said, “Nothing. Do eat your meal, Ken,” he was on her.

He’d only managed to strike her three times — one hand twisted in her hair and the other smacking harder each time she cried out — when Colin grabbed him. His father’s response was the same as it had been from Colin’s childhood. Women’s faces were meant to be abused with the open hand. On boy children a real man used his fi sts.

The difference this time was that Colin was bigger. And while he was as afraid of his father as he’d always been, he was also angry. Anger and fear washed his body with adrenaline. When Pa struck him, for the first time in his life, Colin struck back. It had taken more than five minutes for his father to beat him into submission. He did it with his fists, his belt, and his feet. But when it was over, the delicate balance of power had shifted. And when Colin said, “I’ll kill you next time, you fi lthy bastard. Just see if I won’t,” he saw for an instant, reflected on his father’s face, that he too was capable of inspiring fear.

It had been a source of pride to Colin that his father had never struck his mother again, that his mother had filed for divorce a month later, and most of all that they were rid of the bastard because of him. He’d sworn he’d never be like his father. He’d never again struck a living soul. Until Polly.

On the side of the road leading out of Win-slough, Colin sat in the Land Rover and rolled between his palms the piece of material from Polly’s skirt which the inspector had pressed into his hand. All of it had been such a pleasure: feeling the sting of her flesh against his palm, tearing the material so easily from her body, tasting the salty sweat of her terror, hearing her cries, her pleas, and especially her choked sob of pain — no moan of sexual arousal now, Polly, is this what you wanted, is this how you hoped it would happen between us? — and finally accepting the triumph of her numb defeat. He slammed into her, he ploughed her, he mastered her, all the time saying cow bitch sow cunt in his father’s voice.

He’d done it all in a storm of blind rage and desperation, frantic to keep the memory and the truth of Annie at bay.

Colin pressed the piece of material to his closed eyes and tried not to think about either of them, Polly or his wife. With Annie’s dying, he’d crossed every line, violated every code, wandered in the dark, and lost himself entirely, somewhere between the valley of his worst depression and the desert of his blackest despair. He’d spent the years since her death caught between trying to rewrite the history of her torturous illness and trying to recall, reinvent, and resurrect the image of a marriage that was utterly perfect. The resulting lie had been so much easier to face than the reality that when Polly tried to obliterate it forever in the vicarage, Colin struck out in an effort to preserve it as much as in an attempt to hurt her.

He’d always felt he could continue to cope and move forward in life as long as he had the falsehood. It comprised what he called the sweetness of their relationship, the sure knowledge that with Annie he’d had warmth and tenderness, complete understanding, compassion, and love. It also comprised an account of her illness, one filled with the details of her noble suffering, replete with illustrations of his efforts to save her and his eventual calm acceptance of the fact he could not. The falsehood depicted him at her bedside, holding her hand and trying to memorise the colour of her eyes before she closed them forever. The falsehood declared that as life was taken from her in vicious bits and pieces, her optimism never faltered and her spirit stayed whole.

You’ll forget all this, people had said at the funeral. Given time, you’ll remember only the beauty of what you had. And you had two wonderful years with her, Colin. So let time work its magic, and watch what happens. You’ll heal and look back and still have those two years.

It hadn’t happened that way. He hadn’t healed. He’d simply rearranged his recollection of what the end had been like and how they’d got there. In his revised version of their history, Annie had accepted her fate with grace and dignity while he had been unfailing in his support of her. Gone from memory were her descents into bitterness. Excised from existence was his implacable rage. In the place of these was a new reality that masked everything he couldn’t face: how he hated her in moments as much as he loved her, how he despised his marriage vows, how he embraced her death as his only possible escape from a life that he could not bear, and how in the end all they had to share in a marriage that had once been joyful was the fact of her illness and the day-to-day horror of having to cope with it.

Make it different, he had thought, after she had died, make me better than I was. And he had used the past six years to do so, seeking oblivion instead of forgiveness.

He rubbed the gauzy material against his face, feeling it snag on the scratches that Polly’s nails had left. It was stiff in places with Polly’s blood and musty with the scent of her body’s secrets.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Polly.”

He’d been steadfast in his unwillingness to face Polly Yarkin because of what she represented. She knew the facts. She also forgave them. But her knowledge alone made her the single contagion he had to avoid if he was to continue to live with himself. She couldn’t see this fact. She was incapable of grasping the importance of their leading completely separate lives. She saw only her love for him and her longing to make him whole once again. If she’d only been able to understand that they’d shared too much of Annie ever to be able to share each other, she would have learned to accept the limitations he’d imposed upon their relationship after his wife’s death. Accepting these, she would have allowed him to go his own way without her. Ultimately, she would have rejoiced in his love for Juliet. And, thus, Robin Sage would still be alive.

Colin knew what had happened and how she had done it. He understood why. If keeping the knowledge to himself was the only way he could make amends to Polly, he would do that. Scotland Yard would unravel the skein of events in good time once they looked into her access to Cotes Fell. He would not betray her while he himself bore so much responsibility for what she had done.

He drove on. Unlike the previous night, all the lights were on in the cottage when he pulled to a stop in the courtyard of Cotes Hall. Juliet ran out as he opened the car door. She was struggling into her pea jacket. A red-andgreen scarf dangled from her arm like a banner.

“Thank God,” she said. “I thought I’d go mad with the waiting.”

“Sorry.” He got out of the Land Rover. “Those blokes from Scotland Yard stopped me as I was leaving.”

She hesitated. “You? Why?”

“They’d been to the vicarage.”

She buttoned the coat, wrapped the scarf round her neck. She fished gloves from her pocket and began drawing them on. “Yes. Well. I’ve them to thank for this, don’t I?”

“They’ll be off soon, I expect. The inspector’s got the wind up about the vicar going to London the day before he…you know. The day before he died. He’ll no doubt be on the trail of that next. And then on the trail of something else afterwards. That’s how it goes with these types. So he won’t be bothering Maggie again.”

“Oh God.” Juliet was looking at her hands, taking too much time about adjusting the gloves. She was smoothing the leather against each finger in an uneven motion that betrayed her anxiety. “I’ve phoned the police in Clitheroe, but they couldn’t be bothered to take me seriously. She’s thirteen years old, they said, she’s only been gone for three hours, madam, she’ll turn up by nine. Kids always do. But they don’t, Colin. You know it. They don’t always turn up. And not in this case. Maggie won’t. I don’t even know where to begin looking for her. Josie said she ran off from the schoolyard. Nick went after her. I must fi nd her.”

He took her arm. “I’ll find her for you. You’ve got to wait here.”

She twisted from his grasp. “No! You can’t. I need to know…I just…Listen to me. I must be the one. I’ve got to find her. I must do it myself.”

“You need to stay here. She may phone. If she does, you’ll want to be able to fetch her, won’t you?”

“I can’t just wait here.”

“You’ve no choice.”

“And you don’t understand. You’re trying to be kind. I know that. But listen. She isn’t going to phone. The inspector’s been with her. He’s filled her head with all sorts of things…Please. Colin. I’ve got to find her. Help me.”

“I will. I am. I’ll phone the instant I have any news. I’ll stop in Clitheroe and get some men out in cars. We’ll find her. I promise you. Now go back inside.”

“No. Please.”

“It’s the only way, Juliet.” He led her towards the house. He could feel her resistance. He opened the door. “Stay by the phone.”

“He filled her head with lies,” she said. “Colin, where’s she gone? She has no money, no food. She’s got only her school coat to keep her warm. It’s not heavy enough. It’s cold and God knows—”

“She can’t have got far. And remember, she’s with Nick. He’ll watch out for her.”

“But if they hitchhiked…if someone picked them up. My God, they could be in Manchester by now. Or Liverpool.”

He ran his fingers against her temples. Her great dark eyes were tear-fi lled and frightened. “Sssh,” he whispered. “Let the panic go, love. I said I’ll find her and I will. You can trust me on that. You can trust me on anything. Gentle, now. Rest.” He loosened her scarf and unbuttoned her coat. He caressed the line of her jaw with his knuckles. “You make her some dinner and keep it warm on the cooker. She’ll be eating it sooner than you can know. I promise.” He touched her lips and her cheeks. “Promise.”

She swallowed. “Colin.”

“Promise. You can trust me.”

“I know that. You’re so good to us.”

“As I mean to be forever.” He kissed her gently. “Will you be all right now, love?”

“I…Yes. I’ll wait. I won’t leave.” She lifted his hand, pressed it against her lips. Then her forehead creased. She drew him into the light of the entry. “You’ve hurt yourself,” she said. “Colin, what have you done to your face?”

“Nothing that you need to worry about,” he said. “Ever,” and he kissed her again.

When she’d watched him drive off, when the sound of the Rover’s engine faded and was replaced by the night wind creaking in the trees, Juliet let the pea jacket fall from her shoulders and left it in a heap by the front cottage door. She dropped her scarf on top of it. She kept on her gloves.

These she examined. They were made of old leather lined with rabbit fur, the skin feather-smooth with the years she had worn them, a thread unravelling along the inner right wrist. She pressed them against her cheeks. The leather was cool but she could feel nothing of her face’s temperature through the gloves, so it was much like being touched by someone else, like having her face cupped with tenderness, with love, with amusement, or with anything else that hinted remotely at romantic attachment.

That’s what had started all this in the fi rst place: her need for a man. She’d managed to avoid the need for years by keeping herself and her daughter isolated — just Mummy and Maggie taking on the human race in one part of the country or another. She’d diverted both the interior longing and the dull pain of desire by throwing her energies into Maggie, because Maggie was what her life was all about.

Juliet knew she had bought and paid for this night’s anguish in coin she had minted from a part of her make-up that had never failed to give her grief. Wanting a man, hungering to touch the hard fierce angles of his body, longing to lie beneath him — to straddle or to kneel — and to feel that moment’s delight in their bodies’ joining…These were the voids that had started her on this current path to disaster. So it was utterly fitting that physical desire, which she had never been able to eradicate completely no matter how many years she refused to acknowledge it, should be what had brought her to losing Maggie tonight.

There were dozens of if only’s barking in her head, but she fastened on one of them because, although she wanted to do so, she couldn’t lie to herself about its importance. She had to accept her involvement with Colin as the prime mover behind everything that had happened with Maggie.

She’d heard about him from Polly long before she’d ever seen him. And she’d thought herself secure in the belief that since Polly was herself in love with the man, since he was so many years her own junior, since she rarely saw him — indeed, since she rarely saw anyone now that they’d found what she’d come to believe was an ideal location to get on with their lives at last — she stood little chance of involvement or attachment. Even when he came to the cottage that day on his offi cial business and she saw him parked by the lavender on the lane and read the bleak despair on his face and recalled Polly’s story about his wife, even when she felt the ice of her detached composure receive its first rift in the face of his sorrow and for the first time in years she recognised a stranger’s pain, she’d not considered the danger he presented to the weakness in herself that she believed she had mastered.

It was only when he was inside the cottage and she saw him looking round at the frivolous fittings of the kitchen with such ill-disguised yearning that she felt her heart stir. At first, getting ready to pour them each a glass of her homemade wine, she’d looked round herself to try to understand what was moving him. She knew it couldn’t be the superficials — cooker, table, chairs, cupboards — and she wondered at the fact that the rest might be touching him in some way. Could a man be moved by a rack of spices, African violets in the window, jars on the work top, two loaves of bread left to cool, a rack of washed dishes, a tea towel hanging from a drawer to dry? Or was it the fi nger-painted and oft-moved picture affixed with Blu-Tack to the wall above the cooker: two skirt-wearing stick figures — one with breasts that looked like lumps of coal — surrounded by fl owers as tall as themselves and surmounted by the words I love you, Mummy in a fi ve-year-old’s hand. He’d looked at it, looked at her, looked away, and finally didn’t seem to know where to look at all.

Poor man, she had thought. And that had been her downfall. She knew about his wife, she began to speak, and she’d not been able to turn back from that moment. Sometime during their conversation, she’d thought just this once oh God to have a man that way just this once one more time he’s so hurting and if I control it if I’m the one if it’s only his pleasure with no thought of my own can it be such a wrong, and as he asked her about the shotgun and why she had used it and how, she had watched his eyes. She answered, keeping everything brief and to the point. And when he would have left — all information having been gathered, and thank you, madam, for your time — she decided to show him the pistol to keep him from going. She shot it and waited for him to react, to take it from her, to touch her hand as he removed it from her grip, but he wouldn’t, he kept the distance between them, and she realised with a sudden dawning of wonder that he was thinking those very same words just this once oh God just this once.

It wouldn’t be love, she decided, because she was those ugly, gaping ten years older than he, because they didn’t even know each other and had not spoken before this day, because the religion she’d long ago forsaken declared that love didn’t grow from allowing the needs of the flesh to dominate the needs of the soul.

She held on to those thoughts as that fi rst afternoon together wore on, believing herself safe from loving. This would just be for pleasure, she decided, and then it would be forgotten.

She should have recognised the extent of the danger he represented when she looked at the clock on her bedside table and realised that more than four hours had passed and she’d not even thought about Maggie. She should have ended it there — the moment guilt rushed in to replace the sleepy peace that accompanied her orgasms. She should have closed her heart and cut him out of her life with something abrupt and potentially hurtful like you’re almost a decent fuck for a copper. But instead she’d said, “Oh my God,” and he’d known. He’d said, “I’ve been selfish. You’re worried about your daughter. Let me clear out. I’ve kept you far too long. I’ve…” When he stopped speaking, she didn’t look his way, but she felt his hand graze her arm. “I don’t know how to name what I felt,” he said, “or what I feel. Except that being with you like that…it wasn’t enough. It’s not even enough now. I don’t know what that means.”

She should have said drily, “It means you were randy, Constable. We both were. We still are in fact.” But she didn’t. She listened to him dressing and tried to work up something curt and unmistakably final with which to dismiss him. When he sat on the edge of the bed and turned her to him with his face caught somewhere between wonder and fear, she had the opportunity to draw the line. But she didn’t. Instead, she listened to him say,

“Can I love you this quickly, Juliet Spence? Just like that? In an afternoon? Can my life change like that?”

And because she knew more than anything else that life can change irrevocably in the instant one is forced to realise its malicious caprice, she said, “Yes But don’t.”

“What?”

“Love me. Or let your life change.”

He didn’t understand. He couldn’t, really. He thought, perhaps, she was being coy. He said, “No one has control over that,” and when his hand moved slowly down her body and her body rose eagerly to meet it against her will, she knew he was right. He phoned her that night long after midnight, saying, “I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what to call it. I thought if I heard your voice…Because I’ve never felt…But that’s what men say, isn’t it? I’ve never felt like this before so let me get into your knickers and test the feeling out another time or two. And it’s that, I won’t lie, but it goes beyond and I don’t know why.”

She had played the fool in the biggest way because she loved being loved by a man. Even Maggie couldn’t stop her: not with her white-faced knowledge — unspoken when she entered the cottage not five minutes after Colin’s initial departure, with her cat in her arms and her cheeks fresh-scrubbed from where she’d been brushing tears away; not with her silent appraisal of Colin when he came to dinner or took them for hikes with his dog on the moors; not with her shrill pleas not to be left alone when Juliet went for an hour or two to be with Colin in his house. Maggie couldn’t stop her. And she didn’t really need to do so because Juliet knew there was no hope of permanency. She understood from the first that each minute was a memory stored against a future in which he and the love of him had no place. She merely forgot that while she had lived for the moment for so many years — on the edge of a tomorrow that always promised to bring the worst upon them — she’d made sure to create a life for Maggie that appeared normal. So Maggie’s fears of Colin’s permanent intrusion were real. To explain to her that they were also groundless would be to tell her things that would destroy her world. And while Juliet couldn’t bring herself to do that, she couldn’t bring herself to let Colin go either. Another week, she would think, please God just give me another week with him and I’ll end it between us, I promise I will.

So she had bought this evening. How well she knew it.

Like mother, like daughter in the end, Juliet thought. Maggie’s sex with Nick Ware was more than just an adolescent’s way of striking back at her mother; it was more than just a search for a man she could call daddy in the darkest part of her mind; it was the blood in her veins declaring itself at last. Yet Juliet knew that she might have been able to forestall the inevitable had she herself not taken up with Colin and given her daughter an example to follow.

Juliet drew off the leather gloves a fi nger at a time and dropped them onto the pea jacket and scarf that lay heaped on the fl oor. She went not to the kitchen to prepare a dinner that her daughter wouldn’t eat, but to the stairs. She paused at the bottom with one hand on the banister, trying to gather the energy to climb. This stairway was a duplication of so many others over the years: worn carpeting on the flooring, nothing on the walls. She had always thought of pictures on the walls as one more thing to have to remove when they left a cottage, so there never seemed to be a point to hanging any up in the fi rst place. Keep it plain, keep it simple, keep it functional. Following that credo, she had always refused to decorate in a way that might encourage affection for a set of rooms in which they lived. She wanted there to be no sense of loss when they moved on.

Another adventure, she’d called each move, let’s see what’s what in Northumberland. She’d tried to make a game out of running. It was only when she’d stopped running that she’d lost.

She mounted the stairs. A perfect sphere of dread seemed to be growing beneath her heart.

Why did she run, Juliet wondered, what did they tell her, what does she know?

The door to Maggie’s room was partially closed, and she swung it open. Moonlight shone through the branches of the lime tree outside the window and fell in a wavy pattern across the bed. On this Maggie’s cat was curled, head buried deeply between his paws, feigning sleep so that Juliet would take pity and not displace him. Punkin had been the first compromise Juliet had made with Maggie. Please, please c’n I have a kitten, Mummy had been such a simple request to grant. What she had not understood at the time was that seeing the joy of one small wish granted led inexorably to the longing to grant others. They’d been little nothings at fi rst — a dossround with her girlfriends, a trip to Lancaster with Josie and her mum — but they’d led to a budding sense of belonging that Maggie had never experienced before. In the end, they had led to the request to stay. Which, along with everything else, led to Nick, to the vicar, and to this night…

Juliet sat on the edge of the bed and switched on the light. Punkin buried his head deeper in his paws although the tip of his tail twitched once to betray him. Juliet ran her hand over his head and along the mobile curve of his spine. He wasn’t as clean as he ought to be. He spent too much time prowling about the wood. Another six months and he’d no doubt be more feral than tame. Instinct, after all, was instinct.

On the floor next to Maggie’s bed lay her thick scrapbook, its cover worn and cracked and its pages so dog-eared that their edges were crumbling to flakes in places. Juliet picked it up and rested it on her lap. A gift for her sixth birthday, it had Maggie’s Important Events printed in large block letters in her own hand on the first page. Juliet could tell by the feel of the book that most of the pages were full. She’d never looked through it before — it had seemed too like an invasion of Maggie’s small, private world — but she looked through it now, driven not so much by curiosity as by a need to feel her daughter’s presence and to understand.

The first part comprised childhood mementos: a tracing of a large hand with a smaller one traced inside it and the words Mumy and me scrawled below; a fanciful composition about “My Doggie Fred” upon which a teacher had written “And what a lovely pet he must be, Margaret” across the top; a programme for a Christmas music recital at which she had been part of a chorus of children who sang — very badly but ambitiously — the Alleluia Chorus from Handel’s Messiah; a second-place ribbon from a science project on plants; and scores of pictures and postcards of their camping holidays together on the Hebrides, on Holy Island, far from the crowds in the Lake District. Juliet flipped through the pages. She touched her fingertips to the drawing, traced the edge of the ribbon, and studied each picture of her daughter’s face. This was a real history of their lives, a collection that spoke of what she and her daughter had managed to build upon a foundation of sand.

The second part of the scrapbook, however, spoke of the cost of having lived that same history. It comprised a collection of newspaper clippings and magazine articles about automobile racing. Interspersed among these were photographs of men. For the first time, Juliet saw that he died in a car crash, darling had assumed heroic proportions in Maggie’s imagination, and from Juliet’s reticence on the subject had sprung a father whom Maggie could love. Her fathers were the winners at Indianapolis, at Monte Carlo, at Le Mans. They spun out in flames on a track in Italy, but they walked away with their heads held high. They lost wheels, they crashed, they broke open champagne and waved trophies in the air. They all shared the single quality of being alive.

Juliet closed the book and rested her hands on its cover. It was all about protection, she said inside her head to a Maggie who wasn’t there. When you’re a mother, Maggie, the last thing you can bear of all the things that you have to bear anyway is losing your child. You can bear just about anything else and you usually have to at one time or another — losing your possessions, your home, your job, your lover, your husband, even your way of life. But losing a child is what will break you. So you don’t take risks that might lead to the loss because you’re always aware that the one risk you take might be the one that will cause all the horrors in the world to sweep into your life.

You don’t know this yet, darling, because you haven’t experienced that moment when the twisting squeezing crush of your muscles and the urge to expel and to scream at once results in this small mass of humanity that squalls and breathes and comes to rest against your stomach, naked to your nakedness, dependent upon you, blind at that moment, hands instinctively trying to clutch. And once you close those fingers round one of your own…no, not even then…once you look at this life that you’ve created, you know you’ll do anything, suffer anything, to protect it. Mostly for its own sake you protect, of course, because all it is really is living, breathing need. But partly you protect it for your own.

And that is the greatest of my sins, darling Maggie. I reversed the process and I lied in doing it because I couldn’t face the immensity of loss. But I’ll tell the truth now, here, and to you. What I did I did partly for you, my daughter. But what I did all those years ago, I did mostly for myself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I DON’T THINK WE SHOULD stop yet, Nick,” Maggie said as stoutly as she could manage. Her jaw hurt awfully from locking her teeth together to keep them from chattering, and the tips of her fingers were numb despite the fact that she’d kept her hands balled into her pockets for most of the journey. She was tired of walking and muscle-weary from leaping behind hedges, over walls, or into ditches whenever they heard the sound of a car. But it was still relatively early, although it was dark, and she knew that in darkness lay their best hope of escape.

They’d kept off the road whenever possible, heading southwest towards Blackpool. The going was rough on both farmland and moors, but Nick wouldn’t hear of setting foot to pavement until they’d put Clitheroe a good fi ve miles behind them. Even then, he wouldn’t hear of taking the main road to Longridge where, the plan was, they would get a ride in a lorry to Blackpool. Instead, he said, they would stick to the twisty turny back lanes, skirting by farms, through hamlets, and over fields when necessary. The route he was taking made Longridge miles and miles farther away, but it was safer this way and she’d be glad they’d taken it. In Longridge, he said, no one would look at them twice. But until then, they had to keep off the road.

She didn’t have a watch, but she knew it couldn’t be much more than eight or half past. It seemed later, but that was because they were tired, it was cold, and the food Nick had managed to bring back to the car park from the town had long since been consumed. There had been little enough of it in the fi rst place — what could one reasonably be expected to purchase with less than three pounds? — and while they’d divided it evenly between them and talked about making it last until morning, they’d eaten the crisps fi rst, moved on to the apples to quench their thirst, and devoured the small package of biscuits to answer their craving for a sweet. Nick had been smoking steadily since that time to take the edge off his hunger. Maggie had tried to ignore her own, which had been easy enough to do since it was more than convenient to concentrate on the bitter cold instead. Her ears ached with it.

Nick was clambering over a drystone wall when Maggie said again, “It’s too early to stop, Nick. We haven’t gone nearly far enough. Where’re you going, anyway?”

He pointed to three squares of yellow light some distance across the field in which he stood, on the other side of the wall. “Farm,” he said. “They’ll have a barn. We can doss there.”

“In a barn?”

He brushed back his hair. “What’d you think, Mag? We don’t have any money. We can’t exactly get a room somewhere, can we?”

“But I thought…” She hesitated, squinting at the lights. What had she thought? Get away, run off, never again see anyone but Nick, stop thinking, stop wondering, find a place to hide.

He was waiting. He dug inside his jacket and brought out his Marlboros. He shook the pack against his hand. The last cigarette popped into his palm. He began to crumple the pack and Maggie said:

“P’rhaps you ought to save the last one. For later. You know.”

“Nah.” He crushed the pack and dropped it. He lit up as she picked her way up the loose stones and over the wall. She rescued the pack from the weeds and carefully smoothed it, folded it, and put it into her pocket.

“Trail,” she said in explanation. “If they’re looking for us, we don’t want to leave a trail, do we? If they’re looking.”

He nodded. “Right. Come on, then.” He grabbed her hand and headed in the direction of the lights.

“But why’re we stopping now?” she asked once again. “It’s too early, don’t you think?”

He looked at the night sky, at the position of the moon. “Perhaps,” he said and smoked thoughtfully for a moment. “Look. We’ll rest up here a while and doss somewhere else later. Aren’t you feeling clapped out? Don’t you want to have a sit?”

She did. Only she was also feeling that if she sat anywhere, she might not be able to get back up. Her school shoes weren’t the best for walking, and she thought that once her head sent her feet the false message that their evening’s walk was at an end, her feet mightn’t cooperate in setting off again in an hour or so.

“I don’t know…” She shivered.

“And you need to warm up,” he said decisively and began to lead her towards the lights.

The field they walked across was pasture, the ground uneven. It was littered with sheep droppings that looked like shadows against the frost. Maggie stepped into a pile of these, felt her shoe slither among them, and nearly went down. Nick righted her with a “Mag, you got to watch for the muck,” and then he added with a laugh, “Lucky they don’t have cows here.” He clasped her arm and offered her a share of his cigarette. She took it politely, sucked in on it, and blew the smoke through her nose.

“You c’n have the rest,” she said.

He seemed glad to do so. He picked up their pace to cross the pasture but slowed abruptly as they neared the other side. A large fl ock of sheep were huddled together against the pasture’s far wall, like mounds of dirty snow in the darkness. Nick said in a low voice something that seemed to be, “Hey, ah, ishhhh,” as they slowly closed in on the fl ock’s perimeter. He extended his hand before him. As if in response, the animals jostled one another to allow Nick and Maggie passage, but they neither panicked, bleated, nor began to move off.

“You know what to do,” Maggie said and felt a tingle behind her eyes. “Nick, why d’you always know just what to do?”

“It’s only sheep, Mag.”

“But you know. I love that about you, Nick. You know the right thing.”

He looked towards the farmhouse. It stood beyond a paddock and another set of walls. “I know with sheep,” he said.

“Not only sheep,” she said. “Truly.”

He crouched next to the wall, easing a ewe to one side. Maggie crouched next to him. He rolled his cigarette between his fi ngers and after a moment drew a long breath as if to speak. She waited for his words, then said herself, “What?” He shook his head. His hair fell forward across his forehead and cheek and he concentrated solely on fi nishing his cigarette. Maggie clasped his arm and leaned against him. It was pleasant here, with the wool and the breath of the animals to warm them. She could almost think of staying the night in this very spot. She raised her head.

“Stars,” she said. “I always wished I could name them. But all I ever could fi nd was the North Star because it’s brightest. It’s…” She twisted round. “It should be…” She frowned. If Longridge was to the west of Clitheroe, with just the smallest jog to the south, the North Star should be…Where was its bright shining?

“Nick,” she said slowly, “I can’t find the North Star. Are we lost?”

“Lost?”

“I think we’re going in the wrong direction because the North Star isn’t where—”

“We can’t go by the stars, Mag. We have to go by the land.”

“What d’you mean? How d’you know what direction you’re heading in if you go by the land?”

“Because I know. Because I’ve lived here forever. We can’t go climbing up and down fells in the middle of the night which is what we’d be doing if we headed direct west. We have to go round them.”

“But—”

He crushed his cigarette against the sole of his shoe. He stood. “Come on.” He climbed the wall and reached back over to hold her hand as she did the same. He said, “We’ve got to be quiet now. There’ll be dogs.”

They slipped across the paddock in near silence, the only noise coming from their shoe soles crackling against the frost-covered ground. At the last wall, Nick hunched over, raised his head slowly, and examined the area. Maggie watched him from below, hunkered against the wall, gripping her knees.

“Barn’s on the far side of the yard,” he said. “Looks like solid muck, though. It’s going to be messy. Hold on to me tight.”

“Any dogs?”

“I can’t see. But they’ll be about.”

“But Nick, if they bark or chase us, what’ll—”

“Don’t worry. Come on.”

He climbed over. She followed, scraping her knee across the very top stone and feeling the corresponding rip in her tights. She gave a little mewl when she felt the quick heat of abrasion against her skin. But to feel a scratch was baby business at this point. She allowed herself neither a wince nor a hobble as she dropped to the ground. It was thick with bracken along the edge of the wall, but rutted and muck-filled as it gave onto the farmyard itself. Once they left the protective cushion of the bracken, each step they took smick-smacked loudly with suction. Maggie felt her feet sinking into the muck, felt the muck seeping over the sides of her shoes. She shuddered. She was whispering, “Nick, my feet keep getting stuck,” when the dogs appeared.

They announced themselves by yapping first. Then three border collies tore across the farmyard from the out-buildings, barking wildly and baring their teeth. Nick shoved Maggie behind him. The dogs slithered to a stop less than six feet away, snapping, snarling, and ready to spring.

Nick held out his hand.

Maggie whispered, “Nick! No!” and watched the farm-house fearfully, waiting for the door to crash open and the farmer himself to come storming out. He’d be shouting and red in the face and angry. He’d phone the

police. They were trespassing after all.

The dogs began to howl.

“Nick!”

Nick squatted. He said, “Hey-o, come on, you funny blokes. You can’t scare me,” and he whistled to them softly.

It was just like magic. The dogs quieted, stepped forward, sniffed his hand, and within an instant became old friends. Nick petted them in turn, laughing quietly, tugging at their ears. “You won’t hurt us, will you, funny old blokes?” In answer, they wagged their tails and one of them licked Nick’s face. When Nick stood, they surrounded him happily and acted as escort into the yard.

Maggie looked round at the dogs in wonder as she carefully sloshed through the mud. “How’d you do that? Nick!”

He took her hand. “It’s only dogs, Mag.”

The old stone barn was a section of one elongated building, and it stood across the yard from the house. It directly abutted a narrow cottage on whose fi rst floor a curtained window was lit. This had probably been the original farm building, a granary with a cart-shed beneath it. The granary had been converted sometime in the past to house a worker and his family, and its living quarters were gained by means of a stairway that led up to a cracked red door above which a sole bulb was now glowing. Beneath, lay the cart-shed with its single unglazed window and its gaping arch of a door.

Nick looked from the cart-shed to the barn. The latter was enormous, an ancient cow-house that was falling into disuse. Moonlight illumined its sagging roofline, its uneven row of pitching eyes on the upper storey, and its large wooden doors with their gaps and their warping. As the dogs sniffed round their shoes and as Maggie hugged herself against the cold and waited for him to lead her onward, Nick appeared to evaluate the possibilities and finally slogged through a heavier patch of muck towards the cart-shed.

“Aren’t there people up there?” Maggie whispered, pointing to the quarters above it.

“I s’pose. We’ll just have to be real quiet. It’ll be warmer in here. The barn’s too big and it’s facing the wind. Come on.”

He led her beneath the stairway where the arched door gave entrance into the cart-shed. Inside, the light from above the labourer’s front door at the top of the stairs provided a meagre, match-strength illumination through the cart-shed’s single window. The dogs followed them, milling about what was apparently their sleeping quarters, for several chewed-up blankets lay in a corner on the stone fl oor and the dogs went there eventually, where they sniffed, pawed, and sank into the pungent wool.

The cold outside seemed to magnify in the stone walls and floor of the shed. Maggie tried to comfort herself with the thought that it was just like where the baby Jesus was born— except there hadn’t been any dogs there as far as she could recall from her limited knowledge of Christmas stories — but odd squeakings and rustlings from the deep pockets of darkness in the corners of the shed made her uneasy.

She could see that the shed was used for storage. There were big burlap sacks piled along one wall, dirty buckets, tools she couldn’t have named, a bicycle, a wooden rocking chair with its wicker seat missing, and a toilet lying on its side. Against the far wall stood a dusty chest of drawers, and Nick went to this. He shimmied open the top drawer and said, with some excitement in his voice, “Hey, look at this, Mag. We’ve had ourselves some luck.”

She picked her way through the debris on the floor. Out of the drawer he was taking a blanket. And then another. They were both large and fluffy. They seemed perfectly clean. Nick shoved the drawer partially closed. The wood howled. The dogs lifted their heads. Maggie held her breath and listened for a betraying movement in the labourer’s quarters above them. Dimly, she could hear someone talking — a man, then a woman, followed by dramatic music and the sound of gunfi re — but no one came in search of them.

“The telly,” Nick said. “We’re safe.”

He cleared a space on the floor, spread the first blanket down, doubling it up to serve as both cushion against the stones and insulation against the cold, and beckoned her to join him. The second he wrapped round them, saying, “This’ll work for now. Feel warmer, Mag?” and drew her close.

She did feel warmer at once, although she fingered the blanket and smelled the fresh lavender scent of it with a twinge of doubt. She said, “Why do they keep their blankets out here? They’ll get messed up, won’t they? Won’t they get rotten or something?”

“Who cares? It’s our luck and their loss, isn’t it? Here. Lie down. Nice, that, isn’t it? Warmer, Mag?”

The rustlings along the wall seemed louder now that she was at the level of the fl oor. They also seemed accompanied by an occasional squeak. She burrowed closer to Nick and said, “What’s that noise, then?”

“I said. The telly.”

“I mean the other…that…there, did you hear it?”

“Oh, that. Barn rats, I expect.”

She flew up. “Rats! Nick, no! I can’t… please…I’m afraid of…Nick!”

“Shh. They won’t bother you. Come on. Lie down.”

“But rats! If they bite you, you die! And I—”

“We’re bigger than they are. They’re lots more scared. They won’t even come out.”

“But my hair…I read once where they like to collect hair to make up their nests.”

“I’ll keep them away from you.” He urged her down next to him and lay on his side. “Use my arm for a pillow,” he said. “They won’t climb up my arm to get you. Jeez, Mag, you’re shaking. Here. Get close. You’ll be

okay.”

“We won’t stay here long?”

“Just for a rest.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah. Promise. Come on. It’s cold.” He unzipped his bomber jacket and held it open. “Here. Double warmth.”

With a fearful glance in the direction of the deepest pool of darkness where the barn rats skittered among the burlap sacks, she lowered herself onto the blanket, into the confi nes of Nick’s bomber jacket. She felt stiff with both the cold and her fear, uneasy with their proximity to people. The dogs hadn’t roused anyone, that was true, but if the farmer made a final round of the yard prior to going to bed, they’d likely be found.

Nick kissed her head. “Okay?” he said. “It’s just for a while. Just for a rest.”

“Okay.”

She slipped her arms round him and let her body warm from his and from the blanket that covered them. She kept her thoughts away from the rats and instead pretended that they were in their very fi rst flat together, she and Nick. It was their offi cial first night, like a honeymoon. The room was small but the moonlight gleamed against the walls’ pretty rosebud paper. There were prints hanging on them, watercolours of frolicking dogs and cats, and Punkin lay at the foot of the bed.

She moved closer to Nick. She was wearing a beautiful full-length gown of pale pink satin with lace on the straps and along the bodice. Her hair flowed round her, and perfume rose from the hollow of her throat and behind her ears and between her breasts. He was wearing dark blue pyjamas of silk, and she could feel his bones, his muscles, and the strength of him along the length of her body. He would want to do it, of course — he would always want to do it — and she would always want to do it as well. Because it was so close and so nice.

“Mag,” Nick said, “lie still. Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You are.”

“I’m just getting closer. It’s cold. You said—”

“We can’t. Not here. Okay?”

She pressed against him. She could feel It in his trousers, despite his words. It was already hard. She slithered her hand between their bodies.

“Mag!”

“It’s nothing but warmness,” she whispered and rubbed It just the way he’d taught her.

“Mag, I said no!” His answering whisper was fi erce.

“But you like it, don’t you?” She squeezed It, released It.

“Mag! Get off!”

She ran her hand Its length.

“No! Damn! Mag, leave it be!”

She recoiled when he knocked her hand away and felt quick tears come in answer. “I only…” She ached when she breathed. “It was nice, wasn’t it? I wanted to be nice.”

In the dim light, he looked like something was hurting inside him. He said, “It is nice. You’re nice. But that makes me want to and we can’t right now. We can’t. Okay. Here. Lie down.”

“I wanted to be close.”

“We are close, Mag. Come on. Let me hold you.” He urged her back down. “It feels good just like this, lying here, you and me.”

“I only wanted—”

“Shh. It’s okay. It’s nothing.” He opened her coat and slipped his arm round her. “It’s nice just like this,” he whispered against her hair. He moved his hand to her back and began

caressing the length of her spine.

“But I only wanted—”

“Shh. See. It’s just as nice like this, isn’t it? Just holding? Like this?” His fi ngers pressed in long, slow circles, stopping at the small of her back where they remained, a tender pressure that relaxed and relaxed and relaxed her completely. She finally slipped, protected and loved, into sleep.

It was the dogs’ movement that awakened her. They were up, about, and dashing outside at the sound of a vehicle coming into the farmyard. By the time they were barking, she was sitting up, fully awake, aware that she was alone on the blanket. She clutched it to her and whispered, “Nick!” frantically. He materialised from the darkness by the window. The light from above was no longer shining. She had no idea how long she had slept.

“Someone’s here,” he said unnecessarily.

“Police?”

“No.” He glanced back at the window. “I think it’s my dad.”

“Your dad? But how—”

“I don’t know. Come here. Be quiet.”

They gathered up the blankets and crept to one side of the window. The dogs were sending up enough noise to announce the Second Coming and lights were snapping on outside.

“Hey there! Enough!” someone shouted roughly. A few more barks and the dogs were silent. “What is it? Who’s there?”

Footsteps sloshed across the yard. Conversation ensued. Maggie strained to hear it, but the voices were low. A woman said quietly, “Is it Frank?” at a distance and a child’s voice cried, “Mummy, I want to see.”

Maggie pulled the blanket closer round her. She clutched on to Nick. “Where c’n we go? Nick, can we run?”

“Just be quiet. He ought to…Damn.”

“What?”

But she heard it herself:

“You don’t mind if I have a look round, do you?”

“Not at all. Two of them, you said it was?”

“A boy and a girl. They’d be wearing school uniforms. The boy might have had a bomber jacket on.”

“Never saw a hair of anything like that. But go on and have a look. Let me get my boots on and I’ll join you. Need a torch?”

“Got one, thanks.”

Footsteps went in the direction of the barn. Maggie grabbed Nick’s jacket. “Let’s go, Nick. Now! We can run to the wall. We can hide in the pasture. We can—”

“What about the dogs?”

“What?”

“They’ll follow and give us away. Besides, the other bloke said he was going to help in the search.” Nick turned from the window and looked around the shed. “Our best hope is to hide out in here.”

“Hide out? How? Where?”

“Move the sacks. Get behind them.”

“But the rats!”

“No choice. Come on. You’ve got to help.”

The farmer began to tromp across the yard in the direction of Nick’s father as they dropped their blankets and started pulling the sacks away from the wall. They heard Nick’s father call out, “Nothing in the barn,” and the other man say, “Have a go with the shed, here,” and the sound of their approach spurred Maggie into a fury of pulling sacks far enough from the wall to create a burrow of safety. She had retreated within it — Nick had as well — when the light from a torch beamed in through the window.

“Doesn’t look like nothing,” Nick’s father said.

A second light joined the first; the shed became brighter. “The dogs sleep in here. Can’t say as I’d want to join them even if I was on the run.” His torch clicked off. Maggie let out her breath. She heard footsteps in the muck. Then, “Best to have a closer look, though,” and the light reappeared, stronger, and shining from the doorway.

A dog’s whine accompanied the sound of wet boots slapping on the floor of the shed. Nails ticked against the stones and approached the sacks. Maggie said, “No” in despair without making any sound and felt Nick move a step closer.

“Here’s something,” the farmer said. “Someone’s messed with that chest.”

“Those blankets belong there on the fl oor?”

“Can’t say they do.” The light darted round the room, corners to ceiling. It glinted off the discarded toilet and shone on the dust on the rocking chair. It came to rest on the top of the sacking and illuminated the wall above Maggie’s head. “Ah,” the farmer said. “Here we’ve got it. Step out here in the open, youngsters. Step out now or I’ll send the dogs in to help you make up your minds.”

“Nick?” his father said. “That you, lad? Have you got the girl with you? Come out of there. Now.”

Maggie rose first, trembling, blinking into the torchlight, trying to say, “Please don’t be angry with Nick, Mr. Ware. He only wanted to help me,” but beginning to weep instead, thinking, Don’t send me home, I don’t want to go home.

Mr. Ware said, “What in God’s name were you thinking of, Nick? Get out here with you. Jesus Christ, I ought to beat you silly. You know how worried your mum’s been, lad?”

Nick was turning his head, eyes narrowed against the light that his father was shining into his face. “Sorry,” he said.

Mr. Ware harumphed. “Sorry won’t go far to mend your fences with me. You know you’re trespassing here? You know these people could’ve had the police after you? What’re you thinking of? Haven’t you no better sense than that? And what were you planning to do with this girl?”

Nick shifted his weight, silent.

“You’re filthy.” Mr. Ware shone the light up and down. “God almighty, just look at the sight of you. You look like a tramp.”

“No, please,” Maggie cried, rubbing her wet nose against the sleeve of her coat. “It isn’t Nick. It’s me. He was only helping me.”

Mr. Ware harumphed again and clicked off his torch. The farmer did likewise. He’d been standing to one side, holding the light in their direction but otherwise looking out the window. When Mr. Ware said, “Out to the car with both of you, then,” the farmer scooped up the two blankets from the fl oor and followed them out.

The dogs were milling round Mr. Ware’s old Nova, snuffling at the tyres and the ground alike. The exterior lights were shining from the house and in their glow Maggie could see the condition of her clothes for the fi rst time. They were crusted with mud and streaked with dirt. In places the lichen from the walls she’d climbed over had deposited patches of grey-green slime. Her shoes were clotted with muck out of which sprouted bracken and straw. The sight was a stimulus for a new onslaught of tears. What had she been thinking? Where were they supposed to go, looking like this? With no money, no clothing, and no plan to guide them, what had she been thinking?

She clutched Nick’s arm as they slogged to the car. She sobbed, “I’m sorry, Nick. It’s my fault. I’ll tell your mummy. You didn’t mean harm. I’ll explain. I will.”

“Get in the car, the both of you,” Mr. Ware said gruffly. “We’ll do our deciding about who’s at fault later.” He opened the driver’s door and said to the farmer, “It’s Frank Ware. I’m at Skelshaw Farm up Winslough direction. I’m in the book if you discover this lot did any damage to your place.”

The farmer nodded but said nothing. He shuffled his feet in the muck and looked as if he wished they’d be off. He was saying, “Funny blokes, out of the way,” to the dogs when the farmhouse door opened. A child of perhaps six years old stood framed in the light in her nightgown and slippers.

She giggled and waved, calling, “Uncle Frank, ’lo. Won’t you let Nickie stay the night with us please?” Her mother dashed into the doorway and pulled her back, casting a frantic and apologetic look towards the car.

Maggie slowed, then stopped. She turned to Nick. She looked from him to his father to the farmer. She saw the resemblance fi rst— how their hair grew the same although the colour was different; how their noses each had a bump on the bridge; how they held their heads. And then she saw the rest — the dogs, the blankets, the direction they’d been walking, Nick’s insistence that they rest at this particular farm, his form at the window standing and waiting when she had awakened…

Her insides went so calm that at fi rst she thought her heart had stopped beating. Her face was still wet, but her tears disappeared. She stumbled once in the muck, grabbed the Nova’s door handle, and felt Nick take her arm. From somewhere that sounded like a thousand miles away, she heard him say her name. She heard him say, “Please, Mag. Listen. I didn’t know what else…” but then fog filled her head and she didn’t hear the rest. She climbed into the rear seat of the car. Directly in her line of vision a pile of old roof slates lay beneath a tree, and she focussed on them. They were large, much bigger than she’d imagined they would be, and they looked like tombstones. She counted them slowly, one two three, and was up to a dozen when she felt the car dip as Mr. Ware got into it and as Nick climbed in and sat next to her on the rear seat. She could tell he was looking at her, but it didn’t matter. She continued counting — thirteen fourteen fi fteen. Why did Nick’s uncle have so many slates? And why did he keep them under the tree? Sixteen seventeen eighteen.

Nick’s father was unrolling his window. “Ta, Kev,” he said quietly. “Don’t give it a thought, all right?”

The other man came to the car and leaned against it. He spoke to Nick. “Sorry, lad,” he said. “We couldn’t get the lass to go to bed once she heard you were on your way. She’s that fond of you, she is.”

“S’okay,” Nick said.

His uncle slapped his two hands down on the door in farewell, nodded sharply, and stepped back from the car. “Funny blokes,” he called to the dogs. “Away with you.”

The car lurched round in the farmyard, made a slippery turn, and set off towards the road. Mr. Ware turned on the radio. He said kindly, “What d’you fancy, youngsters?” but Maggie shook her head and looked out the side window. Nick said, “Anything, Dad. It doesn’t matter,” and Maggie felt the truth of those words pierce through her calm and drip like cold bits of lead into her stomach. Nick’s hand touched her tentatively. She fl inched.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t know what else to do. We didn’t have any money. We didn’t have any place to go. I couldn’t think what to do to take care of you proper.”

“You said you would,” she said dully. “Last night. You said you would.”

“But I didn’t think it would be…” She saw his hand close round his knee. “Mag, listen. I can’t take care of you proper if I don’t go to school. I want to be a vet. I got to get through school and then we’ll be together. But I got to—”

“You lied.”

“I didn’t!”

“You phoned your dad from Clitheroe when you went to buy the food. You told him where we’d be. Didn’t you?”

He said nothing, which was affirmation enough. The nighttime scenery slipped by the window. Stone walls gave way to the bony frames of hedges. Farmland gave way to open country. Across the moors, the fells rose like Lancashire’s black guardians against the sky.

Mr. Ware had turned the car’s heater on along with the radio, but Maggie had never felt so cold. She felt colder than she had when they were walking in the fields, colder than she had on the floor of the cart-shed. She felt colder than she had on the previous night in Josie’s lair, with her clothes half off and Nick inside her and the meaningless promises he’d made creating fi re between them.

The end was where the beginning had been, with her mother. When Mr. Ware pulled into the courtyard of Cotes Hall, the front door opened and Juliet Spence came out. Maggie heard Nick whisper urgently, “Mag! Wait!” but she pushed the car door open. Her head felt so heavy that she couldn’t lift it. Nor could she walk.

She heard Mummy approach, her good boots clicking against the cobbles. She waited. For what, she didn’t know. The anger, the lecture, the punishment: it didn’t really matter. Whatever it was, it couldn’t touch her. Nothing would ever touch her now.

Juliet said in a curiously hushed voice, “Maggie?”

Mr. Ware explained. Maggie heard phrases like “took her to his uncle’s…bit of a walk… hungry, I’d guess…tired as the dickens…. Kids. Don’t know what to make of them sometimes…”

Juliet cleared her throat, said, “Thank you. I don’t quite know what I would have done if…Thank you, Frank.”

“I don’t think they meant real harm,” Mr. Ware said.

“No,” Juliet said. “No. I’m sure they didn’t.”

The car reversed, turned, and headed down the lane. Still, Maggie’s head drooped with its own weight. Three more clicks sounded on the cobbles and she could see the tops of her mother’s boots.

“Maggie.”

She couldn’t look up. She was fi lled with lead. She felt a whispery touch on her hair, and she withdrew from it fearfully, taking a gasping, indrawn breath.

“What is it?” Her mother sounded puzzled. More than puzzled, she sounded afraid.

Maggie couldn’t understand how that could be, for the power had shifted once again, and the worst had happened: She was alone with her mother with no escape. Her eyes got blurry, and a sob was building down deep inside her. She fought against letting it out.

Juliet stepped away. “Come inside, Maggie,” she said. “It’s cold. You’re shivering.” She began to walk towards the cottage.

Maggie raised her head. She was fl oating in nowhere. Nick was gone, and Mummy was walking away. There was nothing to grab on to any longer. There was no safe harbour in which she could rest. The sob built and burst. Her mother stopped.

“Talk to me,” Juliet said. Her voice was desperate and uneven sounding. “You’ve got to talk to me. You’ve got to tell me what happened. You’ve got to say why you ran. We can’t go any further with each other until you do, and if you don’t, we’re lost.”

They stood apart, her mother on the doorstep, Maggie in the courtyard. To Maggie, it seemed that they were separated by miles. She wanted to move closer but she didn’t know how. She couldn’t see her mother’s face clearly enough to know if it was safe. She couldn’t tell whether her voice’s quiver meant sorrow or rage.

“Maggie, darling. Please.” And Juliet’s voice broke. “Talk to me. I’m begging you.”

Her mother’s anguish — it seemed so real— tore a little hole in Maggie’s heart. She said on a sob, “Nick promised he would take care of me, Mummy. He said he loved me. He said I was special, he said we were special, but he lied and he had his dad come get us and he didn’t tell me and all the time I thought…” She wept. She wasn’t quite sure what the source of her grief really was any longer. Except that she had nowhere to go and no one to trust. And she needed something, someone, an anchor, a home.

“I’m so sorry, darling.”

What a kindness sounded in those four words. It was easier to continue in their echo.

“He pretended to tame the dogs and to fi nd some blankets and…” The rest of the story came tumbling out. The London policeman, the after-school talk, the whispers and rumbles and gossip. And finally, “So I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

Maggie couldn’t put the rest into words. She stood in the courtyard with the night wind whistling through her filthy clothes, and she couldn’t move forward and she couldn’t go back. Because there was no back, as she knew quite well. And going forward meant devastation.

But apparently, she would not need to go anywhere, for Juliet said, “Oh my God, Maggie,” and seemed to know it all. She said, “How could you ever think… You’re my life. You’re everything I have. You’re—” She leaned against the door-jamb with her fi sts on her eyes and her head raised up to the sky. She began to cry.

It was a horrible sound, like someone was pulling her insides out. It was low and ugly. It caught in her breath. It sounded like dying.

Maggie had never before seen her mother cry. The weeping frightened her. She watched and waited and clutched at her coat because Mummy was the strong one, Mummy stood tall, Mummy was the one who knew what to do. Only now Maggie saw that Mummy was not so very much different from her when it came to hurting. She went to her mother. “Mummy?”

Juliet shook her head. “I can’t make it right. I can’t change things. Not now. I can’t do it. Don’t ask me.” She swung from the doorway and went into the house. Numbly, Maggie followed her into the kitchen and watched her sit at the table with her face in her hands.

Maggie didn’t know what to do, so she put on the kettle and crept round the kitchen assembling tea. By the time she had it ready, Juliet’s tears had stopped but under the harsh overhead light, she looked old and ill. Wrinkles reached out in long zigzags from her eyes. Her skin was blotched with red marks where it wasn’t pasty. Her hair hung limply round her face. She reached for a paper napkin from its metal holder and blew her nose on it. She took another and blotted her face.

The telephone began to ring. Maggie didn’t move. Which way to head was mystery now, and she waited for a sign. Her mother pushed back from the table and picked up the receiver. Her conversation was emotionless and brief. “Yes, she’s here…Frank Ware found them… No…No…I don’t…I don’t think so, Colin… No, not tonight.” Slowly, she replaced the receiver and kept her fingers on it, as if she were gentling an animal’s fears. After a moment in which she did nothing but look at the telephone, in which Maggie did nothing but look at her, she went back to the table and sat once again.

Maggie brought her the tea. “Chamomile,” she said. “Here, Mummy.”

Maggie poured. Some sloshed into the saucer and she reached hastily for a napkin to soak it up. Her mother’s hand closed over her wrist.

“Sit down,” she said.

“Don’t you want—”

“Sit down.”

Maggie sat. Juliet took the teacup out of its saucer and cradled the cup between her palms. She looked into the tea and swirled it slowly round and round. Her hands looked strong, steady, and sure.

Something big was about to happen. Maggie knew. She could feel it in the air and in the silence between them. The kettle was still hissing gently on the cooker, and the cooker itself snapped and popped as it cooled. She heard this as background to the sight of her mother’s head lifting as she made her decision.

“I’m going to tell you about your father,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

POLLY SETTLED INTO THE tub and let the water rise round her. She tried to concentrate on the warm wash of it between her legs and the gush of it across her thighs as she sank, but instead she caught herself in the midst of a cry, and she squeezed her eyes shut. She saw the negative image of her body fading slowly against her eyelids. Tiny pits of red replaced it. Then black swept in. That’s what she wanted, the black. She needed it behind her eyelids, but she wanted it in her mind as well.

She hurt more now than she had this afternoon at the vicarage. She felt as if she’d been stretched on the rack, with her groin ligaments torn from their proper housings. Her pubic and pelvic bones seemed beaten and raw. Her back and her neck were throbbing. But this was a pain that would recede, given time. It was the other pain that she feared would never leave her.

If she saw only the black, she wouldn’t have to see his face any longer: the way his lips curled back, the sight of his teeth and his eyes like slits. If she only saw the black, she wouldn’t have to see him stagger to his feet afterwards, with his chest heaving and the back of one wrist scouring his mouth of the taste of her. She wouldn’t have to watch him lean against the wall while he stuffed himself back into his trousers. She would still have to bear the rest of it, of course. That endless, guttural voice and the knowledge it provided of the fi lth she was to him. The invasion of his tongue. His teeth biting, his hands tearing, and then the last when he scourged her. She would have to live with that. There was no memory pill she could take to wipe it away, no matter how much she liked to hope there might be.

The worst of it was that she knew she deserved what Colin had done to her. Her life was governed, after all, by the laws of the Craft and she had violated the most important:

Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfi l: An it harm none, do what ye will.

All those years ago, she had convinced herself that she cast the magic circle for Annie’s own good. But all the while in her most secret heart, she had thought — and hoped — that Annie would die and that her passing would bring Colin closer to herself in a grief he would want to share with someone who had known his wife. And this, she had believed, would lead them to loving each other and lead him to an eventual forgetting. Towards this end — which she called noble, unselfish, and right — she began to cast the circle and perform the Rite of Venus. It was no matter that she had not changed to this Rite until nearly a year after Annie’s death. The Goddess was not and had never been a fool. She always read the soul of the petitioner.The Goddess heard the chant:

God and Goddess up above

Bring me Colin in full love

and She remembered how three months before Annie Shepherd’s death, her friend Polly Yarkin — with sublime powers that came only from being a child conceived of a witch, conceived within the magic circle itself when the moon was full in Libra and its light cast a radiance on the altar stone at the top of Cotes Fell — had stopped performing the Rite of the Sun and had switched to Saturn. Burning oak, wearing black, breathing hyacinth incense, Polly had prayed for Annie’s death. She had told herself that death wasn’t to be feared, that the ending of a life could come as a blessing when the suffering endured had been profound. And that is how she had justified the evil, all the time knowing that the Goddess would not let evil go unpunished.

Everything until today had been a prelude to the descent of Her wrath. And She had exacted Her retribution in a form that exactly matched the evil committed, delivering Colin to Polly not in love but in lust and violence, turning the magic three-fold against its maker. How stupid ever ever to think that Juliet Spence — not to mention the knowledge of Colin’s attentions to her — was the punishment that the Goddess intended. The sight of them together and the realisation of what they were to each other had merely acted to lay the foundation for the real mortification to come.

It was over now. Nothing worse could happen, except her own death. And since she was more than half dead now, even that didn’t seem so terrible.

“Polly? Luv-doll? What’re you doin’?”

Polly opened her eyes and rose in the water so quickly that it sloshed over the side of the tub. She watched the bathroom door. Behind it, she could hear her mother’s wheezing. Rita generally climbed the stairs only once a day— to go to bed — and since she never made that climb until after midnight, Polly had assumed she would be safe when she’d fi rst called out that she’d be wanting no dinner as she entered the lodge, hurried up to the bathroom, and shut herself in. She didn’t reply. She reached for a towel. The water sloshed again.

“Polly! You still taking a bath, girl? Didn’t I hear the water running long before dinner?”

“I just started, Rita.”

“Just started? I heard the water running directly you got home. More’n two hours back. So what’s up, luv-doll?” Rita scratched her nails against the door. “Polly?”

“Nothing.” Polly wrapped herself in the towel as she stepped from the tub. She grimaced with the effort of lifting each leg.

“Nothing my eye. Cleanliness is next to whatever, I know, but this is taking it to extremes. Wha’s the story? You fancying yourself up for some toy boy to climb through your window tonight? You meetin’ someone? You want a spray of my Giorgio?”

“I’m just tired. I’m going to bed. You go on back down to the telly, all right?”

“All wrong.” She tapped again. “Wha’s going on? You feeling queer?”

Polly tucked the towel round her to make a wrap. Water ran in rivulets down her legs to the stained green bath rug on the fl oor. “Fine, Rita.” She tried to say it as normally as possible, sifting through her memories of how she and her mother interacted to come up with an appropriate tone of voice. Would she be irritated with Rita by now? Should her voice reflect impatience? She couldn’t remember. She settled for friendly. “You go on back down. Isn’t your police programme on about now? Why don’t you cut yourself a piece of that cake. Cut me one as well and leave it on the work top.” She waited for the answer, the lumber and huff of Rita’s departure, but no sound came from the other side of the door. Polly watched it, warily. She felt chilled where her skin was wet and exposed, but she couldn’t face unwrapping the towel, uncovering her body for drying, and having to look at it again just yet.

“Cake?” Rita said.

“I might have a piece.”

The door knob rattled. Rita’s voice was sharp. “Open up, girl. You a’nt had a piece of cake in fifteen years. Somethin’s wrong and I mean to know what.”

“Rita…”

“We a’nt playing here, luv-doll. And unless you intend to climb out the window, you may as well open this door straightaway ’cause I mean to be here whenever you get round to it.”

“Please. It’s nothing.”

The door knob rattled louder. The door itself thumped. “Am I going to need the help of our local constabulary?” her mother asked. “I c’n phone him, you know. Why is it I expect you’d rather I didn’t?”

Polly reached for the bathrobe on its hook and slid the lock back. She draped the bathrobe round her and was in the act of tying its belt when her mother swung the door open. Hastily, Polly turned away, unfastening her hair from its elastic binding to let it fall forward.

“He was here today, was Mr. C. Shepherd,” Rita said. “He cooked up some story ’bout looking for tools to fix our shed door. What an agreeable bloke, our local policeman. You know anything about that, luv-doll?”

Polly shook her head and fumbled with the knot she’d made in the belt of the robe. She watched her fingers pick at it and waited for her mother to give up the effort at communication and leave. Rita wasn’t going anywhere, however.

“You’d best tell me ’bout it, girl.”

“What?”

“What happened.” She lumbered into the bathroom and seemed to fill it with her size, her scent, and, above all, her power. Polly tried to summon her own as a defence, but her will was weak.

She heard the clank-jangle of bracelets as Rita’s arm raised behind her. She didn’t cringe — she knew her mother had no intention of striking her — but she waited in dread for Rita to respond to what she didn’t feel emanating like a palpable wave from Polly’s body.

“You got no aura,” Rita said. “And you got no heat. Turn round here.”

“Rita, come on. I’m just tired. I’ve been working all day and I want to go to bed.”

“Don’t you mess me about. I said turn. I mean turn.”

Polly made the belt’s knot double. She shook her head to gain further protection from her hair. She pivoted slowly, saying, “I’m only tired. A bit sore. I slipped on the vicarage drive this morning and banged up my face. It hurts. I pulled a muscle or something in my back as well. I thought a hot soak would—”

“Raise your head. Now.”

She could feel the power behind the command. It overcame whatever feeble resistance she might have been able to muster. She lifted her chin, although she kept her eyes lowered. She was inches from the goat’s head that served as pendant on her mother’s necklace. She bent her thoughts to the goat, his head, and how it resembled the naked witch standing in the pentagram position, from which the Rites began and petitions were made.

“Move your hair off your face.”

Polly’s hand did her mother’s bidding.

“Look at me.”

Her eyes did the same.

Rita’s breath whistled between her teeth as she sucked in air, face to face with her daughter. Her pupils expanded rapidly across the surface of her irises, and then retracted to pinpricks of black. She raised her hand and moved her fingers along the welt that scythe-cut its path of angry skin from Polly’s eye to her mouth. She didn’t make actual contact, but Polly could feel the touch of her fi ngers as if she did. They hovered above the eye that was swollen. They tapped their way from her cheek to her mouth. Finally, they slid into her hair, both hands on either side of her head, this time an actual touch that seemed to vibrate through her skull.

“What else is there?” Rita asked.

Polly felt the fingers tighten and catch at her hair, but still she said, “Nothing. I fell. A bit sore,” although her voice sounded faint and lacking in conviction.

“Open that robe.”

“Rita.”

Rita’s hands pressed in, not a punishing grip but one that spread warmth outward, like circles in a pond when a pebble hits its surface. “Open the robe.”

Polly untied the first knot, but found she couldn’t manage the second. Her mother did it, picking at the tie with her long, blue fi ngernails and with hands that were as unsteady as her breath. She pushed the robe from her daughter’s body and took a step back as it fell to the fl oor.

“Great Mother,” she said and reached for the goat’s head pendant. Her chest rapidly rose and fell under her kaftan.

Polly dropped her head.

“It was him,” Rita said. “Wasn’t it him did this to you, Polly. After he was here.”

“Let it be,” Polly said.

“Let it…?” Rita’s voice was incredulous.

“I didn’t do right by him. I wasn’t pure in my wanting. I lied to the Goddess. She heard and She punished. It wasn’t him. He was in Her hands.”

Rita took her arm and swung her towards the mirror above the basin. It was still opaque from steam, and Rita vigorously ran her hand up and down it and wiped her palm on the side of her kaftan. “You look here, Polly,” she said. “You look at this right and you look at it good. Do it. Now.”

Polly saw reflected what she had already seen. The vicious impression of his teeth on her breast, the bruises, the oblong marks of the blows. She closed her eyes but felt tears still trying to seep past her lashes.

“You think this is how She punishes, girl? You think She sends some bastard with rape on his mind?”

“The wish comes back three-fold on the wisher, whatever it is. You know that. I didn’t wish pure. I wanted Colin, but he belonged to Annie.”

“No one belongs to no one!” Rita said. “And She doesn’t use sex — the very power of creation — to punish Her priestess. Your thinking’s gone off. You’re looking at yourself like those sodding Christian saints would have you do: ‘The food of worms…a vile dung-hill. She is the gate by which the devil enters…she is what the sting of the scorpion is…’ That’s how you’re seeing yourself now, isn’t it? Something to be trampled. Something no good.”

“I did wrong by Colin. I cast the circle—”

Rita turned her and grabbed her arms firmly. “And you’ll cast it again, right now, with me. To Mars. Like I said you should’ve been doing all along.”

“I cast to Mars like you said the other night. I gave the ashes to Annie. I put the ring stone with them. But I wasn’t pure.”

“Polly!” Rita shook her. “You didn’t do wrong.”

“I wanted her to die. I can’t take back that wanting.”

“An’ you think she didn’t want to die as well? Her insides were eaten with cancer, luv. It went from her ovaries to her stomach and her liver. You couldn’t have saved her. No one could have saved her.”

“The Goddess could. If I’d asked right. But I didn’t. So She punished.”

“Don’t be simple-minded. This isn’t punishment, what happened to you. This is evil, his evil. And we got to see that he pays for doing it.”

Polly loosened her mother’s hands from her arms. “You can’t use magic against Colin. I won’t let you.”

“Believe me, girl, I don’t mean to use magic,” Rita said. “I mean to use the police.” She lurched round and headed for the door.

“No.” Polly shuddered against the pain as she bent and retrieved the robe from the fl oor. “You’ll be bringing them out on a fool’s errand. I won’t talk to them. I won’t say a word.”

Rita swung back. “You listen to me…”

“No. You listen, Mum. It doesn’t matter, what he did.”

“Doesn’t…That’s like saying you don’t matter.”

Polly tied the robe firmly until it, and her answer, were both in place. “Yes. I know that,” she said.

“So the Social Services connection made Tommy feel even more certain that, whatever her reasons might have been for being rid of the vicar, they’re probably connected to Maggie.”

“And what do you think?”

St. James opened the door of their room and locked it behind them. “I don’t know. Something still niggles.”

Deborah kicked off her shoes and sank onto the bed, drawing her legs up Indian fashion and rubbing her feet. She sighed. “My feet feel twenty years older than I do. I think women’s shoes are designed by sadists. They ought to be shot.”

“The shoes?”

“Those too.” She pulled a tortoiseshell comb from her hair and pitched it onto the chest of drawers. She was wearing a green wool dress the same colour as her eyes, and it billowed round her like a mantle.

“Your feet may feel forty-five,” St. James noted, “but you look fi fteen.”

“It’s the lighting, Simon. Nicely subdued. Get used to it, won’t you? You’ll be seeing it more and more at home in the coming years.”

He chuckled, shedding his jacket. He removed his watch and placed it on the bedside table beneath a lamp whose tasselled shade was going decidedly frizzy on the ends. He joined her on the bed, shifting his bad leg to accommodate his position of half-sit and half-slouch, resting on his elbows. “I’m glad of it,” he said.

“Why? You’ve developed a fancy for subdued lighting?”

“No. But I’ve a definite fancy for the coming years. That we’ll be having them, I mean.”

“You thought we might not?”

“I never know quite what to think with you, frankly.”

She raised her knees and rested her chin on them, pulling her dress close round her legs. Her gaze was on the bathroom door. She said, “Please don’t ever think that, my love. Don’t let who I am — or what I do — make you think we’ll drift apart. I’m diffi cult, I know—”

“You were ever that.”

“—but the together of us is the most important thing in my life.” When he didn’t respond at once, she turned her head to him, still resting it against her knees. “Do you believe that?”

“I want to.”

“But?”

He coiled a lock of her hair round his fi nger and examined how it caught the light. It was, in colour, somewhere on the scale between red, chestnut, and blonde. He couldn’t have named it. “Sometimes the business of life and its general messiness get in the way of together,” he settled on saying. “When that happens, it’s easy to lose sight of where you began, where you were heading, and why you took up with each other in the fi rst place.”

“I’ve never had a single problem with any of that,” she said. “You were always in my life and I always loved you.”

“But?”

She smiled and side-stepped with greater skill than he would have thought she possessed. “The night you first kissed me, you ceased being my childhood hero Mr. St. James and became the man I meant to marry. It was simple for me.”

“It’s never simple, Deborah.”

“I think it can be. If two minds are one.” She kissed him on the forehead, the bridge of his nose, his mouth. He shifted his hand from her hair to the back of her neck, but she hopped off the bed and unzipped her dress, yawning.

“Did we waste our time going to Bradford, then?” She wandered to the clothes cupboard and fished for a hanger.

He watched her, nonplussed, trying to make the connection. “Bradford?”

“Robin Sage. Did you find nothing in the vicarage about his marriage? The woman taken in adultery? And what about St. Joseph?”

He accepted her change in conversation, for the moment. It kept things easier, after all.

“Nothing. But his things were packed away in cartons and there were dozens of those, so there may be something still to be uncovered. Tommy seems to think it unlikely, however. He thinks the truth’s in London. And he thinks it has to do with the relationship between Maggie and her mother.”

Deborah pulled her dress over her head, saying in a voice muffled from within its folds, “Still, I don’t see why you’ve rejected the past. It seemed so compelling — a mysterious wife’s even more mysterious boating accident and all of that. He may have been phoning Social Services for reasons having nothing to do with the girl in the fi rst place.”

“True. But phoning Social Services in London? Why wouldn’t he have phoned a local branch if it was in reference to a local problem?”

“For that matter, even if his phoning had to do with Maggie, why would he phone London about her?”

“He wouldn’t want her mother to know, I expect.”

“He could have phoned Manchester or Liverpool, then. Couldn’t he? And if he didn’t, why didn’t he?”

“That’s the question. One way or the other, we need to find the answer. Suppose he was telephoning with regard to something that Maggie had confi ded in him. If he was invading what Juliet Spence saw as her own patch — the upbringing of her daughter — and if he was invading it in a way that threatened her and if he revealed this invasion to her, perhaps to force her hand in some way, don’t you suppose she may have reacted to that?”

“Yes,” Deborah said. “I tend to think she would have done.” She hung up her dress and straightened it on the hanger. She sounded thoughtful.

“But you’re not convinced?”

“It’s not that.” She reached for her dressing gown, donned it, and rejoined him on the bed. She sat on the edge, studying her feet. “It’s just that…” She frowned. “I mean…I think it more likely that, if Juliet Spence murdered him and if Maggie’s at the bottom of why she murdered him, she did it not because she herself was threatened, but because Maggie was. This is her child, after all. You can’t forget that. You can’t forget what it means.”

St. James felt trepidation send its current of warning through the shorter hairs on the back of his neck. Her final statement, he knew, could lead to treacherous ground between them. He said nothing and waited for her to continue. She did so, dropping her hand to trace a pattern between them on the counterpane.

“Here’s this creature that grew inside her for nine months, listening to her heartbeat, sharing the flow of her blood, kicking and moving in those final months to make her presence known. Maggie came from her body. She sucked milk from her breasts. Within weeks, she knew her face and her voice. I think—” Her fingers paused in their tracing. Her tone tried and ultimately failed to become practical. “A mother would do anything to safeguard her child. I mean…Wouldn’t she do anything to protect the life she created? And don’t you honestly think that’s what this killing’s all about?”

Somewhere below them in the inn, Dora Wragg’s voice called, “Josephine Eugenia! Where’ve you got yourself to? How many times do I have to tell you—” A slamming door cut off the rest of the words.

St. James said, “Not everyone is like you, my love. Not everyone sees a child that way.”

“But if it’s her only child…”

“Born under what circumstances? Having what kind of impact on her life? Trying her patience in what sort of ways? Who knows what’s gone on between them? You can’t look at Mrs. Spence and her daughter through the filter of your own desires. You can’t stand in her shoes.”

Deborah gave a bitter laugh. “I do know that.”

He saw how she had grasped his words and turned them round on herself to wound. “Don’t,” he said. “You can’t know what the future has in mind for you.”

“When the past is its prologue?” She shook her head. He couldn’t see her face, just a sliver of her cheek like a small quarter moon nearly covered by her hair.

“Sometimes the past is prologue to the future. Sometimes it isn’t.”

“Holding on to that sort of belief is a damned easy way to avoid responsibility, Simon.”

“It can be, indeed. But it can also be a way of getting on with things, can’t it? You always look backwards for your auguries, my love. But that doesn’t seem to give you anything but pain.”

“While you don’t look for auguries at all.”

“That’s the worst of it,” he admitted. “I don’t. Not for us, at least.”

“And for others? For Tommy and Helen? For your brothers? For your sister?”

“Not for them either. They’ll go their own way in the end, despite my brooding over what led up to their eventual decisions.”

“Then who?”

He made no reply. The truth of the matter was that her words had jogged a fragment of conversation loose in his memory, giving rise to thought. But he was wary of a change in topic that she might misinterpret as further indication of his detachment from her.

“Tell me.” She was starting to bristle. He could see it in the way her fi ngers spread out then clutched the counterpane. “Something’s on your mind and I don’t much like to be cut out when we’re talking about—”

He squeezed her hand. “It has nothing to do with us, Deborah. Or with this.”

“Then…” She was quick to read him. “Juliet Spence.”

“Your instincts are generally good about people and situations. Mine aren’t. I always look for bald facts. You’re more comfortable

with conjectures.”

“And?”

“It was what you said about the past being prologue to the future.” He loosed his tie and pulled it over his head, throwing it in the direction of the chest of drawers. It fell short and draped against one of the pulls. “Polly Yarkin overheard Sage having a conversation on the telephone the day he died. He was talking about the past.”

“To Mrs. Spence?”

“We think so. He said something about judging…” St. James paused in the act of unbuttoning his shirt. He sought the words as Polly Yarkin had recited them. “‘You can’t judge what happened then.’”

“The boating accident.”

“I think that’s what’s been niggling at me since we left the vicarage. That declaration doesn’t fit in with his interest in Social Services, as far as I can see. But something tells me it needs to fi t somewhere. He’d been praying all that day, Polly said. He wouldn’t take any food.”

“Fasting.”

“Yes. But why?”

“Perhaps he wasn’t hungry.”

St. James considered other options. “Selfdenial, penance.”

“For a sin? What was it?”

He finished with his unbuttoning and sailed the shirt the way of the tie. It too missed its mark and fell to the floor. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m willing to lay whatever odds you’d like that Mrs. Spence does.”