Missing Joseph

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

WAS HE LOOKING FOR HER, Tommy?” Deborah asked. “D’you think he never believed she drowned in the first place? Is that why he moved from parish to parish? Is that why he came to Win-slough?”

St. James stirred another spoonful of sugar into his cup and regarded his wife thoughtfully. She had poured their coffee but added nothing to her own. She was playing the small cream jug between her hands. She didn’t look up as she waited for Lynley’s answer. It was the first time she had spoken.

“I think it was pure chance.” Lynley forked up a portion of his veal. He’d arrived at Crofters Inn as St. James and Deborah were finishing dinner. Although they hadn’t had the dining room to themselves this night, the two other couples who had been enjoying beef Wellington and rack of lamb had moved to the residents’ lounge for their coffee. So between Josie Wragg’s appearances in the dining room to serve one portion of Lynley’s late meal or another, he had told them the story of Sheelah Cotton Yanapapoulis, Katherine Gitterman, and Susanna Sage.

“Consider the facts,” he went on. “She didn’t go to church; she lived in the North while he remained in the South; she kept on the move; she chose isolated locations. When the locations promised to become less isolated, she merely moved on.”

“Except this last time,” St. James noted.

Lynley reached for his wine-glass. “Yes. It’s odd that she didn’t move at the end of her two years here.”

“Perhaps Maggie’s at the root of that,” St. James said. “She’s a teenager now. Her boyfriend’s here and according to what Josie was disclosing last night with her usual passion for detail, that’s a fairly serious relationship. She may have found it difficult — as we all do — to walk away from someone she loves. Perhaps she refused to go.”

“That’s a reasonable possibility. But isolation was still essential to her mother.”

Deborah’s head darted up at that. She began to speak, but she appeared to stop herself.

Lynley was continuing. “It seems odd that Juliet — or Susanna, if you will — didn’t do something to force the issue. After all, their isolation at Cotes Hall was due to end any time. When the renovation was complete, Brendan Power and his wife—” He paused in the act of spearing up a piece of new potato. “Of course,” he said.

“She was the mischief-maker at the Hall,” St. James said.

“She must have been. Once it was occupied, she increased her chances of being seen. Not necessarily by people from the village, who would have seen her occasionally already, but by guests coming to call. And with a new baby, Brendan Power and his wife would have had guests: family, friends, out-of-town visitors.”

“Not to mention the vicar.”

“She wouldn’t have wanted to take the risk.”

“Still, she must have heard the name of the new vicar long before she saw him,” St. James said. “It’s odd that she didn’t invent some sort of crisis and run for it then.”

“Perhaps she tried. But it was autumn when the vicar arrived in Winslough. Maggie was already in school. If indeed her mother had rashly agreed to stay on in the village for Maggie’s happiness, she’d be hard-pressed to come up with an excuse to leave.”

Deborah released her hold on the cream jug and pushed it away. “Tommy,” she said in a voice so carefully controlled that it sounded strung, “I don’t see how you can be sure of all this.” When Lynley looked at her, she went on quickly. “Perhaps she didn’t even need to run. What sort of proof do you actually have that Maggie isn’t her real daughter in the first place? She could be hers, couldn’t she?”

“That’s unlikely, Deborah.”

“But you’re drawing conclusions without having all the facts.”

“What more facts do I need?”

“What if—” Deborah grabbed her spoon and clutched it as if she would use it to strike the table while she made a point. Then she dropped it, saying in a dispirited voice, “I suppose she…I don’t know.”

“My guess is that an X-ray of Maggie’s leg will show it was once broken and that DNA testing will tell the rest of the tale,” Lynley told her.

She got to her feet in response, shoving her hair away from her face. “Yes. Well. Look, I’m…Sorry, but I’m a bit tired. I think I’ll go up. I’ll…No, please stay, Simon. No doubt you and Tommy have lots to discuss. I’ll just say good night.”

She was out of the room before they could respond. Lynley stared after her, saying to St. James, “Did I say something?”

“It’s nothing.” Pensively, St. James watched the door, thinking Deborah might reconsider and return. When she didn’t after a moment, he turned back to his friend. Their reasons for questioning Lynley were disparate, he knew, but Deborah had a point, if not the one she was intending to make. “Why didn’t she brazen it out?” he asked. “Why didn’t she claim Maggie was her own child, the product of an affair?”

“I wondered about that myself initially. It seemed the logical way to go. But Sage had met Maggie first, remember. I imagine he knew how old she was, the same age as their son Joseph would have been. So Juliet had no choice. She knew she couldn’t pull the wool over his eyes. She could only tell him the truth and hope for the best.”

“And did she? Tell him the truth, that is?”

“I expect so. The truth was bad enough, after all: unmarried teenagers with an infant who’d already suffered a fractured skull and a broken leg. I’ve no doubt she saw herself as Maggie’s saviour.”

“She might have been.”

“I know. That’s the hell of it. She might have been. And I imagine Robin Sage knew that as well. He had visited Sheelah Yanapapoulis the adult. He couldn’t have known what she would have been like as a fi fteen-year-old girl in possession of an infant. He could make surmises based upon her other children: how they were turning out, what she said about them and their upbringing, how she acted round them. But he couldn’t know for certain what it would have been like for Maggie had she grown up with Sheelah instead of Juliet Spence for a mother.” Lynley poured himself another glass of wine and smiled bleakly. “I’m only glad I’m not in the position Sage was. His decision was agonising. Mine is only devastating. And even then, it’s not going to be devastating to me.”

“You’re not responsible,” St. James pointed out. “A crime’s been committed.”

“And I serve the cause of justice. I know that, Simon. But, frankly, it gives me no pleasure.” He drank deeply of the wine, poured more, drank again. He placed the glass on the table. The wine shimmered in the light. He said, “I’ve been trying to keep my mind off Maggie all day. I’ve been trying to keep it focussed on the crime. I keep thinking that if I continue to re-examine what Juliet did — all those years ago and this past December as well — I might forget about why she did it. Because the why of it isn’t important. It can’t be.”

“Then let the rest of it go.”

“I’ve been saying it like a litany since half past one. He phoned her and told her what his decision would be. She protested. She said she wouldn’t give her up. She asked him to come to the cottage that night to talk about the situation. She went out to where she knew the water hemlock grew. She dug up a root stock. She fed it to him for dinner. She sent him on his way. She knew he would die. She knew how he would die.”

St. James added the rest. “She took a purgative to make herself look ill. Then she phoned the constable and implicated him.”

“So why in God’s name can I forgive her?” Lynley asked. “She murdered a man. Why do I want to turn a blind eye to the fact that she’s a killer?”

“Because of Maggie. She was a victim once in her life and she’s about to become a victim of a different sort again. At your hands this time.”

Lynley said nothing. In the pub next door, a man’s voice rose momentarily. A babble of conversation ensued.

St. James said, “What’s next?”

Lynley crumpled his linen napkin on the table top. “I have a WPC driving out from Clitheroe.”

“For Maggie.”

“She’ll need to take the child when we take the mother.” He glanced at his pocket watch. “She wasn’t on duty when I stopped by the station. They were tracking her down. She’s to meet me at Shepherd’s.”

“He doesn’t know yet?”

“I’m heading there now.”

“Shall I come with you?” When Lynley glanced back at the door through which Deborah had disappeared, St. James said, “It’s all right.”

“Then I’ll be glad of your company.”

The crowd in the pub was a large one this night. It appeared to consist mostly of farmers who had come by foot, by tractor, and by Land Rover to outshout one another on the subject of the weather. Smoke from their cigarettes and pipes hung heavily on the air as they each recounted the effect that the continuing snowfall was having on their sheep, the roads, their wives, and their work. Because of a respite from noon until six o’clock that evening, they hadn’t yet been snowed in. But flakes had begun to fall again steadily round half past six, and the farmers seemed to be fortifying themselves against a long siege.

They weren’t the only ones. The village teenagers were spread out at the far end of the pub, playing the fruit machine and watching Pam Rice carry on with her boyfriend much as she had done on the night of the St. Jameses’ arrival in Winslough. Brendan Power was sitting near the fire, looking up hopefully each time the door opened. It did this with fair regularity as more villagers arrived, stamping snow from their boots and shaking it from their clothes and their hair.

“We’re in for it, Ben,” a man called over the din.

Pulling the taps behind the bar, Ben Wragg couldn’t have looked more delighted. Custom in winter was hard enough to come by. If the weather turned rough enough, half of these blokes would be looking for beds.

St. James left Lynley long enough to go upstairs for his overcoat and gloves. Deborah was sitting on the bed with all the pillows piled up behind her. Her head was back, her eyes were closed, and her hands were balled in her lap. She was still fully dressed.

She said as he closed the door, “I lied. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

“I knew you weren’t tired, if that’s what you mean.”

“You aren’t angry?”

“Should I be?”

“I’m not a good wife.”

“Because you didn’t want to hear anything more about Juliet Spence? I’m not sure that’s an accurate measurement of your loyalties.” He took his coat from the cupboard and put it on, fishing in the pockets for his gloves.

“You’re going with him, then. To finish things.”

“I’ll rest easier if he doesn’t have to do it alone. I brought him into this, after all.”

“You’re a good friend to him, Simon.”

“As he is to me.”

“You’re a good friend to me as well.”

He went to the bed and sat down on the edge. He closed his hand over the fi st hers made. The fist turned, the fingers opened. He felt something pressed between his palm and hers. It was a stone, he saw, with two rings painted on it in bright pink enamel.

She said, “I found it sitting on Annie Shepherd’s grave. It reminded me of marriage — the rings and how they’re painted. I’ve been carrying it round ever since. I’ve thought it might help me be better for you than I have been.”

“I have no complaints, Deborah.” He closed her fingers round the stone and kissed her forehead.

“You’ve wanted to talk. I haven’t. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve wanted to preach,” he said, “which is different from talking. You can’t be blamed for displaying an unwillingness to listen to my sermons.” He stood, pulling on his gloves. He took his scarf from the chest of drawers. “I don’t know how long this will take.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll wait.” She was placing the stone on the bedside table as he left the room.

He found Lynley waiting for him outside the pub, sheltered within the porch and watching the snow continue to come down in silent undulations lit by the street lamps and by the lights from the terrace houses lining the Clitheroe Road.

He said, “She’d only been married once, Simon. Just to Yanapapoulis.” They headed towards the car park where he’d left the Range Rover he’d hired in Manchester. “I’ve been trying to understand the process Robin Sage went through to make his decision, and it comes down to that. She’s not a bad person, after all, she loves her children, and she’s only been married once, despite her life-style prior to and following that marriage.”

“What happened to him?”

“Yanapapoulis? He gave her Linus — the fourth son — and then evidently took up with a twenty-year-old boy fresh in London from Delphi.”

“Bearing a message from the oracle?”

Lynley smiled. “I dare say that’s better than gifts.”

“Did she tell you about the rest?”

“Obliquely. She said she had a weakness for dark foreign men: Greeks, Italians, Iranians, Pakistanis, Nigerians. She said, ‘They just crook their fingers and I come up pregnant. I can’t think how.’ Only Maggie’s father was English, she said, and look what sort of bloke he was, Mister Inspector person.”

“Do you believe her story? About how Maggie came to have the injuries?”

“What difference does it make what I believe at this point? Robin Sage believed her. That’s why he’s dead.”

They climbed inside the Range Rover, and the engine caught. Lynley reversed it. They inched past a tractor and threaded through the maze of cars to the street.

“He’d decided on that which is moral,” St. James noted. “He threw himself behind the lawful position. What would you have done, Tommy?”

“I’d have checked into the story, just as he did.”

“And when you found out the truth?”

Lynley sighed and turned south down the Clitheroe Road. “God help me, Simon. I just don’t know. I don’t have the kind of moral certitude Sage seems to have garnered. There’s no black or white for me in what happened. Grey stretches forever, despite the law and my professional obligations to it.”

“But if you had to decide.”

“Then I suppose it would all come down to crime and punishment.”

“Juliet Spence’s crime against Sheelah Cotton?”

“No. Sheelah’s crime against the baby: leaving her alone with the father so that he had the opportunity to injure her in the fi rst place, leaving her alone in the car at night only four months later so that someone could take her. I suppose I’d ask myself if the punishment of losing her for thirteen years — or forever — fi t or exceeded the crimes committed against her.”

“And then what?”

Lynley glanced his way. “Then I’d be in Gethsemane, praying for someone else to drink from the cup. Which is, I imagine, what Sage himself did.”

Colin Shepherd had seen her at noon, but she wouldn’t let him into the cottage. Maggie wasn’t well, she told him. A persistent fever, chills, a bad stomach. Running off with Nick Ware and dossing down in a farm building— even if only for part of the night — had taken its toll. She’d had a second bad night, but she was sleeping now. Juliet didn’t want anything to waken her.

She came outside to tell him, shutting the door behind her and shivering in the cold. The first seemed a deliberate effort to keep him out of the cottage. The second seemed designed to send him on his way. If he loved her, her quaking body declared, he wouldn’t want her standing out in the cold having a chat with him.

Her body language was clear enough: arms crossed tightly, fingers digging into the sleeves of her flannel shirt, posture rigid. But he told himself it was merely the cold, and he tried to read beneath her words for an underlying message. He gazed at her face and looked into her eyes. Courtesy and distance were what he read. Her daughter needed her and wasn’t he being rather selfish to expect her either to want or accept a distraction from that need?

He said, “Juliet, when will we have a chance to talk?” but she looked up at Maggie’s bedroom window and answered with “I need to sit with her. She’s been having bad dreams. I’ll phone you later, all right?” And she slipped back into the cottage and shut the door soundlessly. He heard the key turning in its lock.

He wanted to shout, “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? I’ve my own key. I can still get in. I can make you talk. I can make you listen.” But instead he stared long and hard at the door, counting its bolts, waiting for his heart to stop pounding so angrily.

He’d gone back to work, making his rounds, seeing to three cars that had misjudged the icy roads, herding fi ve sheep back over a disintegrating wall near Skelshaw Farm, replacing its stones, rounding up a rogue dog that had finally been cornered in a barn just outside the village. It was routine business, nothing to occupy his mind. And as the hours passed, he found himself more and more needing something to keep his thoughts in order.

Later had come, and she did not phone. He moved about his house restlessly as he waited. He looked out the window at the snow that lay unblemished in the graveyard of St. John the Baptist Church and, beyond it, upon the pasture land and the slopes of Cotes Fell. He built a fire and let Leo bask in front of it as day drew towards evening. He cleaned three of his shotguns. He made a cup of tea, added whisky to it, forgot about drinking it. He picked the phone up twice to make certain it was still in working order. The snow, after all, could have downed some lines. But he listened to the dialling tone’s heartless buzz telling him something was very wrong.

He tried not to believe it. She was concerned about Maggie, he told himself. She was rightfully concerned. It was no more than that.

At four o’clock he could stand the waiting no longer, so he did the phoning. Her line was engaged, and engaged at a quarter past, and engaged at half past, and every quarter hour after that until half past five when he understood that she had taken the phone off the hook so that its ringing would not disturb her daughter.

He willed her to phone from half past fi ve to six. After six, he began to pace. He went over every brief conversation they’d had in the two days since Maggie had returned from her short-lived experience of running away. He heard Juliet’s tone as she had sounded on the phone — resigned, somehow, to something he did not want to understand — and he felt a growing desperation.

When the phone rang at eight, he leapt to answer it, hearing a terse voice ask:

“Where the hell have you been all day, boy-o?”

Colin felt his teeth set and made an effort to relax. “I’ve been working, Pa. That’s what I usually do.”

“Don’t get a mouth with me. He’s asked for a wopsie, and she’s on her way. Do you know that, boy-o? Are you up on the news?”

The telephone was on a lengthy cord. Colin cradled the receiver against his ear and walked to the kitchen window. He could see the light from the vicarage porch, but everything else was shape and shadow, curtained off by the snow that was falling as if disgorged in an explosion from the clouds.

“Who’s asked for a wopsie? What’re you talking about?”

“That blighter from the Yard.”

Colin turned from the window. He looked at the clock. The cat’s eyes moved rhythmically, its tail ticked and tocked. He said, “How do you know?”

“Some of us maintain our ties, boy-o. Some of us have mates that’re loyal to the death. Some of us do favours so that when we need one, we can call it in. I’ve been telling you that from day one, haven’t I? But you don’t want to learn. You’ve been so bloody stupid, so fl aming sure…”

Colin heard a glass clink against the receiver at his father’s end. He heard the rattle of ice. “What is it?” he asked. “You having gin or whisky tonight?”

The glass crashed against something: the wall, a piece of furniture, the cooker, the sink. “God damn you ignorant piece of fi lth. I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Bugger that for a lark. You’re in so deep you can’t smell the shit. That ponce was locked up with Hawkins, boy-o, for nearly an hour. He called in forensic and the DC who came up there when you first found the body. I don’t know what he told them, but the end result was that they phoned for a wopsie and whatever that bloke from the Yard has up his sleeve to do next, it’s with Clitheroe’s blessing. You got that, boy-o? And Hawkins didn’t phone and put you in the picture, did he? Did he?”

Colin didn’t reply. He saw that he’d left a pot on the AGA at lunchtime. Luckily, it had held only salted water which had long since boiled away. The bottom of the pot, however, was crusted with sediment.

“What d’you think that means?” his father was demanding. “Can you put it together or do I have to spell it out?”

Colin forced himself to sound indifferent. “Bringing in a wopsie’s fine with me, Pa. You’re in a state over nothing.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I missed some things. The case needs to be re-opened.”

“You damn fool! Don’t you know what it means to botch a murder investigation?”

Colin could picture the veins in his father’s arms standing out. He said, “I’m not making history. This won’t be the first time a case has been re-opened.”

“Simpleton. Ass,” his father hissed. “You gave evidence for her. You took the oath. You’ve been playing in her knickers. No one’s likely to forget that when it comes time to—”

“I’ve some new information, and it’s nothing to do with Juliet. I’m ready to hand it over to that bloke from the Yard. It’s just as well he’s going to have a female PC with him because he’ll be wanting her.”

“What’re you saying?”

“That I’ve found the killer.”

Silence. In it, he could hear the fi re crackling in the sitting room. Leo was chewing industriously on a ham bone. He had it locked in his paws against the floor, and the sound resembled someone planing wood.

“You’re sure.” His father’s voice was wary. “You’ve evidence?”

“Yes.”

“Because if you cock this up any further, you’re done for, boy-o. And when that happens—”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“—I don’t want you crying to me for help. I’m through covering your arse with HuttonPreston’s CC. You got that?”

“I’ve got it, Pa. Thanks for having confi dence.”

“Don’t you give me your bloody—”

Colin hung up the phone. It began ringing again within ten seconds. He let it ring. It jangled for a full three minutes while he watched it and pictured his father at the other end. He’d be cursing steadily, he’d be aching to batter someone into pulp. But unless one of his pieces of sweet female flesh was there to oblige him, he was going to have to face his furies alone.

When the phone stopped ringing, Colin poured himself a tumbler of whisky, returned to the kitchen, and punched Juliet’s number. The line was still engaged.

He carried his drink to the second bedroom that served as his study and sat down at the desk. From its bottom drawer, he took the slim volume. Alchemical Magic: Herbs, Spices, and Plants. He set it next to a yellow legal pad and began to write his report. It flowed easily enough, line after line, piecing fact and conjecture into an overall pattern of guilt. He had no choice, he told himself. If Lynley was asking for a female PC, he meant to start trouble for Juliet. There was only one way to stop him.

He had just completed his writing, revised it, and typed it when he heard the car doors slam. Leo began to bark. He got up from the desk and went to the door before they had a chance to ring the bell. They would fi nd him neither unprepared nor unaware.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” he said to them. He sounded a mixture of sure and expansive, and he felt good about the sound. He swung the door home behind them and led them into the sitting room.

The blond — Lynley — took off his coat, his scarf, and his gloves and brushed the snow from his hair as if he intended to stay for a while. The other — St. James — loosened his scarf and a few buttons of his coat, but the only things he removed were his gloves. These he held and played through his fi ngers while the snowflakes melted into his hair.

“I’ve a WPC coming up from Clitheroe,” Lynley said.

Colin poured them both a whisky and handed the glasses over, uncaring of whether they chose to drink or not. Not was the case. St. James nodded and set his on the side table next to the sofa. Lynley said thank you and placed his on the floor when he sat, unbidden, in one of the armchairs. He beckoned Colin to do likewise. His face was grave.

“Yes, I know she’s on her way,” Colin answered easily. “You’ve got second sight among your other gifts, Inspector. I was twelve hours away from phoning Sergeant Hawkins for one myself.” He handed over the slender book first. “You’ll be wanting this, I expect.”

Lynley took it and turned it over in his hands, putting on his spectacles to read the cover first and then the descriptive copy on the back. He opened the book and ran his glance over the table of contents. Pages were folded down at the corners — the result of Colin’s own perusal of the book — and he read these next. On the floor by the fire, Leo returned to gnawing his ham bone. His tail thumped happily.

Lynley fi nally looked up without comment. Colin said, “The confusion and the false starts in the case are my fault. I wasn’t on to Polly at first, but I think this clears things up.” He passed the stapled report to Lynley, who handed the book over to St. James and began to read. He went through the pages. Colin watched him, waiting for a fl icker of emotion, recognition, or dawning acceptance to move his mouth, raise his eyebrows, light his eyes. He said, “Once Juliet took the blame and said it was an accident, that’s what I focussed on. I couldn’t see that anyone had a motive to murder Sage and when Juliet insisted that no one could have had access to the root cellar without her knowledge, I believed her. I didn’t realise then that he was never the target in the fi rst place. I was worried about her, about the inquest. I wasn’t seeing things clearly. I should have realised earlier that this murder had nothing to do with the vicar at all. He was the victim by mistake.”

Lynley had two pages left to read, but he closed the report and removed his spectacles. He replaced them in his jacket pocket and handed the report to Colin. When Colin’s fi ngers were on it, he said, “You should have realised earlier…An interesting choice of words. Would this be before or after you assaulted her, Constable? And why was that, by the way. To get a confession? Or merely for pleasure?”

The paper felt weightless beneath his fi ngers. Colin saw that it had slipped to the fl oor. He picked it up, saying, “We’re here to talk about a murder. If Polly’s turning the facts so that I’m under suspicion, that should tell you something about her, shouldn’t it?”

“What tells me something is that she hasn’t said a word. About being assaulted. About you. About Juliet Spence. She doesn’t act much like a woman who’s trying to hide her culpability.”

“Why should she? The person she was after is still alive. She can tot the other up as a simple mistake.”

“With a motive of thwarted love, I take it. You must think a great deal of yourself, Mr. Shepherd.”

Colin felt his features hardening. He said, “I suggest you listen to the facts.”

“No. You listen. And you hear me well because when I’m done you’ll resign from policework and thank God that’s all your superiors expect from you.”

And then the inspector began to talk. He listed names that had no meaning to Colin: Susanna Sage and Joseph, Sheila Cotton and Tracey, Gladys Spence, Kate Gitterman. He talked about cot death, a long-ago suicide, and an empty grave in a family plot. He sketched the vicar’s route through London, and he laid out the story that Robin Sage — and he him-self — had pieced together. In the end he unfolded a poor copy of a newspaper article and said, “Look at the picture, Mr. Shepherd,” but Colin kept his eyes where he’d placed them the moment the man had started speaking: on the gun cabinet and the shotguns he’d cleaned. They were primed and ready and he wanted to use them.

He heard Lynley say, “St. James,” and then his companion began to speak. Colin thought, No. I won’t and I can’t, and he conjured up her face to hold the truth at bay. Occasional words and phrases pierced through: most poisonous plant in the western hemisphere…root stock…would have known…oily juice upon cutting an indication of…couldn’t possibly have ingested…

He said in a voice that came from so far within him he couldn’t quite hear it himself, “She was sick. She’d eaten it. I was there.”

“I’m afraid that’s not the case. She’d taken a purgative.”

“The fever. She was burning. Burning.”

“I expect she’d taken something to elevate her temperature as well. Cayenne, probably. That would have done it.”

He felt cleaved in half.

“Look at the picture, Mr. Shepherd,” Lynley said.

“Polly wanted to kill her. She wanted to clear the way.”

“Polly Yarkin had nothing to do with any of this,” Lynley said. “You were a form of alibi. At the inquest, you’d be the one to testify to Juliet’s illness the night Robin Sage died. She used you, Constable. She murdered her husband. Look at the picture.”

Did it look like her? Was that her face? Were those her eyes? It was more than ten years old, the copy was bad, it was dark, it was blurry.

“This doesn’t prove a thing. It’s not even clear.”

But the other two men were relentless. A simple confrontation between Kate Gitterman and her sister would tell the tale of identifi cation. And if it didn’t, the body of Joseph Sage could be exhumed and genetic testing could be done upon it to match him to the woman who called herself Juliet Spence. Because if she was indeed Juliet Spence, why would she refuse to be tested, to have Maggie tested, to produce the documents attendant to Maggie’s birth, to do anything possible to clear her name?

He was left with nothing. Nothing to say, no argument to propose, and nothing to reveal. He got to his feet and carried the copied photograph and its accompanying article to the fireplace. He threw them in and watched the fl ames take them, curling the paper at the edges first, then lapping eagerly, then consuming entirely.

Leo watched him, looking up from his bone, whining low in his throat. God, to have everything simple, like a dog. Food and shelter. Warmth against the cold. Loyalty and love that never wavered.

He said, “I’m ready, then.”

Lynley said, “We won’t be needing you, Constable.”

Colin looked up to protest even as he knew he had no right. The doorbell rang.

The dog barked, quieted. Colin said bitterly, “Would you like to answer that yourself, then?” to Lynley. “It’ll be your wopsie.”

It was. But it was more. The female PC had come in uniform, bundled against the cold, her spectacles flecked with moisture. She said, “PC Garrity. Clitheroe CID. Sergeant Hawkins’s already put me in the picture,” while behind her on the porch listened a man in heavy tweeds and boots with a cap pulled low on his head: Frank Ware, Nick’s father. Both of them were backlit by the headlamps of one of their two vehicles which blazed a blinding white light into the steady fall of the snow.

Colin looked at Frank Ware. Ware looked uneasily from the PC to Colin. He stomped the snow off his boots and pulled at his nose. He said, “Sorry to disturb. But there’s a car gone into a ditch out next the reservoir, Colin. I thought I best stop by and tell you. It looks to me like Juliet’s Opel.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

THERE WAS NO CHOICE BUT to take Shepherd with them. He’d grown up in the area. He knew the lay of the land. Lynley wasn’t willing to give him the freedom of his own vehicle, however. He directed him to the front seat of the hired Range Rover, and with Constable Garrity and St. James following in the other, they set out for the reservoir.

The snow flew into the windscreen in constant banners of white, dazzling in the headlamps and blown by the wind. Other vehicles had beaten it down into ruts on the road, but ice ridged the bottom of these and made the going perilous. Even their Range Rover’s four-wheel drive was not suffi cient to negotiate the worst of the curves and acclivities. They slipped and slid, moving at a crawl.

They eased past Winslough’s monument to World War I, the soldier’s bowed head and his rifle now glittering white. They passed the common where the snow blew in a spectral whirlwind that dusted the trees. They crossed the bridge that arched over a tumbling beck. Visibility worsened as the windscreen wipers began to leave a curved trail of ice when they moved on the glass.

“Blast,” Lynley muttered. He made an adjustment to the defroster. It was ineffectual, since the problem was external.

Next to him, Shepherd said nothing beyond giving two-word directions whenever they approached what went for an intersection this deep in the country. Lynley glanced his way when he said, “Left here,” as the head-lamps illuminated a sign for Fork Reservoir. He thought about taking a few minutes’ pleasure from mixing obloquy with castigation — God knew that Shepherd was getting off far too lightly with a request for resignation from his superiors and not a full public hearing — but the blank mask that was the other man’s face dried up the well-spring of Lynley’s need to censure. Colin Shepherd would be reliving the events of the last few days for the rest of his life. And ultimately, when he closed his eyes, Lynley could only hope that it would be Polly Yarkin’s face that haunted him most.

Behind them, Constable Garrity drove her Rover aggressively. Even with the wind blowing and the windows rolled up, they could hear her grinding her way through the gears. The engine of her vehicle roared and complained, but she never dropped more than six yards behind them.

Once they left the outskirts of the village, there were no lights other than those from their vehicles and those that shone from the occasional farmhouse. It was like driving blind, for the falling snow reflected their head-lamps, creating a permeable, milky wall that was ever shifting, ever changing, ever blowing their way.

“She knew you’d gone to London,” Shepherd finally said. “I told her. Put that into the account if you’d like.”

“You just pray we can find her, Constable.” Lynley changed down gears as they rounded a curve. The tyres slid, spun helplessly, then caught again. Behind them, Constable Garrity sounded her horn in congratulations. They lumbered on.

Some four miles from the village, the entrance to Fork Reservoir loomed to their left, offset by a stand of pines. Their branches hung heavily with a weight of wet snow caught in the web of the trees’ stubby needles. The pines lined the road for perhaps a quarter of a mile. Opposite them, a hedge gave way to the open moor.

“There,” Shepherd said as they came to the end of the trees.

Lynley saw it as Shepherd spoke: the shape of a car, its windows along with its roof, bonnet, and boot hidden beneath a crust of snow. The car teetered at a drunken angle just at the point where the road sloped upward. It sat on the verge neither coming nor going, but rather diagonally with its chassis oddly balanced on the ground.

They parked. Shepherd offered his torch. Constable Garrity joined them and beamed hers on the car. Its rear wheels had spun themselves a grave in the snow. They lay deeply imbedded in the side of the ditch.

“My nitwit sister tried this once,” Constable Garrity said, flinging her hand in the upward direction the road was taking. “Tried to make it up a slope and slid backwards. Nearly broke her neck, little fool.”

Lynley brushed the snow from the driver’s door and tried the handle. The car was unlocked. He opened the door, shone the light inside, and said, “Mr. Shepherd?”

Shepherd came to join him. St. James opened the other door. Constable Garrity handed him her torch. Shepherd looked inside at the cases and cartons as St. James went through the glove box, which was gaping open.

“Well?” Lynley said. “Is this her car, Constable?”

It was an Opel like a hundred thousand other Opels, but different in that its rear seat was crammed to the roof with belongings. Shepherd pulled one of the cartons towards him, pulled out a pair of gardening gloves.

Lynley saw his hand close over them tightly. It was affi rmation enough.

St. James said, “Nothing much in here,” and snapped the glove box closed. He picked a piece of dirty towelling off the floor and wrapped round his hand a short length of twine that lay with it. Thoughtfully, he looked out across the moors. Lynley followed his gaze.

The landscape was a study in white and black: It was falling snow and night unredeemed by the moon or stars. There was nothing to break the force of the wind here— neither woodland nor fell disrupted the fl ow of the land — so the frigid air cut keenly and quickly, bringing tears to the eyes.

“What’s ahead?” Lynley asked.

No one responded to the question. Constable Garrity was beating her hands against her arms and stomping her feet, saying, “Must be ten below.” St. James was frowning and making moody knots in the twine he’d found. Shepherd was still holding the gardening gloves in his fist, and his fist was at his chest. He was watching St. James. He looked shell-shocked, caught between dazed and mesmerised.

“Constable,” Lynley said sharply. “I asked you what’s ahead.”

Shepherd roused himself. He removed his spectacles and wiped them on his sleeve. It was a useless activity. The moment he replaced them, the lenses were respeckled with snow.

“Moors,” he said. “The closest town’s High Bentham. To the northwest.”

“On this road?”

“No. This cuts over to the A65.”

Leading to Kirby Lonsdale, Lynley thought, and beyond it the M6, the Lakes, and Scotland. Or south to Lancaster, Manchester, Liverpool. The possibilities were endless. Had she been able to make it that far, she would have bought herself time and perhaps an escape route to the Irish Republic. As it was, she played the part of fox in a winter landscape where either the police or the unforgiving weather ultimately was going to run her to ground.

“Is High Bentham closer than the A65?”

“On this road, no.”

“But off the road? Cutting across country? For Christ’s sake, man, they won’t be walking along the verge, waiting for us to come by and give them a lift.”

Shepherd’s eyes darted inside the car and then, with what seemed like an effort, to Constable Garrity, as if he were anxious to make sure they all heard his words and knew, at this point, that he’d made the decision to cooperate fully. He said, “If they’re headed due east across the moors from here, the A65’s about four and a half miles. High Bentham’s double that.”

“They’d be able to get a ride on the A65, sir,” Constable Garrity pointed out. “It might not be closed yet.”

“God knows they’d never be able to make a nine-mile hike northwest in this weather,” St. James said. “But they’ve got the wind directly in their faces going east. There’s no bet they could even make the four and a half.”

Lynley turned from his examination of the darkness. He shone his torchlight beyond the car. Constable Garrity followed his lead and did the same, heading a few yards in the opposite direction. But snow obscured whatever footprints Juliet Spence and Maggie might have left behind them.

Lynley said to Shepherd, “Does she know the land? Has she been out here before? Is there shelter anywhere?” He saw the fl icker cross Shepherd’s face. He said, “Where?”

“It’s too far.”

“Where?”

“Even if she started before dark, before the snowfall got bad—”

“Damn it all, I don’t want your analysis, Shepherd. Where?”

Shepherd’s arm extended more west than north. He said, “Back End Barn. It’s four miles south of High Bentham.”

“And from here?”

“Directly across the moors? Perhaps three miles.”

“Would she know that? Trapped here, in the car? Would she know?”

Lynley saw Shepherd swallow. He saw the betrayal bleed out of his features and settle them into the mask of a man without hope or future. “We hiked it from the reservoir four or five times. She knows,” he said.

“And that’s the only shelter?”

“That’s it.” She’d have to find the track that led from Fork Reservoir to Knottend Well, he told them, a spring that was the midway point between the reservoir and Back End Barn. It was marked well enough when the ground was clear, but a wrong turn in the dark and the snow could take them in circles. Still, if she found the track they could follow it to Raven’s Castle, a five-stone marker that joined the tracks to the Cross of Greet and the East Cat Stones.

“Where’s the barn from there?” Lynley asked.

It was a mile and a half north from the Cross of Greet. It sat not far off the road that ran north and south between High Bentham and Winslough.

“I can’t think why she didn’t head there in the car in the first place,” Shepherd said in conclusion, “instead of coming out this way.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s a train station in High Bentham.”

St. James got out of the car and slammed the door home. “It could be a blind, Tommy.”

“In this weather?” Lynley asked. “I doubt it. She’d have needed an accomplice. Another vehicle.”

“Drive this far, fake an accident, drive on with someone else,” St. James said. “It’s not that far removed from the suicide game, is it?”

“Who’d have helped her?”

All of them looked at Shepherd. He said, “I last saw her at noon. She said Maggie was ill. That was it. As God is my witness, Inspector.”

“You’ve lied before.”

“I’m not lying now. She didn’t expect this to happen.” He flicked his thumb at the car. “She didn’t plan an accident. She didn’t plan anything but getting away. Look at it straight. She knows where you’ve been. If Sage discovered the truth in London, you did as well. She’s running. She’s panicked. She’s not being as careful as she ought to be. The car skids on the ice and puts her in a ditch. She tries to get out. She can’t. She stands here on the road, just where we are. She knows she could try for the A65 across the moors, but it’s snowing and she’s afraid she’ll get lost because she’s never made the hike before and she can’t risk it in the cold. She looks the other direction and remembers the barn. She can’t make it to High Bentham. But she thinks she and Maggie can make it there. She’s been there before. She sets off.”

“All of which could be what we’re intended to think.”

“No! Bloody Christ, it’s what happened, Lynley. It’s the only reason why—” He stopped. He looked over the moors.

“The reason why…?” Lynley prompted.

Shepherd’s answer was nearly taken by the wind. “Why she took the gun with her.”

It was the open glove box, he said. It was the towelling and the twine on the fl oor.

How did he know?

He’d seen the gun. He’d seen her use it. She’d taken it from a drawer in the sitting room one day. She’d unwrapped it. She’d shot at a chimney pot on the Hall. She’d—

“God damn it, Shepherd, you knew she had a pistol? What’s she doing with a pistol? Is she a collector? Is it licenced?”

It wasn’t.

“Jesus Christ!”

He didn’t think…It didn’t seem at the time…He knew he should have taken it from her. But he didn’t. That was all.

Shepherd’s voice was low. He was identifying one more crook to the rules and procedures he’d bent for Juliet Spence from the fi rst, and he knew what the outcome of the revelation would be.

Lynley jammed his hand against the gear shift and cursed again. They shot forward, north. They had virtually no choice in the matter of pursuit. Providing she had found the track from the reservoir, she had the advantage of darkness and snow. If she was still on the moors and they tried to follow her across by torchlight, she could pick them off when they got within range by simply aiming at the torches’ beams. Their only hope was to drive on to High Bentham and then head south down the road that led to Back End Barn. If she hadn’t reached it, they couldn’t risk waiting for her and taking the chance she’d got lost in the storm. They’d have to set across the moors, back towards the reservoir. They’d have to make an attempt to fi nd her and hope for the best.

Lynley tried not to think about Maggie, confused and frightened, travelling in Juliet Spence’s furious wake. He had no way of knowing what time they’d left the cottage. He had no idea of the clothes they wore. When St. James said something about having to take hypothermia into consideration, Lynley shoved his way into the Range Rover and slammed his fist against the horn. Not like that, he thought. God damn it to hell. However it ended, it wouldn’t be like that.

They got no moment’s relief from either the wind or the snow. It was falling so heavily that it seemed as though all of the northwest would be five feet under drifts by the morning. The landscape was changed entirely. The muted greens and russets of winter were moonscape. Heather and gorse were hidden. An endless camoufl age of white upon white made grassland, bracken, and heath a uniform sheet upon which the only markers were the boulders whose tops were powdered but still visible, dark specks like blemishes on the skin around them.

They crawled along, prayed their way up inclines, rode the declivities on brakes and ice. The lights from Constable Garrity’s Range Rover slithered and wavered behind them, but came steadily on.

“They won’t make it,” Shepherd said, gazing out at the flurries that gusted against the car. “No one could. Not in this.”

Lynley changed down to first gear. The engine howled. “She’s desperate,” he said. “That might keep her going.”

“Add the rest, Inspector.” He hunched into his coat. His face looked grey-green in the lights from the dash. “I’m at fault. If they die.” He turned to the window. He fi ddled with his spectacles.

“It won’t be the only thing on your conscience, Mr. Shepherd. But I expect you know that already, don’t you?”

They rounded a curve. A sign pointing west was printed with the single word Keasden. Shepherd said, “Turn here.” They veered to the left into a lane that was reduced to two ruts the width of a car. It ran through a hamlet that appeared to consist of a telephone box, a small church, and half a dozen signs for public footpaths. They experienced an all-too-brief respite from the storm when they entered a small wood just west of the hamlet. There the trees were bearing most of the snow in their branches and keeping it relatively clear of the ground. But another curve took them into open land again, and the car was instantly buffeted by a gust of wind. Lynley felt it in the steering wheel. He felt the tyres slide. He cursed with some reverence and moved his foot off the gas. He restrained himself from hitting the brakes.

The tyres found purchase. The car moved

on.

“If they’re not in the barn?” Shepherd asked.

“Then we’ll look on the moor.”

“How? You don’t know what it’s like. You could die out there, searching. Are you willing to risk it? For a murderess?”

“It’s not only a murderess I’m looking for.”

They approached the road that connected High Bentham and Winslough. The distance from Keasden to this crossroads was a little over three miles. It had taken them nearly half an hour to drive it.

They turned left — heading south in the direction of Winslough. For the next half mile, they saw the occasional lights from other houses, most of them set some considerable distance off the road. The land was walled here, the wall itself fast becoming just another white eruption from which individual stones, like staggered peaks, still managed to break through the snow. Then they were out on the moor again. No wall or fence served as demarcation between the land and the road. Only the tracks left by a heavy tractor showed them the way. In another half hour, they too would probably be obliterated.

The wind was whipping the snow into small, crystal cyclones. They built from the ground as well as from the air. They whirled in front of the car like ghostly dervishes and spun into the darkness again.

“Snow’s letting up,” Shepherd remarked. Lynley gave him a quick glance in which the other man obviously read the incredulity because he went on with, “It’s just the wind now, blowing it about.”

“That’s bad enough.”

But when he studied the view, Lynley could see that Shepherd was not merely acting the role of optimist. The snowfall was indeed diminishing. Much of what the wipers were sweeping away came from what was blowing off the moors, not falling from the sky. It gave little relief other than to make the promise that things weren’t going to get much worse.

They crept along for another ten minutes with the wind whining like a dog outside. When their headlamps struck a gate that acted as a fence across the road, Shepherd spoke again.

“Here. The barn’s to the right. Just beyond the wall.”

Lynley peered through the windscreen. He saw nothing but eddies of snowflakes and darkness.

“Thirty yards from the road,” Shepherd said. He shouldered open his door. “I’ll have a look.”

“You’ll do what I tell you,” Lynley said. “Stay where you are.”

A muscle worked angrily in Shepherd’s jaw. “She’s got a gun, Inspector. If she’s in there in the first place, she isn’t likely to shoot at me. I can talk to her.”

“You can do many things, none of which you’re going to do right now.”

“Have some sense! Let me—”

“You’ve done enough.”

Lynley got out of the car. Constable Garrity and St. James joined him. They directed their torches’ beams across the snow and saw the stone wall rising in a perpendicular line from the road. They ran their beams along it and found the spot where its fl ow was interrupted by the red iron bars of a gate. Beyond the gate stood Back End Barn. It was stone and slate, with a large door to admit vehicles, a smaller door for their drivers. It looked due east, so the wind had blown the snow in large drifts against the barn’s face. The drifts were smooth mounds against the larger barn door. Against the smaller, however, a single drift was partially trampled. A V-shaped dent ran through it. Fresh snow dusted its edges.

“By God, she made it,” St. James said quietly.

“Someone did,” Lynley replied. He looked over his shoulder. Shepherd, he saw, was out of the Range Rover although he was maintaining his position next to its door.

Lynley considered the options. They had the element of surprise but she had the weapon. He had little doubt that she would use it the moment he moved against her. Sending in Shepherd was, in truth, the only reasonable way to proceed. But he wasn’t willing to risk anyone’s life when there was a chance of getting her out without gunfi re. She was, after all, an intelligent woman. She had run in the first place because she knew that the truth was a moment away from discovery. She couldn’t hope to escape with Maggie and go unapprehended a second time in her life. The weather, her history, and every one of the odds were dead set against her.

“Inspector.” Something was pressed into his hand. “You might want to use this.” He looked down, saw that Constable Garrity had given him a loud hailer. “Part of the kit in the car,” she said. She looked embarrassed as she tipped her head towards her vehicle and buttoned the neck of her coat against the wind. “Sergeant Hawkins says a DC’s always got to know what might be needed at a crime scene or in an emergency. Shows initiative, he says. I’ve a rope as well. Life vests. The lot.” Her eyes blinked solemnly behind the wet-streaked lenses of her spectacles.

“You’re a godsend, Constable,” Lynley said. “Thank you.” He raised the loud hailer. He looked at the barn. Not a sliver of light showed round either of the doors. There were no windows. If she was inside, she was sealed off completely.

What to say to her, he wondered. Which cinematic inanity would serve their purpose and bring her out? You’re surrounded, you can’t hope to escape, throw out the gun, come out with your hands up, we know you’re inside…

“Mrs. Spence,” he called. “You have a weapon with you. I don’t. We’re at an impasse.

I’d like to get you and Maggie out of here without harm being done to anyone.”

He waited. There was no sound from the barn. The wind hissed as it slid along three graduated tiers of stone projections that ran the length of the barn’s north side.

“You’re still nearly five miles from High Bentham, Mrs. Spence. Even if you managed to survive the night in the barn, neither you nor Maggie would be in any condition to walk farther in the morning. You must know that.”

Nothing. But he could feel her thinking. If she shot him, she could get to his vehicle, a better vehicle than her own, after all, and be on her way. It would be hours before anyone would notice he was missing, and if she hurt him badly enough, he wouldn’t have the strength to crawl back towards High Bentham and fi nd assistance.

“Don’t make it worse than it already is,” he said. “I know you don’t want to do that to Maggie. She’s cold, she’s frightened, she’s probably hungry. I’d like to get her back to the village now.”

Silence. Her eyes would be quite used to the darkness. If he burst in on her and had the luck to shine the torchlight directly in her face on the first go, even if she pulled the trigger, it wouldn’t be likely that she’d be able to hit him. It might work. If he could find her the instant he crashed through the door…

“Maggie’s never seen anyone shot,” he said. “She doesn’t know what it’s like. She hasn’t seen the blood. Don’t make that part of her memory of this night. Not if you love her.”

He wanted to say more. That he knew her husband and her sister had failed her when she needed them most. That there would have been an end to her mourning the death of her son had she only had someone to help her through it. That he knew she had acted in what she’d believed were Maggie’s interests when she’d snatched her from the car that long-ago night. But he also wanted to say that, in the end, she’d not had the right to determine the fate of a baby belonging to a fi fteen-year-old girl. That while she may have indeed done better by Maggie as a result of taking her, they couldn’t know that for sure. And it was because of that simple not knowing that Robin Sage had decided a cruelty-as-justice had to be done.

He found he wanted to blame what was going to happen this night on the man she had poisoned, on his sententious perspective and his bumbling attempt to set things straight. For in the end, she was his victim as much as he was hers.

“Mrs. Spence,” he said, “you know we’re at the end of it here. Don’t make it worse for Maggie. Please. You know I’ve been to London. I’ve seen your sister. I’ve met Maggie’s mother. I’ve—”

A keening rose suddenly above the wind. Eerie, inhuman, it cut to the heart and then took on substance round a single word: Mummy.

“Mrs. Spence!”

And then the keening again. It sounded high with terror. It locked round the unmistakable tone of a plea. “Mummy! I’m afraid! Mummy! Mummy!”

Lynley shoved the loud hailer into Constable Garrity’s hands. He pushed through the gate. And then he saw it. A shape was moving just to his left, beyond the wall as he himself was now.

“Shepherd!” he shouted.

“Mummy!” Maggie cried.

The constable came rapidly onward through the snow. He charged straight for the barn.

“Shepherd!” Lynley shouted. “God damn it! Stay out!”

“Mummy! Please! I’m afraid! Mummy!”

Shepherd reached the barn door as the gun went off. He was inside when she shot again.

It was long past midnight when St. James finally climbed the stairs to their room. He thought she’d be asleep, but she was waiting for him as she’d said she would be, sitting in bed with the covers drawn up to her chest and an old copy of Elle spread across her lap.

She said, “You found her” when she saw his face and then “Simon, what happened,” when he nodded and said nothing except “We did.”

He was tired to the point of weakness. His dead leg felt like a hundredweight hanging from his hip. He dropped his coat and scarf to the floor, tossed his gloves upon them, and left them where they lay.

“Simon?”

He told her. He began with Colin Shepherd’s attempt to implicate Polly Yarkin. He ended with the gunshots at Back End Barn.

“It was a rat,” he said. “She was shooting at a rat.”

They’d been huddled into a corner when Lynley found them: Juliet Spence, Maggie, and a mangy orange cat called Punkin that the girl had refused to leave behind in the car. When the torchlight fell on them, the cat hissed, spit, and scurried into the darkness, but neither Juliet nor Maggie moved. The girl cowered into the woman’s arms, her face hidden. The woman encircled her as much as possible, perhaps to warm, perhaps to protect.

“We thought they were dead at fi rst,” St. James said, “a murder and a suicide, but there wasn’t any blood.”

Then Juliet spoke as if the others weren’t there, saying, It’s all right, darling. If I haven’t hit him, I’ve frightened him to death. He won’t get you, Maggie. Hush. It’s all right.

“They were filthy,” he said. “Their clothes were soaked. I can’t think they would have lasted the night.”

Deborah extended her hand to him. “Please,” she said.

He sat on the bed. She smoothed her fi ngers beneath his eyes and across his forehead. She brushed back his hair.

There was no fight in her, St. James said, and no intention to run any farther or, it seemed, to use the gun again. She’d dropped it onto the stone floor of the barn, and she was holding Maggie’s head to her shoulder. She began to rock her.

“She’d taken off her coat and thrown it round the girl,” St. James said. “I don’t think she actually knew we were there.”

Shepherd got to her first. He stripped his own heavy jacket off. He wrapped it round her and then flung his arms round them both because Maggie wouldn’t release her hold on her mother’s waist. He said her name, but she didn’t respond other than to say that she’d shot at it, darling, she always hit her mark didn’t she, it was probably dead, there was nothing to fear.

Constable Garrity ran for blankets. She’d brought a Thermos from home and she poured it saying, Poor lambs poor dears, in a fashion that was far more maternal than professional. She tried to get Shepherd to put his jacket back on, but he refused, wrapping himself in a blanket instead and watching everything — his eyes riveted with a kind of dying on Juliet’s face.

When they were on their feet, Maggie began to cry for the cat, calling, Punkin! Mummy, where’s Punkin? He’s run off. It’s snowing and he’ll freeze. He won’t know what to do.

They found the cat behind the door, his fur on end and his ears at the alert. St. James grabbed him. The cat climbed his back in a panic. But he settled well enough when he was returned to the girl.

She said, Punkin kept us warm, didn’t he, Mummy? It was good to bring Punkin like I wanted, wasn’t it? But he’ll be happy to get home.

Juliet put her arm round the girl and pressed her face to the top of her head. She said, You take good care of Punkin, darling.

And then Maggie seemed to realise. She said, No! Mummy, please, I’m afraid. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want them to hurt me. Mummy! Please!

“Tommy made the decision to separate them at once,” St. James said.

Constable Garrity took Maggie — You bring the cat, dear, she said — while Lynley took her mother. He intended to push all the way through to Clitheroe if it took him the rest of the night. He wanted it to be over. He wanted to be clear of it.

“I can’t blame him,” St. James said. “I won’t soon forget the sound of her screaming when she saw he meant to separate them then and there.”

“Mrs. Spence?”

“Maggie. Calling for her mother. We could hear her even after the car drove off.”

“And Mrs. Spence?”

There was nothing from Juliet Spence at first. Without expression or reaction, she’d watched Constable Garrity drive away. She’d stood with her hands in the pockets of Shepherd’s jacket and the wind blowing her hair across her face, and she watched the tail lights of the receding car bob and weave as it lurched across the moor in the direction of Winslough. When they began to follow it, she sat in the rear seat next to Shepherd and never looked away from those lights for a moment.

She said, What else could I do? He said he was going to return her to London.

“And that was the real hell behind the murder,” St. James said.

Deborah looked perplexed. “What real hell? What do you mean?”

St. James got to his feet and walked to the clothes cupboard. He began to undress. “Sage never intended to turn his wife over to the authorities for snatching the baby,” he said. “That last night of his life, he’d brought her enough money to get out of the country. He was perfectly willing to go to prison rather than tell anyone in London where he’d found the girl once he turned her over to Social Services. Of course, the police would have known eventually, but by that time his wife would have been long gone.”

“That can’t be right,” Deborah said. “She must be lying about what happened.”

He turned from the clothes cupboard. He said, “Why? The offer of money only makes the case against her blacker. Why would she lie?”

“Because…” Deborah plucked at the bed-covers as if she would find the answer there. She said deliberately, laying out her facts like cards, “He’d found her. He’d discovered who Maggie was. If he meant to return her to her real mother anyway, why wouldn’t she have taken the money and saved herself from gaol? Why did she kill him? Why didn’t she just run? She knew the game was up.”

St. James unbuttoned his shirt with great care. He examined each button as his fi ngers touched it. He said, “I expect it was because Juliet felt she was Maggie’s real mother all along, my love.”

He looked up then. She was rolling a bit of the sheet between her thumb and forefi nger and watching herself do so. He left her alone.

In the bathroom he took his time about washing his face, brushing his teeth, and running a brush through his hair. He removed his leg brace and let it thump to the fl oor. He kicked it to lie by the wall. It was metal and plastic, strips of Velcro and polyester. It was simple in design but essential in function. When legs didn’t work the way they were supposed to, one strapped on a brace, or took to a wheelchair, or eased along on crutches. But one kept going. That had always been his basic philosophy. He wanted that precept to be Deborah’s as well, but he knew she would have to be the one to choose it.

She’d switched off the lamp next to the bed, but when he came out of the bathroom, the light behind him fell across the room. In the shadows he could see that she was still sitting up in bed, but this time with her head on her knees and her arms round her legs. Her face was hidden.

He flicked off the bathroom light and made his way to the bed, tapping carefully in a darkness that was more complete this night because the skylights were covered with snow. He lowered himself into the covers and lay his crutches soundlessly on the fl oor. He reached out and ran his hand along her back.

“You’re going to get cold,” he said. “Lie down.”

“In a moment.”

He waited. He thought about how much of life comprised that very act, and how waiting always involved either another individual or a force outside oneself. He had mastered the art of waiting long ago. It had been a gift imposed upon him with too much alcohol, oncoming headlamps, and the cormorant scream of skidding tyres. Through sheer necessity, wait-and-see along with give-it-time had become his armorial motto. Sometimes the maxims led him into inaction. Sometimes they allowed him peace of mind.

Deborah stirred beneath his touch. She said, “Of course, you were right the other night. I wanted it for myself. But I also wanted it for you. Perhaps even more. I don’t know.” She turned her head to face him. He couldn’t see her features in the darkness, just the shape of her.

“As retribution?” he asked. He felt her shake her head.

“We were estranged in those days, weren’t we? I loved you but you wouldn’t let yourself love me in return. So I tried to love someone else. And I did, you know. Love him.”

“Yes.”

“Does it hurt you to think about it?”

“I don’t think about it. Do you?”

“Sometimes it creeps up on me. I’m never prepared. All of a sudden, there it is.”

“Then?”

“I feel torn inside. I think how much I’ve hurt you. And I want things to be different.”

“The past?”

“No. The past can’t be changed, can it? It can just be forgiven. It’s the present that concerns me.”

He could tell that she was leading him towards something she had thought carefully through, perhaps that night, perhaps in the days that had preceded it. He wanted to help her say whatever it was she felt needed to be said, but he couldn’t see the direction clearly. He could only sense that she believed the unspoken would hurt him in some undefi n-able way. And while he wasn’t afraid of discussion — indeed, he’d been determined to provoke it ever since they’d left London— he found at the moment that he wanted discussion only if he was able to control its content. That she intended to do so, to an end he couldn’t clearly anticipate, caused him to feel the cold-hot mantle of wariness cloak him. He tried to shed it, couldn’t do so completely.

“You’re everything to me,” she said softly. “That’s what I wanted to be to you. Everything.”

“You are.”

“No.”

“This baby thing, Deborah. Adoption, the whole business of children—” He didn’t complete the sentence because he didn’t know where to go with it any longer.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s it. This baby thing. The whole business of children. Being whole in and of itself. That’s what I wanted for you. That would be my gift.”

He saw the truth then. It was between them the single dried bone of reality that they picked at and worried like two mongrel dogs. He’d grabbed it and chewed it for the years they’d been apart. Deborah had been worrying it ever since. Even now, he saw, when there was no need, she was grappling with it.

He said nothing further. She’d gone this far and he was confident she would say the rest. She was too close now to back away from saying it, and backing away was not, in fact, her style. She’d been doing so for months to protect him, he realised, when he needed no protection, either from her or from this.

“I wanted to make it up to you,” she said.

Say the rest, he thought, it doesn’t hurt me, it won’t hurt you, you can say the rest.

“I wanted to give you something special.”

It’s all right, he thought. It doesn’t change anything.

“Because you’re crippled.”

He pulled her down to him. She resisted at first, but came to him when he said her name. Then the rest of it was spilling out, whispered into his ear. Much of it didn’t make sense, an oddly combined jumble of memories and the experience and understanding of the last few days. He merely held her and listened.

She remembered when they brought him home from his convalescence in Switzerland, she told him. He’d been gone four months, she was thirteen years old, and she remembered that rainy afternoon. How she’d observed it all from the top floor of the house, how her father and his mother had followed him slowly up the stairs, watching as he gripped the banister, their hands flying out to keep him from losing his balance but not touching him, never touching him because they knew without seeing the expression on his face — which she herself could see from the top of the house — that he wasn’t to be touched, not that way, not any longer. And a week later when the two of them were alone — she in the study and this angry stranger called Mr. St. James a floor above in his bedroom from which he had not emerged in days — she heard the crash, the heavy thud of weight and she knew he’d fallen. She’d run up the stairs and stood by his door in her thirteenyear-old’s agony of indecision. Then she’d heard him weeping. She’d heard the sound of him pulling himself along the floor. She’d crept away. She’d left him to face his devils alone because she didn’t know what to do to help.

“I promised myself,” she whispered in the darkness. “I’d do anything for you. To make it better.”

But Juliet Spence had seen no difference between the baby she’d borne and the one she’d stolen, Deborah told him. Each was her child. She was the mother. There was no difference. To her, mothering wasn’t the initial act and the nine months that followed it. But Robin Sage hadn’t seen that, had he? He offered her money to escape, but he should have known she was Maggie’s mother, she wouldn’t leave her child, it didn’t matter what price she had to pay to stay with her, she would pay it, she loved her, she was her mother.

“That’s how it was for her, wasn’t it?” Deborah whispered.

St. James kissed her forehead and settled the blankets more closely round her. “Yes,” he said. “That’s how it was.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

BRENDAN POWER CRUNCHED along the verge, heading into the village. He would have sunk up to his knees in the snow, but someone had been out earlier than he, and a path was already trodden. It was speckled every thirty yards or so with charred tobacco. Whoever it was out for a walk was smoking a pipe that didn’t draw much better than Brendan’s.

He himself wasn’t smoking this morning. He had his pipe with him in case he found himself in the position of needing to do something with his hands, but so far he hadn’t brought it out of its leather pouch, although he could feel the weight of it tapping securely against his hip.

The day after any storm was generally glorious, and Brendan found this one as splendid as the previous night had been frightful. The air was still. The early sun laid down great blazes of crystal incandescence across the land. Frost rimed the tops of the drystone walls. Slate roofs wore a thick coating of snow. As he passed the first terraced house on his way into the village, he saw that someone had remembered the birds. Three sparrows were picking at a handful of toast crumbs outside a doorway, and while they eyed him warily as he passed by, hunger kept them from scattering into the trees.

He wished he’d thought to bring something with him. Toast, a slice of stale bread, an apple. It didn’t matter. Anything edible to offer the birds would have served as a marginally credible excuse for being out in the fi rst place. And he’d be needing an excuse when he returned home. In fact, it might be wise to start concocting one now as he walked.

He hadn’t thought of that earlier. Standing at the dining-room window, looking out beyond the garden to the vast white pasture that was part of the Townley-Young estate, he’d thought only of getting out, of tramping holes in the snow and driving his feet forward into a forever he could bear to live with.

His father-in-law had come to their bedroom at eight o’clock. Brendan had heard his military footsteps in the passage and had slid out of bed, freeing himself of the anchoring heaviness of his wife’s arm. In sleep, she’d thrown it diagonally across him so that her fingers rested in his groin. Under other circumstances he might have found this somnolent implication of intimacy quite erotic. As it was, he lay flaccid and mildly repelled and at the same time grateful that she was asleep. Her fingers wouldn’t be drifting coyly another inch to the left in the expectation of encountering what she deemed appropriate male morning arousal. She wouldn’t be demanding what he couldn’t give, pumping him furiously and waiting — agitated, anxious, then angry — for his body to respond. Tin-voiced accusations wouldn’t follow. Neither would the tearless weeping that screwed up her face and resounded through the corridors. As long as she slept, his body was his own and his spirit was free, so he slipped to the door at the sound of his father-in-law’s approach, and he cracked it open before Townley-Young could knock and awaken her.

His father-in-law was fully dressed, as usual. Brendan had never seen him otherwise. His tweeds, his shirt, his shoes, and his tie all made a careful statement about good breeding that Brendan knew he was supposed to understand and emulate. Everything he wore was just old enough to indicate the appropriate lack of interest in clothing that was inherent to the landed gentry. More than once Brendan had looked at his father-in-law and wondered idly how he managed the feat of maintaining an entire wardrobe that — from shirt to shoes — always looked at least ten years old, even when new.

Townley-Young gave a glance to Brendan’s woollen dressing gown and pursed his lips in silent disapproval at the messy bow Brendan had made when tying the belt. Manly men use square knots to keep their dressing gowns closed, his expression said, and the two tails falling from the waist are always perfectly even, you twit.

Brendan stepped into the corridor and shut the door behind him. “Still asleep,” he explained.

Townley-Young peered at the door’s panels as if he could see through them and make an evaluation of his daughter’s frame of mind. “Another rough night?” he asked.

That was certainly one way to put it, Brendan thought. He’d got home after eleven with the hope she’d be asleep, only to end up tussling with her beneath the covers in what went for marital relations between them. He’d been able to perform, thank God, because the room was dark and, during their biweekly nighttime encounters, she’d taken to whispering certain Anglo-Saxon pleasantries which he found allowed him to fantasize more freely. He wasn’t in bed with Becky on those nights. He chose his mate freely. He moaned and writhed beneath her and said, Oh God, oh yes, I love it, I love it to the image of Polly Yarkin.

Last night, however, Becky had been more aggressive than usual. Her ministrations possessed an aura of anger. She’d not accused or wept when he came into their bedroom smelling of gin and looking — he knew because he could not hide it — dejected and decidedly lovelorn. Instead, she’d wordlessly demanded retribution in the form she knew he wished least to make.

So it had indeed been a rough night, although not in the manner his father-in-law thought. He said, “A little discomfort,” and hoped Townley-Young would apply the description to his daughter.

“Right,” Townley-Young had said. “Well, at least we’ll be able to set her mind at rest. That should go far to making her more comfortable.”

He’d gone on to explain that the work at Cotes Hall would proceed without interruption at last. He gave the reasons why, but Brendan merely nodded and tried to look filled with anticipation while his life drained away like an ebbing tide.

Now as he approached Crofters Inn along the Lancaster Road he wondered why he had depended so much upon the Hall’s remaining unavailable to them. He was married to Becky, after all. He’d mucked up his life. Why did it seem a more permanent disaster if they had their own home?

He couldn’t have said. It was just that with the announcement of the Hall’s pending completion, he’d heard a door slam somewhere on his dreams of the future, as meaningless as those dreams had been. And with the door’s slamming, he felt claustrophobic. He needed out. If he couldn’t make an escape from the marriage, at least he could from the house. So out he went, into the frosty morning.

“Where you off to, Bren?” Josie Wragg was perched on top of one of the two stone pillars that gave way to the Crofters Inn car park. She had brushed it clear of snow and she was dangling her legs and looking as forlorn as Brendan felt. She was the word droop personified: in her spine, her arms, her legs, and her feet. Even her face looked heavy, with the skin pulled down round her mouth and eyes.

“Just a walk,” he said. And then he added because she looked so down-trodden and he knew exactly how that feeling throws one’s life into shadow, “Would you like to come along?”

“Can’t. These don’t work in the snow.”

These were the Wellingtons that she bounced upwards in his direction. They were enormous. They looked nearly twice the size of her feet. Over their tops at least three pairs of knee-socks were folded.

“Don’t you have some proper boots?”

She shook her head and pulled her knitted cap down to her eyebrows. “Mine’ve been too small since November, see, and if I tell Mum I need new ones, she’ll have a conniption. ‘When are you going to stop growing, Josephine Eugenia?’ You know. These’re Mr. Wragg’s. He doesn’t mind much.” She bounced her legs back against the frosty stones.

“Why do you call him Mr. Wragg?”

She was fumbling with a fresh packet of cigarettes, trying to rip off its cellophane wrapper with mittened fingers. Brendan crossed the road, took the packet from her, and did the honours, offering her a light. She smoked without answer, trying and failing to make a ring, blowing out steam as much as smoke.

“It’s pretend,” she finally said. “Stupid, I know. You don’t have to tell me. It makes Mum see red, but Mr. Wragg doesn’t care. If he’s not my real dad, I can pretend my mum had a big passion, see, and I’m the product of her fatal love. I pretend this bloke came to Winslough passing through on his way to wherever. He met Mum. They were crazy for each other but they couldn’t get married, of course, because Mum wouldn’t ever leave Lancashire. But he was the big love of her life and he set her on fire the way men are supposed to set women on fire. And I’m how she remembers him now.” Josie flicked ash in Brendan’s direction. “That’s why I call him Mr. Wragg. It’s dumb. I don’t know why I told you. I don’t know why I ever say anything to anyone. It’s always my fault, isn’t it, and everyone’s going to know it eventually. I natter too much.” Her lip trembled. She rubbed her fi nger beneath her nose and threw her cigarette down. It hissed gently in the snow.

“Nattering’s no crime, Josie.”

“Maggie Spence was my best mate, see. And now she’s gone. Mr. Wragg says she won’t probably be back. And she was in love with Nick. Did you know that? True love, it was. Now they won’t see each other again. I don’t think it’s fair.”

Brendan nodded. “Life’s that way, isn’t it?”

“And Pam’s been gated for forever because her mum caught her last night in the sitting room with Todd. Doing it. Right there. Her mum put on the lights and started screaming. It was just like a fi lm, Pam said. So there’s no one. No one special. It feels sort of hollow.

Here.” She pointed to her stomach. “Mum says it’s just because I need to eat but I’m not hungry, you know?”

He did. He knew all about hollow. He sometimes felt he was hollow incarnate.

“And I can’t think about the vicar,” she said. “Mostly, I can’t think about anything.” She squinted at the road. “At least we have the snow. It’s something to look at. For now.”

“It is.” He nodded, tapped her knee, and continued on his way, turning down the Clitheroe Road, concentrating on the walking, putting his energy into that effort rather than into thought.

The going was easier on the Clitheroe Road than it had been on the way into the village. More than one person had forged through the snow, making the walk out to the church, it seemed. He passed two of them — the Londoners — a short distance from the primary school. They walked slowly, heads together in conversation. They looked up only briefl y as he passed.

He felt a quick stab of sadness at the sight of them. Men and women together, talking and touching, promised to cause him unending grief in the coming years. The object was not to care any longer. He wasn’t quite sure if he’d be able to manage it without seeking relief.

Which is why he was out walking in the fi rst place, pushing steadily forward and telling himself that he was merely going to check on the Hall. The exercise was good, the sun was out, he needed the air. But the snow was deep beyond the church, so when he fi nally reached the lodge, he hung about for five minutes just catching his breath.

“Bit of a rest,” he assured himself, and he scrutinised the windows one after the other, looking for movement behind the curtains.

She hadn’t been to the pub for the last two nights. He’d sat and waited until the last possible moment, when Ben Wragg called time and Dora bustled through picking up glasses. He knew that once half past nine arrived, it wasn’t very likely that she’d pop in. But still he waited and dreamed his dreams.

He was dreaming them still when the front door opened and Polly walked out. She started when she saw him. He took an eager step her way. She had a basket over her arm and she was wrapped head to toe in wool and scarves.

“Heading to the village?” he asked. “I’ve just been to the Hall. Shall I walk with you, Polly?”

She came to join him and looked up the lane where the snow lay, pristine and betraying. “Fly there, did you?” she asked.

He fished in his jacket for his leather pouch. “I was going there, actually, not coming back. Out for a walk. Beautiful day.”

Some of the tobacco spilled onto the snow. She watched it fall and appeared to be studying it. He saw that she had bruised her face somehow. A crescent of purple on the cream of her skin was going yellow at the edges as it began to heal.

“You’ve not been at the pub. Busy?”

She nodded, still examining the speckled snow.

“I’ve missed you. Chatting with you and the like. But of course, you’ve got things to do. People to see. I understand that. A girl like you. Still, I wondered where you were. Silly, but there it is.”

She adjusted the basket on her arm.

“I heard it’s resolved. Cotes Hall. What happened to the vicar. Did you know? You’re in the clear. And that’s good news, isn’t it? All things considered.”

She made no reply. She wore black gloves with a hole at the wrist. He wished she’d remove them so he could look at her hands. Warm them, even. Warm her as well.

He said in a burst, “I think about you, Polly. All the time. Day and night. You’re what keeps me going. You know that, don’t you? I’m not good at hiding things. I can’t hide this. You see what I’m feeling. You do see it, don’t you? You’ve seen it from the fi rst.”

She’d wound a purple scarf round her head, and she pulled it closer to her face as if to hide it. She kept her head bent. She reminded him of someone in prayer.

He said, “We’re both lonely, aren’t we? We both need someone. I want you, Polly. I know it can’t be perfect, not with the way things are in my life, but it can be something. It can be special. I swear I can make it good for you. If you’ll let me.”

She raised her head and looked at him curiously. He felt his armpits sweating. He said, “I’m saying it wrong, aren’t I? That’s why it’s a muddle. I’m saying it backwards. I’m in love with you, Polly.”

“It’s not a muddle,” she said. “You’re not saying it backwards.”

His heart opened with joy. “Then—”

“You’re just not saying it all.”

“What more is there to say? I love you. I want you. I’ll make it good if you’ll only—”

“Ignore the fact that you have a wife.” She shook her head. “Go home with you, Brendan. Take care of Miss Becky. Lie in your own bed. Stop sniffing round mine.”

She nodded sharply — dismissal, good morning, whatever he wanted to take it for— and set off towards the village.

“Polly!”

She turned back. Her face was stony. She wouldn’t be touched. But he would reach her. He would fi nd her heart. He would beg for it, plead for it, he didn’t care what it took. “I love you,” he said. “Polly, I need you.”

“Don’t we all need something.” She walked away.

Colin saw her pass. She was a whimsical vision of colour against a backdrop of white. Purple scarf, navy coat, red trousers, brown boots. She was carrying a basket and ploughing steadily along the far side of the road.

She didn’t look his way. She would have at one time. She would have ventured a surreptitious glance at his house, and if by chance he was working in the front garden or tinkering with the car, she would have crossed the road with an excuse to talk. Hear about the dog trials in Lancaster, Colin? How’s your dad feeling? What’d the vet have to say about Leo’s eyes?

Now she made a project out of looking straight ahead. The other side of the road, the houses that lined it, and particularly his simply didn’t exist. It was just as well. She was saving them both. Had she turned her head and caught him watching her from the kitchen window, he might have felt something. And so far, he’d managed to keep himself from feeling anything at all.

He’d gone through the motions of the morning: making coffee, shaving, feeding the dog, pouring himself a bowl of cornflakes, slicing a banana, raining sugar on top, and dousing the mixture thoroughly with milk. He’d even sat at the table with the bowl in front of him. He’d even gone so far as to dip the spoon into it. He’d even lifted the spoon to his lips. Twice. But he was unable to eat.

He’d held her hand but it was dead weight in his. He’d said her name. He was unsure what to call her — this JulietSusanna that the London detective claimed she was — but he needed all the same to call her something in an effort to bring her back to him again.

She wasn’t really there, he discovered. The shell of her was, the body he had worshipped with his own, but the interior substance of her rode up ahead in the other Range Rover, trying to calm her daughter’s fears and looking for the courage to say goodbye.

He strengthened his grip on her. She said in a voice without depth or timbre, “The elephant.”

He struggled to understand. The elephant. Why? Why here? Why now? What was she telling him? What was it that he should know about elephants? That they never forget? That she never would? That she still reached out to him for rescue from the quicksand of her despair? The elephant.

And then oddly, as if they communicated in an English that meant something only to them, Inspector Lynley answered her. “Is it in the Opel?”

She said, “I told her Punkin or the elephant. You must decide, darling.”

He said, “I’ll see that she gets it, Mrs. Spence.”

And that was all. Colin willed her to respond to the pressure of his fingers. Her hand never moved, she never grasped his. She simply took herself to a place of dying.

He understood that now. He was there himself. At first, it seemed he’d begun the process when Lynley had laid the facts before him. At first, it seemed he’d continued to decay throughout the interminable passing of the night. He stopped hearing their voices. He drifted out of his body altogether and observed from on high the ending of things. He watched it all curiously, filed it all away, and thought perhaps he might wonder at it later. How Lynley spoke, not as an official of the police, but as if to comfort or to reassure her, how he helped her to the car, how he steadied her with his arm round her shoulders and pressed her head against his chest the final time they heard Maggie cry. It was odd to think he never once seemed triumphant at having his speculations proven true. Instead he looked torn. The crippled man said something about the workings of justice, but Lynley laughed bitterly. I hate all of this, he said, the living, the dying, the whole bloody mess. And although Colin listened from the faraway place to which the self of him had retreated, he found that he hated nothing at all. One cannot hate while one is engaged in the process of dying.

Later, he saw that he’d really begun that process the moment he raised a hand against Polly. Now, standing at the window and watching her pass by, he wondered if he hadn’t been dying for years.

Behind him the clock ticked the day onwards, its cat’s eyes shifting along with the movement of its pendulum tail. How she’d laughed when she saw it. She’d said, Col, it’s precious, I must have it, I must. And he’d bought it for her birthday, wrapped it in newspaper because he’d forgotten the fancy paper and ribbon, left it on the front porch, and rung the bell. How she’d laughed, clapped her hands, said, Hang it up right now, right now, you must.

He took it from the wall above the AGA and carried it to the work top. He turned it face down. The tail still wagged. He could sense that the eyes were still moving as well. He could still hear the passing of its time.

He tried to prise open the compartment that held its workings, but couldn’t manage the job with his fingers. He tried three times, gave it up, and opened a drawer beneath the work top. He fumbled for a knife.

The clock ticked and tocked. The cat’s tail moved.

He slid the knife between the backing and the body and pulled back sharply. And then a second time. The plastic gave with a snap, part of the backing broke away. It fl ew up and out and landed on the floor. He fl ipped the clock over and slammed it hard a single time against the work top. A gear fell out. The tail and eyes stopped. The gentle ticking ceased.

He broke the tail off. He used the wooden handle of the knife to shatter the eyes. He flung the clock in the rubbish where a soup tin shifted with the weight of its fall and began to drip diluted tomato against its face.

What shall we name it, Col? she’d asked, slipping her arm through his. It needs a name. I fancy Tiger myself. Listen what it sounds like: Tiger tells the time. Am I a poet, Col?

“Perhaps you were,” he said.

He put on his jacket. Leo dashed from the sitting room, ready for a run. Colin heard his anxious whine and ran his knuckles across the top of the dog’s head. But when he left the house, he left it alone.

The steam from his breath said the air was frigid. But he couldn’t feel anything, either warmth or cold.

He crossed the road and went through the lych-gate. He saw that others had been in the graveyard before him because someone had laid a spray of juniper on one of the graves. The rest were bare, frozen under the snow with their markers rising like smokestacks through clouds.

He walked towards the wall and the chestnut tree where Annie lay, these six years dead. He made a deliberate, fresh trail through the snow, feeling the drifts give way against his shins, the way ocean water breaks when you walk against it.

The sky was as blue as the fl ax she’d planted one year by the door. Against it, the leafl ess branches of the chestnut tree wore a diamond cobweb of ice and snow. The branches cast a net of shadows on the ground beneath them. They dipped skinless fi ngers towards Annie’s grave.

He should have brought something with him, he thought. A spray of ivy and holly, a fresh pine wreath. He should have at least come prepared to clean the stone, to make sure lichen had no chance to grow. He needed to keep the words from fading. At the moment, he needed to read her name.

The gravestone was partially buried in the snow and he began to use his hands against it, first brushing off the top and then down the sides and then preparing to use his fi ngers on the carving.

But then he saw it. The colour caught his eye first, bright pink on pure white. The shapes caught his eye second, two interlocking ovals. It was a small flat stone — worn smooth by a thousand years of river — and it was lying at the head of the grave, tangent to the marker.

He put his hand out, then drew it back. He knelt in the snow.

I burnt cedar for you, Colin. I put the ashes on her grave. I put the ring stone with them. I gave Annie the ring stone.

He reached out with an arm that did its own bidding. His hand picked up the stone. His fingers closed round it.

“Annie,” he whispered. “Oh God. Annie.”

He felt the cold air sweeping over him from the moor. He felt the frigid unforgiving embrace of the snow. He felt the small stone settle into his palm. He felt it hard and smooth.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ELIZABETH GEORGE is the author of award-winning and internationally bestselling novels, including A Great Deliverance, Payment in Blood, and A Traitor to Memory. Her novels have been filmed for television by the BBC and broadcast in the United States on PBS’s

Mystery!

She lives in Seattle and London.