“Two to be exact. Two years, four months, and two days, to be even more precise. I could probably get it down to the hours as well, but you get the idea.”
“I couldn’t help overhearing the fact that your wife doesn’t seem to be enthused about the Teys farm.”
Gibson laughed. “You’re well bred, Inspector Lynley. I like that sort of thing when the police come calling.” He ran his hands through his thick hair, looked at the floor beneath his feet, and found a bottle of ale that, in the general confusion, had become positioned precariously against the side of the couch. He picked it up and drained it before going on, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. It was the gesture of a man used to taking his meals out in the fields. “No. Madeline wants the fens again. She wants the open spaces, the water and the sky. But I can’t give that to her. So I’ve got to give her what I can.” Gibson’s eyes flicked over Sergeant Havers, who kept her head bent over her notebook. “Sound like the words of a man who would kill his uncle, don’t they?” he asked pleasantly.
Hank finally caught up with them in the novices’ room. St. James looked up from kissing his wife—her skin smelled intoxicatingly of lilies, her fingers moved silkily through his hair, her murmured “my love” against his mouth fired his blood—and there was the American, grinning wickedly down at them from his perch on the wall of the day room.
“Cotcha.” Hank winked.
St. James contemplated murder. Deborah gasped in surprise. Hank hopped down, unbidden, to join them. “Hey, Bean,” he shouted. “Found the lovebirds in here.”
JoJo Watson appeared only moments later, struggling through the doorway in the ruined abbey, teetering dangerously on high heels. Round her neck, as a complement to the chains and trinkets, hung an Instamatic camera.
“Taking some shots,” Hank said in explanation, nodding towards the camera. “A few minutes more and we’d’ve had a few sweet ones-a you!” He snorted with laughter, slapping St. James affectionately on the shoulder. “Don’t blame you a bit, fella! If she belonged to me, I couldn’t keep my mitts off her.” He gave brief attention to his wife. “Dammit, Bean, be careful, woman! Break your neck in this place.” He turned back to the other two and noticed Deborah’s equipment—camera case, tripod, discarded lenses. “Hey, you taking shots, too? Got sidetracked, huh? That’s honeymooners for you. Come on down here, Bean. Join the party.”
“Back from Richmond so soon?” St. James finally managed to ask with strangled courtesy. Deborah, he noted, was surreptitiously trying to straighten her clothes. Her eyes met his, full of laughter and mischief, alive with desire. What in God’s name were the Americans doing here now?
“Well,” Hank admitted as JoJo reached them at last, “I gotta tell you, fella, Richmond wasn’t quite everything that you promised it’d be. Not that we didn’t get a bang outa the drive. Whatsay, JoJo-bean? Didn’t we love it?”
“Hank loves driving on the wrong side of the road,” JoJo explained. Her nose twitched. Her eyes caught the exchange of looks between the two younger people. “Hank, why don’t we take a nice, long walk toward Bishop Furthing Road? Wouldn’t that be a sweet way to end the afternoon?” She put her bejewelled hand on her husband’s arm, attempting to draw him out onto the abbey grounds.
“Hellsapoppin, no,” Hank answered pleasantly. “I have done e-n-u-f-f walking on this trip to last me a lifetime.” He cocked his head at St. James shrewdly. “That was some m-a-p you gave us, fella! If the Bean here wasn’t so fast at reading road signs, we’d be in Edinburgh by now.” He pronounced it Ed-in-berg. “Well, there’s no harm done, is there? We got here in time to show you the death hole itself.”
There was nothing for it but to go along. “Death hole?” Deborah enquired. She had knelt and was replacing her equipment—forgotten for a few moments in the lovely blue of Simon’s eyes—in its case.
“The baby, remember?” Hank said patiently. “Although considering what you two’s up to in here, I can see the baby story didn’t exactly scare the livin’ hell outa you, did it?” He winked lasciviously.
“Ah, the baby,” St. James responded. He picked up Deborah’s case.
“Now I got your interest!” Hank approved. “I could tell at first you mighta been a little peeved at me popping in on you like that. But now I got you, I can tell.”
“Yes, indeed,” Deborah responded, but her thoughts were elsewhere. Curious, how it had all happened in a moment. She loved him, had loved him from her childhood. But in a dizzying lightning-bolt moment of time, she’d realised that it had changed somehow, becoming quite different between them from what it had been before. He’d all of a sudden become not that gentle Simon whose tender presence had filled her heart with joy but a whip-bodied lover whose very look aroused her. Good heavens, Deborah, you’ve become quite silly with lust, she thought.
St. James heard his wife’s bubble of laughter. “Deborah?” he asked.
Hank nudged him in the ribs with a knowing elbow. “Don’t worry about the bride,” he confided. “They’re all shy at first.” He strutted on ahead like Stanley with Livingston in sight, pointing out areas of interest to his wife with a “Catch that, Bean. Get it in the lens!”
“Sorry, my love,” St. James murmured as they followed the progress of the other two through the ruined day room, across court and warming house and into the cloister. “I thought I had him taken care of until midnight at least. Five minutes more and I’m afraid he would have caught me getting you into some truly serious trouble.”
“What a thought!” she laughed. “Oh, Simon, what if he had! He would have shouted, ‘Get it in the lens, Bean!’ and our love life might have been destroyed forever!” Her eyes danced and sparkled. Her hair gleamed brightly in the afternoon sun, blowing about her throat and shoulders carelessly.
St. James drew in a sharp breath. It was like a pain. “I don’t think so,” he said evenly.
The death hole was in what remained of the vestry. This was no more than a narrow roofless hallway, overgrown with grass and wildflowers, just beyond the south transept of the ancient church. Here, a series of four arched recesses lined the wall, and it was to these that Hank pointed with ghoulish drama.
“In one-a them,” he announced. “Get it in the lens, Bean.” He tromped through the grass and posed toothily. “Seems this was the place where the monks kept their church duds. Sorta a cupboard or something. And on the night in question, the baby was plopped right in and left to die. Pretty sickening when you think about it, huh?” He bounced back to their sides. “Just the right size for a kid, though,” he added thoughtfully. “Like a whatdaya-call-it? Sacrificial offering.”
“I’m not sure the Cistercian monks were in that line of business,” St. James commented. “And human sacrifices have been out of fashion for a good number of years.”
“Well, whatdaya think, then? Whose baby was it?”
“I couldn’t even begin to guess,” St. James replied, knowing full well the theory was forthcoming.
“Then lemme tell you how it happened, because the Bean and I figgered it out the first day. Didn’t we, Bean?” A wait for the woman to nod her head loyally. “Come on over here. Lemme show you two lovebirds a thing or two.”
Hank led them through the south transept, across the uneven paving of the presbytery, and out onto the abbey grounds through a gap in the wall. “There you have it!” He pointed triumphantly to a narrow track that led to the north through the woods.
“I see indeed,” St. James replied.
“Got it figgered out too?”
“Ah, no.”
Hank hooted. “Sure you don’t. That’s ’cause you haven’t thought it through like me ‘n’ the Bean have, right, Sugarplum?” Sugarplum nodded mournfully, moving her bunny eyes from St. James to Deborah in silent contrition. “Gypsies!” her spouse went on. “Okay, okay, I admit it. Bean and I didn’t get the full handle on this till we saw them today. You know who I mean. Those trailers parked on the side-a the road. Well, we figgered out that th
ere musta been some-a the same here that night. It had to be a baby-a theirs.”
“I understand gypsies are inordinately fond of their children,” St. James noted drily.
“Well, not-a this kid, anyway,” Hank replied, undeterred. “So get the pitcher here, fella. Danny and Ezra are over there somewhere”—he waved vaguely in the direction from which they had come—“getting ready for the plunge, you know? And tippy-toeing along this path comes some old crone with a kid.”
“Old crone?”
“Well sure, don’t you see it?”
“‘Ditch-delivered,’ no doubt,” St. James said.
“Ditch-who?” Hank shrugged off the literary allusion like lint from his coat. “The old crone looks around, right and left,” Hank demonstrated, “and slips into the abbey. Looks around for a deposit box and bingo, Bob’s-yer-uncle.”
“It certainly is an interesting theory,” Deborah put in. “But I always feel just a bit sorry for the gypsies. They seem to get blamed for everything, don’t they?”
“That, little bride, brings me right on up to theory number two.”
JoJo-bean blinked her apologies.
Gembler Farm was in excellent condition, a fact unsurprising since Richard Gibson had continued to work it throughout the three weeks since his uncle’s death. Opening the well-oiled gates that hung between two stone posts, Lynley and Havers entered and surveyed it.
It would be quite an inheritance. To their left stood the farmhouse, an old building constructed from the common brown bricks of the district, with freshly painted white woodwork and frail clematis conscientiously trimmed and trellised over windows and door. It was set back from Gembler Road, and a well-tended garden, fenced to keep out the sheep, separated the two. Next to the house was a low outbuilding, and, forming another side to the quadrangle that comprised the yard, the barn loomed to their right.
Like the house, it was constructed of brick with a heavily tiled roof. It was two floors high, with gaping windows on the second floor through which the tops of ladders could be seen. Dutch doors were used on the ground level of the barn, for this was a building for tools and animals only. Vehicles would be kept in the outbuilding to the far side of the house.
They walked across the well-swept yard, and Lynley inserted a key into the rusting lock that hung on the barn door. It swung noiselessly open. Inside, it was eerily still, dim, musty, and overcold, too much the place where a man had met a violent end.
“Quiet,” Havers observed. She hesitated at the door while Lynley entered.
“Hmm,” he responded from the third stall. “Expect that’s due to the sheep.”
“Sir?”
He looked up at her from where he had squatted on the pockmarked stone floor. She was quite pale. “Sheep, Sergeant,” he said. “They’re in the upper meadow, remember? That’s why it’s so quiet. Have a look here, will you?” Seeing that she was reluctant to approach, he added, “You were right.”
She came forward at that and passed her eyes over the stall. At the far end was heaped a mouldly pile of hay. To the centre was a not overlarge pool of dried blood—brown, not red. There was nothing else.
“Right, sir?” Havers asked.
“Dead on the bottom, if you’ll pardon the expression. Not a drop of blood on the walls. I don’t think we had any body-slinging here. No crime-scene arrangement done after the fact. Nice thinking, Havers.” He looked up in time to see the surprise on her face.
She reddened in confusion. “Thank you, sir.”
He stood up and directed his attention back to the stall. The overturned bucket upon which Roberta had been sitting when the priest found her was still in its place. The hay into which the head had rolled remained untouched. The pool of dried blood had scraping marks from the forensic team and the axe was gone, but otherwise everything remained as it had been originally photographed. Except for the bodies. The bodies. Good God. Feeling like the fool Nies intended him to be, Lynley gaped numbly at the outer edge of the stain where a heelprint matted several black and white hairs into the coagulated blood. He swung to Havers.
“The dog,” he said.
“Inspector?”
“Havers, what in God’s name did Nies do with the dog?”
Her eyes went to the same heelprint, saw the same hairs. “It was in the report, wasn’t it?”
“It wasn’t,” he replied with a muttered curse and knew that he was going to have to drag every scrap of information out of Nies as if he were a surgeon probing for shrapnel. It would be absolute hell. “Let’s look at the house,” he said grimly.
They entered as the family would, through an enclosed porch-like hallway in which old coats and mackintoshes hung on pegs and workboots stood beneath a single-plank bench along the wall. The house had gone unheated for three weeks, so the air was tomb-like. A car rumbled past on Gembler Road, but the sound was muffled and distant.
The hall took them immediately into the kitchen. It was a large room, with a red linoleum floor, dark ash cabinets, and brilliantly white appliances that looked as if they were still polished daily. Nothing whatsoever was out of place. Not a dish was out of a single cupboard; not a crumb lay on a single work top; not a stain marred the surface of the white, cast-iron sink. In the centre of the room stood a worktable of unpainted pine, its top scarred with the slashings of thousands of knives cutting thousands of vegetables, with the discolouration of generations of cooking.
“No wonder Gibson is eager for the place,” Lynley remarked as he looked it over. “Certainly a far cry from St. Chad’s Lane.”
“Did you believe him, sir?” Havers asked.
Lynley paused in his inspection of the cupboards. “That he was in bed with his wife when Teys was killed? Considering the nature of their relationship, it’s a credible alibi, wouldn’t you say?”
“I…I suppose so, sir.”
He glanced at her. “But you don’t believe it.”
“It’s only that…well, she looked like she was lying. Like she was angry with him as well. Or maybe angry with us.”
Lynley considered Havers’s statement. Madeline Gibson had indeed spoken to them grudgingly, spitting the words out with barely a glance of corroboration at her husband. For his part, the farmer had smoked stolidly during her recitation, a blank expression of disinterest on his face but, unmistakably, a lurking touch of amusement behind his dark eyes. “There’s something not quite right there, I’ll agree. Let’s go through here.”
They went through a heavy door into the dining room, where a mahogany table was covered with clean, cream-coloured lace. On it, yellow roses in a vase had long since died, weeping petals onto the fret of the cloth. A matching sideboard stood to one side with a silver epergne placed in its exact centre, as if someone with a measuring tool had made certain it was equidistant from each end. A china cabinet held a beautiful collection of dishes obviously unused by the inhabitants of the house. They were antique Belleek pieces, each one stacked or tilted or turned in some way to display it best. As in the kitchen, nothing was out of place. Save for the flowers, they might have been wandering through a museum.
It was across the hall from the dining room, however, where they first found signs of the life of the house. For here in the sitting room the Teyses had kept their shrine.
Havers preceded Lynley into the room, but at the sight she cried out involuntarily, and stepped back quickly, one arm raised as if to ward off a blow.
“Something wrong, Sergeant?” Lynley inspected the room to see what had startled her, observing nothing but furniture and a collection of photographs in one corner.
“Excuse me. I think…” She produced an unnatural grimace to pass for a smile. “Sorry, sir. I…I think I must be hungry or something. A little light-headed. I’m fine.” She walked to the corner of the room in which the photographs hung, before which the candles rested, underneath which the flowers had died. “This must be the mother,” she said. “Quite a tribute.”
Lynley joined her at a three-cor
nered table that backed into the wall. “Beautiful girl,” he replied softly, studying the pictures. “She really wasn’t much more than that, was she? Look at the wedding picture. She looks as if she were ten years old! Such a little creature.”
It was unspoken between them. How had she produced a cow like Roberta?
“Don’t you think it’s a bit…” Havers paused and he glanced at her. She clasped her hands stiffly behind her. “I mean, if he was planning to marry Olivia, sir.”
Lynley set down what was obviously the final portrait of the woman. She looked about twenty-four: a fresh, smiling face; golden freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her nose; long, gleaming blonde hair tied back and curled. Beguiling. He stepped back from the collection.
“It’s as if Teys established a new religion in the corner of this room,” he said. “Macabre, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I…” She tore her eyes from the picture. “Yes, sir.”
Lynley turned his attention to the rest of the room. Everyday living had gone on in it. There were a comfortably worn couch, several chairs, a rack holding numerous magazines, a television set, and a woman’s escritoire. Lynley opened this. Neatly stacked stationery, a tin of postage stamps, three unpaid bills. He glanced at them: a chemist’s receipt for Teys’s sleeping pills, the electricity, the telephone. He looked at the last, but there was nothing of interest. No long distance calls. Everything neat and clean.
Beyond the sitting room was a small library-office and they opened the door to this, looked at each other in surprise, and walked into the room. Three of the four walls had shelves that climbed to the ceiling, and every shelf was littered with books. Books stacked. Books piled. Books falling loosely to one side. Books standing up at rigid attention. Books everywhere.
“But Stepha Odell said—”
“That there was no lending library so Roberta came for the newspaper,” Lynley finished. “She’d read all of her own books—how was that possible?—and all of Marsha Fitzalan’s. Who, by the way, is Marsha Fitzalan?”