“What did you talk about?”
“Tessa, mostly. Of course, it was a problem, but the last time he was here—the day of his death—he said it had finally been overcome.”
“I’m not certain that I understand,” Lynley remarked. “What kind of a problem? Emotional, you mean? An unwillingness to come to terms with her death?”
Olivia had been looking out the window, but she turned to them upon the last word. “Death?” she asked, perplexed. “Tessa’s not dead, Inspector. She deserted William a short time after Roberta was born. He’d hired a detective to find her so that he could have their marriage annulled by the Church, and Saturday afternoon he came to tell me she’d been found at last.”
“York,” the man said. “And I’m not obligated to tell you anything more. I’ve yet to be paid for my services, you know.”
Lynley gripped the telephone in his hand. He could feel the anger burning in his chest. “How does a court order sound?” he asked pleasantly.
“Listen here, old chap, don’t try to pull that kind of shit on me—”
“Mr. Houseman, may I remind you that, in spite of what you may think, you are not part of a Dashiell Hammett novel.” Lynley could just picture the man, feet up on his desk, a bottle of bourbon in the filing drawer, a gun tossed from hand to hand as he balanced the telephone receiver on his shoulder. He wasn’t too far from the truth.
Harry Houseman looked out the grimy window of his office above Jackie’s Barber Shop in Richmond’s Trinity Church Square. A light rain was falling, not enough to clean off his window, just enough to emphasise its filth. What a dreary day, he thought. He’d intended to spend it on a drive to the coast—a little lady in Whitby was only too eager to do some serious private investigating with him—but this kind of weather didn’t put him in the mood. And God knows he needed to be in the mood more and more these days before anything happened in the land down under. He grinned, showing a badly capped front tooth. It added a piratical dimension to his otherwise mundane appearance: dull brown hair, muddy-coloured eyes, cadaverous skin, and the incongruity of full, sensual lips.
He played with a well-chewed pencil on the top of his scarred desk. His eyes caught the thin-lipped glance of his wife’s shrewish face peering moodily out at him from the photograph nearby. He reached out with his pencil and toppled it over, face down.
“I’m sure we can reach some sort of mutual agreement,” Houseman said into the phone. “Let me see. Miss Doalson?” A suitable pause for dramatic effect. “Do I have time today to…Well, cancel that. It can certainly wait until I see…” Back to the phone. “What did you say your name was?”
“We aren’t going to see each other,” Lynley responded patiently. “You’re going to give me the address in York and that’s going to be the end of our relationship.”
“Oh, I don’t see how I can—”
“Certainly you do.” Lynley’s voice was steel. “Because, as you said, you haven’t been paid yet. And in order for you ever to get paid once the estate is settled—which may, incidentally, take years if we don’t get to the bottom of this—you’re going to have to give me Tessa Teys’s address.”
A pause for consideration. “What is that, Miss Doalson?” the infuriating voice asked in saccharine tones. “On the other line? Well, put him off, will you?” A martyred sigh. “I can see, Inspector, that you’re not an easy man to deal with. We all have to make a living, you know.”
“Believe me, I know,” Lynley replied curtly. “The address?”
“I’ll just have to find it in my files. May I give you a ring in…say an hour or so?”
“No.”
“Well, good God, man—”
“I’m on my way to Richmond.”
“No, no, that won’t be necessary. Just wait a moment, old chap.” Houseman leaned back in his chair, eyeing the grey sky for a minute. He reached over to his dented filing cabinet, opening and closing a few drawers for effect. “What’s that, Miss Doalson?” he called. “No, put her off till tomorrow, will you? I don’t care if she’s weeping buckets, sweetheart, I don’t have time to spend with her today.” He picked the scrap of memo paper off his desk. “Ah, here it is, Inspector,” he said and gave Lynley the address. “But don’t expect her to welcome you with open arms, will you?”
“I don’t particularly care how she welcomes me, Mr. Houseman. Good—”
“Oh, but you ought to, Inspector. Just a bit, you know. Hubby went mad when he heard the news. Thought he’d strangle me right on the spot, so God knows what he’ll do when Scotland Yard shows up. He’s one of those scholarly types, big words and thick specs. But trust me, Inspector, that man is deep. There’s an animal inside him.”
Lynley’s eyes narrowed. It was a cast upon the waters, an expert manoeuvre. He wanted to swim past it but admitted defeat. “What are you talking about? What news did he hear?”
“The news about hubby number one, of course.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Houseman?”
“That Tessa Teys is a bigamist, old boy,” Houseman finished with delight. “Married up with number two without seeing to the formal bye-byes to our William. Can you imagine her surprise when I popped up on her doorstep?”
The house wasn’t at all what he had expected. Women who desert husband and children should somehow end up in tenement buildings pungent with the odours of garlic and urine. They should daily subdue a bucking, quarrelsome conscience with liberal applications of soporific gin. They should be faded and worn, their looks quite destroyed by the ravages of shame. Whatever they should be, Lynley was certain they shouldn’t be Tessa Teys Mowrey.
He’d parked in front of the house, and they stared at it silently until Havers finally spoke. “Not exactly gone downhill, has she?” she asked.
They’d found it easily, a new, middle-class neighbourhood a few miles from the city centre, the kind of place where houses have numbers as well as coy little names. The Mowreys’ home was called Jorvik View. It was the concrete reality of every mediocre dream: a facade of brick covered the poured-block construction; red tiles swept up to form steep gables; white-curtained bay windows showed off sitting and dining rooms on either side of a polished front door. A single-car, attached garage was topped by a white iron-fenced roof terrace, and a door opened onto this from the upper floor of the house. It was on this terrace that they had their first glimpse of Tessa.
She came out of the door, blonde hair blowing lightly in the breeze, to water potted plants: spider chrysanthemums, dahlias, and marigolds that made an autumn wall of colour against the white iron. She saw the Bentley and hesitated, watering can poised in midair, appearing every bit in the late morning light as if Renoir had captured her by surprise.
And she looked, Lynley noted grimly, not a day older than her photograph taken nineteen years before and religiously enshrined at Gembler Farm.
“So much for the wages of sin,” he muttered.
8
“Maybe there’s a portrait in the attic,” Havers replied.
Lynley glanced at her in surprise. Thus far today, she had been so markedly diligent about behaving appropriately, about cooperating completely and promptly with his every order, that to hear her break away from that and say something amusing was a bit of a shock. A nice one, in fact. “Honours to you, Sergeant,” he chuckled. “Let’s see what Mrs. Mowrey has to say.”
She met them at the front door, looking from one to the other in confusion and—was it veiled just behind the eyes?—a touch of fear. “Good morning,” she said. Down from the roof terrace, she looked at least more like a woman approaching middle age. But the hair was still sunny-blonde, the figure slight, the skin lightly freckled and virtually unlined.
Lynley showed her his warrant card. “Scotland Yard CID. May we come in, Mrs. Mowrey?”
She looked from Lynley to Havers’s grim face and back again. “Of course.” Her voice was quite even, polite and warm. But there was a hesitation, a rigidity in her movements, that suggested
strong emotion withheld.
She led them to the left, through an open door that took them into the sitting room, where she gestured wordlessly at the furniture, beckoning them to sit. It was a well-furnished, tasteful room, with pieces of a modern design, pine and walnut that mingled with subdued autumn colours. A clock was ticking somewhere, light and rapid like a racing pulse. Here was none of the riotous disorder of Olivia Odell nor the mechanical precision of Gembler Farm. Rather, this room was obviously the gathering place for a congenial family, with informal photographs displayed, souvenirs of trips, and a stack of boxed games and cards shelved among books.
Tessa Mowrey chose a chair in the farthest corner where the light was weakest. She sat down on its edge, her back upright, her legs crossed, her hands folded in her lap. She wore a plain gold wedding band. She didn’t ask why Scotland Yard had come calling. Rather, she followed Lynley with her eyes as he walked to the mantel and took note of the photographs that were its display.
“Your children?” he asked. There were two of them, a girl and a boy, pictures taken on a family holiday in St. Ives. He recognised the familiar sweep of the bay, the grey and white buildings on the shore, and the assortment of boats left beached at low tide.
“Yes,” she responded. She volunteered nothing else. Quiescent, she awaited the inevitable. The silence continued. Lynley allowed it to do so. Eventually, sheer nervousness compelled her to go on.
“Has Russell telephoned you?” There was an edge of despair in her voice. It was dull-sounding, as if she’d experienced the full range of grief and there was nothing left in her, no depth of emotion to plummet further. “I thought he might. Of course, it’s been three weeks. I’d begun to hope he was only punishing me till we sorted everything out.” She stirred uneasily when Sergeant Havers took out her notebook. “Oh, must you?” she asked faintly.
“I’m afraid so,” Lynley replied.
“Then I’ll tell you everything. It’s best.” She looked down at her hands and tightened their grip on each other.
Odd, Lynley thought, how as members of the same species we inevitably rely on the same set of gestures for our nonverbal signals of distress. A hand raised to the throat, arms cradling the body protectively, a quick adjustment of clothing, a flinching to ward off a psychic blow. Tessa, he saw, was gathering strength now to get through this ordeal, as if one hand could give the other a transfusion of courage through the simple expedient of fingers intertwined. It seemed to work. She looked up, her expression defiant.
“I had just turned sixteen when I married him. Can you understand what it’s like to be married to a man eighteen years older than yourself when you’re only sixteen? Of course you can’t. No one can. Not even Russell.”
“You didn’t want to stay on in school?”
“I’d planned to. But I’d left school to help on the farm for a few weeks when Dad’s back went bad. It was only a temporary arrangement. I was supposed to return in a month. Marsha Fitzalan gave me work to do so that I wouldn’t fall behind. But I fell behind, and there was William.”
“How do you mean?”
“He’d come to buy a ram from Dad. I took him out to see it. William was…very handsome. I was romantic. He was Heathcliff come to claim Cathy at last, as far as I was concerned.”
“Surely your father had some concern about his sixteen-year-old daughter wanting to marry? And to marry a man so much older than herself?”
He did. Mother as well. But I was stubborn, and William was responsible, respectable, and strong. I think they believed that if they didn’t let me marry him, I would turn out wild and go desperately bad in one way or another. So they gave their consent, and we married.”
“What happened to the marriage?”
“What does a sixteen-year-old girl know about marriage, Inspector?” she asked in answer. “I wasn’t even certain how babies got themselves born when I married William. You’d think a farm girl would have a bit more sense, but you have to remember that I spent most of my free time with the Brontës. Charlotte, Anne, and Emily were always a bit vague when it came down to the details. But I found out quickly enough. Gillian was born before my seventeenth birthday. William was thrilled. He adored her. It was as if his life began the moment he saw Gilly.”
“Yet a number of years passed before you had a second child.”
“That’s because Gilly changed everything between us.”
“How?”
“Somehow she—this tiny, fragile baby—made William discover religion and nothing was quite the same after that.”
“I’ve somehow got the impression he was always religious.”
“Oh no. Not till Gillian. It was as if he couldn’t quite be a good enough father, as if he had to purify his soul to be worthy of a child.”
“How did he do it?”
She laughed shortly at the memory, but the sound was regretful and unamused. “The Bible, confession, daily communion. Within a year of our marriage, he became the backbone of St. Catherine’s and a devoted father.”
“And there you were, a teenager, trying to live with a baby and a saint.”
“That’s exactly what it was like. Except that I didn’t have to worry so much about the baby. I wasn’t quite good enough to care for William’s child. Or perhaps not holy enough because, at any rate, he mostly cared for her himself.”
“What did you do?”
“I retreated to my books.” She had sat nearly motionless through the initial part of their conversation, but now she moved restlessly, getting up and pacing across the room to look out the bay window where York Minster loomed in the distance. But instead of the cathedral, Lynley guessed that Tessa saw the past. “I dreamt that William would become Mr. Darcy. I dreamt that Mr. Knightley would sweep me off my feet. I hoped that any day I might meet Edward Rochester if I only believed enough that my dreams were real.” She crossed her arms in front of her as if that could ward off the pain of that time. “I wanted desperately to be loved. How I wanted to be loved! Can you possibly understand that, Inspector?”
“Who couldn’t understand?” Lynley replied.
“I thought that if we had a second child, we would each have someone special to love. So I…I seduced William back to our bed.”
“Back?”
“Oh yes, back. He’d left me shortly after Gilly was born and had begun to sleep elsewhere. On the couch, in the sewing room, anywhere but with me.”
“Why?”
“He used as an excuse the fact that Gilly’s birth had been so hard on me. He didn’t want me to become pregnant and go through the torture again.”
“There are contraceptives—”
“William’s Catholic, Inspector. There are no contraceptives.” She turned from the window to face them again. The light bled colour from her cheeks, effaced eyebrows and lashes, and deepened the creases from nose to mouth. If she sensed this, she made no move to avoid it. Rather, she remained, as if willing to allow her age to be exposed. She went on.
“But I really think, looking back on it, that it was sex, not conception, that frightened William. At any rate, I got him back to my bed eventually. And eight years after Gilly, Roberta was born.”
“If you had what you wanted—a second baby to love—why did you leave?”
“Because it began again. All of it. She wasn’t mine any more than Gillian had been. I loved my little girls, but I wasn’t allowed near them, not the way I wanted to be. I had nothing.” Although her voice quavered on the last word, she drew herself in, cradling her body tighter, and found control. “All I had once again was Darcy. My books.”
“So you left.”
“I woke up one morning just a few weeks after Roberta was born and I knew that if I stayed I would shrivel to nothing. I was nearly twenty-five. I had two children I wasn’t allowed to love and a husband who had begun to consult the Bible before dressing in the morning. I looked out the window, saw the trail leading to High Kel Moor, and knew I would leave that day.”
“D
idn’t he try to stop you?”
“No. Of course I wanted him to. But he didn’t. I walked out of the door and out of his life, carrying just one valise and thirty-four pounds. I came to York.”
“He never came to see you? Never tried to follow you?”
She shook her head. “I never told him where I was. I just ceased to exist. But I’d ceased to exist so many years before for William that what did it matter.”
“Why didn’t you divorce him?”
“Because I never intended to marry again. I came to York longing for an education, not a husband. I planned to work for a while, to save money, to go to London or even emigrate to the States. But six weeks after I arrived in York, everything changed. I met Russell Mowrey.”
“How did you meet?”
She smiled at the memory. “They’d fenced off part of the city when they began the Viking digs.”
“Yes, I recall that.”
“Russell was a graduate student from London. He was part of the excavation team. I’d stuck my head through a bit of a hole in the fence to have a look at the work. And there was Russell. His first words to me were, ‘Jesus, a Norse goddess!’ and then he blushed to the roots of his hair. I think I fell in love with him then. He was twenty-six years old. He wore spectacles that kept slipping down his nose, absolutely filthy trousers, and a university jersey. When he walked over to speak to me, he slipped in the mud and fell directly onto his bottom.”
“Not much of a Darcy,” Lynley said kindly.
“No. So much more. We were married four weeks later.”
“Why didn’t you tell him about William?”