A Great Deliverance

  “Simon—”

  He wouldn’t let her finish. “What bothers me is seeing the effect he has on you. I see your guilt. I want to take it away, and I don’t know how. I wish that I did. I don’t like to see you feeling so wretched.”

  She searched his face, finding comfort and peace in the familiar battle of its lines and angles. Utterly unhandsome. A catalogue of agonies lived through and conquered and lived through again. Her heart swelled with love for him. Her throat tightened with the emotion’s sudden intensity.

  “Have you actually been sitting in this darkness worried about me? How like you, Simon.”

  “Why do you say that? What did you think I was doing?”

  “Tormenting yourself with…things in the past.”

  “Ah.” He drew her into his arms, resting his cheek on the top of her head. “I won’t lie to you, Deborah. It’s not easy for me, knowing that Tommy was your lover. If it had been some other man, I could have attributed to him all sorts of faults to convince myself that he wasn’t worthy of you. But that’s not the case, is it? He is a good man. He does deserve you. And no one knows that better than I.”

  “So you are haunted by it. I thought as much.”

  “Not haunted. Not at all.” His fingers moved lightly down her hair to caress her throat and slip the nightdress from her shoulders. “I was at first. I’ll admit that. But frankly, the very first time we made love I realised that I never had to think of you and Tommy again. If I didn’t want to. And now,” she could feel his smile, “every time I look at you, I’m reminded most decidedly of the present, not the past. And then I find that I want to undress you, breathe the fragrance of your skin, kiss your mouth and breasts and thighs. In fact, the distraction’s becoming quite a problem in my life.”

  “In mine as well.”

  “Then perhaps, my love,” he whispered, “we should concentrate all our energies on seeking a solution.” Her hand slid under the covers. He caught his breath at her touch. “That’s a good beginning,” he admitted and brought his mouth to hers.

  10

  The visitor was Superintendent Nies. He was waiting in the lounge, three empty pint glasses on a table nearby and a cardboard carton at his feet. He was standing, not sitting, a man wary and watchful and never relaxed. His lips thinned at the sight of Lynley, and his nostrils pinched as if he smelled something foul. He was contempt personified.

  “You wanted everything, Inspector,” he snapped. “Here it is.” He gave the carton a sharp kick, not so much to move it as to direct the other man’s attention to it.

  No one stirred. It was as if the raw hatred behind Nies’s words immobilised them all. Next to her, Barbara felt Lynley’s tension tightening his muscles like a whipcord. His face, however, was without expression as he took the measure of the other man.

  “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Nies persisted nastily. He picked up the carton, dumping its contents onto the carpet. “I expect, when you ask for everything, that you do mean everything, Inspector. Something about you tells me you’re a man of your word. Or were you hoping that I’d send it all with someone else so you might avoid having any further chats with me?”

  Lynley’s eyes dropped to the objects on the floor. A woman’s clothing, by their appearance.

  “Perhaps you’ve had too much to drink,” he suggested.

  Nies took a step forward. Blood rushed to his face. “You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to see me giving it over to drink, in my cups with flaming regret for having you in the nick for a few days over Davenport’s death. Not exactly the digs his precious lordship was used to, were they?”

  Barbara had never recognised so acutely one man’s need to strike another or the atavistic savagery that often drives that need to completion. She saw it in Nies now, in his posture, in his hands with their talon-like fingers halfway drawn into a fist, in the cords that stood out on his neck. What she couldn’t understand was Lynley’s reaction. After the initial flash of tension, he’d become unnaturally unperturbed. That seemed to be the source of Nies’s increasing rage.

  “Have you solved this case, Inspector?” Nies sneered. “Made any arrests? No, of course not. Not without having all the facts. So let me give you a few and save you a little time. Roberta Teys killed her father. She chopped off his miserable head, sat herself down, and waited to be discovered. And no bloody evidence you can dig out of the blue is ever going to prove this case otherwise. Not for Kerridge. Not for Webberly. Not for anyone. But you have a fine time digging for it, laddie. You’ll get nothing more from me. Now, get out of my way.”

  Nies shoved past them, flung open the outer door, and stormed to his car. It roared into life. He ground the gears viciously and was gone.

  Lynley looked at the two women. Stepha was very pale, Havers was stoic, but both clearly expected some kind of response from him. He found he couldn’t make one. Whatever devils were driving Nies’s behaviour, he didn’t care to discuss them. He longed to hang labels on the man: paranoid, psychopath, madman came to mind. But he knew too well what it felt like to be brought to the breaking point through sheer endeavour and exhaustion during a case. Lynley could see that Nies was a hair’s-breadth from breaking under the stress of the Scotland Yard scrutiny of his competence. So if it gave the man even a moment’s relief to rail wildly about their run-in five years ago, he was more than happy to give Nies free rein.

  “Would you get the Teys file from my room, Sergeant?” he asked Havers. “You’ll find it on the chest of drawers.”

  Havers gawked at him. “Sir, that man just—”

  “It’s on the chest of drawers,” Lynley repeated. He crossed the room to the heap of garments on the floor, picked up the dress, and laid it like a collapsed tent across the couch. It was a pale pastel print with a white sailor collar and long sleeves that ended in upturned white cuffs.

  The left sleeve of the garment was heavily stained with a solid mass of brown. Another solid mass formed an irregular pool from thighs to knees. The bottom of the skirt was speckled with it. Blood.

  He fingered the material and recognised the texture without looking to see if a label revealed it: a delicate lawn.

  Shoes had been part of the package as well: large black high-heeled pumps with mud encrusted along the ridge where left sole met shoe body. These too were flecked with the same brown substance. Petticoat and underclothes completed the lot.

  “That’s her church dress,” Stepha Odell said and added tonelessly, “She had two. One for winter and one for spring.”

  “Her best dress?” Lynley asked.

  “As far as I know.”

  He was beginning to understand the villagers’ stubborn refusal to believe that the girl had committed the crime. With each new piece of information, it made less and less sense. Havers returned with the file, her face without expression. Before he began leafing through it, he was convinced that the information he wanted wouldn’t be there. It wasn’t.

  “Damn the man,” Lynley muttered fruitlessly and looked at Havers. “He’s given us no analysis of the stains.”

  “He’d have to have done them, wouldn’t he?” Havers asked.

  “He’s done them. But he has no intention of giving them to us. Not if that would make our job easier.” Lynley uttered an oath beneath his breath and swept the garments back into their cardboard container.

  “What’s to do?” Havers asked.

  Lynley knew the answer. He needed St. James: the mechanical precision of his highly trained mind; the quick, clean certainty of his finely wrought skill. He needed a laboratory where tests could be made and a forensic expert he could trust who would make them. It was a maddening, circular sort of problem because in any direction the trail curved unquestionably back to St. James.

  He regarded the open carton at his feet and gave himself the ephemeral pleasure of cursing the man from Richmond. Webberly was wrong, he thought. I’m the last person he should have involved in this. Nies reads the London condemnation
too clearly. He sees in me his single serious mistake.

  He considered his options. He could turn the case over to another DI: MacPherson could certainly come sailing into Keldale and have the matter taken care of within two days. But MacPherson was caught up in the Ripper murders. It would be inconceivable to move him from the one case where his expertise was so desperately needed simply because Nies couldn’t come to terms with his past. He could telephone Kerridge in Newby Wiske. Kerridge, after all, was Nies’s superior officer. But to have Kerridge involved, chomping at the bit to make up for the Romanivs in any way he could, was even more absurd. Besides, Kerridge didn’t have the paperwork, the results of the lab tests, the depositions. All he had was an overwhelming hatred of Nies and an inability to get along with the man. The entire situation was an irritating, howling, political maelstrom of thwarted ambition, error, and revenge. He was sick of it.

  A glass was placed before him on the table. He looked up into Stepha’s serene eyes. “A bit of Odell’s is called for, I think.”

  He laughed shortly. “Sergeant,” he said, “would you care to indulge?”

  “No, sir,” she replied, and just when he thought she would go on in her former, exasperating I’m-on-duty manner, she added, “but I could do with a smoke, if you don’t mind.”

  He handed her his gold case and silver lighter. “Have as many as you like.”

  She lit her cigarette. “Got all dressed up to chop off Dad’s head? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “The dress does,” Stepha said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it was Sunday. She was ready for church.”

  Lynley and Havers looked up, realising simultaneously the import of Stephia’s words. “But Teys was killed on Saturday night.” Havers said.

  “So Roberta must have got up as usual on Sunday morning, put her church clothes on, and waited for her father.” Lynley eyed the dress heaped in the carton. “He wasn’t in the house, so she probably assumed he was somewhere on the farm. She wouldn’t worry, of course, because he’d be back in time to take her to church. He probably never missed church in his life. But when he didn’t show up, she began to get worried. She went out to look for him.”

  “And she found him in the barn,” Havers concluded. “But the blood on her dress—how do you think it came to be there?”

  “I’d guess she was in shock. She must have picked up the body and cradled it in her lap.”

  “But he had no head! How could she—”

  Lynley went on. “She lowered the body back down to the floor and, still in shock, sat there until Father Hart came and found her.”

  “But then why say she killed him?”

  “She never said that,” Lynley replied.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What she said was, ‘I did it. I’m not sorry.’” Lynley’s voice held a note of decision.

  “That sounds like a confession to me.”

  “Not necessarily.” He ran his fingers round the edges of the stain on the dress and tested the spacing of the spatters on the skirt. “But it does sound like something.”

  “What?”

  “That Roberta knows quite well who murdered her father.”

  Lynley awoke with a jolt. Early morning light filtered into the room in delicate bands that streaked across the floor to the bed. A chill breeze blew back the curtains and carried upon it the pleasant sounds of waking birds and the distant cries of sheep. But none of this touched his awareness. He lay in the bed and knew only depression, overwhelming desperation, and the burning of desire. He longed to turn on his side and find her there, her wealth of hair spread across the bedclothes, her eyes closed in sleep. He longed to arouse her to wakefulness, his mouth and tongue feeling the subtle, familiar changes in her body that betrayed her desire.

  He flung back the covers. Madness, he thought. He began pulling on clothing mindlessly, furiously, any article that first came to hand. Escape was the exigency.

  He grabbed an Aran sweater and ran from the room, thundering down the stairs and out into the street. There, he finally noticed the time. It was half past six.

  A heavy mist lay on the dale, swirling delicately round the edges of buildings and blanketing the river. To his right the high street was shuttered, abandoned. Not even the greengrocer was stirring his boxes out onto the pavement. Sinji’s windows were darkened, the Wesleyan chapel was barred, and the tea room looked back at him with blank disinterest.

  He walked to the bridge, wasted five minutes restlessly tossing pebbles into the river, and was finally distracted by the sight of the church.

  On its hillock, St. Catherine’s looked peacefully down upon the village, the very exorcist he needed for the demons of his past. He began to walk towards it.

  It was a proud little church. Surrounded by trees and an ancient, crumbling graveyard, it lifted its splendid Norman exterior to the sky. Its apse housed a semicircle of stained glass windows, while its bell tower at the opposite end played host to a whispering band of doves. For a moment he watched them rustling at the edges of the roof, then he walked up the gravel path to the lych gate. He entered, and the peace of the graveyard settled round him.

  Idly, he began to wander among the graves, looking at tombstones made barely legible by the ravages of time. The yard was overgrown with weeds and grass, dampened by morning mist. Gravestones bent into thick vegetation. Moss flourished on surfaces that never saw sun, and trees sheltered final resting places of people long forgotten.

  A curious group of twisting Italian cypresses arched over a few toppled tombstones some distance from the church. Their contortions were mystifying, oddly humanoid, as if they were attempting to protect the graves beneath them. Intrigued, he walked in their direction and saw her.

  How completely like her to have rolled up the legs of her faded blue jeans, to have removed her shoes and plunged barefoot into the tall, damp growth so as to capture the graves in the best angle and light. How like her as well to be utterly oblivious to her surroundings: oblivious to the streak of mud that snaked from ankle to calf, to the torn crimson leaf that had somehow become tangled in her hair, to the fact that he stood less than ten yards away and drank in her every movement and longed quite hopelessly for her to be again what she once had been in his life.

  The low ground fog hid and revealed in alternate patches. The early sunlight weakly dappled the stones. An inquisitive bird watched with bright eyes from a grave nearby. He was only dimly aware of this, but he knew that with her camera she would capture it all.

  He looked for St. James. Surely the man would be sitting somewhere nearby, fondly watching his wife work. But he was nowhere in sight. She was very much alone.

  He felt immediately as if the church had betrayed him with its early promise of comfort and peace. It’s no good, Deb, he thought as he watched her. Nothing makes it go away. I want you to leave him. Betray him. Come back to me. It’s where you belong.

  She looked up, brushed her hair off her face, and saw him. He knew from her expression that he might as well have said everything aloud. She read it at once.

  “Oh, Tommy.”

  Of course she wouldn’t pretend, wouldn’t fill the awkward moment with amusing chatter that, Helen-like, would serve to get them through the encounter. Instead she bit her lip, looking very much as if he had struck her, and turned back to her tripod, making unnecessary adjustments.

  He walked to her side. “I’m so sorry,” he said. She continued to fumble uselessly with her equipment, her head bent, her hair hiding her face. “I can’t get past it. I try to see my way clear, but it’s just no good.” Her face was averted. She seemed to be examining the pattern of the hills. “I tell myself that it’s ended the right way for us all, but I don’t believe that. I still want you, Deb.”

  She turned to him then, her face quite white, her eyes gleaming with tears. “You can’t. You’ve got to let that go.”

  “My mind accepts that, but nothing else does.” A tear escaped and descend
ed her cheek. He put out his hand to wipe it away but remembered himself and dropped his arm to his side. “I woke up this morning so desperate to make love with you again that I thought if I didn’t get out of the room at once I should begin clawing at the walls in pure, adolescent frustration. I thought the church would be a balm to me. What I didn’t think was that you would be wandering round its graveyard at dawn.” He looked at her equipment. “What are you doing here? Where’s Simon?”

  “He’s still at the hall. I…I woke up early and came out to see the village.”

  It didn’t ring true. “Is he ill?” he asked sharply.

  She scanned the branches of the cypresses. A shallowness in Simon’s breathing had immediately awakened her shortly before six. He was lying so still that for one horrifying moment she thought he was dying. He was drawing in each breath carefully, and she knew all at once that his only thought had been not to awaken her. But when she reached for his hand, his fingers closed bruisingly round her own. “Let me get your medicine,” she whispered, and had done so, and then had watched his determined face as he battled to be master of the pain. “Can you…for an hour, my love?” It was the part of his life that brooked no companion. It was the part of his life she could never share. She had left him.

  “He had…there was some pain this morning.”

  Lynley felt the full impact of Deborah’s words. He understood so well everything that they implied. “Christ, there’s no escaping it, is there?” he asked bitterly. “Even that’s part of the miserable account.”

  “No!” Raw horror tore her voice. “Don’t say that! Don’t you ever! Don’t you do that to yourself! It isn’t your fault!” Having spoken so quickly, really without thinking of the impression that her words would have upon Lynley, it was suddenly as if she had said too much—far more than she had intended to say—and she went back to fumbling with her camera, taking it apart this time, detaching lens from body and body from tripod, putting everything away.