A Great Deliverance (18 page)

Lynley had gone in this direction once before. “The musical dog.”

“Pardon?”

“Father Hart told us that Whiskers liked to lie on the common and listen to you play the organ.”

Parrish laughed. “Isn’t it the absolute devil? I practise my fingers to the bone, dear ones, and my most enthusiastic audience is a farm dog.” His words dealt with the matter in a lambent fashion—as if nothing on earth could really be more amusing. Yet Lynley could see it was a brittle performance, a facade made frangible by the force of a current of bitterness that ran, swift and sure, just beneath the surface. Parrish was working at joviality and rather too industriously.

“Well, there you have it,” he continued. He turned the snifter in his hands, admiring the variety of colours that the cognac produced as it caught the light. “A virtual Sahara of musical appreciation in the village. In fact, the only reason I play at St. Catherine’s on Sundays is to please myself. God knows no one else can tell a fugue from a scherzo. D’you know that St. Catherine’s has the finest organ in Yorkshire? Typical, isn’t it? I’m sure Rome purchased it personally to keep the RCs in control in Keldale. I’m C of E, myself.

“And Farmington?” Lynley asked.

“Ezra? I don’t think Ezra’s religious at all. Except,” seeing no amused appreciation on Lynley’s face, “what you probably mean is what do I have to say about Ezra.”

“You’ve certainly read me, Mr. Parrish.”

“Ezra.” Parrish smiled and took a drink, perhaps for courage, perhaps for solace. It was difficult to tell. He lowered his voice momentarily, however, and as he did so, a brief glimmer of the real man emerged, brooding and moody. But the chatty gossip replaced him almost at once. “Let me see, loves, it must have been about a month ago when William Teys ran Ezra off the farm.”

“Was he trespassing?”

“Absolutely. But according to Ezra, he has some sort of ‘artistic licence’ that allows him to trespass everywhere. And I do mean
everywhere
. He was doing what he call light studies’ of High Kel Moor. Your basic Rouen Cathedral sort of thing. Start a new picture every fifteen minutes.”

“I’m familiar with Monet.”

“Then you know what I mean. Well, the only way—let’s say the quickest way—up to High Kel Moor is right through the woods behind Gembler Farm. And the way to the woods—”

“Was across Teys’s land,” Lynley finished.

“Exactly. I was trotting along the road with Whiskers in tow. He’d put in his usual appearance on the common and, as it seemed late to let the old boy find his own way home, I was taking him there myself. I had hoped our darling Stepha might be willing to do the job in her Mini, but she was nowhere to be found. So I had to drag the old thing out there on these poor, stiff legs.”

“You don’t own a car?”

“Not one that runs with any reliablity, I’m afraid. Anyway, I got to the farm and there they were, right in the road having the most god-awful row I’ve ever seen. There was William in his jimjams—”

“Excuse me?”

“His
pyjamas
, Inspector. Or was it his dressing gown?” Parrish squinted at the ceiling and considered his own question. “It was his dressing gown. I remember thinking, ‘Lord, what hairy legs old William has,’ when I saw him. Quite like a gorilla.”

“I see.”

“And Ezra was standing there, shouting at him, waving his arms, and cursing in ways that must have made poor sainted William’s hair stand on end. The dog got hot into the action and took
quite
a piece out of Ezra’s trousers. While he was doing that, William ripped three of Ezra’s precious watercolours into shreds and dumped the rest of the portfolio right onto the verge. It was dreadful.” Parrish looked down as he concluded his story, a mournful note to his voice, but when he lifted his head his eyes said clearly that Ezra had got what he’d long deserved.

Lynley watched Sergeant Havers climb the stairs and disappear from view. He rubbed his temples and walked into the lounge, where a light at the far end of the room illuminated the bent head of Stepha Odell. She looked up from her book at his footsteps.

“Have we kept you up to lock the door?” Lynley asked. “I’m terribly sorry.”

She smiled and stretched her arms languidly over her head. “Not at all,” she replied pleasantly. “I was nodding a bit over my novel, however.”

“What are you reading?”

“A cheap romance.” She laughed easily and got to her feet, which, he noticed, were bare. She had changed from her grey church dress into a simple tweed skirt and sweater. A single freshwater pearl on a silver chain hung between her breasts. “It’s my way of escaping. Everyone always lives happily ever after in a romance novel.” He remained where he was, near the door. “How do you escape, Inspector?”

“I don’t, I’m afraid.”

“Then what do you do about the shadows in your life?”

“The shadows?”

“Chasing murderers down. It can’t be a pleasant job. Why do you do it?”

There was the question, he admitted, and knew the answer.
It’s penance, Stepha, an expiation for sins committed that you couldn’t understand
. “I never stopped to think about it.”

“Ah.” She nodded thoughtfully and let it go. “Well, you’ve a package that’s come. Brought by a rather nasty man from Richmond. He wouldn’t give me his name, but he smelled like a large digestive tablet.”

An apt description of Nies, Lynley thought, as she went behind the bar. He followed. She had evidently been working in the lounge in the late afternoon, for the room was scented richly with beeswax and the yeasty smell of ale. That combination took him right back to Cornwall, a ten-year-old boy hurriedly wolfing down pasties in the kitchen of the Trefallen farm. Such delicacies they were to him, meat and onions folded into a flaky shell, fruit forbidden and unheard of in the formal dining room of Howenstow. “Common,” his father would snort contemptuously. And indeed they were, which was why he loved them.

Stepha placed a large envelope on the counter. “Here it is. Will you join me for a nightcap?”

“Thank you. I’d like that.”

She smiled. He noticed how it curved her cheeks, how the tiny lines round her eyes seemed to vanish. “Good. Sit down then. You look exhausted.”

He went to one of the couches and opened the envelope. Nies had made no effort to put the material in any sort of order. There were three notebooks of information, some additional photographs of Roberta, forensic reports identical to the ones he already had, and nothing whatsoever on Whiskers.

Stepha Odell placed a glass on the table and sat opposite him, drawing her legs up into the seat of the chair.

“What happened to Whiskers?” Lynley asked himself. “Why is there nothing about that dog?”

“Gabriel knows,” Stepha responded.

For a moment he thought it was some sort of village expression until he recalled the constable’s name. “Constable Langston?”

She nodded, sipping her drink. Her fingers on the glass were long and slender, unencumbered by rings. “He buried Whiskers.”

“Where?”

She shrugged a shoulder and pushed her hair back off her face. Unlike the ugliness of the gesture by Havers, in Stepha it was a lovely movement, chasing shadows away. “I’m not sure. I expect it was somewhere on the farm.”

“But why was no forensic study done on the dog?” Lynley mused.

“I suppose they didn’t need one. They could see how the poor thing died.”

“How?”

“His throat was slit, Inspector.”

He fumbled back through the material, looking for the pictures. No wonder he had failed to see it before. Teys’s body, sprawled right over the dog’s corpse, obscured the view. He considered the photograph.

“You see the problem now, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can you imagine Roberta slitting Whiskers’s throat?” An expression of distaste passed across Stepha’s face. “It’s impossible. I’m sorry, but it’s just impossible. Beyond that, no weapon was ever found. Surely she didn’t slit the poor animal’s throat with an axe!”

As she spoke, Lynley found himself beginning to wonder for the first time exactly who the real target of the crime had been: William Teys or his dog.

Suppose a robbery had been in the works, he thought. The dog would need to be silenced. He was old, certainly incapable of attacking someone, but well enough able to make a din if a foreign presence were found in his territory. So the dog would have to be dealt with. But perhaps not quickly enough, so that when Teys rushed out to the barn to see what the yelping was all about, he would have to be dealt with as well. Perhaps, thought Lynley, we have no premeditated murder here, but a crime of an entirely different nature.

“Stepha,” he said thoughtfully. He reached in his pocket. “Who is this?” He handed her the photograph that he and Havers had found in Roberta’s chest of drawers.”

“Where on earth did you get this?”

“In Roberta’s bedroom. Who is it?”

“It’s Gillian Teys, Roberta’s sister.” She tapped the photograph lightly for emphasis, studying it as she spoke. “Roberta must have kept this well hidden from William.”

“Why?”

“Because after Gillian ran off, she was dead to William. He threw away her clothes, got rid of her books, and even destroyed every picture that she was in. Burnt her birth certificate as well as everything else in a great bonfire right in the middle of the yard. How on earth,” she asked, more to herself than to him, her eyes on the photograph, “did Roberta manage to save this?”

“More importantly perhaps, why did she save it?”

“That’s easy enough. Roberta adored Gillian. God knows why. Gillian was the great disaster in the family. She turned out quite wild. She drank and swore and ran around like mad, having the time of her life, off to a party in Whitby one night, out with some hellion God-knows-where the next. Picking up men and giving them a run for their money. Then one night, some eleven years ago, she left. And she never came back.”

Lynley caught the word. “Left? Or disappeared?”

Stepha’s body backed into the chair. One of her hands rose to her throat, but she stopped the gesture as if it were betraying her. “Left,” she said firmly.

He went along. “Why?”

“I imagine because she was at odds with William. He was fairly straitlaced and Gillian was nothing if not after a good time. But Richard—her cousin—could probably tell you more. The two of them were rather thick before he left for the fens.” Stepha got to her feet, stretched, and walked to the door, where she paused. “Inspector,” she said slowly. Lynley looked up from the photograph, half-expecting her to say more about Gillian Teys. She hesitated. “Would you like … anything else tonight?”

The light from the reception area behind her cast a glow upon her hair. Her skin looked smooth and lovely. Her eyes were kind. It would be so easy. An hour of bliss. Impassioned acceptance. A simple, longed-for forgetting. “No, thank you, Stepha,” he made himself say.

The River Kel was a peaceful tributary unlike many of the rivers that debouched frantically from the hillsides down into the dales. Silently, it wended its way through Keldale, flowing past the ruined abbey on its way to the sea. It loved the village, treating it well, seldom overflowing in destruction. It welcomed the lodge to exist on its banks, splashed greetings onto the village common, and listened to the lives of the people who lived in the houses built at its very edge.

Olivia Odell had one of these houses, across the bridge from the lodge, with a sweeping view of the common and of St. Catherine’s Church. It was the finest home in the village, with a lovely front garden and a lawn that sloped down to the river.

It was still early morning when Lynley and Havers pushed open the gate, but the steady wailing of a child, coming from behind the house, told them that the inhabitants were already up and about. They followed the grief-stricken ululation to its source.

On the back steps of the house sat the youthful mourner. She was huddled in a ball of woe, head bent to her knees, a crumpled magazine photograph beneath her grubby shoes. To her left sat her audience, a solemn male mallard who watched her sympathetically. Upon her head was the ostensible source of her grief, for she’d cut her hair—or rather somebody had—and had plastered it onto her skull with grease. It once had been red and, from the look of the locks escaping their confinement, decidedly curly. But now, giving off the malodourous waft of cheap pomade, it was nothing but dreadful to behold.

Havers and Lynley exchanged a look. “Good morning,” the inspector said pleasantly. “You must be Bridie.”

The child looked up, grabbing the photograph and clutching it to her chest in a motherly gesture. The duck merely blinked.

“What’s wrong?” Lynley asked kindly.

Bridie’s defiant posture was completely deflated at the gentle sound of the tall man’s voice. “I cut my hair!” she wailed. “I saved my money to go to Sinji’s but she said she couldn’t make my hair go this way and she wouldn’t cut it so I cut it myself and now look at me and Mummy’s crying as well. I tried to straighten it all out with this stuff of Hannah’s but it’ll never come right!” She hiccupped pathetically on the last word.

Lynley nodded. “I see. It does look a bit awful, Bridie. Exactly what sort of effect were you going after?” He quailed inwardly at the thought of Hannah’s black spikes.

“This!” She waved the photograph at him, wailing anew.

He took it from her and looked at the smiling, smooth coiffured semblance of the Princess of Wales, elegant in black evening gown and diamonds, not a hair out of place. “Of
course,”
he muttered.

Bereft of her picture, Bridie took comfort in the presence of her duck, slinging an arm round him and pulling him to her side.
“You
don’t care, Dougal,
do
you?” she demanded of the bird. In reply, Dougal blinked and investigated Bridie’s hair for its edible propensities.

“Dougal the Duck?” Lynley enquired.

“Angus McDougal McDuck,” Bridie responded. The formal introduction made, she wiped her nose on the sleeve of her tattered pullover and looked fearfully over her shoulder at the closed door behind her. A single tear rolled down her cheek as she went on. “An’ he’s hungry. But I can’t go inside to get his food. All I got’s these marshmallows. They’re all right for a treat, but his real food’s inside and I can’t go in.”