A Great Deliverance (19 page)

“Why not?”

“‘Cause Mummy said she didn’t want to see me again till I’d done something about my hair and I don’t know what to do!” The child began to cry again, real tears of anguish. Dougal would apparently starve—an unlikely prospect, considering his size—unless some quick thinking were applied to the situation.

It appeared, however, that a plan of attack would be unnecessary, for at that moment the back door was jerked open angrily. Olivia Odell took one look at her daughter—her second only that day—and burst into tears.

“I can’t believe you would do it! I just can’t believe it! Get in the house and wash your hair!” Her voice rose higher with each word, climbing the peak to hysteria.

“But Dougal—”

“Take Dougal with you,” the woman said, weeping. “But do as I say!” The duck was scooped into nine-year-old arms and the two offenders disappeared. Olivia tugged a tissue from the pocket of her cardigan, blew her nose, and smiled shakily at the two adults. “What a dreadful scene,” she said. But as she spoke she began to cry again and walked into the kitchen, leaving them standing at the open back door. She stumbled to the table and buried her face in her hands.

Lynley and Havers looked at each other and, decision made, entered the house.

Unlike Gembler Farm, there was not the slightest doubt that this house was lived in. The kitchen was in total disarray: the stove top cluttered with pots and pans, appliances gaping open to be cleaned, flowers waiting to be put into water, dishes piled in the sink. The floor was sticky under their feet, the walls badly needed paint, and the entire room reeked with the charcoal bouquet of burnt toast. The offending source of this odour was lying on a plate, a sodden black lump that looked as if it has been hastily extinguished by a cup of tea.

Beyond the kitchen, what little they could see of the sitting room indicated that its condition was much the same. Housekeeping was certainly not Olivia Odell’s strong point. Neither was child rearing, if the morning’s confrontation were any indication.

“She’s out of my control!” Olivia wept. “Nine years old and she’s out of my control!” She tore the tissue to shreds, looked dazedly about for another, and, seeing none, cried harder still.

Lynley removed a handkerchief from his pocket. “Take this,” he offered.

“Ta,” she responded. “Oh my God, what a morning!” She blew her nose, dried her eyes, ran her fingers through her brown hair, and looked at her reflection in the toaster. She moaned when she saw herself, and her bloodshot brown eyes filled again but didn’t spill over. “I look fifty years old. Wouldn’t Paul have laughed!” And then disjointedly, “She wants to look like the Princess of Wales.”

“So she showed us,” Lynley responded impassively. He drew a chair out from the table, picked the newspapers off of it, and sat down. After a pause, Havers did likewise.

“Why?” Olivia asked, directing the question more to the ceiling than to her companions. “What have I done that my daughter believes the key to happiness is to look exactly like the Princess of Wales?” She squeezed her fingers into her forehead. “William would have known what to do. What a
mess
I am without him.”

Wishing to avoid a fresh onslaught of tears, Lynley spoke quickly to divert her. “Little girls always have someone they admire, don’t they?”

“Yes,” Olivia said. “Oh yes, how true that is.” She’d begun twisting his handkerchief into an appalling little rope. Lynley winced as he saw it mangled. “But I never seem to have the right thing to say to the child. Everything I try seems to end in hysterics. William always knew what to say and do. Whenever he was here, everything went smoothly. But the moment he was gone, we’d begin to fight like cats and dogs! And now he’s really gone! What’s to become of us?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s her
hair
. She
hates
having red hair. She’s hated it ever since she learned to speak. I can’t understand it. Why is a nine-year-old girl so damned passionate about her hair!”

“Redheads,” Lynley noted, “are generally passionate about everything.”

“Oh, that’s it! That’s it! Stepha’s quite the same. You’d think Bridie was her clone, not her niece.” She drew in a breath and sat up in her chair. Footsteps came running down the hall. “Lord, give me strength,” Olivia murmured.

Bridie entered the room, a towel wrapped precariously round her head, her pullover—which she hadn’t bothered to remove in her haste to obey her mothers instructions—thoroughly soaked round her shoulders and down most of her back. She was followed by her duck, who walked like a seaman, with a peculiar rolling gait.

“He’s crippled,” Bridie announced, noticing Lynley’s inspection of the fowl. “When he swims, he jus’ goes round in a big circle, so I don’t let him swim unless I’m there. We took him swimming lots last summer, though. In the river. We made a dam just outside and he had ever so much fun. He’d plunk himself in the water and go round and round. Huh, Dougal?” The mallard blinked his agreement and searched on the floor for something to eat.

“Here, let me see you, MacBride,” her mother said. The daughter came forward, the towel was removed, the damage was surveyed. Olivia’s eyes welled with tears again above her daughter’s head. She bit her lip.

“Looks like it just needs a bit of a trim,” Lynley interposed hastily. “What do you think, Sergeant?”

“A trim ought to do it,” Havers agreed.

“I think the thing to do, Bridie, is to give up on the Princess of Wales idea. Now,” Lynley added as the child’s bottom lip trembled, “you’ve got to remember that your hair is curly. Hers is quite straight. And when Sinji told you that she couldn’t make it go in that style, she was telling you the truth.”

“But she’s so pretty,” Bridie protested. Tears threatened once again.

“She is. Absolutely. But it would be a fairly strange world if every woman were exactly like her, wouldn’t it? Believe me, there are many women who are very pretty and look nothing like her.”

“There are?” Bridie gave a longing glance to the crumpled photograph again. A large smear of grease was sitting on the Princess’s nose.

“You can believe the inspector when he says that, Bridie,” Havers added, and her tone implied the rest:
He’s a bit of an expert on the subject
.

Bridie looked from woman to man, sensing undercurrents that she didn’t understand. “Well,” she announced, “I s’pose I got to feed Dougal.”

The duck, at least, looked as if he approved.

The Odell sitting room was only a slight improvement over the kitchen. It was hard to believe that one woman and one child could produce such disarray. Clothes lay piled over chairs as if mother and daughter were in the process of moving; knickknacks perched in unlikely positions on the edges of tables and window sills; an ironing board was set up in what looked like permanent residence; an upright piano spat sheet music onto the floor. It was havoc, with dust so thick that it gave the air flavour.

Olivia appeared to be unaware of the mess as she absently gestured them towards seats, but she looked about as she took her own and sighed in unembarrassed resignation. “It’s usually not this bad. I’ve been … it’s been …” She cleared her throat and shook her head as if to get her thoughts in order. Once again the fingers went through the wispy, windblown-looking hair. It was a girlish gesture, oddly incongruous in a woman who so plainly was no longer a girl. She had paper-fine skin and delicate features, but the ageing process was not dealing with her kindly. She was lined and, although thin, her flesh lacked resiliency, as if she had lost too much weight too quickly. Bones jutted from her cheeks and wrists.

“You know,” she said suddenly, “when Paul died, it wasn’t this bad. I can’t come to grips with what’s happened to me over William.”

“The suddenness,” Lynley offered. “The shock.”

She nodded. “Perhaps you’re right. My husband Paul was ill for several years. I had time to prepare myself. And Bridie, of course, was too young to understand. But William …” She made an effort at control, fixing her eyes on the wall, sitting up tall. “William was such a presence in our lives, such a strength. I think we both started to depend on him and then he was gone. But it’s selfish of me to be reacting like this. How can I be so awful when there’s Bobba to consider?”

“Roberta?”

She glanced at him, then away. “She always came here with William.”

“What was she like?”

“Very quiet. Very nice. Not an attractive girl. Heavy, you know. But she was always very good to Bridie.”

“Her weight caused a problem between Richard Gibson and his uncle, though, didn’t it?”

Olivia’s brow furrowed. “A problem? How do you mean?”

“Their argument over it. At the Dove and Whistle. Will you tell us about it?”

“Oh
that
Stepha must have told you. But that has nothing to do with William’s death.” This as she saw Sergeant Havers write a few lines in her notebook.

“One can never be sure. Will you tell us about it?”

A hand fluttered up as if in protest but resettled in her lap. “Richard hadn’t been back from the fens for long. He ran into us at the Dove and Whistle. There were words. Silly. Over in a minute. That’s all.” She smiled vaguely.

“What sort of words?”

“It really had nothing to do with Roberta initially. We were all sitting together at a table and William, I’m afraid, made a comment about Hannah. The barmaid. Have you seen her?”

“Last night.”

“Then you know she looks … different. William didn’t at all approve of her, nor of the way her father deals with her. You know—as if he’s just amused by it all. So William said something about it. Something like, ‘Why her dad lets her walk about looking like a tart is a mystery to me.’ That sort of thing. Nothing really serious. Richard was just a bit in his cups. He’d a terrible set of scratches on his face, so I think he’d been at it with his wife as well. His mood was foul. He said something about not being such a fool as to judge by appearances, that—as I recall—an angel could be wearing a streetwalker’s guise and the sweetest blonde-headed little face could hide a whore.”

“And William took that to mean what?”

She produced a tired smile. “As a reference to Gillian, his older daughter. Rather immediately, I’m afraid. He demanded to know what Richard meant by his remark. Richard and Gilly had been great friends, you see. I think—to avoid having to explain—Richard sidetracked onto Roberta.”

“How?”

“As an example of not judging by appearances. Of course, it went on from there. Richard demanded to know why Roberta had been allowed to get into such an unattractive state. In turn, William demanded to know what he had meant by his insinuation about Gilly. Richard demanded that William answer. William demanded that Richard answer. You know the sort of thing.”

“And then?”

She laughed. It was a tittering sound, like that of a trapped bird. “I thought they might fight. Richard said no child of his would ever be allowed to eat her way into an early grave and that William ought to be ashamed of the job he’d done as a father. William became so angry that he said something about Richard being ashamed of the job he was doing as a husband. He made a … well, a bit of a crude reference to Madeline going unsatisfied—she’s Richard’s wife, have you met her?—and frankly just when I thought Richard might truly hit his uncle, instead he just laughed. He said something about being a fool to waste his time worrying about Roberta and left us.”

“That was all?”

“Yes.”

“What do you suppose Richard meant?”

“By being a fool?” As if seeing the direction his question was taking her, she frowned. “You want me to say that he felt he was being a fool because if Roberta died, he’d get the farm.”

“Is that what he meant?”

“No, of course not. William rewrote his will shortly after Richard returned from the fens. Richard knew very well that the farm had been left to him, not to Roberta.”

“But if you and William married, then the will would most likely have been rewritten once again. Isn’t that true?”

Clearly, she saw the trap. “Yes but … I know what you’re thinking. It was to Richard’s advantage that William should die before we could marry. But isn’t that always the case when there’s an inheritance involved? And people don’t generally kill one another just because they’re to inherit something in a will.”

“On the contrary, Mrs. Odell,” Lynley objected politely, “people do it all the time.”

“That wasn’t the case here. I just think … well, that Richard’s not very happy. And unhappy people say lots of things that they really don’t mean and do lots of things that they wouldn’t otherwise do just to try to forget their unhappiness, don’t they?”

Neither Lynley nor Havers replied at once. Olivia moved restlessly in her chair. Outside, Bridie’s voice rose as she called to her duck.

“Did Roberta know about this conversation?” Lynley asked.

“If she did, she never mentioned it. When she was here she mostly talked—in that low-voiced way of hers—about the wedding. I think she was eager for William and me to marry. To have a sister in Bridie. To have what she once had with Gillian. She missed her sister dreadfully. I don’t believe she ever got over Gillian’s running away.” Her nervous fingers found a loose thread on the hem of her skirt, and she twisted it compulsively until it broke. Then she looked at it mutely, as if wondering how it came to be wrapped round her finger. “Bobba—that’s what William always called her, and we did as well—would take Bridie off so that William and I could have time alone. She and Bridie and Whiskers and that duck would go off together. Can you imagine what they looked like?” She smiled and smoothed the creases in her skirt. “They’d go to the river, across the common, or down to the abbey for a picnic. The four of them. And then William and I would be able to talk.”

“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?”