A Great Deliverance (22 page)

“No. I don’t think so.”

Havers offered a new thought. “Well, then there’s Ezra.”

Lynley flashed her a smile. “William in his jimjams in the middle of the road ripping up Ezra’s watercolours while Ezra curses him to hell and back? We
could
have a motive for murder there. I don’t think an artist would take lightly to having someone rip up his work.”

Havers opened her mouth, stopped. She reflected for a moment. “But it wasn’t his pyjamas.”

“Yes, it was.”

“It wasn’t. It was his dressing gown. Remember? Nigel said his legs reminded him of a gorilla. So what was he doing in his dressing gown? It was still light out. It wasn’t time for bed.”

“Changing for dinner, I dare say. He’s up in his room, looks out the window, sees Ezra trespassing, and comes charging into the yard.”

“I suppose that could be it.”

“What else?”

“Exercising, perhaps?”

“Deep knee bends in his underwear? That’s hard to picture.”

“Or … perhaps with Olivia?”

Lynley smiled. “Not if everything we’ve heard about him is true. William sounds to me like a strictly after-marriage man. I don’t think he’d try any funny business with Olivia beforehand.”

“What about Nigel Parrish?”

“What about him?”

“Walking the dog back to the farm out of the goodness of his heart, like a card-carrying member of the RSPCA? Doesn’t that whole story seem a bit off to you?”

“It does. But do you really think Parrish would want to get his hands dirty with a bit of William Teys’s blood? Not to mention his head rolling across the stall floor.”

“To be honest, he seems the type to faint at the sight.”

They laughed, a first shared communication. It dropped almost immediately into an uncomfortable silence at the sudden realisation that they could become friends.

The decision to go to Barnstingham Mental Asylum grew out of Lynley’s belief that Roberta held all the cards in the current game they were playing: the identity of the murderer, the motive behind the crime, and the disappearance of Gillian Teys. He’d stopped an hour out of York to make the arrangements by telephone, and now, pulling the car to a stop on the gravel drive in front of the building, he turned to Barbara.

“Cigarette?” He offered his gold case.

“No, sir. Thank you.”

He nodded, glanced at the imposing building, then back at her. “Rather wait here, Sergeant?” he asked as he lit his cigarette with the silver lighter. He took a few moments about replacing all the impedimenta of his habit.

She watched him with speculative eyes. “Why?”

He shrugged casually. Too casually, she noted. “You look fagged out. I thought you might want a bit of a rest.”

Fagged out. It was his public-school-fop act. She’d begun to notice how he used it occasionally to serve the need of the moment. He’d dropped it earlier. Why was he picking it up now?

“If we’re talking about exhaustion, Inspector,
you
look just about ready to drop. What’s up?”

He examined himself in the mirror at her words; his cigarette dangling from his lips, his eyes narrowed against the smoke, part Sam Spade, part Algernon Moncrieff. “I
do
look a sight.” He busied himself about his appearance for a moment: straightening his tie, examining his hair, brushing at nonexistent lint on the lapels of his jacket. She waited. Finally he met her eyes. The fop, as well as the other personae, was gone. “The farm upset you a bit yesterday,” he said frankly. “I have an idea that what we’ll find in here is going to be a hell of a lot worse than the farm.”

For a moment she couldn’t take her eyes from his, but she pressed her hand to the door and flung it open. “I can
deal
with it, sir,” she said abruptly and got out into the brisk autumn air.

“We’ve kept her confined,” Dr. Samuels was saying to Lynley as they walked down the transverse passage that ran straight through the building from east to west.

Barbara followed behind them, relieved to find that Barnstingham was not exactly what she had pictured when she first heard the words
mental asylum
. It was really not very hospital-like at all, an English baroque building laid out on cross-axes. They had entered through a front hall that rose two storeys, with fluted pilasters standing on plinths against the walls.
Light
and
colour
were the operative words here, for the room was painted a calming shade of peach, the decorative plasterwork was white, the ankle-thick carpeting was merely a shade off rust, and while the portraits were dark and moody, of the Flemish school, their subjects managed to look suitably apologetic about the fact.

All this was a relief, for when Lynley had first mentioned the need to see Roberta, to come to this place, Barbara had become quite faint, that old insidious panic setting in. Lynley had seen it, of course. Damn the man. He didn’t miss a trick.

Now that she was inside the building, she felt steadier, a feeling that improved once they left the great central hall and began their journey down the passage. Here conviviality expressed itself in soothing Constable landscapes and vases of fresh flowers and quiet voices in the air. The sound of music and singing came from a distance.

“The choir,” Dr. Samuels explained. “Here, it’s just this way.”

Samuels himself had been a secondary source of both surprise and relief. Outside the walls of the hospital, Barbara wouldn’t have known he was a psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist
somehow conjured up images of Freud: a bearded Victorian face, a cigar, and those speculative eyes. But Samuels had the look of a man who was more at home on horseback or hiking across the moors than probing disturbed psyches. He was well-built, loose limbed, and clean shaven, with a tendency, Barbara guessed, to be less than patient with anyone whose intelligence did not match his own. He was probably the devil on a tennis court as well.

She’d begun to feel quite at ease with the hospital when Dr. Samuels opened a narrow door—funny how it had been concealed by some panelling—and led them into the new wing of the building. This was the locked ward, looking and smelling exactly as Barbara had supposed a locked ward would. The carpeting was a very dark, serviceable brown. The walls were the colour of sunbaked sand, unadorned and broken only by doors into which small windows were set at eye level. The air was filled with that medicinal smell of antiseptics and detergents and drugs. And it was cut by a low moaning that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. It could have been the wind. It could have been anything.

Here it is, she told herself. The place for psychos, for girls who decapitate daddies, for girls who murder. Lots of things are murder, Barb.

“There’s been absolutely nothing since her original statement,” Dr. Samuels was saying to Lynley. “She’s not catatonic. She’s merely said what she intends to say, I think.” He glanced at the clipboard he was carrying. “‘I did it. I’m sorry.’ On the day the body was found. She’s not spoken since.”

“There’s no medical cause? She’s been examined?”

Dr. Samuel’s lips tightened in offence. It was clear that this Scotland Yard intrusion bordered on insult, and if he had to impart information, it would be minimal at best.

“She’s been examined,” he said. “No seizure, no stroke. She can speak. She chooses not to.”

If he was bothered by the clipped nature of the doctor’s response, Lynley didn’t let it show. He was used to encountering attitudes like the psychiatrist’s, attitudes proclaiming that the police were antagonists to be thwarted rather than allies to be helped. He slowed his steps and told Dr. Samuel about Roberta’s cache of food. This, at least, caught the man’s attention. When he next spoke, his words walked the line between frustration and deeper thought.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Inspector. The food could, as you guess, be a compulsion. It could be a stimulus or a response. It could be a source of gratification or a form of sublimation. Until Roberta’s willing to give us something to go on, it could be damn well anything.”

Lynley shifted to another area. “Why did you take her from the Richmond police? Isn’t that a bit irregular?”

“Not when the responsible party’s signed her in,” Dr. Samuels replied. “We’re a private hospital.”

“The responsible party. Was that Superintendent Nies?”

Samuels shook his head impatiently. “Not at all. We don’t take people at random from the police.” He scanned Roberta’s chart. “It was … let me see where … Gibson, Richard Gibson. He names himself as her closest relative. He’s the one who got the court to agree and filled out the paperwork.”

“Richard Gibson?”

“That’s the name on the form, Inspector,” Samuels replied tersely. “He’s signed her in for treatment pending the trial. She’s in therapy daily. There’s no progress yet, but that isn’t to say there never will be any.”

“But why would Gibson—” Lynley was speaking more to himself than the other two, but Samuels went on, perhaps in the assumption that he was being addressed.

“She’s his cousin, after all. And the sooner she’s better, the sooner the trial. That is, unless she’s proven incompetent to stand trial at all.”

“And in that case,” Lynley finished, his eyes fixed grimly on the doctor’s face, “she’s in for life, isn’t she?”

“Until she recovers.” Samuels led them up to a heavy, locked door. “She’s just in here. It’s unfortunate that she has to be alone, but considering the circumstances. …” He gestured with his hands, unlocked the door, and swung it open. “Roberta, you’ve visitors,” he said.

He’d chosen Prokofiev—
Romeo and Juliet
—and the music had begun almost immediately when he started the car. Thank God, Barbara thought brokenly. Thank God. Let the music of violins, cellos and violas drive thought away, drive memory away, drive everything completely, irreversibly away so that there is no existence but that of audition, so that she needn’t think of the girl in the room and, even more frightening, of the man in the car.

Even staring steadfastly ahead, she could still see his hands on the wheel, could see the gold hair on them—lighter even than the hair on his head—could see each finger, note its movement, as he guided the car back to Keldale.

When he leaned forward to make an adjustment in the sound, she could see his profile. He was very lightly tanned. Gold and brown. Skin, hair, and eyes. Straight, classical nose. The firm line of jaw. A face that spoke clearly of tremendous inner strength, of resources of character that she couldn’t comprehend.

How
had he done it?

She’d been by a window, not looking out but rather staring fixedly at the wall, a lummox of a girl nearly six feet tall who must have weighed well over fifteen stone. She sat on a stool, her back hunched over in an arc of defeat, and she rocked.

“Roberta, my name is Thomas Lynley. I’ve come to talk to you about your father.”

The rocking continued. The eyes looked at nothing, saw nothing. If she heard at all, she gave absolutely no sign.

Her hair was filthy, foul-smelling. It was pulled back from her broad, moon-shaped face with an elastic band, but greasy tendrils had escaped imprisonment and hung forward stiffly, kissing on her neck the pockets of flesh that encased in their folds the incongruous ornament of a single, slender gold chain.

“Father Hart came to London, Roberta. He’s asked us to help you. He says he knows you didn’t hurt anyone.”

Nothing. The broad face was expressionless. Suppurating pimples covered cheeks and chin. Bloated skin stretched over layers of fat that had long ago erased whatever definition her features might have had. She was dough-like, grey and unclean.

“We’ve been talking to a great many people in Keldale. We’ve seen your cousin Richard, and Olivia, and Bridie. Bridie cut her hair, Roberta. She’s made quite a mess of it, unfortunately, in an effort to look like the Princess of Wales. Her mother was quite upset about it. She said how good you always were to Bridie.”

No response. Roberta was dressed in a too-short skirt that revealed white, flabby thighs upon which the flesh, dotted by red pustules, quivered when she rocked. There were hospital slippers on her feet, but they were too small, and her sausage toes hung out, their uncut nails curling around them.

“We’ve been to the house. Have you read all those books? Stepha Odell said that you’d read them all. We were amazed at how many you have. We saw the pictures of your mother, Roberta. She was lovely, wasn’t she?”

Silence. Her arms hung at her sides. Her enormous breasts strained against the cheap material of her blouse. Its buttons struggled to hold the thin garment closed as the pressure of the rocking continued, each movement causing the flesh to heave to and fro in a rebarbative pavane.

“I think this may be a bit difficult for you to hear, Roberta, but we saw your mother today. Do you know that she lives in York? You have another brother and sister there. She told us how much your father loved you and Gillian.”

The movement ceased. The face neither acknowledged nor changed, but the tears began. They were silent, ugly rivers of mute pain dipping and plunging through the crevices of fat, climbing the peaks of acne. With the tears came the mucus. It began its descent from her nose in a slimy cord, touched her lips, and crawled onto her chin.

Lynley squatted before her. He removed a snowy handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her face clean. He took her pulpy, lifeless hand in his own and pressed it firmly.

“Roberta.” There was no response. “I’ll find Gillian.” He stood, folded the elegant, monogrammed linen square, and returned it to his pocket.

What had Webberly said? Barbara thought.
There’s a lot you might learn from working with Lynley
.

And now she knew. She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She knew what would be there and the thought of its existence in this man she had been determined to believe was an absolute fop of an upper-class snob chilled her entirely.

He was supposed to be the man who danced in nightclubs, who dispensed sexual favours, laughter, and good cheer, who moved effortlessly in a gilt-edged world of money and privilege. But he was not supposed to be—never supposed to be—the man she had seen today.