A Great Deliverance (28 page)

“So you think she did kill her father?” Lynley asked.

Gibson’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know what to think. All I know is Bobby’s not the same girl that I knew when I left Keldale.
That
girl wouldn’t have hurt a fly. But this new girl… she’s a stranger.”

“Perhaps that has to do with Gillian’s disappearance.”

“Gillian?”
Gibson laughed incredulously. “I’d say Gilly’s leaving was a relief to all concerned.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say Gilly was advanced for her years, shall we?” He glanced back at the house. “Let’s just say she’d have made Madeline look like the Virgin Mary. Am I making myself clear?”

“Perfectly. Did she seduce you?”

“You
are
direct, aren’t you? Give me a fag and I’ll tell you about it.” He lit the cigarette that Lynley offered from his case and looked off into the fields that began just across the unpaved street. Beyond them, the trail to High Kel Moor weaved into the trees. “I was nineteen years old when I left Keldale, Inspector. I didn’t want to leave. God knows that was the last thing I wanted to do. But I knew if I didn’t, there’d be hell to pay eventually.”

“But you slept with your cousin Gillian before you left?”

Gibson snorted. “Hardly.
Slept
isn’t exactly the word I’d use with a girl like Gilly. She wanted control and she had it, Inspector. She could do things to a man … better than a high-class tart. She made me crazy just about four times a day.”

“How old was she?”

“She was twelve when she first locked her eyes on me in an uncousinly fashion, thirteen the first time she … performed. Then for the next two years she drove me wild.”

“Are you telling me you left to escape her?”

“I’m hardly that noble. I left to escape William. It was only a matter of time before he caught her going at me. I didn’t want that to happen to either of us. I wanted it to end.”

“Why did you never just speak to William about it?”

Gibson’s eyes widened. “As far as he was concerned, neither of those girls could do anything wrong. How was I supposed to tell him that Gilly, the proverbial apple of his eye, was rubbing up to me like a cat in heat and taking me on like a whore? He’d never have believed it. Half the time, I didn’t myself.”

“She left Keldale a year after you, didn’t she?”

He tossed his cigarette into the street. “That’s what they tell me,” he replied.

“Did you ever see her again?”

Gibson’s eyes slid away. “I never did,” he replied.

“And it was a blessing.”

Marsha Fitzalan was a bent, withered woman with a face that reminded Lynley of the kind on American dolls carved from apples: it was a mass of delicate wrinkles that traced a pattern across her cheeks up to her eyes. These were blue. They danced in her face with interest and amusement and told anyone who looked at her that the body was indeed old but the heart and the mind had not changed from youth.

“Good morning,” she smiled, and then with a look at her watch, “or nearly afternoon. You’re Inspector Lynley, aren’t you? I thought you might be by sooner or later. I’ve lemon pie made.”

“For the occasion?” Lynley asked.

“Indeed,” she replied. “Come in.”

Although she lived in one of the council houses on St. Chad’s Lane, its appearance couldn’t have been more different from the Gibsons’. The front garden was planted, parterre-like, with neat patterns of flowers: in the spring there would be alyssum and primrose, snapdragons and geraniums. They had been trimmed back for the coming of winter, the soil turned over lovingly round each plant. On two of the stepping stones leading to the door, birdseed had been fashioned into small, accessible piles, and a set of metal wind chimes hung near a window, its six notes still managing to be heard over the din of the Gibson children next door.

The contrast to the Gibsons’ small cottage continued indoors, where the smell of potpourri in the air reminded Lynley of long afternoons spent in his grandmother’s bedroom at Howenstow. The tiny sitting room was comfortably if inexpensively furnished and two of its walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books. A small table under the single window was covered by a collection of photographs, and several needlepoint tapestries hung above an ancient television set.

“Will you come into the kitchen, Inspector?” Marsha Fitzalan asked. “I know it’s dreadful to entertain in the kitchen, but I’ve always been far more comfortable there. My friends tell me it’s because I grew up on a farm, and the life of a farm always centres itself in the kitchen, doesn’t it? I suppose I never got over that. Here, please sit at the table. Coffee and pie? You do look hungry. I imagine you’re a bachelor. Bachelors never eat as well as they should, do they?”

Again there was the memory of his grandmother, that unmistakable security of unconditional love. As he watched her busily putting together a tray, her hands sure and unshaking, Lynley knew for a certainty that Marsha Fitzalan held the answer.

“Can you tell me about Gillian Teys?” he asked.

Her hands stopped. She turned to him with a smile. “Gilly?” she said. “What a pleasure that shall be. Gillian Teys was the loveliest creature I’ve ever known.”

She returned to the table and placed the tray between them. It was an unnecessary nicety. The kitchen was so tiny that only a few steps were needed to move across the room, yet still she preserved the semblance of gentility and countered the claustrophobia of poverty by using the tray. It was covered with a piece of old lace upon which rested fine bone china. Both plates were chipped, but the cups and saucers had somehow managed the years unscathed.

Autumn leaves in a pottery jug served to decorate the plain pine table, and onto its surface Marsha Fitzalan set everything out carefully: plates, cutlery, and linen. She poured the steaming coffee into their cups and added sugar and milk to her own before she began to speak.

“Gilly was exactly like her mother. I taught Tessa as well. Of course, it betrays my age dreadfully to admit to that. But there you have it. Nearly everyone in the village passed through my classroom, Inspector.” Her eyes twinkled as she added, “Except Father Hart. He and I are of the same generation.”

“I should never have guessed,” Lynley said solemnly.

She laughed. “Why is it that truly charming men always know when a woman is fishing for a compliment?” She dug into her pie enthusiastically, chewed appreciatively for a few moments, and then continued. “Gillian was the mirror image of her mother. She had that same lovely blonde hair, those beautiful eyes, and that same wonderful spirit. But Tessa was a dreamer and Gillian was a bit more of a realist, I should say. Tessa’s head was always in the clouds. She was all romance. I think that’s why she chose to marry so young. She was determined that life was all about being swept off one’s feet by a tall, dark hero, and William Teys certainly fit the image.”

“Gillian wasn’t worried about being swept off her feet?”

“Oh no. I don’t think the thought of men ever entered Gilly’s head. She wanted to be a teacher. I can remember her coming by in the afternoons, curling up on the floor with a book. How she loved the Brontës! That child must have read
Jane Eyre
six or seven times by her fourteenth birthday. She, Jane, and Mr. Rochester were all rather intimate acquaintances, as I recall. And she loved to talk about everything she read. But it wasn’t just chatter. She talked about characters, motivations, meanings. She would say, ‘I shall have to know these things when I’m a teacher, Miss Fitzalan.’”

“Why did she run away?”

The old woman studied the bronze leaves in the jug. “I don’t know,” she replied slowly. “She was such a good child. There was never a problem that she couldn’t seem to solve with that quick mind of hers. I honestly don’t know what happened.”

“Could she have been involved with a man? Perhaps someone she was running after?”

Miss Fitzalan dismissed the idea with a movement of her hand. “I don’t believe Gillian was interested in men yet. She was a bit slower to mature than the other girls were.”

“What about Roberta? Was she much like her sister?”

“No, Roberta was like her father.” She stopped suddenly and frowned.
“Was
. I don’t want to talk about her in the past tense like that. But she seems to have died.”

“She does, doesn’t she?”

The woman looked as if she appreciated his concurring with her. “Roberta was big like her father, very solid and silent. People will tell you she had no personality at all, but that’s not true. She was simply excruciatingly shy. She had her mother’s romantic disposition, her father’s taciturnity. And she lost herself in books.”

“Like Gillian?”

“Yes and no. She read like Gillian, but she never spoke about what she read. Gillian read to learn. Roberta, I think, read to escape.”

“Escape what?”

Miss Fitzalan fussily straightened the lace that covered the old tray. Her hands, Lynley saw, were spotted with age. “The knowledge of being deserted, I should guess.”

“By Gillian or her mother?”

“By Gillian. Roberta worshipped Gillian. She never knew her mother. You can imagine what it must have been like having Gilly for an older sister: so lovely, so lively, so intelligent. Everything Roberta wasn’t and wished she could be.”

“Jealousy?”

She shook her head. “She wasn’t jealous of Gilly. She loved her. I should think it hurt Roberta dreadfully when her sister left. But unlike Gillian, who would have talked about her pain—Lord knows, Gilly talked about anything and everything—Roberta internalised it. I remember, in fact, the poor child’s skin after Gilly left. Funny that I would still remember that.”

Lynley thought of the girl he had seen in the asylum and was not surprised that the teacher would remember the condition of Roberta’s skin. “Acne?” he asked. “She would have been young for that.”

“No. She broke out in the most dreadful rash. I know it was nerves, but when I spoke to her about it she blamed it on Whiskers.” Miss Fitzalan dropped her eyes and toyed with her fork, making delicate patterns in the crumbs on her plate. Lynley waited patiently, convinced there was more. Finally she went on. “I felt so inadequate, Inspector, such a failure as a friend and as a teacher that she couldn’t talk to me about what had happened to Gilly. But she just couldn’t talk, so she blamed it all on being allergic to her dog.”

“Did you speak to her father about it?”

“Not at first. William had been so crushed by Gillian’s running off that he wasn’t the least bit approachable. For weeks it seemed the only person he would talk to at all was Father Hart. But in the end, frankly, I felt I owed it to Roberta. After all, the child was only eight years old. It wasn’t her fault that her sister had run away. So I went out to the farm and told William I was worried about her, especially considering the pathetic story she’d made up about the dog.” She poured herself more coffee and sipped it as she brooded over that long-ago visit. “Poor man. I certainly needn’t have worried about his reaction. I think he must have felt terribly guilty about having ignored Roberta, because he drove to Richmond directly and bought three or four different kinds of lotion to put on her skin. It may well have been that all the poor girl needed was her father’s attention, because the rash went away after that.”

But nothing else did, Lynley thought. In his mind he saw the lonely little girl in the gloomy farmhouse, surrounded by the ghosts and voices of the past, living her life in grim sterility, taking her nourishment from books.

Lynley unlocked the back door and let himself into the house. It was unchanged, as cold and airless as it had been before. He went through the kitchen to the sitting room, where Tessa Teys smiled at him tenderly from her corner shrine, looking young and infinitely vulnerable. He imagined Russell Mowrey raising his head from his excavation and seeing that lovely face framed in a gap in the fence. It was easy to see why Mowrey had fallen in love. It was easy to see why he would be in love still.

Not a thousand ships but one enraged husband, Lynley thought.
Is it possible, Tessa? Or did you see your world shatter in one afternoon and know you couldn’t bear to build it again?

He turned from the shrine and ran up the stairs. No, the answer had to be in the house. It had to be Gillian.

He went first to her bedroom, but its vacuity told him nothing. The bed stared up at him wordlessly, its covering unblemished. The rug held no footprints leading back into the past. The wallpaper covered no long-held secrets. It was as if a young girl had never lived in the room, had never breathed her liveliness and spirit into the air. And yet something … Something of Gillian lingered, something he had seen, something he could feel.

He walked to the window and looked, unseeing, at the barn.
She was wild, ungoverned. She was an angel, sunshine. She was a cat in heat. She was the loveliest creature I’ve ever seen
. It was as if there were no real Gillian at all, but only a kaleidoscope that, juggled before viewing, appeared different to each person who gazed into it. He longed to believe that the answer was in the room, but when he turned from the window, he saw nothing but furniture, wallpaper, and rug.

How could someone be wiped so completely out of the life of the family in which she had lived for sixteen years? It was inconceivable. Yet it had been done. Or had it?

He walked to Roberta’s room. Gillian couldn’t have faded from her sister’s life so completely. The love was there. The bond was strong. Everyone, at least, no matter what they had said about Gillian, agreed upon that. His gaze roamed from window to wardrobe to bed. He considered this last: it was her hiding place for food, why not for Gillian as well?

Steeling himself to the sight and the smell of the putrefaction, Lynley pulled back the mattress. The stench rose like an undulating wave.

He glanced about, looking for a way to make the job at hand easier but finding nothing that would do. The light in the room was poor, and, unpleasant as it would be, there was nothing for it but to drag the entire mattress off and rip the box spring apart. Grunting with the effort, he jerked mattress and bedding onto the floor and then went to the window. He threw it open and stood for a moment sucking in the fresh air before turning back to the bed. He climbed onto the box spring and planned his attack, ignoring his queasiness.
Come on, old boy. Isn’t this why you got into police work? Buck up, now. Give it one big pull.