A Great Deliverance (33 page)

She looked at the stairway reflectively.

They sat at a table in the corner of the Keys and Candle, Newby Wiske’s central and most thriving pub. Most of the lunchtime crowd had thinned out and, aside from themselves, only the regulars remained, hunched over the bar to nurse pints of bitters.

They pushed their plates to one side of the table, and Deborah poured the coffee that had just been placed before them. Outside, the cook and the dishwasher dumped rubbish into the bin, arguing loudly over the merits of a three-year-old who would be running at Newmarket and upon whom the cook had evidently invested a considerable sum of his most recent week’s wages.

St. James ministered to his coffee with his usual amount of sugar. Lynley spoke after the fourth tea-spoonful was dumped absently into the cup.

“Does he count?”

“Not that I’ve ever noticed,” Deborah replied. “St. James, that’s appalling. How can you stand it?”

“Just sugaring ‘o’er the devil himself,’” is friend replied. He pulled the test results towards him. “I need to do something to recover from the smell of that dog. You owe me for this one, Tommy.”

“In spades. What do you have?”

“The animal bled to death from a wound in the neck. It appeared to have been inflicted with a knife the blade of which was five inches long.”

“Not a pocketknife, then.”

“I should guess a kitchen knife. A butcher knife. Something along that line. Did forensics see to all the knives on the farm?”

Lynley fingered through the material from the file he had brought with him. “Apparently. But the knife in question was nowhere to be found.”

St. James looked thoughtful. “That’s intriguing. It almost suggests …” He paused, brushing aside the idea. “Well, they have the girl admitting to killing her father, they have the axe sitting right there on the floor—”

“With no fingerprints on it,” Lynley interjected.

“Given. But unless the RSPCA wants to make a case for cruelty to animals, there’s no real necessity to have the weapon that killed the dog.”

“You’re starting to sound like Nies.”

“Perish the thought.” St. James stirred his coffee and was about to apply more sugar to it when, with a beatific smile, his wife moved the bowl out of his reach. He grumbled good-naturedly and continued his conversation. “However, there was something else. Barbiturates.”

“What?”

“Barbiturates,” St. James repeated. “They showed up in the drug screen. Here.” He passed the toxicology report across the table.

Lynley read it, amazed. “Are you telling me the dog was drugged?”

“Yes. The amount of residual drug that showed up in the tests indicates that the animal was unconscious when his throat was slit.”

“Unconscious!” Lynley scanned the report and tossed it down on the table. “Then he couldn’t have been killed to silence him.”

“Hardly. He wouldn’t have been making a sound.”

“Was there enough barbiturate to kill him? Had someone attempted to kill him with the drug and then, having botched it, decided to take a knife to the poor creature?”

“That’s possible, I suppose. Except that with everything you’ve told me about the case, it doesn’t make much sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because this unknown person would have had to get into the house first, get the drug, administer it to the dog, wait for it to do the trick, realise that it wasn’t going to kill him, go back for a knife, and finish the job off. What was the dog doing all this time? Cooperatively waiting to have his throat slit? Wouldn’t he have been barking, raising the devil?”

“Wait. You’re too far ahead of me. Why would the person have to go into the house for the drug?”

“Because it was the very same drug that William Teys had taken, and he kept his sleeping pills in the house, not in the barn, I should think.”

Lynley assimilated this. “Perhaps someone brought it with him.”

“Perhaps. I suppose the person could have administered it to the dog, waited for it to take effect, slit the dog’s throat, and waited for Teys to come out to the barn.”

“Between ten and midnight? What would Teys be doing in the barn between ten and midnight?”

“Looking for the dog?”

“Why? Why the barn? Why not in the village where the dog always went? Why look for him at all, in fact? Everyone says that the dog wandered freely. Why would he have suddenly been worried about him on this one night?”

St. James shrugged. “What Teys was up to is a moot point, if your attention is fixed on finding the killer of the animal. Only one person could have killed that dog—Roberta.”

Outside the pub, St. James spread the tent-like dress over the boot of Lynley’s car, oblivious of the curious stares of a group of elderly tourists who passed, in pursuit of pictorial souvenirs, cameras slung round their necks. He pointed to the stain on the inside elbow of the left sleeve, to the pool-like stain between waist and knees, and to the same substance on the right, white cuff.

“All of these test as the dog’s blood, Tommy.” He turned to his wife. “My love, will you demonstrate? As you did in the lab? On this bit of lawn?”

Deborah cooperatively dropped to her knees, resting back on her heels. Her rich, umber dress billowed out and spread on the ground like a mantle. St. James moved behind her.

“A willing dog would make this easier to imagine, but we’ll do our best. Roberta—who had access to her father’s sleeping pills, I should guess—would have given the dog the drug earlier. In his dinner, perhaps. She would have had to make sure the animal stayed in the barn. It wouldn’t have done to have had the creature keel over in the village somewhere. Once the dog was unconscious, she would kneel down on the ground just as Deborah has done. Only that particular posture could give us the stains in the precise places they appear on her dress. She would lift the dog’s head and hold it in the crook of her arm.” He gently bent Deborah’s arm to demonstrate. “Then, with her right hand, she would cut the dog’s throat.”

“That’s insane,” Lynley said hoarsely.
“Why?”

“Wait a moment, Tommy. The dog’s head is turned away from her. She drives the knife into his throat, which results in the pool of blood on the skirt of her dress. She pulls the knife upward with her right hand until the job is done.” He pointed to specific areas on Deborah’s dress. “We have blood on the elbow where the head was cradled, blood on the skirt where it poured from the neck, and blood on the right sleeve and cuff from where she drove the knife in and continued the path of the slash.” St. James touched his wife’s hair lightly. “Thank you, my love.” He helped her to her feet.

Lynley walked back to the car and examined the dress. “Frankly, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Why on earth would she do it? Are you saying the girl dressed herself up on a Saturday night in her best Sunday clothes, calmly went out to the barn, and slit the throat of a dog she’d loved since childhood?” He looked up.
“Why?”

“I can’t answer that. I can’t tell you what she was thinking, only what she had to have done.”

“But couldn’t she have gone out to the barn, found the dog dead, and, in her panic, picked him up, cradled him, and got the blood all over herself then?”

There was a fractional pause. “Possibly. But unlikely.”

“But it’s possible. It
is
possible?”

“Yes. But unlikely, Tommy.”

“What scenario do
you
have then?”

Deborah and St. James exchanged uneasy glances in which Lynley saw that they had discussed the case and were of a mutual opinion they were reluctant to share. “Well?” he demanded. “Are you saying that Roberta killed her dog, that her father came to the barn and discovered the deed, that they got into a tremendous row, and then she beheaded him?”

“No, no. It’s quite possible that Roberta didn’t kill her father at all. But she was definitely present when it happened. She had to have been.”

“Why?”

“Because his blood is all over the bottom of her dress.”

“Perhaps she went to the barn, found his body, and fell to her knees in shock.”

St. James shook his head. “That idea doesn’t wash.”

“Why not?”

He pointed to the garment on the back of the car. “Look at the pattern. Teys’s blood is in splatters. You know what that means as well as J. It only got there one way.”

Lynley was silent for a moment. “She was standing by when it happened,” he concluded.

“She had to have been. If indeed she didn’t do it herself, then she was standing right there when someone else did.”

“Is she protecting someone, Tommy?” Deborah asked, seeing the expression on Lynley’s face.

He didn’t reply at once. He was thinking of patterns: patterns of words, patterns of images, patterns of behaviours. He was thinking of what a person learns, and when he learns it, and when it emerges into practical use. He was thinking of knowledge and how it ultimately, inevitably combines with experience and points to what is incontrovertible truth.

He roused himself to answer the question with one of his own. “St. James, what would you do, how far would you go, to save Deborah?” It was a dangerous query. Its risk was deadly. These were waters, perhaps, best left unexplored.

“‘Forty thousand brothers?’ Is that where we are with it now?” St. James’ voice was unchanged, but the angles of his face were a warning, finely drawn and grim.

“How far would you go?” Lynley insisted.

“Tommy, don’t!” Deborah put out her hand, a gesture to stop him from going any further, to stop him from doing irreparable damage to the delicate crystal of their friable peace.

“Would you hold back the truth? Would you lay down your life? How far would you go to save Deborah?”

St. James looked at his wife. The colour had completely drained from her face; her sprinkling of freckles danced across her nose; her eyes were haunted with tears. And he understood. This was no grappling in an Elsinore grave, but the question primeval.

“I’d do anything,” he replied, his eyes on his wife. “By God, yes, I would. I’d do anything.”

Lynley nodded. “People generally do, don’t they, for the ones they love most.”

He chose Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6,
Pathetique
. He smiled as the swelling of the first movement filled the car. Helen would never have allowed it.

“Darling Tommy, absolutely
not!”
she would have protested. “Let’s not drive our mutual depression right into suicide!” Then she would have resolutely rooted through all of his tapes to find something suitably uplifting: invariably Strauss, played at full volume with Helen making her usual assortment of amusing remarks over the din. “Just picture them, Tommy, flitting through the woods in their little tutus. It’s positively religious!”

Today, however, the heavy theme of
Pathetique
with its relentless exploration of man’s spiritual suffering suited his mood. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so burdened by a case. It felt as if a tremendous weight, having nothing whatsoever to do with the responsibility of getting to the bottom of the matter, were pressing upon his heart. He knew the source. Murder—its atavistic nature and ineffable consequences—was a hydra. Each head, ruthlessly cut off in an effort to reach the “prodigious dog-like body” of culpability, left in its place two heads more venomous than the last. But unlike so many of his previous cases, in which mere rote sufficed to see him sear his way to the core of evil—stopping the flow of blood, allowing no further growth, and leaving him personally untouched by the encounter—this case spoke to him far more intimately. He knew instinctively that the death of William Teys was merely one of the heads of the serpent, and the knowledge that eight others waited to do battle with him—and, more than that, that he had not even come to know the true nature of the evil he faced—filled him with a sense of trepidation. But he knew himself well enough to know that there was more to his desolation and despair than the death of a man in a Keldale barn.

There was Havers to be dealt with. But beyond Havers, there was the truth. For underneath her bitter, unfounded accusations, her ugliness and hurt, the words she spoke rang with veracity. Had he not indeed spent the last year of his life fruitlessly seeking a replacement for Deborah? Not in the way Havers had suggested, but in a way far more dishonest than an inconsequential coupling in which two bodies meet, experience momentary pleasure, and separate to lead their individual lives, untouched and unchanged by the encounter. That, at least, was an expression of some sort, a giving of the moment no matter how brief. But for the last year of his life he had given nothing to anyone.

Behind his behaviour, wasn’t the reality that he had maintained his isolated celibacy this last, long year not because of Deborah but because he had become high priest in a religion of one: a celebrant caught up in devotion to the past? In this twisted religion, he had held up every woman in his life to unforgiving scrutiny and had found each one wanting in comparison to Deborah, not the real Deborah but a mystical goddess who lived only in his mind.

He saw now that he had not wished to forget the past, that he had done everything instead to keep it alive, as if his intention had always been to make it, not Deborah, his bride. He was sick at heart.