There was nothing for it but to go along. "Death hole?" Deborah
enquired. She had knelt and was replacing her equipment—forgotten for a
few moments in the lovely blue of Simon's eyes—in its case.
"The baby, remember?" Hank said patiently. "Although considering what
you two's up to in here, I can see the baby story didn't exactly scare
the livin' hell outa you, did it?" He winked lasciviously.
"Ah, the baby," St. James responded. He picked up Deborah's case.
"Now I got your interest!" Hank approved. "I could tell at first you
mighta been a little peeved at me popping in on you like that. But now I
got you, I can tell."
"Yes, indeed," Deborah responded, but her thoughts were elsewhere.
Curious, how it had all happened in a moment. She loved him, had loved
him from her childhood. But in a dizzying lightning-bolt moment of time,
she'd realised that it had changed somehow, becoming quite different
between them from what it had been before. He'd all of a sudden become
not that gentle Simon whose tender presence had filled her heart with
joy but a whip-bodied lover whose very look aroused her. Good heavens,
Deborah, you've become quite silly with lust, she thought.
St. James heard his wife's bubble of laughter. "Deborah?" he asked.
Hank nudged him in the ribs with a knowing elbow. "Don't worry about the
bride," he confided. "They're all shy at first." He strutted on ahead
like Stanley with Livingston in sight, pointing out areas of interest to
his wife with a "Catch that, Bean. Get it in the lens!"
"Sorry, my love," St. James murmured as they followed the progress of
the other two through the ruined day room, across court and warming
house and into the cloister. "I thought I had him taken care of until
midnight at least. Five minutes more and I'm afraid he would have caught
me getting you into some truly serious trouble."
"What a thought!" she laughed. "Oh, Simon, what if he had! He would have
shouted, ‘Get it in the lens, Bean!' and our love life might have been
destroyed forever!" Her eyes danced and sparkled. Her hair gleamed
brightly in the afternoon sun, blowing about her throat and shoulders
carelessly.
St. James drew in a sharp breath. It was like a pain. "I don't think so," he said evenly.
The death hole was in what remained of the vestry. This was no more than
a narrow roofless hallway, overgrown with grass and wildflowers, just
beyond the south transept of the ancient church. Here, a series of four
arched recesses lined the wall, and it was to these that Hank pointed
with ghoulish drama.
"In one-a them," he announced. "Get it in the lens, Bean." He tromped
through the grass and posed toothily. "Seems this was the place where
the monks kept their church duds. Sorta a cupboard or something. And on
the night in question, the baby was plopped right in and left to die.
Pretty sickening when you think about it, huh?" He bounced back to their
sides. "Just the right size for a kid, though," he added thoughtfully.
"Like a whatdaya-call-it? Sacrifi cial offering."
"I'm not sure the Cistercian monks were in that line of business," St.
James commented. "And human sacrifices have been out of fashion for a
good number of years."
"Well, whatdaya think, then? Whose baby was it?"
"I couldn't even begin to guess," St. James replied, knowing full well the theory was forthcoming.
"Then lemme tell you how it happened, because the Bean and I figgered it
out the fi rst day. Didn't we, Bean?" A wait for the woman to nod her
head loyally. "Come on over here. Lemme show you two lovebirds a thing
or two."
Hank led them through the south transept, across the uneven paving of
the presbytery, and out onto the abbey grounds through a gap in the
wall. "There you have it!" He pointed triumphantly to a narrow track
that led to the north through the woods.
"I see indeed," St. James replied.
"Got it fi ggered out too?"
"Ah, no."
Hank hooted. "Sure you don't. That's 'cause you haven't thought it
through like me ‘n' the Bean have, right, Sugarplum?" Sugarplum nodded
mournfully, moving her bunny eyes from St. James to Deborah in silent
contrition. "Gypsies!" her spouse went on. "Okay, okay, I admit it. Bean
and I didn't get the full handle on this till we saw them today. You
know who I mean. Those trailers parked on the side-a the road. Well, we
figgered out that there musta been some-a the same here that night. It
had to be a baby-a theirs."
"I understand gypsies are inordinately fond of their children," St. James noted drily.
"Well, not-a this kid, anyway," Hank replied, undeterred. "So get the
pitcher here, fella. Danny and Ezra are over there somewhere"— he waved
vaguely in the direction from which they had come—"getting ready for the
plunge, you know? And tippy-toeing along this path comes some old crone
with a kid."
"Old crone?"
"Well sure, don't you see it?"
"‘Ditch-delivered,' no doubt," St. James said.
"Ditch-who?" Hank shrugged off the literary allusion like lint from his
coat. "The old crone looks around, right and left," Hank demonstrated,
"and slips into the abbey. Looks around for a deposit box and bingo,
Bob's-yer-uncle."
"It certainly is an interesting theory," Deborah put in. "But I always
feel just a bit sorry for the gypsies. They seem to get blamed for
everything, don't they?"
"That, little bride, brings me right on up to theory number two."
JoJo-bean blinked her apologies.
Gembler Farm was in excellent condition, a fact unsurprising since
Richard Gibson had continued to work it throughout the three weeks since
his uncle's death. Opening the well-oiled gates that hung between two
stone posts, Lynley and Havers entered and surveyed it.
It would be quite an inheritance. To their left stood the farmhouse, an
old building constructed from the common brown bricks of the district,
with freshly painted white woodwork and frail clematis conscientiously
trimmed and trellised over windows and door.
It was set back from Gembler Road, and a well-tended garden, fenced to
keep out the sheep, separated the two. Next to the house was a low
outbuilding, and, forming another side to the quadrangle that comprised
the yard, the barn loomed to their right.
Like the house, it was constructed of brick with a heavily tiled roof.
It was two fl oors high, with gaping windows on the second floor through
which the tops of ladders could be seen. Dutch doors were used on the
ground level of the barn, for this was a building for tools and animals
only. Vehicles would be kept in the outbuilding to the far side of the
house.
They walked across the well-swept yard, and Lynley inserted a key into
the rusting lock that hung on the barn door. It swung noiselessly open.
Inside, it was eerily still, dim, musty, and overcold, too much the
place where a man had met a violent end.
"Quiet," Havers observed. She hesitated at the door while Lynley entered.
"Hmm," he responded from the third stall. "Expect that's due to the sheep."
"Sir?"
He looked up at her from where he had squatted on the pockmarked stone
fl oor. She was quite pale. "Sheep, Sergeant," he said. "They're in the
upper meadow, remember? That's why it's so quiet. Have a look here, will
you?" Seeing that she was reluctant to approach, he added, "You were
right."
She came forward at that and passed her eyes over the stall. At the far
end was heaped a mouldly pile of hay. To the centre was a not overlarge
pool of dried blood—brown, not red. There was nothing else.
"Right, sir?" Havers asked.
"Dead on the bottom, if you'll pardon the expression. Not a drop of
blood on the walls. I don't think we had any body-slinging here. No
crime-scene arrangement done after the fact. Nice thinking, Havers." He
looked up in time to see the surprise on her face.
She reddened in confusion. "Thank you, sir."
He stood up and directed his attention back to the stall. The overturned
bucket upon which Roberta had been sitting when the priest found her
was still in its place. The hay into which the head had rolled remained
untouched. The pool of dried blood had scraping marks from the forensic
team and the axe was gone, but otherwise everything remained as it had
been originally photographed. Except for the bodies. The bodies. Good
God. Feeling like the fool Nies intended him to be, Lynley gaped numbly
at the outer edge of the stain where a heelprint matted several black
and white hairs into the coagulated blood. He swung to Havers.
"The dog," he said.
"Inspector?"
"Havers, what in God's name did Nies do with the dog?"
Her eyes went to the same heelprint, saw the same hairs. "It was in the report, wasn't it?"
"It wasn't," he replied with a muttered curse and knew that he was going
to have to drag every scrap of information out of Nies as if he were a
surgeon probing for shrapnel. It would be absolute hell. "Let's look at
the house," he said grimly.
They entered as the family would, through an enclosed porch-like hallway
in which old coats and mackintoshes hung on pegs and workboots stood
beneath a single-plank bench along the wall. The house had gone unheated
for three weeks, so the air was tomb-like. A car rumbled past on
Gembler Road, but the sound was muffl ed and distant.
The hall took them immediately into the kitchen. It was a large room,
with a red linoleum floor, dark ash cabinets, and brilliantly white
appliances that looked as if they were still polished daily. Nothing
whatsoever was out of place. Not a dish was out of a single cupboard;
not a crumb lay on a single work top; not a stain marred the surface of
the white, cast-iron sink. In the centre of the room stood a worktable
of unpainted pine, its top scarred with the slashings of thousands of
knives cutting thousands of vegetables, with the discolouration of
generations of cooking.
"No wonder Gibson is eager for the place," Lynley remarked as he looked it over. "Certainly a far cry from St. Chad's Lane."
"Did you believe him, sir?" Havers asked.
Lynley paused in his inspection of the cupboards. "That he was in bed
with his wife when Teys was killed? Considering the nature of their
relationship, it's a credible alibi, wouldn't you say?"
"I…I suppose so, sir."
He glanced at her. "But you don't believe it."
"It's only that…well, she looked like she was lying. Like she was angry with him as well. Or maybe angry with us."
Lynley considered Havers's statement. Madeline Gibson had indeed spoken
to them grudgingly, spitting the words out with barely a glance of
corroboration at her husband. For his part, the farmer had smoked
stolidly during her recitation, a blank expression of disinterest on his
face but, unmistakably, a lurking touch of amusement behind his dark
eyes. "There's something not quite right there, I'll agree. Let's go
through here."
They went through a heavy door into the dining room, where a mahogany
table was covered with clean, cream-coloured lace. On it, yellow roses
in a vase had long since died, weeping petals onto the fret of the
cloth. A matching sideboard stood to one side with a silver epergne
placed in its exact centre, as if someone with a measuring tool had made
certain it was equidistant from each end. A china cabinet held a
beautiful collection of dishes obviously unused by the inhabitants of
the house. They were antique Belleek pieces, each one stacked or tilted
or turned in some way to display it best. As in the kitchen, nothing was
out of place. Save for the flowers, they might have been wandering
through a museum.
It was across the hall from the dining room, however, where they first
found signs of the life of the house. For here in the sitting room the
Teyses had kept their shrine.
