"Sister-in-law. My brother Paul's widow." Stepha placed her glass of ale
on the table and used the same movement to cover the photographs with a
pile of forensic reports. "If you don't mind…"
"Sorry," Lynley said quickly. "We get so used to looking at horrors like
that that we become immune." He replaced it all in the folder. "Why did
they have a row about Roberta?"
"Olivia told me later—she was with them at the Dove and Whistle when it
happened—that it was all due to the way Roberta looks." She fingered her
glass, made a pattern of lace on the moisture of its surface.
"Richard's from Keldale, you see, but he'd been gone a good few years
trying his luck with barley in the fens. He'd married down there, had
two children as well. When the farming didn't work out, he returned to
the Kel." She smiled at them. "They say that the Kel never lets one go
easily, and that was the case for Richard. He was gone for eight or nine
years and, when he returned, he was quite a bit shocked to see the
change in Roberta."
"You said it was all due to the way she looks?"
"She didn't always look as she does now. She was always a big girl, of
course, even at eight when Richard left. But she was never…"
Stepha hesitated, clearly searching delicately for the right word, for a
euphemism that would be factual at the same time as it was
noncommittal.
"Obese," Barbara fi nished. Like a cow.
"Yes," Stepha went on gratefully. "Richard had always been great friends
with Roberta, for all he's twelve years her senior. And to come back
and find his cousin so sadly deteriorated—physically, I mean, she was
much the same otherwise—was a terrible shock to him. He blamed William
for ignoring the girl. Said she had done it to herself to try to get his
attention. William raged at that. Olivia said she'd never seen him so
angry. Poor man, there'd been problems enough in his life without an
accusation like that from his own nephew. But they got it sorted out.
Richard apologised the very next day. William wouldn't take Roberta to a
doctor—he wouldn't bend that far—but Olivia found a diet for the girl,
and from that time on, all went well."
"Until three weeks ago," Lynley observed.
"If you choose to believe that Roberta killed her father, then yes, it
all went well until three weeks back. But I don't believe she killed
him. Not for one blessed moment."
Lynley looked surprised at the force behind her words. "Why not?"
"Because aside from Richard—who heaven knows has enough trouble just
dealing with that family of his own—William was all that Roberta had.
Besides her reading and dreams, there was only her father."
"She'd no friends her own age? No other girls nearby on the farms or in the village?"
Stepha shook her head. "She kept to herself. When she wasn't working on
the farm with her father, mostly she read. She was here every day for
the Guardian, in fact, for years on end. They never did take a paper on
the farm, so she'd come every afternoon once everyone'd seen it and we'd
let her take it home with her. I think she'd read every book of her
mother's in the house, all of Marsha Fitzalan's, and the newspaper was
the only thing left for her. We've no lending library, you see." She
frowned down at the glass in her hands. "She stopped looking at the
paper a few years back, though. When my brother died. I couldn't help
thinking…" Her grey-blue eyes darkened. "That perhaps Roberta was in
love with Paul. After he died four years ago, we saw nothing of the girl
for quite some time. And she never came again to ask for the Guardian."
If a village as small as Keldale could even have an undesirable area out
of which residents aspired to escape, St. Chad's Lane would have been
that spot. It was more like an alley than a street, an unpaved
thoroughfare to nowhere, having the one distinction of a pub on the
corner. This was the Dove and Whistle, its doors and woodwork painted a
blinding shade of purple, itself looking very much as if it wished it
could have had the good fortune to be settled somewhere—anywhere— else.
Richard Gibson and his brood lived in the last attached house in this
lane, a pinched stone building with chipped window sashes and a front
door that had once been painted royal blue but now was fading to a
decided grey. This stood open to the late afternoon, mindless of the
rapidly dropping temperature in the dale, and from within the confi nes
of the tiny house came the noise of a family quarrelling passionately.
"God damn you, do something with him, then. He's your son as well. Jesus
Christ! You'd think he was a miraculous little version of virgin birth
from all the interest you take in his upbringing!" It was a woman
speaking, a shrieking that sounded as if at any moment it would choose
hysteria or cachinnation as a second line of attack.
A man's voice rumbled in answer, indistinguishable in the general uproar.
