She unlocked the window, threw it open to feel the fresh air on her burning cheeks, then turned back, determined to do her job.
This was Roberta's room, neat like the other, but with a lived-in air
about it. A largae four-poster was covered by a quilt, a patchwork
affair with a bright, cheerfu design of sun, clouds, and rainbow on a
sapphire background sky. Clothes hung in the wardrobe. Sturdy shoes—work
shoes, walking shoes, slippers—stood lined beneath them. There were a
dressing table with a wavy cheval glass, and a chest of drawers on which
a framed photograph lay, face down, as if it had toppled over. Barbara
glanced at it curiously. Mother, father, and a newborn Roberta in the
father's arms. But the picture itself, slightly distended, was crowded
into its frame as if it didn't quite fit. She turned the frame in her
hands and prised off the backing.
She was correct in her guess. The photograph had been too large for the
purchased frame, so it had been folded back. Unfolded, the picture was
very much different, for to the left of the father, hands clasped behind
her, stood the mirror image of the baby's mother, a smaller version,
certainly, but undoubtedly the offspring of Tessa Teys.
Barbara was about to call out to Lynley when he came to the door, a
photograph album in his hands. He paused as if trying to decide how to
get their relationship back in order.
"I've found the strangest thing, Sergeant," he said.
"As have I," she replied, as determined as he to forget her outburst. They exchanged their items.
"Yours explains mine, I dare say," Lynley remarked.
She gave curious attention to the open pages of the album. It was a
pictorial family record, the kind that documents weddings and births,
Christmas, Easter, and birthdays. But every picture that had more than
one child in it had been cut up in some way, oddly defaced, so that
pictures had central slices missing or wedges cut into them, and the
size of the family was systematically reduced in every one. The effect
was chilling.
"A sister of Tessa's, I'd say," Lynley observed.
"Perhaps her first child," Barbara offered.
"Surely she's too old to be a first child unless Tessa produced her when
she was a child herself." He set the frame down, slipped the photograph
into his pocket, and turned his attention to the drawers. "Ah," he
said, "at least we know why Roberta was so anxious for the Guardian.
She's lined her drawers with it. And…Havers, look at this." From the
bottom drawer, beneath a pile of worn jerseys, he pulled something which
had been placed face down, hidden. "The mystery girl once again."
Barbara looked at the photograph he handed to her. It was the same girl,
but older this time, a teenager. She and Roberta were standing in the
snow in St. Catherine's churchyard, both grinning at the camera. The
older girl had her hands on Roberta's shoulders, pulling her back
against her. She had bent over— although certainly not far, for Roberta
was nearly as tall as she—and had pressed her cheek to the other girl's.
Her dark gold hair touched Roberta's brown curls. In front of them,
with Roberta's hand clutched into his fur, was a border collie who
looked very much as if he were grinning as well. Whiskers.
"Roberta doesn't look half bad there," Barbara said, handing the picture to Lynley. "Big, but not fat."
"Then this must have been taken sometime before Gibson left. Remember
what Stepha said? She'd not been fat then, not until Richard was gone."
He pocketed the additional photograph and looked round the room.
"Anything else?" he asked.
"Clothes in the wardrobe. Nothing much of interest." As he had done in
the other room, she drew back the quilt from the bed. Unlike the other,
however, this bed was made, and its fresh, laundered linen gave off the
scent of jasmine. But underneath it, as if the jasmine were incense
subtly burning to hide the odour of cannabis, was the cloying smell of
something more. Barbara looked at Lynley. "Do you—"
"Absolutely," he replied. "Help me pull off the mattress."
She did so, covering her mouth and nose when the stench filled the room
and they saw what lay beneath the old mattress. The box-spring covering
had been cut away in the far corner of the bed, and resting within was a
storehouse of food. Rotting fruit, bread grey with mould, biscuits and
candy, pastries half-eaten, bags of crisps.
"Oh, Jesus," Barbara murmured. It was more prayer than exclamation and,
in spite of the catalogue of gruesome sights she had seen as a member of
the force, her stomach heaved uneasily and she backed away. "Sorry,"
she gasped with a shaky laugh. "Bit of a surprise."
Lynley dropped the mattress back into place. His face was expressionless. "It's sabotage," he said to himself.
"Sir?"
"Stepha said something about a diet."
As Barbara had done before, Lynley walked to the window. Evening was
drawing on, and in a fading patch of the dying light he withdrew the
photographs from his coat pocket and examined them. He stood motionless,
perhaps in the hope that an uninterrupted, undisturbed study of the two
girls would tell him who killed William Teys and why, and what a
storehouse of rotting food had to do with anything. Watching him,
Barbara was struck by how a trick of light falling across hair, cheek,
and brow made him look vastly younger than his thirty-two years. And yet
nothing altered or obscured the man's intelligence or the wit behind
his eyes, not even the shadows. The only noise in the room was his
breathing, steady and calm, very sure. He turned, found her watching
him, and began to speak.
She stopped him. "Well," she said forcefully, pushing her hair behind
her ears in a pugnacious gesture, "see anything else in the other
rooms?"
"Just a box of old keys in the wardrobe and a veritable museum of
Tessa," he replied. "Clothing, photographs, locks of hair. Among Teys's
own things, of course." He replaced the photographs in his pocket. "I
wonder if Olivia Odell knew what she was in for."
They had walked the three-quarters of a mile from the village down
Gembler Road to the Teys's farm. As they returned, Lynley began to wish
that he had driven his car. It was not so much concern that darkness had
fallen but a longing for music to distract him. Without it, he found
himself glancing at the woman walking wordlessly at his side, and he
reluctantly considered what he had heard about her.
"One angry vairgin," MacPherson had said. "What she needs is a faer toss
i' the hay." Then he roared with laughter and lifted his pint in his
big, bear's grasp. "But no' me, laddies. I'll not test those waters. I
leave tha' plaisure to a young'r man!"
But MacPherson was wrong, Lynley thought. There was no question of angry virginity here. It was something else.
This wasn't Havers's first murder investigation, so he could not
understand her reaction to the farm: her initial reluctance to enter the
barn, her strange behaviour in the sitting room, her inexplicable
outburst upstairs.
For the second time he wondered what on earth Webberly had in mind in
creating their partnership, but he found he was too weary to attempt an
explanation.
The lights of the Dove and Whistle came in sight upon the final curve of the road. "Lets get something to eat," he said.
"Roast chicken," the proprietor announced. "It's our Sunday night
dinner. Get you some up quick if you have a seat in the lounge."
The Dove and Whistle was doing a brisk evening's business. In the public
bar, which had fallen into stillness upon their entrance, a pall of
cigarette smoke hung like a heavy rain cloud over the room. Farmers
gathered in conversation in a corner, their mud-encrusted boots placed
on rungs of ladder-backed chairs, two younger men played a boisterous
game of darts near a door marked TOILETS, while a group of middle-aged
women compared the Sunday evening remnants of Saturday's crimps and
curls, courtesy of Sinji's Beauty Shoppe. The bar itself was surrounded
by patrons, most of whom were joking with the girl who worked the taps
behind it.
She was clearly the village anomaly. Jet black hair rose out of her
scalp in spikes, her eyes were heavily outlined in purple, and her
clothes were nighttime-in-Soho explicit: short black leather skirt,
white plunging blouse, black lace stockings with holes held together by
safety pins, black laced shoes of the sort that grandmothers wear. Each
of her ears— pierced four times—wore the dubious decoration of a line of
stud earrings, except for the bottom right hole, which sported a
feather dangling to her shoulder.
"Fancies herself a rock singer," the publican said, following their
glance. "She's m' daughter, but I try not to let the word out often." He
thumped a pint of ale on the wobbly table in front of Lynley, gave a
tonic water to Barbara, and grinned. "Hannah!" he shouted back into the
public bar. "Stop making a spectacle of yourself, girl! Y're driving
every man present insane with lust!" He winked at them wickedly.
"Oh Dad!" she laughed. The others did as well.
"Tell him off, Hannah!" somebody called. And another, "What's the poor bloke ever known about style?"
"Style, is it?" the publican called back cheerfully. "She's a cheap one
to dress, all right. But she's running through my fortune buying gunk
for her hair."
"How d'you keep them spikes up, Han?"
"Got scared in the abbey, I'd say."
"Heard the baby howl, did you, Han?"
Laughter. A playful swing at the speaker. The statement made: See, we're
all friends here. Barbara wondered if they'd rehearsed the whole thing.
She and Lynley were the only occupants of the lounge, and once the door
closed behind the publican, she longed for the noise of the public bar
again, but Lynley was speaking.
"She must have been a compulsive eater."
"Who murdered her father because he put her on a diet?" It slipped out
before Barbara could stop herself. Sarcasm was rich in her voice.
"Who obviously did a lot of eating in secret," Lynley went on. His own voice was unperturbed.
"Well, it doesn't look that way to me," she argued. She was pushing him,
and she knew it. It was defensive and stupid. But she couldn't help it.
"What does it look like to you?"
"That food's been forgotten. Who knows how long it's been there?"
"I think we can agree that it's been there three weeks and that any food that's left out for three weeks is likely to spoil."
"All right, I'll accept that," Barbara said. "But not the compulsive eating."
"Why not?"
"Because you can't prove it, dammit!"
He ticked off items on his fi ngers. "We have two rotting apples, three
black bananas, something that at one time might have been a ripe pear, a
loaf of bread, sixteen biscuits, three half-eaten pastries, and three
bags of crisps. Now you tell me what we have here, Sergeant."
"I've no idea," she replied.
"Then if you've no idea, perhaps you'll consider mine." He paused. "Barbara—"
She knew at once from his tone that she had to stop him. He couldn't, he
wouldn't understand. "I'm sorry, Inspector," she said swiftly. "I got
spooked at the farm and I…I've jumped all over you for it ever since.
I…I'm sorry."
He appeared to be taken aback. "All right. Let's start again, shall we?"
The publican approached and plopped two plates down onto the table. "Chicken and peas," he announced proudly.
Barbara got up and stumbled from the room.
