A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,100

Wasn't it as if Tessa had known all along that she could do nothing but fail once she walked into this house and felt its silence and chill?

Three hours, he'd said. Three hours to find the secret of Gillian Teys.

She laughed bitterly at the thought, tasting the sound in the empty air. He knew that she would fail, that he would have the enjoyment of sending her back to London, back to uniform, back to disgrace. So what was the point of trying at all? Why not leave now rather than give him the pleasure?

She threw herself down on the sitting-room couch. Tessa's image watched her sympathetically. But...what if she could find Gillian? What if, where Lynley himself had failed, she was able to succeed? Would it really matter then if he sent her back to the streets? Wouldn't she know, once and for all, that she was good for something, that she could have been part of a working team?

It was a thought. She picked idly at the worn upholstery of the couch. The sound of her fingers scratching at the threads was the only noise in the house. Except for the rustling and burrowing of mice at the edge of her consciousness, like a half-formed thought.

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 New-market 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 teaspoonful 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,'" his 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 goodnaturedly 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,