A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,101

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