A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,102

demanded. "Are you saying that Roberta killed her dog, that her father came to the barn and discovered the deed, that they got into a tremendous row, and then she beheaded him?"

"No, no. It's quite possible that Roberta didn't kill her father at all. But she was definitely present when it happened. She had to have been."

"Why?"

"Because his blood is all over the bottom of her dress."

"Perhaps she went to the barn, found his body, and fell to her knees in shock."

St. James shook his head. "That idea doesn't wash."

"Why not?"

He pointed to the garment on the back of the car. "Look at the pattern. Teys's blood is in splatters. You know what that means as well as I. It only got there one way."

Lynley was silent for a moment. "She was standing by when it happened," he concluded.

"She had to have been. If indeed she didn't do it herself, then she was standing right there when someone else did."

"Is she protecting someone, Tommy?" Deborah asked, seeing the expression on Lynley's face.

He didn't reply at once. He was thinking of patterns: patterns of words, patterns of images, patterns of behaviours. He was thinking of what a person learns, and when he learns it, and when it emerges into practical use. He was thinking of knowledge and how it ultimately, inevitably combines with experience and points to what is incontrovertible truth.

He roused himself to answer the question with one of his own. "St. James, what would you do, how far would you go, to save Deborah?" It was a dangerous query. Its risk was deadly.

These were waters, perhaps, best left unexplored.

"Forty thousand brothers?' Is that where we are with it now?" St. James' voice was unchanged, but the angles of his face were a warning, finely drawn and grim.

"How far would you go?" Lynley insisted.

"Tommy, don't!" Deborah put out her hand, a gesture to stop him from going any further, to stop him from doing irreparable damage to the delicate crystal of their friable peace.

"Would you hold back the truth? Would you lay down your life? How far would you go to save Deborah?"

St. James looked at his wife. The colour had completely drained from her face; her sprinkling of freckles danced across her nose; her eyes were haunted with tears. And he understood. This was no grappling in an Elsinore grave, but the question primeval.

"I'd do anything," he replied, his eyes on his wife. "By God, yes, I would. I'd do anything."

Lynley nodded. "People generally do, don't they, for the ones they love most."

He chose Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6, Pathetique. He smiled as the swelling of the first movement filled the car. Helen would never have allowed it.

"Darling Tommy, absolutely not!" she would have protested. "Let's not drive our mutual depression right into suicide!" Then she would have resolutely rooted through all of his tapes to find something suitably uplifting: invariably Strauss, played at full volume with Helen making her usual assortment of amusing remarks over the din. "Just picture them, Tommy, flitting through the woods in their little tutus. It's positively religious!"

Today, however, the heavy theme of Pathetique with its relentless exploration of man's spiritual suffering suited his mood. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt so burdened by a case. It felt as if a tremendous weight, having nothing whatsoever to do with the responsibility of getting to the bottom of the matter, were pressing upon his heart. He knew the source. Murder - its atavistic nature and ineffable consequences - was a hydra. Each head, ruthlessly cut off in an effort to reach the "prodigious dog-like body" of culpability, left in its place two heads more venomous than the last. But unlike so many of his previous cases, in which mere rote sufficed to see him sear his way to the core of evil - stopping the flow of blood, allowing no further growth, and leaving him personally untouched by the encounter - this case spoke to him far more intimately. He knew instinctively that the death of William Teys was merely one of the heads of the serpent, and the knowledge that eight others waited to do battle with him - and, more than that, that he had not even come to know the true nature of the evil he faced - filled him with a sense of trepidation. But he knew himself well enough to know that there was more to his desolation and despair than the death of a man in a