A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,104

herself, if he didn't believe her, if he laughed at the conclusions she had drawn after nearly three hours in that horrible room. "Except that I don't think the reason she stopped coming for the

Guardian had anything to do with Paul Odell. I think it was Gillian."

His eyes drifted to the newspapers and Barbara saw him take in what she herself had noticed: that Roberta had lined her drawers with the classified section. Moreover, although there were six pieces of newspaper on the table, they were duplicates of only two pages of the

Guardian, as if something memorable had appeared in a single issue, and Roberta had collected that day's edition from the villagers to keep as souvenirs.

"The personal column," Lynley murmured. "By God, Havers, Gillian sent her a message."

Barbara pulled one of the sheets towards her and ran her finger down the column. "R.

Look at the advert. G,'" she read. "I think that's the message."

"Look at the advertisement? What advertisement?"

She reached for a representation of the second saved page. "This one, I think."

He read it. Dated nearly four years previously, it was a small, square announcement of a meeting in Harrogate, a panel discussion involving a group from an organisation called Testament House. The members of the panel were listed, but Gillian Teys was not among them.

Lynley looked up, his brown eyes frankly quizzical.

"You've lost me, Sergeant."

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. "Aren't you familiar with Testament House? Never mind, I keep forgetting that you haven't been in uniform in years. Testament House is run out of Fitzroy Square by an Anglican priest. He used to teach at university but evidently one day one of his students asked him why he wasn't bothering to practise what he preached - feeding the hungry and clothing the naked - and he decided that was something in his life that he ought to address. So he started Testament House."

"Which is?"

"An organisation that collects runaways. Teenaged prostitutes - both male and female - drug abusers of every colour and shape, and everyone else under the age of twenty-one who's hanging about aimlessly in Trafalgar or Piccadilly or in any of the stations just waiting to be preyed on by a pimp or a whore. He's been doing it for years. The uniformed police all know him. We always took kids to him."

"He's the Reverend George Clarence that's listed here, I take it?"

She nodded. "He goes out on fund-raising tours for the organisation."

"Do I understand you to mean that you believe Gillian Teys was picked up by this group in London?"

"I...Yes, I do."

"Why?"

It had taken her ages to find the advertisement, ages longer to decipher its significance, and now everything - most especially her career, she admitted - depended upon Lynley's willingness to believe. "Because of this name." She pointed to the third on the list of panelists.

"Nell Graham?"

"Yes."

"I'm completely in the dark."

"I think Nell Graham was the message Roberta was waiting for. She faithfully searched the paper each day for years, waiting to see what had happened to her sister.

Nell Graham told her. It meant Gillian had survived."

"Why Nell Graham? Why not," he glanced at the other names, "Terence Hanover, Caroline Paulson, or Margaret Crist?"

Havers picked up the battered novel from the table. "Because none of those were born of one of the Brontes." She tapped the book. "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is about Helen Huntington, a woman who breaks the social code of her time and leaves her alcoholic husband to start a new life. She falls in love with a man who knows nothing about her past, who knows only the name she has chosen for herself: Helen Graham, Nell Graham, Inspector." She finished and waited in agony for his reponse.

When it came, nothing could have surprised her more, could have disarmed her more quickly. "

Bravo, Barbara," he said softly, his eyes lit and a smile breaking over his face. He leaned forward earnestly. "What's your theory on how she came to be involved with this group?"

The relief was so tremendous that Barbara found she had begun trembling from head to toe. She took a ragged breath and somehow found her voice. "My...I suspect that Gillian had enough money to get to London but that ran out fairly soon. They may have picked her up off the street somewhere or in one of the stations."

"But wouldn't they return her to her father?"

"That's not how Testament House works. They encourage the kids to go home or at least to phone their parents and