A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,107

not the case now. "Yes," he replied. "I do understand." He nodded to her in farewell and walked back to his car.

"Inspector - " He turned, his hand on the door handle. "You know where Russell is, don't you?"

She read the answer in his face, but she listened instead to the lie. "No," he responded.

Ezra Farmington lived directly across from the Dove and Whistle in the council house that abutted against Marsha Fitzalan's. Like hers, its front garden was planted and cared for, but with less detailed concern, as if the man had started out with the best of intentions, but they, along with the plants, had become the worse for wear. Bushes were thriving but overgrown, weeds were assaulting the flower beds, dead annuals needed to be uprooted and discarded, and a small patch of lawn was looking long enough to be considered a potential source of fodder.

Farmington was not at all pleased to see him. He opened the door to Lynley's knock and placed his body squarely in the frame. Over his shoulder Lynley saw that the other man had been going through his work, for dozens of watercolours were spread upon the sitting room couch and scattered on the floor. Some were torn into shreds, others were crumpled into tight, angry balls, still others were abandoned to meet their fate underfoot. It was a haphazard purging of artistic effort, however, because the artist himself was more than halfway drunk.

"Inspector?" Farmington asked with deliberate politeness.

"May I come in?"

The man shrugged. "Why not?" He opened the door wider and gestured Lynley inside with a lackadaisical sweep. "'Scuse the mess. Just cleaning out the crap."

Lynley stepped over several paintings. "From four years ago?" he asked blandly.

It was the right choice of time. Farmington's face told him so in the sudden flare of nostrils and the movement of lips.

"What's that s'posed to mean?" He was just on the edge of slurring his words, and, perhaps noticing this himself, he sought control visibly.

"What time was it when you and William Teys argued?" Lynley asked, ignoring the man's question.

"Time?" Ezra shrugged. "No idea. Drink, Ins...Inspector?" He smiled glassily and stiffly crossed the room to pour himself a tumbler of gin. "No? You don't mind if I...? Thank you." He gulped back a mouthful, coughed, and laughed, swiping at his mouth so savagely with his wrist that the movement was as good as a blow. "Pulin' wimp. Can' even handle a drink."

"You were coming down from High Kel Moor. That's not a walk you would make in the dark, is it?"

"Course not."

"And you heard music from the farmhouse?"

"Ha!" He waved his glass at Lynley. "Whole screamin'

band, In...spector. Thought I was in the middle of a flipping parade."

"Did you see only Teys? No one else?"

"Are we counting sweet Nigel bringing the doggie home?"

"Aside from Nigel."

"Nope." He lifted his glass and drained it. "Course, Roberta was proba'ly inside the house changing the records, poor fat slob. She wasn't much good for anything else. 'Cept," his bleary eyes twinkled, "swinging an axe and sending Papa into the great beyond." He laughed at his comment. "Like Lizzie Borden!" he added and laughed louder still.

Lynley wondered why the man was being deliberately repugnant, wondered what was motivating him to go to such great lengths to develop and then display a side of his character so ugly as to be intolerable. Hatred and anger were the foundation here and a contempt so virulent that it was like a third person in the room. Farmington was obviously a talented man and yet a man blindly bent upon destroying the single creative force that gave his life meaning.

As he clutched at himself with callous nonchalance and stumbled in the direction of the lavatory, Lynley looked at the paintings he left behind and saw the source of the man's despair in the studies the artist could not bring himself to destroy.

They were done from every possible angle, in charcoal, pencil, pastels, and paint. They chronicled movement, passion, and desire, and bore witness to the anguish of the artist's soul.

They were all of Stepha Odell.

When Lynley heard the man's returning footsteps, he forced his eyes from the work and his mind away from the implication. Instead, he made himself look at Farmington and in doing so he saw the other man clearly for the first time: womaniser and hypocrite, using past pain as an excuse for present behaviour. He saw that Farmington was at best his own mirror image, his second self, the man,