Savage and furious. Blindly determined. Her eyes on the wall. "Love Papa. Love Papa. Don't remember. Don't remember."
"Of course you remember." The psychiatrist's voice was gentle but relentless. "The Bible told you what to do. If you hadn't done it, your father would have done to that little girl all the things he had done to you and Gillian through the years. He would have molested her. He would have sodomised her. He would have raped her. But you stopped him, Roberta. You saved that child. You dressed in fine linens. You put on the gold chain. You killed the dog. You called your father to the barn. He ran in, didn't he? He knelt down and - "
Roberta jumped off her chair. It flew across the room, striking the cabinet, and she went after it, moving like the wind. She picked it up, hurled it against the wall, dumped over the cabinet, and began to scream.
"I chopped off his head! He knelt down. He bent to pick up Whiskers. And I chopped off his head! I don't care that I did it! I wanted him to die! I wouldn't let him touch Bridie! He wanted to. He read to her just like he'd done to me. He talked to her just like he'd done to me.
He was going to do it! I knew the signs! I killed him! I killed him and I don't care! I'm not sorry!
He deserved to die!" Slumping to the floor, she wept into her hands, large grey doughlike hands that covered her face, but pinched and brutalised it even as they protected. "I saw his head on the floor. And I didn't care. And the rat came out of nowhere. And he sniffed at the blood. And he ate at the brains and I didn't care!"
With a strangled cry, Sergeant Havers leapt to her feet and staggered from the room.
Barbara crashed into the lavatory, fell blindly into a stall, and began to vomit. The room swam round her. She was so ragingly hot that she was sure she would faint, but she continued, instead, to vomit. And as she retched - painfully, spasmodically - she knew that what was spewing forth from her body was the turbid mass of her own despair.
She clung to the smooth porcelain bowl, fought for breath to redeem her, and vomited. It was as if she had never seen life clearly until the last two hours and, suddenly faced with its filth, she had to get away from it, had to get it out of her system.
In that dark, stifling room the voices had come to her relentlessly. Not just the voices of the sisters who had lived the nightmare, but the voices of her own past and of the nightmare that remained. It was too much. She could no longer live with it; she could no longer bear it.
I can't, she sobbed inwardly. Tony, I can't any longer! God forgive me, but I can't!
Footsteps entered the room. She struggled to pull herself together but the illness continued and she knew she would have to endure the further humiliation of being mortally ill in front of the fashionable competence of Lady Helen Clyde.
Water was turned on. More footsteps. The stall door opened and a damp cloth was pressed to the back of her neck, folded quickly, and then wiped across her burning cheeks.
"Please. No! Go away!" She was sick again and, what was even more despicable, she began to cry. "I can't!" she wept. "I can't! Please. Please! Leave me alone!"
A cool hand pushed her hair off her face and supported her forehead. "Life's rotten, Barb.
And the hell of it is that it doesn't get much better," Lynley's voice said.
Horrified, she spun around. But it was Lynley, and in his eyes the compassion she had seen before: in his treatment of Roberta, in his conversation with Bridie, in his questioning of Tessa. And she suddenly saw what it was that Webberly had known she could learn from Lynley - the source of his strength, the centre of what she knew quite well was tremendous personal courage. It was that quiet compassion, nothing else, that finally broke her.
"How could he?" she sobbed. "If it's your child...you're supposed to love, not hurt. Not let him die. Never let him die! And that's what they did!" Her voice spiralled hysterically and all the time Lynley's dark eyes were on her face. "I hate...I can't...They were supposed to
be there for him. He