A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,34

priest comes rushing down and does the bit with the holy water, goes on to the abbey, and - " He stopped completely, his face lit with joy, his eyes alive with delight: a master storyteller with the audience tearing and clawing to hear every last syllable.

"More coffee, Deborah?"

"Thank you, no."

"And what do you think?" Hank demanded.

St. James considered the question. He felt his wife's foot nudge his good leg. "What?" he dutifully responded.

"Damn if there wasn't a real baby there. A newborn with the cord still attached. Couldn't be more than a couple hours old. Deader'n a door knocker by the time the old priest got there. Exposure, they say."

"How dreadful." Deborah's face paled. "What a horrible thing!"

Hank nodded solemnly. "You're talking horrible, just think of poor Ezra! Bet he couldn't you-know-what for another two years!"

"Whose baby was it?"

Hank shrugged. He turned his attention to his now-cold breakfast. Clearly, the juicier elements of the story were the only ones that he had pursued.

"No one knows," JoJo answered. "They buried it in the churchyard in the village. With the funniest epitaph on the poor little grave. I can't recall it, offhand. You'll have to go see it."

"They're newlyweds, Bean," Hank put in with a broad wink at St. James. "I bet they got plenty m-o-r-e on their minds than traipsing through graveyards."

Obviously, Lynley favoured the Russians. They'd begun with Rachmaninoff, moved to Rimsky-Korsakov, and were now slam-banging their way through the cannonades of the 1812

Overture.

"There. Did you notice it?" he asked her, once the music had crashed to its finale. "One of the cymbalists was just a counterbeat behind. But it's my only bone of contention with that particular recording of 1812." He flipped the stereo off.

Barbara noticed for the first time that he wore absolutely no jewellery - no crested signet ring, no expensive wrist watch to flash gold richly when it caught the light. For some reason, that fact was as distracting to her as an unsightly display of opulent ornamentation would have been.

"I didn't catch it. Sorry. I don't know a lot about music." Did he really expect her - with her background - to be able to converse with him about classical music?

"I don't know much about it either," he admitted ingenuously. "I just listen to it a great deal. I'm afraid I'm one of those ignoramuses who say, "I don't know a thing about it, but I know what I like."

She listened to his words with surprise. The man had a first in history, an Oxford education. Why in the world would he ever apply the word ignoramus to himself? Unless, of course, it was designed to put her at ease with a liberal dose of charm, something he was capable of doing quite well. It was effortless for him, as easy as breathing.

"I must have developed my liking for it during the very last part of my father's illness. It was always playing in the house when I could get away to see him." He paused, removed the tape, and the silence in the car became every bit as loud as the music had been, but far more disconcerting. It was some moments before he spoke again, and when he did, it was to pick up the thread of his original thought. "He simply wasted away to nothing. So much pain." He cleared his throat. "My mother wouldn't consider putting him into hospital. Even towards the end when it would have been so much easier on her, she wouldn't hear of it. She sat with him hour after hour, day and night, and watched him die by degrees. I think it was music that kept them both sane those last weeks." He kept his eyes on the road. "She held his hand and listened to Tchaikovsky. In the end he couldn't even speak. I've always liked to think the music did his speaking for him."

It was suddenly crucial to stop the direction the conversation was taking. Barbara gripped the stiff edges of the folded roadmap with dry, hot fingers and searched for another subject.

"You know that bloke Nies, don't you?" It blurted out badly, all too obviously an ill-concealed attempt to digress. She shot a wary look at him.

His eyes narrowed, but otherwise he gave no immediate reaction to the question. One hand merely dropped from the steering wheel. For a moment, Barbara thought, ridiculously, that he intended to use it to silence her, but he simply chose another tape at random and slid