A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,39

anxious smile. "I don't know how much I can help you, Inspector."

"Tell us about the row and Roberta."

She came round the bar and joined them, pulling a comfortable, cushioned chair to the other side of the table. She sat down, tucking her legs to one side, and glanced at the stack of photographs in front of her. She looked away quickly.

"I'll tell you what I can, but it isn't much. Olivia's the one who can tell you more."

"Olivia Odell...your..."

"Sister-in-law. My brother Paul's widow." Stepha placed her glass of ale on the table and used the same movement to cover the photographs with a pile of forensic reports. "If you don't mind..."

"Sorry," Lynley said quickly. "We get so used to looking at horrors like that that we become immune." He replaced it all in the folder. "Why did they have a row about Roberta?"

"Olivia told me later - she was with them at the Dove and Whistle when it happened - that it was all due to the way Roberta looks." She fingered her glass, made a pattern of lace on the moisture of its surface. "Richard's from Keldale, you see, but he'd been gone a good few years trying his luck with barley in the fens. He'd married down there, had two children as well. When the farming didn't work out, he returned to the Kel." She smiled at them.

"They say that the Kel never lets one go easily, and that was the case for Richard. He was gone for eight or nine years and, when he returned, he was quite a bit shocked to see the change in Roberta."

"You said it was all due to the way she looks?"

"She didn't always look as she does now. She was always a big girl, of course, even at eight when Richard left. But she was never..."

Stepha hesitated, clearly searching delicately for the right word, for a euphemism that would be factual at the same time as it was noncommittal.

"Obese," Barbara finished.

Like a cow.

"Yes," Stepha went on gratefully. "Richard had always been great friends with Roberta, for all he's twelve years her senior. And to come back and find his cousin so sadly deteriorated - physically, I mean, she was much the same otherwise - was a terrible shock to him. He blamed William for ignoring the girl. Said she had done it to herself to try to get his attention. William raged at that. Olivia said she'd never seen him so angry. Poor man, there'd been problems enough in his life without an accusation like that from his own nephew. But they got it sorted out. Richard apologised the very next day. William wouldn't take Roberta to a doctor - he wouldn't bend that far - but Olivia found a diet for the girl, and from that time on, all went well."

"Until three weeks ago," Lynley observed.

"If you choose to believe that Roberta killed her father, then yes, it all went well until three weeks back. But I don't believe she killed him. Not for one blessed moment."

Lynley looked surprised at the force behind her words. "Why not?"

"Because aside from Richard - who heaven knows has enough trouble just dealing with that family of his own - William was all that Roberta had. Besides her reading and dreams, there was only her father."

"She'd no friends her own age? No other girls nearby on the farms or in the village?"

Stepha shook her head. "She kept to herself. When she wasn't working on the farm with her father, mostly she read. She was here every day for the Guardian, in fact, for years on end.

They never did take a paper on the farm, so she'd come every afternoon once everyone'd seen it and we'd let her take it home with her. I think she'd read every book of her mother's in the house, all of Marsha Fitzalan's, and the newspaper was the only thing left for her. We've no lending library, you see." She frowned down at the glass in her hands. "She stopped looking at the paper a few years back, though. When my brother died. I couldn't help thinking..." Her grey-blue eyes darkened. "That perhaps Roberta was in love with Paul. After he died four years ago, we saw nothing of the girl for quite some time. And she never came again to ask for the Guardian."

If a village as small as Keldale could even have an undesirable area out of which residents aspired to escape, St. Chad's Lane would have