A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,57

seeing the direction his question was taking her, she frowned.

"You want me to say that he felt he was being a fool because if Roberta died, he'd get the farm."

"Is that what he meant?"

"No, of course not. William rewrote his will shortly after Richard returned from the fens.

Richard knew very well that the farm had been left to him, not to Roberta."

"But if you and William married, then the will would most likely have been rewritten once again. Isn't that true?"

Clearly, she saw the trap. "Yes but...I know what you're thinking. It was to Richard's advantage that William should die before we could marry. But isn't that always the case when there's an inheritance involved? And people don't generally kill one another just because they're to inherit something in a will."

"On the contrary, Mrs. Odell," Lynley objected politely, "people do it all the time."

"That wasn't the case here. I just think... well, that Richard's not very happy. And unhappy people say lots of things that they really don't mean and do lots of things that they wouldn't otherwise do just to try to forget their unhappiness, don't they?"

Neither Lynley nor Havers replied at once. Olivia moved restlessly in her chair. Outside, Bridie's voice rose as she called to her duck.

"Did Roberta know about this conversation?" Lynley asked.

"If she did, she never mentioned it. When she was here she mostly talked - in that low-voiced way of hers - about the wedding. I think she was eager for William and me to marry.

To have a sister in Bridie. To have what she once had with Gillian. She missed her sister dreadfully. I don't believe she ever got over Gillian's running away." Her nervous fingers found a loose thread on the hem of her skirt, and she twisted it compulsively until it broke. Then she looked at it mutely, as if wondering how it came to be wrapped round her finger. "Bobba - that's what William always called her, and we did as well - would take Bridie off so that William and I could have time alone. She and Bridie and Whiskers and that duck would go off together. Can you imagine what they looked like?" She smiled and smoothed the creases in her skirt. "They'd go to the river, across the common, or down to the abbey for a picnic. The four of them. And then William and I would be able to talk."

"What did you talk about?"

"Tessa, mostly. Of course, it was a problem, but the last time he was here - the day of his death - he said it had finally been overcome."

"I'm not certain that I understand," Lynley remarked. "What kind of a problem?

Emotional, you mean? An unwillingness to come to terms with her death?"

Olivia had been looking out the window, but she turned to them upon the last word.

"Death? " she asked, perplexed. "Tessa's not dead, Inspector. She deserted William a short time after Roberta was born. He'd hired a detective to find her so that he could have their marriage annulled by the Church, and Saturday afternoon he came to tell me she'd been found at last."

"York," the man said. "And I'm not obligated to tell you anything more. I've yet to be paid for my services, you know."

Lynley gripped the telephone in his hand. He could feel the anger burning in his chest.

"How does a court order sound?" he asked pleasantly.

"Listen here, old chap, don't try to pull that kind of shit on me - "

"Mr. Houseman, may I remind you that, in spite of what you may think, you are not part of a Dashiell Hammett novel." Lynley could just picture the man, feet up on his desk, a bottle of bourbon in the filing drawer, a gun tossed from hand to hand as he balanced the telephone receiver on his shoulder. He wasn't too far from the truth.

Harry Houseman looked out the grimy window of his office above Jackie's Barber Shop in Richmond's Trinity Church Square. A light rain was falling, not enough to clean off his window, just enough to emphasise its filth. What a dreary day, he thought. He'd intended to spend it on a drive to the coast - a little lady in Whitby was only too eager to do some serious private investigating with him - but this kind of weather didn't put him in the mood. And God knows he needed to be in the mood more and more these days before anything happened in the