A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,58

land down under. He grinned, showing a badly capped front tooth. It added a piratical dimension to his otherwise mundane appearance: dull brown hair, muddycoloured eyes, cadaverous skin, and the incongruity of full, sensual lips.

He played with a well-chewed pencil on the top of his scarred desk. His eyes caught the thin-lipped glance of his wife's shrewish face peering moodily out at him from the photograph nearby. He reached out with his pencil and toppled it over, face down.

"I'm sure we can reach some sort of mutual agreement," Houseman said into the phone.

"Let me see. Miss Doalson?" A suitable pause for dramatic effect. "Do I have time today to...Well, cancel that. It can certainly wait until I see..." Back to the phone. "What did you say your name was?"

"We aren't going to see each other," Lynley responded patiently. "You're going to give me the address in York and that's going to be the end of our relationship."

"Oh, I don't see how I can - "

"Certainly you do." Lynley's voice was steel. "Because, as you said, you haven't been paid yet. And in order for you ever to get paid once the estate is settled - which may, incidentally, take years if we don't get to the bottom of this - you're going to have to give me Tessa Teys's address."

A pause for consideration. "What is that, Miss Doalson?" the infuriating voice asked in saccharine tones. "On the other line? Well, put him off, will you?" A martyred sigh. "I can see, Inspector, that you're not an easy man to deal with. We all have to make a living, you know."

"Believe me, I know," Lynley replied curtly. "The address?"

"I'll just have to find it in my files. May I give you a ring in...say an hour or so?"

"No."

"Well, good God, man - "

"I'm on my way to Richmond."

"No, no, that won't be necessary. Just wait a moment, old chap." Houseman leaned back in his chair, eyeing the grey sky for a minute. He reached over to his dented filing cabinet, opening and closing a few drawers for effect. "What's that, Miss Doalson?" he called. "No, put her off till tomorrow, will you? I don't care if she's weeping buckets, sweetheart, I don't have time to spend with her today." He picked the scrap of memo paper off his desk. "Ah, here it is, Inspector," he said and gave Lynley the address. "But don't expect her to welcome you with open arms, will you?"

"I don't particularly care how she welcomes me, Mr. Houseman. Good - "

"Oh, but you ought to, Inspector. Just a bit, you know. Hubby went mad when he heard the news. Thought he'd strangle me right on the spot, so God knows what he'll do when Scotland Yard shows up. He's one of those scholarly types, big words and thick specs. But trust me, Inspector, that man is deep. There's an animal inside him."

Lynley's eyes narrowed. It was a cast upon the waters, an expert manoeuvre. He wanted to swim past it but admitted defeat. "What are you talking about? What news did he hear?"

"The news about hubby number one, of course."

"What are you trying to tell me, Houseman?"

"That Tessa Teys is a bigamist, old boy," Houseman finished with delight. "Married up with number two without seeing to the formal bye-byes to our William. Can you imagine her surprise when I popped up on her doorstep?"

The house wasn't at all what he had expected. Women who desert husband and children should somehow end up in tenement buildings pungent with the odours of garlic and urine. They should daily subdue a bucking, quarrelsome conscience with liberal applications of soporific gin.

They should be faded and worn, their looks quite destroyed by the ravages of shame. Whatever they should be, Lynley was certain they shouldn't be Tessa Teys Mowrey.

He'd parked in front of the house, and they stared at it silently until Havers finally spoke.

"Not exactly gone downhill, has she?" she asked.

They'd found it easily, a new, middle-class neighbourhood a few miles from the city centre, the kind of place where houses have numbers as well as coy little names. The Mowreys' home was called Jorvik View. It was the concrete reality of every mediocre dream: a facade of brick covered the poured-block construction; red tiles swept up to form steep gables; white-curtained bay windows showed off sitting and dining rooms on either side of a polished front door. A single-car, attached garage was topped by a white iron-fenced roof terrace, and