A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,75

Webberly. Not for anyone. But you have a fine time digging for it, laddie. You'll get nothing more from me. Now, get out of my way."

Nies shoved past them, flung open the outer door, and stormed to his car. It roared into life. He ground the gears viciously and was gone.

Lynley looked at the two women. Stepha was very pale, Havers was stoic, but both clearly expected some kind of response from him. He found he couldn't make one. Whatever devils were driving Nies's behaviour, he didn't care to discuss them. He longed to hang labels on the man: paranoid, psychopath, madman came to mind. But he knew too well what it felt like to be brought to the breaking point through sheer endeavour and exhaustion during a case. Lynley could see that Nies was a hair's-breadth from breaking under the stress of the Scotland Yard scrutiny of his competence. So if it gave the man even a moment's relief to rail wildly about their run-in five years ago, he was more than happy to give Nies free rein.

"Would you get the Teys file from my room, Sergeant?" he asked Havers. "You'll find it on the chest of drawers."

Havers gawked at him. "Sir, that man just - "

"It's on the chest of drawers," Lynley repeated. He crossed the room to the heap of garments on the floor, picked up the dress, and laid it like a collapsed tent across the couch. It was a pale pastel print with a white sailor collar and long sleeves that ended in upturned white cuffs.

The left sleeve of the garment was heavily stained with a solid mass of brown. Another solid mass formed an irregular pool from thighs to knees. The bottom of the skirt was speckled with it. Blood.

He fingered the material and recognised the texture without looking to see if a label revealed it: a delicate lawn.

Shoes had been part of the package as well: large black high-heeled pumps with mud encrusted along the ridge where left sole met shoe body. These too were flecked with the same brown substance. Petticoat and underclothes completed the lot.

"That's her church dress," Stepha Odell said and added tonelessly, "She had two. One for winter and one for spring."

"Her best dress?" Lynley asked.

"As far as I know."

He was beginning to understand the villagers' stubborn refusal to believe that the girl had committed the crime. With each new piece of information, it made less and less sense. Havers returned with the file, her face without expression. Before he began leafing through it, he was convinced that the information he wanted wouldn't be there. It wasn't.

"Damn the man," Lynley muttered fruitlessly and looked at Havers. "He's given us no analysis of the stains."

"He'd have to have done them, wouldn't he?" Havers asked.

"He's done them. But he has no intention of giving them to us. Not if that would make our job easier." Lynley uttered an oath beneath his breath and swept the garments back into their cardboard container.

"What's to do?" Havers asked.

Lynley knew the answer. He needed St. James: the mechanical precision of his highly trained mind; the quick, clean certainty of his finely wrought skill. He needed a laboratory where tests could be made and a forensic expert he could trust who would make them. It was a maddening, circular sort of problem because in any direction the trail curved unquestionably back to St. James.

He regarded the open carton at his feet and gave himself the ephemeral pleasure of cursing the man from Richmond. Webberly was wrong, he thought. I'm the last person he should have involved in this. Nies reads the London condemnation too clearly. He sees in me his single serious mistake.

He considered his options. He could turn the case over to another DI: MacPherson could certainly come sailing into Keldale and have the matter taken care of within two days. But MacPherson was caught up in the Ripper murders. It would be inconceivable to move him from the one case where his expertise was so desperately needed simply because Nies couldn't come to terms with his past. He could telephone Kerridge in Newby Wiske. Kerridge, after all, was Nies's superior officer. But to have Kerridge involved, chomping at the bit to make up for the Romanivs in any way he could, was even more absurd. Besides, Kerridge didn't have the paperwork, the results of the lab tests, the depositions. All he had was an overwhelming hatred of Nies and an inability to get along