A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,78

could never share. She had left him.

"He had...there was some pain this morning."

Lynley felt the full impact of Deborah's words. He understood so well everything that they implied. "Christ, there's no escaping it, is there?" he asked bitterly. "Even that's part of the miserable account."

"No!" Raw horror tore her voice. "Don't say that! Don't you ever! Don't you do that to yourself! It isn't your fault!" Having spoken so quickly, really without thinking of the impression that her words would have upon Lynley, it was suddenly as if she had said too much - far more than she had intended to say - and she went back to fumbling with her camera, taking it apart this time, detaching lens from body and body from tripod, putting everything away.

He watched her. Her movements were jerky, like an old-time motion picture run at the wrong speed. Perhaps sensing this and realising what her discomfort revealed, she stopped what she was doing, her head bent, one hand at her eyes. Her hair was caught in a shaft of sunlight. It was the colour of autumn. Summer's death.

"Is he still at the hall? Did you leave him there, Deb?" It wasn't that he wanted to know but that she needed to tell him. Even now he couldn't let that need go unanswered.

"He wanted...it was the pain. He doesn't want me to see it. He thinks he's protecting me if he makes me leave." She looked up at the sky, as if for some sort of sign. The delicate muscles worked in her throat. "Being cut out like this. It's so hard. I hate it."

He understood. "That's because you love him."

She stared at him for a moment before she replied. "I do. I do love him, Tommy. He's half of myself. He's part of my soul." She put a tentative hand on his arm, a mere whisper of a touch. "I want you to find someone to love you like that. It's what you need. It's what you deserve. But I...I can't be that someone for you. I don't even want to be."

His face blanched at her words. His spirit despaired at the finality behind them. Seeking composure, he found a distraction in the grave at their feet. "Is this the source of your morning's inspiration?" he asked lightly.

"Yes." She deliberately matched her tone to his. "I've heard so much about the baby in the abbey that I thought I'd have a peek at its grave."

"As Flame to Smoke,'" he read. "Bizarre epitaph for a child."

"I'm rather attached to Shakespeare," a thin voice said behind them. They swung around.

Father Hart, looking like a spiritual gnome in his cassock and surplice, stood on the gravel path a few feet away, hands folded demurely over his stomach. He'd managed to come upon them noiselessly, like an apparition taking its form from the mist.

"Left to my own devices I always think Shakespeare's just the thing for a grave.

Timeless. Poetic. He gives life and death meaning." He patted the pockets of his cassock and brought out a packet of Dunhills, lighting one absently and pinching the match between his fingers before pocketing it. It was a dream-like movement, as if he were unaware that he was doing it at all.

Lynley noticed the yellow pallour of his skin and the rheumy quality of his eyes. "This is Mrs. St. James, Father Hart," he said gently. "She's taking photographs of your most famous grave."

Father Hart stirred from his reverie. "Most famous...?" Puzzled, he looked from man to woman before his eyes fell on the grave and clouded. His cigarette burned, ignored, between his stained fingers. "Oh, yes. I see." He frowned. "What a horrible thing to have done to an infant, leaving it out naked in the cold to die. I needed special permission to bury the poor thing here."

"Special permission?"

"She was unbaptized. But I call her Marina." He blinked quickly, moving on to other things. "But if it's famous graves that you've come to see, Mrs. St. James, then what you really want is the crypt."

"Sounds like something from Edgar Allan Poe," Lynley remarked.

"Not at all. It's a holy place." The priest dropped his cigarette to the path and crushed it out. He stooped unselfconsciously for the extinguished butt, put it into his pocket, and began to walk in the direction of the church. Lynley picked up Deborah's camera equipment, and they followed.

"It's the burial place of St. Cedd," Father Hart was saying. "Do come in. I was just