A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,84

house. "Let's just say she'd have made Madeline look like the Virgin Mary. Am I making myself clear?"

"Perfectly. Did she seduce you?"

"You are direct, aren't you? Give me a fag and I'll tell you about it." He lit the cigarette that Lynley offered from his case and looked off into the fields that began just across the unpaved street. Beyond them, the trail to High Kel Moor weaved into the trees. "I was nineteen years old when I left Keldale, Inspector. I didn't want to leave. God knows that was the last thing I wanted to do. But I knew if I didn't, there'd be hell to pay eventually."

"But you slept with your cousin Gillian before you left?"

Gibson snorted. "Hardly.

Slept isn't exactly the word I'd use with a girl like Gilly. She wanted control and she had it, Inspector. She could do things to a man...better than a highclass tart. She made me crazy just about four times a day."

"How old was she?"

"She was twelve when she first locked her eyes on me in an uncousinly fashion, thirteen the first time she...performed. Then for the next two years she drove me wild."

"Are you telling me you left to escape her?"

"I'm hardly that noble. I left to escape William. It was only a matter of time before he caught her going at me. I didn't want that to happen to either of us. I wanted it to end."

"Why did you never just speak to William about it?"

Gibson's eyes widened. "As far as he was concerned, neither of those girls could do anything wrong. How was I supposed to tell him that Gilly, the proverbial apple of his eye, was rubbing up to me like a cat in heat and taking me on like a whore? He'd never have believed it. Half the time, I didn't myself."

"She left Keldale a year after you, didn't she?"

He tossed his cigarette into the street. "That's what they tell me," he replied.

"Did you ever see her again?"

Gibson's eyes slid away. "I never did," he replied. "And it was a blessing."

Marsha Fitzalan was a bent, withered woman with a face that reminded Lynley of the kind on American dolls carved from apples: it was a mass of delicate wrinkles that traced a pattern across her cheeks up to her eyes. These were blue. They danced in her face with interest and amusement and told anyone who looked at her that the body was indeed old but the heart and the mind had not changed from youth.

"Good morning," she smiled, and then with a look at her watch, "or nearly afternoon.

You're Inspector Lynley, aren't you? I thought you might be by sooner or later. I've lemon pie made."

"For the occasion?" Lynley asked.

"Indeed," she replied. "Come in."

Although she lived in one of the council houses on St. Chad's Lane, its appearance couldn't have been more different from the Gibsons'. The front garden was planted, parterre-like, with neat patterns of flowers: in the spring there would be alyssum and primrose, snapdragons and geraniums. They had been trimmed back for the coming of winter, the soil turned over lovingly round each plant. On two of the stepping stones leading to the door, birdseed had been fashioned into small, accessible piles, and a set of metal wind chimes hung near a window, its six notes still managing to be heard over the din of the Gibson children next door.

The contrast to the Gibsons' small cottage continued indoors, where the smell of potpourri in the air reminded Lynley of long afternoons spent in his grandmother's bedroom at Howenstow. The tiny sitting room was comfortably if inexpensively furnished and two of its walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books. A small table under the single window was covered by a collection of photographs, and several needlepoint tapestries hung above an ancient television set.

"Will you come into the kitchen, Inspector?" Marsha Fitzalan asked. "I know it's dreadful to entertain in the kitchen, but I've always been far more comfortable there. My friends tell me it's because I grew up on a farm, and the life of a farm always centres itself in the kitchen, doesn't it? I suppose I never got over that. Here, please sit at the table. Coffee and pie?

You do look hungry. I imagine you're a bachelor. Bachelors never eat as well as they should, do they?"

Again there was the memory of his grandmother, that unmistakable security of unconditional love. As he watched her busily putting together a tray, her