A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,86

jealous of Gilly. She loved her. I should think it hurt Roberta dreadfully when her sister left. But unlike Gillian, who would have talked about her pain - Lord knows, Gilly talked about anything and everything - Roberta internalised it. I remember, in fact, the poor child's skin after Gilly left. Funny that I would still remember that."

Lynley thought of the girl he had seen in the asylum and was not surprised that the teacher would remember the condition of Roberta's skin. "Acne?" he asked. "She would have been young for that."

"No. She broke out in the most dreadful rash. I know it was nerves, but when I spoke to her about it she blamed it on Whiskers." Miss Fitzalan dropped her eyes and toyed with her fork, making delicate patterns in the crumbs on her plate. Lynley waited patiently, convinced there was more. Finally she went on. "I felt so inadequate, Inspector, such a failure as a friend and as a teacher that she couldn't talk to me about what had happened to Gilly. But she just couldn't talk, so she blamed it all on being allergic to her dog."

"Did you speak to her father about it?"

"Not at first. William had been so crushed by Gillian's running off that he wasn't the least bit approachable. For weeks it seemed the only person he would talk to at all was Father Hart. But in the end, frankly, I felt I owed it to Roberta. After all, the child was only eight years old. It wasn't her fault that her sister had run away. So I went out to the farm and told William I was worried about her, especially considering the pathetic story she'd made up about the dog."

She poured herself more coffee and sipped it as she brooded over that long-ago visit. "Poor man.

I certainly needn't have worried about his reaction. I think he must have felt terribly guilty about having ignored Roberta, because he drove to Richmond directly and bought three or four different kinds of lotion to put on her skin. It may well have been that all the poor girl needed was her father's attention, because the rash went away after that."

But nothing else did, Lynley thought. In his mind he saw the lonely little girl in the gloomy farmhouse, surrounded by the ghosts and voices of the past, living her life in grim sterility, taking her nourishment from books.

Lynley unlocked the back door and let himself into the house. It was unchanged, as cold and airless as it had been before. He went through the kitchen to the sitting room, where Tessa Teys smiled at him tenderly from her corner shrine, looking young and infinitely vulnerable. He imagined Russell Mowrey raising his head from his excavation and seeing that lovely face framed in a gap in the fence. It was easy to see why Mowrey had fallen in love. It was easy to see why he would be in love still.

Not a thousand ships but one enraged husband, Lynley thought.

Is it possible, Tessa? Or did you see your world shatter in one afternoon and know you couldn't bear to build it again?

He turned from the shrine and ran up the stairs. No, the answer had to be in the house. It had to be Gillian.

He went first to her bedroom, but its vacuity told him nothing. The bed stared up at him wordlessly, its covering unblemished. The rug held no footprints leading back into the past. The wallpaper covered no long-held secrets. It was as if a young girl had never lived in the room, had never breathed her liveliness and spirit into the air. And yet something... Something of Gillian lingered, something he had seen, something he could feel.

He walked to the window and looked, unseeing, at the barn.

She was wild, ungoverned.

She was an angel, sunshine. She was a cat in heat. She was the loveliest creature I've ever seen.

It was as if there were no real Gillian at all, but only a kaleidoscope that, juggled before viewing, appeared different to each person who gazed into it. He longed to believe that the answer was in the room, but when he turned from the window, he saw nothing but furniture, wallpaper, and rug.

How could someone be wiped so completely out of the life of the family in which she had lived for sixteen years? It was inconceivable. Yet it had been done. Or had it?

He walked to Roberta's room. Gillian couldn't have faded from