churchyard, both grinning at the camera. The older girl had her hands on Roberta's shoulders, pulling her back against her. She had bent over - although certainly not far, for Roberta was nearly as tall as she - and had pressed her cheek to the other girl's. Her dark gold hair touched Roberta's brown curls. In front of them, with Roberta's hand clutched into his fur, was a border collie who looked very much as if he were grinning as well. Whiskers.
"Roberta doesn't look half bad there," Barbara said, handing the picture to Lynley. "Big, but not fat."
"Then this must have been taken sometime before Gibson left. Remember what Stepha said? She'd not been fat then, not until Richard was gone." He pocketed the additional photograph and looked round the room. "Anything else?" he asked.
"Clothes in the wardrobe. Nothing much of interest." As he had done in the other room, she drew back the quilt from the bed. Unlike the other, however, this bed was made, and its fresh, laundered linen gave off the scent of jasmine. But underneath it, as if the jasmine were incense subtly burning to hide the odour of cannabis, was the cloying smell of something more.
Barbara looked at Lynley. "Do you - "
"Absolutely," he replied. "Help me pull off the mattress."
She did so, covering her mouth and nose when the stench filled the room and they saw what lay beneath the old mattress. The box-spring covering had been cut away in the far corner of the bed, and resting within was a storehouse of food. Rotting fruit, bread grey with mould, biscuits and candy, pastries half-eaten, bags of crisps.
"Oh, Jesus," Barbara murmured. It was more prayer than exclamation and, in spite of the catalogue of gruesome sights she had seen as a member of the force, her stomach heaved uneasily and she backed away. "Sorry," she gasped with a shaky laugh. "Bit of a surprise."
Lynley dropped the mattress back into place. His face was expressionless. "It's sabotage," he said to himself.
"Sir?"
"Stepha said something about a diet."
As Barbara had done before, Lynley walked to the window. Evening was drawing on, and in a fading patch of the dying light he withdrew the photographs from his coat pocket and examined them. He stood motionless, perhaps in the hope that an uninterrupted, undisturbed study of the two girls would tell him who killed William Teys and why, and what a storehouse of rotting food had to do with anything. Watching him, Barbara was struck by how a trick of light falling across hair, cheek, and brow made him look vastly younger than his thirty-two years. And yet nothing altered or obscured the man's intelligence or the wit behind his eyes, not even the shadows. The only noise in the room was his breathing, steady and calm, very sure. He turned, found her watching him, and began to speak.
She stopped him. "Well," she said forcefully, pushing her hair behind her ears in a pugnacious gesture, "see anything else in the other rooms?"
"Just a box of old keys in the wardrobe and a veritable museum of Tessa," he replied.
"Clothing, photographs, locks of hair. Among Teys's own things, of course." He replaced the photographs in his pocket. "I wonder if Olivia Odell knew what she was in for."
They had walked the three-quarters of a mile from the village down Gembler Road to the Teys's farm. As they returned, Lynley began to wish that he had driven his car. It was not so much concern that darkness had fallen but a longing for music to distract him. Without it, he found himself glancing at the woman walking wordlessly at his side, and he reluctantly considered what he had heard about her.
"One angry vairgin," MacPherson had said. "What she needs is a faer toss i' the hay."
Then he roared with laughter and lifted his pint in his big, bear's grasp. "But no' me, laddies. I'll not test those waters. I leave tha' plaisure to a young'r man!"
But MacPherson was wrong, Lynley thought. There was no question of angry virginity here. It was something else.
This wasn't Havers's first murder investigation, so he could not understand her reaction to the farm: her initial reluctance to enter the barn, her strange behaviour in the sitting room, her inexplicable outburst upstairs.
For the second time he wondered what on earth Webberly had in mind in creating their partnership, but he found he was too weary to attempt an explanation.
The lights of the Dove and Whistle came in