She knotted her brows, appeared to be searching for words that would enable them to understand. “Russell was an innocent. He had such…such an image of me. He saw me as a kind of Viking princess, a snow queen. How could I tell him I had two children and a husband that I’d left on a farm in the dales?”
“What would have changed if he’d known?”
“Nothing, I suppose. But at the time, I believed everything would have. I believed that he wouldn’t want me if he knew, that he wouldn’t be willing to wait for me through a divorce. I’d been looking for love, Inspector. And finally, here it was. Could I take a chance that it might escape me?”
“But you’re only two hours from Keldale here. Were you never worried that William might one day show up in your life? Even as a chance encounter on the street?”
“William never left the dales. Not once in the years that I knew him. He had everything there: his children, his religion, his farm. Why on earth would he ever come to York? Besides, I thought at first that we’d go to London. Russell’s family is there. I’d no idea that he’d want to settle here. But here we stayed. We had Rebecca five years later. Then William eighteen months after that.”
“William?”
“You can imagine how I felt when Russell wanted to call him William. It’s his father’s name. What could I do but agree?”
“And you’ve been here, then, for nineteen years?”
“Yes,” she replied. “First in a small flat in the city centre, then a row house near Bishopthorpe Road, and last year we bought this house. We’d…saved for so long. Russell worked two jobs and I’ve my job at the museum as well. We’ve been,” she blinked back her first tears, “so happy. God, so happy. Until now. You’ve come for me, haven’t you? Or have you brought me word?”
“No one’s told you? You haven’t read about it?”
“Read about it? Has something…He isn’t…” Tessa looked from Lynley to Havers. It was obvious that she saw something in their faces, for her own face flashed fear before she went on. “The night Russell left, he was terribly angry. I thought that if only I said nothing, did nothing, it would work itself out. He’d come home and—”
Lynley suddenly understood that they were talking about two entirely different things. “Mrs. Mowrey,” he said, “do you not know about your husband?”
Her eyes widened, growing dark with apprehension. “Russell,” she whispered. “He left that Saturday the investigator found me. Three weeks ago. He’s not been home since.”
“Mrs. Mowrey,” Lynley said carefully, “William Teys was murdered three weeks ago. On Saturday night between ten and midnight. Your daughter Roberta was charged with the crime.”
If they had thought she might faint, they were wrong. She stared at them without speaking for nearly a minute, then turned back to the window. “Rebecca will be home soon,” she said tonelessly. “She comes home for lunch. She’ll ask about her father. She does every day. She knows something’s wrong, but I’ve managed to keep most of it from her.” A trembling hand touched her cheek. “I know Russell’s gone to London. I haven’t phoned his family because, of course, I didn’t want them to know anything was wrong. But I know he’s gone to them in London. I know.”
“Do you have a photograph of your husband?” Lynley asked. “His family’s London address?”
She swung on him. “He wouldn’t!” she cried passionately. “This is a man who has never lifted his hand to strike one of his own children! He was angry—yes, I’ve said that—but his anger was with me, not with William! He wouldn’t have gone, he couldn’t have—” She began to cry, horribly, shedding what were probably her first tears in three agonising weeks. Pressing her forehead against the window glass, she wept bitterly, as if she would never be consoled.
Havers got to her feet and left the room. Good God, where is she going? Lynley wondered, half-expecting a repeat of her disappearing act in the pub last night. But she returned moments later with a pitcher of orange juice and a glass.
“Thank you, Barbara,” he said.
She nodded, shot him a diffident smile, and poured the woman a glass of the liquid.
Tessa Mowrey took it but rather than drink, she clutched it as if it were a talisman. “Rebecca mustn’t see me like this. I’ve got to pull myself together. Must be stronger than this.” She saw the glass in her hand, took a sip, and grimaced. “I can’t abide tinned orange juice. Why do I have it in the house? Oh, Russell says that it’s not that bad. I suppose it isn’t, really.” When she turned back to Lynley, she looked, he saw, every single day of her forty-three years. “He did not kill William.”
“That’s what everyone in Keldale says of Roberta.”
She flinched. “I don’t think of her as my daughter. I’m sorry. I never knew her.”
“She’s been placed in a mental asylum, Mrs. Mowrey. When William was found, she claimed to have killed him.”
“Then if she’s admitted to the crime, why have you come to see me? If she says she killed William then certainly Russell…” Her voice drifted off. It was as if she had suddenly heard her own words and realised how eager she was to trade daughter for husband.
He could hardly blame her. Lynley thought of the barn stall, the ornate Bible, the photograph albums, the cool silence of the melancholy house. “Did you never see Gillian again?” he asked abruptly, waiting for a sign, the smallest indication that Tessa knew of Gillian’s disappearance. There was none.
“Never.”
“She never contacted you in any way?”
“Of course not. Even if she’d wanted to, William wouldn’t have allowed it, I’m sure.”
Probably not, thought Lynley. But once she ran off, once she cut the ties with her father, why had she not sought her mother then?
“Religious fanatic,” Havers declared decisively. She shoved her hair back behind her ears and gave her attention to the photograph she held. “But this one’s not half bad. She did okay on her second time round. Too bad she didn’t bother with a divorce.” Russell Mowrey smiled up at her from the photograph Tessa had given them. He was a nice-looking man in a three-piece suit, wife on his arm. Easter Sunday. Havers put it in the manila folder and gave herself back to the passing scenery. “At least we know why Gillian left.”
“Because of the father’s religion?”
“That’s the way I see it,” Havers replied. “Obviously, a combination of that and the second baby. There she’d been, for eight years the centre of her father’s life—Mum doesn’t appear to have counted for much—when all of a sudden a new baby arrives. It’s supposed to be Mummy’s, but Dad doesn’t trust Mummy to do right by her children, so he takes this one over as well. Mummy leaves and Gillian follows.”
“Not exactly, Havers. She waited eight years to go wherever she went.”
“Well, you can’t expect her to have run off when she was eight years old! She bided her time, probably hating little Roberta every second for stealing her dad.”
“That doesn’t make sense. First you say that Gillian left because she couldn’t abide her father’s religious fanaticism. Then you say she left because she’d lost his love to Roberta. Now what is it? She either loves him and wants to be his favourite again, or she can’t abide his religious devotion and feels she has to escape. You can’t have it both ways.”
“It’s not black and white!” Havers protested loudly. “These things never are!”
Lynley glanced at her, amazed by the affront in her voice. Her stubby features looked like paste. “Barbara—”
“I’m sorry! Dammit! I’m doing it all over again! Why do I bother? I’m no good at this. I always do it. I never—”
“Barbara,” he interrupted firmly.
She stared straight ahead. “Yes, sir?”
“We’re discussing the case, not arguing before a bar of justice. It’s fine to have an opinion. I want you to, in fact. I’ve always found it extremely helpful to talk a case over with someone.” But it was more than that, really. It was arguin
g, laughing, hearing the sweet voice say Oh, you think you’re right, Tommy, but I shall prove you wrong! He felt loneliness settle on him like a cold, wet shroud.
Havers moved restlessly in her seat. With no music playing, the tension was screaming to be heard.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said at last. “I get into the fray and forget what I’m doing.”
“I understand.” He let the matter drop, his eyes following the meandering pattern that the stone walls made on the hillside across the dale from the road on which they travelled.
He thought about Tessa. He knew that he was trying to understand her and that he was ill-equipped to do so. Nothing in his life of Cornwall and Howenstow, of Oxford and Belgravia, even of Scotland Yard, explained the paucity of experience of life on a remote farm that would drive a girl of sixteen to believe that her only future lay in immediate marriage. And yet surely that was the foundation of what had happened. No romantic interpretation of the facts at hand—no reflections upon Heathcliff, no matter how apt—could hide the real explanation. The drudgery and sheer ennui of those weeks when she had been forced to stay home and help out had made an otherwise simple Yorkshire farmer look arresting by comparison. Thus, she merely moved from one trap into another. Married at sixteen, a mother before her seventeenth birthday. Wouldn’t any woman have wanted to escape such a life? Yet, if that was the case, why marry again in such a hurry?
Havers broke into his thoughts. An underlying note of urgency in her voice made Lynley glance at her curiously. Tiny beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. She swallowed noisily. “What I can’t see is the…Tessa’s shrine. The woman walks out on him—not that she didn’t appear to have every right to—and he sets up a virtual Taj Mahal of photographs in a corner of the sitting room.”
It suddenly dawned on Lynley. “How do we know William set up the shrine?”
Havers came to her own quick terms with the knowledge. “Either of the girls could have done it,” she responded.
“Who do you imagine?”
“It had to be Gillian.”
“As a bit of revenge? A little daily reminder to William that Mummy’d run off? A little knife inserted between the ribs since he’d started to favour Roberta?”
“Bet on it, sir,” Havers agreed.
They drove on for several miles before Lynley spoke again. “She could have done it, Havers. Something tells me she was desperate enough.”
“Tessa, d’you mean?”
“Russell was gone that night. She says she took aspirin and went directly to bed, but no one can verify it. She could have gone to Keldale.”
“Why kill the dog?”
“He wouldn’t have known her. He wasn’t there nineteen years ago. Who was Tessa to him? A stranger.”
“But decapitate her first husband?” Havers frowned. “Would have been easier to divorce him, I’d think.”
“No. Not for a Catholic.”
“Even so, Russell’s a better candidate if you ask me. Who knows where he went?” When Lynley didn’t reply, she added, “Sir?”
“I…” Lynley hesitated, studying the road ahead. “Tessa’s right. He’s gone to London.”
“How can you be certain of that?”
“Because I think I saw him, Havers. At the Yard.”
“So he did go to turn her in. I suppose she knew all along that he would.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
Havers offered a new thought. “Well, then there’s Ezra.”
Lynley flashed her a smile. “William in his jimjams in the middle of the road ripping up Ezra’s watercolours while Ezra curses him to hell and back? We could have a motive for murder there. I don’t think an artist would take lightly to having someone rip up his work.”
Havers opened her mouth, stopped. She reflected for a moment. “But it wasn’t his pyjamas.”
“Yes, it was.”
“It wasn’t. It was his dressing gown. Remember? Nigel said his legs reminded him of a gorilla. So what was he doing in his dressing gown? It was still light out. It wasn’t time for bed.”
“Changing for dinner, I dare say. He’s up in his room, looks out the window, sees Ezra trespassing, and comes charging into the yard.”
“I suppose that could be it.”
“What else?”
“Exercising, perhaps?”
“Deep knee bends in his underwear? That’s hard to picture.”
“Or…perhaps with Olivia?”
Lynley smiled. “Not if everything we’ve heard about him is true. William sounds to me like a strictly after-marriage man. I don’t think he’d try any funny business with Olivia beforehand.”
“What about Nigel Parrish?”
“What about him?”
“Walking the dog back to the farm out of the goodness of his heart, like a card-carrying member of the RSPCA? Doesn’t that whole story seem a bit off to you?”
“It does. But do you really think Parrish would want to get his hands dirty with a bit of William Teys’s blood? Not to mention his head rolling across the stall floor.”
“To be honest, he seems the type to faint at the sight.”
They laughed, a first shared communication. It dropped almost immediately into an uncomfortable silence at the sudden realisation that they could become friends.
The decision to go to Barnstingham Mental Asylum grew out of Lynley’s belief that Roberta held all the cards in the current game they were playing: the identity of the murderer, the motive behind the crime, and the disappearance of Gillian Teys. He’d stopped an hour out of York to make the arrangements by telephone, and now, pulling the car to a stop on the gravel drive in front of the building, he turned to Barbara.
“Cigarette?” He offered his gold case.
“No, sir. Thank you.”
He nodded, glanced at the imposing building, then back at her. “Rather wait here, Sergeant?” he asked as he lit his cigarette with the silver lighter. He took a few moments about replacing all the impedimenta of his habit.
She watched him with speculative eyes. “Why?”
He shrugged casually. Too casually, she noted. “You look fagged out. I thought you might want a bit of a rest.”
Fagged out. It was his public-school-fop act. She’d begun to notice how he used it occasionally to serve the need of the moment. He’d dropped it earlier. Why was he picking it up now?
“If we’re talking about exhaustion, Inspector, you look just about ready to drop. What’s up?”
He examined himself in the mirror at her words, his cigarette dangling from his lips, his eyes narrowed against the smoke, part Sam Spade, part Algernon Moncrieff. “I do look a sight.” He busied himself about his appearance for a moment: straightening his tie, examining his hair, brushing at nonexistent lint on the lapels of his jacket. She waited. Finally he met her eyes. The fop, as well as the other personae, was gone. “The farm upset you a bit yesterday,” he said frankly. “I have an idea that what we’ll find in here is going to be a hell of a lot worse than the farm.”
For a moment she couldn’t take her eyes from his, but she pressed her hand to the door and flung it open. “I can deal with it, sir,” she said abruptly and got out into the brisk autumn air.
“We’ve kept her confined,” Dr. Samuels was saying to Lynley as they walked down the transverse passage that ran straight through the building from east to west.
Barbara followed behind them, relieved to find that Barnstingham was not exactly what she had pictured when she first heard the words mental asylum. It was really not very hospital-like at all, an English baroque building laid out on cross-axes. They had entered through a front hall that rose two storeys, with fluted pilasters standing on plinths against the walls. Light and colour were the operative words here, for the room was painted a calming shade of peach, the decorative plasterwork was white, the ankle-thick carpeting was merely a shade off rust, and while the portraits were dark and moody, of the Flemish school, their subjects managed to look suitably apo
logetic about the fact.
All this was a relief, for when Lynley had first mentioned the need to see Roberta, to come to this place, Barbara had become quite faint, that old insidious panic setting in. Lynley had seen it, of course. Damn the man. He didn’t miss a trick.
Now that she was inside the building, she felt steadier, a feeling that improved once they left the great central hall and began their journey down the passage. Here conviviality expressed itself in soothing Constable landscapes and vases of fresh flowers and quiet voices in the air. The sound of music and singing came from a distance.
“The choir,” Dr. Samuels explained. “Here, it’s just this way.”
Samuels himself had been a secondary source of both surprise and relief. Outside the walls of the hospital, Barbara wouldn’t have known he was a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist somehow conjured up images of Freud: a bearded Victorian face, a cigar, and those speculative eyes. But Samuels had the look of a man who was more at home on horseback or hiking across the moors than probing disturbed psyches. He was well-built, loose limbed, and clean shaven, with a tendency, Barbara guessed, to be less than patient with anyone whose intelligence did not match his own. He was probably the devil on a tennis court as well.
She’d begun to feel quite at ease with the hospital when Dr. Samuels opened a narrow door—funny how it had been concealed by some panelling—and led them into the new wing of the building. This was the locked ward, looking and smelling exactly as Barbara had supposed a locked ward would. The carpeting was a very dark, serviceable brown. The walls were the colour of sunbaked sand, unadorned and broken only by doors into which small windows were set at eye level. The air was filled with that medicinal smell of antiseptics and detergents and drugs. And it was cut by a low moaning that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. It could have been the wind. It could have been anything.
Here it is, she told herself. The place for psychos, for girls who decapitate daddies, for girls who murder. Lots of things are murder, Barb.
“There’s been absolutely nothing since her original statement,” Dr. Samuels was saying to Lynley. “She’s not catatonic. She’s merely said what she intends to say, I think.” He glanced at the clipboard he was carrying. “‘I did it. I’m sorry.’ On the day the body was found. She’s not spoken since.”
A Great Deliverance Page 16