A Great Deliverance

by Elizabeth George

  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 her sister’s life so completely. The love was there. The bond was strong. Everyone, at least, no matter what they had said about Gillian, agreed upon that. His gaze roamed from window to wardrobe to bed. He considered this last: it was her hiding place for food, why not for Gillian as well?

  Steeling himself to the sight and the smell of the putrefaction, Lynley pulled back the mattress. The stench rose like an undulating wave.

  He glanced about, looking for a way to make the job at hand easier but finding nothing that would do. The light in the room was poor, and, unpleasant as it would be, there was nothing for it but to drag the entire mattress off and rip the box spring apart. Grunting with the effort, he jerked mattress and bedding onto the floor and then went to the window. He threw it open and stood for a moment sucking in the fresh air before turning back to the bed. He climbed onto the box spring and planned his attack, ignoring his queasiness. Come on, old boy. Isn’t this why you got into police work? Buck up, now. Give it one big pull.

  He did so, and the rotting material—that thin layer of sanity—came apart in his hands, exposing the madness beneath it. Mice scattered in all directions, leaving diminutive tracks through the decaying fruit. One sow-like rodent nursed her litter of clutching, blind offspring in a bed of women’s dirty underclothes. And an angry cloud of moths, disturbed from their slumber, burst out into the light, flinging themselves upwards into Lynley’s face.

  Startled, he reeled back, managed to keep from crying out, and quickly made his way to the bathroom, where he took a moment to splash water on his face. He looked at himself in the mirror and laughed soundlessly. Good thing you skipped lunch. After that, you may well skip eating for the rest of your life.

  He sought a towel on which to dry his face. There was none on the rack, but he caught a glimpse of a dressing gown hanging on the back of the bathroom door. He swung it shut. Its broken hasp lock grated against the frame like a shriek. He dried his face on the hem of the garment, fingered the lock meditatively, and after a moment, a new thought triggered, he left the room.

  The box of keys was where he had seen it before, far in the back on the top shelf of Teys’s wardrobe. He took it out and dumped it onto the bed. Teys would have put Gillian’s things in a trunk somewhere. In the attic, perhaps. And the keys would be here. He searched through them fruitlessly. They were all door keys, the old-fashioned keyhole variety, a strange collection of rusting, metallic mementoes. He threw them back into their box in disgust and cursed the blind determination of the man who had wiped one daughter’s existence off the face of the earth.

  Why? he wondered. What kind of anguish was it that had driven William Teys to deny the existence of the child he so loved? What could she possibly have done to bring him to such an act of destruction? And at the same time provoke her sister to such an impotent yet desperate act of preservation as the simple hiding of a photograph.

  He knew what came next. The attic’s a blind, old boy. Back to her bedroom. You know it’s there. Maybe not in the mattress, but you know it’s there. He shuddered at the thought of what other surprises waited like spectres in that sepulchral room.

  As he was gathering his shattered defences for another assault, the sound of whistling, joyful and unrestrained, came to him from outside. He went to the window.

  A young man was walking down the trail from High Kel Moor, an easel over his shoulder and a wooden case in his hand. It was time, Lynley decided, to meet Ezra.

  His first thought was that the other man was not as young as he looked from a distance. It must have been the hair, Lynley thought, which was a rich, deep blond and worn much longer than was the current fashion. Up close, Ezra looked very much what he was: a man somewhere in his thirties, wary about this meeting with the detective from Scotland Yard. The wariness came through in the careful stance; it also came through in the swiftly veiled eyes, the kind of eyes that changed colour with the clothing he wore. They were deep blue now, as was the man’s shirt, which was streaked with paint. He had stopped whistling the moment he saw Lynley come out of the house and climb nimbly over the pasture wall.

  “Ezra Farmington?” he said pleasantly.

  Farmington halted. His features put Lynley in mind of the Delacroix painting of Frederic Chopin. Here were the same sculpted lips; the shadow of a cleft in the chin; the dark brows—much darker than the hair; the nose that was dominant but not detractive.

  “That’s right,” he said, noncommittally.

  “Doing some painting on the moor today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nigel Parrish tells me you do light studies.”

  The name got a reaction. The eyes became guarded. “What else does Nigel tell you?”

  “That he saw William Teys run you off his property. You seem to be making free use of it now.”

  “With Gibson’s permission.” The words were terse.

  “Indeed? He didn’t mention it.” Lynley gazed serenely in the direction of the trail. It was steep and rocky, ill-maintained, not the place for a country hike. An artist would have to be most sincere about his endeavours to bother climbing up to the high moor at all. He turned back to the other man. The afternoon breeze that rustled through the pasture ruffled Farmington’s blond hair appealingly so that the sun struck its highlights. Lynley began to understand why he wore it long. “Mr. Parrish tells me that Teys destroyed some of your work.”

  “Does he also tell you what the hell he was doing out here that night?” Farmington demanded. “No, blast his eyes, I’ll be damned if he does.”

  “According to him, he was bringing Teys’s dog back to the farm.”

  The artist’s face mirrored his disbelief. “Bringing the dog back to the farm? What a laugh!” He savagely drove the pointed legs of his easel into the soft earth. “Nigel really knows how to manipulate the facts, doesn’t he? Let me guess what he told you. That Teys and I were having a bloody fine row in the middle of the road when up he popped
, innocently walking the poor, blind dog home.” Farmington ran one hand through his hair in agitation. His body was so tense that Lynley wondered if he would start swinging his fists. “Christ, that man will drive me to do something mad.”

  Lynley lifted an eyebrow in interest. The other man read the expression.

  “And I suppose that is a confession of guilt, Inspector? Well, I suggest you trot back to Nigel and ask him what he was doing wandering down Gembler Road last night. Believe me, that dog could have found his way back from Timbuktu if he’d wanted to.” He laughed. “That dog was a damn sight smarter than Nigel. Not that that means much.”

  Lynley wondered at the source of Farmington’s anger. The passion was real, without doubt. Yet it was out of all proportion to the subject at hand. The man was like a taut bowstring upon which undue pressure was being exerted. An ounce more, and he would snap.

  “I saw your work at Keldale Lodge. The way you painted the abbey put me in mind of Wyeth. Was that deliberate?”

  Ezra relaxed a tightly balled fist. “That was done years ago. I was floundering for style. I didn’t trust my instincts so I copied everyone else’s. I’m surprised Stepha still has it hanging.”

  “She said you did it to pay for your board one autumn.”

  “That’s right. I paid for most everything like that in those days. If you look hard enough, you’ll see my crap hanging in every shop in town. I even bought toothpaste that way.” It was a derisive statement, an indication of contempt, but directed at himself, not at Lynley.

  “I like Wyeth,” Lynley went on. “There’s a simplicity to his work that I find refreshing. I like simplicity. The clarity of line and image. Details.”

  Farmington folded his arms. “Are you always this obvious, Inspector?”

  “I try to be,” Lynley responded with a smile. “Tell me about your argument with William Teys.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “You may, of course. But I’d wonder why. Have you something to hide, Mr. Farmington?”

  Farmington shifted on the balls of his feet. “I’ve nothing to hide. I was on the moor that day and came down towards dark. Teys must have seen me from a window. Hell, I don’t know. He caught up with me here on the road. We had it out.”

  “He destroyed some of your work.”

  “It was crap anyway. It didn’t matter.”

  “I was always under the impression that artists like to have control over their own creations rather than give it to other people. Wouldn’t you agree?” Lynley immediately saw that he’d struck tender flesh, for Farmington stiffened involuntarily. His eyes moved to the low sun in the sky. He didn’t respond immediately.

  “I’d agree,” he said finally. “Yes, by God, I’d agree.”

  “Then when Teys took it upon himself—”

  “Teys?” Ezra laughed. “I didn’t care what Teys did. I told you, what he’d destroyed was pure crap anyway. Not that he’d have known the difference. Any man who’d play Souza full blast for an evening’s entertainment hasn’t got a whole lot of taste, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Souza?”

  “The god-awful stars-and-stripes piece. Christ, you’d think he was entertaining a house full of flag-waving Americans. And then to have the cheek to howl at me for disturbing his peace by tiptoeing across his land to get to the trail. I laughed at him. That’s when he went for my paintings.”

  “What did Nigel Parrish do while all this was going on?”

  “Nothing. Nigel had seen what he’d come to see, Inspector. He’d done his bit of sleuthing. He could rest an easy man that night.”

  “And on other nights?”

  Farmington picked up his easel. “If there’s nothing more, I’ll be on my way.”

  “No, there is one thing more.”

  Farmington pivoted to face him. “What?” he demanded.

  “What were you doing the night William Teys died?”

  “I was at the Dove and Whistle.”

  “And after time was called?”

  “Home in bed. Sleeping it off. Alone.” He tossed his hair off his face. It was an odd, distinctly feminine gesture. “Sorry I didn’t take Hannah with me, Inspector. She’d be quite an alibi, but I’ve never gone in for the whips and chains routine.” He climbed over the rock wall and strode angrily down the road.

  “It was, as they say in American detective films, a total bust.” Sergeant Havers tossed the photograph onto the table in the Dove and Whistle and dropped wearily into a chair opposite him.

  “Which means, I suppose, that no one has ever seen Russell Mowrey in this lifetime?”

  “And unless we can believe in reincarnation, no one has ever seen him at all. Tessa, however, was widely recognised. A few lifted eyebrows. A few pointed questions.”

  “What was your response?”

  “I was suitably vague, murmuring a lot of interesting Latin adages to get me through difficult moments. I was fine until I tried out caveat emptor. Somehow it didn’t have that ring of authority the other phrases had.”

  “Would you care to drown your disappointment in a drink, Sergeant?” he asked.

  “Just tonic water,” she responded and, seeing his expression, added, “Really. I don’t drink much, sir. Honest,” with a smile.

  “I’ve spent a rather fascinating day,” Lynley told her when he returned with her drink. “An encounter with Madeline Gibson, all hotly deshabille in an emerald negligee with absolutely nothing at all underneath.”

  “The life of a policeman is rotten,” Havers noted.

  “And Gibson upstairs at the absolute ready. I was a welcome guest.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I’ve learned the most today about Gillian, however. She was a sunshine angel, a cat in heat, or the loveliest creature ever seen. It depends who’s reporting the details. Either the woman’s a chameleon or some of these people are taking considerable trouble to make it look that way.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Unless, of course, they have a vested interest in keeping her as mysterious as possible.” He swallowed the rest of his ale and leaned back in his chair, stretching his tired muscles. “But the real atmosphere today was at Gembler Farms, Havers.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I was hot on the trail of Gillian Teys. Picture it, please. Something told me it was all in Roberta’s room. So I threw myself into the investigation with a passion, ripped off the top of her mattress’ box spring, and fairly lost myself on the spot.” He described the sight.

  Havers made a grimace of distaste. “Glad I missed that.”

  “Oh, have no fear. I was far too discomposed to put the bed back together. So I shall need your assistance tomorrow. Shall we say directly after breakfast?”

  “Sod you.” She grinned.

  It was obviously teatime when they arrived at the cottage on the corner of Bishop Furthing Road. It was a late tea, however, probably sliding itself right into dinner, for Constable Gabriel Langston answered the door, holding tightly in his hand a plate weighted down with a variety of food. Cold chicken legs, cheese, fruit, and cake jockeyed for position on a brown pottery dish.

  Langston seemed very young for a policeman but aptly named Gabriel, for he was slightly built, with thinning yellow hair the consistency of spun glass, babysmooth skin, and features that looked undeveloped, as if the bones were too soft beneath them.

  “I sh-sh-should’ve s-seen you at once,” he stammered, blushing heavily on cheeks and neck. “Wh-when you arrived. But I was to-told you’d c-come to m-me if you n-needed anything.”

  “Nies told you, no doubt,” Lynley guessed. The other man nodded awkwardly and gestured them into his home.

  The table was laid out for one and the constable hastily set his meal down on it, wiped his hand on his trousers, and extended it to Lynley. “N-nice to m-meet you b-both. S-sorry about…” He blushed darker and gestured helplessly at his mouth as if there were something he could have done about his speech impediment.
“T-tea?” he said eagerly.

  “Thank you. I’d love a cup. What about you, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Havers replied.

  The man nodded in obvious relief, smiled, and disappeared into an undersized kitchen off the room in which they stood. The cottage, they could see, was strictly a one-person affair, not much more than a bedsitting room. But it was conscientiously clean—swept, polished, and dusted. Only the faint odour of wet dog marred it. The source of this lay on a chewed and stringy rag rug, toasting himself before a single-bar electric fire set into a small stone fireplace. He was a white highland terrier, and he lifted his chin, blinked at them seriously, and yawned, revealing a long pink tongue. This done, he turned his nose happily back to the electric blaze.

  Langston returned with a tray in his hands and another terrier at his heels. This was a livelier version of the first, for it threw itself upon Lynley in excited greeting.

  “H-here, down!” Langston ordered as sharply as his gentle voice would allow. The dog obeyed reluctantly, then scampered across the room to join the other in a heap by the fire. “Th-they’re g-good lads, Inspector. S-sorry.”

  Lynley waved off the apology as Langston poured the tea. “Go on with your meal, Constable. Havers and I are out prowling a bit late this evening. We can talk while you eat.”

  Langston didn’t look as if he believed this was possible, but he dug into his food with a shy duck of his head.

  “I understand that Father Hart rang you directly after he found William Teys’s body,” Lynley began. When the man nodded eagerly, he went on. “Roberta was still there when you arrived?” Another nod. “Did you bring Richmond in immediately? Why was that?” Lynley regretted the question the moment he asked it. Stupid clod, he thought, wondering what it would be like for the man to have to agonise his way through questioning witnesses, especially those like Father Hart who seemed to float between two distinct planes of existence.