A Great Deliverance

by Elizabeth George

  “Yes,” he whispered. “We’ll talk then.”

  She smiled tremulously, and he felt his heart wrench. He put the tray across her lap, but when she tried to spoon the soup, he saw that her weakness had become so pronounced that no effort would make it possible for her to feed herself. Gently, he took the spoon from her and began to help her eat, a slow process in which every bit swallowed seemed an individual act of triumph.

  He wouldn’t let her talk. He was too afraid of what she might say. Instead he soothed her with whispered words of love and encouragement and wondered who she was and what kind of terrible grief she had brought into his life.

  They had been married for less than a year, but it seemed to him that they had always been together, that they had been meant for each other from the moment when his father brought her to Testament House from King’s Cross Station—a solemn little waif of a girl who looked twelve years old. She’s all eyes, he had thought when he saw her. But when she smiled, she was sunlight. He knew within the first few weeks that he loved her, but it took nearly ten years to make her his own.

  During that time he had been ordained, had made his decision to be part of his father’s work, had laboured like Jacob in pursuit of a Rachel he could never be certain of winning. Yet that thought had not discouraged him. Like a crusader, he had set on a quest, and Nell was his Grail. No one else would do.

  Except she’s not Nell, he thought. I don’t know who she is. And the worst of it is, I’m not certain I want to know.

  He had always seen himself as a man of action, one of courage, a man powered by the force of his inner convictions, yet still, intimately, a man of peace. All that had died tonight. The sight of her in the bath—mindlessly lacerating her flesh, staining the water with her blood—had demolished that carefully constructed facade in two short minutes: the time it had taken to pull her, frail and screaming, from the tub, to try frantically to stop the bleeding, to throw the shouting police officer from their flat.

  In two short minutes he had become not the cheek-turning, sincere minister of God that had long been his guise, but a maniacal stranger who could have killed, without impunity, anyone seeking to harm his wife. He was shaken to the core, even more so when he considered that, in protecting her from enemies, he couldn’t think of how he was going to protect Nell from herself.

  Except she’s not Nell, he thought.

  She was finished eating, had been finished, in fact, for several minutes and lay back against the pillows. They were stained with her blood. He got to his feet.

  “Jo—”

  “I’m going to get something for the cuts. I’ll just be a moment.”

  He tried not to see the gruesome condition of the bathroom as he rooted in the cupboard. The tub looked and smelled as if they had been butchering livestock in it. Blood was everywhere, in every crevice and crack. His hands weakened as he grabbed the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He felt faint.

  “Jonah?”

  He took several deep breaths and went back to the bedroom. “Delayed reaction.” He tried to smile, clutched the bottle so tightly he thought it might break in his hands, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Mostly surface cuts,” he said conversationally. “We’ll see what it looks like in the morning. If they’re bad, we’ll go to hospital then. How does that sound?”

  He didn’t wait for a response. Rather, he washed the abrasions with the chemical and continued speaking determinedly. “I thought we might go to Penzance this weekend, darling. It would be good to get away for a few days, don’t you think so? I was talking to one of the kids about a hotel down there that she’d stayed at as a child. If it’s still there, it should be wonderful. A view of St. Michael’s Mount. I thought we’d take the train down and hire a car when we got there. Or bicycles. Would you like to hire bicycles, Nell?”

  He felt her hand on his cheek. At the touch, his heart swelled, and he knew he was horribly close to tears. “Jo,” she whispered. “Nell’s dead.”

  “Don’t say that!” he returned fiercely.

  “I’ve done terrible things. I can’t bear for you to know. I thought I was safe from them, that I’d run from them right into forever.”

  “No!” He continued mindlessly, passionately to see to her wounds.

  “I love you, Jonah.”

  That stopped him. His face sank into his hands. “What do I call you?” he whispered. “I don’t even know who you are!”

  “Jo, Jonah, my love, my only love—”

  Her voice was a torment he could barely endure, and when she reached out for him, he was broken and ran from the room, slamming the door firmly, and irrevocably, behind him.

  He stumbled to a chair, hearing his own breathing tear at the air, feeling wedges of panic drive themselves into his stomach and groin. He sat, staring unseeing at the material objects that comprised their home, and desperately pushed away from him the one piece of information that was at the core of his terror.

  Three weeks ago, the police sergeant had said. He had lied to her, an immediate response rising from the horror of her incomprehensible allegation. He had not been in London with his wife at that time but rather at a four-day conference in Exeter, followed by two additional days of fundraisers for Testament House. Nell was supposed to have gone with him but at the last moment had begged off with flu. So she said. Had she been ill? Or had she seen it as an opportunity to travel to Yorkshire?

  “No!” The word came out involuntarily, from between his teeth. Despising himself for even considering the question for a moment, Jonah willed his breathing to calm, willed his muscles to relax.

  He reached for his guitar, not to play it but to reaffirm its reality and to reestablish the meaning it had in his life, for he had been sitting on the back stairs of Testament House, in the semi-darkness, playing strains of the music he loved when she first spoke to him.

  “That’s so nice. D’you think anyone could learn?” She came to crouch next to him on the step, her eyes on his fingers as they moved expertly among the strings, and she smiled, a child’s smile, lit with pleasure.

  It had been simple to teach her to play, for she was a natural mimic: something seen or heard was never forgotten. Now she played as often to him as he did to her, not with his assurance or passion but with a melancholy sweetness that long ago should have told him what he didn’t want to face now.

  He stood abruptly. To assure himself, he opened book after book and saw the name, Nell Graham, written in each volume in her neat script. To show ownership, he wondered, or to convince herself?

  “No!”

  He picked up a photograph album from the bottom shelf and hugged it to his chest. It was a document of Nell, a verification of the fact that she was real, that she had no other life but the one she shared with him. He didn’t even need to open the album to know what lay within its pages: a pictorial history of the love they shared, of the memories that were an integral part of the tapestry of their lives being woven together. In a park, on a trail, dreaming quietly at dawn, laughing at the antics of birds on the beach. All of these bore testimony, were illustrations of Nell’s life and the things she loved.

  His eyes drifted, for more assurance, to her plants in the window. The African violets had always reminded him the most of her. The beautiful flowers poised themselves delicately, precariously, at the tips of their stalks. The heavy green leaves protected and surrounded them. They were plants that looked as if they could never survive in the rigours of the London weather, but in spite of their appearance, they were deceptive plants really, plants of remarkable strength.

  Looking at them, he knew at last and fought fruitlessly to deny it. Tears, long in coming, broke the surface and a sob escaped him. He made his way back to the chair, fell into it, and wept inconsolably.

  It was then that he heard the knocking at the door.

  “Go away!” he sobbed.

  The knocking persisted.

  “Go away!”

  There was no other sound. The knocking continued.
Like the voice of his conscience. It would never end.

  “Damn you, go away!” he screamed and threw himself at the door. He flung it open.

  A woman stood there. She wore a neat black suit and a white silk blouse with a froth of lace at her throat. She carried a black shoulder bag and a leatherbound book. But it was her face that riveted his attention. It was calm, clear-eyed, and masked by tenderness. She might have been a missionary. She might have been a vision. But she extended her hand and made it clear that she was real.

  “My name is Helen Clyde,” she said quietly.

  Lynley chose a corner. Candles flickered some distance away, but where he was darkness shrouded the church. The building smelled vaguely of incense, but more strongly of age, of guttering candles, of the burnt ends of matches, of dust. It was utterly peaceful. Even the doves, who had been stirred into momentary rustling upon his approach, had fallen back into stillness, and no night wind made tree branches creak and scratch against the windows.

  He was alone. His only companions were the youths and maidens, entwined Grecian urn-like in a soundless eternal dance of truth and beauty on the doors of the Elizabethan confessionals nearby.

  His heart felt heavy and sore. It was an old story, a Roman legend from the fifth century, but as real at this moment as it had been to Shakespeare when he used it as the foundation for his drama. The Prince of Tyre went to Antioch, pursuing a riddle and marriage to a princess. But he came away with nothing, fleeing for his life.

  Lynley knelt. He thought about prayer, but nothing came.

  He knew he was near the body of the hydra, but the knowledge gave him neither triumph nor satisfaction. Instead, he wanted to flee from the final confrontation with the monster, knowing now that, although the heads were destroyed and the trunk well seared, he could not hope to emerge unscathed from the encounter.

  “‘Fret not thyself because of evil-doers.’” It was an insubstantial, disembodied, wavering voice. It came out of nowhere, tremulous and uncertain, and it hovered mistily in the frigid air. It was some moments before Lynley located its black-robed source.

  Father Hart knelt at the foot of the altar. He was bent over double, his forehead pressed to the floor. “‘Neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. For they shall be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; Trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass. Evil-doers shall be cut off; But those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth. For yet a little while and the wicked shall not be.’”

  Lynley listened to the words, anguished, and tried to deny their meaning. As a hush swept over the darkened church once more—broken only by the priest’s stertorous breathing—he sorted through himself, trying to find the detachment he needed to carry him, disinterested, to the end of the case.

  “Have you come to confess?”

  He started at the voice. Unseen to him, the priest had materialised from the dark. Lynley stood. “No, I’m not a Catholic,” he replied. “I was just gathering my thoughts.”

  “Churches are good places for that, aren’t they?” Father Hart smiled. “I always stop for a prayer before locking up for the night. I always check first, as well, to make sure no one is still inside. It wouldn’t do to be locked up in St. Catherine’s in this kind of cold, would it?”

  “No,” Lynley agreed. “It wouldn’t do at all.” He followed the little priest to the end of the aisle and out into the night. Clouds obscured moon and stars. The other man was merely a shadow, without form or feature. “How well do you know Pericles, Father Hart?”

  The priest didn’t answer at first as he fumbled with his keys and locked the church door. “Pericles?” he repeated musingly. He moved past the other man, out into the graveyard. “It’s Shakespeare, isn’t it?”

  “‘As flame to smoke.’ Yes, it’s Shakespeare.”

  “I…well, I suppose I know it fairly well.”

  “Well enough to know why Pericles fled from Antiochus? Why Antiochus wanted to have him killed?”

  “I…” The priest groped in his pockets. “I don’t think I quite remember all the details of the play.”

  “You remember enough, I daresay. Good night, Father Hart,” Lynley replied and left the graveyard.

  He descended the hillock by the gravel path, his footsteps sounding unnaturally loud in the nighttime peace. On the bridge, he paused to gather his thoughts, and he leaned against its stone side, surveying the village. To his right, Olivia Odell’s house was dark, and woman and child slept in innocent safety within. Across the street, organ music floated eerily from Nigel Parrish’s cottage on the edge of the common. To his left the lodge awaited his entry, and beyond that the high street curved in the direction of the pub. From where he stood, he couldn’t see St. Chad’s Lane with its council houses. But he could imagine them. Not wanting to do that, he returned to the lodge.

  He’d been gone less than an hour, but he knew as soon as he walked in the door that, during his absence, Stepha had returned. The building held its breath, waiting for him to discover and know. His feet felt like lead.

  He wasn’t entirely sure where Stepha’s rooms would be, but his instinct told him that they were somewhere on the ground floor of the old building, past the reception desk, in the direction of the kitchen. He went through the door.

  As he did so, he had his answers, palpably alive in the atmosphere that surrounded him. He could smell the cigarette smoke. He could almost taste the liquor in the air. He could hear the laughter, the whispered passion, the delight. He could feel the hands drawing him relentlessly forward. All that was left was to see the truth.

  He knocked on the door. There was immediate quiet.

  “Stepha?”

  Movement within, hurried and suppressed. Stepha’s soft laugh hung in the air. At the last moment, he nearly stopped himself, but then he turned the knob, to enter and to know.

  “Perhaps now you can give me an alibi that sticks,” laughed Richard Gibson, giving the woman a proprietary slap on her naked thigh. “I don’t think the inspector believed my little Madeline for a moment.”

  15

  Lady Helen saw him as they made their way over the crowded pedestrian walkway from the arrivals platform. It had been a harrowing enough two hours on the train, one moment afraid that Gillian might go all to pieces in any one of a dozen appalling ways; the next moment desperately trying to rouse Sergeant Havers from whatever black pit of humour she had decided to inhabit. The entire experience had filled Lady Helen with such anxiety that the very sight of Lynley, brushing his blond hair back off his forehead against the breeze of a departing train, made her nearly weak with relief. People in the crowded station bustled and pushed round him. But still he looked as if he were quite alone. He raised his head. Their eyes met and her steps slowed momentarily.

  Even at this distance, she could see the difference in him. The smoky darkness under his eyes. The tension in the set of his head and shoulders, the deepening lines round nose and mouth. He was Tommy still, but somehow not quite Tommy at all. There could be only one reason for it: Deborah.

  He’d seen her in Keldale. His face told Lady Helen as much. And for some reason—in spite of the year that had passed since he’d broken his engagement to Deborah, in spite of the hours that she’d spent with him since then—Lady Helen found that she couldn’t bear the thought of him talking about seeing her. She desperately wanted to avoid giving him an opportunity to do so. It was craven. She despised herself for it. And she didn’t at that moment care to reflect upon why it had suddenly become so crucial that Tommy never speak to her of Deborah again.

  He appeared to have been reading her thoughts—how typical of him, really—for he gave her that brief, quirky smile of his and walked to meet them at the foot of the stairs.

  “How absolutely wonderful to
see you, Tommy,” she said. “I spent half the journey—when I wasn’t frantically eating every pastry that wandered by—terrified that you’d be stuck in Keldale and we’d have to hire a car and drive wildly about the moors in best Earnshaw fashion, trying to find you. Well, it’s all ended for the best, hasn’t it, and I needn’t have given in to my craving for week-old pain au chocolat in order to dull my anxiety. The food is absolutely appalling on the train, isn’t it?” She tightened her arm round Gillian protectively. It was an instinctive gesture, for, although she knew the young woman had nothing to fear from Lynley, the last twelve hours had bonded Gillian to her and now she found herself reluctant to hand the young woman over. “Gillian, this is Inspector Lynley,” she murmured.

  A tentative smile touched Gillian’s lips. Then she dropped her eyes. Lynley began to extend his hand to her, but Lady Helen shook her head in warning. At that, his glance slid to the young woman’s hands. The angry red scoring that covered them was ugly but not as deep or serious as the abrasions that covered her neck, breasts, and thighs, hidden by the dress that Lady Helen had carefully selected for her to wear.

  “I’ve the car just outside,” he said.

  “Thank God,” Lady Helen declared. “Lead me to it this moment before my feet suffer irreparable damage from these ghastly shoes. They are fetching, aren’t they? But the agony I endure hobbling about in them simply beggars belief. I keep asking myself why I’m such a slave to fashion.” She airily dismissed the question as unanswerable. “I’m even willing to put up with five minutes of the most melancholy Tchaikovsky in your collection just to get off my feet.”

  He smiled. “I’ll remember that, old duck.”

  “Darling, I haven’t the slightest doubt of it.” She turned to Sergeant Havers, who had plodded wordlessly behind them since they had disembarked. “Sergeant, I need to pop into the ladies’ and undo the damage I did to my makeup by burying my face in that last pastry just before that dreadful tunnel. Will you take Gillian out to the car?”