A Great Deliverance Page 9

  “Hellsapoppin they don’t!” was Hank’s riposte. “You just ask them, Bean.”

  JoJo rolled her eyes in apology at the other couple. “Hank’s charmed with England. Just really charmed,” she explained.

  “Love it.” Hank nodded. “If I could just get some toast that’s h-o-t, the place’d be perfect. Why in heck d’you people eat your toast cold?”

  “I’ve always thought it was a cultural deficiency,” St. James responded.

  Hank brayed appreciatively, his mouth open wide to display a row of startlingly white teeth. “Cultural deficiency! That’s good! That’s real good! Hear that, Bean? Cultural deficiency!” Hank always repeated any remark that made him laugh. Somehow, it gave him a certain authorship over it. “Now, back to the abbey.” He was also not easily diverted.

  “Hank,” his wife murmured. She was a bit like a rabbit, exophthalmic, with a little upturned nose that continually twitched and flexed on her face as if she were not quite used to the air she breathed.

  “Loosen up, Bean,” her husband urged. “These people here are the salt—of—the—earth.”

  “I think I will have more coffee, Simon,” Deborah said.

  Her husband poured, met her eyes, and said, “Milk, dear?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “H-o-t milk for the coffee!” Hank remarked, seeing a new avenue in which to demonstrate his considerable verbal flexibility. “Now that’s something else I just haven’t got used to. Hey! Here’s Angelina now!”

  The said young girl—obviously by her physical resemblance to Danny yet another member of the curiouser and curiouser Burton-Thomas clan—was carrying a large tray into the dining room with intense concentration. She was not as pretty as Danny: a plump little red hen of a girl whose scrubbed cheeks and rough hands made her look as if she’d be more at home on a farm than attempting to be part of her family’s eccentric establishment. She bobbed a nervous good morning, avoiding their eyes, and awkwardly distributed breakfast, gnawing her bottom lip miserably as she did so.

  “Shy little thing,” Hank observed loudly, squashing a square of toast into the centre of his fried egg. “But she gave us the true poop last night after dinner. Now you’ve heard about that baby, right?”

  Deborah and St. James looked at each other, deciding which one of them would take up the conversational ball. It was tossed to Deborah. “Yes, indeed we did,” she replied. “Crying from the abbey. Danny told us about it just after we arrived.”

  “Ha! Bet she did,” Hank said obscurely, and then to make sure his meaning was clear, added, “Nice little piece. You know. Likes the attention.”

  “Hank…” his wife murmured into her porridge. Her hair was very short, strawberry blonde, and the tips of her ears, showing through it, had become quite red.

  “JoJo-bean, these people are not d-u-m,” Hank replied. “They know the score.” He waved a fork at the other two. A piece of sausage was poised perilously on the prongs. “You gotta excuse the Bean,” he explained. “You’d think living in Laguna Beach’d make a swinger outa her, wouldn’t you? You familiar with Laguna Beach, California?” No pause for an answer. “It is the finest place in the world to live, no offence to you here, of course. JoJo-bean and I’ve lived there for—how long is it now, pretty face? Twenty-two years?—and she still blushes, I tell you, when she sees two queers getting personal! ‘JoJo,’ I tell her, ‘there—is—no—use getting hot and bothered about queers.’” He lowered his voice. “We got them coming out our verified ears in Laguna,” he confided.

  St. James could not bring himself to look at Deborah. “I beg your pardon?” he asked, unsure if he had correctly heard the unusual, gymnastic pun.

  “Queers, man! Faggots! Ho-mo-sex-shuls. By the certified, verified millions in Laguna! They all want to live there! Now, as to the abbey.” Hank paused to slurp gustily at his coffee. “Seems the real story is that Danny and her you-know-what used to meet at the abbey on a regular basis. You know what I mean. For a little clutch-and-feel. And on the night in question some three years back they’ve just decided it’s time to consecrate the relationship. You follow me?”

  “Completely,” St. James replied. He studiously avoided Deborah’s eyes.

  “Now, Danny, see, is a little leery of this. After all, being a virgin on the wedding night’s a puh-retty big item to let go of, don’t you agree? ’Specially in this neck of the woods. And if little Danny lets this fella have his way…well, there’s no backward road, is there?” He awaited St. James’s response.

  “I should imagine not.”

  Hank nodded sagely. “So, as her sister Angelina tells it—”

  “She was there?” St. James asked incredulously.

  Hank spent a moment guffawing at the thought, banging his spoon with tympanic delight on the top of the table. “You’re a card, fella!” He directed his attention to Deborah. “He always like this?”

  “Always,” she replied promptly.

  “That’s great! Well, back to the abbey.”

  Of course, Deborah and St. James’ exchanged looks replied.

  “So here’s this fella with Danny.” Hank painted the scene in the air with his knife and fork. “The gun is loaded and the trigger cocked. When all of a sudden comes this baby wailing fist to beat the band! Can you see it? Huh, can you?”

  “In detail,” St. James replied.

  “Well, these two hear that baby and think it’s the worda God himself. They get outa that abbey so fast that you’d think the devil was chasing them. And that, my friends, put an end to that.”

  “To the baby crying, do you mean?” Deborah asked. “Oh, Simon, I was hoping we’d hear it tonight. Or perhaps even this afternoon. Warding off evil turned out to be so much more rewarding than I expected it to be.”

  Minx, his look said.

  “Not to the crying baby,” Hank instructed. “To the you-know-what between Danny and whoever he was. Who the hell was he, anyway, Bean?”

  “A weird name. Ezra somebody.”

  Hank nodded. “Well, anyway, Danny comes back to the hall here with a case of the hoo-ha’s that just won’t quit. Wants to confess her sins and go right to the Lord. So they call the local priest in. It is ex—or—cism time!”

  “For the abbey, the hall, or Danny?” St. James enquired.

  “All three, fella! So this priest comes rushing down and does the bit with the holy water, goes on to the abbey, and—” He stopped completely, his face lit with joy, his eyes alive with delight: a master storyteller with the audience tearing and clawing to hear every last syllable.

  “More coffee, Deborah?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “And what do you think?” Hank demanded.

  St. James considered the question. He felt his wife’s foot nudge his good leg. “What?” he dutifully responded.

  “Damn if there wasn’t a real baby there. A newborn with the cord still attached. Couldn’t be more than a couple hours old. Deader’n a door knocker by the time the old priest got there. Exposure, they say.”

  “How dreadful.” Deborah’s face paled. “What a horrible thing!”

  Hank nodded solemnly. “You’re talking horrible, just think of poor Ezra! Bet he couldn’t you-know-what for another two years!”

  “Whose baby was it?”

  Hank shrugged. He turned his attention to his now-cold breakfast. Clearly, the juicier elements of the story were the only ones that he had pursued.

  “No one knows,” JoJo answered. “They buried it in the churchyard in the village. With the funniest epitaph on the poor little grave. I can’t recall it, offhand. You’ll have to go see it.”

  “They’re newlyweds, Bean,” Hank put in with a broad wink at St. James. “I bet they got plenty m-o-r-e on their minds than traipsing through graveyards.”

  Obviously, Lynley favoured the Russians. They’d begun with Rachmaninoff, moved to Rimsky-Korsakov, and were now slam-banging their way through the cannonades of the 1812 Overture.

  “There. D
id you notice it?” he asked her, once the music had crashed to its finale. “One of the cymbalists was just a counterbeat behind. But it’s my only bone of contention with that particular recording of 1812.” He flipped the stereo off.

  Barbara noticed for the first time that he wore absolutely no jewellery—no crested signet ring, no expensive wrist watch to flash gold richly when it caught the light. For some reason, that fact was as distracting to her as an unsightly display of opulent ornamentation would have been.

  “I didn’t catch it. Sorry. I don’t know a lot about music.” Did he really expect her—with her background—to be able to converse with him about classical music?

  “I don’t know much about it either,” he admitted ingenuously. “I just listen to it a great deal. I’m afraid I’m one of those ignoramuses who say, ‘I don’t know a thing about it, but I know what I like.”

  She listened to his words with surprise. The man had a first in history, an Oxford education. Why in the world would he ever apply the word ignoramus to himself? Unless, of course, it was designed to put her at ease with a liberal dose of charm, something he was capable of doing quite well. It was effortless for him, as easy as breathing.

  “I must have developed my liking for it during the very last part of my father’s illness. It was always playing in the house when I could get away to see him.” He paused, removed the tape, and the silence in the car became every bit as loud as the music had been, but far more disconcerting. It was some moments before he spoke again, and when he did, it was to pick up the thread of his original thought. “He simply wasted away to nothing. So much pain.” He cleared his throat. “My mother wouldn’t consider putting him into hospital. Even towards the end when it would have been so much easier on her, she wouldn’t hear of it. She sat with him hour after hour, day and night, and watched him die by degrees. I think it was music that kept them both sane those last weeks.” He kept his eyes on the road. “She held his hand and listened to Tchaikovsky. In the end he couldn’t even speak. I’ve always liked to think the music did his speaking for him.”

  It was suddenly crucial to stop the direction the conversation was taking. Barbara gripped the stiff edges of the folded roadmap with dry, hot fingers and searched for another subject.

  “You know that bloke Nies, don’t you?” It blurted out badly, all too obviously an ill-concealed attempt to digress. She shot a wary look at him.

  His eyes narrowed, but otherwise he gave no immediate reaction to the question. One hand merely dropped from the steering wheel. For a moment, Barbara thought, ridiculously, that he intended to use it to silence her, but he simply chose another tape at random and slid it into the stereo. He did not, however, turn the unit on. She stared out at the passing countryside, mortified.

  “I’m surprised you don’t know about it,” he finally said.

  “Know about what?”

  He looked at her then. He appeared to be trying to read her face for insolence or sarcasm or perhaps a need to wound. Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he returned his eyes to the road.

  “Just about five years ago, my brother-in-law, Edward Davenport, was murdered in his home north of Richmond. Superintendent Nies saw fit to arrest me. It wasn’t a long ordeal, just a matter of a few days. But quite long enough.” A glance at her again, a self-deprecatory smile. “You’ve not heard that story, Sergeant? It’s nasty enough to make good cocktail party gossip.”

  “I…no…no, I’d not heard it. And anyway, I don’t go to cocktail parties.” She turned blindly to the window. “I should guess the turnoff is near. Perhaps three miles,” she said uselessly.

  She was shaken to the core. She could not have said why, did not want to think about it, and forced herself to study the scenery, refusing to be caught up in any further conversation with the man. Concentration on the land became imperative, and as she gave herself over to it, the country began its process of seduction upon her, for she was so used to the frenetic pace of London and the desperate grime of her neighbourhood in Acton that Yorkshire came as a bit of a shock.

  The countryside was a thousand different shades of green, from the patchwork quilts of the cultivated land to the desolation of the open moors. The road dipped through dales where forests protected spotless villages and then climbed switchbacked curves to take them again up to the open land where the North Sea wind blew unforgivingly across heather and furze. Here, the only life belonged to the sheep. They wandered free and unfenced, unfettered by the ancient dry stone walls that constructed boundaries for their fellows in the dales below.

  There were contradictions everywhere. In the cultivated areas, life burgeoned from every cranny and hedgerow, a thick vegetation that in another season would produce the mixed beauties of cow parsley, campion, vetch, and foxglove. It was an area where transportation was delayed while two dogs expertly herded a flock of plump sheep across pasture, down hillside, and along the road for a two-mile stroll into the centre of a village, directed only by the whistling of the shepherd who followed, his fate and the fate of the animals he owned left to the skill of the running dogs. And then suddenly, the plants, villages, magnificent oaks, elms, and chestnuts—this truly insubstantial pageant—faded to nothing in the glory of the moors.

  Here, the cerulean sky exploded with clouds. It swept down to meet the rough, unconquered land. Earth and air: there was nothing else, save the sapient presence of the black-faced sheep, stalwart denizens of this lonely place.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Lynley asked after some minutes. “In spite of everything that’s happened to me here, I still love Yorkshire. I think it’s the loneliness here. The complete desolation.”

  Again Barbara resisted the confidence, the implicit message behind the words that here was a man who could understand. “It’s very nice, sir. Not like anything I’ve ever seen. I think this is our turn.”

  The road to Keldale switched back and forth, taking them to the deepest section of the dale. Moments after the turn, the woods closed in on them. Trees arched over the road, ferns grew thickly at its sides. They came to the village the way that Cromwell had come, and they found it as he had: deserted.

  The ringing of St. Catherine’s church bells told them immediately why there was no sign of life in the village. Upon the cessation of what Lynley was beginning to believe was surely Sayers’s nine tailors, the church doors opened and the ancient building spewed forth its tiny congregation.

  “At last,” he murmured. He stood leaning against the car, thoughtfully surveying the village. He’d parked in front of Keldale Lodge, a trim little hostelry, heavily hung with ivy and multipaned windows, from which he had a sweeping view in four directions. Taking it in, he concluded that there couldn’t possibly have been a more unlikely spot on earth for a murder.

  To the north was the narrow high street, flanked by grey stone buildings with tiled roofs and white woodwork containing the requisite elements for comfortable village life: a shoebox-sized post office; a nondescript greengrocer’s; a shop advertising Lyons cakes on a rusty yellow sign and looking like the purveyor of everything from motor oil to baby food; a Wesleyan chapel wedged with delightful incongruity between Sarah’s Tea Room and Sinji’s Beauty Shoppe (“Pretty Curls Make Lovely Girls”). The pavement on either side of the street was raised only slightly off the road, and water pooled in front of doorways from the morning’s rainfall. But the sky was clear now, and the air was so fresh that Lynley could taste its purity.

  To the west, a road called Bishop Furthing led off towards farmland, enclosed on either side by the ubiquitous dry stone walls of the district. On its corner stood a tree-shaded cottage with a front door only steps from the street. It had an enclosed garden to one side from which the excited yelping of small dogs burst forth at regular intervals, as if someone were playing with them, rough and tumble. The building itself was labelled as inconspicuously as possible with the single word POLICE, blue letters on a white sign that stuck out from a window. Home of the archangel Gabri
el, Lynley concluded, suppressing a smile.

  To the south, two roads veered off from an overgrown two-bench common: Keldale Abbey Road, ostensibly leading to the same, and over the humped bridge that spanned the lazy movement of the River Kel, Church Street, with St. Catherine’s built on a hillock on the corner. It, too, was surrounded by a low stone wall, and embedded into this was a World War I memorial plaque, the sombre commonality of every village in the nation.

  To the east was the road down which they had wended their way to this bit of Yorkshire heaven. It had been deserted earlier, but now the bent form of a woman trudged up the incline, a scarf tucked into her black coat. Shod in heavy brogues and dazzling blue ankle socks, she carried a mesh bag over one arm. It dangled there limply, empty. On a Sunday afternoon there was little hope of filling it with foodstuffs purchased at the grocer’s, for everything was locked up tight, and even if it were not, she was heading in the wrong direction to be making a purchase: out of the village, back up towards the moors. A farmwife, perhaps, having made some delivery.

  The village was surrounded by woods, by the upward slope of meadow, by the feeling of absolute security and peace. Once St. Catherine’s bells ceased ringing, the birds took up, tittering from rooftops and trees. Somewhere, a fire had been lit and woodsmoke, just the ghost of its fragrance, was like a whisper in the air. It was hard to believe that three weeks past, a mile out of town, a man had been decapitated by his only daughter.

  “Inspector Lynley? I hope I haven’t kept you waiting long. I always lock up during church since there’s no one else to watch the place. I’m Stepha Odell. I own the lodge.”

  At the sound of the voice, Lynley turned from his inspection of the village, but at the sight of her, his polite introduction died on his lips.

  A tall, shapely woman—perhaps forty years old—stood before him. She was dressed for church in grey linen, a well-cut dress with a white collar. The rest of her was black: shoes, belt, handbag, and hat. Except for her hair, which was coppery red and fell to her shoulders. She was stunning.