“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. Did you notice it?” he asked her, once the music had crashed to its fi nale. “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 fl ash 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, mortifi ed.

“I’m surprised you don’t know about it,” he fi nally 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-inlaw, 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 confi dence, 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 shoe-box-sized post offi ce; 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.