Lynley wandered to one of these as Stepha worked behind the bar. “This is lovely,” he remarked. “A local artist?”

“A young man named Ezra Farmington does them,” she replied. “They’re of our abbey. Those two are how he paid for his board here one autumn. He lives in the village permanently now.”

Barbara watched the redheaded woman deftly work the taps and scoop the foam from the churning brew that was developing a life of its own in the glass. Stepha laughed in a breathless, charming way when the foam slipped over the side and onto her hand, and she unconsciously raised her fingers to her lips to lick the residue. Barbara idly wondered how long it would take Lynley to get her into bed.

“Sergeant?” Stepha asked. “An ale for you as well?”

“Tonic water, if you have it,” Barbara replied. She looked out the window. On the common, the old priest who had been to see them in London was having an anxious conversation with another man. From the gesturing and pointing at the silver Bentley, the news of their arrival was apparently the topic of the village. A woman crossed from the bridge to join them. She was wispy-looking, an effect produced by a dress too gauzy for the season and by baby-fine hair which the smallest air current ruffled. She rubbed her arms for warmth, and, rather than joining in the conversation of the two men, she merely listened as if waiting for one or the other of them to walk off. In a moment the priest said a few final words and meandered back towards the church. The other two remained standing together. Their conversation went in fi ts and starts, with the man saying something with a quick look at the woman and then away and the woman replying briefly. There were long silences in which the woman looked at the bank of the river next to the common and the man focused his attention on the lodge-or perhaps the car in front of it. Someone was significantly interested in the arrival of the police, Barbara decided.

“A tonic water and an ale,” Stepha was saying as she placed both glasses on the bar. “It’s a home brew, my father’s recipe. We call it Odell’s. You must tell me what you think of it, Inspector.”

It was a rich, brown liquid shot through with gold. “Has a bit of a kick, doesn’t it?” Lynley said when he tasted it. “Are you sure you won’t have one, Havers?”

“Just the tonic water, thank you, sir.”

He joined her at the couch in front of which he had earlier spilled out the contents of the report on the Teys murder and had icily flipped through every paper looking for the explanation of Roberta Teys’s placement in Barnstingham Mental Asylum. There had been none. That had set him off on the telephone to Richmond. Now he began to go through the paperwork again, stacking things in categorical fashion. From the bar, Stepha Odell watched them with friendly interest, sipping an ale that she’d poured for herself.

“We’ve got the original warrants, the forensics report, the signed depositions, the photographs.” Lynley fingered the materials as he named them. He looked up at Barbara. “No keys to the farmhouse. Damn the man.”

“Richard has a set of those if you need them,” Stepha said quickly, as if hoping to make up for her remark about Roberta that had set Lynley off on a collision course with the Richmond police in the fi rst place. “Richard Gibson. He was…is William Teys’s nephew. He lives in the council cottages on St. Chad’s Lane. It’s just off the high street.”

Lynley looked up. “How does he come to have keys to the farmhouse?”

“Having arrested Roberta…well, I suppose they just gave them to Richard. He’s to inherit it anyway once the estate’s all settled,” she added. “In William’s will. I suppose he’s seeing to the place in the meantime. Someone must.”

“He’s to inherit? How was Roberta treated in the will?”

Stepha gave the bar a thoughtful sweep with a cloth. “It was fixed between Richard and William that the farm would go to Richard. It was a sensible arrangement. He works there with William… Worked there,” she corrected herself, “ever since he returned to Keldale two years ago. Once they got over their row about Roberta, it all worked out to everyone’s advantage. William had someone to help him, Richard had a job and a future, and Roberta had a place to live for life.”

“Sergeant.” Lynley nodded at her notebook, which was lying unused next to her tonic water. “If you would please…”

Stepha flushed as she saw Barbara reach for her pen. “Is this an interview then?” she asked, flashing an anxious smile. “I don’t know how much I can help you, Inspector.”

“Tell us about the row and Roberta.”

She came round the bar and joined them, pulling a comfortable, cushioned chair to the other side of the table. She sat down, tucking her legs to one side, and glanced at the stack of photographs in front of her. She looked away quickly.

“I’ll tell you what I can, but it isn’t much. Olivia’s the one who can tell you more.”

“Olivia Odell…your…”

“Sister-in-law. My brother Paul’s widow.” Stepha placed her glass of ale on the table and used the same movement to cover the photographs with a pile of forensic reports. “If you don’t mind…”

“Sorry,” Lynley said quickly. “We get so used to looking at horrors like that that we become immune.” He replaced it all in the folder. “Why did they have a row about Roberta?”

“Olivia told me later-she was with them at the Dove and Whistle when it happened-that it was all due to the way Roberta looks.” She fingered her glass, made a pattern of lace on the moisture of its surface. “Richard’s from Keldale, you see, but he’d been gone a good few years trying his luck with barley in the fens. He’d married down there, had two children as well. When the farming didn’t work out, he returned to the Kel.” She smiled at them. “They say that the Kel never lets one go easily, and that was the case for Richard. He was gone for eight or nine years and, when he returned, he was quite a bit shocked to see the change in Roberta.”

“You said it was all due to the way she looks?”

“She didn’t always look as she does now. She was always a big girl, of course, even at eight when Richard left. But she was never…”

Stepha hesitated, clearly searching delicately for the right word, for a euphemism that would be factual at the same time as it was noncommittal.

“Obese,” Barbara fi nished. Like a cow.

“Yes,” Stepha went on gratefully. “Richard had always been great friends with Roberta, for all he’s twelve years her senior. And to come back and find his cousin so sadly deteriorated-physically, I mean, she was much the same otherwise-was a terrible shock to him. He blamed William for ignoring the girl. Said she had done it to herself to try to get his attention. William raged at that. Olivia said she’d never seen him so angry. Poor man, there’d been problems enough in his life without an accusation like that from his own nephew. But they got it sorted out. Richard apologised the very next day. William wouldn’t take Roberta to a doctor-he wouldn’t bend that far-but Olivia found a diet for the girl, and from that time on, all went well.”

“Until three weeks ago,” Lynley observed.

“If you choose to believe that Roberta killed her father, then yes, it all went well until three weeks back. But I don’t believe she killed him. Not for one blessed moment.”

Lynley looked surprised at the force behind her words. “Why not?”

“Because aside from Richard-who heaven knows has enough trouble just dealing with that family of his own-William was all that Roberta had. Besides her reading and dreams, there was only her father.”

“She’d no friends her own age? No other girls nearby on the farms or in the village?”

Stepha shook her head. “She kept to herself. When she wasn’t working on the farm with her father, mostly she read. She was here every day for the Guardian, in fact, for years on end. They never did take a paper on the farm, so she’d come every afternoon once everyone’d seen it and we’d let her take it home with her. I think she’d read every book of her mother’s in the house, all of Marsha Fitzalan’s, and the newspaper was the only thing left for her. We’ve no lending library, you see.” She frowned down at the glass in her hands. “She stopped looking at the paper a few years back, though. When my brother died. I couldn’t help thinking…” Her grey-blue eyes darkened. “That perhaps Roberta was in love with Paul. After he died four years ago, we saw nothing of the girl for quite some time. And she never came again to ask for the Guardian.”