“Clothes in the wardrobe. Nothing much of interest.” As he had done in the other room, she drew back the quilt from the bed. Unlike the other, however, this bed was made, and its fresh, laundered linen gave off the scent of jasmine. But underneath it, as if the jasmine were incense subtly burning to hide the odour of cannabis, was the cloying smell of something more. Barbara looked at Lynley. “Do you-”

“Absolutely,” he replied. “Help me pull off the mattress.”

She did so, covering her mouth and nose when the stench filled the room and they saw what lay beneath the old mattress. The box-spring covering had been cut away in the far corner of the bed, and resting within was a storehouse of food. Rotting fruit, bread grey with mould, biscuits and candy, pastries half-eaten, bags of crisps.

“Oh, Jesus,” Barbara murmured. It was more prayer than exclamation and, in spite of the catalogue of gruesome sights she had seen as a member of the force, her stomach heaved uneasily and she backed away. “Sorry,” she gasped with a shaky laugh. “Bit of a surprise.”

Lynley dropped the mattress back into place. His face was expressionless. “It’s sabotage,” he said to himself.

“Sir?”

“Stepha said something about a diet.”

As Barbara had done before, Lynley walked to the window. Evening was drawing on, and in a fading patch of the dying light he withdrew the photographs from his coat pocket and examined them. He stood motionless, perhaps in the hope that an uninterrupted, undisturbed study of the two girls would tell him who killed William Teys and why, and what a storehouse of rotting food had to do with anything. Watching him, Barbara was struck by how a trick of light falling across hair, cheek, and brow made him look vastly younger than his thirty-two years. And yet nothing altered or obscured the man’s intelligence or the wit behind his eyes, not even the shadows. The only noise in the room was his breathing, steady and calm, very sure. He turned, found her watching him, and began to speak.

She stopped him. “Well,” she said forcefully, pushing her hair behind her ears in a pugnacious gesture, “see anything else in the other rooms?”

“Just a box of old keys in the wardrobe and a veritable museum of Tessa,” he replied. “Clothing, photographs, locks of hair. Among Teys’s own things, of course.” He replaced the photographs in his pocket. “I wonder if Olivia Odell knew what she was in for.”

They had walked the three-quarters of a mile from the village down Gembler Road to the Teys’s farm. As they returned, Lynley began to wish that he had driven his car. It was not so much concern that darkness had fallen but a longing for music to distract him. Without it, he found himself glancing at the woman walking wordlessly at his side, and he reluctantly considered what he had heard about her.

“One angry vairgin,” MacPherson had said. “What she needs is a faer toss i’ the hay.” Then he roared with laughter and lifted his pint in his big, bear’s grasp. “But no’ me, laddies. I’ll not test those waters. I leave tha’ plaisure to a young’r man!”

But MacPherson was wrong, Lynley thought. There was no question of angry virginity here. It was something else.

This wasn’t Havers’s first murder investigation, so he could not understand her reaction to the farm: her initial reluctance to enter the barn, her strange behaviour in the sitting room, her inexplicable outburst upstairs.

For the second time he wondered what on earth Webberly had in mind in creating their partnership, but he found he was too weary to attempt an explanation.

The lights of the Dove and Whistle came in sight upon the final curve of the road. “Lets get something to eat,” he said.

“Roast chicken,” the proprietor announced. “It’s our Sunday night dinner. Get you some up quick if you have a seat in the lounge.”

The Dove and Whistle was doing a brisk evening’s business. In the public bar, which had fallen into stillness upon their entrance, a pall of cigarette smoke hung like a heavy rain cloud over the room. Farmers gathered in conversation in a corner, their mud-encrusted boots placed on rungs of ladder-backed chairs, two younger men played a boisterous game of darts near a door marked TOILETS, while a group of middle-aged women compared the Sunday evening remnants of Saturday’s crimps and curls, courtesy of Sinji’s Beauty Shoppe. The bar itself was surrounded by patrons, most of whom were joking with the girl who worked the taps behind it.

She was clearly the village anomaly. Jet black hair rose out of her scalp in spikes, her eyes were heavily outlined in purple, and her clothes were nighttime-in-Soho explicit: short black leather skirt, white plunging blouse, black lace stockings with holes held together by safety pins, black laced shoes of the sort that grandmothers wear. Each of her ears- pierced four times-wore the dubious decoration of a line of stud earrings, except for the bottom right hole, which sported a feather dangling to her shoulder.

“Fancies herself a rock singer,” the publican said, following their glance. “She’s m’ daughter, but I try not to let the word out often.” He thumped a pint of ale on the wobbly table in front of Lynley, gave a tonic water to Barbara, and grinned. “Hannah!” he shouted back into the public bar. “Stop making a spectacle of yourself, girl! Y’re driving every man present insane with lust!” He winked at them wickedly.

“Oh Dad!” she laughed. The others did as well.

“Tell him off, Hannah!” somebody called. And another, “What’s the poor bloke ever known about style?”

“Style, is it?” the publican called back cheerfully. “She’s a cheap one to dress, all right. But she’s running through my fortune buying gunk for her hair.”

“How d’you keep them spikes up, Han?”

“Got scared in the abbey, I’d say.”

“Heard the baby howl, did you, Han?”

Laughter. A playful swing at the speaker. The statement made: See, we’re all friends here. Barbara wondered if they’d rehearsed the whole thing.

She and Lynley were the only occupants of the lounge, and once the door closed behind the publican, she longed for the noise of the public bar again, but Lynley was speaking.

“She must have been a compulsive eater.”

“Who murdered her father because he put her on a diet?” It slipped out before Barbara could stop herself. Sarcasm was rich in her voice.

“Who obviously did a lot of eating in secret,” Lynley went on. His own voice was unperturbed.

“Well, it doesn’t look that way to me,” she argued. She was pushing him, and she knew it. It was defensive and stupid. But she couldn’t help it.

“What does it look like to you?”

“That food’s been forgotten. Who knows how long it’s been there?”

“I think we can agree that it’s been there three weeks and that any food that’s left out for three weeks is likely to spoil.”

“All right, I’ll accept that,” Barbara said. “But not the compulsive eating.”

“Why not?”

“Because you can’t prove it, dammit!”

He ticked off items on his fi ngers. “We have two rotting apples, three black bananas, something that at one time might have been a ripe pear, a loaf of bread, sixteen biscuits, three half-eaten pastries, and three bags of crisps. Now you tell me what we have here, Sergeant.”

“I’ve no idea,” she replied.

“Then if you’ve no idea, perhaps you’ll consider mine.” He paused. “Barbara-”

She knew at once from his tone that she had to stop him. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t understand. “I’m sorry, Inspector,” she said swiftly. “I got spooked at the farm and I…I’ve jumped all over you for it ever since. I…I’m sorry.”

He appeared to be taken aback. “All right. Let’s start again, shall we?”

The publican approached and plopped two plates down onto the table. “Chicken and peas,” he announced proudly.

Barbara got up and stumbled from the room.