“What happened to Whiskers?” Lynley asked himself. “Why is there nothing about that dog?”

“Gabriel knows,” Stepha responded.

For a moment he thought it was some sort of village expression until he recalled the constable’s name. “Constable Langston?”

She nodded, sipping her drink. Her fi ngers on the glass were long and slender, unencumbered by rings. “He buried Whiskers.”

“Where?”

She shrugged a shoulder and pushed her hair back off her face. Unlike the ugliness of the gesture by Havers, in Stepha it was a lovely movement, chasing shadows away. “I’m not sure. I expect it was somewhere on the farm.”

“But why was no forensic study done on the dog?” Lynley mused.

“I suppose they didn’t need one. They could see how the poor thing died.”

“How?”

“His throat was slit, Inspector.”

He fumbled back through the material, looking for the pictures. No wonder he had failed to see it before. Teys’s body, sprawled right over the dog’s corpse, obscured the view. He considered the photograph.

“You see the problem now, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can you imagine Roberta slitting Whiskers’s throat?” An expression of distaste passed across Stepha’s face. “It’s impossible. I’m sorry, but it’s just impossible. Beyond that, no weapon was ever found. Surely she didn’t slit the poor animal’s throat with an axe!”

As she spoke, Lynley found himself beginning to wonder for the first time exactly who the real target of the crime had been: William Teys or his dog.

Suppose a robbery had been in the works, he thought. The dog would need to be silenced. He was old, certainly incapable of attacking someone, but well enough able to make a din if a foreign presence were found in his territory. So the dog would have to be dealt with. But perhaps not quickly enough, so that when Teys rushed out to the barn to see what the yelping was all about, he would have to be dealt with as well. Perhaps, thought Lynley, we have no premeditated murder here, but a crime of an entirely different nature.

“Stepha,” he said thoughtfully. He reached in his pocket. “Who is this?” He handed her the photograph that he and Havers had found in Roberta’s chest of drawers.”

“Where on earth did you get this?”

“In Roberta’s bedroom. Who is it?”

“It’s Gillian Teys, Roberta’s sister.” She tapped the photograph lightly for emphasis, studying it as she spoke. “Roberta must have kept this well hidden from William.”

“Why?”

“Because after Gillian ran off, she was dead to William. He threw away her clothes, got rid of her books, and even destroyed every picture that she was in. Burnt her birth certifi cate as well as everything else in a great bonfi re right in the middle of the yard. How on earth,” she asked, more to herself than to him, her eyes on the photograph, “did Roberta manage to save this?”

“More importantly perhaps, why did she save it?”

“That’s easy enough. Roberta adored Gillian. God knows why. Gillian was the great disaster in the family. She turned out quite wild. She drank and swore and ran around like mad, having the time of her life, off to a party in Whitby one night, out with some hellion God-knows-where the next. Picking up men and giving them a run for their money. Then one night, some eleven years ago, she left. And she never came back.”

Lynley caught the word. “Left? Or disappeared?”

Stepha’s body backed into the chair. One of her hands rose to her throat, but she stopped the gesture as if it were betraying her. “Left,” she said fi rmly.

He went along. “Why?”

“I imagine because she was at odds with William. He was fairly straitlaced and Gillian was nothing if not after a good time. But Rich-ard-her cousin-could probably tell you more. The two of them were rather thick before he left for the fens.” Stepha got to her feet, stretched, and walked to the door, where she paused. “Inspector,” she said slowly. Lynley looked up from the photograph, half-expecting her to say more about Gillian Teys. She hesitated. “Would you like…anything else tonight?”

The light from the reception area behind her cast a glow upon her hair. Her skin looked smooth and lovely. Her eyes were kind. It would be so easy. An hour of bliss. Impassioned acceptance. A simple, longed-for forgetting. “No, thank you, Stepha,” he made himself say.

The River Kel was a peaceful tributary unlike many of the rivers that debouched frantically from the hillsides down into the dales. Silently, it wended its way through Keldale, flowing past the ruined abbey on its way to the sea. It loved the village, treating it well, seldom overflowing in destruction. It welcomed the lodge to exist on its banks, splashed greetings onto the village common, and listened to the lives of the people who lived in the houses built at its very edge.

Olivia Odell had one of these houses, across the bridge from the lodge, with a sweeping view of the common and of St. Catherine’s Church. It was the finest home in the village, with a lovely front garden and a lawn that sloped down to the river.

It was still early morning when Lynley and Havers pushed open the gate, but the steady wailing of a child, coming from behind the house, told them that the inhabitants were already up and about. They followed the grief-stricken ululation to its source.

On the back steps of the house sat the youthful mourner. She was huddled in a ball of woe, head bent to her knees, a crumpled magazine photograph beneath her grubby shoes. To her left sat her audience, a solemn male mallard who watched her sympathetically. Upon her head was the ostensible source of her grief, for she’d cut her hair-or rather somebody had- and had plastered it onto her skull with grease. It once had been red and, from the look of the locks escaping their confi nement, decidedly curly. But now, giving off the malodourous waft of cheap pomade, it was nothing but dreadful to behold.

Havers and Lynley exchanged a look. “Good morning,” the inspector said pleasantly. “You must be Bridie.”

The child looked up, grabbing the photograph and clutching it to her chest in a motherly gesture. The duck merely blinked.

“What’s wrong?” Lynley asked kindly.

Bridie’s defiant posture was completely deflated at the gentle sound of the tall man’s voice. “I cut my hair!” she wailed. “I saved my money to go to Sinji’s but she said she couldn’t make my hair go this way and she wouldn’t cut it so I cut it myself and now look at me and Mummy’s crying as well. I tried to straighten it all out with this stuff of Hannah’s but it’ll never come right!” She hiccupped pathetically on the last word.

Lynley nodded. “I see. It does look a bit awful, Bridie. Exactly what sort of effect were you going after?” He quailed inwardly at the thought of Hannah’s black spikes.

“This!” She waved the photograph at him, wailing anew.

He took it from her and looked at the smiling, smooth coiffured semblance of the Princess of Wales, elegant in black evening gown and diamonds, not a hair out of place. “Of course,” he muttered.

Bereft of her picture, Bridie took comfort in the presence of her duck, slinging an arm round him and pulling him to her side. “You don’t care, Dougal, do you?” she demanded of the bird. In reply, Dougal blinked and investigated Bridie’s hair for its edible propensities.

“Dougal the Duck?” Lynley enquired.

“Angus McDougal McDuck,” Bridie responded. The formal introduction made, she wiped her nose on the sleeve of her tattered pullover and looked fearfully over her shoulder at the closed door behind her. A single tear rolled down her cheek as she went on. “An’ he’s hungry. But I can’t go inside to get his food. All I got’s these marshmallows. They’re all right for a treat, but his real food’s inside and I can’t go in.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause Mummy said she didn’t want to see me again till I’d done something about my hair and I don’t know what to do!” The child began to cry again, real tears of anguish. Dougal would apparently starve-an unlikely prospect, considering his size-unless some quick thinking were applied to the situation.