“Roberta?”

She glanced at him, then away. “She always came here with William.”

“What was she like?”

“Very quiet. Very nice. Not an attractive girl. Heavy, you know. But she was always very good to Bridie.”

“Her weight caused a problem between Richard Gibson and his uncle, though, didn’t it?”

Olivia’s brow furrowed. “A problem? How do you mean?”

“Their argument over it. At the Dove and Whistle. Will you tell us about it?”

“Oh that. Stepha must have told you. But that has nothing to do with William’s death.”

This as she saw Sergeant Havers write a few lines in her notebook.

“One can never be sure. Will you tell us about it?”

A hand fluttered up as if in protest but resettled in her lap. “Richard hadn’t been back from the fens for long. He ran into us at the Dove and Whistle. There were words. Silly. Over in a minute. That’s all.” She smiled vaguely.

“What sort of words?”

“It really had nothing to do with Roberta initially. We were all sitting together at a table and William, I’m afraid, made a comment about Hannah. The barmaid. Have you seen her?”

“Last night.”

“Then you know she looks…different. William didn’t at all approve of her, nor of the way her father deals with her. You know-as if he’s just amused by it all. So William said something about it. Something like, ‘Why her dad lets her walk about looking like a tart is a mystery to me.’ That sort of thing. Nothing really serious. Richard was just a bit in his cups. He’d a terrible set of scratches on his face, so I think he’d been at it with his wife as well. His mood was foul. He said something about not being such a fool as to judge by appearances, that-as I recall-an angel could be wearing a streetwalker’s guise and the sweetest blonde-headed little face could hide a whore.”

“And William took that to mean what?”

She produced a tired smile. “As a reference to Gillian, his older daughter. Rather immediately, I’m afraid. He demanded to know what Richard meant by his remark. Richard and Gilly had been great friends, you see. I think- to avoid having to explain-Richard sidetracked onto Roberta.”

“How?”

“As an example of not judging by appearances. Of course, it went on from there. Richard demanded to know why Roberta had been allowed to get into such an unattractive state. In turn, William demanded to know what he had meant by his insinuation about Gilly. Richard demanded that William answer. William demanded that Richard answer. You know the sort of thing.”

“And then?”

She laughed. It was a tittering sound, like that of a trapped bird. “I thought they might fight. Richard said no child of his would ever be allowed to eat her way into an early grave and that William ought to be ashamed of the job he’d done as a father. William became so angry that he said something about Richard being ashamed of the job he was doing as a husband. He made a…well, a bit of a crude reference to Madeline going unsatisfi ed-she’s Richard’s wife, have you met her?-and frankly just when I thought Richard might truly hit his uncle, instead he just laughed. He said something about being a fool to waste his time worrying about Roberta and left us.”

“That was all?”

“Yes.”

“What do you suppose Richard meant?”

“By being a fool?” As if seeing the direction his question was taking her, she frowned. “You want me to say that he felt he was being a fool because if Roberta died, he’d get the farm.”

“Is that what he meant?”

“No, of course not. William rewrote his will shortly after Richard returned from the fens. Richard knew very well that the farm had been left to him, not to Roberta.”

“But if you and William married, then the will would most likely have been rewritten once again. Isn’t that true?”

Clearly, she saw the trap. “Yes but…I know what you’re thinking. It was to Richard’s advantage that William should die before we could marry. But isn’t that always the case when there’s an inheritance involved? And people don’t generally kill one another just because they’re to inherit something in a will.”

“On the contrary, Mrs. Odell,” Lynley objected politely, “people do it all the time.”

“That wasn’t the case here. I just think… well, that Richard’s not very happy. And unhappy people say lots of things that they really don’t mean and do lots of things that they wouldn’t otherwise do just to try to forget their unhappiness, don’t they?”

Neither Lynley nor Havers replied at once. Olivia moved restlessly in her chair. Outside, Bridie’s voice rose as she called to her duck.

“Did Roberta know about this conversation?” Lynley asked.

“If she did, she never mentioned it. When she was here she mostly talked-in that low-voiced way of hers-about the wedding. I think she was eager for William and me to marry. To have a sister in Bridie. To have what she once had with Gillian. She missed her sister dreadfully. I don’t believe she ever got over Gillian’s running away.” Her nervous fi ngers found a loose thread on the hem of her skirt, and she twisted it compulsively until it broke. Then she looked at it mutely, as if wondering how it came to be wrapped round her fi nger. “Bobba-that’s what William always called her, and we did as well-would take Bridie off so that William and I could have time alone. She and Bridie and Whiskers and that duck would go off together. Can you imagine what they looked like?” She smiled and smoothed the creases in her skirt. “They’d go to the river, across the common, or down to the abbey for a picnic. The four of them. And then William and I would be able to talk.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Tessa, mostly. Of course, it was a problem, but the last time he was here-the day of his death-he said it had fi nally been overcome.”

“I’m not certain that I understand,” Lynley remarked. “What kind of a problem? Emotional, you mean? An unwillingness to come to terms with her death?”

Olivia had been looking out the window, but she turned to them upon the last word. “Death?” she asked, perplexed. “Tessa’s not dead, Inspector. She deserted William a short time after Roberta was born. He’d hired a detective to find her so that he could have their marriage annulled by the Church, and Saturday afternoon he came to tell me she’d been found at last.”

“York,” the man said. “And I’m not obligated to tell you anything more. I’ve yet to be paid for my services, you know.”

Lynley gripped the telephone in his hand. He could feel the anger burning in his chest. “How does a court order sound?” he asked pleasantly.

“Listen here, old chap, don’t try to pull that kind of shit on me-”

“Mr. Houseman, may I remind you that, in spite of what you may think, you are not part of a Dashiell Hammett novel.” Lynley could just picture the man, feet up on his desk, a bottle of bourbon in the filing drawer, a gun tossed from hand to hand as he balanced the telephone receiver on his shoulder. He wasn’t too far from the truth.

Harry Houseman looked out the grimy window of his office above Jackie’s Barber Shop in Richmond’s Trinity Church Square. A light rain was falling, not enough to clean off his window, just enough to emphasise its fi lth. What a dreary day, he thought. He’d intended to spend it on a drive to the coast-a little lady in Whitby was only too eager to do some serious private investigating with him-but this kind of weather didn’t put him in the mood. And God knows he needed to be in the mood more and more these days before anything happened in the land down under. He grinned, showing a badly capped front tooth. It added a piratical dimension to his otherwise mundane appearance: dull brown hair, muddycoloured eyes, cadaverous skin, and the incongruity of full, sensual lips.

He played with a well-chewed pencil on the top of his scarred desk. His eyes caught the thin-lipped glance of his wife’s shrewish face peering moodily out at him from the photograph nearby. He reached out with his pencil and toppled it over, face down.