Havers broke into his thoughts. An underlying note of urgency in her voice made Lynley glance at her curiously. Tiny beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. She swallowed noisily. “What I can’t see is the…Tessa’s shrine. The woman walks out on him-not that she didn’t appear to have every right to- and he sets up a virtual Taj Mahal of photographs in a corner of the sitting room.”
It suddenly dawned on Lynley. “How do we know William set up the shrine?”
Havers came to her own quick terms with the knowledge. “Either of the girls could have done it,” she responded.
“Who do you imagine?”
“It had to be Gillian.”
“As a bit of revenge? A little daily reminder to William that Mummy’d run off? A little knife inserted between the ribs since he’d started to favour Roberta?”
“Bet on it, sir,” Havers agreed.
They drove on for several miles before Lynley spoke again. “She could have done it, Havers. Something tells me she was desperate enough.”
“Tessa, d’you mean?”
“Russell was gone that night. She says she took aspirin and went directly to bed, but no one can verify it. She could have gone to Keldale.”
“Why kill the dog?”
“He wouldn’t have known her. He wasn’t there nineteen years ago. Who was Tessa to him? A stranger.”
“But decapitate her first husband?” Havers frowned. “Would have been easier to divorce him, I’d think.”
“No. Not for a Catholic.”
“Even so, Russell’s a better candidate if you ask me. Who knows where he went?” When Lynley didn’t reply, she added, “Sir?”
“I…” Lynley hesitated, studying the road ahead. “Tessa’s right. He’s gone to London.”
“How can you be certain of that?”
“Because I think I saw him, Havers. At the Yard.”
“So he did go to turn her in. I suppose she knew all along that he would.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
Havers offered a new thought. “Well, then there’s Ezra.”
Lynley flashed her a smile. “William in his jimjams in the middle of the road ripping up Ezra’s watercolours while Ezra curses him to hell and back? We could have a motive for murder there. I don’t think an artist would take lightly to having someone rip up his work.”
Havers opened her mouth, stopped. She reflected for a moment. “But it wasn’t his pyjamas.”
“Yes, it was.”
“It wasn’t. It was his dressing gown. Remember? Nigel said his legs reminded him of a gorilla. So what was he doing in his dressing gown? It was still light out. It wasn’t time for bed.”
“Changing for dinner, I dare say. He’s up in his room, looks out the window, sees Ezra trespassing, and comes charging into the yard.”
“I suppose that could be it.”
“What else?”
“Exercising, perhaps?”
“Deep knee bends in his underwear? That’s hard to picture.”
“Or…perhaps with Olivia?”
Lynley smiled. “Not if everything we’ve heard about him is true. William sounds to me like a strictly after-marriage man. I don’t think he’d try any funny business with Olivia beforehand.”
“What about Nigel Parrish?”
“What about him?”
“Walking the dog back to the farm out of the goodness of his heart, like a card-carrying member of the RSPCA? Doesn’t that whole story seem a bit off to you?”
“It does. But do you really think Parrish would want to get his hands dirty with a bit of William Teys’s blood? Not to mention his head rolling across the stall fl oor.”
“To be honest, he seems the type to faint at the sight.”
They laughed, a fi rst shared communication. It dropped almost immediately into an uncomfortable silence at the sudden realisation that they could become friends.
The decision to go to Barnstingham Mental Asylum grew out of Lynley’s belief that Roberta held all the cards in the current game they were playing: the identity of the murderer, the motive behind the crime, and the disappearance of Gillian Teys. He’d stopped an hour out of York to make the arrangements by telephone, and now, pulling the car to a stop on the gravel drive in front of the building, he turned to Barbara.
“Cigarette?” He offered his gold case.
“No, sir. Thank you.”
He nodded, glanced at the imposing building, then back at her. “Rather wait here, Sergeant?” he asked as he lit his cigarette with the silver lighter. He took a few moments about replacing all the impedimenta of his habit.
She watched him with speculative eyes. “Why?”
He shrugged casually. Too casually, she noted. “You look fagged out. I thought you might want a bit of a rest.”
Fagged out. It was his public-school-fop act. She’d begun to notice how he used it occasionally to serve the need of the moment. He’d dropped it earlier. Why was he picking it up now?
“If we’re talking about exhaustion, Inspector, you look just about ready to drop. What’s up?”
He examined himself in the mirror at her words, his cigarette dangling from his lips, his eyes narrowed against the smoke, part Sam Spade, part Algernon Moncrieff. “I do look a sight.” He busied himself about his appearance for a moment: straightening his tie, examining his hair, brushing at nonexistent lint on the lapels of his jacket. She waited. Finally he met her eyes. The fop, as well as the other personae, was gone. “The farm upset you a bit yesterday,” he said frankly. “I have an idea that what we’ll find in here is going to be a hell of a lot worse than the farm.”
For a moment she couldn’t take her eyes from his, but she pressed her hand to the door and flung it open. “I can deal with it, sir,” she said abruptly and got out into the brisk autumn air.
“We’ve kept her confined,” Dr. Samuels was saying to Lynley as they walked down the transverse passage that ran straight through the building from east to west.
Barbara followed behind them, relieved to find that Barnstingham was not exactly what she had pictured when she first heard the words mental asylum. It was really not very hospital-like at all, an English baroque building laid out on cross-axes. They had entered through a front hall that rose two storeys, with fluted pilasters standing on plinths against the walls. Light and colour were the operative words here, for the room was painted a calming shade of peach, the decorative plasterwork was white, the ankle-thick carpeting was merely a shade off rust, and while the portraits were dark and moody, of the Flemish school, their subjects managed to look suitably apologetic about the fact.
All this was a relief, for when Lynley had first mentioned the need to see Roberta, to come to this place, Barbara had become quite faint, that old insidious panic setting in. Lynley had seen it, of course. Damn the man. He didn’t miss a trick.
Now that she was inside the building, she felt steadier, a feeling that improved once they left the great central hall and began their journey down the passage. Here conviviality expressed itself in soothing Constable landscapes and vases of fresh flowers and quiet voices in the air. The sound of music and singing came from a distance.
“The choir,” Dr. Samuels explained. “Here, it’s just this way.”
Samuels himself had been a secondary source of both surprise and relief. Outside the walls of the hospital, Barbara wouldn’t have known he was a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist somehow conjured up images of Freud: a bearded Victorian face, a cigar, and those speculative eyes. But Samuels had the look of a man who was more at home on horseback or hiking across the moors than probing disturbed psyches. He was well-built, loose limbed, and clean shaven, with a tendency, Barbara guessed, to be less than patient with anyone whose intelligence did not match his own. He was probably the devil on a tennis court as well.
She’d begun to feel quite at ease with the hospital when Dr. Samuels opened a narrow door-funny how it had been concealed by some panelling-and led them into the new wing of the building. This was the locked ward, looking and smelling exactly as Barbara had supposed a locked ward would. The carpeting was a very dark, serviceable brown. The walls were the colour of sunbaked sand, unadorned and broken only by doors into which small windows were set at eye level. The air was filled with that medicinal smell of antiseptics and detergents and drugs. And it was cut by a low moaning that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. It could have been the wind. It could have been anything.