The visitor was Superintendent Nies. He was waiting in the lounge, three empty pint glasses on a table nearby and a cardboard carton at his feet. He was standing, not sitting, a man wary and watchful and never relaxed. His lips thinned at the sight of Lynley, and his nostrils pinched as if he smelled something foul. He was contempt personified.

“You wanted everything, Inspector,” he snapped. “Here it is.” He gave the carton a sharp kick, not so much to move it as to direct the other man’s attention to it.

No one stirred. It was as if the raw hatred behind Nies’s words immobilised them all. Next to her, Barbara felt Lynley’s tension tightening his muscles like a whipcord. His face, however, was without expression as he took the measure of the other man.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Nies persisted nastily. He picked up the carton, dumping its contents onto the carpet. “I expect, when you ask for everything, that you do mean everything, Inspector. Something about you tells me you’re a man of your word. Or were you hoping that I’d send it all with someone else so you might avoid having any further chats with me?”

Lynley’s eyes dropped to the objects on the floor. A woman’s clothing, by their appearance.

“Perhaps you’ve had too much to drink,” he suggested.

Nies took a step forward. Blood rushed to his face. “You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to see me giving it over to drink, in my cups with flaming regret for having you in the nick for a few days over Davenport’s death. Not exactly the digs his precious lordship was used to, were they?”

Barbara had never recognised so acutely one man’s need to strike another or the atavistic savagery that often drives that need to completion. She saw it in Nies now, in his posture, in his hands with their talon-like fi ngers halfway drawn into a fist, in the cords that stood out on his neck. What she couldn’t understand was Lynley’s reaction. After the initial flash of tension, he’d become unnaturally unperturbed. That seemed to be the source of Nies’s increasing rage.

“Have you solved this case, Inspector?” Nies sneered. “Made any arrests? No, of course not. Not without having all the facts. So let me give you a few and save you a little time. Roberta Teys killed her father. She chopped off his miserable head, sat herself down, and waited to be discovered. And no bloody evidence you can dig out of the blue is ever going to prove this case otherwise. Not for Kerridge. Not for Webberly. Not for anyone. But you have a fine time digging for it, laddie. You’ll get nothing more from me. Now, get out of my way.”

Nies shoved past them, flung open the outer door, and stormed to his car. It roared into life. He ground the gears viciously and was gone.

Lynley looked at the two women. Stepha was very pale, Havers was stoic, but both clearly expected some kind of response from him. He found he couldn’t make one. Whatever devils were driving Nies’s behaviour, he didn’t care to discuss them. He longed to hang labels on the man: paranoid, psychopath, madman came to mind. But he knew too well what it felt like to be brought to the breaking point through sheer endeavour and exhaustion during a case. Lynley could see that Nies was a hair’s-breadth from breaking under the stress of the Scotland Yard scrutiny of his competence. So if it gave the man even a moment’s relief to rail wildly about their run-in fi ve years ago, he was more than happy to give Nies free rein.

“Would you get the Teys file from my room, Sergeant?” he asked Havers. “You’ll find it on the chest of drawers.”

Havers gawked at him. “Sir, that man just-”

“It’s on the chest of drawers,” Lynley repeated. He crossed the room to the heap of garments on the floor, picked up the dress, and laid it like a collapsed tent across the couch. It was a pale pastel print with a white sailor collar and long sleeves that ended in upturned white cuffs.

The left sleeve of the garment was heavily stained with a solid mass of brown. Another solid mass formed an irregular pool from thighs to knees. The bottom of the skirt was speckled with it. Blood.

He fingered the material and recognised the texture without looking to see if a label revealed it: a delicate lawn.

Shoes had been part of the package as well: large black high-heeled pumps with mud encrusted along the ridge where left sole met shoe body. These too were flecked with the same brown substance. Petticoat and underclothes completed the lot.

“That’s her church dress,” Stepha Odell said and added tonelessly, “She had two. One for winter and one for spring.”

“Her best dress?” Lynley asked.

“As far as I know.”

He was beginning to understand the villagers’ stubborn refusal to believe that the girl had committed the crime. With each new piece of information, it made less and less sense. Havers returned with the file, her face without expression. Before he began leafi ng through it, he was convinced that the information he wanted wouldn’t be there. It wasn’t.

“Damn the man,” Lynley muttered fruitlessly and looked at Havers. “He’s given us no analysis of the stains.”

“He’d have to have done them, wouldn’t he?” Havers asked.

“He’s done them. But he has no intention of giving them to us. Not if that would make our job easier.” Lynley uttered an oath beneath his breath and swept the garments back into their cardboard container.

“What’s to do?” Havers asked.

Lynley knew the answer. He needed St. James: the mechanical precision of his highly trained mind; the quick, clean certainty of his finely wrought skill. He needed a laboratory where tests could be made and a forensic expert he could trust who would make them. It was a maddening, circular sort of problem because in any direction the trail curved unquestionably back to St. James.

He regarded the open carton at his feet and gave himself the ephemeral pleasure of cursing the man from Richmond. Webberly was wrong, he thought. I’m the last person he should have involved in this. Nies reads the London condemnation too clearly. He sees in me his single serious mistake.

He considered his options. He could turn the case over to another DI: MacPherson could certainly come sailing into Keldale and have the matter taken care of within two days. But MacPherson was caught up in the Ripper murders. It would be inconceivable to move him from the one case where his expertise was so desperately needed simply because Nies couldn’t come to terms with his past. He could telephone Kerridge in Newby Wiske. Kerridge, after all, was Nies’s superior offi cer. But to have Kerridge involved, chomping at the bit to make up for the Romanivs in any way he could, was even more absurd. Besides, Kerridge didn’t have the paperwork, the results of the lab tests, the depositions. All he had was an overwhelming hatred of Nies and an inability to get along with the man. The entire situation was an irritating, howling, political maelstrom of thwarted ambition, error, and revenge. He was sick of it.

A glass was placed before him on the table. He looked up into Stepha’s serene eyes. “A bit of Odell’s is called for, I think.”

He laughed shortly. “Sergeant,” he said, “would you care to indulge?”

“No, sir,” she replied, and just when he thought she would go on in her former, exasperating I’m-on-duty manner, she added, “but I could do with a smoke, if you don’t mind.”

He handed her his gold case and silver lighter. “Have as many as you like.”

She lit her cigarette. “Got all dressed up to chop off Dad’s head? It doesn’t make sense.”

“The dress does,” Stepha said.

“Why?”

“Because it was Sunday. She was ready for church.”

Lynley and Havers looked up, realising simultaneously the import of Stephia’s words. “But Teys was killed on Saturday night.” Havers said.