“So Roberta must have got up as usual on Sunday morning, put her church clothes on, and waited for her father.” Lynley eyed the dress heaped in the carton. “He wasn’t in the house, so she probably assumed he was somewhere on the farm. She wouldn’t worry, of course, because he’d be back in time to take her to church. He probably never missed church in his life. But when he didn’t show up, she began to get worried. She went out to look for him.”

“And she found him in the barn,” Havers concluded. “But the blood on her dress-how do you think it came to be there?”

“I’d guess she was in shock. She must have picked up the body and cradled it in her lap.” “But he had no head! How could she-” Lynley went on. “She lowered the body back down to the floor and, still in shock, sat there until Father Hart came and found her.” “But then why say she killed him?” “She never said that,” Lynley replied. “What do you mean?” “What she said was, ‘I did it. I’m not sorry.’”

Lynley’s voice held a note of decision. “That sounds like a confession to me.” “Not necessarily.” He ran his fi ngers round the edges of the stain on the dress and tested the spacing of the spatters on the skirt. “But it does sound like something.”

“What?” “That Roberta knows quite well who murdered her father.”

Lynley awoke with a jolt. Early morning light filtered into the room in delicate bands that streaked across the floor to the bed. A chill breeze blew back the curtains and carried upon it the pleasant sounds of waking birds and the distant cries of sheep. But none of this touched his awareness. He lay in the bed and knew only depression, overwhelming desperation, and the burning of desire. He longed to turn on his side and fi nd her there, her wealth of hair spread across the bedclothes, her eyes closed in sleep. He longed to arouse her to wakefulness, his mouth and tongue feeling the subtle, familiar changes in her body that betrayed her desire.

He flung back the covers. Madness, he thought. He began pulling on clothing mindlessly, furiously, any article that first came to hand. Escape was the exigency.

He grabbed an Aran sweater and ran from the room, thundering down the stairs and out into the street. There, he finally noticed the time. It was half past six.

A heavy mist lay on the dale, swirling delicately round the edges of buildings and blanketing the river. To his right the high street was shuttered, abandoned. Not even the greengrocer was stirring his boxes out onto the pavement. Sinji’s windows were darkened, the Wesleyan chapel was barred, and the tea room looked back at him with blank disinterest.

He walked to the bridge, wasted fi ve minutes restlessly tossing pebbles into the river, and was finally distracted by the sight of the church.

On its hillock, St. Catherine’s looked peacefully down upon the village, the very exorcist he needed for the demons of his past. He began to walk towards it.

It was a proud little church. Surrounded by trees and an ancient, crumbling graveyard, it lifted its splendid Norman exterior to the sky. Its apse housed a semicircle of stained glass windows, while its bell tower at the opposite end played host to a whispering band of doves. For a moment he watched them rustling at the edges of the roof, then he walked up the gravel path to the lych gate. He entered, and the peace of the graveyard settled round him.

Idly, he began to wander among the graves, looking at tombstones made barely legible by the ravages of time. The yard was overgrown with weeds and grass, dampened by morning mist. Gravestones bent into thick vegetation. Moss flourished on surfaces that never saw sun, and trees sheltered fi nal resting places of people long forgotten.

A curious group of twisting Italian cypresses arched over a few toppled tombstones some distance from the church. Their contortions were mystifying, oddly humanoid, as if they were attempting to protect the graves beneath them. Intrigued, he walked in their direction and saw her.

How completely like her to have rolled up the legs of her faded blue jeans, to have removed her shoes and plunged barefoot into the tall, damp growth so as to capture the graves in the best angle and light. How like her as well to be utterly oblivious to her surroundings: oblivious to the streak of mud that snaked from ankle to calf, to the torn crimson leaf that had somehow become tangled in her hair, to the fact that he stood less than ten yards away and drank in her every movement and longed quite hopelessly for her to be again what she once had been in his life.

The low ground fog hid and revealed in alternate patches. The early sunlight weakly dappled the stones. An inquisitive bird watched with bright eyes from a grave nearby. He was only dimly aware of this, but he knew that with her camera she would capture it all.

He looked for St. James. Surely the man would be sitting somewhere nearby, fondly watching his wife work. But he was nowhere in sight. She was very much alone.

He felt immediately as if the church had betrayed him with its early promise of comfort and peace. It’s no good, Deb, he thought as he watched her. Nothing makes it go away. I want you to leave him. Betray him. Come back to me. It’s where you belong.

She looked up, brushed her hair off her face, and saw him. He knew from her expression that he might as well have said everything aloud. She read it at once.

“Oh, Tommy.”

Of course she wouldn’t pretend, wouldn’t fill the awkward moment with amusing chatter that, Helen-like, would serve to get them through the encounter. Instead she bit her lip, looking very much as if he had struck her, and turned back to her tripod, making unnecessary adjustments.

He walked to her side. “I’m so sorry,” he said. She continued to fumble uselessly with her equipment, her head bent, her hair hiding her face. “I can’t get past it. I try to see my way clear, but it’s just no good.” Her face was averted. She seemed to be examining the pattern of the hills. “I tell myself that it’s ended the right way for us all, but I don’t believe that. I still want you, Deb.”

She turned to him then, her face quite white, her eyes gleaming with tears. “You can’t. You’ve got to let that go.”

“My mind accepts that, but nothing else does.” A tear escaped and descended her cheek. He put out his hand to wipe it away but remembered himself and dropped his arm to his side. “I woke up this morning so desperate to make love with you again that I thought if I didn’t get out of the room at once I should begin clawing at the walls in pure, adolescent frustration. I thought the church would be a balm to me. What I didn’t think was that you would be wandering round its graveyard at dawn.” He looked at her equipment. “What are you doing here? Where’s Simon?”

“He’s still at the hall. I…I woke up early and came out to see the village.”

It didn’t ring true. “Is he ill?” he asked sharply.

She scanned the branches of the cypresses. A shallowness in Simon’s breathing had immediately awakened her shortly before six. He was lying so still that for one horrifying moment she thought he was dying. He was drawing in each breath carefully, and she knew all at once that his only thought had been not to awaken her. But when she reached for his hand, his fingers closed bruisingly round her own. “Let me get your medicine,” she whispered, and had done so, and then had watched his determined face as he battled to be master of the pain. “Can you…for an hour, my love?” It was the part of his life that brooked no companion. It was the part of his life she could never share. She had left him.

“He had…there was some pain this morning.”

Lynley felt the full impact of Deborah’s words. He understood so well everything that they implied. “Christ, there’s no escaping it, is there?” he asked bitterly. “Even that’s part of the miserable account.”