“No!” Raw horror tore her voice. “Don’t say that! Don’t you ever! Don’t you do that to yourself! It isn’t your fault!” Having spoken so quickly, really without thinking of the impression that her words would have upon Lynley, it was suddenly as if she had said too much- far more than she had intended to say-and she went back to fumbling with her camera, taking it apart this time, detaching lens from body and body from tripod, putting everything away.

He watched her. Her movements were jerky, like an old-time motion picture run at the wrong speed. Perhaps sensing this and realising what her discomfort revealed, she stopped what she was doing, her head bent, one hand at her eyes. Her hair was caught in a shaft of sunlight. It was the colour of autumn. Summer’s death.

“Is he still at the hall? Did you leave him there, Deb?” It wasn’t that he wanted to know but that she needed to tell him. Even now he couldn’t let that need go unanswered.

“He wanted…it was the pain. He doesn’t want me to see it. He thinks he’s protecting me if he makes me leave.” She looked up at the sky, as if for some sort of sign. The delicate muscles worked in her throat. “Being cut out like this. It’s so hard. I hate it.”

He understood. “That’s because you love him.”

She stared at him for a moment before she replied. “I do. I do love him, Tommy. He’s half of myself. He’s part of my soul.” She put a tentative hand on his arm, a mere whisper of a touch. “I want you to find someone to love you like that. It’s what you need. It’s what you deserve. But I…I can’t be that someone for you. I don’t even want to be.”

His face blanched at her words. His spirit despaired at the fi nality behind them. Seeking composure, he found a distraction in the grave at their feet. “Is this the source of your morning’s inspiration?” he asked lightly.

“Yes.” She deliberately matched her tone to his. “I’ve heard so much about the baby in the abbey that I thought I’d have a peek at its grave.”

“‘As Flame to Smoke,’” he read. “Bizarre epitaph for a child.”

“I’m rather attached to Shakespeare,” a thin voice said behind them. They swung around. Father Hart, looking like a spiritual gnome in his cassock and surplice, stood on the gravel path a few feet away, hands folded demurely over his stomach. He’d managed to come upon them noiselessly, like an apparition taking its form from the mist.

“Left to my own devices I always think Shakespeare’s just the thing for a grave. Timeless. Poetic. He gives life and death meaning.” He patted the pockets of his cassock and brought out a packet of Dunhills, lighting one absently and pinching the match between his fingers before pocketing it. It was a dream-like movement, as if he were unaware that he was doing it at all.

Lynley noticed the yellow pallour of his skin and the rheumy quality of his eyes. “This is Mrs. St. James, Father Hart,” he said gently. “She’s taking photographs of your most famous grave.”

Father Hart stirred from his reverie. “Most famous…?” Puzzled, he looked from man to woman before his eyes fell on the grave and clouded. His cigarette burned, ignored, between his stained fingers. “Oh, yes. I see.” He frowned. “What a horrible thing to have done to an infant, leaving it out naked in the cold to die. I needed special permission to bury the poor thing here.”

“Special permission?”

“She was unbaptized. But I call her Marina.” He blinked quickly, moving on to other things. “But if it’s famous graves that you’ve come to see, Mrs. St. James, then what you really want is the crypt.”

“Sounds like something from Edgar Allan Poe,” Lynley remarked.

“Not at all. It’s a holy place.” The priest dropped his cigarette to the path and crushed it out. He stooped unselfconsciously for the extinguished butt, put it into his pocket, and began to walk in the direction of the church. Lynley picked up Deborah’s camera equipment, and they followed.

“It’s the burial place of St. Cedd,” Father Hart was saying. “Do come in. I was just getting ready for daily Mass but I’ll show it to you first.” He unlocked the doors of the church with an enormous key and motioned them inside. “Weekday Mass is a bit of a bygone now. No one much bothers unless it’s a Sunday. William Teys was my only consistent daily attendant, and with William gone…well, I’ve found myself more often than not saying Mass in an empty church during the week.”

“He was a close friend of yours, wasn’t he?” Lynley asked.

The priest’s hand wavered over the light switch. “He was…like a son.”

“Did he ever talk to you about the trouble he had sleeping? About his need for sleeping pills?”

The hand wavered again. The priest hesitated. It was too long a pause, Lynley decided, and adjusted his position in the dim light to see the old man’s face more clearly. His eyes were on the light switch but his lips moved as if in prayer.

“Are you all right, Father Hart?”

“I…yes, fine. I just…so often the memory of him.” The priest pulled himself up with an effort, like someone drawing the scattered pieces of a puzzle into one disjointed pile. “William was a good man, Inspector, but a troubled spirit. He…he never spoke to me about having difficulty sleeping, but it doesn’t surprise me at all to hear it.”

“Why?”

“Because unlike so many troubled souls who drown themselves in alcohol or escape their difficulties some other way, William always faced them head on and did the best he could. He was strong and decent, but his burdens were tremendous.”

“Burdens like Tessa leaving and Gillian running away?”

On the second name, the priest’s eyes closed. He swallowed with difficulty: it was a rasping sound. “Tessa hurt him. But Gillian devastated him. He was never the same once she’d gone.”

“What was she like?”

“She…she was an angel, Inspector. Sunshine.” The shaking hand moved quickly to the lights and switched them on, and the priest gestured towards the church. “Well. What do you think of it?”

It was decidedly not the expected interior of a village church. Village churches tend to be small, square, purely functional affairs with an absence of colour, line, or beauty. This was none of that. Whoever had built it had cathedrals in mind, for two great pillars at the west end had been intended to bear more tremendous weight than that of St. Catherine’s roof.

“Ah, so you’ve noticed,” Father Hart murmured, following the direction of Lynley’s gaze from pillars to apse. “This was to have been the site of the abbey; St. Catherine’s was to have been the great abbey church. But a conflict among the monks resulted in the other location by Keldale Hall. It was a miracle.”

“A miracle?” Deborah asked.

“A real miracle. If they’d built the abbey here, where the remains of St. Cedd are, it would all have been destroyed in the time of Henry VIII. Can you imagine destroying the very church where St. Cedd lay buried?” The priest’s voice managed to convey his complete revulsion. “No, it was an act of God that brought about the disagreement among the monks. And since the foundation for this church was already laid and the crypt complete, there was no reason to disinter the body of the saint. So they left him here with just a small chapel.” He moved with painful slowness to a stone stairway that led from the main aisle down into darkness. “It’s just this way,” he beckoned them.

The crypt was a second tiny church deep within the main church of St. Catherine’s. It was a vault, arched in Norman style, and pillared with columns that had meagre ornamentation. At its far end a simple stone altar was adorned with two candles and a crucifi x, and along its sides stones from an earlier version of the church-crossheads and cross shafts and pieces from vesicular windows-lay preserved for posterity. It was a damp and musty place, poorly lit and smelling of loam. Green mould clung to the walls.