“All of these test as the dog’s blood, Tommy.” He turned to his wife. “My love, will you demonstrate? As you did in the lab? On this bit of lawn?”

Deborah cooperatively dropped to her knees, resting back on her heels. Her rich, umber dress billowed out and spread on the ground like a mantle. St. James moved behind her.

“A willing dog would make this easier to imagine, but we’ll do our best. Roberta-who had access to her father’s sleeping pills, I should guess-would have given the dog the drug earlier. In his dinner, perhaps. She would have had to make sure the animal stayed in the barn. It wouldn’t have done to have had the creature keel over in the village somewhere. Once the dog was unconscious, she would kneel down on the ground just as Deborah has done. Only that particular posture could give us the stains in the precise places they appear on her dress. She would lift the dog’s head and hold it in the crook of her arm.” He gently bent Deborah’s arm to demonstrate. “Then, with her right hand, she would cut the dog’s throat.”

“That’s insane,” Lynley said hoarsely. “Why?”

“Wait a moment, Tommy. The dog’s head is turned away from her. She drives the knife into his throat, which results in the pool of blood on the skirt of her dress. She pulls the knife upward with her right hand until the job is done.” He pointed to specific areas on Deborah’s dress. “We have blood on the elbow where the head was cradled, blood on the skirt where it poured from the neck, and blood on the right sleeve and cuff from where she drove the knife in and continued the path of the slash.” St. James touched his wife’s hair lightly. “Thank you, my love.” He helped her to her feet.

Lynley walked back to the car and examined the dress. “Frankly, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Why on earth would she do it? Are you saying the girl dressed herself up on a Saturday night in her best Sunday clothes, calmly went out to the barn, and slit the throat of a dog she’d loved since childhood?” He looked up. “Why?”

“I can’t answer that. I can’t tell you what she was thinking, only what she had to have done.”

“But couldn’t she have gone out to the barn, found the dog dead, and, in her panic, picked him up, cradled him, and got the blood all over herself then?”

There was a fractional pause. “Possibly. But unlikely.”

“But it’s possible. It is possible?”

“Yes. But unlikely, Tommy.”

“What scenario do you have then?”

Deborah and St. James exchanged uneasy glances in which Lynley saw that they had discussed the case and were of a mutual opinion they were reluctant to share. “Well?” he demanded. “Are you saying that Roberta killed her dog, that her father came to the barn and discovered the deed, that they got into a tremendous row, and then she beheaded him?”

“No, no. It’s quite possible that Roberta didn’t kill her father at all. But she was defi nitely present when it happened. She had to have been.”

“Why?”

“Because his blood is all over the bottom of her dress.”

“Perhaps she went to the barn, found his body, and fell to her knees in shock.”

St. James shook his head. “That idea doesn’t wash.”

“Why not?”

He pointed to the garment on the back of the car. “Look at the pattern. Teys’s blood is in splatters. You know what that means as well as I. It only got there one way.”

Lynley was silent for a moment. “She was standing by when it happened,” he concluded.

“She had to have been. If indeed she didn’t do it herself, then she was standing right there when someone else did.”

“Is she protecting someone, Tommy?” Deborah asked, seeing the expression on Lynley’s face.

He didn’t reply at once. He was thinking of patterns: patterns of words, patterns of images, patterns of behaviours. He was thinking of what a person learns, and when he learns it, and when it emerges into practical use. He was thinking of knowledge and how it ultimately, inevitably combines with experience and points to what is incontrovertible truth.

He roused himself to answer the question with one of his own. “St. James, what would you do, how far would you go, to save Deborah?” It was a dangerous query. Its risk was deadly. These were waters, perhaps, best left unexplored.

“‘Forty thousand brothers?’ Is that where we are with it now?” St. James’ voice was unchanged, but the angles of his face were a warning, finely drawn and grim.

“How far would you go?” Lynley insisted.

“Tommy, don’t!” Deborah put out her hand, a gesture to stop him from going any further, to stop him from doing irreparable damage to the delicate crystal of their friable peace.

“Would you hold back the truth? Would you lay down your life? How far would you go to save Deborah?”

St. James looked at his wife. The colour had completely drained from her face; her sprinkling of freckles danced across her nose; her eyes were haunted with tears. And he understood. This was no grappling in an Elsinore grave, but the question primeval.

“I’d do anything,” he replied, his eyes on his wife. “By God, yes, I would. I’d do anything.”

Lynley nodded. “People generally do, don’t they, for the ones they love most.”

He chose Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6, Pathetique. He smiled as the swelling of the first movement filled the car. Helen would never have allowed it.

“Darling Tommy, absolutely not!” she would have protested. “Let’s not drive our mutual depression right into suicide!” Then she would have resolutely rooted through all of his tapes to find something suitably uplifting: invariably Strauss, played at full volume with Helen making her usual assortment of amusing remarks over the din. “Just picture them, Tommy, flitting through the woods in their little tutus. It’s positively religious!”

Today, however, the heavy theme of Pathetique with its relentless exploration of man’s spiritual suffering suited his mood. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so burdened by a case. It felt as if a tremendous weight, having nothing whatsoever to do with the responsibility of getting to the bottom of the matter, were pressing upon his heart. He knew the source. Murder-its atavistic nature and ineffable consequences-was a hydra. Each head, ruthlessly cut off in an effort to reach the “prodigious dog-like body” of culpability, left in its place two heads more venomous than the last. But unlike so many of his previous cases, in which mere rote suffi ced to see him sear his way to the core of evil-stopping the flow of blood, allowing no further growth, and leaving him personally untouched by the encounter-this case spoke to him far more intimately. He knew instinctively that the death of William Teys was merely one of the heads of the serpent, and the knowledge that eight others waited to do battle with him-and, more than that, that he had not even come to know the true nature of the evil he faced-filled him with a sense of trepidation. But he knew himself well enough to know that there was more to his desolation and despair than the death of a man in a Keldale barn.

There was Havers to be dealt with. But beyond Havers, there was the truth. For underneath her bitter, unfounded accusations, her ugliness and hurt, the words she spoke rang with veracity. Had he not indeed spent the last year of his life fruitlessly seeking a replacement for Deborah? Not in the way Havers had suggested, but in a way far more dishonest than an inconsequential coupling in which two bodies meet, experience momentary pleasure, and separate to lead their individual lives, untouched and unchanged by the encounter. That, at least, was an expression of some sort, a giving of the moment no matter how brief. But for the last year of his life he had given nothing to anyone.

Behind his behaviour, wasn’t the reality that he had maintained his isolated celibacy this last, long year not because of Deborah but because he had become high priest in a religion of one: a celebrant caught up in devotion to the past? In this twisted religion, he had held up every woman in his life to unforgiving scrutiny and had found each one wanting in comparison to Deborah, not the real Deborah but a mystical goddess who lived only in his mind.