He saw now that he had not wished to forget the past, that he had done everything instead to keep it alive, as if his intention had always been to make it, not Deborah, his bride. He was sick at heart.

With the sickness came the realisation that there were facts to be faced about Stepha as well. But he could not bring himself to them. Not yet.

As the final movement of the symphony came to a close, he turned down the winding road from the moors into Keldale. Autumn leaves flew from under the car’s wheels, leaving a cloud of red, gold, and yellow billowing behind him, promising winter. He pulled in front of the lodge and spent a moment gazing at the windows, numbly wondering how and when he was going to piece together the fragments of his life.

Havers must have been watching for him from the lounge, for she came to the door as soon as he switched off the car’s ignition. He groaned and steeled himself to another confrontation, but she gave him no chance to make preliminary remarks.

“I’ve found Gillian,” she announced.

She had somehow survived the morning. The dreadful row with Lynley followed by the horrors of Roberta’s bedroom had served to wear down her anger and wretchedness, abrading them both into a dull detachment. She knew he was going to sack her anyway. She certainly deserved it. But before he did, she would prove to him that she could be a decent DS. In order to do that, however, there was this one last meeting to get through, this one last opportunity to show her stuff.

She watched Lynley’s eyes roam over the unusual collection of items spread out on one of the tables in the lounge: the album containing the defaced family pictures, a dog-eared and well-thumbed novel, the photograph from Roberta’s chest of drawers, the additional one of the two sisters, and a collection of six yellowed newspaper pages, all folded and shaped to the identical size, seventeen by twenty-two inches.

Lynley absently felt in his pocket for his cigarettes, lit one, and sat down on the couch. “What is this, Sergeant?” he asked.

“I think these are the facts on Gillian,” she responded. Her voice was carefully modulated, but a slight quaver in it caught his attention. She cleared her throat to hide it.

“You’re going to need to enlighten me, I’m afraid,” he said. “Cigarette?”

Her fingers itched to feel the cylinder of tobacco; her body ached for the soothing smoke. But she knew, if she lit one, it would betray her shaking hands. “No, thank you,” she replied. She took a breath, kept her eyes on his noncommittal face, and went on. “How does your man Denton line your chest of drawers?”

“With some sort of paper, I should guess. I’ve never noticed.”

“But it isn’t newspaper, is it?” She sat down opposite him, squeezing her hands into fi sts in her lap, feeling the sharp crescent pain of nails biting palms. “It wouldn’t be, because the newsprint would come off on your clothes.”

“True.”

“So I was intrigued when you mentioned that Roberta’s drawers were lined with newspapers. And I remembered Stepha saying that Roberta used to come every day for the Guardian.”

“Until Paul Odell died. Then she stopped.”

Barbara pushed her hair back behind her ears. It was quite unimportant, she told herself, if he didn’t believe her, if he laughed at the conclusions she had drawn after nearly three hours in that horrible room. “Except that I don’t think the reason she stopped coming for the Guardian had anything to do with Paul Odell. I think it was Gillian.”

His eyes drifted to the newspapers and Barbara saw him take in what she herself had noticed: that Roberta had lined her drawers with the classified section. Moreover, although there were six pieces of newspaper on the table, they were duplicates of only two pages of the Guardian, as if something memorable had appeared in a single issue, and Roberta had collected that day’s edition from the villagers to keep as souvenirs.

“The personal column,” Lynley murmured. “By God, Havers, Gillian sent her a message.”

Barbara pulled one of the sheets towards her and ran her finger down the column. “‘R. Look at the advert. G,’” she read. “I think that’s the message.”

“Look at the advertisement? What advertisement?”

She reached for a representation of the second saved page. “This one, I think.”

He read it. Dated nearly four years previously, it was a small, square announcement of a meeting in Harrogate, a panel discussion involving a group from an organisation called Testament House. The members of the panel were listed, but Gillian Teys was not among them. Lynley looked up, his brown eyes frankly quizzical.

“You’ve lost me, Sergeant.”

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Aren’t you familiar with Testament House? Never mind, I keep forgetting that you haven’t been in uniform in years. Testament House is run out of Fitzroy Square by an Anglican priest. He used to teach at university but evidently one day one of his students asked him why he wasn’t bothering to practise what he preached-feeding the hungry and clothing the naked-and he decided that was something in his life that he ought to address. So he started Testament

House.”

“Which is?”

“An organisation that collects runaways. Teenaged prostitutes-both male and female-drug abusers of every colour and shape, and everyone else under the age of twenty-one who’s hanging about aimlessly in Trafalgar or Piccadilly or in any of the stations just waiting to be preyed on by a pimp or a whore. He’s been doing it for years. The uniformed police all know him. We always took kids to him.”

“He’s the Reverend George Clarence that’s listed here, I take it?”

She nodded. “He goes out on fund-raising tours for the organisation.”

“Do I understand you to mean that you believe Gillian Teys was picked up by this group in London?”

“I…Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

It had taken her ages to find the advertisement, ages longer to decipher its signifi cance, and now everything-most especially her career, she admitted-depended upon Lynley’s willingness to believe. “Because of this name.” She pointed to the third on the list of panelists.

“Nell Graham?”

“Yes.”

“I’m completely in the dark.”

“I think Nell Graham was the message Roberta was waiting for. She faithfully searched the paper each day for years, waiting to see what had happened to her sister. Nell Graham told her. It meant Gillian had survived.”

“Why Nell Graham? Why not,” he glanced at the other names, “Terence Hanover, Caroline Paulson, or Margaret Crist?”

Havers picked up the battered novel from the table. “Because none of those were born of one of the Brontës.” She tapped the book. “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is about Helen Huntington, a woman who breaks the social code of her time and leaves her alcoholic husband to start a new life. She falls in love with a man who knows nothing about her past, who knows only the name she has chosen for herself: Helen Graham, Nell Graham, Inspector.” She finished and waited in agony for his reponse.

When it came, nothing could have surprised her more, could have disarmed her more quickly. “Bravo, Barbara,” he said softly, his eyes lit and a smile breaking over his face. He leaned forward earnestly. “What’s your theory on how she came to be involved with this group?”

The relief was so tremendous that Barbara found she had begun trembling from head to toe. She took a ragged breath and somehow found her voice. “My…I suspect that Gillian had enough money to get to London but that ran out fairly soon. They may have picked her up off the street somewhere or in one of the stations.”

“But wouldn’t they return her to her father?”

“That’s not how Testament House works. They encourage the kids to go home or at least to phone their parents and let them know they’re all right, but no one is forced to do it. If they choose to stay at Testament, they just have to obey the rules. No questions asked.”