“Hello,” a voice called cheerfully. “Need some help?”

Barbara turned to find a plump middle-aged woman leaning over the reception counter, pushing a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles to the top of her clipped grey hair. Her smile was welcoming, but it faded immediately when her eyes fell upon the warrant card that Barbara produced. Above them, the intricate music continued.

“Is there some sort of trouble?” the woman asked. “I suppose you want Mr. Clarence.”

“No,” Barbara replied. “That may not be necessary. I’m looking for this young woman. Her name is Gillian Teys, but we think she may be using the name Nell Graham.” She handed over the photograph, a gesture she knew would be unnecessary, for the moment she had said the name the other woman’s expression had altered and revealed.

Nonetheless, she looked at the photograph cooperatively. “Yes, this is Nell,” she said.

In spite of having been so certain, Barbara felt a surge of triumph. “Can you tell me how to locate her? It’s quite important that I fi nd her as soon as possible.”

“She’s not in trouble, is she?”

“It’s important that I find her,” Barbara said again.

“Oh yes, of course. I suppose you can’t tell me. It’s only that…” The woman fi ngered her chin nervously. “Let me get Jonah,” she said impulsively. “This is his concern.”

Before Barbara could reply, the woman was running up the stairs. In a moment the guitar music stopped abruptly to a storm of protesting voices and then laughter. That was followed by the sound of footsteps. The hushed voice of the receptionist was met by a man’s response.

When he came into sight on the stairway, Barbara saw that he was the musician, for he carried a fine guitar over his shoulder. He was far too young to be the Reverend George Clarence, but he wore clerical garb and his marked resemblance to the founder of Testament House indicated to Barbara that this must be the man’s son. For here were the same chiselled features, the same broad expanse of forehead, the same quick glance that assimilated and evaluated within an instant. Even his hair was the same, parted on the left, with an unruly tuft that no comb could discipline. He was not a big man, probably no more than fi ve feet eight inches tall, and his build was slight. But there was something about the way he held his body that indicated the presence of an inner core of strength and self-confi dence.

He strode down the hall and extended his hand. “Jonah Clarence,” he said. His grip was firm. “Mother tells me you’re looking for Nell.”

Mrs. Clarence had removed her spectacles from their perch on the top of her head. She chewed on the earpiece unconsciously as she listened to their conversation, her brow creased and her eyes moving back and forth between them as they spoke.

Barbara handed him the photograph. “This is Gillian Teys,” she said. “Her father was murdered three weeks ago in Yorkshire, and she’s going to have to come with me for some questioning.”

Clarence greeted the statement with no strong visible reaction beyond what appeared to be an inability to take his eyes from Barbara’s face. But he made himself do so, made himself look at the picture. Then his eyes met his mother’s. “It’s Nell.”

“Jonah,” she murmured. “My dearest…” Her voice was laced with compassion.

Clarence handed the photograph back to Barbara but spoke to his mother. “It had to happen one day, didn’t it?” he said. His tone was coloured by emotion.

“Darling, shall I…Do you want to…”

He shook his head. “I was just about to leave anyway,” he said, and looked at Barbara. “I’ll take you to Nell. She’s my wife.”

Lynley gazed at the painting of Keldale Abbey and wondered why he had been so blind to its message. The painting’s beauty lay in its utter simplicity, its devotion to detail, its refusal to distort or romanticise the crumbling ruin, to make it anything other than what it was: a vestige of time dead, being devoured by time to come.

Skeletal walls arched against a desolate sky, straining to lift themselves out of the inevitable end that waited for them on the ground below. They fought against flora: ferns that grew stubbornly out of barren crevices; wildflowers that bloomed on the edge of transept walls; grass that grew thickly and mingled with wild parsley on the very stones where monks had once knelt in prayer.

Steps led to nowhere. Curving stairways that once had carried the devoted from cloister to parlour, from day room to court, now sank into moss-covered oblivion, submitting to changes that did not make them ignoble, but merely moulded them into a different shape and a purpose changed.

Windows were gone. Where long ago stained glass had proudly enclosed presbytery and quire, nave and transept, nothing remained but gaping holes, gazing sightlessly out onto a landscape which rightfully proclaimed that it alone had ascendancy in the battle with time.

How did one really define the remains of Keldale Abbey? Was it the plundered ruin of a glorious past or a tumbling promise of what the future could be? Wasn’t it all, Lynley thought, in the defi nition?

He stirred at the sound of a car stopping at the lodge, of doors opening and the murmur of voices, of uneven footsteps approaching. He realised that darkness was falling in the lounge and switched on one of the lamps just as St. James entered the room. He was alone, as Lynley had known he would be.

They faced each other across a short expanse of inoffensive carpeting, across a virtual chasm created and maintained by one man’s guilt and another man’s pain. They both knew and recognised these components of their history, and, as if to escape them, Lynley went behind the bar and poured each of them a whisky. He crossed the room and handed it to his friend.

“Is she outside?” he asked.

“She’s gone to the church. Knowing Deborah, to have one last look at the graveyard, I expect. We’re off tomorrow.”

Lynley smiled. “You’ve been braver than I. Hank would have driven me off within the first five minutes. Are you fleeing to the lakes?”

“No. To York for a day, then back to London. I’m to be in court to testify on Monday morning. I need a bit of time to complete a fibre analysis before then.”

“Rotten luck to have had so few days.”

“We’ve the rest of our lives. Deborah understands.”

Lynley nodded and looked from St. James to the windows in which they saw themselves reflected, two men so entirely different from each other, who shared an afflicted past and who could, if he chose, share a full, rich future. It was all, he decided, in the defi nition. He tossed back the rest of his drink.

“Thank you for your help today, St. James,” he said finally, extending his hand. “You and Deborah are wonderful friends.”

Jonah Clarence drove them to Islington in his dilapidated Morris. It wasn’t a very long drive, and he was quiet for every moment of it, his hands on the wheel showing white knuckles that betrayed his distress.

They lived on a peculiar little street called Keystone Crescent, directly off Caledonian Road. Blessed with two take-away food stores at its head-exuding the multicultural odours of frying egg rolls, falafel, and fi sh and chips- and a butcher shop at its foot on Pentonville Road, it was located in an area of town that was arguing between industrial and residential. Dressmaking factories, car hire firms, and tool companies gave way to streets which were trying very hard to become fashionable.

Keystone Crescent was just that, a crescent lined on one side with concave and on the other with a convex terrace of houses. All were fenced by identical wrought iron, and where once diminutive gardens had bloomed, concrete paving provided additional parking for cars.

The buildings were sooty brick, two storeys tall, topped by dormer windows and a thin scalloping of ornamentation at the roofl ine. Each building had its own basement fl at, and while some of the houses had recently been refurbished in keeping with the neighbourhood effort towards chic, the one in front of which Jonah Clarence parked his car was defi nitely shabby, whitewashed and decorated with green woodwork at one time, but grimy now, with two unlidded dustbins standing in front of it.