“Or perhaps you’re the best for the job,” Lynley finished. “What do you know about the case?”

“I…nothing. Only that-”

“Tommy?” They swung around at the sound of the voice, the single word spoken as if on a breath. The bride stood in the doorway, a spray of flowers in one hand and others tucked into the tumble of coppery hair that fell round her shoulders and down her back. Backlit from the hallway, she looked in her ivory dress as if she were surrounded entirely by a cloud, a Titian creation come to life. “Helen tells me you’re leaving…?”

Lynley appeared to have nothing to say. He felt in his pockets, brought out a gold cigarette case, opened it, and then snapped it shut with a flash of annoyance. During this operation the bride watched him, the flowers in her hand trembling momentarily.

“It’s the Yard, Deb,” Lynley finally answered. “I have to go.”

She watched him without speaking, fi ngering a pendant she wore at her throat. Not until he met her eyes did she reply. “What a disappointment for everyone. It’s not an emergency, I hope. Simon told me last night that you might be reassigned to the Ripper case.”

“No. Just a meeting.”

“Ah.” She looked as if she might say something more-indeed, she began to do so-but instead she turned to Barbara with a friendly smile. “I’m Deborah St. James.”

Lynley rubbed his forehead. “Lord, I am sorry.” Mechanically, he completed the introduction. “Where’s Simon?”

“He was right behind me, but I think Dad caught him. He’s absolutely terrified to let us off on our own, certain I’ll never take care of Simon well enough.” Her laughter bubbled up. “Perhaps I should have considered the problems of marrying a man my father is so inordinately fond of. “‘The electrodes,’ he keeps lecturing me. ‘You mustn’t forget to see to his leg every morning.’ I think he’s told me that ten times today.”

“I imagine it was all you could do to keep him from going on the honeymoon as well.”

“Well, of course, they’ve not been apart for more than a day since…” She stopped suddenly, awkwardly. Their eyes met. She bit the inside of her lip and an ugly fl ush stained her cheeks.

There was an immediate, anxious silence between them, the kind in which the most telling sort of communication exists in body language and tension in the air. It was fi nally-mercifully, Barbara decided-broken by the sound of slow, painfully uneven footsteps in the hall, awkward harbinger of Deborah’s husband.

“I see that you’ve come to capture Tommy.” St. James paused in the doorway but continued to speak quietly, as was his habit, to direct attention away from his disability and put others at ease in his presence. “That’s a strange twist on tradition, Barbara. Time was when the brides were kidnapped, not the best man.”

He was, Barbara decided, very much Hephaestus to Lynley’s Apollo. Aside from his eyes, the satin blue of a highland sky, and his hands, the sensitive tools of an artist, Simon Allcourt-St. James was singularly unattractive. His hair was dark, unruly with curls, and haphazardly cut in a way that did nothing to make it manageable. His face was a combination of aquilinity and angles, harsh in repose, forbidding in anger, yet vibrant with good nature when softened by his smile. He was sapling thin, but not sapling sturdy, a man who had known too much pain and sorrow at far too young an age.

Barbara smiled as he joined them, her fi rst genuine smile of the entire afternoon. “But even best men are generally not kidnapped to New Scotland Yard. How are you, Simon?”

“Fine. Or so my father-in-law continues to tell me. Lucky as well. It seems he saw it all from the beginning. He knew it directly the day of her birth. You’ve been introduced to Deborah?”

“Only just now.”

“And we can keep you no longer?”

“Webberly’s called a meeting,” Lynley put in. “You know how that is.”

“How I do. Then we won’t ask you to stay. We’re off ourselves in a very little while. Helen has the address if anything should come up.”

“Don’t give a thought to that.” Lynley paused as if he were not quite sure what to do next. “My warmest congratulations, St. James,” he settled on saying.

“Thank you,” the other man replied. He nodded to Barbara, touched his bride’s shoulder lightly, and left the room.

How odd, Barbara thought. They didn’t even shake hands.

“Will you go to the Yard dressed like that?” Deborah asked Lynley.

He looked at his clothes ruefully. “Anything to keep up my reputation as a rake.” They laughed together. It was a warm communication that died as suddenly as it had risen. From it grew yet another little silence.

“Well,” Lynley began.

“I’d a speech all planned,” Deborah said quickly, looking down at her fl owers. They trembled once again in her hand and a shower of baby’s breath fell to the floor. She raised her head. “Something…it was just the kind of thing Helen might say. Talk about my childhood, Dad, this house. You know the sort of thing. Witty and clever. But I’m absolutely pathetic at that sort of thing. Quite out of my depth. A hopeless incompetent.” She looked down again to see that a very small dachshund had come into the study and carried in its jaws a woman’s sequined handbag. The dog placed the bag at Deborah’s satin-shod feet, supremely confident that the offering had merit. A tail wagged in the friendliest fashion. “Oh, no! Peach!” Laughing, Deborah bent to retrieve the purloined article, but when she straightened, her green eyes glittered with tears. “Thank you, Tommy. For everything. Really. For it all.”

“The best, Deb,” he said lightly in reply. He went to her, hugged her quickly to him, and brushed a kiss against her hair.

And it came to Barbara, as she stood there watching, that for some reason St. James had left the two of them together precisely so that Lynley could do just that.

The body had no head. That single, grisly detail was the most prominent feature of the police photographs that were being passed among the three CID officers gathered at the circular table in the Scotland Yard office.

Father Hart looked nervously from one face to the next, and he fingered the tiny silver rosary in his pocket. It had been blessed by Pius XII in 1952. Not an individual audience, of course. One could never hope for that. But certainly that trembling, numinous hand making the sign of the cross over two thousand reverential pilgrims counted for a powerful sort of something. Eyes closed, he’d held the rosary high above his head as if somehow that would allow the Pope’s blessing to strike it more potently.

He was well on his way into the third decade of the sorrowful mysteries when the tall, blond man spoke.

“‘What a blow was there given,’” he murmured, and Father Hart looked his way.

Was he a policeman? Father Hart couldn’t understand why the man was dressed so formally, but now, upon hearing the words, he looked at him hopefully. “Ah, Shakespeare. Yes. Just the very thing somehow.” The big man with the awful cigar looked at him blankly. Father Hart cleared his throat and watched them continue to scrutinise the pictures.

He’d been with them for nearly a quarter of an hour and in that time barely a word had been exchanged. A cigar had been lit by the older man, the woman had twice bitten off something she’d intended to say, and nothing more had occurred until that line from Shakespeare.

The woman tapped her fingers restlessly on the top of the table. She at least was some sort of police person. Father Hart knew that by the uniform she wore. But she seemed so entirely unpleasant with her tiny, shifting eyes and her grim little mouth. She would never do. Not what he needed. Not what Roberta needed. What should he say?

The horrid photographs continued to be passed among them. Father Hart did not need to see them. He knew far too well what they captured. He’d been there first, and it was all so unspeakably engraved on his mind. William Teys sprawled out on his side-all six feet four of him-in a ghastly, quasi-fetal position, right arm extended as if he’d been reaching for something, left arm curled into his stomach, knees drawn up halfway to his chest, and where the head had been…There was simply nothing. Like Cloten himself. But no Imogen there to awaken in horror by his side. Just Roberta. And those terrifying words: “I did it. I’m not sorry.”