“And no one ever knew? I can’t believe it.”

“If you consider the situation, it’s easy to believe. Teys projected a very successful image in his community. At the same time, his daughters were tricked into self-blame and secrecy. Gillian believed she had been responsible for her mother’s desertion of her father and was making reparation for that by, in Teys’s words, ‘being a mummy’ to him. Roberta believed that Gillian had pleased her father and that she was supposed to do the same.

And both of them, of course, were taught from the Bible-Teys’s careful selection of passages and his twisted interpretations of them-that what they were doing was not only right but written by the hand of God as their duty as his daughters.”

“It makes me sick.”

“It is sick. He was sick. Consider his sickness: He chose a child to be his bride. That was safe. He was threatened by the adult world and in the person of this sixteen-year-old girl, he saw someone who could arouse him with her childlike body and, at the same time, gratify his need for the self-respect that a marriage would give him.”

“Then why did he turn to his children?”

“When Tessa-this childlike bride of his- produced a baby, Teys had frightening and irrefutable evidence that the creature who had been arousing him and upon whose body he had taken such gratification was not a child at all, but a woman. And he was threatened by women, I should guess, the feminine representation of the entire adult world that he feared.”

“She said he stopped sleeping with her.”

“I’ve no doubt of that. If he had slept with her and failed to perform, imagine his humiliation. Why risk that kind of failure when there in his house was a helpless infant from whom he could get immense pleasure and satisfaction?”

Lynley felt his throat close. “Infant?” he asked. “Do you mean…”

Dr. Samuels took the measure of Lynley’s reaction and nodded in sad recognition of an outrage he himself had felt for many years. “I should think that the abuse of Gillian began in infancy. She remembers the fi rst incident when she was four or five, but Teys was unlikely to have waited that long unless his religion was providing him with self-control for those years. It’s possible.”

His religion. Each piece was falling into place more tidily than the last, but as each did, Lynley felt an anger that needed free rein. He controlled it with an effort. “She’ll stand trial.”

“Eventually. Roberta’s going to recover. She’ll be found competent to stand trial.” The doctor turned in his chair to watch the group in the garden. “But you know as well as I, Inspector, that no jury in the world is going to convict her of anything when the truth is told. So perhaps we can believe that there will be a form of justice after all.”

The trees that towered above St. Catherine’s Church cast long shadows on the exterior of the building so that, even though it was still light outside, the interior was dim. The deep reds and purples from stained glass windows poured forth bloody pools of light which faded slowly on the cracked tile floor, and votive candles flickered under statues who watched his movement in the aisle. The air within the building was heavy and dead, and as Lynley made his way to the Elizabethan confessional, he shivered.

He opened the door, went inside the booth, knelt, and waited. The darkness was complete, the tranquillity absolute. A suitable ambience for meditating upon one’s sins, Lynley thought.

A grill was moved in the darkness. A gentle voice murmured incantations to a nonexistent god. Then, “Yes, my child?”

At the last moment, he wondered if he would be able to do it. But he found his voice.

“He came to you here,” Lynley said. “This was the place where he confessed his sins. Did you absolve him, Father? Did you make some sort of mystical configuration in the air that told William Teys he was free of the sin of abusing his children? What did you tell him? Did you give him your blessing? Did you release him from the confessional, his soul purged once more, to go home to his farm and begin it again? Is that how it was?”

In response, he only heard breathing, harsh and rapid, that told him a living creature was on the other side of the grill.

“And did Gillian confess? Or was she too frightened? Did you talk to her about what her father did to her? Did you try to help her?”

“I…” The voice sounded as if it were coming from a great distance. “Understand and forgive.”

“That’s what you told her? Understand? Forgive? What about Roberta? Was she supposed to understand and forgive as well? Was a sixteen-year-old girl supposed to learn to accept the fact that her father raped her, made her pregnant, that he then murdered her child? Or was that your idea, Father?”

“I didn’t know about the baby. I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” The voice was frantic.

“But you knew once you found it in the abbey. You damn well knew. You chose Pericles, Father Hart. You damn well knew.”

“He…he never confessed to that. Never!”

“And what would you have done if he had? What exactly would his penance have been for the murder of his child? And it was murder. You know it was murder.”

“No. No!”

“William Teys carried that baby from Gembler Farm to the abbey. He couldn’t wrap it in anything because anything he used might have been traced back to him. So he carried it naked. And it died. You knew when you saw it whose baby it was, how it got to the abbey. You chose Pericles for the epitaph. Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke. You damn well knew.”

“He said…after that…he swore he was cured.”

“Cured? A miraculous recovery from sexual deviance, nicely engineered by the death of his infant child? Is that what you thought? Is that what you wanted to think? He was recovered, all right. His idea of recovery was that he’d stopped raping Roberta. But listen to me, Father, because this is on your conscience and by God you shall hear me, he stopped nothing else.”

“No!”

“You know it’s the truth. He was addicted. The only problem was that he needed a fresh young fix for his habit. He needed Bridie. And you were going to let it happen.”

He swore to me-”

“He swore? On what? The Bible that he used to make Gillian believe she had to give her body to her father? Is that what he swore on?”

“He stopped confessing. I didn’t know. I-”

“You knew. From the moment he started on Bridie, you knew. And when you went to the farm and saw what Roberta had done, the real truth came crashing right down, didn’t it?”

There was a stifled sob. And then growing out of it a keening of grief that rose like the wail of Jacob and broke on the utterance of three nearly incoherent words. “Mea…mea culpa!”

“Yes!” Lynley hissed. “Through your fault, Father.”

“I couldn’t…it was the silence of the confessional. It’s a holy oath.”

“There is no oath more important than life. There is no oath more important than the ruin of a child. You saw that, didn’t you, when you went to the farm? You knew that it was finally time to break the silence. So you wiped off the axe, you got rid of the knife, and you came to Scotland Yard. You knew the real truth would come out that way, the truth you lacked the courage to reveal.”

“Oh God, I…understand and forgive.” The whisper was broken.

“Not for this. Not for twenty-seven years of physical abuse. For two ruined lives. For the death of their dreams. There is no understanding. There is no forgiveness. By God, not for this.” He shoved open the door of the confessional and left.

Behind him a querulous voice rose in agonising prayer. “‘Fret not thyself because of evildoers…they shall soon be cut down like the grass…trust in the Lord…he shall give thee the desires of thy heart…evildoers shall be cut off…’”