Scarcely able to breathe, Lynley fl ung open the church door and stepped out into the air.

Lady Helen was leaning against the edge of a lichened sarcophagus, watching Gillian, who stood at the small, distant grave under the cypress trees, her cropped blonde head bent in contemplation or prayer. She heard Lynley’s footsteps but did not stir, not even when he joined her and she felt the sure, steady pressure of his arm against her own.

“I saw Deborah,” he said at last.

“Ah.” Her eyes remained on Gillian’s slight form. “I thought you might see her, Tommy. I hoped you wouldn’t but I did think you might.”

“You knew they were here in Keldale. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Still she looked away from him, but for a moment she lowered her eyes. “What was there to say, really? We’d said it already. So many times.” She hesitated, wanting to let it go, to let the subject die between them once and for all. But the backward abysm of time that constituted the many years of their friendship would not allow her to do so. “Was it dreadful for you?” she made herself ask.

“At fi rst.”

“And then?”

“Then I saw that she loves him. As you did once.”

A regretful smile touched her lips briefl y. “Yes. As I did once.”

“Where did you find the strength to let St. James go, Helen? How on earth did you survive it?”

“Oh, I muddled through somehow. Besides, you were always there for me, Tommy. You helped me. You were always my friend.”

“As you’ve been mine. My very best friend.”

She laughed softly at that. “Men say that about their dogs, you know. I’m not sure I ought to be flattered by the appellation.”

“But are you?” he asked.

“Most decidedly,” she replied. She turned to him then and searched his face. The exhaustion was there as it had been before, but the weight of sorrow was lessened. Not gone, that would not happen quickly, but dissolving and leading him out of the past. “You’re beyond the worst of it now, aren’t you?”

“I’m beyond the worst. I think, in fact, I’m ready to go on.” He touched the fall of her hair and smiled.

The lych-gate opened and over Lynley’s shoulder Lady Helen saw Sergeant Havers coming into the graveyard. Her steps slowed momentarily when she saw them talking tranquilly together, but she cleared her throat as if in warning of her intrusion and strode towards them quickly, her shoulders squared.

“Sir, you’ve a message from Webberly,” she said to Lynley. “Stepha had it at the lodge.”

“A message? What sort?”

“His usual cryptogram, I’m afraid.” She handed the paper to him. “‘ID positive. London verifies. York informed last P.M.,’” she recited. “Does it make sense to you?”

He read the message over, folded the paper, and looked bleakly off through the graveyard to the hills beyond. “Yes,” he replied, but the words were not coming easily to him, “it makes perfect sense.”

“Russell Mowrey?” Havers asked perceptively. When he nodded, she went on. “So he did go to London to turn Tessa in to Scotland Yard. How strange. Why not turn her in to the York police? What could Scotland Yard-”

“No. He’d gone to London to see his family, just as Tessa guessed. But he never made it farther than King’s Cross Station.”

“King’s Cross Station?” Havers repeated.

“That’s where the Ripper got him, Havers. His picture was on the wall in Webberly’s office.”

He went to the lodge alone. He walked down Church Street and stood for a moment on the bridge as he had done only the night before. The village was hushed, but, as he took a final look at Keldale, a door slammed nearby. A little red-haired girl hurtled down the back steps of her house and darted to a shed. She disappeared, emerging moments later, dragging a large sack of feed on the ground.

“Where’s Dougal?” he called.

Bridie looked up. Her curly hair trapped the sunlight, burning an autumn contrast against the bright green pullover-several sizes too large-that she wore. “Inside. He has a stomachache today.”

Lynley wondered idly how one diagnosed a stomachache in a mallard and wisely thought better of asking. “Why are you feeding him, then?” he asked.

She pondered the question, scratching her left leg with the top of her right foot. “Mummy says I ought to. She’s been keeping him warm all day and she says she thinks he can eat something now.”

“Sounds like a good nurse.”

“She is.” She waved a grubby hand at him and disappeared into the house, a small package of life with her dreams intact.

He walked across the bridge and into the lodge. Behind the reception desk, Stepha stood up, her lips parted to speak.

“It was Ezra Farmington’s baby that you had, wasn’t it?” he asked her. “He was part of the wild, crazy laughter you wanted after your brother died, wasn’t he?”

“Thomas-”

“Wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Do you watch when he and Nigel torment each other over you? Are you amused when Nigel drinks himself blind at the Dove and Whistle, hoping to catch you spending time with Ezra at his house across the street? Or do you escape the whole confl ict with Richard Gibson’s help?”

“That’s really unfair.”

“Is it? Do you know that Ezra doesn’t believe he can paint any longer? Are you interested, Stepha? He’s destroyed his work. The only pieces left are his paintings of you.”

“I can’t help him.”

“You won’t help him.”

“That’s not true.”

“You won’t help him,” Lynley repeated. “For some reason, he still wants you. He wants the child as well. He wants to know where it is. He wants to know what you did with it, who has it. Have you even bothered to tell him if it’s a boy or girl?”

She dropped her eyes. “She’s…she was adopted by a family in Durham. That’s the way it had to be.”

“And that’s to be his punishment, I take it?”

Her eyes flew up. “For what? Why would I punish him?”

“For stopping the laughter. For insisting on having something more with you. For being willing to take chances. For being all the things you’re too afraid to be.”

She didn’t reply. There was no need for her to do so when he could read the answer so clearly on her face.

She had not wanted to go to the farm. The scene of so many of her childhood terrors, the farm was a place she wished to bury in the past. All she had wanted to see was the baby’s grave. That done, she was ready to leave. The others, this group of kind strangers who had come into her life, did not question her. Rather, they bundled her into the large, silver car and drove her out of Keldale.

She had no idea where they were taking her, and she didn’t much care. Jonah was gone. Nell was dead. And whoever Gillian was remained to be discovered. She was simply a shell. There was nothing else left.

Lynley glanced at Gillian in the mirror. He wasn’t sure what would happen. He wasn’t sure that it was the right thing to do. He was working on instinct, a blind instinct which insisted that something good had to rise, like a phoenix triumphant, from the ashes of the day.

He knew that he was looking for meaning, that he couldn’t accept the senselessness of Russell Mowrey’s death in King’s Cross Station at the hands of an unknown killer. He raged against it, against its vile brutality, against its diabolical ugliness, against its terrible waste.

He would give meaning to it all. He would not accept that these fragmented lives could not somehow conjoin, could not reach across the chasm of nineteen years and find peace at last.

It was a risk. He didn’t care. He would take it. It was six o’clock when he pulled in front of the house in York.

“I’ll just be a moment,” he said to the others in the car and reached for his door handle.

Sergeant Havers touched his shoulder. “Let me, sir. Please.”

He hesitated. She watched him.