CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

ER EYES COULDN'T SEEM to move from the hemlock she had dropped. "Surely I would have seen the multiple tubers," she said. "I would have known. Even now, I'd remember."

"Were you distracted? Did someone see you? Did someone call out to you while you were digging?"

Still she didn't look at him. "I was in a rush. I came down the slope, made for this spot, cleared away the snow, and found the parsnip."

"The hemlock, Mrs. Spence. Just as you did now."

"It had to have been a single root. I would have seen otherwise. I would have known."

"Tell me about Mr. Sage," he repeated.

She raised her head. Her expression seemed bleak. "He came to the cottage several times. He wanted to talk about the Church. And Maggie."

"Why Maggie?"

"She'd grown fond of him. He'd taken an interest in her."

"What sort of interest?"

"He knew she and I were having our troubles. What mother and daughter don't? He wanted to intercede."

"Did you object to this?"

"I didn't particularly enjoy feeling inadequate as a mother, if that's what you mean. But I let him come. And I let him talk. Maggie wanted me to see him. I wanted to make Maggie happy."

"And the night he died? What happened then?"

"Nothing more than had happened before. He wanted to counsel me."

"About religion? About Maggie?"

"About both, actually. He wanted me to join the Church, and he wanted me to let Maggie do the same."

"That was the extent of it?"

"Not exactly." She wiped her hands on the faded bandana which she took from the pocket of her jeans. She balled it up, tucked it into the sleeve of her sweater to join her mittens, and shivered. Her pullover was heavy, but it would not be enough protection against the cold. Seeing this, Lynley decided to continue the interview right where they were. Her uprooting of the water hemlock had given him the whip hand, if only momentarily. He was determined to use it and to strengthen it by whatever means were available. Cold was one of them.

"Then what?" he asked.

"He wanted to talk to me about parenthood, Inspector. He felt I was keeping too tight a rein on my daughter. It was his belief that the more I insisted upon chast.i.ty from Maggie, the more I'd drive her away. He felt if she was having s.e.x, she should be taking precautions against pregnancy. I felt she shouldn't be having s.e.x at all, precautions or not. She's thirteen years old. She's little more than a child."

"Did you argue about her?"

"Did I poison him because he disagreed with how I was bringing her up?" She was trembling, but not from distress, he thought. Aside from the earlier tears which she had managed to control within moments of being tested by them, she didn't really appear to be the sort of woman who would allow herself an overt display of anxiety in the presence of the police. "He didn't have children. He wasn't even married. It's one thing to express an opinion growing out of a mutual experience. It's quite another to offer advice having no basis in anything but reading psychology texts and possessing a glorified ideal of family life. How could I possibly take his concerns to heart?"

"Despite this, you didn't argue with him."

"No. As I said, I was willing to hear him out. I did that much for Maggie because she was fond of him. And that's the extent of it. I had my beliefs. He had his. He wanted Maggie to use contraceptives. I wanted her to stop complicating her life by having s.e.x in the first place. I didn't think she was ready for it. He thought it was too late to turn her behaviour around. We chose to disagree."

"And Maggie?"

"What?"

"Where did she stand in this disagreement?"

"We didn't discuss it."

"Did she discuss it with Sage?"

"I wouldn't know."

"But they were close."

"She was fond of him."

"Did she see him often?"

"Now and again."

"With your knowledge and approval?"

She lowered her head. Her right foot dug at the weeds in a spasmodic, kicking motion. "We've always been close, Maggie and I, until this business with Nick. So I knew about it when she saw the vicar."

The nature of the answer said everything. Dread, love, and anxiety. He wondered if they went hand in hand with motherhood.

"What did you serve him for dinner that night?"

"Lamb. Mint jelly. Peas. Parsnips."

"What happened?"

"We talked. He left shortly after nine."

"Was he feeling ill?"

"He didn't say. Only that he had a walk ahead of him and since it had been snowing, he ought to be off."

"You didn't offer to drive him."

"I wasn't feeling well. I thought it was flu. I was just as happy to have him leave, frankly."

"Could he have stopped somewhere along the way home?"

Her eyes moved to the Hall on its crest of land, from there to the oak wood beyond it. She appeared to be evaluating this as a possibility, but then she said firmly, "No. There's the lodge-his housekeeper lives there, Polly Yarkin-but that would have taken him out of his way, and I can't see what reason he'd have to stop by and visit with Polly when he saw her every day at the vicarage. Beyond that, it's easier to get back to the village on the footpath. And Colin found him on the footpath the next morning."

"You didn't think to phone him that night when you yourself were being sick?"

"I didn't attach my condition to the food. I said already, I thought I'd got flu. If he'd mentioned feeling unwell before he left, I might have phoned him. But he hadn't mentioned it. So I didn't make the connection."

"Yet he died on the footpath. How far is that from here? A mile? Less? He'd have been stricken rather quickly, wouldn't you say?"

"He must have been. Yes."

"I wonder how it was that he died and you didn't."

She met his gaze squarely. "I couldn't say."

He gave her a long ten seconds of silence in which to move her eyes off him. When she didn't do so, he finally nodded and directed his own attention to the pond. The edges, he saw, wore a dingy skin of ice like a coating of wax that encircled the reeds. Each night and day of continued cold weather would extend the skin farther towards the centre of the water. When entirely covered, the pond would look like the frosty ground that surrounded it, appearing to be an uneven but nonetheless innocuous smear of land. The wary would avoid it, seeing it clearly for what it was. The innocent or oblivious would attempt to cross it, breaking through its false and fragile surface to encounter the foul stagnation beneath.

"How are things between you and your daughter now, Mrs. Spence?" he asked. "Does she listen to you now that the vicar's gone?"

Mrs. Spence took the mittens from the sleeves of her pullover. She thrust her hands into them, her fingers bare. It was clear she intended to go back to work. "Maggie isn't listening to anyone," she said.

Lynley slipped the ca.s.sette into the Bentley's tape player and turned up the volume. Helen would have been pleased with the choice, Haydn's Concerto in E-flat Major, with Wynton Marsalis on the trumpet. Uplifting and joyful, with violins supplying the counterpoint to the trumpet's pure notes, it was utterly unlike his usual selection of "some grim Russian. Good Lord, Tommy, didn't they compose anything just the merest bit listener-friendly? What made them so ghoulish? D'you think it was the weather?" He smiled at the thought of her. "Johann Strauss," she would request. "Oh, all right. I know. Simply too pedestrian for your lofty taste. Then compromise. Mozart." And in would pop Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the only piece by Mozart which Helen could invariably identify, announcing that her ability to do so kept her free of the epithet absolute philistine.

He drove south, away from the village. He put the thought of Helen aside.

He pa.s.sed beneath the bare tree branches and headed for the moors, thinking about one of the basic tenets of criminology: There is always a relationship between the killer and the victim in a premeditated murder. This is not the case in a serial killing where the killer is driven by rages and urges incomprehensible to the society in which he lives. Nor is it always the case in a crime of pa.s.sion when a murder grows out of an unexpected, transitory, but nonetheless virulent blaze of anger, jealousy, revenge, or hate. Nor is it like an accidental death in which the forces of coincidence bring the killer and the victim together for one moment of inalterable time. Premeditated murder grows out of a relationship. Sort through the relationships that the victim has had, and inevitably the killer turns up.

This bit of knowlege was part of every policeman's bible. It went hand in glove with the fact that most victims know their killers. It was second cousin to the additional fact that most killings are committed by one of the victim's immediate relatives. Juliet Spence may well have poisoned Robin Sage in a horrible accident the consequences of which she would have to wrestle with for the rest of her life. It would not be the first time someone with a bent towards the natural and organic life picked up a wild-grown bit of root or fungi, flowers or fruit and ended up killing himself or someone else as a result of an error in identification. But if St. James was correct-if Juliet Spence couldn't have realistically survived even the smallest ingestion of water hemlock, if the symptoms of fever and vomiting couldn't be attached to hemlock poisoning in the first place-then there had to be a connection between Juliet Spence and the man who had died at her hands. If this was the case, then the superficial connection appeared to be Juliet's daughter, Maggie.

The grammar school, an uninteresting brick building that sat at the triangle created by the juncture of two converging streets, was not far from the centre of c.l.i.theroe. It was eleven-forty when he pulled into the car park and slid carefully into the s.p.a.ce left between an antique Austin-Healey and a conventional Golf of recent vintage with an infant's safety seat riding as pa.s.senger. A small homemade sticker reading Mind The Baby was affixed to the Golf's rear window.

Lessons were in progress inside the school, judging from both the emptiness of the long linoleum-floored corridors and the closed doors that lined them. The administration offices were just inside, facing one another to the left and the right of the entrance. At one time suitable t.i.tles had been painted in black upon the opaque gla.s.s that comprised the upper half of their doors, but the pa.s.sing years had reduced the letters to speckles the approximate colour of wet soot, from which one could barely make out the words headmistress, bursar, masters' common room, and second master in self-important Graeco-Roman printing.

He chose the headmistress. After a few minutes' loud and repet.i.tive conversation with an octogenarian secretary whom he found nodding over a strip of knitting that appeared to be the sleeve of a sweater appropriate in size for a male gorilla, he was shown into the headmistress' study. Mrs. Crone was engraved across a placard that sat on her desk. An unfortunate name, Lynley thought. He spent the moments until her arrival considering all the possible sobriquets the pupils probably had invented for her. They seemed infinite in both variety and connotation.

She turned out to be the ant.i.thesis of all of them, in a pencil-tight skirt hemmed a good five inches above the knee and an over-long cardigan with padded shoulders and enormous b.u.t.tons. She wore discoidal gold earrings, a necklace to match, and shoes whose skysc.r.a.per heels directed the eye inexorably to an outstanding pair of ankles. She was the sort of woman who asked for the once-over twice or more, and as he forced his eyes to remain on her face, Lynley wondered how the school's board of governors had ever settled upon such a creature for the job. She couldn't have been more than twenty-eight years old.

He managed to make his request with the minimum of time given to speculating what she looked like naked, forgiving himself for the instant of fantasy by telling himself it was the curse of being male. In the presence of a beautiful woman, he had always experienced that knee-jerk reaction of being reduced-if only momentarily-to skin, bone, and testosterone. He liked to believe that this response to an exposure to feminine stimuli had nothing to do with who he really was and where his loyalties lay. But he could imagine Helen's reaction to this minor and a.s.suredly inconsequential battle with l.u.s.t-in-the-heart, so he engaged in a mental explanation of his behaviour, using terms like idle curiosity and scientific study and for G.o.d's sake stop overreacting to things, Helen, as if she were present, standing in the corner, silently watching, and knowing his thoughts.

Maggie Spence was in a Latin lesson, Mrs. Crone told him. Couldn't this wait until lunch? A quarter of an hour?

It couldn't, actually. And even if it could, he'd prefer to make contact with the girl in complete privacy. At lunch, with other pupils milling about, there was the chance they'd be seen. He'd like to spare the girl whatever potential embarra.s.sment he could. It couldn't be easy for her, after all, with her mother having been under police scrutiny once already and now under it again. Did Mrs. Crone know her mother, by the way?

She'd met her on Speech Day in Easter term last year. A very nice woman. A firm disciplinarian, but very loving towards Maggie, obviously devoted to the child's every interest. Society could use a few more parents like Mrs. Spence behind our nation's youth, couldn't it, Inspector.

Indeed. Mrs. Crone would get no disagreement from him. Now about seeing Maggie...?

Did her mother know he'd come?

If Mrs. Crone would like to phone her...

The headmistress eyed him carefully and scrutinised his warrant card with such attention that he thought she was going to try it for gold between her teeth. At last she handed it back to him and said she would send for the girl if the Inspector would be so good as to wait here. They could use this study as well, she informed him, as she herself was on her way to the dining hall where she would remain on duty while the pupils had their lunch. But she expected the Inspector to allow Maggie time for hers, she warned in parting, and if the girl wasn't in the dining hall by a quarter past twelve, Mrs. Crone would send someone to fetch her. Was that clear? Did they understand each other?

They certainly did.

In less than five minutes, the study door opened and Lynley stood as Maggie Spence came into the room. She shut the door behind her with unnecessary care, turning the k.n.o.b to make certain the activity was done in perfect silence. She faced him across the room, hands clasped behind her back, head lowered.

He knew that in comparison with today's youth, his own introduction to s.e.xual activity-enthusiastically orchestrated by the mother of one of his friends during the half-term at Lent in his final year at Eton-had been relatively late. He'd just turned eighteen. But despite the change in mores and the bent towards youthful profligacy, he found it difficult to believe that this girl was engaged in s.e.xual experimentation of any kind.

She looked too like a child. Part of this was her height. She couldn't have been much more than an inch over five feet tall. Part was her posture and demeanour. She stood slightly pigeon-toed with her navy stockings bunched a bit at her ankles, and she shuffled on her feet, bent her ankles outwards, and looked as if she expected to be caned. The rest was personal appearance. The rules of the school may have forbidden the wearing of make-up, but surely nothing prevented her from taking a more adult approach with her hair. This was thick, the only attribute she shared with her mother. It fell to her waist in a wavy ma.s.s and was drawn back from her face and held in place with a large amber barrette shaped like a bow. She wore no bob, no shelf-cut, no sophisticated French braid. She made no attempt to emulate an actress or a rock-and-roll star.

"h.e.l.lo," he said to her, finding that he spoke as gently as he would have done to a frightened kitten. "Has Mrs. Crone told you who I am, Maggie?"

"Yes. But she needn't have done. I knew already." Her arms moved. She seemed to be twisting her hands behind her back. "Nick said last night you'd come to the village. He saw you in the pub. He said you'd be wanting to talk to all of Mr. Sage's good mates."

"And you're one of them, aren't you?"

She nodded.

"It's rough to lose a friend."

She made no reply, merely shuffled again on her feet. This appeared to be another similarity to her mother. He was reminded of Mrs. Spence's digging at the terrace weeds with the toe of her boot.

"Join me," he said. "I'd prefer to sit down, if you don't mind."

He drew a second chair to the window, and when she sat, she finally looked up at him. Her sky-blue eyes regarded him frankly, with hesitant curiosity but no trace of guile. She was sucking on the inside of her lower lip. The action deepened a dimple in her cheek.

Now that she was closer to him, he could more easily recognise the budding woman that was altering forever the sh.e.l.l of the child. She had a generous mouth. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were full. Her hips were just wide enough to be welcoming. Hers was the sort of body that was probably going to fight off weight in middle age. But now, under the staid school uniform of skirt, blouse, and jumper, it was ripe and ready. If it was at the insistence of Juliet Spence that Maggie used no make-up and wore a hairstyle more suited to a ten-year-old than to a teenager, Lynley found he couldn't blame her.

"You weren't at the cottage the night that Mr. Sage died, were you?" he asked her.

She shook her head.

"But you were there during the day?"

"Off and on. It was Christmas hols, see."

"You didn't want to have dinner with Mr. Sage? He was your mate, after all. I wonder you didn't welcome the chance."

Her left hand covered her right. She held them balled in her lap. "It was the night of the monthly doss-round," she said. "Josie, Pam, and me. We spent the night with each other."

"Something you do every month?"

"In alphabetical order. Josie, Maggie, Pam. It was Josie's turn. That's always the funnest because if they aren't booked up, Josie's mum lets us choose whatever room in the inn we fancy. We took the skylight room. It's up under the eaves. It was snowing and we liked to watch it settle on the gla.s.s." She was sitting up straight, her ankles properly crossed. Wisps of russet hair uncontrolled by the barrette curled against her cheeks and her forehead. "Dossing at Pam's is the worse because we have to sleep in the sitting room. That's on account of her brothers. They have the upstairs bedroom. They're twins. Pam doesn't like them much. She thinks it's disgusting that her mummy and dad made more babies at their age.

They're forty-two, Pam's mummy and dad. Pam says it gives her the creeps to think of her mum and dad like that. But I think they're sweet. The twins, I mean."

"How do you organise the doss-round?" Lynley asked.

"We don't, ac'shully. We just do it."

"With no plan?"