He was reading the t.i.tles of her video-tapes-lined up like guardsmen beneath a television-when she returned.

"I like to stay fit," she said, in apparent explanation of the fact that beyond a copy of Olivier's Wuthering Heights, the ca.s.settes all contained exercise tapes, featuring one film actress or another.

He could see that fitness was approximately as important to her as neatness, for aside from the fact that she was herself slender, solid, and athletic looking, the room's only photograph was a framed, poster-sized enlargement of her running in a race with the number 194 on her chest. She was wearing a red headband and sweating profusely, but she'd managed a dazzling smile for the camera.

"My first marathon," she said. "Everyone's first is rather special."

"I'd imagine that to be the case."

"Yes. Well." She brushed her thumb and middle finger through her hair. Light brown carefully streaked with blonde, it was cut quite short and blown back from her face in a fashionable style that suggested frequent trips to a hairdresser who wielded scissors and colour with equal skill. From the lining round her eyes and in the room's daylight, despite the rain that was beginning to streak the flat's cas.e.m.e.nt windows, Lynley would have placed her in mid to late forties. But he imagined that dressed for business or pleasure, made up, and seen in the forgiving artificial light of one restaurant or another, she looked at least ten years younger.

She was holding a mug from which steam rose aromatically. "Chicken broth," she said. "I suppose I should offer you something, but I'm not well versed in how one behaves when the police come to call. And you are the police?"

He offered her his warrant card. Unlike the receptionist below, she studied it before handing it back.

"I hope this isn't about one of my girls." She walked to the sofa and sat on the edge with her mug of chicken broth balanced on her left knee. She had, he saw, the shoulders of a swimmer and the unbending posture of a Victorian woman cinched into a corset. "I check into their backgrounds thoroughly when they first apply. No one gets into my files without at least three references. If they get a bad report from more than two of their employers, I let them go. So I never have trouble. Never."

Lynley joined her, sitting in one of the armchairs. He said, "I've come about a man called Robin Sage. He had the directions to this oast house among his belongings and a reference to Kate in his engagement diary. Do you know him? Did he come to see you?"

"Robin? Yes."

"When?"

She drew her eyebrows together. "I don't recall exactly. It was sometime in the autumn. Perhaps late September?"

"The eleventh of October?"

"It could have been. Shall I check that for you?"

"Did he have an appointment?"

"One could call it that. Why? Has he got into trouble?"

"He's dead."

She adjusted her grip on the mug slightly, but that was the only reaction that Lynley could read. "This an investigation?"

"The circ.u.mstances were rather irregular." He waited for her to do the normal thing, to ask what the circ.u.mstances were. When she didn't, he said, "Sage lived in Lancashire. May I take it that he didn't come to see you about hiring a temporary employee?"

She sipped her chicken bouillon. "He came to talk about Susanna."

"His wife."

"My sister." She pulled a square of white linen from her pocket, dabbed it against the corners of her mouth, and replaced it neatly. "I hadn't seen or heard a word from him since the day of her funeral. He wasn't exactly welcome here. Not after everything that had happened."

"Between him and his wife."

"And the baby. That dreadful business about Joseph."

"He was an infant when he died, as I understand."

"Just three months. It was a cot death. Susanna went to get him up one morning, thinking that he'd actually slept through the night for the first time. He'd been dead for hours. He was stiff with rigor. She broke three of his ribs between the kiss of life and trying to give him CPR. There was an investigation, of course. And there were questions of abuse when the word got out about his ribs."

"Police questions?" Lynley asked in some surprise. "If the bones were broken after death-"

"They would have known. I'm aware of that. It wasn't the police. Naturally, they questioned her, but once they had the pathologist's report, they were satisfied. Still, there were whispers in the community. And Susanna was in an exposed position."

Kate got up and walked to the window where she pushed back the curtains. The rain was pattering against the gla.s.s. She said contemplatively but without much ferocity, "I blamed him. I still do. But Susanna only blamed herself."

"I'd think that's a fairly normal reaction."

"Normal?" Kate laughed softly. "There was nothing normal about her situation."

Lynley waited without reply or question. The rain snaked in rivulets against the window-panes. A telephone rang in the office below.

"Joseph slept in their bedroom the first two months."

"Hardly abnormal."

She seemed not to hear. "Then Robin insisted he be given a room of his own. Susanna wanted him near her, but she cooperated with Robin. That was her way. And he was very convincing."

"About what?"

"He kept insisting that a child could be irrevocably damaged by witnessing at any age, even in infancy, what Robin in his infinite wisdom called 'the primal scene' between his parents." Kate turned from the window and sipped more broth. "Robin refused to have s.e.x as long as the baby was in the room. When Susanna wanted to... resume relations, she had to go along with Robin's wishes. But I suppose you can imagine what little Joseph's death did to any future primal scenes between them."

The marriage quickly fell apart, she said. Robin flung himself into his work as a means of distraction. Susanna drifted into depression.

"I was living and working in London at the time," Kate said, "so I had her come to stay with me. I had her go to galleries. I gave her books to identify the birds in the parks. I mapped out city walks and had her take one each day. Someone had to do something, after all. I tried."

"To...?"

"To get her back into life. What do you think? She was wallowing in grief. She was luxuriating in guilt and self-loathing. It wasn't healthy. And Robin wasn't helping matters at all."

"He'd have been feeling his own grief, I dare say."

"She wouldn't put it behind her. Every day I'd come home and there she would be, sitting on the bed, holding the baby's picture against her breast, wanting to talk and relive it all. Day after day. As if talking about it would have done any good." Kate returned to the sofa and placed her mug on a round of mosaic that served as a mat on the side table. "She was torturing herself. She wouldn't let it go. I told her she had to. She was young. She'd have another baby, after all. Joseph was dead. He was gone. He was buried. And if she didn't snap out of it and take care of herself, she'd be buried with him."

"Which she eventually was."

"I blame him for that. With his primal scenes and his miserable belief in G.o.d's judgement in our lives. That's what he told her, you know. That Joseph's death was the hand of G.o.d at work. What a beastly man. Susanna didn't need to hear that sort of rubbish. She didn't need to believe she was being punished. And for what? For what?"

Kate pulled out her handkerchief a second time. She pressed it against her forehead although she didn't appear to be perspiring.

"Sorry," she said. "There are some things in life that don't bear remembering."

"Is that why Robin Sage came to see you? To share memories?"

"He was suddenly interested in her," she said. "He hadn't been the least involved in her life in the six months that led up to her death. But suddenly he cared. What did she do while she was with you, he wanted to know. Where did she go? What did she talk about? How did she act? Whom did she meet?" She chuckled bitterly. "After all these years. I wanted to smack his mournful little face. He'd been eager enough to see her buried."

"What do you mean?"

"He kept identifying bodies washed up on the coast. There were two or three of them he said were Susanna. The wrong height, the wrong hair colour when there was hair left on them at all, the wrong weight. It didn't matter. He was in such a nasty rush about it all."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I thought at first he had some woman lined up to marry and he needed to have Susanna declared officially dead in order to get on with it."

"But he didn't marry."

"He didn't. I a.s.sume the woman gave him the brush-off, whoever she was."

"Does the name Juliet Spence mean anything to you? Did he mention a woman called Juliet Spence when he was here? Did Susanna ever mention Juliet Spence?"

She shook her head. "Why?"

"She poisoned Robin Sage. Last month in Lancashire."

Kate raised a hand as if to touch it to her perfectly brushed hair. She dropped it, however, before it made contact. Her eyes grew momentarily distant. "How odd. I find I'm glad of the fact."

Lynley wasn't surprised. "Did your sister ever mention any other men when she was staying with you? Did she see other men once things began to go wrong in her marriage? Could her husband have discovered that?"

"She didn't talk about men. She talked only about babies."

"There is, of course, an unavoidable connection between the two."

"I've always found that a rather unfortunate quirk in our species. Everyone pants towards o.r.g.a.s.m without pausing to realise that it's merely a biological trap designed for the purpose of reproduction. What utter nonsense."

"People get involved with one another. They pursue intimacy along with love."

"More fools, they," Kate said.

Lynley got to his feet. Kate moved behind him and made an adjustment to the position of the pillow on his chair. She brushed her fingers across the chair's back.

He watched her, wondering what it had been like for her sister. Grief calls for acceptance and understanding. No doubt she'd felt herself cut off from mankind.

He said, "Have you any idea why Robin Sage might have telephoned Social Services in London?"

Kate picked a hair from the lapel of her dressing gown. "He'd have been looking for me, no doubt."

"You supply them with temps?"

"No. I've had this business only eight years. Before that, I worked for Social Services. He'd have phoned there first."

"But your name was in his diary before his calls or visits to Social Services. Why would that be?"

"I couldn't say. Perhaps he wanted to go through Susanna's paperwork in the trip down memory lane he'd been taking. Social Services in Truro would have been involved when the baby died. Perhaps he was tracking her paperwork to London."

"Why?"

"To read it? To set the record straight?"

"To discover if Social Services knew what someone else claimed to know?"

"About Joseph's death?"

"Is it a possibility?"

She folded her arms beneath her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "I can't see how. If there had been something suspicious about his death, it would have been acted upon, Inspector."

"Perhaps it was something borderline, something that could have been interpreted either way."

"But why would he take a sudden interest in that now? From the moment Joseph died, Robin showed no interest in anything other than his ministry. 'We'll get through this by the grace of G.o.d,' he told Susanna." Kate's lips pressed into a line of distaste. "Frankly, I wouldn't have blamed her in the least if she'd had the luck to find someone else. Just to forget about Robin for a few hours would have been heaven."

"Could she have done? Did you get a sense of that?"

"Not from her conversation. When she wasn't talking about Joseph, she was trying to get me to talk about my cases. It was just another way to punish herself."

"You were a social worker, then. I'd thought-" He gestured in the general direction of the stairway.

"That I was a secretary. No. I had much larger aspirations. I once believed I could actually help people. Change lives. Make things better. What an amusing laugh. Ten years in Social Services took care of that."

"What sort of work did you do?"

"Mothers and infants," she said. "Home visits. And the more I did it, the more I understood what a myth our culture has created about childbirth, depicting it as woman's highest purpose fulfilled. What contemptible rot, all of it generated by men. Most of the women I saw were utterly miserable when they weren't too uneducated or too impossibly ignorant to be able to recognise the extent of their plight."

"But your sister believed in the myth."

"She did. And it killed her, Inspector."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

T'S THE NASTY LITTLE FACT that he kept misidentifying bodies," Lynley said. He nodded to the officer on duty at the kiosk, flashed his identification, and descended the ramp into the underground car park of New Scotland Yard. "Why keep saying definitively that each one was his wife? Why not say he wasn't certain? It didn't matter, after all. A postmortem would have been performed on the bodies in any case. And he must have known that."

"It sounds like shades of Max de Winter to me," Helen replied.

Lynley pulled into a s.p.a.ce conveniently close to the lift now that the day was long over and the vast clerical staff was gone. He thought about the idea. "We're meant to believe she deserved to die," he mused.

"Susanna Sage?"

He got out of the car and opened her door. "Rebecca," he said. "She was evil, lewd, lubricious, lascivious-"

"Just the sort of person one longs to have at a dinner party to liven things up."