“You mustn’t mind, Elizabeth,” Francesca was saying gently. “She means well. She does mean well. You mustn’t mind so awfully much.”

Elizabeth felt her throat close. How well her aunt knew her. How completely she had always understood. “‘Get Mr. Vinney a drink, darling… His glass is almost empty.’” Bitterly, she mimicked her mother’s retiring voice. “I wanted to die. Even with the police. Even with Joy. She can’t stop. She won’t stop. It won’t ever end.”

“She wants your happiness, my dear. She sees it in marriage.”

“Like her own, you mean?” The words tasted like acid.

Her aunt frowned. She put her brush on the chest of drawers, placing her comb neatly across its bristles. “Have I shown you the photographs Gowan gave to me?” she asked brightly, pulling open the top drawer. It squeaked and stuck. “Silly dear boy. He saw a magazine with those before-and-after pictures and decided we’d do a set of the house. Of each room as we renovate it. And then perhaps we’ll display them all in the drawing room when everything’s done. Or perhaps an historian might find them of interest. Or we could always use them to…” She struggled with the drawer, but the wood was swollen with the winter damp.

Elizabeth watched her wordlessly. It was always the way within the circle of the family: unanswered questions, secrets, and withdrawal. They were all conspirators whose collusion insisted upon ignoring the past so that it would go away. Her father, her mother, Uncle Geoffrey, and Granda. And now Aunt Francie. Her loyalties, too, were to the ties of blood.

There was no point in staying in the room any longer. Only one thing needed to be said between them. Elizabeth steadied herself to say it.

“Aunt Francie. Please.”

Francesca looked up. She still held on to the drawer, still pulled at it fruitlessly, without realising that she was only making its inutility even more pronounced.

“I wanted you to know,” Elizabeth said. “You need to know. I…I’m afraid I didn’t manage things properly at all last night.”

Francesca at last dropped her grip on the drawer. “In what way, my dear?”

“It’s just that…she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t even in her room. So I didn’t have a chance to talk to her at all, to give her your message.”

“It doesn’t matter, darling. You did your best, didn’t you? And at any rate, I-”

“No! Please!”

Her aunt’s voice-as always-was warm with compassion, with understanding how it felt to be barren of ability or talent or hope. In the face of this unconditional acceptance, Elizabeth felt the dry choking of fruitless tears. She couldn’t bear to weep-in either sorrow or pain-so she turned and left the room.

“BLUIDY THING!”

Gowan Kilbride had just about reached his point of no return in his ability to survive nonstop aggravation. The situation in the library had been bad enough, but afterwards it had grown worse with the knowledge, neither admitted to nor denied by the girl herself, that Mary Agnes had allowed Robert Gabriel the very liberties that were forbidden to Gowan’s own pleasure. And now, after all that, to be sent to the scullery by Mrs. Gerrard with directions to do something about the bloody boiler that hadn’t worked properly in fifty years…It was beyond a person’s ability to endure.

With a curse, he threw his spanner down onto the floor where it promptly chipped an old tile, bounced once, and slid under the fi ery coils of the infernal water heater.

“Damn! Damn! Damn!” Gowan fumed with rising anger.

He squatted on the floor, poked about with his arm, and immediately burned himself on the metal underside of the boiler.

“Jesus flippin’ Christ!” he howled, throwing himself to one side and staring at the old mechanism as if it were a malevolent, living being. He kicked it viciously, kicked it again.

He thought about Robert Gabriel with Mary Agnes and kicked it a third time, which dislodged one of the rusting pipes. Steaming water began to spray out in a hissing arc.

“Oh hell!” Gowan snapped. “Burn an’ rot an’ worms eat yer insides!”

He grabbed a piece of towelling from the scullery sink and wrapped it round the pipe to grasp it without further damage to himself. Wrestling the piece into inadequate submission, sputtering against the fi ne hot spray that shot against his face and his hair, he lay on his chest. With one hand he forced the pipe back into place, and with the other he sought the spanner that he had dropped, fi nally locating it back against the far wall. He scrabbled against the floor to inch his way closer to the tool. His fingers were mere centimetres from it when suddenly the entire scullery went black, and Gowan realised that on top of everything else, the single light bulb in the room had just burnt out. The only light left came from the boiler itself, a thin useless glow of red that was shining directly into his eyes. It was the fi nal blow.

“Ye shittin’ piece of crile!” he cried. “Ye damn pie-eyed sheemach! Ye veecious piece o’ sussy! Ye-”

And then, with no warning, he knew that he wasn’t alone.

“Who’s there? Cum here an’ help me!”

There was no answer.

“Here! Richt on the fl uir!”

And still no response.

He turned his head, tried and failed to pierce the gloom. He was about to call out again-and louder this time, for the hair on the back of his neck had begun to rise with consternation-when there was a rush of movement in his direction. It sounded as if half a dozen people were storming him at once.

“Hey-”

A blow cut off his voice. A hand gripped his neck and smashed his head to the fl oor. Pain roared through his temples. His fi ngers loosened their hold on the pipe and water shot out directly into his face, blinding him, searing him, scalding his flesh. He struggled wildly to free himself but was shoved savagely onto the burning pipe so that the gush of water entered his clothes, blistering his chest, his stomach, and his legs. His clothing was wool, and it clung to him like a sealant, holding the liquid like acid upon his skin.

“Gaaaa-”

He tried to cry out as agony, terror, and confusion ripped through him. But a knee dropped onto the small of his back, and the hand twined in his hair forced his head to turn and ground his forehead, nose, and chin into the pool of steaming water forming on the tile.

He felt the bridge of his nose crack, felt the skin scrape from his face. And just as he began to understand that his unseen assailant meant to drown him in less than one inch of water, he heard the unmistakable snick of metal on tile.

The knife entered his back a second later.

THE LIGHT switched on again. Quick footsteps climbed the stairs.

7

“I SUPPOSE the more important question is whether you believe Stinhurst’s story,” St. James pointed out to Lynley. They were in their corner bedroom, where the northwest wing of the house met the main body. It was a small room, adequately furnished in beechwood and pine, inoffensively papered with stripes of creeping jenny on a field of pale blue. The air held that vaguely medicinal smell of cleanser and disinfectant, disagreeable but not overwhelming. From the window, Lynley could see across a recess to the west wing where Irene Sinclair was moving listlessly in her room, a dress draped over her arm as if she couldn’t decide whether to put it on or to forget the business entirely. Her face looked etiolated, an elongated white oval framed by black hair, like an artist’s study of the power of contrast. Lynley dropped the curtain and turned to fi nd that his friend had begun changing his clothes for dinner.

It was an awkward ritual, made worse because St. James’ father-in-law was not there to assist him, made worse because the entire need for assistance in what for anyone else would have been a simple procedure had its genesis on a single night of Lynley’s own drunken carelessness. He watched St. James, caught between wanting to offer him help and knowing that the offer would be politely rebuffed. The leg brace was uncovered, the crutches were used, the shoes were untied, and always St. James’ face remained entirely indifferent, as if he had not been lithe and athletic a mere decade before.