From the corner of his eye, Lynley saw Davies-Jones draw Lady Helen towards the drinks trolley and pour her a dry sherry. He even knows her habits, Lynley thought dismally and decided that he had had his fill of the entire group.

“Tell me about the pearls,” he said.

Francesca Gerrard felt for the single string of cheap beads she wore. They were pucecoloured; they argued dramatically with the green of her blouse. Ducking her head, raising a nervous hand to her mouth as if to hide her prominent teeth from scrutiny, she spoke with a well-bred hesitation, as if better manners told her it was unwise to intrude.

“I…It’s my fault, Inspector. I’m afraid that last night I did ask Elizabeth to offer the pearls to Joy. They aren’t priceless, of course, but I thought if she needed money…”

“Ah. I see. A bribe.”

Francesca’s eyes went to Lord Stinhurst. “Stuart, won’t you…?” The words wavered uneasily. Her brother didn’t reply. “Yes. I thought she might be willing to withdraw the play.”

“Tell him how much the pearls are worth,” Elizabeth insisted hotly. “Tell him!”

Francesca made a delicate moue of distaste, clearly unused to discussing such matters in public. “They were a wedding present from Phillip. My husband. They were…perfectly matched so-”

“They were worth more than eight thousand pounds,” Elizabeth snapped.

“I had of course always intended to pass them on to my own daughter. But since I have no children-”

“They were going to go to our little Elizabeth,” Vinney finished triumphantly. “So who better to have nicked them from Joy’s room? You nasty little bitch! Clever to point the fi nger at me!”

Elizabeth made a precipitate move towards him. Her father rose and intercepted her. The entire scene was about to be lived through once again. But Mary Agnes Campbell arrived in their midst, coming to stand hesitantly in the doorway, her eyes large and round, her fingers playing at the tips of her hair. Francesca spoke to her in an effort to divert the tide of passion.

“Dinner, Mary Agnes?” she asked inanely.

Mary Agnes scanned the room. “Gowan?” she responded. “He isna wi’ ye? Nae wi’ the police? Cuik wants him…” Her voice fell off. “Ye havena seen…”

Lynley looked from St. James to Havers. All of them shared a moment of the unthinkable.

All of them moved. “See that no one leaves the room,” Lynley directed Constable Lonan.

THEY WENT in separate directions, Havers up the stairs, St. James down the lower northeast corridor, and Lynley into the dining room, through the china and warming rooms. He burst into the kitchen.The cook started in surprise, a steaming kettle in her hand. Broth spilled over the side in an aromatic stream. Above them, Lynley heard Havers pounding down the west corridor. Doors crashed open. She called the boy’s name.

Seven steps and Lynley was at the scullery door. The knob turned in his hand, but the door wouldn’t open. Something blocked the passage.

“Havers!” he shouted, and in rising anxiety at the absence of reply, “Havers! Damn and blast!”

Then he heard her flying down the back staircase, heard her pause, heard her cry of incredulity, heard the unbelievable sound of water, the sound of sloshing like a child in a wading pond. Precious seconds passed. And then her voice like a bitter draught of medicine one expects but hopes not to swallow:

“Gowan! Christ!”

“Havers, for God’s sake-”

There was movement, something dragging. The door eased open a precious twelve inches, giving Lynley access to the heat and the steam and the heart of malevolence.

His back muddied and gummed by crimson, Gowan had been lying on his stomach across the top step of the scullery, apparently in an effort to escape the room and the scalding water that poured from the boiler and mixed with the cooling water on the fl oor. It was inches deep, and Havers waded back across it, seeking the emergency valve that would shut it off. When she found it, the room was plunged into an eerie stillness that was broken by the cook’s voice on the other side of the door.

“Is it Gowan? Is it the lad?” And she began a keening that reverberated like a musical instrument against the kitchen walls.

But when she paused, a second sound racked the hot air. Gowan was breathing. He was alive.

Lynley turned the boy to him. His face and neck were a puckered, red mass of boiled fl esh. His shirt and trousers were cooked onto his body. “Gowan!” Lynley cried. And then, “Havers, phone for an ambulance! Get St. James!” She did not move. “Blast it, Havers! Do as I say!”

But her vision was transfixed on the boy’s face. Lynley spun back, saw the initial glazing of Gowan’s eyes, knew what it meant.

“Gowan! No!”

For an instant, Gowan seemed to try desperately to respond to the shout, to accept the call back from the darkness. He took a stertorous breath, wracked with bloody phlegm.

“Didn’t…see…”

“What?” Lynley urged. “Didn’t see what?”

Havers leaned forward. “Who? Gowan, who?”

With an enormous effort, the boy’s eyes sought her. But he said nothing more. His body shuddered once and was still.

LYNLEY FOUND that he had grasped hold of Gowan’s shirt in a frantic attempt to infuse his tortured body with life. Now he released him, letting the corpse rest back upon the step, and a monumental sense of outrage filled him. It began as a howling, curling deep within muscles, tissues, and organs, screaming to get out.

He thought of the wasted life-the generations of life callously destroyed-in the single young boy who had done… what? Who had paid for what crime? What chance remark? What piece of knowledge?

His eyes burned, his heart pounded, and for a moment he chose to ignore the fact that Sergeant Havers was speaking to him. Her voice broke wretchedly.

“He pulled the ruddy thing out! Oh my God, Inspector, he must have pulled it out!”

Lynley saw that she had gone back to the boiler in the corner of the room. She was kneeling on the fl oor, mindless of the water, a torn piece of towel in her hand. Using it, she lifted something from the pool and Lynley saw it was a kitchen knife, the very same knife he had seen in the hands of the Westerbrae cook a few short hours before.

8

THERE WASN’T ENOUGH space in the scullery, so Inspector Macaskin did his pacing in the kitchen. His left hand ran along the worktable in the centre of the room; he gnawed at the fingers of his right with vicious concentration. His eyes fl icked from the windows that presented him blankly with his own reflection to the closed door leading towards the dining room. From there he could hear the raised wail of a woman’s voice, and the voice of a man, raw with anger. Gowan Kilbride’s parents from Hillview Farm, meeting with Lynley, fl ailing him mercilessly with the first fury of their grief. On the floor above them, behind closed and guarded doors, the suspects waited for their summons from the police. Again, Macaskin thought. He cursed himself soundly, his conscience shredded by the belief that had he not suggested letting everyone out of the library for dinner, Gowan Kilbride might well be alive.

Macaskin swung around as the scullery door opened and St. James stepped out with Strathclyde’s medical examiner. He hurried to join them. Over their shoulders, he could see two other crime-scene men still at work in the small room, doing what they could to collect what evidence had not been obliterated by water and steam.

“Right branch of the pulmonary artery is my guess without a full postmortem,” the examiner murmured to Macaskin. He was stripping off a pair of gloves, which he stuffed into his jacket pocket.

Macaskin directed a querying look at St. James.