A Great Deliverance

Nies rudely delivers a box of evidence containing a blood-stained dress. Havers brings Lynley the file but notes that the lab analyses are missing. They realize Nies is intentionally obstructing their investigation. To get a forensic analysis, they call St. James.

They imagine the crime scene: Roberta dresses for church, cannot find her father, goes to the barn, and gathers the headless body into her lap. She lowers it, sits in shock until Father Hart arrives, and then makes her confession. He decides that her words seem less like a confession that an acknowledgement that she knows who murdered her father.

At dawn, Lynley walks to the graveyard and sees Deborah photographing old stones. She says Lynley must let her go; Simon has pain from his injury that he hides to protect her. She came to the graveyard to give him space. Suddenly, Father Hart appears and speaks of the baby’s grave. The headstone bears the epitaph “As Flame to Smoke” (177), a line from Pericles, Prince of Tyre, by William Shakespeare. The priest named the child Marina and says he sought special permission to bury her. After, he shows them the church’s crypt.

Later, Lynley visits Richard and asks why he admitted Roberta to the hospital but didn’t hire a solicitor for her. Richard says he retains one for himself and will seek to have her certified incompetent rather than face prison. He says Gillian was sexually precocious, beginning with him at 12, and she drove him to leave at 19 to avoid discovery by William. Lynley then visits a neighbor, Marsha Fitzalan, who calls Gillian the loveliest creature she ever knew.

Marsha says Gillian was “like her mother” (193) while Roberta “was like her father” (194). They had different temperaments but were close. When Gillian ran away, Roberta broke out in a nervous rash. William eventually drove to Richmond for lotions for his daughter. Roberta’s rash faded, but the loneliness remained for Roberta in the “gloomy farmhouse” (196).

Havers hasn’t found Tessa’s missing husband, Russell Mowrey. Next, she and Lynley visit Constable Gabriel Langston. He confirms Roberta never spoke to the police, only to Father Hart. The dog’s throat was cut with a missing blade, and Langston admits he buried Whiskers himself because he could not bear to see the dog cremated. Lynley plans to exhume the dog in the morning and bring St. James in to study the corpse.

At Keldale Hall, Havers distracts the Americans while Lynley speaks to Simon. During the conversation, Deborah reveals that she grew up largely in Simon’s house since her father worked as a servant for the St. James family. Havers realizes Lynley wouldn’t marry Deborah because of her class, but that wasn’t a problem for St. James. She sees Lynley not as a snob, but as someone trapped by his sense of social class and obligation.

That night, Stepha comes to Lynley’s room, and they make love. After, he notices “unmistakable” (218) signs of a past pregnancy despite her vowing never to have children.

Across the corridor, Havers lies awake, kept up by their sounds coming through the wall. At the farm, she needles Lynley about the inscription in his cigarette case, implying it comes from a sexual conquest. Havers cannot help but unleash her anger at him, even though she knows that she is endangering her career. Lynley tells her to find something on Gillian in the next three hours or be sacked. As he leaves for the lab, he corrects her: The case belonged to his father and Daze, his late mother. Shaken, Havers recognizes she has lost control of herself. She turns back to the house with a single purpose: find Gillian.

In Newby Wiske, St. James and Deborah meet with Lynley to discuss the autopsy’s results. It shows Whiskers died from a five-inch blade but also that there were barbiturates in the dog’s blood, the same class as William’s sleeping pills. The pills were enough to render the dog unconscious before its throat was cut. On Roberta’s dress, St. James shows how the pattern demonstrates the kneeling posture and the upward slash. He then points to fine spatter low on the hem: William’s blood, thrown while she was present at the beheading. Whether she was the killer or a witness, he says, Roberta was in the barn when it happened. If she is protecting anyone, it is someone she loves. Back at the lodge, Havers says she has “found Gillian” (233).