A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George Read Free Book Online

at far too young an age.
    Barbara smiled as he joined them, her first genuine smile of the entire afternoon. “But even best men are generally not kidnapped to New Scotland Yard. How are you, Simon?”
    “Fine. Or so my father-in-law continues to tell me. Lucky as well. It seems he saw it all from the beginning. He knew it directly the day of her birth. You’ve been introduced to Deborah?”
    “Only just now.”
    “And we can keep you no longer?”
    “Webberly’s called a meeting,” Lynley put in. “You know how that is.”
    “How I do. Then we won’t ask you to stay. We’re off ourselves in a very little while. Helen has the address if anything should come up.”
    “Don’t give a thought to that.” Lynley paused as if he were not quite sure what to do next. “My warmest congratulations, St. James,” he settled on saying.
    “Thank you,” the other man replied. He nodded to Barbara, touched his brides shoulder lightly, and left the room.
    How odd, Barbara thought. They didn’t even shake hands.
    “Will you go to the Yard dressed like that?” Deborah asked Lynley.
    He looked at his clothes ruefully. “Anything to keep up my reputation as a rake.” They laughed together. It was a warm communication that died as suddenly as it had risen. From it grew yet another little silence.
    “Well,” Lynley began.
    “I’d a speech all planned,” Deborah said quickly, looking down at her flowers. They trembled once again in her hand and a shower of baby’s breath fell to the floor. She raised her head. “Something … it was just the kind of thing Helen might say. Talk about my childhood, Dad, this house. You know the sort of thing. Witty and clever. But I’m absolutely pathetic at that sort of thing. Quite out of my depth. A hopeless incompetent.” She looked down again to see that a very small dachshund had come into the study and carried in its jaws a woman’s sequined handbag. The dog placed the bag at Deborah’s satin-shod feet, supremely confident that the offering had merit. A tail wagged in the friendliest fashion. “Oh, no!
Peach!”
Laughing, Deborah bent to retrieve the purloined article, but when she straightened, her green eyes glittered with tears. “Thank you, Tommy. For everything. Really. For it all.”
    “The best, Deb,” he said lightly in reply. He went to her, hugged her quickly to him, and brushed a kiss against her hair.
    And it came to Barbara, as she stood there watching, that for some reason St. James had left the two of them together precisely so that Lynley could do just that.

3

    The body had no head. That single, grisly detail was the most prominent feature of the police photographs that were being passed among the three CID officers gathered at the circular table in the Scotland Yard office.
    Father Hart looked nervously from one face to the next, and he fingered the tiny silver rosary in his pocket. It had been blessed by Pius XII in 1952. Not an individual audience, of course. One could never hope for that. But certainly that trembling, numinous hand making the sign of the cross over two thousand reverential pilgrims counted for a powerful sort of something. Eyes closed, he’d held the rosary high above his head as if somehow that would allow the Pope’s blessing to strike it more potently.
    He was well on his way into the third decade of the sorrowful mysteries when the tall, blond man spoke.
    “‘What a blow was there given,’” he murmured, and Father Hart looked his way.
    Was he a policeman? Father Hart couldn’t understand why the man was dressed so formally, but now, upon hearing the words, he looked at him hopefully. “Ah, Shakespeare. Yes. Just the very thing somehow.” The big man with the awful cigar looked at him blankly. Father Hart cleared his throat and watched them continue to scrutinise the pictures.
    He’d been with them for nearly a quarter of an hour and in that time barely a word had been exchanged. A cigar had been lit by the older man, the