He relaxed. 'It's all right, Frances. As long as Jack is under suspicion of murdering his eminently murderable wife then they'll strive to keep him healthy and unpromoted.
You've actually saved him by giving him his motive, love - if you'd proved him innocent then O'Leary would have probably been given a new target by the name of Butler.'
Crowe was looking at her. Crowe knew what Audley didn't know.
She'd told the Death Story.
'I've already phoned Control,' said Frances.
Once you've summoned
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
This Yorkshire rain wasn't like Lancashire rain, or even like Midland rain, thought Frances resentfully as the car thudded into another unavoidable puddle which had spread into the centre of the narrow road: in the Midlands it had been half-hearted drizzle, with the occasional well-bred little storm; in Lancashire it had been pervasive wetness; but here, on the shoulder of the high moors, it was an obliterating deluge which had to be fought every inch of the way.
The car juddered and skidded over a pot-hole hidden in the puddle and the spray rose up simultaneously ahead, to dash itself on the windscreen a fraction of a second later, and underneath, to strike the floor beneath them with a solid
'You're going too fast,' said Audley nervously. 'If you kill us on the way we won't get there at all.'
It was such a stupidly obvious thing to say that Frances felt a half-hysterical giggle beneath her irritation that he should have said it at all.
'If you can drive better, then you can drive,' she snapped back at him out of her knowledge (which was common knowledge, for he had never concealed it) that the great David Audley was a bad driver who hated driving, and who would have still managed to put them at risk in this downpour, on this road, even at half her speed.
He lapsed into sullen silence beside her, and she instantly felt half-ashamed, and half-angry with herself for snapping him down. It was the sort of thing a shrewish wife might have said, all the worse for being true; and, worse still, she knew also that his fear for their safety was sharpened by a greater fear which she shared with him.
* * *
They were dropping down off the ridge, she could sense it rather than see it, between the low, half-ruined dry- stone walls with their occasional stunted bushes and trees in the featureless moorland landscape which the rain narrowed around them.
Somewhere ahead of them, down there ahead of them in the greyness, was the opening into the tree-shrouded valley of the Thor Brook, still almost as secret and isolated as when the first monks and lay brothers trudged up it all those forgotten centuries ago.
'How much further?' asked Audley.
The child's eternal question -
* * *
'Not far, dear.'
'But I don't
'You're not meant to see anything.' Father always knew the answer. He always knew how much further and how long. He even knew, unfailingly, how the films on TV
ended, whether they were sad or happy. He knew everything.
'Why not?'
'Because that's why they came here, the old monks. Because there was nobody here, and it was miles from anywhere. Remember Rievaulx, Frances - hidden there in its valley. Getting away from men to be closer to God, that was what being a Cistercian monk was all about.'
'But why. Daddy?' She knew the answer now, he had told it to her before, but she wanted the comfort of hearing it again.
'Because it was a nasty, rough world, and they wanted to get away from it.' Patient repetition.
'But Kirkstall Abbey's in the middle of a town.' Unanswerable logic.
'It wasn't when they built it, sweetie. Things have changed a lot since the twelfth century, you know.' Unarguable answer.
'It's still a nasty, rough world,' said Mother dryly.
'And now you can't get away from it, either,' said Daddy.
* * *
And so Frances Warren had come to Thornervaulx the first time.
* * *
'Thornervaulx?' The man presiding over - the communications centre had not been overawed at first by Audley's appearance, for Audley's appearance had not been overawing. But the penny had dropped at last, with Jock
