LYNLEY WAS DRIVING UP THE acclivity of the Clitheroe Road towards the village of Winslough by late afternoon. Mellow sunlight, fading as day drew towards night, pierced the winter mist that lay over the land. In narrow bands, it glanced against the old stone structures— church, school, houses, and shops that rose in a serried display of Lancashire’s stalwart architecture — and it changed the colour of the buildings to ochre, from their normally sombre tan-soaked-with-soot. Beneath the tyres of the Bentley, the road was wet, as it always seemed to be in the North at this time of year, and pools of water from both ice and frost, which gathered and melted and gathered again on a nightly basis, glimmered in the light. Upon their surfaces the sky was refl ected, as were the vertebral forms of hedges and trees.
He slowed the car some fifty yards from the church. He parked on the verge and got out into the knife-sharp air. He could smell the smoke from a fresh, dry-wood fire nearby. This argued for dominance with the prevalent odours of manure, turned earth, wet and rotting vegetation which emanated from the expanse of open land lying just beyond the brambly hedge that bordered the road. He looked past this. To his left, the hedge curved northeast with the road, giving way to the church and then, perhaps a quarter of a mile farther on, to the village itself. To his far right, a stand of trees thickened into an old oak wood above which rose a hill that was sided by frost and topped by a wavering wreath of mist. And directly in front of him, the open fi eld dipped languidly down to a crooked stream from which the land lifted again on the other side in a patchwork of drystone walls. Among these stood farms, and from them even at this distance Lynley could hear the bleating of sheep.
He leaned against the side of the car and gazed at St. John the Baptist’s. Like the village itself, the church was a plain structure, roofed in slate and ornamented only by its clock-faced bell tower and Norman crenellation. Surrounded by a graveyard and chestnut trees, backdropped by a misty egg-shell sky, it didn’t much look like a player in a set piece with murder at its core.
Priests, after all, were supposed to be minor characters in the drama of life and death. Theirs was the role of conciliator, counsellor, and general intermediary between the penitent, the petitioner, and the Lord. They offered a service elevated both in effi cacy and importance as a result of its connection to the divine, but because of this fact there was a measured distance between them and the members of their congregation, one which seemed to preclude the sort of intimacy that led to murder.
Yet this chain of thought was sophistry, Lynley knew. Everything from the monitory aphorism about the wolf in sheep’s clothing to that time-worn hypocrite the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale bore evidence of that. Even if this were not the case, Lynley had been a policeman long enough to know that the most guileless exterior — not to mention the most exalted position — had the fullest potential to hide culpability, sin, and shame. Thus, if murder had shattered the peace of this somnolent countryside, the fault did not lie in the stars or in the ceaseless movement of the planets, but rather at the centre of a guarded heart.
“There’s something peculiar going on,” St. James had said on the phone that morning. “From what I’ve been able to gather, the local constable apparently managed to avoid calling in his divisional CID for anything more than a cursory investigation. And he seems to be involved with the woman who fed this priest— Robin Sage — the hemlock in the fi rst place.”
“Surely there was an inquest, St. James.”
“There was. The woman — she’s called Juliet Spence — admitted doing it and claimed it was an accident.”
“Well, if the case went no further and the coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of accidental poisoning, we have to assume that the autopsy and whatever other evidence there was — no matter who gathered it — verifi ed her account.”
“But when you consider the fact that she’s a herbalist—”
“People make mistakes. Consider how many deaths have risen from a putative fungi expert’s picking the wrong sort of wild mushroom in the woods and cooking it up for dinner and death.”
“This isn’t quite the same.”
“You said she mistook it for wild parsnip, didn’t you?”
“I did. And that’s where the story goes bad.”
St. James set forth the facts. While it was true, he said, that the plant was not immediately distinguishable from a number of other members of its family — the
Why not the fruit, Lynley wanted to know. Didn’t this entire situation arise from the act of picking, cooking, and eating the fruit?
Not at all, St. James told him. Although the fruit was as poisonous as the rest of the plant, it consisted of dry, two-part capsules that, unlike a peach or an apple, weren’t fleshy and hence gastronomically attractive. Someone harvesting water hemlock, thinking it was wild parsnip, would not be eating the fruit at all. Rather, he’d be digging up the plant and using the root.
“And that’s the rub,” St. James said.
“The root bears the distinguishing characteristics, I take it.”
“It does.”
Lynley had to admit that, while the characteristics weren’t legion, they were enough to rouse his own sleeping disquiet. This was, in part, why he unpacked the clothing he’d put in his suitcase for a week in the mild winter of Corfu, repacked it for the insidious bone-chill of the North, and made his way up the M1 to the M6 and thence deep into Lancashire with its desolate moors, its cloud-covered fells, and its antique villages from which more than three hundred years ago had sprung his country’s ugliest fascination with witchcraft.
Roughlee, Blacko, and Pendle Hill were none of them too distant in either miles or memory from the village of Winslough. Nor was the Trough of Bowland through which twenty women were marched to their trials and their deaths at Lancaster Castle. It was historical fact that persecution raised its nasty head most often when tensions rose and a scapegoat was needed to diffuse and displace them. Lynley wondered idly if the death of the local vicar at the hands of a woman was tension enough.
He turned from his contemplation of the church and went back to the Bentley. He switched on the ignition, and the tape he’d been listening to since Clitheroe resumed. Mozart’s
If it wasn’t a mistake that killed Robin Sage, it was something else, and the facts suggested that
“One distinguishes water hemlock from other members of the
“But isn’t it within the realm of possibility that this particular plant had only one root stock?”
“It’s possible, yes. Just as another sort of plant might have its opposite: two or three adventitious roots. But statistically speaking, it’s unlikely, Tommy.”
“Still, one can’t discount it.”
“Agreed. But even if this particular plant had been an anomaly of that sort, there are other characteristics to the underground portion of the stem that one would think a herbalist would notice. When cut open lengthwise, the stem of water hemlock displays nodes and internodes.”
“Help me out here, Simon. Science isn’t my fi eld.”
“Sorry. I suppose you’d call them chambers. They’re hollow, with a diaphragm of pith tissue running horizontally across the cavity.”
“And wild parsnip doesn’t have these chambers?”
“Nor does it exude a yellow oily liquid when its stem is cut.”
“But would she have cut the stem? Would she have opened it lengthwise?”
“The latter, no. I admit it’s doubtful. But as to the former: How could she have removed the root — even if it
