Angel With Two Faces by Nicola Upson

holding her as she cried and waiting until she felt ready to leave. He remembered looking down through the bluebell woods: the view had been much as it was today, exceptfor two dead magpies which the gamekeeper of the time had strung up by the neck on the fence – a deterrent to other vermin and, it seemed, a potent denial of the rhyme which he had learnt by heart as a boy. The birds moved gently in the breeze, and the green and violet sheen of their feathers mirrored the flowers that covered the ground, but the lifelessness in their eyes mocked any promise of summer. The image had stayed with him, allied to Morwenna – a pairing of beauty and death which made each the more powerfully felt, and which now seemed more poignant than ever.
    ‘Just like old times,’ Morwenna said, as if reading his thoughts, but her attempt at lightness was not very convincing. ‘I seem to make a habit of running to you whenever there’s trouble, but I really didn’t know who else I could talk to at the moment.’
    ‘Twice in eight years is hardly a habit.’
    ‘No, I suppose not.’ She sat down on an old tree trunk and invited him to do the same. ‘I thought I could carry this on my own, but it’s been eating away at me since Harry died. Somehow it’s easier to talk to you because you’re not here all the time – and I know I can trust you not to pass judgement.’ Archie wondered again about the sin that Morwenna had thrown back at Nathaniel, but he said nothing and let her continue. ‘You see, I don’t think his death was an accident,’ she said quietly.
    It was the last thing that Archie had expected to hear. ‘Are you saying that someone killed him?’ he asked, careful to keep the disbelief out of his voice.
    ‘What?’ Morwenna looked horrified. ‘No – God, no, nothing like that.’ She gave him a look that seemed to doubt, after all, the wisdom of confiding in a policeman, then explained whatshe had meant. ‘I think he took his own life – it’s the only thing that makes any sense.’
    This time, Archie thought before speaking. The idea that Harry Pinching would kill himself seemed to him so unlikely that he had not even considered it as a possibility, and he chided himself for betraying years of training by subconsciously subscribing to the idea that there was a suicide ‘type’. ‘What makes you think he’d do that?’ he asked. ‘Harry always struck me as remarkably positive about life, even after your parents died.’
    ‘Yes, he was strong then and I don’t know how Loveday or I would have got through that without him, and it’s not that anything’s changed – it’s more the way he died. He was far too good a rider to drown like that. Even if he couldn’t keep Shilling out of the water, he’d have known that his best chance of survival was to hang on and get them both to the other bank. He loved that horse and they trusted each other – I’ve never seen such a bond between a man and an animal. There’s no way he’d simply let go.’
    ‘Perhaps not, if he could help it – but the Loe’s a law unto itself. You don’t need me to tell you how dangerous it is. We’ve both been here long enough to know that the stories about it live on for a reason – I can think of at least five people who’ve died in the lake or off the Bar in the last thirty years.’
    Morwenna looked at him defiantly for a moment. ‘Tell me honestly, Archie – what was your instant reaction when you heard about the accident?’
    He couldn’t deny his surprise at the news of Harry’s death – surprise and, if he thought about it carefully, a touch of disbelief which he had put down to his natural tendency to over-analyse. But suicide? There was the sorry state of the cottage, ofcourse: he had assumed that it was Morwenna who was at her wits’ end but perhaps that was simply grief and worry – perhaps it was her brother who had given up on life? Somehow, though, it still didn’t seem to fit with the Harry he had