“That'd be nice.”
“I have my sewing lesson tomorrow. Did you know? I'm making something awfully special, but I can't say what it is right now. Because.” She cast a meaningful look at her father. “But you can see it, Barbara. Tomorrow, if you like. Do you want to see it? I'll show it to you if you say you want to see it.”
“That sounds just the ticket.”
“But only if you can keep a secret. Can you?”
“Mum's the absolute word,” Barbara vowed.
During this exchange, Azhar had been regarding her. His professional field was microbiology, and Barbara was beginning to feel like one of his specimens, so intense was his scrutiny. Despite their conversation of the previous night and the conclusion he'd reached upon seeing her manner of dress, he'd witnessed her setting off in her normal work togs long enough to know that the alteration in her get-up had a significance beyond a woman's fancying a fashion make-over. He said, “How content you must be, on a case again. After the weeks of idleness, it's always gratifying to engage one's mind, isn't it?”
“It's definitely the cat's jim-jams.” Barbara dropped her cigarette to the ground and crushed it out, kicking the dog end into the flower bed. “Biodegradable,” she said to Hadiyyah, who was obviously about to reprimand her. “Aerates the soil. Feeds the worms.” She settled the strap of her bag more comfortably on her shoulder. “Well. I'm off. Keep that toffee apple fresh for me, okay?”
“Maybe we can watch a video as well.”
“No damsels in distress though. Let's do The Avengers. Mrs. Peel's my idol. I like a woman who can show off her legs and kick gentlemen's bottoms simultaneously.”
Hadiyyah giggled.
Barbara nodded her goodbye. She was on the pavement, making her escape when Azhar spoke again. “Is Scotland Yard undergoing a reduction in force, Barbara?”
She stopped, puzzled, and answered without thinking of the intent behind the question. “Good grief, no. What made you ask that?”
“Autumn, perhaps,” he said. “And the changes it brings.”
“Ah.” She sidestepped the implication behind the word changes. She avoided his eyes. She took the statement at its most superficial and dealt with it accordingly. “The bad guys want nabbing no matter the season. You know the wicked. They never rest.” She smiled brightly and went on her way. As long as he never confronted her directly with the word constable, she knew that she wouldn't have to explain to him how it had come to be attached to her name. She wanted to avoid that explanation as long as possible, forever if she could, because explaining to Azhar ran the risk of wounding him. And for reasons she didn't care to speculate upon, wounding Azhar was unthinkable to her.
Now, in the stairwell of New Scotland Yard, Barbara strove to put the thought of her neighbours out of her mind. That's all they were at the end of the day anyway: a man and a child whom she had come to know by chance.
She glanced at her watch. It was half past ten. She groaned. The thought of six or eight more hours staring at a computer screen was less than exciting. There had to be a more economical way to delve into DI Maiden's professional history. She tossed round several possibilities and decided to try the most likely one.
In her perusal of the files, she'd come across the same name time and again: DCI Dennis Hextell, with whom Maiden had worked in partnership as an undercover cop. If she could locate Hextell, she thought, he might be able to put her onto a lead that was stronger than something she would have to interpret from reading twenty years of files. That was the ticket, she decided: Hextell. She shoved herself off the stairs and went in search of him.
It turned out to be easier than she had anticipated. A phone call to SO 10 gained her the information that DCI Hextell was still in the department, although now, as detective chief superintendent he directed operations instead of taking part in them on the street.
Barbara found him at a small table in the cafeteria on the fourth floor. She introduced herself, asking if she could join him. The DCS looked up from a set of photographs. His face, Barbara saw, wasn't so much lined as it was gouged, and gravity had taken its toll on his muscles. The years certainly hadn't been good to him.
The chief superintendent gathered his photographs together and didn't answer. Barbara said helpfully, “I'm working on the Maiden killing in Derbyshire, sir. Andy Maiden's daughter. You were a team with him, right?”
That got a response. “Sit.”
She could live with monosyllables. Barbara did his bidding. She'd fetched herself a Coke and a chocolate donut from the cafeteria, and she set these down on the table in front of her.
“Rot your teeth, that,” Hextell noted with a nod.
“I'm a victim of my addictions.”
He grunted.
“That your plane?” Barbara asked with a nod at the picture on the top of his stack. It featured a yellow bi-plane of the sort that had been flown in World War I when aviators wore leather helmets and flowing white scarves.
“One of them,” he said. “The one I use for aerobatics.”
“Stunt pilot, are you?”
“I fly.”
“Oh. Right. Must be nice.” Barbara wondered if the years undercover had made the man so loquacious. She launched into the purpose behind tracking him down: Was there any case, any stake-out, any operation that leapt to mind as being particularly important in the history of his association with Andy Maiden? “We're looking at revenge as a possible motive for the girl's murder, someone that you and DI Maiden put away, someone wanting to settle the score. Maidens trying to come up with a name on his own in Derbyshire, and I've been scrolling through the reports all morning on the computer. But nothings ringing my chimes.”
Hextell began separating his pictures. He appeared to have a system for doing so, but Barbara couldn't tell what it was since each shot was of exactly the same plane, just of varying angles: the fuselage here, the struts there, the wing tip, the engine, and the tail. When the piles were arranged to his liking, he took a magnifying glass from his jacket pocket and began studying each photograph under it. “Could be anyone. We were rubbing elbows with first class rot. Pushers, addicts, pimps, gun runners. You name it. Any one of them would have walked the length of the country to rub us out.”
“But no one's name comes to mind?”
“I've survived by putting their names behind me. Andy was the one who couldn't.”
“Survive?”
“Forget.” Hextell separated one picture from the rest. It documented the plane head-on, its body truncated by the angle. He applied his magnifying glass to every inch of it, squinting like a jeweller with a diamond in question.
“Is that why he left? He was out of here on early retirement, I've heard.”
Hextell looked up. “Who's being investigated here?”
Barbara hastened to reassure him. “I'm just trying to get a feeling for the man. If there's something you can tell me that'll help …” She made a that-would-be-great gesture and gave her enthusiasm to her chocolate donut.
The DCS set down his magnifying glass and folded his hands over it. He said, “Andy went out on a medical. He was losing his nerves.”
“He had a nervous breakdown?”
Hextell blew out a derisive breath. “Not stress, woman. Nerves. Real nerves. Sense of smell went first. Taste went next, then touch.
He coped well enough, but then it was his vision. And that was the end of him. He had to get out.”
“Bloody hell. He went blind?”
“Would have done, no doubt. But once he retired, it all came back. Feeling, vision, the lot.”
“So what'd been wrong with him?”
Hextell looked at her long and hard before answering. Then he raised his index and middle fingers and tapped them lightly against his skull. “Couldn't cope with the game. Undercover takes it out of you. I lost four wives. He lost nerves. Some things can't be replaced.”
“He didn't have wife problems?”
“Like I said. It was the game
. Some blokes keep their peckers up fine when they're pretending to be someone they're not. But for Andy, that's not how it was. The lies he had to tell out there … Keeping mum about a case till it was long over … It knocked the stuffing out of him.”
“So there was no one case—one big case, perhaps—that cost him more than the others?”
“Don't know,” Hextell concluded. “Like I said, I put it behind me. If there was one case, I couldn't name it.”
With that sort of memory, Hextell would have been a pearl of low price to the Crown Prosecutors in his salad days. But something told Barbara that the DCS didn't care whether the prosecutors found him useful or not. She packed the rest of her donut into her mouth and washed it down with Coke.
“Thanks for your time,” she told him, and added in a gesture of friendliness, “Looks like fun,” with a nod at the bi-plane.
Hextell picked up the propeller picture, held it top to bottom with the edges of his thumb and index finger so as not to smudge it. “Just another way to die,” he said.
Bloody hell, Barbara thought. What people do to put the job out of mind.
No closer to the name she was looking for but wiser to the potential pitfalls promised by a lengthy career in police work, she returned to the computer. She'd just begun revisiting Andrew Maiden's history when a phone call interrupted her.
“It's Cole.” Winston Nkata's voice came over a line that was thick with static. “Mum took one look at the body, said, ‘Right. That's my Terry,’ walked out 'f the room like she was going for groceries, and just hit the floor. Flat on her face. We thought she'd had heart failure, but she'd just checked out. She had to be sedated once she came to. She's taking it hard.”
“Rough go,” Barbara said.
“She doted on the bloke. Makes me think of my mum.”
“Right. Well.” Barbara couldn't help thinking of her own mother. Doting certainly wouldn't be the word to describe her maternal deportment. “Sorry and all that. Are you bringing her back?”
“Be there by mid-afternoon, I expect. We stopped for coffee. She's in the loo.”
“Ah.” Barbara wondered why he was phoning. Perhaps to serve as intermediary between herself and Lynley, passing along information so that the inspector would have as little contact with her as he apparently deemed necessary at the moment. She said, “I haven't got anything on Maiden's arrests yet. At least not anything that looks useful.” She told him what DCS Hextell had confided about Maiden's nervous complaints, adding, “Whatever the inspector wants to make of that.”
“I'll give him the information,” Nkata told her. “If you c'n break off, there's Battersea to look at. It'd save us some time.”
“Battersea?”
“Terry Cole's digs. His studio as well. One of us needs to get over there, talk to his roommate. This Cilia Thompson, you recall?”
“Yeah. But I thought …” What had she thought? Obviously, that Nkata would keep as much to himself as he could, leaving the grunt work to her. The other DC continued to nonplus her with his easy generosity. “I can break off,” Barbara said. “I remember the address.”
She heard Nkata chuckle. “Now, why'm I not surprised at that?”
Lynley and Hanken had spent the first part of the morning waiting for Winston Nkata to deliver Terry Cole's mother to them for the purpose of identifying the second body found on the moor. Neither man had much doubt that the procedure would be a mere formality—devastating and anguished, but still a formality. When no one had come off the moor by dawn to claim the motorcycle and no one else had reported it stolen, it seemed fairly conclusive that the mutilated male and the owner of the motorcycle were one and the same.
Nkata reached them by ten, and the answer was theirs by quarter past the hour. Mrs. Cole verified that the boy was indeed her son Terry, after which she collapsed. A doctor was summoned, sedative in hand. He took over where the police left off.
“I want his effects,” Sal Cole had sobbed, by which they understood that she meant her sons clothes. “I want his effects for our Darryl. I mean to have them.”
And she would do, they told her, once forensics had completed their analysis, once the jeans and T-shirt and Doc Martens and socks were no longer deemed necessary for a successful prosecution of whoever had committed the crime. Until that time, they would give her receipts for each garment that the boy had been wearing, for his motorcycle as well. They didn't tell her that it could easily be years before the ensanguined clothing was released to her. And for her part, she didn't ask when she might expect it. She just clutched the envelope of receipts and wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist. Winston Nkata escorted her from the nightmare into the extended nightmare to come.
Lynley and Hanken withdrew to the DI's office in silence. Prior to Nkata's arrival, Hanken had spent the time reviewing his notes on the case thus far, and he'd had another look at the initial report compiled by the constable who'd first talked to the Maidens about their daughter's disappearance. “She had several phone calls on the morning of her hike,” he told Lynley. “Two from a woman, one from a man, neither giving their names to Nan Maiden before she fetched Nicola to take the calls.”
“Could the man have been Terence Cole?” Lynley asked.
It was more grist for the mill of their suspicions, Hanken concluded.
He went to his desk. At its precise centre, someone had placed a sheaf of papers while they'd been with Mrs. Cole. It was, Hanken told Lynley upon taking them up, a document relating to the case. Owing largely to the services of an excellent transcriptionist, Dr. Sue Myles had managed to be as good as her word: They had the post-mortem report in hand.
Dr. Myles had been as thorough as she'd been unconventional, they discovered. Her findings upon external examination of the bodies alone took up nearly ten pages. In addition to a detailed description of every wound, contusion, abrasion, and bruise on both corpses, Dr. Myles had recorded each minute particular associated with a death on the moor. Thus, everything from the heather caught up in the hair of Nicola Maiden to a thorn pricking one of Terry Cole's ankles was assiduously noted. The detectives were made aware of infinitesimal fragments of stone embedded in flesh, evidence of bird droppings on skin, unidentified slivers of wood in wounds, and the postmortem damage done to the bodies by insects and birds. What the detectives didn't have at the end of their reading, however, was what they hadn't had at the beginning of it: a clear idea of the number of killers they were seeking. But they did have one intriguing detail: Aside from her eyebrows and the hair on her head, Nicola Maiden had been completely shaven. Not born hairless, but deliberately shaven.
It was that interesting fact that suggested their next move in the investigation.
Perhaps it was time, Lynley said, to talk to Julian Britton, the grief-stricken fiancé of their primary victim. They set off to do so.
The Britton home, Broughton Manor, sat midway up a limestone outcrop just two miles southeast of the town of Bakewell. Facing due west, it overlooked the River Wye, which at this location in the dale cut a placid curve through an oak-studded meadow where a flock of sheep grazed. From a distance, the building looked not like a manor house that had doubtless once been the centre of a thriving estate but instead an impressive fortification. Erected from limestone that had long ago gone grey from the lichen that thrived upon it, the house consisted of towers, battlements, and walls that rose twelve feet before giving way to the first of a series of narrow windows. The manor's entire appearance suggested longevity and strength, combined with the willingness and the ability to survive everything from the vicissitudes of weather to the whimsies of the family who owned it.
Closer, however, Broughton Manor told a different tale. Glass was missing from some of its diamond-paned windows. Part of its ancient oak roof appeared to have caved in. A forest of greenery—everything from ivy to old man's beard—seemed to be pressing against the remaining windows of the southwest wing, and the low walls that marked a series of gardens falling towards the riv
er were crumbling and gap-ridden, giving wandering sheep access to what had probably once been a descending array of colourful parterres.
“Used to be the showplace of the county,” DI Hanken said to Lynley as they swung across the stone bridge that spanned the river and gave onto the sloping drive up to the house. “Chatsworth aside, of course. I'm not talking about palaces. But once Jeremy Britton got his maulers on it, he ran it straight to hell in less than ten years. The older boy—that's our Julian—has been trying to bring the place back to life. He wants to make it pay for itself as a farm. Or a hotel. Or a conference centre. Or a park. He even lets it out for fetes and tournaments, which probably has his ancestors spinning in their graves. But he's got to stay one step ahead of his dad, who'll drink up the profits if he's got the chance.”
“Julian's in need of funds?”
“Putting it mildly.”
“And there are other children?” Lynley asked. “Julian's the eldest?”
Hanken pulled past an enormous iron-studded front door—its dark oak dun with age, indifferent care, and bad weather—and drove them round to the back of the house, where an arched gate big enough for a carriage to pass through had an additional human-size door cut into it. This stood open, beyond it a courtyard between whose paving stones weeds sprang like unexpected thoughts. He switched off the ignition. “Julian's got a brother permanently at university. And a sister married and living in New Zealand. He's the oldest child—Julian is—and why he doesn't go along the same path as the others and clear out is far beyond me. His dad's a real piece of work, but you'll see that for yourself if you meet him.”
Hanken shoved open his door and led the way towards the house. Behind them, excited howling came from what seemed to be the stables, which stood at the end of an overgrown gravel lane shooting north from a curve in the nearby drive. “Someone's with the harriers,” Hanken told Lynley over his shoulder. “Probably Julian—he breeds the dogs—but we may as well check inside first. This way.”