“Right,” said Two, “I s'pose you do.”
“And we all want something,” said One with a smirk.
Upstairs, a door crashed back against a wall. Muffled voices accompanied the noise of furniture being roughly shoved round a room. In Martin's office the cops made their search with a minimum of effort and a maximum of mess: They strewed books on the floor, took pictures from the walls, and emptied the filing cabinet in which Martin kept scrupulous records for the escort service. Gorilla Two bent and, with cigar-stub fingers, began sifting through them.
“Shit,” Martin hissed, receiver to his ear. Where was that fucker Polmanteer?
On the other end of the line the phone at his solicitor's home double-rang four times. His answer machine clicked on. Martin cursed, disconnected, and tried the solicitor's mobile. Where would he be on a Sunday, for God's sake? The slimy bastard couldn't have gone to church.
The mobile brought him no better results. He slammed down the receiver and rooted in his desk for the solicitor's card. Gorilla Two elbowed him to one side. He said, “Sorry, sir. Can't let you remove—”
“I'm not removing a fucking thing! I'm looking for my solicitor's pager.”
“Wouldn't keep it in your desk, would he?” One asked from the shelves, where he continued his work. Books thunked to the floor.
“You know what I mean,” Martin said to Two. “I want the number of his pager. It's on a card. I know my rights. Now, step aside or I won't be responsible—”
“Martin? What is it? What's going on? There're men in our room and they've emptied the wardrobe and … What's going on?”
Martin spun round. Tricia was in the doorway, unshowered, undressed, and unpainted. She looked like the hags who sat on their sleeping bags and begged money in the subway at Hyde Park Corner. She looked like what she was: a smack-head.
His hands started to burn once again. He dug his nails into his palms. Tricia had been the single cause of his every difficulty for the last twenty years. And now she was the cause of his downfall.
He said, “God damn it. God damn it. You!” And he plunged across the room. He grabbed her by the hair and managed to ram her head against the door jamb before the cops were on him. “Stupid cunt!” he shouted as they dragged him off her. And then to the police, “All right. All right” as he shook off their hold on him. “Call your asshole boss. Tell him I'm ready to deal.”
CHAPTER 25
t was nearly midday before Simon St. James was able to give his time to the Derbyshire post-mortem reports that Lynley had sent him via Barbara Havers. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to be looking for. The examination of the Maiden girl appeared in order. The conclusion of epidural haematoma was consistent with the blow to her skull. That it had been administered by a right-handed person attacking her from above was consistent with the hypothesis that she'd been running and had tripped—or been tackled—in her flight across the moor in the darkness. Apart from the blow to her head and the scrapes and contusions one would expect to find after a rough fall on uneven ground, there was nothing on her body that suggested anything curious. Unless, of course, one wanted to consider the extraordinary number of holes she'd had pierced in everything from her eyebrows to her genitals as a point of interest. And that hardly seemed a reasonable route to go when driving needles through various body parts had long ago become one of the relatively few acts of defiance left to a generation of young people whose parents had already engaged in them all.
From his reading of the Maiden report, it seemed to St. James that all the bases had been covered: from the time, cause, and mechanism of death to the evidence—or lack thereof—of a struggle. X-rays and photographs had been duly taken, and the body had been examined from top to bottom. The various organs had been studied, removed, and commented upon. Samples of body fluids had been sent to toxicology for their findings. At the end of the report, the opinion was stated briefly and clearly: The girl had died as the result of a blow to the head.
St. James went through the findings once more to make sure he hadn't missed any pertinent detail. Then he turned to the second report and immersed himself in the death of Terence Cole.
Lynley had phoned him with the information that one of the wounds on the boy hadn't been inflicted by the Swiss Army knife that had apparently been responsible for the others, including the fatal piercing of the femoral artery. After reading through the basic facts in the report, St. James gave a more careful scrutiny to everything related to this particular wound. He noted its size, its position on the body, and the marking left on the bone beneath it. He stared at the words and then walked contemplatively to the window of his lab, where he watched as Peach rolled blissfully below him in a patch of garden sunlight, exposing her furry dachshund belly to the twelve o'clock heat.
The Swiss Army knife, he knew, had been found in a grit dispenser. Why hadn't the secondary weapon been left in the same place? Why cache one weapon but not the other? Those questions, of course, belonged in the realm of the case detectives and not the scientists, but he believed they needed to be asked nonetheless.
Once they were asked, there seemed to be only two possible answers: Either the second weapon identified the killer too closely to be left at the scene or the second weapon had been left at the scene and the police had mistaken it for something else.
If the first supposition was the case, he could be of no assistance in the matter. If the second was the case, a more detailed study of the crime scene evidence was in order. He had no access to that evidence and he knew he wouldn't be welcome in Derbyshire to finger through it. So he returned to the post-mortem report and he sought anything within it that might give him a clue.
Dr. Sue Myles hadn't missed a thing: from the insects that had taken up residence in and on both of the bodies during the hours they'd lain undiscovered on the moor to the leaves, flowers, and twigs that had become caught up in the hair of the girl and the wounds on the boy.
It was this final detail—a sliver of wood some two centimeters long found on the body of Terence Cole—that St. James closed in on curiously. The sliver had been sent on to the lab for analysis, and someone had appended a note in pencil in the margin of the report, identifying it. From a phone call, doubtless. When officers were pressed, they didn't always wait for official word from the police lab before they moved on.
Cedar, someone had printed neatly in the margin. And next to it in parentheses the words Port Orford. St. James was no botanist, so Port Orford illuminated nothing for him. He knew it was unlikely that he'd be able to track down on a Sunday the forensic botanist who'd identified the wood, so he gathered up his paperwork and descended the stairs to his study.
Deborah was within, absorbed in the Sunday Times magazine. She said, “Trouble, love?”
He replied, “Ignorance. Which is trouble enough.”
He found the book he was looking for among the dustier of his volumes. He began leafing through the pages as Deborah joined him by the shelves.
“What is it?”
“I don't know,” he said. “Cedar. And Port Orford. Mean anything to you?”
“Sounds like a place. Port Isaac, Port Orford. Why?”
“A sliver of cedar was found on Terence Cole's body. The boy on the moors.”
“Tommy's case?”
“Hmm.” St. James flipped to the back of the book and ran his finger down the index under cedar. “Atlas, blue, Chilean incense. Did you know there were so many kinds of cedar?”
“Is it important?”
“I'm beginning to think it could be.” He ran his gaze further down the page. And then he saw the two words Port Orford. They were listed as a variety of the tree.
He turned to the indicated page, where first he took note of the picture which featured a sample of the coniferous tree's foliage and then read the entry itself. “This is curious,” he said to his wife.
“What?” she asked, sliding her arm through his.
He told her what the post-mortem had claimed
: that a wooden sliver identified by the forensic botanist as Port Orford cedar had been found in one of the wounds on the body of Terence Cole.
Deborah looked thoughtful as she shrugged back a heavy mass of her hair. “Why's that curious? They were killed out of doors, weren't they? Out on the moors?” And then her eyes widened. “Oh yes. I do see.”
“Exactly,” St. James said. “What kind of moor has cedars growing on it? But it's more curious than that, my love. This particular cedar grows in America, in the States. Oregon and northern California, it says.”
“The tree could have been imported, couldn't it?” Deborah asked reasonably. “For someone's garden or for a park? Or even a greenhouse or conservatory. You know what I mean: like palm trees or cactuses.” She smiled, her nose wrinkling. “Or is that cacti?”
St. James walked to his desk and put the book down. He lowered himself slowly into his chair, thinking. “All right. Let's say it was imported for someone's garden or a park.”
“Of course.” She was with him, tagging her own thought onto his. “That still begs the obvious question, doesn't it? How did a cedar tree meant for someone's garden or a park get to the moor?”
“And how did it get to a part of the moor that's nowhere near someone's garden or a park in the first place?”
“Someone planted it there for religious reasons?”
“More likely no one planted it at all.”
“But you said …” Deborah frowned. “Oh yes. I see. I suppose the forensic botanist must have made an error, then.”
“I don't think so.”
“But, Simon, if there was only a sliver to work with—”
“That's all a good forensic botanist would need.” St. James went on to explain. Even a fragment of wood, he told her, bore the pattern of tubes and vessels that transported fluids from the bottom to the top of a tree. Soft-wood trees—and all conifers, he told her, are among the soft woods—are less developed evolutionary and consequently easier to identify. Placed under microscopic analysis, a sliver would reveal a number of key features that distinguish its species from all other species. A forensic botanist would catalogue these features, plug them into a key—or a computer identification system, for that matter—and derive from the information and the key an exact identification of the tree. It was a faultlessly accurate process, or at least as accurate as any other identification made from microscopic, human, and computer analysis.
“All right,” Deborah said slowly and with some apparent doubt. “So it's cedar, yes?”
“Port Orford cedar. I think we can depend on that.”
“And it's a piece of cedar that's not from a tree growing in the area, yes?”
“Yes as well. So we're left with asking where that piece of cedar came from and how it came to be on the boy's body.”
“They were camping, weren't they?”
“The girl was, yes.”
“In a tent? Well, what about a tent peg from the tent? What if the peg was made from cedar?”
“She was hiking. I doubt it was that kind of tent.”
Deborah crossed her arms and leaned against the desk, considering this. “What about a camp stool, then? The legs, for instance.”
“Possibly. If a stool was among the items at the site.”
“Or tools. She would have had camping tools with her. An axe for wood, a trowel, something like that. The sliver could be from one of the handles.”
“Tools would have to be lightweight, though, if she was carrying them in a rucksack.”
“What about cooking utensils? Wooden spoons?”
St. James smiled. “Gourmets in the wilderness?”
“Don't laugh at me,” she said, laughing herself. “I'm trying to help.”
“I've a better idea,” he told her. “Come along.”
He led her upstairs to the laboratory, where his computer hummed quietly in a corner near the window. There he sat down and, with Deborah at his shoulder, he accessed the Internet, saying, “Let's consult the Great Intelligence on-line.”
“Computers always make my palms sweat.”
St. James took her palm, unsweaty, and kissed it. “Your secret's safe with me.”
In a moment the computer screen came to life, and St. James selected the search engine he generally used. He typed the word cedar into the search field and blinked with consternation when the result was some six hundred thousand entries.
“Good Lord,” Deborah said. “That's not very helpful, is it?”
“Let's narrow our options.” St. James altered his selection to Port Oxford cedar. The result was an immediate change to one hundred and eighty-three. But when he began to scroll through the listing, he saw he'd come up with everything from an article written about Port Or-ford, Oregon, to a treatise on wood rot. He sat back, reflected for a moment, and typed in the word usage after cedar, adding the appropriate inverted commas and addition signs. That gleaned him absolutely nothing at all. He switched from usage to market and hit the return. The screen altered and gave him his answer.
He read the very first listing and said, “Good God,” when he saw what it was.
Deborah, whose attention had drifted towards her darkroom, came back to him. “What?” she said. “What?”
“It's the weapon,” he said, and pointed to the screen.
Deborah read for herself and drew in a sharp breath. “Shall I get in touch with Tommy?”
St. James considered. But the request to study the post-mortem reports had been relayed to him from Lynley via Barbara. And that served as sufficient indication of a chain of command, which gave him the excuse he needed in order to attempt to make peace where there was strife.
“Let's track down Barbara,” he told his wife. “She can be the one to take the news to Tommy.”
Barbara Havers zoomed round the corner of Anhalt Road and hoped her luck would hold for another few hours. She'd managed to find Cilia Thompson in her railway arch studio applying her talents to a canvas on which a cavernous mouth with tonsils like bellows opened upon a three-legged girl skipping rope on a spongy-looking tongue. A few questions had been enough to ascertain fuller information about the “gent with good taste” who'd purchased one of Cilia's master-works the previous week.
Cilia couldn't remember his name off the top of her head. Come to think of it, she reported, he'd never told her. But he'd written her a cheque which she'd photocopied, the better—Barbara thought—to prove to the world of artistic doubting Thomases that she'd actually managed to sell a canvas. She had that photocopy taped to the inside of her wooden paintbox, and she showed it off willingly, saying, “Oh yeah, the blokes name's right here. Gosh. Look at this. I wonder if he's any relation?”
Matthew King-Ryder, Barbara saw, had paid an idiotically exorbitant amount for one dog of a painting. He'd used a cheque drawn on a bank in St. Helier on the island of Jersey. Private Banking was embossed above his name. He'd scrawled the amount as if he'd been in a hurry. As perhaps he had been, Barbara thought.
How had Matthew King-Ryder happened to turn up in Portslade Street? she'd asked the artist. Cilia herself would admit, wouldn't she, that this particular row of railway arches wasn't exactly heralded throughout London as a hotbed of modern art.
Cilia shrugged. She didn't know how he'd happened upon the studio. But obviously, she wasn't the sort of girl who looked at a gift horse cross-eyed. When he'd shown up, asked to have a look about, and demonstrated an interest in her work, she was as happy as a duck in the sun to let him browse right through it. All she could report in the end was that the bloke with the chequebook had spent a good hour looking at every piece of art in the studio—Terry's as well? Barbara wanted to know. Had he asked about Terry's art? Using Terry's name?
No. He just wanted to see her paintings, Cilia explained. All of them. And when he couldn't find anything he liked, he asked if she had any others tucked away that he could see. So she'd sent him round to the flat, having phoned Mrs. Baden and told her to show him up when he arrived.
He went straight there and made his selection from one of those paintings. He sent her a cheque promptly by post on the following day. “Gave me the asking price as well,” Cilia said proudly. “No dickering about it.”
And that point alone—that Matthew King-Ryder had gained access to the digs of Terry Cole, for whatever reason—made Barbara push the accelerator floorward as she whipped through Battersea back to Cilia's flat.
She didn't give a thought to what she was supposed to be doing instead of reversing into a parking space at the end of Anhalt Road. She'd got the search warrant as directed, and she'd put together a team. She'd even met them in front of Snappy Snaps in Notting Hill Gate and put the whole boiling kettle of them in the picture on what the inspector wanted them to look for in Martin Reeve's home. She'd merely omitted the information that she was supposed to accompany them. It was easy enough to justify this omission. The team she'd assembled—two members of which were amateur boxers in their free time—could shake up a house and intimidate its inhabitants far better if they had no female presence among them, diluting the threat implied by their imposing physiques and their tendency to communicate in monosyllables. Besides, wasn't she killing two birds—three or four, perhaps—by sending officers to Notting Hill to shake up and shake down the Reeves without her? While they were doing that, she would be using the time to see what information could be harvested from the Battersea end of things. Delegation of responsibility and the mark of an officer with leadership potential, she called the situation. And she pushed from her mind the nasty little voice that kept trying to call it something else.
She pressed the bell for Mrs. Baden's ground floor flat. The faint sound of hesitantly played piano music halted abruptly. The sheer curtains in the bay window flicked an inch to one side.
Barbara called out, “Mrs. Baden? Barbara Havers again. New Scotland Yard CID.”
The buzzer sounded to release the lock. Barbara scurried inside.