In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

  “Hang on. I'm not talking about a warrant to shovel through the Brittons' territory. This”—Hanken lifted the bag—“gives us another nail to pound into Maiden's coffin.”

  “I don't see how.” And then, when he saw that Hanken would expatiate on his reasons for seeking a warrant to search Maiden Hall, Lynley said quickly, “Hear me out for a moment. Do you agree that a long bow's probably our third weapon?”

  “When I compare that suggestion to the hole in this jacket, I do,” Hanken said. “What're you getting at?”

  “I'm getting at the fact that we already know of a location where long bows have probably been used. Broughton Manor's been the site for tournaments, hasn't it? For reenactments and fetes, from what you've told me. That being the case, and Julian being the man who hoped to marry a woman who—as we know—betrayed him in Derbyshire alone with two other men, why would we want to search Maiden Hall?”

  “Because the dead girl's dad was the man who threatened her in London,” Hanken countered. “Because he was shouting that he'd see her dead before he'd let her do what she wanted to do. Because he took out a bloody bank loan to bribe her into living the way he wanted her to live, and she pocketed that money, played the game by his rules for three short months, and then said, ‘Right. Well, thanks mounds for the corn. It's been great fun, Dad, but I'm off to London to squeeze blokes' bollocks in a cylinder for a living. Hope you understand.’ And he didn't. Understand, that is. What dad would?”

  Lynley said, “Peter, I know it looks bad for Andy …”

  “Any way you rotate the roast on the spit, it looks bad for Andy.”

  “But when I asked the hotel employees if any of them knew the Brittons, the answer was yes. Frankly, it was more than yes. It was ‘we know the Brittons by sight.’ Now, why would that be?” Lynley didn't wait for Hanken to respond. “Because they come here. Because they drink in the bar. Because they eat in the dining room. And it's easy enough for them to do that because Tideswell's practically on a direct route between Broughton Manor and Calder Moor. And you can't go charging off to search Maiden Hall without stopping to consider what all of that means.”

  Hanken kept his gaze fixed on Lynley as he spoke. When Lynley had finished his polemic, he said, “Come with me, lad,” and led his colleague to the reception counter of the hotel, where he asked for a map of the White Peak. He took Lynley through to the bar and opened this map on a table top in the corner.

  Lynley wasn't mistaken, he acknowledged. Tideswell sat on the east edge of Calder Moor. A decent hiker with murder in mind could start out from the Black Angel Hotel, climb to the top of the town, and set off across the moor to Nine Sisters Henge. It would take a few hours, considering the size of the moor, and it wouldn't be as efficient as simply following the route the girl herself had taken from the site just beyond the hamlet of Sparrowpit. But it could be done. On the other hand, that same killer could arguably have accomplished everything by car: parking in the same spot where Nicola had left her Saab behind the stone wall and, after the killings, returning home by way not only of the Black Angel Hotel but also by way of the hamlet of Peak Forest near which he got rid of the knife.

  “Exactly,” Lynley said. “That's my point exactly. So you do see—”

  But, Hanken argued, if his colleague would take a closer look at the map, he would see that the same short detour of less than two miles that their killer would have taken to drop the leather jacket at the Black Angel and then proceed homeward to the south towards Bakewell and Broughton Manor was the identical short detour of less than two miles that their killer would have taken to drop the leather jacket at the Black Angel and then proceed homeward to the north to Padley Gorge and Maiden Hall.

  Lynley followed the two routes that Hanken indicated. He had to admit that the other DI had a point. He could see how their killer—having left the murder site, having driven through Peak Forest to dump the knife in the grit dispenser, having detoured briefly to Tideswell to place the jacket where it would hang unnoticed—could then have driven onwards to the junction that marked Wardlow Mires. From there, one road led towards Padley Gorge and the other towards Bakewell. And when means and opportunity aligned for two suspects in an investigation, the police were bound by everything from logic to ethics to look first at the stronger suspect. So a search of Maiden Hall was called for.

  The event would be hell for Andy and his wife, but Lynley had to conclude that it was an unavoidable hell. Still, a remnant of the old loyalty he felt towards Andy prompted him to ask Hanken for a single assurance. The Maidens wouldn't be told, of course, what it was that the police were looking for in their search of Maiden Hall. It stood to reason, therefore, that there was no need to make any further discussion of Nicola's London life part of that inspection.

  “You're only postponing the inevitable, Thomas. Unless Nan Maiden's dead before we make an arrest and go to trial, she's eventually going to know the worst about the girl. Even—and I don't believe this, but I'll give it to you for the moment—even if Dad didn't chop her. If Britton did the business on her …” Hanken made an aimless gesture with his hand.

  The worst will still out, Lynley finished silently. He knew that. But if he couldn't save his former colleague from the humiliation of a formal search of his home and his business, at least he could spare him for the moment the added grief of having to be witness to the suffering of the only person left in his world.

  “We'll set it for tomorrow,” Hanken said, folding the map and taking up the bag with its incriminating contents. “I'll take this to the lab. You get some sleep.”

  It was hardly a directive he'd be able to comply with, Lynley thought.

  In London, Lynley's wife also slept fitfully and awakened in a thoughtful mood on the following morning. Sleeping fitfully was an anomaly for Helen. Generally, she sank into something resembling unconsciousness shortly after her head touched her pillow, and she remained in that condition until morning. Thus, Helen found the fact of having slept poorly a sure indication that something was vexing her, and she didn't have to excavate very far into her psyche to uncover what that something was.

  Tommy's reactions to and dealings with Barbara Havers had been, for the last few days, like a very small splinter festering beneath the surface of Helen's skin: something that she didn't necessarily have to confront in her normal routine, but something that was both troubling and painful when brought to her awareness. And brought to her awareness it had been—in neon lights, actually—during her husband's final confrontation with Barbara.

  Helen understood Tommy's position: He'd given Barbara a series of directives, and Barbara had been less than cooperative in carrying them out. Tommy had seen this as an acid test which his former partner had failed; Barbara had seen this as an unfair punishment. Neither of them wished to acknowledge the other's point of view, and Barbara was the one who stood upon the less solid ground when it came to arguing her perspective. So Helen found no difficulty in admitting that Tommy's ultimate reaction to Barbara's defiance of his orders was justified, and she knew his superior officers would agree with the action he'd taken.

  But that same action, when considered in conjunction with his earlier decision to work with Winston Nkata and not Barbara Havers, was what bothered Helen. What, she wondered as she rose from her bed and donned her dressing gown, was really at the heart of her husband's animus towards Barbara: the fact that she had defied him or the fact that she was a woman who'd defied him? Of course, Helen had asked him a variation on this very question prior to his departure on the previous day, and unsurprisingly he'd hotly denied that gender had anything to do with how he was reacting towards Barbara. But didn't Tommy's entire history give the He to any denial he might make? Helen wondered.

  She washed her face, ran a brush through her hair, and thought about the question. Tommy had a past that was littered with women: women he'd wanted, women he'd had, women with whom he'd worked. His very first lover had been a school friend's mother with whom he'd carried on
a tumultuous affair for more than a year, and, prior to his relationship with Helen, his most passionate attachment of the heart had been to the woman who was now the wife of his closest friend. Aside from that latter connection, all Tommy's associations with women had one characteristic in common as far as Helen could see: It was Tommy who directed the course of the action. The women cooperatively went along for the ride.

  This exercise of command was simple for him to gain and maintain. Myriad women over the years had been so taken by his looks, his title, or his wealth that giving over to him not only their bodies but also their minds had seemed of little consequence in comparison with what they hoped they'd be getting in return. And Tommy had become used to this power. What human being wouldn't?

  The real question was why he'd grasped the power that very first time with that very first woman. He'd been young, it was true, but although he could have chosen to meet that lover and every lover that followed her on a playing field that he himself made level despite the woman's reluctance or inability to insist upon that leveling, he had not done so. And Helen was certain that the why of Tommy's sway over women was behind his difficulties with Barbara Havers.

  But Barbara was wrong, Helen could hear her husband insisting, and there's no damn way you can twist the facts to make them read that she was right.

  Helen couldn't disagree with Tommy on that. But she wanted to tell him that Barbara Havers was only a symptom. The disease, she was certain, was something else.

  She left the bedroom and descended to the dining room, where Denton had assembled the breakfast she preferred. She helped herself to eggs and mushrooms, poured a glass of juice and a cup of coffee, and set everything on the dining table, where her morning's copy of the Daily Mail lay next to her cutlery and Tommy's Times lay just beneath it. She flipped through the morning post idly as she added milk and sugar to her coffee. She set the bills to one side—no reason to spoil her breakfast, she thought—and she also set aside the Daily Mail upon whose front page the latest decidedly unattractive royal paramour was being acclaimed as looking “radiant at the annual Children in Need tea.” No reason, Helen thought grimly, to spoil her entire day as well.

  She was just opening a letter from her eldest sister—its postmark from Positano telling her that Daphne had prevailed over her husband in terms of where to spend their twentieth wedding anniversary—when Denton came into the room. “Good morning, Charlie,” Helen said to him cheerfully. “You've excelled with the mushrooms today.”

  Denton didn't return her greeting with similar enthusiasm. He said, “Lady Helen …” and hesitated—or so it seemed to Helen—somewhere between confusion and chagrin.

  “I hope you're not going to scold me about that wallpaper, Charlie. I phoned Peter Jones and asked for another day. Truly, I did.”

  Denton said, “No. It's not the wallpaper,” and he lifted the manila envelope he was holding, bringing it level with his chest.

  Helen set down her toast. “What is it, then? You look so …” How did he actually look? she asked herself. He looked quite agitated, she concluded. She said, “Has something happened? You've not received bad news, have you? Your family's well, aren't they? Oh Lord, Charlie, have you got yourself into trouble with a woman?”

  He shook his head. Helen saw that a duster hung over his arm, and the pieces fell into place: He'd been doing a spot of cleaning up, she realised, and no doubt he wished to lecture her on the messier of her habits. Poor man. He couldn't decide how best to begin.

  He'd come from the direction of the drawing room, and Helen recalled that she hadn't picked up those sheets of music that Barbara had left upon her abrupt departure on the previous afternoon. Den-ton wouldn't like that, Helen thought. He was so like Tommy in his neatness.

  “You've caught me out,” she confessed with a nod at the envelope. “Barbara brought that yesterday for Tommy to look at. I'm afraid I forgot all about it, Charlie. Will you believe me if I promise to do better next time? Hmm, I suppose not. I'm promising that constantly, aren't I?”

  “Where did you get this, Lady Helen? This… I mean, this … ?” And Denton gestured with the envelope as if he had no words to describe what it contained.

  “I've just told you. Barbara Havers brought it. Why? Is it important?”

  As an answer, Charlie Denton did the unexpected. For the first time since Helen had known the man, he drew a chair out from beneath the dining table and, completely unbidden, he sat.

  “The blood matches” was Hanken's terse announcement to Lynley. He was phoning from Buxton, where he'd just got the word from the forensic lab. “The jackets the boy's.”

  Hanken went on to tell him that they were moments away from getting a warrant to search Maiden Hall. “I've six blokes who can find diamonds in dog shit. If he's stashed the long bow there, we'll find it.” Hanken groused about the fact that Andy Maiden had had more than enough time since the night of the murders to rid himself of the bow in three dozen locations round the White Peak, which made their job of finding it doubly difficult. But at least he didn't know they'd twigged that an arrow was the missing weapon, which gave them the advantage of surprise if he hadn't rid himself of the rest of his equipment.

  “We don't have the slightest indication that Andy Maiden's an archer,” Lynley pointed out.

  “How many parts did he play undercover?” was Hanken's riposte. He rang off with “You're in if you want to be. Meet us at the Hall in ninety minutes.”

  Heavy of heart, Lynley hung up the phone.

  Hanken was right in his pursuit of Andy. When virtually every piece of information that was gathered led to one particular suspect, you proceeded with that suspect. You didn't avoid thinking the unthinkable because you couldn't disengage your mind from a memory of your twenty-fifth year and an undercover operation that you had so longed to be a part of. You did what you had to do as a professional.

  Yet even though Lynley knew that DI Hanken was following procedures as they were meant to be followed in his search of Maiden Hall, he still found himself thrashing round in the quagmire of evidence, facts, and conjectures, seeking something that would vindicate Andy. It was, he stubbornly continued to believe, the least he could do.

  There appeared to be only one usable fact: that Nicola's rain gear had been missing from among her belongings at Nine Sisters Henge. Alone in his room with the morning sounds of the hotel rising round him, Lynley considered nothing but that waterproof and what its absence from the murder scene meant.

  They'd originally thought that the killer had taken the waterproof and worn it to cover his blood-stained clothes. But if he had called at the Black Angel Hotel on Tuesday after the murder, he would hardly have done so wearing rain gear on a fine summer's night. He wouldn't have been willing to run the risk of standing out, and there wasn't much that would have been more conspicuous than a man walking round in rain gear in the midst of Derbyshire's long spell of perfect weather.

  To make certain, however, Lynley rang down to the Black Angel's proprietor. A single question—shouted round the ground floor from one employee to another—was sufficient for Lynley to be assured that nothing like that had been played out at the hotel on any night in recent memory. What, then, had become of the waterproof?

  Lynley began to pace the room. He reflected on the moor, the murders, and the weapons, and he dwelt upon the mental image he'd constructed of how the crimes had been carried out.

  If the killer had taken the garment from the scene but had not worn it from the scene, there seemed to be only two possibilities for its use to him. Either the waterproof had been fashioned into a sort of carrier for transporting something from the henge when the killer left or it had been used in some way by the killer during the commission of the crime.

  Lynley dismissed the first prospect as unlikely: The two victims had gone to the henge on foot. What could they have carried in with them that would require something the size of a waterproof to transport out? He went on to the second possibility. And when he l
ined up all he knew about the killings, what he'd assumed about the killings, and what he'd discovered at the Black Angel Hotel, he finally saw the answer.

  The killer had incapacitated the boy with an arrow. He'd then gone after the fleeing girl and dispatched her without much trouble. Returning to the henge, he'd seen that the boy's wound was serious but not mortal. He'd cast about for a quick way of doing him in. He could have stood the boy up—firing-squad fashion—and made of him a modern St. Sebastian, but the boy would hardly have cooperated in that plan. So the killer had torn through the equipment at the site and found the knife and the rain gear. He'd put on the waterproof to protect his clothes while he was knifing the boy Thus he could enter the Black Angel Hotel with impunity later.

  A blood-stained waterproof couldn't be left hanging with the black leather jacket, however. The blood on the jacket had soaked into its lining, where it was camouflaged by the material's colour. So the jacket might have taken months to be noticed. But a blood-stained waterproof would not be so easily overlooked.

  Yet the killer had to get rid of it. And sooner rather than later. So where … ?

  Lynley continued to pace as he pictured that night, the killings, and their aftermath.

  The knife had been left along the killer's escape route. It was easy enough to bury in a few inches of grit in a roadside container, a process that would probably have taken no more than thirty seconds.

  But the waterproof couldn't be buried there because there wasn't enough grit to do the job and, besides that, on a public road even at night it would have been sheer idiocy to stop for the length of time it would have taken to bury something so bulky in a roadside container.

  Yet something very like a roadside container would have worked well as a depository for a garment, something that had an everyday use, something that one saw without thinking about, and something on the way to the hotel where—the killer knew—a black leather jacket could be stowed in plain sight with no one the wiser for ages …