Bloody hell, Barbara thought. It felt as if her brain were undergoing nuclear meltdown. What she needed was to talk to another professional. What she needed was a flaming good confab with someone who could not only see all the tentacles of this octopus crime but could also step forward, offer the solution, be part of the solution, and defend himself against King-Ryder should everything go to hell in an instant.
Inspector Lynley was the obvious choice. But he was out of the question. So she needed someone like him. She needed his clone. She needed—Barbara caught herself up and smiled. “Of course,” she said.
Helen raised an eyebrow. “You've got an idea?”
“I've got a bloody inspiration.”
It wasn't until one o'clock that Nan Maiden realised her husband was missing. She'd been occupied with putting the ground floor of Maiden Hall back in order, and she'd been making such an effort to act as if unexpected police searches were part of the normal routine that she hadn't noticed when Andy disappeared.
When he wasn't in the house, she first assumed he was in the grounds. But when she asked one of the kitchen boys to take a message out to Mr. Maiden offering him lunch, the boy told her that Andy had gone off in the Land-Rover not half an hour before.
“Oh. I see,” Nan said, and she tried to look as if this were perfectly reasonable behaviour under the circumstances. She even tried to tell herself as much: because it was inconceivable that Andy would have gone off without a word to her after what they both had been through.
She'd said, “A search?” to DI Hanken's unmoving face. “But a search for what? We've got nothing … we're hiding nothing … you'll find nothing …”
“Love,” Andy had said. He'd asked to see the search warrant and, once he'd seen it, he'd handed it back. “Go on, then,” he told Hanken.
Nan wouldn't consider what they were looking for. She wouldn't consider what their presence meant. When they left empty-handed, she felt such relief that her legs wobbled and she had to sit quickly or risk crumpling to the floor.
Her easing of nerves at the failure of the police to find what they were looking for quickly gave way to anxiety, however, when she learned that Andy was gone. Hanging over their heads was his declared willingness to find someone in the country who would give him a polygraph.
That's where he's gone, Nan decided. He's found someone to give him that bloody test. This search of the Hall pushed him to it. He means to have the test and prove himself to everyone by having it witnessed by someone from the investigation.
She had to stop him. She had to make him see that he was playing into their hands. They'd come with a warrant to search the premises knowing that such an action would unnerve him, and it had done so. It had unnerved them both.
Nan tore at her fingernails. Had she not felt momentarily faint, she could have gone to him, she told herself. They could have talked. She could have drawn him to her and soothed his sore conscience and—no. She would not think of that. Not of conscience. Never of conscience. She would think only of what she could do to turn the tide of her husband's intentions.
She realised that there was a single possibility.
She couldn't risk using the phone in Reception, so she went upstairs to the family floor to use the phone by their bed. She had the receiver in her hand, ready to punch in the number, when she saw the folded piece of paper on her pillow.
The message from her husband comprised one sentence. Nan Maiden read it and dropped the phone.
She didn't know where to go. She didn't know what to do. She ran from the bedroom. She clattered down the stairs with Andy's note clutched in her hand and so many voices inside her head shouting for action that she couldn't make out one coherent word that would tell her what step was the first to take.
She wanted to grab each person she saw: on the residents’ floor, in the lounge, in the kitchen, at work on the grounds. She wanted to shake them all. She wanted to shout Where is he help me what is he doing where has he gone what does it mean that he's … oh God don't tell me because I know I know I know what it means and I've always known and I don't want to hear it to face it to feel it to somehow come to terms with what he's … no no no … help me find him help me.
She found herself running across the car park before she knew she'd even gone there, and then she understood that her body had taken control of a mind that had ceased to function. Even as she realised what she was meant to do, she saw what she had already been told: The Land-Rover wasn't there. Andy had taken it himself because he'd intended to leave her powerless.
She wouldn't accept that. She spun and tore back into the hotel, where the first person she saw was one of her two Grindleford women—and why on earth had she always thought of them as the Grindleford women as if they had no names of their own?—and she accosted her.
Nan knew she looked wild. She certainly felt wild. But that couldn't matter.
She said, “Your car. Please,” which was as much as she could manage because she found that her breathing was erratic.
The woman blinked. “Mrs. Maiden? Are you ill?”
“The keys. Your car. It's Andy.”
Blessedly, that was message enough. Within moments Nan was behind the wheel of a Morris so old that its driver's seat consisted of a thin layer of stuffing covering springs.
She revved the engine and took off down the incline. Her only thought was to find him. Where he'd gone and why he'd gone there was something she would not dwell upon.
Barbara found that it was no mean feat convincing Winston Nkata to get involved. It had been one thing for him to invite her into the investigation when she had been just another DC waiting for an assignmerit while he himself trekked off to Derbyshire with Lynley. It was quite another for her to ask him to join her in a part of that same investigation once she'd been drop-kicked out of it. Her suggested little bout of hounds-chasing-the-fox wasn't authorised by their superior officer. So when she spoke to Nkata, she felt a little like Mr. Christian, while her fellow DC didn't sound much like a man who wanted to take a cruise on the Bounty.
He said, “No way, Barb. This's dodgy as hell.”
She said, “Winnie. It's a single phone call. And this's your lunch hour anyway, isn't it? Or it could be your lunch hour, couldn't it? You've got to eat, So just meet me there. We'll have a meal in the neighbourhood. We'll have anything you'd like. My treat. I promise.”
“But the guv—”
“—won't even have to know if it comes to nothing,” Barbara finished for him, and then she added, “Winnie, I need you.”
He hesitated. Barbara held her breath. Winston Nkata wasn't a man who rushed in with fools, so she gave him the time to think about her request from every possible angle. And while he did his thinking, she prayed. If Nkata didn't enter into her plan, she had no idea who else might be willing to.
He finally said, “Guv asked for a fax of your report from CRIS, Barb.”
“See?” she replied. “He's still barking up that bloody stupid tree and there's nothing in the branches. It's nowhere, Winnie. Come on. Please. You're my only hope. This is it. I know it. All I need from you is a single little phone call.”
She heard him sigh the sole word damn. Then, “Give me a half hour,” he said.
“Brilliant,” she said and began to ring off.
“Barb.” He caught her. “Don't make me regret this.”
She took off to South Kensington. After cruising up and down every street from Exhibition Road to Palace Gate, she finally found a place to park in Queen's Gate Gardens and walked over to the corner of Elvaston Place and Petersham Mews, which was where the only phone boxes on Elvaston Place were located. There were two of them, and they were hung with at least three dozen of the sort of advertising postcards that Barbara had found beneath Terry Cole's bed.
Nkata, having to travel the greater distance from Westminster, had not yet arrived, so Barbara took herself across Gloucester Road to a French bakery she'd spied on one of her circumnavigations of the neighbourhood
in search of a parking space. Even from the street and inside her car, she'd smelled the siren fragrance of chocolate croissants. With time to kill in the wait for Winston, she decided there was no point to ignoring her body's desperate cry for the two basic food groups she'd so far denied herself that day: butter and sugar.
Twenty minutes after her own arrival in the South Kensington neighbourhood, Barbara saw Winston Nkata's lanky body coming up the street from the direction of Cromwell Road. She shoved the rest of her croissant into her mouth, wiped her fingers on her T-shirt, threw down the remains of a Coke, and dashed across the street just as he reached the corner.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.
“If you're solid on this bloke, why don't we just nick him?” Nkata asked, adding, “You've got chocolate on your chin, Barb,” with the nonchalance of a man who'd long ago become familiar with the worst of her vices.
She used her T-shirt to take care of the problem. “You know the dance. What've we got for evidence?”
“Guv's found that leather jacket, for one.” Nkata gave her the details on Lynley's discovery at the Black Angel Hotel.
Barbara was glad enough to hear them, especially since they supported her conjecture that an arrow had been one of their killers weapons. But Nkata had been the one to pass along the arrow information to Lynley, and Barbara knew that if he were now to phone the inspector another time and say, “By the way, Guv, why don't we haul in this bloke King-Ryder for a lark and get his dabs while we grill him about leather jackets and trips to Derbyshire,” Lynley was going to see the name Havers written all over the suggestion, and he'd order Nkata to back off so far that he'd be in Calais before he stopped backing.
Nkata wasn't a bloke to defy anyone's orders for love or money. And he certainly wouldn't undergo a sudden personality change for Barbara's benefit. So they had to keep Lynley out of it at all costs, until the birdcage was built and King-Ryder was sitting inside it singing.
Barbara explained all of that to Nkata. The other DC listened without comment. At the end he nodded. But he said, “I still hate to go at it with him not knowing.”
“I know you do, Winnie. But I don't see how he's given us any other choice. Do you?”
Nkata had to admit not. He said with a nod to the phone boxes, “Which one do I use, then?”
Barbara said, “It doesn't matter for the moment, so long as we keep both of them vacant once you've made the call. But I'd go for the one on the left. It's got a brilliant card for Tantalising Transvestites in case you're looking for excitement some evening.”
Nkata rolled his eyes. He went into the booth, fished for some coins, and made the call. Over his shoulder Barbara listened to his side of the conversation. He did West Indian Yobbo from South of the River. Since that was the voice of his first twenty years of life, it was a stellar performance.
The script was simplicity itself once he got Matthew King-Ryder on the phone: “I think I got a package you want, Mistah King-Ryder,” Nkata said, and listened for a moment. “Oh, I 'xpect you know which package I mean … Albert Hall ring any special bells? Hey, no way, mon. You need the proof? You know the phone box. You know the number. You want the music? You make the call.”
He rang off and looked at Barbara. “Bait's on the hook.”
“Let's hope for a bite.” Barbara lit a cigarette and walked the few feet to Petersham Mews, where she leaned against the wing of a dusty Volvo and counted fifteen seconds before pacing back to the phone box, then once again to the car. King-Ryder would have to think before he acted. He would have to assess the risks and the payoffs of picking up the phone in Soho and betraying himself. This would take some minutes. He was anxious, he was desperate, he was capable of murder. But he wasn't a fool.
More seconds ticked by. They turned into minutes. Nkata said, “He's not going for it.”
Barbara waved him off. She looked away from the phone boxes, up Elvaston Place in the direction of Queen's Gate. Despite her own disquiet, she found that she could picture how it had happened on that night three months before: Terry Cole roaring up the street on his motorcycle, hopping off to Blu Tack a fresh batch of postcards into the two phone boxes, which were doubtless part of his regular route. It takes him a few minutes; he has a number of cards. As he's sticking them up, the telephone rings and, on a whim, he picks it up to hear the message intended for David King-Ryder. He thinks, Why not see what that's all about? and he goes to do so. Less than half a mile on his Triumph, and he's in front of the Albert Hall. In the meantime, David King-Ryder arrives, five minutes too late, perhaps even less. He parks in the mews, he strides to the phones, he begins his wait. A quarter of an hour passes. Perhaps more. But nothing happens, and he doesn't know why. He doesn't know about Terry Cole. Eventually, he thinks he's been had. He believes he's ruined. His career—and his life—are fodder for a blackmailer who wants to destroy him. They are, in short, history.
One single minute would be all that it took. And how easy it was to be late in London when so much depended upon the traffic. There was never really a way to know whether a drive from Point A to Point B would take fifteen minutes or forty-five. And perhaps King-Ryder hadn't been trying to get from A to B in town at all. Perhaps he'd been corning in from the countryside on the motorway, where anything could happen to throw a spanner into one's plans. Or perhaps he'd had car trouble, a dead battery, a flat tyre. What did the precise circumstance matter? The only fact that counted was that he'd missed the call. The call made by his son. The call not so different from the one which Barbara and Nkata were waiting for now.
Nkata said, “It's dead in the water.”
Barbara said, “God damn it.”
And the telephone rang.
Barbara threw her cigarette smouldering into the street. She leapt towards the phone box. It wasn't the same box from which Nkata had made the call in the first place, but the box standing next to it. Which could, Barbara thought, mean nothing or everything, since they'd never known which of the two had been the one where Terry Cole had intercepted the call.
Nkata lifted the receiver on the third ring. He said, “Mistah King-Ryder?” as Barbara held her breath.
Yes, yes, yes, she thought when Nkata gave her a thumbs-up. At last they were in business.
“God damn bloody computers! What's the point of having them if they break down daily? You tell me that, damn you.”
WPC Peggy Hammer had apparently heard this demand from her superior officer many times before. “It's not actually broken, sir,” she said with admirable patience. “It's just like the other day. We're off-line for some reason. I expect the problem's somewhere in Swansea. Or I suppose it could be in London, if it comes down to it. Then there's always our own—”
“I'm not asking for your analysis, Hammer,” Hanken snapped. “I'm asking for some action.”
They'd brought into the Buxton incident room the stack of registration cards from the Black Angel Hotel with what had seemed like simple instructions which would allow them to gather information in a matter of minutes: Get on-line to the DVLA in Swansea. Feed in the numbers on the plates of each car whose driver had stayed at the Black Angel Hotel within the last two weeks. Get the name of the legal owner of that car. Match that name to the registrant on the hotel card. Purpose: to see if anyone had checked into the hotel using a false name. Corroboration for that possibility: one name on the registration card, a different name in the DVLA's system indicating ownership of the vehicle. It was a simple task. It would take a few minutes because the computers were fast and the registration cards—considering the size of the hotel and the number of rooms it had—were not innumerable. It would have been fifteen minutes of labour, maximum. If the sodding system had worked for bloody once.
Lynley could see all of this reasoning going on in DI Hanken's mind. And he felt his own share of frustration. The source of his agitation was different, however: He couldn't loosen Hanken's mind from the lock it had on Andy Maiden.
Lynley understood Hanken's reas
oning. Andy had motive and opportunity. Whether he also had the slightest idea how to use a long bow made no difference if someone who had checked into the Black Angel Hotel under a false name possessed that ability. And until they discovered whether any false identities had been used in Tideswell, Lynley knew that Hanken wasn't about to move on to another area of enquiry.
That logical area was Julian Britton. That logical area had always been Britton. Unlike Andy Maiden, Britton had everything they were looking for in their killer. He had loved Nicola enough to want to marry her, and on his own admission he'd visited her in London. How likely was it that he'd never come across something that had clued him in to her real life? Beyond that, how likely was it that he'd never had the slightest idea he wasn't her only Derbyshire lover?
So Julian Britton had motive in spades. He also had no solid alibi for the murder night. And as for being able to shoot a long bow, he'd likely seen long bows aplenty at Broughton Manor during tournaments, reenactments, and the like. How much of a stretch was it to posit that Julian knew how to use one?
A search of Broughton Manor would tell that tale. Julian's fingerprints—matched to whatever prints forensic managed to pull off the leather jacket—would put a full stop to the piece. But Hanken wasn't about to budge in that direction unless the Black Angel's records proved a dead end. No matter that Julian could have planted that jacket at the Black Angel. No matter that he could have thrown that waterproof into the skip. No matter that doing this would have taken him five minutes off the direct route from Calder Moor to his home. Hanken would deal exhaustively with Andy Maiden, and until he had done, Julian Britton might as well not exist.
When he was faced with the computer misfiring, Hanken soundly cursed modern technology. He left the registration cards with WPC Hammer and ordered her onto that antique means of communication: the telephone. “Ring Swansea and tell them to do it by hand if they bloody have to,” he snapped.