“The DCI ordered a life belt thrown to her.”
“But there was doubt as to whether the girl could swim. And beyond that …” Webberly removed the cigar from his mouth and examined its tip as he said, “She's someone's only child. Evidently, Havers knew it.”
And Lynley knew what that fact meant to his superintendent. Webberly himself had a single light in his life: his one daughter, Miranda. He said, “Barbara owes you on this one, sir.”
“I'll see that she pays.” Webberly nodded at a yellow pad that lay before him on the desk. Lynley glanced at it to see the superintendent's scribbling rendered in black felt-tip pen. Webberly said, “Andrew Maiden. D'you remember him?”
At the question—the name—Lynley sat in a chair near Webberly's desk and said, “Andy? Of course. I'd not be likely to forget him.”
“I thought not.”
“One operation in SO10 and I made a hash of it. What a nightmare that was.”
SO 10 was the Crime Operations Group, the most secret and secretive collection of officers in the Met. They were responsible for hostage negotiation, witness and jury protection, the organisation of informants, and undercover operations. Lynley had once aimed to work among them in the latter group. But at twenty-six, he hadn't possessed either the sangfroid or the performance ability to adopt a persona other than his own. “Months of preparation went straight down the drain,” he recalled. “I expected Andy to string me up.”
Andy Maiden hadn't done so, however. That wasn't his style. The SO 10 officer was a man who knew how to cut his losses, and that's what he'd done, not assigning blame where it was owed but instead matching his moves to the moment's need: He quickly withdrew his men from the undercover operation and waited for another opportunity to introduce them, months later, when he could join them and assure that no outrageous faux pas such as Lynley's could undermine their efforts again.
He'd been called Domino—Andy Maiden—so adept had he been at assuming the character of everyone from hit men to American backers of the IRA. His primary field had ultimately become drug operations, but before he arrived there, he made his mark in murder for hire and organised crime as well.
“I used to run into him from time to time on the fourth floor,” Lynley told Webberly. “But I lost track of him once he left the Met. That was … when? Ten years ago?”
“Just over nine.”
Maiden, Webberly said, had taken early retirement and moved his family to Derbyshire. In the Peaks, he'd poured his life savings and his energy into the renovation of an old hunting lodge. It was a country hotel now, called Maiden Hall. Quite the spot for walkers, holiday-makers, mountain bikers, or anyone looking for an evening out and a decent meal.
Webberly referred to his yellow pad. “Andy Maiden brought more louts to justice than anyone else in SO 10, Tommy.”
“It doesn't surprise me to hear that, sir.”
“Yes. Well. He's asking for our help, and we owe him.”
“What's happened?”
“His daughter was murdered in the Peaks. Twenty-five years old and some bastard left her in the middle of nowhere in a place called Calder Moor.”
“Christ. That's rough. I'm sorry to hear it.”
“There was a second body as well—a boy's—and no one knows who the devil he is. No ID on him. The girl—Nicola—had gone camping and she was geared up for the works: rain, fog, sun, or anything else. But the boy at the site hadn't got any gear at all.”
“Do we know how they died?”
“No word on that.” And when Lynley raised an eyebrow in surprise, Webberly said, “This is coming our way via SO 10. Name the time those bastards made fast and free with their information.”
Lynley couldn't do so. Webberly went on.
“What I know is this: Buxton CID's got the case, but Andy's asking for more and we're giving it to him. He's asked for you in particular.”
“Me?”
“That's right. You may have lost track of him over the years, but it seems he hasn't lost track of you.” Webberly plugged his cigar into his mouth, clamping it into the corner and referring to his notes. “A Home Office pathologist is on his way up there for a formal by-the-books with scalpel and recorder. He's set to do the post-mortem sometime today. You'll be on the patch of a bloke called Peter Han-ken. He's been told that Andy's one of us, but that's all he knows.” He removed the cigar from his mouth again and looked at it instead of at Lynley as he concluded, “Tommy, I'll make no pretence about this. It could turn dicey. The fact that Maiden's asked for you by name …” Webberly hesitated before finishing with, “Just keep your eyes open and move with caution.”
Lynley nodded. The situation was irregular. He couldn't remember another time when a relative of a victim of a crime had been allowed to name the officer who would investigate it. That Andy Maiden had been allowed to do so suggested spheres of influence that could easily encroach upon Lynley's efforts to manage a smooth investigation.
He couldn't handle the case alone, and Lynley knew that Webberly wouldn't expect him to do so. But he had a fairly good idea of what officer the superintendent, given half the chance, would assign as his partner. He spoke to circumvent that assignment. She wasn't ready yet. Neither—if it came down to it—was he.
“I'd like to see who's on rota to take with me,” he told Webberly. “Since Andy's a former SO 10 officer, we're going to want someone with a fair amount of finesse.”
The superintendent regarded him directly. Fifteen seconds ticked by before he spoke. “You know best who you can work with, Tommy,” he finally said.
“Thank you, sir. I do.”
• • •
Barbara Havers made her way to the fourth floor canteen, where she bought a bowl of vegetable soup which she took to a table and tried to eat while all the time imagining that the word pariah hung from her shoulders on a sandwich board. She ate alone. Every nod of recognition she received from other officers seemed imbued with a silent message of contempt. And while she tried to bolster herself with an interior monologue informing her shrinking ego that no one could possibly yet know of her demotion, her disgrace, and the dissolution of her partnership, every conversation going on round her—particularly those flavoured by light-hearted laughter—was a conversation mocking her.
She gave up on the soup. She gave up on the Yard. She signed herself out—“going home ill” would doubtless be welcomed by those who clearly saw her as a form of contagion anyway—and made her way to her Mini. One half of her was ascribing her actions to a mixture of paranoia and stupidity. The other half was trapped in an endless repetition of her final encounter with Lynley, playing the game of what-I-could-have-would-have-and-should-have-said after learning the outcome of his meeting with Webberly.
In this frame of mind, she found herself driving along Millbank before she knew what she was doing, not heading for home at all. Her body on automatic pilot, she came up to Grosvenor Road and the Battersea Power Station with her brain engaged in a mental castigation of DI Lynley. She felt like a shattered mirror, useless but dangerous with broken edges. How easy it had been for him to cut her loose, she thought bitterly. And what an idiot she had been, believing for weeks that he was on her side.
Obviously, it hadn't been enough for Lynley that she'd been demoted and humiliated by a man whom both of them had loathed for years. It seemed now that he'd also needed an opportunity to do some disciplining on his own. As far as she was concerned, he was wrong wrong wrong taking the direction he'd chosen. And she needed an ally straightaway who would agree with her point of view.
Spinning along the River Thames in the light midday traffic, she had a fairly good idea where to find just such a confederate. He lived in Chelsea, little more than a mile from where she was driving.
Simon St. James was Lynley's oldest friend, his schoolmate from Eton. A forensic scientist and an expert witness, he was regularly called upon by defence counsel as well as Crown Prosecutors to bolster one side or the other of a criminal case that
was relying on evidence rather than eyewitnesses to win a conviction. Unlike Lynley, he was a reasonable man. He had the ability to stand back and observe, disinterested and dispassionate, without becoming personally embroiled in whatever situation was roiling round him. He was exactly the person she needed to talk to. He'd see Lynley's actions for what they were.
What Barbara didn't consider in the midst of her turbulent mental gymnastics was that St. James might not be alone in his house in Chelsea's Cheyne Row. However, the fact that his wife was also at home—working in the darkroom that adjoined his own top floor laboratory—didn't make the situation nearly as delicate as did the presence of St. James's regular assistant. And Barbara didn't know that St. James's regular assistant was there until she was climbing the stairs behind Joseph Cotter: father-in-law, housekeeper, cook, and general factotum to the scientist himself.
Cotter said, “All three of them's at work, but it's time to break for lunch and Lady Helen, for one, ‘11 be glad of the diversion. Likes her meals regular, always ’as done. No change there, married or not.”
Barbara hesitated on the second floor landing, saying, “Helen's here?”
“She is.” Cotter added with a smile, “'S nice to know some things's the same as ever was, isn't it?”
“Damn,” Barbara muttered under her breath.
For Helen was also Countess of Asherton, titled in her own right, but also the wife of Thomas Lynley who—although he made no bones about preferring it otherwise—was the other half of the Asherton equation: the official, belted, velvet-and-ermine-clad Earl. Barbara could hardly expect St. James and his wife to join her in a round of denigration doo-dah with the wife of the object of denigration in the room. She realised that retreat was in order.
She was about to beat a hasty one, when Helen came onto the top floor landing, laughing over her shoulder into the lab as she said, “All right, all right. I'll fetch a new roll. But if you'd claw your way into the current decade and replace that machine with something more up-to-date, we wouldn't be out of fax paper at all. I'd think you'd notice these things occasionally, Simon.” She turned away from the door, began to come down the stairs, and spied Barbara on the landing below her. Her face lit. It was a lovely face, not beautiful in any conventional sense, but tranquil and radiant, framed by a smooth fall of chestnut hair.
“Heavens, what a wonderful surprise! Simon. Deborah. Here's a visitor for us, so you'll absolutely have to break for lunch now. How are you, Barbara? Why haven't you called round in all these weeks?”
There was nothing for it but to join her. Barbara nodded her thanks to Cotter, who called up, “I'll lay another place at the table, then,” in the general direction of the lab and headed back down the way they'd come. Barbara climbed upwards and took Helen's extended hand. The handshake turned into a swift kiss on the cheek, a welcome so warm that Barbara knew Lynley hadn't yet contacted his wife about what had occurred at Scotland Yard that day.
Helen said, “This is brilliant timing. You've just saved me from a slog down the King's Road in search of fax paper. I'm famished, but you know Simon. Why stop for anything as incidental as a meal when one has the opportunity to slave for a few more hours? Simon, detach yourself from the microscope, please. Here's someone more interesting than fingernail scrapings.”
Barbara followed Helen into the lab where St. James regularly evaluated evidence, prepared reports as well as professional papers, and organised materials for his recently acquired position as a lecturer at the Royal College of Science. Today he appeared to be in expert-witness mode, because he was perched on a stool at one of the work tables, and he was assembling slides from the contents of an envelope that he'd unsealed. The aforementioned fingernail scrapings, Barbara thought.
St. James was a largely unattractive man, no longer the laughing cricket player but disabled now and hampered by a leg brace that made his movements awkward. His best features were his hair, which he always wore overlong with complete disregard for whatever current fashion dictated, and his eyes, which changed from grey to blue depending on his clothing, which was itself nondescript. He looked up from the microscope as Barbara entered the lab. His smile humanised a lined and angular face.
“Barbara. Hullo.” He eased himself off the stool and came across the room to greet her, calling out to his wife that Barbara Havers had joined them. At the far end of the room, a door swung open. In cutoff blue jeans and a olive T-shirt, St. James's wife stood beneath a line of photographic enlargements that hung from a cord running the length of her darkroom and dripped water onto the rubber-matted floor.
Deborah looked quite well, Barbara noted. Renewing her commitment to her art—instead of brooding and mourning the string of miscarriages that had plagued her marriage—obviously agreed with her. It was nice to think of something going well for someone.
Barbara said, “Hullo. I was in the area and …” She glanced at her wrist to see that she'd forgotten her watch at home that morning in her haste to get to the Yard for her meeting with Hillier. She dropped her arm. “Actually, I didn't think about what time it was. Lunch and everything. Sorry.”
“We were about to stop,” St. James told her. “You can join us for a meal.”
Helen laughed. “‘About to stop?’ What outrageous casuistry. I've been begging for food these last ninety minutes and you wouldn't consider it.”
Deborah looked at her blankly. “What time is it, Helen?”
“You're as bad as Simon” was Helen's dry reply.
“You'll join us?” St. James asked Barbara.
“I just had something,” she said. “At the Yard.”
All three of the others knew what that last phrase meant. Barbara could see the underlying connotation register on their faces. It was Deborah who said, “Then you've finally had word,” as she poured chemicals from their trays into large plastic bottles that she took from a shelf beneath her photographic enlarger. “That's why you've come by, isn't it? What happened? No. Don't explain yet. Something tells me you could do with a drink. Why don't the three of you go downstairs? Give me ten minutes to sort things out here and I'll join you.”
Downstairs meant Simon's study, and that's where St. James took Barbara and Helen, with Barbara wishing that Helen and not Deborah had been the one to stay above and continue working. She thought about denying that her visit to Chelsea had anything to do with the Yard, but she realised that her tone of voice had probably given her away. There was certainly nothing buoyant about it.
An old drinks trolley stood beneath the window that overlooked Cheyne Row, and St. James poured them each a sherry as Barbara made much of inspecting the wall on which Deborah always hung a changing display of her photographs. Today these were more of the suite she'd been working on for the last nine months: oversize enlargements of Polaroid portraits taken in locations like Covent Garden, Lincoln's Inn Fields, St. Botolph's Church, and Spitalfields Market.
“Is Deborah going to show them?” Barbara asked, gripping the sherry she'd been given and stalling for time. She nodded towards the pictures.
“In December.” St. James handed Helen her sherry. She slid out of her shoes and sat in one of the two leather chairs by the fireplace, drawing her slender legs underneath her. She was, Barbara noted, watching her steadily. Helen read people the way other people read books. “So what's happened?” St. James was saying as Barbara wandered from the photo wall to the window and looked out at the narrow street. There was nothing to hold her attention there: just a tree, a row of parked cars, and a line of houses, two of which were currently fronted by scaffolding. Barbara wished she'd gone into that line of work. Considering how frequently it was employed in everything from gentrification projects to washing windows, erecting scaffolding as a career would have kept her busy, out of trouble, and extremely well-oiled with lolly.
“Barbara?” St. James said. “Have you heard something from the Yard this morning?”
She turned from the window. “A letter in my file and demotion,” she r
eplied.
St. James grimaced. “Are you back on the street, then?”
Which had happened to her once before in what had felt like another lifetime during the last three years of working with Lynley. She said, “Not quite,” and went on to explain, leaving out the nastier details of her meeting with Hillier and mentioning Lynley not at all.
Helen did it for her. “Does Tommy know? Have you seen him yet, Barbara?”
Which brings us to the point, Barbara thought morosely. She said, “Well. Yes. The inspector knows.”
A fine line appeared between Helen's eyes. She placed her glass on the table next to her chair. “I've a very bad feeling about what's happened.”
Barbara was surprised at her own response to the quiet sympathy in Helen's voice. Her throat tightened. She felt herself reacting as she might have reacted in Lynley's office that morning had she not been so stunned when he'd returned from his meeting with Webberly and explained that he was setting out on a case. It wasn't the fact of his assignment to a case that stunned and struck her momentarily wordless, however. It was the choice he'd made of a partner to accompany him, a partner who was not herself.
“Barbara, this is for the best,” he'd told her, gathering materials from his desk.
And she'd gulped down what she wanted to say in protest and stared at him, realising that she'd never actually known him before that moment.
“He doesn't seem to agree with the outcome of the internal investigation,” Barbara concluded her story for St. James and Helen. “Demotion and all. I don't think he believes I've been punished enough.”
“I'm so sorry,” Helen said. “You must feel as if you've lost your best friend.”
The authenticity of her compassion stung the backs of Barbara's eyelids. She hadn't expected Helen—of all people—to be the source. So deeply did it touch her to have the sympathy of Lynley's wife that she heard herself stammering, “It's just that his choice … To replace me with … I mean …” She fumbled for the words and instead encountered that rush of pain all over again. “It felt like such a slap in the face.”