In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

CHAPTER 7

At the end of her third hour at the computer, Barbara Havers knew she had two alternatives. She could continue with the SO 10 files in CRIS and possibly end up blind. Or she could take a break. She chose the latter option. She flipped her notebook closed, made an exit from the search she'd been conducting, and enquired where the nearest office was in which she could indulge her habit. With New Scotland Yard giving itself ever more over into the eager embrace of ASH, she was told that everyone on this particular floor was abstemious.

“Bloody hell,” she muttered. There was nothing for it but to backslide into behaviour from her schooldays. She slouched towards the nearest stairwell and plunked her squat body onto the stairs, where she lit up, inhaled, and held the wonderful, noxious fumes within her lungs for so long that her eyeballs felt ready to pop from their sockets. Pure bliss, she thought. Life didn't get much better than a fag after three hours away from the weed.

The morning had gained her nothing of scintillating substance. On CRIS she'd discovered that Detective Inspector Andrew Maiden had served with the force for thirty years, and he'd spent the last twenty with SO 10, where only

Inspector Javert could have had a more resplendent career. His record of arrests was transcendent. The convictions that followed those arrests were themselves a marvel of British jurisprudence. But those two facts created a nightmare for anyone looking into his history undercover.

Maiden's convicts had gone through the system and ended up being detained at Her Majesty's pleasure in virtually every one of Her Majesty's prisons within the UK. And while the files gave details of undercover operations-most of them having been named by someone with a distinct taste for loony acronyms, she found-and complete reports into investigations, interrogations, arrests, and charges, the information became sketchy when it came to prison terms and sketchier still in the area of parole. If a ticket-of-leave man was on the streets and after the bloke who caused the silver bracelets to be slapped on him in the first place, he wasn't going to be easy to find.

Barbara sighed, yawned, and tapped her cigarette against the sole of her shoe, dislodging ash onto the step beneath her. She'd abjured her trademark high-top red trainers in deference to her new position-all spit and polish for AC Hillier should he happen past, eager to give her another wigging-and she found that her feet had begun to throb, so unaccustomed had they become to formal footwear. Indeed, sitting on the step in the stairwell, she became aware of entire areas of her body that were screaming discomfort and had doubtless been doing so for most of the morning: Her skirt felt as if an anaconda had taken position round her hips, her jacket appeared to be chewing large bites from her underarms, and her tights had dug so far into her crotch that an episiotomy was going to be unnecessary should she ever be in the position to give birth.

She'd never been one for high fashion during her working hours, choosing drawstring trousers, T-shirts, and jerseys over anything that might be construed as remotely related to haute couture. And used to seeing her more casually arrayed, more than one person this day had encountered Barbara with a raised eyebrow or a stifled grin.

Among this lot had been her near neighbours, whom Barbara had encountered not twenty-five yards from her own front door. Tay-mullah Azhar and his daughter had been loading themselves into Azhar's spotless Fiat when Barbara trundled round the corner of the house that morning, fighting her notebook into her shoulder bag, a half-smoked fag dangling from her lips. She hadn't been aware of them at first, not till Hadiyyah called out happily, “Barbara! Hullo, hullo! Good morning! You shouldn't smoke so awfully much. It'll make your lungs all black and nasty if you don't stop. We learned that in school. We saw pictures and everything. Did I tell you that already? You look quite nice.”

Half in and half out of the car, Azhar extricated himself and nodded at Barbara politely. His gaze travelled from her head to her toes. “Good morning,” he said. “You're off early as well.”

“The bird, the worm, and all that rubbish,” Barbara replied heartily.

“Did you reach your friend?” he enquired. “Last night?”

“My friend? Oh. You mean Nkata. Winston. Right? I mean Winston Nkata. That's his name.” She winced inwardly, wondering if she always sounded so lame. “He's a colleague from the Yard. Yeah. We got in touch. I'm back in the game. It's afoot. Or whatever. I mean, I'm on a case.”

“You aren't working with Inspector Lynley? You've a new partner, Barbara?” The dark eyes probed.

“Oh no,” she said, partial truth, partial lie. “We're all working the same case. Winston's just part of it. Like me. You know. The inspector's handling one arm. Out of town. The rest of us're here.”

He said reflectively, “Yes. I see.”

Too much, she thought.

“I only ate half my toffee apple last night,” Hadiyyah informed her, a blessed diversion. She'd begun to swing on the open door of the Fiat, hanging from the lowered window with her legs dangling and her feet kicking energetically to keep up the momentum. She was wearing socks as white as angel's wings. “We c'n eat it for tea. If you like, Barbara.”

“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 river 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.”

This way took them into a courtyard, one of two, Hanken informed him. According to the DI, the imperfect rectangle in which they stood was a relatively modern addition to the older four wings of the building, which comprised the west facade of the house. Relatively modern in the history of Broughton Manor, of course, meant that the courtyard was just under three hundred years old and as such it was called the new court. The old court was mostly fifteenth century with a fourteenth-century central portion that constituted the shared boundary between the courts.

Even a cursory inspection of the courtyard was enough to reveal the decay that Julian Britton was attempting to counteract. But there were indications of occupancy intermingling with those of decrepitude: A makeshift clothesline waving incongruous pink sheets had been rigged in one corner, extending in a diagonal between two wings of the house and tied onto two paneless windows by means of their rusting iron casements. Plastic rubbish bags waited to be carted off alongside antique tools that probably hadn't been used for a century A shiny aluminium walking stick lay near an old, discarded mantel clock. Past and present met in every corner of the courtyard, as something new tried to rise from the detritus of the old.

“Hullo there. Can I help you?” It was a woman's voice, calling to them from above. They looked towards the windows, and she laughed and said, “No. Up here.”

She was on the roof, with a rubbish sack slung over her shoulder, giving her the appearance of a decidedly unseasonal and even more outsized Christmas elf in the middle of a delivery. But she was a particularly dishevelled elf: Her bare arms and legs were streaked with grime.

“Gutters,” she said cheerfully in apparent reference to her current occupation. “If you'll wait a moment, I'll be right down.”

Clouds of filth and decomposing leaves rose round her as she worked, her head turned away to keep the worst of the mess from alighting on her face.

“There. That's that,” the young woman said when she reached the gutter's end. She yanked off a pair of gardening gloves and came across the roof to an extension ladder that rested against the building, behind the line of pink sheets. She climbed down agilely and came across the courtyard. She introduced herself as Samantha McCallin.

In an environment so conducive to historical reflections, Lynley saw the young woman as she would have likely been seen in the distant past: extremely plain but hardy, of peasant stock, a perfect specimen for childbearing and labour on the land. In modern terms, she was tall and well built, with the physique of a swimmer. She wore no-nonsense clothes that were suited to her activity. Old cut-off blue jeans and boots were topped by a T-shirt. A bottle of water hung from her belt.

She'd pinned her mouse-brown hair to the top of her head in a coil, and she loosed it as she observed them frankly. It fell in a single thick plait to her waist. “I'm Julian's cousin. And you, I expect, are the police. And this visit, I imagine, is about Nicola Maiden. Am I right?” Her expression told them that she generally was.

“We'd like a chat with Julian,” Hanken told her.

“I hope you're not thinking he was involved in her death.” She unhooked the water bottle and took a slug of it. “That's impossible. He adored Nicola. He played knight to her damsel and all that nonsense. No distress was too much of a challenge for Julie. When Nicola called, he was into his armour before you could say Ivanhoe. Metaphorically speaking, naturally.” She offered them a smile. It was her only mistake. Brittle, it revealed the anxiety beneath her friendly demeanour.

“Where is he?” Lynley asked.

“Gone to the dogs. Fitting, isn't it, for the environment we're in? Come along. I'll show you the way.”

Her guidance wasn't necessary. They could have followed the noise. But the young woman's determination to monitor their meeting with Julian was an intriguing circumstance that a wise investigator would want to toy with. And that she was determined to monitor that meeting was evidenced in the long, sure stride she employed, charging past them out of the courtyard.

They followed Samantha up the overgrown lane. The branches of unpruned limes overhung it, offering an idea of what the leafy, tunnelled path to the stables had once been like.

The stables themselves had been converted to kennels for the breeding of Julian Britton's harriers. There were dogs in abundance in a number of curiously shaped runs, and all of them broke into cacophonous barking as Hanken and Lynley approached with Samantha McCallin.

“Quiten down, you lot,” Samantha shouted. “You, Cass. Why aren't you with the pups?”

In reply, the dog spoken to-stalking back and forth in a separate run from the others-trotted back to the building and disappeared through a dog-size door that had been hewn into the limestone wall. “That's better,” Samantha remarked. And to the men, “She whelped a few nights ago. She's protective of the pups. Julie'll be with them, I expect. It's just inside.” The kennels, she told them as she swung open the door, consisted of exterior and interior dog runs, two birthing rooms, and a dozen puppy pens.

In contrast to the manor house, at the kennels the accent was on the clean and the modern. Outside, the runs had been swept and the water dishes had sparkled. Inside, the detectives found that the walls were whitewashed, the lights were bright, the stone floor was polished, and music played. Brahms, by the sound of it. The thick walls of the building provided an insulation against the noise of the dogs outside. Because they also intensified the damp and the cold, central heating had been installed.

Lynley glanced at Hanken as Samantha led them towards a closed door. It was clear that the other DI was thinking the same thing: The dogs were living better than the humans.

Julian Britton was in a room identified on its door as “Pup Room One.” Samantha knocked twice and called his name. She said, “The police want a word. Can we come in?”

A man's voice said, “Quietly. Cass's uneasy.”

“We saw her outside.” And to Lynley and Hanken, “Act reassuring if you will. Towards the dog.”

Cass set up a ruckus when they entered the room. She was in an L-shaped run that gave on to the exterior run by means of the door through the wall. At the far end of this-well away from the draft-a box contained her new litter of puppies. Four heat lamps shone over this section of the run. The box itself was insulated, sided with sheepskin, and floored with a thick padding of newspaper.

Julian Britton stood inside the run. He held a puppy in his left hand while he offered his right index finger to the tiny dog's mouth. Eyes still closed, the animal sucked eagerly. After a moment, Julian disengaged him, returned him to the nest, and made a note in a three-ring binder. He said, “Easy, Cass,” to calm the dog. She remained wary though, merely exchanging the bark for low growls.

“All mothers should take such an interest in their brood.” It was impossible to tell to whom Samantha was referring: the dog or Julian Britton.

As Cass settled herself in the nest of newspapers, Julian watched. He said nothing until the pup he'd been examining had found its place on one of the teats. Then he merely murmured to the dogs as the rest of the litter nosed into position to nurse.

Lynley and Hanken introduced themselves, producing warrant cards. Julian looked these over, which gave them time to look him over. He was a good-size man, hefty without being overweight. His face bore the sort of irregular freckles on the forehead that were indications of a life spent out-of-doors as well as the precursors of skin cancer, and an additional patch of freckles across his cheeks gave him the appearance of a ginger-haired bandit. In combination with the unnatural pallor of his skin, though, the freckles enhanced a look of malaise.

After he had inspected the detectives' identification to his satisfaction, he removed a blue handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped his face with it, although he didn't appear to be perspiring. He said, “I'll do anything I can to help you. I was with Andy and Nan when they got the news. I had a date with Nicola that night. When she didn't turn up at the Hall, we phoned the police.”

“Julie went looking for her himself,” Samantha added. “The police weren't willing to do anything.”

Hanken didn't look pleased with this oblique criticism. He cast a sour glance at the woman and asked if they could have their conversation somewhere where the bitch wouldn't be growling at them. He was, of course, referring to the dog. But Samantha didn't miss the double entente. She gave Hanken a narrow glance and pressed her lips together.

Julian obliged them by leading the way to the puppy runs in a separate section of the building. Here, older pups were engaged in play: The runs were cleverly devised to keep them challenged and entertained, with cardboard boxes to tear apart, complicated multi-level mazes to wander in, toys to play with, and hidden treats to search out. The dog, Julian Britton informed them, was an intelligent animal. Expecting an intelligent animal to thrive in a concrete run devoid of distraction was not only stupid, it was also cruel. He'd talk to the detectives while he worked, he said. He hoped that would be all right.

So much for the grieving fiancé, Lynley thought.

“That'll be fine,” Hanken said.

Julian seemed to know what Lynley was thinking. He said, “Work's a balm at the moment. I expect you understand.”

“Need help, Julie?” Samantha asked. To her credit, the offer was gently made.

“Thanks. You can work with the biscuits if you'd like, Sam. I'm going to rearrange the maze.” He entered the run as Samantha went to fetch the food.

The pups were delighted with this human intrusion into their domain. They stopped playing and gravitated towards Julian, eager for another distraction. He murmured to them, patted their heads, and tossed four balls and several rubber bones to the far end of the run. As the dogs scampered after them, he set to work on the maze, which he disassembled through a series of slots in the wood.

“We've been given to understand that you and Nicola Maiden were engaged to be married,” Hanken said. “We've been told it was a recent engagement as well.”

“You have our sympathy,” Lynley added. “It can't be something you particularly want to talk about, but there might be something you can tell us-something you're not even aware of yourself perhaps-that will help in the investigation.”

Julian gave his attention to the sides of the maze, stacking them neatly as he answered. “I misled Andy and Nan. It was easier at the moment than going into everything. They kept asking if we'd had a row. Everyone kept asking, when she didn't turn up.”

“Misled? Then you weren't engaged to her?”

Julian cast a glance in the direction that Samantha had taken to fetch the dogs’ food. He said quietly, “No. I asked. She turned me down.”

“The feelings weren't mutual?” Hanken asked.

“I suppose they weren't if she didn't want to marry me.”

Samantha rejoined them, lugging a large burlap sack behind her, her pockets bulging with treats for the puppies. She entered the run, saying, “Here, Julie. Let me help you with that,” when she saw that her cousin was wrestling with a part of the maze that didn't want to give way.

He said, “I'm coping.”

“Don't be a goose. I'm stronger than you are.”

In Samantha's capable hands, the maze came apart. Julian stood by and looked uncomfortable.

“Exactly when did this proposal occur?” Lynley asked him.

Samantha's head turned swiftly towards her cousin. Just as swiftly, it turned away. She industriously began hiding dog biscuits throughout the run.

“On Monday night,” Julian told them. “The night before she… before Nicola went out on the moor.” Abruptly, he went back to his work. He spoke to the maze, not to them, saying, “I know how that looks. I'm not such a fool that I don't know exactly how it looks. I propose, she turns me down, then she dies. So yes, yes. I know exactly how it bloody well looks. But I didn't kill her.” Head lowered, he widened his eyes as if by doing so he could keep them from watering. He said only, “I loved her. For years. I loved her.”

Samantha froze where she was at the far end of the run, the puppies cavorting round her. It seemed as if she wanted to go to her cousin, but she didn't move.

“Did you know where she'd be that night?” Hanken asked. “The night she was killed?”

“I phoned her that morning-the morning she left-and we fixed up a date for Wednesday night. But she didn't tell me anything more.”

“Not that she'd be going out hiking?”

“Not that she was going off at all.”

“She had other phone calls before she'd left that day,” Lynley told him. “A woman phoned. Possibly two women. A man phoned as well. No one gave Nicola's mother a name. Have you any idea who might have wanted to speak with her?”

“None at all.” Julian showed no reaction to the knowledge that one of her callers had been male. “It could have been anyone.”

“She was quite popular,” Samantha said from her end of the run. “She was always surrounded by people up here, so she must have had dozens of student friends as well. I expect she got phone calls from them all the time when she was away from college.”

“College?” Hanken asked.

Nicola had just finished doing a conversion course at the College of Law, Julian told them. And he added, “In London,” when they asked him where she'd studied. “She was up for the summer working for a bloke called Will Upman. He's got a firm of solicitors in Buxton. Her dad fixed it up for her because Upman's something of a regular at the Hall. And because, I expect, he hoped she'd work for Upman in Derbyshire when she finished her course.”

“That was important to her parents?” Hanken asked.

“It was important to everyone,” Julian replied.

Lynley wondered if everyone included Julian's cousin. He glanced her way. She was very busy hiding dog biscuits for the puppies to search out. He asked the obvious next question. How had Julian parted from Nicola that night of the marriage proposal? In anger? Bitterness? Misunderstanding? Hope? It was a hell of a thing, Lynley said, to ask a woman to marry you and to be turned down. It would be understandable if her refusal led to depression or an unexpected burst of passion.

Samantha rose from her position at the far end of the run. “Is that your clever way of asking if he killed her?”

“Sam,” Julian said. It sounded like a warning. “I was down, of course. I felt blue. Who wouldn't?”

“Was Nicola involved with someone else? Is that why she refused you?”

Julian didn't reply. Lynley and Hanken exchanged a glance. Samantha said, “Ah. I see where this is heading. You're thinking that Julie came home on Monday night, phoned her up the next day to arrange a meeting, discovered where she'd be that night-which he of course wouldn't admit to you-and then killed her. Well, I can tell you this: That's absurd.”

“Perhaps. But an answer to the question would be helpful,” Lynley noted.

Julian said, “No.”

“No, she wasn't involved with someone else? Or no, she didn't tell you if she was involved with someone else?”

“Nicola was honest. If she'd been involved with someone else romantically, she would have told me.”

“She wouldn't have tried to protect you from the knowledge, to spare your feelings once you'd made them clear to her?”

Julian gave a rueful laugh. “Believe me, sparing people's feelings wasn't her way.”

Despite any suspicions that he had elsewhere, the nature of Julian's response seemed to prompt Hanken to ask, “Where were you on Tuesday night, Mr. Britton?”

“With Cass,” Julian said.

“The dog? With the dog?”

“She was whelping,” Samantha said. “You don't leave a dog alone when she's whelping.”

“You were here as well, Miss McCallin?” Lynley asked. “Helping out with the delivery?”

She caught her lower lip with her teeth. “It was in the middle of the night. Julie didn't get me up. I saw the puppies in the morning.”

“I see.”

“No, you don't!” she cried. “You think Julie's involved. You've come to trick him into saying something that will implicate him. That's how you work.”

“We work at getting to the truth.”

“Oh right. Tell that to the Bridgewater Four. Only it's three now, isn't it? Because one of those poor sods died in prison. Call a solicitor, Julie. Don't say another word.”

Julian Britton in possession of a solicitor was exactly what they didn't need at the moment. Lynley said, “You appear to keep records about the dogs, Mr. Britton. Did you record the time of delivery?”

“They don't all pop out at once, Inspector,” Samantha said.

Julian said, “Cass went into labour round nine at night. She began delivering round midnight. There were six puppies-one was stillborn-so it took several hours. If you want the exact times, I have them in the records. Sam can fetch the book.”

She went to do so. When she returned, Julian said to her, “Thanks. I'm nearly finished in here. You've been a real help. I'll manage the rest.”

Obviously, he was dismissing her. She appeared to communicate something to him through eye contact only. Whatever it was, he either couldn't or didn't want to receive the message. She cast a moderately baleful look at Lynley and Hanken before she left them. The sound of the dogs barking outside rose, then fell as she opened and closed the door behind her.

“She means well,” Julian told them when she was gone. “I don't know what I'd do without her. Trying to put the whole manor back together… It's a hell of a job. Sometimes I wonder why I took it on.”

“Why did you?” Lynley asked.

“There've been Brittons here for hundreds of years. My dream is to keep them here for a few hundred more.”

“Nicola Maiden was part of that dream?”

“In my mind, yes. In her mind, no. She had her own dreams. Or plans. Or whatever they were. But that's fairly obvious, isn't it?”

“She told you about them?”

“All she told me was that she didn't share mine. She knew I couldn't offer her what she wanted. Not at the moment and probably never. She thought it was the wiser course to leave our relationship the way it was.”

“Which was what?”

“We were lovers, if that's what you're asking.”

“In the normal sense?” Hanken asked.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“The girl was shaved. It suggests… a certain sexual whimsicality to the relationship you had with her.”

Ugly colour flared in Julian's face. “She was quirky. She waxed herself. She had some body piercings done as well. Her tongue. Her navel. Her nipples. Her nose. That's just who she was.”

She didn't sound like a woman who'd be the prospective bride of the impoverished landed gentry. Lynley wondered how Julian Britton had come to think of her as such.

Britton, however, appeared to read the direction Lynley's thoughts were taking. He said, “It doesn't mean anything, all that. She just was who she was. Women are like that these days. At least women her age. As you're from London, I'd expect you know that already.”

It was true that one saw just about everything on the streets of London. It would be a myopic investigator who judged any woman under thirty-or over thirty for that matter-on the basis of waxing herself hairless or allowing holes to be needled into her body. But all the same, Lynley wondered at the nature of Julian's comments. There was an eagerness to them that wanted probing.

“That's all I can tell you.” Having made that remark, Julian opened the record book that his cousin had brought to him. He flipped to a section behind a blue divider and turned several pages until he found the one he wanted. He turned the book round so that Lynley and Hanken could see it. The page was labelled Cass in large block letters. Beneath her name were documented the times of each puppy's delivery as well as the times that parturition had begun and ended.

They thanked him for the information and left him to continue his work with the harriers. Outside, it was Lynley who spoke first.

“Those times were written in pencil, Peter, the lot of them.”

“I noticed.” Hanken nodded in the direction of the manor house, saying, “Make quite a team, don't they? ‘Julie’ and his cousin.”

Lynley agreed. He just wondered what game the team was playing.