In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

CHAPTER 30

Barbara chose a venue that Matthew King-Ryder would know intimately: the Agincourt Theatre, where his father's production of Hamlet was being mounted. But after Nkata passed this message on to King-Ryder from the phone box in South Kensington, he made it clear that he wasn't about to let his fellow DC meet with a killer alone.

“Are you a convert to King-Ryder-as-killer, then?” Barbara asked her colleague.

“Seems like only one reason he'd know the number of this phone box.” Nkata sounded mournful, however, and when he went on, Barbara understood why. “Can't think why he'd go after his own dad. Makes me wonder, that.”

“He wanted more lolly than his dad left for him. He saw only one way to get it.”

“But how'd he come by that music in the first place? His dad wouldn't've told him, would he?”

“Tell your own son-tell anyone, in fact-that you're plagiarising your old mate's work? I don't think so. But he was his dad's manager, Winnie. He must have come across that music somewhere.”

They walked to Barbara's car in Queen's Gate Gardens. Nkata had told King-Ryder to meet him at the Agincourt half an hour from the moment he rang off. “You're there too early and

I'm not showing my face,” he had warned King-Ryder. “You just thank your stars I'm willing to negotiate on your own turf.”

King-Ryder was to see to it that the stage door was unlocked. He was also to see to it that the building was unoccupied.

The drive into the West End took them less than twenty minutes. There, the Agincourt Theatre stood next to the Museum of Theatrical History, on a narrow side street off Shaftesbury Avenue. Its stage door was opposite a line of skips serving the Royal Standard Hotel. No windows overlooked it, so Barbara and Nkata could enter the Agincourt unobserved.

Nkata took a position in the last row of the stalls. Barbara placed herself off stage, in the deep darkness provided by a bulky piece of scenery. Although the traffic and the pedestrians outside the theatre had made a din that seemed to run the length of Shaftesbury Avenue, inside the building it was tomb-silent. So when their quarry entered by the stage door some seven minutes later, Barbara heard him.

He did everything as Nkata had instructed him. He closed the door. He made his way to the backstage area. He flipped on the working lights above the stage. He walked to stage centre. He stood pretty much where Hamlet would probably lie dying in Horatio's arms, Barbara realised. It was such a nice touch.

He looked out into the darkened theatre and said, “All right, damn you. I'm here.”

Nkata spoke from the back, where the shadows obscured him. “So I see.”

King-Ryder took a step forward and said unexpectedly in a high, pained voice, “You killed him, you filthy bastard. You killed him. Both of you. All of you. And I swear to God, I'll make you pay.”

“I didn't do no killing. I done no traveling to Derbyshire lately.”

“You know what I'm talking about. You killed my father.”

Barbara frowned as she heard this. What the hell was he on about?

“Seems like I heard that bloke shot himself,” Nkata said.

“And why? Just why the hell do you think he shot himself? He needed that music. And he would have had it-every sodding sheet of it-if you and your fucking mates… He shot himself because he thought… he believed… My father believed…” King-Ryder's voice broke. “You killed him. Give me that music. You killed him.”

“We need to make ourselfs an arrangement first.”

“Come into the light where I can see you.”

“Don't think so. What I figure is this: What you can't see, you don't hurt.”

“You're mad if you think I'll hand over a wad of money to someone I can't even see.”

“Expected your dad to do the same though.”

“Don't mention him to me. You're not fit to speak his name.”

“Feeling guilty?”

“Just give me that God damn music. Step up here. Act like a man. Hand it over.”

“It's going to cost you.”

“Fine. What?”

“What your dad had to pay.”

“You're mad.”

“Nice little packet of dosh that was,” Nkata said. “I'm happy to take it off your hands. And play no games, man. I know the amount. I'll give you twenty-four hours to have it here, in cash. I'spect things take longer when St. Helier's involved, and I'm an understanding kind of bloke, I am.”

The mention of St. Helier took things too far. Barbara saw that when King-Ryder's back stiffened suddenly as every nerve ending went on the alert. No ordinary yobbo in an ordinary scam would have known about that bank in St. Helier.

King-Ryder moved away from centre stage. He peered into the darkness of the stalls. Warily, he said: “Who the hell are you?”

Barbara took the cue.

“I think you know the answer to that, Mr. King-Ryder.” She stepped out of the darkness. “The music's not here, by the way. And to be honest, it probably never would have surfaced at all had you not killed Terry Cole to get it back. Terry had given it to his neighbour, the old lady, Mrs. Baden. And she hadn't the least idea what it was.”

“You,” King-Ryder said.

“Right. Do you want to come quietly, or shall we have a scene?”

“You've got nothing on me,” King-Ryder said. “I didn't say a damn thing that you can use to prove I lifted a finger against anyone.”

“Somewhat true, that.” Nkata came forward down the centre aisle of the theatre. “But we've got ourselves a nice leather jacket up in Derbyshire. And if your dabs match up with the dabs we pull off it, you're going to have one hell of a time dancing your way out of the dock.”

Barbara could almost see the wheels spinning wildly in King-Ryder's skull as he dashed through his options: fight, flight, or surrender. The odds were against him-despite one of the opposition being a woman-and while the theatre and the surrounding neighbourhood provided myriad places to run to and to hide, even had he tried to flee, it was only a matter of time before they nabbed him.

His posture altered again. “They killed my father,” he said obscurely. “They killed my dad.”

It was when Andy Maiden hadn't materialised at Broughton Manor within two hours that Lynley began to doubt the conclusions he'd drawn from the note that the man had left in Maiden Hall. A phone call from Hanken-informing him of Will Upman's safety-further solidified Lynley's doubts.

“There's no sign of him here, either,” Lynley told his colleague. “Pete, I'm getting a bad feeling about this.”

His bad feeling grew ominous when Winston Nkata phoned from London. He had Matthew King-Ryder at the Yard, Nkata told him in a rapid recitation that offered no opportunity for interruption. Barbara Havers had developed a plan to nab him, and it had worked like a charm. The bloke was ready to talk about the murders. Nkata and Havers could lock him up and wait for the inspector or they could have at him themselves. What were Lynley's wishes?

“It was all about that music Barb found in Battersea. Terry Cole got between the music and what was supposed to happen to the music, and King-Ryder's dad blew his brains out over it. Matthew was 'venging himself for the death, so he claims. 'Course, he wanted that music back as well.”

Lynley listened blankly as Nkata talked about the West End, the new production of Hamlet, phone boxes in South Kensington, and Terry Cole. When he had finished and he repeated his question-did the inspector want them to wait until his return to take Matthew King-Ryder's statement?-Lynley said numbly, “What about the girl? Nicola. What about her?”

“Just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Nkata replied.

“King-Ryder killed her because she was there. When the arrow hit Terry, she saw him with the bow. Barb says she saw a picture in his flat, by the way: Matthew as a kid posing with Dad on Sports Day at school. He was wearing a quiver, she says. She saw the strap of it running across his chest. I 'xpect if we get a warrant, we'll find that long bow in his digs. D'you want me to get on to that as well?”

“How was Havers involved?”

“She grilled Vi Nevin when the girl came to last night. She got most of the details from her.” Lynley could hear Nkata draw a deep breath to hurry on. “Since Nevin didn't seem like part of the case, 'spector… because of that Islington business… the threat… the wheel clamp and Andy Maiden and all… I told her to do it. I told Barb to talk to her. If things come down to reprimands, I'll take the rap on that.”

Lynley felt stunned by the amount of information Nkata had passed on to him, but he found the voice to say, “Well done, Winston.”

“I just went along with Barb, spector.”

“Then well done to Constable Havers as well.”

Lynley rang off. He found that his movements were slower than normal. Surprise-shock-was the cause. But when he'd finally managed to take in the extent of what had occurred in London during his absence, he felt apprehension descend like a cloud.

After her appearance at the Buxton police station, Nancy Maiden had gone home to await word of her husband's whereabouts. Stubbornly refusing the offer of a female constable to remain with her until Andy turned up, she'd said, “Find him. Please,” to Lynley as she'd left the station. And her eyes had tried to communicate something that she wouldn't put into words.

He realised the challenge that a search for Andy Maiden presented. If he'd learned nothing else in the past few days, he'd come to know that the Peak District was vast: crosshatched by hiking trails, distinguished by utterly different topographical phenomena, and marked with five hundred thousand years of man's habitation upon it. But when he considered the desperate state that Andy had been in when they'd last spoken and he combined this state with the words I'm taking care of this myself, he had a fairly good idea where his search should begin.

Lynley told the Brittons and Samantha McCallin to remain in the Long Gallery with their police guards until further notice. He left them there.

He sped north from Broughton Manor towards Bakewell, propelled by an urgency born of dread. Andy believed that the investigation was heading unstoppably in his direction, and everything Lynley and Hanken had done and said at their last two meetings with the man had communicated that brutal fact. Should he be arrested for his daughter's murder-should he even be questioned more thoroughly about his daughter's murder-the truth of Nicola's life in London would come out. And he'd already demonstrated the extremes to which he was willing to go in order to keep the truth of that life hidden.

Lynley tore across the district to Sparrowpit and flew along the country road beyond it to the white iron gate, behind which lay the unbroken expanse of Calder Moor. A Land Rover stood at the far end of the truncated lane that led onto the moor. Directly behind it was a rusting Morris.

Lynley set off at a jog along the muddy, rut-filled footpath. Because he did not wish to consider the extreme Andy might have gone to in order to keep Nicola's secrets from her mother, he concentrated on the one recollection that had bound him to the other man for more than ten years.

Wearing a wire is the easy part, boy-o, Dennis Hextell had told him. Opening your mouth without sounding like you've got starch in your knickers is something else. Hextell had despised him, had patiently anticipated his failure to portray himself undercover as anything other than what he was: the privileged son of a privileged son. Andy Maiden, on the other hand, said, Give him a chance, Den. And when that chance had resulted in an entire lorry of semtex-intended as bait-hijacked by the very people it was intended to entrap, the message Americans don't use the word torch, Jack arrived at the Met within the same hour and served as illustration of how a single syllable can cost lives and destroy careers. That it hadn't destroyed Lynley's was owing to Andy Maiden. He'd taken the stricken young officer aside after the subsequent Belfast bombing and said, “Come in here, Tommy. Talk to me. talk.”

And Lynley had done, eventually. He had poured out his guilt, his confusion, and his sorrow in a manner that ultimately told him how badly he needed a figure to act the role of parent in his life.

Andy Maiden had stepped into that part without ever questioning why Lynley had needed him so desperately to do so. He'd said, “Listen to me, son,” and Lynley had listened, in small part because the other man was his superior officer, in large part because no one before had ever used the word son when speaking to him. Lynley came from a world where people recognised their individual places in the social hierarchy and generally kept to them or felt the consequences for not doing so. But Andy Maiden was not such a man. “You're not cut out for SO10,” Andy had told him. “What you've been through proves that, Tommy. But you had to go through it to know, d'you understand? And there's no sin in learning, son. There's only sin in refusing to take what you've learned and do something with it.”

That guiding philosophy of Andy Maiden's life reverberated now in Lynley's mind. The SO 10 officer had used it to map his entire career, and there was very little in the past few days of their re-acquaintance to reassure Lynley that Andy wouldn't follow that same philosophy today.

Lynley's fears drove him towards Nine Sisters Henge. When he reached it, the place was silent, except for the wind. This gushed and ceased and gushed in great gusts like air from a bellows. It blew from the east off the Irish Sea and promised more rain in the coming hours.

Lynley approached the copse and entered. The ground was still damp from the morning rain, and leaves fallen from the birches made a spongy padding beneath his feet. He followed the path that led from the sentry stone into the middle of the copse. Out of the wind, only the tree leaves susurrating provided sound aside from his own breathing, which was harsh from exertion.

At the final moment, he found that he didn't want to approach. He didn't want to see, and more than anything he didn't want to know. But he forced himself forward into the circle. And it was at the circle's centre that he found them.

Nan Maiden half-sat and half-knelt, her legs folded beneath her and her back to Lynley. Andy Maiden lay, one leg cocked and the other straight out, with his head and shoulders cradled in his wife's lap.

The rational part of Lynley's mind said, That would be where all the blood is coming from, from his head and his shoulders. But the heart of Lynley said, Good God no, and wished what he saw as he circled round the two figures was only a dream: a nightmare coming, as all dreams come, from what lies within the subconscious and cries for scrutiny when one is most afraid.

He said, “Mrs. Maiden. Nancy.”

Nan raised her head. She'd bent to Andy, so her cheeks and her forehead were splodged with his blood. She wasn't weeping and perhaps, beyond tears at this point, she hadn't wept at all. She said, “He thought he'd failed. And when he found that he couldn't make things good again…” Her hands tightened on her husband's body, trying to press closed the gash in his neck where the blood had throbbed out of him, bathing his clothes and pooling beneath him. “He had to do… something.”

Lynley saw that a blood-spattered paper lay crumpled on the ground next to her. On it, he read what he'd expected to see: “I did it. Nancy, I'm sorry.” Andy Maiden's brief and apocryphal confession to the murder of a daughter he had deeply loved.

“I didn't want to believe, you see,” Nan Maiden said, gazing down at her husband's ashen face and smoothing back his hair. “I couldn't believe and live with myself. And continue to live with him. I saw that something was terribly wrong when his nerves went bad, but I couldn't think he'd ever have hurt her. How could I think it? Even now. How?”

“Mrs. Maiden…” Lynley had no words for her. She was too much in shock to comprehend the scope of what lay behind her husband's actions. Right now her horror-born of her husband's putative murder of their daughter-was quite enough for her to contend with.

Lynley squatted next to Nan Maiden and put his hand on her shoulder. “Mrs. Maiden,” he said. “Come away from here. I've left my mobile in the car and we're going to need to phone the police.”

“He is the police,” she said. “He loved that job. He couldn't do it any longer because his nerves wouldn't take it.”

“Yes,” Lynley said, “Yes. I've been told.”

“Which is why I knew, you see. But still I couldn't be sure. I could never be sure, so I didn't want to say. I couldn't risk it.”

“Of course.” Lynley tried to urge her to her feet. “Mrs. Maiden, if you'll come-”

“I thought if I could just protect him from ever having to know… That's what I wanted to do. But it turns out that he knew about everything anyway, didn't he, so we might have actually talked about it, Andy and I. And if we'd talked about it… Do you see what that means? If we'd talked, I could have stopped him. I know it. I hated what she was doing-at first I thought I'd die from the knowledge of it-and if I'd known that she'd told him what she was doing as well…” Nan bent to Andy again. “We would have had each other. At the very least. We could have talked. And I would have said the right words to stop him.”

Lynley dropped his hand from her shoulder. He'd been listening all along, but he suddenly realised that he hadn't been hearing. The sight of Andy-his throat slashed open by his own hand-had clouded all his senses save his vision. But he finally heard what Nan Maiden was saying. Hearing, he finally understood.

“You knew about her,” he said. “You knew.”

And a yawning chasm of responsibility opened up beneath him as he saw the part he himself had played in Andy Maiden's purposeless death.

“I followed him,” Matthew King-Ryder said.

They'd taken him to an interview room, where he sat at one side of a Formica-topped table while Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata sat on the other side. In between them at one end of the table, a tape player whirred, recording his answers.

King-Ryder appeared defeated by more than one aspect of his present situation. His future sealed by the existence of a leather jacket and the presence of a sliver of Port Orford cedar in the wound of one of his victims, he had apparently turned to a review of some of the unpleasant realities that had led him to this juncture. Those past realities joined with his future prospects to alter him appreciably. Upon his entry into the interview room, the vengeance-fueled anger that had defined his arrival at the Agincourt Theatre had become the devastated submission of the fighter who faces surrender.

He told the first part of his story in a monotone. This was the background in which he laid out the grievance that had prompted him to blackmail his own father. David King-Ryder, worth so many millions that it took the services of a team of accountants to keep track of all his money, had decided to put his fortune into a fund for creative artists upon his death, leaving not a penny of it to his own children. One of these children accepted the terms of the King-Ryder will with the resignation of a daughter who knew only too well that it would be profitless to argue against such a course of action. The other child-Matthew-had sought a way round the situation.

“I'd known about the Hamlet music for years, but Dad didn't know that,” Matthew told them. “He wouldn't have known since he and my mother were long divorced when Michael wrote the score, and he never realised that Michael had kept in touch with us. He was actually more like a dad to me than Dad was, Michael Chandler. He played the score for me-parts of it, that is-when I visited him for tea at half-terms and holidays. He wasn't married then, but he wanted a son and I was happy enough for him to act the part of my father.”

David King-Ryder hadn't thought the Hamlet score had much potential, so upon Michael Chandler's completion of it, the partners had filed it away twenty-two years ago. There it had remained-buried among the King-Ryder/Chandler memorabilia in the offices of King-Ryder Productions in Soho. Thus, when David King-Ryder had presented it as his latest effort, Matthew had instantly recognised not only the music and the lyrics but also what they represented to his father: a final attempt to salvage a reputation that had been all but destroyed by two successive and expensive failures as a solo act once his longtime partner had drowned.

It hadn't taken much effort for Matthew to find the original score. And once he had it in his hands, he saw how he could make some money from it. His father wouldn't know who had the score-anyone from the production offices could have nicked it from the files if they'd known where to look-and because his reputation was paramount to him, he'd pay whatever was asked to get the music back. In that way, Matthew would have the inheritance his father's will denied him.

The scheme had been simple. Four weeks before the opening of Hamlet, Matthew had sent a page of the score to his father's home with an anonymous note. If one million pounds wasn't paid into an account in St. Helier, the score would be sent to the biggest tabloid in the country just in time for opening night. Once the money was in the bank, David King-Ryder would be informed where to pick up the rest of the music.

“When I had the money, I waited till a week before the opening,” Matthew told them. “I wanted him to sweat.”

He sent his dad a note then and gave him the instructions to go to the phone boxes in South Kensington and wait for further instructions. At ten o'clock, he told him, David King-Ryder would be informed where the music could be found.

“But Terry Cole answered the phone that night, not your dad,” Barbara said. “Why didn't you recognise the different voice?”

“He said ‘yeah,’ that's all,” Matthew told her. “I thought he was nervous, in a hurry. And he sounded like someone who was expecting the call.”

In the days that followed, he'd seen that his father was agitated about something, but he'd assumed that King-Ryder was in a state about having had to pay out one million pounds. He'd had no way of knowing that his father was daily growing more frantic as the phone call he kept hoping to receive-from the blackmailer who, he believed, had failed to contact him at the phone box in Elvaston Place-did not materialise. As the premier of Hamlet approached, David King-Ryder had started to see himself in the power of someone who was either going to bleed him dry with more demands for money over the years or ruin him forever by releasing Michael Chandler's music to the tabloids.

“When he hadn't heard by opening night and the production was such a success… You know what happened.”

“He blew out his brains,” Barbara said. “That's owing to you.”

“I didn't mean him to die,” King-Ryder cried. “He was my dad. But I thought it wasn't fair that all his money… every penny of his money except that measly bequest to Ginny…” He lowered his gaze, spoke fiercely to hands rather than to Barbara and Winston. “He owed me something. He hadn't been much of a father to me. He owed me at least this much.”

“Why didn't you just ask him for it?” Nkata asked.

Matthew breathed out a bitter laugh. “Dad worked to be who and where he was. He expected me to do the same. And I always did-I worked and I worked-and I would have kept on working. But then I saw that he was going to take a shortcut to his own success through Michael's music. And I decided that if he could take a shortcut, so could I. And it would have come out all right in the end if that bloody little bastard hadn't showed up. And then when I saw that he intended to use the music and to play the same rotten game with me, I had to do something. I couldn't just sit there and let it happen.”

Barbara frowned. Everything until that moment had fitted perfectly into the picture. She said, “Play the same game? What?”

“Blackmail,” Matthew King-Ryder said. “Cole walked into my office with that smirk on his face and said, ‘I got something here that I need your help with, Mr. King-Ryder,’ and as soon as I saw it-a single sheet just like I'd sent to my dad-I knew exactly what that little shit had in mind. I asked him how he came to have it in his possession, but he wouldn't tell me. So I threw him out. But I followed him. I knew he wasn't in it alone.”

On the trail of the music, he'd followed Terry Cole to the railway arches in Battersea, and from there to his flat on Anhalt Road. When the boy had gone inside the studio, Matthew had taken a chance and riffled through the saddlebags hanging from his motorcycle. When he'd found nothing, he knew he had to continue following till the kid led him either to the music or to the person who had the music.

It was when he'd followed him to Rostrevor Road that he'd first believed he was on the right trail. For Terry had emerged from Vi Nevin's building with a large manila envelope, which he'd placed in his saddlebag. And that, Matthew King-Ryder had believed, had to contain the music.

“When he took to the motorway, I'd no idea where he was going. But I was committed to seeing things through. So I followed him.”

And when he'd seen Terry and Nicola Maiden having their meeting out in the middle of nowhere, he'd been convinced that they were the principals behind his father's death and his own misfortune. His only weapon was the long bow he had in his car. He went back for it, waited till nightfall, then dispatched them both.

“But there was no music at the camping site,” Matthew said. “Just an envelope of letters, pasted-up letters from magazines and newspapers.”

So he'd had to keep looking. He had to find that score to Hamlet, and he'd returned to London and searched in those places Terry had led him.

“I didn't think of the old woman,” he said finally.

“You should have accepted when she offered you cake,” Barbara told him.

Once more Matthew's glance fell to his hands. His shoulders shook. He began to cry.

“I didn't mean harm to come to him. I swear to God. If he'd only just said he'd leave me something. But he wouldn't do that. I was his son, his only son, but I wasn't meant to have anything. Oh, he said I could have his family pictures. His bloody piano and guitar. But as for the money… any of the money… a single penny of his God damn money… Why couldn't he see that it made me worth nothing to be overlooked? I was supposed to be grateful just to be his son, just to be alive on account of him. He'd give me a job, but for all the rest… No. I had to make it entirely on my own. And it wasn't fair. Because I loved him. All the years when he failed, I still loved him. And if he'd continued to fail, it wouldn't have made a difference. Not to me.”

His distress seemed real, and Barbara wanted to feel sorry for him. But she found that she couldn't as she realised how much he wanted her pity. He wanted her to see him as a victim of his father's indifference. No matter that he'd destroyed his father for one million pounds, no matter that he'd committed two brutal murders. They were meant to feel sorry that circumstances beyond his control had forced his hand, that David King-Ryder hadn't seen fit to leave him the money in his will, which would have precluded the crimes ever happening in the first place.

God, Barbara thought, there it was: the malaise of their time. Do it to Julia. Hurt someone else. Blame someone else. But don't hurt or blame me.

She wouldn't begin to buy that line of thinking. Any pity Barbara might have mustered for the man was erased by two senseless deaths in Derbyshire and the image of what he'd done to Vi Nevin. He'd pay for those crimes. But a prison term-no matter its length-didn't seem enough recompense for blackmail, suicide, murder, assault, and the aftermath of each. She said, “You might want to know the truth of the matter about Terry Cole's intentions, Mr. King-Ryder. In fact, I think it's important that you know.”

And so she told him that all Terry Cole had wanted was a simple address and telephone number. In fact, had Matthew King-Ryder offered to take the music off his hands and pay him handsomely for bringing it to the offices of King-Ryder Productions, the boy would probably have been thrilled to the dickens.

“He didn't even know what it was,” Barbara said. “He hadn't the slightest idea in the world that he'd put his hands on the music to Hamlet.”

Matthew King-Ryder absorbed this information. But if Barbara had hoped she was dealing him a mortal blow that would worsen his coming life in prison, she was disabused of that notion when he replied. “He's to blame for it all. If he hadn't interfered, my dad would be alive.”

Lynley reached Eaton Terrace at ten that night. He found his wife in the bathroom, sunk in a fragrant citrus froth of bubbles. Her eyes were closed, her head cradled in a towelling pillow, and her hands-garbed incongruously in white satin gloves-rested on the spotless stainless steel tray that spanned the width of the bath and held her soaps and her sponges. A CD player sat on the vanity amid a clutter of Helens unguents, potions, and creams. Music emanated from it. A soprano sang.

Lynley reached for the off button. “Ophelia, I expect, once Hamlet's killed Polonius.”

Helen splashed in the bath behind him. “Tommy! You frightened me half to death.”

“Sorry.”

“Have you just now got in?”

“Yes. Tell me about the gloves, Helen.”

“The gloves?” Helens glance shifted to her hands. “Oh! The gloves. It's my cuticles. I'm giving them a treatment, a combination of heat and oil.”

“That's a relief,” he said.

“Why? Had you noticed my cuticles?”

“No. But I thought you were anticipating a future as the Queen, which would mean our relationship has come to an end. Have you ever seen the Queen without her gloves?”

“Hmm. I don't think I have. But you don't suppose she actually bathes with them on, do you?”

“It's a possibility. She may loathe human contact even with herself.”

Helen laughed. “I'm so glad you're home.” She peeled off the gloves and plunged her hands into the water. She settled back against her pillow and regarded him. “Tell me” she said gently. “Please.”

It was her way, and Lynley hoped it would always be her way: to read him so swiftly and to open herself to him with those three simple words.

He pulled a stool over to the side of the bath. He took off his jacket, dropped it onto the floor, rolled up his sleeves, and reached for one of the sponges and some soap. He took her arm first and ran the sponge down its slender length. And as he bathed her, he told her everything. She listened in silence, watching him.

“The worst of it all is this,” he said in conclusion to his tale. “Andy Maiden would still be alive if I'd stuck to procedure when we met yesterday afternoon. But his wife came into the room, and instead of questioning her about Nicola's life in London-which would have revealed that she'd known about it even longer than Andy, that Nicola had told her months before she told her father-I held back. Because I wanted to help him protect her.”

“When she didn't need his protection at all,” Helen said. “Yes. I see how it happened. How dreadful. But, Tommy, you were doing the best you knew at the time.”

Lynley squeezed the sponge and let the soapy water run against his wife's shoulders before he returned the sponge to its tray. “The best I knew at the time was to stick to procedure. He was a suspect. So was she. I didn't treat either one of them that way. Had I done so, he wouldn't be dead.”

Lynley couldn't decide what the worst of it had been: seeing the bloody Swiss Army knife still clutched in Andy's stiffened hand, trying to get Nancy Maiden away from her husband's corpse, hiking back to the Bentley with her in tow and every moment fearing that her shock would give way to a raving grief which he would not be able to handle, waiting-endlessly, it seemed-for the police to arrive, facing the corpse a second time and this time without Andy's wife present to deflect his attention from his former colleague's manner of death.

“Looks like the knife he showed me,” Hanken had said, observing it on the ground.

“It would be, wouldn't it” was Lynley's only reply. Then, passionately, “Blast it. God damn it, Peter. It's all my fault. If I'd showed them every one of my cards when they were both with me… But I didn't. I didn't.”

Hanken had nodded at his team then, directing them to bag the body. He'd shaken a cigarette from his packet and offered the packet to Lynley. He'd said, “Take one, God damn it. You need it, Thomas,” and Lynley had complied. They'd left the ancient stone circle but remained by the sentry stone, smoking their Marlboros. “No one operates by rote,” Hanken said. “Half of this job is intuition, and that comes from the heart. You followed your heart. In your position, I can't say I would have done differently.”

“Can't you?”

“No.”

But Lynley had known the other man was lying. Because the most important part of the job was knowing both when to follow your heart and when to do so would lead to disaster.

“Barbara was right from the first,” Lynley told Helen as she rose from the bath and took the towel he extended to her. “Had I even seen that this wouldn't have happened, because I'd have stayed in London and reined back the Derbyshire end of things while we brought down King-Ryder.”

“If that's the case,” Helen said quietly as she wrapped the towel round her body, “then I'm equally to blame for what's happened, Tommy.” And she told him how Barbara had come to be tracking down King-Ryder once she'd been thrown off the case. “I could have phoned you when Denton told me about the music. I didn't make that choice.”

“I doubt I would have listened if I'd known that what you were telling me was going to prove Barbara right.”

“As to that, darling…” Helen went to the vanity and took up a small bottle of lotion, which she began to smooth against her face. “What is it, really, that's bothered you about Barbara? About this North Sea business and her firing that gun. Because I know you know she's a fine detective. She may go her own way now and again, but her heart is always in the right place, isn't it?”

And there it was again, that word heart and everything it implied about the underlying reasons behind a person's actions. Hearing his wife use it, Lynley was reminded of another's use of it so many years before, of a woman weeping and saying to him, “My God, Tommy, what's become of your heart?” when he refused to see her, to speak to her even, in the aftermath of discovering her adultery.

And then he finally knew. He understood for the very first time, and the understanding made him recoil from who he had been and what he had done for the last twenty years. “I couldn't control her,” he said quietly, far more to himself than to his wife. “I couldn't mould her into the image I'd had of her. She went her own way and I couldn't bear it. He's dying, I thought, and she should damn well act like a wife whose husband is dying.”

Helen understood. “Ah. Your mother.”

“I thought I'd forgiven her long ago. But perhaps I haven't forgiven her at all. Perhaps she's always there-in every woman I have to deal with-and perhaps I keep trying to make her be someone she doesn't want to be.”

“Or perhaps you've simply never forgiven yourself for not being able to stop her.” Helen set down her lotion and came to him. “We carry such baggage, don't we, darling? And just when we think we've finally unpacked, there it all is again, waiting in front of our bedroom door, ready to trip us when we get up in the morning.”

She'd had her head wrapped in a turban, and she took this off and shook her hair out. She hadn't completely dried herself, so drops of water glistened on her shoulders and gathered in the hollow of her throat.

“Your mother, my father,” she said as she took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “It's always someone. I was all in a muddle because of that ridiculous wallpaper. I'd decided that if I hadn't become the woman my father intended me to be-the wife of a man in possession of a title-I'd have known my own mind with regard to that paper. And because I didn't know my own mind, I blamed him. My father. But the truth of the matter is that I could always have gone my own way, as Pen and Iris did. I could have said no. And I didn't because the path laid out was so much easier and so much less frightening than forging my own would have been.”

Lynley smoothed her cheek fondly He traced her jaw and the length of her long and lovely neck.

“Sometimes I hate being a grown-up,” Helen told him. “There's so much more freedom in being a child.”

“Isn't there,” he agreed. He put his fingers to the towel that wrapped her body. He kissed her neck, her shoulders, and her mouth. “But there's more advantage in adulthood, I think.”

He loosened the towel and drew her to him.