In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

Elizabeth George In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

The tenth book in the Inspector Lynley series, 1999

In loving memory of my father

ROBERT EDWIN GEORGE

and with gratitude for

roller-skating, on Todd Street

trips to Disneyland

Big Basin

Yosemite Big Sur

air mattress rides on Big Chico Creek

the Shakespeare guessing game

the raven and the fox

and most of all

for instilling in me

a passion for our native language

***

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is

To have a thankless child!

– King Lear

June

The West End

PROLOGUE

What David King-Ryder felt inside was a kind of grief and a secondary dying. He felt overcome by a gloom and despair completely at odds with his situation.

Below him on the stage of the Agincourt Theatre, Horatio was reprising Hamlet's “Divinity That Shapes Us” while Fortinbras countered with “O Proud Death.” Three of the four bodies were being borne off the stage, leaving Hamlet lying in Horatio's arms. The cast-thirty strong-were moving towards one another, Norwegian soldiers coming from stage left, Danish courtiers coming from stage right, to meet up-stage from Horatio. As they began the refrain, the music swelled and the ordnance-which he'd initially argued against because of the risk of begging comparisons to the 1812-boomed out in the wings. And at that precise moment, the stalls began rising beneath David's box. They were followed by the dress circle. Then the balconies. And over the music, the singing, and the cannons, thundered applause.

This was what he had craved for more than a decade: a complete vindication of his prodigious talent. And by God, he had it before him. He had it below him and everywhere round him as well, for that matter. Three years of mind-crushing, body-numbing labour were at this moment culminating in the standing ovation that had been denied him at the conclusion of his two previous West End productions. For those extravaganzas, the nature of the applause and what followed the applause had said it all. A polite and perfunctory recognition of the cast members had preceded a hasty exodus from the theatre, which itself had been followed by an opening night party not unlike a wake. After that, the London reviews had finished what the first night word-of-mouth had begun. Two hugely expensive productions sank like concrete battleships. And David King-Ryder had the dubious pleasure of reading countless analyses of his creative decline. Life Without Chandler was the sort of headline he'd read from the reviews of the one or two theatrical critics possessing an emotion akin to sympathy. But the rest of them-the types who crafted vituperative metaphors over their morning Weetabix and spent months waiting for the opportunity to plug them into a commentary more noted for its vitriol than its information-had been merciless. He'd been called everything from an “artistic charlatan” to a “vessel buoyed by past glories,” with those glories ostensibly burgeoning from a single source: Michael Chandler.

David King-Ryder wondered if other musical partnerships had undergone the scrutiny that his collaboration with Michael Chandler had. He doubted it. It seemed to him that musicians and lyricists from Gilbert and Sullivan to Rice and Lloyd-Webber had bloomed, had faded, had risen to prominence, had flourished, had failed, had vanquished critics, had stumbled, and had gloried all without the accompanying baying of the jackals that had snapped at his own heels.

The romance of his association with Michael Chandler had called for this analysis, naturally. When one partner of a team who mounted twelve of the West End's most successful productions dies in such a ghastly stupid way, then a legend is going to be born from that dying. And Michael had died just that sort of death: becoming lost in an underwater Florida cave that had claimed three hundred other divers, violating every rule of diving by going alone, going at night, going inebriated, and leaving only an anchored fifteen-foot boat to mark the spot where he'd entered the water. He left behind a wife, a mistress, four children, six dogs, and a partner with whom he'd dreamed of fame, fortune, and theatrical success from their shared childhood in Oxford, sons of assemblymen at the Austin- Rover plant.

So there had been a logic to the interest that the media had displayed in David King-Ryder's emotional and artistic rehabilitation following Michael's untimely death. And while the critics had battered him for his first solo attempt at pop opera five years later, they'd used fleece-covered clubs as if in the belief that a man who lost both his longtime partner and his lifelong friend in one fell swoop deserved at least a single opportunity to fail without being publicly humiliated in his effort to find the muse by himself. These same critics hadn't been so merciful upon his second failure, however.

But that was over now. That was the past.

Next to him in the box Ginny cried out, “We did it! David! We bloody well did it!” as she doubtless realised that-all charges of nepotism be damned when he'd chosen his wife to direct the production-she'd just risen to the sort of heights occupied by artists like Hands, Nunn, and Hall.

David's son Matthew-as his father's manager, knowing only too well how much they had at stake in the production-grabbed David's hand hard and said gruffly, “Damn. Well done, Dad.” And David wanted to warm to those words and to what they implied, a firm withdrawal of the initial doubts that Matthew had expressed when told of his father's intention to turn Shakespeare's greatest tragedy into his own musical triumph. “You're