“I don't see why not. Until you realised what had happened to you, of course. And then you'd probably go into shock. Especially if you reached back and felt the shaft sticking out of you. God, that would be grim. That would be enough to make you-”
“Faint,” Barbara said. “Pass out. Fall over.”
“Right,” he agreed.
“And then the arrow would break off, wouldn't it?”
“Depending on the way you fell, it might do.”
Which would, she concluded silently, possibly leave a sliver of wood behind when the killer-eager to remove the one thing from the body that could ultimately identify him to the police-pulled the remainder of the arrow from the victim's back. But he wouldn't have been dead-Terry Cole-at that point. Just in shock. So the killer would have to finish him off once he returned from pounding in the girl's skull. He had no weapon with him other than the long bow. His only choice was to find a weapon there at the campsite.
And having done that, with the boy safely stabbed, he himself was free to search for what he assumed Terry Cole had with him: the Chandler music, the source of a fortune denied him by the terms of his father's will.
There was only a final point to clarify with Jason Harley. She said, “Jason, can an arrow's tip-”
“The pile,” he corrected her.
“The pile. Can it pierce human flesh? I mean, I always thought arrows had to have rubber ends or something if you took them out in public.”
He smiled. “Suction cups, you mean? Like on kids’ bows and arrows?” He rolled past her and behind one of the display cases, where he took out a small box and emptied it on the low glass counter. These, he told her, were the piles used at the end of the cedar arrows. The most common for field archery was the bodkin head. Barbara could test its sharpness if she wanted to.
She did so. The metal piece was cylindrical, in keeping with the arrows shape, but it also narrowed to a nasty four-sided point that would be deadly when propelled with force. As she was pressing this tip into her finger experimentally, Harley chatted on about the other piles he sold. He laid out broadheads and hunting heads and explained their use. Finally, he separated from them the mediaeval reproductions.
“And these,” he concluded, “are for demonstrations and battles.”
“Battles?” Barbara asked incredulously. “People actually shooting
“Not real battles, of course, and when the fighting begins, the arrows are fitted out with rubber bunts on the end so they're not dangerous. They're reenactments, the battles are. A slew of weekend warriors gather together in the grounds of some castle or great house and play out the War of Roses with one another. It goes on all over the countryside.”
“People travel to reenactments, do they? With bows and arrows in the boots of their cars?”
“Just like that. Yes. They do.”
CHAPTER 27
The rain was unrelenting. The wind had joined it. In the car park of the Black Angel Hotel, both the wind and the rain played a sodden game with the top layer of rubbish in an overloaded skip. The wind lifted and hurled cardboard boxes and old newspapers into the air; the downfall plastered both to the windscreens and wheels of the empty cars.
Lynley climbed from the Bentley and raised his umbrella against the late summer storm. He hurried with his suitcase in hand round the side of the building and through the front door. A coat rack just within the entrance sprouted the dripping coats and jackets of a dozen or more Sunday patrons whose shapes Lynley could see through the translucent amber glass of the upper half of the hotel bar's door. Next to the rack, a good ten umbrellas stood in an elongated iron stand and glistened wetly under the light of the entrance porch where Lynley stamped the damp from his shoes. He hung his coat among the others, shoved his umbrella in with the rest, and went through the bar to Reception.
If the proprietor of the Black Angel was surprised to see him back so soon, the man gave no indication. Tourist season, after all, was nearly at an end. He would be happy enough for whatever custom came his way in the coming months. He handed over a key-depressingly, it was for the same room he'd had earlier, Lynley saw-and asked if the inspector wanted his bags taken up or would he rather see to them himself? Lynley handed over his suitcase and went to the bar for a meal.
Sunday lunch was long since finished, but they could do him a cold ham salad or a filled jacket potato, he was informed, as long as he wasn't overly particular about the potato's filling. He said that he wasn't, and he asked for both.
When the food was in front of him, however, Lynley found that he wasn't as hungry as he'd thought. He dipped into the potato with its thatch of cheddar, but when he brought the loaded fork to his mouth, his tongue thickened at the thought of having to swallow anything solid, chewed or not. He lowered the fork and reached for the lager. Getting drunk was still an option.
He wanted to believe them. He wanted to believe them not because they were able to offer him the slightest bit of evidence in support of their statements but because he didn't want to believe anything else. Cops went bad from time to time, and only a fool denied that fact. Birmingham, Guildford, and Bridgewater were only three of the places that had numbers attached to them-six, four, and four respectively-in reference to the defendants convicted on spurious evidence, interrogation room beatings, and manufactured confessions with signatures forged. Each conviction had been the result of police malfeasance for which not a single excuse could possibly be made. So there were bad cops: whether one called them overly zealous, outright tendentious, thoroughly corrupt, or simply too indolent or ignorant to do the job the way the job was supposed to be done.
But Lynley didn't want to believe that Andy Maiden was a cop who'd gone bad. Nor did he even want to believe that Andy was simply a father who'd reached the end of his tether in dealing with his child. Even now, after talking to Andy, after watching the interplay between the man and his wife and having to evaluate what every word, gesture, and nuance between them meant, Lynley found that his heart and his mind were still in conflict over the basic facts.
Nan Maiden had joined them in the airless little office behind Reception in Maiden Hall. She'd shut the door. Her husband had said, “Nancy, don't bother. The guests… Nan, you're not needed in here,” and cast a beseeching look at Lynley in an unspoken request that Lynley did not grant. For needed was exactly what Nan Maiden was if they were to get to the bottom of what had happened to Nicola on Calder Moor.
She said to Lynley, “We weren't expecting anyone else today. I told Inspector Hanken yesterday that Andy was at home that night. I explained-”
“Yes,” Lynley agreed. “I've been told.”
“Then I don't see what further good can come from more questions.” She stood stiffly near the door, and her words were as rigid as her body when she went on. “I know you've come for that, Inspector: questioning Andy instead of offering us information about Nicola's death. Andy wouldn't look like that-like he's being chewed up inside-if you hadn't come to ask him if he actually… if he went onto the moor so that he could-” And there her voice faltered. “He was
The absolute truth, Lynley thought. He wanted to hear it. More, he wanted them both to face it. But at the last moment, when he could have revealed to her the real nature of her daughter's life in London, he didn't do it. All the facts about Nicola would come out eventually-in interrogation rooms, in legal depositions, and in the trial-but there was no reason to drag them out now, like the bones of a grinning skeleton forced from a cupboard that the girl's mother didn't even know existed. If nothing else, he could honour Andy Maiden's wishes in that matter, at least for now.
He said, “Who can support your statement, Mrs. Maiden? DI Hanken told me that Andy had gone to bed early in the evening. Did someone else see him?”
“Who else would have seen him? Our employees don't go into the private part of the house unless they're instructed to do so.”
