In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

and nodded at Barbara. “That's you.”

“Me? Hang on, Winnie, you've got no rank to pull on me,” Barbara said in protest, seeing her Sunday-evening plans go down the sewer.

“Right. But I don't think you want to miss out on this.”

“I'm off the case.”

“I know that. But 'cording to the guv, this isn't exactly on the case any longer, so I don't see why you don't take it yourself.”

“Take what?”

“Vi Nevin. She's full conscious, Barb. And someone's got to take a statement from her.”

Lynley phoned DI Hanken at home, where he found him sealed within his small garage, apparently trying to make sense of instructions to assemble a child's swing set. “I'm not a bloody God damn engineer,” he fumed, and seemed grateful for anything that promised to take him away from a hopeless endeavour.

Lynley brought him into the picture. Hanken agreed that an arrow and its bow looked likely as their missing weapon. “Explains why it wasn't stowed in that grit dispenser with the knife,” he said. “And if it's initials that we're going to find on the arrow, I've a good idea whose they're likely to be.”

“I recall your telling me about the various ways Julian Britton makes money at Broughton Manor,” Lynley acknowledged. “It looks like we're finally closing in on him, Peter. I'm heading over there now to have a-”

“Heading over? Where the hell are you?” Hanken demanded. “Aren't you in London?”

Lynley was fairly certain in which direction Hanken would run when he learned why Lynley had returned so quickly to Derbyshire, and his fellow DI did not disappoint him. “I knew it was Maiden,” Hanken exclaimed at the end of Lynley's explanation. “He found that car on the moor, Thomas. And there's no way in hell he would have found it had he not known where she'd be in the first place. He knew she was on the game in London and he couldn't deal with it. So he gave her the chop. It was the only way-I dare say-that he could keep her from spilling the news to her mum.”

This was so close to what Maiden's actual desires were that Lynley felt chilled by Hanken's perspicacity. Still, he said, “Andy's said he'll arrange to take a polygraph. I can't think he'd make an offer like that if he had Nicola's blood on his hands.”

“The hell he wouldn't,” Hanken countered. “This bloke's an undercover cop, let's not forget. If he hadn't been able to lie with the best of them, he'd be a dead man now. A polygraph taken by Andy Maiden's going to be nothing more than a joke. On us, by the way.”

“Julian Britton's still got the stronger motive,” Lynley said. “Let me see if I can shake him up.”

“You're playing right into Maiden's hands. You know that, don't you? He's working you like you're wearing the same school tie.”

Which they were, in a manner of speaking. But Lynley refused to be blinded by their history. He refused to be blinded in either direction. It was as foolhardy to believe beyond doubt that Andy Maiden was the killer as it was to ignore the possible guilt of someone with a stronger motive.

Hanken rang off. Lynley had made the phone call from his hotel room, so he took five minutes to unpack his belongings before heading out to Broughton Manor. He'd left his umbrella and trench coat below in the entrance when he'd gone upstairs to place the call, so after tossing his room key onto the reception desk, he went to fetch them.

The Black Angel's earlier patrons had mostly departed, he saw. There were only three umbrellas left in the stand and, apart from his own coat, only a single jacket remained on the coat rack.

Under other circumstances, a jacket on a coat rack wouldn't have caught his attention. But as he endeavoured to untangle the hook of his umbrella from the gaping ribs of another, he knocked the jacket from its spot on the rack and thus felt obliged to pick it up from the floor.

The fact that the garment was leather didn't strike him at first. Nor did the fact that it was black make an immediate impression upon him. It was only when the silence and darkness of the previously occupied hotel bar told him all the patrons were gone that he realised the jacket had no owner.

He looked from the darkened bar door to the black leather jacket, feeling a tingling along his scalp. He thought, No, it can't be. But even as his mind formed the words, his fingers contacted the stiffened lining-stiffened the way only one substance can render an otherwise soft material stiff because the substance itself does not so much dry as coagulate…

Lynley dropped his umbrella. He took the jacket nearer to the entry porch's window, where he could better examine it under the light. And there he saw that in addition to that unnamed substance which had altered the texture of the lining, the leather was damaged in another way. A hole-perhaps the size of a five-pence coin-had pierced the back.

Apart from knowing that the lining of the jacket had once been soaked with blood, Lynley did not need to be a student of anatomy also to know that the hole in the jacket matched up precisely with the left scapula of the unfortunate person who'd been wearing it.

Nan Maiden found him in his lair near their bedroom. He'd left the office as soon as the detective was out of the hotel, and she hadn't followed him. Instead, she'd spent nearly an hour straightening the lounge after the last of the Sunday guests and setting up the dining room for residents and others who would be requiring a light Sunday supper. When she'd completed these tasks, checked the kitchen to see that the evening's soup was being prepared, and given directions to several American hikers who were apparently intent upon reenacting Jane Eyre at North Lees Hall, she went in search of her husband.

Her excuse was a meal: She hadn't seen him eat for days, and if he went on like this, he would certainly fall ill. The reality was something rather different: Andy couldn't be permitted to carry through his plan to be questioned with electrodes attached to his body. None of his responses could possibly be accurate when one considered the condition he was in.

She loaded a tray with anything he might find tempting. She included two drinks for him to choose from, and she climbed the stairs to make her offering.

He was sitting at the kneehole, and before him was a shoe box with its lid off and its contents spread across the secretaire drawer that was pulled out and open. Nan said his name, but he didn't hear her, so engrossed was he with the papers that had been in the box.

She approached. Over his shoulder she could see that he was looking at a collection of letters, notes, drawings, and greeting cards spanning nearly a quarter of a century. What had occasioned each one was different, but their source was the same. They represented every drawing or other communication that Andy had received from Nicola throughout her life.

Nan put the tray down next to the comfortable old overstuffed chair where Andy sometimes read. She said, “I've brought you something to eat, darling,” and was unsurprised when he didn't reply. She didn't know if he could not hear her or if he merely wished to be alone and wasn't willing to say so. But in either case, it didn't matter. She would make him hear her and she would not leave him.

She said, “Please don't take that lie detector test, Andy. Your condition isn't normal, and it hasn't been for months. I'm going to ring that policeman in the morning and tell him you've changed your mind. There's no sin in that. You're perfectly within your rights. He'll know it.”

Andy stirred. In his fingers he held a child's gawky drawing of “dady gets out of his bath” that had provoked in both of them such fond laughter so many years before. But now the sight of that little girl's rendering of her naked father-complete with a penis hilariously out of proportion-caused a shudder in Nan, followed by a shutting down of some basic function in her body and a shutting off of some essential emotion in her heart. “I'll take the polygraph.” Andy set the drawing to one side. “It's the only way.”

She wanted to say The only way to what? And she would have done had she been more prepared to hear the answer. Instead, she said, “And what if you fail?”

He turned to her then. He held an old letter between his fingers.

Nan could see the words Dearest Daddy in Nicola's bold, firm hand. “Why would I fail?” he asked.

“Because of your condition,” she answered. “If your nerves are going bad, they're going to send out incorrect readings. The police will take those readings and misinterpret them. The machine will say your body's not working.