In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“Always go with the special of the day,” Hanken advised him and nodded at the paperwork Lynley was holding. “What've we got?”

Lynley didn't think they had anything, but he remembered three names that he had to admit, even beyond his own prejudices in the matter, bore looking into. One of them was a former snout of Maiden s. Two others were secondary shadowy figures who'd operated at the periphery of Maiden's investigations but never served time at their monarch's pleasure. Ben Venables was the snout. Clifford Thompson and Gar Brick were the others.

On their way back to the Black Angel, Hanken had perfected a new theory. Maiden, he said, had far too much nouse to be such a fool as to kill his own daughter personally, no matter how much he wanted her dead. He'd have hired the job out to one of the blighters from his past, and he'd have then misdirected the police by telling them it was a vengeance killing to keep them focused on the louts either in prison or on parole while all the others who'd rubbed elbows with Maiden but had no reason to revenge themselves upon him would escape police notice. It was a clever ploy. So Hanken wanted that SO 10 report to see if any names on it matched up with anyone who'd registered at the hotel.

“You see how it could happen, don't you?” Hanken asked Lynley. “All Maiden would need to do after hiring this bloke would be to put him in the picture where the girl was camping. And he knew where she was camping, Thomas. We've seen that from the first.”

Lynley wanted to argue, but he didn't. Andy Maiden, of all people, would understand how risky it was to arrange a contract killing. That he might have done so to rid himself of a child whose lifestyle he found intolerable was an unthinkable proposition. If the man had wanted to eliminate Nicola because he couldn't force her to change her ways, he wouldn't have looked for someone else to do the job, especially someone who might break easily under interrogation and point the finger back at him. No. If Andy Maiden had wanted to eliminate his daughter, Lynley knew, he would have done so himself. And they had sod all evidence to suggest that he'd done it.

Lynley picked at his food as Hanken read the report. The other DI wolfed down his own meal. He finished the report and the meal simultaneously and said, “Venables, Thompson, and Brick,” in an impressive show of reaching the same conclusion as Lynley himself had drawn. “But I say we check them all against the records.”

Which was what they did. They took the records for the previous week and checked the names of all the hotel's residents during that time against the names that were in Havers’ report. As the report covered more than twenty years of Andy Maiden's police experience, the project took some time. But the end of their endeavour left them in the same position as they'd been in in the beginning. No names matched.

It was Lynley who pointed out that someone coming to kill Nicola Maiden would hardly have registered in a local hotel and used his own name. Hanken saw the reason in this. But rather than use it to dismiss altogether the idea of a hired killer who'd stayed at the hotel and left the jacket and waterproof behind, he said obscurely, “Of course. Let's get on to Buxton.”

But what about Broughton Manor? Lynley wanted to know.

Were they going to let that slide in favour of… what? A chase for someone who might not exist?

“The killer exists, Thomas,” Hanken replied as he stood. “And I've an idea we'll track him down through Buxton.”

Barbara looked at Helen and said, “But why'd you phone me? Why not the inspector?”

Helen said, “Thank you, Charlie. Will you see about getting those wallpaper books back to Peter Jones? I've made my choice. It's marked.”

Denton nodded, saying, “Will do,” and took himself up the stairs after switching off the stereo and removing his CD.

“Thank God Charlie loves West End extravaganzas,” Helen said when she and Barbara were alone. “The more I get to know him, the more invaluable I find he's becoming. And who would have thought it, because when Tommy and I married, I wondered how I'd feel having my husband's valet-or whatever Charlie Denton actually is-lurking about like a nineteenth-century retainer. But he's indispensable. As you've just seen.”

“Why, Helen?” Barbara asked, not put off by the other woman's light remarks.

Helen's face softened. “I love him,” she said. “But he's not always right. No one is.”

“He won't like your having shared this with me.”

“Yes. Well. I'll deal with that as it comes.” Helen gestured to the music. “What do you make of it?”

“In light of the murder?” And when Helen nodded, Barbara considered all the possible answers. David King- Ryder, she recalled, had killed himself on the opening night of his production of Hamlet. From his son's own words, she'd heard that King-Ryder had to have known that very same evening that the show was a smashing success. Nonetheless, he'd killed himself, and when Barbara blended this fact not only with the real authorship of the music and lyrics but also with the story that Vi Nevin had told her about how the music had come to be in Terry Cole's hands, she could arrive at only one conclusion: Someone out there had known that David King-Ryder had not written either the music or the lyrics to the show he was mounting under his own name. That person had known because that same person had somehow got his hands on the original score. And considering that the phone call intercepted by Terry Cole in Elvaston Place had been made in June when Hamlet debuted, it seemed reasonable to conclude that that phone call had been intended not for Matthew King-Ryder-hot to produce a show that would not be governed by the terms of his father's will-but for David King-Ryder himself, who was desperate to get that music back and to hide from the world the simple fact that it wasn't his work.

Why else would King-Ryder have killed himself unless he'd arrived at the phone box just five minutes too late to receive that call? Why else would he have killed himself unless he believed that-despite having paid off a blackmailer who was supposed to phone him with directions where to “pick up the package”-he was going to be blackmailed ad infinitum? Or, worse yet, he was going to be exposed to the very tabloids who'd slagged him off for years? Of course he'd kill himself, Barbara thought. He'd have had no way of knowing that Terry Cole received the phone call intended for him. He'd have had no way of knowing how to make contact with the blackmailer to see what had gone wrong. So once that call hadn't come through in that phone box on Elvaston Place when he managed to get there, he'd have thought he was cooked.

The only question was: Who had blackmailed David King-Ryder? And there was only one answer that was remotely reasonable: his own son. There was evidence for this, if only circumstantial. Surely, Matthew King-Ryder had known before his father's suicide that he stood to get nothing when David King-Ryder died. If he was to head the King-Ryder Fund-and he'd admitted as much when Barbara spoke to him-he would have had to be told about the terms of his father's will. So the sole way he had to get his hands on some of his father's money was to extort it from him.

Barbara explained all this to Helen, and when she was finished, Lynley's wife asked, “But have you any evidence? Because without evidence…” Her expression said the rest, You're done for, my friend.

Barbara tossed the question round in her head as she finished her lunch. And she found the answer in a brief review of her visit to King-Ryder in his Baker Street flat.

“The house,” she said to Lynley's wife. “Helen, he was moving house. He said he'd finally got the money together to buy himself a property south of the river.”

“But south of the river…? That's not exactly…” Helen looked distinctly uncomfortable, and Barbara liked her for her reluctance to draw attention to Lynley's considerable wealth. One would need brass by the bucketful to buy even a cupboard in Belgravia. On the other hand, south of the river-where the lesser mortals bought their homes- would not present such a problem. King-Ryder could have saved enough to buy a freehold there. Barbara accepted that.

Nonetheless, she said, “There's no other explanation for what King-Ryder's been up to: lying about what happened when Terry Cole went to his office, searching Terry's flat in Battersea, buying one of Cilia Thompson's monstrosities, going to Vi Nevin's digs and trashing them. He's got to put his hands on that music, and he's willing to do anything to get it. His dad's dead, and he's to blame. He doesn't want the poor bloke's memory shot to bits as well. He wanted some of his lolly, sure. But he didn't want him destroyed.”

Helen considered this, smoothing her fingers along the crease in her trousers. “I see how you're fitting it together,” she admitted. “But as to proof that he's even a blackmailer, let alone a killer…?” She looked up and opened her hands as if to say, Where is it?

Barbara thought about what she had on King-Ryder besides what she knew about the terms of his father's will: Terry had been to see him; he had searched Terry's flat; he'd gone to the studio on Portslade Road… “The cheque,” she said. “He wrote Cilia Thompson a cheque when he bought one of her nightmare-in-the-railway-arches