In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

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.