In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

anxiety, resentment, insomnia, and outright rage.

Uncle Jeremy didn't help matters. By him, Samantha was daily regaled with lubricious innuendoes and direct assaults, all circling or landing upon the subject of Julian's love life. Had she not quickly seen upon her arrival how necessary was her presence at Broughton Manor, had she not needed a respite from her mother's incessant displays of lugubrious mourning, Samantha knew that she would have decamped months before. But she maintained her position and held her peace-most of the time-because she'd been able to see the bigger picture: Jeremy's sobriety, the blessed distraction that a reunion with him would provide her mother, and Julian's gradual awakening to the contribution Samantha was making to his well-being, his future, and his hope of transforming the derelict manor house and the estate into a thriving business.

“Sam?”

She raised her head. So deeply had she been into her attempt to release the tension of having a conversation with her uncle, she'd failed to hear his son come into the kitchen. Stupidly, she said, “Aren't you with the dogs, Julian?”

“Short shrift,” he said in explanation. “They need more but I can't give it to them now.”

“I did see to Cass. Do you want me to-”

“She's dead.”

“My God. Julian, she can't be,” Samantha cried. “I went out as soon as I spoke with you. She was fine. She'd eaten, the puppies were all asleep. I made notes of everything and left them on the clipboard. Didn't you see it? I hung it on the peg.”

“Nicola,” he said tonelessly. “Sam, she's dead. Out on Calder Moor, where she'd gone camping. Nicola's dead.”

Samantha stared at him as the word dead seemed to echo round the room. He isn't crying, she thought. What does it mean that he isn't crying? “Dead,” she repeated, careful with the word, certain that saying it the wrong way would give an impression that she didn't want to give.

He kept his eyes on her and she wished he wouldn't. She wished he'd talk. Or scream or cry or do something to indicate what was going on inside so that she would know how to behave with him. When he finally moved, it was to walk to the work top where Samantha had been chopping the peppers. He stood examining them as if they were a curiosity. Then he lifted the chef's knife and inspected it closely. Finally, he pressed his thumb firmly against the sharp blade.

“Julian!” Samantha cried. “You'll hurt yourself!”

A thin line of crimson appeared on his skin. “I don't know what to call how I feel,” he said.

Samantha, on the other hand, didn't have that problem.

CHAPTER 5

DI Peter Hanken apparently decided to show mercy when it came to the Marlboros. The first actions he took when they were on the road from Buxton to Padley Gorge were to lean over, flip open the Fords glove compartment, and pluck out a packet of sugarless gum. As he folded a stick of it into his mouth, Lynley blessed him for his willingness to abstain from tobacco.

The DI didn't speak as the A6 began its course through Wye Dale, hugging the placid river for several miles before dipping slightly to the southeast. It wasn't until they passed the second of the limestone quarries scarring the landscape that he made his first comment.

“Newlywed, is it?” he said with a smile. Lynley steeled himself for the ribald humour that was doubtless coming, the price one generally paid for legitimising a relationship with a woman. “Yes. Just three months. That's longer than most Hollywood marriages, I expect.”

“It's the best time. You and the wife starting out. There's nothing else like it. Your first?”

“Marriage? Yes. For both of us. We got a late start.”

“All the better.”

Lynley glanced at his companion warily, wondering if the fallout from his parting argument with Helen could be read on his face, acting on Hanken as an inspiration for a tongue-in-cheek panegyric to the blessings of the marital state. But all he saw in Hanken's expression was the evidence of a man who seemed content with his life.

“Name's Kathleen,” the DI confided. “We've got three kids. Sarah, Bella, and PJ. That's Peter Junior, our newest. Here. Have a look.” He pulled a wallet from his jacket pocket and handed it over. In pride of place was a family photo: two small girls cuddling a blue-blanketed newborn on a hospital bed with Mum and Dad cuddling the two small girls. “Family's everything. But you'll be finding that out for yourself soon enough.”

“I dare say.” Lynley tried to picture himself and Helen similarly surrounded by winsome offspring. He couldn't do it. If he summoned up his wife's image at all, it was as it had been earlier that day, pale-faced as she left him.

He stirred uncomfortably in his seat. He didn't want to discuss marriage at the moment, and he offered a silent imprecation to Nkata for having brought up the subject at all. “They're brilliant,” he said, handing the wallet back to Hanken.

“Boy's the image of his dad,” Hanken said. “Hard to tell from that snap, of course. But there you have it.”

“They're a handsome group.”

To Lynley's relief, Hanken took this as sufficient closing comment on the subject. He returned his full attention to the driving. He gave the road the same concentration that he appeared to give everything else in his immediate environment, a characteristic of the man that Lynley had had little difficulty in deducing. After all, there hadn't been a paper out of place in his office, he was running the most orderly incident room in Lynley's memory, and his clothes made him look as if his next destination were a photo shoot for GQ magazine.

They were on their way to see the parents of the dead girl, having just met the Home Office pathologist who'd traveled up from London to perform the post-mortems. They'd had their conference with her outside the post- mortem room, where she was changing from trainers into court shoes, one of which she was in the process of repairing by pounding its heel into the metal plate on the door. Announcing that women's shoes-not to mention their handbags-were designed by men to promote the enslavement of the female sex, she had eyed the DIs’ comfortable footwear with undisguised hostility and said, “I can give you ten minutes. The report'll be on your desk in the morning. Which one of you is Hanken, by the way? You? Fine. I know what you want. It's a knife with a three-inch blade. Folding knife-pocket knife-most likely, although it could be a small one used in the kitchen. Your killers right-handed and strong, quite strong. That's for the boy. The girl was done in with that chunk of stone you had off the moor. Three blows to the head. Right-handed assailant as well.”

“The same killer?” Hanken asked.

The pathologist gave her shoe five final pounds against the door as she reflected on the question. She said brusquely that the bodies could tell only what they'd told: how they'd been robbed of life, what sort of weapons had been used against them, and whether a right or left hand had wielded those weapons. Forensic evidence-fibres, hairs, blood, sputum, skin, and the like-might tell a longer, more precise story, but they'd have to queue to get the reports back from the lab for that. The naked eye could discern only so much, and she'd told them what that so much was.

She tossed her shoe onto the floor and introduced herself as Dr. Sue Myles. She was a stout woman with short-fingered hands, grey hair, and a chest that resembled the prow of a ship. But her feet, Lynley noted as she slid them into her shoes, were as slender as a debutante's.

“One of the boy's back wounds was more of a gouge,” she went on. “The blow chipped the left scapula, so if you find a likely weapon, we can go for a match from the blade to the bone.”

That wound didn't kill him? Hanken wanted to know.

“The poor sod bled to death. Would've taken some minutes, but once he took a wound to the femoral artery- that's in the groin, by the way-he was done for.”

“And the girl?” Lynley asked.

“Skull cracked like an egg. The post-cerebral artery was pierced.”

Which meant what exactly, Hanken enquired.

“Epidural haematoma. Internal bleeding, pressure on the brain. She died in less than an hour.”

“It took longer than the boy?”