In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

knowing her at all?”

He checked his watch. He looked out of the window and made note of the sun's position in the sky. There were several good hours of daylight left, so he had no need to rush off right at the moment. Knowing this, and knowing what he could well do because of this, he procrastinated by checking to make sure he had a compass, a torch, and an Ordnance Survey map tucked into the various pockets of his jacket.

Then, without further employment available, he heaved a sigh of defeat. He walked to the phone and punched in his home number. Might as well leave her a message if she's gone out, he thought. One can make a point with one's mate for only a limited period.

He expected Denton. Or the answerphone. What he didn't expect-because if she was at home, why the devil wasn't she phoning him-was to hear his wife's soft voice on the other end of the line.

She said hello twice. In the background he could hear music playing. It was one of his new Prokofiev CDs. She'd taken the call in the drawing room.

He wanted to say “Hello, darling. We parted badly, and I'm longing to make it up with you.” But instead, he wondered how the hell she could sit there in London, blissfully enjoying his music, while they were at odds. And they were at odds, weren't they? Hadn't he just spent most of his working day successfully avoiding an obsessive contemplation of their disagreement, of everything that had led up to it, of what it indicated about the past, of what it presaged for the future, of what it might lead them to if one of them didn't wake up and realise that-Helen said, “This is very rude, whoever you are,” and rang off.

Which left Lynley holding a dead receiver and feeling very foolish. Ringing her back at the moment would make him feel even more foolish, he concluded. So that was that. He replaced the receiver, removed the keys to the police car from his suit coat, and left the room.

He drove northeast, cruising along the road that carved a gully between the limestone slopes upon which Tideswell was built. The land formed a natural siphon here. The wind gusted through it like a gushing river, whipping tree limbs and flipping leaves upside down in an unspoken promise of the season's first rain.

At the junction, a handful of honey-coloured buildings marked the hamlet of Lane Head. Here Lynley veered to the west, where the road made a straight charcoal incision into the moor and drystone walls prevented the accretion of heather, bilberry, and ferns from reclaiming the road and returning it to the land.

It was a wild country. Once Lynley left the last of the hamlets behind, the only signs of life-aside from the vegetation, which was profuse-were the jackdaws and magpies and the occasional sheep that stood serene and cloudlike, grazing among the pink and the green.

Stiles provided access to the moor, and signposts marked the routes of public footpaths that had been used for centuries by farmers or shepherds traveling between the far-flung hamlets. Hiking and biking trails were a more recent addition to the landscape, however, and these carved through the heather and disappeared towards distant lichen-grey outcrops that formed the remains of prehistoric settlements, ancient places of worship, and Roman forts.

Lynley found the spot a few miles northeast of the tiny hamlet of Sparrowpit, where Nicola Maiden had left her Saab upon setting off into the moor. There, a long and knobby border of wall was interrupted by a white iron gate, its thick skin of crusty paint eaten through in spots by blemishes of rust. When he arrived, Lynley did what Nicola Maiden herself had done: He opened the gate, pulled into a narrow paved lane within, and parked behind the stone wall on a patch of earth.

He consulted the map before getting out of the car, opening it against the passenger seat and fixing his reading glasses on his nose. He studied the route he would need to take to get out to Nine Sisters Henge, making note of landmarks that would be useful in guiding him on his way. Hanken had offered him a detective constable as a guide, but he'd refused. He wouldn't have minded an experienced hiker as an escort, but he preferred not to be accompanied by a member of the Buxton police who could possibly take offence-and report such offence to Hanken-when Lynley scrutinised the crime scene with an attention suggesting that the local CID hadn't done its job.

“It's a last possibility for that blasted pager, and I'd like to eliminate it,” Lynley had told Hanken.

“If it had been there, my boys would have found it,” Hanken had replied, reminding him that they'd done a fingertip search for the weapon, which certainly would have turned up a pager even if it hadn't dislodged a knife from the site. “But if it puts your mind at rest to do it, then put your mind at rest and do it.” As for himself, he was off after Upman, champing at the bit to confront the solicitor.

Feeling sure of his route, Lynley folded the map and returned his glasses to their case. He put map and glasses in his jacket pockets and climbed out into the wind. He set out southeast, with the collar of his jacket turned up and his shoulders hunched against the gusts that were blowing against him. The stretch of paved lane led in the direction he wanted, so he started out on it, but after less than a hundred yards, it ended in a crumble of aggregate boulders comprising mostly gravel and tar. From there, the going became rougher, an uneven trail of earth and stones, creased by watercourses that were skeletally dry from a summer without rain.

The walk took him nearly an hour, and he made it in utter solitude. His route followed stony paths that intersected with other, stonier paths. He brushed through heather, gorse, and fern; he climbed limestone outcrops; he passed the remains of chambered cairns.

He was just coming upon an unexpected fork in the trail, when he saw a lone hiker walking his way from the southeast. As he was fairly certain that this was the direction of Nine Sisters Henge, Lynley remained where he was, waiting to see who had made this late-afternoon visit to the scene of the crime. As far as he knew, Hanken still had the stone circle taped off and guarded. So if the hiker was a journalist or press photographer, he would have found little joy in taking an extended walk across the moor.

It wasn't a man, as things turned out. Nor was it either a journalist or a photographer. Instead, as the figure approached, Lynley saw that Samantha McCallin had, for some reason, decided to treat herself to an afternoon hike out to Nine Sisters Henge.

Apparently, she recognised him at the same instant that he realised her identity, because her gait changed its rhythm. She'd been marching along with a whip tail of birch in her hand, flicking it against the heather as she stepped along the path. But seeing Lynley, she chucked the whip tail to one side, squared her shoulders, and came straight at him.

“It's a public place,” she said at once. “You can tape off the circle and post guards out there, but you can't keep people off the rest of the moor.”

“You're some miles from Broughton Manor, Miss McCallin.”

“Don't killers return to the scenes of their crimes? I'm merely living the part. Would you like to arrest me?”

“I'd like you to explain what you're doing here.”

She looked over her shoulder in the direction from which she'd come. “He thinks I killed her. Isn't that rich? I speak out in defence of him this morning, and by afternoon he's decided I did it. It's an odd way to say ‘Thanks for taking my part, Sam,’ but there you have it.”

It could have been the wind, of course, but it looked to Lynley as if she'd been crying. He said, “So what are you doing here, Miss McCallin? You must know that your presence-”

“I wanted to see the place where his fantasy died.” The wind had loosened hair from her plait, and wispy tendrils of it blew round her face. “He'd say, of course, that his fantasy died on Monday night when he asked her to marry him. But I don't think so. I think as long as Nicola walked the earth, my cousin Julian would have held on to his obsession of having a life with her. Waiting for her to change her mind. Waiting for her to-as he would say- really see him. And the funny thing is, if she'd crooked her finger at him just the right way-or even the wrong way, for that matter-he would've interpreted it as the sign he was waiting for, proving to him that she loved him in spite of everything she said and did to the contrary.”

“You disliked her, didn't you?” Lynley asked.

She gave a short laugh. “What difference does it make? She was going to get what she wanted no matter how I felt about her.”

“What she got was death. And she can't have wanted that.”

“She would have destroyed him. She would have sucked out his marrow. She was that sort of woman.”

“Was she?”

Samantha's eyes narrowed as a gust of wind spat chalky bits of earth into the air. “I'm glad she's dead. I won't