The second message began with a bright “Hello hello”, followed by three breathy notes of music. “Did you hear that? I'm learning flute. I just got it today after school and I'm to be in the orchestra! They asked me special and I asked Dad would it be okay and he said yes so now I play flute. Only I don't play it very well yet. But I'm practising. I know the scale. Listen.” There followed a clatter as the phone was dropped. Afterwards came eight highly hesitant notes, breathy like the first. Then, “See? The teacher says I've a natural talent, Barbara. Do you think so as well?” The voice was interrupted by another, a man's voice speaking quietly in the background. Then, “Oh. This is Khalidah Hadiyyah. Up front in the ground floor flat. Dad says I forgot to tell you that. I expect you know it's me though, don't you?
I wanted to remind you about my sewing lesson. It's tomorrow and you said you wanted to see what I'm making. D'you still want to go? We c'n have the rest of the toffee apple afterwards, for our tea. Pang me back, okay?” And the phone clunked down at her end of the line.
After which Barbara heard the quiet, well-bred tones of Inspector Lynley's wife. Helen said, “Barbara, Winston's just returned the Bentley. He told me you're working on the case here in town. I'm so glad, and I wanted to tell you so. I
At which Barbara winced. Her conscience prickled. But she muffled the voice that told her she'd been acting in defiance of Lynley's orders for a good part of the day, and she silently announced that she wasn't defying anyone at all. She was merely taking the initiative, supplementing her assignment with additional activities demanded by the logic of the unfolding investigation.
It was as good an excuse as any.
She kicked off her shoes and flopped onto the day bed, where she pulled the elastic band from the collection of postcards she was carrying. She began to flip through them. And as she did so, she thought of the myriad ways in which Terry Cole's life-as it was unfolding through her investigation of it-was unveiling him as a killer's target while Nicola Maiden's life-no matter how they viewed it-was unveiling her as nothing more than a sexually active twenty- five-year-old who'd had one or two men in every port and a wealthy lover by the string. And while sexual jealousy on the part of one of those men might have led him to give the girl the chop, he certainly wouldn't have needed to do the job out on the moor, especially when he saw that she was with someone. It would have made more sense for him to wait till he found her alone. Unless, of course, she and Terry had been into something at that moment that made him think they were an item. In which case, blinded by rage and jealousy, he could well have stormed into the stone circle and attacked his rival for the Maiden girl's favours, running her down as well after he'd wounded the boy. But that seemed an unlikely scenario. Nothing Barbara had learned about Nicola Maiden had so far suggested that she'd gone for unemployed teenaged boys.
Terry, on the other hand, was turning out to be a field ripe for harvest when it came to activities from which murder could arise. According to Cilia, he'd carried gobs of cash with him, and the postcards that Barbara now arranged on her day bed suggested a field of underworld employment that was absolutely rife with violence. Despite what his mother claimed about the big commission that Terry had, despite what Mrs. Baden had asserted about the boy's good nature and generosity, it was seeming more and more likely that the real Terry Cole had lived close to if not directly within the underbelly of English life. Tied to that underbelly were drugs, pornography, snuff films, paedophilia, exotica, erotica, and white slavery. Not to mention a hundred tasty perversions, all of which could so easily give rise to a motive for murder.
But in Nicola's case, nearly everything had been accounted for: from her lifestyle in London to her supply of dosh. They still had to discover why she'd gone to work in Derbyshire for the summer, but what on earth could that possibly have to do with her murder?
On the other hand, virtually nothing about Terry Cole's life had made sense at all. Until Barbara had unearthed the postcards.
She gazed upon them in their orderly rows on the day bed and pursed her lips. Come on, she told them, give me something to run with. I know it's here, I know one of you can tell me, I know, I
She could still hear Cilia Thompson's passionate reaction to seeing the cards: “He
But Terry had never been truly interested in art, Barbara guessed. He'd been interested in something else entirely.
In the first set of postcards, there were forty-five in all. Each, Barbara saw, was different. And no matter how she studied them, categorized them, or attempted to eliminate them one by one, she was finally forced to accept the fact that only the telephone-even at this hour of the night-was going to assist her in sussing out her next move in the investigation.
She deliberately set aside any consideration that Terry Cole might be connected to Andy Maiden's past in SO 10. She set aside any consideration that SO 10 was involved in the case at all.
Instead, she reached for the phone. She knew quite well that-despite the hour-at the other end of the line would be forty-five suspects just waiting for someone to ring them and ask a few questions.
By rising at dawn the next morning and driving to Manchester Airport, Lynley managed to catch the first flight to London. It was nine-forty when his taxi left him at the front door of his house in Eaton Terrace.
He paused before entering. Despite the brightness of the morning-with the sun glittering against the transom windows of the houses that lined the quiet street-he felt as if he were walking directly beneath a cloud. His eyes took in the fine white buildings, the wrought iron railings that fronted them without a spot of rust marring their midnight paint, and regardless of the fact that he'd been born into the longest period of peace that his country had ever experienced, he found himself unaccountably thinking of war.
London had been devastated. Night after night the bombs fell upon it, reducing large areas of the metropolis to bricks, mortar, beams, and rubble. The City, the docklands, and the suburbs-both north and south of the river-had sustained the worst of the damage, but no one in the nation's capital had escaped the fear. It was heralded nightly by the sound of the sirens and the whistling of the bombs. It was embodied by explosions, fires, panic, confusion, uncertainty, and the aftermath of them all.
Yet London had continued to persevere, renewing itself as it had done for two thousand years. Boadicea's tribesmen had not vanquished it, neither the plague nor the Great Fire had subdued it, so the firestorm of the Blitz could not have hoped to defeat it. Because out of pain, destruction, and loss it always managed to rise anew.
So perhaps it could be argued that strife and travail could lead one to greatness, Lynley thought, that ones sense of purpose, once tested by adversity, became reliably firm and one's understanding of the world, once questioned in the midst of sorrow and misconception, was forever enhanced. But the thought that bombs ultimately led to peace as a woman's labour led to birth was not enough to dispel the gloom and dread that he was feeling. Good could come out of bad, it was true. It was the hell in between that he didn't want to ponder.
At six that morning he'd phoned DI Hanken and told him that “some crucial information uncovered by the London officers working the case” required his presence back in town. He would be communicating with Derbyshire as soon as he followed up on that information. To Hanken's logical query about the necessity of Lynley's traveling to London when he had two officers already working there and could-with a simple telephone call-garner two or even two dozen more, Lynley replied that his team had uncovered a few details that were making it look as if London and not Derbyshire was where the facts were leading. It seemed reasonable, he said, for one of the two ranking officers on the case to assess and assemble these facts in person. Would Hanken make available to him a copy of the post-mortem report? he asked. He also wanted to hand that document over to a forensic specialist, to see if Dr. Myles's conclusion about the murder weapon was accurate.
“If she's made an error about the knife-the length of the blade, for example-I'd like to know that at once,” he said.
How would a forensic specialist be able to discern an error in the report without seeing the body, the x-rays,
