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?”
“Right. But she'd have been unconscious once she was hit.”
“Could we have two killers?” Hanken asked directly.
“Could have, yes,” Dr. Myles confirmed.
“Defensive wounds on the boy?” Lynley asked.
None that were obvious, Dr. Myles replied. She settled her trainers into a sports bag and zipped it smartly before giving the officers her attention again.
Hanken asked for confirmation on the times of the deaths. Dr. Myles enquired what times his own forensic pathologist had given him. Thirty-six to forty-eight hours before the bodies had been discovered, Hanken told her.
“I wouldn't argue with that.” And she scooped up her bag, nodded a curt farewell, and headed towards the hospital exit.
Now in the car, Lynley reflected on what they knew: that the boy had brought nothing with him into the camp site; that there were anonymous and threatening letters left at the scene; that the girl was unconscious for close to an hour; that the two means of murder were entirely different.
Lynley was dwelling on this last thought when Hanken swung the car to the left, and they headed north in the direction of a town called Tideswell. Along this route they ultimately regained the River Wye, where the steep cliffs and the woods surrounding Miller's Dale had long since brought dusk to the village. Just beyond the last cottage, a narrow lane veered northwest and Hanken steered the Ford into it. They quickly climbed above the woods and the valley and within minutes were cruising along a vast expanse of heather and gorse that appeared to undulate endlessly towards the horizon.
“Calder Moor,” Hanken said. “The largest moor in all the White Peak. It stretches from here to Castleton.” He drove another minute in silence till they came to a lay-by. He pulled into it and let the engine idle. “If she'd gone camping in the Dark Peak, we'd have had Mountain Rescue going after her eventually when she didn't turn up. No little old bat with a doggy to walk would've taken her constitutional up there and found the bodies. But this”-he swept his hand in an arc above the dashboard-“is accessible, all of it. There're miles and miles to cover if someone gets lost, but at least those miles can be handled on foot. Not an easy walk and not entirely safe. But easier to tackle than the peat bogs you'll find round Kinder Scout. If someone had to be murdered in the district, better it happened here, on the limestone plateau, than the other.”
“Is this where Nicola Maiden set off?” Lynley asked. There was no track that he could see from the car. The girl would have had to fight her way through everything from bracken to bilberry.
Hanken rolled down his window and spat out his chewing gum. He reached over Lynley and flipped open the glove compartment to fish out another stick. “She set off from the other side, northwest of here. She was hiking out to Nine Sisters Henge, which's closer to the western boundary of the moor. Rather more of interest to be looked at on that side: tumuli, caverns, caves, barrows. Nine Sisters Henge is the highlight.”
“You're from this area?” Lynley asked.
Hanken didn't answer at once. He looked as if he was considering whether to answer at all. He made the decision at last and said, “From Wirksworth,” and appeared to seal his lips on the subject.
“You're lucky to live where your history is. I wish I could say the same for myself.”
“Depends on the history,” Hanken said, and changed gears abruptly with, “Want to have a look at the site?”
Lynley was wise enough to know that how he met the offer to look over the crime scene would be crucial to the relationship he developed with the other officer. The truth was that he did want to see the site of the murders. No matter the point at which he joined an investigation, there was always a time during the course of the enquiry when he felt the need to look things over himself. Not because he didn't trust the competence of his fellow investigators but because only through a firsthand viewing of as much as possible of what related to the case was he able to become a part of the crime. And it was in becoming a part of the crime that he did his best work. Photographs, reports, and physical evidence conveyed a great deal. But sometimes the place where a murder occurred held back secrets from even the most astute observer. It would be in pursuit of those secrets that Lynley would inspect a murder scene. However, inspecting this particular murder scene ran the risk of unnecessarily alienating DI Hanken, and nothing Hanken had said or done so far even hinted that he might overlook a detail.
There would be an occasion, Lynley thought, when he and the other officer wouldn't be working this case in each other's presence. When that occasion arose, he would have ample opportunity to examine the location where Nicola Maiden and the boy had died.
“You and your team have covered that end of things, as far as I can see,” Lynley said. “It wastes our time for me to go over what you've already done.”
Hanken gave him another lengthy scrutiny, chewing his gum in staccato. “Wise decision,” he said with a nod as he put the car back into gear.
They cruised northwards along the eastern edge of the moor. Perhaps a mile beyond the little market town of Tideswell, they turned to the east and began to leave the heather, bilberry, and bracken behind. They drove a short distance into a dale-its gentle slopes dotted with trees that were only just beginning to display the foliage of the coming autumn-and at a junction that was curiously signposted to the “plague village,” they headed north again.
Less than quarter of an hour took them to Maiden Hall, situated in the shelter of limes and chestnut trees on a hillside not far from Padley Gorge. The route coursed them through a verdant woodland and along the edge of an incision in the landscape made by a brook that tumbled out of the woods and cut a meandering path between slopes of limestone, fern, and wild grass. The turnoff to Maiden Hall rose suddenly as they entered another stretch of woodland. It twisted up a hillside and spilled out into a gravel drive that swung round the front of a gabled stone Victorian structure and led to a car park behind it.
The hotel entrance was actually at the back of the building. There a discreet sign printed with the single word Reception directed them through a passage and into the hunting lodge itself. A small desk stood just inside. Beyond this a sitting room apparently served as the hotel lounge, where the original entrance to the building had been converted to a bar and the room itself had been restored with oak wainscoting, subdued cream and umber wallpaper, and overstuffed furniture. As it was too early for any of the residents to be gathering for preprandial drinks, the lounge was deserted. But Lynley and Hanken hadn't been in the room for a minute before a dumpling-shaped woman-red-eyed and red-nosed from weeping-came from what appeared to be the dining room and greeted them with some considerable dignity.
There were no rooms available for the evening, she told them quietly. And as there had been a sudden death in the family, the dining room would not be open tonight. But she would be happy to recommend several restaurants in the area should the gentlemen require one.
Hanken offered the woman his police identification and introduced
Lynley. The woman said, “You'll be wanting to speak to the Maidens. I'll fetch them,” and she ducked past the officers, hurried through the reception area, and began climbing the stairs.
Lynley walked to one of the lounge's two alcoves, where late afternoon light was filtering through lead-paned windows. These overlooked the drive that curved round the front of the house. Beyond it, a lawn had been reduced to a heat-baked mat of twisted blades in the previous months’ drought. Behind him, he could hear Hanken moving restlessly round the room. A few magazines shifted position and slapped down onto table tops. Lynley smiled at the sound. His fellow DI was doubtless giving in to his restless need to put things in order.
It was absolutely quiet inside the hunting lodge. The windows were open, so the sound of birds and a distant plane broke the stillness. But inside, it was as hushed as an empty church.
A door closed somewhere and footsteps crunched across gravel. A moment later, a dark-haired man in jeans and a sleeveless grey sweatshirt pedaled past the windows on a ten-speed bicycle. He disappeared into the trees as the Maiden Hall drive began to descend the hill.
The Maidens joined them then. Lynley turned from the window at the sound of their entrance and Hanken's formal “Mr. and Mrs. Maiden. Please accept our sympathies.”
Lynley saw that the years of his retirement had dealt with Andy Maiden kindly. The former SO 10 officer and his wife were both in their early sixties, but they looked at least a decade younger. Andy had developed the appearance of an outdoorsman: a tanned face, a flat stomach, a brawny chest, all of which seemed suited to a man who'd left behind a reputation for disappearing chameleon-like into his environment. His wife matched him in physical condition. She, too, was tanned and solid, as if she took frequent exercise. Both of them looked as if they'd missed more than one night's sleep though. Andy Maiden was unshaven, in rumpled clothing. Nan was haggard, beneath her eyes a puckering of skin that was purplish in hue.
Maiden managed a grateful half-smile. “Tommy. Thank you for coming.”
Lynley said, “I'm sorry it has to be under these circumstances,” and introduced himself to Maiden's wife. He said, “Everyone at the Yard sends condolences, Andy.”
“Scotland Yard?” Nan Maiden sounded dazed. Her husband said, “In a moment, love.” He made a gesture with his arm, indicating the alcove behind Lynley, where two sofas faced each other across a coffee table that was spread with copies of Country Life. He and his wife took one of the sofas, Lynley the other. Hanken swiveled an armchair round and positioned himself just a few inches away from the central point between the Maidens and Lynley. The action suggested that he would play a mediating influence between the parties. But Lynley noted that the DI was careful to place his chair several inches closer to Scotland Yard of the present than to Scotland Yard of the past.
If Andy Maiden was aware of Hanken's manoeuvre and what it implied, he gave no sign. Instead, he sat forward on the sofa with his hands balanced between his legs. Left hand massaged right. Right massaged left.
His wife observed him doing this. She passed him a small red ball that she took from her pocket, saying, “Is it still bad? Shall I phone the doctor for you?”
“You're ill?” Lynley asked.
Maiden squeezed the ball with his right hand and gazed at the spread fingers of his left. “Circulation,” he said. “It's nothing.”
“Please let me phone the doctor, Andy,” his wife said.
“That's not what's important.”
“How can you say-” Nan Maiden's eyes grew suddenly bright. “God. Did I forget even for a moment?” She leaned her forehead against her husband's shoulder and began to cry. Roughly, Maiden put his arm round her.
Lynley cast a look at Hanken. You or I? he asked silently. It's not going to be pleasant.
Hanken's reply was a sharp nod. It's yours, the nod said.
“There isn't going to be an easy time to talk about your daughter's death,” Lynley began gently. “But in a murder investigation-and I know that you're already aware of this, Andy-the first hours are critical.”
As he spoke, Nan Maiden raised her head. She tried to speak, failed, then tried again.
“Murder investigation,” she repeated. “What are you saying?”
Lynley looked from husband to wife. Hanken did likewise. Then they looked at each other. Lynley said to Andy, “You've seen the body, haven't you? You've been told what happened?”
“Yes,” Maiden said. “I've been told. But I-” “Murder?” His wife cried out in horror. “Oh my God, Andy. You never said Nicola was murdered!”
Barbara Havers had spent the afternoon in Greenford, making the decision to use the rest of her sick day to visit her mother in Hawthorn Lodge, an overnamed postwar semi-detached where Mrs. Havers had lived as a permanent resident for the last ten months. In the way of most people who attempt to gain support from others for a position that might be untenable, Barbara had found that there was a price to pay for successfully cultivating advocates among Inspector Lynley's friends and relatives. And because she didn't want to face any more price-paying in one afternoon, she sought a distraction.
Mrs. Havers was nothing if not adept at providing escape hatches from reality, since she herself no longer lived in that realm on a regular basis. Barbara had found her in the back garden of Hawthorn Lodge, where she was engaged in putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle's box top had been propped up against an old mayonnaise jar that was filled with coloured sand holding seven plastic carnations in position. On this box top, a smarmy cartoon prince-perfectly proportioned and demonstrating a sufficient amount of adoration for the occasion-was slipping a high-heeled glass shoe onto the slender and curiously toeless foot of Cinderella while the girl's two cowlike and resentful stepsisters watched jealously to one side, culling a richly deserved comeuppance.
With the tender encouragement of her nurse and keeper Mrs. Flo-as Florence Magentry was called by her three elderly residents and their families-Mrs. Havers had managed successfully to assemble Cinderella, part of the stepsisters, the prince's shoe-wielding arm, his manly torso, and his bent left leg. However as Barbara joined her, she was in the midst of attempting to pound the prince's face onto one of the stepsisters’ shoulders and when Mrs. Flo gently guided her hand towards the proper placement of the piece, Mrs. Havers shouted, “No, no, no!” and pushed the whole puzzle away, knocking over the jar, scattering its plastic carnations, and spilling sand across the table.
Barbara's intervention didn't help matters. Whether her mother recognised her during visits was always a matter of chance, and on this day Mrs. Havers’ clouded consciousness attached Barbara's face to someone called Libby O'Rourke, who apparently had been the school temptress during Mrs. Havers’ childhood. It seemed that Libby O'Rourke had operated in a female version of Georgie Porgie mode most of the time, and one of the boys whom she'd kissed was none other than Mrs. Havers’ own beau, an act of effrontery that Mrs. Havers felt compelled to avenge on this very day by throwing puzzle pieces, shouting invective coloured by the sort of language Barbara wouldn't have thought part of her mother's vocabulary, and ultimately crumpling into a weeping heap. It was a situation that had taken some handling: persuading her mother to leave the garden, urging her upstairs to her room, coaxing her to look through a family album long enough to see that Barbara's round and snubby face appeared on its pages far too often for her to be the loathsome Libby.
“But I don't have a little girl,” Mrs. Havers protested in a voice more frightened than confused when she'd been forced to agree that Libby O'Rourke's being given a position of prominence in the family album made no sense, considering the offence she had once given. “Mummy won't let me have babies. I c'n only have dolls.”
Barbara had no answer for that. Her mother's mind made the tortuous journey into the past too often and with so little warning that she'd long ago forgiven herself her inability to deal with it with any expertise. So, after the album was set aside, she hadn't made any further attempts to argue, persuade, dissuade, or appeal. She'd merely selected one of the travel magazines that her mother loved to thumb through and she'd spent ninety minutes sitting shoulder to shoulder on the edge of the bed with the woman who'd forgotten she'd ever given birth, looking at photographs of Thailand, Australia, and Greece.
That was when her conscience finally gained some dominance over her resistance, and the internal voice that had earlier decried Lyn-ley's actions was confronted by a voice that suggested her own actions might have been wanting. What ensued was a nonverbal argument taking place in her head. One side insisted that Inspector Lynley was a vindictive prig. The other informed her that-prig or not-he didn't deserve her disloyalty. And she had been disloyal. Trotting round to Chelsea in order to denounce him to his intimates was not the behaviour of a steadfast friend. On the other hand, he'd been disloyal as well. Taking it upon himself to amplify her formal punishment by overlooking her on a case, he'd more than illustrated whose side he was on in her battle to save her professional hide, no matter what he claimed about her need to keep a low profile for a while.
Such was the argument that raged within her. It began as she leafed through the travel magazines and murmured comments about fantasy holidays her mother had taken to Crete, Mykonos, Bangkok, and Perth. It continued unabated on her drive from Greenford back into London at the end of the day. Not even an ancient Fleetwood Mac tape playing at maximum volume could subdue the disputing parties inside Barbara's head. Because throughout the drive, singing harmony with Stevie Nicks was the mezzo soprano of Barbara's conscience, a sententious cantata that stubbornly refused to be excised from her brain.
He deserved it, he deserved it, he deserved it! she silently screamed at the voice.
And where did giving him what he deserved get you, my darling? her conscience replied.
She was still refusing to answer that question when she pulled into Steeles Road and slid the Mini into a parking space that was being conveniently vacated by a woman, three children, two dogs, and what appeared to be a cello with legs. She locked up and trudged in the direction of Eton Villas, gratified that she was feeling tired, because tired meant sleep and sleep meant putting an end to the voices.
She heard other voices, however, as she rounded the corner and came upon the yellow Edwardian house behind which sat her mouse-hole dwelling. These new voices were coming from the flagstone area in front of the ground floor flat. And one of these voices-belonging to a child-cried out happily when Barbara came through the gate of bright orange pickets.
“Barbara! Hullo, hullo! Dad and I are blowing bubbles. Come and see. When the light hits them just exactly right, they look like round rainbows. Did you know that, Barbara? Come and see, come and see.”
The little girl and her father were seated on the solitary wooden bench in front of their flat, she in the fast-fading light, he in the growing shadows where his cigarette glowed like a crimson firefly. He touched his daughter's head fondly and rose in the formal fashion that was his by nature. “You'll join us?” Taymullah Azhar asked Barbara.
“Oh do, do, do,” the child exclaimed. “After the bubbles, we're watching a video. The Little Mermaid. And we've got toffee apples for a treat. Well, we've only got two, but I'll share mine with you. One's too much for me to eat anyway.” She scooted off the bench and came to greet Barbara, dancing across the lawn with the bubble wand and creating a trail of round rainbows behind her.
“The Little Mermaid, is it?” Barbara said thoughtfully. “I don't know, Hadiyyah. I've never thought of myself as a Disney sort of bird. All those skinny Sloane-types being rescued by blokes in suits of armour-”
“This is a mermaid,” Hadiyyah interrupted instructively.
“Hence the title. Yeah. Right.”
“So she can't be rescued by someone in armour 'cause he'd sink to the bottom of the sea. And anyways, no one saves her at all. She saves the prince.”
“Now, there's a twist I might be able to live with.”
“You've never seen it, have you? Well, tonight you can. Do come.” Hadiyyah whirled round in a circle, surrounding herself with a hoop of bubbles. Her long, thick plaits flew about her shoulders, the silver ribbons that tied them glittering like pale dragonflies. “The little mermaid's prettier'n anything. She has auburn hair.”
“A good contrast to her scales.”
“And she wears the sweetest little shells on her chest.” Hadiyyah demonstrated with two small, dark hands cupped over two non-existent breasts.
“Ah. Strategically placed, I see,” Barbara said.
“Won't you watch it with us? Please? Like I said, we've got toffee ap-ples…” Coaxingly, she drew out the last two words.
“Hadiyyah,” her father said quietly, “an invitation once extended needn't be repeated.” And to Barbara, “Nonetheless, we'd be most happy to have you join us.”
Barbara considered the proposition. An evening with Hadiyyah and her father offered the potential for more distraction, and she liked the thought of that very much. She could sit with her little friend, comfortably lounging on enormous floor pillows, their heads in their palms and their feet in the air, swaying side by side as they kept time to the music. She could chat to her little friend's father afterwards, when Hadiyyah herself had been sent off to bed. Taymullah Azhar would expect that much. It was a habit they'd developed during the months of Barbara's enforced leave from Scotland Yard. And in the past few weeks especially, their dialogue had moved from the banalities of relative strangers being polite to the initial delicate conversational probing of two individuals who might become friends.
But in that friendship lay the rub of the matter. It called for Barbara to reveal her encounters with Hillier and Lynley. It required the truth of her demotion and her estrangement from the man she'd sought to emulate. And because Azhar's own eight-year-old daughter was the child whose life had been saved by Barbara's impetuous actions on the North Sea-actions that she'd managed to keep from Azhar in the three months since the chase had occurred-he would feel a responsibility for the fallout to her career that wasn't his to bear.
“Hadiyyah,” Taymullah Azhar said when Barbara didn't answer, “I think we've had enough bubbles for the evening. Return them to your room and wait for me there, please.”
Hadiyyah's small brow furrowed, and her eyes looked stricken. “But, Dad, the little mermaid…?”
“We shall watch it as previously decided, Hadiyyah. Put the bubbles in your room now.”
She gave Barbara an anxious glance. “More'n half the toffee apple,” she said. “If you'd like, Barbara.”
“Hadiyyah.”
She smiled impishly and dashed into the house.
Azhar reached into the breast pocket of his spotless white shirt and brought forth a packet of cigarettes, which he offered. Barbara took one, said thanks, and accepted his light as well. He observed her in silence until she grew so restive that she was compelled to speak.
“I'm knackered, Azhar. I'll have to cry off tonight. But thanks. Tell Hadiyyah I'm happy to watch a film with her another time. Hopefully, when the heroine isn't as skinny as a pencil with a silicone chest.”
His gaze was unwavering. He studied her the way other people studied the labels on tins in supermarkets. Barbara wanted to writhe away, but she managed to restrain herself. He said, “You must have returned to work today.”
“Why'd you think-”
“Your clothing. Has your”-he searched for a word, a euphemism undoubtedly-“situation been resolved at New Scotland Yard, Barbara?”
There was no point in lying. Despite the fact that she'd been able to keep from him the full knowledge of what had occurred to put her there, he knew that she'd been placed on suspension. She was going to have to start dragging herself out of bed and down to work each morning, beginning with the very next day, so he would deduce sooner or later that she wasn't spending her waking hours feeding the ducks in Regent's Park any longer. “Yeah,” she said. “It was resolved today.” And she drew in deeply on her cigarette so that she'd have to turn her head and blow the smoke away from his face, thus hiding her own.
“And? But what am I asking? You're dressed for work, so it must have gone well.”
“Right.” She offered him a spurious smile. “It did. All the way. I'm still gainfully employed, still in CID, still have my pension intact.” She'd lost the confidence of the only person who counted at the Yard, but she didn't add that. She couldn't imagine an occasion when she would.
“This is good,” Azhar said.
“Right. It's the best.”
“I'm happy to know that nothing from Essex affected you here in London.” Again, that level gaze of his, dark eyes the colour of chocolate drops in a face with nut-brown skin that was amazingly un-lined on a man of thirty-five.
“Yeah. Well. It didn't,” she said. “Everything worked out brilliantly.”
He nodded, looking past her finally, above her head and up into the fading sky. The lights from London would hide all but the most brilliant of the coming night's stars. Even those that shone would do so through a thick pall of pollution that not even the growing darkness could dissipate. “As a child, I drew my greatest comfort from the night,” he told her quietly. “In Pakistan, my family slept in the traditional way: the men together, the women together. So at night, in the presence of my father, my brother, and my uncles, I always believed that I was perfectly safe and secure. But I forgot that feeling as I came into adulthood in England. What had been reassuring became an embarrassment from my past. I found that all I could remember were the sounds of my father and my uncles snoring and the smell of my brothers breaking wind. For some time when I came to be alone, I thought how good it was to be away from them at last, to have the night for myself and for whomever I wished to share it with. And that's how I lived for a while. But now I find that I would willingly return to that older way, when whatever one's burdens or secrets were, there was always a sense-at least at night-of never having to bear them or keep them alone.”
There was something so comforting in his words that Barbara found herself wanting to grasp the invitation to disclosure that they implied. But she stopped herself from doing so, saying, “P'rhaps Pakistan doesn't prepare its children for the world's reality.”
“What reality is that?”
“The one that tells us we're all alone.”
“Do you believe that to be the truth, Barbara?”
“I don't just believe it. I know it. We use our daytimes to escape our nighttimes. We work, we play, we keep ourselves busy. But when it's time to sleep, we run out of distractions. Even if we're in bed with someone, their act of sleeping when we can't manage it is enough to tell us that we've got only ourselves.”
“Is this philosophy or experience speaking?”
“Neither,” she said. “Just the way it is.”
“But not,” he said, “the way it has to be.”
At the comment, alarm bells went off in Barbara's head, then quickly receded. Coming from any other bloke, the remark could have been construed as a chat-up line. But her personal history was an illustration of the fact that Barbara wasn't the type of bird blokes chatted up. Besides, even if she'd ever had the odd moments of Aph-rodisian allure, she knew this wasn't one of them. Standing in the semi-dark in a rumpled linen suit that made her look like a transvestite toad, she knew quite well that she was hardly a paragon of desirability. So, ever articulate when it counted, she said, “Yeah. Well. Whatever,” and tossed her cigarette to the ground, where she mashed it with the sole of her shoe. “Goodnight, then,” she added. “Enjoy the mermaid. And thanks for the fag. I needed it.”
“Everyone needs something.” Azhar reached into his shirt pocket again. Barbara thought he was going to offer his cigarettes another time. But instead, he extended to her a folded piece of paper. “A gentleman was here looking for you earlier, Barbara. He asked me to make sure you got this note. He tried to fix it to your door, he said, but it wouldn't stay in place.”
“Gentleman?” Barbara knew only one man to whom that word would automatically be applied by a stranger after a mere moment's conversation. She took the piece of paper, scarcely daring to hope.
Which was just as well, because the writing on the note-a sheet of paper removed from a small spiral notebook-wasn't Lynley's. She read the eight words: Page me as soon as you get this. A number followed them. There was no signature.
Barbara refolded the note. Doing so, she saw what was written on the outside of it, what Azhar himself must have seen, interpreted, and understood the moment it had been handed over. DC Havers was printed in block capitals across it. C for Constable. So Azhar knew.
She met his gaze. “Looks like I'm back in the game already,” she said as heartily as she could manage. “Thanks, Azhar. This bloke say where he'd be waiting for the page?”
Azhar shook his head. “He said only that I should make sure you had the message.”
“Okay Thanks.” She gave him a nod and turned to walk away.
He called her name-sounding urgent-but when she stopped and glanced back, he was studying the street. He said, “Can you tell me…” and then his voice died away. He drew his eyes back to her as if the effort cost him.
“Tell you what?” she asked, though she felt apprehension dance along her spine when she said the words.
“Tell me… How is your mother?” Azhar asked.
“Mum? Well… She's a bloody disaster when it comes to jigsaw puzzles, but otherwise I think she's okay.”
He smiled. “That's good to know.” And with a quiet goodnight, he slipped into the house.
Barbara went to her own lodgings, a tiny cottage that sat at the bottom of the back garden. Sheltered by the limbs of an old false acacia, it was not much larger than a potting shed with mod cons. Once inside, she peeled herself out of her linen jacket, tossed the string of faux pearls onto the table that served purposes as diverse as dining and ironing, and went to the phone. There were no messages on her machine. She wasn't surprised. She punched in the number for the pager, punched in her own number, and waited.
Five minutes later, someone phoned. She made herself wait through four of the double-rings before she answered. There was no reason to sound desperate, she decided.
Her caller, she discovered, was Winston Nkata, and her back went up the instant she heard that unmistakable mellifluous voice with its mixed flavours of Jamaica and Sierra Leone. He was in the Load of
Hay tavern just round the corner on Chalk Farm Road, he told her, finishing up a plate of lamb curry and rice that “was not, do believe me, something my mum would ever put on the table for her favourite son, but it's better than McDonald's although not by much.” He would set off straightaway for her digs. “Be there in five minutes,” he said, and rang off before she had a chance to tell him that his mug was just about the last one she wanted to see putting in an appearance on her doorstep. She hung up the phone, muttered an expletive, and went to the refrigerator to graze.
Five minutes stretched to ten. Ten minutes to fifteen. He didn't show up.
Bastard, Barbara thought. Fine idea of a joke.
She went to the bathroom and turned on the shower.
Lynley tried to adjust quickly to the astonishing fact that Andy Maiden hadn't told his wife that their daughter had been the victim of a crime. Since Calder Moor was a location replete with potential sites of accidents, Lynley's former colleague had apparently and unaccountably allowed his wife to believe that their daughter had fractured her skull in a fall.
When she learned otherwise, Nan Maiden crumpled forward, elbows pressed into her thighs, and fists raised to her mouth. Either shocked, too stricken with grief to comprehend, or comprehending something only too well, she didn't weep further. She merely muttered a guttural “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
DI Hanken appeared to take a fairly quick measure of what was implied by her reaction. He was observing Andy Maiden with a decidedly unsympathetic eye. He asked no questions in response to Nan's revelation though. Like a good cop, he merely waited.
In the aftermath of all this, Maiden waited as well. Still, he apparently reached the conclusion that something was required of him by way of explanation for his incomprehensible behaviour. “Love, I'm sorry,” he said to Nan. “I couldn't… I'm sorry. Nan, I could barely cope with the fact that she'd died, let alone tell… let alone have to face… have to begin to deal with…” He spent a moment rigidly marshaling the inner resources a policeman learned to develop in order to live through the worst of the worst. His right hand-still in possession of the ball his wife had given him-clutched and released it spasmodically. “I'm so sorry,” he said brokenly “Nan.”
Nan Maiden raised her head. She watched him for a moment. Then her hand-shaking as it was-reached out and closed over his arm. She spoke to the police.
“Would you…” Her lips quivered. She didn't go on until she had the emotion under control. “Tell me what happened.”
DI Hanken obliged with minimal details: He explained where Nicola Maiden had died and how, but he told them nothing more.
“Would she have suffered?” Nan asked when Hanken had concluded his brief remarks. “I know you can't be positive. But if there's anything that might allow us to feel that at the end… anything at all…”
Lynley recounted what the Home Office pathologist had told them.
Nan reflected on the information for a moment. In the silence, Andy Maiden's breath sounded loud and harsh. Nan said, “I wanted to know because… D'you think… Would she have called out for one of us… would she have hoped… or needed…?” Her eyes filled. She stopped talking.
Hearing the questions, Lynley was reminded of the old moors murders, the monstrous tape recording that Myra Hindley and her cohort had made, and the anguish of the dead girl's mother when the recording had been played at the trial and she'd had to listen to her child's terrified voice crying out for her mummy in the midst of her murder. Isn't there a certain kind of knowledge, he thought, that shouldn't be revealed publicly because it can't be borne privately? He said, “The blows to the head knocked her unconscious at once. She stayed that way.”
“And on her body, were there other… Had she been… Had anyone…?”
“She wasn't tortured.” Hanken cut in as if he, too, felt the need to show some mercy to the dead girl's mother. “She wasn't raped. We'll have a fuller report later, but at the moment it seems that the blows to the head were all that she”-he paused, it seemed, in the search for a word that connoted the least pain-“experienced.”
Maiden said, “She looked asleep. White. Like chalk. But still asleep.”
“I want that to make it better,” Nan said. “But it doesn't.”
And nothing will, Lynley thought. “Andy, we've got a possible identification on the second body. We're going to need to press forward. We think the boy was called Terence Cole. He had a London address, in Shoreditch. Is his name familiar to you?”
“She wasn't alone?” The glance Nan Maiden cast at her husband told the police that he'd withheld this information from her as well.
“She wasn't alone,” Maiden said.
Hanken clarified the situation for Nan Maiden, explaining that the camping gear of one person only-which he would later ask Maiden to identify as belonging to his daughter-had been within the enclosure of Nine Sisters Henge along with the body of a teenaged boy who himself had no gear other than the clothes on his back.
“That motorcycle by her car.” Maiden pulled his facts together quickly. “It belonged to him?”
“To a Terence Cole,” Hanken affirmed. “Not reported stolen and so far not claimed by anyone coming off the moor. It's registered to an address in Shoreditch. We've a man heading there now to see what's what, but it seems likely that we've got the right ID. Is the name familiar to either of you?”
Maiden shook his head and said, “Cole. Not to me. Nan?”
“I don't know him. And Nicola… Surely she would have talked about him if he was a friend of hers. She would have brought him round to meet us as well. When did she not? That's… It was her way.”
Andy Maiden then spoke perspicaciously, asking a logical question that rose from his years of policing. “Is there any chance that Nick-” He paused and seemed to prepare his wife for the question by laying a hand gently on her thigh. “Could she just have been in the wrong place? Could the boy have been the target? Tommy?” And he looked to Lynley.
“That would have to be a consideration in any other case,” Lynley admitted.
“But not in this case? Why?”
“Have a look at this.” Hanken produced a copy of the handwritten note that had been found on Nicola Maiden's body.
The Maidens read the five words on it-THIS BITCH HAS HAD IT-as Hanken advised them that the original had been found tucked into their daughter's pocket.
Andy Maiden stared long at the note. He shifted the red ball to his left hand and clutched it. “Jesus God. Are you telling us someone went there to kill her? Someone tracked her to kill her? That this wasn't just a case of her meeting up with strangers? A stupid argument breaking out over something? A psychopath killing her and that boy for the thrill of it?”
“It's doubtful,” Hanken said. “But you know the procedure as well as we do, I expect.”
Which was, Lynley knew, his way of saying that as a police officer Andy Maiden would know that every avenue potentially related to the killing of his daughter was going to be explored. He said, “If someone went out to the moor specifically to kill your daughter, we must consider why.”
“But she didn't have enemies,” Nan Maiden declared. “I know that's what you expect every mother to say, but in this case it's the truth. Everyone liked Nicola. She was that kind of person.”
“Not everyone, apparently, Mrs. Maiden,” Hanken said. And he brought forth the copies of the anonymous letters that had also been at the site.
Andy Maiden and his wife read these in silence and without expression. She was the one who finally spoke. As she did so, her husband's gaze remained locked on the letters. And both man and woman sat still, like statues.
“It's impossible,” she said. “Nicola can't have received these. You're making a mistake if you think that she did.”
“Why?”
“Because we never saw them. And if she'd been threatened-by anyone, by anyone-she would have told us at once.”
“If she didn't want to worry you-”
“Please. Believe me. That wasn't how she was. She didn't think like that: about worrying us and such. She thought only about telling the truth. If something had been going wrong in her life, she would have told us. That's how she was. She talked about everything. Everything. Truly.” And with an earnest look at her husband, “Andy?”
With an effort, he took his eyes off the letters. His face, which had appeared bloodless before, was now even more so. He said, “I don't want to think it. But it's the best possible answer if someone actually tracked her… if someone wasn't with her already… if someone didn't just stumble upon her and kill her and the boy for the sick fun of it.”
“What?” Lynley asked.
“SO10,” he said heavily, looking as if the words cost him dearly. “There were so many cases over the years, so many yobs put away. Killers, drug dealers, crime bosses. You name them, I rolled in the muck with them.”
“Andy! No,” his wife protested, apparently understanding where he was heading. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“Someone out on parole, tracking us down, hanging round long enough to get to know our movements-” He turned to her then. “You see how it could have happened, don't you? Someone out for revenge, Nancy, striking at Nick because he knew that to hurt my daughter-my girl-was to kill me in stages… to sentence me to a living death…”
Lynley said, “It's a possibility that we can't rule out, can we? Because if, as you say, your daughter had no enemies, then we're left with the single question: Who had? If you put away someone who's out on parole, Andy, we're going to need the name.”
“Jesus. There were scores.”
“The Yard can pull all your old files in London, but you can help by giving us some direction. If there's a particular investigation that stands out in your memory, you could halve our work by listing the players.”
“I've got my diaries.”
“Diaries?” Hanken asked.
“I once thought-” Maiden shook his head self-derisively. “I thought of writing after retirement. Memoirs. Ego. But the hotel came along, and I never got round to it. I've got the diaries, though. If I have a look through them, perhaps a name… a face…” He seemed to crumple then, as if the weight of responsibility for his daughter's death bore down on him heavily.
“You don't know this for certain,” Nan Maiden said. “Andy. Please. Don't do this to yourself.”
Hanken said, “We'll follow whatever leads turn up. So if-”
“Then follow Julian.” Nan Maiden spoke as if determined to prove that there were other avenues to explore beyond the one that led to her husband's past.
Maiden said, “Nancy. Don't.”
“Julian?” Lynley said.
Julian Britton, Nan told them. He'd just become engaged to Nicola. She wasn't suggesting him as a suspect, but if the police were looking for leads, then they certainly would want to talk to Julian. Nicola had been with him the night before she left for her camping trip. She might have said something to Julian-or done something even-that would result in another possibility for the police to explore in their investigation.
It was a reasonable enough suggestion, Lynley thought. He jotted down Julian's name and address. Nan Maiden supplied the information.
For his part, Hanken brooded. And he said nothing more until he and Lynley had returned to the car. “It may all be a blind, you know.” He switched on the ignition, reversed out of their parking space, and turned the car to face Maiden Hall. There, he let the engine idle while he studied the old limestone structure.
“What?” Lynley asked.
“SO10. This business of someone from his past. It's a bit too convenient, wouldn't you say?”
“Convenient is an odd choice of words to describe a lead and a potential suspect,” Lynley said. “Unless you yourself already suspect…” He looked towards the Hall. “Exactly what is it that you suspect, Peter?”
“D'you know the White Peak?” Hanken asked abruptly. “It runs from Buxton to Ashbourne. From Matlock to Castleton. We've got dales, we've got moors, we've got trails, we've got hills. This”-with a gesture at the environment-“is part of it. So's the road we came in on, for that matter.”
“And?”
Hanken turned in his seat to face Lynley squarely. “And in all this vast amount of space, on last Tuesday night-or Wednesday morning if we want to believe him-Andy Maiden managed to find his daughter's car hidden out of sight behind a stone wall. What would you say the odds are on that?”
Lynley looked to the building, to its windows reflecting the last of the daylight like row upon row of shielded eyes. “Why didn't you tell me?” he asked the other DI.
“I didn't think of it,” Hanken said. “Not till our boy brought up SO 10. Not till our Andy got caught out keeping the truth from his wife.”
“He wanted to spare her as long as he could. What man wouldn't?” Lynley asked.
“A man with nothing on his conscience,” Hanken said.
Showered and changed into the most comfortable elastic-waisted trousers that she possessed, Barbara was back to grazing-on leftover take-away pork fried rice which, unheated, wasn't about to make it onto anyone's culinary top ten-when Nkata arrived. He announced himself with two sharp raps on the door. She swung it open, take-away container in hand, and leveled a chopstick at him.
“Your watch stopped or something? What goes for five minutes in your book, Winston?”
He stepped inside unbidden and flashed her the full wattage of his smile. “Sorry. Got another page before I could clear out. The guv. I had to phone him first.”
“Of course. Can't keep his lordship waiting.”
Nkata let the comment go. “Damned lucky that service is slow at the pub. I should've been out of there thirty minutes ago, which would've put me too close to Shoreditch to come back here for you. Funny, isn't it? Like my mum always says. Things work out exactly the way they're s'posed to.”
Barbara stared at him, wordless. She felt nonplused. She wanted to tell him off for the note he'd left her-and for the letter C so prominent on it-but his air of ease stopped her. She couldn't explain his nonchalance any more than she could explain his presence inside her dwelling. He could at least look bloody uncomfortable, she decided.
“We got two bodies in Derbyshire and a London angle that needs playing on the case,” Nkata said. He sketched in the details: a woman, a young man, a former SO 10 officer, anonymous letters assembled from newsprint, a threatening note written by hand. “I got to get over to an address in Shoreditch where this dead bloke might've come from,” he told her. “If someone's there who can i.d. the body, I'm on my way back to Buxton in the morning. But the Yard end of things'll need looking into. The spector just told me to set that up. That's why he paged.”
Barbara couldn't hide her eagerness when she said, “Lynley asked for me?”
Nkata's glance shifted away for an instant, but that was enough. Her spirits came to earth.
“I see.” She carried her take-away container to the kitchen work top. The rice sat heavily on her stomach. Its flavour clung to her tongue like fur. “If he doesn't know you're asking me, Winston, I can refuse with no one the wiser, can't I? You can pass me by and get someone else.”
“Can do, sure,” Nkata said. “I can check the rota. Or I can wait till morning and let the super make the call. But doing all that leaves you free to get assigned to Stewart, Hale, or MacPherson, doesn't it? And I didn't much think you'd want to go that way if you didn't have to.” He left unsaid what was legend in CID: Barbara's failure to establish a working relationship with the DIs he'd mentioned, her subsequent return to uniform from which she had only been elevated by her partnership with Lynley.
Barbara swung around, perplexed by what appeared to be the other DCs inexplicable generosity. Another man in his position would have left her hanging in the wind, the better to improve his own position, and to hell with what she might have to face. That Nkata wasn't doing so made her doubly cautious.
He was saying, “It's computer work the guv wants. On CRIS. Not your thing, I know. But I thought if you wanted to come to Shoreditch with me-which is why I was in your neighbourhood in the first place-I could drop you at the Yard afterwards and you could get onto Crime Recording straightaway. If you pull something good from the records quick, who knows?” Nkata shifted on his feet. His air of ease diminished slightly as he concluded. “It could go some distance to setting you right.”
Barbara found an unopened packet of cigarettes wedged between the crumb-dusted toaster and a box of watermelon Pop-Tarts. She lit up, using one of the gas burners on the cooker, and she tried to make sense of what she was hearing. “I don't get it. This is your chance, Winston. Why don't you take it?”
“My chance for what?” he said, looking blank.
“You know for what. To climb the ladder, to ascend the mountain, to fly to the moon. My stock with Lynley couldn't be much lower. Now's your chance to break out of the pack. Why aren't you taking it? Or better said, why're you taking the risk that I might do something to untarnish myself?”
“The spector told me to bring in another DC,” Nkata said. “I thought of you.”
And there they were, those two ugly letters once again. DC. And there was the nasty reminder as well: of what she had been and what she had become. Of course Nkata would have thought of her. What better way to rub her face in her loss of position and authority than by bringing her in as a fellow DC, his superior no longer?
“Ah,” she said. “Another DC. As to that…” She scooped up the note from where she'd left it on the dining table next to her necklace. She said, “I guess I've got to thank you for this, haven't I? I'd been thinking about taking out an advert in the paper to inform the general public, but you've saved me the trouble.”
Nkata's eyebrows knotted. “What're you on about?”
“The note, Winston. Did you honestly think I might forget my position? Or did you just want to remind me that we're equals now, players on a level pitch, lest I forget?”
“Hang on. You've got it dead wrong.”
“Have I?”
“Right.”
“I don't think so. What other reason could there possibly be for you to address me as DC Havers? C for Constable. Just like you.”
“Most obvious reason in the world,” Nkata said.
“Really? What's that?”
“I've never called you Barb.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I've never called you Barb,” he repeated. “Just Sarge. Always that. And then this…” He used his wide hands in a gesture that encompassed the room but meant the day, as she very well knew. “I didn't know what else. The name and everything.” He grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck, which lowered his head and ended eye contact. He said, “DCs only your title anyway. It's not who you are.”
Barbara was struck dumb. She stared at him. His attractive face with its nasty scar looked unsure at the moment, which had to be a first. She thought back and relived in an instant the cases on which she'd worked with Nkata. And in reliving them, she was a witness to the truth.
She covered her confusion with her cigarette, inhaling, exhaling, studying the ash, flicking grey flakes of it into the sink. When the silence between them became too much for her, she sighed and said, “Jesus. Winston. Sorry. Bloody hell.”
“Right,” he said. “So are you in or out?”
“I'm in,” she answered.
“Good,” he said.
“And, Winnie,” she added, “I'm Barbara as well.”