The Derbyshire weather matched DI Peter Hanken's mood: grim. While a silver sky dissolved into rain, he navigated the road between Buxton and Bakewell, wondering what it meant that a black leather jacket was missing from the evidence taken from Nine Sisters Henge. The missing rain gear had been easy to explain. The missing jacket was not. For a single killer did not need two articles of clothing to cover up the blood from a chopped-up victim.
He hadn't made the search for Terry Cole's missing leather jacket entirely unassisted. DC Mott had been with him, a flapjack in his hand. As evidence officer, Mott's presence was essential. But he did little enough to help with the search. Instead, he munched loudly and appreciatively with much smacking of lips and pronounced that he'd “never seen no black leather jacket, Guv,” throughout Hanken's inspection.
Mott's record keeping had been vindicated. There was no jacket. That message transmitted to London, Hanken set out for Bakewell and Broughton Manor. Jacket or no, there was still Julian Britton to clear off or keep on their list of suspects.
As Hanken cruised over the bridge that spanned the River Wye, he unexpectedly entered another century. Despite the rain that was continuing to fall unabated like a harbinger of grief to come, a fierce battle was going on round the manor house. On the hillside that descended to the river, five or six dozen Royalist soldiers, wearing the varied colours of the Monarch and the nobility, were flailing swords with an equal number of armoured and pot-helmeted Parliamentarians. On the meadow beneath them, more armoured soldiers were rolling cannon into position, while on a far slope a pistol-wielding division of helmeted infantry made for the south gate of the manor house with a battering ram trundling along among them.
The Cavaliers and the Roundheads were re-fighting a battle of the Civil War, Hanken concluded. Julian Britton was engaged in yet another means of raising money for the restoration of his home.
A seventeenth-century milkmaid standing beneath a Burberry umbrella waved Hanken to a makeshift car park a short distance from the house. There, various other players in the reenactment drama were milling about in the guise of Royals, peasants, farmers, noblemen, surgeons, and musketeers. Eating from a soup tin in the door of a caravan, ill-fated King Charles-a bloody bandage round his head-chatted up a wench who was carrying a basket of bread getting soaked by the rain. Not far away, a black-garbed Oliver Cromwell struggled out of his armour, attempting the feat without untying the lacing. Dogs and children dashed in and out of the crowd, while a snack stall did a thriving business in whatever they could serve that was hot and steaming.
Hanken parked and asked where the Brittons were hiding. He was directed to a viewing area within the third of the manor's ruined gardens. There, on the southwest side of the house, a stalwart crowd huddled on makeshift stands and deck chairs to watch the unfolding reenactment from beneath a motley mushrooming of umbrellas.
To one side of the viewers, a lone man sat on a tripod stool of the type used at the turn of the century by artists or hunters on safari. He wore an antique tweed suit and an old pith helmet, and he sheltered himself from the rain with a striped umbrella. He watched the action with a collapsible telescope. A walking stick lay by his feet. Jeremy Britton, Hanken thought, dressed as always in his forebears’ clothing.
Hanken approached him. “Mr. Britton? You won't remember me. DI Peter Hanken. Buxton CID.”
Britton half turned on the stool. He'd aged greatly, Hanken thought, since their sole encounter at the Buxton police station five years in the past. Britton had been drunk at the time. His car had been broken into on the High Street while he was “taking the waters”-undoubtedly a euphemism for his imbibing something considerably stronger than the town's mineral water-and he was demanding action, satisfaction, and immediate vengeance upon the ill-dressed and worse-bred hooligans who'd violated him so egregiously.
Looking at Jeremy Britton now, Hanken could see the results of a lifetime spent in drink. Liver damage showed in the colour and texture of Britton's skin and in the cooked-egg-yolk look of his eyes. Hanken noted the Thermos on the far side of the camp stool on which Britton was sitting. He doubted it contained either coffee or tea.
“I'm looking for Julian,” Hanken said. “Is he taking part in the battle, Mr. Britton?”
“Julie?” Britton squinted through the rain. “Don't know where he's gone off to. Not part of this though.” He waved at the drama below. The battering ram was mired in the mud and the Cavaliers were taking advantage of this blip on the screen of the Roundheads’ plans. Swords drawn, a crush of them were swarming down the slope from the house to fend off the Parliamentary forces. “Julie never did like a good dust-up like this,” Britton said, slipping slightly with dust. He'd added an h. “Can't think why he agrees to let the grounds be used this way. But it's great fun, what?”
“Everyone seems to be fully involved,” Hanken agreed. “Are you a history buff, sir?”
“Nothing like it,” Britton said and shouted down at the soldiers, “Traitors be damned! You'll burn in hell for harming one hair on the head of God's anointed.”
Royalist, Hanken thought. Odd position for a member of the gentry to have taken at the time, but not unheard of if the gentleman in question had no ties to Parliament. “Where can I find him?”
“Carried off the field, sporting a head wound. No one could ’cuse the poor sod of not having his share of courage, could they?”
“I meant Julian, not King Charles.”
“Ah. Julie.” With an irresolute grip Britton fixed his telescope towards the west. A fresh band of Cavaliers had just arrived by coach. That vehicle was disgorging them on the far side of the bridge, where they were racing to arm themselves. Among them an elaborately clad nobleman appeared to be shouting directions. “Shouldn't allow that, you ask me,” Britton commented. “If they aren't here on time, they should forfeit, what?” He swung back to Hanken. “The boy was here, if tha's why you've come.”
“Does he get to London much? With his late girlfriend living there, I expect-”
“Girlfriend?” Britton blew out a contemptuous breath. “Rubbish. Girlfriend says there's give and take involved. There was none of that. Oh, he wanted it, Julie. He wanted her. But she wasn't having anything from him other than a shag if the mood was on her. If he'd only used the eyes God gave him, he would've seen that from the first.”
“You didn't like the Maiden girl.”
“She had nothing to add to the brew.” Britton looked back at the battle, shouting, “Watch your backs, you blighters!” at the Parliamentary soldiers as the Cavaliers forded the River Wye and began charging wetly up the hillside towards the house. A man of easy allegiance, Hanken thought.
He said, “Will I find Julian in the house, Mr. Britton?”
Britton watched the initial clash as the Cavaliers reached those of the Roundheads who were straggling behind in the effort to free the battering ram from the mud. Suddenly, the tide of the battle shifted. The Roundheads looked outnumbered three to one. “Run for your lives, you idjits,” Britton shouted. And he laughed with glee as the rebels began to lose the uneasy purchase they had on their footholds. Several men went down, losing their weapons. Britton applauded.
Hanken said, “I'll try him inside.”
Britton stopped the detective as he turned to depart. “I was with him. On Tues'ay night, you know.”
Hanken turned back. “With Julian? Where? What time was this?”
“In the kennels. Don't know the time. Proba'ly round eleven. A bitch was delivering. Julie was with her.”
“When I spoke to him, he made no mention of your being there, Mr. Britton.”
“He wouldn't've done. Didn't see me. When I saw what he was about, I lef’ him to it. I watched for a bit from the doorway-something special about the birthing process, no matter who's delivering, don't you think?-then I went off.”
“Is that your normal routine? To visit the kennels at eleven at night?”
“Don't have a normal routine at all. Do what I want when I want.”
“What took you to the kennels, then?”
Britton reached in his jacket pocket with an unsteady hand. He brought out several heavily creased brochures. “Wanted to talk to Julie about these.”
They were, Hanken saw, all leaflets from clinics that offered programmes for alcoholics. Smudged and dog-eared, they looked like refugees from the Oxfam book section. Either Britton had been caressing them for weeks on end or he'd found them secondhand somewhere in anticipation of a moment just like this.
“Want to take the cure,” Britton said. “'Bout time, I think. Don't want Julie's kids to have a sot for a granddad.”
“Julian's thinking of marrying, is he?”
“Oh, things're definitely brewing in that direction.”
Britton extended his hand for the brochures. Hanken bent towards the umbrella to give them back.
“He's a good boy, our Julie,” Britton said, taking the leaflets and stuffing them back in his jacket pocket. “Don't you forget it. He'll make a good father. And I'll be a granddad he can be proud of.”
There was at least a fragment of doubt to that. Britton's breath could have been lit with a match, so heavily was it laden with gin.
Julian Britton was conferring with the reenactment's organisers on the roof-top battlements when DI Hanken appeared. He'd seen the detective in conversation with his father and he'd watched as Jeremy produced his treatment brochures for the other man's inspection. He knew how unlikely it was that Hanken had come to Broughton Manor to have colloquy on the subject of alcoholism with his father, so he wasn't unprepared when the policeman finally tracked him down.
Their conversation was brief. Hanken wanted to know the exact last date that Julian had been in London. Julian took him down to his office, where his diary lay among the discarded account books on his desk, and he handed it over. His record keeping was faultless, the diary showing that his last trip to London had been at Easter, in early April. He'd stayed at the Lancaster Gate Hotel. Hanken could phone to verify because the number was next to the hotel's name in his diary. “I always stay there when I'm in town,” Julian said. “Why do you want to know?”
Hanken answered the question with one of his own. “You didn't stay with Nicola Maiden?”
“She had only a bed-sit.” Julian coloured. “Besides, she preferred me to stay in a hotel.”
“But you'd gone to town to see her, hadn't you?”
He had.
It had been stupid really, Julian told himself now as he watched Hanken work his way back through the Cavaliers that crowded the courtyard, bunched under awnings and umbrellas as they prepared for the next phase of the battle. He'd gone to London because he'd sensed a change in her. Not only because she hadn't come to Derbyshire for Easter-as had been her habit during every holiday while she was at university-but because at each of their meetings from the autumn onwards, he'd felt a greater distance developing between them than had existed at the meeting before. He suspected another man, and he'd wanted to know the worst firsthand.
He gave a bitter brief laugh as he thought of it now: that trip to London. He'd never asked her directly if there was someone else, because at heart he hadn't wanted to know. He'd allowed himself to be satisfied with the fact that his surprise visit hadn't caught her out with someone else, and that a surreptitious look in the bathroom cupboards, the medicine cabinet, and her chest of drawers hadn't turned up anything a man might keep there for mornings after nighttime assignations. On top of that, she'd made love with him. And hopeless numbskull that he'd been at the time, he'd actually thought that her lovemaking meant something.
But it was just part of her line of work, he realised now. Just part of what Nicola did for money.
“All's clear with the coppers, Julie my boy.”
Julian swung round to see that his father had joined him in the manor office, apparently having had enough of the rain, the reenactment, or the company of other spectators. Jeremy had a dripping umbrella hanging over his arm, a camp stool in one hand, and a Thermos in the other. His great-uncle's telescope poked from the breast pocket of his grandfather's jacket.
Jeremy smiled, looking pleased with himself. “Gave you an alibi, son. Concrete as the motorway, it was.”
Julian stared at him. “What did you say?”
“Told the copper I was with you an’ the new pups on Tuesday. Saw them pop out and saw you catch them, I said.”
“But, Dad, I never said you were there! I never told them…” Julian sighed. He began sorting through the account books. He stacked them in order of year. “They're going to wonder why I never mentioned you. You see that, don't you? Don't you, Dad?”
Jeremy tapped a trembling finger to his temple. “Thought that out in advance, my boy. Said I never disturbed you. There you were, acting the part of midwife, and I didn't like to break your concentration. Said I went to talk to you 'bout getting off the drink. Said I went to show you these.” Once more Jeremy produced the brochures. “'Nspired, wasn't it? You already saw them, see? So when he asked you 'bout them, you tol’ him, right?”
“He didn't ask me about Tuesday night. He wanted to know when I'd last been to London. So no doubt he's wondering why you took the trouble to give me a damn alibi, when he wasn't even asking for one.” Past his exasperation, Julian suddenly realised the implication behind what his father had done. He said, “Why did you give me an alibi, Dad? You know I don't need one, don't you? I was with the dogs. Cassie was delivering. And anyway, how did you know to tell them that?”
“Your cousin tol’ me.”
“Sam? Why?”
“She says the police're looking at you funny, and she doesn't like that. ‘As if Julie would raise his hand against anyone,’ she says. All righteous anger, she is, Julie. Quite a woman. Loyalty like that… It's something to behold.”
“I don't need Sam's loyalty. Or your help, for that matter. I didn't kill Nicola.”
Jeremy shifted his glance from his son to the desktop. “No one's saying you did.”
“But if you think you have to lie to the police, that must mean… Dad, do you think I killed her? Do you honestly believe… Jesus.”
“Now, don't get yourself twisted. You're red in the face, and I know what that means. I didn't say I thought anything. I don't think anything. I just want to ease the way a bit. We don't have to take life as it comes so much, Julie. We can do something to shape our destinies, y'know.”
“And that's what you were doing? Shaping my destiny?”
He shook his head. “Selfish bastard. I'm shaping my own.” He lifted the brochures to his heart. “I want to get dry. It's time. I want it. But God knows and I know: I can't do it alone.”
Julian had been round his father long enough to recognise a manipulation when he heard one. The yellow flags of caution went up. “Dad, I know you want to get sober. I admire you for it. But those programmes… the cost…”
“You c'n do this for me. You c'n do it knowing I'd do it for you.”
“It isn't as if I don't want to do it for you. But we haven't the funds. I looked through the books again and again and we just haven't got them. Have you thought about phoning Aunt Sophie? If she knew what you intend to do with the money, I expect she'd lend-”
“Lend? Bah!” Jeremy swept the notion aside with the brochures he held. “Your aunt'll never go for that. ‘He'll stop when he wants to stop’ is what she thinks. She won't lift a finger to help me do it.”
“What if I phoned her?”
“Who're you to her, Julie? Just some relative she's never seen, come begging for a handout from what her own husband worked hard to make. No. You can't be the one to do the asking.”
“If you spoke to Sam, then.”
Jeremy waved the idea off like a gnat. “Can't ask her to do that. She's been giving us too much as it is. Her time. Her effort. Her concern. Her love. I can't ask her for anything more, and I won't.” He heaved a sigh and shoved the brochures back into his pocket. “Never mind, then. I'll soldier on.”
“I could ask Sam to speak to Aunt Sophie. I could explain.”
“No. Forget it. I c'n bite the bullet. I've done it before…”
Too many times, Julian thought. His father's life spanned more than five decades of broken promises and good intentions come to nothing. He'd seen Jeremy give up drink more times than he could remember. And just as many times, he'd seen Jeremy return to the bottle. There was more than a simple grain of truth in what he said. If he was going to beat the beast this time, he was not going to go into battle alone.
“Look, Dad. I'll talk to Sam. I want to do it.”
“Want to?” Jeremy repeated. “Really want to? Not think you have to because of whatever you owe your old man?”
“No. Wantto. I'll ask her.”
Jeremy looked humbled. His eyes actually filled with tears. “She loves you, Julie. Fine woman like that and she loves you, son.”
“I'll speak to her, Dad.”
The rain was still falling when Lynley turned up the drive to Maiden Hall.
Barbara Havers had actually provided him with a few minutes' distraction from the turmoil he felt over what he'd learned about Andy Maiden's presence in London. Indeed, he'd managed to exchange the turmoil for an anger over Barbara's defiance that hadn't been the least palliated by Helen's gentle attempt to wring reason from the constable's behaviour. “Perhaps she misunderstood your orders, Tommy,” she'd said once Havers had taken herself away from Eaton Terrace. “In the heat of the moment, she might have assumed you didn't intend her to be part of the Notting Hill search.”
“Christ,” he'd countered. “Don't defend her, Helen. You heard what she said. She knew what she was supposed to do and she chose not to do it. She went her own way.”
“But you admire initiative. You always have done. You've always told me that Winston's initiative is one of the finest-”
“God damn it, Helen. When Nkata takes matters into his own hands, he does it after he's completed an assignment, not before. He doesn't argue, whinge, or ignore what's in front of him because he thinks he's got a better idea. And when he's been corrected-which is damn seldom, by the way-he doesn't make the same mistake twice. One would think that Barbara would have learned something this summer about the consequence of defying an order. But she hasn't. Her skull is lead.”
Helen had carefully gathered together the sheets of music that Barbara had left behind. She placed them, not in the envelope, but in a pile on the coffee table. She said, “Tommy, if Winston Nkata and not Barbara Havers had been in that boat with DCI Barlow… If Winston Nkata and not Barbara Havers had taken up that gun…” She'd gazed at him earnestly. “Would you have been so angry?”
His response had been both swift and hot. “This isn't a bloody issue of gender. You know me better than that.”
“I do know you, yes” had been her quiet reply.
Still, he'd considered her question more than once during the first one hundred miles of the drive to Derbyshire. But every way he examined his possible responses both to the question and to Havers’ incredible act of insubordination on the North Sea, his answer was the same. Havers had engaged in assault, not initiative. And nothing justified that. Had Winston Nkata been wielding the weapon-which was as risible an image as Lynley could invent-he would have reacted identically. He knew it.
Now, as he pulled into the car park of Maiden Hall, his anger had long since abated, to be replaced by the same disquiet of spirit that had descended upon him when he'd learned about Andy Maiden's visit to his daughter. He stopped the car and gazed at the hotel through the rain.
He didn't want to believe what the facts were asking him to believe, but he drew in what resolve he could muster and reached in the back seat for his umbrella. He walked through the rain across the car park. Inside the hotel, he asked the first employee he saw to fetch Andy Maiden. When the former SO 10 officer appeared five minutes later, he came alone.
“Tommy,” he greeted him. “You've news? Come with me.”
He led the way to the office near Reception. He shut the door behind them.
“Tell me about Islington in May, Andy,” Lynley said without preamble, because he knew that to hesitate was to offer the other man an opening into his sympathy that he couldn't afford to allow. “Tell me about saying ‘I'll see you dead before I let you do it.’”
Maiden sat. He indicated a chair for Lynley. He didn't speak until Lynley was seated, and even then he seemed to go inward for a moment, as if he was gathering his resources before he replied.
Then he said, “The wheel clamp.”
To which Lynley replied, “No one could ever accuse you of being an incompetent cop.”
“The same could be said of you. You've done good work, Tommy. I always believed you'd shine in CID.”
If anything, the compliment was like a slap in the face, hearkening as it did to all the now-obvious reasons that Andy Maiden had chosen him-blinded as he was by admiration-to come to Derbyshire. Lynley said steadily, “I have a good team. Tell me about Islington.”
They were finally upon it, and Maiden's eyes bore so much anguish that Lynley found he still-even now-had to steel himself against a rush of pity towards his old friend. “She asked to see me,” Maiden said. “So I went.”
“Last May. To London,” Lynley clarified. “You went to Islington to see your daughter.”
“That's right.”
He'd thought Nicola wanted to make arrangements to move her belongings back to Derbyshire for the summer, preparatory to taking her holiday job with Will Upman as they'd arranged in December. So he'd driven the Land-Rover, the better to be able to haul things home if she was willing to part with them a few weeks before her classes ended at the College of Law.
“But she didn't want to come home,” Maiden said. “That's not why she'd called me to London. She wanted to tell me her future plans.”
“Prostitution,” Lynley said. “Her set-up in Fulham.”
Maiden cleared his throat roughly and whispered, “Oh God.”
Even hardening himself against empathy, Lynley found he couldn't force the man to lay out the facts that he'd gathered that day in London. So he did it for him: Lynley went through everything as he himself had learned it, from Nicola's employment first as a trainee then as an escort at MKR Financial Management to her partnership with Vi Nevin and her choice of domination as her speciality. He concluded with “Sir Adrian believes there could be only one reason why she came north for the summer instead of remaining in London: money.”
“It was a compromise. She did it for me.”
They'd argued bitterly, but he'd finally got her to agree to work for Upman during the summer, at least to try the law as a career. By paying her more than she would have made remaining in London, he said, he garnered her cooperation. He'd had to take out a bank loan to raise the sum she demanded as recompense, but he considered it money well spent.
“You were that confident that the law would win her over?” Lynley asked. The prospect hardly seemed likely.
“I was confident that Upman would win her over,” Maiden replied. “I've seen him with women. He has a way. I thought he and Nicola… Tommy, I was willing to try anything. The right man, I kept thinking, could bring her to her senses.”
“Wouldn't Julian Britton have been a better choice? He was already in love with her, wasn't he?”
“Julian wanted her too much. She needed a man who'd seduce her but keep her guessing. Upman seemed right for the job.” Maiden appeared to hear his own words, because he flinched a moment after he'd made the declaration, and finally he began to weep. “Oh God, Tommy. She drove me to it,” he said, and he held a fist at his mouth as if this could deaden his pain.
And Lynley was at last face-to-face with what he hadn't wanted to see. He'd turned away from the guilt of this man because of who he had been at New Scotland Yard, while all the time who he had been at New Scotland Yard illuminated his culpability as nothing else could. A master of deception and dissimulation, Andy Maiden had spent decades moving in that netherworld of undercover where the lines between fact and fantasy, between illegality and honour first became blurred and ultimately became altogether non-existent.
“Tell me how it happened,” Lynley said stonily. “Tell me what you used besides the knife.”
Maiden dropped his hand. “God in heaven…” His voice was hoarse. “Tommy, you can't be thinking…” Then he appeared to reflect back over what he'd said, to locate the exact point of misunderstanding between them. “She drove me to bribery. To paying her to work for Upman so that he could win her… so that her mother would never discover what she was… because it would have destroyed her. But no. No. You can't think I killed her. I was here the night she died. Here in the hotel. And… my God, she was my only child.”
“And she'd betrayed you,” Lynley said. “After all you'd done for her, after the life you'd given her-”
“No! I loved her. Do you have children? A daughter? A son? Do you know what it is to see the future in your child and know you'll live on no matter what happens just because she herself exists?”
“As a whore?” Lynley asked. “As a woman on the game who makes her money paying house calls on men she whips into submission? ‘I'll see you dead before I let you do it.’ Those were your words. And she was returning to London next week, Andy You'd bought yourself only a reprieve from the inevitable when you paid her to work in Buxton.”
“I didn't! Tommy, listen to me! I was here on Tuesday night.”
Maiden's voice had risen and a knock sounded on the door. It opened before either man could speak. Nan Maiden stood there. She looked from Lynley to her husband. She didn't speak.
But she didn't need to say a word in explanation of what Lynley read on her face. She knows what he did, he thought. My God, she's known from the first.
“Leave us,” Andy Maiden cried out to his wife.
“I don't think that will be necessary,” Lynley said.
Barbara Havers had never been to Westerham, and she discovered soon enough that there was no easy way to get there from the St. James home in Chelsea. She'd made a quick run to the St. Jameses upon leaving Eaton Terrace-why not, she'd thought, since she was in the area so close to the King's Road, a short jaunt down which would take her to Cheyne Row-and she'd been dead eager to let off steam to the couple who she very well knew were most likely to have also experienced Inspector Lynley's brand of priggish irrationality firsthand at one time or another. But she hadn't had a chance to tell her story. For Deborah St. James had answered the door, given a happy shout in the direction of the study, and pulled her inside the house like a woman greeting someone unexpectedly back from the war.
“Simon, look!” she'd announced. “Isn't this just meant” And the meeting between the three of them had been the spur that sent Barbara into Kent. To get there, however, she'd had to battle the maze of unmarked streets that made the words south of the river synonymous with a sojourn in hell. She'd got lost on the far side of Albert Bridge, where one moment of inattention resulted in twenty minutes of exasperation driving round Clapham Common in a futile search for the A205. Once she'd found it and worked her way over to Lewisham, she'd begun wondering about the efficacy of using the Internet to locate one's expert witnesses.
The witness in this case lived in Westerham, where he also ran a small business a short distance away from Quebec House. “You won't be able to miss it,” he'd told her on the telephone. “Quebec House sits at the top of the Edenbridge Road. It's got a sign at the front. It's open today-Quebec House-so there'll probably be the odd coach in the car park. I'm less than five hundred yards to the south.”
So he was, she found, in a clapboard construction that bore the sign QUIVER ME TIMBERS above its door.
His name was Jason Harley, and his business shared room with his house, the original home having been halved by a wall that ran down its middle like Solomon's judgement. An overly wide door had been set into this wall, and it was through this door that Jason Harley rolled himself in the high performance wheelchair of a marathon athlete when Barbara rang the bell outside the shop door.
“You're Constable Havers?” Harley asked.
“Barbara,” she said.
He tossed back a mass of hair that was blond, very thick, and straight as a ruler. “Barbara, then. Lucky you caught me at home. I usually shoot on Sundays.” He rolled himself back and beckoned her inside, saying, “Make sure the sign stays on closed, won't you? I've got a local fan club that likes to drop by when they see I'm open.” He made this last remark ironically.
“Trouble?” Barbara asked him, thinking of louts, hooligans, and what torments they could inflict on a paraplegic.
“Nine-year-old boys. I spoke at their school. Now I'm their hero.” Harley grinned affably. “So. How can I help you, Barbara? You said you wanted to see what I have?”
“Right.”
They'd found him on the Internet, where his business had a Web page, and his proximity to London had been the deciding factor in Barbara's selection of him as her expert witness. On the phone, which rang in his house as well as in his shop, Jason Harley had told her he wasn't open on Sundays, but when she'd explained the reasons behind her call, he'd agreed to see her.
Now she stood in the close confines of Quiver Me Timbers, and she glanced over its merchandise: the fibreglass, yew, and carbon of Jason Harley's trade. Racks stood against walls. Display cases lined the shop's single wide aisle. An assembly area spanned the farther end. And central to everything was a maple stand in which a ribboned medal was encased in glass. It was an Olympic gold, Barbara saw when she examined the medal. Not only in Westerham was Jason Harley somebody.
When she gave her attention back to him, she saw he was watching her. “I'm impressed,” she said. “Did you do it from your chair?”
“Could have done,” he told her. “Would do today, as well, if I had a bit more free time to practise. But I wasn't in a chair back then. The chair came later. After a hang-gliding accident.”
“Rough,” she said.
“I cope. Better than most, I dare say. Now. How can I help you, Barbara?”
“Tell me about cedar arrows,” she said.
Jason Harley's Olympic gold medal represented the culmination of years of competition and practise. Years of competition and practise gave him rare expertise in the field of archery. His hang-gliding accident had forced him to consider how he might put his athletic prowess and his knowledge to use in order to support himself and the family he and his girlfriend wished to have. The result was his shop, Quiver Me Timbers, where he sold the fine carbon arrows shot by modern bows made of fiberglass or laminae of wood and where he hand-made and sold the wooden arrows that were used with the traditional long bows for which English archery had historically been known, from the Battle of Agincourt onwards.
In his shop he also provided his customers with the accoutrements of archery: from the complicated hand and body pieces worn by archers to the arrow heads-called piles, he told Barbara-that differed depending upon the use to which the arrow was being put.
What about shooting a nineteen-year-old boy in the back? Barbara wanted to ask the archer. What kind of pile would you need for that? But she went at it slowly, knowing that she was going to need a volume of information to heave at Lynley in order to make the slightest dent in his armour against her.
She asked Harley to tell her about the wooden arrows he made, particularly the arrows that he crafted from Port Orford cedar.
Cedar arrows were the only ones he made at all, he corrected her. The shafts came to him from Oregon. There they were individually weighed, graded, and subjected to a bending test prior to being shipped. “They're dependable as hell,” he told her, “which is important, because when the pull weight of the bow is high, you need an arrow that's made to withstand it. You can get arrows of pine or ash,” he went on after a moment during which he handed her a finished cedar arrow for her inspection, “some from local wood and some from Sweden. But the Oregon cedar's more easily available-because of the quantity, I suppose-and I expect you'd find every archery shop in England sells it.”
He shepherded her to the back of his shop, where his work area was. There, set at the height of his waist, a mini assembly line allowed him to move easily from the round saw that cut the slot in the arrow's shaft to the fletching jig where the cock and shaft feathers were glued into position. Araldite kept the pile in place. And, as he'd said before, the pile differed depending on the use to which the arrow would be put.
“Some archers prefer to make their own arrows,” he told her in summation. “But as it's a labour intensive job-well, I suppose you can see that for yourself, can't you-most of them find an arrow maker they like and they buy their arrows from him. He can make them distinctive in any way they prefer-within reason, of course-so long as they tell him what they want as a means of identification.”
“Identification?” Barbara asked.
“Because of the competitions,” Harley said. “That's mostly what long bows are used for these days.”
There were, he explained, two types of competitions that long bow archers engaged in: tournament shooting and field shooting. With the former, they shot at traditional targets: twelve dozen arrows fired at bull's-eyes from varying distances. For the latter, they shot in wooded areas or on hillsides: arrows fired at animals whose images were depicted on paper. But in either case, the only way a winner could be determined was by the individual identification marks that were made upon the arrow that was fired. And every competitive archer in England would be certain that his arrows could be distinguished from the arrows of every other archer who also competed. “How else could they tell whose arrow hit the target?” Harley asked reasonably.
“Right,” Barbara said. “How else.”
She'd read the post-mortem report on Terry Cole. She knew from her conversation with St. James that Lynley had been told of a third weapon beyond the knife and the stone they'd already identified as having been used on the victims. Now, with that third weapon as good as identified, she began to see how the crime had occurred.
She said, “Tell me, Mr. Harley, how fast can a good archer-with a decade or more of experience, let's say-get off successive arrows at a target? Using a long bow, that is.”
He considered the question thoughtfully, fingers pulling at his lower lip. “Ten seconds, I'd guess. At the most.”
“As long as that?”
“Let me show you.”
She thought Harley intended to demonstrate for her himself. But instead, he fetched a quiver from the display rack, slid six arrows into it, and motioned Barbara to come to his chair. “Right-handed or left?” he asked her.
“Right.”
“Okay. Turn around.”
Feeling a little foolish, she allowed him to slide the quiver onto her body and adjust the strap across her torso. “Suppose the bow's in your left hand,” he explained when he had the quiver in place. “Now reach back for the arrow. Only one.” When she had it-and not without a bit of unfamiliar groping-he pointed out that she would next have to position it on the Dacron string of the bow. Then she would have to draw the string back and take aim. “It's not like a gun,” he reminded her. “You have to reload and re-aim after every shot. A good archer can do it in just under ten seconds. But for someone like you-no offence-”
Barbara laughed. “Give me twenty minutes.”
She looked at herself in the mirror that hung on the door through which Jason had earlier rolled himself into the shop. Standing there, she practised reaching back for the arrow. She imagined herself with a bow, and she tried to picture the target in front of her: not a bull's-eye or a paper animal, but a living human being. Two of them, in fact, sitting next to a fire. That would have been the only light.
He didn't shoot the girl because he wasn't after the girl, she thought. But he had no other weapon with him, and he was desperate to kill the boy, so he had to use what he'd brought and hope the shot would kill him because-with another person present-he wasn't going to have the chance to fire off another at Cole.
So what had happened? The shot hadn't gone true. Perhaps the boy had moved at the last moment. Perhaps, aiming for the neck, he'd hit lower, on the back instead. The girl, realising someone in the darkness was trying to harm them, would have jumped to her feet and tried to flee. And since she was running and since it was dark, the bow and arrow were useless against her. So he'd have chased her down. He'd have dispatched her and gone back for the boy.
Barbara said, “Jason, if you were shot in the back with one of these arrows, what would you feel? Would you know you'd been hit? By an arrow, I mean.”
Harley gave his attention to the rack of bows as if the answers were hidden among them. “I expect you'd feel a terrific blow at first,” he said slowly. “Rather like you'd been hit with a hammer.”
“Could you move? Stand?”
“I don't see why not. Until you realised what had happened to you, of course. And then you'd probably go into shock. Especially if you reached back and felt the shaft sticking out of you. God, that would be grim. That would be enough to make you-”
“Faint,” Barbara said. “Pass out. Fall over.”
“Right,” he agreed.
“And then the arrow would break off, wouldn't it?”
“Depending on the way you fell, it might do.”
Which would, she concluded silently, possibly leave a sliver of wood behind when the killer-eager to remove the one thing from the body that could ultimately identify him to the police-pulled the remainder of the arrow from the victim's back. But he wouldn't have been dead-Terry Cole-at that point. Just in shock. So the killer would have to finish him off once he returned from pounding in the girl's skull. He had no weapon with him other than the long bow. His only choice was to find a weapon there at the campsite.
And having done that, with the boy safely stabbed, he himself was free to search for what he assumed Terry Cole had with him: the Chandler music, the source of a fortune denied him by the terms of his father's will.
There was only a final point to clarify with Jason Harley. She said, “Jason, can an arrow's tip-”
“The pile,” he corrected her.
“The pile. Can it pierce human flesh? I mean, I always thought arrows had to have rubber ends or something if you took them out in public.”
He smiled. “Suction cups, you mean? Like on kids’ bows and arrows?” He rolled past her and behind one of the display cases, where he took out a small box and emptied it on the low glass counter. These, he told her, were the piles used at the end of the cedar arrows. The most common for field archery was the bodkin head. Barbara could test its sharpness if she wanted to.
She did so. The metal piece was cylindrical, in keeping with the arrows shape, but it also narrowed to a nasty four-sided point that would be deadly when propelled with force. As she was pressing this tip into her finger experimentally, Harley chatted on about the other piles he sold. He laid out broadheads and hunting heads and explained their use. Finally, he separated from them the mediaeval reproductions.
“And these,” he concluded, “are for demonstrations and battles.”
“Battles?” Barbara asked incredulously. “People actually shooting arrows at each other?”
“Not real battles, of course, and when the fighting begins, the arrows are fitted out with rubber bunts on the end so they're not dangerous. They're reenactments, the battles are. A slew of weekend warriors gather together in the grounds of some castle or great house and play out the War of Roses with one another. It goes on all over the countryside.”
“People travel to reenactments, do they? With bows and arrows in the boots of their cars?”
“Just like that. Yes. They do.”