Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“Shit,” Martin hissed, receiver to his ear. Where was that fucker Polmanteer?

On the other end of the line the phone at his solicitor's home double-rang four times. His answer machine clicked on. Martin cursed, disconnected, and tried the solicitor's mobile. Where would he be on a Sunday, for God's sake? The slimy bastard couldn't have gone to church.

The mobile brought him no better results. He slammed down the receiver and rooted in his desk for the solicitor's card. Gorilla Two elbowed him to one side. He said, “Sorry, sir. Can't let you remove-”

“I'm not removing a fucking thing! I'm looking for my solicitor's pager.”

“Wouldn't keep it in your desk, would he?” One asked from the shelves, where he continued his work. Books thunked to the floor.

“You know what I mean,” Martin said to Two. “I want the number of his pager. It's on a card. I know my rights. Now, step aside or I won't be responsible-”

“Martin? What is it? What's going on? There're men in our room and they've emptied the wardrobe and… What's going on?”

Martin spun round. Tricia was in the doorway, unshowered, undressed, and unpainted. She looked like the hags who sat on their sleeping bags and begged money in the subway at Hyde Park Corner. She looked like what she was: a smack-head.

His hands started to burn once again. He dug his nails into his palms. Tricia had been the single cause of his every difficulty for the last twenty years. And now she was the cause of his downfall.

He said, “God damn it. God damn it. You!” And he plunged across the room. He grabbed her by the hair and managed to ram her head against the door jamb before the cops were on him. “Stupid cunt!” he shouted as they dragged him off her. And then to the police, “All right. All right” as he shook off their hold on him. “Call your asshole boss. Tell him I'm ready to deal.”

It was nearly midday before Simon St. James was able to give his time to the Derbyshire post-mortem reports that Lynley had sent him via Barbara Havers. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to be looking for. The examination of the Maiden girl appeared in order. The conclusion of epidural haematoma was consistent with the blow to her skull. That it had been administered by a right-handed person attacking her from above was consistent with the hypothesis that she'd been running and had tripped-or been tackled-in her flight across the moor in the darkness. Apart from the blow to her head and the scrapes and contusions one would expect to find after a rough fall on uneven ground, there was nothing on her body that suggested anything curious. Unless, of course, one wanted to consider the extraordinary number of holes she'd had pierced in everything from her eyebrows to her genitals as a point of interest. And that hardly seemed a reasonable route to go when driving needles through various body parts had long ago become one of the relatively few acts of defiance left to a generation of young people whose parents had already engaged in them all.

From his reading of the Maiden report, it seemed to St. James that all the bases had been covered: from the time, cause, and mechanism of death to the evidence-or lack thereof-of a struggle. X-rays and photographs had been duly taken, and the body had been examined from top to bottom. The various organs had been studied, removed, and commented upon. Samples of body fluids had been sent to toxicology for their findings. At the end of the report, the opinion was stated briefly and clearly: The girl had died as the result of a blow to the head.

St. James went through the findings once more to make sure he hadn't missed any pertinent detail. Then he turned to the second report and immersed himself in the death of Terence Cole.

Lynley had phoned him with the information that one of the wounds on the boy hadn't been inflicted by the Swiss Army knife that had apparently been responsible for the others, including the fatal piercing of the femoral artery. After reading through the basic facts in the report, St. James gave a more careful scrutiny to everything related to this particular wound. He noted its size, its position on the body, and the marking left on the bone beneath it. He stared at the words and then walked contemplatively to the window of his lab, where he watched as Peach rolled blissfully below him in a patch of garden sunlight, exposing her furry dachshund belly to the twelve o'clock heat.

The Swiss Army knife, he knew, had been found in a grit dispenser. Why hadn't the secondary weapon been left in the same place? Why cache one weapon but not the other? Those questions, of course, belonged in the realm of the case detectives and not the scientists, but he believed they needed to be asked nonetheless.

Once they were asked, there seemed to be only two possible answers: Either the second weapon identified the killer too closely to be left at the scene or the second weapon had been left at the scene and the police had mistaken it for something else.

If the first supposition was the case, he could be of no assistance in the matter. If the second was the case, a more detailed study of the crime scene evidence was in order. He had no access to that evidence and he knew he wouldn't be welcome in Derbyshire to finger through it. So he returned to the post-mortem report and he sought anything within it that might give him a clue.

Dr. Sue Myles hadn't missed a thing: from the insects that had taken up residence in and on both of the bodies during the hours they'd lain undiscovered on the moor to the leaves, flowers, and twigs that had become caught up in the hair of the girl and the wounds on the boy.

It was this final detail-a sliver of wood some two centimeters long found on the body of Terence Cole-that St. James closed in on curiously. The sliver had been sent on to the lab for analysis, and someone had appended a note in pencil in the margin of the report, identifying it. From a phone call, doubtless. When officers were pressed, they didn't always wait for official word from the police lab before they moved on.

Cedar, someone had printed neatly in the margin. And next to it in parentheses the words Port Orford. St. James was no botanist, so Port Orford illuminated nothing for him. He knew it was unlikely that he'd be able to track down on a Sunday the forensic botanist who'd identified the wood, so he gathered up his paperwork and descended the stairs to his study.

Deborah was within, absorbed in the Sunday Times magazine. She said, “Trouble, love?”

He replied, “Ignorance. Which is trouble enough.”

He found the book he was looking for among the dustier of his volumes. He began leafing through the pages as Deborah joined him by the shelves.

“What is it?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Cedar. And Port Orford. Mean anything to you?”

“Sounds like a place. Port Isaac, Port Orford. Why?”

“A sliver of cedar was found on Terence Cole's body. The boy on the moors.”

“Tommy's case?”

“Hmm.” St. James flipped to the back of the book and ran his finger down the index under cedar. “Atlas, blue, Chilean incense. Did you know there were so many kinds of cedar?”

“Is it important?”

“I'm beginning to think it could be.” He ran his gaze further down the page. And then he saw the two words Port Orford. They were listed as a variety of the tree.

He turned to the indicated page, where first he took note of the picture which featured a sample of the coniferous tree's foliage and then read the entry itself. “This is curious,” he said to his wife.

“What?” she asked, sliding her arm through his.

He told her what the post-mortem had claimed: that a wooden sliver identified by the forensic botanist as Port Orford cedar had been found in one of the wounds on the body of Terence Cole.