Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

Deborah looked thoughtful as she shrugged back a heavy mass of her hair. “Why's that curious? They were killed out of doors, weren't they? Out on the moors?” And then her eyes widened. “Oh yes. I do see.”

“Exactly,” St. James said. “What kind of moor has cedars growing on it? But it's more curious than that, my love. This particular cedar grows in America, in the States. Oregon and northern California, it says.”

“The tree could have been imported, couldn't it?” Deborah asked reasonably. “For someone's garden or for a park? Or even a greenhouse or conservatory. You know what I mean: like palm trees or cactuses.” She smiled, her nose wrinkling. “Or is that cacti?”

St. James walked to his desk and put the book down. He lowered himself slowly into his chair, thinking. “All right. Let's say it was imported for someone's garden or a park.”

“Of course.” She was with him, tagging her own thought onto his. “That still begs the obvious question, doesn't it? How did a cedar tree meant for someone's garden or a park get to the moor?”

“And how did it get to a part of the moor that's nowhere near someone's garden or a park in the first place?”

“Someone planted it there for religious reasons?”

“More likely no one planted it at all.”

“But you said…” Deborah frowned. “Oh yes. I see. I suppose the forensic botanist must have made an error, then.”

“I don't think so.”

“But, Simon, if there was only a sliver to work with-”

“That's all a good forensic botanist would need.” St. James went on to explain. Even a fragment of wood, he told her, bore the pattern of tubes and vessels that transported fluids from the bottom to the top of a tree. Soft-wood trees-and all conifers, he told her, are among the soft woods-are less developed evolutionary and consequently easier to identify. Placed under microscopic analysis, a sliver would reveal a number of key features that distinguish its species from all other species. A forensic botanist would catalogue these features, plug them into a key-or a computer identification system, for that matter-and derive from the information and the key an exact identification of the tree. It was a faultlessly accurate process, or at least as accurate as any other identification made from microscopic, human, and computer analysis.

“All right,” Deborah said slowly and with some apparent doubt. “So it's cedar, yes?”

“Port Orford cedar. I think we can depend on that.”

“And it's a piece of cedar that's not from a tree growing in the area, yes?”

“Yes as well. So we're left with asking where that piece of cedar came from and how it came to be on the boy's body.”

“They were camping, weren't they?”

“The girl was, yes.”

“In a tent? Well, what about a tent peg from the tent? What if the peg was made from cedar?”

“She was hiking. I doubt it was that kind of tent.”

Deborah crossed her arms and leaned against the desk, considering this. “What about a camp stool, then? The legs, for instance.”

“Possibly. If a stool was among the items at the site.”

“Or tools. She would have had camping tools with her. An axe for wood, a trowel, something like that. The sliver could be from one of the handles.”

“Tools would have to be lightweight, though, if she was carrying them in a rucksack.”

“What about cooking utensils? Wooden spoons?”

St. James smiled. “Gourmets in the wilderness?”

“Don't laugh at me,” she said, laughing herself. “I'm trying to help.”

“I've a better idea,” he told her. “Come along.”

He led her upstairs to the laboratory, where his computer hummed quietly in a corner near the window. There he sat down and, with Deborah at his shoulder, he accessed the Internet, saying, “Let's consult the Great Intelligence on-line.”

“Computers always make my palms sweat.”

St. James took her palm, unsweaty, and kissed it. “Your secret's safe with me.”

In a moment the computer screen came to life, and St. James selected the search engine he generally used. He typed the word cedar into the search field and blinked with consternation when the result was some six hundred thousand entries.

“Good Lord,” Deborah said. “That's not very helpful, is it?”

“Let's narrow our options.” St. James altered his selection to Port Oxford cedar. The result was an immediate change to one hundred and eighty-three. But when he began to scroll through the listing, he saw he'd come up with everything from an article written about Port Or-ford, Oregon, to a treatise on wood rot. He sat back, reflected for a moment, and typed in the word usage after cedar, adding the appropriate inverted commas and addition signs. That gleaned him absolutely nothing at all. He switched from usage to market and hit the return. The screen altered and gave him his answer.

He read the very first listing and said, “Good God,” when he saw what it was.

Deborah, whose attention had drifted towards her darkroom, came back to him. “What?” she said. “What?”

“It's the weapon,” he said, and pointed to the screen.

Deborah read for herself and drew in a sharp breath. “Shall I get in touch with Tommy?”

St. James considered. But the request to study the post-mortem reports had been relayed to him from Lynley via Barbara. And that served as sufficient indication of a chain of command, which gave him the excuse he needed in order to attempt to make peace where there was strife.

“Let's track down Barbara,” he told his wife. “She can be the one to take the news to Tommy.”

Barbara Havers zoomed round the corner of Anhalt Road and hoped her luck would hold for another few hours. She'd managed to find Cilia Thompson in her railway arch studio applying her talents to a canvas on which a cavernous mouth with tonsils like bellows opened upon a three-legged girl skipping rope on a spongy-looking tongue. A few questions had been enough to ascertain fuller information about the “gent with good taste” who'd purchased one of Cilia's master-works the previous week.

Cilia couldn't remember his name off the top of her head. Come to think of it, she reported, he'd never told her. But he'd written her a cheque which she'd photocopied, the better-Barbara thought-to prove to the world of artistic doubting Thomases that she'd actually managed to sell a canvas. She had that photocopy taped to the inside of her wooden paintbox, and she showed it off willingly, saying, “Oh yeah, the blokes name's right here. Gosh. Look at this. I wonder if he's any relation?”

Matthew King-Ryder, Barbara saw, had paid an idiotically exorbitant amount for one dog of a painting. He'd used a cheque drawn on a bank in St. Helier on the island of Jersey. Private Banking was embossed above his name. He'd scrawled the amount as if he'd been in a hurry. As perhaps he had been, Barbara thought.

How had Matthew King-Ryder happened to turn up in Portslade Street? she'd asked the artist. Cilia herself would admit, wouldn't she, that this particular row of railway arches wasn't exactly heralded throughout London as a hotbed of modern art.

Cilia shrugged. She didn't know how he'd happened upon the studio. But obviously, she wasn't the sort of girl who looked at a gift horse cross-eyed. When he'd shown up, asked to have a look about, and demonstrated an interest in her work, she was as happy as a duck in the sun to let him browse right through it. All she could report in the end was that the bloke with the chequebook had spent a good hour looking at every piece of art in the studio-Terry's as well? Barbara wanted to know. Had he asked about Terry's art? Using Terry's name?