Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“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.