Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“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.”

The rain was unrelenting. The wind had joined it. In the car park of the Black Angel Hotel, both the wind and the rain played a sodden game with the top layer of rubbish in an overloaded skip. The wind lifted and hurled cardboard boxes and old newspapers into the air; the downfall plastered both to the windscreens and wheels of the empty cars.

Lynley climbed from the Bentley and raised his umbrella against the late summer storm. He hurried with his suitcase in hand round the side of the building and through the front door. A coat rack just within the entrance sprouted the dripping coats and jackets of a dozen or more Sunday patrons whose shapes Lynley could see through the translucent amber glass of the upper half of the hotel bar's door. Next to the rack, a good ten umbrellas stood in an elongated iron stand and glistened wetly under the light of the entrance porch where Lynley stamped the damp from his shoes. He hung his coat among the others, shoved his umbrella in with the rest, and went through the bar to Reception.

If the proprietor of the Black Angel was surprised to see him back so soon, the man gave no indication. Tourist season, after all, was nearly at an end. He would be happy enough for whatever custom came his way in the coming months. He handed over a key-depressingly, it was for the same room he'd had earlier, Lynley saw-and asked if the inspector wanted his bags taken up or would he rather see to them himself? Lynley handed over his suitcase and went to the bar for a meal.

Sunday lunch was long since finished, but they could do him a cold ham salad or a filled jacket potato, he was informed, as long as he wasn't overly particular about the potato's filling. He said that he wasn't, and he asked for both.