Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

Denton didn't return her greeting with similar enthusiasm. He said, “Lady Helen…” and hesitated-or so it seemed to Helen-somewhere between confusion and chagrin.

“I hope you're not going to scold me about that wallpaper, Charlie. I phoned Peter Jones and asked for another day. Truly, I did.”

Denton said, “No. It's not the wallpaper,” and he lifted the manila envelope he was holding, bringing it level with his chest.

Helen set down her toast. “What is it, then? You look so…” How did he actually look? she asked herself. He looked quite agitated, she concluded. She said, “Has something happened? You've not received bad news, have you? Your family's well, aren't they? Oh Lord, Charlie, have you got yourself into trouble with a woman?”

He shook his head. Helen saw that a duster hung over his arm, and the pieces fell into place: He'd been doing a spot of cleaning up, she realised, and no doubt he wished to lecture her on the messier of her habits. Poor man. He couldn't decide how best to begin.

He'd come from the direction of the drawing room, and Helen recalled that she hadn't picked up those sheets of music that Barbara had left upon her abrupt departure on the previous afternoon. Den-ton wouldn't like that, Helen thought. He was so like Tommy in his neatness.

“You've caught me out,” she confessed with a nod at the envelope. “Barbara brought that yesterday for Tommy to look at. I'm afraid I forgot all about it, Charlie. Will you believe me if I promise to do better next time? Hmm, I suppose not. I'm promising that constantly, aren't I?”

“Where did you get this, Lady Helen? This… I mean, this…?” And Denton gestured with the envelope as if he had no words to describe what it contained.

“I've just told you. Barbara Havers brought it. Why? Is it important?”

As an answer, Charlie Denton did the unexpected. For the first time since Helen had known the man, he drew a chair out from beneath the dining table and, completely unbidden, he sat.

“The blood matches” was Hanken's terse announcement to Lynley. He was phoning from Buxton, where he'd just got the word from the forensic lab. “The jackets the boy's.”

Hanken went on to tell him that they were moments away from getting a warrant to search Maiden Hall. “I've six blokes who can find diamonds in dog shit. If he's stashed the long bow there, we'll find it.” Hanken groused about the fact that Andy Maiden had had more than enough time since the night of the murders to rid himself of the bow in three dozen locations round the White Peak, which made their job of finding it doubly difficult. But at least he didn't know they'd twigged that an arrow was the missing weapon, which gave them the advantage of surprise if he hadn't rid himself of the rest of his equipment.

“We don't have the slightest indication that Andy Maiden's an archer,” Lynley pointed out.

“How many parts did he play undercover?” was Hanken's riposte. He rang off with “You're in if you want to be. Meet us at the Hall in ninety minutes.”

Heavy of heart, Lynley hung up the phone.

Hanken was right in his pursuit of Andy. When virtually every piece of information that was gathered led to one particular suspect, you proceeded with that suspect. You didn't avoid thinking the unthinkable because you couldn't disengage your mind from a memory of your twenty-fifth year and an undercover operation that you had so longed to be a part of. You did what you had to do as a professional.

Yet even though Lynley knew that DI Hanken was following procedures as they were meant to be followed in his search of Maiden Hall, he still found himself thrashing round in the quagmire of evidence, facts, and conjectures, seeking something that would vindicate Andy. It was, he stubbornly continued to believe, the least he could do.

There appeared to be only one usable fact: that Nicola's rain gear had been missing from among her belongings at Nine Sisters Henge. Alone in his room with the morning sounds of the hotel rising round him, Lynley considered nothing but that waterproof and what its absence from the murder scene meant.

They'd originally thought that the killer had taken the waterproof and worn it to cover his blood-stained clothes. But if he had called at the Black Angel Hotel on Tuesday after the murder, he would hardly have done so wearing rain gear on a fine summer's night. He wouldn't have been willing to run the risk of standing out, and there wasn't much that would have been more conspicuous than a man walking round in rain gear in the midst of Derbyshire's long spell of perfect weather.

To make certain, however, Lynley rang down to the Black Angel's proprietor. A single question-shouted round the ground floor from one employee to another-was sufficient for Lynley to be assured that nothing like that had been played out at the hotel on any night in recent memory. What, then, had become of the waterproof?

Lynley began to pace the room. He reflected on the moor, the murders, and the weapons, and he dwelt upon the mental image he'd constructed of how the crimes had been carried out.

If the killer had taken the garment from the scene but had not worn it from the scene, there seemed to be only two possibilities for its use to him. Either the waterproof had been fashioned into a sort of carrier for transporting something from the henge when the killer left or it had been used in some way by the killer during the commission of the crime.

Lynley dismissed the first prospect as unlikely: The two victims had gone to the henge on foot. What could they have carried in with them that would require something the size of a waterproof to transport out? He went on to the second possibility. And when he lined up all he knew about the killings, what he'd assumed about the killings, and what he'd discovered at the Black Angel Hotel, he finally saw the answer.

The killer had incapacitated the boy with an arrow. He'd then gone after the fleeing girl and dispatched her without much trouble. Returning to the henge, he'd seen that the boy's wound was serious but not mortal. He'd cast about for a quick way of doing him in. He could have stood the boy up-firing-squad fashion-and made of him a modern St. Sebastian, but the boy would hardly have cooperated in that plan. So the killer had torn through the equipment at the site and found the knife and the rain gear. He'd put on the waterproof to protect his clothes while he was knifing the boy Thus he could enter the Black Angel Hotel with impunity later.

A blood-stained waterproof couldn't be left hanging with the black leather jacket, however. The blood on the jacket had soaked into its lining, where it was camouflaged by the material's colour. So the jacket might have taken months to be noticed. But a blood-stained waterproof would not be so easily overlooked.

Yet the killer had to get rid of it. And sooner rather than later. So where…?

Lynley continued to pace as he pictured that night, the killings, and their aftermath.

The knife had been left along the killer's escape route. It was easy enough to bury in a few inches of grit in a roadside container, a process that would probably have taken no more than thirty seconds.

But the waterproof couldn't be buried there because there wasn't enough grit to do the job and, besides that, on a public road even at night it would have been sheer idiocy to stop for the length of time it would have taken to bury something so bulky in a roadside container.

Yet something very like a roadside container would have worked well as a depository for a garment, something that had an everyday use, something that one saw without thinking about, and something on the way to the hotel where-the killer knew-a black leather jacket could be stowed in plain sight with no one the wiser for ages…