Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

He was just coming upon an unexpected fork in the trail, when he saw a lone hiker walking his way from the southeast. As he was fairly certain that this was the direction of Nine Sisters Henge, Lynley remained where he was, waiting to see who had made this late-afternoon visit to the scene of the crime. As far as he knew, Hanken still had the stone circle taped off and guarded. So if the hiker was a journalist or press photographer, he would have found little joy in taking an extended walk across the moor.

It wasn't a man, as things turned out. Nor was it either a journalist or a photographer. Instead, as the figure approached, Lynley saw that Samantha McCallin had, for some reason, decided to treat herself to an afternoon hike out to Nine Sisters Henge.

Apparently, she recognised him at the same instant that he realised her identity, because her gait changed its rhythm. She'd been marching along with a whip tail of birch in her hand, flicking it against the heather as she stepped along the path. But seeing Lynley, she chucked the whip tail to one side, squared her shoulders, and came straight at him.

“It's a public place,” she said at once. “You can tape off the circle and post guards out there, but you can't keep people off the rest of the moor.”

“You're some miles from Broughton Manor, Miss McCallin.”

“Don't killers return to the scenes of their crimes? I'm merely living the part. Would you like to arrest me?”

“I'd like you to explain what you're doing here.”

She looked over her shoulder in the direction from which she'd come. “He thinks I killed her. Isn't that rich? I speak out in defence of him this morning, and by afternoon he's decided I did it. It's an odd way to say ‘Thanks for taking my part, Sam,’ but there you have it.”

It could have been the wind, of course, but it looked to Lynley as if she'd been crying. He said, “So what are you doing here, Miss McCallin? You must know that your presence-”

“I wanted to see the place where his fantasy died.” The wind had loosened hair from her plait, and wispy tendrils of it blew round her face. “He'd say, of course, that his fantasy died on Monday night when he asked her to marry him. But I don't think so. I think as long as Nicola walked the earth, my cousin Julian would have held on to his obsession of having a life with her. Waiting for her to change her mind. Waiting for her to-as he would say- really see him. And the funny thing is, if she'd crooked her finger at him just the right way-or even the wrong way, for that matter-he would've interpreted it as the sign he was waiting for, proving to him that she loved him in spite of everything she said and did to the contrary.”

“You disliked her, didn't you?” Lynley asked.

She gave a short laugh. “What difference does it make? She was going to get what she wanted no matter how I felt about her.”

“What she got was death. And she can't have wanted that.”

“She would have destroyed him. She would have sucked out his marrow. She was that sort of woman.”

“Was she?”

Samantha's eyes narrowed as a gust of wind spat chalky bits of earth into the air. “I'm glad she's dead. I won't lie about that. But you're making a mistake if you think that I'm the only person who'd dance on her grave, given half the chance.”

“Who else is there?”

She smiled. “I don't intend to do your job for you.”

That said, she stepped past him and walked off down the path, taking the direction he himself had traveled from the northern boundary of the moor. He wondered how she had come to be on the moor at all, as he'd seen no cars parked on the verge when he'd turned off the road. He also wondered if she parked elsewhere either out of ignorance of the presence of the hard-packed little plot of land behind the drystone wall or to hide her knowledge of the plot's existence.

He watched her, but she didn't turn back to see if he was doing so. She must have wanted to-it was human nature-and the fact that she didn't spoke worlds about her self-discipline. He himself walked on.

He recognised Nine Sisters Henge by the separate stone-the King Stone, he'd been told-that marked its location within a thick copse of birches. He came at the monument from the opposite side, however, and didn't realise that he was actually upon it till he circled the copse, took a compass reading just beyond it, reckoned that the stone circle had to be nearby, and turned back to see the pockmarked monolith rising beside a narrow path into the trees.

He retraced his steps, hands shoved into his pockets. He found DI Hanken's posted guard a few yards from the site, and he admitted Lynley to it, allowing him to duck beneath the crime scene tape and approach the sentry stone alone. Lynley paused by this and examined it. It was weather-worn, as one would expect, but it was man-worn as well. At some time in the past, indentations had been carved into the back side of the enormous column. They formed handholds and footholds so that a climber could ascend to the top.

To what use had the stone been put in ancient times? Lynley wondered. As a means of calling a community to assemble? As a lookout post for someone responsible for the safety of shamans performing rituals within the stone circle? As the reredos of an altar for sacrifice? It was impossible to say.

He slapped his hand against it and went under the trees, where the first thing he noticed was that the birches-growing so thickly together-acted as a natural windbreak. When he finally made his way into the prehistoric circle, not a breath of air was stirring.

His first thought was that it was nothing like Stonehenge, which was when he realised how firmly the word henge was rooted in his mind with a particular image. There were standing stones-nine of them, as the place name suggested-but these were far more roughly hewn than he'd expected. There were no lintel stones as there were at Stonehenge. And the external bank and the internal ditch that enclosed the standing stones were far less distinct.

He entered the circle. It was quiet as death. While the trees prevented the wind from reaching into the circle, the stones appeared to prevent the sound of the leaves being rustled from reaching into the circle either. It wouldn't be difficult for someone at night to come upon the monument unheard, then. He-or she or they-would merely have had to know where Nine Sisters Henge was or to follow a hiker there from a distance in daylight and wait for nightfall. Which in itself would not have been difficult. The moor was vast, but it was also open. On a clear day one could see for miles.

The circle's interior consisted of dying moor grass beaten lateral by a summer of visitors to the site, a flat slice of rock at the base of the northernmost standing stone, and the remains of half a dozen old fires built by campers and worshippers. Starting at the circle's perimeter, Lynley began a systematic search for Nicola Maiden's pager. It was a tedious activity, involving an inch-by-inch scrutiny of the bank, the ditch, the base of each stone, the moor grass, and the fire rings. When he'd completed his inspection of the site without finding a thing and knew he'd next have to trace Nicola's route to the location of her death, he paused to pick out the path of her flight. In doing so, he found his gaze drawn to the central fire ring.

He saw that the ring was distinguished from the rest in three ways. It was fresher-with hunks of charred wood not yet disintegrated into ashes and lumps, it bore the unmistakable marks of having been sifted through by the scenes of crime team, and the stones that encircled it had been disturbed roughly, as if someone had stamped on the fire to put it out and dislodged the barrier in the process. But seeing these stones brought to Lynley's mind the photographs of the dead Terry Cole and the burns that charred one side of the young man's face.