Elizabeth George: Payment in Blood

“If that’s your decision, sir,” he said equably. “But as to the complications attached to the removal of the body, St. James has more crime-scene experience than anyone currently on staff. You know better than I that he was our best crime-scene man then and…”

“Our best crime-scene man now. I know the standard line, Inspector. But we’ve a time problem here. St. James can’t possibly be given-” A short bark of conversation from Chief Superintendent Hillier interrupted in the background. It was immediately muffl ed, no doubt by Webberly’s hand over the mouthpiece. After a moment, the superintendent said, “All right. St. James has approval. Just get going, get up there and see to the mess.” He coughed, cleared his throat, and fi nished with, “I’m not any happier than you are about this, Tommy.”

Webberly rang off at once, allowing no time for either further discussion or questions. It was only when he was holding the dead telephone in his hand that Lynley had a moment to consider two curious details inherent to the conversation. He had been told virtually nothing about the crime, and for the fi rst time in their twelve years of association, the superintendent had called Lynley by his Christian name. An odd cause for unease, to be sure. Yet he found himself wondering for the briefest of moments what was really at the root of this murder in Scotland.

WHEN HE left both alcove and drawing room- on his way to his own suite of rooms in Howenstow’s east wing-the name fi nally struck Lynley. Joy Sinclair . He had seen it somewhere. And not all that long ago. He paused in the corridor next to a fruitwood mule chest and gazed, unfocussed, at the porcelain bowl on its top. Sinclair. Sinclair . It seemed so familiar, so within his grasp.The bowl’s delicate pattern of blue against white blurred in his vision, the figures overlapping, crossing, inverting…

Inverting. Back to front. Playing with words. It hadn’t been Joy Sinclair he had seen, but Sinclair’s Joy , a headline in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. It had been an obvious aren’t-we-clever inversion that was followed by the teasing phrase: “A score with Darkness and on to bigger things.”

He remembered thinking that the headline made her sound like a blind athlete on her way to the Olympics. And aside from the fact that he’d read far enough into the article to discover that she was no athlete but rather an author whose first play had been well received by critics and audiences seeking respite from London’s usual glitzy fare, and whose second play would open the Agincourt Theatre, he had learned nothing else. For a call from Scotland Yard had sent him to Hyde Park and a fi veyear-old girl’s naked body, shoved in among the bushes beneath the Serpentine Bridge.

Little wonder he’d not remembered Sinclair’s name until this moment. The devastating sight of Megan Walsham, the knowledge of what she’d suffered before she died, had driven every other thought from his mind for weeks. He’d moved through time in a fury, sleeping, eating, and drinking his need to fi nd Megan’s killer…and then arresting the child’s maternal uncle…and then having to tell her distraught mother who was responsible for the rape and mutilation and murder of her youngest child.

He had just come off that case, in fact. Bone-weary from long days and longer nights, yearning for rest, for a spiritual ablution to wash the filth of murder and inhumanity from his soul.

It was not to be. At least neither here nor now. He sighed, rapped his fingers sharply against the chest, and went to pack.

DETECTIVE CONSTABLE Kevin Lonan loathed drinking his tea from a flask. It always developed a repulsive film that reminded him of bath scum. For that reason, when circumstances required him to pour his longed-for afternoon cuppa from a dented Thermos resurrected from a cobwebbed corner of the Strathclyde CID office, he gagged down only a mouthful before dumping the rest out onto the meagre strip of tarmac that comprised the local airfield. Grimacing, wiping his mouth on the back of his gloved hand, he beat his arms to improve his circulation. Unlike yesterday, the sun was out, glittering like a false promise of spring against the plump drifts of snow, but still the temperature was well below freezing. And the thick bank of clouds riding down from the north promised another storm. If the party from Scotland Yard was to put in an appearance, they had better be fl aming quick about it, Lonan thought morosely.

As if in response, the steady throb of rotor blades cut through the air from the east. A moment later, a Royal Scottish Police helicopter came into view. It circled Ardmucknish Bay in a tentative survey of what the ground afforded as a landing site, then slowly touched down on a square in the tarmac that a wheezing snowplough had cleared for it thirty minutes earlier. Its rotor blades kept spinning, sending up minor snow flurries from the drifts that bordered the airfield. The noise was teeth-jarring.

The helicopter’s passenger door was shoved open by a short, plump fi gure, muffl ed like a mummy from head to toe in what looked like someone’s old brown carpeting. Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lonan decided. She threw down the steps the way one would fl ing a rope ladder over the side of a tree house, pitched out three pieces of luggage, which hit the ground with a thud, and plopped herself after them. A man followed her. He was very tall, very blond, his head bare to the cold, a well-cut cashmere overcoat, a muffl er, and gloves his only capitulation to the subfreezing temperature. He would be Inspector Lynley, Lonan thought, the object of Strathclyde CID’s particular interest at the moment, considering how his arrival had been manipulated by London from beginning to end. Lonan watched him exchanging a few words with the other officer. She gestured towards the van, and Lonan expected them at that point to join him. Instead, however, they both turned to the helicopter’s steps where a third person was slowly negotiating his descent, one made awkward and diffi cult by the heavy brace he wore upon his left leg. Like the blond, he also had no hat, and his black hair-curly, far too long, and wildly ungovernable-blew about his pale face. His features were sharp, excessively angular. He had the look of a man who never missed a detail.

At this unexpected arrival, Constable Lonan mouthed unspoken words of awe and wondered if Detective Inspector Macaskin had been given the news. London was sending in the heavy artillery: forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James. The constable pushed himself off the side of the van and marched eagerly to the helicopter, where the arrivals were folding the steps back inside and gathering their belongings.

“Have you ever given thought to the fact that there might be something breakable in my suitcase, Havers?” Lynley was asking.

“Packing on-the-job drinks?” was her tart reply. “If you’ve brought your own whisky, more the fool you. That’s a bit like taking coals to Newcastle, wouldn’t you say?”

“That has the sound of a line you’ve been waiting to use for months.” Lynley gave a wave and a nod of thanks to the helicopter’s pilot as Lonan joined them.

When the introductions were made, Lonan blurted out, “I heard you speak once in Glasgow,” as he shook St. James’ hand. Even inside the glove, Lonan could sense how thin it was, yet it gripped his own with surprising strength. “It was the lecture on the Cradley murders.”

“Ah, yes. Putting a man behind bars on the strength of his pubic hair,” Sergeant Havers murmured.

“Which is, if nothing else, metaphorically unsound,” Lynley added.

It was obvious that St. James was accustomed to the verbal sparring of his two companions, for he merely smiled and said, “We were lucky to have it. God knows we had nothing else but a set of teeth prints gone bad on the corpse.”