In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (14 page)

“Sam?”

She raised her head. So deeply had she been into her attempt to release the tension of having a conversation with her uncle, she'd failed to hear his son come into the kitchen. Stupidly, she said, “Aren't you with the dogs, Julian?”

“Short shrift,” he said in explanation. “They need more but I can't give it to them now.”

“I did see to Cass. Do you want me to—”

“She's dead.”

“My God. Julian, she can't be,” Samantha cried. “I went out as soon as I spoke with you. She was fine. She'd eaten, the puppies were all asleep. I made notes of everything and left them on the clipboard. Didn't you see it? I hung it on the peg.”

“Nicola,” he said tonelessly. “Sam, she's dead. Out on Calder Moor, where she'd gone camping. Nicola's dead.”

Samantha stared at him as the word dead seemed to echo round the room. He isn't crying, she thought. What does it mean that he isn't crying? “Dead,” she repeated, careful with the word, certain that saying it the wrong way would give an impression that she didn't want to give.

He kept his eyes on her and she wished he wouldn't. She wished he'd talk. Or scream or cry or do something to indicate what was going on inside so that she would know how to behave with him. When he finally moved, it was to walk to the work top where Samantha had been chopping the peppers. He stood examining them as if they were a curiosity. Then he lifted the chef's knife and inspected it closely. Finally, he pressed his thumb firmly against the sharp blade.

“Julian!” Samantha cried. “You'll hurt yourself!”

A thin line of crimson appeared on his skin. “I don't know what to call how I feel,” he said.

Samantha, on the other hand, didn't have that problem.

I Peter Hanken apparently decided to show mercy when it came to the Marlboros. The first actions he took when they were on the road from Buxton to Padley Gorge were to lean over, flip open the Fords glove compartment, and pluck out a packet of sugarless gum. As he folded a stick of it into his mouth, Lynley blessed him for his willingness to abstain from tobacco.

The DI didn't speak as the A6 began its course through Wye Dale, hugging the placid river for several miles before dipping slightly to the southeast. It wasn't until they passed the second of the limestone quarries scarring the landscape that he made his first comment.

“Newlywed, is it?” he said with a smile. Lynley steeled himself for the ribald humour that was doubtless coming, the price one generally paid for legitimising a relationship with a woman. “Yes. Just three months. That's longer than most Hollywood marriages, I expect.”

“It's the best time. You and the wife starting out. There's nothing else like it. Your first?”

“Marriage? Yes. For both of us. We got a late start.”

“All the better.”

Lynley glanced at his companion warily, wondering if the fallout from his parting argument with Helen could be read on his face, acting on Hanken as an inspiration for a tongue-in-cheek panegyric to the blessings of the marital state. But all he saw in Hanken's expression was the evidence of a man who seemed content with his life.

“Name's Kathleen,” the DI confided. “We've got three kids. Sarah, Bella, and PJ. That's Peter Junior, our newest. Here. Have a look.” He pulled a wallet from his jacket pocket and handed it over. In pride of place was a family photo: two small girls cuddling a blue-blanketed newborn on a hospital bed with Mum and Dad cuddling the two small girls. “Family's everything. But you'll be finding that out for yourself soon enough.”

“I dare say.” Lynley tried to picture himself and Helen similarly surrounded by winsome offspring. He couldn't do it. If he summoned up his wife's image at all, it was as it had been earlier that day, pale-faced as she left him.

He stirred uncomfortably in his seat. He didn't want to discuss marriage at the moment, and he offered a silent imprecation to Nkata for having brought up the subject at all. “They're brilliant,” he said, handing the wallet back to Hanken.

“Boy's the image of his dad,” Hanken said. “Hard to tell from that snap, of course. But there you have it.”

“They're a handsome group.”

To Lynley's relief, Hanken took this as sufficient closing comment on the subject. He returned his full attention to the driving. He gave the road the same concentration that he appeared to give everything else in his immediate environment, a characteristic of the man that Lynley had had little difficulty in deducing. After all, there hadn't been a paper out of place in his office, he was running the most orderly incident room in Lynley's memory, and his clothes made him look as if his next destination were a photo shoot for GQ magazine.

They were on their way to see the parents of the dead girl, having just met the Home Office pathologist who'd traveled up from London to perform the post-mortems. They'd had their conference with her outside the post-mortem room, where she was changing from trainers into court shoes, one of which she was in the process of repairing by pounding its heel into the metal plate on the door. Announcing that women's shoes—not to mention their handbags—were designed by men to promote the enslavement of the female sex, she had eyed the DIs’ comfortable footwear with undisguised hostility and said, “I can give you ten minutes. The report'll be on your desk in the morning. Which one of you is Hanken, by the way? You? Fine. I know what you want. It's a knife with a three-inch blade. Folding knife—pocket knife—most likely, although it could be a small one used in the kitchen. Your killers right-handed and strong, quite strong. That's for the boy. The girl was done in with that chunk of stone you had off the moor. Three blows to the head. Right-handed assailant as well.”

“The same killer?” Hanken asked.

The pathologist gave her shoe five final pounds against the door as she reflected on the question. She said brusquely that the bodies could tell only what they'd told: how they'd been robbed of life, what sort of weapons had been used against them, and whether a right or left hand had wielded those weapons. Forensic evidence—fibres, hairs, blood, sputum, skin, and the like—might tell a longer, more precise story, but they'd have to queue to get the reports back from the lab for that. The naked eye could discern only so much, and she'd told them what that so much was.

She tossed her shoe onto the floor and introduced herself as Dr. Sue Myles. She was a stout woman with short-fingered hands, grey hair, and a chest that resembled the prow of a ship. But her feet, Lynley noted as she slid them into her shoes, were as slender as a debutante's.

“One of the boy's back wounds was more of a gouge,” she went on. “The blow chipped the left scapula, so if you find a likely weapon, we can go for a match from the blade to the bone.”

That wound didn't kill him? Hanken wanted to know.

“The poor sod bled to death. Would've taken some minutes, but once he took a wound to the femoral artery—that's in the groin, by the way—he was done for.”

“And the girl?” Lynley asked.

“Skull cracked like an egg. The post-cerebral artery was pierced.”

Which meant what exactly, Hanken enquired.

“Epidural haematoma. Internal bleeding, pressure on the brain. She died in less than an hour.”

“It took longer than the boy?”

“Right. But she'd have been unconscious once she was hit.”

“Could we have two killers?” Hanken asked directly.

“Could have, yes,” Dr. Myles confirmed.

“Defensive wounds on the boy?” Lynley asked.

None that were obvious, Dr. Myles replied. She settled her trainers into a sports bag and zipped it smartly before giving the officers her attention again.

Hanken asked for confirmation on the times of the deaths. Dr. Myles enquired what times his own forensic pathologist had given him. Thirty-six to forty-eight hours before the bodies had been discovered, Hanken told her.

“I wouldn't argue with that.” And she scooped up her bag, nodded a curt farewell, and headed towards the hospital exit.

Now in the car, Lynley reflected on what they knew: that the boy had brought nothing with him into the camp site; that there were anonymous and threatening letters left at the scene; that the girl was unconscious for close to an hour; that the two means of murder were entirely different.

Lynley was dwelling on this last thought when Hanken swung the car to the left, and they headed north in the direction of a town called Tideswell. Along this route they ultimately regained the River Wye, where the steep cliffs and the woods surrounding Miller's Dale had long since brought dusk to the village. Just beyond the last cottage, a narrow lane veered northwest and Hanken steered the Ford into it. They quickly climbed above the woods and the valley and within minutes were cruising along a vast expanse of heather and gorse that appeared to undulate endlessly towards the horizon.

“Calder Moor,” Hanken said. “The largest moor in all the White Peak. It stretches from here to Castleton.” He drove another minute in silence till they came to a lay-by. He pulled into it and let the engine idle. “If she'd gone camping in the Dark Peak, we'd have had Mountain Rescue going after her eventually when she didn't turn up. No little old bat with a doggy to walk would've taken her constitutional up there and found the bodies. But this”—he swept his hand in an arc above the dashboard—“is accessible, all of it. There're miles and miles to cover if someone gets lost, but at least those miles can be handled on foot. Not an easy walk and not entirely safe. But easier to tackle than the peat bogs you'll find round Kinder Scout. If someone had to be murdered in the district, better it happened here, on the limestone plateau, than the other.”

“Is this where Nicola Maiden set off?” Lynley asked. There was no track that he could see from the car. The girl would have had to fight her way through everything from bracken to bilberry.

Hanken rolled down his window and spat out his chewing gum. He reached over Lynley and flipped open the glove compartment to fish out another stick. “She set off from the other side, northwest of here. She was hiking out to Nine Sisters Henge, which's closer to the western boundary of the moor. Rather more of interest to be looked at on that side: tumuli, caverns, caves, barrows. Nine Sisters Henge is the highlight.”

“You're from this area?” Lynley asked.

Hanken didn't answer at once. He looked as if he was considering whether to answer at all. He made the decision at last and said, “From Wirksworth,” and appeared to seal his lips on the subject.

“You're lucky to live where your history is. I wish I could say the same for myself.”

“Depends on the history,” Hanken said, and changed gears abruptly with, “Want to have a look at the site?”

Lynley was wise enough to know that how he met the offer to look over the crime scene would be crucial to the relationship he developed with the other officer. The truth was that he did want to see the site of the murders. No matter the point at which he joined an investigation, there was always a time during the course of the enquiry when he felt the need to look things over himself. Not because he didn't trust the competence of his fellow investigators but because only through a firsthand viewing of as much as possible of what related to the case was he able to become a part of the crime. And it was in becoming a part of the crime that he did his best work. Photographs, reports, and physical evidence conveyed a great deal. But sometimes the place where a murder occurred held back secrets from even the most astute observer. It would be in pursuit of those secrets that Lynley would inspect a murder scene. However, inspecting this particular murder scene ran the risk of unnecessarily alienating DI Hanken, and nothing Hanken had said or done so far even hinted that he might overlook a detail.

There would be an occasion, Lynley thought, when he and the other officer wouldn't be working this case in each other's presence. When that occasion arose, he would have ample opportunity to examine the location where Nicola Maiden and the boy had died.

“You and your team have covered that end of things, as far as I can see,” Lynley said. “It wastes our time for me to go over what you've already done.”

Hanken gave him another lengthy scrutiny, chewing his gum in staccato. “Wise decision,” he said with a nod as he put the car back into gear.

They cruised northwards along the eastern edge of the moor. Perhaps a mile beyond the little market town of Tideswell, they turned to the east and began to leave the heather, bilberry, and bracken behind. They drove a short distance into a dale—its gentle slopes dotted with trees that were only just beginning to display the foliage of the coming autumn—and at a junction that was curiously signposted to the “plague village,” they headed north again.

Less than quarter of an hour took them to Maiden Hall, situated in the shelter of limes and chestnut trees on a hillside not far from Padley Gorge. The route coursed them through a verdant woodland and along the edge of an incision in the landscape made by a brook that tumbled out of the woods and cut a meandering path between slopes of limestone, fern, and wild grass. The turnoff to Maiden Hall rose suddenly as they entered another stretch of woodland. It twisted up a hillside and spilled out into a gravel drive that swung round the front of a gabled stone Victorian structure and led to a car park behind it.

The hotel entrance was actually at the back of the building. There a discreet sign printed with the single word Reception directed them through a passage and into the hunting lodge itself. A small desk stood just inside. Beyond this a sitting room apparently served as the hotel lounge, where the original entrance to the building had been converted to a bar and the room itself had been restored with oak wainscoting, subdued cream and umber wallpaper, and overstuffed furniture. As it was too early for any of the residents to be gathering for preprandial drinks, the lounge was deserted. But Lynley and Hanken hadn't been in the room for a minute before a dumpling-shaped woman—red-eyed and red-nosed from weeping—came from what appeared to be the dining room and greeted them with some considerable dignity.

There were no rooms available for the evening, she told them quietly. And as there had been a sudden death in the family, the dining room would not be open tonight. But she would be happy to recommend several restaurants in the area should the gentlemen require one.