In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (85 page)

Lynley told the Brittons and Samantha McCallin to remain in the Long Gallery with their police guards until further notice. He left them there.

He sped north from Broughton Manor towards Bakewell, propelled by an urgency born of dread. Andy believed that the investigation was heading unstoppably in his direction, and everything Lynley and Hanken had done and said at their last two meetings with the man had communicated that brutal fact. Should he be arrested for his daughter's murder—should he even be questioned more thoroughly about his daughter's murder—the truth of Nicola's life in London would come out. And he'd already demonstrated the extremes to which he was willing to go in order to keep the truth of that life hidden.

Lynley tore across the district to Sparrowpit and flew along the country road beyond it to the white iron gate, behind which lay the unbroken expanse of Calder Moor. A Land Rover stood at the far end of the truncated lane that led onto the moor. Directly behind it was a rusting Morris.

Lynley set off at a jog along the muddy, rut-filled footpath. Because he did not wish to consider the extreme Andy might have gone to in order to keep Nicola's secrets from her mother, he concentrated on the one recollection that had bound him to the other man for more than ten years.

Wearing a wire is the easy part, boy-o, Dennis Hextell had told him. Opening your mouth without sounding like you've got starch in your knickers is something else. Hextell had despised him, had patiently anticipated his failure to portray himself undercover as anything other than what he was: the privileged son of a privileged son. Andy Maiden, on the other hand, said, Give him a chance, Den. And when that chance had resulted in an entire lorry of semtex—intended as bait—hijacked by the very people it was intended to entrap, the message Americans don't use the word torch, Jack arrived at the Met within the same hour and served as illustration of how a single syllable can cost lives and destroy careers. That it hadn't destroyed Lynley's was owing to Andy Maiden. He'd taken the stricken young officer aside after the subsequent Belfast bombing and said, “Come in here, Tommy. Talk to me. talk.”

And Lynley had done, eventually. He had poured out his guilt, his confusion, and his sorrow in a manner that ultimately told him how badly he needed a figure to act the role of parent in his life.

Andy Maiden had stepped into that part without ever questioning why Lynley had needed him so desperately to do so. He'd said, “Listen to me, son,” and Lynley had listened, in small part because the other man was his superior officer, in large part because no one before had ever used the word son when speaking to him. Lynley came from a world where people recognised their individual places in the social hierarchy and generally kept to them or felt the consequences for not doing so. But Andy Maiden was not such a man. “You're not cut out for SO10,” Andy had told him. “What you've been through proves that, Tommy. But you had to go through it to know, d'you understand? And there's no sin in learning, son. There's only sin in refusing to take what you've learned and do something with it.”

That guiding philosophy of Andy Maiden's life reverberated now in Lynley's mind. The SO 10 officer had used it to map his entire career, and there was very little in the past few days of their re-acquaintance to reassure Lynley that Andy wouldn't follow that same philosophy today.

Lynley's fears drove him towards Nine Sisters Henge. When he reached it, the place was silent, except for the wind. This gushed and ceased and gushed in great gusts like air from a bellows. It blew from the east off the Irish Sea and promised more rain in the coming hours.

Lynley approached the copse and entered. The ground was still damp from the morning rain, and leaves fallen from the birches made a spongy padding beneath his feet. He followed the path that led from the sentry stone into the middle of the copse. Out of the wind, only the tree leaves susurrating provided sound aside from his own breathing, which was harsh from exertion.

At the final moment, he found that he didn't want to approach. He didn't want to see, and more than anything he didn't want to know. But he forced himself forward into the circle. And it was at the circle's centre that he found them.

Nan Maiden half-sat and half-knelt, her legs folded beneath her and her back to Lynley. Andy Maiden lay, one leg cocked and the other straight out, with his head and shoulders cradled in his wife's lap.

The rational part of Lynley's mind said, That would be where all the blood is coming from, from his head and his shoulders. But the heart of Lynley said, Good God no, and wished what he saw as he circled round the two figures was only a dream: a nightmare coming, as all dreams come, from what lies within the subconscious and cries for scrutiny when one is most afraid.

He said, “Mrs. Maiden. Nancy.”

Nan raised her head. She'd bent to Andy, so her cheeks and her forehead were splodged with his blood. She wasn't weeping and perhaps, beyond tears at this point, she hadn't wept at all. She said, “He thought he'd failed. And when he found that he couldn't make things good again …” Her hands tightened on her husband's body, trying to press closed the gash in his neck where the blood had throbbed out of him, bathing his clothes and pooling beneath him. “He had to do … something.”

Lynley saw that a blood-spattered paper lay crumpled on the ground next to her. On it, he read what he'd expected to see: “I did it. Nancy, I'm sorry.” Andy Maiden's brief and apocryphal confession to the murder of a daughter he had deeply loved.

“I didn't want to believe, you see,” Nan Maiden said, gazing down at her husband's ashen face and smoothing back his hair. “I couldn't believe and live with myself. And continue to live with him. I saw that something was terribly wrong when his nerves went bad, but I couldn't think he'd ever have hurt her. How could I think it? Even now. How?”

“Mrs. Maiden …” Lynley had no words for her. She was too much in shock to comprehend the scope of what lay behind her husband's actions. Right now her horror—born of her husband's putative murder of their daughter—was quite enough for her to contend with.

Lynley squatted next to Nan Maiden and put his hand on her shoulder. “Mrs. Maiden,” he said. “Come away from here. I've left my mobile in the car and we're going to need to phone the police.”

“He is the police,” she said. “He loved that job. He couldn't do it any longer because his nerves wouldn't take it.”

“Yes,” Lynley said, “Yes. I've been told.”

“Which is why I knew, you see. But still I couldn't be sure. I could never be sure, so I didn't want to say. I couldn't risk it.”

“Of course.” Lynley tried to urge her to her feet. “Mrs. Maiden, if you'll come—”

“I thought if I could just protect him from ever having to know … That's what I wanted to do. But it turns out that he knew about everything anyway, didn't he, so we might have actually talked about it, Andy and I. And if we'd talked about it … Do you see what that means? If we'd talked, I could have stopped him. I know it. I hated what she was doing—at first I thought I'd die from the knowledge of it—and if I'd known that she'd told him what she was doing as well …” Nan bent to Andy again. “We would have had each other. At the very least. We could have talked. And I would have said the right words to stop him.”

Lynley dropped his hand from her shoulder. He'd been listening all along, but he suddenly realised that he hadn't been hearing. The sight of Andy—his throat slashed open by his own hand—had clouded all his senses save his vision. But he finally heard what Nan Maiden was saying. Hearing, he finally understood.

“You knew about her,” he said. “You knew.”

And a yawning chasm of responsibility opened up beneath him as he saw the part he himself had played in Andy Maiden's purposeless death.

“I followed him,” Matthew King-Ryder said.

They'd taken him to an interview room, where he sat at one side of a Formica-topped table while Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata sat on the other side. In between them at one end of the table, a tape player whirred, recording his answers.

King-Ryder appeared defeated by more than one aspect of his present situation. His future sealed by the existence of a leather jacket and the presence of a sliver of Port Orford cedar in the wound of one of his victims, he had apparently turned to a review of some of the unpleasant realities that had led him to this juncture. Those past realities joined with his future prospects to alter him appreciably. Upon his entry into the interview room, the vengeance-fueled anger that had defined his arrival at the Agincourt Theatre had become the devastated submission of the fighter who faces surrender.

He told the first part of his story in a monotone. This was the background in which he laid out the grievance that had prompted him to blackmail his own father. David King-Ryder, worth so many millions that it took the services of a team of accountants to keep track of all his money, had decided to put his fortune into a fund for creative artists upon his death, leaving not a penny of it to his own children. One of these children accepted the terms of the King-Ryder will with the resignation of a daughter who knew only too well that it would be profitless to argue against such a course of action. The other child—Matthew—had sought a way round the situation.

“I'd known about the Hamlet music for years, but Dad didn't know that,” Matthew told them. “He wouldn't have known since he and my mother were long divorced when Michael wrote the score, and he never realised that Michael had kept in touch with us. He was actually more like a dad to me than Dad was, Michael Chandler. He played the score for me—parts of it, that is—when I visited him for tea at half-terms and holidays. He wasn't married then, but he wanted a son and I was happy enough for him to act the part of my father.”

David King-Ryder hadn't thought the Hamlet score had much potential, so upon Michael Chandler's completion of it, the partners had filed it away twenty-two years ago. There it had remained—buried among the King-Ryder/Chandler memorabilia in the offices of King-Ryder Productions in Soho. Thus, when David King-Ryder had presented it as his latest effort, Matthew had instantly recognised not only the music and the lyrics but also what they represented to his father: a final attempt to salvage a reputation that had been all but destroyed by two successive and expensive failures as a solo act once his longtime partner had drowned.

It hadn't taken much effort for Matthew to find the original score. And once he had it in his hands, he saw how he could make some money from it. His father wouldn't know who had the score—anyone from the production offices could have nicked it from the files if they'd known where to look—and because his reputation was paramount to him, he'd pay whatever was asked to get the music back. In that way, Matthew would have the inheritance his father's will denied him.

The scheme had been simple. Four weeks before the opening of Hamlet, Matthew had sent a page of the score to his father's home with an anonymous note. If one million pounds wasn't paid into an account in St. Helier, the score would be sent to the biggest tabloid in the country just in time for opening night. Once the money was in the bank, David King-Ryder would be informed where to pick up the rest of the music.

“When I had the money, I waited till a week before the opening,” Matthew told them. “I wanted him to sweat.”

He sent his dad a note then and gave him the instructions to go to the phone boxes in South Kensington and wait for further instructions. At ten o'clock, he told him, David King-Ryder would be informed where the music could be found.

“But Terry Cole answered the phone that night, not your dad,” Barbara said. “Why didn't you recognise the different voice?”

“He said ‘yeah,’ that's all,” Matthew told her. “I thought he was nervous, in a hurry. And he sounded like someone who was expecting the call.”

In the days that followed, he'd seen that his father was agitated about something, but he'd assumed that King-Ryder was in a state about having had to pay out one million pounds. He'd had no way of knowing that his father was daily growing more frantic as the phone call he kept hoping to receive—from the blackmailer who, he believed, had failed to contact him at the phone box in Elvaston Place—did not materialise. As the premier of Hamlet approached, David King-Ryder had started to see himself in the power of someone who was either going to bleed him dry with more demands for money over the years or ruin him forever by releasing Michael Chandler's music to the tabloids.

“When he hadn't heard by opening night and the production was such a success … You know what happened.”

“He blew out his brains,” Barbara said. “That's owing to you.”

“I didn't mean him to die,” King-Ryder cried. “He was my dad. But I thought it wasn't fair that all his money … every penny of his money except that measly bequest to Ginny …” He lowered his gaze, spoke fiercely to hands rather than to Barbara and Winston. “He owed me something. He hadn't been much of a father to me. He owed me at least this much.”

“Why didn't you just ask him for it?” Nkata asked.

Matthew breathed out a bitter laugh. “Dad worked to be who and where he was. He expected me to do the same. And I always did—I worked and I worked—and I would have kept on working. But then I saw that he was going to take a shortcut to his own success through Michael's music. And I decided that if he could take a shortcut, so could I. And it would have come out all right in the end if that bloody little bastard hadn't showed up. And then when I saw that he intended to use the music and to play the same rotten game with me, I had to do something. I couldn't just sit there and let it happen.”

Barbara frowned. Everything until that moment had fitted perfectly into the picture. She said, “Play the same game? What?”

“Blackmail,” Matthew King-Ryder said. “Cole walked into my office with that smirk on his face and said, ‘I got something here that I need your help with, Mr. King-Ryder,’ and as soon as I saw it—a single sheet just like I'd sent to my dad—I knew exactly what that little shit had in mind. I asked him how he came to have it in his possession, but he wouldn't tell me. So I threw him out. But I followed him. I knew he wasn't in it alone.”