A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(41)

“They ’as inside when I got here,” Parker said.

“Were they?” Boscowan asked with a thin smile. When Parker returned it, momentarily relieved by what he mistakenly perceived as bonhomie in his superior, Boscowan snarled, “Well, get them out now! Which is bloody well what you should have done in the first place!”

Lynley was aware of that fact himself. He knew that St. James was aware of it as well. Yet in the confusion engendered by Nancy’s hysteria, the chaos of the sitting room, and the sight of Cambrey’s body, both of them had disregarded or forgotten or developed an uncharacteristic indifference to that most basic tenet of police work. They had not sealed the crime scene. While they had not touched anything, they had been in the room, Trenarrow had been in the room, not to mention Helen and Deborah and Nancy in the kitchen and then upstairs. With all of them leaving fibres and hairs and fingerprints everywhere. What a nightmare for the forensic team. And he himself—a policeman—had been responsible for creating it, or at least for doing nothing productive to stop it. His behaviour had been unforgivably incompetent, and he could not excuse it by telling himself that he hadn’t been thinking straight due to his being acquainted with the principals involved in the crime itself. For he’d known the principals involved in crimes before and had always kept his head. But not this time. He’d lost his grip the moment St. James involved Deborah.

Boscowan had said nothing more in condemnation of anyone. He had merely taken their fingerprints and sent them to stand in the kitchen while he and a sergeant went upstairs to talk to Nancy and the crime scene team began their work in the sitting room. He spent nearly an hour with Nancy, patiently taking her back and forth over the facts. Having gleaned from her what little he could, he sent her home with Lynley, home to her father.

Now, Lynley looked up at the lodge. The front door was closed. The windows were shut, the curtains drawn. Darkness enfolded it, and the trellised red roses that walled in the porch and encircled the windows on the ground floor looked like feather-edged smudges of ink in the shadows.

“I’ll come in with you,” Lynley said, “just in case your father’s not yet home.”

Nancy stirred in the rear seat where, between Lady Helen and St. James, she held her sleeping baby. Dr. Trenarrow had given her a mild sedative, and for the time being the drug shielded her from shock.

“Dad’s only sleeping,” she murmured, resting her cheek on Molly’s head. “I spoke with him on the phone after the interval. At the play. He’s gone to bed.”

“He wasn’t home when I phoned at half past twelve,” Lynley said. “So he may not be home now. If he isn’t, I’d rather you and Molly came on to the house with us and not stay here alone. We can leave him a note.”

“He’s only sleeping. The phone’s in the sitting room. His bedroom’s upstairs. He mightn’t have heard it.”

“Wouldn’t Mark have heard it then?”

“Mark?” Nancy hesitated. Obviously, she hadn’t yet considered her brother. “No. Mark sleeps heavy, doesn’t he? Plays his music sometimes as well. He’d not have heard. But they’re both upstairs asleep. For certain.” She moved on the seat, preparatory to getting out. St. James opened the door. “I’ll just go on in. I do thank you. I can’t think what would’ve happened if I hadn’t found you on Paul Lane.”

Her words were growing progressively drowsier. Lynley got out, and with St. James he helped her from the car. Despite Nancy’s declaration that both father and brother were sleeping soundly in the lodge, Lynley had no intention of leaving her without making sure that this was the case.

Beneath her words he had heard the unmistakable note of urgency which generally accompanies a lie. It was not inconceivable that she had spoken to her father by telephone during the evening. But he had not been home when Lynley had phoned from Gull Cottage just ninety minutes ago, and Nancy’s protestations that he—as well as her brother—would sleep through the noise of the telephone were not only improbable but also indicative of a need to conceal.

Taking Nancy’s arm, he led her up the uneven flagstone path and onto the porch where the climbing roses cast a sweet fragrance on the warm night air. Once inside the house, a quick look in the rooms affirmed his suspicions. The lodge was empty. As Nancy drifted into the sitting room and sat in a cane-backed rocking chair where she sang tonelessly to her daughter, he went back to the front door.

“No one’s here,” he said to the others. “But I think I’d rather wait for John than take Nancy up to the house. Do you want to go on yourselves?”

St. James made the decision for them all. “We’ll come in.”

They joined Nancy in the sitting room, taking places among and upon the overstuffed furniture. No one spoke. Instead they each attended to the Penellin personal effects which crammed the walls, the table tops, and the floor, attesting to the lives and personalities of the family who had occupied the lodge for twenty-five years. Spanish porcelains—the passion of Nancy’s mother—collected dust upon a spinet piano. Mounted butterflies in a dozen frames hung on one wall and these, along with a quantity of aging tennis trophies, spoke of the wide swings which Mark Penellin’s interests took. A broad bay window displayed a mass of Nancy’s poorly executed petit point pillows, faded and looking in their serried line as if they’d been placed there to get them out of the way. In one corner, a television set held the room’s only photograph, one taken of Nancy, Mark, and their mother at Christmastime shortly before the railway disaster that ended Mrs. Penellin’s life.