In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(189)

When she gave her attention back to him, she saw he was watching her. “I'm impressed,” she said. “Did you do it from your chair?”

“Could have done,” he told her. “Would do today, as well, if I had a bit more free time to practise. But I wasn't in a chair back then. The chair came later. After a hang-gliding accident.”

“Rough,” she said.

“I cope. Better than most, I dare say. Now. How can I help you, Barbara?”

“Tell me about cedar arrows,” she said.

Jason Harley's Olympic gold medal represented the culmination of years of competition and practise. Years of competition and practise gave him rare expertise in the field of archery. His hang-gliding accident had forced him to consider how he might put his athletic prowess and his knowledge to use in order to support himself and the family he and his girlfriend wished to have. The result was his shop, Quiver Me Timbers, where he sold the fine carbon arrows shot by modern bows made of fiberglass or laminae of wood and where he hand-made and sold the wooden arrows that were used with the traditional long bows for which English archery had historically been known, from the Battle of Agincourt onwards.

In his shop he also provided his customers with the accoutrements of archery: from the complicated hand and body pieces worn by archers to the arrow heads—called piles, he told Barbara—that differed depending upon the use to which the arrow was being put.

What about shooting a nineteen-year-old boy in the back? Barbara wanted to ask the archer. What kind of pile would you need for that? But she went at it slowly, knowing that she was going to need a volume of information to heave at Lynley in order to make the slightest dent in his armour against her.

She asked Harley to tell her about the wooden arrows he made, particularly the arrows that he crafted from Port Orford cedar.

Cedar arrows were the only ones he made at all, he corrected her. The shafts came to him from Oregon. There they were individually weighed, graded, and subjected to a bending test prior to being shipped. “They're dependable as hell,” he told her, “which is important, because when the pull weight of the bow is high, you need an arrow that's made to withstand it. You can get arrows of pine or ash,” he went on after a moment during which he handed her a finished cedar arrow for her inspection, “some from local wood and some from Sweden. But the Oregon cedar's more easily available—because of the quantity, I suppose—and I expect you'd find every archery shop in England sells it.”

He shepherded her to the back of his shop, where his work area was. There, set at the height of his waist, a mini assembly line allowed him to move easily from the round saw that cut the slot in the arrow's shaft to the fletching jig where the cock and shaft feathers were glued into position. Araldite kept the pile in place. And, as he'd said before, the pile differed depending on the use to which the arrow would be put.

“Some archers prefer to make their own arrows,” he told her in summation. “But as it's a labour intensive job—well, I suppose you can see that for yourself, can't you—most of them find an arrow maker they like and they buy their arrows from him. He can make them distinctive in any way they prefer—within reason, of course—so long as they tell him what they want as a means of identification.”

“Identification?” Barbara asked.

“Because of the competitions,” Harley said. “That's mostly what long bows are used for these days.”

There were, he explained, two types of competitions that long bow archers engaged in: tournament shooting and field shooting. With the former, they shot at traditional targets: twelve dozen arrows fired at bull's-eyes from varying distances. For the latter, they shot in wooded areas or on hillsides: arrows fired at animals whose images were depicted on paper. But in either case, the only way a winner could be determined was by the individual identification marks that were made upon the arrow that was fired. And every competitive archer in England would be certain that his arrows could be distinguished from the arrows of every other archer who also competed. “How else could they tell whose arrow hit the target?” Harley asked reasonably.

“Right,” Barbara said. “How else.”

She'd read the post-mortem report on Terry Cole. She knew from her conversation with St. James that Lynley had been told of a third weapon beyond the knife and the stone they'd already identified as having been used on the victims. Now, with that third weapon as good as identified, she began to see how the crime had occurred.

She said, “Tell me, Mr. Harley, how fast can a good archer—with a decade or more of experience, let's say—get off successive arrows at a target? Using a long bow, that is.”

He considered the question thoughtfully, fingers pulling at his lower lip. “Ten seconds, I'd guess. At the most.”

“As long as that?”

“Let me show you.”

She thought Harley intended to demonstrate for her himself. But instead, he fetched a quiver from the display rack, slid six arrows into it, and motioned Barbara to come to his chair. “Right-handed or left?” he asked her.

“Right.”

“Okay. Turn around.”

Feeling a little foolish, she allowed him to slide the quiver onto her body and adjust the strap across her torso. “Suppose the bow's in your left hand,” he explained when he had the quiver in place. “Now reach back for the arrow. Only one.” When she had it—and not without a bit of unfamiliar groping—he pointed out that she would next have to position it on the Dacron string of the bow. Then she would have to draw the string back and take aim. “It's not like a gun,” he reminded her. “You have to reload and re-aim after every shot. A good archer can do it in just under ten seconds. But for someone like you—no offence—”