In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(193)

She'd jumped at the offer. She'd even taken along two of his catalogues for good measure. For some Sunday-evening light reading, she'd thought as she'd tucked them into her bag. As things were now, she certainly had Sweet FA. else to do.

“What about you?” she asked Nkata. “The inspector give you another assignment?”

“Sunday night off with my mum and dad.”

“Now, there's an assignment.” She saluted him and was about to stride off, when the phone rang on Lynley's desk. She said, “Uh-oh. Forget Sunday night, Winston.”

“Hell,” he grumbled, and reached for the phone.

His side of the conversation consisted of: “No. Not here. Sorry … Up in Derbyshire … DC Winston Nkata … Yeah. Right. Pretty much, but it's not 'xactly the same case, I'm 'fraid …” A lengthier pause as someone went on and on, followed by, “She is?” and a smile. Nkata looked at Barbara and, for some reason, gave her a thumbs-up. “Good news, that. Best news there is. Thanks.” He listened a moment longer and looked at the wall clock. “Right. Will do. Say thirty minutes? … Yeah. Oh, we definitely got someone who can take a statement.” He rang off a second time and nodded at Barbara. “That's you.”

“Me? Hang on, Winnie, you've got no rank to pull on me,” Barbara said in protest, seeing her Sunday-evening plans go down the sewer.

“Right. But I don't think you want to miss out on this.”

“I'm off the case.”

“I know that. But 'cording to the guv, this isn't exactly on the case any longer, so I don't see why you don't take it yourself.”

“Take what?”

“Vi Nevin. She's full conscious, Barb. And someone's got to take a statement from her.”

Lynley phoned DI Hanken at home, where he found him sealed within his small garage, apparently trying to make sense of instructions to assemble a child's swing set. “I'm not a bloody God damn engineer,” he fumed, and seemed grateful for anything that promised to take him away from a hopeless endeavour.

Lynley brought him into the picture. Hanken agreed that an arrow and its bow looked likely as their missing weapon. “Explains why it wasn't stowed in that grit dispenser with the knife,” he said. “And if it's initials that we're going to find on the arrow, I've a good idea whose they're likely to be.”

“I recall your telling me about the various ways Julian Britton makes money at Broughton Manor,” Lynley acknowledged. “It looks like we're finally closing in on him, Peter. I'm heading over there now to have a—”

“Heading over? Where the hell are you?” Hanken demanded. “Aren't you in London?”

Lynley was fairly certain in which direction Hanken would run when he learned why Lynley had returned so quickly to Derbyshire, and his fellow DI did not disappoint him. “I knew it was Maiden,” Hanken exclaimed at the end of Lynley's explanation. “He found that car on the moor, Thomas. And there's no way in hell he would have found it had he not known where she'd be in the first place. He knew she was on the game in London and he couldn't deal with it. So he gave her the chop. It was the only way—I dare say—that he could keep her from spilling the news to her mum.”

This was so close to what Maiden's actual desires were that Lynley felt chilled by Hanken's perspicacity. Still, he said, “Andy's said he'll arrange to take a polygraph. I can't think he'd make an offer like that if he had Nicola's blood on his hands.”

“The hell he wouldn't,” Hanken countered. “This bloke's an undercover cop, let's not forget. If he hadn't been able to lie with the best of them, he'd be a dead man now. A polygraph taken by Andy Maiden's going to be nothing more than a joke. On us, by the way.”

“Julian Britton's still got the stronger motive,” Lynley said. “Let me see if I can shake him up.”

“You're playing right into Maiden's hands. You know that, don't you? He's working you like you're wearing the same school tie.”

Which they were, in a manner of speaking. But Lynley refused to be blinded by their history. He refused to be blinded in either direction. It was as foolhardy to believe beyond doubt that Andy Maiden was the killer as it was to ignore the possible guilt of someone with a stronger motive.

Hanken rang off. Lynley had made the phone call from his hotel room, so he took five minutes to unpack his belongings before heading out to Broughton Manor. He'd left his umbrella and trench coat below in the entrance when he'd gone upstairs to place the call, so after tossing his room key onto the reception desk, he went to fetch them.

The Black Angel's earlier patrons had mostly departed, he saw. There were only three umbrellas left in the stand and, apart from his own coat, only a single jacket remained on the coat rack.

Under other circumstances, a jacket on a coat rack wouldn't have caught his attention. But as he endeavoured to untangle the hook of his umbrella from the gaping ribs of another, he knocked the jacket from its spot on the rack and thus felt obliged to pick it up from the floor.

The fact that the garment was leather didn't strike him at first. Nor did the fact that it was black make an immediate impression upon him. It was only when the silence and darkness of the previously occupied hotel bar told him all the patrons were gone that he realised the jacket had no owner.