In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(223)

“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.”