In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(3)

The car turned between the two oaks that marked their drive. Twenty yards along, an iron gate swung open. The road beyond curved beneath alders, poplars, and beeches, skirting a pond where the reflection of stars made a second sky. It climbed a slight rise, swung past a row of silent bungalows, and pooled out into the alluvial fan of the entrance to the King-Ryder mansion.

Their housekeeper had laid out supper for them, assembling an array of David's favourite foods. “Mr. Matthew did phone,” Portia explained in her quiet, dignified voice. A runaway from the Sudan at the age of fifteen, she'd been with Virginia for the last ten years and she had the melancholy face of a beautiful, sorrowing black Madonna. “My warmest congratulations to both of you,” she added.

David thanked her. He stood in the dining room, where the windows stretched from floor to ceiling and reflected all three of them in the glass. He admired the epergne that spilled white roses onto plaits of ivy. He fingered one of the thin silver forks. He used his thumbnail against a drip of candle wax. And he knew he wouldn't be able to force a crumb of food past the constriction in his throat.

So he told his wife that he needed a bit of time alone to unwind from the evening. He would join her later, he said. He just needed a while to decompress.

One always expected an artist to retreat to the heartbeat of his artistry. So David went to his music room. He flipped on the lights. He poured another vodka and placed the tumbler on the unprotected top of the grand piano.

He realised as he did it that Michael would never have done such a thing. Michael had been careful that way, understanding the value of a musical instrument, respectful of its boundaries, its dimensions, its possibilities. He'd been careful about most of his life as well. It was only on one crazy night in Florida that he'd got careless.

David sat at the piano. Without thinking or planning, his fingers sought out an aria he loved. It was a melody from his most auspicious failure—Mercy—and he hummed as he played it, trying and failing to recall the words to a song that had once held the key to his future.

As he played, he let his gaze travel the walls of the room, four monuments to his success. Shelves held awards. Frames enclosed certificates. Posters and playbills announced productions that even to this day were mounted in every part of the world. And photographs by the silver-framed score documented his life.

Michael was there among them. And when David's glance fell on his old friends face, his fingers shifted—of their own accord—from the aria he'd been playing to the song he knew was destined to be the hit of Hamlet. “What Dreams May Come” was its title, taken from the prince's most famous soliloquy.

He played it only halfway through before he had to stop. He found that he was so monumentally tired that his hands fell from the keys and his eyes closed. But still he could see Michael's face.

“You shouldn't have died,” he told his partner. “I thought a success would make everything different, but it only makes the prospect of failure worse.”

He took up his drink again. He left the room. He tossed back the vodka, set the tumbler next to a travertine urn in a recessed alcove, and didn't notice when he failed to push the glass in far enough and it fell to the carpeted floor.

Above him in the enormous house, he could hear a bath running. Ginny would be soaking away the stress of the evening and the tension of the months that had preceded it. He wished that he could do the same. It seemed to him that he had so much more cause.

He allowed himself to relive those glorious moments of triumph a final time: the audience rising to its feet before the curtain call had begun, the cheers, the hoarse shouts of “bravo.”

All that should have been enough for David. But it wasn't. It couldn't be. It fell, if not on ears that were deaf, then on ears that were listening to another voice entirely.

“Petersham Mews and Elvaston Place. Ten o'clock.”

“But where … ? Where are they?”

“Oh, you'll work that out.”

And now when he tried to hear the praise, the excited chatter, the paeans that were supposed to be his air, his light, his food, and his drink, all David could hear were those last four words: You'll work that out.

And it was time.

He climbed the stairs and went to the bedroom. Beyond, behind the closed door to the bathroom, his wife was enjoying her soak. She was singing with a determined happiness that told him how worried she actually was: about everything from the state of his nerves to the state of his soul.

She was a good woman, Virginia Elliott, David thought. She was the very best of his wives. It had been his intention to stay married to her till the end of his days. He simply hadn't realised how abbreviated that time would turn out to be.

Three quick movements did the job neatly.

He took the gun from a drawer in the bedside table. He raised it. He pulled the trigger.





[page]CHAPTER 1


Julian Britton was a man who knew that his life thus far had amounted to nothing. He bred his dogs, he managed the crumbling ruin that was his family's estate, and daily he tried to lecture his father away from the bottle. That was the extent of it. He hadn't been a success at anything save pouring gin down the drain, and now, at twenty-seven years of age, he felt branded by failure. But he couldn't allow that to affect him tonight. Tonight he had to prevail.

He began with his appearance, giving himself a ruthless scrutiny in his bedroom's cheval glass. He straightened the collar of his shirt and flicked a piece of lint from his shoulder. He stared at his face and schooled his features into the expression he wanted them to wear. He should look completely serious, he decided. Concerned, yes, because concern was reasonable. But he shouldn't look conflicted. And certainly he shouldn't look ripped up inside and wondering how he came to be where he was, at this precise moment, with his world a shambles.