Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(74)

“She was murdered three nights ago.”

“I was here three nights ago,” Darrow replied. His tone was surly. “Saturday’s my busiest. Anyone in the village’ll tell you as much.”

It wasn’t at all the reaction Lynley had been expecting. Perhaps surprise, perhaps confusion, perhaps reserve. But a reflex denial of culpability? That was unusual, to say the least.

“She’s been here to see you,” Lynley stated. “She telephoned this pub ten times in the last month.”

“What of it?”

“I expect you to tell me that.”

The publican seemed to be evaluating the even quality of Lynley’s voice. He appeared disconcerted that his show of belligerent uncooperation produced virtually no reaction in the London detective. “I was having none of her,” he said. “She wanted to write a flipping book.”

“About Hannah?” Lynley asked.

The tightening of Darrow’s jaw tensed every muscle in his face. “Aye. Hannah.” He went to an upturned bottle of Bushmill’s Black Label and pushed a glass against its spigot. He drained the whisky, not in a single gulp but in two or three slow swallows, all taken with his back to Lynley. “Have one?” he asked, drawing himself another.

“No.”

The man nodded, drank again. “She came out of nowhere,” he said. “Bringing a clutch of newspaper clippings about this and that book that she’d written, and going on about awards she’d received and…I don’t know what else. And she plain expected me to give her Hannah and be thankful for the attention. Well, I wouldn’t. I wasn’t having it. And I wasn’t having my Teddy exposed to that kind of muck. It’s bad enough with his mum doing herself in and providing the local ladies with gossip till he was ten years old. I wasn’t about to have it start again. Raking it all up. Upsetting the lad.”

“Hannah was your wife?”

“Aye. My wife.”

“How did Joy Sinclair happen to know about her?”

“Claimed she’d been studying up on suicides for nine or ten months to find one she thought interesting, and she’d read of Hannah’s. Caught her eye, she said.” His voice was sour. “Can you credit that, man? Caught her eye. Han wasn’t a person to her. She was a piece of meat. So I told her to f*ck herself. In just those words.”

“Ten telephone calls suggests that she was rather persistent.”

Darrow snorted. “Made no difference. She was getting nowhere. Teddy was too young to know what had happened. So she couldn’t talk to him. And she was getting nothing from me.”

“May I take it that without your cooperation, there could be no book?”

“Aye. No book. Nothing. And that’s the way it was going to stay.”

“When she came to see you, was she alone?”

“Aye.”

“Never anyone with her? Perhaps someone waiting out in the car?”

Darrow’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. They darted to the windows and back. “What d’you mean?”

It had seemed a straightforward question to Lynley. He wondered if Darrow was temporising. “Did she come with a companion?”

“She was always alone.”

“Your wife killed herself in 1973, didn’t she? Did Joy Sinclair ever give you any indication why a suicide that long ago was of interest to her?”

Darrow’s face darkened. His lips curled with loathing. “She liked the chair, Inspector. She was good enough to tell me that. She liked the bleeding chair.”

“The chair?”

“Right. Han lost a shoe when she kicked over the chair. And the woman fancied that. She called it…poignant.” He turned back to the Bushmill’s. “Begging your pardon if I don’t particularly care that someone murdered the bitch.”



ST. JAMES and his wife were both working at their respective interests on the top floor of their house, St. James in his forensic laboratory and Deborah in her developing room that adjoined it. The door between the two was open, and looking up from the report that he was compiling for the defence team in an upcoming trial, St. James engaged in a moment of simple pleasure, watching his wife. She was frowning over a collection of her photographs, a pencil stuck behind one ear and a mass of curly hair drawn back from her face with a set of combs. The light above glittered against her head like a halo. Much of the rest of her was in shadow.

“Hopeless. Pathetic,” she murmured, scribbling on the back of one picture and tossing another into a rubbish box at her feet. “Blasted light…God in heaven, Deborah, where did you learn the basic elements of composition!…Oh Lord, this is even worse!”

St. James laughed at that. Deborah looked up. “Sorry,” she said. “Am I distracting you?”

“You always distract me, my love. Far too much, I’m afraid. And especially when I’ve been away from you for twenty-four hours or more.”

A faint colour rose in her cheeks. “Well, after a year, I’m glad to hear there’s a bit of romance left between us. I…silly though, isn’t it? Were you really only gone one night to Scotland? I missed you, Simon. I find that I don’t care for going to bed without you any longer.” Her blush deepened when St. James got down from his tall stool and crossed the lab to join her in the semi-darkness of the developing room. “No, my love…I really didn’t mean…Simon, we’ll get no work done like this,” she said in insincere protest when he took her into his arms.