Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(77)

“I remember it, all right,” he said, leading Lynley and Havers into his well-appointed office. He adjusted beige venetian blinds in a manner of proud ownership, then picked up a telephone, dialled three numbers, and said, “Plater here. Will you bring me the file on Darrow, Hannah. D-a-r-r-o-w. It’ll be in 1973…. A closed case…Right.” He swivelled his chair to a table behind his desk and tossed back over his shoulder, “Coffee?”

When the other two accepted his offer, Plater did the honours with an efficient-looking coffee maker, passing steaming mugs over to them along with milk and sugar. He himself drank appreciatively, yet with remarkable delicacy for a man so energetic and so fierce of feature. With its implacable jaw and clear Nordic eyes, his face reflected the savage Viking warriors from whom he no doubt had taken his blood.

“You’re not the first to come asking about the Darrow woman,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

“The writer Joy Sinclair was here,” Lynley responded, and to Plater’s quickly cocked head, added, “She was murdered this past weekend in Scotland.”

The chief constable’s adjustment in position indicated his interest. “Is there a connection?”

“Merely a gut feeling at the moment. Did Sinclair come to you alone?”

“Yes. Persistent she was, too. Arrived without an appointment, and as she wasn’t a member of the Force, there was a bit of a wait.” Plater smiled. “Just over two hours, as I recall. But she put in the time, so I went ahead and saw her. This was…sometime early last month.”

“What did she want?”

“Conversation mostly. A look at what we had on the Darrow woman. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have made it available to anyone, but she had two letters of introduction, one from a Welsh chief constable she’d worked with on a book and another from a detective superintendent somewhere in the south. Devon, perhaps. Beyond that, she’d an impressive list of credentials—at least two Silver Daggers, I recall—that she wasn’t above showing off to convince me she wasn’t hanging about the entrance hall in the hope of an hour’s natter.”

A deferential knock upon the door heralded a young constable who handed his chief a thick folder and made himself scarce. Plater opened the folder and drew out a stack of police photographs.

They were, Lynley saw, standard crime-scene work. Starkly black and white, they still depicted death with grim attention to detail, going so far as to include an elongated shadow cast by the hanging body of Hannah Darrow. There was little else to see. The room was virtually unfurnished, with an open-beam ceiling, a floor of wide but badly pitted planks, and rough-hewn wooden walls. These appeared to be curved, small four-paned windows their only decoration. A plain cane-seated chair lay on its side beneath the body, and one of her shoes had fallen off and rested against a rung. She had not used rope, but rather what appeared to be a dark scarf, attached to a hook in a ceiling beam, and her head hung forward with long blonde hair curtaining the worst distortion of her face.

Lynley scrutinised the photographs, one after another, feeling a twinge of uncertainty. He handed them to Havers and watched as she sorted through them, but she returned them to Plater without remark.

“Where were the photographs taken?” he asked the chief constable.

“She was found in a mill out on Mildenhall Fen, about a mile from the village.”

“Is the mill still there?”

Plater shook his head. “Torn down three or four years past, I’m afraid. Not that it would do you too much good to see it. Although,” his voice was momentarily reflective, “the Sinclair woman asked to see it as well.”

“Did she?” Lynley asked thoughtfully. He wondered about that request and considered what John Darrow had told him: Joy had taken ten months to find the death she wanted to write about. “Are you absolutely certain this was a suicide?” he asked the chief constable.

In answer, Plater riffled through the file. He brought out a single piece of notebook paper. Torn in several places, it bore the trace of creases from having been crumpled and then pressed in among other papers to smooth it out. Lynley scanned the few words, written in a large, childish script with rounded letters and tiny circles used in place of periods and dots.



I must go, it’s time…There’s a tree that’s dead, but it goes on swaying in the wind with the others. So it seems to me that if I die, I’ll still have a part in life, one way or another. Good-bye, my darling.



“Pretty straightforward, that,” Plater commented.

“Where was this found?”

“On the kitchen table at her home. With the pen right beside it, Inspector.”

“Who found it?”

“Her husband. Evidently, she was supposed to help him in the pub that night. When she didn’t show up, he went upstairs to their flat. He saw the note, panicked, ran out looking for her. When he couldn’t find her, he came back, closed the pub, and got up a group of men for a proper search. She was found in the mill,” Plater referred to the file, “shortly after midnight.”

“Who found her?”

“Her husband. Accompanied,” he noted hastily when he saw Lynley start to speak, “by two blokes from the village who were no particular friends of his.” Plater smiled affably. “I expect you’re thinking what we all thought at first, Inspector. That Darrow lured his wife out to the mill, strung her up, and fashioned the note himself. But we checked on that angle. The note’s genuine enough. Our writing people verify that. And although both their prints were on the paper—Hannah’s and her husband’s—his are explained away easily enough. He’d picked up the paper from the kitchen table where she’d left it for him. Hardly questionable behaviour under the circumstances. Besides, Hannah Darrow was wearing plenty of ballast that night to make certain she did the job right and proper. She had on two wool coats and two heavy sweaters. And you can’t tell me her husband talked her into going for an evening stroll all done up like that.”