Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(96)

Darrow’s chin lowered to his chest. “How can I?” he muttered.

Lynley pressed further. “I know Joy Sinclair brought everything back to you. I know she caused you grief. But for God’s sake, did she deserve to die alone, with an eighteen-inch dagger plunged through her neck? Who of us deserves that kind of death? What crime committed in life is worth that kind of punishment? And Gowan. What about the boy? He’d done absolutely nothing, yet he died as well. Darrow! Think, man! You can’t let their deaths count for nothing!”

And then there were no more words to be said. There was only waiting for the man to decide. The fire popped once. A large ember dislodged and fell from the grate to roll against the fender. Above them, Darrow’s son continued with his chores. After an agonising pause, the man raised his heavy head.

“Come up to the flat,” he said tonelessly.



THE FLAT was reached by an outer rather than an inner stairway, running up the rear of the building. Below it, a gravel-strewn path led through the tangled mass of a forlorn garden to a gate, beyond which the endless stretch of fields lay, broken only by an occasional tree, a canal, the hulking shape of a windmill on the horizon. Everything was colourless under the melancholy sky, and the air carried upon its rich peaty scent an acknowledgement of the generations of flooding and decay that had gone into the composition of this desolate part of the country. In the distance, drainage pumps rhythmically tuh-tumped.

Opening the door, John Darrow admitted Lynley into the kitchen where Teddy was on his hands and knees with scouring pads, rags, and a pail of water, seeing to the interior of a grimy oven well past its youth. The floor surrounding him was damp and dirty. From the radio on a counter, a male singer squawked in a catarrhal voice. At their entrance, Teddy looked up from his toil, grimacing disarmingly.

“Waited too long on this mess, Dad. I’d do a sight better with a chisel, I’m afraid.” He grinned, wiping his hand on his face and laying a streak of something sludgy from cheekbone to jaw.

Darrow spoke to him with gruff affection. “Get below with you, lad. See to the pub. The oven can wait.”

The boy was more than agreeable. He hopped to his feet and flicked off the radio. “I’ll take a few rubs at it every day, shall I? That way,” again the grin, “we might have it cleaned by next Christmas.” He sketched a light-hearted salute in the air and left them.

When the door closed on the boy, Darrow spoke to Lynley. “I’ve her things in the attic. I’ll thank you to look through them up there so Teddy won’t come upon you and want to have a look for himself. It’s cold. You’ll want your coat. But at least there’s a light.”

He led the way through a meagrely furnished sitting room and down a shadowy hall off of which the flat’s two bedrooms opened. At the end of this, a recessed trapdoor in the ceiling gave them access to the attic. Darrow shoved the door upwards and pulled down a collapsible metal stairway, fairly new by the look of it.

As if reading Lynley’s mind, he said, “I come up here time and again. Whenever I need reminding.”

“Reminding?”

Darrow responded to the question drily. “When I feel the urge for a woman. Then I have a look through Hannah’s diaries. That cures the itch like nothing else.” He heaved himself up the stairs.

The attic bore qualities not entirely unlike those of a tomb. It was eerily still, airless, and only slightly less cold than the out-of-doors. Dust hung thickly upon cartons and trunks, and sudden movements sent clouds of it flying upwards in suffocating bursts. It was a small room, filled with the scent of age: those vague odours of camphor, of musty clothing, of damp and rotting wood. A weak shaft of afternoon light sifted its way through a single, heavily streaked window near the roof.

Darrow pulled on a cord hanging from the ceiling, and a bulb cast a cone of light onto the floor beneath it. He nodded towards two trunks that sat on either side of a single wooden chair. Lynley noted that neither chair nor trunks were dusty. He wondered how often Darrow paid visits to this sepulchre of his marriage.

“Her things’re in no sort of order,” the man said, “as I wasn’t much concerned with what I did with everything. The night she died I just dumped the case out into her chest of drawers as fast as I could before getting the village up to search. Then later, after the funeral, I packed everything up in those two trunks.”

“Why did she wear two coats and two sweaters that night?”

“Greed, Inspector. She couldn’t fit anything more into her case. So if she wanted to take them, she had to wear or carry them. I suppose wearing seemed easier. It was cold enough.” Darrow took a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the trunks on either side of the chair. He shoved the top off each and then said, “I’ll leave you to it. The diary you want’s on the top of the stack.”

When Darrow was gone, Lynley put on his reading spectacles. But he did not reach at once for the five bound journals that lay on top of the clothes. Rather, he began by examining her other belongings, developing an idea of what Hannah Darrow had been like.

Her clothes were of the sort that are cheaply made with the hope of passing themselves off as expensive. They were showy—beaded sweaters, clingy skirts, short gauzy dresses cut very low, trousers with narrow legs and flared bottoms and zips in the front. When he examined these, he saw how the material stretched and pulled away from the metal teeth. She had worn her clothes tight, moulded to her body.