In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (70 page)

He said to Havers, “You were given an assignment.”

“I got the warrant, Inspector. I set up a team for the search, and I met them. I told them what they—”

“You were directed to be a part of that team, Havers.”

“But the thing is that I believed … I had this gut feeling—”

“No. There is no thing. There is no gut feeling. Not in your position.”

Helen said, “Tommy …”

He said, “No. Forget it. It's done. You've defied me every inch of the way, Havers. You're off the case.”

“But—”

“Do you want chapter and verse?”

“Tommy.” Helen reached in his direction. He could see that she wanted to intercede between them. She so hated his anger. For her sake, he did his best to control it.

“Anyone else in your position—demoted, having barely escaped criminal prosecution—and with your history of failure in CID—”

“That's low.” Havers’ words sounded faint.

“—would have toed every line that was drawn from the instant AC Hillier pronounced sentence.”

“Hillier's a pig. You know it.”

“Anyone else,” he went doggedly on, “would have dotted every i in sight and double-crossed every t for good measure. In your case, all that was asked of you was a bit of research through some SO 10 cases, research which you had to be ordered back to on more than one occasion in the last few days.”

“But I did it. You got the report. I did it.”

“And after that you went your own way.”

“Because I saw those pictures. In your office. This morning. I saw that the flat in Fulham had been searched, and I tried to tell you, but you wouldn't hear me out. So what could I do?” She didn't wait for an answer, likely knowing what he would say. “And when Mrs. Baden handed over that music and I saw who'd written it, I knew we'd found our man, Inspector. All right. I should have gone with the team to Notting Hill. You told me to go, and I didn't. But can't you please look at how much time I ended up saving us? You're about to trot back up to Derbyshire, aren't you? I've saved you the trip.”

Lynley blinked. He said, “Havers, do you actually think I give credence to this nonsense?”

Nonsense. She mouthed the word rather than to speak it.

Helen looked from one of them to the other. She dropped her hand. Expression regretful, she reached for a sheet of the music. Havers looked at her, which sparked Lynley's anger. He wouldn't have his wife put into the middle.

“Report to Webberly in the morning,” he told Havers. “Whatever your next assignment is, get it from him.”

“You aren't even looking at what's in front of you,” Havers said, but she no longer sounded argumentative or defiant, merely mystified. Which angered him more.

“Do you need a map out of here, Barbara?” he asked her.

“Tommy!” Helen cried.

“Sod you,” Havers said.

She rose from the sofa with a fair amount of dignity. She took up her tattered bag. As she moved past the coffee table and sailed out of the room, five sheets from the Chandler music fluttered to the floor.

he Derbyshire weather matched DI Peter Hanken's mood: grim. While a silver sky dissolved into rain, he navigated the road between Buxton and Bakewell, wondering what it meant that a black leather jacket was missing from the evidence taken from Nine Sisters Henge. The missing rain gear had been easy to explain. The missing jacket was not. For a single killer did not need two articles of clothing to cover up the blood from a chopped-up victim.

He hadn't made the search for Terry Cole's missing leather jacket entirely unassisted. DC Mott had been with him, a flapjack in his hand. As evidence officer, Mott's presence was essential. But he did little enough to help with the search. Instead, he munched loudly and appreciatively with much smacking of lips and pronounced that he'd “never seen no black leather jacket, Guv,” throughout Hanken's inspection.

Mott's record keeping had been vindicated. There was no jacket. That message transmitted to London, Hanken set out for Bakewell and Broughton Manor. Jacket or no, there was still Julian Britton to clear off or keep on their list of suspects.

As Hanken cruised over the bridge that spanned the River Wye, he unexpectedly entered another century. Despite the rain that was continuing to fall unabated like a harbinger of grief to come, a fierce battle was going on round the manor house. On the hillside that descended to the river, five or six dozen Royalist soldiers, wearing the varied colours of the Monarch and the nobility, were flailing swords with an equal number of armoured and pot-helmeted Parliamentarians. On the meadow beneath them, more armoured soldiers were rolling cannon into position, while on a far slope a pistol-wielding division of helmeted infantry made for the south gate of the manor house with a battering ram trundling along among them.

The Cavaliers and the Roundheads were re-fighting a battle of the Civil War, Hanken concluded. Julian Britton was engaged in yet another means of raising money for the restoration of his home.

A seventeenth-century milkmaid standing beneath a Burberry umbrella waved Hanken to a makeshift car park a short distance from the house. There, various other players in the reenactment drama were milling about in the guise of Royals, peasants, farmers, noblemen, surgeons, and musketeers. Eating from a soup tin in the door of a caravan, ill-fated King Charles—a bloody bandage round his head—chatted up a wench who was carrying a basket of bread getting soaked by the rain. Not far away, a black-garbed Oliver Cromwell struggled out of his armour, attempting the feat without untying the lacing. Dogs and children dashed in and out of the crowd, while a snack stall did a thriving business in whatever they could serve that was hot and steaming.

Hanken parked and asked where the Brittons were hiding. He was directed to a viewing area within the third of the manor's ruined gardens. There, on the southwest side of the house, a stalwart crowd huddled on makeshift stands and deck chairs to watch the unfolding reenactment from beneath a motley mushrooming of umbrellas.

To one side of the viewers, a lone man sat on a tripod stool of the type used at the turn of the century by artists or hunters on safari. He wore an antique tweed suit and an old pith helmet, and he sheltered himself from the rain with a striped umbrella. He watched the action with a collapsible telescope. A walking stick lay by his feet. Jeremy Britton, Hanken thought, dressed as always in his forebears’ clothing.

Hanken approached him. “Mr. Britton? You won't remember me. DI Peter Hanken. Buxton CID.”

Britton half turned on the stool. He'd aged greatly, Hanken thought, since their sole encounter at the Buxton police station five years in the past. Britton had been drunk at the time. His car had been broken into on the High Street while he was “taking the waters”—undoubtedly a euphemism for his imbibing something considerably stronger than the town's mineral water—and he was demanding action, satisfaction, and immediate vengeance upon the ill-dressed and worse-bred hooligans who'd violated him so egregiously.

Looking at Jeremy Britton now, Hanken could see the results of a lifetime spent in drink. Liver damage showed in the colour and texture of Britton's skin and in the cooked-egg-yolk look of his eyes. Hanken noted the Thermos on the far side of the camp stool on which Britton was sitting. He doubted it contained either coffee or tea.

“I'm looking for Julian,” Hanken said. “Is he taking part in the battle, Mr. Britton?”

“Julie?” Britton squinted through the rain. “Don't know where he's gone off to. Not part of this though.” He waved at the drama below. The battering ram was mired in the mud and the Cavaliers were taking advantage of this blip on the screen of the Roundheads’ plans. Swords drawn, a crush of them were swarming down the slope from the house to fend off the Parliamentary forces. “Julie never did like a good dust-up like this,” Britton said, slipping slightly with dust. He'd added an h. “Can't think why he agrees to let the grounds be used this way. But it's great fun, what?”

“Everyone seems to be fully involved,” Hanken agreed. “Are you a history buff, sir?”

“Nothing like it,” Britton said and shouted down at the soldiers, “Traitors be damned! You'll burn in hell for harming one hair on the head of God's anointed.”

Royalist, Hanken thought. Odd position for a member of the gentry to have taken at the time, but not unheard of if the gentleman in question had no ties to Parliament. “Where can I find him?”

“Carried off the field, sporting a head wound. No one could ’cuse the poor sod of not having his share of courage, could they?”

“I meant Julian, not King Charles.”

“Ah. Julie.” With an irresolute grip Britton fixed his telescope towards the west. A fresh band of Cavaliers had just arrived by coach. That vehicle was disgorging them on the far side of the bridge, where they were racing to arm themselves. Among them an elaborately clad nobleman appeared to be shouting directions. “Shouldn't allow that, you ask me,” Britton commented. “If they aren't here on time, they should forfeit, what?” He swung back to Hanken. “The boy was here, if tha's why you've come.”

“Does he get to London much? With his late girlfriend living there, I expect—”

“Girlfriend?” Britton blew out a contemptuous breath. “Rubbish. Girlfriend says there's give and take involved. There was none of that. Oh, he wanted it, Julie. He wanted her. But she wasn't having anything from him other than a shag if the mood was on her. If he'd only used the eyes God gave him, he would've seen that from the first.”

“You didn't like the Maiden girl.”

“She had nothing to add to the brew.” Britton looked back at the battle, shouting, “Watch your backs, you blighters!” at the Parliamentary soldiers as the Cavaliers forded the River Wye and began charging wetly up the hillside towards the house. A man of easy allegiance, Hanken thought.

He said, “Will I find Julian in the house, Mr. Britton?”

Britton watched the initial clash as the Cavaliers reached those of the Roundheads who were straggling behind in the effort to free the battering ram from the mud. Suddenly, the tide of the battle shifted. The Roundheads looked outnumbered three to one. “Run for your lives, you idjits,” Britton shouted. And he laughed with glee as the rebels began to lose the uneasy purchase they had on their footholds. Several men went down, losing their weapons. Britton applauded.

Hanken said, “I'll try him inside.”

Britton stopped the detective as he turned to depart. “I was with him. On Tues'ay night, you know.”

Hanken turned back. “With Julian? Where? What time was this?”

“In the kennels. Don't know the time. Proba'ly round eleven. A bitch was delivering. Julie was with her.”

“When I spoke to him, he made no mention of your being there, Mr. Britton.”

“He wouldn't've done. Didn't see me. When I saw what he was about, I lef’ him to it. I watched for a bit from the doorway—something special about the birthing process, no matter who's delivering, don't you think?—then I went off.”

“Is that your normal routine? To visit the kennels at eleven at night?”

“Don't have a normal routine at all. Do what I want when I want.”

“What took you to the kennels, then?”

Britton reached in his jacket pocket with an unsteady hand. He brought out several heavily creased brochures. “Wanted to talk to Julie about these.”

They were, Hanken saw, all leaflets from clinics that offered programmes for alcoholics. Smudged and dog-eared, they looked like refugees from the Oxfam book section. Either Britton had been caressing them for weeks on end or he'd found them secondhand somewhere in anticipation of a moment just like this.

“Want to take the cure,” Britton said. “'Bout time, I think. Don't want Julie's kids to have a sot for a granddad.”

“Julian's thinking of marrying, is he?”

“Oh, things're definitely brewing in that direction.”

Britton extended his hand for the brochures. Hanken bent towards the umbrella to give them back.

“He's a good boy, our Julie,” Britton said, taking the leaflets and stuffing them back in his jacket pocket. “Don't you forget it. He'll make a good father. And I'll be a granddad he can be proud of.”

There was at least a fragment of doubt to that. Britton's breath could have been lit with a match, so heavily was it laden with gin.

Julian Britton was conferring with the reenactment's organisers on the roof-top battlements when DI Hanken appeared. He'd seen the detective in conversation with his father and he'd watched as Jeremy produced his treatment brochures for the other man's inspection. He knew how unlikely it was that Hanken had come to Broughton Manor to have colloquy on the subject of alcoholism with his father, so he wasn't unprepared when the policeman finally tracked him down.

Their conversation was brief. Hanken wanted to know the exact last date that Julian had been in London. Julian took him down to his office, where his diary lay among the discarded account books on his desk, and he handed it over. His record keeping was faultless, the diary showing that his last trip to London had been at Easter, in early April. He'd stayed at the Lancaster Gate Hotel. Hanken could phone to verify because the number was next to the hotel's name in his diary. “I always stay there when I'm in town,” Julian said. “Why do you want to know?”

Hanken answered the question with one of his own. “You didn't stay with Nicola Maiden?”

“She had only a bed-sit.” Julian coloured. “Besides, she preferred me to stay in a hotel.”

“But you'd gone to town to see her, hadn't you?”

He had.

It had been stupid really, Julian told himself now as he watched Hanken work his way back through the Cavaliers that crowded the courtyard, bunched under awnings and umbrellas as they prepared for the next phase of the battle. He'd gone to London because he'd sensed a change in her. Not only because she hadn't come to Derbyshire for Easter—as had been her habit during every holiday while she was at university—but because at each of their meetings from the autumn onwards, he'd felt a greater distance developing between them than had existed at the meeting before. He suspected another man, and he'd wanted to know the worst firsthand.