In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (72 page)

“I didn't! Tommy, listen to me! I was here on Tuesday night.”

Maiden's voice had risen and a knock sounded on the door. It opened before either man could speak. Nan Maiden stood there. She looked from Lynley to her husband. She didn't speak.

But she didn't need to say a word in explanation of what Lynley read on her face. She knows what he did, he thought. My God, she's known from the first.

“Leave us,” Andy Maiden cried out to his wife.

“I don't think that will be necessary,” Lynley said.

Barbara Havers had never been to Westerham, and she discovered soon enough that there was no easy way to get there from the St. James home in Chelsea. She'd made a quick run to the St. Jameses upon leaving Eaton Terrace—why not, she'd thought, since she was in the area so close to the King's Road, a short jaunt down which would take her to Cheyne Row—and she'd been dead eager to let off steam to the couple who she very well knew were most likely to have also experienced Inspector Lynley's brand of priggish irrationality firsthand at one time or another. But she hadn't had a chance to tell her story. For Deborah St. James had answered the door, given a happy shout in the direction of the study, and pulled her inside the house like a woman greeting someone unexpectedly back from the war.

“Simon, look!” she'd announced. “Isn't this just meant” And the meeting between the three of them had been the spur that sent Barbara into Kent. To get there, however, she'd had to battle the maze of unmarked streets that made the words south of the river synonymous with a sojourn in hell. She'd got lost on the far side of Albert Bridge, where one moment of inattention resulted in twenty minutes of exasperation driving round Clapham Common in a futile search for the A205. Once she'd found it and worked her way over to Lewisham, she'd begun wondering about the efficacy of using the Internet to locate one's expert witnesses.

The witness in this case lived in Westerham, where he also ran a small business a short distance away from Quebec House. “You won't be able to miss it,” he'd told her on the telephone. “Quebec House sits at the top of the Edenbridge Road. It's got a sign at the front. It's open today—Quebec House—so there'll probably be the odd coach in the car park. I'm less than five hundred yards to the south.”

So he was, she found, in a clapboard construction that bore the sign QUIVER ME TIMBERS above its door.

His name was Jason Harley, and his business shared room with his house, the original home having been halved by a wall that ran down its middle like Solomon's judgement. An overly wide door had been set into this wall, and it was through this door that Jason Harley rolled himself in the high performance wheelchair of a marathon athlete when Barbara rang the bell outside the shop door.

“You're Constable Havers?” Harley asked.

“Barbara,” she said.

He tossed back a mass of hair that was blond, very thick, and straight as a ruler. “Barbara, then. Lucky you caught me at home. I usually shoot on Sundays.” He rolled himself back and beckoned her inside, saying, “Make sure the sign stays on closed, won't you? I've got a local fan club that likes to drop by when they see I'm open.” He made this last remark ironically.

“Trouble?” Barbara asked him, thinking of louts, hooligans, and what torments they could inflict on a paraplegic.

“Nine-year-old boys. I spoke at their school. Now I'm their hero.” Harley grinned affably. “So. How can I help you, Barbara? You said you wanted to see what I have?”

“Right.”

They'd found him on the Internet, where his business had a Web page, and his proximity to London had been the deciding factor in Barbara's selection of him as her expert witness. On the phone, which rang in his house as well as in his shop, Jason Harley had told her he wasn't open on Sundays, but when she'd explained the reasons behind her call, he'd agreed to see her.

Now she stood in the close confines of Quiver Me Timbers, and she glanced over its merchandise: the fibreglass, yew, and carbon of Jason Harley's trade. Racks stood against walls. Display cases lined the shop's single wide aisle. An assembly area spanned the farther end. And central to everything was a maple stand in which a ribboned medal was encased in glass. It was an Olympic gold, Barbara saw when she examined the medal. Not only in Westerham was Jason Harley somebody.

When she gave her attention back to him, she saw he was watching her. “I'm impressed,” she said. “Did you do it from your chair?”

“Could have done,” he told her. “Would do today, as well, if I had a bit more free time to practise. But I wasn't in a chair back then. The chair came later. After a hang-gliding accident.”

“Rough,” she said.

“I cope. Better than most, I dare say. Now. How can I help you, Barbara?”

“Tell me about cedar arrows,” she said.

Jason Harley's Olympic gold medal represented the culmination of years of competition and practise. Years of competition and practise gave him rare expertise in the field of archery. His hang-gliding accident had forced him to consider how he might put his athletic prowess and his knowledge to use in order to support himself and the family he and his girlfriend wished to have. The result was his shop, Quiver Me Timbers, where he sold the fine carbon arrows shot by modern bows made of fiberglass or laminae of wood and where he hand-made and sold the wooden arrows that were used with the traditional long bows for which English archery had historically been known, from the Battle of Agincourt onwards.

In his shop he also provided his customers with the accoutrements of archery: from the complicated hand and body pieces worn by archers to the arrow heads—called piles, he told Barbara—that differed depending upon the use to which the arrow was being put.

What about shooting a nineteen-year-old boy in the back? Barbara wanted to ask the archer. What kind of pile would you need for that? But she went at it slowly, knowing that she was going to need a volume of information to heave at Lynley in order to make the slightest dent in his armour against her.

She asked Harley to tell her about the wooden arrows he made, particularly the arrows that he crafted from Port Orford cedar.

Cedar arrows were the only ones he made at all, he corrected her. The shafts came to him from Oregon. There they were individually weighed, graded, and subjected to a bending test prior to being shipped. “They're dependable as hell,” he told her, “which is important, because when the pull weight of the bow is high, you need an arrow that's made to withstand it. You can get arrows of pine or ash,” he went on after a moment during which he handed her a finished cedar arrow for her inspection, “some from local wood and some from Sweden. But the Oregon cedar's more easily available—because of the quantity, I suppose—and I expect you'd find every archery shop in England sells it.”

He shepherded her to the back of his shop, where his work area was. There, set at the height of his waist, a mini assembly line allowed him to move easily from the round saw that cut the slot in the arrow's shaft to the fletching jig where the cock and shaft feathers were glued into position. Araldite kept the pile in place. And, as he'd said before, the pile differed depending on the use to which the arrow would be put.

“Some archers prefer to make their own arrows,” he told her in summation. “But as it's a labour intensive job—well, I suppose you can see that for yourself, can't you—most of them find an arrow maker they like and they buy their arrows from him. He can make them distinctive in any way they prefer—within reason, of course—so long as they tell him what they want as a means of identification.”

“Identification?” Barbara asked.

“Because of the competitions,” Harley said. “That's mostly what long bows are used for these days.”

There were, he explained, two types of competitions that long bow archers engaged in: tournament shooting and field shooting. With the former, they shot at traditional targets: twelve dozen arrows fired at bull's-eyes from varying distances. For the latter, they shot in wooded areas or on hillsides: arrows fired at animals whose images were depicted on paper. But in either case, the only way a winner could be determined was by the individual identification marks that were made upon the arrow that was fired. And every competitive archer in England would be certain that his arrows could be distinguished from the arrows of every other archer who also competed. “How else could they tell whose arrow hit the target?” Harley asked reasonably.

“Right,” Barbara said. “How else.”

She'd read the post-mortem report on Terry Cole. She knew from her conversation with St. James that Lynley had been told of a third weapon beyond the knife and the stone they'd already identified as having been used on the victims. Now, with that third weapon as good as identified, she began to see how the crime had occurred.

She said, “Tell me, Mr. Harley, how fast can a good archer—with a decade or more of experience, let's say—get off successive arrows at a target? Using a long bow, that is.”

He considered the question thoughtfully, fingers pulling at his lower lip. “Ten seconds, I'd guess. At the most.”

“As long as that?”

“Let me show you.”

She thought Harley intended to demonstrate for her himself. But instead, he fetched a quiver from the display rack, slid six arrows into it, and motioned Barbara to come to his chair. “Right-handed or left?” he asked her.

“Right.”

“Okay. Turn around.”

Feeling a little foolish, she allowed him to slide the quiver onto her body and adjust the strap across her torso. “Suppose the bow's in your left hand,” he explained when he had the quiver in place. “Now reach back for the arrow. Only one.” When she had it—and not without a bit of unfamiliar groping—he pointed out that she would next have to position it on the Dacron string of the bow. Then she would have to draw the string back and take aim. “It's not like a gun,” he reminded her. “You have to reload and re-aim after every shot. A good archer can do it in just under ten seconds. But for someone like you—no offence—”

Barbara laughed. “Give me twenty minutes.”

She looked at herself in the mirror that hung on the door through which Jason had earlier rolled himself into the shop. Standing there, she practised reaching back for the arrow. She imagined herself with a bow, and she tried to picture the target in front of her: not a bull's-eye or a paper animal, but a living human being. Two of them, in fact, sitting next to a fire. That would have been the only light.

He didn't shoot the girl because he wasn't after the girl, she thought. But he had no other weapon with him, and he was desperate to kill the boy, so he had to use what he'd brought and hope the shot would kill him because—with another person present—he wasn't going to have the chance to fire off another at Cole.

So what had happened? The shot hadn't gone true. Perhaps the boy had moved at the last moment. Perhaps, aiming for the neck, he'd hit lower, on the back instead. The girl, realising someone in the darkness was trying to harm them, would have jumped to her feet and tried to flee. And since she was running and since it was dark, the bow and arrow were useless against her. So he'd have chased her down. He'd have dispatched her and gone back for the boy.

Barbara said, “Jason, if you were shot in the back with one of these arrows, what would you feel? Would you know you'd been hit? By an arrow, I mean.”

Harley gave his attention to the rack of bows as if the answers were hidden among them. “I expect you'd feel a terrific blow at first,” he said slowly. “Rather like you'd been hit with a hammer.”

“Could you move? Stand?”

“I don't see why not. Until you realised what had happened to you, of course. And then you'd probably go into shock. Especially if you reached back and felt the shaft sticking out of you. God, that would be grim. That would be enough to make you—”

“Faint,” Barbara said. “Pass out. Fall over.”

“Right,” he agreed.

“And then the arrow would break off, wouldn't it?”

“Depending on the way you fell, it might do.”

Which would, she concluded silently, possibly leave a sliver of wood behind when the killer—eager to remove the one thing from the body that could ultimately identify him to the police—pulled the remainder of the arrow from the victim's back. But he wouldn't have been dead—Terry Cole—at that point. Just in shock. So the killer would have to finish him off once he returned from pounding in the girl's skull. He had no weapon with him other than the long bow. His only choice was to find a weapon there at the campsite.

And having done that, with the boy safely stabbed, he himself was free to search for what he assumed Terry Cole had with him: the Chandler music, the source of a fortune denied him by the terms of his father's will.

There was only a final point to clarify with Jason Harley. She said, “Jason, can an arrow's tip—”

“The pile,” he corrected her.

“The pile. Can it pierce human flesh? I mean, I always thought arrows had to have rubber ends or something if you took them out in public.”

He smiled. “Suction cups, you mean? Like on kids’ bows and arrows?” He rolled past her and behind one of the display cases, where he took out a small box and emptied it on the low glass counter. These, he told her, were the piles used at the end of the cedar arrows. The most common for field archery was the bodkin head. Barbara could test its sharpness if she wanted to.

She did so. The metal piece was cylindrical, in keeping with the arrows shape, but it also narrowed to a nasty four-sided point that would be deadly when propelled with force. As she was pressing this tip into her finger experimentally, Harley chatted on about the other piles he sold. He laid out broadheads and hunting heads and explained their use. Finally, he separated from them the mediaeval reproductions.

“And these,” he concluded, “are for demonstrations and battles.”

“Battles?” Barbara asked incredulously. “People actually shooting arrows at each other?”

“Not real battles, of course, and when the fighting begins, the arrows are fitted out with rubber bunts on the end so they're not dangerous. They're reenactments, the battles are. A slew of weekend warriors gather together in the grounds of some castle or great house and play out the War of Roses with one another. It goes on all over the countryside.”