In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (75 page)

Shelly grumbled and petted Vis shoulder. Barbara tapped the pen against her notebook and considered their options.

They could hardly cart Vi Nevin to an identity parade, and even if that were possible, they had—at the moment—no reason in hell to trot Matthew King-Ryder into the local nick to stand in one. So they needed a picture, but it would have to come from a newspaper or a magazine. Or from King-Ryder Productions on some sort of spurious excuse. Because one hint that they were on to him, and King-Ryder would weigh down his long bow and arrows with concrete and dump them into the Thames faster than you could say Robin Hood's Merry Men.

But getting a photo was going to take some time because they needed the real thing—sharp and clear—and not something sent over to the hospital via fax. And fax or otherwise, where the hell were they going to get a photo of Matthew King-Ryder at—here Barbara looked at her watch—half past seven on a Sunday evening? There was no way. It was stab-in-the-dark time. She drew a deep breath and took the plunge. “D'you know a bloke called Matthew King-Ryder by any chance?”

Vi said the completely unexpected. “Yes.”

Lynley held the jacket by its satin lining. It had doubtless been touched by a dozen people since being removed from Terry Cole's body on Tuesday night. But it had been touched by the killer as well, and if he hadn't realised that fingerprints could be lifted from leather nearly as easily as they could be lifted from glass or painted wood, there was an excellent chance that he'd left an unintentional calling card upon the garment.

Once the proprietor of the Black Angel understood the import of Lynley's request, he fetched all the employees to the bar for some questions post haste. He offered the inspector tea, coffee, or other refreshment to go along with his queries, seeking to be helpful with the sort of anxiety to please that generally struck people who found themselves inadvertently living on the county line between murder and respectability. Lynley demurred at all refreshment. He just wanted some information, he said.

Showing the jacket to the hotels proprietor and its employees didn't get him anywhere however. One jacket was much like another to them. None could say how or when the garment that Lynley was holding had appeared at the hotel. They made suitable noises of horror and aversion when he pointed out the copious amount of dried blood on the lining and the hole in the back, and while they looked at him with properly mournful expressions when he mentioned the two recent deaths on Calder Moor, not an eyelash among them so much as fluttered at the suggestion that a killer might have been in their midst.

“I reckon someone left that thing here. Tha's what happened. No mistake about it,” the barmaid said.

“Coats hanging on the porch rack all winter long,” one of the room maids added. “I never take notice of them one day to the next.”

“But that's just it,” Lynley said. “It isn't winter. And until today, I dare say there hasn't been rain enough for macs, jackets, or coats.”

“So what s'r point?” the proprietor said.

“How could all of you fail to notice a leather jacket on a coat rack if the leather jacket is hanging there alone?”

The ten employees who were gathered in the bar shifted about, looked sheepish, or appeared regretful. But no one could shed any light on the jacket or how it had come to be there. They came in to work through the back door, not through the front, they told him. They left the same way. So they wouldn't have even seen the coat rack in the course of their normal workdays. Besides, things often got left behind at the Black Angel Hotel: umbrellas, walking sticks, rain gear, rucksacks, maps. Everything ended up in lost property, and until things got there, no one paid them much mind.

Lynley decided on a full frontal approach. Were they acquainted with the Britton family? he wanted to know. Would they recognise Julian Britton if they saw him?

The proprietor spoke for everyone. “We all know the Brittons at the Black Angel.”

“Did any of you see Julian on Tuesday night?”

But no one had.

Lynley dismissed them. He asked for a bag in which to stow the jacket, and while one was being fetched for him, he walked to the window, watched the rain fall, and thought about Tideswell, the Black Angel, and the crime.

He himself had seen that Tideswell abutted the eastern edge of Calder Moor, and the killer—vastly more familiar with the White Peak than Lynley—would have known that as well. So in possession of a jacket with an incriminating hole that would have told the tale of the crime in short order had it been found on the scene, he had to be rid of it as soon as possible. What could have been easier than stopping at the Black Angel Hotel on his way home from Calder Moor, knowing, as an habitué of the bar, that coats and jackets accumulated for whole seasons before anyone thought to have a look at them.

But could Julian Britton have managed to hang up the leather jacket in the entrance without being seen by anyone inside? It was possible, Lynley thought. Risky as the devil, but possible.

And at this point Lynley was willing to accept that which was possible. It kept that which was probable out of his thoughts.

Barbara leaned forward in her chair, saying, “You know him? Matthew King-Ryder. You know him?” and trying to keep the excitement from her voice.

“Terry,” Vi murmured.

Her eyelids were getting heavy. But Barbara pressed the young woman anyway, against the rising protestations of Shelly Platt. “Terry knew Matthew King-Ryder? How?”

“Music” Vi said.

Barbara felt immediately deflated. Damn, she thought. Terry Cole, the Chandler music, and Matthew King-Ryder. There was nothing new in this. They were nowhere again.

Then Vi said, “Found it in the Albert Hall, did Terry.”

Barbara's eyebrows knotted. “The Albert Hall? Terry found the music there?”

“Under a seat.”

Barbara was gobsmacked. She tried to get her mind round what Vi Nevin was telling her even as Vi continued to tell her.

In the course of his job as card boy, Terry put cards regularly in South Kensington phone boxes. He always did this work at night, since there was less likelihood of finding himself on the receiving end of police aggro after dark. He'd been on his regular rounds in the neighbourhood of Queen's Gate, when the phone in one of the boxes rang.

“On the corner of Elvaston Place and one of the mewses, this was,” Vi said.

For a lark, Terry answered to hear a male voice say, “The package is in the Albert Hall. Circle Q, Row 7, Seat 19,” after which the line went dead.

The mysterious nature of the call piqued Terry's interest. The word package—with its intimations of either a money drop, a drug drop, or a dead letter box—clinched the deal. Since he was so close to Kensington Gore, where the Royal Albert Hall overlooked the south border of Hyde Park, Terry went to investigate. A concert audience was just leaving, so the Hall was open. He tracked down the seat high in one of the balconies and found a package of music beneath it.

The Chandler music, Barbara thought. But what the bloody hell was it doing there?

He thought at first that he'd been sent off on a fool's errand intended for whatever fool was supposed to answer that phone on the corner of Elvaston Place. And when he'd met up with Vi to collect a fresh batch of phone box cards, he'd told her about his brief adventure.

“I thought there might be money to be made,” Vi told Barbara. “So did Nikki when we told her about it.”

Shelly dropped Vis hand abruptly, saying, “I don't want to hear nothing about that bitch.”

To which Vi replied, “Come on, Shell. She's dead.”

Shelly flounced over to the chair she'd been sitting on earlier. She plopped down and began to sulk, arms crossed over her bony chest. Barbara speculated briefly on the uneasy future of a relationship between two women when one of them was so perilously dependent. Vi ignored the demonstration of pique.

They all had ambitions, she told Barbara. Terry had his Destination Art and Vi and Nikki had plans to start up a first class escort business. They also had a need to support themselves once Nikki broke with Adrian Beattie. Both operations depended upon an infusion of cash, and the music looked like a potential source of it. “See, I remembered when Sotheby's—or whoever it was—was set to auction a piece by Lennon and McCartney. And that was just one single sheet that was supposed to fetch a few thousand quid. This was a whole packet of music. I said Terry ought to try to sell it. Nikki offered to do the research and find the right auction house. We'd split the money when the music sold.”

“But why cut you in?” Barbara asked. “You and Nikki. It was Terry's find, after all.”

“Yeah. But he was soft on Nikki,” Vi said simply. “He wanted to impress her. This was the way.”

Barbara knew the rest. Neil Sitwell at Bowers had opened Terry's eyes to copyright law. He'd handed over the address for 31-32 Soho Square and informed the boy that King-Ryder Productions would put him in touch with the Chandler solicitors. Terry had gone to Matthew King-Ryder with the music in hand. Matthew King-Ryder had seen it and had realised how he could use it to make himself the fortune that his father's will denied him. But why not just buy the music from the boy right then? she wondered. Why kill him to get it? Better yet, why not just buy the rights to the music from the Chandler family? If the production that resulted from the music was anything like the King-Ryder/Chandler productions from the past, there would have been plenty of lolly to go round in royalties even if fifty percent of it went to the Chandlers.

Vi was saying “—couldn't get the name,” when Barbara roused herself from her thoughts. She said, “What? Sorry. What did you say?”

“Matthew King-Ryder didn't give Terry the solicitor's name. Didn't even give him a chance to ask for it. He booted him out of his office as soon as he saw what Terry'd brought with him.”

“When he saw the music.”

She nodded. “Terry said he called security. Two guards came up straightaway and threw him out.”

“But Terry had gone there just for the Chandler solicitor's address, hadn't he? That's all he wanted from Matthew King-Ryder? He didn't want money? A reward or something?”

“Money's what we wanted the Chandlers to give him. Once we knew the music couldn't be auctioned.”

A nurse came into the room then, a small square tray in her hand. A hypodermic needle lay on it. Time for pain medication, the woman said.

“One last question,” Barbara said. “Why did Terry go up to Derbyshire on Tuesday?”

“Because I asked him to,” Vi said. “Nikki thought I was being a fool about Shelly—” Here the other woman raised her head. Vi spoke to her rather than to Barbara. “She kept sending these letters and hanging about and I was getting scared.”

Shelly raised a thin hand and pointed to her chest. “Of me?” she asked. “You 'as scared of me?”

“Nikki laughed them off when I told her about them. I thought if she saw them herself, we could plan to take care of Shelly some way. I wrote Nikki a note and asked Terry to take it and the letters up to her. Like I said, he was soft on her. Any excuse to see her. You know what I mean.”

The nurse interposed at this juncture, saying, “I really must insist,” and holding up the syringe.

“Yeah, okay,” Vi Nevin said.

Barbara stopped for groceries on her way back to Chalk Farm, so it was after nine by the time she got home. She unpacked her booty and stashed it within the cupboards and the munchkin-size fridge of her bungalow. All the time in her mind she picked through the information that Vi Nevin had given her. Somewhere within their interview was buried the key to everything that had happened: not only in Derbyshire but also in London. Surely, she thought, a mere assembling of the information in the right order would tell her what she needed to know.

With a plate of reheatable rogan josh from the grocery's precooked section—of which Barbara had quickly become an habitué nonpareil when she'd moved to the neighbourhood—she settled herself at her tiny dining table next to the bungalow's front window. She accompanied her meal with a lukewarm Bass and laid her notebook next to the coffee mug from which she was reduced to drinking, since several days of crockery, cutlery, and glassware had piled in her kitchen's diminutive sink. She took a gulp of the ale, forked up a portion of the lamb, and flipped to the notes from her interview with Vi Nevin.

Once the pain medication had been administered, the patient had drifted off to sleep, but not before answering a few more questions. In her role of Argos watching over Io, Shelly Platt had protested Barbara's continued presence. But Vi, lulled into a drug-induced ease, had whispered responses cooperatively until her eyes had closed and her breathing had deepened.

Reviewing her notes, Barbara concluded that the logical place to begin in developing a hypothesis about the case would have to be with the telephone call that Terry Cole had intercepted in South Kensington. That event had set all others in motion. It also stimulated enough questions to suggest that an understanding of the phone call—what had prompted it and what exactly had arisen from it—would lead inexorably to the evidence that would allow her to nab Matthew King-Ryder as a killer.

Although it was now September, Vi Nevin had been quite clear about the fact that Terry Cole had intercepted the phone call in South Kensington in the month of June. She couldn't give the exact date, but she knew it was early in the month because she'd collected a fresh batch of their phone box cards at the beginning of the month and she passed them to Terry on the same day that she picked them up. It was then that he told her about the curious call.

Not the beginning of July? Barbara enquired. Not August? Not even September?

June it was, Vi Nevin insisted. She remembered because they'd already moved house to Fulham—she and Nikki—and since Nikki had gone on to Derbyshire, Terry had questioned putting her cards in the phone boxes when she wasn't in town. Vi was quite sure of that. She'd wanted Terry to put up her own cards as soon as possible, she said, so that she could continue to build her clientele, and she'd told the boy to hold Nikki's cards for posting until the autumn, when he was to place them in boxes a day before the young woman returned.