In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (78 page)

Yet something very like a roadside container would have worked well as a depository for a garment, something that had an everyday use, something that one saw without thinking about, and something on the way to the hotel where—the killer knew—a black leather jacket could be stowed in plain sight with no one the wiser for ages …

A pillar box? Lynley wondered. But he dismissed the possibility almost as soon as he considered it. Aside from the fact that the killer wouldn't have wanted to go to the effort of cramming the waterproof inch by inch into the slot for letters, the post was collected every day.

Someone's rubbish bin? But there again he encountered virtually the same problem. Unless the killer managed to bury it at the bottom of someone's dustbin, the first time the bin's owner wished to discard a bag of rubbish, the waterproof would be found. Unless, of course, the killer managed to find a bin that was constructed in such a way that rubbish already within it couldn't be seen when someone deposited more. A bin in a public park might have worked for this, one where refuse was shoved through an opening in the cover or the side. But where on the route from Calder Moor to Tideswell did such a park with such a container exist? That's what he needed to find out.

Lynley descended the stairs and got from Reception the same map of the White Peak that Hanken had used on the previous evening. Upon examining the area, the closest Lynley could come to a public park was a nature reserve near Hargatewall. He frowned when he saw how far off the direct route it was. It would have taken the killer a number of miles out of his way. But it was worth a try.

The morning outside was much like the previous day: grey, windy, and rainy. But unlike the previous day when Lynley had arrived, the Black Angel's car park was virtually deserted since it was far too early for even the most inebriated of the hotel's regular patrons to be bellying up to the bar. So with his umbrella raised and the collar of his waxed jacket turned up, Lynley dodged puddles and hurried round the side of the building to the only spot that he'd been able to find for the Bentley on the previous afternoon.

Which was when he finally saw what he'd seen without acknowledging upon his arrival.

The spot he'd found for the Bentley had been vacant yesterday because it would always be the last spot chosen to park one's car. No one with half a care for his car's paint job would park it right next to an overloaded skip that was even now, in the wind and the rain, erupting with refuse.

Of course, Lynley thought as the grinding of gears behind him spoke of a lorry's approach.

As it was, he made it to the skip just a stride ahead of the local dustmen who'd arrived to pick up the Black Angel's week's worth of rubbish.

Samantha heard the noise before she saw her uncle. The sound of bottles clinking together echoed on the old stone stairway as Jeremy Britton descended to the kitchen, where Samantha was doing the washing up from breakfast. She glanced at her watch, which she'd set on a shelf near the kitchen's deep sink. Even by Uncle Jeremy's standards, it seemed too early in the day to be drinking.

She scoured the frying pan in which she'd cooked the morning's bacon, and she tried to ignore her uncle's presence. Footsteps shuffled behind her. The bottles continued to clank. When she could no longer avoid doing so, Samantha glanced round to see what her uncle was doing.

Jeremy had a large basket crooked over his arm. Into this he'd deposited perhaps a dozen bottles of spirits. They were mostly gin. He began going through the dole cupboards that they used for storage in the kitchen, rustling through their contents to pull out more bottles. These were miniatures, and he took them from the flour bin, from the containers of rice and spaghetti and dried beans, from among the assorted tins of fruit, from deep within the storage space for pots and pans. As the collection grew in the basket on his arm, Uncle Jeremy clanked and rattled round the kitchen like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

He murmured, “Going to do it this time.”

Samantha put the final pot on the drying rack and pulled the plug on the water in the sink. She dried her hands on the front of her apron and watched. Her uncle looked older than he had done since she'd been in Derbyshire. And the tremors that were jerking his body didn't help the overall impression he gave of serious illness in the offing.

She said, “Uncle Jeremy? Are you ill? What's wrong?”

“Coming off it,” he replied. “It's the bloody devil. Gives you temptation, then sends you to hell.”

He'd begun to perspire, and in the kitchen's meagre light his skin looked like a lemon coated with oil. With unsteady hands, he eased the loaded basket onto the draining board. He clutched at the first of the bottles. Bombay Sapphire, his one true love. He unscrewed the top and upended the bottle into the sink. The smell of gin rose up like leaking gas.

When the bottle was empty, Jeremy broke it against the lip of the sink. “No more,” he said. “Through with this poison. I swear. No more.”

Then he began to cry. He cried with dry, hard sobs that shook his body worse than the absence of alcohol in his veins. He said, “So scared. I can't do it alone.”

Samantha's heart went out to him. “Oh, Uncle Jeremy. Here. Let me help. I'll hold the basket, shall I? Or shall I open the bottles for you?” She took one out—Beefeater's this time—and offered it to her uncle.

“It'll kill me,” he cried. “'S what it's doing already. Look at me.” And he held up his hands to show her what she'd already seen: their terrible shaking. He grabbed the Beefeater's and broke the bottle against the lip of the sink without emptying it first. Gin splashed on both of them. He grabbed another. “Rotten,” he wept. “Miserable. Sot. Drove three of 'em off but that wasn't enough. No. No. He'll not be content till the last one's gone.”

Samantha sorted through this. His wife and the Britton children, she decided. Julian's sister, brother, and mother had fled the manor ages ago, but she couldn't believe that Julian would ever desert his father. She said, “Julian loves you, Uncle Jeremy. He won't leave you. He wants the best for you. You must see that's why he's been working so hard to bring the manor back,” as Jeremy dumped another half litre of gin into the sink.

“He's a wonderful boy. Always was. And I won't, I won't. No longer.” And another bottle's contents joined the others. “'S working so hard to make this place something, and all the while his sot of a dad's drinking everything away. But no more.”

The kitchen sink was rapidly filling with glass, but that didn't matter to Samantha. She could see that her uncle was in the throes of a conversion so important that one or two kilos of broken glass were of small account in comparison. She said, “Are you giving up drinking, Uncle Jeremy? Are you seriously giving up drinking?” She had her doubts about his sincerity, yet bottle after bottle went the way of the first. When Jeremy was finished with the lot of them, he leaned over the sink and began to pray with an earnestness that Samantha could feel in her bones.

He swore on the lives of his children and his future grandchildren that he would not take another drop of drink. He would not, he said, be an advertisement for the evils of life-long inebriation. He would walk away from the bottle here and now and he would never look back. He owed that much, if not to himself, then to the son whose love had kept him here in the rotting family home when he could have gone elsewhere and lived a decent, wholesome, normal life.

“Hadn't been for me, he'd be married now. Wife. Kids. A life. An’ I took that from him. I did it. Me.”

“Uncle Jeremy, you mustn't think that. Julie loves you. He knows how important Broughton Manor is to you at the end of the day, and he wants to make it a home again. And anyway, he's not even thirty yet. He's got years and years to have a family.”

“Life's passing him by,” Jeremy said. “An’ it'll go right by him while he struggles at home. An’ he'll hate me for that when he wakes up and sees it.”

“But this is life.” Samantha placed a comforting hand on her uncle's shoulder. “What we're doing here, at the manor, every day. This is life, Uncle Jeremy.”

He straightened from the sink, reaching in his pocket as he did so, bringing out a neatly folded handkerchief and honking into it before he turned to her. Poor man, she thought. When had he last wept? And why were men so embarrassed when they finally broke with the force of a reasonable emotion?

“Want to be part of it again,” he said.

“Part of it?”

“Life. I want life, Sammy. This”—he made a gesture towards the sink—“this runs away from everything living. I say enough.”

Odd, Samantha thought. He suddenly sounded so strong, as if nothing stood between him and his hope for sobriety. And just as suddenly she wanted that for him: the life he imagined for himself, happy in his home, occupied and surrounded by his darling grandchildren. She could even see them, those lovely grandchildren still unconceived. She said, “I'm so glad, Uncle Jeremy. I'm so terribly terribly glad. And Julian … Julie'll be so delighted. He'll want to help you. I know he will.”

Jeremy nodded, his gaze fixed on her. “You think?” he said hesitantly. “After all these years … with me … like this?”

“I know he'll help,” she said. “I just know it.”

Jeremy straightened his clothes. He blew his nose noisily once again and folded his handkerchief back into his pocket. He said, “Y’ love him, don't you, girl?”

Samantha shuffled her feet.

“You're not like the other. You'd do anything for him.”

“I would,” Samantha said. “Yes. I would.”

When Lynley arrived in Padley Gorge, the search of Maiden Hall was in full swing. Hanken had brought six constables with him, and he'd deployed them economically as well as thoroughly. Three of them were searching the family's floor, the residents’ floor, and the ground floor of the Hall proper. One was searching the outbuildings on the property. Two others were searching the grounds. Hanken himself was coordinating the effort, and when Lynley pulled to a stop in the car park he found his fellow DI smoking moodily beneath an umbrella near a panda car as the family-floor constable made his report.

“Get out with the others on the grounds, then,” Hanken was instructing him. “If there's been any digging round here, I want you lot on it like hounds down a foxhole. Understand? And mind you dig up that new road sign at the bottom of the drive.” The constable trotted off in the direction of the slope that fell away towards the road. There Lynley could see two other policemen pacing along evenly beneath the trees in the rain.

“Nothing so far,” Hanken told Lynley. “But it's here somewhere. Or something related to it is. And we'll find it.”

“I've got the waterproof,” Lynley said.

Hanken raised an eyebrow and tossed his cigarette onto the ground. “Have you indeed? That's good work, Thomas. Where'd you find it?”

Lynley told him about the thought process that had led him to the skip. Under a week's worth of rubbish from the hotel, he'd found the rain gear by relying upon a pitchfork and the patience of the dustmen who'd arrived just behind him to collect the skip's contents.

“You don't much look like you've been doing some skip-trolling,” Hanken told him.

“I showered and changed,” Lynley admitted.

The rubbish in the skip—piled up on the waterproof for nearly a week—had ultimately protected it from the rain, which might have otherwise washed away any evidence left upon it. As it was, the plastic garment hadn't been touched by anything other than coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, plate scrapings, old newspapers, and crumpled tissues. And since it had been turned inside out anyway, even these had only smeared its insides, giving it the appearance of a discarded tarpaulin. Its exterior had been largely untouched, so the blood splatters on it remained as they had been on the previous Tuesday night: mute witnesses to what had occurred inside Nine Sisters Henge. Lynley had bundled the waterproof into a supermarket carrier bag. It was, he said, in the boot of the Bentley.

“Let's have it, then.”

“First,” Lynley said with a nod at the Hall, “are the Maidens here?”

“We don't need an ID on the rain gear if it's got the kid's blood on it, Thomas.”

“I wasn't asking professionally. How are they taking the search?”

“Maiden claims he's found some bloke in London who can do a lie detector on him. Runs a business called Polygraph Professionals, or something like that.”

“If he's willing—”

“Bollocks,” Hanken cut in irritably. “You know that polygraphs are worth sod all. So does Maiden. But they make one hell of a delaying tactic, don't they? ‘Please don't arrest me. I've got a polygraph organised.’ Bugger that for a lark. Let's have the waterproof.”

Lynley handed it over. It was turned inside out, as it had been upon his discovery of it. But one of its edges was exposed, where the blood made a purple deposit in the shape of a leaf.

“Ah,” Hanken said when he saw it. “Yes. We'll get this over to forensic, then. But I'd say everything's over bar the shouting.”

Lynley didn't feel so certain. But why? he wondered. Was it because he couldn't believe Andy Maiden had killed his daughter? Or was it because the facts truly led elsewhere? “It looks deserted,” he said with a nod at the Hall.

“Due to the rain,” Hanken told him. “They're inside though. The lot of them. Most of the guests're gone, it being Monday. But the Maidens are here. As are the employees. Except for the chef. He generally doesn't show up till after two, they said.”

“Have you spoken to them? The Maidens?”

Hanken appeared to read the underlying meaning, because he said, “I haven't told the wife, Thomas,” and then transferred the waterproof to the front seat of the panda car. “Fryer!” he shouted in the direction of the slope. The family-floor constable looked up, then came at a trot when Hanken gestured him over. “The lab,” he said with a jerk of his head towards the car. “Drive that bag over for a work-up on the blood. See if you can get the job done by a girl called Kubowsky. She doesn't let grass grow, and we're in a hurry.”

The constable looked happy enough to be out of the rain. He removed his lime-coloured windcheater and hopped into the car. In less than ten seconds he was gone.