Payment In Blood (33 page)

“Did you get a look at him?”

“Too dark. I was too far away. I went on to the mill after a moment. And I found her.” He set his glass on the table. “Hanging.”

“Was she exactly as the police pictures show her?”

“Aye. Except there was a bit of paper sticking from her coat pocket, so I pulled that out. It was the note I gave to the police. When I read it, I saw how it was meant to look like a suicide.”

“Yes. But it wouldn’t have looked like suicide had you left her suitcase there. So you brought it home with you.”

“I did. I took it upstairs. Then I raised a cry, using the note from her pocket. The other note I burned.”

In spite of what the man had been through, Lynley found himself feeling a sore spot of anger. A life had been taken, callously, cold-bloodedly. And for fifteen years the death had gone unavenged. “But why did you do all that?” he asked. “Surely you wanted her murderer brought to justice.”

Darrow’s look betrayed a derisive weariness. “You’ve no idea what it’s like in a village like this, do you, pommy boy? You’ve no idea how it’d feel to a man, having his neighbours all know that his randy little wife’d been snuffed while she was trying to leave him for some ponce she thought’d make her feel better between her legs. And not snuffed by her husband, mind you, which everyone in the village would have understood, but by the very bastard who was poking her behind her husband’s back. Are you trying to tell me that, had I let Hannah stand as murdered, none of that would have come out?” Although his voice rose incredulously, Darrow continued, as if to shun a response. “At least this way, Teddy’s never had to know what his mum was really like. As far as I was concerned, Hannah was dead. And Teddy’s peace of mind was worth letting her murderer go free.”

“Better his mother should be a suicide than his father a cuckold?” Lynley enquired.

Darrow pounded a fist hard onto the stained table between them. “Aye! For it’s me he’s been living with these fifteen years. It’s me he’s to look in the eye every day. And when he does, he sees a
man
, by God. Not some puling fairy who couldn’t hold a woman to her marriage vows. And do you think that bloke could have held on to her any better?” He poured more liquor, spilling it carelessly when the bottle slipped against the glass. “He promised her acting coaches, lessons, a part in some play. But when that all fell through, how much flaming—”

“A part in a play? Coaches? Lessons? How do you know that? Was it in her note?”

Jerking himself towards the fire, Darrow didn’t answer. But Lynley suddenly saw a sure reason why Joy Sinclair must have made ten telephone calls to him, what she had been insistently seeking in her conversation with the man. No doubt in his anger he had inadvertently revealed to her the existence of a source of information she desperately needed to write her book.

“Is there a record, Darrow? Are there diaries? A journal?”

There was no response.

“Good God, man, you’ve come this far! Do you know her killer’s name?”

“No.”

“Then what
do
you know? How do you know it?”

Still Darrow watched the fire impassively. But his chest heaved with repressed emotion. “Diaries,” he said. “Girl was always too bloody full of herself. She wrote everything down. They were in her valise. With all her other things.”

Lynley took a desperate shot, knowing that if he phrased it as a question the man would claim he had destroyed them years ago. “Give the diaries to me, Darrow. I can’t promise that Teddy will never learn the truth about his mother. But I swear to you that he won’t learn it from me.”

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.

T
HE 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.

A large plastic case gave off the strange odour of animal fat. It held a variety of inexpensive cosmetics and creams—a painter’s box of eyeshadows, half a dozen tubes of very dark lipstick, an eyelash curler, mascara, three or four kinds of lotion, a package of cotton wool. Tucked into a pocket was a five months’ supply of birth control pills. One set of the pills was partially used.

A shopping bag from Norwich contained a collection of new lingerie. But here again, her selections were tawdry, an uneducated girl’s idea of what a man might find seductive. Insubstantial bikini panties of scarlet, black, or purple lace, overhung with garter belts of the same material and colour; diaphanous brassieres, cut low to the nipple and decorated with strategically placed, coy little bows; slithering petticoats slit to the waist; two nightgowns designed identically, without bodices and merely concocted with two wide satin straps that crisscrossed from waist to shoulders, covering nothing much at all.

Underneath this was a stack of photographs. Looking through them, Lynley saw that they were all of Hannah herself: each one showing her off at her best, whether she was posing on a stile, laughing down from horseback, or sitting on the beach with the wind in her hair. Perhaps they were to be publicity photographs. Or perhaps she had needed reassurance that she was pretty or validation that she existed at all.

Lynley picked up the journal on top of the stack. Its cover was cracked with age, several of the pages were stuck together and a number of others had become swollen with the damp. He leafed through them carefully until he found the final entry, one-third of the way through. Written on March 25, 1973, it was the same childish handwriting that was on the suicide note, but unlike that note, this work was rich with misspellings and other errors.

Its settled. Im leaving tommorrow night. Im so glad its finally decided between us. We talked and talked tonight for hours to get it all planned out. When it was decided for good and all, I wanted to love him but he said no weve not enough time, Han, and for a moment I thought praps he was angry becouse he even pushed my hand away but then he smiled that melty smile of his and said darling love we’ll have plenty of time for that every night of the week once we get to London. London!!! LONDON!!! This time tomorrow! He said his flats ready and that hes taken care of everything. I cann’t think how Im going to get threw tommorrow thinking about him. Darling love. Darling love!

Lynley looked up, his eyes on the attic’s single window and on the dust motes that floated in its weak oblong of light. He had not considered the possibility that he might feel even slightly moved by the words of a woman so long dead, a woman who painted herself with a garish array of colours, dressed herself with an eye for lubricity, and still managed to become caught up with excitement at the idea of a new life in a city that was for her a place of promise and dreams. Yet her words had indeed touched him somehow. With her buoyant confidence, she was like a water-starved plant, thriving for the very first time under someone’s skill and attention. Even in addressing herself awkwardly to sensuality, she wrote with an unconscious innocence. Unschooled in the world, Hannah Darrow had ultimately made herself the perfect victim.

He began to flip forward through the journal, skimming the entries, looking for the point at which her relationship with the unidentified man began. He found it on January 15, 1973, and as he read, he felt the fire of certainty begin its slow burn through his veins.

Had the best time ever in Norwich today which is fair hard to beleive after the row with John. Me and Mum went to shop there as she said that should cheer me up proper. We stopped in for Aunt Pammy and took her along as well. (She’d been tippling again since the morning and smelled of gin—it was awful.) At lunch we saw a playbill and Pammy said we owed ourselfs a treat so she took us to the play mostly, I think, becouse she wanted to sleep it off which she did with proper snoring till the man behind her kicked her seat. I was never at a play befor, can you credit that? It was about some dutchess who gets passed a dead mans hand and then ends up getting strangled and then everyone stabs each other. And one man kept talking about being a wolf. Quite a piece, I say. But the customes were real pretty Ive never seen nothing like them all these long gowns and head pieces. The ladys so pretty and the men wearing funny tights with little pouches in front. And in the end they gave the dutchess lady flowers and people stood and clapped. I read in the programe whear they travel all round the country doing plays. Fancy that. Made me want to do somthing as well. I hate being stuck in PGreen. Somtimes the pub makes me want to scream. And John wants to do it to me all the time and I just dont want it anymore. Ive not been right since the baby but he wont beleive me.

There followed a week in which she wearily catalogued her life in the village: a round of doing laundry, seeing to the baby’s needs, talking to her mother on the telephone daily, cleaning the flat, working in the pub. She seemed to have no female friends. Nothing other than work and television occupied her time. On January 25, Lynley found the next pertinent entry.