In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

by Elizabeth George

  It hadn't taken much effort for Matthew to find the original score. And once he had it in his hands, he saw how he could make some money from it. His father wouldn't know who had the score—anyone from the production offices could have nicked it from the files if they'd known where to look—and because his reputation was paramount to him, he'd pay whatever was asked to get the music back. In that way, Matthew would have the inheritance his father's will denied him.

  The scheme had been simple. Four weeks before the opening of Hamlet, Matthew had sent a page of the score to his father's home with an anonymous note. If one million pounds wasn't paid into an account in St. Helier, the score would be sent to the biggest tabloid in the country just in time for opening night. Once the money was in the bank, David King-Ryder would be informed where to pick up the rest of the music.

  “When I had the money, I waited till a week before the opening,” Matthew told them. “I wanted him to sweat.”

  He sent his dad a note then and gave him the instructions to go to the phone boxes in South Kensington and wait for further instructions. At ten o'clock, he told him, David King-Ryder would be informed where the music could be found.

  “But Terry Cole answered the phone that night, not your dad,” Barbara said. “Why didn't you recognise the different voice?”

  “He said ‘yeah,’ that's all,” Matthew told her. “I thought he was nervous, in a hurry. And he sounded like someone who was expecting the call.”

  In the days that followed, he'd seen that his father was agitated about something, but he'd assumed that King-Ryder was in a state about having had to pay out one million pounds. He'd had no way of knowing that his father was daily growing more frantic as the phone call he kept hoping to receive—from the blackmailer who, he believed, had failed to contact him at the phone box in Elvaston Place—did not materialise. As the premier of Hamlet approached, David King-Ryder had started to see himself in the power of someone who was either going to bleed him dry with more demands for money over the years or ruin him forever by releasing Michael Chandler's music to the tabloids.

  “When he hadn't heard by opening night and the production was such a success … You know what happened.”

  “He blew out his brains,” Barbara said. “That's owing to you.”

  “I didn't mean him to die,” King-Ryder cried. “He was my dad. But I thought it wasn't fair that all his money … every penny of his money except that measly bequest to Ginny …” He lowered his gaze, spoke fiercely to hands rather than to Barbara and Winston. “He owed me something. He hadn't been much of a father to me. He owed me at least this much.”

  “Why didn't you just ask him for it?” Nkata asked.

  Matthew breathed out a bitter laugh. “Dad worked to be who and where he was. He expected me to do the same. And I always did—I worked and I worked—and I would have kept on working. But then I saw that he was going to take a shortcut to his own success through Michael's music. And I decided that if he could take a shortcut, so could I. And it would have come out all right in the end if that bloody little bastard hadn't showed up. And then when I saw that he intended to use the music and to play the same rotten game with me, I had to do something. I couldn't just sit there and let it happen.”

  Barbara frowned. Everything until that moment had fitted perfectly into the picture. She said, “Play the same game? What?”

  “Blackmail,” Matthew King-Ryder said. “Cole walked into my office with that smirk on his face and said, ‘I got something here that I need your help with, Mr. King-Ryder,’ and as soon as I saw it—a single sheet just like I'd sent to my dad—I knew exactly what that little shit had in mind. I asked him how he came to have it in his possession, but he wouldn't tell me. So I threw him out. But I followed him. I knew he wasn't in it alone.”

  On the trail of the music, he'd followed Terry Cole to the railway arches in Battersea, and from there to his flat on Anhalt Road. When the boy had gone inside the studio, Matthew had taken a chance and riffled through the saddlebags hanging from his motorcycle. When he'd found nothing, he knew he had to continue following till the kid led him either to the music or to the person who had the music.

  It was when he'd followed him to Rostrevor Road that he'd first believed he was on the right trail. For Terry had emerged from Vi Nevin's building with a large manila envelope, which he'd placed in his saddlebag. And that, Matthew King-Ryder had believed, had to contain the music.

  “When he took to the motorway, I'd no idea where he was going. But I was committed to seeing things through. So I followed him.”

  And when he'd seen Terry and Nicola Maiden having their meeting out in the middle of nowhere, he'd been convinced that they were the principals behind his father's death and his own misfortune. His only weapon was the long bow he had in his car. He went back for it, waited till nightfall, then dispatched them both.

  “But there was no music at the camping site,” Matthew said. “Just an envelope of letters, pasted-up letters from magazines and newspapers.”

  So he'd had to keep looking. He had to find that score to Hamlet, and he'd returned to London and searched in those places Terry had led him.

  “I didn't think of the old woman,” he said finally.

  “You should have accepted when she offered you cake,” Barbara told him.

  Once more Matthew's glance fell to his hands. His shoulders shook. He began to cry.

  “I didn't mean harm to come to him. I swear to God. If he'd only just said he'd leave me something. But he wouldn't do that. I was his son, his only son, but I wasn't meant to have anything. Oh, he said I could have his family pictures. His bloody piano and guitar. But as for the money … any of the money … a single penny of his God damn money … Why couldn't he see that it made me worth nothing to be overlooked? I was supposed to be grateful just to be his son, just to be alive on account of him. He'd give me a job, but for all the rest … No. I had to make it entirely on my own. And it wasn't fair. Because I loved him. All the years when he failed, I still loved him. And if he'd continued to fail, it wouldn't have made a difference. Not to me.”

  His distress seemed real, and Barbara wanted to feel sorry for him. But she found that she couldn't as she realised how much he wanted her pity. He wanted her to see him as a victim of his father's indifference. No matter that he'd destroyed his father for one million pounds, no matter that he'd committed two brutal murders. They were meant to feel sorry that circumstances beyond his control had forced his hand, that David King-Ryder hadn't seen fit to leave him the money in his will, which would have precluded the crimes ever happening in the first place.

  God, Barbara thought, there it was: the malaise of their time. Do it to Julia. Hurt someone else. Blame someone else. But don't hurt or blame me.

  She wouldn't begin to buy that line of thinking. Any pity Barbara might have mustered for the man was erased by two senseless deaths in Derbyshire and the image of what he'd done to Vi Nevin. He'd pay for those crimes. But a prison term—no matter its length—didn't seem enough recompense for blackmail, suicide, murder, assault, and the aftermath of each. She said, “You might want to know the truth of the matter about Terry Cole's intentions, Mr. King-Ryder. In fact, I think it's important that you know.”

  And so she told him that all Terry Cole had wanted was a simple address and telephone number. In fact, had Matthew King-Ryder offered to take the music off his hands and pay him handsomely for bringing it to the offices of King-Ryder Productions, the boy would probably have been thrilled to the dickens.

  “He didn't even know what it was,” Barbara said. “He hadn't the slightest idea in the world that he'd put his hands on the music to Hamlet.”

  Matthew King-Ryder absorbed this information. But if Barbara had hoped she was dealing him a mortal blow that would worsen his coming life in prison, she was disabused of that notion when he replied. “He's to blame for it all. If he hadn't interfered, my dad would be alive.”

  Lynley reached Eaton Terrace at ten that n
ight. He found his wife in the bathroom, sunk in a fragrant citrus froth of bubbles. Her eyes were closed, her head cradled in a towelling pillow, and her hands—garbed incongruously in white satin gloves—rested on the spotless stainless steel tray that spanned the width of the bath and held her soaps and her sponges. A CD player sat on the vanity amid a clutter of Helens unguents, potions, and creams. Music emanated from it. A soprano sang.

  They lay him—gently and softly—in the cold cold ground,

  they lay him—gently and softly—in the cold cold ground.

  And here am I, a child without a light, to see me through the coming

  storm, with no one here to tell me I am not alone.

  Lynley reached for the off button. “Ophelia, I expect, once Hamlet's killed Polonius.”

  Helen splashed in the bath behind him. “Tommy! You frightened me half to death.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Have you just now got in?”

  “Yes. Tell me about the gloves, Helen.”

  “The gloves?” Helens glance shifted to her hands. “Oh! The gloves. It's my cuticles. I'm giving them a treatment, a combination of heat and oil.”

  “That's a relief,” he said.

  “Why? Had you noticed my cuticles?”

  “No. But I thought you were anticipating a future as the Queen, which would mean our relationship has come to an end. Have you ever seen the Queen without her gloves?”

  “Hmm. I don't think I have. But you don't suppose she actually bathes with them on, do you?”

  “It's a possibility. She may loathe human contact even with herself.”

  Helen laughed. “I'm so glad you're home.” She peeled off the gloves and plunged her hands into the water. She settled back against her pillow and regarded him. “Tell me” she said gently. “Please.”

  It was her way, and Lynley hoped it would always be her way: to read him so swiftly and to open herself to him with those three simple words.

  He pulled a stool over to the side of the bath. He took off his jacket, dropped it onto the floor, rolled up his sleeves, and reached for one of the sponges and some soap. He took her arm first and ran the sponge down its slender length. And as he bathed her, he told her everything. She listened in silence, watching him.

  “The worst of it all is this,” he said in conclusion to his tale. “Andy Maiden would still be alive if I'd stuck to procedure when we met yesterday afternoon. But his wife came into the room, and instead of questioning her about Nicola's life in London—which would have revealed that she'd known about it even longer than Andy, that Nicola had told her months before she told her father—I held back. Because I wanted to help him protect her.”

  “When she didn't need his protection at all,” Helen said. “Yes. I see how it happened. How dreadful. But, Tommy, you were doing the best you knew at the time.”

  Lynley squeezed the sponge and let the soapy water run against his wife's shoulders before he returned the sponge to its tray. “The best I knew at the time was to stick to procedure. He was a suspect. So was she. I didn't treat either one of them that way. Had I done so, he wouldn't be dead.”

  Lynley couldn't decide what the worst of it had been: seeing the bloody Swiss Army knife still clutched in Andy's stiffened hand, trying to get Nancy Maiden away from her husband's corpse, hiking back to the Bentley with her in tow and every moment fearing that her shock would give way to a raving grief which he would not be able to handle, waiting—endlessly, it seemed—for the police to arrive, facing the corpse a second time and this time without Andy's wife present to deflect his attention from his former colleague's manner of death.

  “Looks like the knife he showed me,” Hanken had said, observing it on the ground.

  “It would be, wouldn't it” was Lynley's only reply. Then, passionately, “Blast it. God damn it, Peter. It's all my fault. If I'd showed them every one of my cards when they were both with me … But I didn't. I didn't.”

  Hanken had nodded at his team then, directing them to bag the body. He'd shaken a cigarette from his packet and offered the packet to Lynley. He'd said, “Take one, God damn it. You need it, Thomas,” and Lynley had complied. They'd left the ancient stone circle but remained by the sentry stone, smoking their Marlboros. “No one operates by rote,” Hanken said. “Half of this job is intuition, and that comes from the heart. You followed your heart. In your position, I can't say I would have done differently.”

  “Can't you?”

  “No.”

  But Lynley had known the other man was lying. Because the most important part of the job was knowing both when to follow your heart and when to do so would lead to disaster.

  “Barbara was right from the first,” Lynley told Helen as she rose from the bath and took the towel he extended to her. “Had I even seen that this wouldn't have happened, because I'd have stayed in London and reined back the Derbyshire end of things while we brought down King-Ryder.”

  “If that's the case,” Helen said quietly as she wrapped the towel round her body, “then I'm equally to blame for what's happened, Tommy.” And she told him how Barbara had come to be tracking down King-Ryder once she'd been thrown off the case. “I could have phoned you when Denton told me about the music. I didn't make that choice.”

  “I doubt I would have listened if I'd known that what you were telling me was going to prove Barbara right.”

  “As to that, darling …” Helen went to the vanity and took up a small bottle of lotion, which she began to smooth against her face. “What is it, really, that's bothered you about Barbara? About this North Sea business and her firing that gun. Because I know you know she's a fine detective. She may go her own way now and again, but her heart is always in the right place, isn't it?”

  And there it was again, that word heart and everything it implied about the underlying reasons behind a person's actions. Hearing his wife use it, Lynley was reminded of another's use of it so many years before, of a woman weeping and saying to him, “My God, Tommy, what's become of your heart?” when he refused to see her, to speak to her even, in the aftermath of discovering her adultery.

  And then he finally knew. He understood for the very first time, and the understanding made him recoil from who he had been and what he had done for the last twenty years. “I couldn't control her,” he said quietly, far more to himself than to his wife. “I couldn't mould her into the image I'd had of her. She went her own way and I couldn't bear it. He's dying, I thought, and she should damn well act like a wife whose husband is dying.”

  Helen understood. “Ah. Your mother.”

  “I thought I'd forgiven her long ago. But perhaps I haven't forgiven her at all. Perhaps she's always there—in every woman I have to deal with—and perhaps I keep trying to make her be someone she doesn't want to be.”

  “Or perhaps you've simply never forgiven yourself for not being able to stop her.” Helen set down her lotion and came to him. “We carry such baggage, don't we, darling? And just when we think we've finally unpacked, there it all is again, waiting in front of our bedroom door, ready to trip us when we get up in the morning.”

  She'd had her head wrapped in a turban, and she took this off and shook her hair out. She hadn't completely dried herself, so drops of water glistened on her shoulders and gathered in the hollow of her throat.

  “Your mother, my father,” she said as she took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “It's always someone. I was all in a muddle because of that ridiculous wallpaper. I'd decided that if I hadn't become the woman my father intended me to be—the wife of a man in possession of a title—I'd have known my own mind with regard to that paper. And because I didn't know my own mind, I blamed him. My father. But the truth of the matter is that I could always have gone my own way, as Pen and Iris did. I could have said no. And I didn't because the path laid out was so much easier and so much less frightening than forging my own would have been.”

  Lynley smoothed her cheek fondly He traced her jaw and the length of her long and love
ly neck.

  “Sometimes I hate being a grown-up,” Helen told him. “There's so much more freedom in being a child.”

  “Isn't there,” he agreed. He put his fingers to the towel that wrapped her body. He kissed her neck, her shoulders, and her mouth. “But there's more advantage in adulthood, I think.”

  He loosened the towel and drew her to him.

  CHAPTER 31

  t the sound of her alarm the next morning, Barbara Havers rolled out of bed with a blazing headache. She stumbled to the bathroom, where she rattled round for several aspirin and fumbled with the handles of the shower. Bollocks, she thought. She'd obviously been leading much too exemplary a life in the last few years. As a result, she'd become grossly out of condition in the partying arena.

  It hadn't even been that much of a celebration. After they'd finished taking Matthew King-Ryder's statement, she and Nkata had gone out for a minor frolic. They'd visited only four pubs, and neither one of them had drunk the truly hard stuff. But what they'd drunk had been enough to do the trick. Barbara felt like a lorry had driven over her head.

  She stood under the shower and let the water beat against her until the aspirin began to take effect. She scrubbed her body and washed her hair, swearing off everything even remotely alcoholic on week nights henceforth. She thought about phoning Nkata to see if he was experiencing a morning-after as well. But she considered how his mother would react to her favourite child's receiving a phone call from an unknown woman before seven in the morning, and she abandoned the idea. No need to worry Mrs. Nkata about her darling Winnie's purity of flesh and spirit. Barbara would see him at the Yard soon enough.

  Her morning ablutions performed, Barbara padded over to her wardrobe and pondered what sartorial statement she could make today. She opted for discretion and pulled out a trouser suit that she hadn't thought to wear for at least two years.