Payment In Blood

by Elizabeth George

  Indeed, Darrow had become decidedly congenial towards the men at the bar within moments of Lynley’s arrival, as if an unaccustomed infusion of bonhomie into his behaviour would encourage them to linger long after they would otherwise have departed. They were talking of sports at the moment, a loud conversation about Newcastle football that was interrupted when the pub door opened and a young boy—perhaps sixteen years old—hurried in from the cold.

  Lynley had seen him coming from the direction of Mildenhall, on an ancient motorbike whose predominant colour was mud. Wearing heavy work boots, blue jeans, and an antique leather jacket—all stained liberally with what appeared to be grease—the boy had parked in front of the pub and had spent several minutes across the street, admiring Lynley’s car and running his hand along the sleek line of its roof. He had the sturdy build of John Darrow, but his colouring was as light as his mother’s had been.

  “Whose boat?” he called out cheerfully as he entered.

  “Mine,” Lynley replied.

  The boy sauntered over, tossing fair hair off his forehead in that self-conscious way of the young. “Dead nice, that.” He gazed out the window longingly. “Set you back a few quid.”

  “And continues to do so. It guzzles petrol as if I were the sole support of British Petroleum. Most of the time, frankly, I think about taking on your mode of transportation.”

  “Sorry?”

  Lynley nodded towards the street. “Your motorbike.”

  “Oh that!” The boy laughed. “Quite a piece, that. Got in a smash with it last week and it didn’t even take a dent. Not that you’d notice if it had. It’s so old that—”

  “You’ve chores to do, Teddy,” John Darrow interrupted sharply. “See to them.”

  While his words effectively ended the conversation between his son and the London policeman, they also served to remind the others of the time. The farmers dropped coins and notes onto the bar, the old woman by the fire gave a loud snort and awoke, and within moments only Lynley and John Darrow were left in the pub. The muted sound of rock and roll and a banging of cupboards in the flat above them spoke of Teddy seeing to his chores.

  “He’s not in school,” Lynley noted.

  Darrow shook his head. “He’s finished. Like his mum in that. Didn’t hold much with books.”

  “Your wife didn’t read?”

  “Hannah? Girl never opened a book that I saw. Didn’t even own one.”

  Lynley felt in his pocket for his cigarettes, lit one thoughtfully, opened the file on Hannah Darrow’s death. He removed her suicide note. “That’s odd, then, isn’t it? Where do you suppose she copied this from?”

  Darrow pressed his lips together as he recognised the paper Lynley had shown him once before. “I’ve nothing more to say on’t.”

  “You do, I’m afraid.” Lynley joined the man at the bar, Hannah’s note in his hand. “Because she was murdered, Mr. Darrow, and I think you’ve known that for fifteen years. Frankly, up until this morning, I was certain you’d done the murdering yourself. Now I’m not so sure. But I have no intention of leaving today until you tell me the truth. Joy Sinclair died because she came too close to understanding what happened to your wife. So if you think her death is going to be swept aside because you’d rather not talk about what happened in this village in 1973, I suggest you reconsider. Or we can all go into Mildenhall and chat with Chief Constable Plater. The three of us. You and Teddy and I. For if you won’t cooperate, I’ve no doubt your son has some pertinent memory of his mother.”

  “You leave the lad out of it! He’s nothing to do with this! He’s never known! He can’t know!”

  “Know what?” Lynley asked. The publican played with the porcelain pulls on the ale and the lager, but his face was wary. Lynley continued. “Listen to me, Darrow. I don’t know what happened. But a sixteen-year-old boy—just like your son—was brutally murdered because he came too close to a killer. The same killer—I swear it, I feel it—who murdered your wife. And I know she was murdered. So for God’s sake, help me before someone else dies.”

  Darrow stared at him dully. “A boy, you say?”

  Lynley heard rather than saw the initial crumbling of Darrow’s defences. He pressed the advantage mercilessly. “A boy called Gowan Kilbride. All he wanted in life was to go to London to be another James Bond. A boy’s dream, wasn’t it? But he died on the steps of a scullery in Scotland, with his face and chest scalded like cooked meat and a butcher knife in his back. And if the killer comes here next, wondering how much Joy Sinclair managed to learn from you…How in God’s name will you protect your son’s life or your own from a man or woman you don’t even know!”

  Darrow openly struggled with the weight of what Lynley was asking him to do: to go back into the past, to resurrect, to relive. This, in the hope that he and his son might be secure from a killer who had touched their lives with devastating cruelty so many years ago.

  His tongue flicked across his dry lips. “It was a man.”

  DARROW LOCKED the pub door, and they moved to a table by the fire. He brought an unopened bottle of Old Bushmill’s with him, twisted off the seal, and poured himself a tumbler. For at least a minute, he drank without speaking, fortifying himself for what he would ultimately have to say.

  “You followed Hannah when she left the flat that night,” Lynley guessed.

  Darrow wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. “Aye. She was to help me and one of the local lasses in the pub, so I’d gone upstairs to fetch her, and I found a note on the kitchen table. Only, wasn’t the same note as you’ve there in the file. Was one telling me she was leaving. Going with some fancy nob to London. To be in a play.”

  Lynley felt a stirring of affirmation and with it a nascent vindication that told him that, in spite of everything he had heard from St. James and Helen, Barbara Havers and Stinhurst, his instincts had not led him wrong after all. “That’s all the note said?”

  Darrow shook his head darkly and looked down into his glass. The whisky gave off a heady smell of malt. “No. She took me to task…as a man. And did a bit of comparing so I’d know for certain what she’d been up to and what’d made her decide to leave. She wanted a real man, she said, one who knew how to love a woman proper, please a woman in bed. I’d never pleased her, she said. Never. But this bloke…She described how he did it to her so, she said, if I ever fancied having a woman in the future, I’d know how to do it right, for once. Like she was doing me a favour.”

  “How did you know where to find her?”

  “Saw her. When I read the note, I went to the window. She must’ve only just left a minute or two before I went up to the flat because I saw her down at the edge of the village, carrying a big case, setting off on the path to the canal that runs through Mildenhall Fen.”

  “Did you think of the mill at once?”

  “I thought of nothing but getting my hands on the bloody little bitch and beating her silly. But after a moment, I thought how much tastier it would be to follow her, catch her with him, and have at them both. So I kept my distance.”

  “She didn’t see you following her?”

  “It was dark. I kept to the far edge of the path where the growth is thickest. She turned round two or three times. I thought she knew I was there. But she just kept walking. She got a bit ahead of me where there’s a bend in the canal, so I missed the turn to the mill and kept going for…perhaps three hundred yards. When I finally saw I’d lost her, I figured where she must be heading—there was little else out there—so I doubled back quick and made my way along the track to the mill. Her case was lying some thirty yards down the way.”

  “She’d gone on without it?”

  “It was dead heavy. I thought she’d gone on to the mill to have that bloke come back for it. So I decided to wait and have at him right there on the path. Then I’d go on and see to her in the mill.” Darrow poured himself another drink and shoved the bottle towards Lynley, who demurred. “But no one came back for the case,” he went on. “I wait
ed some five minutes. Then I crept up along the path to have a better look. Hadn’t got as far as the clearing when this bloke come out of the mill at a run. He tore round the side. I heard a car start and take off. That was it.”

  “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.

  THE 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.