Payment in Blood

He could hear Havers’ smile-in spite of herself-across the telephone line. “A pleasure, sir. As I’ve always said, when the ship is sinking, one may as well bash a few holes in the bow.”

WHEN LYNLEY asked for a ploughman’s lunch and a pint of Gui

He ate calmly enough, not bothered by the curiosity evidenced in the ill-hushed questions of the other customers. Local farmers, no doubt, they would soon be off to see to the rest of their day’s work, leaving John Darrow with no choice but to face another interview that he appeared to be doing his best to avoid.

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 ru

“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 fl at above them spoke of Teddy seeing to his chores.

“He’s not in school,” Lynley noted.

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

“Your wife didn’t read?”

“Ha

Lynley felt in his pocket for his cigarettes, lit one thoughtfully, opened the file on Ha

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, Ha

“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 Ha

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 affi rmation 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 fi nd 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 fl at 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.”