“Unusual but not out of the range of belief.”

“That’s not it.” Vinney shook his head. “Sir Andrew was a longtime school friend of Geoffrey’s father. They’d been at Harrow and Cambridge together. They were in the same London club. He died in 1970.”

St. James supplied his own conclusion to this new revelation. Sir Andrew may have hidden what needed to be hidden. He may have brought forth only what needed to be brought forth. Yet, all the disjointed pieces of information considered, the time period-January 1963-struck St. James as the most relevant item. He couldn’t have said why. He reached for the photographs.

The first was of a group of black-garbed people about to climb into a row of parked limousines. St. James recognised most of them. Francesca Gerrard clinging to the arm of a middle-aged man, presumably her husband Phillip; Stuart and Marguerite Rintoul bending over to speak to two bewildered children, obviously Elizabeth and her older brother Alec; several people forming a conversational circle on the steps of the building in the background, their faces blurry. The second picture was of the accident site with its scar of burnt land. Standing next to it was a roughly dressed farmer, a border collie at his side. Hugh Kilbride, Gowan’s father, St. James speculated, the first on the scene. The last picture was of a group leaving a building, most likely the site of the inquest itself. Once again, St. James recognised the people he had met at Westerbrae. But this photograph contained several unfamiliar faces.

“Who are these people? Do you know?”

Vinney pointed as he spoke. “Sir Andrew Higgins is directly behind the old Earl of Stinhurst. Next to him is the family solicitor. You know the others, I presume.”

“Save this man,” St. James said. “Who is he?” The man in question was behind and to the right of the old Earl of Stinhurst, his head turned in conversation to Stuart Rintoul, who listened, frowning, one hand pulling at his chin.

“Not a clue,” Vinney said. “The chap who took the notes for the story might know, but I didn’t think to ask him. Shall I take them back and have a go?”

St. James thought about it. “Perhaps,” he said slowly, and then turned to the darkroom. “Deborah, will you have a look at these please?” His wife joined them at the table, gazing over St. James’ shoulder at the photographs. After giving her a moment to evaluate them, St. James said, “Can you do a set of enlargements from this last one? Individual pictures of each person, mostly each face?”

She nodded. “They’d be quite grainy, of course, certainly not the best quality, but recognisable. Shall I set up to do it?”

“Please, yes.” St. James looked at Vinney. “We shall have to see what our current Lord Stinhurst has to say about these.”

THE POLICE in Mildenhall had conducted the investigation into Hannah Darrow’s suicide. Raymond Plater, the investigating offi cer, was, in fact, now the town’s chief constable. He was a man who wore authority like a suit of clothes into which he had grown more and more comfortable with the passage of time. So he was not the least concerned to have Scotland Yard CID popping up on his doorstep to talk about a case fifteen years closed.

“I remember it, all right,” he said, leading Lynley and Havers into his well-appointed office. He adjusted beige venetian blinds in a manner of proud ownership, then picked up a telephone, dialled three numbers, and said, “Plater here. Will you bring me the fi le on Darrow, Hannah. D-a-r-r-o-w. It’ll be in 1973… A closed case…Right.” He swivelled his chair to a table behind his desk and tossed back over his shoulder, “Coffee?”

When the other two accepted his offer, Plater did the honours with an effi cient-looking coffee maker, passing steaming mugs over to them along with milk and sugar. He himself drank appreciatively, yet with remarkable delicacy for a man so energetic and so fi erce of feature. With its implacable jaw and clear Nordic eyes, his face reflected the savage Viking warriors from whom he no doubt had taken his blood.

“You’re not the first to come asking about the Darrow woman,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

“The writer Joy Sinclair was here,” Lynley responded, and to Plater’s quickly cocked head, added, “She was murdered this past weekend in Scotland.”

The chief constable’s adjustment in position indicated his interest. “Is there a connection?”

“Merely a gut feeling at the moment. Did Sinclair come to you alone?”

“Yes. Persistent she was, too. Arrived without an appointment, and as she wasn’t a member of the Force, there was a bit of a wait.” Plater smiled. “Just over two hours, as I recall. But she put in the time, so I went ahead and saw her. This was…sometime early last month.”

“What did she want?”

“Conversation mostly. A look at what we had on the Darrow woman. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have made it available to anyone, but she had two letters of introduction, one from a Welsh chief constable she’d worked with on a book and another from a detective superintendent somewhere in the south. Devon, perhaps. Beyond that, she’d an impressive list of credentials-at least two Silver Daggers, I recall-that she wasn’t above showing off to convince me she wasn’t hanging about the entrance hall in the hope of an hour’s natter.”

A deferential knock upon the door heralded a young constable who handed his chief a thick folder and made himself scarce. Plater opened the folder and drew out a stack of police photographs.

They were, Lynley saw, standard crime-scene work. Starkly black and white, they still depicted death with grim attention to detail, going so far as to include an elongated shadow cast by the hanging body of Hannah Darrow. There was little else to see. The room was virtually unfurnished, with an open-beam ceiling, a floor of wide but badly pitted planks, and rough-hewn wooden walls. These appeared to be curved, small four-paned windows their only decoration. A plain cane-seated chair lay on its side beneath the body, and one of her shoes had fallen off and rested against a rung. She had not used rope, but rather what appeared to be a dark scarf, attached to a hook in a ceiling beam, and her head hung forward with long blonde hair curtaining the worst distortion of her face.

Lynley scrutinised the photographs, one after another, feeling a twinge of uncertainty. He handed them to Havers and watched as she sorted through them, but she returned them to Plater without remark.

“Where were the photographs taken?” he asked the chief constable.

“She was found in a mill out on Mildenhall Fen, about a mile from the village.”

“Is the mill still there?”

Plater shook his head. “Torn down three or four years past, I’m afraid. Not that it would do you too much good to see it. Although,” his voice was momentarily reflective, “the Sinclair woman asked to see it as well.”

“Did she?” Lynley asked thoughtfully. He wondered about that request and considered what John Darrow had told him: Joy had taken ten months to find the death she wanted to write about. “Are you absolutely certain this was a suicide?” he asked the chief constable.

In answer, Plater riffled through the fi le. He brought out a single piece of notebook paper. Torn in several places, it bore the trace of creases from having been crumpled and then pressed in among other papers to smooth it out. Lynley scanned the few words, written in a large, childish script with rounded letters and tiny circles used in place of periods and dots.

I must go, it’s time…There’s a tree that’s dead, but it goes on swaying in the wind with the others. So it seems to me that if I die, I’ll still have a part in life, one way or another. Goodbye, my darling.

“Pretty straightforward, that,” Plater commented.

“Where was this found?”

“On the kitchen table at her home. With the pen right beside it, Inspector.”