“Rhys-”

“No. Please. Tell me tomorrow.” He turned decisively and walked down the aisle, up the steps to join the others.

Left alone, Lady Helen forced her eyes to remain on the stage, but her thoughts would not. Instead, they attached themselves stubbornly to a reflection on loyalty. If this encounter with Rhys were a test of her devotion to him, she saw that, without even thinking, she had failed it miserably. And she wondered if that momentary failure meant the very worst, if in her heart she questioned what Rhys had really done two nights ago while she was asleep at Westerbrae. The very thought was devastating. She despised herself.

Getting to her feet, she returned to the entrance hall and approached the offi ce doors. She decided against an elaborate fabrication. She would face Stinhurst’s secretary with the truth.

That commitment to honesty would, in this case, be a wise decision.

“IT’S THE CHAIR, Havers,” Lynley was saying once again, possibly for the fourth or fifth time.

The afternoon was growing unbearably cold. A frigid wind had swept in from The Wash and was tearing across the Fens, unbroken by woodland or hills. Lynley made the turn back towards Porthill Green just as Barbara concluded her third examination of the suicide photographs and replaced them in the Darrow file that Chief Constable Plater had loaned them.

She shook her head inwardly. As far as she could tell, the case he was building was more than tenuous; it was virtually nonexistent. “I don’t see how you can possibly reach any viable conclusion from looking at a picture of a chair,” she said.

“Then you look at it again. If she hanged herself, how would she tip the chair onto its side? It couldn’t have been done. She could have kicked at the back of it, or even turned it sideways and still kicked at the back of it. But in either case, the chair would have fallen onto its back, not onto its side. The only way for the chair to end up in that position at Hannah Darrow’s own doing would be if she had twisted her foot into the space between the seat and the back and actually tried to toss the thing.”

“It could have happened. She was missing a shoe,” Barbara reminded him.

“Indeed. But she was missing her right shoe, Havers. And if you look again, you’ll see that the chair was tipped over to her left.”

Barbara saw that he was determined to win her to his way of thinking. There seemed little point to a further protest. Nonetheless, she felt compelled to argue. “So what you’re saying is that Joy Sinclair, in innocently researching a book about a suicide, fell upon a murder instead. How? Out of all the suicides in the country, how could she possibly have stumbled onto one that was a murder? Good God, what do you think the odds are for doing that?”

“But consider why she was attracted to Hannah Darrow’s death in the fi rst place, Havers. Look at all the oddities involved that would have made it stand out glaringly in comparison to any others she looked at. The location: the Fens. A system of canals, periodic fl oods, land reclaimed from the sea. All the natural characteristics that have made it the inspiration of everyone from Dickens to Dorothy Sayers. How did Joy describe it on her tape? ‘The sound of frogs and pumps, the unremittingly flat land.’ Then there’s the site of the suicide: an old abandoned mill. The bizarre clothing she was wearing: two wool coats over two wool sweaters. And then the inconsistency that surely must have struck Joy the moment she saw those police photos: the position of that chair.”

“If it is an inconsistency, how do you explain the fact that Plater himself overlooked it during the investigation? He doesn’t exactly seem to be your bumbling Lestrade type.”

“By the time Plater got there, all the men from the pub had been searching for Hannah, all of them convinced that they were looking for a suicide. And when they found her and telephoned for the police, they reported a suicide. Plater was predisposed to believe that’s exactly what he was looking at when he got to the mill. So he’d lost objectivity before he ever saw the body. And he was given fairly convincing evidence that Hannah Darrow had indeed intended to kill herself when she left her fl at. The note.”

“But you heard Plater say it was genuine enough.”

“Of course it’s genuine,” Lynley said. “I’m certain it’s her handwriting.”

“Then how do you explain-”

“Good God, Havers, look at the thing. Is there a single misspelled word in it? Is there a point of punctuation that she even missed?”

Barbara took it out, glanced at it, turned to Lynley. “Are you trying to say that this is something Hannah Darrow copied? Why? Was she practising her handwriting? Acting out of sheer boredom? Life in Porthill Green looks like it might be less than ducky, but I don’t exactly see a village girl whiling away her time by improving her script. And even if she did, are you going to argue that Darrow found this note somewhere and realised how he could use it? That he had the foresight to stow it away until the time was right? That he put it out on the kitchen table? That he…what? Killed his wife? How? When? And how did he get her to wear all those clothes? And even if he managed it all without raising anyone’s suspicion, how on earth is he connected to Westerbrae and Joy Sinclair’s death?”

“Through the telephone calls,” Lynley said. “Wales and Suffolk over and over. Joy Sinclair innocently telling her cousin Rhys Davies-Jones about her frustrations in dealing with John Darrow, not to mention her budding suspicions about Hannah’s death. And Davies-Jones biding his time, suggesting that Joy arrange to have a room next to Helen, then fi nishing her off the moment he saw his chance.”

Barbara heard him, incredulous. Once again she saw how he was turning and interpreting all the facts skillfully, using only what he needed to take him closer to an arrest of Davies-Jones. “Why?” she demanded in exasperation.

“Because there’s a connection between Darrow and Davies-Jones. I don’t know what it is yet. Perhaps an old relationship. Perhaps a debt to be paid. Perhaps mutual knowledge. But whatever it is, we’re getting closer to fi nding it.”

12

WINE’S THE PLOUGH was just minutes short of its midafternoon closing when

Lynley and Havers entered. John Darrow made no secret of his displeasure at seeing them.

“Closing,” he barked.

Lynley ignored the man’s implied refusal to speak with them. Instead, he approached the bar, opened the file, and took out Hannah Darrow’s suicide note. Next to him, Havers flipped open her notebook. Darrow watched all this with his mouth pressed into a hostile line.

“Tell me about this,” Lynley suggested, passing the note across to him.

The man gave it a moment’s sullen, cursory attention, but he said nothing. Instead, he began gathering the pint glasses that lined the bar, dousing them furiously into a pan of murky water beneath it.

“How much education did your wife have, Mr. Darrow? Did she finish school? Did she go to university? Or was she self-educated? A great reader, perhaps?”

Darrow’s scowling face revealed a stumbling search through Lynley’s words for a trap. Apparently not finding one, he said shortly, “Hannah didn’t hold with books. She’d had enough of school at fi fteen.”

“I see. But interested in the Fens, was she? The plant life and such?”

The man’s lips moved in a quick snarl of contempt. “What d’you want with me, pommy boy? Have your say and get out.”

“She writes here about trees. And a tree that died but still sways in the wind. Rather poetic, wouldn’t you say? Even for a suicide message. What is this note really, Darrow? When did your wife write it? Why did she? Where did you find it?” There was no reply. Wordlessly, Darrow continued washing glasses. They clanked and scraped angrily against the metal pan. “On the night she died, you left the pub. Why?”