‘You’re going to love the latest,’ Bill Lamb said as O’Reilly buckled himself into his partner’s car outside the Black Dog.
They pulled away rapidly and set out for the road up the hill and toward the Dimple. This morning the sky was clear enough to outline Tinley Tower on its vantage point in searing blue. ‘The tooth’ fitted its pointed, up-thrust, slightly leaning shape well, but O’Reilly wondered just why the earliest villagers had made the folly their settlement’s namesake.
‘You in a coma, Guv?’ Lamb asked.
‘I’m bloody tired, if that’s what you mean. Sleep and this case don’t go together. OK, spill the news. You’re dying to.’
One of the good things about Lamb was that nastiness ran right off him. ‘For once we’ve got a break. It’s going to turn out to be a break, or else.’
‘Or else?’
Lamb stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, lighted it and squinted ahead through acrid smoke. ‘Heads will roll,’ he intoned, managing not to grin. ‘The obit for the baby came from the announcements in some uppity small-circulation society rag. Our Kind, if you can believe that. One of our eager beaver boys went after their circulation list and got no joy. But the sheet of copy paper used for the obituary left on Alex’s kitchen table turns out to come from a batch in use by the library system. Apparently a bunch of London libraries – in appropriate areas – carry the magazine, and the Home Counties, of course. No breaks for several hours but then he hit on a branch in Gloucester where a librarian remembered someone asking for an old copy of Our Kind in the last few days.’
O’Reilly gave the man his whole attention. ‘Go on.’
‘They’ve got CCTV. The Gloucester boys are going through the surveillance films and the librarian is helping. She thinks she might remember the man if she saw him.’
‘But—’
‘I know.’ Lamb cut him off. ‘We’ve got to be sure he wanted to look at the same copy with the obit. But the one he wanted was the right one – according to the librarian.’
‘Don’t suppose he was a regular, or she got his name?’
‘No, but if he’s on film and identifiable, we’ve got him.’ Lamb negotiated the hill with the familiarity of one who had done so a few times before. ‘You heard they put a rush on the DNA?’
‘Yeah, I know. Could get it any time.’
‘So what’s the drill for this fishing expedition, Guv,’ Lamb said.
They were on their way for an informal interview with Leonard Derwinter.
‘Just that. I can smell a break and if these people aren’t in the mix up to their necks, someone wants us to think they are. There’s the entrance. Stags on the gateposts, huh? How high would you say those were? Twenty feet?’
‘Conservatively.’
Impressive was an understatement for the Derwinter estate. It had to cover hundreds of acres and the pale honey-colored stone house itself, set a mile or so back from the road, stood in Georgian splendor amid sloping lawns, and pools more properly classified as lakes, where sculptures rose out of the water and stone urns of evergreen vines interrupted low walls at intervals.
O’Reilly had decided to have Lamb drive them there in the new gray Ford Fiesta which made Bill a happy man. The two of them worked well as an interview team and he wasn’t in the mood to soft pedal anymore. He could feel facts tightening around them. Too bad he had yet to find some strong connecting pieces between the revelations.
‘Will you look at this lot?’ Bill said. ‘Conspicuous consumption, or what?’
‘That about covers it. See the workers’ cottages in the distance. Good for a bit of pastoral color. Not close enough to mar the landscape but visible to prove how important it all is.’
‘A lot of it will be farmland, right?’ Lamb said. He inclined his head to numerous sheep huddled together around the trunks of great beech trees. ‘Just sheep, you think? Or other livestock?’
‘They’re known for their stables and there’s bound to be more. You can only see a sampling of what they’ve got from here, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘This is only a sampling?’ Lamb made a disbelieving sound and stopped the Ford at the bottom of the steps to the main doors. ‘I’d like to see what the whole thing looks like then, boss.’
O’Reilly looked at him sideways. He’d never liked the ‘boss’ bit. ‘None of this is what it once was,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t a working farm they’d probably be holding tours for the public and have a theme park.’
‘A petting zoo,’ Lamb said and laughed. ‘Miniature train? An iced lolly and floss stand?’
‘Down to business,’ O’Reilly said, but he grinned. ‘I think it’ll work best if I’m Mr Sympathy.’
‘Be my guest. Nice Guy was never in my MO.’
O’Reilly glanced thoughtfully at his second in command and partner. Here was one who hadn’t had it easy, but under the hard crust everything wasn’t completely without a shred of compassion.
They climbed out of the car and started up the steps, steps brushed clear of snow and coated with grit. Before they arrived at the top, one of the double doors opened and the sexy Heather Derwinter emerged to greet them. O’Reilly had never seen her without a tight high-necked jumper – this one white – and skin-tight jodhpurs. He was grateful there was no sun or the sheen on her boots might blind him. She no longer wore a sling, but held her left arm protectively against her ribs.
‘Welcome,’ she said, smiling and showing off beautiful teeth. ‘We’re expecting you.’
O’Reilly and Lamb automatically flipped out their warrant cards and introduced themselves, although they’d both met Heather Derwinter following her encounter with the dart in her horse’s rump. She still had healing scratches on her face. They entered the house and O’Reilly nodded to a servant, a man in a dark suit, who hovered nearby.
The portraits that lined dark green silk-covered walls were of horses rather than ancestors, although the most prominent painting, large enough for small details to be more or less discernable at the top of a first flight of marble stairs, had to be of Heather Derwinter mounted on a handsome gray. Derwinter House was in the background, and the richness of rolling land.
‘I didn’t want Leonard to put it there,’ she said, and O’Reilly realized she knew what he was looking at. ‘He wouldn’t listen. Men. Really.’ She giggled and he didn’t think she made that particular sound often. The message he got was to treat her gently, as Leonard’s charming but uninvolved pet.
She led the way beneath lofty ceilings and through towering gilded doors into some sort of receiving room. The place was huge, furnished with elegant-looking antiques, although O’Reilly was no expert on that subject, and smelled heavily of the large floral arrangements on tables, desks and mantel.
Leonard rose from a straight-backed chair in an alcove where he had been reading – or holding a book open – and showed none of his wife’s cheery countenance. ‘Detectives,’ he said, shaking hands with each of them. ‘You must have news for me. I admit I’ve been edgy – more than edgy, waiting to find out what you know.’
‘I’ll ring for coffee,’ Heather said. ‘Elliot’s nose is out of joint because I took over his duties at the door. Serving coffee will mend his ego.’
Mrs Derwinter had definite ideas about what assuaged the egos of the served and those who served, O’Reilly noted. ‘We just had coffee,’ he said, avoiding catching Lamb’s eye. Bill would drink coffee whenever he could get it, which was most of the time. O’Reilly didn’t want the interference of niceties.
Leonard didn’t sit. He remembered the book he held and tossed it on a sofa with spindly legs that reflected in polished wood floors. ‘So?’ His raised eyebrows underscored the question.
‘We’d like to talk more, Mr Derwinter,’ O’Reilly said as if he didn’t know the man was asking for DNA results. ‘There have been some developments. Informal would be acceptable to us but you might prefer to have your solicitor. If that’s—’
‘Hell, no,’ Leonard shot back. ‘You’re not accusing me of anything. Why would I need my solicitor? What did the test show?’
‘Anxious about that, aren’t you?’ Lamb said, producing a notebook. ‘What difference will it make one way or the other? The man’s dead.’
Leonard stared, swallowed hard enough to make his throat jerk, and a flush spread over his olive skin.
‘That’s really not very nice, Detective,’ Heather said behind them. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know if a man who was found dead was your brother or not?’
‘Given that Mr Derwinter supposedly thought his brother had been dead for years he must be used to the idea.’
Time for the sympathy. ‘Those results aren’t back yet,’ O’Reilly said pleasantly. ‘Could we sit down and go over a few things?’
Leonard closed his eyes for an instant and let his hands fall to his sides. ‘Of course.’ He waved them to a pair of red velvet chairs and sat at one end of a facing loveseat.
This was just one of half-a-dozen potential conversation groupings in the room, which seemed like a lot of redundancy to O’Reilly.
Heather joined her husband on the couch and the girlish ingénue had left. The woman glared steadily at Lamb, who could always find a smile in such moments.
‘Your brother, Edward, was older than you,’ O’Reilly began. ‘That would have made him your father’s heir.’
‘Correct.’
‘Hypothetically, why would your father invent the death of a son?’
‘He didn’t,’ Heather said reflexively. ‘That couldn’t have been Edward’s body.’
Without turning to her, Leonard found his wife’s hand and said, ‘Shh, darling. I … I don’t think that’s what Father did but we’ll have to wait for those results, won’t we?’
O’Reilly switched his attention to Heather. ‘I’m glad to see you’re getting better, Mrs Derwinter. Would you hazard a guess about the reason why someone would want you to take a fall like that?’
She looked startled. ‘No, how could I?’
‘It ties you to the case. Since your husband’s family is already heavily implicated – or potentially so – surely you have some thoughts about why you were singled out like that.’
She blushed. Heather Derwinter wasn’t a blusher but he’d clearly caught her off guard. With a finger and thumbnails on her right hand, she traced the seams in her jodhpurs.
He saw inspiration clear her expression. ‘Someone wants you to think we’re involved,’ she said, falling over her words. ‘Why didn’t I think about this before? They did it as a … what do you call it? A smokescreen. You know, they took a chance. Whoever stuck that dart in poor Shiny Boy had to do it while I was taking that hedge. If anything had gone just a little bit wrong, I’d have seen them – only I was too busy flying over Shiny Boy’s head. Wretched nuisance.’
Unfortunately she might make perfect sense. He didn’t respond.
‘I bet the horse wasn’t thinking it was a nuisance,’ Lamb said. ‘Poor devil.’
Bill was very good at setting people’s teeth on edge.
‘Could we go back to the death of Graham Cummings?’ O’Reilly asked. He could still enjoy watching shock tactics work and Leonard fell against the back of his chair, his eyes haunted. ‘You were very young at the time, Mr Derwinter.’
‘And he wasn’t there,’ Heather put in. ‘He couldn’t have been more than six. Six-year-olds don’t remember that sort of thing.’
A glance from Lamb reflected O’Reilly’s own thought that Heather might need closer investigation herself.
‘I remember,’ Leonard said quietly. ‘Afterward, anyway. Edward was in a terrible state. He didn’t say anything, just muttered and stuttered while father raved.’
‘But he was just a boy, too,’ O’Reilly said. ‘Eight or nine.’
Leonard nodded. ‘Yes, and Doc James said it was an accident. Graham was playing in the shallows. He slipped and hit his head on a rock just under the water. How was Edward supposed to fix that?’ He frowned and started to speak again, but closed his mouth.
‘Yes, Mr Derwinter?’ Lamb said. ‘What else?’
‘Nothing,’ Heather said. ‘Stop pushing him. Can’t you see how painful this is?’
‘We’re dealing with a murder investigation,’ O’Reilly said evenly. ‘We have to pursue every angle.’
‘Well, it can’t have anything to do with a kid who drowned because he was fooling about in the water,’ Heather said.
‘Don’t,’ Leonard told her. ‘My father thought it best for Edward to go where he could get a lot of peace and care, so that’s what he did. Father was still grieving for my mother and he wasn’t equipped to bring up two young boys on his own.’
O’Reilly pivoted again. ‘Have you found your father’s signet ring?’
Leonard put his face in his hands and shook his head, no.
‘No, well, I’m sorry for all your troubles but would you look at this again.’ He took the evidence bag containing the ring found on the hill from his pocket. It had been thoroughly examined for trace evidence and he slid it into his palm. ‘Take a close look, sir.’
Reluctantly, Leonard picked up the ring and turned it this way and that, then he looked on the inside of the shank and grew quite still.
‘What do you think?’ O’Reilly said.
‘Was this taken off the dead man’s hand?’
‘Possibly.’ He didn’t admit the ring might have been dropped by someone who did pull it from the corpse, and subsequently found in a patch of gorse and stones.
‘It was my father’s.’ Leonard’s lips were colorless.
‘But they didn’t find it on the body,’ Heather said, all urgency. ‘They’ve just admitted that. For all they know, your father lost it on the hill years ago. He loved to ramble all over the place. He used to turn the ring around and around because it was uncomfortable. What if he did that when he was out walking, lost the thing, and never did anything about it.’
‘You’ve a neat train of thought, madam,’ Lamb said with a slight smirk. ‘Orderly thinking, as it were.’
She scowled at him. ‘You’re on a fishing expedition.’
O’Reilly almost laughed.
‘Who was there when the Cummings boy died?’ He liked to keep the subject off balance. ‘Your father?’
‘I … I can’t think why he would have been.’
‘But Edward was there. Why was that?’
‘Edward liked the river. Father took him into Bourton-on-the-Water with him sometimes so he could be by the Windrush.’
‘So your father was there when the other boy died.’
‘Perhaps he was. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, was I?’
‘So you say.’ He didn’t want Leonard to get his feet under him. ‘How did the Cummings boy come to be there with Edward?’
‘Will Cummings was there, too,’ Leonard said and turned his face away. ‘He’d have had to be. Graham was too small to be on his own.’
‘But you don’t know if your father was there or if he just left a young son to wander by the river on his own?’
‘Will could have been watching both of them if Father was seeing someone about business. But Father was there after Graham had the accident. I remember that. He was distraught … angry. Damn it, what does this have to do with a dead man on that hill – or another man dying at the rectory – only days ago? Graham Cummings was nothing to us – the child of an employee – and he’s been dead for years.’
‘Leonard!’ Heather looked over her shoulder. She stood and took several steps away from the couch. ‘Cathy, how lovely to see you. I was going to call you when I could ride again.’
Cathy Cummings hovered on the threshold of the room, a bunch of paper-wrapped flowers in her hands. She seemed unable to move and her face was stretched into stricken agony. ‘I brought you these,’ she said finally, her voice breaking. She looked at the flowers. ‘Because you had an accident.’
Elliot hovered behind her, all but wringing his hands at having let her arrive on the scene without warning. She turned and thrust the bouquet at him, already running from the room.
Lamb’s mobile rang and he answered. He said, ‘Yes,’ twice and clicked off. ‘Results are in,’ he told O’Reilly.
‘And …’
‘Mr Derwinter here and the dead man were related.’
Leonard choked. He bent over to rest his face on his knees. He didn’t make a sound but his back heaved.