Suddenly everything on Joy’s desk began to take on a marked coherence. The texts on suicide, the workings of the police, the articles about death, the title of a new book. Lynley felt the tightening of excitement that always came with knowing he was on the right track.
He turned back to the word processor. It had two disks in it, he saw, both a program disk and one that would contain Joy’s work.
“Havers,” he shouted, “what do you know about computers?”
“A minute,” she returned. “I’ve got…” Her voice lowered as she spoke into the phone.
Impatiently, Lynley switched the machine on. In a moment, directions appeared on the screen. It was far simpler than he would have ever imagined. Within a minute he was looking at Joy’s working copy of Hanging’s Too Good.
Unfortunately, the sum total of her manuscript-six months overdue to her publishers and no doubt the cause of her dispute with them-was one simple sentence: “Hannah decided to kill herself on the night of March 26, 1973.” That was it.
Fruitlessly, Lynley searched for something else, using every direction that the computer program had to offer him. But nothing was there. Either her work had been erased, or that single sentence was as far as Joy Sinclair had gone. No wonder her editor is frothing at the mouth and talking about legal action, Lynley thought.
He switched the machine off and gave his attention back to her desk. He spent the next ten minutes trying to fi nd something more in the material there. Failing that, he went to her filing cabinet and began searching through its four drawers. He was on his second one when Havers came into the room.
“Anything?” she asked him.
“A book called Hanging’s Too Good, someone named Hannah who decided to commit suicide, and a place called Porthill Green, P. Green, I should guess. What about you?”
“I’ve begun to get the feeling that no one goes to work in New York much before noon, but I was able to find out that the New York number was for a literary agent.”
“And the others?”
“The Somerset call was to Stinhurst’s home.”
“What about the letter from Edna? Did you telephone the publishing house about it?”
Havers nodded. “Joy sold a proposal to them early last year. She wanted to do something different, not a study of a criminal and victim which was her usual bent, but a study of a suicide, what led up to it and its aftereffects. The publisher bought the proposal- they’ve not had to worry about her meeting deadlines before this. But that was the end of it. She never gave them a thing. They’ve been after her for months. In fact, the reaction to her death sounded as if one of them may have been praying for it on a nightly basis.”
“What about the other numbers?”
“The number in Suffolk was an interesting one,” Havers replied. “A boy answered- sounded like a teenager. But he didn’t have the slightest idea who Joy Sinclair was or why she might have been phoning his number.”
“So what’s so interesting about that?”
“His name, Inspector. Teddy Darrow. His father’s name is John. And he was speaking to me from a pub called Wine’s the Plough. And that pub is sitting right in the middle of Porthill Green.”
Lynley grinned, felt that swift surge of power that comes from validation. “By God, Havers. Sometimes I think we’re one hell of a team. We’re onto it now. Can’t you feel it?”
Havers didn’t respond. She was browsing through the material on the desk.
“So we’ve found the John Darrow that Joy talked about both at dinner and on her tape,” Lynley mused. “We’ve the explanation for the reference on her calendar to P. Green. We’ve the reason for the matchbook in her shoulder bag-she must have been in the pub. And now we’re looking for a connection between Joy’s book and John Darrow, between John Darrow and Westerbrae.” He looked at Havers sharply. “But there was another set of phone calls, wasn’t there? To Wales.”
Lynley watched her leaf through the newspaper clippings on the desk in an apparent need to scrutinise each one of them. She didn’t appear to be reading, however. “They were to Llanbister. To a woman called Anghared Mynach.”
“Why did Joy phone her?”
Again, there was hesitation. “She was looking for someone, sir.”
Lynley’s eyes narrowed. He closed the fi ling drawer whose contents he had been examining. “Who?”
Havers frowned. “Rhys Davies-Jones. Anghared Mynach is his sister. He was staying with her.”
BARBARA SAW in Lynley’s face the swift assimilation of a series of ideas. She knew quite well the set of facts he was combining in his mind: the name John Darrow that was mentioned at dinner the night Joy Sinclair was murdered; the reference to Rhys Davies-Jones on Joy’s tape recorder; the ten telephone calls to Porthill Green, and mixed in with those calls, six to Wales. Six calls made to Rhys Davies-Jones.
To avoid a discussion of all of this, Barbara went to the pile of manuscripts lying near the study door. She began riffling through them curiously, noting the range of Joy Sinclair’s interest in murder and death: an outline for a study of the Yorkshire Ripper, an unfi nished article on Crippen, at least sixty pages of material on Lord Mountbatten’s death, a bound galley from a book called The Knife Plunges Once, three heavily edited versions of another book called Death in Darkness. But there was something missing.
As Lynley involved himself again with the filing cabinet, Barbara went to the desk. She opened the top drawer. In it, Joy had kept her computer disks, two long rows of fl oppy black squares, all labelled by subject on the upper right-hand corner. Barbara fl ipped through them, reading the titles. And as she did so, the knowledge began to fl ourish within her, like a growth that was swelling, not with malignancy but with tension. The second and third drawers were much the same, containing stationery, envelopes, ribbons for the printers, staples, ancient carbon paper, tape, scissors. But not what she was looking for. Nothing like that at all.
When Lynley moved to the bookshelves and began looking through the materials there, Barbara went to the fi ling cabinet.
“I’ve been through that, Sergeant,” Lynley said.
She sought an excuse. “Just a hunch, sir. It’ll only take a moment.”
The fact was that it took nearly an hour, but by that time Lynley had removed the jacket from a copy of Joy Sinclair’s most recent book, putting this into his pocket before going on into the bedroom and from there to the storage cabinet at the top of the stairs where Barbara could hear him rooting systematically through the assortment of belongings. It was after four o’clock when she concluded her search of the files and rested back on her heels, satisfied with the validity of her hypothesis. Her only decision now was whether to tell Lynley or to hold her tongue until she had more facts, facts that he would be incapable of brushing aside.
Why, she wondered, had he not noticed it himself? How could he possibly have missed it? With the glaring absence of material right before his eyes, he was seeing only what he wanted to see, what he needed to see, a trail of guilt leading directly to Rhys Davies-Jones.
This guilt was so seductive a presence that it had become for Lynley an effective smokescreen hiding the one crucial detail that he had failed to note. Joy Sinclair had been in the midst of writing a play for Stuart Rintoul, Lord Stinhurst. And nowhere in the study was there a single reference to it. Not a draft, not an outline, not a list of characters, not a scrap of paper.
Someone had been through the house before them.
“I’LL DROP YOU in Acton, Sergeant,” Lynley said when they were back outside. He headed down the street towards his car, a silver Bent-ley that had collected a small group of admiring schoolboys who were peering into its windows and running pious hands along its gleaming wings. “Let’s plan on an early start out to Porthill Green tomorrow. Half past seven?”