“It’s the same village, Sergeant,” Lynley said after a cursory examination through the windscreen. Aside from a liver-coloured mongrel sniffing along an ill-formed hedge, the place might have been abandoned.
“Same as what, sir?”
“As that drawing posted in Joy Sinclair’s study. The petrol station, the greengrocers. There’s the cottage set back behind the church as well. She’d been here long enough to become familiar with the place. I’ve no doubt someone will remember her. You take care of the high while I have a word with John Darrow.”
Havers reached for the door handle with a sigh of resignation. “Always the footwork,” she groused.
“Good exercise to clear your head after last night.”
She looked at him blankly. “Last night?”
“Dinner, film? The chap from the supermarket?”
“Oh, that,” Havers said, fidgeting in her seat. “Believe me, it was very forgettable, sir.” She got out of the car, letting in a gust of air that commingled the faint odours of the sea, dead fish, and rotting debris, and strode over to the first building, disappearing behind its weathered black door.
By pub hours it was early yet, the drive from London having taken them less than two hours, so Lynley was not surprised to fi nd the door locked when he tried to enter Wine’s the Plough across the street. He stepped back from the building and looked above to what seemed to be a flat, but his observation gained him nothing. Limp curtains served as a barrier against prying eyes. No one was about at all, and there was no automobile or motorbike to indicate that the building was currently under anyone’s ownership. Nonetheless, when Lynley peered through the grimy windows of the pub itself, a missing slat in one of the shutters revealed a light shining in a far doorway that appeared to lead to the building’s cellar stairs.
He returned to the door and knocked upon it soundly. Within moments, he heard heavy footsteps. They trudged to the door.
“Not opened,” a man’s gravelly voice said behind it.
“Mr. Darrow?”
“Aye.”
“Would you open the door please?”
“Y’r business is?”
“Scotland Yard CID.”
That got a reaction, although not much of one. The door was unbolted and held open a mere six or seven inches. “All’s in order in here.” Eyes the shape and size of hazel nuts, the colour of a brown gone bad with yellow, dropped to the identification that Lynley held.
“May I come in?”
Darrow didn’t look up as he considered the request and the limited responses available to him. “Not about Teddy, is it?”
“Your son? No, it’s nothing to do with him.”
Apparently satisfied, the man held the door open wider, stepped back, and admitted Lynley into the pub. It was a humble establishment, in keeping with the village it served. Its sole decoration appeared to be a variety of unlit signs behind and above the Formica-topped bar, identifying the liquors sold on the premises. There was very little furniture: half a dozen small tables surrounded by stools and a bench running beneath the front windows. This was padded, but the cushion was sun-bleached from its original red to rusty pink, and dark stains patterned it. A stinging burnt smell tinctured the air, a combination of cigarette smoke, a dead fire in a blackened fi replace, and windows too long closed against the winter weather.
Darrow positioned himself behind the bar, perhaps with the intention of treating Lynley like a customer in spite of the hour and his police identification. For his part, Lynley followed suit in front of it although it meant standing and he would much rather have conducted this interview at one of the tables.
Darrow, he guessed, was in his mid-forties, a rough-looking man who projected a decided air of suppressed violence. He was built like a boxer, squat, with long, powerful limbs, a barrel chest, and incongruously small, well-shaped ears which lay flat against his skull. His clothes suited him. They suggested a man able to make the transition from publican to brawler in the time it would take to ball up a fist. He wore a wool shirt, with cuffs turned up to reveal hirsute arms, and a pair of loose-fitting trousers for ease of movement. Evaluating all this, Lynley doubted that any fi st fi ghts broke out in Wine’s the Plough unless Darrow himself provoked them.
He had in his pocket the jacket of Death in Darkness, which he had taken from Joy Sinclair’s study. Removing it, he folded it so that the author’s smiling photograph was facing up. “Do you know this woman?” he asked.
Recognition flickered unmistakably in Darrow’s eyes. “I know her. What of it?”
“She was murdered three nights ago.”
“I was here three nights ago,” Darrow replied. His tone was surly. “Saturday’s my busiest. Anyone in the village’ll tell you as much.”
It wasn’t at all the reaction Lynley had been expecting. Perhaps surprise, perhaps confusion, perhaps reserve. But a refl ex denial of culpability? That was unusual, to say the least.
“She’s been here to see you,” Lynley stated. “She telephoned this pub ten times in the last month.”
“What of it?”
“I expect you to tell me that.”
The publican seemed to be evaluating the even quality of Lynley’s voice. He appeared disconcerted that his show of belligerent uncooperation produced virtually no reaction in the London detective. “I was having none of her,” he said. “She wanted to write a fl ipping book.”
“About Hannah?” Lynley asked.
The tightening of Darrow’s jaw tensed every muscle in his face. “Aye. Hannah.” He went to an upturned bottle of Bushmill’s Black Label and pushed a glass against its spigot. He drained the whisky, not in a single gulp but in two or three slow swallows, all taken with his back to Lynley. “Have one?” he asked, drawing himself another.
“No.”
The man nodded, drank again. “She came out of nowhere,” he said. “Bringing a clutch of newspaper clippings about this and that book that she’d written, and going on about awards she’d received and…I don’t know what else.
And she plain expected me to give her Hannah and be thankful for the attention. Well, I wouldn’t. I wasn’t having it. And I wasn’t having my Teddy exposed to that kind of muck. It’s bad enough with his mum doing herself in and providing the local ladies with gossip till he was ten years old. I wasn’t about to have it start again. Raking it all up. Upsetting the lad.”
“Hannah was your wife?”
“Aye. My wife.”
“How did Joy Sinclair happen to know about her?”
“Claimed she’d been studying up on suicides for nine or ten months to find one she thought interesting, and she’d read of Hannah’s. Caught her eye, she said.” His voice was sour. “Can you credit that, man? Caught her eye. Han wasn’t a person to her. She was a piece of meat. So I told her to fuck herself. In just those words.”
“Ten telephone calls suggests that she was rather persistent.”
Darrow snorted. “Made no difference. She was getting nowhere. Teddy was too young to know what had happened. So she couldn’t talk to him. And she was getting nothing from me.”
“May I take it that without your cooperation, there could be no book?”
“Aye. No book. Nothing. And that’s the way it was going to stay.”
“When she came to see you, was she alone?”
“Aye.”
“Never anyone with her? Perhaps someone waiting out in the car?”
Darrow’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. They darted to the windows and back. “What d’you mean?”
It had seemed a straightforward question to Lynley. He wondered if Darrow was temporising. “Did she come with a companion?”
“She was always alone.”
“Your wife killed herself in 1973, didn’t she? Did Joy Sinclair ever give you any indication why a suicide that long ago was of interest to her?”
Darrow’s face darkened. His lips curled with loathing. “She liked the chair, Inspector. She was good enough to tell me that. She liked the bleeding chair.”