In his London office, New Scotland Yard’s Superintendent Malcolm Webberly mashed out his third cigar in as many hours and surveyed his divisional DI’s, wondering how merciful they would be about ignoring the egg which he was about to splatter upon his own face. Considering the length and volume of his diatribe only two weeks ago, he knew he could probably expect the worst. He certainly deserved it. He had expostulated with his team for at least thirty minutes about what he had caustically referred to as the Cross-Country Crusaders, and now he was about to ask one of his men to join them.
He evaluated the possibilities. They were sitting round the central table in his office. As usual, Hale was giving way to nervous energy, playing with a pile of paperclips which he appeared to be fashioning into a form of lightweight mail, perhaps with the anticipation of doing battle with someone armed with toothpicks. Stewart—the divisional compulsive—was using the pause in conversation to work on a report, a behaviour that was typical to him. Rumour had it that Stewart had somehow managed to perfect making love to his wife and filling out police reports simultaneously, and with just about the same degree of enthusiasm. Next to him, MacPherson was cleaning his fingernails with a broken-tipped pen knife, a this-too-shall-pass expression on his face, while on his left Lynley polished his reading spectacles with a snow-coloured handkerchief on which the heavily embroidered letter A adorned one corner.
Webberly had to smile at the irony of the situation. A fortnight ago, he had been expounding on the country’s current penchant for peripatetic policing, using as fodder a piece in the Times which consisted of an expose on the amount of public funds being poured into the unnatural workings of the criminal justice system.
“Look at this,” he had snarled, bunching the newspaper in his hand in such a way that made looking at it impossible. “We’ve got the Greater Manchester Force investigating Sheffield on suspicion of bribery because of that Hillsborough football cock-up. We’ve got Yorkshire in Manchester, looking at complaints against some senior officers. We’ve got West Yorkshire peeping at the serious crimes squad in Birmingham; Avon and Somerset dabbling round the Guilford Four in Surrey; and Cambridgeshire mucking out Northern Ireland, looking for dust under the beds of the RUC. No one’s patrolling his own patch any longer and it’s time that stopped!”
His men had nodded in thoughtful agreement, although Webberly wondered if any of them had really been listening. Their hours were long, their burdens tremendous. Thirty minutes given to their superintendent’s political maundering were thirty minutes they could ill afford. That latter thought came to him later, however. At the moment, the craving for debate was upon him, his audience was captive, he was compelled to continue.
“This is miserable rubbish. What’s happened to us? CC’s are running like bashful milkmaids at the first sign of trouble from the press. They ask anyone and everyone to investigate their men rather than run their own force, conduct their own investigation, and tell the media to eat cow dung in the meantime. Who are these idiots that they don’t have the gumption to wash their own dirty laundry?”
If anyone took umbrage with the superintendent’s display of mixed metaphors, no one commented upon it. Instead, they bowed to the rhetorical nature of his question and waited patiently for him to answer it, which he did, in an oblique fashion.
“Just let them ask me to become part of this nonsense. I’ll give them all a real piece of what-for.”
And now he had come to it, with a special request from two separate parties, direction from Webberly’s own superior officer, and neither time nor opportunity to give anyone what-for.
Webberly pushed himself back from the table and lumbered to his desk where he pressed the intercom for his secretary. In response the slender box chattered with static and conversation. The former he was used to. The intercom had not worked properly since the hurricane of 1987. The latter, unfortunately, he was used to as well: Dorothea Harriman waxing warmly eloquent on the object of her not inconsiderable admiration.
“They’re dyed, I tell you. Have been for years. That way there’s no mascara to smudge up her eyes in pictures and such..” An interruption of static. “…can’t tell me Fergie’s anything…I don’t care how many more babies she decides—”
“Harriman,” Webberly interrupted.
“White tights would look the best…when she used to favour those god-awful spots. Thank God, she’s given them a rest.”
“Harriman.”
“…darling hat she had on at Royal Ascot this summer, did you see?…Laura Ashley? No! I wouldn’t be seen dead…”
Speaking of death, Webberly thought and resigned himself to a more primitive, stentorian, and decidedly effective manner of getting his secretary’s attention. He strode to the door, yanked it open, and shouted her name.
Dorothea Harriman popped into the doorway as he returned to the table. She’d had her hair cut recently, quite short in the back and on the sides, a long glossy bit of blonde mane in the front that swept across her brow in a glitter of artificial gold highlighting. She wore a red wool dress, matching pumps, and white tights. Unfortunately, red favoured her as little as it did the Princess. But, like the Princess, she had remarkable ankles.
“Superintendent Webberly?” she asked, with a nod at the officers sitting round the table. It was a butter-wouldn’t-melt look. All business, it declared. Every moment of her day was spent with her nose pressed directly upon the grindstone of her job.
“If you can tear yourself away from your current evaluation of the Princess…” Webberly said. His secretary’s expression was a study in guilelessness. Princess who? was telegraphed across her innocent face. He knew better than to engage her in indirect combat. Six years of her adulation of the Princess of Wales had taught him he would lose in any attempt to shame her away from wallowing in it. He resigned himself to saying, “There’s a FAX due from Cambridge. See about it. Now. If you get any calls from Kensington Palace, I’ll keep them on hold.”
Harriman pressed the very front of her lips together, but an imp’s smile curled both corners of her mouth. “FAX,” she said. “Cambridge. Right. In a tick, Superintendent.” And she added as a parting shot, “Charles went there, you know.”
John Stewart looked up, tapping the top of his pen reflectively against his teeth. “Charles?” he asked in some confusion, as if wondering whether the attention he had been giving to his report had somehow caused him to lose the drift of the conversation.
“Wales,” Webberly said.
“Whales in Cambridge?” Stewart asked. “What sort of whales? Where? Have they opened an aquarium?”
“Wales as in princes of,” Phillip Hale barked.
“The Prince of Wales is in Cambridge?” Stewart asked. “But that should be handled by Special Branch, not by us.”
“Jesus.” Webberly took Stewart’s report from him and used it to gesture with as he spoke. Stewart winced when Webberly rolled it into a tube. “No Prince. No Wales. Just Cambridge. Got it?”
“Sir.”
“Thank you.” Webberly noted with gratitude that MacPherson had put away his pocket knife and that Lynley was regarding him evenly with those unreadable dark eyes that were so much at odds with his perfectly clipped blond hair.
“There’s been a killing up in Cambridge that we’ve been asked to take on,” Webberly said and brushed away both their objections and their comments with a quick, vertical chopping motion of his hand. “I know. Don’t remind me. I’m eating my own words. I don’t much like it.”
“Hillier?” Hale asked astutely.
Sir David Hillier was Webberly’s Chief Superintendent. If a request for the involvement of Webberly’s men came from him, it was no request at all. It was law.
“Not altogether. Hillier approves. He knows about the case. But the request came directly to me.”
Three of the DI’s looked at each other curiously. The fourth, Lynley, kept his eyes on Webberly.
“I temporised,” Webberly said. “I know your plates are full at the moment, so I can get one of the other divisions to take this. But I’d rather not do that.” He returned Stewart his report, and watched as the DI assiduously smoothed the pages against the table top to remove the curled edges. He continued speaking. “A student’s been murdered. A girl. She was an undergraduate at St. Stephen’s College.”
All four men reacted to that. A movement in the chair, a question cut off quickly, a sharp look in Webberly’s direction to read his face for signs of worry. All of them knew that the superintendent’s own daughter was a junior member of St. Stephen’s College. Her photograph—giggling as she inexpertly punted both parents in an endless circle on the River Cam—stood on one of the filing cabinets in the room. Webberly saw the concern on their faces.
“It’s nothing to do with Miranda,” he reassured them. “But she knew the girl. That’s part of the reason I got the call.”
“But not the only reason,” Stewart said.
“Right. The calls—there were two of them—didn’t come from Cambridge CID. They came from the Master of St. Stephen’s College and the University’s Vice Chancellor. It’s a tricky situation as far as the local police are concerned. The killing didn’t occur in the college, so Cambridge CID have the right to pursue it on their own. But since the victim’s a college girl, they need the University’s cooperation to investigate.”
“Th’ University won’t gie it?” MacPherson sounded incredulous.
“They prefer an outside agency. From what I understand, they got their feathers ruffled over the way the local CID handled a suicide last Easter term. Gross insensitivity towards everyone concerned, the Vice Chancellor said, not to mention some sort of leaking of information to the press. And since this girl is apparently the daughter of one of the Cambridge professors, they want everything handled with delicacy and tact.”
“Detective Inspector Empathy,” Hale said with a curl of his lip. It was, they all knew, a poorly veiled attempt to imply antagonism and lack of objectivity. None of them were unaware of Hale’s marital troubles. The last thing he wanted at the moment was to be sent out of the city on a lengthy case.
Webberly ignored him. “Cambridge CID aren’t happy about the situation. It’s their patch. They prefer to handle it. So whoever goes can’t expect them to start killing the fatted calf. But I’ve spoken briefly to their superintendent—a bloke called Sheehan…he seems a decent sort—and they’ll cooperate. He sees the University implying this is a town-and-gown situation and he’s miffed about the idea that his team might be accused of prejudice against the students. But he knows that without the University’s cooperation, any man he sends in will spend the next six months sifting through sawdust in order to find sand.”
The sound of her light footsteps heralded Harriman. She presented Webberly with several sheets of paper on which the words Cambridgeshire Constabulary were printed along the top and in the right-hand corner a badge surmounted by a crown. She frowned at the collection of plastic coffee cups and foul-smelling ashtrays that sat on the table amid folders and documents. She clucked, tossed the cups into the waste bin by the door, and carried the ashtrays at arm’s length from the room.
As Webberly read the report, he passed on the pertinent information to his men.
“Not much to work with so far,” he said. “Twenty years old. Elena Weaver.” He gave the girl’s Christian name a Mediterranean pronunciation.
“A foreign student?” Stewart asked.
“Not from what I gathered from the Master of the College this morning. The mother lives in London and as I’ve said, the dad’s a professor at the University, a bloke short-listed for something called the Penford Chair of History—whatever the hell that is. He’s a senior fellow at St. Stephen’s. A major reputation in his field, I was told.”
“Thus the red carpet treatment,” Hale interjected.
Webberly continued. “They’ve done no autopsy yet, but they’re giving us an initial rough estimate of the time of death between midnight last night and seven this morning. Face beaten in with a heavy, blunt instrument—”
“Isn’t it always?” Hale asked.
“—after which—according to the preliminaries—she was strangled.”
“Rape?” Stewart asked.
“No indication of that yet.”
“Midnight and seven?” Hale asked. “But you said she wasn’t found in college?”
Webberly shook his head. “She was found by the river.” He frowned as he read the rest of the information Cambridge Constabulary had sent. “She was wearing a tracksuit and athletic shoes, so they assume she was out running when somebody jumped her. The body was covered with leaves. Some sketch artist stumbled on her round a quarter past seven this morning. And, according to Sheehan, got sick on the spot.”
“Nae on the body, I hope,” MacPherson said.
“That certainly plays hell with trace evidence,” Hale noted.
The others laughed quietly in response. Webberly didn’t mind the levity. Years of exposure to murder hardened the softest of his men.
He said, “According to Sheehan they had enough evidence at the scene to keep two or three crime scene teams busy for weeks.”
“How’s that?” Stewart asked.
“She was found on an island, and it’s used as a general trysting place, evidently. So they’ve at least half a dozen sacks of rubbish to analyse along with their tests on the body itself.” He tossed the report onto the table. “That’s the limit of what we know right now. No autopsy. No record of interviews. Whoever takes the case will be working from the bottom.”
“It’s a nice little mairder, nonetheless,” MacPherson said.
Lynley stirred, reaching out for the report. He put on his spectacles, read it over, and having done so, he spoke for the first time.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
“I thought you were working on that rent boy case in Maida Vale,” Webberly said.
“We tied it up last night. This morning, rather. Brought the killer in at half past two.”
“Good God, laddie, take a breather sometime,” MacPherson said.
Lynley smiled and rose. “Have any of you seen Havers?”