“May I assume he dashed off straightaway and proposed to Joyce once his head was cleared with regard to the Maiden girl?” Lynley asked.
Hanken guffawed appreciatively. Upman had oiled the wheels with drinks, dinner, and wine, the DI reported. He took her to his home. More drinks there. Some music. Several cappuccinos. He had candles set up round his bathtub—“Lord.” Lynley shuddered. The man was a victim of Hollywood cinema.
—and he got her undressed and in the water without any trouble.
“Her wanting it as bad as he did, according to Upman,” Han-ken said.
They played in the tub till they looked like prunes, at which point they adjourned to the bedroom.
“Which is where,” Hanken concluded, “the rocket didn't launch.”
“And on the night of the murder?”
“Where was he, you mean?” Hanken recounted that as well. At lunch on Tuesday, Upman had had another set-to with the girlfriend on the topic of cohabitation. Rather than go home after work and run the risk of a phone call from her, he went for a drive. He ended up at Manchester Airport, where he checked into a hotel for the night and had a massage therapist come to his room to relieve him of his tension.
“Even had the receipts to wave in front of me,” Hanken said. “Seems he intends to claim it as a business expense.”
“You're checking it out.”
“I plan to, as I breathe,” Hanken said. “Your end of things?”
This was where he had to tread carefully, Lynley thought. So far, despite his encounter with Upman, Hanken hadn't appeared to be wedded irrevocably to any particular scenario. Still, what he was about to suggest was a contravention of the DI's main conjecture. He wanted to lead into it carefully so that his colleague might be open to its logic.
He hadn't found the pager, he said. But he'd had a rather long look round the site and an even longer think about the two bodies. He wanted to propose an altogether different hypothesis to the one they'd been working with. Would Hanken hear him out?
The DI lowered his chair and smashed out his cigarette. Mercifully, he didn't light another. He ran his tongue over his teeth, eyes speculatively fixed on Lynley. He finally said, “Let's have it,” and settled back as if expecting a lengthy monologue.
“I think we've got one killer,” Lynley said. “And no accomplice. No phone call for reinforcements when our man—”
“Or woman? Or are you giving that up as well?”
“Or woman,” Lynley replied, and he used the opportunity to inform Hanken of his encounter with Samantha McCallin on Calder Moor.
The other DI said, “That puts her back in the running, I'd say.”
“She was never out of it.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“No call for reinforcements when the killer saw there were two targets instead of one.”
Hanken folded his hands over his stomach and said, “Continue.”
Lynley used the photograph of Terry Cole as he did so. Burns on the face but no defensive wounds on the body, Lynley said, indicated that Cole hadn't been held in the fire but, rather, that he had fallen into it. The damage to his skin indicated that contact with the flames had been more than brief. There was no contusion to the head to suggest that he'd been clubbed, knocked unconscious, and left in the fire. So he had to have been wounded or disabled in some way as he sat by the fire in the first place.
“One killer,” Lynley said, “goes out there after the girl. When he arrives at the site—”
“Or she,” Hanken cut in.
“Yes. Or she. When he or she arrives at the site, it's to find that Nicola isn't alone. So Cole has to be eliminated. First, because he's capable of protecting her should the killer go after her, and second, because he's a potential witness. But the killer faces a dilemma. Does he—or she, yes, I see that, Peter—kill Cole at once and run the risk of losing Nicola if she escapes while he's dispatching Cole? Or does he kill Nicola and run the risk of being thwarted by Cole? He has surprise on his side, but that's all he has aside from his weapon.” Lynley sorted through the photographs and pulled out one that showed the trail of blood most clearly. “If you consider all that and take into account the deposits of blood at the site—”
Hanken raised his hand to stop the words. He moved his gaze from Lynley to the window where the unappealing prospect of Buxton football stadium across the street resembled a concentration camp. He said thoughtfully, “The killer rushes forward with his knife and wounds the boy in an instant. The boy topples into the fire, where he's burned. The girl takes to her heels. The killer follows.”
“But his weapon is lodged in the boy.”
“Hmm. Yes. I see how it works.” Hanken turned from the window, eyes cloudy as he considered the scene he went on to describe. “It's dark outside the ring of the fire. The girl's on the run.”
“So does he take the time to remove the knife from the boy or does he take off after the girl straightaway?”