“The house,” she said to Lynley's wife. “Helen, he was moving house. He said he'd finally got the money together to buy himself a property south of the river.”
“But south of the river … ? That's not exactly …” Helen looked distinctly uncomfortable, and Barbara liked her for her reluctance to draw attention to Lynley's considerable wealth. One would need brass by the bucketful to buy even a cupboard in Belgravia. On the other hand, south of the river—where the lesser mortals bought their homes—would not present such a problem. King-Ryder could have saved enough to buy a freehold there. Barbara accepted that.
Nonetheless, she said, “There's no other explanation for what King-Ryder's been up to: lying about what happened when Terry Cole went to his office, searching Terry's flat in Battersea, buying one of Cilia Thompson's monstrosities, going to Vi Nevin's digs and trashing them. He's got to put his hands on that music, and he's willing to do anything to get it. His dad's dead, and he's to blame. He doesn't want the poor bloke's memory shot to bits as well. He wanted some of his lolly, sure. But he didn't want him destroyed.”
Helen considered this, smoothing her fingers along the crease in her trousers. “I see how you're fitting it together,” she admitted. “But as to proof that he's even a blackmailer, let alone a killer … ?” She looked up and opened her hands as if to say, Where is it?
Barbara thought about what she had on King-Ryder besides what she knew about the terms of his father's will: Terry had been to see him; he had searched Terry's flat; he'd gone to the studio on Portslade Road …. “The cheque,” she said. “He wrote Cilia Thompson a cheque when he bought one of her nightmare-in-the-railway-arches paintings.”
“All right,” Helen said cautiously. “But where does that take you?”
“To Jersey,” Barbara said with a smile. “Cilia made a copy of the cheque—probably because she's never sold a thing in her life and, believe me, she's going to want to remember the occasion, since it's never likely to happen again. That cheque was drawn on a bank in St. Helier. Now, why would our boy be banking in the Channel Islands unless he had money to hide, Helen? Like a major deposit of a few thousand quid—maybe a few hundred thousand quid bled out of his dad to keep a blackmailer's mug plugged—that he didn't want anyone asking questions about? There's your evidence.”
“But still, it's all supposition, isn't it? How can you prove anything? You can't get into those bank records, can you? So where do you go from here?”
That was certainly a problem, Barbara thought. She could prove nothing. The police couldn't get their mitts on King-Ryder's bank records, and even if she herself could do that in some way, what would a hefty deposit made prior to the June phone call prove aside from someone's attempt to avoid the Inland Revenue's prying eyes?
There was that footprint in the muck in Vi Nevin's flat, of course, that shoe sole with its hexagonal markings. But if such a shoe sole proved to be as common as toast on the breakfast table, what did that add to the investigation? Of course, King-Ryder would have left trace evidence all over Vi Nevin's flat. But he wasn't likely to cooperate if the coppers asked him for a few strands of hair or a vial of blood for a DNA match-up. And even if he gave them everything from his toe jam to his dental floss, that did nothing to pin him to the Derbyshire murders unless the rozzers had a packet of trace evidence left at the scene up there as well.
Barbara knew she'd be more than just demoted and off the case if she phoned up DI Lynley for a little discussion about the Derbyshire evidence. She'd defied his orders; she'd gone her own way. He'd thrown her off the investigation. What he'd do if he discovered she'd put herself back on the investigation did not bear thinking of. So to bring King-Ryder down she had to go it more or less alone. There was only the small point of trying to figure out how to do it.
“He's been clever as the dickens,” Barbara said to Helen. “This bloke's no slouch in the brains department—but if I can come up with a way to get a step ahead of him … if I can use something that I know from everything I've gathered …”
“You've got the music,” Helen pointed out. “Which is what he's wanted from the first, isn't it?”
“He sure as bloody hell searched high and low for it. He tore apart that camping site. He went through the flat in Battersea. He ripped up Vis maisonette. He spent enough time in the studio with Cilia to suss out whether there was a hiding place there. I'd say we're safe in assuming he's after that music. And he knows it wasn't with Terry, Cilia, or Vi.”
“But he also knows it's somewhere.”