It was a reasonable enough suggestion, Lynley thought. He jotted down Julian's name and address. Nan Maiden supplied the information.
For his part, Hanken brooded. And he said nothing more until he and Lynley had returned to the car. “It may all be a blind, you know.” He switched on the ignition, reversed out of their parking space, and turned the car to face Maiden Hall. There, he let the engine idle while he studied the old limestone structure.
“What?” Lynley asked.
“SO10. This business of someone from his past. It's a bit too convenient, wouldn't you say?”
“Convenient is an odd choice of words to describe a lead and a potential suspect,” Lynley said. “Unless you yourself already suspect …” He looked towards the Hall. “Exactly what is it that you suspect, Peter?”
“D'you know the White Peak?” Hanken asked abruptly. “It runs from Buxton to Ashbourne. From Matlock to Castleton. We've got dales, we've got moors, we've got trails, we've got hills. This”—with a gesture at the environment—“is part of it. So's the road we came in on, for that matter.”
“And?”
Hanken turned in his seat to face Lynley squarely. “And in all this vast amount of space, on last Tuesday night—or Wednesday morning if we want to believe him—Andy Maiden managed to find his daughter's car hidden out of sight behind a stone wall. What would you say the odds are on that?”
Lynley looked to the building, to its windows reflecting the last of the daylight like row upon row of shielded eyes. “Why didn't you tell me?” he asked the other DI.
“I didn't think of it,” Hanken said. “Not till our boy brought up SO 10. Not till our Andy got caught out keeping the truth from his wife.”
“He wanted to spare her as long as he could. What man wouldn't?” Lynley asked.
“A man with nothing on his conscience,” Hanken said.
Showered and changed into the most comfortable elastic-waisted trousers that she possessed, Barbara was back to grazing—on leftover take-away pork fried rice which, unheated, wasn't about to make it onto anyone's culinary top ten—when Nkata arrived. He announced himself with two sharp raps on the door. She swung it open, take-away container in hand, and leveled a chopstick at him.
“Your watch stopped or something? What goes for five minutes in your book, Winston?”
He stepped inside unbidden and flashed her the full wattage of his smile. “Sorry. Got another page before I could clear out. The guv. I had to phone him first.”
“Of course. Can't keep his lordship waiting.”
Nkata let the comment go. “Damned lucky that service is slow at the pub. I should've been out of there thirty minutes ago, which would've put me too close to Shoreditch to come back here for you. Funny, isn't it? Like my mum always says. Things work out exactly the way they're s'posed to.”
Barbara stared at him, wordless. She felt nonplused. She wanted to tell him off for the note he'd left her—and for the letter C so prominent on it—but his air of ease stopped her. She couldn't explain his nonchalance any more than she could explain his presence inside her dwelling. He could at least look bloody uncomfortable, she decided.
“We got two bodies in Derbyshire and a London angle that needs playing on the case,” Nkata said. He sketched in the details: a woman, a young man, a former SO 10 officer, anonymous letters assembled from newsprint, a threatening note written by hand. “I got to get over to an address in Shoreditch where this dead bloke might've come from,” he told her. “If someone's there who can i.d. the body, I'm on my way back to Buxton in the morning. But the Yard end of things'll need looking into. The spector just told me to set that up. That's why he paged.”
Barbara couldn't hide her eagerness when she said, “Lynley asked for me?”
Nkata's glance shifted away for an instant, but that was enough. Her spirits came to earth.
“I see.” She carried her take-away container to the kitchen work top. The rice sat heavily on her stomach. Its flavour clung to her tongue like fur. “If he doesn't know you're asking me, Winston, I can refuse with no one the wiser, can't I? You can pass me by and get someone else.”
“Can do, sure,” Nkata said. “I can check the rota. Or I can wait till morning and let the super make the call. But doing all that leaves you free to get assigned to Stewart, Hale, or MacPherson, doesn't it? And I didn't much think you'd want to go that way if you didn't have to.” He left unsaid what was legend in CID: Barbara's failure to establish a working relationship with the DIs he'd mentioned, her subsequent return to uniform from which she had only been elevated by her partnership with Lynley.