Webberly drove a thick fist into his open palm. "Those sods! I knew they were trying to protect him. I just didn't know from what." He fired Lynley a dark look. "But you don't believe me, I dare say."

"You're right. I don't. You're not that powerless, sir. You never have been."

"You're wrong, lad. I am, when it comes to my job. I do as I'm told. It's easy to be a man of inflexible rect.i.tude when you've the freedom to walk out of here anytime you smell something a little unpleasant. But I don't have that kind of freedom. No independent source of wealth, no country estate. This job isn't a lark. It's my bread and b.u.t.ter. And when I'm given an order, I follow it. As unpleasant as that may seem to you."

"And if Stinhurst had been the killer? If I'd closed the case without making an arrest?"

"You didn't do that, did you? I trusted Havers to see that you wouldn't. And I trusted you. I knew that your instincts would take you to the killer eventually."

"But they didn't," Lynley said. The words cost him dearly in pride, and he wondered why it mattered so much to him that he had been such a fool.

Webberly studied his face. When he spoke, his voice was kind yet still keen with perception. "And that's why you're tossing it in, isn't it, laddie? Not because of me and not because of Stinhurst. And not because some higher-ups saw you as a man they could use to meet their own ends. You're tossing it in because you made a mistake. You lost your objectivity on this one, didn't you? You went after the wrong man. So. Welcome to the club, Inspector. You're not perfect any longer."

Webberly reached for the warrant card, fingered it for a moment before taking it to Lynley. Without formality, he shoved it into the breast pocket of his coat.

"I'm sorry the Stinhurst situation happened," he said. "I can't tell you it won't happen again. But if it does, I should guess you won't need Sergeant Havers there to remind you that you're more of a policeman than you ever were a b.l.o.o.d.y peer." He turned back to his desk and surveyed its mess. "You're due time off, Lynley. So take it. Don't report in till Tuesday." And then, having said that, he looked up. His words were quiet. "Learning to forgive yourself is part of the job, lad. It's the only part you've never quite mastered."

HE HEARD the muted shout as he drove up the ramp from the underground car park and pulled onto Broadway. It was fast growing dark. Braking, he looked in the direction of St. James' Park Station, and among the pedestrians he saw Jeremy Vinney loping down the pavement, topcoat flapping round his knees like the wings of an ungainly bird. As he ran, he waved a spiral notebook. Pages, covered with writing, fluttered in the wind. Lynley lowered the window as Vinney reached the car.

"I've done the story on Geoffrey Rintoul," the journalist panted, managing a smile. "Jesus, what a piece of luck to catch you! I need you to be the source. Off the record. Just to confirm. That's all."

Lynley watched a flurry of snow blow across the street. He recognised a group of secretaries making their end-of-day dash from the Yard to the train, their laughter like music rising into the air.

"There's no story," he said.

Vinney's expression altered. That momentary sharing of confidence was gone. "But you've spoken to Stinhurst! You can't tell me he didn't confirm every detail of his brother's past! How could he deny it? With Willingate in the inquest pictures and Joy's play alluding to everything else? You can't tell me he talked his way out of that!"

"There's no story, Mr. Vinney. I'm sorry." Lynley began to raise the window but stopped when Vinney hooked his fingers over the gla.s.s.

"She wanted it!" His voice was a plea. "You know Joy wanted me to follow the story. You know that's why I was there. She wanted everything about the Rintouls to come to light."

The case was closed. Her murderer had been found. Yet Vinney pursued his original quest. There was no possibility of a journalistic coup involved for him since the government would quash his story without a thought. Here was loyalty far beyond the call of friendship. Once again, Lynley wondered what lay at its heart, what debt of honour Vinney owed Joy Sinclair.

"Jer! Jerry! For G.o.d's sake, hurry up! Paulie's waiting and you know he'll get himself all hot and bothered if we're late again."

The second voice drifted from across the street. Delicate, petulant, very nearly feminine. Lynley tracked it down. A young man- no more than twenty years old-stood in the archway leading into the station. He was stamping his feet, shoulders hunched against the cold, and one of the pa.s.sageway lights illuminated his face. It was achingly handsome, possessing a Renaissance beauty, perfect in feature, in colour, in form. And a Renaissance a.s.sessment of such beauty rose in Lynley's mind, Marlowe's a.s.sessment, as apt now as it had been in the sixteenth century. To hazard more than for the Golden Fleece.

Finally, then, that last puzzle piece clicked into position, so obvious a piece that Lynley wondered what had kept him from placing it before. Joy hadn't been talking about Vinney on her tape recorder. She had been talking to him, reminding herself of a point she wanted to make in a future conversation with her friend. And here across the street was the source of her concern: "Why be in such a lather over him? It's hardly a lifetime proposition."

"Jerry! Jemmy!" the voice wheedled again. The boy spun on one heel, an impatient puppy. He laughed when his overcoat billowed out round his body like a circus clown's garb.

Lynley moved his eyes back to the journalist. Vinney looked away, not towards the boy but towards Victoria Street.

"Wasn't it Freud who said there are no accidents?" Vinney's voice sounded resigned. "I must have wanted you to know, so you'd understand what I meant when I said that Joy and I were always-and only-friends. Call it absolution, I suppose. Perhaps vindication. It makes no difference now."

"She did know?"

"I had no secrets from her. I don't think I could have had one if I tried." Vinney looked deliberately back at the boy. His expression softened. His lips curved in a smile of remarkable tenderness. "We are cursed by love, aren't we, Inspector? It gives us no peace. We seek it endlessly in a thousand different ways, and if we're lucky, we do have it for a shuddering instant. And we feel like free men then, don't we? Even when we bear its most terrible burden."

"Joy would have understood that, I dare say."

"G.o.d knows. She was the only one in my life who ever did." His hand dropped from the window. "So I owe her this about the Rintouls, you see. It's what she would have wanted. The story. The truth."

Lynley shook his head. "Revenge is what she wanted, Mr. Vinney. And I do think she got that. After a fashion."

"So that's the way it's to be? Can you really let it end this way, Inspector? After what these people have done to you?" He waved in the direction of the building behind them.

"We do things to ourselves," Lynley replied. He nodded, raised the window, and drove on.

HE WOULD LATER SEE the trip to Skye as a phantasmagorical blur of continually changing countryside that he was only dimly aware of as he flew towards the north. Stopping merely for food and petrol and once for a few hours of rest at an inn somewhere between Carlisle and Glasgow, he arrived at Kyle of Lochalsh, a small village on the mainland across from the Isle of Skye, in the late afternoon the following day.

He pulled into the car park of an hotel on the waterfront and sat gazing at the strait, its rippled surface the colour of old coins. The sun was setting, and on the island the majestic peak of Sgurr na Coinnich looked covered in silver. Far below it, the car ferry pulled away from the dock and began its slow movement towards the mainland, carrying only a lorry, two hikers who hugged one another against the bitter cold, and a slender solitary figure whose smooth chestnut hair blew round her face, which was lifted, as if for blessing, to the last rays of the winter sun.

Seeing Helen, Lynley all at once perceived the sheer lunacy of his coming to her now. He knew he was the last person she wanted to see. He knew that she wanted this isolation. Yet none of that mattered as the ferry drew nearer to the mainland and he saw her eyes fall upon the Bentley in the car park above her. He got out, pulled on his overcoat, and walked down to the landing. The wind blew frigidly against him, buffeting his cheeks, whipping through his hair. He tasted the salt of the distant North Atlantic.

When the ferry docked, the lorry started up with a foul emission of smoke, and trundled down the Invergarry road. Arm in arm, the hikers pa.s.sed him, laughing, a man and a woman who stopped to kiss, then to ponder the opposite sh.o.r.e of Skye. It was hung with clouds, dove grey turning to the lavish hues of sunset.

The drive north from London had given Lynley long hours in which to contemplate what he would say to Helen when he finally saw her. But as she stepped from the ferry, brushing her hair from her cheeks, words were lost to him. He wanted only to hold her in his arms and knew beyond a doubt that he did not have that right. Instead, he walked wordlessly at her side up the rise towards the hotel.

They went inside. The lounge was empty, its vast front windows offering a panorama of water and mountains and the sunset-shot clouds of the island. Lady Helen walked to these and stood before them, and although her posture-the slightly bent head, the small curved shoulders-spoke volumes of her desire for solitude, Lynley could not bring himself to leave her with so much left unsaid between them. He joined her and saw the shadows under her eyes, smudges of both sorrow and fatigue. Her arms were crossed in front of her, as if in the need of warmth or protection.

"Why on earth did he kill Gowan? More than anything else, Tommy, that seems so senseless to me."

Lynley wondered why he had ever given a moment to thinking that Helen, of all people, would greet him with the score of recriminations that he had so steadfastly earned. He had been prepared to hear them, to admit to their truth. Somehow in the confusion of the last few days, he had forgotten the basic human decency that was the central core of Helen's character. She would put Gowan before herself.

"At Westerbrae, David Sydeham claimed that he'd left his gloves at the reception desk," he replied, watching her eyes lower thoughtfully, the lashes dark against her creamy skin. "He said he'd left them there when he and Joanna first arrived."

She nodded in comprehension. "But when Francesca Gerrard ran into Gowan and spilled all those liqueurs that night after the reading, Gowan had to clean the entire area. And he saw that David Sydeham's gloves weren't there at all, didn't he? But he must not have remembered it at once."

"Yes, I think that's what happened. At any rate, once Gowan remembered, he would have realised what it meant. The single glove that Sergeant Havers found at the reception desk the next day-and the one that you found in the boot-could have got there only one way: through Sydeham's putting them there himself, after he killed Joy. I think that's what Gowan tried to tell me. Just before he died. That he hadn't seen the gloves at the reception desk. But I...I thought he was talking about Rhys."

Lynley saw her eyes close painfully upon the name, knew she hadn't expected to hear it from him.

"How did Sydeham manage it?"

"He was still in the sitting room when Macaskin and the Westerbrae cook came to me and asked if everyone could be allowed out of the library. He slipped into the kitchen then and got the knife."

"But with everyone in the house? Especially with the police?"

"They'd been packing up to leave. Everyone was wandering here and there. And besides, it was only the work of a minute or two. After that, he went up the back stairs and along to his room."

Without thinking, Lynley raised his hand, grazed it gently along the length of her hair, following its curve to touch her shoulder. She did not move away from him. He felt his heart beat heavily against his chest.

"I'm so sorry about everything," he said. "I had to see you to say at least that much, Helen."

She didn't look at him. It seemed as if the effort to do so was monumental, as if she found herself unequal to the task. When she spoke, her voice was low and her eyes were fixed on the distant ruin of Caisteal Maol as the sun struck its crumbling walls for the final time that day.

"You were right, Tommy. You said I was trying to replay Simon to a different ending, and I discovered that I was. But it wasn't a different ending after all, was it? I repeated myself admirably when it came down to it. The only thing missing from the wretched scenario was a hospital room for me to walk out of, leaving him lying there entirely alone."

No acrimony underscored her tone. But Lynley didn't need to hear it to know how each word carried its full weight of searing self-loathing. "No," he said miserably.

"Yes. Rhys knew it was you on the telephone. Was that just two nights ago? It seems like forever. And when I rang off, he asked me if it was you. I said no, I said it was my father. But he knew. And he saw that you'd convinced me that he was the killer. I kept denying it, of course, denying everything. When he asked me if I'd told you he was with me, I even denied that as well. But he knew I was lying. And he saw that I'd chosen, just as he'd told me I'd choose." She lifted a hand as if to touch her cheek, but again it seemed that it required too much effort. She dropped it to her side. "I didn't even need to hear a c.o.c.k crow three times. I knew what I'd done. To both of us."

Whatever his own desires in coming to her here, Lynley knew he had to convince Lady Helen of his culpability in the sin she believed she had committed. He had to give her that much, if nothing else.

"It isn't your fault, Helen. You wouldn't have done any of that had I not forced you into it. What were you to think when I told you about Hannah Darrow? What were you to believe? Whom were you to believe?"

"That's just it. I could have chosen Rhys in spite of what you said. I knew that then, I know it now. But instead, I chose you. When Rhys saw that, he left me. And who could blame him? Believing one's lover is a murderer does rather irreparable damage to a relationship, after all." She finally looked at him, turning, so near that he could smell the pure, fresh scent of her hair. "And until Hampstead, I did think Rhys was the killer."

"Then why did you warn him off? Was it to punish me?"

"Warn him...? Is that what you thought? No. When he came over the wall, I saw at once it wasn't Rhys. I...I'd grown to know Rhys' body, you see. And that man was too big. So without thinking, I reacted. It was horror, I think, the realisation of what I'd done to him, the knowledge that I'd lost him." Her head turned back to the window, but only for a moment. When she went on, her eyes once again sought his. "At Westerbrae, I'd come to see myself as his saviour, the fine, upright woman who was going to make him whole again after he'd been in ruins. I saw myself as his reason for never drinking again. So you see, you were really right at the heart of it, weren't you? It was just like Simon after all."

"No. Helen, I didn't know what I was talking about. I was half-mad with jealousy."

"You were right, all the same."

As they spoke, shadows lengthened in the lounge, and the barman walked through, turning on lights, opening the bar at the far end of the room for its evening business. Voices drifted to them from the reception desk: a crucial decision to be reached about postcards, a good-humoured debate about the next day's activities. Lynley listened, longing for that sweet normality of a holiday from home with someone he loved.

Lady Helen stirred. "I must change for dinner." She began to move towards the lift.

"Why did you come here?" Lynley asked abruptly.

She paused but did not look at him. "I wanted to see Skye in the dead of winter. I needed to see what it was like to be here alone."

He put his hand on her arm. Her warmth was like an infusion of life. "And have you seen enough of it? Alone, I mean."

Both of them knew what he was really asking. But instead of replying, she walked to the lift and pressed the b.u.t.ton, watching its light single-mindedly, as if she were observing an amazing act of creative genius. He followed and barely heard her when she finally spoke.

"Please. I can't bear to cause either of us any more pain."

Somewhere above them, the machinery whirred. And he knew then that she would go on to her room, seeking the solitude she had come for, leaving him behind. But he saw that she intended this to be no few minutes' separation between them. Instead, this was something indeterminate, endless, something not to be borne. He knew it was the worst possible time to speak. But there would probably not be another opportunity.

"Helen." When she looked at him, he saw that her eyes were liquid with tears. "Marry me."

A small bubble of laughter escaped her, not a sound of humour but one of despair. She made a tiny gesture, eloquent in its futility.

"You know how I love you," he said. "Don't tell me it's too late."

She bowed her head. In front of her the lift doors opened. As if they beckoned her to do so, she put into words what he had been afraid-and had known-she might say. "I don't want to see you, Tommy. Not for a while."

He felt wrenched by the words, managed only, "How long?"

"A few months. Perhaps longer."

"That feels like a sentence of death."

"I'm sorry. It's what I need." She walked into the lift, pushed the b.u.t.ton for her floor.

"Even after this, I still can't bear to hurt you. I never could, Tommy."

"I love you," he said. And then again, as if each word could serve as its own painful act of contrition. "Helen. Helen. I love you."

He saw her lips part, saw her fleeting, sweet smile before the lift doors closed and she was gone.

BARBARA HAVERS was in the public bar of the King's Arms not far from New Scotland Yard, moping into her weekly pint of ale. She'd been nursing it along for the past thirty minutes. It was an hour before closing, long after the time when she should have made her way back to her parents and Acton, but she hadn't been able to bring herself to that yet.The paperwork was filed, the reports completed, the conversations with Macaskin at an end for now. But as always, at the conclusion of a case, she had a sense of her own uselessness. People would go on brutalising one another, despite her meagre efforts to stop them.

"Buy a bloke a drink?"

At Lynley's voice, she looked up. "I thought you'd gone to Skye! Holy G.o.d, you look done in."

He did indeed. Unshaven, his clothes rumpled, he looked like last year's Christmas wish.

"I am done in," he admitted, making a pathetically visible effort to smile. "I've lost count of the hours I've spent in the car over the last few days. What're you drinking? Not tonic water tonight, I take it?"

"Not tonight. I've moved up to Ba.s.s. But now you're here, I may change my poison. Depends on who's paying."

"I see." He took off his overcoat, threw it down carelessly on the next table, and sank into a chair. Feeling in his pocket, he produced cigarette case and lighter. As always she helped herself, regarding him over the flame that he held for her.

"What's up?" she asked him.

He lit a cigarette. "Nothing."

"Ah."

They smoked companionably. He made no move to get himself a drink. She waited.

Then with his eyes on the opposite wall he said, "I've asked her to marry me, Barbara."

It was as she expected. "You don't exactly look like the bearer of glad tidings."

"No. I'm not." Lynley cleared his throat, studying the tip of his cigarette.

Barbara sighed, felt the weighty, sore blanket of his unhappiness, and found to her surprise that she wore it as her own. At the nearby bar Evelyn, the blowsy barmaid, was fingering her way, bleary-eyed, through the night's receipts and doing her best to ignore the leering advances of two of the establishment's regular patrons. Barbara called out her name.

"Aye?" Evelyn responded with a yawn.

"Bring on two Glenlivets. Neat." Barbara eyed Lynley and added, "And keep them coming, will you?"

"Sure, luv."

When they were delivered to the table and Lynley reached for his wallet, Barbara spoke again.

"It's on me tonight, sir."

"A celebration, Sergeant?"

"No. A wake." She tossed back her whisky. It lit her blood like a flame. "Drink up, Inspector. Let's get ourselves soused."