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years, it was still thick, shining like silver in the fluorescent lights of the police station. And that same police station was his last source of pride. In his career, he had never once closed a case without making an arrest, and he expended considerable energy making certain that his men could say the same about themselves. He operated a tight investigations unit in which his officers ran every detail to ground like hounds after a fox. He saw to that. As a result, he was omnipresent in the office. Nervous energy personified, he bit his fingernails down to the quick, sucking on breath mints or chewing gum or eating sacks of potato crisps in an effort to break himself of this single bad habit.
    Inspector Macaskin met the London party not in his office but in a conference room, a ten-by-fifteen-foot cubicle with uncomfortable furniture, inadequate lighting, and poor ventilation. He had chosen it deliberately.
    He was not at all happy with the way this case was beginning. Macaskin liked to pigeonhole, liked to have everything put in its proper place with no muss and no fuss. Each person involved was supposed to act out his appropriate role. Victims die, police question, suspects answer, and crime-scene men collect. But right from the beginning, aside from the victim, who was cooperatively inanimate, the suspects had been doing the questioning and the police had been answering. As for the evidence, that was something else entirely.
    “Explain that to me again.” Inspector Lynley’s voice was even, but it carried a deadly tone that told Macaskin that Lynley had not been made party to the peculiar circumstances that surrounded his assignment to this case. That was good. It made Macaskin decide to like the Scotland Yard detective right on the spot.
    They had shed their outer garments and were sitting round the pine conference table, all save Lynley, who was on his feet, his hands in his pockets and something dangerous simmering behind his eyes.
    Macaskin was only too happy to go over the story again. “Hadn’t been at Westerbrae thirty minutes this morning before there was a message to phone my people at CID. Chief Constable informed me that Scotland Yard would be handling the case. That’s all. Couldn’t get another word out of him. Just instructions to leave men at the house, come back here and wait for you. Way I see it is that some highbrow at
your
end made the decision that this would be a Yard operation. He gave our chief constable the word and, to keep things on the up and up, we cooperatively put in a ‘call for help.’ You’re it.”
    Lynley and St. James exchanged unreadable glances. The latter spoke. “But why did you move the body?”
    “Part of the order,” Macaskin answered. “Blasted strange, if you ask me. Seal the rooms, pick up the package and bring her in for autopsy after our medical examiner did us his usual honour of proclaiming her dead on the scene.”
    “A bit of divide and conquer,” Sergeant Havers remarked.
    “It looks that way, doesn’t it?” Lynley replied. “Strathclyde deals with the physical evidence, London deals with the suspects. And if someone somewhere gets lucky and we fail to communicate properly, everything gets swept under the nearest rug.”
    “But whose rug?”
    “Yes. That
is
the question, isn’t it?” Lynley stared down at the conference table, at the stains created by myriad coffee rings that looped across its surface. “What exactly happened?” he asked Macaskin.
    “The girl, Mary Agnes Campbell, found the body at six-fifty this morning. We were called at seven-ten. We got out there at nine.”
    “Nearly two hours?”
    Lonan answered. “Storm last night closed the roads down, Inspector. Westerbrae’s five miles from the nearest village, and none of the roads were ploughed yet.”
    “Why in God’s name did a group from London come to such a remote location?”
    “Francesca Gerrard—widowed lady, the owner of Westerbrae—is Lord Stinhurst’s