Well-Schooled in Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

peppers onto a blanket. It was a compilation of vibrant colours. Her veil of black hair, the living red of the vegetables, the tawny velvet of her skin, her purple gown, the blend of rose and blue background that called the time of day sunset . Beauty, he knew, always offered its own form of seduction.
    “Have you brought a picture of the boy?” Lynley asked. “Can you write out an accurate description of him?” The last question, he thought, would probably be unnecessary.
    “Yes. Of course. Both.” Never before had Lynley heard such relief.
    “Then if you’ll leave them with the sergeant, we’ll see if there’s anything we can do from this end. Perhaps he’s already been picked up in Crawley and is too afraid to give his name. Or even closer to London. One can never tell.”
    “I thought…I hoped you’d help. I’ve already…” Corntel reached into the breast pocket of his coat, bringing out a photograph and a folded page of typescript. He had the grace to look faintly abashed by the assumption of Lynley’s cooperation that was implied by his possession of both.
    Lynley took them wearily. Corntel had been confident of his man indeed. The old Viscount of Vacillation would hardly desert one of his former schoolmates now.
     
     
     
    Barbara Havers read the description that Corntel had left with them. She studied the photograph of the boy as Lynley dumped out the ashtray that she and Corntel had managed to fill during the interview. He wiped it carefully with a tissue.
    “God, you’re getting to be an unbearable prig over this smoking business, Inspector,” Barbara complained. “Should I start wearing a scarlet S on my chest?”
    “Not at all. But either I clean the ashtray or find myself licking it in desperation. Somehow, cleaning seems closer to a behaviour I can live with. But only just, I’m afraid.” He looked up, smiled.
    She laughed even through her exasperation. “Why did you give up smoking? Why not march right into an early grave with the rest of us? The more the merrier. You know the sort of thing.”
    He didn’t answer. Instead, his eyes went to the postcard propped up against a coffee cup on his desk. So Barbara knew. Lady Helen Clyde did not smoke. Perhaps she would find more acceptable upon her return a man who had given up smoking as well.
    “Do you really think that’s going to make a difference, Inspector?”
    His reply was as good as ignoring her altogether. “If the boy’s run away, I shouldn’t be surprised if he turns up in a few days. Perhaps in Crawley. Perhaps in the city. But if he doesn’t turn up, as callous as it sounds, his body may. Are they prepared for that, I wonder.”
    Barbara skilfully turned the statement to her own use. “Is anyone ever really prepared for the worst, Inspector?”
     
     
     
    Send my roots rain. Send my roots rain .
    With those four words pressing into her brain like a persistent melody, Deborah St. James sat in her Austin, eyes fixed on the lych gate of St. Giles’ Church outside the town of Stoke Poges. She scrutinised nothing in particular. Instead, she tried to count how many times over the last month she had recited not just those final words but Hopkins’ entire sonnet. She had started every day with it, had made it the force that propelled her from beds and hotel rooms, into her car, and through site after site where she took photographs like an automaton. But beyond every morning’s determined recitation of those fourteen lines of supplication, she could not have said how many times during each day she had returned to it, when some unexpected sight or sound she was unprepared for broke through her defences and attacked her calm.
    She understood why the lines came to her now. St. Giles’ Church was the last stop in her four-week photographic odyssey. At the end of this afternoon she would return to London, avoiding the M4, which would take her there quickly, and choosing instead the A4 with its traffic signals, its congestion