he watched his brother struggle with the animal, knowing it was useless to ask him to be careful. The immediacy of danger and the fact that a wrong move could mean a broken bone were what attracted Peter to the horse in the fi rst place.
As it was, Peter flung back his head in exhilaration. He'd come without a hat, and his hair shone in the winter sunlight, close-cropped to his skull like a golden cap. His hands were work-hardened, and even in winter his skin retained its tan, coloured by the months that he spent toiling in the southwestern sun. He was vibrantly alive, inordinately youthful. Watching him, Lynley felt decades more than ten years his senior.
"Hey, Saffron!" Peter shouted, wheeled the horse away from the wall, and, with a wave, shot off across the field. He would indeed reach Howenstow long before his brother.
When horse and rider had disappeared through a windbreak of sycamores at the far side of the field, Lynley pressed down on the accelerator, muttered in exasperation as the old car slipped momentarily out of gear, and hobbled his way back down the narrow lane.
LYNLEY PLACED his call to London from the small alcove off the drawing room. It was his personal sanctuary, built directly over the entrance porch of his family's home and furnished at the turn of the century by his grandfather, a man with an acute understanding of what made life bearable. An undersized mahogany desk sat beneath two narrow mullioned windows. Bookshelves held a variety of entertaining volumes and several bound decades of Punch. An ormolu clock ticked on the overmantel of the fireplace, near which a comfortable reading chair was drawn. It had always been an altogether welcoming site at the end of a tiring day.
Waiting for Webberly's secretary to track down the superintendent and wondering what both of them were doing at New Scotland Yard on a winter weekend, Lynley gazed out the window at the expansive garden below. His mother was there, a tall slim fi gure buttoned into a heavy pea jacket with an American baseball cap covering her sandy hair. She was involved in a discussion with one of the gardeners, a fact which prevented her from noticing that her retriever had fallen upon a glove she had dropped and was treating it as a midmorning snack. Lynley smiled as his mother caught sight of the dog. She shrieked and wrestled the glove away.
When Webberly's voice crackled over the line, it sounded as if he had come to the phone on a run. "We've a dicey situation," the superintendent announced with no prefatory remarks. "Some Drury Laners, a corpse, and the local police acting as if it's an outbreak of the bubonic plague. They put in a call to their local CID, Strathclyde. Strathclyde won't touch it. It's ours."
"Strathclyde?" Lynley repeated blankly. "But that's in Scotland."
He was stating the obvious to his commanding officer. Scotland had its own police force. Rarely did they call for assistance from the Yard. Even when they did so, the complexities of Scottish law made it difficult for the London police to work there effectively and impossible for them to take part in any subsequent court prosecutions. Something wasn't right. Lynley felt suspicion nag, but he temporised with:
"Isn't there someone else on call this weekend?" He knew that Webberly would supply the rest of the details attendant to that remark: it was the fourth time in five months that he had called Lynley back to duty in the middle of his time off.
"I know, I know," Webberly responded brusquely. "But this can't be helped. We'll sort it all out when it's over."
"When what's over?"
"It's one hell of a mess." Webberly's voice faded as someone else in his London offi ce began to speak, tersely and at considerable length.
Lynley recognised that rumbling baritone. It belonged to Sir David Hillier, chief superintendent. Something was in the wind, indeed. As he listened, straining to catch Hillier's words, the two men apparently reached some sort of decision, for Webberly went on in a more confi dential tone, as if he were speaking on an unsafe line and were wary of listeners.
"As I said, it's dicey. Stuart Rintoul, Lord Stinhurst, is involved. Do you know him?"
"Stinhurst. The producer?"
"The same. Midas of the Stage."
Lynley smiled at the epithet. It was very apt. Lord Stinhurst had made his reputation in London theatre by financing one successful show after another. A man with a keen sense of what the