and from Porthill Green out to the X near Mildenhall Fen. Lynley considered the implications attached to the presence of the map as below him he heard Sergeant Havers making one telephone call after another, muttering to herself occasionally when a response displeased her or when she was kept waiting or a line was engaged.
Lynley dropped his eyes to the second map on the wall. This was hand-drawn and rough, a pencilled depiction of a village with buildings common to any spot in England. They were only identified in the most generic of terms as church, greengrocers, pub, cottage, petrol station. The map told him nothing. Unless, of course, it was a rough delineation of Porthill Green. And even then it only indicated Joy's interest in the spot. Not why she was interested, or what she would have done had she gone there.
Lynley gave his attention to her desk. Like everything else in the room, it had the appearance of disordered confusion, of the sort in which the originator of the mess knows exactly where everything is but of which no other human being could ever make sense. Books, maps, notebooks, and papers covered its surface, as well as an unwashed teacup, several pens, a stapler, and a tube of heat-producing analgesic to be rubbed on tired muscles. He considered it for several minutes as Havers' voice continued its rise and fall of conversation below him.
There had to be some strange system involved, Lynley thought, looking through it. And it wasn't too long before he understood what it was. Although the piles of material made no superficial sense as a whole, taken individually, they were perfectly rational. One stack of books seemed to be reference materials. There were three psychology texts dealing with depression and suicide, two textbooks on the workings of the British police. Another stack was a collection of newspaper articles, all detailing one sort of death or another. A third stack contained a collection of booklets and pamphlets describing various sections of the country. A last stack was correspondence, thick and probably gone unanswered.
He looked through this, ignoring the fan letters, working on instinct, hoping it would guide him to something signifi cant. He found it thirteen letters into the stack.
It was a brief note from Joy Sinclair's editor, fewer than ten sentences long. When, the editor asked, might we expect to see the fi rst draft of Hanging's Too Good? You're six months overdue on it and as your contract stipulates...
Suddenly everything on Joy's desk began to take on a marked coherence. The texts on suicide, the workings of the police, the articles about death, the title of a new book. Lynley felt the tightening of excitement that always came with knowing he was on the right track.
He turned back to the word processor. It had two disks in it, he saw, both a program disk and one that would contain Joy's work.
"Havers," he shouted, "what do you know about computers?"
"A minute," she returned. "I've got..." Her voice lowered as she spoke into the phone.
Impatiently, Lynley switched the machine on. In a moment, directions appeared on the screen. It was far simpler than he would have ever imagined. Within a minute he was looking at Joy's working copy of Hanging's Too Good.
Unfortunately, the sum total of her manuscript-six months overdue to her publishers and no doubt the cause of her dispute with them-was one simple sentence: "Hannah decided to kill herself on the night of March 26, 1973." That was it.
Fruitlessly, Lynley searched for something else, using every direction that the computer program had to offer him. But nothing was there. Either her work had been erased, or that single sentence was as far as Joy Sinclair had gone. No wonder her editor is frothing at the mouth and talking about legal action, Lynley thought.
He switched the machine off and gave his attention back to her desk. He spent the next ten minutes trying to fi nd something more in the material there. Failing that, he went to her filing cabinet and began searching through its four drawers. He was on his second one when Havers came into the room.
"Anything?" she asked him.
"A book called Hanging's Too Good, someone named Hannah who decided to commit suicide, and a place called Porthill Green, P. Green, I should guess. What about you?"
"I've begun to get the feeling that no one goes to work in New York much before noon, but I was able to find out that the