WHEN HE left both alcove and drawing room- on his way to his own suite of rooms in Howenstow’s east wing-the name fi nally struck Lynley. Joy Sinclair. He had seen it somewhere. And not all that long ago. He paused in the corridor next to a fruitwood mule chest and gazed, unfocussed, at the porcelain bowl on its top. Sinclair. Sinclair. It seemed so familiar, so within his grasp.The bowl’s delicate pattern of blue against white blurred in his vision, the figures overlapping, crossing, inverting…

Inverting. Back to front. Playing with words. It hadn’t been Joy Sinclair he had seen, but Sinclair’s Joy, a headline in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. It had been an obvious aren’t-we-clever inversion that was followed by the teasing phrase: “A score with Darkness and on to bigger things.”

He remembered thinking that the headline made her sound like a blind athlete on her way to the Olympics. And aside from the fact that he’d read far enough into the article to discover that she was no athlete but rather an author whose first play had been well received by critics and audiences seeking respite from London’s usual glitzy fare, and whose second play would open the Agincourt Theatre, he had learned nothing else. For a call from Scotland Yard had sent him to Hyde Park and a fi veyear-old girl’s naked body, shoved in among the bushes beneath the Serpentine Bridge.

Little wonder he’d not remembered Sinclair’s name until this moment. The devastating sight of Megan Walsham, the knowledge of what she’d suffered before she died, had driven every other thought from his mind for weeks. He’d moved through time in a fury, sleeping, eating, and drinking his need to fi nd Megan’s killer…and then arresting the child’s maternal uncle…and then having to tell her distraught mother who was responsible for the rape and mutilation and murder of her youngest child.

He had just come off that case, in fact. Bone-weary from long days and longer nights, yearning for rest, for a spiritual ablution to wash the filth of murder and inhumanity from his soul.