In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (39 page)

“She was never right for him, Sammy. Obvious whenever they were together. She held the reins. And he got ridden. Whenever he wasn't riding her, of course.” Jeremy chuckled at his own joke. “P'rhaps he would've seen the wrongness of it all at the end of the day. But I don't think so. She'd worked herself under his skin too deep. Good at that, she was. Some women are.”

You're not was what he didn't say. But Samantha didn't need him to say it. Pulling men had never been her forte. She'd always believed that an outright demonstration of her virtues would serve to establish her firmly in someone's affections. Womanly virtues had a longevity to them that sexual allure could never match. And when lust and passion died the death of familiarity, one needed something of substance to take their place. Or so she had taught herself to believe through an adolescence and a young adulthood remarkable for their solitude.

“Couldn't have happened any better,” Jeremy was saying. “Sammy, always remember this: Things generally work out the way they're meant to.”

She felt her palms dampening and she rubbed them surreptitiously against the skirt that she'd donned for dinner.

“You're right for him. The other … She wasn't. What you have to offer, she couldn't touch. She would've brought nothing to a marriage with Julie—aside from the only decent pair of ankles the Brittons have seen in two hundred years—whereas you understand our dream. You can be part of it, Sammy. You can make it happen. With you, Julie can bring Broughton Manor back to life. With her … Well. Like I said, things generally work out the way they're meant to. So what we've got to do now—”

“I'm sorry she's dead,” Samantha broke in, because she knew she must say something eventually, and a conventional expression of sorrow was the only statement she could think of at the moment to stop him from going on. “For Julian's sake, I'm sorry. He's devastated, Uncle Jeremy.”

“Isn't he just. And that's exactly where we begin.”

“Begin?”

“Don't play the innocent with me. And for God's sake, don't be a fool. The way's clear and there're plans to be laid. You've taken enough trouble to woo him—”

“You're mistaken.”

“—and what you've done is lay a decent foundation. But this is the point where we start building on that foundation. Nothing hasty, mind you. No going to his bedroom and dropping your knickers just yet. Everything in good time.”

“Uncle Jeremy. I hardly think—”

“Good. Don't think. Let me do that. You keep it simple from this time on.” He raised his glass to his lips and eyed her sharply over its rim. “It's when a woman complicates her plans that her plans get cocked up. If you know what I mean. And I expect you do.”

Samantha swallowed, pinned to his gaze. How was it that an ageing alcoholic—a bloody drunk, for the love of God—could manage to discompose her so easily? Except he didn't seem very much like a drunk right now. Flustered, she went to the windows and locked them, as had been her intention. Behind her, the film came to an end, and the tail of it slapped noisily against its spool as the projector continued to run. Kickateck, kickateck, kickateck. Jeremy didn't seem to notice.

“You want him, don't you?” he asked her. “And don't lie to me about it, because if I'm to help you catch the boy, I want to know the facts. Oh, not all of them, mind you. Just the important one, about you wanting him.”

“He's not a boy. He's a man who—”

“Isn't he just.”

“—knows his own mind.”

“Bollocks, that. He knows his own dick and where he wants to stick it. We just need to see that he learns to want to stick it in you.”

“Please, Uncle Jeremy …” It was horrible, inconceivable, humiliating: to be listening to this. She was a woman who'd forged her own path throughout her life, and to place herself in the position of depending on someone other than herself to mould events and people to her wishes was not only foreign to her thinking, it was also foolhardy and it could be dangerous.

“Sammy, my angel, I'm on your side.” Jeremy's voice coaxed, urging her to declare herself in the very same way that one might urge a frightened puppy to come forward from beneath a chair. She found herself turning from the windows. She saw that he was watching her, his eyes hooded and his chin held by fingers adopting a pious attitude of prayer. “I'm on your side completely and one hundred percent. Only listen, my angel. I need to know exactly what your side is before I take action on your behalf.”

Samantha tried to move her eyes away from him, but she failed completely.

“One little fact, Sammy. You want the boy. Believe me, you don't need to say anything more. Fact is, I don't want to know any more. Just that you want him. End of story.”

“I can't.”

“You can. Simple as anything. Three little words. And they won't kill you. Words, that is. Words don't kill. But I fancy you know that already, don't you?”

She couldn't look away. She wanted to, she was desperate to, and yet she couldn't.

The words came from her at last without volition, as if he drew them from her and she was powerless to stop him. “All right. I want him.”

Jeremy smiled. “Don't tell me anything else.”

Barbara Havers felt as if someone had planted thorns beneath her eyelids. It was her fourth hour into her adventure with the SO 10 files on CRIS, and she was mightily regretting her promise to Nkata that she'd work nights and dawns to fulfill her obligations to the assignment given her by Inspector Lynley. She wasn't getting anywhere with this rubbish, aside from becoming aware of her potential for arriving at destinations marked Damaged Retinas and Imminent Hypermetropia.

Following their recce of Terry Cole's flat, Nkata and Barbara had driven to the Yard. There, after transferring the cannabis and the box of postcards to the front seat of Barbara's Mini—to be dealt with later—they had parted ways. Nkata drove off to return the inspector's Bentley to his home in Belgravia. Barbara reluctantly trudged off to keep her promise to Nkata to do her duty in the Crime Recording Information System.

She'd come up with sod bloody all so far, which hardly surprised her. As far as she was concerned, after the discovery of the postcards in the Battersea flat, neon arrows had begun pointing to Terry Cole as the killer's main target—not to Nicola Maiden—and unless there was some manner in which she could tie Cole to Andy Maiden's time in SO 10, this business of delving through files was a waste of her time. Only a name leaping off the screen, drooling blood, and screaming “I'm the one, baby!” was going to convince her otherwise.

Still, she'd known it was in her best interest to comply with Lynley's orders. So for the fifteen names he had given her, she'd read the cases and organised each into arbitrary—albeit useless—categories that she'd called Drugs, Potential for Blackmail, Prostitution, Organised Crime, and Murder for Hire. Dutifully, she'd placed the names from Lynley's list into these categories and she'd added the prisons to which each malefactor had been sent to while away a few years at Her Majesty's pleasure. She'd tracked down terms of imprisonment and added those to the mix, and she'd begun the process of determining which of the convicts were now on parole. Locating the former lags, however, was something which she knew would be impossible at the time. So feeling that she'd been virtuous, obedient, and responsive to her superior's order to return to CRIS, she decided, at half past twelve, to call it a night.

Traffic was light, so she was home by one. With Terry on her mind and a motive for his murder to be fished from the evidence, she scooped up the box of postcards and carried them through the dark garden to her digs.

Inside, her phone was blinking its message light when she shouldered open the door of her bungalow and heaved the cardboard box onto the table. She switched on a lamp, gathered up a selection of the postcards—which were bundled together with elastic bands—and crossed the room to listen to her calls.

The first was Mrs. Flo, telling her that “Mum looked right at your picture this morning, Barbie dear, and she said your name. Bright and clear as ever was. She said, ‘This is my Barbie.’ What do you think of that? I wanted you to know because … Well, it is distressing when she's got herself into one of her muddles, isn't it? And that silly business about … what was she called? Lilly O'Ryan? Well, no matter. She's been right as rain all day. So don't you worry that she's forgotten you, because she hasn't. All right, dear? I hope you're well. See you soon. Bye now, Barbie. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.”

Praise God for small favours, Barbara thought. A day of lucidity weighed against weeks of dementia was little enough to celebrate, but she'd learned to take her triumphs in teaspoonfuls when it came to her mother's fleeting moments of coherence.

The second message began with a bright “Hello hello”, followed by three breathy notes of music. “Did you hear that? I'm learning flute. I just got it today after school and I'm to be in the orchestra! They asked me special and I asked Dad would it be okay and he said yes so now I play flute. Only I don't play it very well yet. But I'm practising. I know the scale. Listen.” There followed a clatter as the phone was dropped. Afterwards came eight highly hesitant notes, breathy like the first. Then, “See? The teacher says I've a natural talent, Barbara. Do you think so as well?” The voice was interrupted by another, a man's voice speaking quietly in the background. Then, “Oh. This is Khalidah Hadiyyah. Up front in the ground floor flat. Dad says I forgot to tell you that. I expect you know it's me though, don't you?

I wanted to remind you about my sewing lesson. It's tomorrow and you said you wanted to see what I'm making. D'you still want to go? We c'n have the rest of the toffee apple afterwards, for our tea. Pang me back, okay?” And the phone clunked down at her end of the line.

After which Barbara heard the quiet, well-bred tones of Inspector Lynley's wife. Helen said, “Barbara, Winston's just returned the Bentley. He told me you're working on the case here in town. I'm so glad, and I wanted to tell you so. I know your work will put you back in good standing with everyone at the Yard. Barbara, will you be patient with Tommy? He thinks the world of you, and … Well, I hope you know that. It's just that the situation … what happened this past summer … it took him rather by surprise. So … Oh bother. I just wanted to wish you well on the case. You've always worked brilliantly with Tommy, and I know this instance will be no different.”

At which Barbara winced. Her conscience prickled. But she muffled the voice that told her she'd been acting in defiance of Lynley's orders for a good part of the day, and she silently announced that she wasn't defying anyone at all. She was merely taking the initiative, supplementing her assignment with additional activities demanded by the logic of the unfolding investigation.

It was as good an excuse as any.

She kicked off her shoes and flopped onto the day bed, where she pulled the elastic band from the collection of postcards she was carrying. She began to flip through them. And as she did so, she thought of the myriad ways in which Terry Cole's life—as it was unfolding through her investigation of it—was unveiling him as a killer's target while Nicola Maiden's life—no matter how they viewed it—was unveiling her as nothing more than a sexually active twenty-five-year-old who'd had one or two men in every port and a wealthy lover by the string. And while sexual jealousy on the part of one of those men might have led him to give the girl the chop, he certainly wouldn't have needed to do the job out on the moor, especially when he saw that she was with someone. It would have made more sense for him to wait till he found her alone. Unless, of course, she and Terry had been into something at that moment that made him think they were an item. In which case, blinded by rage and jealousy, he could well have stormed into the stone circle and attacked his rival for the Maiden girl's favours, running her down as well after he'd wounded the boy. But that seemed an unlikely scenario. Nothing Barbara had learned about Nicola Maiden had so far suggested that she'd gone for unemployed teenaged boys.

Terry, on the other hand, was turning out to be a field ripe for harvest when it came to activities from which murder could arise. According to Cilia, he'd carried gobs of cash with him, and the postcards that Barbara now arranged on her day bed suggested a field of underworld employment that was absolutely rife with violence. Despite what his mother claimed about the big commission that Terry had, despite what Mrs. Baden had asserted about the boy's good nature and generosity, it was seeming more and more likely that the real Terry Cole had lived close to if not directly within the underbelly of English life. Tied to that underbelly were drugs, pornography, snuff films, paedophilia, exotica, erotica, and white slavery. Not to mention a hundred tasty perversions, all of which could so easily give rise to a motive for murder.

But in Nicola's case, nearly everything had been accounted for: from her lifestyle in London to her supply of dosh. They still had to discover why she'd gone to work in Derbyshire for the summer, but what on earth could that possibly have to do with her murder?

On the other hand, virtually nothing about Terry Cole's life had made sense at all. Until Barbara had unearthed the postcards.

She gazed upon them in their orderly rows on the day bed and pursed her lips. Come on, she told them, give me something to run with. I know it's here, I know one of you can tell me, I know, I know.

She could still hear Cilia Thompson's passionate reaction to seeing the cards: “He never would've told me about this. Never in a hundred years. He was pretending to be an artist, for God's sake. And artists spend their time on their art. When they're not creating, they're thinking about creating. They're not crawling round London sticking these up everywhere. Art begets art so you expose yourself to art. This”—with a contemptuous gesture towards the cards—“is a life exposed to absolute crap.”

But Terry had never been truly interested in art, Barbara guessed. He'd been interested in something else entirely.

In the first set of postcards, there were forty-five in all. Each, Barbara saw, was different. And no matter how she studied them, categorized them, or attempted to eliminate them one by one, she was finally forced to accept the fact that only the telephone—even at this hour of the night—was going to assist her in sussing out her next move in the investigation.