In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (56 page)

Nkata rose quickly in response. “Guv, sh'll I … ?”

“Wait. Let's see.”

“He could be on the phone setting up his alibi.”

“I don't think so.” Lynley couldn't have explained why he had that feeling, save the fact that there was something decidedly odd in Sir Adrian Beattie's reactions, not only to the news of Nicola Maiden's murder but also to the logical implication that his involvement with her had vast potential to destroy everything he appeared to value.

When Beattie returned some two minutes later, he brought with him a woman whom he introduced to the detectives as his wife. Lady Beattie, he titled her, and then to the woman herself, “Chloe, these men are here about Nikki Maiden.”

Lady Beattie—a thin woman with Wallis Simpson hair and skin made shiny by too many face-lifts—reached for the triple-strand pearls that were slung round her neck like souvenir golf balls. She said, “Nikki Maiden? She's not in some kind of trouble, I hope.”

“Unfortunately, she's been murdered, my dear,” her husband said, and he placed a hand at her elbow, perhaps on the chance that she'd find the news distressing.

Which she apparently did, saying, “Oh my God. Adrian—” and reaching for him.

He slid his hand down her arm and took her own, clucking at it with what looked to Lynley like genuine tenderness. “Awful,” he said. “Ghastly, rotten. These policemen have come because they think I might be involved. Because of the arrangement.”

Lady Beattie disengaged her hand from her husband's. She raised a shapely eyebrow, saying, “But isn't it much more likely that Nikki could have hurt you, and not the opposite? She didn't allow anyone to dominate her, did she? I remember her being quite specific about that the very first time we interviewed her. ‘I won't be the bottom’ is exactly what she said. ‘I only tried it once, and I found it revolting.’ And then she pardoned herself, thinking she might have offended you. I remember that perfectly, don't you, dear?”

“I don't expect she was killed during a session,” Beattie told his wife. “They've said it was in Derbyshire, and she'd got that summer job with the solicitor, you remember.”

“And in her free time she didn't … ?”

“That was only in London, as far as I know.”

“I see.”

Lynley found himself feeling as if he'd just stepped through the looking glass. He glanced at Nkata and saw that the DC, his face a study in stupefaction, felt the same. Lynley said, “Perhaps you'd explain the arrangement to us, Sir Adrian, Lady Beattie. The background will allow us to see what we're dealing with.”

“Of course.” Lady Beattie and her husband were pleased as punch to give a full account of Sir Adrian's sexual proclivities. Lady Beattie sat gracefully on a sofa near the fireplace. The men went back to their original positions. And while her husband outlined the exact nature of his relationship with Nicola Maiden, she added salient details wherever he forgot them.

He'd met Nicola Maiden round the first of November the previous year, perhaps nine months after his Chloe's arthritis had become too painful in her hands for her to be able to perform the rites of discipline that they'd learned to enjoy throughout their marriage. “We thought at first that we'd simply go without,” Sir Adrian said. “The pain, I mean. Not the sex itself. We thought we'd just cope. Be traditional and all that. But it wasn't long before we saw that my need—” He paused, as if seeking an abbreviated way to explain that would not take them through the cobwebbed labyrinth of his psyche. “It is a need, you see. You must understand that if you're to understand anything.”

“Go on,” Lynley said. He shot a look at Nkata. The DC had resumed his scrupulous note-taking, although his expression was telegraphing Oh Lord, what's my mum going to say 'bout this as eloquently as if he were speaking it.

Realising that Sir Adrian's need was going to have to be met if the Beatties wanted to continue their own sexual relations, they'd sought someone young, healthy, strong, and—most important—entirely discreet to minister to him.

“Nicola Maiden,” Lynley said.

“Discretion was—is—critical,” Sir Adrian said. “For a man in my position.” Obviously, he couldn't select a dominatrix blindly by choosing someone from a phone box card or a magazine advert. He could hardly ask friends and colleagues for recommendations. And going to an's & M club—or even to one of the lesser flesh pits in Soho in the hope of meeting a likely candidate—wasn't a wise option, since there was always the chance of being seen, being recognised, and consequently being subjected to the sort of tabloid treatment guaranteed to cause excruciating agonies to his children, the spouses of his children, and their offspring. “And to Chloe, of course,” Sir Adrian added with a nod. “For while she knew—has always known, in fact—about the hunger, her friends and relations don't know. And I expect she'd like to keep it that way.”

“Thank you, darling,” Chloe said.

So Sir Adrian had contacted an escort service—Global Escorts, to be precise—and through that institution had ultimately met Nicola Maiden. Their first interview—consisting of tea, scones, and satisfactory conversation—had been followed by a second, in which the initial deal had been struck.

“Deal?” Lynley asked.

“When her services would be required,” Chloe explained. “What they would entail and what she would be paid for them.”

“Chloe and I talked to her together for both interviews to make the arrangements,” Sir Adrian said. “It was crucial that she understand there would be nothing gained by holding over my head a liaison potentially painful to my wife.”

“Because it wasn't painful,” Chloe said. “At least not to me.”

“Will you show them the chamber, darling?” Sir Adrian asked his wife. “I'll pop down to the children and let them know we'll be with them before too much longer.”

“Of course,” she replied. “Come with me, Inspector, Constable.” And as gracefully as she'd sat, she rose, leading them to the door and up two flights of stairs as Sir Adrian went off to have a few words with his partying offspring. They were, ironically, crooning “I Get No Kick from Champagne.”

Lady Beattie showed them up to the top floor of the house. From deep within an old clothes press that stood in the narrow corridor there, she took a key, which she used on one of the doors. She swung it open, preceded the police into the room, and switched on a low-wattage light.

“He actually wanted only discipline at first,” she explained, “which, while I found it a bit odd, frankly, I was able to give him. Rulers on the palm, paddles on the bottom, the strap against the back of his legs. But after a few years he wanted more, and when it got to the point that I wasn't strong enough … Well, he's already explained that, hasn't he? At any rate, here's where they had their sessions—where he and I had them as well when I was able.”

The chamber, as they'd called it, had been fashioned out of several of the erstwhile servants' bedrooms. By knocking out walls, padding them, installing a ventilation system that obviated the use of windows—which were themselves shuttered against potential outside curiosity—the Beatties had created a fantasy world that was in part headmaster's office, operating theatre, dungeon, and mediaeval torture chamber. A line of cupboards had been fitted under the eaves, and Lady Beattie opened these to display the various costumes and devices of discipline, as she called them, that had been used on Sir Adrian.

It was clear why the Maiden girl had brought nothing with her to the house save her desire to be useful to Sir Adrian and to be paid well for her usefulness: The costumes in the cupboards ranged from a heavy wool nuns habit to a prison guards uniform complete with truncheon. There was, of course, the more traditional garb associated with the's & M game: PVC get-ups of red or black, leather teddies and masks, high-heeled boots. And the instruments of Sir Adrian's discipline, tidily arranged like the antique surgical instruments in the study, also explained why she'd been able to make her calls so lightly burdened. Everything necessary for discipline, pain, and humiliation had been collected and housed together.

From his years in policing, Lynley knew that he should by now have seen it all. But every time he thought he had, something in life caught him by surprise. And in this case, it wasn't so much the presence of the chamber in the Beatties' house that took his breath away. It was the attitude to it taken by the couple themselves, particularly the wife. She might have been showing them a state-of-the-art kitchen.

She seemed to realise this. Watching Lynley from her position in the doorway, observing Nkata wandering the length of the room with an expression on his face that suggested how actively his imagination was supplying him with images of the uses to which the costumes and the equipment were put, she said quietly, “I wouldn't have had it this way had I been given a choice. One does expect a traditional marriage. But loving someone means compromise occasionally. And once he explained why it was so important to him …” She gestured at the room with a hand whose knuckles were enlarged from the disease that had necessitated Nicola Maiden's entrance into the Beatties’ private world. “Need is just need. So long as judgement remains apart from it, need has no real power to hurt us.”

“Did you mind another woman seeing to the need?”

“My husband loves me. I've never had any doubt about that.”

Lynley wondered.

Sir Adrian rejoined them, saying to her, “You're wanted below, darling. Molly's not to be denied her presents another five minutes.”

“But will you—”

They communicated in that way peculiar to couples who'd been married for more than a generation. “As soon as I finish here. It won't be long.”

When she'd left them, Sir Adrian waited for a moment before he said quietly, “There's a part, of course, that I'd rather Chloe didn't know. It would only hurt her unnecessarily.”

Nkata made his notebook ready as Lynley thought about what the surgeon's statement implied. He said, “You paged her—Nicola—throughout the summer. But as she couldn't have serviced you with discipline from Derbyshire, I've a feeling your ‘arrangement’ was something more than you wanted to say in front of your wife.”

“You're very good, Inspector.” Beattie closed the chamber door. “I was in love with her. Not at first, naturally. We didn't know each other. But within a month or two, I realised how strongly I was feeling about her. Initially, I told myself it was only addiction: A new woman doing the discipline heightened my excitement, and I wanted that excitement more and more often. But it went beyond that in the end because she was far more than I expected. So I wanted to keep her.”

“As your wife?”

“I love Chloe. But there's more than one kind of love in a man's life—which you may know already or will come to know eventually—and selfishly, I hoped to experience it.” He dropped his gaze to the deformed nails at the ends of his fingers. He said, “I felt sexual love for Nikki, the sort that has to do with physical possession. Animal craving. My love for Chloe, on the other hand, is the stuff of our history. When I knew I had this other love for Nikki—this sexual thing that I found I couldn't get out of my mind the more we met—I told myself it was natural to feel it. She was meeting a tremendous need of mine. And no matter what I wanted, she was willing to do it to me. But when I saw there was so much more to her than domination …”

“You became reluctant to share her with other men.”

“An intuitive leap. Yes, you are very good.”

Nicola visited the Boltons at least five times a week, Beattie told them. And he explained the frequency of their sessions to Chloe by talking about the heightened stress of his work as younger doctors and advances in medicine had increased his level of anxiety to the point that only discipline could relieve it.

“I told Nikki that when the craving came upon me, I wanted her available to gratify it at once,” he said.

“But the reality was more complicated than that?”

“The reality was infinitely simple. I couldn't cope with imagining Nikki doing to others—and being to others—what she was doing and being to me. Thinking of her with anyone else was a quick descent into hell. And I didn't expect that, to feel that way about a tart. But then, when I took her on, I didn't know how much more than a tart she was going to be.”

Without his wife's knowledge, he'd offered Nicola a special deal. He would pay to keep her—and pay her, more than she'd ever dreamed of being paid—in whatever situation she fancied for herself: a flat, a house, a hotel suite, a country cottage. He didn't care, just so long as she promised him that her time would be kept open solely for him. “I claimed that I didn't want to stand in a queue or book an appointment any longer,” Beattie explained. “But if I wanted her available to me at any hour, I had to place her in a position where she was free.”

The maisonette in Fulham gave her that position. And since Nicola always came to Sir Adrian and not the reverse, it was of little account to him that she asked to be allowed a flatmate as company for the periods of time when he didn't want her services. “That was fine with me,” he told them. “All I wanted was her to be available whenever I phoned. And for the first month that's what she was. Five or six days a week. Sometimes twice a day. She'd arrive within an hour of being paged. She'd stay as long as I wanted her to be here. The arrangement worked well.”

“But then she returned to Derbyshire. Why?”

“She claimed that she needed to honour a commitment to work for a solicitor up there, that she'd be gone only for the summer. I was a fool in love, but not so much of a fool as to believe that. I told her I wouldn't go on paying for the Fulham place if she wasn't going to be in town for me.”

“But she went anyway. She was willing to risk losing what she had from you. What does that suggest?”

“The obvious. I knew that if she was returning to Derbyshire despite what I was paying her—and providing her—to be here in London, there had to be a reason and the reason was money. Someone there was paying her more than I was. Which meant, of course, another man.”

“The solicitor.”

“I accused her. She denied it. And I have to admit that an ordinary solicitor couldn't have afforded her, not without an independent source of income. So it was someone else. But she wouldn't name him no matter what I threatened. ‘It's only for the summer,’ she kept saying. And I kept bellowing, ‘I don't bloody care.’”