In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (66 page)

The woman held at arm's length from him, Martin was able to recognise her at last. It was the hair colour that had thrown him off. When they'd met—when she'd come for her first and only interview at MKR—she'd been black-haired. Otherwise, she was little changed. Still skeletal, still sallow-skinned, with very bad teeth, even worse breath, and the body odour of three-day-old halibut.

“Shelly Platt,” he said.

“You did it! You tried to kill her!”

Martin wondered how his day could possibly get worse. He had his answer a moment later. The constable studied his identification, still holding Shelly in a death-grip. He said, “Miss, miss, one thing at a time,” and he took her with him while he went to the phone at the nurses’ station and punched in a number.

“Look,” Martin called to him. “I only want to know if Miss Nevin's all right. I spoke to someone in casualty. I was told she'd been transferred here.”

“He wants to kill her!” Shelly cried.

“Don't be an idiot,” Martin responded. “I'd hardly show up in the middle of the day and present my ID if I planned to kill her. What the hell happened?”

“As if you don't know!”

“I just need to talk to her,” he told the constable when he was returned his ID and refused admittance. “That's all. It probably won't take five minutes.”

“Sorry” was the reply.

“Look. I don't think you understand. This is an urgent matter and—”

“Aren’ you going t’arrest him?” Shelly demanded. “Wha's he have t'do to her before you lot cart him off to the nick?”

“Will you at least shut her up long enough for me to explain to you that—”

“Orders're orders,” the constable said, and he loosened his grip on Shelly Platt just enough to indicate to Martin that a temporary retreat was called for.

He made that retreat with as much grace as he could muster, considering that the orange-haired termagant had raised enough ruckus for him to become the cynosure of the entire hospital floor. He returned to the Jaguar, threw himself inside, and flicked its air conditioning on full blast with every vent pointing at his face.

Shit, he thought. Fuck, hell, shit. He had little doubt about who had been on the receiving end of that constable's phone call, so he'd put himself in line for another visit from the cops. He considered what sort of light he was going to shine upon his trip to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. “Getting corroboration for my story last night” hardly seemed credible when one considered from whom he was attempting to wrest corroboration in the first place.

He jerked the car into gear and roared out of the car park. On the Fulham Road once more, he pulled down the sun visor and used the recessed mirror within it to examine the damage Shelly Platt had done to him. Jesus, she was a vicious little cat. She'd managed to draw blood on his chest when she'd grabbed his shirt. He'd be wise to get a tetanus shot pronto.

He cut up Finborough Road, heading for home and considering what options were available to him now. It appeared that there was no way he was going to get close to Vi Nevin any time soon and, since the cop on guard in front of her room had no doubt phoned that goon who'd dropped by Lansdowne Road in the middle of the previous night, it also appeared that there was no way he was going to get close to her any time at all. At least not while the cops were doing their bloodhound bit on the Maiden whore's killing, and that might go on for months. He had to develop another plan to get corroboration for his alibi, and he found his mind feverishly coming up with one scenario, only to dismiss it and come up with another.

On the Exhibition Hall side of Earl's Court Station, he stopped for a traffic light. He waved off a street urchin who wanted to wash his windscreen for fifty p, and he observed a hooker in negotiations with a potential client by the Underground entrance. He made an instant evaluation of her in a knee-jerk reaction to the sight of her Band-Aid-size skirt of magenta spandex, her black polyester blouse with its plunging neckline and its senseless ruffles, her stiletto heels and her fishnet stockings: She was a hand-or-mouth bitch only, he decided. Twenty-five pounds if the John was desperate; no more than ten if she and her coke habit were working the street together.

The light changed, and as he drove off, Martin's sense of grievance against the police began to grow in him. He was doing the whole shitting city one hell of a favour, he decided, and no one—least of all the cops—seemed to realise or appreciate that. His girls didn't clutter up the sidewalks making deals with clients, and they sure as hell didn't pollute the landscape by dressing like something out of an adolescent's wet dream. They were refined, educated, attractive, and discreet, and if they did take money for engaging in the odd sexual encounter or two and if they did pass on a percentage to him, who made it possible for them to be in the company of wealthy and successful men who were willing to recompense them richly for their services, who the hell cared? Who the hell did it hurt? No one. The bottom line was that sex had a place in men's lives that it did not have in the lives of women. For men it was a signature act, primal and necessary to their identity. Their wives grew tired of it or bored by it, but the men did not. And if someone was prepared to provide those men with access to women who welcomed their attentions, women willing to allow their bodies to be the soft and pliable wax into which those men poured their juices not to mention left the indelible impression of their very characters, why couldn't money be exchanged for such a service? And why couldn't someone—like himself—with the organisational skills and the vision to recruit exceptional women for the entertainment of exceptional men be allowed to make a living doing it?

If the laws had been written by visionaries like himself and not by a group of spineless jerks who were more concerned with being able to feed at the public trough than they were with being even marginally realistic about activities participated in by consenting adults, Martin thought, then he wouldn't have been in the position he was in at this very moment. He wouldn't be scrambling for someone who could vouch for his whereabouts and get the police off his back, because the police would never have been on his back in the first place. And even if they had come calling and had asked their questions and made their demands, they wouldn't have had a single thing to hold over his head to gain cooperation because he wouldn't have been living on the wrong side of the law in the first place.

And what sort of country was it, anyway, where prostitution was legal but living off prostitution wasn't? What was prostitution but a means of livelihood? And who the hell were they kidding trying to regulate it from Westminster, when three-quarters of those hypocrites who planted their asses on those green leather benches were screwing their eyeballs out with any secretary, student, or parliamentary assistant who appeared even remotely willing?

Fuck it, the entire situation made him want to punch holes through walls. And the more he thought of it, the angrier he became. And the angrier he became, the more he focused on the cause of all his current troubles. Forget Maiden and Nevin, he realised. They were taken care of, after all. They hadn't been the ones to spill their miserable guts to the cops. Tricia, on the other hand, remained to be dealt with.

He spent the rest of the drive considering how best to do this. What he came up with wasn't pleasant, but when was it pleasant when a notable figure on the social scene loses his wife to heroin despite his best efforts to save her from herself and to shield her from the displeasure of her family and the censure of an unforgiving public?

He felt his mood lift. His lips curved upwards, and he began to hum. He made the turn from Lansdowne Walk into Lansdowne Road.

And there he saw them.

Four men were mounting the front steps to his house, with PLAINCLOTHES COPS written all over them. They were beefy, tall, and designed to tyrannise. They looked like gorillas in fancy dress.

Martin hit the accelerator. He swerved into the drive. He was out of the Jaguar and up the steps in their wake before they had a chance to ring the bell. “What do you want?” he demanded.

Gorilla One removed a white envelope from the pocket of a leather bomber jacket. “Search warrant,” he said.

“What? Search for what?”

“Are you opening the door or are we breaking it down?”

“I'm phoning my solicitor.” Martin shoved past them and unlocked the door.

“Whatever you want,” Gorilla Two said.

They followed him inside. Gorilla One gave instructions as Martin raced for the phone. Two of the cops were right on his heels and into his office. The other two pounded up the stairs. Shit, he thought, and he shouted, “Hey! My wife's up there!”

“They'll say hello,” Gorilla One said.

As Martin frantically punched in the phone number, One began removing books from the shelves and Two went for a filing cabinet. “I want you fuckers out of here,” Martin told them.

“Right,” said Two, “I s'pose you do.”

“And we all want something,” said One with a smirk.

Upstairs, a door crashed back against a wall. Muffled voices accompanied the noise of furniture being roughly shoved round a room. In Martin's office the cops made their search with a minimum of effort and a maximum of mess: They strewed books on the floor, took pictures from the walls, and emptied the filing cabinet in which Martin kept scrupulous records for the escort service. Gorilla Two bent and, with cigar-stub fingers, began sifting through them.

“Shit,” Martin hissed, receiver to his ear. Where was that fucker Polmanteer?

On the other end of the line the phone at his solicitor's home double-rang four times. His answer machine clicked on. Martin cursed, disconnected, and tried the solicitor's mobile. Where would he be on a Sunday, for God's sake? The slimy bastard couldn't have gone to church.

The mobile brought him no better results. He slammed down the receiver and rooted in his desk for the solicitor's card. Gorilla Two elbowed him to one side. He said, “Sorry, sir. Can't let you remove—”

“I'm not removing a fucking thing! I'm looking for my solicitor's pager.”

“Wouldn't keep it in your desk, would he?” One asked from the shelves, where he continued his work. Books thunked to the floor.

“You know what I mean,” Martin said to Two. “I want the number of his pager. It's on a card. I know my rights. Now, step aside or I won't be responsible—”

“Martin? What is it? What's going on? There're men in our room and they've emptied the wardrobe and … What's going on?”

Martin spun round. Tricia was in the doorway, unshowered, undressed, and unpainted. She looked like the hags who sat on their sleeping bags and begged money in the subway at Hyde Park Corner. She looked like what she was: a smack-head.

His hands started to burn once again. He dug his nails into his palms. Tricia had been the single cause of his every difficulty for the last twenty years. And now she was the cause of his downfall.

He said, “God damn it. God damn it. You!” And he plunged across the room. He grabbed her by the hair and managed to ram her head against the door jamb before the cops were on him. “Stupid cunt!” he shouted as they dragged him off her. And then to the police, “All right. All right” as he shook off their hold on him. “Call your asshole boss. Tell him I'm ready to deal.”

t was nearly midday before Simon St. James was able to give his time to the Derbyshire post-mortem reports that Lynley had sent him via Barbara Havers. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to be looking for. The examination of the Maiden girl appeared in order. The conclusion of epidural haematoma was consistent with the blow to her skull. That it had been administered by a right-handed person attacking her from above was consistent with the hypothesis that she'd been running and had tripped—or been tackled—in her flight across the moor in the darkness. Apart from the blow to her head and the scrapes and contusions one would expect to find after a rough fall on uneven ground, there was nothing on her body that suggested anything curious. Unless, of course, one wanted to consider the extraordinary number of holes she'd had pierced in everything from her eyebrows to her genitals as a point of interest. And that hardly seemed a reasonable route to go when driving needles through various body parts had long ago become one of the relatively few acts of defiance left to a generation of young people whose parents had already engaged in them all.

From his reading of the Maiden report, it seemed to St. James that all the bases had been covered: from the time, cause, and mechanism of death to the evidence—or lack thereof—of a struggle. X-rays and photographs had been duly taken, and the body had been examined from top to bottom. The various organs had been studied, removed, and commented upon. Samples of body fluids had been sent to toxicology for their findings. At the end of the report, the opinion was stated briefly and clearly: The girl had died as the result of a blow to the head.

St. James went through the findings once more to make sure he hadn't missed any pertinent detail. Then he turned to the second report and immersed himself in the death of Terence Cole.

Lynley had phoned him with the information that one of the wounds on the boy hadn't been inflicted by the Swiss Army knife that had apparently been responsible for the others, including the fatal piercing of the femoral artery. After reading through the basic facts in the report, St. James gave a more careful scrutiny to everything related to this particular wound. He noted its size, its position on the body, and the marking left on the bone beneath it. He stared at the words and then walked contemplatively to the window of his lab, where he watched as Peach rolled blissfully below him in a patch of garden sunlight, exposing her furry dachshund belly to the twelve o'clock heat.

The Swiss Army knife, he knew, had been found in a grit dispenser. Why hadn't the secondary weapon been left in the same place? Why cache one weapon but not the other? Those questions, of course, belonged in the realm of the case detectives and not the scientists, but he believed they needed to be asked nonetheless.