In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (71 page)

He gave a bitter brief laugh as he thought of it now: that trip to London. He'd never asked her directly if there was someone else, because at heart he hadn't wanted to know. He'd allowed himself to be satisfied with the fact that his surprise visit hadn't caught her out with someone else, and that a surreptitious look in the bathroom cupboards, the medicine cabinet, and her chest of drawers hadn't turned up anything a man might keep there for mornings after nighttime assignations. On top of that, she'd made love with him. And hopeless numbskull that he'd been at the time, he'd actually thought that her lovemaking meant something.

But it was just part of her line of work, he realised now. Just part of what Nicola did for money.

“All's clear with the coppers, Julie my boy.”

Julian swung round to see that his father had joined him in the manor office, apparently having had enough of the rain, the reenactment, or the company of other spectators. Jeremy had a dripping umbrella hanging over his arm, a camp stool in one hand, and a Thermos in the other. His great-uncle's telescope poked from the breast pocket of his grandfather's jacket.

Jeremy smiled, looking pleased with himself. “Gave you an alibi, son. Concrete as the motorway, it was.”

Julian stared at him. “What did you say?”

“Told the copper I was with you an’ the new pups on Tuesday. Saw them pop out and saw you catch them, I said.”

“But, Dad, I never said you were there! I never told them …” Julian sighed. He began sorting through the account books. He stacked them in order of year. “They're going to wonder why I never mentioned you. You see that, don't you? Don't you, Dad?”

Jeremy tapped a trembling finger to his temple. “Thought that out in advance, my boy. Said I never disturbed you. There you were, acting the part of midwife, and I didn't like to break your concentration. Said I went to talk to you 'bout getting off the drink. Said I went to show you these.” Once more Jeremy produced the brochures. “'Nspired, wasn't it? You already saw them, see? So when he asked you 'bout them, you tol’ him, right?”

“He didn't ask me about Tuesday night. He wanted to know when I'd last been to London. So no doubt he's wondering why you took the trouble to give me a damn alibi, when he wasn't even asking for one.” Past his exasperation, Julian suddenly realised the implication behind what his father had done. He said, “Why did you give me an alibi, Dad? You know I don't need one, don't you? I was with the dogs. Cassie was delivering. And anyway, how did you know to tell them that?”

“Your cousin tol’ me.”

“Sam? Why?”

“She says the police're looking at you funny, and she doesn't like that. ‘As if Julie would raise his hand against anyone,’ she says. All righteous anger, she is, Julie. Quite a woman. Loyalty like that … It's something to behold.”

“I don't need Sam's loyalty. Or your help, for that matter. I didn't kill Nicola.”

Jeremy shifted his glance from his son to the desktop. “No one's saying you did.”

“But if you think you have to lie to the police, that must mean … Dad, do you think I killed her? Do you honestly believe … Jesus.”

“Now, don't get yourself twisted. You're red in the face, and I know what that means. I didn't say I thought anything. I don't think anything. I just want to ease the way a bit. We don't have to take life as it comes so much, Julie. We can do something to shape our destinies, y'know.”

“And that's what you were doing? Shaping my destiny?”

He shook his head. “Selfish bastard. I'm shaping my own.” He lifted the brochures to his heart. “I want to get dry. It's time. I want it. But God knows and I know: I can't do it alone.”

Julian had been round his father long enough to recognise a manipulation when he heard one. The yellow flags of caution went up. “Dad, I know you want to get sober. I admire you for it. But those programmes … the cost …”

“You c'n do this for me. You c'n do it knowing I'd do it for you.”

“It isn't as if I don't want to do it for you. But we haven't the funds. I looked through the books again and again and we just haven't got them. Have you thought about phoning Aunt Sophie? If she knew what you intend to do with the money, I expect she'd lend—”

“Lend? Bah!” Jeremy swept the notion aside with the brochures he held. “Your aunt'll never go for that. ‘He'll stop when he wants to stop’ is what she thinks. She won't lift a finger to help me do it.”

“What if I phoned her?”

“Who're you to her, Julie? Just some relative she's never seen, come begging for a handout from what her own husband worked hard to make. No. You can't be the one to do the asking.”

“If you spoke to Sam, then.”

Jeremy waved the idea off like a gnat. “Can't ask her to do that. She's been giving us too much as it is. Her time. Her effort. Her concern. Her love. I can't ask her for anything more, and I won't.” He heaved a sigh and shoved the brochures back into his pocket. “Never mind, then. I'll soldier on.”

“I could ask Sam to speak to Aunt Sophie. I could explain.”

“No. Forget it. I c'n bite the bullet. I've done it before …”

Too many times, Julian thought. His father's life spanned more than five decades of broken promises and good intentions come to nothing. He'd seen Jeremy give up drink more times than he could remember. And just as many times, he'd seen Jeremy return to the bottle. There was more than a simple grain of truth in what he said. If he was going to beat the beast this time, he was not going to go into battle alone.

“Look, Dad. I'll talk to Sam. I want to do it.”

“Want to?” Jeremy repeated. “Really want to? Not think you have to because of whatever you owe your old man?”

“No. Wantto. I'll ask her.”

Jeremy looked humbled. His eyes actually filled with tears. “She loves you, Julie. Fine woman like that and she loves you, son.”

“I'll speak to her, Dad.”

The rain was still falling when Lynley turned up the drive to Maiden Hall.

Barbara Havers had actually provided him with a few minutes' distraction from the turmoil he felt over what he'd learned about Andy Maiden's presence in London. Indeed, he'd managed to exchange the turmoil for an anger over Barbara's defiance that hadn't been the least palliated by Helen's gentle attempt to wring reason from the constable's behaviour. “Perhaps she misunderstood your orders, Tommy,” she'd said once Havers had taken herself away from Eaton Terrace. “In the heat of the moment, she might have assumed you didn't intend her to be part of the Notting Hill search.”

“Christ,” he'd countered. “Don't defend her, Helen. You heard what she said. She knew what she was supposed to do and she chose not to do it. She went her own way.”

“But you admire initiative. You always have done. You've always told me that Winston's initiative is one of the finest—”

“God damn it, Helen. When Nkata takes matters into his own hands, he does it after he's completed an assignment, not before. He doesn't argue, whinge, or ignore what's in front of him because he thinks he's got a better idea. And when he's been corrected—which is damn seldom, by the way—he doesn't make the same mistake twice. One would think that Barbara would have learned something this summer about the consequence of defying an order. But she hasn't. Her skull is lead.”

Helen had carefully gathered together the sheets of music that Barbara had left behind. She placed them, not in the envelope, but in a pile on the coffee table. She said, “Tommy, if Winston Nkata and not Barbara Havers had been in that boat with DCI Barlow … If Winston Nkata and not Barbara Havers had taken up that gun …” She'd gazed at him earnestly. “Would you have been so angry?”

His response had been both swift and hot. “This isn't a bloody issue of gender. You know me better than that.”

“I do know you, yes” had been her quiet reply.

Still, he'd considered her question more than once during the first one hundred miles of the drive to Derbyshire. But every way he examined his possible responses both to the question and to Havers’ incredible act of insubordination on the North Sea, his answer was the same. Havers had engaged in assault, not initiative. And nothing justified that. Had Winston Nkata been wielding the weapon—which was as risible an image as Lynley could invent—he would have reacted identically. He knew it.

Now, as he pulled into the car park of Maiden Hall, his anger had long since abated, to be replaced by the same disquiet of spirit that had descended upon him when he'd learned about Andy Maiden's visit to his daughter. He stopped the car and gazed at the hotel through the rain.

He didn't want to believe what the facts were asking him to believe, but he drew in what resolve he could muster and reached in the back seat for his umbrella. He walked through the rain across the car park. Inside the hotel, he asked the first employee he saw to fetch Andy Maiden. When the former SO 10 officer appeared five minutes later, he came alone.

“Tommy,” he greeted him. “You've news? Come with me.”

He led the way to the office near Reception. He shut the door behind them.

“Tell me about Islington in May, Andy,” Lynley said without preamble, because he knew that to hesitate was to offer the other man an opening into his sympathy that he couldn't afford to allow. “Tell me about saying ‘I'll see you dead before I let you do it.’”

Maiden sat. He indicated a chair for Lynley. He didn't speak until Lynley was seated, and even then he seemed to go inward for a moment, as if he was gathering his resources before he replied.

Then he said, “The wheel clamp.”

To which Lynley replied, “No one could ever accuse you of being an incompetent cop.”

“The same could be said of you. You've done good work, Tommy. I always believed you'd shine in CID.”

If anything, the compliment was like a slap in the face, hearkening as it did to all the now-obvious reasons that Andy Maiden had chosen him—blinded as he was by admiration—to come to Derbyshire. Lynley said steadily, “I have a good team. Tell me about Islington.”

They were finally upon it, and Maiden's eyes bore so much anguish that Lynley found he still—even now—had to steel himself against a rush of pity towards his old friend. “She asked to see me,” Maiden said. “So I went.”

“Last May. To London,” Lynley clarified. “You went to Islington to see your daughter.”

“That's right.”

He'd thought Nicola wanted to make arrangements to move her belongings back to Derbyshire for the summer, preparatory to taking her holiday job with Will Upman as they'd arranged in December. So he'd driven the Land-Rover, the better to be able to haul things home if she was willing to part with them a few weeks before her classes ended at the College of Law.

“But she didn't want to come home,” Maiden said. “That's not why she'd called me to London. She wanted to tell me her future plans.”

“Prostitution,” Lynley said. “Her set-up in Fulham.”

Maiden cleared his throat roughly and whispered, “Oh God.”

Even hardening himself against empathy, Lynley found he couldn't force the man to lay out the facts that he'd gathered that day in London. So he did it for him: Lynley went through everything as he himself had learned it, from Nicola's employment first as a trainee then as an escort at MKR Financial Management to her partnership with Vi Nevin and her choice of domination as her speciality. He concluded with “Sir Adrian believes there could be only one reason why she came north for the summer instead of remaining in London: money.”

“It was a compromise. She did it for me.”

They'd argued bitterly, but he'd finally got her to agree to work for Upman during the summer, at least to try the law as a career. By paying her more than she would have made remaining in London, he said, he garnered her cooperation. He'd had to take out a bank loan to raise the sum she demanded as recompense, but he considered it money well spent.

“You were that confident that the law would win her over?” Lynley asked. The prospect hardly seemed likely.

“I was confident that Upman would win her over,” Maiden replied. “I've seen him with women. He has a way. I thought he and Nicola … Tommy, I was willing to try anything. The right man, I kept thinking, could bring her to her senses.”

“Wouldn't Julian Britton have been a better choice? He was already in love with her, wasn't he?”

“Julian wanted her too much. She needed a man who'd seduce her but keep her guessing. Upman seemed right for the job.” Maiden appeared to hear his own words, because he flinched a moment after he'd made the declaration, and finally he began to weep. “Oh God, Tommy. She drove me to it,” he said, and he held a fist at his mouth as if this could deaden his pain.

And Lynley was at last face-to-face with what he hadn't wanted to see. He'd turned away from the guilt of this man because of who he had been at New Scotland Yard, while all the time who he had been at New Scotland Yard illuminated his culpability as nothing else could. A master of deception and dissimulation, Andy Maiden had spent decades moving in that netherworld of undercover where the lines between fact and fantasy, between illegality and honour first became blurred and ultimately became altogether non-existent.

“Tell me how it happened,” Lynley said stonily. “Tell me what you used besides the knife.”

Maiden dropped his hand. “God in heaven …” His voice was hoarse. “Tommy, you can't be thinking …” Then he appeared to reflect back over what he'd said, to locate the exact point of misunderstanding between them. “She drove me to bribery. To paying her to work for Upman so that he could win her … so that her mother would never discover what she was … because it would have destroyed her. But no. No. You can't think I killed her. I was here the night she died. Here in the hotel. And … my God, she was my only child.”

“And she'd betrayed you,” Lynley said. “After all you'd done for her, after the life you'd given her—”

“No! I loved her. Do you have children? A daughter? A son? Do you know what it is to see the future in your child and know you'll live on no matter what happens just because she herself exists?”

“As a whore?” Lynley asked. “As a woman on the game who makes her money paying house calls on men she whips into submission? ‘I'll see you dead before I let you do it.’ Those were your words. And she was returning to London next week, Andy You'd bought yourself only a reprieve from the inevitable when you paid her to work in Buxton.”