In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (8 page)

Lynley let the words hang there between them. In the silence, Barbara found herself wanting to reach into the air and unspeak them, so untrue did she know them to be. “Sorry,” she said, feeling that the huskiness in her voice was a worse betrayal than any action she herself had taken earlier that summer.

“I know,” he said. “I do know you're sorry. I'm sorry as well.”

“Detective Inspector Lynley?”

The quiet interruption came from the door. Lynley and Barbara swung to the voice. Dorothea Harriman, secretary to their divisional superintendent, stood there: well-coifed with a helmet of honey-blonde hair, well-dressed in a pin-striped suit that would have done service in a fashion advert. Barbara all at once felt what she always was in the presence of Dorothea Harriman, a sartorial nightmare.

“What is it, Dee?” Lynley asked the younger woman.

“Superintendent Webberly,” Harriman replied. “He's asked for you. As soon as you can make it. He's had a call from Crime Operations. Something's come up.” And with a glance and a nod at Barbara, she was gone.

Barbara waited. She found that her pulse had begun throbbing painfully. The request from Webberly couldn't have come at a more terrible time.

Something's come up was Harriman shorthand for the fact that the game was afoot. And in the past that summons from Webberly had generally preceded an invitation from the inspector to accompany him in his discovery of what the game was.

Barbara said nothing. She just watched Lynley and waited. She knew very well that the next few moments would constitute the stand he took on their partnership.

Outside his office, business went on as usual. Voices echoed in the lino-floored corridor. Telephones rang in departments. Meetings began. But here, inside, it seemed to Barbara as if she and Lynley had taken themselves into another dimension altogether, one into which much more than merely her professional future was tied.

He finally got to his feet. “I'll need to see what Webberly has going.”

She said, “Shall I … ?” despite his use of the singular pronoun that had already said it all. But she found that she couldn't complete the question because she couldn't face the answer at the moment. So she asked another. “What would you like me to do, sir?”

He thought about it, looking away from her at last, seeming to study the picture that hung by the door: a laughing young man with a cricket bat in his hand and a long rip in his grass-stained trousers. Barbara knew why Lynley kept the photo in his office: It served as a daily reminder of the man in the photo and what Lynley had done to him on a long-ago drunken night in a car. Most people put what was unpleasant out of their minds. But DI Thomas Lynley didn't happen to be most people.

He said, “I think it's best that you lie low for a while, Barbara. Let the dust settle. Let people get past this. Let them forget.”

But you won't be able to, will you? she asked silently. What she said, however, was a bleak “Yes, sir.”

“I know that isn't easy for you,” he said, and his voice was so gentle that she wanted to howl. “But I haven't got any other answer to give you at the moment. I only wish that I had.”

And again, the few words she could manage were “Sir. I see. Yes sir.”

“Demotion to detective constable,” Lynley said to Superintendent Malcolm Webberly when he joined him. “That's marks to you, isn't it, sir?”

Webberly was ensconced behind his desk, smoking a cigar. Mercifully, he'd kept the door to his office closed to spare the other officers, the secretaries, and the clerks from the fumes emanating from the noxious tube of tobacco. This consideration, however, did little to deliver anyone who had to enter from experiencing and breathing the fug of smoke. Lynley tried to inhale as little as possible. Webberly used his lips and tongue to move the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. It was the only response he gave.

“Can you tell me why?” Lynley asked. “You've gone out on a limb for officers before. No one knows that better than I. But why in this case, when it seems so cut and dried? And what're you going to have to pay for having saved her?”

“We all have favours,” the superintendent said. “I called a few in. Havers was in the wrong, but her heart was in the right.”

Lynley frowned. He'd been trying to work himself round to this same conclusion from the moment he'd learned about Barbara Havers’ disgrace, but he hadn't been able to manage the feat. Every time he came close, the facts reared up at him, demanding acknowledgement. And he'd gathered a number of those facts himself, driving out to Essex to talk to the principal officer involved. Having talked to her, he couldn't understand how—let alone why—Webberly was able to condone Barbara Havers’ decision to fire a rifle at DCI Emily Barlow. Disregarding his own friendship with Havers, even disregarding the very basic issue of chain of command, weren't they responsible for asking what sort of professional mayhem they were encouraging if they failed to punish a member of the force who'd taken part in such an egregious action? “But to shoot at an officer … Even to pick up a rifle in the first place when she had no authority …”

Webberly sighed. “These things just aren't black and white, Tommy I wish they were, but they never are. The child involved—”

“The DCI ordered a life belt thrown to her.”

“But there was doubt as to whether the girl could swim. And beyond that …” Webberly removed the cigar from his mouth and examined its tip as he said, “She's someone's only child. Evidently, Havers knew it.”

And Lynley knew what that fact meant to his superintendent. Webberly himself had a single light in his life: his one daughter, Miranda. He said, “Barbara owes you on this one, sir.”

“I'll see that she pays.” Webberly nodded at a yellow pad that lay before him on the desk. Lynley glanced at it to see the superintendent's scribbling rendered in black felt-tip pen. Webberly said, “Andrew Maiden. D'you remember him?”

At the question—the name—Lynley sat in a chair near Webberly's desk and said, “Andy? Of course. I'd not be likely to forget him.”

“I thought not.”

“One operation in SO10 and I made a hash of it. What a nightmare that was.”

SO 10 was the Crime Operations Group, the most secret and secretive collection of officers in the Met. They were responsible for hostage negotiation, witness and jury protection, the organisation of informants, and undercover operations. Lynley had once aimed to work among them in the latter group. But at twenty-six, he hadn't possessed either the sangfroid or the performance ability to adopt a persona other than his own. “Months of preparation went straight down the drain,” he recalled. “I expected Andy to string me up.”

Andy Maiden hadn't done so, however. That wasn't his style. The SO 10 officer was a man who knew how to cut his losses, and that's what he'd done, not assigning blame where it was owed but instead matching his moves to the moment's need: He quickly withdrew his men from the undercover operation and waited for another opportunity to introduce them, months later, when he could join them and assure that no outrageous faux pas such as Lynley's could undermine their efforts again.

He'd been called Domino—Andy Maiden—so adept had he been at assuming the character of everyone from hit men to American backers of the IRA. His primary field had ultimately become drug operations, but before he arrived there, he made his mark in murder for hire and organised crime as well.

“I used to run into him from time to time on the fourth floor,” Lynley told Webberly. “But I lost track of him once he left the Met. That was … when? Ten years ago?”

“Just over nine.”

Maiden, Webberly said, had taken early retirement and moved his family to Derbyshire. In the Peaks, he'd poured his life savings and his energy into the renovation of an old hunting lodge. It was a country hotel now, called Maiden Hall. Quite the spot for walkers, holiday-makers, mountain bikers, or anyone looking for an evening out and a decent meal.

Webberly referred to his yellow pad. “Andy Maiden brought more louts to justice than anyone else in SO 10, Tommy.”

“It doesn't surprise me to hear that, sir.”

“Yes. Well. He's asking for our help, and we owe him.”

“What's happened?”

“His daughter was murdered in the Peaks. Twenty-five years old and some bastard left her in the middle of nowhere in a place called Calder Moor.”

“Christ. That's rough. I'm sorry to hear it.”

“There was a second body as well—a boy's—and no one knows who the devil he is. No ID on him. The girl—Nicola—had gone camping and she was geared up for the works: rain, fog, sun, or anything else. But the boy at the site hadn't got any gear at all.”

“Do we know how they died?”

“No word on that.” And when Lynley raised an eyebrow in surprise, Webberly said, “This is coming our way via SO 10. Name the time those bastards made fast and free with their information.”

Lynley couldn't do so. Webberly went on.

“What I know is this: Buxton CID's got the case, but Andy's asking for more and we're giving it to him. He's asked for you in particular.”

“Me?”

“That's right. You may have lost track of him over the years, but it seems he hasn't lost track of you.” Webberly plugged his cigar into his mouth, clamping it into the corner and referring to his notes. “A Home Office pathologist is on his way up there for a formal by-the-books with scalpel and recorder. He's set to do the post-mortem sometime today. You'll be on the patch of a bloke called Peter Han-ken. He's been told that Andy's one of us, but that's all he knows.” He removed the cigar from his mouth again and looked at it instead of at Lynley as he concluded, “Tommy, I'll make no pretence about this. It could turn dicey. The fact that Maiden's asked for you by name …” Webberly hesitated before finishing with, “Just keep your eyes open and move with caution.”

Lynley nodded. The situation was irregular. He couldn't remember another time when a relative of a victim of a crime had been allowed to name the officer who would investigate it. That Andy Maiden had been allowed to do so suggested spheres of influence that could easily encroach upon Lynley's efforts to manage a smooth investigation.

He couldn't handle the case alone, and Lynley knew that Webberly wouldn't expect him to do so. But he had a fairly good idea of what officer the superintendent, given half the chance, would assign as his partner. He spoke to circumvent that assignment. She wasn't ready yet. Neither—if it came down to it—was he.

“I'd like to see who's on rota to take with me,” he told Webberly. “Since Andy's a former SO 10 officer, we're going to want someone with a fair amount of finesse.”

The superintendent regarded him directly. Fifteen seconds ticked by before he spoke. “You know best who you can work with, Tommy,” he finally said.

“Thank you, sir. I do.”

• • •

Barbara Havers made her way to the fourth floor canteen, where she bought a bowl of vegetable soup which she took to a table and tried to eat while all the time imagining that the word pariah hung from her shoulders on a sandwich board. She ate alone. Every nod of recognition she received from other officers seemed imbued with a silent message of contempt. And while she tried to bolster herself with an interior monologue informing her shrinking ego that no one could possibly yet know of her demotion, her disgrace, and the dissolution of her partnership, every conversation going on round her—particularly those flavoured by light-hearted laughter—was a conversation mocking her.

She gave up on the soup. She gave up on the Yard. She signed herself out—“going home ill” would doubtless be welcomed by those who clearly saw her as a form of contagion anyway—and made her way to her Mini. One half of her was ascribing her actions to a mixture of paranoia and stupidity. The other half was trapped in an endless repetition of her final encounter with Lynley, playing the game of what-I-could-have-would-have-and-should-have-said after learning the outcome of his meeting with Webberly.

In this frame of mind, she found herself driving along Millbank before she knew what she was doing, not heading for home at all. Her body on automatic pilot, she came up to Grosvenor Road and the Battersea Power Station with her brain engaged in a mental castigation of DI Lynley. She felt like a shattered mirror, useless but dangerous with broken edges. How easy it had been for him to cut her loose, she thought bitterly. And what an idiot she had been, believing for weeks that he was on her side.

Obviously, it hadn't been enough for Lynley that she'd been demoted and humiliated by a man whom both of them had loathed for years. It seemed now that he'd also needed an opportunity to do some disciplining on his own. As far as she was concerned, he was wrong wrong wrong taking the direction he'd chosen. And she needed an ally straightaway who would agree with her point of view.

Spinning along the River Thames in the light midday traffic, she had a fairly good idea where to find just such a confederate. He lived in Chelsea, little more than a mile from where she was driving.

Simon St. James was Lynley's oldest friend, his schoolmate from Eton. A forensic scientist and an expert witness, he was regularly called upon by defence counsel as well as Crown Prosecutors to bolster one side or the other of a criminal case that was relying on evidence rather than eyewitnesses to win a conviction. Unlike Lynley, he was a reasonable man. He had the ability to stand back and observe, disinterested and dispassionate, without becoming personally embroiled in whatever situation was roiling round him. He was exactly the person she needed to talk to. He'd see Lynley's actions for what they were.

What Barbara didn't consider in the midst of her turbulent mental gymnastics was that St. James might not be alone in his house in Chelsea's Cheyne Row. However, the fact that his wife was also at home—working in the darkroom that adjoined his own top floor laboratory—didn't make the situation nearly as delicate as did the presence of St. James's regular assistant. And Barbara didn't know that St. James's regular assistant was there until she was climbing the stairs behind Joseph Cotter: father-in-law, housekeeper, cook, and general factotum to the scientist himself.