In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (9 page)

Cotter said, “All three of them's at work, but it's time to break for lunch and Lady Helen, for one, ‘11 be glad of the diversion. Likes her meals regular, always ’as done. No change there, married or not.”

Barbara hesitated on the second floor landing, saying, “Helen's here?”

“She is.” Cotter added with a smile, “'S nice to know some things's the same as ever was, isn't it?”

“Damn,” Barbara muttered under her breath.

For Helen was also Countess of Asherton, titled in her own right, but also the wife of Thomas Lynley who—although he made no bones about preferring it otherwise—was the other half of the Asherton equation: the official, belted, velvet-and-ermine-clad Earl. Barbara could hardly expect St. James and his wife to join her in a round of denigration doo-dah with the wife of the object of denigration in the room. She realised that retreat was in order.

She was about to beat a hasty one, when Helen came onto the top floor landing, laughing over her shoulder into the lab as she said, “All right, all right. I'll fetch a new roll. But if you'd claw your way into the current decade and replace that machine with something more up-to-date, we wouldn't be out of fax paper at all. I'd think you'd notice these things occasionally, Simon.” She turned away from the door, began to come down the stairs, and spied Barbara on the landing below her. Her face lit. It was a lovely face, not beautiful in any conventional sense, but tranquil and radiant, framed by a smooth fall of chestnut hair.

“Heavens, what a wonderful surprise! Simon. Deborah. Here's a visitor for us, so you'll absolutely have to break for lunch now. How are you, Barbara? Why haven't you called round in all these weeks?”

There was nothing for it but to join her. Barbara nodded her thanks to Cotter, who called up, “I'll lay another place at the table, then,” in the general direction of the lab and headed back down the way they'd come. Barbara climbed upwards and took Helen's extended hand. The handshake turned into a swift kiss on the cheek, a welcome so warm that Barbara knew Lynley hadn't yet contacted his wife about what had occurred at Scotland Yard that day.

Helen said, “This is brilliant timing. You've just saved me from a slog down the King's Road in search of fax paper. I'm famished, but you know Simon. Why stop for anything as incidental as a meal when one has the opportunity to slave for a few more hours? Simon, detach yourself from the microscope, please. Here's someone more interesting than fingernail scrapings.”

Barbara followed Helen into the lab where St. James regularly evaluated evidence, prepared reports as well as professional papers, and organised materials for his recently acquired position as a lecturer at the Royal College of Science. Today he appeared to be in expert-witness mode, because he was perched on a stool at one of the work tables, and he was assembling slides from the contents of an envelope that he'd unsealed. The aforementioned fingernail scrapings, Barbara thought.

St. James was a largely unattractive man, no longer the laughing cricket player but disabled now and hampered by a leg brace that made his movements awkward. His best features were his hair, which he always wore overlong with complete disregard for whatever current fashion dictated, and his eyes, which changed from grey to blue depending on his clothing, which was itself nondescript. He looked up from the microscope as Barbara entered the lab. His smile humanised a lined and angular face.

“Barbara. Hullo.” He eased himself off the stool and came across the room to greet her, calling out to his wife that Barbara Havers had joined them. At the far end of the room, a door swung open. In cutoff blue jeans and a olive T-shirt, St. James's wife stood beneath a line of photographic enlargements that hung from a cord running the length of her darkroom and dripped water onto the rubber-matted floor.

Deborah looked quite well, Barbara noted. Renewing her commitment to her art—instead of brooding and mourning the string of miscarriages that had plagued her marriage—obviously agreed with her. It was nice to think of something going well for someone.

Barbara said, “Hullo. I was in the area and …” She glanced at her wrist to see that she'd forgotten her watch at home that morning in her haste to get to the Yard for her meeting with Hillier. She dropped her arm. “Actually, I didn't think about what time it was. Lunch and everything. Sorry.”

“We were about to stop,” St. James told her. “You can join us for a meal.”

Helen laughed. “‘About to stop?’ What outrageous casuistry. I've been begging for food these last ninety minutes and you wouldn't consider it.”

Deborah looked at her blankly. “What time is it, Helen?”

“You're as bad as Simon” was Helen's dry reply.

“You'll join us?” St. James asked Barbara.

“I just had something,” she said. “At the Yard.”

All three of the others knew what that last phrase meant. Barbara could see the underlying connotation register on their faces. It was Deborah who said, “Then you've finally had word,” as she poured chemicals from their trays into large plastic bottles that she took from a shelf beneath her photographic enlarger. “That's why you've come by, isn't it? What happened? No. Don't explain yet. Something tells me you could do with a drink. Why don't the three of you go downstairs? Give me ten minutes to sort things out here and I'll join you.”

Downstairs meant Simon's study, and that's where St. James took Barbara and Helen, with Barbara wishing that Helen and not Deborah had been the one to stay above and continue working. She thought about denying that her visit to Chelsea had anything to do with the Yard, but she realised that her tone of voice had probably given her away. There was certainly nothing buoyant about it.

An old drinks trolley stood beneath the window that overlooked Cheyne Row, and St. James poured them each a sherry as Barbara made much of inspecting the wall on which Deborah always hung a changing display of her photographs. Today these were more of the suite she'd been working on for the last nine months: oversize enlargements of Polaroid portraits taken in locations like Covent Garden, Lincoln's Inn Fields, St. Botolph's Church, and Spitalfields Market.

“Is Deborah going to show them?” Barbara asked, gripping the sherry she'd been given and stalling for time. She nodded towards the pictures.

“In December.” St. James handed Helen her sherry. She slid out of her shoes and sat in one of the two leather chairs by the fireplace, drawing her slender legs underneath her. She was, Barbara noted, watching her steadily. Helen read people the way other people read books. “So what's happened?” St. James was saying as Barbara wandered from the photo wall to the window and looked out at the narrow street. There was nothing to hold her attention there: just a tree, a row of parked cars, and a line of houses, two of which were currently fronted by scaffolding. Barbara wished she'd gone into that line of work. Considering how frequently it was employed in everything from gentrification projects to washing windows, erecting scaffolding as a career would have kept her busy, out of trouble, and extremely well-oiled with lolly.

“Barbara?” St. James said. “Have you heard something from the Yard this morning?”

She turned from the window. “A letter in my file and demotion,” she replied.

St. James grimaced. “Are you back on the street, then?”

Which had happened to her once before in what had felt like another lifetime during the last three years of working with Lynley. She said, “Not quite,” and went on to explain, leaving out the nastier details of her meeting with Hillier and mentioning Lynley not at all.

Helen did it for her. “Does Tommy know? Have you seen him yet, Barbara?”

Which brings us to the point, Barbara thought morosely. She said, “Well. Yes. The inspector knows.”

A fine line appeared between Helen's eyes. She placed her glass on the table next to her chair. “I've a very bad feeling about what's happened.”

Barbara was surprised at her own response to the quiet sympathy in Helen's voice. Her throat tightened. She felt herself reacting as she might have reacted in Lynley's office that morning had she not been so stunned when he'd returned from his meeting with Webberly and explained that he was setting out on a case. It wasn't the fact of his assignment to a case that stunned and struck her momentarily wordless, however. It was the choice he'd made of a partner to accompany him, a partner who was not herself.

“Barbara, this is for the best,” he'd told her, gathering materials from his desk.

And she'd gulped down what she wanted to say in protest and stared at him, realising that she'd never actually known him before that moment.

“He doesn't seem to agree with the outcome of the internal investigation,” Barbara concluded her story for St. James and Helen. “Demotion and all. I don't think he believes I've been punished enough.”

“I'm so sorry,” Helen said. “You must feel as if you've lost your best friend.”

The authenticity of her compassion stung the backs of Barbara's eyelids. She hadn't expected Helen—of all people—to be the source. So deeply did it touch her to have the sympathy of Lynley's wife that she heard herself stammering, “It's just that his choice … To replace me with … I mean …” She fumbled for the words and instead encountered that rush of pain all over again. “It felt like such a slap in the face.”

All Lynley had done, of course, was to make a selection among the officers available to work with him on an investigation. That his choice was itself a wound to Barbara wasn't a problem he was required to address.

Detective Constable Winston Nkata had done a fine job on two cases in town on which he'd worked with both Barbara and Lynley. It wasn't unreasonable that the DC would be offered an opportunity to demonstrate his talents outside London on the sort of special assignment that had previously gone to Barbara herself. But Lynley couldn't have been blind to the fact that Barbara saw Nkata as the competition nipping at her heels at the Yard. Eight years her junior, twelve years younger than the inspector, he was more ambitious than either Lynley or Barbara had ever been. He was a self-starter, a man who anticipated orders before they were spoken and seemed to fulfill them with one hand tied behind his back. Barbara had long suspected him of showboating for Lynley, trying to outdo her own efforts in order to replace her at the inspector's side.

Lynley knew this. He had to know it. So his choice of Nkata seemed less a logical selection made by a man who weighed the respective gifts of his subordinates and used them according to the needs of a case than it appeared to be an instance of outright in-your-face cruelty.

“Is this Tommy in a temper?” St. James asked.

But it hadn't been anger behind Lynley's actions, and desolate as she was, Barbara wouldn't accuse him of that.

Deborah joined them then, saying, “What's happened?” and fondly kissing her husband on the cheek as she passed him and poured herself a small sherry.

The story was repeated, Barbara telling it, St. James adding details, and Helen listening in thoughtful silence. Like Lynley, the others were in possession of the facts connected to Barbara's professional insubordination and her assault on a superior officer. Unlike Lynley, however, they appeared capable of seeing the situation as Barbara herself had seen it: unavoidable, regrettable, but fully justified, the only course open to a woman who was simultaneously under pressure and in the right.

St. James even went so far as to say, “Tommy'll doubtless come round to your way of thinking at the end of the day, Barbara. It's rough that you have to go through this though.” And the other two women murmured their agreement.

All of this should have been intensely gratifying. After all, their sympathy was what Barbara had come to Chelsea in order to gather. But she found that their sympathy merely enflamed her pain and the sense of betrayal that had driven her to Chelsea in the first place. She said, “I guess it boils down to this: The inspector wants someone he knows he can trust to work with him.”

And no matter the ensuing protests of Lynley's wife and Lynley's friends, Barbara knew she was not, at the present time, anywhere close to being that someone.

ulian Britton could picture exactly what his cousin was doing on the other end of the telephone line. He could hear a steady thwack thwack thwack punctuating her sentences, and that sound told him that she was in the old, ill-lit kitchen of Broughton Manor, chopping up some of the vegetables that she grew at the bottom of one of the gardens. “I didn't say that I was unwilling to help you out, Julian.” Samantha's comment was accompanied by a thwack that sounded more decisive than the earlier ones. “I merely asked what's going on. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?”

He didn't want to reply. He didn't want to tell her what was going on: Samantha, after all, had never made a secret of her aversion for Nicola Maiden.

So what could he say? Little enough. By the time the police in Buxton had made the assessment that it might behoove them to phone the force headquarters in Ripley, by the time Ripley had sent two panda cars to examine the location in which Nicola's Saab and an old Triumph motorcycle were parked, and by the time Ripley and Buxton in conjunction reached the obvious conclusion that Mountain Rescue was needed, an old woman on a morning stroll with her dog had stumbled into the hamlet of Peak Forest, pounded on a door, and told a tale about a body she'd come across in the ring of Nine Sisters Henge. The police had gone there at once, leaving Mountain Rescue waiting at their meeting point for further directions. When those directions came, they were ominous enough: Mountain Rescue would not be needed.

Julian knew all this because as a member of Mountain Rescue, he'd gone to his team's rendezvous site once the call had come through—passed along that morning by Samantha, who intercepted it in his absence at Broughton Manor. So he was standing among the members of his team, checking his equipment as the leader read from a dog-eared checklist, when the mobile rang and the equipment check was first interrupted and then canceled altogether. The team leader passed on the information he was given—the old woman, her dog, their morning walk, the body, Nine Sisters Henge.