In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (16 page)

“Hadiyyah,” Taymullah Azhar said when Barbara didn't answer, “I think we've had enough bubbles for the evening. Return them to your room and wait for me there, please.”

Hadiyyah's small brow furrowed, and her eyes looked stricken. “But, Dad, the little mermaid … ?”

“We shall watch it as previously decided, Hadiyyah. Put the bubbles in your room now.”

She gave Barbara an anxious glance. “More'n half the toffee apple,” she said. “If you'd like, Barbara.”

“Hadiyyah.”

She smiled impishly and dashed into the house.

Azhar reached into the breast pocket of his spotless white shirt and brought forth a packet of cigarettes, which he offered. Barbara took one, said thanks, and accepted his light as well. He observed her in silence until she grew so restive that she was compelled to speak.

“I'm knackered, Azhar. I'll have to cry off tonight. But thanks. Tell Hadiyyah I'm happy to watch a film with her another time. Hopefully, when the heroine isn't as skinny as a pencil with a silicone chest.”

His gaze was unwavering. He studied her the way other people studied the labels on tins in supermarkets. Barbara wanted to writhe away, but she managed to restrain herself. He said, “You must have returned to work today.”

“Why'd you think—”

“Your clothing. Has your”—he searched for a word, a euphemism undoubtedly—“situation been resolved at New Scotland Yard, Barbara?”

There was no point in lying. Despite the fact that she'd been able to keep from him the full knowledge of what had occurred to put her there, he knew that she'd been placed on suspension. She was going to have to start dragging herself out of bed and down to work each morning, beginning with the very next day, so he would deduce sooner or later that she wasn't spending her waking hours feeding the ducks in Regent's Park any longer. “Yeah,” she said. “It was resolved today.” And she drew in deeply on her cigarette so that she'd have to turn her head and blow the smoke away from his face, thus hiding her own.

“And? But what am I asking? You're dressed for work, so it must have gone well.”

“Right.” She offered him a spurious smile. “It did. All the way. I'm still gainfully employed, still in CID, still have my pension intact.” She'd lost the confidence of the only person who counted at the Yard, but she didn't add that. She couldn't imagine an occasion when she would.

“This is good,” Azhar said.

“Right. It's the best.”

“I'm happy to know that nothing from Essex affected you here in London.” Again, that level gaze of his, dark eyes the colour of chocolate drops in a face with nut-brown skin that was amazingly un-lined on a man of thirty-five.

“Yeah. Well. It didn't,” she said. “Everything worked out brilliantly.”

He nodded, looking past her finally, above her head and up into the fading sky. The lights from London would hide all but the most brilliant of the coming night's stars. Even those that shone would do so through a thick pall of pollution that not even the growing darkness could dissipate. “As a child, I drew my greatest comfort from the night,” he told her quietly. “In Pakistan, my family slept in the traditional way: the men together, the women together. So at night, in the presence of my father, my brother, and my uncles, I always believed that I was perfectly safe and secure. But I forgot that feeling as I came into adulthood in England. What had been reassuring became an embarrassment from my past. I found that all I could remember were the sounds of my father and my uncles snoring and the smell of my brothers breaking wind. For some time when I came to be alone, I thought how good it was to be away from them at last, to have the night for myself and for whomever I wished to share it with. And that's how I lived for a while. But now I find that I would willingly return to that older way, when whatever one's burdens or secrets were, there was always a sense—at least at night—of never having to bear them or keep them alone.”

There was something so comforting in his words that Barbara found herself wanting to grasp the invitation to disclosure that they implied. But she stopped herself from doing so, saying, “P'rhaps Pakistan doesn't prepare its children for the world's reality.”

“What reality is that?”

“The one that tells us we're all alone.”

“Do you believe that to be the truth, Barbara?”

“I don't just believe it. I know it. We use our daytimes to escape our nighttimes. We work, we play, we keep ourselves busy. But when it's time to sleep, we run out of distractions. Even if we're in bed with someone, their act of sleeping when we can't manage it is enough to tell us that we've got only ourselves.”

“Is this philosophy or experience speaking?”

“Neither,” she said. “Just the way it is.”

“But not,” he said, “the way it has to be.”

At the comment, alarm bells went off in Barbara's head, then quickly receded. Coming from any other bloke, the remark could have been construed as a chat-up line. But her personal history was an illustration of the fact that Barbara wasn't the type of bird blokes chatted up. Besides, even if she'd ever had the odd moments of Aph-rodisian allure, she knew this wasn't one of them. Standing in the semi-dark in a rumpled linen suit that made her look like a transvestite toad, she knew quite well that she was hardly a paragon of desirability. So, ever articulate when it counted, she said, “Yeah. Well. Whatever,” and tossed her cigarette to the ground, where she mashed it with the sole of her shoe. “Goodnight, then,” she added. “Enjoy the mermaid. And thanks for the fag. I needed it.”

“Everyone needs something.” Azhar reached into his shirt pocket again. Barbara thought he was going to offer his cigarettes another time. But instead, he extended to her a folded piece of paper. “A gentleman was here looking for you earlier, Barbara. He asked me to make sure you got this note. He tried to fix it to your door, he said, but it wouldn't stay in place.”

“Gentleman?” Barbara knew only one man to whom that word would automatically be applied by a stranger after a mere moment's conversation. She took the piece of paper, scarcely daring to hope. Which was just as well, because the writing on the note—a sheet of paper removed from a small spiral notebook—wasn't Lynley's. She read the eight words: Page me as soon as you get this. A number followed them. There was no signature.

Barbara refolded the note. Doing so, she saw what was written on the outside of it, what Azhar himself must have seen, interpreted, and understood the moment it had been handed over. DC Havers was printed in block capitals across it. C for Constable. So Azhar knew.

She met his gaze. “Looks like I'm back in the game already,” she said as heartily as she could manage. “Thanks, Azhar. This bloke say where he'd be waiting for the page?”

Azhar shook his head. “He said only that I should make sure you had the message.”

“Okay Thanks.” She gave him a nod and turned to walk away.

He called her name—sounding urgent—but when she stopped and glanced back, he was studying the street. He said, “Can you tell me …” and then his voice died away. He drew his eyes back to her as if the effort cost him.

“Tell you what?” she asked, though she felt apprehension dance along her spine when she said the words.

“Tell me … How is your mother?” Azhar asked.

“Mum? Well … She's a bloody disaster when it comes to jigsaw puzzles, but otherwise I think she's okay.”

He smiled. “That's good to know.” And with a quiet goodnight, he slipped into the house.

Barbara went to her own lodgings, a tiny cottage that sat at the bottom of the back garden. Sheltered by the limbs of an old false acacia, it was not much larger than a potting shed with mod cons. Once inside, she peeled herself out of her linen jacket, tossed the string of faux pearls onto the table that served purposes as diverse as dining and ironing, and went to the phone. There were no messages on her machine. She wasn't surprised. She punched in the number for the pager, punched in her own number, and waited.

Five minutes later, someone phoned. She made herself wait through four of the double-rings before she answered. There was no reason to sound desperate, she decided.

Her caller, she discovered, was Winston Nkata, and her back went up the instant she heard that unmistakable mellifluous voice with its mixed flavours of Jamaica and Sierra Leone. He was in the Load of Hay tavern just round the corner on Chalk Farm Road, he told her, finishing up a plate of lamb curry and rice that “was not, do believe me, something my mum would ever put on the table for her favourite son, but it's better than McDonald's although not by much.” He would set off straightaway for her digs. “Be there in five minutes,” he said, and rang off before she had a chance to tell him that his mug was just about the last one she wanted to see putting in an appearance on her doorstep. She hung up the phone, muttered an expletive, and went to the refrigerator to graze.

Five minutes stretched to ten. Ten minutes to fifteen. He didn't show up.

Bastard, Barbara thought. Fine idea of a joke.

She went to the bathroom and turned on the shower.

Lynley tried to adjust quickly to the astonishing fact that Andy Maiden hadn't told his wife that their daughter had been the victim of a crime. Since Calder Moor was a location replete with potential sites of accidents, Lynley's former colleague had apparently and unaccountably allowed his wife to believe that their daughter had fractured her skull in a fall.

When she learned otherwise, Nan Maiden crumpled forward, elbows pressed into her thighs, and fists raised to her mouth. Either shocked, too stricken with grief to comprehend, or comprehending something only too well, she didn't weep further. She merely muttered a guttural “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

DI Hanken appeared to take a fairly quick measure of what was implied by her reaction. He was observing Andy Maiden with a decidedly unsympathetic eye. He asked no questions in response to Nan's revelation though. Like a good cop, he merely waited.

In the aftermath of all this, Maiden waited as well. Still, he apparently reached the conclusion that something was required of him by way of explanation for his incomprehensible behaviour. “Love, I'm sorry,” he said to Nan. “I couldn't … I'm sorry. Nan, I could barely cope with the fact that she'd died, let alone tell … let alone have to face … have to begin to deal with …” He spent a moment rigidly marshaling the inner resources a policeman learned to develop in order to live through the worst of the worst. His right hand—still in possession of the ball his wife had given him—clutched and released it spasmodically. “I'm so sorry,” he said brokenly “Nan.”

Nan Maiden raised her head. She watched him for a moment. Then her hand—shaking as it was—reached out and closed over his arm. She spoke to the police.

“Would you …” Her lips quivered. She didn't go on until she had the emotion under control. “Tell me what happened.”

DI Hanken obliged with minimal details: He explained where Nicola Maiden had died and how, but he told them nothing more.

“Would she have suffered?” Nan asked when Hanken had concluded his brief remarks. “I know you can't be positive. But if there's anything that might allow us to feel that at the end … anything at all …”

Lynley recounted what the Home Office pathologist had told them.

Nan reflected on the information for a moment. In the silence, Andy Maiden's breath sounded loud and harsh. Nan said, “I wanted to know because … D'you think … Would she have called out for one of us … would she have hoped … or needed … ?” Her eyes filled. She stopped talking.

Hearing the questions, Lynley was reminded of the old moors murders, the monstrous tape recording that Myra Hindley and her cohort had made, and the anguish of the dead girl's mother when the recording had been played at the trial and she'd had to listen to her child's terrified voice crying out for her mummy in the midst of her murder. Isn't there a certain kind of knowledge, he thought, that shouldn't be revealed publicly because it can't be borne privately? He said, “The blows to the head knocked her unconscious at once. She stayed that way.”

“And on her body, were there other … Had she been … Had anyone … ?”

“She wasn't tortured.” Hanken cut in as if he, too, felt the need to show some mercy to the dead girl's mother. “She wasn't raped. We'll have a fuller report later, but at the moment it seems that the blows to the head were all that she”—he paused, it seemed, in the search for a word that connoted the least pain—“experienced.”

Maiden said, “She looked asleep. White. Like chalk. But still asleep.”

“I want that to make it better,” Nan said. “But it doesn't.”

And nothing will, Lynley thought. “Andy, we've got a possible identification on the second body. We're going to need to press forward. We think the boy was called Terence Cole. He had a London address, in Shoreditch. Is his name familiar to you?”

“She wasn't alone?” The glance Nan Maiden cast at her husband told the police that he'd withheld this information from her as well.

“She wasn't alone,” Maiden said.

Hanken clarified the situation for Nan Maiden, explaining that the camping gear of one person only—which he would later ask Maiden to identify as belonging to his daughter—had been within the enclosure of Nine Sisters Henge along with the body of a teenaged boy who himself had no gear other than the clothes on his back.

“That motorcycle by her car.” Maiden pulled his facts together quickly. “It belonged to him?”

“To a Terence Cole,” Hanken affirmed. “Not reported stolen and so far not claimed by anyone coming off the moor. It's registered to an address in Shoreditch. We've a man heading there now to see what's what, but it seems likely that we've got the right ID. Is the name familiar to either of you?”

Maiden shook his head and said, “Cole. Not to me. Nan?”

“I don't know him. And Nicola … Surely she would have talked about him if he was a friend of hers. She would have brought him round to meet us as well. When did she not? That's … It was her way.”

Andy Maiden then spoke perspicaciously, asking a logical question that rose from his years of policing. “Is there any chance that Nick—” He paused and seemed to prepare his wife for the question by laying a hand gently on her thigh. “Could she just have been in the wrong place? Could the boy have been the target? Tommy?” And he looked to Lynley.