In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (17 page)

“That would have to be a consideration in any other case,” Lynley admitted.

“But not in this case? Why?”

“Have a look at this.” Hanken produced a copy of the handwritten note that had been found on Nicola Maiden's body.

The Maidens read the five words on it—THIS BITCH HAS HAD IT—as Hanken advised them that the original had been found tucked into their daughter's pocket.

Andy Maiden stared long at the note. He shifted the red ball to his left hand and clutched it. “Jesus God. Are you telling us someone went there to kill her? Someone tracked her to kill her? That this wasn't just a case of her meeting up with strangers? A stupid argument breaking out over something? A psychopath killing her and that boy for the thrill of it?”

“It's doubtful,” Hanken said. “But you know the procedure as well as we do, I expect.”

Which was, Lynley knew, his way of saying that as a police officer Andy Maiden would know that every avenue potentially related to the killing of his daughter was going to be explored. He said, “If someone went out to the moor specifically to kill your daughter, we must consider why.”

“But she didn't have enemies,” Nan Maiden declared. “I know that's what you expect every mother to say, but in this case it's the truth. Everyone liked Nicola. She was that kind of person.”

“Not everyone, apparently, Mrs. Maiden,” Hanken said. And he brought forth the copies of the anonymous letters that had also been at the site.

Andy Maiden and his wife read these in silence and without expression. She was the one who finally spoke. As she did so, her husband's gaze remained locked on the letters. And both man and woman sat still, like statues.

“It's impossible,” she said. “Nicola can't have received these. You're making a mistake if you think that she did.”

“Why?”

“Because we never saw them. And if she'd been threatened—by anyone, by anyone—she would have told us at once.”

“If she didn't want to worry you—”

“Please. Believe me. That wasn't how she was. She didn't think like that: about worrying us and such. She thought only about telling the truth. If something had been going wrong in her life, she would have told us. That's how she was. She talked about everything. Everything. Truly.” And with an earnest look at her husband, “Andy?”

With an effort, he took his eyes off the letters. His face, which had appeared bloodless before, was now even more so. He said, “I don't want to think it. But it's the best possible answer if someone actually tracked her … if someone wasn't with her already … if someone didn't just stumble upon her and kill her and the boy for the sick fun of it.”

“What?” Lynley asked.

“SO10,” he said heavily, looking as if the words cost him dearly. “There were so many cases over the years, so many yobs put away. Killers, drug dealers, crime bosses. You name them, I rolled in the muck with them.”

“Andy! No,” his wife protested, apparently understanding where he was heading. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“Someone out on parole, tracking us down, hanging round long enough to get to know our movements—” He turned to her then. “You see how it could have happened, don't you? Someone out for revenge, Nancy, striking at Nick because he knew that to hurt my daughter—my girl—was to kill me in stages … to sentence me to a living death …”

Lynley said, “It's a possibility that we can't rule out, can we? Because if, as you say, your daughter had no enemies, then we're left with the single question: Who had? If you put away someone who's out on parole, Andy, we're going to need the name.”

“Jesus. There were scores.”

“The Yard can pull all your old files in London, but you can help by giving us some direction. If there's a particular investigation that stands out in your memory, you could halve our work by listing the players.”

“I've got my diaries.”

“Diaries?” Hanken asked.

“I once thought—” Maiden shook his head self-derisively. “I thought of writing after retirement. Memoirs. Ego. But the hotel came along, and I never got round to it. I've got the diaries, though. If I have a look through them, perhaps a name … a face …” He seemed to crumple then, as if the weight of responsibility for his daughter's death bore down on him heavily.

“You don't know this for certain,” Nan Maiden said. “Andy. Please. Don't do this to yourself.”

Hanken said, “We'll follow whatever leads turn up. So if—”

“Then follow Julian.” Nan Maiden spoke as if determined to prove that there were other avenues to explore beyond the one that led to her husband's past.

Maiden said, “Nancy. Don't.”

“Julian?” Lynley said.

Julian Britton, Nan told them. He'd just become engaged to Nicola. She wasn't suggesting him as a suspect, but if the police were looking for leads, then they certainly would want to talk to Julian. Nicola had been with him the night before she left for her camping trip. She might have said something to Julian—or done something even—that would result in another possibility for the police to explore in their investigation.

It was a reasonable enough suggestion, Lynley thought. He jotted down Julian's name and address. Nan Maiden supplied the information.

For his part, Hanken brooded. And he said nothing more until he and Lynley had returned to the car. “It may all be a blind, you know.” He switched on the ignition, reversed out of their parking space, and turned the car to face Maiden Hall. There, he let the engine idle while he studied the old limestone structure.

“What?” Lynley asked.

“SO10. This business of someone from his past. It's a bit too convenient, wouldn't you say?”

“Convenient is an odd choice of words to describe a lead and a potential suspect,” Lynley said. “Unless you yourself already suspect …” He looked towards the Hall. “Exactly what is it that you suspect, Peter?”

“D'you know the White Peak?” Hanken asked abruptly. “It runs from Buxton to Ashbourne. From Matlock to Castleton. We've got dales, we've got moors, we've got trails, we've got hills. This”—with a gesture at the environment—“is part of it. So's the road we came in on, for that matter.”

“And?”

Hanken turned in his seat to face Lynley squarely. “And in all this vast amount of space, on last Tuesday night—or Wednesday morning if we want to believe him—Andy Maiden managed to find his daughter's car hidden out of sight behind a stone wall. What would you say the odds are on that?”

Lynley looked to the building, to its windows reflecting the last of the daylight like row upon row of shielded eyes. “Why didn't you tell me?” he asked the other DI.

“I didn't think of it,” Hanken said. “Not till our boy brought up SO 10. Not till our Andy got caught out keeping the truth from his wife.”

“He wanted to spare her as long as he could. What man wouldn't?” Lynley asked.

“A man with nothing on his conscience,” Hanken said.

Showered and changed into the most comfortable elastic-waisted trousers that she possessed, Barbara was back to grazing—on leftover take-away pork fried rice which, unheated, wasn't about to make it onto anyone's culinary top ten—when Nkata arrived. He announced himself with two sharp raps on the door. She swung it open, take-away container in hand, and leveled a chopstick at him.

“Your watch stopped or something? What goes for five minutes in your book, Winston?”

He stepped inside unbidden and flashed her the full wattage of his smile. “Sorry. Got another page before I could clear out. The guv. I had to phone him first.”

“Of course. Can't keep his lordship waiting.”

Nkata let the comment go. “Damned lucky that service is slow at the pub. I should've been out of there thirty minutes ago, which would've put me too close to Shoreditch to come back here for you. Funny, isn't it? Like my mum always says. Things work out exactly the way they're s'posed to.”

Barbara stared at him, wordless. She felt nonplused. She wanted to tell him off for the note he'd left her—and for the letter C so prominent on it—but his air of ease stopped her. She couldn't explain his nonchalance any more than she could explain his presence inside her dwelling. He could at least look bloody uncomfortable, she decided.

“We got two bodies in Derbyshire and a London angle that needs playing on the case,” Nkata said. He sketched in the details: a woman, a young man, a former SO 10 officer, anonymous letters assembled from newsprint, a threatening note written by hand. “I got to get over to an address in Shoreditch where this dead bloke might've come from,” he told her. “If someone's there who can i.d. the body, I'm on my way back to Buxton in the morning. But the Yard end of things'll need looking into. The spector just told me to set that up. That's why he paged.”

Barbara couldn't hide her eagerness when she said, “Lynley asked for me?”

Nkata's glance shifted away for an instant, but that was enough. Her spirits came to earth.

“I see.” She carried her take-away container to the kitchen work top. The rice sat heavily on her stomach. Its flavour clung to her tongue like fur. “If he doesn't know you're asking me, Winston, I can refuse with no one the wiser, can't I? You can pass me by and get someone else.”

“Can do, sure,” Nkata said. “I can check the rota. Or I can wait till morning and let the super make the call. But doing all that leaves you free to get assigned to Stewart, Hale, or MacPherson, doesn't it? And I didn't much think you'd want to go that way if you didn't have to.” He left unsaid what was legend in CID: Barbara's failure to establish a working relationship with the DIs he'd mentioned, her subsequent return to uniform from which she had only been elevated by her partnership with Lynley.

Barbara swung around, perplexed by what appeared to be the other DCs inexplicable generosity. Another man in his position would have left her hanging in the wind, the better to improve his own position, and to hell with what she might have to face. That Nkata wasn't doing so made her doubly cautious.

He was saying, “It's computer work the guv wants. On CRIS. Not your thing, I know. But I thought if you wanted to come to Shoreditch with me—which is why I was in your neighbourhood in the first place—I could drop you at the Yard afterwards and you could get onto Crime Recording straightaway. If you pull something good from the records quick, who knows?” Nkata shifted on his feet. His air of ease diminished slightly as he concluded. “It could go some distance to setting you right.”

Barbara found an unopened packet of cigarettes wedged between the crumb-dusted toaster and a box of watermelon Pop-Tarts. She lit up, using one of the gas burners on the cooker, and she tried to make sense of what she was hearing. “I don't get it. This is your chance, Winston. Why don't you take it?”

“My chance for what?” he said, looking blank.

“You know for what. To climb the ladder, to ascend the mountain, to fly to the moon. My stock with Lynley couldn't be much lower. Now's your chance to break out of the pack. Why aren't you taking it? Or better said, why're you taking the risk that I might do something to untarnish myself?”

“The spector told me to bring in another DC,” Nkata said. “I thought of you.”

And there they were, those two ugly letters once again. DC. And there was the nasty reminder as well: of what she had been and what she had become. Of course Nkata would have thought of her. What better way to rub her face in her loss of position and authority than by bringing her in as a fellow DC, his superior no longer?

“Ah,” she said. “Another DC. As to that …” She scooped up the note from where she'd left it on the dining table next to her necklace. She said, “I guess I've got to thank you for this, haven't I? I'd been thinking about taking out an advert in the paper to inform the general public, but you've saved me the trouble.”

Nkata's eyebrows knotted. “What're you on about?”

“The note, Winston. Did you honestly think I might forget my position? Or did you just want to remind me that we're equals now, players on a level pitch, lest I forget?”

“Hang on. You've got it dead wrong.”

“Have I?”

“Right.”

“I don't think so. What other reason could there possibly be for you to address me as DC Havers? C for Constable. Just like you.”

“Most obvious reason in the world,” Nkata said.

“Really? What's that?”

“I've never called you Barb.”

She blinked. “What?”

“I've never called you Barb,” he repeated. “Just Sarge. Always that. And then this …” He used his wide hands in a gesture that encompassed the room but meant the day, as she very well knew. “I didn't know what else. The name and everything.” He grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck, which lowered his head and ended eye contact. He said, “DCs only your title anyway. It's not who you are.”

Barbara was struck dumb. She stared at him. His attractive face with its nasty scar looked unsure at the moment, which had to be a first. She thought back and relived in an instant the cases on which she'd worked with Nkata. And in reliving them, she was a witness to the truth.

She covered her confusion with her cigarette, inhaling, exhaling, studying the ash, flicking grey flakes of it into the sink. When the silence between them became too much for her, she sighed and said, “Jesus. Winston. Sorry. Bloody hell.”

“Right,” he said. “So are you in or out?”

“I'm in,” she answered.

“Good,” he said.

“And, Winnie,” she added, “I'm Barbara as well.”

t was dark by the time they cruised into Chart Street in Shoreditch and sought out a parking space along a pavement that was lined with Vauxhalls, Opels, and Volkswagens. Barbara had felt a distinct twinge in her gut when Nkata had led her to Lynley's sleek silver car, a possession so prized by the inspector that merely to have been handed its keys was an eloquent statement of Lynley's confidence in his subordinate officer. She herself had been casually tossed that key ring on only two occasions, but both had come long after she'd worked her first case as the inspector's partner. Indeed, reflecting upon her association with Lynley, she found that she couldn't begin to imagine him passing his car keys over to the person she'd been on the first investigation they'd worked together. That he'd given them so easily to Nkata spoke volumes about the nature of their relationship.