In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (55 page)

Hadiyyah stopped, door knob in hand. “We're going to the pleasure pier,” she coaxed.

“I'll be with you in spirit,” Barbara assured her. And she thought about the resilience of children and she marveled at their capacity for taking what came. Considering what had occurred the last time Hadiyyah had been to the sea, Barbara wondered that she wanted to go again. But children aren't like adults, she thought. What they can't endure, they simply forget.

east we're running round incognito,” was DC Winston Nkatas announcement as they pulled into the Boltons, a small neighbourhood shaped like a rugger ball, sandwiched between the Fulham and Old Brompton roads. It consisted of two curving, leafy streets that formed an oval round the central church of St. Mary the Boltons, and its predominant characteristics were the number of security cameras that were mounted on the exterior walls of the mansions and the ostentatious display of Rolls-Royces, Mercedes-Benz, and Range-Rovers that were tucked behind the iron gates of many of the properties.

When Lynley and Nkata pulled into the Boltons, the streetlamps had not yet switched on and the pavements were largely deserted. The only sign of life came from a cat who slinked along the gutter in pursuit of another slinking feline, and a Filipina—dressed in the anachronistic black-and-white garb of a housemaid—who tucked a handbag under her arm and slid into a Ford Capri across the street from the house that Lynley and Nkata were seeking.

Nkata's remark was in reference to Lynley's Bentley, as perfectly at home in this neighbourhood as it had been in Notting Hill. But other than being in possession of the car, the two detectives couldn't have been more out of place in the area: Lynley for his choice of occupation, so unlikely in a man whose family could trace its roots back to the Conqueror and whose more recent ancestors would have considered the Boltons a step down from their usual haunts, and Nkata for the obvious Caribbean-via-South-Bank-of-the-Thames sound of his voice.

“Don't spect they see much rozzer action here,” Nkata said as he stood surveying the iron railings, the cameras, the alarm boxes, and the intercoms that appeared to be the feature of every dwelling. “But it makes you wonder what the point is—all that money—if you got to wall yourself up to enjoy it.”

“I wouldn't disagree,” Lynley said, and he accepted an Opal Fruit from the detective constable's portable stash, unwrapping it and carefully folding the paper into his pocket so as not to foul the pristine footpath with litter. “Let's see what Sir Adrian Beattie has to say.”

Lynley had recognised the name when Tricia Reeve had spoken it in Notting Hill. Sir Adrian Beattie was the UK's answer to Christiaan Barnard. He'd performed the first heart transplant in England and he'd successfully kept performing them round the world for the last several decades, establishing a record of success that had assured his place in medical history and guaranteed his wealth. This latter was on display in the Boltons: Beattie's home was a fortress of glacially white walls and gridiron windows with a front gate barring entrance to anyone who couldn't provide its inhabitants with an acceptable identity through an intercom from which a disembodied voice demanded, “Yes?” in a tone suggesting that not just any answer would do.

Assuming that New Scotland Yard would have a cachet unavailable to the simple word police, Lynley used their place of employment along with their ranks when he identified himself and Nkata. In reply, the gate clicked ajar. By the time Lynley and Nkata had mounted the six front steps, the door had been opened by a woman wearing an incongruous cone-shaped party hat.

She introduced herself as Margaret Beattie, daughter of Sir Adrian. The family were having a birthday party at the moment, she explained hastily, unhooking the hat's elastic strap from her chin and removing the cone from her head. Her daughter was this very evening celebrating the happy negotiation of five years among her fellow men. Was there something wrong in the neighbourhood? Not a burglary, she hoped. And she glanced past them anxiously, as if breaking and entering in the Boltons were a daily occurrence that she might inadvertently encourage by holding the front door open for longer than necessary.

They were there to see Sir Adrian, Lynley explained. And no, their visit had nothing to do with the neighbourhood and its vulnerability to professional thieves.

Margaret Beattie said doubtfully, “I see,” and admitted them into the house. She said that if they'd wait in her father's study upstairs, she would fetch the man himself. “I hope it won't take too long, what you've come to see him about,” she said with the sort of gentle smiling insistence a well-bred woman always uses to imply what she wants without stating it directly. “Molly's his favourite grandchild and he's told her she can have him all to herself tonight. He's promised to read her a whole chapter of Peter Pan. He asked her what she wanted for her birthday, and that was it. Remarkable, don't you think?”

“Quite.”

Obviously pleased, Margaret Beattie beamed, directed them to the study, and went seeking her father.

Sir Adrian's study was on the first floor of the house, at the top of a wide staircase. Decorated with burgundy leather armchairs and fitted with forest-green carpet, the room contained a plethora of volumes from the medical to the mundane, and it acted as a silent testimony to the two disparate aspects of Sir Adrian's life. The professional side was represented by medallions, certificates, awards, and mementos as diverse as antique surgical instruments and centuries-old engravings of the human heart. The personal side showed itself in dozens of photographs. They stood everywhere—on the mantelpiece, tucked into random spaces in the bookshelves, lined up like dancers ready to high kick across the top of the desk. Their subjects were the doctor's family: on holiday, at home, at school, and through the years. Lynley picked up one picture and examined it as Nkata bent to scrutinise the antique instruments that were arranged on the top of a dwarf break-front bookcase.

The doctor had four children, it seemed. In the picture Lynley held, Beattie posed among them and among their spouses, a proud paterfamilias with his wife standing next to him and eleven grandchildren clustered about him like tiny beads of oil round a larger central drop that seeks to absorb them. The occasion of the photograph had been a Christmas celebration, with each of the children holding a gift and Beattie himself decked out as Father Christmas sans beard. Everyone in the picture was either smiling or laughing, and Lynley wondered how their expressions would have read should Sir Adrian's liasion with a dominatrix have become public—or even familial—knowledge.

“Detective Inspector Lynley?”

Lynley swung round at the sound of the pleasant tenor. It should have been voiced by a younger man, but it came from the rotund surgeon himself, who stood in the doorway, a papier mâché captain's hat on his head and a flute of champagne in his hand. He said, “We're about to toast our little Molly. She's going to open her presents. Can this wait another hour?”

“I'm afraid not.” Lynley replaced the photograph and introduced Nkata, who reached in his jacket pocket for his notebook and pencil.

Beattie saw this with apparent consternation. He entered the room and shut the door behind him. “Is this a professional call? Has something happened? My family …” He looked in the direction from which he had come and dismissed whatever it was that he'd intended to say. Bearing bad news about a member of his family could not be the reason that the police had come calling. His family members were all in his house.

“A young woman called Nicola Maiden was murdered in Derbyshire on Tuesday night,” Lynley told the surgeon.

In reply, Beattie was stillness itself, waiting incarnate. His eyes were on Lynley. His surgeon's hands—an old man's hands that still looked as nimble as the hands of a man three decades younger—neither trembled, grasped the glass more tightly, nor moved in any visible way. His glance went to Nkata, dropping to the little leather notebook in the DCs big palm, then back to Lynley.

Lynley said, “You knew Nicola Maiden, didn't you, Sir Adrian? Although perhaps you knew her by her professional name only: Nikki Temptation.”

Beattie advanced across the carpet and set his champagne glass upon the desk with studied care. He placed himself behind the desk in a high-back chair and canted his head at the leather armchairs. He finally said, “Please sit, Inspector. You as well, Constable.” And when they had done so, he went on with “I've not seen a paper. What happened to her, please?”

It was the sort of question that a man who was used to being in charge might have asked of a subordinate. In reply, however, Lynley sought to communicate which of them would be controlling the direction of the conversation. He said evenly, “You did know Nicola Maiden, then.”

Beattie's fingers folded round each other. Two of them, Lynley saw, had nails that were blackened, both of them deformed by some sort of fungus that apparently grew rampant beneath them. It was a disconcerting sight in a man of medicine, and Lynley wondered that Beattie didn't do something about it.

“Yes. I knew Nicola Maiden,” Beattie said.

“Tell us about your relationship.”

Behind gold-framed spectacles, the eyes were wary. “Am I a suspect?”

“Everyone who knew her is a suspect.”

“You said Tuesday night.”

“I did say that, yes.”

“I was here on Tuesday night.”

“In this house?”

“Not here. But in London. At my club in St. James's. Shall I arrange for corroboration, Inspector? That's the word I want, isn't it? Corroboration”

Lynley said, “Tell us about Nicola. When did you see her last?”

Beattie reached for his champagne and drank. To gain time, to still nerves. It was impossible to tell. “The morning of the day before she left for the North.”

“This would be last June?” Nkata asked. And when Beattie nodded, Nkata added, “In Islington?”

“Islington?” Beattie frowned. “No. Here. She came to the house. She always came to the house when I … when I needed her.”

“Your relationship was sexual, then,” Lynley said. “You were one of her clients.”

Beattie turned his head away from Lynley, looking towards the mantelpiece with its copious display of family photos. “I expect you know the answer to that question. You'd hardly have come calling on a Saturday evening had you not been told exactly where I fitted in Nikki's life. So, yes, I was one of her clients, if that's what you'd like to call it.”

“What would you call it?”

“We had a mutually beneficial arrangement. She provided an indispensable service. I paid her generously for it.”

“You're a man with a high public profile,” Lynley pointed out. “You've a successful career, a wife and children, grandchildren, and all the external trappings of a fortunate life.”

“I've all the internal trappings as well,” Beattie said. “It is a fortunate life. So why would I risk losing it by having a liaison with a common prostitute? That's what you want to know, isn't it? But that's just the point, you see, Inspector Lynley. Nikki wasn't common in any way.”

Music started somewhere in the house, a furious and proficient playing on a piano. Chopin, it sounded like. Then the tune broke off abruptly amid some shouting, to be replaced by a spritely Cole Porter piece that was accompanied by exuberant voices not bothering to aim for the appropriate key. “‘Call me irreSPONsible, call me unreLIable,’” the group partly howled, partly laughed, partly sang. Much guffawing and good-natured derision followed this: the happy family in celebration.

“So I'm learning,” Lynley agreed. “You're not the first person to mention the fact that she was a cut above the ordinary. But actually, why you were willing to risk everything with an affair—”

“That's not what it was.”

“With an arrangement, then. Why you'd risk everything for that isn't what I want to know. I'm more interested in discovering exactly what you'd be willing to do to safeguard what you have—these external and internal trappings of your life—if the continuing possession of them was threatened in some way.”

“Threatened?” Beattie's voice was too perplexed for Lynley to believe the reaction was ingenuous. Surely the man knew how much he put at jeopardy by having a prostitute operating on the periphery of his life.

“Every man has enemies,” Lynley told him. “Even you, I dare say. Should someone untrustworthy have found out about your arrangement with Nicola Maiden, should someone have decided to harm you by revealing that arrangement, you would have lost a great deal, and not all of it tangible.”

“Ah. I do see: the traditional outcome of societal defiance. ‘Who steals my purse,’” Beattie murmured. Then he went on more conversationally, giving Lynley the oddest sensation that they might have been discussing the next day's weather forecast. “That couldn't have happened, Inspector. Nikki came to the house, as I said. She dressed conservatively, carried a brief case, and drove a Saab. To all appearances, she was arriving to take dictation or to help plan a party. And as our encounters took place well away from windows, there was absolutely nothing for anyone to see.”

“She herself didn't wear a blindfold, I expect.”

“Of course she didn't. She could hardly do that and be of any satisfactory service to me.”

“So you'll no doubt agree that she might have been in possession of certain details about you. Details, which if revealed, could confirm a story—perhaps one sold to a tabloid?—that would prove whatever facts she might choose to lay before a public for whom gossip can never be salacious enough.”

Beattie said, sounding pensive, “Good my God.”

“So corroboration is in order, as you guessed,” Lynley said. “We'll need the name of your club.”

“Are you suggesting that I killed Nikki because she wanted more from me than I was paying? Or because I'd decided I didn't need her any longer and she was threatening to go public if I didn't keep paying her?” He drank a final mouthful of his champagne, afterwards giving a rueful laugh and shoving the glass away. He lumbered to his feet, saying, “Mother of God, if that had only been the case. Wait here please.” And he left the room.