In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (79 page)

“Exercise in going through the motions,” Hanken said. “The blood's the boy's.”

“Doubtless,” Lynley agreed. Still, he looked towards the Hall. “D'you mind if I have a word with Andy?”

Hanken eyed him. “Can't accept it, can you?”

“I can't get away from the fact that he's a cop.”

“He's a human being. Governed by the same passions as the rest of us,” Hanken said. Mercifully, Lynley thought, he didn't add the rest: Andy Maiden was better than most people at doing something about those passions. Instead, Hanken said, “Mind you, remember that,” and strode off in the direction of the outbuildings.

Lynley found Andy and his wife in the lounge, in the same alcove where he and Hanken had first spoken to them. They weren't together this time, however. Rather, they sat, silent, on the opposing sofas. They were in identical positions: leaning forward with their arms resting just above their knees. Andy was rubbing his hands together. His wife was watching him.

Lynley obliterated from his mind the Shakespearean image that was invoked by Andy's attention to his hands. He said his former colleague's name. Andy looked up.

“What're they looking for?” he asked.

Lynley didn't miss the pronoun or its implication of a distinction between himself and the local police.

He said, “How are you both doing?”

“How do you expect we're doing? It's not enough that Nicola's been taken from us. But now you come and tear apart our home and our business without having the decency to tell us why. Just waving a filthy piece of paper from a magistrate and barging inside like a group of hooligans with—” Nan Maiden's anger threatened to give way to tears. She clenched her hands in her lap and, in a movement not unlike her husband's, she beat them together as if this would allow her to maintain a poise she'd already lost.

Maiden said, “Tommy?”

Lynley gave him what he could. “We've found her waterproof.”

“Where?”

“There's blood on it. The boy's most likely. We assume the killer wore it to protect his clothes. There may be other evidence on it. He'd have pulled it on over his hair.”

“Are you asking me for a sample?”

“You might want to arrange for a solicitor.”

“You can't think he did this!” Nan Maiden cried.

“Do you think I need a solicitor?” Maiden asked Lynley. And both of them knew what he was really asking: How well do you know me, Thomas? And: Do you believe I am as I appear to be?

Lynley couldn't reply in the way Maiden wanted. Instead, he said, “Why did you ask for me specifically? When you phoned the Yard, why did you ask for me?”

“Because of your strengths,” Maiden replied. “Among which was always honour first. I knew that I could depend on that. You'd do the right thing. And, if it came down to it, you'd keep your word.”

They exchanged a long look. Lynley knew its meaning. But he couldn't risk being played for a fool. He said, “We're approaching the end, Andy. Keeping my word or not isn't going to make a difference then. A solicitor's called for.”

“I don't need one.”

“Of course you don't need one,” his wife agreed quietly, having taken some strength, it seemed, from her husband's sense of calm. “You've done nothing. You don't need a solicitor when you've nothing to hide.”

Andy's gaze dropped back to his hands. He went back to massaging them. Lynley left the lounge.

For the next hour the search of Maiden Hall and its environs continued. But at the end of it, the five remaining constables had come up with nothing that resembled a long bow, the remains of a long bow, or any item related to archery. Hanken stood in the rain with the wind whipping his mac round his legs. He smoked and brooded, studying Maiden Hall as if its limestone exterior were hiding the bow in plain sight. His search team waited for further instructions, their shoulders hunched, their hair flattened against their skulls, and their eyelashes spiked by the rain. Lynley felt vindicated by Hanken's lack of success. If the other DI was going to suggest that Andy Maiden as their killer had removed every last bit of evidence related to archery from his home—without knowing they'd connected one of the two killings to archery in the first place—he was prepared to do battle on that front. No killer thought of everything. Even if that killer was a cop, he was going to make a mistake, and that mistake would hang him eventually.

Lynley said, “Let's go on to Broughton Manor, Peter. We've got the team, and it won't take long to get a second warrant.”

Hanken roused himself. He said, “Get back to the station,” to his men. And then to Lynley, when the constables had departed, “I want that report from SO 10. The one your man in London put together.”

“You can't still be thinking that this is a revenge killing. At least not one that's connected with Andy's past.”

“I don't think that,” Hanken said. “But our boy-with-a-past might have used that past in a way we've not considered yet.”

“How?”

“To find someone willing to do a nasty spot of work for him. Come along, Inspector. I've a mind to have a look through the records at your Black Angel Hotel.”

lthough they'd been thorough, the police had also been moderately gentle in their treatment of the Maidens’ personal belongings and the Hall's furnishings. Andy Maiden had seen far worse searches in his time, and he tried to take comfort from the fact that his brother policemen hadn't decimated his dwelling in their search. Still, the Hall had to be put back into order again. When the police had left, Andy, his wife, and their staff each took a separate section to straighten.

Andy was relieved that Nan had agreed to this reasonable plan of action. It kept her away from him for a while. He hated himself for wanting to be away from her. He knew she needed him, but with the departure of the police, Andy found himself desperate for solitude. He had to think. He knew he wouldn't be able to do so with Nan hanging over him, displacing her grief by locking her mind on the fruitless endeavour of caring for him. He didn't want his wife's care right now. Things had progressed too far for that.

The wheel of Nicola's death was coming closer and closer to breaking them both. Andy realised he could protect Nan from it while the investigation was on-going, but he didn't know how he could continue to do so once the police made an arrest. That they were getting closer to doing just that had been made only too evident by his brief conversation with Lynley. And in Tommy's suggestion that Andy ask for his solicitor's help, there was fair indication of exactly what the detectives’ next move would be.

Tommy was a good man, Andy thought. But there was only so much you could ask of a good man. When that good man's limit was reached, you had to place your confidence in yourself.

This was a principle that Nicola had seen. Blended with her insatiable desire to be gratified—now—whenever she had an inclination towards something, her reliance on herself before others had led her down the path she'd taken.

Andy had long known that his daughter's ambition in life was, simply expressed, never to go without. She'd seen the economies her parents had employed both to save towards the purchase of a country home and to channel funds to Andy's father, whose pension didn't cover his profligate ways. And more than once, especially when met with her parents’ refusal to accede to one of her demands, she'd announced that she would never find herself in a position of having to scrimp and save and deny herself life's simple pleasures, eschewing them for such barren activities as repairing sheets and pillowcases, turning collars on shirts, and darning socks. “You'd better not end up like Granddad, Dad,” she'd said to Andy on more than one occasion. “'cause I plan to spend all my money on me.”

Yet it really wasn't avarice that dominated her behaviour. Rather, it seemed to be a profound vacuity at the heart of her that she sought to fill with material possessions. How often he'd tried to explain to her mankind's essential dilemma: We are born of parents and into families, so we have connections, but we're ultimately alone. Our primitive sense of isolation creates a void within us. That void can be filled only through the nurturing of spirit. “Yes, but I want that motorbike,” she'd respond as if he hadn't just attempted to explain to her why the acquisition of a motorbike would not soothe a spirit whose singular needs were restless for acknowledgement. Or that guitar, she'd reply. Or that set of gold earrings, that trip to Spain, that flashy car. “And if there's money enough to buy it, I don't see why we shouldn't. What's spirit got to do with whether one has the money to buy a motorbike, Dad? Even if I wanted to, I can't spend money on my spirit, can I? So what am I supposed to do with money if I've ever got it? Throw it away?” And she'd list those individuals whose achievements or position garnered them vast reserves of cash: the Royal Family, erstwhile rock stars, business magnates, and entrepreneurs. “They've got houses and cars and boats and planes, Dad,” she would say. “And they're never alone either. And they don't look like they've got some big hollow in the pit of their stomachs, if you ask me.” Nicola was a persuasive supplicant when she wanted something, and nothing he could say was sufficient to make her see that she was merely observing the exterior lives of these people whose possessions she so admired. Who they were inside—and what they felt—was something that no one but them could know. And when she acquired what she had begged to possess, she wasn't able to see that it satisfied her only briefly. Her vision was occluded from this knowledge because what stood in the way was always the desire for the next object that she believed would soothe her soul.

And all of this—which would have made any child difficult to rear—was combined with Nicola's natural propensity for living life on the edge. She'd learned that from him, from watching him shift from persona to persona over the years of undercover work and from listening to the tales told by his colleagues over family dinners when they'd all drunk too much wine. Andy and his wife had kept from their daughter the other side of those acts of bravado that so regaled her. She never knew the personal price her father paid as his health crumbled beneath his mind's inability to divide itself into separate arenas serving who he was and who his work forced him to pretend to be. She was supposed to see her dad as strong, complete, and indomitable. Anything else would shake her foundations, they assumed.

Thus, it was natural that Nicola had thought nothing of it when it came to telling him the truth about her future plans. She'd phoned and asked him if he would come to London. “Let's have a chick-and-Dad date,” she'd said. Delighted to think that his beautiful daughter would want to spend special time with him, he'd gone to London. They'd have their date—whatever she wanted to do, he told her—and he'd cart some of her belongings back to Derbyshire for her summer's employment. It was when he'd looked round her neat bed-sit and rubbed his hands together and asked what she wanted him to load into the Land-Rover that she told him the truth.

She began with “I've changed my mind about working for Will. I've had another think about law as well. That's what I wanted to talk to you about, Dad. Although”—with a smile, and God how lovely she was when she smiled—“our date was wonderful. I've never been to the Planetarium before.”

She made them tea, sat him down with a plate of sandwiches that she took from a Marks & Spencer container, and said, “Did you ever get into the bondage scene when you were undercover, Dad?”

He'd thought at first that they were making polite conversation: an ageing father's reminiscences prompted by his daughter's fond questions. He hadn't done much in's & M, he told her. That would have been handled by another division at the Yard. Oh, he'd had to go into the S 8c M clubs and shops a few times, and there was that party where an idiotic bloke dressed as a schoolgirl was being whipped on a cross. But that had been the extent of it. And thank God for that, because there were some things in life that left one feeling too filthy for a simple bath to cure, and sado-masochism was at the top of his list.

“It's just a lifestyle, Dad,” Nicola told him, reaching for a ham sandwich and chewing it thoughtfully. “After all you've seen, I'm surprised you'd condemn it.”

“It's a sickness,” he said to his daughter. “Those people have problems they're afraid to face. Perversion looks like the answer while all the while it's only part of what ails them.”

“So you think,” Nicola reminded him gently. “The reality could be something different though, couldn't it? An aberration to you might be perfectly normal to someone else. In fact, you might be the aberration in their eyes.”

He supposed this was the case, he admitted. But wasn't normality determined by the numbers? Wasn't that what the word norm meant in the first place? Wasn't the norm decided by what the most people did?

“That would make cannibalism normal, Dad, among cannibals.”

“Among cannibals, I suppose it is.”

“And if a group among the cannibals decides it doesn't like eating human flesh, are they abnormal? Or can we say they have tastes that might have undergone a change? And if someone from our society goes out and joins the cannibals and discovers he has a taste for human flesh that he wasn't aware he had, is he abnormal? And to whom?”

Andy had smiled at that. He'd said, “You're going to make a very fine lawyer.”

And that comment had led them to hell.

“As to that, Dad,” she'd begun, “as to the law …”

She'd started with her decision not to work for Will Upman, to remain for the summer in London instead. He'd thought at first that she meant she'd found a placement more to her liking with a firm in town. Perhaps, he'd thought hopefully, she's got herself established at one of the Inns of Court. That wasn't where he dreamed she'd end up, but he wasn't blind to the compliment such a position paid to his daughter. He'd said, “I'm disappointed, of course. Your mum will be as well. But we always looked at Will as a fallback if nothing better turned up. What has?”

She told him. He thought at first that she was joking, although Nicola had never been a child to joke when it came to what she wanted to do. In fact, she'd always stated her intentions exactly as she stated them that day in Islington: Here's the plan, here's why, here's the intended result.