In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner by Elizabeth George
“But this wasn't a case of breaking a law,” Barbara said. And that, she told herself, was merely a mild prevarication. After all, she hadn't been in the dock defending herself against a charge of assault or attempted murder, so she'd been able to convince herself that, law-wise, she'd always been in the clear.
“Nonetheless, as you are my friend—at least I hope that you are—”
“Of course I am.”
“Then perhaps you'll help me to understand more about your society.”
Bollocks, Barbara thought. He understood more about British society than she herself did. But she could hardly take the discussion in that direction, where it would soon enough crumble into a Punch and Judy of Yes you do, No I don't. So she said, “Its nothing much. I had a row with the DCI in charge of the case out in Essex, Azhar. We were in the middle of a chase. And the one thing an underling isn't supposed to do is to question an order in the middle of a chase. That's what happened and that's why I lost my rank.”
“For questioning an order.”
“I tend to question more forcefully than the average bird,” she said airily. “It's a habit that I learned in school. I'm short. I get lost in a crowd if I don't make myself heard. You ought to hear me order a pint of Bass in the Load of Hay when the football crowd's watching an Arsenal match on the telly But when I used the same approach with DCI Barlow, she didn't much like it.”
“Yet to lose your rank … It's a draconian measure, certainly. Are you being made an example of? Can you not protest it? Is there not a union or organisation who might represent you aggressively enough to—”
“In a situation like this,” Barbara cut in, “it's best not to make waves. Let the smoke clear, you know. Let sleeping dogs lie.” She groaned inwardly, the Queen of Cliché. “Anyway, when enough time passes, it'll sort itself out. The situation. You know.” She smashed her own cigarette among the others, putting an end to their discussion. She waited for him to bid her goodnight.
Instead, he said, “Hadiyyah and I go to the seaside tomorrow.”
“She told me. She's looking forward to it. The pleasure pier, especially. And she's expecting a big win from the crane grab, Azhar, so I hope you've been practising with the pincers.”
He smiled. “She asks for so little. And yet life appears to give her so much.”
“P'haps that's why,” Barbara pointed out. “If you don't spend your time looking for something particular, what you end up finding suits you just fine.”
“Wise words,” he acknowledged.
Wisdom's cheap, Barbara thought. She rustled in the manila folder on the table and brought out the roster of names from Soho Square. Duty was calling, her action told him. And Azhar was nothing if not astute at drawing inferences from unspoken implications.
The journey from Sir Adrian Beattie's home to Vi Nevin's maisonette was little more than a cruise down the Fulham Road in rather light traffic. It didn't take long. But it was long enough for Lynley to consider what he'd heard from Beattie and what he felt about what he'd heard. After years in CID, he realised that there was no real place in the investigation for him to be dwelling upon what he felt about anyone's revelations, least of all Sir Adrian's. But he found that he couldn't help himself. And he justified the direction his thoughts were taking by declaring them natural: Sexual deviance was as much a curiosity as a two-headed kitten. One might shudder at the sight of such an anomaly. But one still looked at it, however briefly.
And that's what he was doing: looking at the deviant behaviour for its anomaly quotient first, then evaluating the possibility that sexual deviance in itself was the relevant detail that would allow him to unearth Nicola Maiden's killer. The only problem he was having with attempting to use sexual deviance as a means of finding a killer was that he was discovering himself incapable of moving beyond the mere presence of the deviance in the first place.
Why was this? he wondered. Was he titillated by it? Sententiously condemnatory? Intrigued? Appalled? Seduced? What?
He couldn't have said. He knew it existed, of course: what some would call the dark side of desire. He was aware of at least some of the theoretical frameworks that students of the psyche had constructed to explain it. Depending upon what school of thought one wished to enroll in, sado-masochism could be considered an erotic blasphemy born of sexual dissent; an upper-class vice growing out of spending one's formative years in boarding schools where corporal punishment was the order of the day—and the more ritualised the better; a defiant reaction to a rigidly conservative upbringing; an expression of personal loathing for the simple possession of sexual drives; or the sole means of physical intimacy for those whose terror of the mere prospect of intimacy was greater than their willingness to overcome it. But what he didn't know was why, at the moment, the thought of deviancy was eating away at him. And it was the why of that eating away that plagued his mind.
What has all this to do with love? Lynley had wanted to ask the surgeon. What did being bruised, beaten, bloodied, and humiliated have to do with the ineffable and—yes, all right, it was absurdly romantic but he'd use the term anyway—transcendent joy that was attached to the act of possessing and of being possessed by another person? Wasn't that joy the outcome to which sexual partners ought to aspire when they engaged in intercourse? Or was he too new a newlywed to be making any assessments at all about what went for devotion between consenting adults? And did sex have anything to do with love anyway? And should it, for that matter? Or was that where everyone went wrong in the first place, assigning an importance to a bodily function that should have no more importance than cleaning one's teeth?
Except that direction of thought was sophistry, wasn't it. One didn't need to clean one's teeth. One didn't even feel the need. And it was the feeling of that need—the slow building up of a tension at first subtle and ultimately impossible to ignore—that told the real tale in life. Because it was that feeling of need which led to a hunger that insisted upon gratification. And it was the desire for gratification that caused one to abjure everything that rose up to forbid the satiety one sought: One willingly disregarded honour, responsibility, tradition, fidelity, and duty in pursuit of one's passion. And why? Because one wanted.
If he cast himself back more than twenty years, Lynley could see how the wanting had rent his own family. Or at least how he himself had allowed the wanting—which he had then only imperfectly understood—to rend it. Honour had bound his mother to his father. Responsibility and tradition had tied her to the family home and to the more than two hundred and fifty years of Asherton countesses who had overseen its maintenance and its glory. Duty had demanded that she concern herself with her husband's failing health and her children's welfare. And fidelity had required that she do it all without openly, inwardly, or privately acknowledging that she herself might want something different—or at least something more—than the lot she'd chosen as an eighteen-year-old bride. She'd coped with everything well until disease began to gnaw at her husband. Even then she'd managed to hold together life as the family had always known it, until the very act of having to cope, of having to act a role instead of simply being able to live it, had made her long for rescue. And rescue had come, if only temporarily.
Bitch, whore, tart, he'd called her. And he would have struck her—the mother he'd adored—had she not struck him first, and with a violence, a frustration, and an anger that had given to the blow a force which split open his upper lip.
Why had he reacted so violently to the knowledge of her infidelity? Lynley wondered now as he braked to avoid a pack of cyclists who were negotiating the right turn onto North End Road. He watched them idly—all business in their helmets and spandex—and considered the question, not only for what it revealed about his adolescence but also for what its answer implied about the case in hand. The answer, he decided, had to do with love and with the insidious and often unreasonable expectations that always seemed to attach themselves to the very fact of loving. How often we want the love object to be an e
But, he realised, there was more than one kind of turmoil that was becoming apparent in the relationships that Nicola Maiden had had. While thwarted desire played a part in her life—and very possibly in her death—he couldn't overlook the place that was occupied by jealousy, revenge, avarice, and hate. All those crippling passions caused turmoil. Any one of them could drive someone to murder.
Rostrevor Road was a mere half mile south of Fulham Broadway, and the door of Vi Nevin's building was propped open when Lynley climbed the steps. A hand-lettered sign on the jamb explained why, as did the noise coming from a ground floor flat whose door was also propped open. Tildy and Steve's Digs at the Rear were the words written out in multi-coloured felt pen on a sheet of heavy paper. Smoke Outside, Please! was the request made beneath.
The noise from within was considerable as the partygoers were enjoying the musical talents of an unidentifiable group of males who were gutturally advising members of their sex to use her, abuse her, have her, and lose her, all to the accompaniment of percussion, electric guitar, and brass. None of this sounded particularly mellifluous in combination, Lynley decided. He was getting older—and, alas, stuffier—than he thought. He headed for the stairs and dashed upwards.
The corridor lights were on a timer, with a push button at the bottom of the stairs. There were windows on the landing, but as darkness had fallen, these did very little to dispel the gloom above the ground floor of the building. So Lynley punched for the lights on Vi Nevin's floor and strode towards her door.
She hadn't been willing to tell the truth about how she'd come to meet Nicola Maiden in the first place. She hadn't been willing to name the man who had originally financed the rooms in which she lived. There were probably a score of other facts that she could part with if the psychological thumb-screws were applied with enough finesse.
Lynley felt up to the task of applying them. Although Vi Nevin was nobody's fool and unlikely to be tricked into revealing information, she was also living at the edge of the law and, like the Reeves, she'd be willing to compromise if compromise was what would keep her in business.
He rapped sharply on her door. There was a brass knocker, so he knew she'd be able to hear his knock despite the music and shouting from the party below. However, there was no answer from within, which upon reflection was hardly a circumstance worthy of suspicion since it was a Saturday night and—whether she was out servicing a client or otherwise engaged—a woman away from home on a Saturday night was nothing to raise the alarm about.
He removed one of his cards from his jacket, put on his glasses, and slid a pen from his pocket to leave her a note. He wrote and returned the pen to his pocket. He fixed the card to the door at the height of the knob.
And then he saw it.
Blood. An unmistakable thumbprint upon the door knob. A second smear some eight inches higher, rising at an angle on the door from the jamb.
“Christ.” Lynley used his fist against the door. “Miss Nevin?” he called. Then he shouted, “Vi Nevin!”
There was no answer. There was no sound from within.
Lynley pulled his wallet from his trouser pocket, extracted a credit card, and applied it to the old Banham latch.
CHAPTER 22
o you have any idea what you've done? Any idea at all?”
How long had it been since she'd shot up? Martin Reeve wondered. And could he hope against unlikely hope that the pathetic smack-head had hallucinated the encounter and not actually lived it in the first place? Strictly speaking, that was possible. Tricia never answered the door when he wasn't in. Her paranoia was far too advanced for that. So why the hell would she have answered it this time, when nearly everything that comprised their lifestyle was sitting at the edge of a cliff just waiting for someone to make a wrong move and send it hurtling down to the boulders below?
But he knew the answer to that question well enough. She would have answered the door because she was brainless, because she couldn't be trusted to think in a straight line from action to consequence of action for five minutes, because if anyone on the face of the earth even prompted her to think that her pipeline of dope was in danger of being stopped up in some way, she would do anything to prevent that happening, and answering a door was the least of that anything. She would sell her body, she would sell her soul, she would sell them both down the God damn river. Which was, apparently, what the airheaded bitch had actually managed to do while he was out.
He'd found her in their bedroom, nodding away in her white wicker rocker next to the window, with a sword's width of illumination from the streetlight outside falling across her left shoulder and gilding her breast. She was completely nude, and an oval cheval mirror, drawn near to the rocker, reflected the ghostly perfection of her body.
He'd said, “What the hell are you doing, Tricia?” not entirely unpleasantly, since he was, after twenty years of marriage to the woman, quite used to finding his wife in an array of conditions: from dressed to the nines in a little designer number that cost a small fortune, to tucked up in bed at three o'clock in the afternoon wearing Babygro and sucking on a bottle of piña colada. So at first he'd thought she'd arranged herself for his delectation. And while he hadn't been in the mood to fuck her, he'd still been capable of acknowledging that the money he'd spent on Beverly Hills surgeons had been cash invested with visually enjoyable results.
But that thought had died like a candle's flame in a draught when Martin saw how far his wife was gone on the stuff. While her shit-induced semi-somnolence generally inspired him to take her in that master-of-the-rag-doll fashion which he vastly preferred when coupling with any woman openly willing to receive his ministrations, the afternoon and evening hadn't worked out according to his plans, and he knew the workings of his body and his mind well enough to realise that if he roused himself to take another woman today—especially one who wouldn't put up a gratifying fight against him—it wasn't going to be a female whose range of response was similar to that of a bottle of plasma. That would hardly provide him with the distraction he'd been looking for.
So at first he'd dismissed both her and the possibility of receiving a coherent answer to the question he'd asked her. And he'd ignored her altogether when she'd murmured, “Got t'go t'Melbourne, Marty. Got t'get's there straightaway.” Typical strung-out nonsense, he'd thought. He went into the bathroom, turned on the shower to heat up, and lathered his hands beneath the tap, soothing both his knuckles and his face with the creamy soap that Tricia favoured.
By the window, she spoke again, this time louder so as to be heard over the rush of water. “S’ I made some calls. T'see wha’ iss cost us to go. Soon's we can, Marty. Babe? You hear tha?’ Got t'go t'Melbourne.”
He went to the doorway, drying his hands and face gently on a towel. She saw him, smiled, and ran her manicured fingers up her thigh, across her stomach, and teasingly round her nipple. The nipple hardened. She smiled wider. Martin did neither.
“I wonder 'bout the heat in 'stralia,” she said. “I know you don't much fancy heat. Bu’ we got go t'Melbourne 'cause I promised him.”
Martin had begun to take her more seriously at that. It was the him that caught his attention. “What are you talking about, Tricia?”
She said with a pout, “No’ list'ning, Marty. I hate it when you don't listen to me.”
Martin knew the importance of keeping his voice pleasant, at least for the moment. “I am listening, darling. Melbourne. The heat. Australia. A promise. I've heard it all. I just don't understand how it fits together and what it relates to. Perhaps if you'll explain …?”
“What it relates to—” She waved airily round the room at everything and at nothing. Then she changed gears abruptly in that Jekyll-Hyde move so common to loadies, saying scornfully, “You soun' like such a poof, Marty. ‘P'rhaps if you'll 'splain …’”
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“Ooohhh,” she mocked. “He's taking a shower. And I 'spect we know why if we sniff him up. We know what we'll smell. So who was it this time? Which one of the ladies di' you have today? An' don' He 'bout it, Marty, 'cause I know what's what with you ‘n’ the girls. They tell me, y'know. They even complain. Which, I 'spect, you'd never think of them doing, would you?”
For a moment Martin considered believing her. God knew there were times when the act of simply demanding and taking what wasn't on offer wasn't enough to satisfy him. Every now and then events piled one upon the other in such a way that only a certain level of ferocity was able to compensate him for his lack of control over the countless daily irritations that swirled round him like gnats. But Tricia didn't know that beyond a shadow of a doubt, and there wasn't a single girl in his stable who'd be stupid enough to tell her. So Martin turned away from his wife without making a response to her remark. He stripped off his shirt in preparation for his shower.
She said from the bedroom, “So say bye-bye. Bye-bye to all this. You ready to do that, Marty?”
He unzipped his trousers and let them drop to the floor. He peeled off his socks. He made no reply.
She went on, calling, “He said if we wen’ t’ stralia, you and me, he'd keep his mug shut 'bout the bus'ness. So I ’spect that's what we got to do.”
“He.” Martin re-entered the bedroom, clad only in his shorts. “He?” he said again. “Tricia, he?” Within his gut, a roiling began: a nascent nausea suggesting that something previously inconceivable might actually have happened in the time during which he'd left his wife alone in the house.