In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

the damn cylinder is in the first place. I've never seen anything like it and neither has she.”

“It's a ball stretcher,” Lynley told him.

“A what?”

“Hang on, Pete.” At the other end of the line, Hanken heard the rumble of male voices with continued hospital noises as counterpoint. Lynley got back to him, saying, “She'll pull through, thank God.”

“Can you get to her?”

“Unconscious at the moment.” And then to someone else, “Round-the-clock protection. No visitors without first clearing them with me. And ask for their IDs if anyone shows up… No. I have no idea… Right.” Then he was back. “Sorry. Where was I?”

“A ball stretcher.”

“Ah. Yes.”

Hanken listened as his colleague explained the device of torture. He felt his own testicles shrink in response.

“My guess is that it rolled out of one of her cases when she was en route to or from a client while she worked for Reeve,” Lynley concluded. “It could have been in the boot of her car for months.”

Hanken reflected on this and saw another possibility. He knew Lynley would fight it, so he broached the subject with care. “Thomas, she might have used it in Derbyshire. Perhaps on someone who's not admitting it.”

“I don't see either Upman or Britton going in for the whips-and-chains routine. And Ferrer seems more likely to use something on his women rather than vice versa. Who else is there?”

“Her dad.”

“Christ. Peter, that's a bloody sick thought.”

“Isn't it just. But the whole S & M scene's sick, and from what you've just told me, its major players look normal as hell.”

“There is no way-”

“Just listen.” And Hanken reported his interview with the dead girl's parents, including Nan Maiden's interruption of that interview and Andy Maidens feeble alibi. “So who's to say beyond doubt that Nicola wasn't servicing her dad along with everyone else?”

“Peter, you can't keep reinventing the case to fit your suspicions. If she was servicing her father-which, by the way, I would go to the rack protesting-then he can't have killed her because of her lifestyle which-as you recall-was your earlier position.”

“Then you agree he has a motive?”

“I agree that you're twisting my words.” A new spate of noise then ensued: sirens and a babble of voices. It sounded to Hanken as if the other DI were conducting their conversation in the middle of a motorway. When the noise abated slightly, Lynley said, “There's still what happened to Vi Nevin to consider. What happened tonight. If that's related to the doings in Derbyshire, you've got to see that Andy Maiden isn't involved.”

“Then who?”

“My money's on Martin Reeve. He had a bone to pick with both of the women.”

Lynley went on to say that their best hope was having Vi Nevin regain consciousness and name her attacker. Then they would have immediate grounds to drag Martin Reeve into the Met, where he belonged. “I'll stay for a while to see if she comes to,” he said. “If she doesn't in an hour or two, I'll have them ring me the moment her condition changes. What about you?”

Hanken sighed. He rubbed his tired eyes and stretched to ease the tension he was feeling in the muscles of his back. He thought of Will Upman and his stress management massages at the Manchester Airport Hilton. He could have done with one of those himself.

“I'll get on to Julian Britton,” he said. “Truth to tell, though, I can't see him as anyone's killer. A bloke dandling puppies in his spare time doesn't strike me as someone who'd bash in his lover's skull. And as for knifing a bloke into minced beef… more likely he'd sick the harriers on someone.”

“But if he believed he had powerful cause to kill her…?” Lynley asked.

“Oh, to be sure.” Hanken agreed. “Someone believed he had powerful cause to kill Nicola Maiden.”

The doctor had given her sleeping pills, but Nan Maiden hadn't taken them after the first night. She couldn't afford to be less than vigilant, so she did nothing to encourage slumber. When she went to bed at all, she dozed. But most of the time she either walked the corridors in a corporeal haunting or sat in the overstuffed armchair in their bedroom and watched her husband's fitful rest.

This night, her pyjama-clad legs curled beneath her and a hand-knitted blanket drawn round her shoulders, Nan huddled into the armchair and observed her husband thrashing round in the bed. She couldn't tell if he was really asleep or just feigning sleep, but in either case, it didn't matter. The sight of him there roused within her a complicated tangle of emotions more important to consider at the moment than the authenticity of her husband's repose.

She still wanted him. Odd after all these years that she still felt desire for him in the same old way, but she did. And that desire had never abated for either of them. Rather, it seemed to have increased over time, as if the length of their marriage had somehow seasoned the passion they felt for each other. So she'd noticed when Andy first stopped turning to her at night. And she'd noticed when he stopped reaching for and claiming her with the assurance and familiarity that were born of their long and happy marriage.

She dreaded what that change in him meant.

It had happened once before-this loss of interest on Andy's part in what had always been the most vital area of their relationship-and so long ago that Nan liked to believe she'd nearly forgotten it had happened at all. But that wasn't the real fact of the matter, and Nan could admit that much in the safety of darkness as her husband did or did not sleep some six feet away from her.

He'd been undercover in a drugs operation. Seduction had been called for as the drama played out. Remaining true to his assigned role required him to accept all advances made in his direction no matter the nature those advances took. And when several of them were overtly sexual… What else could he do that would keep him in character? he asked her later. How else could he act so as not to betray the entire operation and endanger the lives of the officers involved?

But he took no pleasure from any of it, he'd said as he confessed to her. There had been nothing for him in the firm young beautiful flesh of girls young enough to be his daughters. What he'd done, he'd done because it had been required of him, and he wanted his wife to grasp that fact. There was no joy in such an act of coupling. There was only getting through the act itself, which was robbed of feeling when it was done without love.

They were lofty words. They demanded of an intelligent woman her compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, and understanding. But they were also words which made Nan wonder at the time why Andy had felt it necessary to confess his transgression to her at all.

But she'd learned the answer to that question through the years as she slowly developed a knowledge of her husband's ways. And she'd seen the alterations that had come upon him whenever he was untrue to who he actually was. Which was why SO 10 had ultimately become such a nightmare: because he was forced, day in and day out and month after month, to be someone who he simply was not. Required by his job to live through great periods of untruth, he found that his mind, his soul, and his psyche would not permit dissimulation without making a demand for some sort of payment from his body.

That payment had shown itself in ways that had been extremely easy to ignore at first, to label as an allergic reaction to something or the initial harbinger of approaching old age. The tongue grows old so the food stops tasting right and the only way to give it flavour is to soak it in sauce or blizzard it with pepper. And what did it really mean when one failed to catch the subtle scent of night-blooming jasmine? Or the musty odour of a country church? Those little occasions of sensory deprivation were easy to overlook.

But then the more serious deprivations began, the sort that couldn't be ignored without risk to one's well being. And when the doctors and the specialists had run their tests, tried out their diagnoses, and finally shrugged their shoulders in a maddening combination of fascination, perplexity, and defeat, the psychiatric warriors had boarded the ship of Andy's condition, setting sail like Vikings towards the uncharted waters of her husband's psyche. There was never a name applied to what ailed him, just an explanation of the human condition as some people experienced it. So he fell apart by inches and degrees, with confession the only means by which he could put his life in order once again, reclaiming who he was through an act of purgation. But ultimately, all the diary writing,