In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

He led the way to the office near Reception. He shut the door behind them.

“Tell me about Islington in May, Andy,” Lynley said without preamble, because he knew that to hesitate was to offer the other man an opening into his sympathy that he couldn't afford to allow. “Tell me about saying ‘I'll see you dead before I let you do it.’”

Maiden sat. He indicated a chair for Lynley. He didn't speak until Lynley was seated, and even then he seemed to go inward for a moment, as if he was gathering his resources before he replied.

Then he said, “The wheel clamp.”

To which Lynley replied, “No one could ever accuse you of being an incompetent cop.”

“The same could be said of you. You've done good work, Tommy. I always believed you'd shine in CID.”

If anything, the compliment was like a slap in the face, hearkening as it did to all the now-obvious reasons that Andy Maiden had chosen him-blinded as he was by admiration-to come to Derbyshire. Lynley said steadily, “I have a good team. Tell me about Islington.”

They were finally upon it, and Maiden's eyes bore so much anguish that Lynley found he still-even now-had to steel himself against a rush of pity towards his old friend. “She asked to see me,” Maiden said. “So I went.”

“Last May. To London,” Lynley clarified. “You went to Islington to see your daughter.”

“That's right.”

He'd thought Nicola wanted to make arrangements to move her belongings back to Derbyshire for the summer, preparatory to taking her holiday job with Will Upman as they'd arranged in December. So he'd driven the Land- Rover, the better to be able to haul things home if she was willing to part with them a few weeks before her classes ended at the College of Law.

“But she didn't want to come home,” Maiden said. “That's not why she'd called me to London. She wanted to tell me her future plans.”

“Prostitution,” Lynley said. “Her set-up in Fulham.”

Maiden cleared his throat roughly and whispered, “Oh God.”

Even hardening himself against empathy, Lynley found he couldn't force the man to lay out the facts that he'd gathered that day in London. So he did it for him: Lynley went through everything as he himself had learned it, from Nicola's employment first as a trainee then as an escort at MKR Financial Management to her partnership with Vi Nevin and her choice of domination as her speciality. He concluded with “Sir Adrian believes there could be only one reason why she came north for the summer instead of remaining in London: money.”

“It was a compromise. She did it for me.”

They'd argued bitterly, but he'd finally got her to agree to work for Upman during the summer, at least to try the law as a career. By paying her more than she would have made remaining in London, he said, he garnered her cooperation. He'd had to take out a bank loan to raise the sum she demanded as recompense, but he considered it money well spent.

“You were that confident that the law would win her over?” Lynley asked. The prospect hardly seemed likely.

“I was confident that Upman would win her over,” Maiden replied. “I've seen him with women. He has a way. I thought he and Nicola… Tommy, I was willing to try anything. The right man, I kept thinking, could bring her to her senses.”

“Wouldn't Julian Britton have been a better choice? He was already in love with her, wasn't he?”

“Julian wanted her too much. She needed a man who'd seduce her but keep her guessing. Upman seemed right for the job.” Maiden appeared to hear his own words, because he flinched a moment after he'd made the declaration, and finally he began to weep. “Oh God, Tommy. She drove me to it,” he said, and he held a fist at his mouth as if this could deaden his pain.

And Lynley was at last face-to-face with what he hadn't wanted to see. He'd turned away from the guilt of this man because of who he had been at New Scotland Yard, while all the time who he had been at New Scotland Yard illuminated his culpability as nothing else could. A master of deception and dissimulation, Andy Maiden had spent decades moving in that netherworld of undercover where the lines between fact and fantasy, between illegality and honour first became blurred and ultimately became altogether non-existent.

“Tell me how it happened,” Lynley said stonily. “Tell me what you used besides the knife.”

Maiden dropped his hand. “God in heaven…” His voice was hoarse. “Tommy, you can't be thinking…” Then he appeared to reflect back over what he'd said, to locate the exact point of misunderstanding between them. “She drove me to bribery. To paying her to work for Upman so that he could win her… so that her mother would never discover what she was… because it would have destroyed her. But no. No. You can't think I killed her. I was here the night she died. Here in the hotel. And… my God, she was my only child.”

“And she'd betrayed you,” Lynley said. “After all you'd done for her, after the life you'd given her-”

“No! I loved her. Do you have children? A daughter? A son? Do you know what it is to see the future in your child and know you'll live on no matter what happens just because she herself exists?”

“As a whore?” Lynley asked. “As a woman on the game who makes her money paying house calls on men she whips into submission? ‘I'll see you dead before I let you do it.’ Those were your words. And she was returning to London next week, Andy You'd bought yourself only a reprieve from the inevitable when you paid her to work in Buxton.”

“I didn't! Tommy, listen to me! I was here on Tuesday night.”

Maiden's voice had risen and a knock sounded on the door. It opened before either man could speak. Nan Maiden stood there. She looked from Lynley to her husband. She didn't speak.

But she didn't need to say a word in explanation of what Lynley read on her face. She knows what he did, he thought. My God, she's known from the first.

“Leave us,” Andy Maiden cried out to his wife.

“I don't think that will be necessary,” Lynley said.

Barbara Havers had never been to Westerham, and she discovered soon enough that there was no easy way to get there from the St. James home in Chelsea. She'd made a quick run to the St. Jameses upon leaving Eaton Terrace-why not, she'd thought, since she was in the area so close to the King's Road, a short jaunt down which would take her to Cheyne Row-and she'd been dead eager to let off steam to the couple who she very well knew were most likely to have also experienced Inspector Lynley's brand of priggish irrationality firsthand at one time or another. But she hadn't had a chance to tell her story. For Deborah St. James had answered the door, given a happy shout in the direction of the study, and pulled her inside the house like a woman greeting someone unexpectedly back from the war.

“Simon, look!” she'd announced. “Isn't this just meant” And the meeting between the three of them had been the spur that sent Barbara into Kent. To get there, however, she'd had to battle the maze of unmarked streets that made the words south of the river synonymous with a sojourn in hell. She'd got lost on the far side of Albert Bridge, where one moment of inattention resulted in twenty minutes of exasperation driving round Clapham Common in a futile search for the A205. Once she'd found it and worked her way over to Lewisham, she'd begun wondering about the efficacy of using the Internet to locate one's expert witnesses.

The witness in this case lived in Westerham, where he also ran a small business a short distance away from Quebec House. “You won't be able to miss it,” he'd told her on the telephone. “Quebec House sits at the top of the Edenbridge Road. It's got a sign at the front. It's open today-Quebec House-so there'll probably be the odd coach in the car park. I'm less than five hundred yards to the south.”

So he was, she found, in a clapboard construction that bore the sign QUIVER ME TIMBERS above its door.

His name was Jason Harley, and his business shared room with his house, the original home having been halved by a wall that ran down its middle like Solomon's judgement. An overly wide door had been set into this wall, and it was through this door that Jason Harley rolled himself in the high performance wheelchair of a marathon athlete when Barbara rang the bell outside the shop door.

“You're Constable Havers?” Harley asked.

“Barbara,” she said.

He tossed back a mass of hair that was blond, very thick, and straight as a ruler. “Barbara, then. Lucky you caught me at home. I usually shoot on Sundays.” He rolled himself back and beckoned her inside, saying, “Make sure the sign stays on closed, won't you? I've got a local fan club that likes to drop by