In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

Lynley reached for the off button. “Ophelia, I expect, once Hamlet's killed Polonius.”

Helen splashed in the bath behind him. “Tommy! You frightened me half to death.”

“Sorry.”

“Have you just now got in?”

“Yes. Tell me about the gloves, Helen.”

“The gloves?” Helens glance shifted to her hands. “Oh! The gloves. It's my cuticles. I'm giving them a treatment, a combination of heat and oil.”

“That's a relief,” he said.

“Why? Had you noticed my cuticles?”

“No. But I thought you were anticipating a future as the Queen, which would mean our relationship has come to an end. Have you ever seen the Queen without her gloves?”

“Hmm. I don't think I have. But you don't suppose she actually bathes with them on, do you?”

“It's a possibility. She may loathe human contact even with herself.”

Helen laughed. “I'm so glad you're home.” She peeled off the gloves and plunged her hands into the water. She settled back against her pillow and regarded him. “Tell me” she said gently. “Please.”

It was her way, and Lynley hoped it would always be her way: to read him so swiftly and to open herself to him with those three simple words.

He pulled a stool over to the side of the bath. He took off his jacket, dropped it onto the floor, rolled up his sleeves, and reached for one of the sponges and some soap. He took her arm first and ran the sponge down its slender length. And as he bathed her, he told her everything. She listened in silence, watching him.

“The worst of it all is this,” he said in conclusion to his tale. “Andy Maiden would still be alive if I'd stuck to procedure when we met yesterday afternoon. But his wife came into the room, and instead of questioning her about Nicola's life in London-which would have revealed that she'd known about it even longer than Andy, that Nicola had told her months before she told her father-I held back. Because I wanted to help him protect her.”

“When she didn't need his protection at all,” Helen said. “Yes. I see how it happened. How dreadful. But, Tommy, you were doing the best you knew at the time.”

Lynley squeezed the sponge and let the soapy water run against his wife's shoulders before he returned the sponge to its tray. “The best I knew at the time was to stick to procedure. He was a suspect. So was she. I didn't treat either one of them that way. Had I done so, he wouldn't be dead.”

Lynley couldn't decide what the worst of it had been: seeing the bloody Swiss Army knife still clutched in Andy's stiffened hand, trying to get Nancy Maiden away from her husband's corpse, hiking back to the Bentley with her in tow and every moment fearing that her shock would give way to a raving grief which he would not be able to handle, waiting-endlessly, it seemed-for the police to arrive, facing the corpse a second time and this time without Andy's wife present to deflect his attention from his former colleague's manner of death.

“Looks like the knife he showed me,” Hanken had said, observing it on the ground.

“It would be, wouldn't it” was Lynley's only reply. Then, passionately, “Blast it. God damn it, Peter. It's all my fault. If I'd showed them every one of my cards when they were both with me… But I didn't. I didn't.”

Hanken had nodded at his team then, directing them to bag the body. He'd shaken a cigarette from his packet and offered the packet to Lynley. He'd said, “Take one, God damn it. You need it, Thomas,” and Lynley had complied. They'd left the ancient stone circle but remained by the sentry stone, smoking their Marlboros. “No one operates by rote,” Hanken said. “Half of this job is intuition, and that comes from the heart. You followed your heart. In your position, I can't say I would have done differently.”

“Can't you?”

“No.”

But Lynley had known the other man was lying. Because the most important part of the job was knowing both when to follow your heart and when to do so would lead to disaster.

“Barbara was right from the first,” Lynley told Helen as she rose from the bath and took the towel he extended to her. “Had I even seen that this wouldn't have happened, because I'd have stayed in London and reined back the Derbyshire end of things while we brought down King-Ryder.”

“If that's the case,” Helen said quietly as she wrapped the towel round her body, “then I'm equally to blame for what's happened, Tommy.” And she told him how Barbara had come to be tracking down King-Ryder once she'd been thrown off the case. “I could have phoned you when Denton told me about the music. I didn't make that choice.”

“I doubt I would have listened if I'd known that what you were telling me was going to prove Barbara right.”

“As to that, darling…” Helen went to the vanity and took up a small bottle of lotion, which she began to smooth against her face. “What is it, really, that's bothered you about Barbara? About this North Sea business and her firing that gun. Because I know you know she's a fine detective. She may go her own way now and again, but her heart is always in the right place, isn't it?”

And there it was again, that word heart and everything it implied about the underlying reasons behind a person's actions. Hearing his wife use it, Lynley was reminded of another's use of it so many years before, of a woman weeping and saying to him, “My God, Tommy, what's become of your heart?” when he refused to see her, to speak to her even, in the aftermath of discovering her adultery.

And then he finally knew. He understood for the very first time, and the understanding made him recoil from who he had been and what he had done for the last twenty years. “I couldn't control her,” he said quietly, far more to himself than to his wife. “I couldn't mould her into the image I'd had of her. She went her own way and I couldn't bear it. He's dying, I thought, and she should damn well act like a wife whose husband is dying.”

Helen understood. “Ah. Your mother.”

“I thought I'd forgiven her long ago. But perhaps I haven't forgiven her at all. Perhaps she's always there-in every woman I have to deal with-and perhaps I keep trying to make her be someone she doesn't want to be.”

“Or perhaps you've simply never forgiven yourself for not being able to stop her.” Helen set down her lotion and came to him. “We carry such baggage, don't we, darling? And just when we think we've finally unpacked, there it all is again, waiting in front of our bedroom door, ready to trip us when we get up in the morning.”

She'd had her head wrapped in a turban, and she took this off and shook her hair out. She hadn't completely dried herself, so drops of water glistened on her shoulders and gathered in the hollow of her throat.

“Your mother, my father,” she said as she took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “It's always someone. I was all in a muddle because of that ridiculous wallpaper. I'd decided that if I hadn't become the woman my father intended me to be-the wife of a man in possession of a title-I'd have known my own mind with regard to that paper. And because I didn't know my own mind, I blamed him. My father. But the truth of the matter is that I could always have gone my own way, as Pen and Iris did. I could have said no. And I didn't because the path laid out was so much easier and so much less frightening than forging my own would have been.”

Lynley smoothed her cheek fondly He traced her jaw and the length of her long and lovely neck.

“Sometimes I hate being a grown-up,” Helen told him. “There's so much more freedom in being a child.”

“Isn't there,” he agreed. He put his fingers to the towel that wrapped her body. He kissed her neck, her shoulders, and her mouth. “But there's more advantage in adulthood, I think.”

He loosened the towel and drew her to him.

CHAPTER 31

At the sound of her alarm the next morning, Barbara Havers rolled out of bed with a blazing headache. She stumbled to the bathroom, where she rattled round for several aspirin and fumbled with the handles of the shower. Bollocks, she thought. She'd obviously been leading much too exemplary a life in the last few years. As a result,