In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

covered with a slick pseudo-satin material that promised a night of wrestling to keep it on the bed. He'd at least been equipped with an electric kettle, he observed gloomily, with a wicker basket of PG Tips, seven plastic thimbles of milk, one packet of sugar, and two pieces of shortbread. And he had a bathroom as well, although it had no window and it was fitted out with a water-stained bath encased in linoleum and was lit by a single light bulb of candle-strength wattage. It could have been worse, he told himself. But he wasn't sure how.

When he could no longer avoid doing so, he glanced at the telephone on the iron-legged outdoor table that did service next to the bed. He owed Helen a call, at least to give her his whereabouts, but he was reluctant to punch in the numbers. He considered the reason.

Certainly, Helen was more in the wrong than he. He may have lost his temper with her, but she'd crossed a line when she'd taken the part of Barbara Havers' advocate. As his wife, she was supposed to be his advocate. She might have asked why he'd chosen Winston Nkata to work with and not Barbara Havers instead of attempting to argue him into altering a decision that he had felt compelled to take.

Of course, upon reflection, he recalled that Helen's conversational opening had indeed been to ask him why he'd selected Nkata. It was his series of responses that had led them from a reasonable discussion into a row. Yet he'd responded as he had done because she'd provoked in him a sense of marital-if not moral-outrage. Her questions implied an alliance with someone whose actions couldn't begin to be justified. That he was being asked to justify his own actions-which were reasonable, allowable, and completely understandable-was more than mildly annoying.

Policing worked because of its officers’ adherence to an established chain of command. Senior officers gained their positions by proving themselves capable of performance under pressure. With a life at stake and a suspect fleeing, Barbara Havers’ superior officer had made a split-second decision, giving orders that were as pellucid as they were reasonable. That Havers had contravened those orders was bad enough. That she'd taken matters into her own hands was very much worse. But that she'd wrested power to herself by using a firearm was q. violation of their entire oath of office. It wasn't a simple bending of rules. It was a mockery of everything they stood for. Why hadn't Helen understood all this?

“These things aren't black and white, Tommy.” Malcolm Webberly's comment came back to him as if in answer to his mental question.

But Lynley had to disagree with his superintendent. It seemed to him that some things were.

Still, he couldn't work his way round the fact that he owed his wife a telephone call. They didn't need to pursue their argument. And he could at least offer an apology for losing his temper.

Instead of Helen, however, he found himself talking to Charlie Denton, the young, frustrated thespian who played the role of manservant in Lynley's life, when he wasn't haunting the half-price ticket booth in Leicester Square. The countess wasn't at home, Denton informed him, and Lynley could tell how much the maddening man enjoyed giving Helen the title. She'd phoned round seven o'clock from Mr. St. James's house, Denton went on, and said she'd been asked to stay to dinner. She hadn't yet returned. Did his lordship wish-Lynley cut him off wearily. “Denton,” he warned.

“Sorry.” The younger man chuckled and dropped the mock servility. “D'you want to leave her a message, then?”

“I'll catch her in Chelsea,” Lynley replied. But he gave the Black Angel's number to Denton all the same.

When he phoned the St. James house, however, he discovered that Helen and St. James's wife had gone out straight after dinner. He was left talking to his old friend.

“They mentioned a film,” St. James told him vaguely “I got the impression it was something romantic. Helen said she could do with an evening looking at Americans rolling round on a mattress with sculpted bodies, fashionable hair, and perfect teeth. That's the Americans, not the mattress, by the way.”

“I see.” Lynley gave his friend the number of the hotel with a message for Helen to phone if she returned at a reasonable hour. They hadn't had a proper chance to speak before he'd taken off for Derbyshire, he told St. James. Even to his own ears, it sounded a lame explanation.

St. James said that he'd pass the message to Helen. How was Lynley finding Derbyshire? he wanted to know.

It was a tacit invitation to discuss the case. St. James would never enquire directly. He had too much respect for the unwritten rules that governed a police investigation.

Lynley found himself wanting to talk to his old friend. He reviewed the facts: the two deaths, the differing means by which they'd come about, the absence of one of the weapons, the lack of identification on the boy, the anonymous letters assembled from cut-outs, the scrawled suggestion that “This bitch has had it.”

“It puts a signature on the crime,” Lynley concluded, “although Hanken thinks the note could be part of a blind.”

“Misdirection on the part of the killer? Who?”

“Andy Maiden, if you go along with Hanken's thinking.”

“The father? That's a bit rough. Why is Hanken heading that way?”

“He wasn't at first.” Lynley described their interview with the dead girl's parents: what had been said and what had been inadvertently revealed. He ended with “So Andy believes there's an SO10 connection.”

“What do you think?”

“Like everything else, it needs checking out. But Hanken didn't trust a word Andy said once we learned that he'd been keeping information from his wife.”

“He could merely have been trying to protect her,” St. James offered. “Not an unreasonable thing for a man to do for a woman he loves. And if they were really looking for a blind, wouldn't they misdirect you into considering the boy?”

Lynley agreed. “There's a real bond between the two of them, Simon. It appears to be an extraordinarily close relationship.”

St. James was silent for a moment on the other end of the line. Outside Lynley s hotel room, someone walked down the corridor. A door shut quietly.

“Then there's another way to look at Andy Maiden protecting his wife, isn't there, Tommy?” St. James finally said.

“What's that, then?”

“He may be doing it for another reason. The worst possible reason, in fact.”

“Medea in Derbyshire?” Lynley asked. “Christ. That's horrific, Simon. And when mothers kill, the child's generally young. I'll be pressed for a motive if things go that way.”

“Medea would have argued that she had one.”

In the midst of dealing with one of Nicola's many disappearances prior to the family's move to Derbyshire, Nan Maiden would have been incredulous had anyone suggested to her that there would come a day when she would yearn for something as simple as a teenager's running away from home in a fit of temper. When Nicola had disappeared in the past, her mother had reacted the only way she knew: with a mixture of terror, anger, and despair. She'd phoned the girl's friends, she'd alerted the police, and she'd taken to the streets to trackher down. She'd been capable of nothing else until she'd known her child was safe.

That Nicola would vanish into the streets of London always intensified Nan's worry. For anything could happen on the streets of London. A teenaged girl could be raped; she could be seduced into the netherworld of narcotics; she could be beaten; she could be maimed.

There was one prospective consequence of Nicola's running off that Nan never considered, however: that her daughter had been murdered. The thought simply didn't bear dwelling upon. Not because murder never happened to young girls, but because if it happened to this particular young girl, her mother had no idea how she herself would go on.

And now it had happened. Not during those tempestuous teenage years when Nicola was insisting on autonomy, independence, and what she'd called “the right to self-determination, Mum. We're not living in the Middle Ages, you know.” Not during that torturous period when making a demand of her parents-whether it was for something simple and concrete like a new CD or something complex and nebulous like personal freedom-was no less than an unspoken threat to vanish for a day or a week or a month if that demand wasn't met. But now, when she was an adult, when locking her door and nailing closed her window were actions that were supposed to be not only unthinkable but also unnecessary.

Yet that's exactly what I should have done, Nan thought brokenly. I should have locked her in, tied her to her