In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

you say you want to see it.”

“That sounds just the ticket.”

“But only if you can keep a secret. Can you?”

“Mum's the absolute word,” Barbara vowed.

During this exchange, Azhar had been regarding her. His professional field was microbiology, and Barbara was beginning to feel like one of his specimens, so intense was his scrutiny. Despite their conversation of the previous night and the conclusion he'd reached upon seeing her manner of dress, he'd witnessed her setting off in her normal work togs long enough to know that the alteration in her get-up had a significance beyond a woman's fancying a fashion make-over. He said, “How content you must be, on a case again. After the weeks of idleness, it's always gratifying to engage one's mind, isn't it?”

“It's definitely the cat's jim-jams.” Barbara dropped her cigarette to the ground and crushed it out, kicking the dog end into the flower bed. “Biodegradable,” she said to Hadiyyah, who was obviously about to reprimand her. “Aerates the soil. Feeds the worms.” She settled the strap of her bag more comfortably on her shoulder. “Well. I'm off. Keep that toffee apple fresh for me, okay?”

“Maybe we can watch a video as well.”

“No damsels in distress though. Let's do The Avengers. Mrs. Peel's my idol. I like a woman who can show off her legs and kick gentlemen's bottoms simultaneously.”

Hadiyyah giggled.

Barbara nodded her goodbye. She was on the pavement, making her escape when Azhar spoke again. “Is Scotland Yard undergoing a reduction in force, Barbara?”

She stopped, puzzled, and answered without thinking of the intent behind the question. “Good grief, no. What made you ask that?”

“Autumn, perhaps,” he said. “And the changes it brings.”

“Ah.” She sidestepped the implication behind the word changes. She avoided his eyes. She took the statement at its most superficial and dealt with it accordingly. “The bad guys want nabbing no matter the season. You know the wicked. They never rest.” She smiled brightly and went on her way. As long as he never confronted her directly with the word constable, she knew that she wouldn't have to explain to him how it had come to be attached to her name. She wanted to avoid that explanation as long as possible, forever if she could, because explaining to Azhar ran the risk of wounding him. And for reasons she didn't care to speculate upon, wounding Azhar was unthinkable to her.

Now, in the stairwell of New Scotland Yard, Barbara strove to put the thought of her neighbours out of her mind. That's all they were at the end of the day anyway: a man and a child whom she had come to know by chance.

She glanced at her watch. It was half past ten. She groaned. The thought of six or eight more hours staring at a computer screen was less than exciting. There had to be a more economical way to delve into DI Maiden's professional history. She tossed round several possibilities and decided to try the most likely one.

In her perusal of the files, she'd come across the same name time and again: DCI Dennis Hextell, with whom Maiden had worked in partnership as an undercover cop. If she could locate Hextell, she thought, he might be able to put her onto a lead that was stronger than something she would have to interpret from reading twenty years of files. That was the ticket, she decided: Hextell. She shoved herself off the stairs and went in search of him.

It turned out to be easier than she had anticipated. A phone call to SO 10 gained her the information that DCI Hextell was still in the department, although now, as detective chief superintendent he directed operations instead of taking part in them on the street.

Barbara found him at a small table in the cafeteria on the fourth floor. She introduced herself, asking if she could join him. The DCS looked up from a set of photographs. His face, Barbara saw, wasn't so much lined as it was gouged, and gravity had taken its toll on his muscles. The years certainly hadn't been good to him.

The chief superintendent gathered his photographs together and didn't answer. Barbara said helpfully, “I'm working on the Maiden killing in Derbyshire, sir. Andy Maiden's daughter. You were a team with him, right?”

That got a response. “Sit.”

She could live with monosyllables. Barbara did his bidding. She'd fetched herself a Coke and a chocolate donut from the cafeteria, and she set these down on the table in front of her.

“Rot your teeth, that,” Hextell noted with a nod.

“I'm a victim of my addictions.”

He grunted.

“That your plane?” Barbara asked with a nod at the picture on the top of his stack. It featured a yellow bi-plane of the sort that had been flown in World War I when aviators wore leather helmets and flowing white scarves.

“One of them,” he said. “The one I use for aerobatics.”

“Stunt pilot, are you?”

“I fly.”

“Oh. Right. Must be nice.” Barbara wondered if the years undercover had made the man so loquacious. She launched into the purpose behind tracking him down: Was there any case, any stake-out, any operation that leapt to mind as being particularly important in the history of his association with Andy Maiden? “We're looking at revenge as a possible motive for the girl's murder, someone that you and DI Maiden put away, someone wanting to settle the score. Maidens trying to come up with a name on his own in Derbyshire, and I've been scrolling through the reports all morning on the computer. But nothings ringing my chimes.”

Hextell began separating his pictures. He appeared to have a system for doing so, but Barbara couldn't tell what it was since each shot was of exactly the same plane, just of varying angles: the fuselage here, the struts there, the wing tip, the engine, and the tail. When the piles were arranged to his liking, he took a magnifying glass from his jacket pocket and began studying each photograph under it. “Could be anyone. We were rubbing elbows with first class rot. Pushers, addicts, pimps, gun runners. You name it. Any one of them would have walked the length of the country to rub us out.”

“But no one's name comes to mind?”

“I've survived by putting their names behind me. Andy was the one who couldn't.”

“Survive?”

“Forget.” Hextell separated one picture from the rest. It documented the plane head-on, its body truncated by the angle. He applied his magnifying glass to every inch of it, squinting like a jeweller with a diamond in question.

“Is that why he left? He was out of here on early retirement, I've heard.”

Hextell looked up. “Who's being investigated here?”

Barbara hastened to reassure him. “I'm just trying to get a feeling for the man. If there's something you can tell me that'll help…” She made a that-would-be-great gesture and gave her enthusiasm to her chocolate donut.

The DCS set down his magnifying glass and folded his hands over it. He said, “Andy went out on a medical. He was losing his nerves.”

“He had a nervous breakdown?”

Hextell blew out a derisive breath. “Not stress, woman. Nerves. Real nerves. Sense of smell went first. Taste went next, then touch.

He coped well enough, but then it was his vision. And that was the end of him. He had to get out.”

“Bloody hell. He went blind?”

“Would have done, no doubt. But once he retired, it all came back. Feeling, vision, the lot.”

“So what'd been wrong with him?”

Hextell looked at her long and hard before answering. Then he raised his index and middle fingers and tapped them lightly against his skull. “Couldn't cope with the game. Undercover takes it out of you. I lost four wives. He lost nerves. Some things can't be replaced.”

“He didn't have wife problems?”

“Like I said. It was the game. Some blokes keep their peckers up fine when they're pretending to be someone they're not. But for Andy, that's not how it was. The lies he had to tell out there… Keeping mum about a case till it was long over… It knocked the stuffing out of him.”

“So there was no one case-one big case, perhaps-that cost him more than the others?”