In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“She was whelping,” Samantha said. “You don't leave a dog alone when she's whelping.”

“You were here as well, Miss McCallin?” Lynley asked. “Helping out with the delivery?”

She caught her lower lip with her teeth. “It was in the middle of the night. Julie didn't get me up. I saw the puppies in the morning.”

“I see.”

“No, you don't!” she cried. “You think Julie's involved. You've come to trick him into saying something that will implicate him. That's how you work.”

“We work at getting to the truth.”

“Oh right. Tell that to the Bridgewater Four. Only it's three now, isn't it? Because one of those poor sods died in prison. Call a solicitor, Julie. Don't say another word.”

Julian Britton in possession of a solicitor was exactly what they didn't need at the moment. Lynley said, “You appear to keep records about the dogs, Mr. Britton. Did you record the time of delivery?”

“They don't all pop out at once, Inspector,” Samantha said.

Julian said, “Cass went into labour round nine at night. She began delivering round midnight. There were six puppies-one was stillborn-so it took several hours. If you want the exact times, I have them in the records. Sam can fetch the book.”

She went to do so. When she returned, Julian said to her, “Thanks. I'm nearly finished in here. You've been a real help. I'll manage the rest.”

Obviously, he was dismissing her. She appeared to communicate something to him through eye contact only. Whatever it was, he either couldn't or didn't want to receive the message. She cast a moderately baleful look at Lynley and Hanken before she left them. The sound of the dogs barking outside rose, then fell as she opened and closed the door behind her.

“She means well,” Julian told them when she was gone. “I don't know what I'd do without her. Trying to put the whole manor back together… It's a hell of a job. Sometimes I wonder why I took it on.”

“Why did you?” Lynley asked.

“There've been Brittons here for hundreds of years. My dream is to keep them here for a few hundred more.”

“Nicola Maiden was part of that dream?”

“In my mind, yes. In her mind, no. She had her own dreams. Or plans. Or whatever they were. But that's fairly obvious, isn't it?”

“She told you about them?”

“All she told me was that she didn't share mine. She knew I couldn't offer her what she wanted. Not at the moment and probably never. She thought it was the wiser course to leave our relationship the way it was.”

“Which was what?”

“We were lovers, if that's what you're asking.”

“In the normal sense?” Hanken asked.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“The girl was shaved. It suggests… a certain sexual whimsicality to the relationship you had with her.”

Ugly colour flared in Julian's face. “She was quirky. She waxed herself. She had some body piercings done as well. Her tongue. Her navel. Her nipples. Her nose. That's just who she was.”

She didn't sound like a woman who'd be the prospective bride of the impoverished landed gentry. Lynley wondered how Julian Britton had come to think of her as such.

Britton, however, appeared to read the direction Lynley's thoughts were taking. He said, “It doesn't mean anything, all that. She just was who she was. Women are like that these days. At least women her age. As you're from London, I'd expect you know that already.”

It was true that one saw just about everything on the streets of London. It would be a myopic investigator who judged any woman under thirty-or over thirty for that matter-on the basis of waxing herself hairless or allowing holes to be needled into her body. But all the same, Lynley wondered at the nature of Julian's comments. There was an eagerness to them that wanted probing.

“That's all I can tell you.” Having made that remark, Julian opened the record book that his cousin had brought to him. He flipped to a section behind a blue divider and turned several pages until he found the one he wanted. He turned the book round so that Lynley and Hanken could see it. The page was labelled Cass in large block letters. Beneath her name were documented the times of each puppy's delivery as well as the times that parturition had begun and ended.

They thanked him for the information and left him to continue his work with the harriers. Outside, it was Lynley who spoke first.

“Those times were written in pencil, Peter, the lot of them.”

“I noticed.” Hanken nodded in the direction of the manor house, saying, “Make quite a team, don't they? ‘Julie’ and his cousin.”

Lynley agreed. He just wondered what game the team was playing.

CHAPTER 8

Barbara Havers was relieved to be able to leave the claustrophobic confines of the Met headquarters. Once Winston Nkata requested that she get onto the Battersea address of Terry Cole, she wasted little time in dashing for her car. She took the most direct route possible, heading for the river, where she followed the Embankment to Albert Bridge. On the south bank of the Thames she consulted her battered A to Z until she found the street she was looking for sandwiched between the two Bridge Roads: Battersea and Albert.

Terry Cole's digs were in a forest-green brick-and-bay-windowed conversion set among other similar conversions in Anhalt Road. A line of buzzers indicated that there were four flats in the building, and Barbara pressed the one that had Cole/Thompson taped next to it. She waited, glancing round at the neighbourhood. Terraced houses, some in better condition than others, were fronted by gardens. Some were neatly planted, some were overgrown, and more than one appeared to be used as a dumping place for everything from rusting cookers to screenless televisions.

There was no answer from the flat. Barbara frowned and descended the steps. She blew out a breath, not wanting to face another few hours at the computer, and considered her options as she studied the house. A spate of breaking and entering definitely wasn't going to cut the mustard, and she was thinking about a retreat to the nearest pub for a heaped plate of bangers and mash, when she noticed a curtain flick in the bay window of the ground floor flat. She decided to have a go at the neighbours.

Next to flat number one was the name Baden. Barbara pressed the buzzer. A tremulous voice came through the speaker almost at once in reply, as if the person in the corresponding flat had been preparing for a visit from the law. Once Barbara identified herself-and cooperatively held up her warrant card so that it could be observed at a distance through the ground floor window-the lock on the door was released. She pushed it open and found herself inside a vestibule that was the approximate size of a chess board. It was chess board in decoration as well: red and black tiles across which innumerable footprints were smudged.

Flat number one opened to the right of the vestibule. When Barbara knocked, she found that she had to go through the procedure all over again. She held her warrant card to the peep hole in the door this time. When it had been studied to the occupant's satisfaction, two dead bolts and a safety chain were released and the door opened. Barbara was faced with an elderly woman who said apologetically, “One can't be too careful these days, I'm afraid.”

She introduced herself as Mrs. Geoffrey Baden and quickly brought Barbara up to speed on the particulars of her life without being asked. Twenty years a widow, she had no children, just her birds-finches, whose enormous cage occupied one complete side of the sitting room-and her music, the source of which seemed to be a piano that occupied the other side. This was an antique upright and its top held several dozen framed pictures of the late Geoffrey while its music rack displayed enough hand-scored sheet music to suggest that Mrs. Baden might be channelling Mozart in her free afternoons.

Mrs. Baden herself suffered from tremors. They affected her hands and her head, which shook subtly but