In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“It didn't rain Tuesday night, did it?” Nan Maiden's question was non-sequiturial. They all knew that anyone who hiked on the moors had to be prepared for swift changes in weather.

Andy spent the longest time with the implements from the camp site: the compass, the stove, the pot, the map case, the trowel. His forehead creased as he examined everything. Then he finally said, “Her pocket knife's missing as well.”

It was a Swiss Army knife that had been his own, he told them. He'd given it to Nick as a gift one Christmas when her fancy for hiking and camping had first developed. She'd always kept it with the rest of her gear. And she'd always taken it when she went into the Peaks.

Lynley felt rather than saw Hanken looking his way He reflected on what the fact of a missing knife might do to their conjecture. He said, “You're sure of that, Andy?”

“She could've lost it,” Maiden replied. “But she would have replaced it with another before camping again.” His daughter was an experienced hiker, he explained. Nick didn't take chances on the moors or in the Peaks. She never went out without being prepared. “Who would try to camp without a knife?”

Hanken asked for a description. Maiden gave him the particulars, listing the features of a multi-use utensil. The largest blade was about three inches, he said.

When the dead girl's parents had completed their task, Hanken asked Stewart to provide them with a cup of tea. He turned to Lynley once the door was shut upon them. “Are you thinking my thinking?” he asked.

“The blade length matches Dr. Myles' conclusions about the weapon used on Cole.” Lynley stared thoughtfully at the items on the table and pondered the spanner that Andy Maiden had inadvertently thrown into the works of his theory. “It could be a coincidence, Peter. She could have lost it earlier that day.”

“But if she didn't, you know what it means.”

“We have a killer on the moors, tracking Nicola Maiden, and for some reason tracking her without a weapon.”

“Which means-”

“No premeditation. A chance encounter in which things got out of hand.”

Hanken blew out a breath. “Where the hell does that take us?”

“To some serious rethinking,” Lynley said.

CHAPTER 13

The night sky was awash with stars when Lynley stepped from the entrance porch of Maiden Hall. And because he'd loved the night sky as a boy in Cornwall where, like the sky in Derbyshire, he could see, study, and name the constellations with an ease that was impossible in London, he paused next to the weather-pitted stone pillar marking the edge of the car park and looked to the heavens. He was seeking an answer to what everything meant.

“There must be a mistake with their records,” Nan Maiden had told him with quiet insistence. She was hollow- eyed, as if the last thirty-six hours had dragged from her a life force that would never be replaced. “Nicola wouldn't have left law college. And she certainly wouldn't have left law college without telling us. That wasn't her way. She loved the law. Besides, she'd spent the whole summer working for Will Upman. So why on earth would she have done that if she dropped out of college in… did you say it was May?”

Lynley had driven them home from Buxton and had followed them into the Hall for a final conversation. Because the lounge was still occupied by hotel residents and diners enjoying postprandial coffees, brandy, and chocolates, they'd repaired to an office next to the reception desk. It was overcrowded with the three of them, a room meant for one person who would work at a computer behind a desk. A fax machine was disgorging a lengthy message when they walked in. Andy Maiden glanced at this, and placed the message into a tray that bore a neat sign declaring it to be the repository of reservations.

Neither of the Maidens had known of their daughter's leaving the College of Law. Neither had known that she had moved house to take up residence in Fulham with a young woman called Vi Nevin, whose name Nicola had never mentioned. Neither had known that she'd gone to work full-time at MKR Financial Management. Which went far to put a significant dent in Nan Maiden's earlier assertion that her daughter had been the incarnation of honesty.

Andy Maiden had been silent in response to the revelations. But he looked beaten, as if each new piece of knowledge about his daughter was a blow to his psyche. While his wife sought to explain away the inconsistencies in their daughter's actions, he merely seemed to be attempting to absorb them while minimising the additional damage to his heart.

“Perhaps she meant to transfer to a college closer to home.” Nan had sounded pathetically eager to believe her own words. “Isn't there one in Leicester? Or in Lincoln? And as she was engaged to Julian, she might have wanted to be nearer to him.”

Disabusing Nicola's mother of the notion of an engagement to Julian Britton had been a tougher task than Lynley would have thought possible. Nan Maiden's efforts at elucidation ceased entirely when he revealed Britton's misrepresentation of the facts of his relationship with her daughter. She looked stricken, saying only, “They weren't…? But then why…?” before falling silent and turning to her husband as if he were capable of giving her an explanation for the inexplicable.

Thus, Lynley reached the conclusion that it wasn't beyond the realm of reason that the Maidens hadn't known of their daughter's possession of a pager. And when Nan Maiden had proved to be as much in the dark as her husband regarding the little device, Lynley had felt inclined to believe her.

Now, as he stood in the penumbrous space between the softly-lit car park and bright-windowed hotel, Lynley allowed himself a few minutes to ponder in a circumstance in which he also allowed himself a few additional minutes to feel. He'd earlier taken the car keys from

Hanken and said, “Go home to your family, Peter. I'll drive the Maidens back to Padley Gorge,” and it was Hanken, his family, and his words earlier that day that Lynley considered as he remained by the pillar. The DI had said that holding in his arms an infant-one's own child and creation-changed a man irrevocably He'd said that the pain of losing that child was something beyond his contemplation. What, then, did a man like Andy Maiden feel at this moment: the fabric of him altered so many years ago at his daughter's birth, the substance of him shifting subtly throughout her childhood and adolescence, and the core of him fractured-perhaps irreparably-at her death. And now to pile on top of the loss of her came the additional knowledge that his only child had had secrets from him… How, Lynley wondered, must it feel?

The death of a child, he thought, kills the future and decimates the past, making the former an imprisonment that seems interminable, rendering the latter an unvoiced reproach for every moment robbed of its significance by the calls of a parent's career. One didn't recover from such a death. One just grew more adept at stumbling on.

He glanced back at the Hall and saw the distant form of Andy Maiden leave the little office, cross the entrance, and trudge towards the stairs. The light remained on in the room he departed and in the window of that room Nan Maiden's silhouette appeared. Lynley saw the Maidens’ separateness and wanted to tell them not to bear their grief in solitude from each other. They'd created their daughter Nicola together and they'd bury her together. So why did they have to mourn her alone?

We're all alone, Inspector, Barbara Havers had told him once in a similar case in which two parents had been forced to mourn the death of a child. And believe me, it's only a bloody illusion that we're anything else.

But he didn't want to think of Barbara Havers, of her wisdom or her lack thereof. He wanted to do something to give the Maidens a measure of peace. He told himself that he owed that much, if not to two parents whose suffering was of a kind he hoped never to have to face, then to a former colleague whose service on the force had placed officers like Lynley in his debt. But he also had to admit that he sought to give them peace as a hedge against potential grief in his own future, in the hope that attenuating their present sorrow might prevent him from ever having to experience a similar pain himself.

He couldn't change the basic facts of Nicola's death and the secrets she'd kept from her parents. But he could seek to disprove what information was beginning to look manufactured, wearing the guise of innocent revelation