In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“Are you certain it was Britton who paged her?”

“Who else? She talked to him as she talked to me. The way one talks to a lover. And he was her lover. Not the same as I, of course, but still her lover.”

Lynley set that area of discussion aside. “Did she always have the pager with her? Or did she have it only when she was away from the Hall?”

She always had it as far as he knew, Ferrer answered. She wore it tucked into the waistband of her trousers or her skirt or her hiking shorts. Why? he wanted to know. Was the pager of some importance in the inspector's investigation?

That, Lynley thought, was indeed the question.

Nan Maiden watched them. She'd moved from the office to the first floor corridor, where a bank of windows lined the wall. She stood in the embrasure of one of these windows, someone studying the moonlight striking the trees should any of the residents happen to see her. Nervously, she fingered the tie-back of the heavy curtains. It caught on the bitten skin round her nails. She watched the two men below in conversation, and she fought the desire-the impulse, the need-to run down the stairs with an excuse to join them, to offer explanations and to argue fine points of her daughter's character that might be misconstrued.

“Look, Mum,” Nicola had said, all of twenty years old with the Frenchman's scent clinging to her like the aftertaste of wine gone bad, “I know what I'm doing. I'm quite of an age to know my own mind, and if I want to fuck a bloke old enough to be my dad, then I'm going to fuck him. It's no one's business but my own and it isn't hurting a soul. So why're you in a state about it?” And she'd gazed at Nan with those clear blue eyes, so frank and open and reasonable. She'd unbuttoned her shirt and stepped out of her shorts, dropping bra and knickers on top of them. As she passed her mother and stepped into the tub, Ferrer's scent grew stronger, and Nan choked upon it. Nicola lowered herself into the water, sinking up to her shoulders so that it completely covered her teacup breasts. But not before Nan saw the marks of his teeth. And not before Nicola saw her see them. She said, “He likes it that way, Mummy. Rough. But he doesn't actually hurt me. And anyway, I do the same to him. Everything's okay. You're not to worry.”

Nan said, “Worry? I didn't bring you up to-”

“Mum.” She'd lifted the sponge from the tray and dipped it into the water. The room was steamy and Nan sat on the toilet lid. She felt dizzy and caught in a world gone mad. “You brought me up fine,” Nicola said. “And this isn't about how you brought me up anyway. He's sexy and he's fun and I like to fuck him. There's no need to make an issue out of something that isn't an issue for either one of us.”

“He's married. You know that. He can't offer you marriage. He wants you for… Can't you see it's only sex to him? Free sex without the slightest obligation? Can't you see you're his toy? His little English plaything?”

“It's only sex to me as well,” Nicola said frankly. She brightened as if she suddenly realised why her mother was harbouring such concerns. “Mum! Were you thinking I love him? That I want to marry him or something like that? Lord, no, Mum. I promise you. I just like the way he makes me feel.”

“And when the happiness of being with him makes you long for more and you're not able to have it?”

Nicola picked up her gel soap and applied it to the sponge, dribbling it out like custard over a cake. She looked confused for a moment, then her expression cleared and she said, “I don't mean that kind of feel, that heart kind of feel. I mean physically. The way he makes my body feel. That's all. I like what he does and how I feel when he does it. That's what I want from him and that's what he gives me.”

“Sex.”

“Right. He's quite good, you know.” She'd cocked her head, given an impish grin, and winked at her mother. “Or do you know already? Have you had him as well?”

“Nicola!”

She squirmed in the water and hung her head appealingly on the side of the tub. “Mum, it's okay. I wouldn't tell Dad. God, have you done it with him? I mean when I'm away at college, he must need someone else to… Come on. Tell me.”

Nan had longed to strike her, to mark the lovely elfin face as Christian-Louis had marked the lithe young body. She wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake until her teeth rattled in her head and pebbled from her mouth into the water. She wasn't supposed to be like this. Confronted by her mother with the accusation, she was supposed to deny, to break down when the evidence was presented, to plea for forgiveness, and to ask for understanding. But the last thing she was supposed to do was to confirm her mother's worst suspicions with the same ease that might have gone into answering a question about what she'd eaten for breakfast.

“Sorry,” Nicola said when her mother didn't reply to her light-hearted questions. “It's different for you. I can see that. I shouldn't have intruded. I'm sorry, Mum.”

She'd taken a razor from the bathtub tray and she was applying this to her right leg. It was deeply tanned and long, with a well-shaped calve and muscles taut from hiking. Nan watched her run it along her flesh. She waited for a nick, for a scrape, for the blood. None came.

She said, “What are you, exactly? What do I call you? A scrubber? A slag? A common tart?”

The words didn't wound. They didn't even touch. Nicola set down the razor and gazed at her. “I'm Nicola,” she said. “The daughter who loves you very much, Mummy.”

“Don't say that. If you loved me, you wouldn't be-”

“Mum, I made a decision to do this. Eyes wide open and knowing all the facts. I didn't make the decision to hurt you. I made it because I wanted him. And when this ends-because all things do-how I'll feel is my responsibility. If I'm hurt, I'm hurt. If I'm not, I'm not. I'm sorry you found out about it, because obviously it's upset you. But I'd like you to know that we did try to be discreet.”

The voice of reason, her lovely daughter. Nicola was who Nicola was. She called aces as she saw them and spades the same. And as Nan saw her so vividly-a spectral figure whose image seemed to form on the glass panes of the window at which her mother now stood-she tried not to think, let alone to believe that the girl's forthright honesty was what had killed her.

Nan had never understood her daughter, and she saw that now more clearly than she had done in all the years she'd waited for Nicola to emerge from the chrysalis of her troubled adolescence, fully formed as an adult made in the image and likeness of her progenitors. Thinking of her child, Nan felt settle upon her shoulders the mantle of a failure so profound that she wondered how she would ever be able to continue living. That she had produced such a daughter from her own body… that the years of self-sacrifice had brought her to this moment… that the cooking and cleaning and washing and ironing and worrying and planning and giving giving giving had resulted in her feeling like a starfish taken from the ocean and left to dry-and to rot-too far from the water to save herself… that the sweaters knitted and the temperatures taken and the scraped knees bandaged and the little shoes polished and the clothes kept neat and fresh and sweet had ultimately counted for nothing in the eyes of the single person for whom she lived and breathed… It was too much to bear.

She'd given the effort of motherhood everything she possessed, and she'd failed entirely, teaching her daughter nothing of substance. Nicola was who Nicola was.

Nan was only grateful that her own mother had died during Nicola's childhood. She would never have to see how Nan had failed where her female forebears had known nothing but success. Nan herself was the embodiment of her mother's values. Born into a time of terrible strife, she'd been schooled in the disciplines of poverty, suffering, generosity, and duty. In war, one did not seek to gratify the self. The self was secondary to the Cause. One's home became a haven for convalescing soldiers. One's food and clothing-and, dear God, even the gifts one received at an eighth-year birthday party when the little attendants had been told in advance that the guest of honour had no wants in comparison with what the dear soldiers needed-were gently but firmly removed from one's grasp and passed on to hands worthier than her own. It was a hard time, but it created her mettle on its forge. She had character as a result. This was what she should have passed to her daughter.

Nan had moulded herself in her own mother's image, and her reward had been a cool, unspoken but nonetheless treasured approval communicated by a single nod of the regal head. She'd lived for that nod. It said, “Children learn from their parents, and you have learned to perfection, Nancy.”

Parents gave their children's world both order and meaning. Children learned who they were-and how to be-at their parents' knees. So what had Nicola seen in her parents that resulted in who and what she had become?

Nan didn't want to answer that question. It brought her face-to-face with ghouls that she didn't wish to