In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“You bloody outrageous-”

“It's a nasty world,” Nkata cut in solemnly.

She glared at both of them.

The telephone rang and she jumped to answer it. She said, “What's your pleasure…?” into the receiver.

Nkata looked heavenward.

Vi said, “Hang on. Let me check my book,” and she flipped through the pages of an engagement diary. “Sorry. I can't manage that. Someone's already booked…” She ran her finger down the page, saying, “I could do four o'clock… How long a session…?” She listened, then murmured, “Don't I always leave you fit for her afterwards?” And she jotted a reference into her diary. She rang off, stood with her fingers on the telephone as if in thought, her back to them. She sighed and said, “All right, then,” quietly. She went into the kitchen and returned with an envelope, which she handed over to Lynley.

“This is what you want. I hope it doesn't break your heart to be completely wrong about the punters.”

The envelope had already been unsealed. Lynley slid out its contents: one piece of paper and a single message, assembled from letters that appeared to come from glossy magazines, TWO BITCHES WILL DIE

IN THERE OWN PUKE. THEY'LL BEG FOR MERSEY AND GET NOTHING BUT PAIN. After reading it, Lynley handed the note to Nkata. The DC looked it over, then raised his head.

“Same as the others left at the scene.”

Lynley nodded. He told Vi Nevin about the anonymous notes that had been left at the murder site.

“I sent them to her,” she said.

Puzzled, Lynley turned over the envelope and saw it was addressed to Vi Nevin, with a local postmark. “But this appears identical to those.”

She said, “I don't mean I sent them to her like this. Without a name. Like a threat. I mean they came to me. Here. At home. They've been coming all summer long. I kept telling Nikki about them when we talked on the phone, but she just laughed them off. So I finally sent them up to her with Terry because I wanted her to see for herself that the situation was escalating and we both needed to start taking some care. Which,” she added bitterly, “Nikki didn't do. God, why wouldn't she ever listen?”

Lynley took the note back from Nkata. He examined it again, then carefully refolded and stowed it into its envelope. He said, “Perhaps you'd better start from the beginning.”

“Shelly Platt's the beginning” was her reply.

Vi went to the window, which overlooked the street. She looked down, as if expecting to see someone below. She said, “We were friends. It was always Shelly and Vi and it had been for years. But then Nikki came along, and I could see it made more sense to set myself up with her. Shelly couldn't cope with that, and she started causing trouble. I knew…” Her voice quavered. She halted. Then, “I knew she'd do something eventually. But Nikki never believed me. She just kept laughing it off.”

“It?”

“The letters. And the calls. We hadn't been in this place”-with her hand she indicated the maisonette-“two days before Shelly got her hands on the phone number and started ringing. And then sending letters. And then turning up in the street. And then pinching the cards…” Vi went to the drinks trolley. An ice bucket stood on it. She lifted this, and from beneath it she took a small stack of postcards. “She said she'd destroy us. She's a nasty little jealous-” She drew a quick breath. “She's jealous.”

The cards were the same schoolgirl advertisements that Lynley had already seen except that each had been defaced, with various sexually transmitted diseases scrawled upon it in bright felt pen.

“Terry found those when he was making his regular rounds of the boxes,” Vi said. “It was Shelly who did it, up to her tricks. She won't be happy till I'm ruined.”

“Tell us about Shelly Platt,” Lynley said.

“She was my maid. We met in C'est la Vie. Do you know it? It's a French bakery and caff over by South Ken Station. I had what you might call an arrangement there with the head baker-baguettes, quiches, and tarts in exchange for a few liberties in the gents’ loo-and Shelly was there one morning shoveling chocolate croissants into her mouth when Alf and I went below stairs. She saw him give me the food afterwards without taking any money, and she got interested in what was going on.”

“In order to blackmail you?”

Vi looked grimly amused by the question. “She wanted to know what she had to do to get her croissants for nothing. Plus, she liked the way I dress-I was doing a Mary Quant that morning-and she wanted a bit of that as well.”

“Your clothes?”

“My whole life, as things turned out.”

“I see. And as your maid, with access to your belongings-”

Vi laughed. At the drinks trolley, she took two cubes of ice from the bucket and a small tin of tomato juice from the bottom shelf. She deftly mixed herself a bloody Mary with the precision of long experience. “She wasn't that kind of maid, Inspector. She was the other kind. She took phone calls from punters and booked their appointments for me.” Vi stirred her drink with a glass rod surmounted by a bright green parrot. She set this neatly on a cocktail napkin and returned to the sofa, where she placed the glass on the coffee table and continued her explanation. She'd been employing a middle-aged Filipino woman to book her clients prior to meeting Shelly Platt in C'est la Vie. But everyone employed middle-aged Filipino women as their maids these days, so she thought it might be an added interest to have a teenager acting the part instead. Fixed up, Shelly wouldn't look half bad. And, more important, she was so ignorant of the ways of the profession that Vi knew she would be able to pay her a pittance. “I gave her room, board, and thirty pounds a week,” Vi told them. “And believe me, that's more than she was getting doing knee tremblers outside Earl's Court Station, which was how she was supporting herself when I met her.”

They were together for nearly three years, she went on. But then Vi met Nikki Maiden and saw how much more was possible if the two of them set up a business together. “We kept Shelly with us at first. But she hated Nikki because with her there, it wasn't just the two of us any longer. That's the way Shelly is, although I didn't know it when I first took her on.”

“‘The way she is?’”

“She gets her hooks into people and thinks she owns them. I should have seen it when she first talked about what had gone on with her boyfriend. She followed him to London from Liverpool, and when she got here and found out he didn't want to be her boyfriend any longer, she started her routine: following him everywhere, phoning him constantly, hanging round his flat, sending him letters, bringing him presents. Only I didn't know it was her routine, you see. I thought it was a one-off: her reaction to her first love not working out.” She took a stiff gulp of her drink. “Right bloody fool I was.”

“She did the same to you?”

“I should have seen, obviously. Stan-this was her boyfriend-came to the flat after she'd cut up his car tyres. He was all in a rage, and he must have thought he'd straighten her out. But he was the one who got straightened out.”

“How?”

“She cut him open with a butcher knife.”

Nkata glanced Lynley's way. Lynley nodded. A killer did generally have a favourite weapon. But why kill Nicola if Shelly's object was Vi? And why wait so many months to do it?

Vi seemed to recognise Lynley's unspoken questions. She said, “She didn't know where Nikki was. But she did know Terry was thick with her. If she followed him, it was only a matter of time before he led Shelly right to her.” She tossed down more of the drink, picking up a napkin to dab against the corner of her mouth. “Murdering little bitch,” she said quietly “I hope she rots.”

“‘This bitch has had it,’” Lynley murmured, now knowing the source of the note that had been found in Nicola Maiden's pocket. He said, “We'll need her address, if you have it. And we'll also need a list of Nicola's clients.”

“This isn't about clients. I've just told you that.”

“You have. But we've also been told that there was a man in London with whom Nicola had a relationship that was more than you'd expect between a client and…” He looked for a euphemism.

“His evening's companion,” Nkata supplied.

“And we may well find him among the men she serviced regularly,” Lynley finished.

“Well, if there was someone, I don't know about him,” Vi said.