In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

be. Teddy peered to the right and to the left. He realised with horror where he'd landed. This wasn't a brand-new planet at all. He'd taken himself into Jurassic Park! And what had lightninged by with the fury of hunger driving it was a velociraptor homing in on something for the kill!

Omigod omigod. And he had NOTHING with him. No high-powered rifle, no weapon of any kind. Just a stupid old stick and what good would THAT be against a dinosaur with human flesh on its mind?

He had to hide. One velociraptor didn't exist without another nearby. And two meant twenty. Or a hundred. A thousand!

Omigod! He tore along the road.

A short distance ahead, he saw his safety. A yellow bin stood in the weeds on the verge. He could hide in there till the danger passed.

Whoosh. Whoosh. More 'raptors tore by as Teddy flung his body inside the bin. He lowered himself and brought the lid down.

He'd seen what 'raptors could do to a person, Teddy had. They tore at flesh and sucked out eyeballs and crunched bones like they were McDonald's french fries. And they liked ten-year-old boys the best.

He had to do something. He had to save himself. He crouched within the safety of the bin and tried to come up with a plan.

The bin held the remainder of last year's grit: some six inches of it, left over from the winter when it was used on the road so that car tyres didn't slide on the ice. Teddy could feel the pebbles and shards of it biting into the palms of his hands.

Could he use the grit? Could he make it a weapon? Could he ball it up into a nasty missile that he could throw at the 'raptors and hurt them enough for them to leave him alone? If he did that, he would then have time to-His fingers grabbed on to something hard, something buried three inches into the grit. It was slender and palm-sized and when he dug round it, he was able to free it and to bring it up into the weak light that came through the yellow walls of his hiding place.

Wicked, he thought. What a find. He was saved. It was a knife.

Julian Britton was doing what he always did at the end of a mountain rescue: He was checking his equipment as he put it away. But he wasn't being as thorough or as careful as he usually was when organising and repacking his gear. His thoughts were far away from ropes, boots, picks, hammers, compasses, maps, and everything else they used when someone got lost or someone else got injured and a team was required to find them.

His thoughts were on her. On Nicola. On what had been and what could have been had she only acted the appropriate part in the drama he'd written for their relationship.

“But I love you,” he'd said to her, and even to his own ears the four words had sounded pathetic and stricken.

“And I love you back,” she'd replied kindly. She'd even taken his hand and held it-palm upwards-as if she intended to place something within it. “Only it's not enough, the kind of love I feel for you. And the kind of love you want-and deserve-to have, Jules… well, it isn't the sort of love I'm likely to feel for anyone.”

“But I'm good for you. You've said it enough times over the years. That's enough, isn't it? Can't the other sort of love-the sort you're talking about… can't it grow from there? I mean, we're friends. We're companions. We're… for God's sake we're lovers… And if that doesn't mean we have something special together… Hell. What does?”

She'd sighed. She'd looked out of the car window to the darkness. He could see her reflection in the glass. “Jules, I've become an escort,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

The statement and the question had come out of nowhere, so for a moment he'd thought ridiculously of tour guides, travel escorts who stand at the front of a coach and speak into a microphone as the vehicle lumbers round the countryside with tourists crammed into its seats. “You're traveling?” he'd asked.

“I'm seeing men for money,” she replied. “I spend the evening with them. Sometimes I spend the night. I go to hotels and pick them up and we do what they want. Whatever they want. Then they pay me. They give me two hundred pounds an hour. Fifteen hundred pounds if I sleep in their beds for the night.”

He stared at her. He heard her clearly, but his brain refused to assimilate the information. He said, “I see. You have someone else in London, then.”

She said, “Jules, you're not listening to me.”

“I am. You said-”

“You're hearing. Not listening. Men pay me for companionship.”

“To go out on dates.”

“You could call them dates: dinner, the theatre, a gallery opening or business party when someone wants a nice-looking woman on his arm. They pay me for that. And they pay me for sex as well. And depending on what I do to them when it comes to sex, they pay me quite a lot. More than I would ever have imagined possible for fucking a relative stranger, to be honest with you.”

The words were like bullets. And he reacted as he would have done had she fired a volley through his body. He went into shock. Not the normal sort of shock when one's system has undergone a physical trauma like a motor accident or a fall from a barn roof, but the sort of shock that shatters the psyche so that one can take in only a single detail and that detail is usually the least dangerous to one's peace.

So what he saw was her hair, how the light was behind it, and how it shone through individual strands so that she looked like an earthbound angel. But what she was telling him was far from angelic. It was foul and disgusting. And she continued to tell him, and he continued to die.

“No one forced me into it,” she said as she took a boiled sweet from her bag. “The escort stuff. Or the other. The sex. It was my decision once I saw the possibilities and once I knew how much I had to offer. I started out just having drinks with them. Dinner, sometimes. Or the theatre. All on the up and up, you know: a few hours of conversation and someone to listen, to reply if they wanted, and to look starry-eyed otherwise. But they always asked-every one of them-if I would do more. At first I thought no. I couldn't. I didn't know them, after all. And I always thought… I mean, I couldn't imagine doing it with someone that I didn't actually know. But then one of them asked if he could just touch me. Fifty pounds for putting his hand in my knickers and feeling my bush.” A smile. “When I had a bush back then. Before… You know. So I let him and it wasn't half bad. It was rather funny, in fact. I started laughing-this was inside, not openly, mind you-because it seemed so… just so silly: this bloke-older than my dad, he was-breathing heavy and going all teary-eyed because he had his hand in my crotch. So when he said Touch me back please, I told him that would be fifty pounds more. He said Oh God, anything. So I obliged. One hundred pounds for feeling his willie and letting him poke round my bush with his fingers.”

“Stop.” He'd finally managed the words.

But she was eager to make him understand. They were friends, after all. They'd always been friends. They'd been mates from the moment they'd met in Bakewell: she a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl with an attitude and a strut to her walk that had always said I'm open to anything only he hadn't seen that until this moment, and he nearly three years her senior, home from university for the holidays and consumed with worry about his father's drinking and a house that was falling down round their ears. But Nicola hadn't seen his worries then. She'd seen only an opportunity for some fun. Which she'd taken happily. He understood that now.

“What I'm trying to explain is that it's a way of life that works for me at the moment. It won't always, of course. But it does today. And because it does, I'm grabbing it, Jules. I would be every sort of fool if I didn't.”

“You've gone bloody mad” was his numb assessment. “London's done this to you. You need to come home, Nick. You need to be with friends. You need help.”

She looked at him blankly.

“It's obvious, isn't it? Something's wrong. You can't be in your right mind and be selling your body night after night.”

“Several times a night, frequently.”

He'd clutched at his head. “Jesus, Nick… You need to talk to someone. Let me find a doctor, a psychiatrist. I won't tell anyone why. It'll be our secret. And when you've recovered-”

“Julian.” She drew his hands from his head. “There's nothing wrong with me. If I thought I was having relationships with these men, there'd be something wrong. If I thought I was on the path to true love, there'd be something wrong. If I was trying to avenge a wrong or hurt someone else or live in a fantasy, I'd need to be carted