In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

the moment, she explained hastily, unhooking the hat's elastic strap from her chin and removing the cone from her head. Her daughter was this very evening celebrating the happy negotiation of five years among her fellow men. Was there something wrong in the neighbourhood? Not a burglary, she hoped. And she glanced past them anxiously, as if breaking and entering in the Boltons were a daily occurrence that she might inadvertently encourage by holding the front door open for longer than necessary.

They were there to see Sir Adrian, Lynley explained. And no, their visit had nothing to do with the neighbourhood and its vulnerability to professional thieves.

Margaret Beattie said doubtfully, “I see,” and admitted them into the house. She said that if they'd wait in her father's study upstairs, she would fetch the man himself. “I hope it won't take too long, what you've come to see him about,” she said with the sort of gentle smiling insistence a well-bred woman always uses to imply what she wants without stating it directly. “Molly's his favourite grandchild and he's told her she can have him all to herself tonight. He's promised to read her a whole chapter of Peter Pan. He asked her what she wanted for her birthday, and that was it. Remarkable, don't you think?”

“Quite.”

Obviously pleased, Margaret Beattie beamed, directed them to the study, and went seeking her father.

Sir Adrian's study was on the first floor of the house, at the top of a wide staircase. Decorated with burgundy leather armchairs and fitted with forest-green carpet, the room contained a plethora of volumes from the medical to the mundane, and it acted as a silent testimony to the two disparate aspects of Sir Adrian's life. The professional side was represented by medallions, certificates, awards, and mementos as diverse as antique surgical instruments and centuries-old engravings of the human heart. The personal side showed itself in dozens of photographs. They stood everywhere-on the mantelpiece, tucked into random spaces in the bookshelves, lined up like dancers ready to high kick across the top of the desk. Their subjects were the doctor's family: on holiday, at home, at school, and through the years. Lynley picked up one picture and examined it as Nkata bent to scrutinise the antique instruments that were arranged on the top of a dwarf break-front bookcase.

The doctor had four children, it seemed. In the picture Lynley held, Beattie posed among them and among their spouses, a proud paterfamilias with his wife standing next to him and eleven grandchildren clustered about him like tiny beads of oil round a larger central drop that seeks to absorb them. The occasion of the photograph had been a Christmas celebration, with each of the children holding a gift and Beattie himself decked out as Father Christmas sans beard. Everyone in the picture was either smiling or laughing, and Lynley wondered how their expressions would have read should Sir Adrian's liasion with a dominatrix have become public-or even familial-knowledge.

“Detective Inspector Lynley?”

Lynley swung round at the sound of the pleasant tenor. It should have been voiced by a younger man, but it came from the rotund surgeon himself, who stood in the doorway, a papier mache captain's hat on his head and a flute of champagne in his hand. He said, “We're about to toast our little Molly. She's going to open her presents. Can this wait another hour?”

“I'm afraid not.” Lynley replaced the photograph and introduced Nkata, who reached in his jacket pocket for his notebook and pencil.

Beattie saw this with apparent consternation. He entered the room and shut the door behind him. “Is this a professional call? Has something happened? My family…” He looked in the direction from which he had come and dismissed whatever it was that he'd intended to say. Bearing bad news about a member of his family could not be the reason that the police had come calling. His family members were all in his house.

“A young woman called Nicola Maiden was murdered in Derbyshire on Tuesday night,” Lynley told the surgeon.

In reply, Beattie was stillness itself, waiting incarnate. His eyes were on Lynley. His surgeon's hands-an old man's hands that still looked as nimble as the hands of a man three decades younger-neither trembled, grasped the glass more tightly, nor moved in any visible way. His glance went to Nkata, dropping to the little leather notebook in the DCs big palm, then back to Lynley.

Lynley said, “You knew Nicola Maiden, didn't you, Sir Adrian? Although perhaps you knew her by her professional name only: Nikki Temptation.”

Beattie advanced across the carpet and set his champagne glass upon the desk with studied care. He placed himself behind the desk in a high-back chair and canted his head at the leather armchairs. He finally said, “Please sit, Inspector. You as well, Constable.” And when they had done so, he went on with “I've not seen a paper. What happened to her, please?”

It was the sort of question that a man who was used to being in charge might have asked of a subordinate. In reply, however, Lynley sought to communicate which of them would be controlling the direction of the conversation. He said evenly, “You did know Nicola Maiden, then.”

Beattie's fingers folded round each other. Two of them, Lynley saw, had nails that were blackened, both of them deformed by some sort of fungus that apparently grew rampant beneath them. It was a disconcerting sight in a man of medicine, and Lynley wondered that Beattie didn't do something about it.

“Yes. I knew Nicola Maiden,” Beattie said.

“Tell us about your relationship.”

Behind gold-framed spectacles, the eyes were wary. “Am I a suspect?”

“Everyone who knew her is a suspect.”

“You said Tuesday night.”

“I did say that, yes.”

“I was here on Tuesday night.”

“In this house?”

“Not here. But in London. At my club in St. James's. Shall I arrange for corroboration, Inspector? That's the word I want, isn't it? Corroboration”

Lynley said, “Tell us about Nicola. When did you see her last?”

Beattie reached for his champagne and drank. To gain time, to still nerves. It was impossible to tell. “The morning of the day before she left for the North.”

“This would be last June?” Nkata asked. And when Beattie nodded, Nkata added, “In Islington?”

“Islington?” Beattie frowned. “No. Here. She came to the house. She always came to the house when I… when I needed her.”

“Your relationship was sexual, then,” Lynley said. “You were one of her clients.”

Beattie turned his head away from Lynley, looking towards the mantelpiece with its copious display of family photos. “I expect you know the answer to that question. You'd hardly have come calling on a Saturday evening had you not been told exactly where I fitted in Nikki's life. So, yes, I was one of her clients, if that's what you'd like to call it.”

“What would you call it?”

“We had a mutually beneficial arrangement. She provided an indispensable service. I paid her generously for it.”

“You're a man with a high public profile,” Lynley pointed out. “You've a successful career, a wife and children, grandchildren, and all the external trappings of a fortunate life.”

“I've all the internal trappings as well,” Beattie said. “It is a fortunate life. So why would I risk losing it by having a liaison with a common prostitute? That's what you want to know, isn't it? But that's just the point, you see, Inspector Lynley. Nikki wasn't common in any way.”

Music started somewhere in the house, a furious and proficient playing on a piano. Chopin, it sounded like. Then the tune broke off abruptly amid some shouting, to be replaced by a spritely Cole Porter piece that was accompanied by exuberant voices not bothering to aim for the appropriate key. “‘Call me irreSPONsible, call me unreLIable,’” the group partly howled, partly laughed, partly sang. Much guffawing and good-natured derision followed this: the happy family in celebration.

“So I'm learning,” Lynley agreed. “You're not the first person to mention the fact that she was a cut above the ordinary. But actually, why you were willing to risk everything with an affair-”

“That's not what it was.”

“With an arrangement, then. Why you'd risk everything for that isn't what I want to know. I'm more interested in discovering exactly what you'd be willing to do to safeguard what you have-these external and internal trappings