In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“1 don't always work with the inspector, Azhar. Sometimes we take different parts of a case.”

“Do you.” But she could see he didn't believe the story. Or at least that he thought there was something more to it. “Demotion. And yet there's been no reduction in the force, has there? I believe you told me that earlier, didn't you? And if that's the case, it seems that you must be avoiding a truth. With me, that is. I find myself wondering why.”

“Azhar, I'm not avoiding anything. Hell. We don't exactly live in each other's knickers, do we?” Barbara said, and then found her face blazing with the implication of an intimacy which she hadn't intended. Bloody hell, she thought. Why was conversation with this man such a verbal minefield? “I mean, we don't do a lot of job talk, you and I. We never have done. You teach your classes at the university. I saunter round the Yard and try to look indispensable.”

“Demotion is serious in any profession. And in this case I expect that it comes from your time in Essex, doesn't it? What happened there, Barbara?”

“Whoa. How'd you make that jump?”

He crushed out his cigarette in an ashtray from which at least ten dog ends of Players protruded from the burnt tobacco like burgeoning vegetables. He regarded her. “I am correct in the surmise, am I not? You were disciplined because of your work in Essex last June. What happened, Barbara?”

“It's sort of a private situation,” she temporised, “I mean, you know, it's a personal thing. Why d'you want to know?”

“Because I find myself in a state of confusion about British law, and I wish to understand it better. How can I be of assistance to my people when they have legal difficulties if I don't clearly see how the laws of your country are applied to the individual who breaks them?”

“But this wasn't a case of breaking a law,” Barbara said. And that, she told herself, was merely a mild prevarication. After all, she hadn't been in the dock defending herself against a charge of assault or attempted murder, so she'd been able to convince herself that, law-wise, she'd always been in the clear.

“Nonetheless, as you are my friend-at least I hope that you are-”

“Of course I am.”

“Then perhaps you'll help me to understand more about your society.”

Bollocks, Barbara thought. He understood more about British society than she herself did. But she could hardly take the discussion in that direction, where it would soon enough crumble into a Punch and Judy of Yes you do, No I don't. So she said, “Its nothing much. I had a row with the DCI in charge of the case out in Essex, Azhar. We were in the middle of a chase. And the one thing an underling isn't supposed to do is to question an order in the middle of a chase. That's what happened and that's why I lost my rank.”

“For questioning an order.”

“I tend to question more forcefully than the average bird,” she said airily. “It's a habit that I learned in school. I'm short. I get lost in a crowd if I don't make myself heard. You ought to hear me order a pint of Bass in the Load of Hay when the football crowd's watching an Arsenal match on the telly But when I used the same approach with DCI Barlow, she didn't much like it.”

“Yet to lose your rank… It's a draconian measure, certainly. Are you being made an example of? Can you not protest it? Is there not a union or organisation who might represent you aggressively enough to-”

“In a situation like this,” Barbara cut in, “it's best not to make waves. Let the smoke clear, you know. Let sleeping dogs lie.” She groaned inwardly, the Queen of Cliche. “Anyway, when enough time passes, it'll sort itself out. The situation. You know.” She smashed her own cigarette among the others, putting an end to their discussion. She waited for him to bid her goodnight.

Instead, he said, “Hadiyyah and I go to the seaside tomorrow.”

“She told me. She's looking forward to it. The pleasure pier, especially. And she's expecting a big win from the crane grab, Azhar, so I hope you've been practising with the pincers.”

He smiled. “She asks for so little. And yet life appears to give her so much.”

“P'haps that's why,” Barbara pointed out. “If you don't spend your time looking for something particular, what you end up finding suits you just fine.”

“Wise words,” he acknowledged.

Wisdom's cheap, Barbara thought. She rustled in the manila folder on the table and brought out the roster of names from Soho Square. Duty was calling, her action told him. And Azhar was nothing if not astute at drawing inferences from unspoken implications.

The journey from Sir Adrian Beattie's home to Vi Nevin's maisonette was little more than a cruise down the Fulham Road in rather light traffic. It didn't take long. But it was long enough for Lynley to consider what he'd heard from Beattie and what he felt about what he'd heard. After years in CID, he realised that there was no real place in the investigation for him to be dwelling upon what he felt about anyone's revelations, least of all Sir Adrian's. But he found that he couldn't help himself. And he justified the direction his thoughts were taking by declaring them natural: Sexual deviance was as much a curiosity as a two-headed kitten. One might shudder at the sight of such an anomaly. But one still looked at it, however briefly.

And that's what he was doing: looking at the deviant behaviour for its anomaly quotient first, then evaluating the possibility that sexual deviance in itself was the relevant detail that would allow him to unearth Nicola Maiden's killer. The only problem he was having with attempting to use sexual deviance as a means of finding a killer was that he was discovering himself incapable of moving beyond the mere presence of the deviance in the first place.

Why was this? he wondered. Was he titillated by it? Sententiously condemnatory? Intrigued? Appalled? Seduced? What?

He couldn't have said. He knew it existed, of course: what some would call the dark side of desire. He was aware of at least some of the theoretical frameworks that students of the psyche had constructed to explain it. Depending upon what school of thought one wished to enroll in, sado-masochism could be considered an erotic blasphemy born of sexual dissent; an upper-class vice growing out of spending one's formative years in boarding schools where corporal punishment was the order of the day-and the more ritualised the better; a defiant reaction to a rigidly conservative upbringing; an expression of personal loathing for the simple possession of sexual drives; or the sole means of physical intimacy for those whose terror of the mere prospect of intimacy was greater than their willingness to overcome it. But what he didn't know was why, at the moment, the thought of deviancy was eating away at him. And it was the why of that eating away that plagued his mind.

What has all this to do with love? Lynley had wanted to ask the surgeon. What did being bruised, beaten, bloodied, and humiliated have to do with the ineffable and-yes, all right, it was absurdly romantic but he'd use the term anyway-transcendent joy that was attached to the act of possessing and of being possessed by another person? Wasn't that joy the outcome to which sexual partners ought to aspire when they engaged in intercourse? Or was he too new a newlywed to be making any assessments at all about what went for devotion between consenting adults? And did sex have anything to do with love anyway? And should it, for that matter? Or was that where everyone went wrong in the first place, assigning an importance to a bodily function that should have no more importance than cleaning one's teeth?

Except that direction of thought was sophistry, wasn't it. One didn't need to clean one's teeth. One didn't even feel the need. And it was the feeling of that need-the slow building up of a tension at first subtle and ultimately impossible to ignore-that told the real tale in life. Because it was that feeling of need which led to a hunger that insisted upon gratification. And it was the desire for gratification that caused one to abjure everything that rose up to forbid the satiety one sought: One willingly disregarded honour, responsibility, tradition, fidelity, and duty in pursuit of one's passion. And why? Because one wanted.

If he cast himself back more than twenty years, Lynley could see how the wanting had rent his own family. Or at least how he himself had allowed the wanting-which he had then only imperfectly understood-to rend it. Honour had bound his mother to his father. Responsibility and tradition had tied her to the family home and to the more than two hundred and fifty years of Asherton countesses who had overseen its maintenance and its glory. Duty had demanded that she concern herself with her husband's failing health and her children's welfare. And fidelity had required that she do it all without openly, inwardly, or privately acknowledging that she herself might want something different-or at least something more-than the lot she'd chosen as an eighteen-year-old bride. She'd coped with everything well until disease began to gnaw at her husband. Even then she'd managed to hold together