“He's a sculptor, my Terry,” Sal informed her, corning to stand at Barbara's side. “That's his medium.”
“Gardening tools?”
“He's got a piece with secateurs that makes me want to cry. Both my kids're artists. Cyn's doing a course at the college of fashion. Is this about my Terry? 'S he in some sort 'f trouble? Tell me straightaway.”
Barbara glanced at Nkata to see if he wanted to do the dubious honours. He raised the fingers of one hand to his scarred cheek as if the cicatrix there had begun to throb. She said, “Terry isn't home, then, Mrs. Cole?”
“He doesn't live here,” Sal informed her. She went on to say that he shared digs and a studio in Battersea with a girl called Cilia Thompson, a fellow artist. “Something's not happened to Cilia, has it? You're not looking for Terry because of Cilia? They're only friends, the two of them. So if she's been roughed up again, you best talk to that boyfriend of hers, not to my Terry. Terry wouldn't hurt a flea if it was biting him. He's a good boy, always has been.”
“Is there a … Well, is there a Mr. Cole?” If they were about to suggest to this woman that her son was dead, Barbara wanted another presence—a potentially stronger presence—to help absorb the blow.
Sal gave a hoot. “Mr. Cole—as he was—did a Houdini on us when Terry was five. Found hisself a little bit of fluff with a nice set of kitties down in Folkestone, and that was that for Mr. Family Man. Why?” Her voice had begun to sound more anxious. “What's this all about, then?”
Barbara nodded at Nkata. He, after all, had come to London to fetch the woman should it be necessary. It was in his hands how to break the news that the unidentified body they had might well be her son's. He began with the Triumph. Sal Cole confirmed that her son owned such a motorcycle, and as she did so, she also made the logical leap to a traffic accident. She went on so quickly to ask what hospital he'd been taken to that Barbara found herself wishing that the news they bore was as simple as a crash on the motorway.
There was no easy way. Barbara saw that Nkata had moved to a photograph-laden mantel that spanned a shallow embrasure where a fireplace once had been. He lifted one of the plastic-framed pictures, and the expression on his face told Barbara that carting Mrs. Cole all the way to Derbyshire was probably going to be a mere formality. Nkata had, after all, seen pictures of the corpse if not the corpse itself. And while murder victims sometimes bore little resemblance to their living selves, there were usually enough areas of commonality for the astute observer to make a tentative identification from a photograph.
Seeing the picture appeared to give Nkata the courage to tell the tale, which he did with a simplicity and sympathy that impressed Barbara more than she would have thought possible.
There had been a double homicide in Derbyshire, Nkata informed Mrs. Cole. A young man and a woman were the victims. Terry's motorcycle had been found nearby, and the young man in question bore something of a resemblance to this photograph from the mantel. It could be coincidental, of course, that Terry's motorcycle would be found near the scene of a murder. But, nonetheless, the police needed someone to accompany them to Derbyshire in an attempt to identify the body. Mrs. Cole could be that someone. Or if she believed it would be too traumatic, then someone else—perhaps Terry's sister … It was up to Mrs. Cole. Nkata gently replaced the photograph.
Sal watched him, looking stunned. She said, “Derbyshire? No. I don't think so. My Terry's working on a project in London, a big-money project. A commission taking up all his time. It's why he couldn't be here last Sunday for lunch like he usually is. He dotes on our little Darryl, he does. He wouldn't miss his Sunday afternoon with Darryl. But the commission … Terry couldn't come because of the commission. That's what he said.”
Her daughter joined them then, having donned a blue track suit and slicked back her hair. She paused in the doorway and appeared to take a reading of the room. She went hastily to Sal's side, saying, “Mum. What's wrong? You've gone dead white. Sit down or you'll faint.”
“Where's our baby? Where's our little Darryl?”
“He's settled. That hot water bottle did the trick. Come on, Mum. Sit down before you fall over.”
“You wrapped it in a towel like I said?”
“He's fine.” Cyn turned to Barbara and Nkata. “What's happened?”
Nkata explained briefly The second time through seemed to deplete not his resources but those of Mrs. Cole. When he reached the body another time, she grasped the handle of the hoe in the odd teepee sculpture, said, “It was to be three times this size, his commission was. He told me so,” and made her way to a threadbare overstuffed chair. A small child's toys encircled this, and she reached for one of them: a bright yellow bird that she held to her chest.
“Derbyshire?” Cyn sounded incredulous. “What the hell's our Terry doing in Derbyshire? Mum, he probably borrowed the motorcycle to someone. Cilia would know Let's phone her.”
She strode to do so, punching in the numbers on a phone that stood on a squat table at the foot of the stairs. Her end of the conversation was simple enough: “Is that Cilia Thompson? … This is Cyn Cole, Terry's sister … Yeah … Oh, right. Proper little monster, he is. Got us all running round for him whenever he blinks. Listen, Cilia, 's Terry about? … Oh. D'you know where's he gone off to, then?” A sombre glance over her shoulder at her mother as Cilia answered. Cyn said, “Right then … No. No message. But if he turns up in the next hour or so, have him phone me at home, okay?” And then she rang off.
Sal and Cyn communicated wordlessly in the way of women long used to each other's company. Sal said quietly, “He's set on that commission heart and soul. He said, ‘This'll bring destination art into being. Just you watch, Mum.’ So I don't see why he would've left.”
“‘Destination art?’” Barbara asked.
“His gallery. That's what he wants to call it: Destination Art,” Cyn clarified. “He's always wanted a gallery for moderns. It was to be—is to be—on the south bank near the Hayward. It's his dream. Mum, this could be nothing. You hold on to that. It could be nothing.” But the tone of her voice sounded as if she'd have loved nothing more dearly than to convince herself.
“We'll need the address,” Barbara told her.
“There isn't any gallery yet,” Cyn replied.
“For Terry's digs,” Nkata clarified. “And the studio he shares.”
“But you just said—” Sal didn't finish her remark. A silence fell among them. The source of it was obvious to them all: What could have been nothing was probably something, the worst sort of something that a family like the Coles might ever have to face.
Cyn went in search of the exact addresses. As she did so, Nkata said to Terry Cole's mother, “I'll fetch you first thing in the morning, Mrs. Cole. But if Terry should ring you sometime tonight, you page me. Right? Don't mind the time. Just page me.”
He wrote out his pager number on a sheet of paper that he removed from his neatly kept notebook. He was ripping it out and handing it over to Sal Cole when Terry's sister returned with her brother's information. She gave it to Barbara. Two locations were listed next to the words flat and studio. Both, Barbara saw, were in Battersea. She committed the addresses to memory—-just in case, she told herself—and she gave the paper to Nkata. He nodded his thanks, folded it, and shoved it into his pocket. A time was agreed upon for the morning's departure, and the two police constables found themselves out in the night.
A mild wind gusted on the street, blowing a plastic carrier bag and a large Burger King cup down the pavement. Nkata disarmed the security system on the car, but he didn't open the door. Instead, he looked at Barbara over the roof, then beyond her to the dismal-looking council housing on the other side of the street. His face was a study in sadness.
“What?” Barbara asked him.
“I killed their sleep,” he said. “I should've waited till morning. Why didn't I think that? No way could we have driven back there tonight. I'm too shagged out. So why'd I rush over here like there was a fi
re I had to put out? They got that baby to see to, and I just killed their sleep.”
“You didn't have a choice,” Barbara said. “If you'd waited till morning, they'd probably both've been gone—to work and to school—and you'd've lost a day. Don't drive yourself round the bend on it, Winston. You did what you had to do.”
“It's him,” he said. “The bloke in the picture. He's the one got the chop.”
“I reckoned as much.”
“They don't want to believe it.”
“Who would?” Barbara said. “It's the final goodbye without a chance to say it. And there can't be anything more rotten than that.”
Lynley chose Tideswell. A limestone village climbing two opposing hillsides, Tideswell sat virtually at the midway point between Buxton and Padley Gorge. Housing himself in the Black Angel Hotel—with its pleasing view of the parish church and its surrounding green—would provide him during the investigation with easy access both to the police station and to Maiden Hall. And to Calder Moor, if it came to that.
Inspector Hanken was agreeable to the idea of Tideswell. He would send a car round for Lynley in the morning, he said, pending the return of Lynley's own officer from London.
Hanken had thawed considerably in the hours they'd spent in each other's company. In the bar of the Black Angel Hotel, he and Lynley had enjoyed one Bushmill apiece prior to dinner, a bottle of wine with the meal, and a brandy afterwards, which also gave some assistance in the matter.
The whiskey and wine had elicited from Hanken the sort of professional war stories that were common to most interactions between policemen: rows with superiors, cock-ups in investigations, rough cases he'd been lumbered with. The brandy had provoked more personal revelations.
The inspector from Buxton pulled out the family photograph he'd shown Lynley earlier and gazed upon it long before he spoke. His index finger tracing the bundled shape of his infant son, he said the word children and went on to explain that a man was changed for all time the moment a newborn was placed into his arms. One wouldn't expect that to be the case—that sort of alteration in persona was women's stuff, wasn't it?—but that's what happened. And what resulted from that change was an overwhelming desire to protect, to batten down every hatch in sight, and to secure every route of access into the heart of the home. So to lose a child despite every precaution … ? It was a hell beyond his imagining.
“Something Andy Maiden is currently experiencing,” Lynley noted.
Hanken eyed him but didn't argue the point. He went on to confide that his Kathleen was the light of his life. He'd known from the day they'd met that he wanted to marry her, but it had taken five years to persuade her to agree. What about Lynley and his new bride? How had it been for them?
But marriage, wife, and children were the last subjects Lynley wanted to entertain. He sidestepped adroitly by claiming inexperience. “I'm too wet behind the ears as a husband to have anything remarkable to report,” he said.
He found that he couldn't avoid the subject when he was alone with his thoughts later that night in his room. Still, in an attempt to divert them—or at least to postpone them—he went to the window. He notched open the casement an inch and tried to ignore the strong scent of mildew that seemed to permeate the environment. He was as successful at this, however, as he was at overlooking the bed with its concave mattress and its pink duvet covered with a slick pseudo-satin material that promised a night of wrestling to keep it on the bed. He'd at least been equipped with an electric kettle, he observed gloomily, with a wicker basket of PG Tips, seven plastic thimbles of milk, one packet of sugar, and two pieces of shortbread. And he had a bathroom as well, although it had no window and it was fitted out with a water-stained bath encased in linoleum and was lit by a single light bulb of candle-strength wattage. It could have been worse, he told himself. But he wasn't sure how.
When he could no longer avoid doing so, he glanced at the telephone on the iron-legged outdoor table that did service next to the bed. He owed Helen a call, at least to give her his whereabouts, but he was reluctant to punch in the numbers. He considered the reason.
Certainly, Helen was more in the wrong than he. He may have lost his temper with her, but she'd crossed a line when she'd taken the part of Barbara Havers' advocate. As his wife, she was supposed to be his advocate. She might have asked why he'd chosen Winston Nkata to work with and not Barbara Havers instead of attempting to argue him into altering a decision that he had felt compelled to take.
Of course, upon reflection, he recalled that Helen's conversational opening had indeed been to ask him why he'd selected Nkata. It was his series of responses that had led them from a reasonable discussion into a row. Yet he'd responded as he had done because she'd provoked in him a sense of marital—if not moral—outrage. Her questions implied an alliance with someone whose actions couldn't begin to be justified. That he was being asked to justify his own actions—which were reasonable, allowable, and completely understandable—was more than mildly annoying.
Policing worked because of its officers’ adherence to an established chain of command. Senior officers gained their positions by proving themselves capable of performance under pressure. With a life at stake and a suspect fleeing, Barbara Havers’ superior officer had made a split-second decision, giving orders that were as pellucid as they were reasonable. That Havers had contravened those orders was bad enough. That she'd taken matters into her own hands was very much worse. But that she'd wrested power to herself by using a firearm was q. violation of their entire oath of office. It wasn't a simple bending of rules. It was a mockery of everything they stood for. Why hadn't Helen understood all this?
“These things aren't black and white, Tommy.” Malcolm Webberly's comment came back to him as if in answer to his mental question.
But Lynley had to disagree with his superintendent. It seemed to him that some things were.
Still, he couldn't work his way round the fact that he owed his wife a telephone call. They didn't need to pursue their argument. And he could at least offer an apology for losing his temper.
Instead of Helen, however, he found himself talking to Charlie Denton, the young, frustrated thespian who played the role of manservant in Lynley's life, when he wasn't haunting the half-price ticket booth in Leicester Square. The countess wasn't at home, Denton informed him, and Lynley could tell how much the maddening man enjoyed giving Helen the title. She'd phoned round seven o'clock from Mr. St. James's house, Denton went on, and said she'd been asked to stay to dinner. She hadn't yet returned. Did his lordship wish—Lynley cut him off wearily. “Denton,” he warned.
“Sorry.” The younger man chuckled and dropped the mock servility. “D'you want to leave her a message, then?”
“I'll catch her in Chelsea,” Lynley replied. But he gave the Black Angel's number to Denton all the same.
When he phoned the St. James house, however, he discovered that Helen and St. James's wife had gone out straight after dinner. He was left talking to his old friend.
“They mentioned a film,” St. James told him vaguely “I got the impression it was something romantic. Helen said she could do with an evening looking at Americans rolling round on a mattress with sculpted bodies, fashionable hair, and perfect teeth. That's the Americans, not the mattress, by the way.”
“I see.” Lynley gave his friend the number of the hotel with a message for Helen to phone if she returned at a reasonable hour. They hadn't had a proper chance to speak before he'd taken off for Derbyshire, he told St. James. Even to his own ears, it sounded a lame explanation.
St. James said that he'd pass the message to Helen. How was Lynley finding Derbyshire? he wanted to know.
It was a tacit invitation to discuss the case. St. James would never enquire directly. He had too much respect for the unwritten rules that governed a police investigation.
Lynley found himself wanting to talk to his old friend. He reviewed the facts: the two deaths, the differing means by which they'd come about, the
absence of one of the weapons, the lack of identification on the boy, the anonymous letters assembled from cut-outs, the scrawled suggestion that “This bitch has had it.”
“It puts a signature on the crime,” Lynley concluded, “although Hanken thinks the note could be part of a blind.”
“Misdirection on the part of the killer? Who?”
“Andy Maiden, if you go along with Hanken's thinking.”
“The father? That's a bit rough. Why is Hanken heading that way?”
“He wasn't at first.” Lynley described their interview with the dead girl's parents: what had been said and what had been inadvertently revealed. He ended with “So Andy believes there's an SO10 connection.”
“What do you think?”
“Like everything else, it needs checking out. But Hanken didn't trust a word Andy said once we learned that he'd been keeping information from his wife.”
“He could merely have been trying to protect her,” St. James offered. “Not an unreasonable thing for a man to do for a woman he loves. And if they were really looking for a blind, wouldn't they misdirect you into considering the boy?”
Lynley agreed. “There's a real bond between the two of them, Simon. It appears to be an extraordinarily close relationship.”
St. James was silent for a moment on the other end of the line. Outside Lynley s hotel room, someone walked down the corridor. A door shut quietly.
“Then there's another way to look at Andy Maiden protecting his wife, isn't there, Tommy?” St. James finally said.
“What's that, then?”
“He may be doing it for another reason. The worst possible reason, in fact.”
“Medea in Derbyshire?” Lynley asked. “Christ. That's horrific, Simon. And when mothers kill, the child's generally young. I'll be pressed for a motive if things go that way.”
“Medea would have argued that she had one.”
In the midst of dealing with one of Nicola's many disappearances prior to the family's move to Derbyshire, Nan Maiden would have been incredulous had anyone suggested to her that there would come a day when she would yearn for something as simple as a teenager's running away from home in a fit of temper. When Nicola had disappeared in the past, her mother had reacted the only way she knew: with a mixture of terror, anger, and despair. She'd phoned the girl's friends, she'd alerted the police, and she'd taken to the streets to trackher down. She'd been capable of nothing else until she'd known her child was safe.
In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner Page 15