In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

by Elizabeth George

  And never had reason to sack you, Lynley thought.

  The Frenchman seemed to feel the necessity for a further explanation. “It was that look she gave me when first we met. You know what I mean. I could tell from the look. Her interest matched my own. There is sometimes an animal need between a man and a woman. This is not love. This is not devotion. This is just what one feels—a pain, a pressure, a need—here.” He indicated his groin. “You, a man, you feel this as well. Not every woman has an ache that matches that of a man. But Nicola had. I saw that at once.”

  “And did something about it.”

  “As was her wish. The game of it came later.”

  “The game was her idea?”

  “Her way … It was why I never sought another woman while in England. There was no need. She had a way to make a simple affair …” He sought a word to describe it. “Magic,” he settled on. “Exciting. I would not have thought myself capable of fidelity to a mere mistress over five years. One woman had never held me more than three months before Nicola.”

  “The game of it was what she enjoyed? That's what kept her tied to the affair with you?”

  “The game kept me tied. For her, there was the physical pleasure, naturally.”

  There was also the ego, Lynley thought wryly. He said, “Five years is a long time to keep a woman interested, especially with no hope of any future.”

  “Of course, there were the tokens as well,” Ferrer admitted. “They were small, but all true symbols of my esteem. I have so little money because most of it … My Estelle would wonder if the money changed … what I send to her, you see … if it became less. So there were tokens only, but they were enough.”

  “Gifts to Nicola?”

  “Gifts, if you will. Perfume. A gold charm or two. This pleased her. And the game went on.” He dug into his pocket and removed the small tool he'd been using on the bicycle spokes. He hunkered down and went at them again, tightening each spoke with infinite patience. He said, “I shall miss her, my little Nicola. We didn't love. But how we laughed.”

  “When you wanted the game to begin,” Lynley said, “how did you let her know?”

  The Frenchman raised his head, his expression puzzled. “Please?”

  “Did you leave her a note? Did you page her?”

  “Ah. No. It was the look between us. Nothing else was needed.”

  “So you never paged her?”

  “Page? No. Why would I when the look was all that … ? Why do you ask this question?”

  “Because evidently when she was at work in Buxton this past summer, someone paged her and phoned her a number of times. I thought it might have been you.”

  “Ah. I had no need. But the other … He could not leave her alone. The buzzer. Every time it went off. Like a clock's work.”

  Corroboration at last, Lynley thought. He clarified with “She received pages when you were together?”

  “It was the only imperfection in our game, that little pager. Always, she would ring him back.” He tested the bicycle spokes with his fingers. “Bah. What was she doing with him? There was so little they could have had together. Sometimes when I think of what she had to experience with him, too young to know the first thing about giving a woman pleasure … What a crime against love, him with my Nicola. With him, she endured. With me, she enjoyed.”

  Lynley filled in the blanks. “Are you saying it was Julian Britton who paged her?”

  “Always he wanted to know when they could meet, when they could talk, when they could make plans. She would say, ‘Darling, how extraordinary that you'd page me now. I was just thinking of you. I swear I was. Shall I tell you what I was thinking? Shall I tell you what I'd do if we were together?’ And then she would tell. And he would be satisfied. With that. Just that” Ferrer shook his head in disgust.

  “Are you certain it was Britton who paged her?”

  “Who else? She talked to him as she talked to me. The way one talks to a lover. And he was her lover. Not the same as I, of course, but still her lover.”

  Lynley set that area of discussion aside. “Did she always have the pager with her? Or did she have it only when she was away from the Hall?”

  She always had it as far as he knew, Ferrer answered. She wore it tucked into the waistband of her trousers or her skirt or her hiking shorts. Why? he wanted to know. Was the pager of some importance in the inspector's investigation?

  That, Lynley thought, was indeed the question.

  Nan Maiden watched them. She'd moved from the office to the first floor corridor, where a bank of windows lined the wall. She stood in the embrasure of one of these windows, someone studying the moonlight striking the trees should any of the residents happen to see her. Nervously, she fingered the tie-back of the heavy curtains. It caught on the bitten skin round her nails. She watched the two men below in conversation, and she fought the desire—the impulse, the need—to run down the stairs with an excuse to join them, to offer explanations and to argue fine points of her daughter's character that might be misconstrued.

  “Look, Mum,” Nicola had said, all of twenty years old with the Frenchman's scent clinging to her like the aftertaste of wine gone bad, “I know what I'm doing. I'm quite of an age to know my own mind, and if I want to fuck a bloke old enough to be my dad, then I'm going to fuck him. It's no one's business but my own and it isn't hurting a soul. So why're you in a state about it?” And she'd gazed at Nan with those clear blue eyes, so frank and open and reasonable. She'd unbuttoned her shirt and stepped out of her shorts, dropping bra and knickers on top of them. As she passed her mother and stepped into the tub, Ferrer's scent grew stronger, and Nan choked upon it. Nicola lowered herself into the water, sinking up to her shoulders so that it completely covered her teacup breasts. But not before Nan saw the marks of his teeth. And not before Nicola saw her see them. She said, “He likes it that way, Mummy. Rough. But he doesn't actually hurt me. And anyway, I do the same to him. Everything's okay. You're not to worry.”

  Nan said, “Worry? I didn't bring you up to—”

  “Mum.” She'd lifted the sponge from the tray and dipped it into the water. The room was steamy and Nan sat on the toilet lid. She felt dizzy and caught in a world gone mad. “You brought me up fine,” Nicola said. “And this isn't about how you brought me up anyway. He's sexy and he's fun and I like to fuck him. There's no need to make an issue out of something that isn't an issue for either one of us.”

  “He's married. You know that. He can't offer you marriage. He wants you for … Can't you see it's only sex to him? Free sex without the slightest obligation? Can't you see you're his toy? His little English plaything?”

  “It's only sex to me as well,” Nicola said frankly. She brightened as if she suddenly realised why her mother was harbouring such concerns. “Mum! Were you thinking I love him? That I want to marry him or something like that? Lord, no, Mum. I promise you. I just like the way he makes me feel.”

  “And when the happiness of being with him makes you long for more and you're not able to have it?”

  Nicola picked up her gel soap and applied it to the sponge, dribbling it out like custard over a cake. She looked confused for a moment, then her expression cleared and she said, “I don't mean that kind of feel, that heart kind of feel. I mean physically. The way he makes my body feel. That's all. I like what he does and how I feel when he does it. That's what I want from him and that's what he gives me.”

  “Sex.”

  “Right. He's quite good, you know.” She'd cocked her head, given an impish grin, and winked at her mother. “Or do you know already? Have you had him as well?”

  “Nicola!”

  She squirmed in the water and hung her head appealingly on the side of the tub. “Mum, it's okay. I wouldn't tell Dad. God, have you done it with him? I mean when I'm away at college, he must need someone else to … Come on. Tell me.”

  Nan had longed to strike her, to mark the lovely elfin face as Christian-Louis had marked the lithe young body. She w
anted to take her by the shoulders and shake until her teeth rattled in her head and pebbled from her mouth into the water. She wasn't supposed to be like this. Confronted by her mother with the accusation, she was supposed to deny, to break down when the evidence was presented, to plea for forgiveness, and to ask for understanding. But the last thing she was supposed to do was to confirm her mother's worst suspicions with the same ease that might have gone into answering a question about what she'd eaten for breakfast.

  “Sorry,” Nicola said when her mother didn't reply to her light-hearted questions. “It's different for you. I can see that. I shouldn't have intruded. I'm sorry, Mum.”

  She'd taken a razor from the bathtub tray and she was applying this to her right leg. It was deeply tanned and long, with a well-shaped calve and muscles taut from hiking. Nan watched her run it along her flesh. She waited for a nick, for a scrape, for the blood. None came.

  She said, “What are you, exactly? What do I call you? A scrubber? A slag? A common tart?”

  The words didn't wound. They didn't even touch. Nicola set down the razor and gazed at her. “I'm Nicola,” she said. “The daughter who loves you very much, Mummy.”

  “Don't say that. If you loved me, you wouldn't be—”

  “Mum, I made a decision to do this. Eyes wide open and knowing all the facts. I didn't make the decision to hurt you. I made it because I wanted him. And when this ends—because all things do—how I'll feel is my responsibility. If I'm hurt, I'm hurt. If I'm not, I'm not. I'm sorry you found out about it, because obviously it's upset you. But I'd like you to know that we did try to be discreet.”

  The voice of reason, her lovely daughter. Nicola was who Nicola was. She called aces as she saw them and spades the same. And as Nan saw her so vividly—a spectral figure whose image seemed to form on the glass panes of the window at which her mother now stood—she tried not to think, let alone to believe that the girl's forthright honesty was what had killed her.

  Nan had never understood her daughter, and she saw that now more clearly than she had done in all the years she'd waited for Nicola to emerge from the chrysalis of her troubled adolescence, fully formed as an adult made in the image and likeness of her progenitors. Thinking of her child, Nan felt settle upon her shoulders the mantle of a failure so profound that she wondered how she would ever be able to continue living. That she had produced such a daughter from her own body … that the years of self-sacrifice had brought her to this moment … that the cooking and cleaning and washing and ironing and worrying and planning and giving giving giving had resulted in her feeling like a starfish taken from the ocean and left to dry—and to rot—too far from the water to save herself … that the sweaters knitted and the temperatures taken and the scraped knees bandaged and the little shoes polished and the clothes kept neat and fresh and sweet had ultimately counted for nothing in the eyes of the single person for whom she lived and breathed …. It was too much to bear.

  She'd given the effort of motherhood everything she possessed, and she'd failed entirely, teaching her daughter nothing of substance. Nicola was who Nicola was.

  Nan was only grateful that her own mother had died during Nicola's childhood. She would never have to see how Nan had failed where her female forebears had known nothing but success. Nan herself was the embodiment of her mother's values. Born into a time of terrible strife, she'd been schooled in the disciplines of poverty, suffering, generosity, and duty. In war, one did not seek to gratify the self. The self was secondary to the Cause. One's home became a haven for convalescing soldiers. One's food and clothing—and, dear God, even the gifts one received at an eighth-year birthday party when the little attendants had been told in advance that the guest of honour had no wants in comparison with what the dear soldiers needed—were gently but firmly removed from one's grasp and passed on to hands worthier than her own. It was a hard time, but it created her mettle on its forge. She had character as a result. This was what she should have passed to her daughter.

  Nan had moulded herself in her own mother's image, and her reward had been a cool, unspoken but nonetheless treasured approval communicated by a single nod of the regal head. She'd lived for that nod. It said, “Children learn from their parents, and you have learned to perfection, Nancy.”

  Parents gave their children's world both order and meaning. Children learned who they were—and how to be—at their parents' knees. So what had Nicola seen in her parents that resulted in who and what she had become?

  Nan didn't want to answer that question. It brought her face-to-face with ghouls that she didn't wish to confront. She's so like her father, Nan's inner voice whispered. But no, but no. She turned from the window.

  She climbed the stairs to the private floor of Maiden Hall. She found her husband in their bedroom, sitting in the armchair in the darkness, his head in his hands.

  He didn't look up as she closed the door behind her. She crossed the room to him, knelt by the chair, and put her hand on his knee. She didn't say to him what she wanted to say, that Christian-Louis had accidentally burnt pine nuts into tiny lumps of charcoal weeks ago, that the ground floor took hours to lose the acrid scent of the burning, and that he—Andy—hadn't mentioned the odour because he hadn't noticed it in the first place. She didn't say any of this because she didn't want to consider what it implied. Instead, she said, “Let's not lose each other as well, Andy.”

  At that, he looked up. She was struck by how the last days had aged him. His natural vibrancy was gone. She couldn't imagine the man she saw before her jogging from Padley Gorge to Hathersage, skiing hell for leather down Whistler Mountain, or tearing along the Tissington Trail on his mountain bike without raising a sweat. He didn't look as if he'd make it down the stairs.

  “Let me do something for you,” she murmured, a hand at his temple to smooth back his hair.

  “Tell me what you did with it,” he replied.

  Her hand dropped. “With what?”

  “I don't need to spell it out. Did you take it with you onto the moor this afternoon? You must have done. It's the only explanation.”

  “Andy, I don't know what you—”

  “Don't,” he said. “Just tell me. And tell me why you said you didn't know she had one. I'd like to know that most of all.”

  Nan felt—rather than heard—an odd buzzing in her head. It was very much as if Nicola's pager were somewhere in the room with them. An impossibility, of course. It lay where she had deposited it: deep in a crevice created at the juncture of two pieces of limestone on Hathersage Moor.

  “Dearest,” she said, “I really don't know what you're talking about.”

  He examined her. She met his gaze. She waited for him to be more direct, to ask with an explicitness of language that she couldn't avoid. She had never been a particularly good liar; she could feign confusion and act ignorant of the facts, but she could do little else.

  He didn't ask. Instead, he let his head sink back against the chair, and he closed his eyes. “God,” he whispered. “What have you done?”

  She made no reply. He'd been invoking God, not her. And God's ways were a mystery, even to the faithful. Yet Andy's suffering was so excruciating to her that she wanted to give him an anodyne of some sort. She found it in a partial disclosure. He could make of it what he would.

  “Things need to stay uncomplicated,” she murmured. “We need to keep things simple as best we can.”

  CHAPTER 14

  amantha came across her uncle Jeremy in the parlour when she was making her final rounds of the night. She'd been checking doors and windows—by virtue of habit rather than by virtue of the fact that the family had anything of value worth burgling at this point—and she'd marched into the parlour with the intention of seeing to the windows in there before she realised that he was present.

  The lights were off, but not because Jeremy was sleeping. He was, instead, running an old eight-millimeter film through a projector that clacked and whirred as if on its last legs. The picture itself flic
kered not on a screen, because Jeremy couldn't be bothered setting that up. Rather, it moved against a bookshelf, where the curved backs of mildewing volumes distorted the figures whose images had been filmed.

  He was reliving what appeared to be a long-ago birthday. Broughton Manor rose in the background—long before the building had fallen into ruinous disrepair—while in the foreground a floppy-hatted clown played the Pied Piper to a group of little children wearing party hats. The clown led them down the slope to the ancient footbridge that provided access to a meadow beyond the River Wye. And in that meadow a pony stood waiting, its reins in the hand of a man whose resemblance to the adult Jeremy told Samantha that she was looking at her maternal grandfather as a very young man. As she watched, the little boy her uncle once had been ran across the meadow and flung himself ecstatically into his fathers arms. He was lifted onto the pony's back as the other children—Samantha's own mother among them—clustered round and the clown danced a jig to soundless music.

  The scene shifted in the way of home films, and they were under a tree where a table had been laid with a birthday cloth and decorations. The same children bobbed and squirmed on either side of the table, and a woman carried into the picture a cake on which five candles burned. The child Jeremy stood upon his chair to make his wish and extinguish the candles. He lost his balance and nearly toppled, to be saved from the fall by his mother. She laughed, waved at the camera, and dropped her arms to hold her son safely on the chair.

  “Dead in less than two years,” Jeremy Britton said without turning from the picture that undulated against the backs of the books. His words were only mildly slurred, not nearly as incomprehensible as they usually were after a day of drinking. “She was counting out change to buy me a packet of crisps in Longnor, Mum was—Jesus, can you credit that?—and she dropped dead at the till. Gone before she hit the floor. And I said, ‘Mum, what about my crisps?’ Jesus have mercy on us all.” Jeremy lifted his glass and drank. He replaced it with such precision on the table next to his chair that Samantha wondered what he was actually drinking. He turned his head and squinted in her direction as if the light from the corridor were too bright. “Ah. It's you, Sammy. Come to join the resident insomniac?”