In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

by Elizabeth George

  CHAPTER 16

  i Nevin took the postcard from Lynley's fingers and, after glancing at it, set it carefully onto the spotless glass coffee table that served both the buttery sofa and the matching love seat which formed a right angle at one of its corners. She had placed herself on the sofa, leaving the love seat for Lynley and Nkata to crowd themselves onto. Nkata hadn't cooperated with the ploy, however. He'd stationed himself at the door to the maisonette, with his arms crossed and his body proclaiming no escape.

  “You're the schoolgirl pictured on the card, aren't you?” Lynley began.

  Vi reached for the portfolio she'd showed Havers and Nkata on the previous day. She slid this across the coffee table. “I pose for pictures, Inspector. That's what I do and that's what I get paid for. I don't know who's going to use them for what and I don't really care. As long as I get paid.”

  “Are you saying that you're just a model for sexual services that someone else provides?” “That's what I'm saying.” “I see. Then what's the point of having your phone number on the card if you're not the ‘schoolgirl’ in question?”

  Her gaze slid away from him. She was quick, fairly well educated, well spoken, and clever, but she hadn't thought quite that far ahead.

  “You know, I don't have to talk to you,” she said. “And what I'm doing's not illegal, so please don't act like it is.”

  Explaining the finer points of the law to her wasn't his purpose in coming to see her, Lynley told her. But if she was engaged in prostitution—

  “Show me where it says on that card that anyone pays me for anything” she demanded.

  If, Lynley repeated, she was engaged in prostitution, then he assumed she knew where the ice was thin and where it was not in her behaviour. That being the case—“Am I loitering somewhere. Am I soliciting in a public place?”

  That being the case, he continued firmly, he would also assume that Miss Nevin was cognisant of how loosely and generously the word brothel could be defined by a magistrate with little patience with linguistic gymnastics. He glanced round the maisonette lest she not comprehend the full meaning of his comment.

  She said, “Cops,” dismissively.

  “Indeed” was Lynley's affable reply.

  He and Nkata had driven directly to Fulham from New Scotland Yard. They'd found Vi Nevin unloading Sainsbury's carrier bags from a new Alfa Romeo, and when she'd caught a glimpse of Nkata as he eased his lengthy body from the Bentley, she said, “Why're you here again? Why aren't you out looking for Nikki's killer? Look, I don't have time to talk to you. I've an appointment in forty-five minutes.”

  “Then I expect you'd like us to be gone in advance,” Lynley had said.

  She'd flicked a glance at both men, looking for meaning. She said, “Give me a hand, then,” and passed two loaded carrier bags over to them.

  She'd unpacked perishables into a large refrigerator: pâté, Greek olives, prosciutto, Camembert, dolmades …

  “Having a party?” Lynley had asked her. “Or is the food part of the … appointment, perhaps?”

  Vi Nevin had shut the refrigerator door smartly and walked into the sitting room, where she'd taken up her position on the sofa. There she still sat, a retro-garbed figure in brogues and white socks, turned-up blue jeans, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar at attention, a scarf knotted at the throat, and a ponytail. She looked like a refugee from a James Dean film. All that was missing was the bubble gum.

  She did not, however, speak like a refugee from a James Dean film. She might have been dressed like a gum-popping devotee of bop, but she spoke like a woman either born to advantage or self-made to appear that way. More likely the latter, Lynley would think as he interviewed her. Every now and then her careful persona slipped. Just a word here and there or a skewed pronunciation that inadvertently revealed her origins. Still, she wasn't what he would have expected to find at the other end of a phone box postcard advertising sex.

  “Miss Nevin,” Lynley said, “I'm not here to strong-arm you. I'm here because a woman's been murdered, and if her murder is somehow connected with her source of income—”

  “That's where you always head, isn't it? Right to one of our punters. ‘She's a slag and she got what she was asking for. It's damn lucky she lasted as long as she did, what with her lifestyle and the blokes who take part in it.’ Which is what you'd like to put an end to, isn't it? The lifestyle. So don't tell me what you do or don't intend with regard to my ‘source of income.’” She gazed at him evenly. “If you only knew how many warrant cards get set to one side when a bloke's in a hurry to climb out of his trousers. Hmph. I could name a few names.”

  “I'm not interested in your clients. I'm interested in finding Nicola Maiden's killer.”

  “Who, you think, is one of her clients. Why won't you admit it? And how do you expect those punters will feel when the cops come calling on them? And what do you think it'll do for business once word gets out that I'm naming names? If I know their names to begin with. And I don't, by the way. We go by first names only, and that's not going to help you much.”

  Across the room Nkata took out his notebook, opened it, and said, “We're happy to take what's on offer, miss.”

  “Forget it, Constable. I'm not that stupid.”

  Lynley leaned towards her. “Then you know how simple it would be for me to shut you down. A uniformed constable walking this street every fifteen minutes would, I think, do some damage to your clients' sense of privacy. As would the word slipped to one or two tabloids who might want to see if anyone worthy of public notice is paying calls on you.”

  “You wouldn't dare! I know my rights.”

  “None of which preclude the presence of journalists, paparazzi looking for everyone from film stars to members of the Royal Family, or your local bobby who's just keeping the streets safe for elderly women walking their dogs.”

  “You bloody outrageous—”

  “It's a nasty world,” Nkata cut in solemnly.

  She glared at both of them.

  The telephone rang and she jumped to answer it. She said, “What's your pleasure … ?” into the receiver.

  Nkata looked heavenward.

  Vi said, “Hang on. Let me check my book,” and she flipped through the pages of an engagement diary. “Sorry. I can't manage that. Someone's already booked …” She ran her finger down the page, saying, “I could do four o'clock …. How long a session … ?” She listened, then murmured, “Don't I always leave you fit for her afterwards?” And she jotted a reference into her diary. She rang off, stood with her fingers on the telephone as if in thought, her back to them. She sighed and said, “All right, then,” quietly. She went into the kitchen and returned with an envelope, which she handed over to Lynley.

  “This is what you want. I hope it doesn't break your heart to be completely wrong about the punters.”

  The envelope had already been unsealed. Lynley slid out its contents: one piece of paper and a single message, assembled from letters that appeared to come from glossy magazines, TWO BITCHES WILL DIE

  IN THERE OWN PUKE. THEY'LL BEG FOR MERSEY AND GET NOTHING BUT PAIN. After reading it, Lynley handed the note to Nkata. The DC looked it over, then raised his head.

  “Same as the others left at the scene.”

  Lynley nodded. He told Vi Nevin about the anonymous notes that had been left at the murder site.

  “I sent them to her,” she said.

  Puzzled, Lynley turned over the envelope and saw it was addressed to Vi Nevin, with a local postmark. “But this appears identical to those.”

  She said, “I don't mean I sent them to her like this. Without a name. Like a threat. I mean they came to me. Here. At home. They've been coming all summer long. I kept telling Nikki about them when we talked on the phone, but she just laughed them off. So I finally sent them up to her with Terry because I wanted her to see for herself that the situation was escalating and we both needed to start taking some care. Which,” she added bitterly, “Nikki didn
't do. God, why wouldn't she ever listen?”

  Lynley took the note back from Nkata. He examined it again, then carefully refolded and stowed it into its envelope. He said, “Perhaps you'd better start from the beginning.”

  “Shelly Platt's the beginning” was her reply.

  Vi went to the window, which overlooked the street. She looked down, as if expecting to see someone below. She said, “We were friends. It was always Shelly and Vi and it had been for years. But then Nikki came along, and I could see it made more sense to set myself up with her. Shelly couldn't cope with that, and she started causing trouble. I knew …” Her voice quavered. She halted. Then, “I knew she'd do something eventually. But Nikki never believed me. She just kept laughing it off.”

  “It?”

  “The letters. And the calls. We hadn't been in this place”—with her hand she indicated the maisonette—“two days before Shelly got her hands on the phone number and started ringing. And then sending letters. And then turning up in the street. And then pinching the cards …” Vi went to the drinks trolley. An ice bucket stood on it. She lifted this, and from beneath it she took a small stack of postcards. “She said she'd destroy us. She's a nasty little jealous—” She drew a quick breath. “She's jealous.”

  The cards were the same schoolgirl advertisements that Lynley had already seen except that each had been defaced, with various sexually transmitted diseases scrawled upon it in bright felt pen.

  “Terry found those when he was making his regular rounds of the boxes,” Vi said. “It was Shelly who did it, up to her tricks. She won't be happy till I'm ruined.”

  “Tell us about Shelly Platt,” Lynley said.

  “She was my maid. We met in C'est la Vie. Do you know it? It's a French bakery and caff over by South Ken Station. I had what you might call an arrangement there with the head baker—baguettes, quiches, and tarts in exchange for a few liberties in the gents’ loo—and Shelly was there one morning shoveling chocolate croissants into her mouth when Alf and I went below stairs. She saw him give me the food afterwards without taking any money, and she got interested in what was going on.”

  “In order to blackmail you?”

  Vi looked grimly amused by the question. “She wanted to know what she had to do to get her croissants for nothing. Plus, she liked the way I dress—I was doing a Mary Quant that morning—and she wanted a bit of that as well.”

  “Your clothes?”

  “My whole life, as things turned out.”

  “I see. And as your maid, with access to your belongings—”

  Vi laughed. At the drinks trolley, she took two cubes of ice from the bucket and a small tin of tomato juice from the bottom shelf. She deftly mixed herself a bloody Mary with the precision of long experience. “She wasn't that kind of maid, Inspector. She was the other kind. She took phone calls from punters and booked their appointments for me.” Vi stirred her drink with a glass rod surmounted by a bright green parrot. She set this neatly on a cocktail napkin and returned to the sofa, where she placed the glass on the coffee table and continued her explanation. She'd been employing a middle-aged Filipino woman to book her clients prior to meeting Shelly Platt in C'est la Vie. But everyone employed middle-aged Filipino women as their maids these days, so she thought it might be an added interest to have a teenager acting the part instead. Fixed up, Shelly wouldn't look half bad. And, more important, she was so ignorant of the ways of the profession that Vi knew she would be able to pay her a pittance. “I gave her room, board, and thirty pounds a week,” Vi told them. “And believe me, that's more than she was getting doing knee tremblers outside Earl's Court Station, which was how she was supporting herself when I met her.”

  They were together for nearly three years, she went on. But then Vi met Nikki Maiden and saw how much more was possible if the two of them set up a business together. “We kept Shelly with us at first. But she hated Nikki because with her there, it wasn't just the two of us any longer. That's the way Shelly is, although I didn't know it when I first took her on.”

  “‘The way she is?’”

  “She gets her hooks into people and thinks she owns them. I should have seen it when she first talked about what had gone on with her boyfriend. She followed him to London from Liverpool, and when she got here and found out he didn't want to be her boyfriend any longer, she started her routine: following him everywhere, phoning him constantly, hanging round his flat, sending him letters, bringing him presents. Only I didn't know it was her routine, you see. I thought it was a one-off: her reaction to her first love not working out.” She took a stiff gulp of her drink. “Right bloody fool I was.”

  “She did the same to you?”

  “I should have seen, obviously. Stan—this was her boyfriend—came to the flat after she'd cut up his car tyres. He was all in a rage, and he must have thought he'd straighten her out. But he was the one who got straightened out.”

  “How?”

  “She cut him open with a butcher knife.”

  Nkata glanced Lynley's way. Lynley nodded. A killer did generally have a favourite weapon. But why kill Nicola if Shelly's object was Vi? And why wait so many months to do it?

  Vi seemed to recognise Lynley's unspoken questions. She said, “She didn't know where Nikki was. But she did know Terry was thick with her. If she followed him, it was only a matter of time before he led Shelly right to her.” She tossed down more of the drink, picking up a napkin to dab against the corner of her mouth. “Murdering little bitch,” she said quietly “I hope she rots.”

  “‘This bitch has had it,’” Lynley murmured, now knowing the source of the note that had been found in Nicola Maiden's pocket. He said, “We'll need her address, if you have it. And we'll also need a list of Nicola's clients.”

  “This isn't about clients. I've just told you that.”

  “You have. But we've also been told that there was a man in London with whom Nicola had a relationship that was more than you'd expect between a client and …” He looked for a euphemism.

  “His evening's companion,” Nkata supplied.

  “And we may well find him among the men she serviced regularly,” Lynley finished.

  “Well, if there was someone, I don't know about him,” Vi said.

  “I have trouble believing that,” Lynley said. “You can't expect me to believe that a flat like this is paid for solely from your earnings in the sex trade.”

  “Believe what you want,” Vi Nevin said. Her fingers crept to the scarf at her throat and loosened it quickly.

  “Miss Nevin, we're looking for a killer. If he's the man who initially installed Nicola Maiden in this maisonette, then you need to give us his name. Because if he thought he had one kind of arrangement with her only to learn that it was another, he might well have been driven to kill her, and I dare say he won't like you hanging on here at his expense now that she's gone.”

  “You've had my answer.”

  “Is Reeve the bloke?” Nkata asked her.

  “Reeve?” Vi reached for her glass again.

  “Martin Reeve. MKR Financial Management.”

  She didn't drink. Instead, she swirled the liquid and watched as it slid across the ice cubes, which rattled against the side of the glass. She finally said, “I lied about MKR. I've never worked for Martin Reeve. I don't even know him. I just knew about him and Tricia from what Nikki said. And when you asked about him yesterday, I followed your lead. I didn't know what you knew. About me. About Nikki. And in my line of work, it doesn't make sense to trust the police.”

  “Then how did you two hook up in the first place?” Nkata asked her.

  “Nikki and I? We met in a pub. Jack Horner on the Tottenham Court Road, near her college. She was being chatted up by a bald-headed bloke with a paunch and bad teeth, and once he left her alone, we had a laugh about him. We began to chat and …” She shrugged. “We just got on. Nikki was easy to talk to. Easy to tell the truth to. She was interested in my work, and when she knew how much money could be
had on the job—a far sight more than what she was making at MKR—she decided to try it.”

  “You didn't mind the competition?” Lynley asked.

  “There wasn't any.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “Nikki didn't like it straight,” Vi explained. “She only serviced men if they wanted quirky sex. Costumes, play-acting, domination. I'll do little girls for men who prefer it from twelve-year-olds without the risk of going to gaol for their pleasure. But that's about as quirky as I get. I'll give hand relief and do oral in addition to the little-girl bit, naturally. Otherwise, what I have on offer is exactly what Nikki couldn't be bothered with: romance, seduction, and understanding. You'd be amazed how little of that goes on between husbands and wives.”

  “So between the two of you,” Lynley concluded, sidestepping any discussion of what marriage could do by way of cocking up the works of a relationship, “you covered all tastes and all inclinations?”

  “We did,” she replied. “And Shelly knew it. So she also knew that I wasn't about to choose her over Nikki if the two of them didn't get on once Nikki and I hooked up, which is why you need to talk to her. Not to some non-existent punter with money enough to give Nikki this place.”

  “Where c'n we find this Shelly?” Nkata asked.

  Vi didn't have her address. But she'd be easy enough to locate, she said. She was a regular at The Stocks, a club in Wandsworth that “catered to individuals with specific interests.” She was, Vi added, “special mates” with the barman.

  “If she's not there now, he'll be able to tell you where to find her,” Vi told them.

  Lynley examined her from his position on the love seat. He found that despite the volume of information she'd given them, he still wanted to give her some sort of veracity test. Glibness was one of the essentials for survival in her profession, and the course of wisdom—not to mention the years of rubbing elbows with those who lived on the edge of the law—suggested that he take her word as something less than gospel.