In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

by Elizabeth George

  He removed his glasses and used the bottom of his T-shirt against his eye. It stung, it burned, and his sense of grievance grew. Blurry of vision, he stumbled to the back of the house, where the Saturday morning washing was flapping and snapping on the line that was strung from the eaves to a rust-eaten pole near a crumbling drystone wall.

  “Pooey, phooey, poop,” Teddy muttered. On the ground near the house he found a long, thin branch. He scooped this up, and it became a sword. He used it as he advanced on the washing, a row of his dad's jeans his target.

  “Stay where you are,” he hissed at them. “I'm armed, you lot. And if you think you can take me alive … Ha! Take that! And that! And that!”

  They'd come from the Death Star to deal with him. They knew that he was the Last of the Jedi. If they could just get him out of the way, the Emperor would be able to Rule the Universe. But they couldn't kill him. AbsoLUTEly no way. They were under orders to take him captive so that he could be made an Example to All Rebels in the Star System. Well, Ha! And Ha! They would NEVER take him. Because he had a laser sword and swish swish lash and swish. But omigod. Hang on now. They had laser guns. And they didn't want to capture him at all! They wanted to kill him and … eeeeooooowww! He was completely outnumbered! Runrunrun!

  Teddy turned and fled, waving his sword in the air. He sought the protection of the drystone wall that fronted the property and edged the road. With a leap, he was over. His heart pounded. His ears throbbed.

  Safe, he thought. He'd gone into light speed and left the Imperial Star Troopers behind. He'd landed on an undiscovered planet. They'd never find him here in a zillion years. HE would be an Emperor now.

  Whoosh. Something whizzed by on the road. Teddy blinked. The wind pummeled him like an angry ghost's fists, bringing water to his eyes. He couldn't quite see. But still, it looked like … No. It couldn't be. Teddy peered to the right and to the left. He realised with horror where he'd landed. This wasn't a brand-new planet at all. He'd taken himself into Jurassic Park! And what had lightninged by with the fury of hunger driving it was a velociraptor homing in on something for the kill!

  Omigod omigod. And he had NOTHING with him. No high-powered rifle, no weapon of any kind. Just a stupid old stick and what good would THAT be against a dinosaur with human flesh on its mind?

  He had to hide. One velociraptor didn't exist without another nearby. And two meant twenty. Or a hundred. A thousand!

  Omigod! He tore along the road.

  A short distance ahead, he saw his safety. A yellow bin stood in the weeds on the verge. He could hide in there till the danger passed.

  Whoosh. Whoosh. More 'raptors tore by as Teddy flung his body inside the bin. He lowered himself and brought the lid down.

  He'd seen what 'raptors could do to a person, Teddy had. They tore at flesh and sucked out eyeballs and crunched bones like they were McDonald's french fries. And they liked ten-year-old boys the best.

  He had to do something. He had to save himself. He crouched within the safety of the bin and tried to come up with a plan.

  The bin held the remainder of last year's grit: some six inches of it, left over from the winter when it was used on the road so that car tyres didn't slide on the ice. Teddy could feel the pebbles and shards of it biting into the palms of his hands.

  Could he use the grit? Could he make it a weapon? Could he ball it up into a nasty missile that he could throw at the 'raptors and hurt them enough for them to leave him alone? If he did that, he would then have time to—His fingers grabbed on to something hard, something buried three inches into the grit. It was slender and palm-sized and when he dug round it, he was able to free it and to bring it up into the weak light that came through the yellow walls of his hiding place.

  Wicked, he thought. What a find. He was saved. It was a knife.

  Julian Britton was doing what he always did at the end of a mountain rescue: He was checking his equipment as he put it away. But he wasn't being as thorough or as careful as he usually was when organising and repacking his gear. His thoughts were far away from ropes, boots, picks, hammers, compasses, maps, and everything else they used when someone got lost or someone else got injured and a team was required to find them.

  His thoughts were on her. On Nicola. On what had been and what could have been had she only acted the appropriate part in the drama he'd written for their relationship.

  “But I love you,” he'd said to her, and even to his own ears the four words had sounded pathetic and stricken.

  “And I love you back,” she'd replied kindly. She'd even taken his hand and held it—palm upwards—as if she intended to place something within it. “Only it's not enough, the kind of love I feel for you. And the kind of love you want—and deserve—to have, Jules … well, it isn't the sort of love I'm likely to feel for anyone.”

  “But I'm good for you. You've said it enough times over the years. That's enough, isn't it? Can't the other sort of love—the sort you're talking about … can't it grow from there? I mean, we're friends. We're companions. We're … for God's sake we're lovers … And if that doesn't mean we have something special together … Hell. What does?”

  She'd sighed. She'd looked out of the car window to the darkness. He could see her reflection in the glass. “Jules, I've become an escort,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

  The statement and the question had come out of nowhere, so for a moment he'd thought ridiculously of tour guides, travel escorts who stand at the front of a coach and speak into a microphone as the vehicle lumbers round the countryside with tourists crammed into its seats. “You're traveling?” he'd asked.

  “I'm seeing men for money,” she replied. “I spend the evening with them. Sometimes I spend the night. I go to hotels and pick them up and we do what they want. Whatever they want. Then they pay me. They give me two hundred pounds an hour. Fifteen hundred pounds if I sleep in their beds for the night.”

  He stared at her. He heard her clearly, but his brain refused to assimilate the information. He said, “I see. You have someone else in London, then.”

  She said, “Jules, you're not listening to me.”

  “I am. You said—”

  “You're hearing. Not listening. Men pay me for companionship.”

  “To go out on dates.”

  “You could call them dates: dinner, the theatre, a gallery opening or business party when someone wants a nice-looking woman on his arm. They pay me for that. And they pay me for sex as well. And depending on what I do to them when it comes to sex, they pay me quite a lot. More than I would ever have imagined possible for fucking a relative stranger, to be honest with you.”

  The words were like bullets. And he reacted as he would have done had she fired a volley through his body. He went into shock. Not the normal sort of shock when one's system has undergone a physical trauma like a motor accident or a fall from a barn roof, but the sort of shock that shatters the psyche so that one can take in only a single detail and that detail is usually the least dangerous to one's peace.

  So what he saw was her hair, how the light was behind it, and how it shone through individual strands so that she looked like an earthbound angel. But what she was telling him was far from angelic. It was foul and disgusting. And she continued to tell him, and he continued to die.

  “No one forced me into it,” she said as she took a boiled sweet from her bag. “The escort stuff. Or the other. The sex. It was my decision once I saw the possibilities and once I knew how much I had to offer. I started out just having drinks with them. Dinner, sometimes. Or the theatre. All on the up and up, you know: a few hours of conversation and someone to listen, to reply if they wanted, and to look starry-eyed otherwise. But they always asked—every one of them—if I would do more. At first I thought no. I couldn't. I didn't know them, after all. And I always thought … I mean, I couldn't imagine doing it with someone that I didn't actually know. But then one of them asked if he could just touch me. Fifty pounds for putting his hand in my knickers
and feeling my bush.” A smile. “When I had a bush back then. Before … You know. So I let him and it wasn't half bad. It was rather funny, in fact. I started laughing—this was inside, not openly, mind you—because it seemed so … just so silly: this bloke—older than my dad, he was—breathing heavy and going all teary-eyed because he had his hand in my crotch. So when he said Touch me back please, I told him that would be fifty pounds more. He said Oh God, anything. So I obliged. One hundred pounds for feeling his willie and letting him poke round my bush with his fingers.”

  “Stop.” He'd finally managed the words.

  But she was eager to make him understand. They were friends, after all. They'd always been friends. They'd been mates from the moment they'd met in Bakewell: she a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl with an attitude and a strut to her walk that had always said I'm open to anything only he hadn't seen that until this moment, and he nearly three years her senior, home from university for the holidays and consumed with worry about his father's drinking and a house that was falling down round their ears. But Nicola hadn't seen his worries then. She'd seen only an opportunity for some fun. Which she'd taken happily. He understood that now.

  “What I'm trying to explain is that it's a way of life that works for me at the moment. It won't always, of course. But it does today. And because it does, I'm grabbing it, Jules. I would be every sort of fool if I didn't.”

  “You've gone bloody mad” was his numb assessment. “London's done this to you. You need to come home, Nick. You need to be with friends. You need help.”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “It's obvious, isn't it? Something's wrong. You can't be in your right mind and be selling your body night after night.”

  “Several times a night, frequently.”

  He'd clutched at his head. “Jesus, Nick … You need to talk to someone. Let me find a doctor, a psychiatrist. I won't tell anyone why. It'll be our secret. And when you've recovered—”

  “Julian.” She drew his hands from his head. “There's nothing wrong with me. If I thought I was having relationships with these men, there'd be something wrong. If I thought I was on the path to true love, there'd be something wrong. If I was trying to avenge a wrong or hurt someone else or live in a fantasy, I'd need to be carted to the madhouse straightaway. But that's not how it is. I'm doing this because I enjoy it, because I'm paid well, because my body has something to offer men, and while it's silly to me that they'd pay me to get it, I'm perfectly willing to—”

  He'd hit her then. God forgive him, but he'd hit her because he was desperate to make her stop. So he struck her in the face with a hard, closed fist, and her head flew back and hit the window.

  Then they stared at each other, she with her fingertips at the point where his knuckles had met her face, he with his left hand holding those knuckles and in his ears a high, loud singing like the whining of car tyres caught in a skid. And there was nothing to say. Not a single word to excuse what he'd done, to excuse what she was doing to both of them with the choices she was making and the life she was living. Still, he'd tried.

  “Where did this come from?” he'd asked hoarsely. “Because it had to come from somewhere, Nick. It's not how normal people live.”

  “A nasty skeleton in the closet, d'you mean?” she'd replied lightly, fingers still at her cheek. Her voice was the same, but her eyes had changed, as if she was seeing him differently. Like the enemy, he'd thought. And he'd despaired right to the soles of his feet because he loved her so. “No, Jules. I haven't got any convenient excuses. No one to blame. No one to accuse. Just a few experiences that led to other experiences. Just exactly as I told you. First an escort, then a brief little grope and feel, then …” She smiled. “Then on from there.”

  He read the truth of who she was in that instant. “You must despise us all. Men. What we want. What we do.”

  She'd reached for his hand. It was still clenched and she unclenched it. She raised it to her lips and kissed the knuckles that he'd used to bruise her. “You are who you are,” she said. “Julian, it's the same for me.”

  But he couldn't accept the simplicity of that statement. He railed against it. And he railed against her. And he determined to change her no matter the cost. She would see reason, he'd decided. She would get help if that's what it took.

  She'd got death instead. A fair trade, some would argue, for what she offered life.

  Julian felt numb as he packed his mountain rescue equipment away in its haversack. His mind was swarming with memories, and he was willing to do just about anything to silence the voices in his head.

  Distraction arrived in the person of his father, who toddled along the first floor passageway just as Julian was placing his haversack into the old mule trunk. Jeremy Britton clutched a glass in one hand, which was no surprise, and a fan of brochures in the other, which was. He said, “Ah. M'boy. Here you are, then. Have you a minute for your dad?”

  His speech was clear, which caused Julian to eye his fathers drinking glass curiously. The colourless liquid suggested gin or vodka. But the glass was large enough to hold at least eight ounces of fluid, and since it was three-quarters empty and since Jeremy would have never splashed so meagre an amount into a glass whose volume could have held more, and since he wasn't slurring his words, it could only mean that the glass didn't hold either vodka or gin at all. Which in turn had to mean … Julian rattled his own head mentally. God, he was losing it by leaps and by bounds.

  “Sure.” He did his best not to eye the glass or to sniff its contents.

  Jeremy smiled, lifted the glass, and said, “Water, Julie. The old local aitch-two-and-oh. I'd nearly forgotten the taste of it.”

  The sight of his father drinking water was akin to having a vision of the Ascension into Heaven while hiking on the moor. “Water?”

  “Best there is. You ever notice, my boy, how the flavour of water taken off our own land tastes sweeter than what you can get from a bottle? Bottled water, I mean,” he added with a smile. “Evian, Perrier. You know.” He tipped the glass up and swigged down a mouthful. He smacked his lips. “Spare a bit of time for your dad? I want to ask your advice, old chap.”

  Puzzled, wary, amazed at the change in his father—prompted, it seemed to Julian, by nothing at all—he followed him into the parlour. There Jeremy sat in his usual chair after pulling another round to face it. He gestured for Julian to take that place. Julian did so hesitantly.

  “Didn't notice at lunch, did you?” Jeremy asked.

  “Notice what?”

  “Water. Nothing else. That's what I was drinking. Didn't you see?”

  “Sorry. I've had things on my mind. But I'm glad of it, Dad. Good for you. Brilliant.”

  Jeremy nodded, looking pleased with himself. “Had a think over the past week, Julie. And here's what it is. I'm going to take the cure. I've been thinking about it since … oh, I don't know since when. And I think it's time.”

  “You re going to stop? Drinking? You're going to stop drinking?”

  “Enough is enough. I been … I've been blotto for something like thirty-five years. Thought I'd try the next thirty-five sober as a judge.”

  His father had made this claim before. But he'd usually made the claim when either drunk or hung over. This time he seemed neither. “You're going to go to AA?” Julian asked. There were meetings in Bakewell, others in Buxton, in Matlock, and in Chapel-en-le-Frith. More than once Julian had phoned each town to get schedules of meetings that were sent to the manor house and then thrown away.

  “That's what I want to talk to you about,” Jeremy said. “How best for me to beat the devil forever this time. Here's what I think, Julie,” and he handed over the fan of brochures he'd been holding, spreading them out on Julian's knees. “These're clinics,” he said. “Dry-out houses. You check in for a month—two or three if you need it—and you take the cure. Proper diet, proper exercise, sessions with the resident shrink. That's where you start. Detox. Once you've done the dance steps, you're into AA.
Have a look, m'boy. Tell me what you think.”

  Julian didn't need to look to know what he thought. The clinics were private. They were expensive. And there was no money to pay for them unless he gave up his work on Broughton Manor, sold off the harriers, and got a proper job. It would be the end of his dream to bring the estate back to life if he sent his father to a clinic.

  Jeremy was watching him hopefully. “I know I could do it this time, m'boy. I feel it in my gut. You know how that is. With a little help, I'll do it. I'll beat the devil at his own game.”

  “You don't think AA's enough to help you?” Julian said. “Because, you see, Dad, in order to send you to a place like this … I mean, I can check our insurance, and I will, absolutely. But I rather think they won't pay …. We have the most basic health insurance, you know. Unless you'd like me to …” He didn't want to do it. And the guilt of his reluctance felt like a gouge incised on his soul. But he made himself say it. This was, after all, his father in front of him. “I could stop work on the estate. I could get a proper job.”

  Jeremy reached forward and hastily gathered up the brochures. “I don't want that. Great Scot, Julie. I don't want that. I want Broughton Manor back in its glory like you do. I won't take you from that, son. No. I'll make do.”

  “But if you think you need a clinic—”

  “I do. I do. I'd get squared away proper and have a foundation. But if there's no money—and God knows I believe you, boy—then there's no money and that's an end to it. Perhaps another day …” Jeremy stuffed the brochures into his jacket pocket. He gave his gaze moodily to the fireplace. “Money,” he murmured. “Damn me if it doesn't always come down to money.”

  The parlour door opened. Samantha entered.

  It was quite as if she'd heard her cue.

  CHAPTER 18

  orry, luvs, members only” was how Lynley and Nkata were greeted at a lectern at the top of a staircase in Wandsworth. This led into the dark cavity that appeared to be the entrance to The Stocks, and it was being guarded in the early afternoon by a matronly woman doing needlepoint. Aside from her curious ensemble, which consisted of a black leather sheath with a silver zip lowered to her waist and exposing pendulous breasts of an unappealing chicken-skin texture, she could have been somebody's grandmother, and she probably was. She had grey hair that looked crimped for Sunday's church services and half-moon glasses at the end of her nose. She looked up over them at the two detectives and added, “Unless you're wanting to join. Is that it? Here. Have a look, then.” She handed each of them a brochure.