In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

by Elizabeth George

  “She's saying you sent her letters. She's saying you've stalked her for a number of months.”

  “Listen to her,” Shelly said derisively. “This's a free country last time I looked. I c'n go where I want an’ if she just happens to be there, it's too bloody bad. For her, that is. I don't give a fook one way or th'other.”

  “Even if she's with Nicola Maiden?”

  Shelly said nothing in reply, merely fingering through her chocolates for another piece. She was skeletally thin beneath her dungarees, and the unappealing condition of her teeth gave mute testimony to how she managed it despite a diet of truffles. She said, “Bitches. Users, those two are. I should of seen it sooner, only I thought being mates meant something to certain people. Which, of course, it di'n't. I hope they pay for how they treated me.”

  “Nicola Maiden has done,” Lynley told her. “She was murdered on Tuesday night. Have you someone who can verify your whereabouts between ten and midnight, Miss Platt?”

  “Murdered?” Shelly sat up straight. “Nikki Maiden murdered? How? When? I di'n't ever … You saying she was murdered? Fook. Hell. I got to ring Vi. I got to ring Vi.” She popped to her feet and went to the telephone which, like the hot plate, was on the chest of drawers. There, the water in the pan had begun to boil, which offered Shelly a moment's distraction in her quest to contact Vi Nevin. She carried the pan to the basin, where she poured some of the water into a lavender cup, saying, “Murdered. How is she? Vis okay, right? No one did nothing to Vi, did they?”

  “She's fine.” Lynley was curious about the sudden change in the young woman: what it said about her, what it said about the case.

  “She asked you to come and tell me, di'n't she? Fook. Poor kid.” Shelly opened a cabinet above the wash basin and took from it ajar of Gold Blend, a second jar of coffee creamer, and a box of sugar. She excavated in the coffee creamer for a grimy-looking spoon. She used it to measure everything into her cup, stirring vigorously between each measurement and dipping the spoon liberally into the next ingredient. She performed each step without drying the utensil. By the end it was thickly coated with an unappetising patina the colour of mud. “Well, steady on anyway,” she said, having apparently used the coffee-making time to reflect upon the information Lynley had brought to her. “It's not like I'm going to run right over, am I, no matter what she wants. She did wrong by me, and she bloody well knows it and she can just ask me nice if she wants me back. And I might not go, mind you. I got my pride.”

  Lynley wondered if she'd heard his earlier question. He wondered if she understood what his having asked it implied: not only about her place in the investigation into Nicola Maiden's murder but also about the state of her relationship with Vi Nevin. He said, “Your having sent threatening letters puts you under suspicion, Miss Platt. You do understand that, don't you? So you're going to need to produce whoever can verify your whereabouts on Tuesday night between ten and midnight.”

  “But Vi knows I'd never…” Shelly frowned. Something apparently made its way into her consciousness, like a mole burrowing towards the roots of a rosebush. Her face illustrated what her mind was assembling: If the police were standing there in her bed-sit, putting the frighteners on her about Nikki Maidens death, there could be only one reason for their visit and only one person who'd pointed them towards her. “Vi sent you to me, didn't she? Vi … sent … you … to … me. Vi thinks I took Nikki for an airing. Fook. That bitch. That rotten little bitch. She'll do anything to get back at me, won't she?”

  “To get back for what?” Nkata asked. The guitar-wielding lout leered over his shoulder from an overlarge photograph, tongue hanging out. A line of studs pierced it. A silver chain dangled from one of the studs, looping across his cheek to a ring in his ear. “To get back at you for what?” Nkata repeated patiently, his pencil poised and his face all interest.

  “For sneaking to Prongbreath Reeve, that's for what,” Shelly declared.

  “MKR Financial Management?” Nkata asked. “Martin Reeve?”

  “As ever bloody was.” Shelly marched over to the mattress, her coffee mug in her hand, unmindful of the hot liquid that sloshed onto the floor. She squatted, rooted for a truffle, and plopped it into the mug along with the coffee. Another chocolate she popped into her mouth. She sucked energetically and with intense concentration. This appeared to be directed—at long last—at the moderate peril of her situation. “Okay, so I told him about everything” she announced. “So bloody what? He had a right to know they were lying to him. Oh, he didn't deserve to know, little wanker that he is, but since they were doing to him what they did to me and since they were going to keep bloody doing it to everyone else in sight as long as they could get away with it, then he had a right to know. Because if people just use other people like that, then they bloody ought to pay for the using. One way or another, they bloody ought to pay Just like the punters, is what I say.”

  Nkata looked like a man who was listening to Greek and attempting to write a translation in Latin. Lynley didn't feel a great deal more clarity at his end. He said, “Miss Platt, what are you talking about?”

  “I'm talking about Prongbreath Reeve, I am. Vi and Nikki milked him like a cow, and when their pockets were full”—obviously, she wasn't a woman who clung to the unity of her figurative language—“they did a bunk on him. Only they made sure they took their punters with them when they scarpered. They were setting themselfs up to cost the Prong dear by going into business for themselfs, Nikki and Vi were, and I didn't think it was fair. So I told him.”

  “So Vi Nevin did work for Martin Reeve?” Lynley asked Shelly.

  “'Course she did. Both of them did. Tha's how they met.”

  “Did you work for him as well?”

  She snorted. “Not bloody likely, that. Oh I tried, I did. Right when Vi got hired, I tried. But I wasn't the type he was looking for, Prongbreath said. He wanted refinement, he said. He wanted his girls to make conversation and know which fork to use with the fish knife and watch an opera without falling asleep and go to a drinks party on the arm of some ugly fat bloke who wants to pretend she's his girlfriend for a night and—”

  “I think we've got the idea,” Lynley cut in. “But let me make sure so there's no confusion: MKR is an escort service.”

  “Posing as a financial management firm,” Nkata added.

  “Is that what you're saying?” Lynley asked Shelly. “Are you saying that both Nicola and Vi worked for MKR as escorts until they broke away to form their own business? Is that right, Miss Platt?”

  “Right as rain,” she asserted. “Right as a bleeding hurricane. He hires girls, does Martin, and he calls them trainees for some flaming money business that don't even exist in the first place. He sits them down with a slew of books they're supposed to study from to learn the ‘business,’ and after 'bout a week he asks them will they do him a favour and act like the date of one of MKR's big clients in town for a conference and wanting to go to dinner. He'll pay them extra, he says, if they'll do it just this once. And just this once turns into just another time, and by the time they figger what MKR's really about they're seeing they can make a lot more dosh acting like dates for Korean computer salesmen or Arab oil blokes or American políticos or … whoever than they could ever make doing whatever else they was doing when they came to work for Prongbreath in the first place. And they can make even more if they give their companion a bit more than their company for the evening. Which is when the Prong introduces them to what his business really is. Which has sod all to do with investing anyone's money anywhere, believe you me.”

  “How did you learn all this?” Lynley asked.

  “Vi brought Nikki home once. They were talking. I listened. Vi got hired by the Prong different, and they were telling their stories to each other to compare.”

  “Vis was?”

  “Different, like I said. She was the only escort he ever hired from the street. The rest were students. College girls who wanted to work part-time. But Vi worked the game
by sticking her card in call boxes—”

  “With you as her maid?”

  “Yeah. Tha's right. And Prongbreath picked up one of her cards, liked the look of her—I s'pose he didn't have another girl who could look ten years old like Vi can when she sets her mind to it—and he rang her up. I booked him in like I always did, but when he showed up, he wanted to talk business.” She lifted her coffee and drank, examining Lynley over the rim. She said, “So Vi went to work for him.”

  “And ceased to need you,” Lynley said.

  “I stuck by her though. Cooking meals, doing laundry, keeping the flat nice. But then she wanted to take up with Nikki as her mate and her partner, and I was out. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “One day I was washing her knickers. The next day I was pulling mine down to give ten-pound pokes to blokes waiting to catch the District Line to Ealing Broadway.”

  “Which was when you decided to inform Martin Reeve what they were up to,” Lynley noted. “It was a good provocation for you to seek revenge.”

  “I didn't hurt no one!” Shelly cried. “If you want someone likely to do someone else in—I mean, to kill them—then you look at the Prong, not at me.”

  “Yet Vi doesn't point the finger at him,” Lynley said. “Which you think she would do if she suspected him of anything. How do you account for that? She even denies knowing him.”

  “Well, she would do, wouldn't she?” Shelly declared. “If that bloke even thought she sneaked on him to the cops about … like … well, about his escort business, on top of her already using him to build up a list of clients and then doing a runner to set up in business on her own …” Shelly drew her thumb across her neck in a mime of throat-slitting. “She wouldn't last ten minutes after he found out, Vi wouldn't. The Prong don't like to be crossed, and he'd see to it she paid for crossing.” Shelly seemed to hear what she was saying and to realise all of the possibilities that could grow out of it. Nervously, she looked towards the door, as if expecting Martin Reeve to come barreling through it, ready to wreak vengeance upon her for the sneaking that she had just done.

  “If that's the case,” Lynley said, “if Reeve is indeed responsible for Nicola Maiden's death—which is what I assume you're suggesting when you talk about people paying when they double-cross him—”

  “I never said!”

  “Understood. You didn't say it directly. I'm drawing the inference.” Lynley waited for her to give a sign of comprehension. She blinked. He decided that would do. He said, “If we infer that Reeve's responsible for Nicola Maiden's death, why would he have waited so long to kill her? She left his employ in April. It's now September. How do you account for the five months he waited to take his revenge?”

  “I never told him where they were.” Shelly said it proudly. “I pretended I didn't know. I reckoned he was owed the tale of what they were up to, but he was on his own to track them down. And tha's what he did. Depend on it.”

  CHAPTER 19

  I Peter Hanken had just got back to his office after his conversation with Will Upman when the news came in that a ten-year-old schoolboy called Theodore Webster playing hide-and-seek in a grit dispenser on the road between Peak Forest and Lane Head had found a knife buried in what remained of last winter's protection against road ice. It was a good-size pocket knife, replete with blades and the sort of miscellaneous gewgaws that made its inclusion in the equipment of a camper or a hiker de rigueur. The boy might have kept it hidden away for years for his own use—so his father reported—had its blades not been impossible to open without someone's assistance. Because of this, he'd taken the knife to his father for help, thinking that a few drops of oil would take care of the problem. But his father had seen the dried blood that was crusting the tightly closed knife, and he'd recalled the story of the Calder Moor deaths that had filled the front page of the High Peak Courier. He'd phoned the police immediately. It might not be the knife that had been used on one of the two Calder Moor victims, Hanken was told via his mobile by the WPC who'd taken the call, but the DI might want to have a look at it himself prior to its being sent onward to the lab. Hanken declared that he'd take the knife to the lab himself, so he barreled north to the A623 and headed southeast at Sparrowpit. This course bisected Calder Moor, running at a forty-five-degree angle from its northwest edge, which was defined by the road along which the Maiden girl's car had been parked.

  At the site, Hanken examined the grit dispenser in which the weapon had been found. He made a note of the fact that a killer—depositing a knife therein—could then have proceeded on his way to a junction not five miles distant at which he could have turned either due east then north for Padley Gorge or immediately south towards Bakewell and Broughton Manor, which lay a mere two miles beyond it. Once Hanken had confirmed this bit of data with a quick look at the map, he went on to examine the knife itself in the kitchen of the Websters’ farmhouse.

  It was indeed a Swiss Army model, and it now lay in an evidence bag on the car's seat next to him. The lab would conduct all the necessary tests to ascertain whether the blood on both the blades and the case was Terry Coles, but prior to those tests, another less scientific identification could give the investigators a valuable piece of information.

  Hanken found Andy Maiden at the bottom of the drive leading up to the Hall. The former SO 10 officer was apparently installing a new sign for the establishment, an activity that involved a wheelbarrow, a shovel, a small concrete mixer, several lengths of flex, and an impressive set of floodlights. The old sign had already been removed and lay disassembled beneath a lime tree. The new one—in all its ornate, hand-carved, and hand-painted splendour—waited nearby to be mounted on a sturdy post of oak and wrought iron.

  Hanken parked on the verge and studied Maiden, who was working with a fierce expenditure of energy, as if the replacement of the sign had to be accomplished in record time. He was sweating heavily, the damp forming rivulets on his legs and plastering his T-shirt to his torso. Hanken noted that he was in remarkable physical condition, looking like a man who had the strength and endurance of a boy in his twenties.

  “Mr. Maiden,” he called as he shoved his door open. “Could I have a word, please?” And then more loudly when there was no reaction, “Mr. Maiden?”

  Maiden slowly turned from his work, revealing his face. Hanken was struck by what his expression revealed of his mental state. If the other man's body could have belonged to a bloke of a younger generation, his face was ancient. Maiden looked as if the only thing keeping him going was the mindlessness of the moment's exertion. Ask him to do anything but labour and sweat, and the shell of the man that he had become would be blasted to fragments like a friable carapace hit by a hammer.

  Hanken experienced a dual reaction to the sight of the former SO 10 officer: an immediate surge of sympathy that was swiftly replaced by the recollection of an important detail. As an undercover cop, Andy Maiden knew how to play a role.

  Hanken slid the evidence bag into his jacket pocket and joined Andy Maiden on the drive. Maiden watched him, expressionless, as he approached.

  Hanken nodded at the sign that Maiden was preparing to hang, admiring the artistry with which it had been crafted and saying, “Nicer than the Cavendish's road sign, I think.”

  “Thanks.” But Maiden hadn't spent his career with the Met to think that the detective inspector in charge of the investigation into his daughter's murder had come to chat about the manner in which Maiden Hall was advertising its presence. He dumped a mound of concrete into the hole he'd dug, and he sank his shovel into the earth nearby. He said, “You've news for us,” and he appeared to be attempting to read Hanken's face for the answer in advance of hearing it.

  “A knife's been found.” Hanken brought the other policeman into the picture with a brief explanation of how it had come into the hands of the police.

  “You'll want me to look at it,” Maiden said.

  Hanken brought out the plastic evidence bag and rested it with the knife in his palm. Maiden did
n't ask to hold it himself. Rather, he stood gazing at it as if the case, the folded blades, or the blood upon both could give him an answer to questions he wasn't yet willing to ask.

  “You mentioned that you gave her your own knife,” Hanken said. “Could this be it?” And when Maiden nodded, “Is there anything about the knife that you gave her that distinguishes it from others of the same type, Mr. Maiden?”

  “Andy? Andy?” A woman's voice grew louder as the woman herself descended from the Hall, walking through the trees. “Andy darling, here. I've brought you some—” Nan Maiden stopped abruptly when she saw Hanken. “Excuse me, Inspector. I had no idea you were … Andy, I've brought you some water. The heat. You know. Pellegrino's all right, isn't it?”

  She thrust the water at her husband. She touched the backs of her fingers to his temple, saying, “You aren't overdoing it, are you?”

  He flinched.

  Hanken felt a stirring on the back of his neck, like a spirit's caress against his skin. He looked from husband to wife, assessed the moment that had just passed between them, and knew he was fast approaching the time to ask the question no one had given voice to yet.

  He said first, after nodding a hello to Maiden's wife, “As to anything that might differentiate the knife you gave your daughter from other similar Swiss Army knives … ?”

  “One of the blades of the scissors broke off a few years ago. I never replaced it,” Maiden said.

  “Anything else?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “After you gave the knife—possibly this one—to your daughter, did you buy another for yourself?”

  “I have another, yes,” he said. “Smaller than that though. Easier to carry about.”

  “You have it with you?”

  Maiden reached into the pocket of his cut-off jeans. He brought out another model of a Swiss Army knife and handed it over. Hanken examined it, using his thumbnail to prise open its largest blade. Two inches appeared to be its length.