Lynley had recognised the name when Tricia Reeve had spoken it in Notting Hill. Sir Adrian Beattie was the UK's answer to Christiaan Barnard. He'd performed the first heart transplant in England and he'd successfully kept performing them round the world for the last several decades, establishing a record of success that had assured his place in medical history and guaranteed his wealth. This latter was on display in the Boltons: Beattie's home was a fortress of glacially white walls and gridiron windows with a front gate barring entrance to anyone who couldn't provide its inhabitants with an acceptable identity through an intercom from which a disembodied voice demanded, “Yes?” in a tone suggesting that not just any answer would do.
Assuming that New Scotland Yard would have a cachet unavailable to the simple word police, Lynley used their place of employment along with their ranks when he identified himself and Nkata. In reply, the gate clicked ajar. By the time Lynley and Nkata had mounted the six front steps, the door had been opened by a woman wearing an incongruous cone-shaped party hat.
She introduced herself as Margaret Beattie, daughter of Sir Adrian. The family were having a birthday party at the moment, she explained hastily, unhooking the hat's elastic strap from her chin and removing the cone from her head. Her daughter was this very evening celebrating the happy negotiation of five years among her fellow men. Was there something wrong in the neighbourhood? Not a burglary, she hoped. And she glanced past them anxiously, as if breaking and entering in the Boltons were a daily occurrence that she might inadvertently encourage by holding the front door open for longer than necessary.
They were there to see Sir Adrian, Lynley explained. And no, their visit had nothing to do with the neighbourhood and its vulnerability to professional thieves.
Margaret Beattie said doubtfully, “I see,” and admitted them into the house. She said that if they'd wait in her father's study upstairs, she would fetch the man himself. “I hope it won't take too long, what you've come to see him about,” she said with the sort of gentle smiling insistence a well-bred woman always uses to imply what she wants without stating it directly. “Molly's his favourite grandchild and he's told her she can have him all to herself tonight. He's promised to read her a whole chapter of Peter Pan. He asked her what she wanted for her birthday, and that was it. Remarkable, don't you think?”
“Quite.”
Obviously pleased, Margaret Beattie beamed, directed them to the study, and went seeking her father.
Sir Adrian's study was on the first floor of the house, at the top of a wide staircase. Decorated with burgundy leather armchairs and fitted with forest-green carpet, the room contained a plethora of volumes from the medical to the mundane, and it acted as a silent testimony to the two disparate aspects of Sir Adrian's life. The professional side was represented by medallions, certificates, awards, and mementos as diverse as antique surgical instruments and centuries-old engravings of the human heart. The personal side showed itself in dozens of photographs. They stood everywhere—on the mantelpiece, tucked into random spaces in the bookshelves, lined up like dancers ready to high kick across the top of the desk. Their subjects were the doctor's family: on holiday, at home, at school, and through the years. Lynley picked up one picture and examined it as Nkata bent to scrutinise the antique instruments that were arranged on the top of a dwarf break-front bookcase.
The doctor had four children, it seemed. In the picture Lynley held, Beattie posed among them and among their spouses, a proud paterfamilias with his wife standing next to him and eleven grandchildren clustered about him like tiny beads of oil round a larger central drop that seeks to absorb them. The occasion of the photograph had been a Christmas celebration, with each of the children holding a gift and Beattie himself decked out as Father Christmas sans beard. Everyone in the picture was either smiling or laughing, and Lynley wondered how their expressions would have read should Sir Adrian's liasion with a dominatrix have become public—or even familial—knowledge.
“Detective Inspector Lynley?”
Lynley swung round at the sound of the pleasant tenor. It should have been voiced by a younger man, but it came from the rotund surgeon himself, who stood in the doorway, a papier mâché captain's hat on his head and a flute of champagne in his hand. He said, “We're about to toast our little Molly. She's going to open her presents. Can this wait another hour?”
“I'm afraid not.” Lynley replaced the photograph and introduced Nkata, who reached in his jacket pocket for his notebook and pencil.
Beattie saw this with apparent consternation. He entered the room and shut the door behind him. “Is this a professional call? Has something happened? My family …” He looked in the direction from which he had come and dismissed whatever it was that he'd intended to say. Bearing bad news about a member of his family could not be the reason that the police had come calling. His family members were all in his house.
“A young woman called Nicola Maiden was murdered in Derbyshire on Tuesday night,” Lynley told the surgeon.
In reply, Beattie was stillness itself, waiting incarnate. His eyes were on Lynley. His surgeon's hands—an old man's hands that still looked as nimble as the hands of a man three decades younger—neither trembled, grasped the glass more tightly, nor moved in any visible way. His glance went to Nkata, dropping to the little leather notebook in the DCs big palm, then back to Lynley.
Lynley said, “You knew Nicola Maiden, didn't you, Sir Adrian? Although perhaps you knew her by her professional name only: Nikki Temptation.”
Beattie advanced across the carpet and set his champagne glass upon the desk with studied care. He placed himself behind the desk in a high-back chair and canted his head at the leather armchairs. He finally said, “Please sit, Inspector. You as well, Constable.” And when they had done so, he went on with “I've not seen a paper. What happened to her, please?”
It was the sort of question that a man who was used to being in charge might have asked of a subordinate. In reply, however, Lynley sought to communicate which of them would be controlling the direction of the conversation. He said evenly, “You did know Nicola Maiden, then.”
Beattie's fingers folded round each other. Two of them, Lynley saw, had nails that were blackened, both of them deformed by some sort of fungus that apparently grew rampant beneath them. It was a disconcerting sight in a man of medicine, and Lynley wondered that Beattie didn't do something about it.
“Yes. I knew Nicola Maiden,” Beattie said.
“Tell us about your relationship.”
Behind gold-framed spectacles, the eyes were wary. “Am I a suspect?”
“Everyone who knew her is a suspect.”
“You said Tuesday night.”
“I did say that, yes.”
“I was here on Tuesday night.”
“In this house?”
“Not here. But in London. At my club in St. James's. Shall I arrange for corroboration, Inspector? That's the word I want, isn't it? Corroboration”
Lynley said, “Tell us about Nicola. When did you see her last?”
Beattie reached for his champagne and drank. To gain time, to still nerves. It was impossible to tell. “The morning of the day before she left for the North.”
“This would be last June?” Nkata asked. And when Beattie nodded, Nkata added, “In Islington?”
“Islington?” Beattie frowned. “No. Here. She came to the house. She always came to the house when I … when I needed her.”
“Your relationship was sexual, then,” Lynley said. “You were one of her clients.”
Beattie turned his head away from Lynley, looking towards the mantelpiece with its copious display of family photos. “I expect you know the answer to that question. You'd hardly have come calling on a Saturday evening had you not been told exactly where I fitted in Nikki's life. So, yes, I was one of her clients, if that's what you'd like to call it.”
“What would you call it?”
“We had a mutually beneficial arrangement. She provided an i
ndispensable service. I paid her generously for it.”
“You're a man with a high public profile,” Lynley pointed out. “You've a successful career, a wife and children, grandchildren, and all the external trappings of a fortunate life.”
“I've all the internal trappings as well,” Beattie said. “It is a fortunate life. So why would I risk losing it by having a liaison with a common prostitute? That's what you want to know, isn't it? But that's just the point, you see, Inspector Lynley. Nikki wasn't common in any way.”
Music started somewhere in the house, a furious and proficient playing on a piano. Chopin, it sounded like. Then the tune broke off abruptly amid some shouting, to be replaced by a spritely Cole Porter piece that was accompanied by exuberant voices not bothering to aim for the appropriate key. “‘Call me irreSPONsible, call me unreLIable,’” the group partly howled, partly laughed, partly sang. Much guffawing and good-natured derision followed this: the happy family in celebration.
“So I'm learning,” Lynley agreed. “You're not the first person to mention the fact that she was a cut above the ordinary. But actually, why you were willing to risk everything with an affair—”
“That's not what it was.”
“With an arrangement, then. Why you'd risk everything for that isn't what I want to know. I'm more interested in discovering exactly what you'd be willing to do to safeguard what you have—these external and internal trappings of your life—if the continuing possession of them was threatened in some way.”
“Threatened?” Beattie's voice was too perplexed for Lynley to believe the reaction was ingenuous. Surely the man knew how much he put at jeopardy by having a prostitute operating on the periphery of his life.
“Every man has enemies,” Lynley told him. “Even you, I dare say. Should someone untrustworthy have found out about your arrangement with Nicola Maiden, should someone have decided to harm you by revealing that arrangement, you would have lost a great deal, and not all of it tangible.”
“Ah. I do see: the traditional outcome of societal defiance. ‘Who steals my purse,’” Beattie murmured. Then he went on more conversationally, giving Lynley the oddest sensation that they might have been discussing the next day's weather forecast. “That couldn't have happened, Inspector. Nikki came to the house, as I said. She dressed conservatively, carried a brief case, and drove a Saab. To all appearances, she was arriving to take dictation or to help plan a party. And as our encounters took place well away from windows, there was absolutely nothing for anyone to see.”
“She herself didn't wear a blindfold, I expect.”
“Of course she didn't. She could hardly do that and be of any satisfactory service to me.”
“So you'll no doubt agree that she might have been in possession of certain details about you. Details, which if revealed, could confirm a story—perhaps one sold to a tabloid?—that would prove whatever facts she might choose to lay before a public for whom gossip can never be salacious enough.”
Beattie said, sounding pensive, “Good my God.”
“So corroboration is in order, as you guessed,” Lynley said. “We'll need the name of your club.”
“Are you suggesting that I killed Nikki because she wanted more from me than I was paying? Or because I'd decided I didn't need her any longer and she was threatening to go public if I didn't keep paying her?” He drank a final mouthful of his champagne, afterwards giving a rueful laugh and shoving the glass away. He lumbered to his feet, saying, “Mother of God, if that had only been the case. Wait here please.” And he left the room.
Nkata rose quickly in response. “Guv, sh'll I … ?”
“Wait. Let's see.”
“He could be on the phone setting up his alibi.”
“I don't think so.” Lynley couldn't have explained why he had that feeling, save the fact that there was something decidedly odd in Sir Adrian Beattie's reactions, not only to the news of Nicola Maiden's murder but also to the logical implication that his involvement with her had vast potential to destroy everything he appeared to value.
When Beattie returned some two minutes later, he brought with him a woman whom he introduced to the detectives as his wife. Lady Beattie, he titled her, and then to the woman herself, “Chloe, these men are here about Nikki Maiden.”
Lady Beattie—a thin woman with Wallis Simpson hair and skin made shiny by too many face-lifts—reached for the triple-strand pearls that were slung round her neck like souvenir golf balls. She said, “Nikki Maiden? She's not in some kind of trouble, I hope.”
“Unfortunately, she's been murdered, my dear,” her husband said, and he placed a hand at her elbow, perhaps on the chance that she'd find the news distressing.
Which she apparently did, saying, “Oh my God. Adrian—” and reaching for him.
He slid his hand down her arm and took her own, clucking at it with what looked to Lynley like genuine tenderness. “Awful,” he said. “Ghastly, rotten. These policemen have come because they think I might be involved. Because of the arrangement.”
Lady Beattie disengaged her hand from her husband's. She raised a shapely eyebrow, saying, “But isn't it much more likely that Nikki could have hurt you, and not the opposite? She didn't allow anyone to dominate her, did she? I remember her being quite specific about that the very first time we interviewed her. ‘I won't be the bottom’ is exactly what she said. ‘I only tried it once, and I found it revolting.’ And then she pardoned herself, thinking she might have offended you. I remember that perfectly, don't you, dear?”
“I don't expect she was killed during a session,” Beattie told his wife. “They've said it was in Derbyshire, and she'd got that summer job with the solicitor, you remember.”
“And in her free time she didn't … ?”
“That was only in London, as far as I know.”
“I see.”
Lynley found himself feeling as if he'd just stepped through the looking glass. He glanced at Nkata and saw that the DC, his face a study in stupefaction, felt the same. Lynley said, “Perhaps you'd explain the arrangement to us, Sir Adrian, Lady Beattie. The background will allow us to see what we're dealing with.”
“Of course.” Lady Beattie and her husband were pleased as punch to give a full account of Sir Adrian's sexual proclivities. Lady Beattie sat gracefully on a sofa near the fireplace. The men went back to their original positions. And while her husband outlined the exact nature of his relationship with Nicola Maiden, she added salient details wherever he forgot them.
He'd met Nicola Maiden round the first of November the previous year, perhaps nine months after his Chloe's arthritis had become too painful in her hands for her to be able to perform the rites of discipline that they'd learned to enjoy throughout their marriage. “We thought at first that we'd simply go without,” Sir Adrian said. “The pain, I mean. Not the sex itself. We thought we'd just cope. Be traditional and all that. But it wasn't long before we saw that my need—” He paused, as if seeking an abbreviated way to explain that would not take them through the cobwebbed labyrinth of his psyche. “It is a need, you see. You must understand that if you're to understand anything.”
“Go on,” Lynley said. He shot a look at Nkata. The DC had resumed his scrupulous note-taking, although his expression was telegraphing Oh Lord, what's my mum going to say 'bout this as eloquently as if he were speaking it.
Realising that Sir Adrian's need was going to have to be met if the Beatties wanted to continue their own sexual relations, they'd sought someone young, healthy, strong, and—most important—entirely discreet to minister to him.
“Nicola Maiden,” Lynley said.
“Discretion was—is—critical,” Sir Adrian said. “For a man in my position.” Obviously, he couldn't select a dominatrix blindly by choosing someone from a phone box card or a magazine advert. He could hardly ask friends and colleagues for recommendations. And going to an's & M club—or even to one of the lesser flesh pits in Soho in the hope of meeting a likely candidate—wasn't a wis
e option, since there was always the chance of being seen, being recognised, and consequently being subjected to the sort of tabloid treatment guaranteed to cause excruciating agonies to his children, the spouses of his children, and their offspring. “And to Chloe, of course,” Sir Adrian added with a nod. “For while she knew—has always known, in fact—about the hunger, her friends and relations don't know. And I expect she'd like to keep it that way.”
“Thank you, darling,” Chloe said.
So Sir Adrian had contacted an escort service—Global Escorts, to be precise—and through that institution had ultimately met Nicola Maiden. Their first interview—consisting of tea, scones, and satisfactory conversation—had been followed by a second, in which the initial deal had been struck.
“Deal?” Lynley asked.
“When her services would be required,” Chloe explained. “What they would entail and what she would be paid for them.”
“Chloe and I talked to her together for both interviews to make the arrangements,” Sir Adrian said. “It was crucial that she understand there would be nothing gained by holding over my head a liaison potentially painful to my wife.”
“Because it wasn't painful,” Chloe said. “At least not to me.”
“Will you show them the chamber, darling?” Sir Adrian asked his wife. “I'll pop down to the children and let them know we'll be with them before too much longer.”
“Of course,” she replied. “Come with me, Inspector, Constable.” And as gracefully as she'd sat, she rose, leading them to the door and up two flights of stairs as Sir Adrian went off to have a few words with his partying offspring. They were, ironically, crooning “I Get No Kick from Champagne.”
Lady Beattie showed them up to the top floor of the house. From deep within an old clothes press that stood in the narrow corridor there, she took a key, which she used on one of the doors. She swung it open, preceded the police into the room, and switched on a low-wattage light.
“He actually wanted only discipline at first,” she explained, “which, while I found it a bit odd, frankly, I was able to give him. Rulers on the palm, paddles on the bottom, the strap against the back of his legs. But after a few years he wanted more, and when it got to the point that I wasn't strong enough … Well, he's already explained that, hasn't he? At any rate, here's where they had their sessions—where he and I had them as well when I was able.”
In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner Page 44