In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

by Elizabeth George

  “Righ’,” she said. “Just like a chocolate bar, he was. And just as sweet, I ’spect, if I'd wanted t’ try him. He di'n't come with that cow this time round, so I could've, I s'pose. Only he di'n't come alone.”

  Jesus, Martin thought. They'd come back, the bastards. And they'd got into the house. And they'd talked to his airhead nitwit of a wife.

  He strode over to the rocker. He knocked her hand from her breast. “Tell me,” he said sharply. “The police were here. Tell me.”

  She said, “Hey!” in protest and reached for her nipple again.

  He caught her fingers in his hand. He squeezed them till the bones ground together like brittle twigs. He said, “I'll cut it off. You like that pretty tit of yours, I think. You wouldn't want it to go missing, would you? So tell me right now or I won't answer for the consequences.” And just to make certain she understood, he moved his clasp from her fingers to her hand and then to her wrist. A good twist, he'd found long ago, was worth a hundred lashes. And more important, it didn't leave a significant mark to show Mummy and Daddy later.

  Tricia cried out. He increased the torque. She shrieked, “Marty!” He said, “Talk.” She tried to slither from the rocker to the floor, but he had the better position and he straddled her. An arm across her throat and he had her head flung back into the wicker chair. “Do you want more?” he asked. “Or is this enough?”

  She opted for the second. She told the story. He listened with incredulity mounting, wanting so much to pound in his wife's face that he wasn't quite sure how he'd keep himself from doing it. That she'd let the cops in the house in the first place bordered on the absolutely fantastic. That she'd spoken to them about the escort service ventured into the unbelievable. But that she'd actually given them the name and address of Sir Adrian Beattie—-just blithely handed it over without even considering what it meant to break the confidence of a man whose peculiar needs had been serviced by Global Escorts in the past and whose same peculiar needs would want servicing by Global Escorts anew now that the Maiden tart was finally out of the way—constituted such an act of insanity that Martin didn't know how he could contain his fury.

  So he said, “Do you have any idea what you've done?” as his insides tightened like a wrung-out rag. “Any idea at all?” and he grabbed her hair and jerked her head back viciously.

  “Stop it! Tha’ hurts. Marty! Stop!”

  “Do you know what you've done, you stupid little cunt? Have you any idea how thoroughly you've finished us?”

  “No! Hurts!”

  “Oh darling, I'm glad of it.” And he yanked her head so far back that he could count the muscles down the front of her neck. “You're worthless, beloved,” he said into her ear. “You're trash in a bun, little wife of mine. If your father had just half a dozen fewer connections, I'd throw you on the street and be done with you.”

  She began to cry at that. She was afraid of him, had always been so, and that knowledge usually acted like an aphrodisiac upon him. But not tonight. Tonight, on the contrary, he wanted to kill her.

  “They were going to arrest you,” she cried. “Wha’ was I s'posed to do? Just let it happen?”

  He moved his other hand under her jaw, thumb on one side and index finger on the other. This grip could cause a mark or two. But, by God, she was such an exceptional imbecile that the consequences of damaging her seemed almost worth it. “Oh, were they?” he said, again into her ear. “And upon what charge?”

  “Marty, they knew ever'thing. They knew about Global and Nicola and about Vi and her going off on their own. I di'n't tell them any of that. But they knew. They asked where you were on Tuesday night. I told them the res'rant, but it wasn't enough. They were going t’ search and get our books and give them to the Inland Revenue and charge you with keeping a disorderly house and—”

  “Stop babbling!” He pressed thumb and index finger more deeply into her skin to emphasise his point. He needed time to think what to do, and he wasn't going to be able to manage it with her spewing nonsense like a vomiting cat.

  All right, he thought, one hand still in Tricia's hair and the other at her throat. The worst had happened. His dearly beloved—possessing all the presence of mind of a melting ice cube—had been the one to parry with the cops on their second go in Lansdowne Road. That was unfortunate, but it couldn't be helped now. And Sir Adrian Beattie, not to mention the thousands he was willing to spend in a single month just to gratify the more eccentric of his urges, was undoubtedly lost to their ability to regain his custom. He might take others with him if he was willing to spread the word to his fellow puling bottoms that his name and inclinations had been made known to the police by a source hitherto unapproachable. But there was a saving grace: The cops had nothing on Martin Reeve in the long run, had they? Just the blathering of a smack user whose credibility was about as unimpeachable as a con man's in the act of selling eighteen karat “gold” necklaces at Knightsbridge Station.

  They might come to arrest him, Martin thought. Well, frigging let them. He had a solicitor who'd have him out of the slammer so fast, the cell bars might have been coated with axle grease in anticipation of his rapid departure. And if he ever had to stand in front of a magistrate or if he was ever charged with something other than introducing gentlemen with a taste for quirky encounters to appealing and intelligent young women willing to take an active part in those encounters, he had in his possession a list of clients from so many lofty positions of influence that the multitudinous strings that could be called upon to pull on his behalf would make the Inns of Court, the Old Bailey, and the Metropolitan Police look like marionette conventions.

  No. He had nothing to worry about in the long run. And he was as likely to have to go to Australia as to the moon. Things might be a little unpleasant for a while. Certain newspaper editors might have to be paid to quash a story here and there. But that would be the extent of it aside from the cash he'd also probably have to pay out to his solicitor. And that likely—and significant—expenditure pissed him off in a very big way. So much so, in fact, that when he thought about it, when he added it all up, when he dwelt for so much as a nanosecond on the fucking cause of all these added aggravations Jesus he just wanted to crush in her face break open her nose blacken her eyes ram himself into her when she was dry and unwilling and likely to scream and beg him to stop so that just for a moment he'd be so supreme that no one no one no one in his life would ever again look at him and think he was less than or smaller than or weaker than or God God God how he wanted to hurt her and mutilate everyone else who said Martin Reeve without Mister in front of it who smiled from faces with eyes of derision who crossed his path without stepping aside who dared to even think—Tricia had ceased moving. She wasn't thrashing. Her legs were motionless. Her arms had gone limp.

  Martin looked down at her, down at his hand whose thumb and index finger made a half circle high on his wife's throat.

  He jumped up, jumped off her, backed away in a rush. She was white in the moonlight, as still as marble.

  “Tricia,” he said hoarsely. “God damn you. Bitch!”

  Lynley's credit card was sufficient to slide the latch of the lock from its housing. The maisonette's door swung open. Inside, all was darkness. There was no sound save what drifted upwards from the drinks party going on in the ground floor flat.

  “Miss Nevin?” Lynley called.

  There was no response.

  The light from the corridor provided a glowing parallelogram on the floor. In it, a large cushion lay, half in and half out of its yellow cover of fine brocade. Next to this, a pool of spilled liquid had soaked into the carpet in an alligator shape, while just beyond, the drinks trolley stood upended and surrounded by its bottles, its decanters—now upstoppered and emptied—its glasses, and its jugs.

  Lynley reached for a switch on the wall to the right of the door. He flipped it on. Recessed lights sprang to Life in the ceiling, revealing the extent of the chaos beneath them.

  From what he could see from
the doorway, the maisonette was in ruins: sofa and love seat overturned with cushions torn from their covers, pictures off the walls and looking as if they'd been broken deliberately across someone's knee, stereo system and television flung to the floor and destroyed—the backings on everything from the speakers to the television hacked away—a portfolio ripped into two pieces with its photographs left scattered round the room. Not even the fitted carpet had escaped, jerked back from the wall with the sort of strength that spoke of a rage long anticipated and fully indulged.

  The devastation in the kitchen was similar: crockery lying shattered on the white-tiled floor, shelves swept clean of every object which now lay where it had apparently fallen, either on work tops or broken beneath them. The refrigerator had been dealt with as well, if only in part: Everything from the freezer was dewing with moisture among the rest of the detritus while the contents of the crisping drawers were smashed like victims of runaway lorries, leaving smears of their juices on the tiles, in the grout, and against the cupboard doors.

  From the ruins of a bottle of ketchup and ajar of mustard, footprints led from the kitchen towards the outer corridor. One of them was perfectly formed, as if brushed onto the tiles with dark orange paint.

  Along the ascent of the stairs, pictures torn from the walls had met a fate similar to those in the sitting room, and as he climbed, Lynley felt the burning of a slow, hard anger begin in the middle of his chest. It mixed there, however, with the chill of fear. And he found himself praying that the condition of the maisonette meant Vi Nevin had been absent from the building when the intruder—so obviously bent upon harming her—had taken out his frustration on her possessions.

  He called her name again. Again there was no reply. He flicked on the light in the first of the bedrooms. Illumination fell upon utter ruin. Not one stick of furniture had been left untouched.

  He murmured, “Christ.” Which was when the pulsation from the music below ceased abruptly as, perhaps, a new selection of entertainment was made.

  And then, in that sudden quiet, he heard it. A scrabbling, like rodents running on wood. It came from the bedroom in which he was standing, from behind the beds mattress which canted drunkenly against one of the walls. In three strides he was at it. He shoved it aside. He said, “Jesus God,” and bent to the battered form whose hair—so long, so Alice-in-Wonderland blonde where it wasn't blood-soaked—told him that Vi Nevin had indeed been at home when vengeance had come calling in Rostrevor Road.

  The scrabbling had come from her fingernails, plucking spasmodically at the white baseboard which was splodged with her blood. And the blood itself came from her head, particularly from her face, which had been bashed repeatedly, destroying the little-girl prettiness that had been her hallmark and her stock-in-trade.

  Lynley held her small hand. He didn't want to take the risk of moving her. Had he been willing to do so, he would have grabbed her up once he'd phoned for help and cradled her battered body until the ambulance arrived. But he couldn't tell how—or if—she was injured internally, so he simply held on to her hand.

  The ensanguined weapon lay nearby, a heavy hand mirror. It appeared to have been fashioned from some sort of metal, but now it was crimson with gore and made repulsive with strands of blonde hair and small bits of flesh. Lynley closed his eyes briefly when he saw it. Having observed far worse crime scenes and far more grievously wounded victims, he could not have said why an object as simple as a hand mirror affected him so, except that the mirror was such an innocent object, really, a piece of feminine vanity that suddenly made Vi Nevin more of a living presence to him than she had been before. Why? he wondered. And even as he asked himself the question, he saw Helen with just such a mirror in her own hand, examining the way she'd arranged her hair, saying, “What a mess. I look like a curled-up hedgehog. Lord, Tommy. How can you love a woman who's so utterly useless?”

  And Lynley wanted her to be there in that moment. He wanted to hold her, as if the simple, primitive act of holding his wife could safeguard all women from every possible harm.

  Vi Nevin moaned. Lynley tightened his grip on her hand.

  “You're safe, Miss Nevin,” he told her, although he doubted that she could either hear or understand him. “An ambulance is coming. Just hold on until it gets here. I won't leave you. You're safe. You're really quite safe.”

  He noticed for the first time that she was dressed for her work: She wore a schoolgirl's uniform with the skirt hiked high up on her thighs. Beneath it, tiny bits of black lace served as knickers, and lacy stockings were fastened to a matching suspender belt. She had knee socks on over the stockings. She wore regulation schoolgirl shoes on her feet. It was doubtless an ensemble designed to titillate, with Vi Nevin presenting herself to her client as the bashful schoolgirl he desired.

  God, Lynley wondered, why did women make themselves so vulnerable to men who could harm them? Why did they ever involve themselves in a pursuit that was guaranteed to destroy, if not in one way then certainly in another?

  The first of the sirens shattered the night as the ambulance made the turn into Rostrevor Road. Moments later below stairs, the door to the maisonette crashed open.

  “Up here,” Lynley shouted.

  And Vi Nevin stirred. “Forgot …” she murmured. “Likes honey. Forgot.”

  And then the bedroom filled with paramedics while below on the street more sirens sounded as the local police arrived.

  While in the building itself, a selection of music having apparently been made, the musical score to Rent began playing. The ensemble sang their paean to love.

  CHAPTER 23

  t was part blessing and part curse that a good number of the forensic scientists at the police lab were lads and lasses of insatiable curiosity. The blessing rose from their willingness to work days, nights, weekends, and holidays if they were intrigued enough by evidence that was presented for their evaluation. The curse rose from one's personal knowledge of the existence of the blessing. For realising that the forensic lab employed scientists whose inquisitive natures prompted them to remain at their microscopes when saner individuals were at home or out on the town, one felt obliged to gather the information that those scientists were so willing to provide.

  Thus on a Saturday night, DI Peter Hanken found himself not in the bosom of his family in Buxton but, rather, standing before a microscope while Miss Amber Kubowsky—chief evidence technician of the moment—waxed enthusiastic about what she'd discovered regarding the Swiss Army knife and the wounds that had been made on the body of Terry Cole.

  The blood on the knife—she was happy to confirm as she went at her scalp with the rubber end of a pencil, as if wishing to erase something that was scribbled on her skull—was indeed Cole's. And, upon carefully prising apart the knife's various blades and devices, she'd been able to ascertain that the left blade of the scissors was, as reported by Andy Maiden, broken off. Thus, the ineluctable conclusion one would normally reach was that the knife in question not only inflicted the wounds found upon Terry Cole's body, but also bore a marked resemblance to the knife that Andy Maiden had allegedly passed on to his daughter.

  “Right,” Hanken said.

  She looked pleased at his affirmation of her remarks. She said, “Have a look at this, then,” and nodded towards the microscope.

  Hanken squinted through the lens. Everything Miss Amber Kubowsky had said was so achingly obvious that he wondered at her level of excitement. Things must be as bland as yesterday's porridge in the laboratory—not to mention in her life—if the poor lass got herself worked up over this. “What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?” he asked Miss Kubowsky, raising his head and gesturing at the microscope. “This doesn't much look like a scissor blade to me. Or blood, for that matter.”

  “It isn't,” she said happily. “And that's the point, DI Hanken. That's what's so damned intriguing about everything.”

  Hanken glanced at the clock on the wall. He'd been working nonstop for more than twelve hours, and bef
ore the day was through he still wanted to coordinate his information with whatever was being accumulated at the London end of the case. So the last entertainment he was willing to engage in was a guessing game with a frizzy-haired forensic technician.

  He said, “If it's not the blade and it's not Cole's blood, why am I looking at it, Miss Kubowsky?”

  “It's nice you're so polite,” she told him. “Not every detective has your manners, I find.”

  She was going to find out a hell of a lot more if she didn't start elucidating, Hanken thought. But he thanked her for the compliment and indicated that he'd be happy to hear whatever else she had to tell him as long as she told him post haste.

  “Oh! Of course,” she said. “That's the scapula wound you're looking at there. Well, not all of it. If you magnified the whole thing, it would be twenty inches long, probably. This is just a portion of it.”

  “The scapula wound?”

  “Right. It was the biggest gash on the boy's body, did the doctor say? On his back? The boy, not the doctor, that is.”

  Hanken recalled Dr. Myles's report. One of the wounds had chipped the left scapula and come near to one of the heart's arteries.

  Miss Kubowksy said, “I wouldn't have bothered with it normally, except I saw on the report that the scapula—that's one of the bones in the back, did you know?—had a weapon mark on it, so I went ahead and compared the mark with the knife blades. With all the knife blades. And what do you know?”

  “What?”

  “The knife didn't make that mark, Inspector Hanken. No way, not for a minute, uh-uh, and forget it.”

  Hanken stared at her. He tried to assimilate the information. More, he wondered if she'd made a mistake. She looked so scatty—her lab coat had half its hem ripped out and a coffee stain on the front of it—that it was hardly beyond the realm of possibility that she was less than proficient in her own line of work.