In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (36 page)

He and Hanken observed each other across the width of the table. By the door, DC Stewart glanced between them, her pencil poised. Outside the building, a car alarm went off.

Hanken was the one to blink. He said, “Have a go,” with a nod at the articles on the table. “Is there anything missing? Or anything not hers?”

The Maidens moved slowly, inspecting each item. Nan Maiden reached out and fingered a navy sweater with a strip of ivory defining its neckline.

She said, “The neck wasn't right … the way it lay on her skin. I wanted to change it, but she wouldn't have that. She said, ‘You made it, Mum, and that's what counts.’ But I wish I'd fixed it. It would've been no trouble.” She blinked several times, and her breathing became shallow. “I don't see anything. I'm sorry. I'm being so little help.”

Andy Maiden put his hand on the back of his wife's neck and said, “A few moments more, love.” He urged her along the table. He, however, rather than she, was the one to notice what wasn't among the items gathered from the scene of the crime. “Nicola's rain gear,” he told them. “It's blue, hooded. A waterproof. It isn't here.”

Hanken shot a glance at Lynley. Corroboration for your theory, his expression said.

“It didn't rain Tuesday night, did it?” Nan Maiden's question was non-sequiturial. They all knew that anyone who hiked on the moors had to be prepared for swift changes in weather.

Andy spent the longest time with the implements from the camp site: the compass, the stove, the pot, the map case, the trowel. His forehead creased as he examined everything. Then he finally said, “Her pocket knife's missing as well.”

It was a Swiss Army knife that had been his own, he told them. He'd given it to Nick as a gift one Christmas when her fancy for hiking and camping had first developed. She'd always kept it with the rest of her gear. And she'd always taken it when she went into the Peaks.

Lynley felt rather than saw Hanken looking his way He reflected on what the fact of a missing knife might do to their conjecture. He said, “You're sure of that, Andy?”

“She could've lost it,” Maiden replied. “But she would have replaced it with another before camping again.” His daughter was an experienced hiker, he explained. Nick didn't take chances on the moors or in the Peaks. She never went out without being prepared. “Who would try to camp without a knife?”

Hanken asked for a description. Maiden gave him the particulars, listing the features of a multi-use utensil. The largest blade was about three inches, he said.

When the dead girl's parents had completed their task, Hanken asked Stewart to provide them with a cup of tea. He turned to Lynley once the door was shut upon them. “Are you thinking my thinking?” he asked.

“The blade length matches Dr. Myles' conclusions about the weapon used on Cole.” Lynley stared thoughtfully at the items on the table and pondered the spanner that Andy Maiden had inadvertently thrown into the works of his theory. “It could be a coincidence, Peter. She could have lost it earlier that day.”

“But if she didn't, you know what it means.”

“We have a killer on the moors, tracking Nicola Maiden, and for some reason tracking her without a weapon.”

“Which means—”

“No premeditation. A chance encounter in which things got out of hand.”

Hanken blew out a breath. “Where the hell does that take us?”

“To some serious rethinking,” Lynley said.

he night sky was awash with stars when Lynley stepped from the entrance porch of Maiden Hall. And because he'd loved the night sky as a boy in Cornwall where, like the sky in Derbyshire, he could see, study, and name the constellations with an ease that was impossible in London, he paused next to the weather-pitted stone pillar marking the edge of the car park and looked to the heavens. He was seeking an answer to what everything meant.

“There must be a mistake with their records,” Nan Maiden had told him with quiet insistence. She was hollow-eyed, as if the last thirty-six hours had dragged from her a life force that would never be replaced. “Nicola wouldn't have left law college. And she certainly wouldn't have left law college without telling us. That wasn't her way. She loved the law. Besides, she'd spent the whole summer working for Will Upman. So why on earth would she have done that if she dropped out of college in … did you say it was May?”

Lynley had driven them home from Buxton and had followed them into the Hall for a final conversation. Because the lounge was still occupied by hotel residents and diners enjoying postprandial coffees, brandy, and chocolates, they'd repaired to an office next to the reception desk. It was overcrowded with the three of them, a room meant for one person who would work at a computer behind a desk. A fax machine was disgorging a lengthy message when they walked in. Andy Maiden glanced at this, and placed the message into a tray that bore a neat sign declaring it to be the repository of reservations.

Neither of the Maidens had known of their daughter's leaving the College of Law. Neither had known that she had moved house to take up residence in Fulham with a young woman called Vi Nevin, whose name Nicola had never mentioned. Neither had known that she'd gone to work full-time at MKR Financial Management. Which went far to put a significant dent in Nan Maiden's earlier assertion that her daughter had been the incarnation of honesty.

Andy Maiden had been silent in response to the revelations. But he looked beaten, as if each new piece of knowledge about his daughter was a blow to his psyche. While his wife sought to explain away the inconsistencies in their daughter's actions, he merely seemed to be attempting to absorb them while minimising the additional damage to his heart.

“Perhaps she meant to transfer to a college closer to home.” Nan had sounded pathetically eager to believe her own words. “Isn't there one in Leicester? Or in Lincoln? And as she was engaged to Julian, she might have wanted to be nearer to him.”

Disabusing Nicola's mother of the notion of an engagement to Julian Britton had been a tougher task than Lynley would have thought possible. Nan Maiden's efforts at elucidation ceased entirely when he revealed Britton's misrepresentation of the facts of his relationship with her daughter. She looked stricken, saying only, “They weren't … ? But then why … ?” before falling silent and turning to her husband as if he were capable of giving her an explanation for the inexplicable.

Thus, Lynley reached the conclusion that it wasn't beyond the realm of reason that the Maidens hadn't known of their daughter's possession of a pager. And when Nan Maiden had proved to be as much in the dark as her husband regarding the little device, Lynley had felt inclined to believe her.

Now, as he stood in the penumbrous space between the softly-lit car park and bright-windowed hotel, Lynley allowed himself a few minutes to ponder in a circumstance in which he also allowed himself a few additional minutes to feel. He'd earlier taken the car keys from Hanken and said, “Go home to your family, Peter. I'll drive the Maidens back to Padley Gorge,” and it was Hanken, his family, and his words earlier that day that Lynley considered as he remained by the pillar. The DI had said that holding in his arms an infant—one's own child and creation—changed a man irrevocably He'd said that the pain of losing that child was something beyond his contemplation. What, then, did a man like Andy Maiden feel at this moment: the fabric of him altered so many years ago at his daughter's birth, the substance of him shifting subtly throughout her childhood and adolescence, and the core of him fractured—perhaps irreparably—at her death. And now to pile on top of the loss of her came the additional knowledge that his only child had had secrets from him …. How, Lynley wondered, must it feel?

The death of a child, he thought, kills the future and decimates the past, making the former an imprisonment that seems interminable, rendering the latter an unvoiced reproach for every moment robbed of its significance by the calls of a parent's career. One didn't recover from such a death. One just grew more adept at stumbling on.

He glanced back at the Hall and saw the distant form of Andy Maiden leave the little office, cross the entrance, and trudge towards the stairs. The light remained on in the room he departed and in the window of that room Nan Maiden's silhouette appeared. Lynley saw the Maidens’ separateness and wanted to tell them not to bear their grief in solitude from each other. They'd created their daughter Nicola together and they'd bury her together. So why did they have to mourn her alone?

We're all alone, Inspector, Barbara Havers had told him once in a similar case in which two parents had been forced to mourn the death of a child. And believe me, it's only a bloody illusion that we're anything else.

But he didn't want to think of Barbara Havers, of her wisdom or her lack thereof. He wanted to do something to give the Maidens a measure of peace. He told himself that he owed that much, if not to two parents whose suffering was of a kind he hoped never to have to face, then to a former colleague whose service on the force had placed officers like Lynley in his debt. But he also had to admit that he sought to give them peace as a hedge against potential grief in his own future, in the hope that attenuating their present sorrow might prevent him from ever having to experience a similar pain himself.

He couldn't change the basic facts of Nicola's death and the secrets she'd kept from her parents. But he could seek to disprove what information was beginning to look manufactured, wearing the guise of innocent revelation while all the time created to meet the exigency of the moment.

Will Upman, after all, was the person who had mentioned a pager and a London lover in the first place. And who better than Upman—interested in the young woman himself—to fabricate both possessions and relationships to divert the police's attention from himself? He could have been the lover in question, showering gifts upon a woman who was his obsession as well as his employee. And told that she was leaving the law, leaving Derbyshire, and establishing a life for herself in London, how might he have reacted to the knowledge that he would be losing her permanently? Indeed, they knew from the postcards which Nicola sent to her flatmate that she had a lover in addition to Julian Britton. And she would have hardly felt the need to code a message—let alone to arrange for the assignations suggested by the postcards—had the man in question been someone with whom she felt that she could freely be seen.

And then there was the entire question of Julian Britton's place in Nicola's life. If he had actually loved her and had wished to marry her, what would his reaction have been had he discovered her relationship with another man? It was perfectly possible that Nicola had revealed that relationship to Britton as part of her refusal to marry him. If she'd done so, what thoughts—taking up residence in Britton's mind—did he have and where did those thoughts take him on Tuesday night?

An exterior door closed somewhere. Footsteps crunched in gravel, and a figure came round the side of the building. It was a man wheeling a bicycle. He guided it into a puddle of light that spilled from one of the windows. There, he toed the kick stand downwards and removed from his pocket a small tool which he applied to the base of the bicycle's spokes.

Lynley recognised him from the previous afternoon when, from the lounge window, he'd seen him pedalling away from the Hall as Lynley and Hanken had waited for the Maidens to join them. He was, no doubt, one of the employees. As Lynley watched him, crouched on his haunches next to the bike with a heavy lock of hair falling into his eyes, he saw his hand slip and get caught between the spokes and he heard him cry out, “Merde! Saloperie de bécane! Je sais pas ce qui me retient de Venvoyer a la casse.” He leapt up, knuckles shoved to his mouth. He used his sweatshirt to wipe the blood from his skin.

Hearing him speak, Lynley also recognised the unmistakable sound of a cog in the wheel of the investigation clicking into place. He adjusted his previous conjectures with alacrity, realising that Nicola Maiden had done more than merely joke with her London flatmate. She'd also given her a clue.

He approached the man. “Have you hurt yourself?”

The man swung round, startled, brushing the hair from his eyes. “Bon Dieu! Vous m'avez fait peur!”

“Excuse me. I didn't mean to come out of nowhere like that,” Lynley said. And he produced his warrant card and introduced himself.

A fractional movement of the eyebrows was the other man's only reaction to hearing the words New Scotland Yard. He replied in heavily-accented English—interspersed with French—that he was Christian-Louis Ferrer, master chef of the kitchen and the primary reason that Maiden Hall had been awarded the coveted étoile Michelin.

“You're having trouble with your bike. D'you need a lift somewhere?”

No. Mais merci quand même. Long hours in the kitchen robbed him of time to exercise. He needed the twice-daily ride to keep himself fit. This vélo de merde—with a dismissive gesture at the bicycle—was better than nothing to use for that exercise. But he'd have been grateful for un deux-roues that was a little more dependable on the roads and the trails.

“Might we chat before you leave, then?” Lynley asked politely.

Ferrer shrugged in classic Gallic fashion: a simple uplift of the shoulders communicating that if the police wished to speak with him, he'd be foolish to refuse. He'd been standing with his back to the window, but now he shifted position so that his face was in the light.

Seeing him illuminated, Lynley realised that he was much older than he'd looked from a distance on his bicycle. He appeared to be in his mid fifties, with age and the good life incised on his face and grey threaded through his walnut hair.

Lynley quickly discovered that Ferrer's English was fine when it suited him. Of course he knew Nicola Maiden, Ferrer said, calling her la malheureuse jeune femme. He had laboured for the past five years to raise Maiden Hall to its current position de temple de la gastronomie—did the inspector happen to know how few country restaurants in England had actually been awarded the étoile Michelin?—so of course he knew the daughter of his employers. She had worked in the dining room during all her school holidays ever since he himself had practised his art for Monsieur Andee, so naturally he had come to know her.