Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

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.”

The chamber, as they'd called it, had been fashioned out of several of the erstwhile servants' bedrooms. By knocking out walls, padding them, installing a ventilation system that obviated the use of windows-which were themselves shuttered against potential outside curiosity-the Beatties had created a fantasy world that was in part headmaster's office, operating theatre, dungeon, and mediaeval torture chamber. A line of cupboards had been fitted under the eaves, and Lady Beattie opened these to display the various costumes and devices of discipline, as she called them, that had been used on Sir Adrian.

It was clear why the Maiden girl had brought nothing with her to the house save her desire to be useful to Sir Adrian and to be paid well for her usefulness: The costumes in the cupboards ranged from a heavy wool nuns habit to a prison guards uniform complete with truncheon. There was, of course, the more traditional garb associated with the's & M game: PVC get-ups of red or black, leather teddies and masks, high-heeled boots. And the instruments of Sir Adrian's discipline, tidily arranged like the antique surgical instruments in the study, also explained why she'd been able to make her calls so lightly burdened. Everything necessary for discipline, pain, and humiliation had been collected and housed together.

From his years in policing, Lynley knew that he should by now have seen it all. But every time he thought he had, something in life caught him by surprise. And in this case, it wasn't so much the presence of the chamber in the Beatties' house that took his breath away. It was the attitude to it taken by the couple themselves, particularly the wife. She might have been showing them a state-of-the-art kitchen.

She seemed to realise this. Watching Lynley from her position in the doorway, observing Nkata wandering the length of the room with an expression on his face that suggested how actively his imagination was supplying him with images of the uses to which the costumes and the equipment were put, she said quietly, “I wouldn't have had it this way had I been given a choice. One does expect a traditional marriage. But loving someone means compromise occasionally. And once he explained why it was so important to him…” She gestured at the room with a hand whose knuckles were enlarged from the disease that had necessitated Nicola Maiden's entrance into the Beatties’ private world. “Need is just need. So long as judgement remains apart from it, need has no real power to hurt us.”

“Did you mind another woman seeing to the need?”

“My husband loves me. I've never had any doubt about that.”

Lynley wondered.

Sir Adrian rejoined them, saying to her, “You're wanted below, darling. Molly's not to be denied her presents another five minutes.”

“But will you-”

They communicated in that way peculiar to couples who'd been married for more than a generation. “As soon as I finish here. It won't be long.”

When she'd left them, Sir Adrian waited for a moment before he said quietly, “There's a part, of course, that I'd rather Chloe didn't know. It would only hurt her unnecessarily.”

Nkata made his notebook ready as Lynley thought about what the surgeon's statement implied. He said, “You paged her-Nicola-throughout the summer. But as she couldn't have serviced you with discipline from Derbyshire, I've a feeling your ‘arrangement’ was something more than you wanted to say in front of your wife.”

“You're very good, Inspector.” Beattie closed the chamber door. “I was in love with her. Not at first, naturally. We didn't know each other. But within a month or two, I realised how strongly I was feeling about her. Initially, I told myself it was only addiction: A new woman doing the discipline heightened my excitement, and I wanted that excitement more and more often. But it went beyond that in the end because she was far more than I expected. So I wanted to keep her.”

“As your wife?”

“I love Chloe. But there's more than one kind of love in a man's life-which you may know already or will come to know eventually-and selfishly, I hoped to experience it.” He dropped his gaze to the deformed nails at the ends of his fingers. He said, “I felt sexual love for Nikki, the sort that has to do with physical possession. Animal craving. My love for Chloe, on the other hand, is the stuff of our history. When I knew I had this other love for Nikki-this sexual thing that I found I couldn't get out of my mind the more we met-I told myself it was natural to feel it. She was meeting a tremendous need of mine. And no matter what I wanted, she was willing to do it to me. But when I saw there was so much more to her than domination…”

“You became reluctant to share her with other men.”

“An intuitive leap. Yes, you are very good.”

Nicola visited the Boltons at least five times a week, Beattie told them. And he explained the frequency of their sessions to Chloe by talking about the heightened stress of his work as younger doctors and advances in medicine had increased his level of anxiety to the point that only discipline could relieve it.

“I told Nikki that when the craving came upon me, I wanted her available to gratify it at once,” he said.

“But the reality was more complicated than that?”

“The reality was infinitely simple. I couldn't cope with imagining

Nikki doing to others-and being to others-what she was doing and being to me. Thinking of her with anyone else was a quick descent into hell. And I didn't expect that, to feel that way about a tart. But then, when I took her on, I didn't know how much more than a tart she was going to be.”

Without his wife's knowledge, he'd offered Nicola a special deal. He would pay to keep her-and pay her, more than she'd ever dreamed of being paid-in whatever situation she fancied for herself: a flat, a house, a hotel suite, a country cottage. He didn't care, just so long as she promised him that her time would be kept open solely for him. “I claimed that I didn't want to stand in a queue or book an appointment any longer,” Beattie explained. “But if I wanted her available to me at any hour, I had to place her in a position where she was free.”

The maisonette in Fulham gave her that position. And since Nicola always came to Sir Adrian and not the reverse, it was of little account to him that she asked to be allowed a flatmate as company for the periods of time when he didn't want her services. “That was fine with me,” he told them. “All I wanted was her to be available whenever I phoned. And for the first month that's what she was. Five or six days a week. Sometimes twice a day. She'd arrive within an hour of being paged. She'd stay as long as I wanted her to be here. The arrangement worked well.”

“But then she returned to Derbyshire. Why?”

“She claimed that she needed to honour a commitment to work for a solicitor up there, that she'd be gone only for the summer. I was a fool in love, but not so much of a fool as to believe that. I told her I wouldn't go on paying for the Fulham place if she wasn't going to be in town for me.”