Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

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.

It 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 before 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.