Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

Helen had carefully gathered together the sheets of music that Barbara had left behind. She placed them, not in the envelope, but in a pile on the coffee table. She said, “Tommy, if Winston Nkata and not Barbara Havers had been in that boat with DCI Barlow… If Winston Nkata and not Barbara Havers had taken up that gun…” She'd gazed at him earnestly. “Would you have been so angry?”

His response had been both swift and hot. “This isn't a bloody issue of gender. You know me better than that.”

“I do know you, yes” had been her quiet reply.

Still, he'd considered her question more than once during the first one hundred miles of the drive to Derbyshire. But every way he examined his possible responses both to the question and to Havers’ incredible act of insubordination on the North Sea, his answer was the same. Havers had engaged in assault, not initiative. And nothing justified that. Had Winston Nkata been wielding the weapon-which was as risible an image as Lynley could invent-he would have reacted identically. He knew it.

Now, as he pulled into the car park of Maiden Hall, his anger had long since abated, to be replaced by the same disquiet of spirit that had descended upon him when he'd learned about Andy Maiden's visit to his daughter. He stopped the car and gazed at the hotel through the rain.

He didn't want to believe what the facts were asking him to believe, but he drew in what resolve he could muster and reached in the back seat for his umbrella. He walked through the rain across the car park. Inside the hotel, he asked the first employee he saw to fetch Andy Maiden. When the former SO 10 officer appeared five minutes later, he came alone.

“Tommy,” he greeted him. “You've news? Come with me.”

He led the way to the office near Reception. He shut the door behind them.

“Tell me about Islington in May, Andy,” Lynley said without preamble, because he knew that to hesitate was to offer the other man an opening into his sympathy that he couldn't afford to allow. “Tell me about saying ‘I'll see you dead before I let you do it.’”

Maiden sat. He indicated a chair for Lynley. He didn't speak until Lynley was seated, and even then he seemed to go inward for a moment, as if he was gathering his resources before he replied.

Then he said, “The wheel clamp.”

To which Lynley replied, “No one could ever accuse you of being an incompetent cop.”

“The same could be said of you. You've done good work, Tommy. I always believed you'd shine in CID.”

If anything, the compliment was like a slap in the face, hearkening as it did to all the now-obvious reasons that Andy Maiden had chosen him-blinded as he was by admiration-to come to Derbyshire. Lynley said steadily, “I have a good team. Tell me about Islington.”

They were finally upon it, and Maiden's eyes bore so much anguish that Lynley found he still-even now-had to steel himself against a rush of pity towards his old friend. “She asked to see me,” Maiden said. “So I went.”

“Last May. To London,” Lynley clarified. “You went to Islington to see your daughter.”

“That's right.”

He'd thought Nicola wanted to make arrangements to move her belongings back to Derbyshire for the summer, preparatory to taking her holiday job with Will Upman as they'd arranged in December. So he'd driven the Land-Rover, the better to be able to haul things home if she was willing to part with them a few weeks before her classes ended at the College of Law.

“But she didn't want to come home,” Maiden said. “That's not why she'd called me to London. She wanted to tell me her future plans.”

“Prostitution,” Lynley said. “Her set-up in Fulham.”

Maiden cleared his throat roughly and whispered, “Oh God.”

Even hardening himself against empathy, Lynley found he couldn't force the man to lay out the facts that he'd gathered that day in London. So he did it for him: Lynley went through everything as he himself had learned it, from Nicola's employment first as a trainee then as an escort at MKR Financial Management to her partnership with Vi Nevin and her choice of domination as her speciality. He concluded with “Sir Adrian believes there could be only one reason why she came north for the summer instead of remaining in London: money.”

“It was a compromise. She did it for me.”

They'd argued bitterly, but he'd finally got her to agree to work for Upman during the summer, at least to try the law as a career. By paying her more than she would have made remaining in London, he said, he garnered her cooperation. He'd had to take out a bank loan to raise the sum she demanded as recompense, but he considered it money well spent.

“You were that confident that the law would win her over?” Lynley asked. The prospect hardly seemed likely.

“I was confident that Upman would win her over,” Maiden replied. “I've seen him with women. He has a way. I thought he and Nicola… Tommy, I was willing to try anything. The right man, I kept thinking, could bring her to her senses.”

“Wouldn't Julian Britton have been a better choice? He was already in love with her, wasn't he?”

“Julian wanted her too much. She needed a man who'd seduce her but keep her guessing. Upman seemed right for the job.” Maiden appeared to hear his own words, because he flinched a moment after he'd made the declaration, and finally he began to weep. “Oh God, Tommy. She drove me to it,” he said, and he held a fist at his mouth as if this could deaden his pain.

And Lynley was at last face-to-face with what he hadn't wanted to see. He'd turned away from the guilt of this man because of who he had been at New Scotland Yard, while all the time who he had been at New Scotland Yard illuminated his culpability as nothing else could. A master of deception and dissimulation, Andy Maiden had spent decades moving in that netherworld of undercover where the lines between fact and fantasy, between illegality and honour first became blurred and ultimately became altogether non-existent.

“Tell me how it happened,” Lynley said stonily. “Tell me what you used besides the knife.”

Maiden dropped his hand. “God in heaven…” His voice was hoarse. “Tommy, you can't be thinking…” Then he appeared to reflect back over what he'd said, to locate the exact point of misunderstanding between them. “She drove me to bribery. To paying her to work for Upman so that he could win her… so that her mother would never discover what she was… because it would have destroyed her. But no. No. You can't think I killed her. I was here the night she died. Here in the hotel. And… my God, she was my only child.”

“And she'd betrayed you,” Lynley said. “After all you'd done for her, after the life you'd given her-”

“No! I loved her. Do you have children? A daughter? A son? Do you know what it is to see the future in your child and know you'll live on no matter what happens just because she herself exists?”

“As a whore?” Lynley asked. “As a woman on the game who makes her money paying house calls on men she whips into submission? ‘I'll see you dead before I let you do it.’ Those were your words. And she was returning to London next week, Andy You'd bought yourself only a reprieve from the inevitable when you paid her to work in Buxton.”

“I didn't! Tommy, listen to me! I was here on Tuesday night.”

Maiden's voice had risen and a knock sounded on the door. It opened before either man could speak. Nan Maiden stood there. She looked from Lynley to her husband. She didn't speak.

But she didn't need to say a word in explanation of what Lynley read on her face. She knows what he did, he thought. My God, she's known from the first.