Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“Detective Inspector Lynley?”

The quiet interruption came from the door. Lynley and Barbara swung to the voice. Dorothea Harriman, secretary to their divisional superintendent, stood there: well-coifed with a helmet of honey-blonde hair, well-dressed in a pin-striped suit that would have done service in a fashion advert. Barbara all at once felt what she always was in the presence of Dorothea Harriman, a sartorial nightmare.

“What is it, Dee?” Lynley asked the younger woman.

“Superintendent Webberly,” Harriman replied. “He's asked for you. As soon as you can make it. He's had a call from Crime Operations. Something's come up.” And with a glance and a nod at Barbara, she was gone.

Barbara waited. She found that her pulse had begun throbbing painfully. The request from Webberly couldn't have come at a more terrible time.

Something's come up was Harriman shorthand for the fact that the game was afoot. And in the past that summons from Webberly had generally preceded an invitation from the inspector to accompany him in his discovery of what the game was.

Barbara said nothing. She just watched Lynley and waited. She knew very well that the next few moments would constitute the stand he took on their partnership.

Outside his office, business went on as usual. Voices echoed in the lino-floored corridor. Telephones rang in departments. Meetings began. But here, inside, it seemed to Barbara as if she and Lynley had taken themselves into another dimension altogether, one into which much more than merely her professional future was tied.

He finally got to his feet. “I'll need to see what Webberly has going.”

She said, “Shall I…?” despite his use of the singular pronoun that had already said it all. But she found that she couldn't complete the question because she couldn't face the answer at the moment. So she asked another. “What would you like me to do, sir?”

He thought about it, looking away from her at last, seeming to study the picture that hung by the door: a laughing young man with a cricket bat in his hand and a long rip in his grass-stained trousers. Barbara knew why Lynley kept the photo in his office: It served as a daily reminder of the man in the photo and what Lynley had done to him on a long-ago drunken night in a car. Most people put what was unpleasant out of their minds. But DI Thomas Lynley didn't happen to be most people.

He said, “I think it's best that you lie low for a while, Barbara. Let the dust settle. Let people get past this. Let them forget.”

But you won't be able to, will you? she asked silently. What she said, however, was a bleak “Yes, sir.”

“I know that isn't easy for you,” he said, and his voice was so gentle that she wanted to howl. “But I haven't got any other answer to give you at the moment. I only wish that I had.”

And again, the few words she could manage were “Sir. I see. Yes sir.”

“Demotion to detective constable,” Lynley said to Superintendent Malcolm Webberly when he joined him. “That's marks to you, isn't it, sir?”

Webberly was ensconced behind his desk, smoking a cigar. Mercifully, he'd kept the door to his office closed to spare the other officers, the secretaries, and the clerks from the fumes emanating from the noxious tube of tobacco. This consideration, however, did little to deliver anyone who had to enter from experiencing and breathing the fug of smoke. Lynley tried to inhale as little as possible. Webberly used his lips and tongue to move the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. It was the only response he gave.

“Can you tell me why?” Lynley asked. “You've gone out on a limb for officers before. No one knows that better than I. But why in this case, when it seems so cut and dried? And what're you going to have to pay for having saved her?”

“We all have favours,” the superintendent said. “I called a few in. Havers was in the wrong, but her heart was in the right.”

Lynley frowned. He'd been trying to work himself round to this same conclusion from the moment he'd learned about Barbara Havers’ disgrace, but he hadn't been able to manage the feat. Every time he came close, the facts reared up at him, demanding acknowledgement. And he'd gathered a number of those facts himself, driving out to Essex to talk to the principal officer involved. Having talked to her, he couldn't understand how-let alone why-Webberly was able to condone Barbara Havers’ decision to fire a rifle at DCI Emily Barlow. Disregarding his own friendship with Havers, even disregarding the very basic issue of chain of command, weren't they responsible for asking what sort of professional mayhem they were encouraging if they failed to punish a member of the force who'd taken part in such an egregious action? “But to shoot at an officer… Even to pick up a rifle in the first place when she had no authority…”

Webberly sighed. “These things just aren't black and white, Tommy I wish they were, but they never are. The child involved-”

“The DCI ordered a life belt thrown to her.”

“But there was doubt as to whether the girl could swim. And beyond that…” Webberly removed the cigar from his mouth and examined its tip as he said, “She's someone's only child. Evidently, Havers knew it.”

And Lynley knew what that fact meant to his superintendent. Webberly himself had a single light in his life: his one daughter, Miranda. He said, “Barbara owes you on this one, sir.”

“I'll see that she pays.” Webberly nodded at a yellow pad that lay before him on the desk. Lynley glanced at it to see the superintendent's scribbling rendered in black felt-tip pen. Webberly said, “Andrew Maiden. D'you remember him?”

At the question-the name-Lynley sat in a chair near Webberly's desk and said, “Andy? Of course. I'd not be likely to forget him.”

“I thought not.”

“One operation in SO10 and I made a hash of it. What a nightmare that was.”

SO 10 was the Crime Operations Group, the most secret and secretive collection of officers in the Met. They were responsible for hostage negotiation, witness and jury protection, the organisation of informants, and undercover operations. Lynley had once aimed to work among them in the latter group. But at twenty-six, he hadn't possessed either the sangfroid or the performance ability to adopt a persona other than his own. “Months of preparation went straight down the drain,” he recalled. “I expected Andy to string me up.”

Andy Maiden hadn't done so, however. That wasn't his style. The SO 10 officer was a man who knew how to cut his losses, and that's what he'd done, not assigning blame where it was owed but instead matching his moves to the moment's need: He quickly withdrew his men from the undercover operation and waited for another opportunity to introduce them, months later, when he could join them and assure that no outrageous faux pas such as Lynley's could undermine their efforts again.

He'd been called Domino-Andy Maiden-so adept had he been at assuming the character of everyone from hit men to American backers of the IRA. His primary field had ultimately become drug operations, but before he arrived there, he made his mark in murder for hire and organised crime as well.

“I used to run into him from time to time on the fourth floor,” Lynley told Webberly. “But I lost track of him once he left the Met. That was… when? Ten years ago?”

“Just over nine.”

Maiden, Webberly said, had taken early retirement and moved his family to Derbyshire. In the Peaks, he'd poured his life savings and his energy into the renovation of an old hunting lodge. It was a country hotel now, called Maiden Hall. Quite the spot for walkers, holiday-makers, mountain bikers, or anyone looking for an evening out and a decent meal.