Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

Webberly referred to his yellow pad. “Andy Maiden brought more louts to justice than anyone else in SO 10, Tommy.”

“It doesn't surprise me to hear that, sir.”

“Yes. Well. He's asking for our help, and we owe him.”

“What's happened?”

“His daughter was murdered in the Peaks. Twenty-five years old and some bastard left her in the middle of nowhere in a place called Calder Moor.”

“Christ. That's rough. I'm sorry to hear it.”

“There was a second body as well-a boy's-and no one knows who the devil he is. No ID on him. The girl-Nicola-had gone camping and she was geared up for the works: rain, fog, sun, or anything else. But the boy at the site hadn't got any gear at all.”

“Do we know how they died?”

“No word on that.” And when Lynley raised an eyebrow in surprise, Webberly said, “This is coming our way via SO 10. Name the time those bastards made fast and free with their information.”

Lynley couldn't do so. Webberly went on.

“What I know is this: Buxton CID's got the case, but Andy's asking for more and we're giving it to him. He's asked for you in particular.”

“Me?”

“That's right. You may have lost track of him over the years, but it seems he hasn't lost track of you.” Webberly plugged his cigar into his mouth, clamping it into the corner and referring to his notes. “A Home Office pathologist is on his way up there for a formal by-the-books with scalpel and recorder. He's set to do the post-mortem sometime today. You'll be on the patch of a bloke called Peter Han-ken. He's been told that Andy's one of us, but that's all he knows.” He removed the cigar from his mouth again and looked at it instead of at Lynley as he concluded, “Tommy, I'll make no pretence about this. It could turn dicey. The fact that Maiden's asked for you by name…” Webberly hesitated before finishing with, “Just keep your eyes open and move with caution.”

Lynley nodded. The situation was irregular. He couldn't remember another time when a relative of a victim of a crime had been allowed to name the officer who would investigate it. That Andy Maiden had been allowed to do so suggested spheres of influence that could easily encroach upon Lynley's efforts to manage a smooth investigation.

He couldn't handle the case alone, and Lynley knew that Webberly wouldn't expect him to do so. But he had a fairly good idea of what officer the superintendent, given half the chance, would assign as his partner. He spoke to circumvent that assignment. She wasn't ready yet. Neither-if it came down to it-was he.

“I'd like to see who's on rota to take with me,” he told Webberly. “Since Andy's a former SO 10 officer, we're going to want someone with a fair amount of finesse.”

The superintendent regarded him directly. Fifteen seconds ticked by before he spoke. “You know best who you can work with, Tommy,” he finally said.

“Thank you, sir. I do.”

Barbara Havers made her way to the fourth floor canteen, where she bought a bowl of vegetable soup which she took to a table and tried to eat while all the time imagining that the word pariah hung from her shoulders on a sandwich board. She ate alone. Every nod of recognition she received from other officers seemed imbued with a silent message of contempt. And while she tried to bolster herself with an interior monologue informing her shrinking ego that no one could possibly yet know of her demotion, her disgrace, and the dissolution of her partnership, every conversation going on round her-particularly those flavoured by light-hearted laughter-was a conversation mocking her.

She gave up on the soup. She gave up on the Yard. She signed herself out-“going home ill” would doubtless be welcomed by those who clearly saw her as a form of contagion anyway-and made her way to her Mini. One half of her was ascribing her actions to a mixture of paranoia and stupidity. The other half was trapped in an endless repetition of her final encounter with Lynley, playing the game of what-I-could-have-would-have-and-should-have-said after learning the outcome of his meeting with Webberly.

In this frame of mind, she found herself driving along Millbank before she knew what she was doing, not heading for home at all. Her body on automatic pilot, she came up to Grosvenor Road and the Battersea Power Station with her brain engaged in a mental castigation of DI Lynley. She felt like a shattered mirror, useless but dangerous with broken edges. How easy it had been for him to cut her loose, she thought bitterly. And what an idiot she had been, believing for weeks that he was on her side.

Obviously, it hadn't been enough for Lynley that she'd been demoted and humiliated by a man whom both of them had loathed for years. It seemed now that he'd also needed an opportunity to do some disciplining on his own. As far as she was concerned, he was wrong wrong wrong taking the direction he'd chosen. And she needed an ally straightaway who would agree with her point of view.

Spinning along the River Thames in the light midday traffic, she had a fairly good idea where to find just such a confederate. He lived in Chelsea, little more than a mile from where she was driving.

Simon St. James was Lynley's oldest friend, his schoolmate from Eton. A forensic scientist and an expert witness, he was regularly called upon by defence counsel as well as Crown Prosecutors to bolster one side or the other of a criminal case that was relying on evidence rather than eyewitnesses to win a conviction. Unlike Lynley, he was a reasonable man. He had the ability to stand back and observe, disinterested and dispassionate, without becoming personally embroiled in whatever situation was roiling round him. He was exactly the person she needed to talk to. He'd see Lynley's actions for what they were.

What Barbara didn't consider in the midst of her turbulent mental gymnastics was that St. James might not be alone in his house in Chelsea's Cheyne Row. However, the fact that his wife was also at home-working in the darkroom that adjoined his own top floor laboratory-didn't make the situation nearly as delicate as did the presence of St. James's regular assistant. And Barbara didn't know that St. James's regular assistant was there until she was climbing the stairs behind Joseph Cotter: father-in-law, housekeeper, cook, and general factotum to the scientist himself.

Cotter said, “All three of them's at work, but it's time to break for lunch and Lady Helen, for one, ‘11 be glad of the diversion. Likes her meals regular, always ’as done. No change there, married or not.”

Barbara hesitated on the second floor landing, saying, “Helen's here?”

“She is.” Cotter added with a smile, “'S nice to know some things's the same as ever was, isn't it?”

“Damn,” Barbara muttered under her breath.

For Helen was also Countess of Asherton, titled in her own right, but also the wife of Thomas Lynley who-although he made no bones about preferring it otherwise-was the other half of the Asherton equation: the official, belted, velvet-and-ermine-clad Earl. Barbara could hardly expect St. James and his wife to join her in a round of denigration doo-dah with the wife of the object of denigration in the room. She realised that retreat was in order.

She was about to beat a hasty one, when Helen came onto the top floor landing, laughing over her shoulder into the lab as she said, “All right, all right. I'll fetch a new roll. But if you'd claw your way into the current decade and replace that machine with something more up-to-date, we wouldn't be out of fax paper at all. I'd think you'd notice these things occasionally, Simon.” She turned away from the door, began to come down the stairs, and spied Barbara on the landing below her. Her face lit. It was a lovely face, not beautiful in any conventional sense, but tranquil and radiant, framed by a smooth fall of chestnut hair.