Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

She heard him sigh the sole word damn. Then, “Give me a half hour,” he said.

“Brilliant,” she said and began to ring off.

“Barb.” He caught her. “Don't make me regret this.”

She took off to South Kensington. After cruising up and down every street from Exhibition Road to Palace Gate, she finally found a place to park in Queen's Gate Gardens and walked over to the corner of Elvaston Place and Petersham Mews, which was where the only phone boxes on Elvaston Place were located. There were two of them, and they were hung with at least three dozen of the sort of advertising postcards that Barbara had found beneath Terry Cole's bed.

Nkata, having to travel the greater distance from Westminster, had not yet arrived, so Barbara took herself across Gloucester Road to a French bakery she'd spied on one of her circumnavigations of the neighbourhood in search of a parking space. Even from the street and inside her car, she'd smelled the siren fragrance of chocolate croissants. With time to kill in the wait for Winston, she decided there was no point to ignoring her body's desperate cry for the two basic food groups she'd so far denied herself that day: butter and sugar.

Twenty minutes after her own arrival in the South Kensington neighbourhood, Barbara saw Winston Nkata's lanky body coming up the street from the direction of Cromwell Road. She shoved the rest of her croissant into her mouth, wiped her fingers on her T-shirt, threw down the remains of a Coke, and dashed across the street just as he reached the corner.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“If you're solid on this bloke, why don't we just nick him?” Nkata asked, adding, “You've got chocolate on your chin, Barb,” with the nonchalance of a man who'd long ago become familiar with the worst of her vices.

She used her T-shirt to take care of the problem. “You know the dance. What've we got for evidence?”

“Guv's found that leather jacket, for one.” Nkata gave her the details on Lynley's discovery at the Black Angel Hotel.

Barbara was glad enough to hear them, especially since they supported her conjecture that an arrow had been one of their killers weapons. But Nkata had been the one to pass along the arrow information to Lynley, and Barbara knew that if he were now to phone the inspector another time and say, “By the way, Guv, why don't we haul in this bloke King-Ryder for a lark and get his dabs while we grill him about leather jackets and trips to Derbyshire,” Lynley was going to see the name Havers written all over the suggestion, and he'd order Nkata to back off so far that he'd be in Calais before he stopped backing.

Nkata wasn't a bloke to defy anyone's orders for love or money. And he certainly wouldn't undergo a sudden personality change for Barbara's benefit. So they had to keep Lynley out of it at all costs, until the birdcage was built and King-Ryder was sitting inside it singing.

Barbara explained all of that to Nkata. The other DC listened without comment. At the end he nodded. But he said, “I still hate to go at it with him not knowing.”

“I know you do, Winnie. But I don't see how he's given us any other choice. Do you?”

Nkata had to admit not. He said with a nod to the phone boxes, “Which one do I use, then?”

Barbara said, “It doesn't matter for the moment, so long as we keep both of them vacant once you've made the call. But I'd go for the one on the left. It's got a brilliant card for Tantalising Transvestites in case you're looking for excitement some evening.”

Nkata rolled his eyes. He went into the booth, fished for some coins, and made the call. Over his shoulder Barbara listened to his side of the conversation. He did West Indian Yobbo from South of the River. Since that was the voice of his first twenty years of life, it was a stellar performance.

The script was simplicity itself once he got Matthew King-Ryder on the phone: “I think I got a package you want, Mistah King-Ryder,” Nkata said, and listened for a moment. “Oh, I 'xpect you know which package I mean… Albert Hall ring any special bells? Hey, no way, mon. You need the proof? You know the phone box. You know the number. You want the music? You make the call.”

He rang off and looked at Barbara. “Bait's on the hook.”

“Let's hope for a bite.” Barbara lit a cigarette and walked the few feet to Petersham Mews, where she leaned against the wing of a dusty Volvo and counted fifteen seconds before pacing back to the phone box, then once again to the car. King-Ryder would have to think before he acted. He would have to assess the risks and the payoffs of picking up the phone in Soho and betraying himself. This would take some minutes. He was anxious, he was desperate, he was capable of murder. But he wasn't a fool.

More seconds ticked by. They turned into minutes. Nkata said, “He's not going for it.”

Barbara waved him off. She looked away from the phone boxes, up Elvaston Place in the direction of Queen's Gate. Despite her own disquiet, she found that she could picture how it had happened on that night three months before: Terry Cole roaring up the street on his motorcycle, hopping off to Blu Tack a fresh batch of postcards into the two phone boxes, which were doubtless part of his regular route. It takes him a few minutes; he has a number of cards. As he's sticking them up, the telephone rings and, on a whim, he picks it up to hear the message intended for David King-Ryder. He thinks, Why not see what that's all about? and he goes to do so. Less than half a mile on his Triumph, and he's in front of the Albert Hall. In the meantime, David King-Ryder arrives, five minutes too late, perhaps even less. He parks in the mews, he strides to the phones, he begins his wait. A quarter of an hour passes. Perhaps more. But nothing happens, and he doesn't know why. He doesn't know about Terry Cole. Eventually, he thinks he's been had. He believes he's ruined. His career-and his life-are fodder for a blackmailer who wants to destroy him. They are, in short, history.

One single minute would be all that it took. And how easy it was to be late in London when so much depended upon the traffic. There was never really a way to know whether a drive from Point A to Point B would take fifteen minutes or forty-five. And perhaps King-Ryder hadn't been trying to get from A to B in town at all. Perhaps he'd been corning in from the countryside on the motorway, where anything could happen to throw a spanner into one's plans. Or perhaps he'd had car trouble, a dead battery, a flat tyre. What did the precise circumstance matter? The only fact that counted was that he'd missed the call. The call made by his son. The call not so different from the one which Barbara and Nkata were waiting for now.

Nkata said, “It's dead in the water.”

Barbara said, “God damn it.”

And the telephone rang.

Barbara threw her cigarette smouldering into the street. She leapt towards the phone box. It wasn't the same box from which Nkata had made the call in the first place, but the box standing next to it. Which could, Barbara thought, mean nothing or everything, since they'd never known which of the two had been the one where Terry Cole had intercepted the call.

Nkata lifted the receiver on the third ring. He said, “Mistah King-Ryder?” as Barbara held her breath.

Yes, yes, yes, she thought when Nkata gave her a thumbs-up. At last they were in business.

“God damn bloody computers! What's the point of having them if they break down daily? You tell me that, damn you.”

WPC Peggy Hammer had apparently heard this demand from her superior officer many times before. “It's not actually broken, sir,” she said with admirable patience. “It's just like the other day. We're off-line for some reason. I expect the problem's somewhere in Swansea. Or I suppose it could be in London, if it comes down to it. Then there's always our own-”