Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“Could the boy have killed her?” Lynley asked. “And then inadvertently become a victim himself afterwards?”

“Not unless my pathologist had the times of death wrong. He puts them dying within an hour of each other. How likely is it that two completely unrelated killings would occur in a single location on a Tuesday night in September?”

“Yet that's what appears to have happened, isn't it?” Lynley said. He went on to ask where Nicola Maiden's car had been in relation to the stone circle. Had plaster impressions of tyre prints been taken from that location? What about footprints in the circle itself? And the boy's face… What did Hanken make of the burns?

Hanken fielded the questions, using the map and the reports that his men had compiled thus far in the case. From the other end of the room, WPC Peggy Hammer-whose countenance had always reminded Hanken of a shovel with freckles-called out, “Pete, we've got it. Here's the DVLA.” She copied something from her terminal's monitor at the far end of the room.

“The Triumph?” Hanken said.

“Right. Got it.” She handed over a slip of paper.

Hanken read the name and the address of the motorcycle's owner, and when he did so, he realised that the London detectives were going to turn out to be a godsend. For the address he was looking at was in London, and using either Lynley or Nkata to handle the London end of things would save him manpower. In these times of budget cuts, belt tightening, and the sort of fiscal responsibility that made him shout about “not being a bloody accountant, for God's sake,” sending someone out on the road was a manoeuvre that had to be defended practically all the way to the House of Lords. Hanken had no time for such nonsense. The Londoners made such nonsense unnecessary.

“The bike,” he told them, “is registered to someone called Terence Cole.” According to the DVLA in Swansea, this Terence Cole lived in Chart Street in Shoreditch. And if one of the Scotland Yard detectives didn't mind taking on that end of things, he'd send him back to London straightaway to find someone at that address who could make an i.d. of the second body from Nine Sisters Henge.

Lynley looked at Nkata. “You'll need to head back at once,” he said. “I'll stay. I want a word with Andy Maiden.”

Nkata seemed surprised. “You don't want London yourself? You'd have to pay me a bundle to stay up here if I was you.”

Hanken glanced from one man to the other. Lynley, he saw, was colouring slightly. This surprised him. Until that moment, the man had seemed utterly unflappable.

“Helen can cope for a few days without me, I expect,” Lynley said.

“No new bride ought to have to do that” was Nkata's rejoinder. He explained to Hanken that “the'spector got himself married three months ago. He's practically fresh from the honeymoon.”

“That'll do, Winston,” Lynley said.

“Newlywed,” Hanken acknowledged with a nod. “Cheers.”

“I'm afraid that's quite a moot sentiment,” Lynley replied obscurely.

He wouldn't have said so twenty-four hours earlier. Then, he had been blissful. While there were numerous rough edges of adjustment that had to be smoothed as he and Helen established their life together, nothing they had come across so far had seemed so scabrous that it couldn't be leveled through discussion, negotiation, and compromise. Until the Havers situation had come along, that is.

In the months since their return from the honeymoon, Helen had maintained a discreet distance from Lynley's professional life, and she'd merely said, “Tommy, there must be an explanation,” when he'd returned from his only visit to Barbara Havers and reported the facts behind her suspension. After that moment, Helen had kept her own counsel, relaying telephone messages from Havers and others interested in the situation but always remaining an objective presence whose loyalty to her husband was beyond question. Or so Lynley had assumed the case to be.

His wife had disabused him of the notion when she'd returned from the St. James house earlier that day. He'd been packing for the journey to Derbyshire, tossing some shirts into a suitcase and rooting out an old waxed jacket and hiking boots for using on the moors, when Helen had joined him. In a departure from her usual more oblique manner of addressing herself to a delicate subject, she'd taken the bull directly by the horns, saying, “Tommy, why've you chosen Winston Nkata rather than Barbara Havers to work this case with you?”

He said, “Ah. You've spoken to Barbara, I see,” to which she replied, “And she practically defended you, although the poor woman's heart was clearly breaking.”

“Do you want me to defend myself as well?” he'd asked mildly. “Barbara needs to keep her head down at the Yard for a while. Taking her along to Derbyshire wouldn't have accomplished that. Winston's the logical choice if Barbara's unavailable.”

“But, Tommy, she adores you. Oh, don't look at me that way. You know what I mean. You can do no wrong in Barbara's eyes.”

He'd placed his last shirt into the suitcase, stuffed his shaving gear in among his socks, closed the case, and draped his jacket on top of it. He'd faced his wife. “Are you here as her intermediary, then?”

“Please don't patronise me, Tommy. I hate that.”

He'd sighed. He didn't want to be at odds with his wife and he thought fleetingly of the compromises one made in attaching another life to one's own. We meet, he told himself, we want, we pursue, and we obtain. But he wondered if the man existed who, caught up in the heat of desire, still managed to consider whether he could possibly live with the object of his passion before he was actually doing so. He doubted it.

He said, “Helen, it's a miracle that Barbara still has her job, considering the charges she was facing. Webberly went to the wall for her, and God only knows what he had to promise, give up, or compromise on in order to keep her in CID. At the moment, she ought to be thanking her lucky stars that she wasn't sacked. What she shouldn't be doing is looking for support in a grievance against me. And, frankly, the last person on earth she should be trying to set against me is my own wife.”

“That's not what she's doing!”

“No?”

“She came to see Simon, not me. She didn't even know I was there. When she saw me, she wanted to turn tail and run. And she would have done had I not stopped her. She needed someone to talk to. She felt terrible, and she needed a friend, which is what you always used to be in her life. What I want to know is why you're not being a friend to her now.”

“Helen, this isn't about friendship. There's no place for friendship in a situation in which everything depends on an officer obeying an order. Barbara didn't do that. And what's worse, she nearly killed someone in the process.”

“But you know what happened. How can you not see-”

“What I see is that there's a purpose to a chain of command.”

“She saved a life .”

“And it wasn't her place to determine that life was in danger.”

His wife had moved towards him then, coming to grasp one of the posts at the end of their bed. She said, “I don't understand this. How can you be so unforgiving? She'd be the first person to forgive you anything.”

“In the same circumstances, I wouldn't expect it. She shouldn't have expected as much of me.”

“You've bent the rules before. You've told me so.”

“You can't think attempted murder is bending the rules, Helen. It's a criminal act. For which, by the way, most people go to prison.”

“And for which, in this case, you've decided to be the judge, the jury, and the executioner. I see.”

“Do you?” He was beginning to get angry and he should have held his tongue. Why was it, he wondered, that Helen could push his buttons in ways no one else ever could? “Then I'll ask you to see this as well. Barbara Havers doesn't concern you. Her behaviour in Essex, the subsequent investigation, and whatever medicine she's asked to swallow as a result of that behaviour and investigation are none of your business. If you're finding your life so circumscribed these days that you need to champion a cause to keep yourself busy, you might consider aligning yourself with me. To be honest, I'd appreciate coming home to support and not to subversion.”