Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

Five minutes stretched to ten. Ten minutes to fifteen. He didn't show up.

Bastard, Barbara thought. Fine idea of a joke.

She went to the bathroom and turned on the shower.

Lynley tried to adjust quickly to the astonishing fact that Andy Maiden hadn't told his wife that their daughter had been the victim of a crime. Since Calder Moor was a location replete with potential sites of accidents, Lynley's former colleague had apparently and unaccountably allowed his wife to believe that their daughter had fractured her skull in a fall.

When she learned otherwise, Nan Maiden crumpled forward, elbows pressed into her thighs, and fists raised to her mouth. Either shocked, too stricken with grief to comprehend, or comprehending something only too well, she didn't weep further. She merely muttered a guttural “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

DI Hanken appeared to take a fairly quick measure of what was implied by her reaction. He was observing Andy Maiden with a decidedly unsympathetic eye. He asked no questions in response to Nan's revelation though. Like a good cop, he merely waited.

In the aftermath of all this, Maiden waited as well. Still, he apparently reached the conclusion that something was required of him by way of explanation for his incomprehensible behaviour. “Love, I'm sorry,” he said to Nan. “I couldn't… I'm sorry. Nan, I could barely cope with the fact that she'd died, let alone tell… let alone have to face… have to begin to deal with…” He spent a moment rigidly marshaling the inner resources a policeman learned to develop in order to live through the worst of the worst. His right hand-still in possession of the ball his wife had given him-clutched and released it spasmodically. “I'm so sorry,” he said brokenly “Nan.”

Nan Maiden raised her head. She watched him for a moment. Then her hand-shaking as it was-reached out and closed over his arm. She spoke to the police.

“Would you…” Her lips quivered. She didn't go on until she had the emotion under control. “Tell me what happened.”

DI Hanken obliged with minimal details: He explained where Nicola Maiden had died and how, but he told them nothing more.

“Would she have suffered?” Nan asked when Hanken had concluded his brief remarks. “I know you can't be positive. But if there's anything that might allow us to feel that at the end… anything at all…”

Lynley recounted what the Home Office pathologist had told them.

Nan reflected on the information for a moment. In the silence, Andy Maiden's breath sounded loud and harsh. Nan said, “I wanted to know because… D'you think… Would she have called out for one of us… would she have hoped… or needed…?” Her eyes filled. She stopped talking.

Hearing the questions, Lynley was reminded of the old moors murders, the monstrous tape recording that Myra Hindley and her cohort had made, and the anguish of the dead girl's mother when the recording had been played at the trial and she'd had to listen to her child's terrified voice crying out for her mummy in the midst of her murder. Isn't there a certain kind of knowledge, he thought, that shouldn't be revealed publicly because it can't be borne privately? He said, “The blows to the head knocked her unconscious at once. She stayed that way.”

“And on her body, were there other… Had she been… Had anyone…?”

“She wasn't tortured.” Hanken cut in as if he, too, felt the need to show some mercy to the dead girl's mother. “She wasn't raped. We'll have a fuller report later, but at the moment it seems that the blows to the head were all that she”-he paused, it seemed, in the search for a word that connoted the least pain-“experienced.”

Maiden said, “She looked asleep. White. Like chalk. But still asleep.”

“I want that to make it better,” Nan said. “But it doesn't.”

And nothing will, Lynley thought. “Andy, we've got a possible identification on the second body. We're going to need to press forward. We think the boy was called Terence Cole. He had a London address, in Shoreditch. Is his name familiar to you?”

“She wasn't alone?” The glance Nan Maiden cast at her husband told the police that he'd withheld this information from her as well.

“She wasn't alone,” Maiden said.

Hanken clarified the situation for Nan Maiden, explaining that the camping gear of one person only-which he would later ask Maiden to identify as belonging to his daughter-had been within the enclosure of Nine Sisters Henge along with the body of a teenaged boy who himself had no gear other than the clothes on his back.

“That motorcycle by her car.” Maiden pulled his facts together quickly. “It belonged to him?”

“To a Terence Cole,” Hanken affirmed. “Not reported stolen and so far not claimed by anyone coming off the moor. It's registered to an address in Shoreditch. We've a man heading there now to see what's what, but it seems likely that we've got the right ID. Is the name familiar to either of you?”

Maiden shook his head and said, “Cole. Not to me. Nan?”

“I don't know him. And Nicola… Surely she would have talked about him if he was a friend of hers. She would have brought him round to meet us as well. When did she not? That's… It was her way.”

Andy Maiden then spoke perspicaciously, asking a logical question that rose from his years of policing. “Is there any chance that Nick-” He paused and seemed to prepare his wife for the question by laying a hand gently on her thigh. “Could she just have been in the wrong place? Could the boy have been the target? Tommy?” And he looked to Lynley.

“That would have to be a consideration in any other case,” Lynley admitted.

“But not in this case? Why?”

“Have a look at this.” Hanken produced a copy of the handwritten note that had been found on Nicola Maiden's body.

The Maidens read the five words on it-THIS BITCH HAS HAD IT-as Hanken advised them that the original had been found tucked into their daughter's pocket.

Andy Maiden stared long at the note. He shifted the red ball to his left hand and clutched it. “Jesus God. Are you telling us someone went there to kill her? Someone tracked her to kill her? That this wasn't just a case of her meeting up with strangers? A stupid argument breaking out over something? A psychopath killing her and that boy for the thrill of it?”

“It's doubtful,” Hanken said. “But you know the procedure as well as we do, I expect.”

Which was, Lynley knew, his way of saying that as a police officer Andy Maiden would know that every avenue potentially related to the killing of his daughter was going to be explored. He said, “If someone went out to the moor specifically to kill your daughter, we must consider why.”

“But she didn't have enemies,” Nan Maiden declared. “I know that's what you expect every mother to say, but in this case it's the truth. Everyone liked Nicola. She was that kind of person.”

“Not everyone, apparently, Mrs. Maiden,” Hanken said. And he brought forth the copies of the anonymous letters that had also been at the site.

Andy Maiden and his wife read these in silence and without expression. She was the one who finally spoke. As she did so, her husband's gaze remained locked on the letters. And both man and woman sat still, like statues.

“It's impossible,” she said. “Nicola can't have received these. You're making a mistake if you think that she did.”

“Why?”

“Because we never saw them. And if she'd been threatened-by anyone, by anyone -she would have told us at once.”

“If she didn't want to worry you-”

“Please. Believe me. That wasn't how she was. She didn't think like that: about worrying us and such. She thought only about telling the truth. If something had been going wrong in her life, she would have told us. That's how she was. She talked about everything. Everything. Truly.” And with an earnest look at her husband, “Andy?”