Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“Where's our baby? Where's our little Darryl?”

“He's settled. That hot water bottle did the trick. Come on, Mum. Sit down before you fall over.”

“You wrapped it in a towel like I said?”

“He's fine.” Cyn turned to Barbara and Nkata. “What's happened?”

Nkata explained briefly The second time through seemed to deplete not his resources but those of Mrs. Cole. When he reached the body another time, she grasped the handle of the hoe in the odd teepee sculpture, said, “It was to be three times this size, his commission was. He told me so,” and made her way to a threadbare overstuffed chair. A small child's toys encircled this, and she reached for one of them: a bright yellow bird that she held to her chest.

“Derbyshire?” Cyn sounded incredulous. “What the hell's our Terry doing in Derbyshire? Mum, he probably borrowed the motorcycle to someone. Cilia would know Let's phone her.”

She strode to do so, punching in the numbers on a phone that stood on a squat table at the foot of the stairs. Her end of the conversation was simple enough: “Is that Cilia Thompson?… This is Cyn Cole, Terry's sister… Yeah… Oh, right. Proper little monster, he is. Got us all running round for him whenever he blinks. Listen, Cilia, 's Terry about?… Oh. D'you know where's he gone off to, then?” A sombre glance over her shoulder at her mother as Cilia answered. Cyn said, “Right then… No. No message. But if he turns up in the next hour or so, have him phone me at home, okay?” And then she rang off.

Sal and Cyn communicated wordlessly in the way of women long used to each other's company. Sal said quietly, “He's set on that commission heart and soul. He said, ‘This'll bring destination art into being. Just you watch, Mum.’ So I don't see why he would've left.”

“‘Destination art?’” Barbara asked.

“His gallery. That's what he wants to call it: Destination Art,” Cyn clarified. “He's always wanted a gallery for moderns. It was to be- is to be-on the south bank near the Hayward. It's his dream. Mum, this could be nothing. You hold on to that. It could be nothing.” But the tone of her voice sounded as if she'd have loved nothing more dearly than to convince herself.

“We'll need the address,” Barbara told her.

“There isn't any gallery yet,” Cyn replied.

“For Terry's digs,” Nkata clarified. “And the studio he shares.”

“But you just said-” Sal didn't finish her remark. A silence fell among them. The source of it was obvious to them all: What could have been nothing was probably something, the worst sort of something that a family like the Coles might ever have to face.

Cyn went in search of the exact addresses. As she did so, Nkata said to Terry Cole's mother, “I'll fetch you first thing in the morning, Mrs. Cole. But if Terry should ring you sometime tonight, you page me. Right? Don't mind the time. Just page me.”

He wrote out his pager number on a sheet of paper that he removed from his neatly kept notebook. He was ripping it out and handing it over to Sal Cole when Terry's sister returned with her brother's information. She gave it to Barbara. Two locations were listed next to the words flat and studio. Both, Barbara saw, were in Battersea. She committed the addresses to memory-just in case, she told herself-and she gave the paper to Nkata. He nodded his thanks, folded it, and shoved it into his pocket. A time was agreed upon for the morning's departure, and the two police constables found themselves out in the night.

A mild wind gusted on the street, blowing a plastic carrier bag and a large Burger King cup down the pavement. Nkata disarmed the security system on the car, but he didn't open the door. Instead, he looked at Barbara over the roof, then beyond her to the dismal-looking council housing on the other side of the street. His face was a study in sadness.

“What?” Barbara asked him.

“I killed their sleep,” he said. “I should've waited till morning. Why didn't I think that? No way could we have driven back there tonight. I'm too shagged out. So why'd I rush over here like there was a fire I had to put out? They got that baby to see to, and I just killed their sleep.”

“You didn't have a choice,” Barbara said. “If you'd waited till morning, they'd probably both've been gone-to work and to school-and you'd've lost a day. Don't drive yourself round the bend on it, Winston. You did what you had to do.”

“It's him,” he said. “The bloke in the picture. He's the one got the chop.”

“I reckoned as much.”

“They don't want to believe it.”

“Who would?” Barbara said. “It's the final goodbye without a chance to say it. And there can't be anything more rotten than that.”

Lynley chose Tideswell. A limestone village climbing two opposing hillsides, Tideswell sat virtually at the midway point between Buxton and Padley Gorge. Housing himself in the Black Angel Hotel-with its pleasing view of the parish church and its surrounding green-would provide him during the investigation with easy access both to the police station and to Maiden Hall. And to Calder Moor, if it came to that.

Inspector Hanken was agreeable to the idea of Tideswell. He would send a car round for Lynley in the morning, he said, pending the return of Lynley's own officer from London.

Hanken had thawed considerably in the hours they'd spent in each other's company. In the bar of the Black Angel Hotel, he and Lynley had enjoyed one Bushmill apiece prior to dinner, a bottle of wine with the meal, and a brandy afterwards, which also gave some assistance in the matter.

The whiskey and wine had elicited from Hanken the sort of professional war stories that were common to most interactions between policemen: rows with superiors, cock-ups in investigations, rough cases he'd been lumbered with. The brandy had provoked more personal revelations.

The inspector from Buxton pulled out the family photograph he'd shown Lynley earlier and gazed upon it long before he spoke. His index finger tracing the bundled shape of his infant son, he said the word children and went on to explain that a man was changed for all time the moment a newborn was placed into his arms. One wouldn't expect that to be the case-that sort of alteration in persona was women's stuff, wasn't it?-but that's what happened. And what resulted from that change was an overwhelming desire to protect, to batten down every hatch in sight, and to secure every route of access into the heart of the home. So to lose a child despite every precaution…? It was a hell beyond his imagining.

“Something Andy Maiden is currently experiencing,” Lynley noted.

Hanken eyed him but didn't argue the point. He went on to confide that his Kathleen was the light of his life. He'd known from the day they'd met that he wanted to marry her, but it had taken five years to persuade her to agree. What about Lynley and his new bride? How had it been for them?

But marriage, wife, and children were the last subjects Lynley wanted to entertain. He sidestepped adroitly by claiming inexperience. “I'm too wet behind the ears as a husband to have anything remarkable to report,” he said.

He found that he couldn't avoid the subject when he was alone with his thoughts later that night in his room. Still, in an attempt to divert them-or at least to postpone them-he went to the window. He notched open the casement an inch and tried to ignore the strong scent of mildew that seemed to permeate the environment. He was as successful at this, however, as he was at overlooking the bed with its concave mattress and its pink duvet covered with a slick pseudo-satin material that promised a night of wrestling to keep it on the bed. He'd at least been equipped with an electric kettle, he observed gloomily, with a wicker basket of PG Tips, seven plastic thimbles of milk, one packet of sugar, and two pieces of shortbread. And he had a bathroom as well, although it had no window and it was fitted out with a water-stained bath encased in linoleum and was lit by a single light bulb of candle-strength wattage. It could have been worse, he told himself. But he wasn't sure how.