Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“But no one's name comes to mind?”

“I've survived by putting their names behind me. Andy was the one who couldn't.”

“Survive?”

“Forget.” Hextell separated one picture from the rest. It documented the plane head-on, its body truncated by the angle. He applied his magnifying glass to every inch of it, squinting like a jeweller with a diamond in question.

“Is that why he left? He was out of here on early retirement, I've heard.”

Hextell looked up. “Who's being investigated here?”

Barbara hastened to reassure him. “I'm just trying to get a feeling for the man. If there's something you can tell me that'll help…” She made a that-would-be-great gesture and gave her enthusiasm to her chocolate donut.

The DCS set down his magnifying glass and folded his hands over it. He said, “Andy went out on a medical. He was losing his nerves.”

“He had a nervous breakdown?”

Hextell blew out a derisive breath. “Not stress, woman. Nerves. Real nerves. Sense of smell went first. Taste went next, then touch.

He coped well enough, but then it was his vision. And that was the end of him. He had to get out.”

“Bloody hell. He went blind?”

“Would have done, no doubt. But once he retired, it all came back. Feeling, vision, the lot.”

“So what'd been wrong with him?”

Hextell looked at her long and hard before answering. Then he raised his index and middle fingers and tapped them lightly against his skull. “Couldn't cope with the game. Undercover takes it out of you. I lost four wives. He lost nerves. Some things can't be replaced.”

“He didn't have wife problems?”

“Like I said. It was the game. Some blokes keep their peckers up fine when they're pretending to be someone they're not. But for Andy, that's not how it was. The lies he had to tell out there… Keeping mum about a case till it was long over… It knocked the stuffing out of him.”

“So there was no one case-one big case, perhaps-that cost him more than the others?”

“Don't know,” Hextell concluded. “Like I said, I put it behind me. If there was one case, I couldn't name it.”

With that sort of memory, Hextell would have been a pearl of low price to the Crown Prosecutors in his salad days. But something told Barbara that the DCS didn't care whether the prosecutors found him useful or not. She packed the rest of her donut into her mouth and washed it down with Coke.

“Thanks for your time,” she told him, and added in a gesture of friendliness, “Looks like fun,” with a nod at the bi-plane.

Hextell picked up the propeller picture, held it top to bottom with the edges of his thumb and index finger so as not to smudge it. “Just another way to die,” he said.

Bloody hell, Barbara thought. What people do to put the job out of mind.

No closer to the name she was looking for but wiser to the potential pitfalls promised by a lengthy career in police work, she returned to the computer. She'd just begun revisiting Andrew Maiden's history when a phone call interrupted her.

“It's Cole.” Winston Nkata's voice came over a line that was thick with static. “Mum took one look at the body, said, ‘Right. That's my Terry,’ walked out 'f the room like she was going for groceries, and just hit the floor. Flat on her face. We thought she'd had heart failure, but she'd just checked out. She had to be sedated once she came to. She's taking it hard.”

“Rough go,” Barbara said.

“She doted on the bloke. Makes me think of my mum.”

“Right. Well.” Barbara couldn't help thinking of her own mother. Doting certainly wouldn't be the word to describe her maternal deportment. “Sorry and all that. Are you bringing her back?”

“Be there by mid-afternoon, I expect. We stopped for coffee. She's in the loo.”

“Ah.” Barbara wondered why he was phoning. Perhaps to serve as intermediary between herself and Lynley, passing along information so that the inspector would have as little contact with her as he apparently deemed necessary at the moment. She said, “I haven't got anything on Maiden's arrests yet. At least not anything that looks useful.” She told him what DCS Hextell had confided about Maiden's nervous complaints, adding, “Whatever the inspector wants to make of that.”

“I'll give him the information,” Nkata told her. “If you c'n break off, there's Battersea to look at. It'd save us some time.”

“Battersea?”

“Terry Cole's digs. His studio as well. One of us needs to get over there, talk to his roommate. This Cilia Thompson, you recall?”

“Yeah. But I thought…” What had she thought? Obviously, that Nkata would keep as much to himself as he could, leaving the grunt work to her. The other DC continued to nonplus her with his easy generosity. “I can break off,” Barbara said. “I remember the address.”

She heard Nkata chuckle. “Now, why'm I not surprised at that?”

Lynley and Hanken had spent the first part of the morning waiting for Winston Nkata to deliver Terry Cole's mother to them for the purpose of identifying the second body found on the moor. Neither man had much doubt that the procedure would be a mere formality-devastating and anguished, but still a formality. When no one had come off the moor by dawn to claim the motorcycle and no one else had reported it stolen, it seemed fairly conclusive that the mutilated male and the owner of the motorcycle were one and the same.

Nkata reached them by ten, and the answer was theirs by quarter past the hour. Mrs. Cole verified that the boy was indeed her son Terry, after which she collapsed. A doctor was summoned, sedative in hand. He took over where the police left off.

“I want his effects,” Sal Cole had sobbed, by which they understood that she meant her sons clothes. “I want his effects for our Darryl. I mean to have them.”

And she would do, they told her, once forensics had completed their analysis, once the jeans and T-shirt and Doc Martens and socks were no longer deemed necessary for a successful prosecution of whoever had committed the crime. Until that time, they would give her receipts for each garment that the boy had been wearing, for his motorcycle as well. They didn't tell her that it could easily be years before the ensanguined clothing was released to her. And for her part, she didn't ask when she might expect it. She just clutched the envelope of receipts and wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist. Winston Nkata escorted her from the nightmare into the extended nightmare to come.

Lynley and Hanken withdrew to the DI's office in silence. Prior to Nkata's arrival, Hanken had spent the time reviewing his notes on the case thus far, and he'd had another look at the initial report compiled by the constable who'd first talked to the Maidens about their daughter's disappearance. “She had several phone calls on the morning of her hike,” he told Lynley. “Two from a woman, one from a man, neither giving their names to Nan Maiden before she fetched Nicola to take the calls.”

“Could the man have been Terence Cole?” Lynley asked.

It was more grist for the mill of their suspicions, Hanken concluded.

He went to his desk. At its precise centre, someone had placed a sheaf of papers while they'd been with Mrs. Cole. It was, Hanken told Lynley upon taking them up, a document relating to the case. Owing largely to the services of an excellent transcriptionist, Dr. Sue Myles had managed to be as good as her word: They had the post-mortem report in hand.

Dr. Myles had been as thorough as she'd been unconventional, they discovered. Her findings upon external examination of the bodies alone took up nearly ten pages. In addition to a detailed description of every wound, contusion, abrasion, and bruise on both corpses, Dr. Myles had recorded each minute particular associated with a death on the moor. Thus, everything from the heather caught up in the hair of Nicola Maiden to a thorn pricking one of Terry Cole's ankles was assiduously noted. The detectives were made aware of infinitesimal fragments of stone embedded in flesh, evidence of bird droppings on skin, unidentified slivers of wood in wounds, and the postmortem damage done to the bodies by insects and birds. What the detectives didn't have at the end of their reading, however, was what they hadn't had at the beginning of it: a clear idea of the number of killers they were seeking. But they did have one intriguing detail: Aside from her eyebrows and the hair on her head, Nicola Maiden had been completely shaven. Not born hairless, but deliberately shaven.