Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“Perhaps it's her way of coping,” Lynley said.

“But it takes too much concentration for her to cut out the thoughts that she's trying to cut out, d'you see that? It takes every ounce of concentration she has. And I found that I couldn't breathe with her round me. Hovering there. Offering cups of tea and heat pads and… I began to feel like my skin wasn't even my own, like she couldn't rest till she'd even managed to invade my pores in order to-” He paused abruptly and in that pause he seemed to evaluate everything he'd said, unguarded, because his next words were hollow. “God. Listen to me. Selfish bastard.”

“You've been dealt a death blow. You're trying to cope.”

“She's been dealt the blow as well. But she thinks of me.” He kneaded one hand with the fingers of the other. “She wanted to massage them. That's all it was, really. And God forgive me, but I drove her off because I thought I'd suffocate if I stayed in the room with her a moment longer. And now… How can we need and love and loathe all at once? What's happening to us?”

The aftershocks of brutality are happening to you, Lynley wanted to reply. But instead he repeated, “Has she gone out to Calder Moor, Andy?”

“She'll be on Hathersage Moor. It's closer. A few miles. The other…? No. She won't be on Calder.”

“Has she ever ridden there?”

“On Calder?”

“Yes. On Calder Moor. Has she ever ridden there?”

“Of course she has. Yes.”

Lynley hated to do so, but he had to ask. Indeed, he owed it both to himself and to his Buxton colleague to ask: “You as well, Andy? Or just your wife?”

Andy Maiden looked up slowly at this, as if finally seeing the road they were travelling. He said, “I thought you were pursuing the London angle. SO 10. And what goes along with SO 10.”

“I am pursuing SO 10. But I'm after the truth, all of the truth. As you are, I expect. Do both of you ride on Calder Moor?”

“Nancy's not -”

“Andy, help me out. You know what the job's like. The facts generally come out one way or another. And sometimes the how of their coming out becomes more intriguing than the facts themselves.

That can easily divert an otherwise simple investigation, and I can't believe you want that.”

Maiden understood: An attempt at obfuscation could ultimately become more arresting than the information one sought to withhold. “Both of us ride on Calder Moor. All of us, in fact. But it's too far to bike there from here, Tommy.”

“How many miles?”

“I don't know exactly. But far, too far. We take the bikes out in the Land-Rover when we want to ride there. We park in a lay-by. Or in one of the villages. But we don't ride all the way to Calder Moor from here.” He canted his head in the direction of the bedroom window, adding, “The Land Rover's still out there. She won't have gone onto Calder this afternoon.”

Not this afternoon, Lynley thought. He said, “I did see a Land Rover when I came through the car park.”

Maiden hadn't been a police officer for thirty years without being capable of a simple act of mind reading. He said, “Running the Hall's a demanding life. It drains our time. We take our exercise when we can. If you want to track her on Hathersage Moor, there's a map in Reception that'll show you the way.”

That wouldn't be necessary, Lynley told him. If Nancy Maiden had ridden her bike out onto the moors, she probably was seeking some time alone. He was happy enough to let her have it.

Barbara Havers knew that she could have purchased some take-away from Uncle Tom's Cabin, a food stall on the corner of Portslade and Wandsworth roads. It occupied little more than a niche at the near end of the railway arches, and it looked just the sort of unhygienic place where one might purchase enough cholesterol-laden grub to guarantee concrete arteries within the hour. But she resisted the impulse-virtuously, she liked to think-and instead took herself to a pub near Vauxhall Station, where she indulged in the bangers and mash upon which she'd been meditating earlier. These went down a treat, eased on their way with half a pint of Scrumpy Jack. Sated with the food and drink and satisfied with the information she'd gathered during her morning in Battersea, she returned to the north side of the Thames and skimmed her way along the river. Traffic moved well on

Horseferry Road. She was pulling into the underground car park at New Scotland Yard before she'd smoked her second Player.

She had two professional options at this point, she decided. She could return to CRIS and the hunt for a suitable ticket-of-leaver out for the blood of a Maiden. Or she could compile the information she'd gathered so far into a report. The former activity-boring and subservient though it was-would demonstrate her ability to take the medicine which certain officers of the law believed she ought to be swallowing. The latter activity, however, appeared to be the one likelier to take them towards some answers in the case. She opted for the report. It wouldn't take that long, it would allow her to set down information in a concrete and thought-provoking order, and it would postpone having to face the glowing screen for at least another hour. She took herself off to Lynley's office-no harm in using the space since it was going empty at the moment, right?-and set to work.

She was thoroughly into it, just coming up to the salient points made by Cilia Thompson concerning Terry Cole's paternity and his propensity towards questionable means of support-BLACKMAIL? she'd just typed-when Winston Nkata strode into the room. He was wolfing down the last of a Whopper, the container of which he sailed into the rubbish. He wiped his hands thoroughly with a paper napkin. He popped an Opal Fruit into his mouth.

“Junk food'll kill you,” Barbara said sanctimoniously.

“But I'll die smiling” was Nkata's reply. He swung one long leg over a chair and took out his leather-bound notebook as he sat. Barbara glanced at a wall clock and then at her colleague. “Just how fast're you driving up and down the Ml? You're setting land speed records from Derbyshire, Winston.”

He avoided answering, which was answer in itself. Barbara shuddered to think what Lynley would say had he known that Nkata was roaring along in his beloved Bentley at just under the speed of sound. “Been to the College of Law,” he told her. “Guv told me to look into the Maiden girl's doings in town.”

Barbara stopped typing. “And?”

“She dropped out.”

“She dropped out of law college?”

“That's how it looks.” Nicola Maiden, he told her, had apparently dropped out of law college on the first of May, approaching exam time. She'd done it responsibly, making appointments to see all the appropriate instructors and administrators before leaving. Several of them had tried to talk her out of it-she'd been near the top of her class and they'd considered it madness to leave when her successful future in law was assured-but she'd been politely adamant. And she'd disappeared.

“Muffed her exams?” Barbara asked.

“Didn't ever take them. Left before she laid eyes on them.”

“Was she scared? Developing nerves like her dad? Getting ulcers? Losing sleep? Realising she'd have to swot and wasn't up to the challenge?”

“Decided she just didn't fancy the law, was what she told her personal tutor.”

She'd been working for eight months part-time at a firm in Not-ting Hill called MKR Financial Management, Nkata went on. Most of the law students did that sort of thing: worked part-time during the day to support themselves, taking instruction at the college in the late afternoons and at night. She'd been offered a full-time placement at the Notting Hill firm, and as she liked the work, she decided to take it. “And that was that,” Nkata said. “No one at the college heard a word from her since.”