Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“Dead in less than two years,” Jeremy Britton said without turning from the picture that undulated against the backs of the books. His words were only mildly slurred, not nearly as incomprehensible as they usually were after a day of drinking. “She was counting out change to buy me a packet of crisps in Longnor, Mum was-Jesus, can you credit that?-and she dropped dead at the till. Gone before she hit the floor. And I said, ‘Mum, what about my crisps?’ Jesus have mercy on us all.” Jeremy lifted his glass and drank. He replaced it with such precision on the table next to his chair that Samantha wondered what he was actually drinking. He turned his head and squinted in her direction as if the light from the corridor were too bright. “Ah. It's you, Sammy. Come to join the resident insomniac?”

“I was checking the windows. I didn't know you were still up, Uncle Jeremy.”

“Didn't you.”

Jeremy turned from his scrutiny of Samantha, giving his attention back to the film. “You lose your mum, and you're marked forever,” he murmured, taking up his glass once more. “Did I ever tell you, Sammy-”

“Yes. You did.” Numerous times since her arrival in Derbyshire, Samantha had heard the story that she already knew: his mother's untimely death, his father's rapid remarriage, his own banishment to boarding school at the tender age of seven while his only sister was allowed to remain at home. “Ruined me,” he'd said time and again. “Robs a man of his soul, and don't you forget it.”

Samantha decided it was best to leave him to his musings, and she began to depart the room. But his next words stopped her.

“It's nice to have her out of the way, isn't it?” he asked with absolute clarity. “Opens things up the way they should be opened up. That's what I think. What about you?”

She said, “What? I don't… what?” and in her surprise she feigned misunderstanding in a circumstance where no misapprehension was really feasible, especially with the High Peak Courier sitting on the floor next to her uncle's chair with its front-page headline shouting Death at Nine Sisters. So it was foolish to attempt to dissemble with her uncle. Nicola's dead was going to be the subtext of every conversation Samantha had with anyone from this time forward, and it would serve her interests far better to become used to Nicola Maiden as a Rebecca-like figure in the background of her life than it would to pretend the woman had never existed at all.

Jeremy was watching the film, a smile playing round the corners of his mouth as if he found amusement in the sight of his five-year-old self skipping along the path in one of the gardens, dragging a stick along the edge of what was then a well-tended herbaceous border. “Sammy, my angel,” he said to the screen, and again his voice was remarkable for the unusual clarity of his enunciation, “how it happened isn't the point. That it happened is. And what we're going to do now that it's happened is the most important point of all.”

Samantha made no reply. She felt unaccountably rooted to the spot, both trapped and mesmerised by what could destroy her.

“She was never right for him, Sammy. Obvious whenever they were together. She held the reins. And he got ridden. Whenever he wasn't riding her, of course.” Jeremy chuckled at his own joke. “P'rhaps he would've seen the wrongness of it all at the end of the day. But I don't think so. She'd worked herself under his skin too deep. Good at that, she was. Some women are.”

You're not was what he didn't say. But Samantha didn't need him to say it. Pulling men had never been her forte. She'd always believed that an outright demonstration of her virtues would serve to establish her firmly in someone's affections. Womanly virtues had a longevity to them that sexual allure could never match. And when lust and passion died the death of familiarity, one needed something of substance to take their place. Or so she had taught herself to believe through an adolescence and a young adulthood remarkable for their solitude.

“Couldn't have happened any better,” Jeremy was saying. “Sammy, always remember this: Things generally work out the way they're meant to.”

She felt her palms dampening and she rubbed them surreptitiously against the skirt that she'd donned for dinner.

“You're right for him. The other… She wasn't. What you have to offer, she couldn't touch. She would've brought nothing to a marriage with Julie-aside from the only decent pair of ankles the Brittons have seen in two hundred years-whereas you understand our dream. You can be part of it, Sammy. You can make it happen. With you, Julie can bring Broughton Manor back to life. With her… Well. Like I said, things generally work out the way they're meant to. So what we've got to do now-”

“I'm sorry she's dead,” Samantha broke in, because she knew she must say something eventually, and a conventional expression of sorrow was the only statement she could think of at the moment to stop him from going on. “For Julian's sake, I'm sorry. He's devastated, Uncle Jeremy.”

“Isn't he just. And that's exactly where we begin.”

“Begin?”

“Don't play the innocent with me. And for God's sake, don't be a fool. The way's clear and there're plans to be laid. You've taken enough trouble to woo him-”

“You're mistaken.”

“-and what you've done is lay a decent foundation. But this is the point where we start building on that foundation. Nothing hasty, mind you. No going to his bedroom and dropping your knickers just yet. Everything in good time.”

“Uncle Jeremy. I hardly think-”

“Good. Don't think. Let me do that. You keep it simple from this time on.” He raised his glass to his lips and eyed her sharply over its rim. “It's when a woman complicates her plans that her plans get cocked up. If you know what I mean. And I expect you do.”

Samantha swallowed, pinned to his gaze. How was it that an ageing alcoholic-a bloody drunk, for the love of God-could manage to discompose her so easily? Except he didn't seem very much like a drunk right now. Flustered, she went to the windows and locked them, as had been her intention. Behind her, the film came to an end, and the tail of it slapped noisily against its spool as the projector continued to run. Kickateck, kickateck, kickateck. Jeremy didn't seem to notice.

“You want him, don't you?” he asked her. “And don't lie to me about it, because if I'm to help you catch the boy, I want to know the facts. Oh, not all of them, mind you. Just the important one, about you wanting him.”

“He's not a boy. He's a man who-”

“Isn't he just.”

“-knows his own mind.”

“Bollocks, that. He knows his own dick and where he wants to stick it. We just need to see that he learns to want to stick it in you.”

“Please, Uncle Jeremy…” It was horrible, inconceivable, humiliating: to be listening to this. She was a woman who'd forged her own path throughout her life, and to place herself in the position of depending on someone other than herself to mould events and people to her wishes was not only foreign to her thinking, it was also foolhardy and it could be dangerous.

“Sammy, my angel, I'm on your side.” Jeremy's voice coaxed, urging her to declare herself in the very same way that one might urge a frightened puppy to come forward from beneath a chair. She found herself turning from the windows. She saw that he was watching her, his eyes hooded and his chin held by fingers adopting a pious attitude of prayer. “I'm on your side completely and one hundred percent. Only listen, my angel. I need to know exactly what your side is before I take action on your behalf.”

Samantha tried to move her eyes away from him, but she failed completely.