Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“Andy's had a few turns like this,” Nan Maiden said. “They pass. He's fine as long as he rests. And that's what he was doing on Tuesday night. Resting.”

“I'd expect, though, that a condition like that wants looking at. It could lead to something far worse. A stroke, perhaps? Chances are one would think of a stroke straightaway. I'd want to call an ambulance as soon as I had the first symptoms.”

“It's happened before. We know what to do,” Nan Maiden said.

“Which is what, exactly?” Hanken enquired. “Application of ice packs? Acupuncture to the temples? Full body massage? Half a dozen aspirin? What is it you do when it looks like your husband might be having a stroke?”

“It isn't a stroke.”

“So you left him alone to his bed rest, did you? From half past seven in the evening until… what time might that have been, Mrs. Maiden?”

The care the couple took not to look at each other was as obvious as would have been a sudden collapse into each other's arms. Nan Maiden said, “Of course I didn't leave Andy alone, Inspector. I looked in on him twice. Three times, perhaps. During the evening.”

“And the times?”

“I have no idea. Probably at nine. Then again round eleven.” And as Hanken looked towards Maiden, she continued by saying, “It's no use asking Andy. He'd fallen asleep, and I didn't wake him. But he was there in the bedroom. And there he stayed. All night. I hope that's all you want to ask in the matter, Inspector Hanken, because the very idea… the thought that…” Her eyes grew bright as she directed them towards her husband. He looked in the direction of the U-shaped gorge, whose south end could be glimpsed where the road curved to the north. “I hope that's all you want to ask,” she said simply, and there was a quiet dignity to her words.

Still, Hanken said, “Do you have any idea what your daughter planned to do with her life once she returned to London from her summer in Derbyshire?”

Maiden watched him steadily, though his wife looked away. “No,” he said. “I don't know.”

“I see. And you're certain of that? Nothing you want to add? Nothing you want to explain?”

“Nothing,” Maiden said, and to his wife, “You, Nancy?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Hanken gestured with the evidence bag in which the knife lay. “You know the routine, Mr. Maiden. Once we have a report with all the particulars from forensic, I'll probably need another chat with you.”

“I understand,” Andy Maiden said. “Do your job, Inspector. Do it well. That's all I ask.”

But he didn't look at his wife.

They seemed to Hanken like strangers on a railway platform, tied in some way to a departing guest that neither wanted to admit to knowing.

Nan Maiden watched the inspector drive off. Without realising that she was doing it, she began to gnaw at what was left of the fingernails of her right hand. Next to her, Andy set the bottle of Pellegrino she'd brought him into a depression that his heel had made in the soft earth round the concrete-filled hole. He hated Pellegrino. He scorned every kind of water that touted itself as offering more benefit than a full glass of the spring water from their own well. She knew that. But when she'd looked from the window of the first floor mezzanine, when through the trees she'd seen the car pull onto the verge and watched the police inspector clamber out, a bottle of water was the only excuse she could think of to get her down the hillside quickly enough to intercept him. So now she bent for the water and wiped off the grime where the earth clung like an eruption of scabies to the condensation that had formed on the bottle.

Andy fetched the thick oak pole from which the new Maiden Hall sign would hang. He sank it upright into the ground and held it into position with four sturdy timbers. He shovelled the rest of the concrete round it.

When will we talk? she wondered. When will it be safe to say the worst? She tried to tell herself that thirty-seven years of marriage made conversation unnecessary between them, but she knew there was little truth to that. It was only in the halcyon days of courting, engagement, and newlywed excitement that a look, a touch, or a smile sufficed between a man and a woman. And they were decades away from those halcyon days. They were more than thirty years and one devastating death away from that time when words were secondary to the knowledge of one's partner that was as immediate and as natural as breathing.

Silently, Andy packed the concrete round the post. Carefully, he scraped the remains of the mixture from the bucket until there was nothing left. He gave his attention next to the floodlights. Nan clasped the bottle of Pellegrino to her bosom and turned away to climb back to the Hall.

“Why did you say that?” her husband asked.

She turned back to him. “What?”

“You know. Why did you tell him you looked in on me, Nancy?”

The bottle felt sticky under her palm. It felt hard against her breast. She said, “I did look in on you.”

“You didn't. We both know it.”

“Darling, I did. You were asleep. You must have dozed off. I had a quick look in the door and then went back to work. I'm not surprised you didn't hear me.”

He stood with the floodlights in his hands. She wanted to go to him, to swaddle his body with the kind of protection that would dispel the demons and drive off the despair. But she just stood there, a few feet above him on the slope, holding a bottle of Pellegrino which both of them knew he did not want and would never drink.

“She was the why of it,” he said quietly. “Every journey in life reaches an end. But if you're lucky, it has another beginning inside of it. Nick was the why. Do you understand, Nancy?”

Their gazes locked on each other for a moment. His eyes-which she'd studied for thirty-seven years of love and frustration and laughter and fear and delight and anxiety-spoke a message to her that was unmistakable in its existence but incomprehensible in its meaning. Nan's body quivered with a chill of fear, with the belief that she couldn't afford to understand anything that the man she loved would tell her from this moment on.

“I've something to see to in the Hall,” she said. She began to climb the slope beneath the lime trees. She felt the cool air of the shadows as if the tree leaves were spilling it like a soft fall of rain. It touched her cheeks first, then slid to her shoulders, and the movement of the coolness against her skin was what prompted her to turn back to her husband for a final question.

“Andy,” she said. The volume of her voice was normal. “Can you hear me from here?”

He didn't respond. He didn't look up. He didn't do anything save place the first floodlight in position on the ground beneath the pole that would hold the new sign for Maiden Hall. “Oh God,” Nan whispered. She turned and continued her climb.

After the conversation she'd had with her uncle Jeremy on the previous evening, Samantha had done what she could to stay out of his way. She'd had to see him at both breakfast and lunch, but she'd avoided eye contact and conversation with him, and as soon as she'd finished eating, she'd cleared her plates from the table and cleared herself from the room.

She was out in the older courtyard, preparing to wash what looked like a good fifty years of grime from those windows that were still glazed, when she noticed her cousin. He was sitting at the desk in his office, just across the cobbles from where she was unreeling a lengthy hose pipe. She paused to observe him, admiring how the autumn light fell in the open window of the office and struck the top of his bent head so that his hair was burnished to a rusty gold. As she watched, she saw him rub the worry lines on his forehead, and that told her instantly what he was doing, although it didn't tell her why.