In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

  “Any residents tonight?” Julian asked. An old Victorian lodge once used as a hunting retreat by a branch of the Saxe-Coburg family, Maiden Hall had ten bedrooms. All had been individually decorated by Andy's wife when the Maidens had made their escape from London a decade previously; eight were let out to discerning travelers who wanted the privacy of a hotel combined with the intimacy of a home.

  “Fully booked,” Andy replied. “We've had a record summer, what with the fine weather. So what's it to be? Coffee? Brandy? How's your dad, by the way?”

  Julian winced inwardly at the mental association implied in Andy's words. Doubtless the whole blasted county paired his father with one type of booze or another. “Nothing for me,” he said. “I've come for Nicola.”

  “Nicola? Why, she isn't here, Julian.”

  “Not here? She's not left Derbyshire already, has she? Because she said—”

  “No, no.” Andy began storing the kitchen knives in a wooden stand, sliding them into slots with a neat snick as he continued talking. “She's gone camping. Didn't she tell you? She set out mid-morning yesterday.”

  “But I spoke to her …” Julian thought back, reaching for a time. “Early yesterday morning. She wouldn't have forgotten that quickly.”

  “Looks like she has. Women, you know. What did you two have on?”

  Julian sidestepped the question. “Did she go alone?”

  “Always has done,” Andy replied. “You know Nicola.”

  How well he did. “Where? Did she take the proper gear?”

  Andy turned from storing his knives. Obviously, he heard something worrying in Julian's tone. “She wouldn't have gone without her gear. She knows how fast the weather changes out there. At any rate, I helped her stow it in the car myself. Why? What's going on? Did you two have a row?”

  Julian could give a truthful answer to the last question. They hadn't had a row, at least not what Andy would have considered a row. He said, “Andy, she should've been back by now. We were going to Sheffield. She wanted to see a film—”

  “At this time of night?”

  “A special showing.” Julian felt his face getting hot as he explained the tradition behind The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But Andy's time undercover in what he always referred to as his Other Life had exposed him to the film long ago, and he waved the explanation off. This time, when he reached for his moustache and stroked it thoughtfully, he frowned as well.

  “You're certain about the night? She couldn't have thought you meant tomorrow?”

  “I should have preferred to see her last night,” Julian said. “It was Nicola who set the date for tonight. And I'm certain she said she'd be back this afternoon. I'm certain.”

  Andy dropped his hand. His eyes were grave. He looked beyond Julian to the casement window above the sink. There was nothing to see but their reflections. But Julian knew from his expression that Andy was thinking about what lay beyond them, in the darkness. Vast moors populated only by sheep; abandoned quarries reclaimed by nature; limestone cliffs giving way to screes; prehistoric fortresses of tumbling stone. There were myriad limestone caves to entrap one, copper mines whose walls and ceilings could collapse, cairns whose hotchpotch of stones could snap the ankle of an unwary hiker, gritstone ridges where a climber could fall and lie for days or weeks before being found. The district stretched from Manchester to Sheffield, from Stoke-on-Trent to Derby, and more than a dozen times each year Mountain Rescue was called to bring in someone who'd broken an arm or a leg—or worse—in the Peaks. If Andy Maiden's daughter was lost or hurt somewhere out there, it was going to take the effort of more than two men standing in a kitchen to find her.

  Andy said, “Let's get on to the police, Julian.”

  • • •

  Julian's initial impulse also was to phone the police. Upon reflection, however, he dreaded the thought of everything phoning the police implied. But in this brief moment of his hesitation, Andy acted. He strode out to the reception desk to make the call.

  Julian hurried after him. He found Andy hunched over the phone as if he intended to shelter himself from potential eavesdroppers. Still, only he and Julian stood in Reception while the Halls guests lingered over coffees and brandies in the lounge at the other end of the corridor.

  It was from this direction that Nan Maiden approached just as Andy's connection to the Buxton police went through. She came out of the lounge bearing a tray that held an empty cafetiére and the used cups and saucers of coffee for two. She smiled and said, “Why, Julian! Hullo. We weren't expecting …” but her words petered out as she took in her husband's surreptitious appearance—huddled over the phone like an anonymous caller—and Julian's accomplice-like hovering nearby. “What's going on?”

  At her question, Julian felt as if the word guilty were tattooed on his forehead. When Nan said, “What's happened?” he said nothing and waited for Andy to take the lead. Nicola's father, however, spoke in a low voice into the phone, saying, “Twenty-five,” and completely ignoring what his wife had asked.

  But twenty-five seemed to tell Nan what Julian wouldn't put into words and what Andy avoided. “Nicola,” she breathed. And she joined them at the reception desk, sliding her tray onto its surface, where it dislodged a willow basket of hotel brochures that tumbled to the floor. No one picked them up. “Has something happened to Nicola?”

  Andy's answer was calm. “Julian and Nick had a date this evening, which she's apparently forgotten,” he told his wife, left hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “We're trying to track her down.” He offered the lie ingenuously, with the skill of a man who'd once made falsehood his stock-in-trade. “I was thinking that she might have gone to see Will Upman on her way home, to pave the way for another job next summer. Everything all right with the guests, love?”

  Nan's quick grey eyes darted from her husband to Julian. “Exactly who're you talking to, Andy?”

  “Nancy …”

  “Tell me.”

  He didn't do so. On the other end of the line, someone spoke, and Andy looked at his watch. He said, “Unfortunately, we're not altogether sure … No …. Thanks. Fine. I appreciate it.” He rang off and picked up the tray that his wife had placed on the desk. He headed towards the kitchen. Nan and Julian followed.

  Christian-Louis was just leaving, his chef's whites changed for jeans, trainers, and an Oxford University sweatshirt with its sleeves cut off. He grabbed the handlebars of a bicycle that was leaning against the wall, and taking a moment to measure the tension among the other three people in the kitchen, he said, “Bonsoir, ` dermain,” and he quickly left them. Through the window, they saw the white glow of his bicycle lamp as he pedaled off.

  “Andy, I want the truth.” His wife planted herself in front of him. She was a small woman, nearly ten inches shorter than her husband. But her body was solid and tightly muscled, the physique of a woman two decades younger than her sixty years.

  “You've had the truth,” Andy said reasonably. “Julian and Nicola had a date. Nick's forgotten. Julian's got himself into a twist and he'd like to track her down. I'm helping him out.”

  “But that wasn't Will Upman on the phone, was it?” Nan demanded. “Why would Nicola be seeing Will Upman at—” She glanced at the kitchen clock, a functional and institutional timepiece that hung above a rack of dinner plates. It was eleven-twenty, and all of them knew that the hour was unlikely for paying a social call on one's employer, which was what Will Upman had been to Nicola for the last three months. “She said she was going camping. Don't tell me you actually think she stopped to have a chat with Will Upman in the middle of a camping trip. And why would Nicola fail to show up for a date with Julian? She's never done that.” Nan shifted her sharp gaze. “Have you two had a row?” she asked Julian.

  His immediate discomfort came from two sources: having to answer the question another time and concluding that Nicola hadn't yet told her parents of her intention to leave Derbyshire permanently. She would hardly have been seeking her next summer'
s employment if she'd been planning to leave the county.

  “Actually, we talked about marriage,” Julian decided to say. “We were sorting out the future.”

  Nan's eyes widened. Something akin to relief wiped the worry from her face. “Marriage? Nicola's agreed to marry you? When? I mean, when did all this happen? And she never said a word. Why, this is wonderful news. It's absolutely brilliant. Heavens, Julian, it makes me feel giddy. Have you told your dad?”

  Julian didn't want to lie outright. But he couldn't bring himself to tell the full truth. He settled on the precarious middle ground. “Actually, we're just at the talking stage. In fact, we were supposed to talk again tonight.”

  Andy Maiden had been watching Julian curiously, as if he knew very well that any talk of marriage between his daughter and Julian Britton would be as unlikely as a discussion on raising sheep. He said, “Hang on. I thought you were going to Sheffield.”

  “Right. But we planned to talk on the way.”

  “Well, Nicola would never forget that,” Nan declared. “No woman is likely to forget she has a date to talk about marriage.” And then to her husband, “Which is something you ought to know very well.” She was silent for a moment, dwelling—so it seemed—on that final thought while Julian dwelt on the uneasy fact that Andy still had not answered his wife's questions about the phone call he'd made. Nan reached her own conclusion about this. “God. You've just phoned the police. You think that something's happened to her. And you didn't want me to know about it, did you?”

  Neither Andy nor Julian replied. This was answer enough.

  “And what was I to think when the police arrived?” Nan demanded. “Or was I just supposed to keep serving coffee?”

  “I knew you'd worry,” her husband said. “There may be no cause.”

  “Nicola could easily be out there in the dark, lying hurt or trapped or God knows what else and you—both of you—didn't think I should know? Because I might worry?”

  “You're working yourself into a state right now. That's why I didn't want to tell you till I had to. It may be nothing. It's probably nothing. Julian and I agree on that. We'll have it all sorted out in an hour or two.”

  Nan attempted to shove a handful of hair behind her ear. Cut in a strange fashion that she called a beret—long on the top and clipped on the sides—it was too short to do anything but flop back into place. “We'll set out after her,” she decided. “One of us must start looking for her at once.”

  “One of us looking for Nicola isn't going to do much good,” Julian pointed out. “There's no telling where she went.”

  “But we know all her haunts. Arbor Low. Thor's Cave. Peveril Castle.” Nan mentioned half a dozen other locations, all of them inadvertently serving to underscore the point that Julian had been attempting to make: There was no correlation between Nicola's favourite spots and their locations in the Peak District. They were as far north as the outskirts of Holmfirth, as far south as Ashbourne and the lower part of the Tissington Trail. It was going to take a team to find her.

  Andy pulled a bottle out of a cupboard, along with three tumblers. Into each he poured a shot of brandy. He handed round the glasses, saying, “Get that down.”

  Nan's hands circled her glass, but she didn't drink. “Something's happened to her.”

  “We don't know anything. That's why the police are on their way.”

  The police, in the person of an ageing constable called Price, arrived not thirty minutes later. He asked the expected questions of them: When had she left? How was she equipped? Had she set off alone? What seemed to be her state of mind? Depressed? Unhappy? Worried? What had she declared as her intentions? Had she actually stated a time of her return? Who spoke to her last? Had she received any visitors? Letters? Phone calls? Had anything happened recently that might have prompted her to run off?

  Julian joined Andy and Nan Maiden in their efforts to impress upon Constable Price the gravity of Nicola's failure to reappear at Maiden Hall. But Price seemed determined to go his own way, and a painstaking, hair-tearingly slow way it was. He wrote in his notebook at a ponderous pace, taking down a description of Nicola. He wanted to know about her equipment. He took them through her activities during the last two weeks. And he seemed terminally fascinated by the fact that, on the morning before she'd left for her hike, she'd received three phone calls from individuals who wouldn't give their names so that Nan could pass them along to Nicola before she came to the phone.

  “One man and two women?” Price asked four times.

  “I don't know, I don't know. And what does it matter?” Nan said testily. “It may have been the same woman calling twice. What difference does it make? What's that got to do with Nicola?”

  “But just one man?” Constable Price said.

  “God in heaven, how many times am I going to have to—”

  “One man,” Andy interposed.

  Nan pressed her lips into an angry line. Her eyes bored holes into Price's skull. “One man,” she repeated.

  “It wasn't you who phoned?” This to Julian.

  “I know Julian's voice,” Nan said. “It wasn't Julian.”

  “But you have a relationship with the young lady, Mr. Britton?”

  “They're engaged to be married,” Nan said.

  “Not exactly engaged,” Julian quickly clarified, and he cursed in silence as the damnable heat rose from his collar-bone to suffuse his cheeks yet again.

  “Had a bit of a quarrel?” Price asked, voice shrewd. “Another man involved where you didn't like it?”

  Jesus, Julian thought. Why did everyone assume they'd rowed? There hadn't been a single harsh word between them. There hadn't been time for that.

  They hadn't quarreled, Julian reported steadily. And he knew nothing about another man. Absolutely nothing, he asserted for good measure.

  “They had a date to talk about their wedding plans,” Nan said.

  “Well, actually—”

  “D'you honestly know any woman who'd fail to show up for that?”

  “And you are certain she intended to return by this evening?” Constable Price asked Andy He shifted his eyes over his notes, going on to say, “Her gear suggests she might have intended a longer outing.”

  “I hadn't thought much about it till Julian stopped by to fetch her to Sheffield,” Andy admitted.

  “Ah.” The constable eyed Julian with more suspicion than Julian felt was warranted. Then he flipped his notebook closed. The radio receiver that he wore from his shoulder buzzed with an incomprehensible stream of babble. He reached up and turned down the volume. Easing his notebook into his pocket, he said, “Well. She's done a runner before, and this's no different to that, I expect. We'll have ourselves a wait till—”

  “What're you talking about?” Nan cut in. “This isn't a runaway teenager we're reporting. She's twenty-five years old, for heaven's sake.

  She's a responsible adult. She has a job. A boyfriend. A family. She hasn't run off. She's disappeared.”

  “At present, p'rhaps she has,” the constable agreed. “But as she's bunked off before—and our files do show that, madam—till we know she's not doing another runner, we can't send a team out after her.”

  “She was seventeen years old when she last ran off,” Nan argued. “We'd just moved here from London. She was lonely, unhappy. We were caught up getting the Hall in order and we failed to give her the proper attention. All she'd needed was guidance so that—”

  “Nancy.” Andy put his hand gently on the back of her neck.

  “We can't just do nothing!”

  “No choice in the matter,” the constable said implacably. “We've got our procedures. I'll make my report, and if she's not turned up by this time tomorrow, we'll have ourselves another look at the problem.”

  Nan spun to her husband. “Do something. Phone Mountain Rescue yourself.”

  Julian interposed. “Nan, Mountain Rescue can't begin a search unless they have an idea …” He gestured towards the windows a
nd hoped she would fill in the blanks. As a member of Mountain Rescue himself, he'd been on dozens of cases. But the rescuers had always had a general idea of where to begin looking for a hiker. Since neither Julian nor Nicola's parents could even generalise about Nicola's point of departure, the only avenue left to them was to wait until first light, when the police could request a helicopter from the RAE.

  Because of the hour and their lack of information, Julian knew that the only possible activity that actually could have grown from their midnight meeting with Constable Price would have been a preliminary phone call to the closest mountain rescue organization, telling them to assemble their volunteers at dawn. But clearly they had failed to impress upon the constable the gravity of the situation. Mountain Rescue responded only to the police. And the police—at least at the moment and in the person of Constable Price—weren't themselves responding.

  They were wasting time talking to the man. Julian could see from Andy's expression that he'd arrived at this same conclusion. He said, “Thank you for coming, Constable,” and when his wife would have protested, Andy went on. “We'll phone you tomorrow evening if Nicola hasn't turned up.”

  “Andy!”

  He put his arm round her shoulders and she turned into his chest. He didn't speak until the constable had ducked out of the kitchen door, gone to his panda car, switched on the ignition, and flicked on the headlamps. And then he spoke to Julian, not Nan.

  “She always likes camping in the White Peak, Julian. There're maps in Reception. Would you fetch them please? We'll each want to know where the other's searching.”