In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

  SHHH was printed across the top of the first. And below the photograph ran the words Don't Tell Mummy What's On After School! The picture itself showed a rucksack with books tumbling out of it and bending from the waist to gather them up was a girl, her bum pointing towards the camera. She wasn't one's average schoolgirl: Her pleated skirt was hiked up to display black thong knickers and thigh-high black stockings with lace round the top. She was looking coyly over her shoulder at the camera, blonde hair tousled and tumbling round her face. Beneath her stiletto-heeled shoes was a telephone number with a hand-scrawled ring me! next to it.

  “Christ,” Lynley whispered. And when Nkata ended his phone call, he said as if an explanation in the light of day would negate the one he'd heard via phone from the constable in the dead of night, “Take me through it the entire situation beginning to end another time, Winnie.”

  “Let me fetch Barb. The brainwork was hers.”

  “Havers?” Lynley's tone stopped the other man from picking up the phone. “Winston, I told her I wanted her on the computer. You assured me that's what she was doing. Why's she involved in this end of the investigation?”

  Nkata showed his palms, empty and innocent. He said, “She's not involved. I'd the box of cards in your motor when I came back here last evening from Battersea. I called in to see how she was doing on CRIS. She asked to take the cards along with her when she went home. To have a look through them. The rest … She can tell you how it played out.”

  Nkata's face wore the guileless expression of a child at the knees of Father Christmas, declaring that there was more to the story than had been revealed. Lynley sighed. “Fetch her, then.”

  Nkata reached for the phone. He punched in a few numbers and while waiting for the connection, said solemnly, “She's working CRIS right now. Been there since six this morning.”

  “I'll kill the fatted calf,” Lynley replied.

  Nkata, not given to biblical exegesis or allusion, said, “Right,” uncertainly. And then into the phone, “Guv's here, Barb.” That was the extent of it.

  While they waited for Havers, Lynley examined the second postcard. He didn't want to think of the anguish that lay ahead for the parents of the murdered girl, however, so he gave his attention back to Nkata. “Anything else this morning, Winnie?”

  “I'd a page from the Coles. Missus and the sister. That was the sister I was talking to just now.”

  “And?”

  “The boy's jacket's missing.”

  “Jacket?”

  “Right. A black leather jacket. He always wore it when he rode the big bike. When you gave Mrs. Cole that list of the kids effects—those receipts, remember?—the jacket wasn't on it. They think someone pinched it at the station in Buxton.”

  Lynley recalled the photographs of the crime scene. He thought about the evidence that he'd looked through in Buxton. Then he said, “Are they certain about the jacket?”

  “Generally wore it, they claimed. And he wouldn't've ridden all the way north in a T-shirt, which's all the covering it looked like he had … from the receipts, that is. He wouldn't've ever ridden on the motorway in only a T-shirt, they said.”

  “It hasn't been cold though.”

  “The jacket was for more'n warmth. It was also protection if he accidentally pranged the bike on the road. Wouldn't get so cut up with the jacket on, they explained. So where is it is what they want to know.”

  “It wasn't among his things in the flat?”

  “Barb went through his clobber, so she can tell you—” Nkata stopped himself abruptly. He had the grace to look abashed.

  “Ah.” Lynley said, the syllable rich with meaning.

  “She worked the computer half the night afterwards,” Nkata said hastily.

  “Did she indeed. And whose idea was it that she accompany you to the Cole boy's flat?”

  Havers’ advent saved Nkata from having to reply. She arrived as if on cue, all business with a notebook in her hand. She looked as professionally attired as Lynley had ever seen her.

  She didn't flop into the chair in front of his desk as usual. She stood by the open door, her heels pressed against it as if holding her body at a respectful attention. To Lynley's question about the jacket, she responded after a moment in which she seemed to be attempting to read her fellow DCs face as if it were a barometer that would enable her to assess the climate in Lynley's office.

  “The kid's gear?” she said carefully when Nkata's earnest nod towards Lynley apparently told her it was at least moderately safe to reveal that she'd once again been derelict in her duties. “Well. Hmmm.”

  “We'll deal later with what you were supposed to be doing, Havers,” Lynley told her. “Was a black leather jacket among the boy's clothes?”

  She managed to look uncomfortable, Lynley noted. There was a mercy in that. She licked her lips and cleared her throat. Everything was black, she reported. There were sweaters, shirts, T-shirts, and jeans in his clothes cupboard. But a jacket hadn't been among them, not a leather one at least.

  “There was a lighter jacket though, a windcheater,” she said. “And a coat. Really long, like something from the Regency period. That was it.” A pause. And then she ventured, “Why?”

  Nkata told her.

  “Someone must have taken it from the crime scene” was her immediate assessment. To which she added, “Sir,” in Lynley's direction as if the respectful utterance might indicate a newly found reverence for authority.

  Lynley thought about what her conjecture implied. Two garments now were missing from the crime scene: a jacket and a waterproof. So were they back to two killers?

  “P'rhaps the jacket points the way to the killer,” Havers offered as if reading his mind.

  “If our killers worried about forensic evidence, then he should have stripped the body completely. What does taking only the jacket gain him?”

  “Coverage?” Nkata said.

  “He'd have had the raingear to hide the blood on him.”

  “But if he knew he had to stop somewhere after the killing—or if he knew he'd be seen on the route back to his digs—he couldn't exactly have a waterproof on. Why would he be wearing it? It wasn't raining on Tuesday night.” Havers still stood at the doorway. And her questions and statement were careful, as if she'd finally and gratifyingly come to realise just how much a probationary figure she was.

  There was sense in her remarks. Lynley acknowledged this with a nod. He went on to the postcards, saying as he used them to gesture with, “Let me hear it all again.”

  Havers shot a look at Nkata as if she expected him to take the bit. He read her meaning and said, “I could do a quick A to zed off the top of my head. But I'd miss fifteen letters in between. You take it.”

  “Right.” She stayed at the door. “I'd been thinking how any one of that lot”—with a nod to the cards on Lynley's desk—“might have a motive to murder Terry Cole. What if he'd been cheating them? What if he collected their cards, took their hundred pounds each, and never put up the cards at all? Or at least not the number he said.” After all, she pointed out, how did a prostitute really know where—or even if—her cards were tacked up, unless she went out personally to check on them? And even if she walked round central London making stops at every phone box she came to, what was to prevent Terry Cole from claiming that the BT contract cleaners were sweeping the boxes free of cards just as fast as he could distribute them?

  “So I decided to give each of them a call, to see what they had to say about Terry.” She got very little joy from the calls she'd made, however, and she had just begun to ring the number advertised on the schoolgirl card, when she'd given the picture closer scrutiny and realised the girl looked awfully familiar. Fairly certain about her identity, she'd phoned the number on the card and said, “Is that Vi Nevin, then?” when her call was answered. “DC Barbara Havers here,” she'd said to the young woman. “I've one or two points to clear up, if you have the time. Or should I call in in the morning?”

  On the
other end of the line, Vi Nevin hadn't even questioned how Havers had come to have her number. She'd merely said in her sculpted RADA voice, “It's after midnight. Do you know that, Constable? Are you trying to intimidate me?”

  “She looks young enough to play the part of a schoolgirl in some punter's sex fantasy,” Havers concluded. “And from the looks of her digs yesterday, I'd say—” She winced and halted, obviously realising what she'd just revealed about the rest of her activities on the previous day. “Inspector, listen. I talked Winnie into letting me be part of everything. He really wanted me to stay on the computer, just like you ordered. He's absolutely in the clear on this. It just seemed to me that with two of us doing the interview instead of one, we'd be able to—”

  Lynley cut her off. “We'll talk about that later.” He gave his attention to the second of the two postcards that had been at the centre of his desk. The telephone number was the same as the number on the schoolgirl card. What was on offer was different, however.

  Nikki Temptation was printed prominently at the top of the second card with the words Discover the Mysteries of Domination just beneath the name. And under that suggestion the mysteries themselves were alluded to: a fully equipped torture chamber, a dungeon, a medical room, a school room. Bring Your Toys Or Use Mine was the final enticement. The telephone number followed. There was no picture.

  “At least we got the reason they left MKR Financial,” Nkata said. “These birds, they take in anything from fifty quid an hour up to fifteen hundred a night. 'Ccording to what my sources say,” he added quickly as if clarification were needed to keep his reputation unbesmirched. “I had a word with Hillinger in Obscene Publications. Those blokes've seen it all.”

  Reluctantly, Lynley saw how the various pieces of information they'd been gathering on Nicola Maiden were beginning to fit together. He said, “The pager was for her clients, then, which explains why her parents didn't know she had one but Upman and Ferrer—both of them men with whom she'd been intimate—did.”

  “You mean she was on the game in Derbyshire as well?” Barbara asked. “With Upman and Ferrer?”

  “Perhaps. But even if she was having them just for the fun of it, she was a business woman who'd want to keep in touch with her regular clients.”

  “Giving them phone sex while she was away?”

  “It's possible.”

  “But why was she away?”

  That was still the question.

  “As to those blokes from the Peaks,” Nkata added thoughtfully.

  “What about them?”

  “There was a blow-up in Islington. I'm wondering about it.”

  “Blow-up?”

  “Nicola's landlady in Islington heard her having a row with some bloke,” Havers put in from the doorway. “In May. Just before she moved house to Fulham.”

  “I'm wondering if we finally got ourselves a rock-solid motive to pin to Julian Britton,” Nkata said. “This bloke said he'd see her dead before he'd let her ‘do it’ … something like that. P'rhaps he knew she'd left law college and MKR to go on the game.”

  “How would he know?” Lynley countered, testing the theory. “Julian and Nicola were living more than two hundred miles apart. You can't be thinking he came to London, picked up a card in a call box somewhere, phoned the number for a nice session of whips-and-handcuffs, and found Nicola Maiden dressed up to use them. That's more coincidence than one case can bear.”

  Havers said, “He could have come to town for a visit without telling her in advance, sir.”

  Nkata nodded. “He shows up in Islington and finds his woman tightening the nipple clamps on a bloke who's wearing a leather harness. That'd be something could cause a row.”

  That was, indeed, a potential scenario, Lynley agreed. But another existed as well. “There's someone else here in town who might have been just as aggrieved to learn about Nicola's career plans. We need to find her London lover.”

  “But couldn't that have been just another one of her clients?”

  “Phoning as often as Upman and Ferrer both claim? I doubt it.”

  Havers said, “Sir, there's Terry Cole to consider, isn't there?”

  “I'm talking about a man who killed her, Constable, not about a man who was killed alongside her.”

  “I'm not suggesting Cole as her London lover,” Havers said, her voice uncharacteristically careful. “I meant Cole as Cole. To look at. To talk about. We've got our connection between them now—Maiden and Cole. Obviously, he was placing cards for her just like he was doing for the other tarts. But he can't have gone all the way to Derbyshire to collect more cards from her to put in call boxes, especially since she wasn't in London to take calls from anyone who picked up her cards. So what was he doing there in the first place? There must be a further tie between them.”

  “Cole's hardly the point at the moment.”

  “How can you say that? He's dead, Inspector. Do we need a bigger point?”

  Lynley shot her a look. Nkata spoke quickly, as if to head off a hovering confrontation. “What if Cole was sent there to kill her? And he ended up getting killed himself? Or he was trying to warn her about something? Giving her the word to expect some kind of danger.”

  “Then why not just phone her?” Barbara countered. “Does it even make sense that he'd hop on his motorcycle and roar up to Derbyshire to warn her about something?” She took a step away from the door, as if getting closer to them could somehow win them to her way of thinking. “The girl had a pager, Winston. If you're going to argue that Terry trekked all the way up to the Peaks because he couldn't get her by phone, why didn't he just page her? If there was danger that she needed to know about, there was too much of a chance it would get to her before Cole himself did.”

  “Which is what happened,” Nkata pointed out.

  “Right. The worst happened, and both of them died. Both of them. And I say we'd be wise to start thinking of them that way: as a unit, not as a coincidence.”

  “And what I say,” Lynley said meaningfully, “is that your assignment's waiting for you, Havers. Thank you for your input. I'll let you know if I want more.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Constable?” The way he said the word made it more than her title. At Lynley's desk Nkata stirred. He seemed to be hoping Havers would look his way.

  She didn't. But the hand holding her notebook fell to her side, and assurance was gone from her voice when she went on. “Sir, I just think we need to work out exactly what Cole was doing in Derbyshire. When we've got the reason for his trip, we'll have our killer. I can feel that. Can't you?”

  “Your feeling has been noted.”

  Her bottom teeth chewed at her upper lip. She looked towards Nkata at last, as if hoping for direction. The other DC raised his eyebrows slightly, with a cock of his head towards the office door, perhaps telling her that the course of wisdom suggested she hot-foot it back to the computer. She didn't take his meaning to heart. She said to Lynley, “Can I follow it, sir?”

  “Follow what?”

  “The Cole end of things.”

  “Havers, you have an assignment. And you've been told to return to it. When you've completed your work with CRIS, there's a report I want you to deliver to St. James. After you accomplish that, I'll give you another assignment.”

  “But don't you see that if he went all the way to Derbyshire to meet her, there's got to be something more between them?”

  Nkata said, “Barb …” like a cautious admonition.

  “He had wads of dosh,” she persisted. “Wads of it, Inspector. All right. Okay. It could have come from the card business. But he also had cannabis in his flat. And a big commission that he talked about. To his mum and sister, to Mrs. Baden, to Cilia Thompson. I thought at first he was blowing smoke, but since the card boy business can't even begin to explain what he was doing in Derbyshire—”

  “Havers, I'm not going to tell you again.”

  “But, sir—”

  “God damn it. No.” Lynley
felt the ground fracturing beneath his hold on his temper. The woman's obstinacy was working on him like a match put to dry tinder. “If you're trying to suggest that someone followed him all the way to Derbyshire with the express intention of slicing open his arteries, that isn't on. Every piece of information we've come across takes us straight to the Maiden girl, and if you can't see that, then you've lost more than merely your rank as a result of your day trip on the North Sea last June.”

  Her mouth clamped shut. Her lips thinned like a spinsters hopes. Nkata let out a heavy breath on the word “damn.”

  “Now.” Lynley used the word to gain time. He used the time to bring his temper to heel. “If you'd like to request placement with another DI, Havers, be plain about it. There's work to do.”

  Five seconds ticked by. Nkata turned from the window. He and Havers exchanged a look that appeared to mean something to them but to Lynley was inscrutable.

  “I'm not requesting another placement,” Havers finally said.

  “Then you know what to do.”

  She shared another look with Nkata. Then she gave her glance to Lynley. “Sir,” she said politely. And she left the office.

  Lynley realised that he hadn't asked her one question regarding her search through the files. But it was a fact that didn't occur to him until he'd replaced Nkata behind his desk. And then he felt that to call her back would be to give her the advantage. Which was something he didn't want to do at that moment.

  “We'll take the prostitution angle first,” he told Nkata. “That could give a man in love one hell of an incentive to kill.”

  “It'd be ugly for a bloke, sussing out the fact that his woman's on the game.”

  “And being on the game in London suggests the possibility of someone sussing it out here in London as well, wouldn't you agree?”

  “I got no argument with that.”

  “Then I suggest we begin by tracking the London lover,” Lynley finished. “And I've a fairly good idea where to start.”