Amber Kubowsky apparently not only saw the doubt on his face but also understood the necessity for dispelling it. When she went on, she'd become perfect science, speaking in terms of x-rays, blade widths, angles, and micro-millimeters. She didn't complete her remarks until she was certain he understood the import of what she was saying: The tip of the weapon that had pierced Terry Cole's back, chipped his scapula, and scored the bone was shaped unlike the tip of any of the Swiss Army knife's blades. While the knife blades’ tips were pointed—obviously, because how could they be knife blades if they weren't pointed, she asked reasonably—they broadened out at an entirely different angle from the weapon that had marked the bone in Terry Cole's back.
Hanken whistled tonelessly She'd given an impressive recitation, but he had to ask. “Are you sure?”
“I'd swear to it, Inspector. We would've all missed it if I didn't have this theory about x-rays and microscopes that I won't go into at the moment.”
“But the knife made the other wounds on the body?”
“Except for the scapula wound. Yes. That's right.”
She had other information to impart as well. And she took him to another area of the lab, where she held forth on the topic of a pewterlike smear she'd also been asked to evaluate.
When he'd heard what Amber Kubowsky had to say on this final subject, Hanken headed immediately for a phone. It was time to track down Lynley.
Hanken rang the other DI's mobile and found Lynley in the casualty ward of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Lynley put him into the picture tersely: Vi Nevin had been brutally attacked in the maisonette that she and Nicola Maiden had shared.
“What's her condition?”
There was noise in the background, someone shouting, “Over here!” and the increasingly loud howl of an ambulance's double-note siren.
“Thomas?” Hanken raised his voice. “What's her condition? Have you got anything from her?”
“Nothing,” Lynley finally replied from London. “We haven't been able to manage a statement yet. We can't even get close. They've been working on her for an hour.”
“What do you think? Related to the case, what's happened?”
“I'd say that's likely.” Lynley went on to catalogue what he'd learned since their last conversation, beginning with his interview of Shelly Platt, continuing with a precis of his experience at MKR Financial Management, and ending with his meeting with Sir Adrian Beattie and his wife. “So we've managed to unearth the London lover, but he's got an alibi—still to be confirmed, by the way. Even if he hadn't an alibi, I have to say I can't see him slogging across the moors to knife one victim and chase down the other. He must be over seventy.”
“So Upman was telling the truth,” Hanken said, “at least in regard to the pager and those phone calls that the Maiden girl took while she was at work.”
“It looks that way, Peter. But Beattie claims there had to be someone in Derbyshire supplying her with money, or she wouldn't have gone there in the first place.”
“Upman can't be making that much from his divorcees. He said he wasn't in London in May, by the way. He said his diary could prove it.”
“What about Britton?”
“He's still on my list. I got waylaid by the Swiss Army knife.” Hanken brought Lynley up-to-date in that respect, adding the news about the scapula wound. Another weapon, he told Lynley, had evidently been used upon the boy.
“Another knife?”
“Possibly. And Maiden's got one. He even produced it for my inspection.”
“You aren't thinking Andy's fool enough to show you one of the murder weapons. Peter, he's a cop, not a cretin.”
“Wait. When I saw it at first I didn't think Maiden's knife could have been used on the boy because the blades are too short. But I was thinking of the other wounds then, not the blow to the scapula. How far is the scapula beneath the skin anyway? And if Kubowsky dismissed one Swiss Army knife for the scapula wound, does it follow that none other could have done the job?”
“We're back to motive, Peter. Andy hasn't got one. But every other man in her life—not to mention one or two women—has.”
“Don't be so quick to dismiss him,” Hanken objected, “because there's more. Listen to this. I've identification on the substance we found on that odd chrome cylinder from the boot of her car. What d'you expect it is?”
“Tell me.”
“Semen. And there were two other semen deposits on it as well. We've two from secretors—that's counting the one you and I saw—and the other not. The only thing Kubowsky couldn't tell me is what the damn cylinder is in the first place. I've never seen anything like it and neither has she.”
“It's a ball stretcher,” Lynley told him.
“A what?”
“Hang on, Pete.” At the other end of the line, Hanken heard the rumble of male voices with continued hospital noises as counterpoint. Lynley got back to him, saying, “She'll pull through, thank God.”
“Can you get to her?”
“Unconscious at the moment.” And then to someone else, “Round-the-clock protection. No visitors without first clearing them with me. And ask for their IDs if anyone shows up …. No. I have no idea …. Right.” Then he was back. “Sorry. Where was I?”
“A ball stretcher.”
“Ah. Yes.”
Hanken listened as his colleague explained the device of torture. He felt his own testicles shrink in response.
“My guess is that it rolled out of one of her cases when she was en route to or from a client while she worked for Reeve,” Lynley concluded. “It could have been in the boot of her car for months.”
Hanken reflected on this and saw another possibility. He knew Lynley would fight it, so he broached the subject with care. “Thomas, she might have used it in Derbyshire. Perhaps on someone who's not admitting it.”
“I don't see either Upman or Britton going in for the whips-and-chains routine. And Ferrer seems more likely to use something on his women rather than vice versa. Who else is there?”
“Her dad.”
“Christ. Peter, that's a bloody sick thought.”
“Isn't it just. But the whole S & M scene's sick, and from what you've just told me, its major players look normal as hell.”
“There is no way—”
“Just listen.” And Hanken reported his interview with the dead girl's parents, including Nan Maiden's interruption of that interview and Andy Maidens feeble alibi. “So who's to say beyond doubt that Nicola wasn't servicing her dad along with everyone else?”
“Peter, you can't keep reinventing the case to fit your suspicions. If she was servicing her father—which, by the way, I would go to the rack protesting—then he can't have killed her because of her lifestyle which—as you recall—was your earlier position.”
“Then you agree he has a motive?”
“I agree that you're twisting my words.” A new spate of noise then ensued: sirens and a babble of voices. It sounded to Hanken as if the other DI were conducting their conversation in the middle of a motorway. When the noise abated slightly, Lynley said, “There's still what happened to Vi Nevin to consider. What happened tonight. If that's related to the doings in Derbyshire, you've got to see that Andy Maiden isn't involved.”
“Then who?”
“My money's on Martin Reeve. He had a bone to pick with both of the women.”
Lynley went on to say that their best hope was having Vi Nevin regain consciousness and name her attacker. Then they would have immediate grounds to drag Martin Reeve into the Met, where he belonged. “I'll stay for a while to see if she comes to,” he said. “If she doesn't in an hour or two, I'll have them ring me the moment her condition changes. What about you?”
Hanken sighed. He rubbed his tired eyes and stretched to ease the tension he was feeling in the muscles of his back. He thought of Will Upman and his stress management massages at the Manchester Airport Hilton. He could have done with one of those himself.
“I'll get on to
Julian Britton,” he said. “Truth to tell, though, I can't see him as anyone's killer. A bloke dandling puppies in his spare time doesn't strike me as someone who'd bash in his lover's skull. And as for knifing a bloke into minced beef … more likely he'd sick the harriers on someone.”
“But if he believed he had powerful cause to kill her … ?” Lynley asked.
“Oh, to be sure.” Hanken agreed. “Someone believed he had powerful cause to kill Nicola Maiden.”
The doctor had given her sleeping pills, but Nan Maiden hadn't taken them after the first night. She couldn't afford to be less than vigilant, so she did nothing to encourage slumber. When she went to bed at all, she dozed. But most of the time she either walked the corridors in a corporeal haunting or sat in the overstuffed armchair in their bedroom and watched her husband's fitful rest.
This night, her pyjama-clad legs curled beneath her and a hand-knitted blanket drawn round her shoulders, Nan huddled into the armchair and observed her husband thrashing round in the bed. She couldn't tell if he was really asleep or just feigning sleep, but in either case, it didn't matter. The sight of him there roused within her a complicated tangle of emotions more important to consider at the moment than the authenticity of her husband's repose.
She still wanted him. Odd after all these years that she still felt desire for him in the same old way, but she did. And that desire had never abated for either of them. Rather, it seemed to have increased over time, as if the length of their marriage had somehow seasoned the passion they felt for each other. So she'd noticed when Andy first stopped turning to her at night. And she'd noticed when he stopped reaching for and claiming her with the assurance and familiarity that were born of their long and happy marriage.
She dreaded what that change in him meant.
It had happened once before—this loss of interest on Andy's part in what had always been the most vital area of their relationship—and so long ago that Nan liked to believe she'd nearly forgotten it had happened at all. But that wasn't the real fact of the matter, and Nan could admit that much in the safety of darkness as her husband did or did not sleep some six feet away from her.
He'd been undercover in a drugs operation. Seduction had been called for as the drama played out. Remaining true to his assigned role required him to accept all advances made in his direction no matter the nature those advances took. And when several of them were overtly sexual … What else could he do that would keep him in character? he asked her later. How else could he act so as not to betray the entire operation and endanger the lives of the officers involved?
But he took no pleasure from any of it, he'd said as he confessed to her. There had been nothing for him in the firm young beautiful flesh of girls young enough to be his daughters. What he'd done, he'd done because it had been required of him, and he wanted his wife to grasp that fact. There was no joy in such an act of coupling. There was only getting through the act itself, which was robbed of feeling when it was done without love.
They were lofty words. They demanded of an intelligent woman her compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, and understanding. But they were also words which made Nan wonder at the time why Andy had felt it necessary to confess his transgression to her at all.
But she'd learned the answer to that question through the years as she slowly developed a knowledge of her husband's ways. And she'd seen the alterations that had come upon him whenever he was untrue to who he actually was. Which was why SO 10 had ultimately become such a nightmare: because he was forced, day in and day out and month after month, to be someone who he simply was not. Required by his job to live through great periods of untruth, he found that his mind, his soul, and his psyche would not permit dissimulation without making a demand for some sort of payment from his body.
That payment had shown itself in ways that had been extremely easy to ignore at first, to label as an allergic reaction to something or the initial harbinger of approaching old age. The tongue grows old so the food stops tasting right and the only way to give it flavour is to soak it in sauce or blizzard it with pepper. And what did it really mean when one failed to catch the subtle scent of night-blooming jasmine? Or the musty odour of a country church? Those little occasions of sensory deprivation were easy to overlook.
But then the more serious deprivations began, the sort that couldn't be ignored without risk to one's well being. And when the doctors and the specialists had run their tests, tried out their diagnoses, and finally shrugged their shoulders in a maddening combination of fascination, perplexity, and defeat, the psychiatric warriors had boarded the ship of Andy's condition, setting sail like Vikings towards the uncharted waters of her husband's psyche. There was never a name applied to what ailed him, just an explanation of the human condition as some people experienced it. So he fell apart by inches and degrees, with confession the only means by which he could put his life in order once again, reclaiming who he was through an act of purgation. But ultimately, all the diary writing, analysing, discussing, and confessing were not enough to make him completely well.
Unfortunately, considering the type of work he does, your husband simply can't live a dichotomous life, she was told after months and years of visiting doctors. Not, that is, if he wishes to be completely integrated as an individual.
She'd said, What? A dichotomous … what?
Andrew can't live a life of contradictions, Mrs. Maiden. He can't compartmentalise. He can't assume an identity at odds with his central persona. It's the adoption of a succession of identities that appears to be causing this failure of part of his nervous system. Another man might find that sort of life exciting—an actor, for example, or, at the other extreme, a sociopath or a manic-depressive—but your husband does not.
But isn't it just like playing dressing-up? she'd asked. When he's undercover, I mean.
With enormous attendant responsibility, she'd been told, and even more enormous stakes and costs.
She'd thought at first how lucky she was to be married to a man who could only be exactly what he was. And in all the years since he'd taken his retirement from New Scotland Yard, the future that they'd worked upon in Derbyshire had obliterated every one of the lies and the complicated subterfuges that Andy had been forced to make part of his life in the past.
Until now.
She should have realised when he hadn't noticed those burnt pine nuts in the kitchen, despite the way the smell had permeated the air of the Hall like overloud music played enthusiastically and in every wrong key. She should have realised then that something was wrong. But she hadn't noticed, because everything had been right for so many years.
“Can't say …” Andy murmured from the bed.
Nan leaned forward anxiously. She whispered, “What?”
He turned, burrowing his shoulder into the pillow. “No.” It was sleep talk. “No. No.”
Nan's vision blurred. She cast back through the last few months in a desperate attempt to find something that she might have done to alter this ending that they had reached. But she could come up only with having had the courage and the willingness to ask for honesty in the first place, which had not been a realistic option.
Andy turned again. He punched his pillow into shape and flopped from his side onto his back. His eyes were closed.
Nan left her chair and went to the bed, where she sat. She reached forward and brushed her fingertips across her husband's forehead, feeling his skin both clammy and hot. For thirty-seven years he'd been at the centre of her world, and she wasn't about to lose her world's centre at this autumnal date in her life.
But even as she made that determination, Nan knew that life as she currently experienced it was filled with uncertainties. And it was in her uncertainties that her nightmares lay, another reason for her refusal to sleep.
Lynley unlocked his front door just after one in the morning. He was exhausted and heavy of heart. It was difficult to believe that his day had begun in Derbyshire, and more difficult to believe that it had ended in the
encounter he'd just experienced in Notting Hill.
Men and women possessed limitless potential to astonish him. He'd long ago accepted that fact, but he realised now that he was getting weary of the constant surprises they had to offer. After fifteen years in CID, he wanted to be able to say he'd seen it all. That he hadn't—that someone could still do something to amaze him—was a fact that weighed in his gut like a boulder. Not so much because he couldn't understand a person's actions but because he continually failed to anticipate them.
He'd remained with Vi Nevin until she regained consciousness. He'd hoped she'd be able to name her attacker and thus provide him with an immediate reason for arresting the bastard. But she'd shaken her swollen, bandaged head as Lynley questioned her. All he was able to glean from the injured woman was that she'd been set upon too suddenly to manage a clear look at her assailant. Whether that was a lie that she told to protect herself was something that Lynley couldn't discern. But he thought he knew, and he cast about for a way to make it easier for her to say the necessary words.
“Tell me what happened, then, moment by moment, because there may be something, a detail you recall, that we can use to—”
“That's quite enough for now” The sister in charge of casualty intervened, her blunt Scot's face a picture of steely determination.
“Male or female?” Lynley pressed the injured woman.
“Inspector, I made myself clear,” the sister snapped. And she hovered protectively over her childlike patient, making what seemed like unnecessary adjustments to bedclothes, pillows, and drips.
“Miss Nevin?” Lynley prodded nonetheless.
“Out!” the sister said as Vi murmured, “A man.”
Upon hearing that, Lynley decided enough identification had been established. She wasn't, after all, telling him anything that he didn't already know. He'd merely wanted to eliminate the possibility that Shelly Platt—and not Martin Reeve—had come calling on her old flatmate. Having done that much, he felt justified in taking matters to the next level.