Lynley said, “Let's go on to Broughton Manor, Peter. We've got the team, and it won't take long to get a second warrant.”
Hanken roused himself. He said, “Get back to the station,” to his men. And then to Lynley, when the constables had departed, “I want that report from SO 10. The one your man in London put together.”
“You can't still be thinking that this is a revenge killing. At least not one that's connected with Andy's past.”
“I don't think that,” Hanken said. “But our boy-with-a-past might have used that past in a way we've not considered yet.”
“How?”
“To find someone willing to do a nasty spot of work for him. Come along, Inspector. I've a mind to have a look through the records at your Black Angel Hotel.”
CHAPTER 29
lthough they'd been thorough, the police had also been moderately gentle in their treatment of the Maidens’ personal belongings and the Hall's furnishings. Andy Maiden had seen far worse searches in his time, and he tried to take comfort from the fact that his brother policemen hadn't decimated his dwelling in their search. Still, the Hall had to be put back into order again. When the police had left, Andy, his wife, and their staff each took a separate section to straighten.
Andy was relieved that Nan had agreed to this reasonable plan of action. It kept her away from him for a while. He hated himself for wanting to be away from her. He knew she needed him, but with the departure of the police, Andy found himself desperate for solitude. He had to think. He knew he wouldn't be able to do so with Nan hanging over him, displacing her grief by locking her mind on the fruitless endeavour of caring for him. He didn't want his wife's care right now. Things had progressed too far for that.
The wheel of Nicola's death was coming closer and closer to breaking them both. Andy realised he could protect Nan from it while the investigation was on-going, but he didn't know how he could continue to do so once the police made an arrest. That they were getting closer to doing just that had been made only too evident by his brief conversation with Lynley. And in Tommy's suggestion that Andy ask for his solicitor's help, there was fair indication of exactly what the detectives’ next move would be.
Tommy was a good man, Andy thought. But there was only so much you could ask of a good man. When that good man's limit was reached, you had to place your confidence in yourself.
This was a principle that Nicola had seen. Blended with her insatiable desire to be gratified—now—whenever she had an inclination towards something, her reliance on herself before others had led her down the path she'd taken.
Andy had long known that his daughter's ambition in life was, simply expressed, never to go without. She'd seen the economies her parents had employed both to save towards the purchase of a country home and to channel funds to Andy's father, whose pension didn't cover his profligate ways. And more than once, especially when met with her parents’ refusal to accede to one of her demands, she'd announced that she would never find herself in a position of having to scrimp and save and deny herself life's simple pleasures, eschewing them for such barren activities as repairing sheets and pillowcases, turning collars on shirts, and darning socks. “You'd better not end up like Granddad, Dad,” she'd said to Andy on more than one occasion. “'cause I plan to spend all my money on me.”
Yet it really wasn't avarice that dominated her behaviour. Rather, it seemed to be a profound vacuity at the heart of her that she sought to fill with material possessions. How often he'd tried to explain to her mankind's essential dilemma: We are born of parents and into families, so we have connections, but we're ultimately alone. Our primitive sense of isolation creates a void within us. That void can be filled only through the nurturing of spirit. “Yes, but I want that motorbike,” she'd respond as if he hadn't just attempted to explain to her why the acquisition of a motorbike would not soothe a spirit whose singular needs were restless for acknowledgement. Or that guitar, she'd reply. Or that set of gold earrings, that trip to Spain, that flashy car. “And if there's money enough to buy it, I don't see why we shouldn't. What's spirit got to do with whether one has the money to buy a motorbike, Dad? Even if I wanted to, I can't spend money on my spirit, can I? So what am I supposed to do with money if I've ever got it? Throw it away?” And she'd list those individuals whose achievements or position garnered them vast reserves of cash: the Royal Family, erstwhile rock stars, business magnates, and entrepreneurs. “They've got houses and cars and boats and planes, Dad,” she would say. “And they're never alone either. And they don't look like they've got some big hollow in the pit of their stomachs, if you ask me.” Nicola was a persuasive supplicant when she wanted something, and nothing he could say was sufficient to make her see that she was merely observing the exterior lives of these people whose possessions she so admired. Who they were inside—and what they felt—was something that no one but them could know. And when she acquired what she had begged to possess, she wasn't able to see that it satisfied her only briefly. Her vision was occluded from this knowledge because what stood in the way was always the desire for the next object that she believed would soothe her soul.
And all of this—which would have made any child difficult to rear—was combined with Nicola's natural propensity for living life on the edge. She'd learned that from him, from watching him shift from persona to persona over the years of undercover work and from listening to the tales told by his colleagues over family dinners when they'd all drunk too much wine. Andy and his wife had kept from their daughter the other side of those acts of bravado that so regaled her. She never knew the personal price her father paid as his health crumbled beneath his mind's inability to divide itself into separate arenas serving who he was and who his work forced him to pretend to be. She was supposed to see her dad as strong, complete, and indomitable. Anything else would shake her foundations, they assumed.
Thus, it was natural that Nicola had thought nothing of it when it came to telling him the truth about her future plans. She'd phoned and asked him if he would come to London. “Let's have a chick-and-Dad date,” she'd said. Delighted to think that his beautiful daughter would want to spend special time with him, he'd gone to London. They'd have their date—whatever she wanted to do, he told her—and he'd cart some of her belongings back to Derbyshire for her summer's employment. It was when he'd looked round her neat bed-sit and rubbed his hands together and asked what she wanted him to load into the Land-Rover that she told him the truth.
She began with “I've changed my mind about working for Will. I've had another think about law as well. That's what I wanted to talk to you about, Dad. Although”—with a smile, and God how lovely she was when she smiled—“our date was wonderful. I've never been to the Planetarium before.”
She made them tea, sat him down with a plate of sandwiches that she took from a Marks & Spencer container, and said, “Did you ever get into the bondage scene when you were undercover, Dad?”
He'd thought at first that they were making polite conversation: an ageing father's reminiscences prompted by his daughter's fond questions. He hadn't done much in's & M, he told her. That would have been handled by another division at the Yard. Oh, he'd had to go into the S 8c M clubs and shops a few times, and there was that party where an idiotic bloke dressed as a schoolgirl was being whipped on a cross. But that had been the extent of it. And thank God for that, because there were some things in life that left one feeling too filthy for a simple bath to cure, and sado-masochism was at the top of his list.
“It's just a lifestyle, Dad,” Nicola told him, reaching for a ham sandwich and chewing it thoughtfully. “After all you've seen, I'm surprised you'd condemn it.”
“It's a sickness,” he said to his daughter. “Those people have problems they're afraid to face. Perversion looks like the answer while all the while it's only part of what ails them.”
“So you think,” Nicola reminded him gently. “The reality could be something different though, couldn't it? An aberration to you might
be perfectly normal to someone else. In fact, you might be the aberration in their eyes.”
He supposed this was the case, he admitted. But wasn't normality determined by the numbers? Wasn't that what the word norm meant in the first place? Wasn't the norm decided by what the most people did?
“That would make cannibalism normal, Dad, among cannibals.”
“Among cannibals, I suppose it is.”
“And if a group among the cannibals decides it doesn't like eating human flesh, are they abnormal? Or can we say they have tastes that might have undergone a change? And if someone from our society goes out and joins the cannibals and discovers he has a taste for human flesh that he wasn't aware he had, is he abnormal? And to whom?”
Andy had smiled at that. He'd said, “You're going to make a very fine lawyer.”
And that comment had led them to hell.
“As to that, Dad,” she'd begun, “as to the law …”
She'd started with her decision not to work for Will Upman, to remain for the summer in London instead. He'd thought at first that she meant she'd found a placement more to her liking with a firm in town. Perhaps, he'd thought hopefully, she's got herself established at one of the Inns of Court. That wasn't where he dreamed she'd end up, but he wasn't blind to the compliment such a position paid to his daughter. He'd said, “I'm disappointed, of course. Your mum will be as well. But we always looked at Will as a fallback if nothing better turned up. What has?”
She told him. He thought at first that she was joking, although Nicola had never been a child to joke when it came to what she wanted to do. In fact, she'd always stated her intentions exactly as she stated them that day in Islington: Here's the plan, here's why, here's the intended result.
“I thought you ought to know,” she'd concluded. “You have a right, since you were paying for law college. And I'll pay you back for that, by the way.” Again that smile, that sweet and infuriating Nicola smile which had always partnered whatever she announced as a fait accompli. I'm running away, she'd tell her parents when they'd refused an unreasonable request. I won't be here after school today. In fact, I'm not going to school at all. Don't expect me for dinner. Or for breakfast tomorrow. I'm running away. “I should have the money to pay you before the end of summer. I would have had it already, but we had to buy supplies and they cost quite a lot. Would you like to see them, by the way?”
He'd continued to believe it was some sort of joke. Even when she'd brought out her equipment and explained the use of each obscene item: the leather whips, the braces studded with small chrome nails, the masks and manacles, the shackles and collars. “You see, Dad, some people just can't get it off unless there's pain or humiliation involved,” she told her father as if he hadn't spent years exposed to just about every kind of human aberration. “They want the sex—well, that's natural, isn't it? I mean, don't we all want it?—but unless it's connected to something degrading or painful, they either don't get satisfaction from it or they can't even do it in the first place. And then there are others who seem to feel the need to atone for something. It's like they've committed a sin, and if they take their medicine like they're supposed to—six of the best to naughty little boys and all that—they're happy, they're forgiven, and they get on with their business. They go home to the wife and kiddies, and they feel, well, they feel … I suppose it sounds awfully odd to say it, but they seem to feel refreshed.” She appeared to read something on her father's face, then, that creased her own, because she reached across the table at which they sat and earnestly covered Andy's clenched fist with her hand. “Dad, I'm always the dom. You do know that, don't you? I wouldn't ever let someone do to me what I do to … Well, I'm just not interested. I do it because the money's fabulous, it's just beyond belief, and while I'm young and nice-looking and strong enough to do eight or nine sessions a day …” She smiled an impish smile, as she reached for the final object to show him. “The pony tail's the most ridiculous, actually. You can't imagine how silly a seventy-year-old bloke looks when he's got this thing hanging out of his … well, you know.”
“Say it,” he'd said to her, finding his voice at last.
She'd looked at him blankly, the black plastic plug with its black leather streamers dangling from her lovely slender hand. “What?”
“The word. Hanging from his what? If you can't say it, how can you do it?”
“Oh. That. Well, I only don't say it because you're my dad.”
And that admission had shattered something within him, some last vestige of control and an outdated restraint born of lifelong repression. “Arsehole,” he'd shouted. “It hangs from his God damn arse-hole, Nick,” and he swept from the dining table all the devices of torture that she'd assembled for him to see.
Nicola realised—finally—that she'd pushed him too far. She backed away from him as he let his rage, incomprehension, and despair take whatever form they chose. He upended furniture, broke crockery, and ripped her legal books from their bindings. He'd seen the fear in her, and he'd thought of the times that he could have inspired it in the past and had chosen not to. And that enraged him further until the roaring destruction he visited upon her bed-sit reduced his daughter to a cowering heap of the silk, suede, and linen that comprised her clothing. She huddled in the corner with her arms over her head, and that wasn't enough for him. He hurled her filthy equipment at her and bellowed, “I'll see you dead before I let you do it!”
It was only later, when he had time to think in the way that Nicola thought, that he realised there was another route to dissuading his daughter from her newly chosen vocation. There was the route of Will Upman and the possibility that he would do to her what he had the reputation for doing to so many other women. So he'd phoned her two days after his London visit and he'd offered her the deal. And Nicola, seeing that she could make more money in Derbyshire than in London, was willing to compromise.
He'd bought time, he thought. And they didn't discuss what had occurred between them that day in Islington.
For Nancy's sake, Andy had spent the summer trying to pretend that everything would work out well in the end. Should Nick return to the College of Law in the autumn, in fact, he'd have been willing to go to his death acting as if Islington had never happened at all.
“Don't tell your mother any of this,” he'd said to his daughter when they made their arrangements.
“But, Dad, Mummy—”
“No. God damn it, Nick, I'm not going to argue. I want your word to keep silent about all of this when you come home. Is that perfectly clear? Because if one whisper reaches your mother, you'll not have a penny from me, and I mean it. So give me your word.”
She did. And if there was any saving grace in the ugliness of Nick's life and the horror of her death, it was that Nancy had been spared the knowledge of what that life had become.
But now that knowledge threatened to bring further destruction into Andy's world. He'd lost his daughter to degradation and defilement. He wasn't about to lose his wife to the anguish and grief of learning about it.
He saw that there was only one way to stop the wheel of Nicola's death in the midst of its cycle of destruction. He knew he had the means to stop it. He could only pray that at the last moment he would also have the will.
What did it matter that yet another life would pay the forfeit? Men had died for less if the cause was good. So had women.
By Monday midmorning Barbara Havers had increased her knowledge of archery by several degrees. In the future, she'd be able to discuss with the best of them the merits of Mylar instead of feathers for fletchings or the differences among long, compound, and recurve bows. But as to getting any closer to pinning the William Tell award on Matthew King-Ryder's jacket … she'd not had a breath of luck in that.
She'd been through Jason Harley's mailing list. She'd even tracked down by telephone every name from the Ust with a London address, to see if King-Ryder was using a pseudonym. But after three hours she was nowhere with the list, and the catalogue?
??while improving her backlog of trivia for those moments at la-dee-dah drinks parties when one racked one's brain for something to add to the conversation—had gained her nothing. So when her phone rang and it was Helen Lynley on the line, asking if she could come round to Belgravia, Barbara was happy to comply. Helen was nothing if not scrupulous about her mealtimes, and it was drawing towards lunch with nothing in the fridge but more reheatables in the rogan josh line. Barbara knew she could do with a change.
She arrived at Eaton Terrace within the hour. Helen herself answered the door. She was, as usual, perfectly turned out in neat tan trousers and a forest-green shirt. Seeing her, Barbara felt like a lump of mouldy cheese on the doorstep. Since she'd called in ill to the Yard, she'd dressed with even less care than was her norm. She wore an oversize grey T-shirt over black leggings and she was sockless in her red high-top trainers.
“Don't mind me. I'm traveling incognito,” she said to Lynley's wife.
Helen smiled. “Thanks for coming so quickly. I would have come to you, but I thought you might want to be in this part of town when we've finished.”
Finished? Barbara thought. Wonderful news. Then lunch was in the offing.
Helen beckoned Barbara inside, calling out, “Charlie? Barbara is here. Have you had lunch, Barbara?”
“Well. No,” Barbara said, and she added,“I mean not exactly,” because brutal honesty strong-armed her into admitting that having toast with Chicken Tonight creamy garlic sauce on it for her elevenses might be considered an early lunch in some quarters.
“I've got to go out—Pen's coming up from Cambridge sans children this afternoon and we've promised ourselves a meal in Chelsea—but Charlie can do you a sandwich or a salad if you're feeling light-headed.”
“I'll survive,” Barbara told her, although even to herself she sounded doubtful.