In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

CHAPTER 6

It was dark by the time they cruised into Chart Street in Shoreditch and sought out a parking space along a pavement that was lined with Vauxhalls, Opels, and Volkswagens. Barbara had felt a distinct twinge in her gut when Nkata had led her to Lynley's sleek silver car, a possession so prized by the inspector that merely to have been handed its keys was an eloquent statement of Lynley's confidence in his subordinate officer. She herself had been casually tossed that key ring on only two occasions, but both had come long after she'd worked her first case as the inspector's partner. Indeed, reflecting upon her association with Lynley, she found that she couldn't begin to imagine him passing his car keys over to the person she'd been on the first investigation they'd worked together. That he'd given them so easily to Nkata spoke volumes about the nature of their relationship.

Fine, she thought with resignation, that's just the way it is. She studied the neighbourhood through which they were driving, looking for the street address that the DVLA had listed as belonging to the owner of the motorcycle found near the murder scene in Derbyshire.

Like so many of its sister districts in London, Shoreditch may have been down at one time or another, but it could never be counted fully out. It was a densely populated area comprising a narrow appendix of land that dangled from the greater body of Hackney in northeast London. Since it formed one of the boundaries of the City, some of Shore-ditch had been encroached upon by the sort of financial institutions one expected to see only within the Roman walls of old London. Other parts of it had been taken over by industry and commercial development. But there were still vestiges of the former villages of Haggeston and Hoxton in Shoreditch, even if some of those vestiges merely took the form of commemorative plaques marking the spots where the Burbages had plied their theatrical trade and where associates of William Shakespeare lay buried.

Chart Street appeared to represent the history of the district in one brief thoroughfare. Forming a dogleg that stretched between Pit-field Street and East Road, it contained commercial establishments as well as residences. Some of the buildings were smart, modern, and new, and consequently they expressed the abundance of the City. Others awaited that miracle of London neighbourhoods-gentrification-which could take a simple street and transform it from slum into yuppie paradise within the space of a few short years.

The address produced by the DVLA took them to a line of terraced houses that, in appearance, were somewhere between the two extremes of disintegration and renovation. The terrace itself was flat-fronted and constructed of brick, and while the woodwork of the house in question badly needed painting, its windows were hung with white curtains that, at least from the exterior, looked crisp and clean. Nkata found a parking space in front of the Marie Lloyd pub. He slid the Bentley into it with the sort of concentration that Barbara imagined a neurosurgeon giving to a patient's brain. She shoved open the door and clambered out the third time the other DC meticulously straightened the car. She lit a fag and said, “Winston. Bloody hell. You're not clocking on and neither one of us is getting any younger. Come on.”

Nkata chuckled affably. “Giving you time to see to your habit.” “Thanks. But I don't need to smoke a whole packet.” The car finally parked to his satisfaction, Nkata eased out of it, locked it, and set its alarm. He checked scrupulously to make sure the doors were secured before joining Barbara on the pavement. They walked to the house, Barbara smoking and Nkata ruminating. At the yellow front door, he paused. Barbara thought he was giving her time to finish off her fag, and she puffed away, bulking up on the nicotine as she usually did before embarking on a task that could turn unpleasant.

But when she finally tossed the burning end of the cigarette into the street, Nkata still didn't move. She said, “So? Are we going in? What's up?”

He roused himself to answer, saying, “This's my first.”

“First what? Oh. First time as the bearer of bad tidings? Well, take comfort. It doesn't get any easier.”

He shot her a look, smiled ruefully. “Funny when you think,” he said quietly, the Caribbean in him coming out in his pronunciation of the final word. T'ink, he said.

“Think what?”

“Think how many times it could've been my mum getting a visit like this from the rozzers. If I'd kept on walking the path I was walking.”

“Yeah. Well…” She jerked her head towards the door and mounted the single step. “We've all got blots on our copybooks, Winnie.”

The faint sound of a child's crying seeped round the cracks in the doorjamb. When Barbara rang the bell, the crying approached. It intensified, a woman's harassed voice said, “Shush now. Shush. That's quite enough, Darryl. You made your point,” and then called through the panels, “Who's there, then?”

“Police,” Barbara answered. “Can we have a word?”

There was no response at first, other than Darryl's crying, which went unabated. Then the door swung open and they were confronted by a woman with a small boy on her hip. He was in the act of rubbing his running nose against the collar of the green smock she wore. The Primrose Path was embroidered on the left breast of this, along with the name Sal beneath it.

Barbara had her warrant card ready. She was showing it to Sal when a younger woman came dashing down the narrow stairs that rose about nine feet from the entry. She wore a chenille dressing gown with one chewed-up sleeve. Her hair was wet. She said, “Sorry, Mum. Give him here. Thanks for the break. I needed it. Darryl, what're you on about, luv?”

“Da’,” Darryl sobbed, and reached a grimy hand towards Nkata.

“Wanting his daddy,” Nkata remarked.

“Not likely he'd be wanting that bloody bastard,” Sal muttered. “Give your granna kiss, then, darling boy,” she said to Darryl, who in his distress didn't oblige her. She bussed him noisily on one wet cheek. “It's his tummy again, Cyn. I made him a hot water bottle. It's in the kitchen. Mind you wrap it in a towel before you give it him.”

“Thanks, Mum. You're a queen,” Cyn said. Her son on her hip, she disappeared down the corridor towards the back of the house.

“What's this about, then?” Sal looked from Nkata to Barbara, not moving from her position by the door. She hadn't invited them to step inside. It was clear that she didn't intend to do so. “It's gone ten. I expect you know that.”

Barbara said, “May we come in, Mrs.?”

“Cole,” she said. “Sally Cole. Sal.” She stepped back from the door and scrutinised them as they crossed the threshold. She folded her arms beneath her breasts. In the better light of the entryway, Barbara saw that her hair-cut bluntly just below her ears-was streaked on either side of her face with panels of white-blonde. These served to emphasise her irregular and incongruous features: a broad forehead, a hooked nose, and a tiny rosebud mouth. “I can't cope with suspense, so tell me what you got to tell me straightaway.”

“Could we…?” Barbara nodded towards a door that opened to the left of the stairs. Beyond lay what appeared to be the sitting room, although it was dominated by a large and curious arrangement of gardening tools that stood in its centre. A rake with every other tine missing, a hoe with its edge turned inwards, and a blunted shovel all formed a teepee over a cultivator whose handle had been split in half. Barbara examined this curiosity and wondered if it had anything to do with Sal Cole's manner of dress: The green smock and the words embroidered on it did suggest a source of employment that leaned towards the floral, if not the agricultural.

“He's a sculptor, my Terry,” Sal informed her, corning to stand at Barbara's side. “That's his medium.”

“Gardening tools?”

“He's got a piece with secateurs that makes me want to cry. Both my kids're artists. Cyn's doing a course at the college of fashion. Is this about my Terry? 'S he in some sort 'f trouble? Tell me straightaway.”

Barbara glanced at Nkata to see if he wanted to do the dubious honours. He raised the fingers of one hand to his scarred cheek as if the cicatrix there had begun to throb. She said, “Terry isn't home, then, Mrs. Cole?”

“He doesn't live here,” Sal informed her. She went on to say that he shared digs and a studio in Battersea with a girl called Cilia Thompson, a fellow artist. “Something's not happened to Cilia, has it? You're not looking for Terry because of Cilia? They're only friends, the two of them. So if she's been roughed up again, you best talk to that boyfriend of hers, not to my Terry. Terry wouldn't hurt a flea if it was biting him. He's a good boy, always has been.”

“Is there a… Well, is there a Mr. Cole?” If they were about to suggest to this woman that her son was dead, Barbara wanted another presence-a potentially stronger presence-to help absorb the blow.

Sal gave a hoot. “Mr. Cole-as he was-did a Houdini on us when Terry was five. Found hisself a little bit of fluff with a nice set of kitties down in Folkestone, and that was that for Mr. Family Man. Why?” Her voice had begun to sound more anxious. “What's this all about, then?”

Barbara nodded at Nkata. He, after all, had come to London to fetch the woman should it be necessary. It was in his hands how to break the news that the unidentified body they had might well be her son's. He began with the Triumph. Sal Cole confirmed that her son owned such a motorcycle, and as she did so, she also made the logical leap to a traffic accident. She went on so quickly to ask what hospital he'd been taken to that Barbara found herself wishing that the news they bore was as simple as a crash on the motorway.

There was no easy way. Barbara saw that Nkata had moved to a photograph-laden mantel that spanned a shallow embrasure where a fireplace once had been. He lifted one of the plastic-framed pictures, and the expression on his face told Barbara that carting Mrs. Cole all the way to Derbyshire was probably going to be a mere formality. Nkata had, after all, seen pictures of the corpse if not the corpse itself. And while murder victims sometimes bore little resemblance to their living selves, there were usually enough areas of commonality for the astute observer to make a tentative identification from a photograph.

Seeing the picture appeared to give Nkata the courage to tell the tale, which he did with a simplicity and sympathy that impressed Barbara more than she would have thought possible.

There had been a double homicide in Derbyshire, Nkata informed Mrs. Cole. A young man and a woman were the victims. Terry's motorcycle had been found nearby, and the young man in question bore something of a resemblance to this photograph from the mantel. It could be coincidental, of course, that Terry's motorcycle would be found near the scene of a murder. But, nonetheless, the police needed someone to accompany them to Derbyshire in an attempt to identify the body. Mrs. Cole could be that someone. Or if she believed it would be too traumatic, then someone else-perhaps Terry's sister… It was up to Mrs. Cole. Nkata gently replaced the photograph.

Sal watched him, looking stunned. She said, “Derbyshire? No. I don't think so. My Terry's working on a project in London, a big-money project. A commission taking up all his time. It's why he couldn't be here last Sunday for lunch like he usually is. He dotes on our little Darryl, he does. He wouldn't miss his Sunday afternoon with Darryl. But the commission… Terry couldn't come because of the commission. That's what he said.”

Her daughter joined them then, having donned a blue track suit and slicked back her hair. She paused in the doorway and appeared to take a reading of the room. She went hastily to Sal's side, saying, “Mum. What's wrong? You've gone dead white. Sit down or you'll faint.”

“Where's our baby? Where's our little Darryl?”

“He's settled. That hot water bottle did the trick. Come on, Mum. Sit down before you fall over.”

“You wrapped it in a towel like I said?”

“He's fine.” Cyn turned to Barbara and Nkata. “What's happened?”

Nkata explained briefly The second time through seemed to deplete not his resources but those of Mrs. Cole. When he reached the body another time, she grasped the handle of the hoe in the odd teepee sculpture, said, “It was to be three times this size, his commission was. He told me so,” and made her way to a threadbare overstuffed chair. A small child's toys encircled this, and she reached for one of them: a bright yellow bird that she held to her chest.

“Derbyshire?” Cyn sounded incredulous. “What the hell's our Terry doing in Derbyshire? Mum, he probably borrowed the motorcycle to someone. Cilia would know Let's phone her.”

She strode to do so, punching in the numbers on a phone that stood on a squat table at the foot of the stairs. Her end of the conversation was simple enough: “Is that Cilia Thompson?… This is Cyn Cole, Terry's sister… Yeah… Oh, right. Proper little monster, he is. Got us all running round for him whenever he blinks. Listen, Cilia, 's Terry about?… Oh. D'you know where's he gone off to, then?” A sombre glance over her shoulder at her mother as Cilia answered. Cyn said, “Right then… No. No message. But if he turns up in the next hour or so, have him phone me at home, okay?” And then she rang off.

Sal and Cyn communicated wordlessly in the way of women long used to each other's company. Sal said quietly, “He's set on that commission heart and soul. He said, ‘This'll bring destination art into being. Just you watch, Mum.’ So I don't see why he would've left.”

“‘Destination art?’” Barbara asked.

“His gallery. That's what he wants to call it: Destination Art,” Cyn clarified. “He's always wanted a gallery for moderns. It was to be-is to be-on the south bank near the Hayward. It's his dream. Mum, this could be nothing. You hold on to that. It could be nothing.” But the tone of her voice sounded as if she'd have loved nothing more dearly than to convince herself.

“We'll need the address,” Barbara told her.

“There isn't any gallery yet,” Cyn replied.

“For Terry's digs,” Nkata clarified. “And the studio he shares.”

“But you just said-” Sal didn't finish her remark. A silence fell among them. The source of it was obvious to them all: What could have been nothing was probably something, the worst sort of something that a family like the Coles might ever have to face.

Cyn went in search of the exact addresses. As she did so, Nkata said to Terry Cole's mother, “I'll fetch you first thing in the morning, Mrs. Cole. But if Terry should ring you sometime tonight, you page me. Right? Don't mind the time. Just page me.”

He wrote out his pager number on a sheet of paper that he removed from his neatly kept notebook. He was ripping it out and handing it over to Sal Cole when Terry's sister returned with her brother's information. She gave it to Barbara. Two locations were listed next to the words flat and studio. Both, Barbara saw, were in Battersea. She committed the addresses to memory-just in case, she told herself-and she gave the paper to Nkata. He nodded his thanks, folded it, and shoved it into his pocket. A time was agreed upon for the morning's departure, and the two police constables found themselves out in the night.

A mild wind gusted on the street, blowing a plastic carrier bag and a large Burger King cup down the pavement. Nkata disarmed the security system on the car, but he didn't open the door. Instead, he looked at Barbara over the roof, then beyond her to the dismal-looking council housing on the other side of the street. His face was a study in sadness.

“What?” Barbara asked him.

“I killed their sleep,” he said. “I should've waited till morning. Why didn't I think that? No way could we have driven back there tonight. I'm too shagged out. So why'd I rush over here like there was a fire I had to put out? They got that baby to see to, and I just killed their sleep.”

“You didn't have a choice,” Barbara said. “If you'd waited till morning, they'd probably both've been gone-to work and to school-and you'd've lost a day. Don't drive yourself round the bend on it, Winston. You did what you had to do.”

“It's him,” he said. “The bloke in the picture. He's the one got the chop.”

“I reckoned as much.”

“They don't want to believe it.”

“Who would?” Barbara said. “It's the final goodbye without a chance to say it. And there can't be anything more rotten than that.”

Lynley chose Tideswell. A limestone village climbing two opposing hillsides, Tideswell sat virtually at the midway point between Buxton and Padley Gorge. Housing himself in the Black Angel Hotel-with its pleasing view of the parish church and its surrounding green-would provide him during the investigation with easy access both to the police station and to Maiden Hall. And to Calder Moor, if it came to that.

Inspector Hanken was agreeable to the idea of Tideswell. He would send a car round for Lynley in the morning, he said, pending the return of Lynley's own officer from London.

Hanken had thawed considerably in the hours they'd spent in each other's company. In the bar of the Black Angel Hotel, he and Lynley had enjoyed one Bushmill apiece prior to dinner, a bottle of wine with the meal, and a brandy afterwards, which also gave some assistance in the matter.

The whiskey and wine had elicited from Hanken the sort of professional war stories that were common to most interactions between policemen: rows with superiors, cock-ups in investigations, rough cases he'd been lumbered with. The brandy had provoked more personal revelations.

The inspector from Buxton pulled out the family photograph he'd shown Lynley earlier and gazed upon it long before he spoke. His index finger tracing the bundled shape of his infant son, he said the word children and went on to explain that a man was changed for all time the moment a newborn was placed into his arms. One wouldn't expect that to be the case-that sort of alteration in persona was women's stuff, wasn't it?-but that's what happened. And what resulted from that change was an overwhelming desire to protect, to batten down every hatch in sight, and to secure every route of access into the heart of the home. So to lose a child despite every precaution…? It was a hell beyond his imagining.

“Something Andy Maiden is currently experiencing,” Lynley noted.

Hanken eyed him but didn't argue the point. He went on to confide that his Kathleen was the light of his life. He'd known from the day they'd met that he wanted to marry her, but it had taken five years to persuade her to agree. What about Lynley and his new bride? How had it been for them?

But marriage, wife, and children were the last subjects Lynley wanted to entertain. He sidestepped adroitly by claiming inexperience. “I'm too wet behind the ears as a husband to have anything remarkable to report,” he said.

He found that he couldn't avoid the subject when he was alone with his thoughts later that night in his room. Still, in an attempt to divert them-or at least to postpone them-he went to the window. He notched open the casement an inch and tried to ignore the strong scent of mildew that seemed to permeate the environment. He was as successful at this, however, as he was at overlooking the bed with its concave mattress and its pink duvet covered with a slick pseudo-satin material that promised a night of wrestling to keep it on the bed. He'd at least been equipped with an electric kettle, he observed gloomily, with a wicker basket of PG Tips, seven plastic thimbles of milk, one packet of sugar, and two pieces of shortbread. And he had a bathroom as well, although it had no window and it was fitted out with a water-stained bath encased in linoleum and was lit by a single light bulb of candle-strength wattage. It could have been worse, he told himself. But he wasn't sure how.

When he could no longer avoid doing so, he glanced at the telephone on the iron-legged outdoor table that did service next to the bed. He owed Helen a call, at least to give her his whereabouts, but he was reluctant to punch in the numbers. He considered the reason.

Certainly, Helen was more in the wrong than he. He may have lost his temper with her, but she'd crossed a line when she'd taken the part of Barbara Havers' advocate. As his wife, she was supposed to be his advocate. She might have asked why he'd chosen Winston Nkata to work with and not Barbara Havers instead of attempting to argue him into altering a decision that he had felt compelled to take.

Of course, upon reflection, he recalled that Helen's conversational opening had indeed been to ask him why he'd selected Nkata. It was his series of responses that had led them from a reasonable discussion into a row. Yet he'd responded as he had done because she'd provoked in him a sense of marital-if not moral-outrage. Her questions implied an alliance with someone whose actions couldn't begin to be justified. That he was being asked to justify his own actions-which were reasonable, allowable, and completely understandable-was more than mildly annoying.

Policing worked because of its officers’ adherence to an established chain of command. Senior officers gained their positions by proving themselves capable of performance under pressure. With a life at stake and a suspect fleeing, Barbara Havers’ superior officer had made a split-second decision, giving orders that were as pellucid as they were reasonable. That Havers had contravened those orders was bad enough. That she'd taken matters into her own hands was very much worse. But that she'd wrested power to herself by using a firearm was q. violation of their entire oath of office. It wasn't a simple bending of rules. It was a mockery of everything they stood for. Why hadn't Helen understood all this?

“These things aren't black and white, Tommy.” Malcolm Webberly's comment came back to him as if in answer to his mental question.

But Lynley had to disagree with his superintendent. It seemed to him that some things were.

Still, he couldn't work his way round the fact that he owed his wife a telephone call. They didn't need to pursue their argument. And he could at least offer an apology for losing his temper.

Instead of Helen, however, he found himself talking to Charlie Denton, the young, frustrated thespian who played the role of manservant in Lynley's life, when he wasn't haunting the half-price ticket booth in Leicester Square. The countess wasn't at home, Denton informed him, and Lynley could tell how much the maddening man enjoyed giving Helen the title. She'd phoned round seven o'clock from Mr. St. James's house, Denton went on, and said she'd been asked to stay to dinner. She hadn't yet returned. Did his lordship wish-Lynley cut him off wearily. “Denton,” he warned.

“Sorry.” The younger man chuckled and dropped the mock servility. “D'you want to leave her a message, then?”

“I'll catch her in Chelsea,” Lynley replied. But he gave the Black Angel's number to Denton all the same.

When he phoned the St. James house, however, he discovered that Helen and St. James's wife had gone out straight after dinner. He was left talking to his old friend.

“They mentioned a film,” St. James told him vaguely “I got the impression it was something romantic. Helen said she could do with an evening looking at Americans rolling round on a mattress with sculpted bodies, fashionable hair, and perfect teeth. That's the Americans, not the mattress, by the way.”

“I see.” Lynley gave his friend the number of the hotel with a message for Helen to phone if she returned at a reasonable hour. They hadn't had a proper chance to speak before he'd taken off for Derbyshire, he told St. James. Even to his own ears, it sounded a lame explanation.

St. James said that he'd pass the message to Helen. How was Lynley finding Derbyshire? he wanted to know.

It was a tacit invitation to discuss the case. St. James would never enquire directly. He had too much respect for the unwritten rules that governed a police investigation.

Lynley found himself wanting to talk to his old friend. He reviewed the facts: the two deaths, the differing means by which they'd come about, the absence of one of the weapons, the lack of identification on the boy, the anonymous letters assembled from cut-outs, the scrawled suggestion that “This bitch has had it.”

“It puts a signature on the crime,” Lynley concluded, “although Hanken thinks the note could be part of a blind.”

“Misdirection on the part of the killer? Who?”

“Andy Maiden, if you go along with Hanken's thinking.”

“The father? That's a bit rough. Why is Hanken heading that way?”

“He wasn't at first.” Lynley described their interview with the dead girl's parents: what had been said and what had been inadvertently revealed. He ended with “So Andy believes there's an SO10 connection.”

“What do you think?”

“Like everything else, it needs checking out. But Hanken didn't trust a word Andy said once we learned that he'd been keeping information from his wife.”

“He could merely have been trying to protect her,” St. James offered. “Not an unreasonable thing for a man to do for a woman he loves. And if they were really looking for a blind, wouldn't they misdirect you into considering the boy?”

Lynley agreed. “There's a real bond between the two of them, Simon. It appears to be an extraordinarily close relationship.”

St. James was silent for a moment on the other end of the line. Outside Lynley s hotel room, someone walked down the corridor. A door shut quietly.

“Then there's another way to look at Andy Maiden protecting his wife, isn't there, Tommy?” St. James finally said.

“What's that, then?”

“He may be doing it for another reason. The worst possible reason, in fact.”

“Medea in Derbyshire?” Lynley asked. “Christ. That's horrific, Simon. And when mothers kill, the child's generally young. I'll be pressed for a motive if things go that way.”

“Medea would have argued that she had one.”

In the midst of dealing with one of Nicola's many disappearances prior to the family's move to Derbyshire, Nan Maiden would have been incredulous had anyone suggested to her that there would come a day when she would yearn for something as simple as a teenager's running away from home in a fit of temper. When Nicola had disappeared in the past, her mother had reacted the only way she knew: with a mixture of terror, anger, and despair. She'd phoned the girl's friends, she'd alerted the police, and she'd taken to the streets to trackher down. She'd been capable of nothing else until she'd known her child was safe.

That Nicola would vanish into the streets of London always intensified Nan's worry. For anything could happen on the streets of London. A teenaged girl could be raped; she could be seduced into the netherworld of narcotics; she could be beaten; she could be maimed.

There was one prospective consequence of Nicola's running off that Nan never considered, however: that her daughter had been murdered. The thought simply didn't bear dwelling upon. Not because murder never happened to young girls, but because if it happened to this particular young girl, her mother had no idea how she herself would go on.

And now it had happened. Not during those tempestuous teenage years when Nicola was insisting on autonomy, independence, and what she'd called “the right to self-determination, Mum. We're not living in the Middle Ages, you know.” Not during that torturous period when making a demand of her parents-whether it was for something simple and concrete like a new CD or something complex and nebulous like personal freedom-was no less than an unspoken threat to vanish for a day or a week or a month if that demand wasn't met. But now, when she was an adult, when locking her door and nailing closed her window were actions that were supposed to be not only unthinkable but also unnecessary.

Yet that's exactly what I should have done, Nan thought brokenly. I should have locked her in, tied her to her bed, and refused to let her out of my sight.

“I know what I want,” Nicola had declared so many times throughout the years. “And this is it.”

Nan had heard that in the voice of the seven-year-old who wanted Barbie, Barbie's house, Barbie's car, and every item of clothing that could be slid onto the impossibly shaped plastic figure that was supposed to be the epitome of femininity. In the cry of the twelve-year-old who could not exist another moment unless she was allowed to wear make-up, stockings, and four-inch-high heels. In the black moods of the fifteen-year-old who wanted a separate telephone line, a pair of in-line skates, a holiday in Spain without the burden of her parents along. Nicola had always wanted what Nicola wanted at the moment when Nicola wanted it. And many times over the years, it had seemed so much easier just to give in than to face a day, a week, or a fortnight of her disappearance.

But now Nan wished with all her heart that her daughter had simply chosen to run off again. And she felt the hundredweight of guilt dragging down on her for the occasions during Nicola's adolescence when, faced with yet another of her daughter s petulant flights from home, she'd even for an instant harboured the notion that it would be better to have had Nicola die at birth than not to know where she was or if she'd ever be found at all.

In the laundry room of the old hunting lodge, Nan Maiden clutched one of her daughter's cotton shirts to her chest as if the shirt could metamorphose into Nicola herself. Without a thought that she was doing so, she raised the collar of that shirt to her nose and breathed in the scent that was her child, the mixture of gardenias and pears from the lotions and shampoo that Nicola had used, the acrid odour of her perspiration. Nan discovered that she could visualise Nicola on the last occasion when she'd worn the shirt: on a recent bike ride with Christian-Louis once the Sunday afternoon lunches had all been served.

The French chef had always found Nicola attractive-what man hadn't?-and Nicola had observed the interest in his eyes and had not ignored it. That was her talent: pulling men without effort. She didn't do it to prove anything to herself or to anyone else. She simply did it, as if she gave off a peculiar emanation that was transmitted solely to males.

In Nicola's childhood, Nan had fretted over her sexual powers and what price they might exact from the girl. In Nicola's adulthood, Nan saw that the price had finally been paid.

“The purpose of parenthood is to bring up children who stand on their own as autonomous adults, not as clones,” Nicola had said. “I'm responsible for my destiny, Mum. My life has nothing to do with you.”

Why did children say such things? Nan wondered. How could they believe that the choices they made and the end they faced touched no lives other than their own? The way that events had unfolded for Nicola had everything to do with her mother simply because she was her mother. For one did not give birth and then spare no thought to the future of one's treasured child.

And now she was dead. Sweet Jesus God, there would never be another crash-bang entrance of Nicola coming home for a holiday, of Nicola returning from a hike on the moors, of Nicola slugging her way inside the lodge with carrier bags of groceries dangling from her arms, of Nicola back from a date with Julian all laughter and chatter about what they'd done. Sweet Jesus God, Nan Maiden thought. Her lovely, tempestuous, incorrigible child was truly gone. The pain of that knowledge was an iron band growing tight round Nan's heart. She didn't think she'd be able to endure it. So she did what she had usually done when the feelings were too much to be borne. She continued to work.

She forced herself to lower the cotton shirt from her face and went back to what she had been doing, removing from the laundry all of her daughter's unwashed clothing as if by keeping the scent of her alive, she could also forestall the inevitable acceptance of Nicola's death. She mated socks. She folded jeans and jerseys. She smoothed out creases in every shirt, and she rolled up knickers and matched them to bras. Finally, she slid the clothing into plastic carrier bags from the kitchen. Then she methodically taped these bags closed, sealing in the odour of her child. She gathered the bags to her and left the room.

Upstairs, Andy was pacing. Nan could hear his footsteps above her as she moved noiselessly down the corridor past the guest rooms. He was in his cubbyhole of a den, walking from the tiny dormer window to the electric fire, backwards and forwards, over and over again. He'd retreated there upon the departure of the police, announcing that he would start looking through his diaries immediately in an attempt to find the name of someone with a score to settle against him. But unless he was reading those diaries as he paced, in the intervening hours he'd not begun the search.

Nan knew why. The search was useless.

She wouldn't think of it, Nan told herself. Not here, not now, and possibly not ever. Nor would she think what it meant-or didn't mean-that Julian Britton claimed to be engaged to her daughter.

Nan paused at the staircase that led to the private upper floor of the house where the family's quarters were. Her hands felt slick on the carrier bags, which she held to her chest. Her heart seemed to pound in tandem with her husband's tread. Go to bed, she told him silently. Please, Andy. Turn out the lights.

He needed sleep. And the fact that he was starting to go numb again told her just how badly he needed it. The advent of a detective from Scotland Yard hadn't resulted in a mitigation of Andy's anxiety. The departure of that same detective had only increased it. The numbness in his hands had begun to travel up his arms. A prick of a pin brought no blood to the surface of his skin, as if his whole body were shutting down. He'd managed to hold himself together while the police were present, but once they'd left, he'd fallen apart. That was when he'd said he wanted to start going through the diaries. If he withdrew from his wife into his den, he could hide the worst of what he was experiencing. Or so he thought.

But a husband and wife should be able to help each other through something like this, Nan argued in the stillness. What's happening to us that we're facing it alone?

She had tried to replace conversation with concern earlier in the evening, but Andy had sloughed off her solicitous hovering, consistently refusing her offers of heating pads, brandy, cups of tea, and hot soup. He'd also avoided her attempts to massage some feeling back into his fingers. So ultimately, everything that might have been spoken between them went unsaid.

What to say now? Nan wondered. What to say when dread was among the emotions raging inside like innumerable battalions from a single army, out of control and combating one another?

She forced herself to mount the stairs, but instead of going to her husband, she went to Nicola's bedroom. There, she moved across the green carpet in the darkness and opened the clothes cupboard that was tucked under the eaves. Eyes used to the gloom, she could make out the shape of an old skateboard pushed to the back of a shelf, of an electric guitar leaning long unused against the far wall, where it was draped by trousers.

Touching these with the tips of her fingers, saying idiotically, “tweed, wool, cotton, silk” as she felt the material of each, Nan became aware of a sound in the room, a buzzing that came from the chest of drawers behind her. As she turned, puzzled, the sound stopped. She had almost convinced herself that she'd imagined it, when it occurred again.

Curious, Nan set her packages on the bed and crossed the room to the chest. There was nothing on top of it to make such a noise, just a vase of drooping bladder campion and nightshade collected on a walk through Padley Gorge. These wildflowers were accompanied by a hair brush and comb, three bottles of scent, and a small beanbag flamingo with bright pink legs and large yellow feet.

With a glance towards the open bedroom door as if she were engaged in a surreptitious search, Nan slid open the top drawer of the chest. As she did so, the buzzing sounded for a third time. Her fingers moved in the direction of the noise. She found a small plastic square vibrating beneath a stack of knickers.

Nan carried this plastic square to the bed, sat, and switched on the bedside lamp. She examined what she'd taken from the drawer. It was Nicola's pager. On the top of it were two small buttons, one grey and one black. Across the end of it a thin screen held a single brief message: one page.

The buzzer sounded again, startling Nan Maiden. She pushed down one of the two buttons in response. The thin screen shifted to another message, this a telephone number with an area code that Nan recognised from central London.

She swallowed. She stared hard at the number. She realised that whoever had paged her daughter had no idea that Nicola was dead. It was this thought that took her automatically to the telephone in order to make a reply. But it was another set of thoughts that took her to a telephone in the reception area of Maiden Hall when she could have as easily phoned the London number from the bedroom that she shared with Andy.

She drew a long breath. She wondered if she would have the words. She considered the possibility that having the words would make no difference to anyone. But she didn't want to think about that. She just wanted to phone.

Rapidly, she punched in the numbers. She waited and waited for the connection to be made, till she became light-headed and realised that she was holding her breath. Finally, with a click, a phone somewhere in London began sounding. Double-ring, double-ring. Nan counted eight of them. She had started to think she'd misdialled the number, when she finally heard a man's gruff voice.

He answered in the old way, marking his generation: He gave the last four digits of his number. And because of that fact, and because his way of answering reminded her so much of her own father, Nan heard herself saying what she would not have believed herself capable of saying an hour earlier. A whisper only, “Nicola here.”

“Oh, so it's Nicola tonight, is it?” he demanded. “Where the hell've you been? I paged you over an hour ago.”

“Sorry.” And in her daughters abbreviated style of talking, “What's up?”

“Nothing, and you damn well know it. What've you decided? Have you changed your mind? You can do that, you know. All will be forgiven. When're you back?”

“Yes,” Nan whispered. “I've decided yes.”

“Thank God.” It was fervent. “Oh Jesus. Thank God. Damn. It's become impossible, Nikki. I'm missing you too much. Tell me at once when you're coming back.”

“Soon.” The whisper.

“How soon? Tell me.”

“I'll phone you.”

“No! Good God. Are you mad? Margaret and Molly are here this week. Wait for the page.”

She hesitated. “Of course.”

“Darling, have I made you angry?”

She said nothing.

“I have done, haven't I? Forgive me. I didn't mean to.”

She said nothing.

Then the voice altered, becoming suddenly and bizarrely childlike. “Oh Nikki. Pretty Nikki of mine. Say you're not angry. Say something to me, darling.”

She said nothing.

“I know what you're like when I've made you angry. I'm a wicked boy, aren't I?”

She said nothing.

“Yes. I know. I don't deserve you. I'm wicked, and I must take the medicine. You've got my medicine, haven't you, Nikki? And I must take it. Yes, I must.”

Nan's stomach heaved. She cried out, “Who are you? Tell me your name!”

A muted gasp was the answer. The line went dead.