In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

by Elizabeth George

  So when the phone call had finally come, interrupting her increasingly fitful sleep, she should have been prepared. After all, she had known all summer that two aspects of her behaviour as an officer were under scrutiny. Facing criminal charges of assault and attempted murder, facing disciplinary charges that ran the gamut from abuse of authority to failure to obey an order, she should have begun the process of putting her professional life in order prior to what anyone with a teaspoonful of sense would have called its ineluctable demise. But police work had been Barbara's life for a decade and a half, and she couldn't imagine her world without it. So she had spent her suspension telling herself that every day that passed without her being sacked made it more likely that she would emerge from the investigation unscathed. That hadn't been the case, of course, and a more realistic officer would have known what to expect when she walked into the assistant commissioner's office.

  She'd dressed with care, eschewing her usual drawstring trousers for a skirt and jacket. She was hopeless with clothes, so the colour didn't suit her, and the faux pearl necklace was a ludicrous touch that merely emphasised the thickness of her neck. Her shoes, at least, were polished. But getting out of her old Mini in the Yard's underground car park, she'd scraped her calf on a rough edge of door metal and a ladder in her tights had been the result.

  Not that perfect tights, a decent piece of jewellery, and a suit of a hue more flattering to her complexion would have altered the inevitable. Because as soon as she'd entered AC Hillier's office, with its four windows indicating the Olympian heights to which he'd risen, she'd seen the writing on the wall.

  Still, she hadn't expected the castigation to be so vituperative. AC Hillier was a pig—had always been and would be to the end of his days—but Barbara had never before been on the receiving end of his particular brand of discipline. He'd seemed to feel that a vigorous upbraiding wasn't sufficient to relay his displeasure with her comportment. Nor was sufficient a blistering letter that utilised such terms as “disgracing the reputation of the entire Metropolitan Police” and “bringing the service of thousands of officers into disrepute” and “a disgraceful brand of insubordination unlike anything in the history of the force,” which would be placed in her permanent file and left there through the years for every officer with suzerainty over Barbara to see. AC Hillier had also felt the need to interject his personal commentary on the activities that had brought about her suspension. And knowing that, without witnesses, he could be as free as he wanted to reprimand Barbara in whatever language he chose, Hillier had included in that commentary the sort of risky invective and innuendo that another subordinate officer—with less at stake—might well have taken as crossing over the line that separated the professional from the personal. But the assistant commissioner was nobody's fool. He was perfectly aware that, thankful her punishment did not include being sacked, Barbara would adopt the wise course of action and take whatever he chose to dish out to her.

  But she didn't have to like hearing herself referred to as a “bloody stupid slag” and a “sodding minge bag.” And she didn't have to pretend that she was unaffected by having her physical appearance, her sexual proclivities, and her potential as a woman brought into Hillier's ugly monologue.

  So she was shaken. And as she stood by the window in the library and observed the buildings that rose between New Scotland Yard and Westminster Abbey, she tried to control the trembling of her hands. She also tried to eliminate the waves of nausea that kept causing her breath to come in great gulps, as if she were drowning.

  A cigarette would have helped, but in coming to the library, where she wouldn't be found, she'd also come to one of the many locations in New Scotland Yard where smoking was prohibited. And while at one time she would have lit up anyway and damned the consequences, she wouldn't do that now.

  “Once more out of order and you're finished,” Hillier had shouted in conclusion, his florid face grown as maroon as the tie that he wore with his bespoke suit.

  That she hadn't been finished already—considering the level of Hillier's animosity—was a mystery to Barbara. Throughout his speech, she'd prepared herself for her inevitable sacking, but it hadn't materialised. She'd been dressed down, slagged off*, and vilified. But the peroration of Hillier's remarks hadn't included her termination. That Hillier wanted to sack her as much as he wanted to abuse her was clear as could be. That he didn't do so told her that someone of influence had taken her part.

  Barbara wanted to be grateful. Indeed, she knew she ought to be grateful. But at the moment all that she could feel was a monumental sense of betrayal that her superior officers, the disciplinary tribunal, and the Police Complaints Authority hadn't seen things her way. When the facts are in, she'd thought, everyone would see that she'd had no choice but to take up the nearest weapon to hand and fire it in order to save a life. But that wasn't the way her actions had been viewed by those in power. Except for someone. And she had a fairly good idea who that someone was.

  Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley had been on his honeymoon during the birth of Barbara's troubles. Her longtime partner, he'd come home with his bride from ten days on Corfu to find Barbara suspended with an investigation mounted into her conduct. Understandably confounded, he'd driven across town that same night, seeking an explanation from Barbara herself. While their initial conversation hadn't gone as smoothly as she would have wished, Barbara had known at heart that, at the end of the day, DI Lynley would never stand by and let an injustice be done if there was any way that he could prevent it.

  He'd be waiting in his office now to hear about her meeting with Hillier. As soon as she recovered from that meeting, she'd go to see him.

  Someone came into the quiet library. A woman said, “I'm telling you he was born in Glasgow, Bob. I remember the case because I was at the comprehensive and we were doing reports on current events.”

  Bob replied, “You're daft. He was born in Edinburgh.”

  The woman said, “Glasgow. I'll prove it.”

  Proving it meant having a browse through the library. Proving it meant that Barbara's solitude was at an end.

  She left the library and descended by the stairs, buying more time to recover and to come up with the words to thank Inspector Lynley for interceding. She couldn't imagine how he'd done it. He and Hillier were at each other's throats most of the time, so he must have asked a favour of someone above Hillier's head. She knew that doing so would have cost him dearly in professional pride. A man like Lynley wasn't used to going, cap in hand, to anyone. Going cap in hand to those who openly begrudged him his aristocratic birth would have been especially trying.

  She found him in his office in Victoria Block. He was on the phone with his back to the door, his chair swung round to face the window. He was saying lightly, “Darling, if Aunt Augusta's declared that a visit's in order, I don't know how we can actually avoid it. It's rather like trying to stop a typhoon … Hmm, yes. But we should be able to keep her from rearranging the furniture if Mother's agreed to come with her, shouldn't we?” He listened, then laughed at something his wife said on the other end of the line. “Yes. All right. We'll announce the wardrobes off-limits in advance …. Thank you, Helen …. Yes. She does mean well.” He rang off and swiveled his chair to face his desk. He saw Barbara in the doorway.

  “Havers,” he said, surprise in his tone. “Hullo. What're you doing here this morning?”

  She entered, saying, “I had the word from Hillier.”

  “And?”

  “A letter in my file and a quarter of an hour's speech that I'd like to forget. Cast your thoughts to Hillier's propensity for seizing the moment and throttling it and you'll have a good idea of how things played out. He's a flamer, our Dave.”

  “I'm sorry,” Lynley said. “But that was all? A lecture and a letter in your file?”

  “Not all. I've been demoted to detective constable.”

  “Ah.” Lynley reached for a magnetic container of paper clips sitting on his desk. Restlessly, h
is fingers explored the tops of the clips while he apparently gathered his thoughts. He said, “It could have been worse. It could have cost you everything.”

  “Right. Yes. I know.” Barbara tried to sound expansive. “Well, Hillier had his fun. No doubt he'll replay his speech for the big boys at lunch with the commissioner. I thought about telling him to screw himself about halfway through, but I held my tongue. You would've been proud of me.”

  At this, Lynley moved his chair away from the desk and stood at the window, looking out at its indifferent view of Tower Block. Barbara saw a muscle move in his jaw. She was about to venture into the arena of gratitude—his uncharacteristic reserve suggested the price he'd paid interceding on her behalf—when he finally spoke, introducing the topic himself by saying, “Barbara, I'm wondering if you know what had to be gone through to keep you from getting the sack. The meetings, the phone calls, the agreements, the compromises.”

  “I reckoned as much. Which is why I wanted to say—”

  “And all of it to keep you from getting what half of Scotland Yard think you richly deserve.”

  Barbara shifted uncomfortably on her feet. “Sir, I know you put yourself out for me. I know I would have been given the sack if you hadn't interceded. And I just wanted to tell you how grateful I am that you recognised my actions for what they were. I wanted to tell you that you won't have any reason to regret taking my part. I won't give you a reason. Or anyone else, for that matter. I won't give anyone a reason.”

  “I wasn't the one,” Lynley said, turning back to her.

  Barbara looked at him blankly. “You … ? What?”

  “I didn't take your part, Barbara.” To his credit after making the admission, he kept his eyes on hers. She would think of that later and grudgingly admire it. Those brown eyes of his—so kind and so at odds with his head of blond hair—settled on hers and just stayed there, openly.

  Barbara frowned, trying to assimilate what he'd said. “But you … you know all the facts. I told you the story. You read the report. I thought … You just now said the meetings and the phone calls—”

  “They weren't mine,” he cut in. “In conscience, I can't let you think that they were.”

  So she'd jumped to a conclusion. She'd presumed their years of partnership meant that Lynley would automatically take her part. She said, “Are you with them, then?”

  “Them? Who?”

  “The half of the Yard that thinks I got what I deserve. I only ask because I s'pose we ought to know where we stand with each other. I mean, if we're going to work—” Her words were starting to tumble together, and she forced herself to slow down, to be deliberate. “So are you? With them? That half? Sir?”

  Lynley went back to his desk and sat. He regarded her. She could easily read the regret on his face. She just couldn't tell where it was directed. And that frightened her. Because he was her partner. He was her partner. She said again, “Sir?”

  He said, “I don't know if I'm with them.”

  She felt deflated. Just a shriveled bit of her skin remained, lying quietly on the office floor.

  Lynley must have read this because he continued, his voice not unkind. “I've looked at the situation from every angle. All summer long, I've examined it, Barbara.”

  “That's not part of your job,” she told him numbly. “You investigate murders, not … not what I did.”

  “I wanted to understand. I still want to understand. I thought if I went at it on my own, I could see how it happened, through your eyes.”

  “But you couldn't manage that.” Barbara tried to keep the desolation from her voice. “You couldn't see that a life was at stake. You couldn't get your mind round the fact that I wasn't able to let an eight-year-old drown.”

  “That's not the case,” Lynley told her. “I understood that much and I understand it now. What I couldn't get round was that you were out of your jurisdiction, and, given an order to—”

  “So was she,” Barbara broke in. “So was everyone. The Essex police don't patrol the North Sea. And that's where it happened. You know that. On the sea.”

  “I do know that. All of it. Believe me. I know. How you were chasing a suspect, how that suspect dropped a child from his boat, what you were ordered to do when he took that action, and how you reacted when you heard the order.”

  “I couldn't just toss her a life belt, Inspector. It wouldn't have reached her. She would have drowned.”

  “Barbara, please hear me out. It wasn't your place—or your responsibility—to make decisions or to reach conclusions. That's why we have a chain of command. Arguing about the order you'd been given would have been bad enough. But once you fired a weapon at a superior officer—”

  “I expect you're afraid I'll do that to you next, given half a chance,” she said bitterly.

  Lynley let the words hang there between them. In the silence, Barbara found herself wanting to reach into the air and unspeak them, so untrue did she know them to be. “Sorry,” she said, feeling that the huskiness in her voice was a worse betrayal than any action she herself had taken earlier that summer.

  “I know,” he said. “I do know you're sorry. I'm sorry as well.”

  “Detective Inspector Lynley?”

  The quiet interruption came from the door. Lynley and Barbara swung to the voice. Dorothea Harriman, secretary to their divisional superintendent, stood there: well-coifed with a helmet of honey-blonde hair, well-dressed in a pin-striped suit that would have done service in a fashion advert. Barbara all at once felt what she always was in the presence of Dorothea Harriman, a sartorial nightmare.

  “What is it, Dee?” Lynley asked the younger woman.

  “Superintendent Webberly,” Harriman replied. “He's asked for you. As soon as you can make it. He's had a call from Crime Operations. Something's come up.” And with a glance and a nod at Barbara, she was gone.

  Barbara waited. She found that her pulse had begun throbbing painfully. The request from Webberly couldn't have come at a more terrible time.

  Something's come up was Harriman shorthand for the fact that the game was afoot. And in the past that summons from Webberly had generally preceded an invitation from the inspector to accompany him in his discovery of what the game was.

  Barbara said nothing. She just watched Lynley and waited. She knew very well that the next few moments would constitute the stand he took on their partnership.

  Outside his office, business went on as usual. Voices echoed in the lino-floored corridor. Telephones rang in departments. Meetings began. But here, inside, it seemed to Barbara as if she and Lynley had taken themselves into another dimension altogether, one into which much more than merely her professional future was tied.

  He finally got to his feet. “I'll need to see what Webberly has going.”

  She said, “Shall I … ?” despite his use of the singular pronoun that had already said it all. But she found that she couldn't complete the question because she couldn't face the answer at the moment. So she asked another. “What would you like me to do, sir?”

  He thought about it, looking away from her at last, seeming to study the picture that hung by the door: a laughing young man with a cricket bat in his hand and a long rip in his grass-stained trousers. Barbara knew why Lynley kept the photo in his office: It served as a daily reminder of the man in the photo and what Lynley had done to him on a long-ago drunken night in a car. Most people put what was unpleasant out of their minds. But DI Thomas Lynley didn't happen to be most people.

  He said, “I think it's best that you lie low for a while, Barbara. Let the dust settle. Let people get past this. Let them forget.”

  But you won't be able to, will you? she asked silently. What she said, however, was a bleak “Yes, sir.”

  “I know that isn't easy for you,” he said, and his voice was so gentle that she wanted to howl. “But I haven't got any other answer to give you at the moment. I only wish that I had.”

  And again, the few words she could manage were “Sir. I s
ee. Yes sir.”

  “Demotion to detective constable,” Lynley said to Superintendent Malcolm Webberly when he joined him. “That's marks to you, isn't it, sir?”

  Webberly was ensconced behind his desk, smoking a cigar. Mercifully, he'd kept the door to his office closed to spare the other officers, the secretaries, and the clerks from the fumes emanating from the noxious tube of tobacco. This consideration, however, did little to deliver anyone who had to enter from experiencing and breathing the fug of smoke. Lynley tried to inhale as little as possible. Webberly used his lips and tongue to move the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. It was the only response he gave.

  “Can you tell me why?” Lynley asked. “You've gone out on a limb for officers before. No one knows that better than I. But why in this case, when it seems so cut and dried? And what're you going to have to pay for having saved her?”

  “We all have favours,” the superintendent said. “I called a few in. Havers was in the wrong, but her heart was in the right.”

  Lynley frowned. He'd been trying to work himself round to this same conclusion from the moment he'd learned about Barbara Havers’ disgrace, but he hadn't been able to manage the feat. Every time he came close, the facts reared up at him, demanding acknowledgement. And he'd gathered a number of those facts himself, driving out to Essex to talk to the principal officer involved. Having talked to her, he couldn't understand how—let alone why—Webberly was able to condone Barbara Havers’ decision to fire a rifle at DCI Emily Barlow. Disregarding his own friendship with Havers, even disregarding the very basic issue of chain of command, weren't they responsible for asking what sort of professional mayhem they were encouraging if they failed to punish a member of the force who'd taken part in such an egregious action? “But to shoot at an officer … Even to pick up a rifle in the first place when she had no authority …”

  Webberly sighed. “These things just aren't black and white, Tommy I wish they were, but they never are. The child involved—”