In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

by Elizabeth George

  The fact that the garment was leather didn't strike him at first. Nor did the fact that it was black make an immediate impression upon him. It was only when the silence and darkness of the previously occupied hotel bar told him all the patrons were gone that he realised the jacket had no owner.

  He looked from the darkened bar door to the black leather jacket, feeling a tingling along his scalp. He thought, No, it can't be. But even as his mind formed the words, his fingers contacted the stiffened lining—stiffened the way only one substance can render an otherwise soft material stiff because the substance itself does not so much dry as coagulate …

  Lynley dropped his umbrella. He took the jacket nearer to the entry porch's window, where he could better examine it under the light. And there he saw that in addition to that unnamed substance which had altered the texture of the lining, the leather was damaged in another way. A hole—perhaps the size of a five-pence coin—had pierced the back.

  Apart from knowing that the lining of the jacket had once been soaked with blood, Lynley did not need to be a student of anatomy also to know that the hole in the jacket matched up precisely with the left scapula of the unfortunate person who'd been wearing it.

  Nan Maiden found him in his lair near their bedroom. He'd left the office as soon as the detective was out of the hotel, and she hadn't followed him. Instead, she'd spent nearly an hour straightening the lounge after the last of the Sunday guests and setting up the dining room for residents and others who would be requiring a light Sunday supper. When she'd completed these tasks, checked the kitchen to see that the evening's soup was being prepared, and given directions to several American hikers who were apparently intent upon reenacting Jane Eyre at North Lees Hall, she went in search of her husband.

  Her excuse was a meal: She hadn't seen him eat for days, and if he went on like this, he would certainly fall ill. The reality was something rather different: Andy couldn't be permitted to carry through his plan to be questioned with electrodes attached to his body. None of his responses could possibly be accurate when one considered the condition he was in.

  She loaded a tray with anything he might find tempting. She included two drinks for him to choose from, and she climbed the stairs to make her offering.

  He was sitting at the kneehole, and before him was a shoe box with its lid off and its contents spread across the secretaire drawer that was pulled out and open. Nan said his name, but he didn't hear her, so engrossed was he with the papers that had been in the box.

  She approached. Over his shoulder she could see that he was looking at a collection of letters, notes, drawings, and greeting cards spanning nearly a quarter of a century. What had occasioned each one was different, but their source was the same. They represented every drawing or other communication that Andy had received from Nicola throughout her life.

  Nan put the tray down next to the comfortable old overstuffed chair where Andy sometimes read. She said, “I've brought you something to eat, darling,” and was unsurprised when he didn't reply. She didn't know if he could not hear her or if he merely wished to be alone and wasn't willing to say so. But in either case, it didn't matter. She would make him hear her and she would not leave him.

  She said, “Please don't take that lie detector test, Andy. Your condition isn't normal, and it hasn't been for months. I'm going to ring that policeman in the morning and tell him you've changed your mind. There's no sin in that. You're perfectly within your rights. He'll know it.”

  Andy stirred. In his fingers he held a child's gawky drawing of “dady gets out of his bath” that had provoked in both of them such fond laughter so many years before. But now the sight of that little girl's rendering of her naked father—complete with a penis hilariously out of proportion—caused a shudder in Nan, followed by a shutting down of some basic function in her body and a shutting off of some essential emotion in her heart. “I'll take the polygraph.” Andy set the drawing to one side. “It's the only way.”

  She wanted to say The only way to what? And she would have done had she been more prepared to hear the answer. Instead, she said, “And what if you fail?”

  He turned to her then. He held an old letter between his fingers.

  Nan could see the words Dearest Daddy in Nicola's bold, firm hand. “Why would I fail?” he asked.

  “Because of your condition,” she answered. “If your nerves are going bad, they're going to send out incorrect readings. The police will take those readings and misinterpret them. The machine will say your body's not working. The police will call it something else.”

  They'll call it guilt.

  The sentence hung between them. It seemed to Nan suddenly that she and her husband were occupying different continents. She felt that she was the one who'd created the ocean between them, but she could not take the risk of diminishing its size.

  Andy said, “A polygraph measures temperature, pulse, and respiration. There won't be a problem. It's nothing to do with nerves. I want to take it.”

  “But why? Why?”

  “Because it's the only way.” He smoothed the letter against the top of the secretaire drawer. He traced Dearest Daddy with his index finger. “I wasn't asleep,” he said to her. “I tried to sleep but I couldn't because I was so unnerved when my sight went bad. So why did you tell them you checked on me, Nancy?” And then he looked up and held her gaze with his.

  “I've brought you something to eat, Andy,” she said brightly. “There's got to be something here to tempt you. Should I spread some pâté on a piece of baguette?”

  “Nancy,” he said, “please tell me the truth.”

  But she couldn't. She couldn't. He'd created her life. He'd watched her grow. He'd kept every missive and treasured every word. He'd seen her through childhood illnesses and adolescent tantrums, into an adulthood of which he'd been so proud. So if there was a chance—just the slightest possibility—that his physical condition was unrelated to Nicola's death, then she would live by that chance. She'd die by it as well, if that was necessary.

  “She was wonderful, wasn't she?” Nan Maiden whispered, gesturing to the memories of Nicola that her husband had taken from their storage place. “Wasn't our little girl just the best?”

  Vi Nevin wasn't alone in her room when Barbara Havers arrived at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Sitting next to her bed with her head pressed into the mattress like an orange-haired supplicant at the feet of a heavily bandaged goddess was a girl with limbs like bicycle spokes and the wrists and ankles of a starvation dieter. She looked up as the door swung shut behind Barbara.

  “How'd you get in?” she demanded, rising and adopting a defensive stance with her inadequate body placed between the interloper and the bed. “That cop out there i'n't s'posed to let anyone—”

  “Relax,” Barbara said, excavating in her bag for identification. “I'm one of the good guys.”

  The girl sidled forward, snatched Barbara's warrant card, and read it: one eye on the card and the other on Barbara lest she make any precipitate moves. On the bed behind her, the patient stirred. She murmured, “'S okay, Shell. I saw her already. With the black, th’ other day. You know.”

  Shell—who said she was Vi's best friend on earth, Shelly Platt, who meant to take care of Vi till the end of time and don't you forget it—returned Barbara's identification and slunk back to her seat. Barbara rustled out a notepad and a chewed-upon Biro and pulled the room's other chair into a position from which she and Vi Nevin could see each other.

  She said, “I'm sorry about the beating. I got one myself a few months ago. Rotten business, but at least I could point the finger at the bastard. Can you? What d'you remember?”

  Shelly went to the head of the bed, taking Vi's hand and beginning to stroke it. Her presence was an irritant to Barbara, like a sudden case of contact dermatitis, but the young woman in the bed seemed to take comfort from it. Whatever helps, Barbara thought. She sat with Biro poised.

  Beneath the bandages, what could be seen of Vi Nevin's
swollen face was her eyes, a small portion of her forehead, and a stitched-up lower lip. She looked like a victim of the sort of explosive that threw off shrapnel. She said in a voice so faint that Barbara strained to hear it, “Had a punter coming. Old bloke, this is. Likes honey on him. I coat him first … You know? Then I lick it off.”

  What a treat, Barbara thought. She said, “Right. You say honey? Brilliant. Go on.”

  Vi Nevin did so. She said she'd readied herself for her appointment in the schoolgirl costume that her client preferred. But when she'd brought out the honey jar, she'd realised that there wouldn't be enough to baste all the body parts he usually requested. “Plenty for the prong,” Vi said with the frankness of a professional. “But if he wanted more, I needed to have it to hand.”

  “I've got the picture,” Barbara told her.

  At the head of the bed, Shelly eased a skinny thigh onto the mattress. She said, “I c'n tell it, Vi. You'll wear yourself out.”

  Vi shook her head and continued the story. There was little enough of it.

  She'd popped out for the honey before her client's arrival. When she'd returned, she'd transferred the honey into its regular jug and she'd assembled a tray with the linens and other assorted goodies—all of which appeared to be either edible or potable—that she used in her regular sessions with the man. She'd been carrying the tray into the sitting room, when she'd heard a sound from one of the bedrooms upstairs.

  All right, Barbara thought. Her interpretation of the pictures taken at the Fulham crime scene was about to be confirmed. But to be absolutely sure, she clarified with “Was it your client? Had he arrived ahead of you?”

  “Not him,” Vi murmured.

  Shelly said to Barbara, “You c'n see she's knackered. That's enough for now.”

  “Hang on,” Barbara told her. “So a bloke was upstairs, but he wasn't a client? Then how'd he get in? You hadn't bolted the door?”

  Vi raised the hand that Shelly wasn't clutching. It rose two inches off the bed and fell back. She reminded Barbara, “Only popped out for honey Ten minutes is all.” So she saw no reason to bolt the door. When she heard the noise above stairs, she explained, she went to investigate and found a bloke in her bedroom. The room itself was in shambles.

  “You saw him?”

  Only a shadowy glimpse of him as he lunged at her, Vi explained.

  Fine, Barbara thought, because a glimpse might well do it. She said, “That's good. That's brilliant, then. Tell me what you can. Anything at all. A detail. A scar. A mark. Anything,” and she summoned into her mind the image of Matthew King-Ryder's face to match it up with whatever Vi Nevin said.

  But what Vi gave her was a description of Everyman: medium height, medium build, brown hair, clear skin. And while it fitted Matthew King-Ryder to a T, it also fitted at least seventy percent of the male population.

  “Too fast,” Vi breathed. “Happened too fast.”

  “But it wasn't the client you'd been expecting? You do know that?”

  Vis lips curved, and she winced as they pulled against their stitches. “Eighty-one, that bloke is. On his best day … hardly can manage the stairs.”

  “And it wasn't Martin Reeve?”

  She shook her head.

  “One of your other clients? An old boyfriend, perhaps?”

  “She said—” Shelly Platt interrupted hotly.

  “I'm clearing the decks,” Barbara told her. “It's the only way. You want us to nick whoever assaulted her, right?”

  Shelly grumbled and petted Vis shoulder. Barbara tapped the pen against her notebook and considered their options.

  They could hardly cart Vi Nevin to an identity parade, and even if that were possible, they had—at the moment—no reason in hell to trot Matthew King-Ryder into the local nick to stand in one. So they needed a picture, but it would have to come from a newspaper or a magazine. Or from King-Ryder Productions on some sort of spurious excuse. Because one hint that they were on to him, and King-Ryder would weigh down his long bow and arrows with concrete and dump them into the Thames faster than you could say Robin Hood's Merry Men.

  But getting a photo was going to take some time because they needed the real thing—sharp and clear—and not something sent over to the hospital via fax. And fax or otherwise, where the hell were they going to get a photo of Matthew King-Ryder at—here Barbara looked at her watch—half past seven on a Sunday evening? There was no way. It was stab-in-the-dark time. She drew a deep breath and took the plunge. “D'you know a bloke called Matthew King-Ryder by any chance?”

  Vi said the completely unexpected. “Yes.”

  Lynley held the jacket by its satin lining. It had doubtless been touched by a dozen people since being removed from Terry Cole's body on Tuesday night. But it had been touched by the killer as well, and if he hadn't realised that fingerprints could be lifted from leather nearly as easily as they could be lifted from glass or painted wood, there was an excellent chance that he'd left an unintentional calling card upon the garment.

  Once the proprietor of the Black Angel understood the import of Lynley's request, he fetched all the employees to the bar for some questions post haste. He offered the inspector tea, coffee, or other refreshment to go along with his queries, seeking to be helpful with the sort of anxiety to please that generally struck people who found themselves inadvertently living on the county line between murder and respectability. Lynley demurred at all refreshment. He just wanted some information, he said.

  Showing the jacket to the hotels proprietor and its employees didn't get him anywhere however. One jacket was much like another to them. None could say how or when the garment that Lynley was holding had appeared at the hotel. They made suitable noises of horror and aversion when he pointed out the copious amount of dried blood on the lining and the hole in the back, and while they looked at him with properly mournful expressions when he mentioned the two recent deaths on Calder Moor, not an eyelash among them so much as fluttered at the suggestion that a killer might have been in their midst.

  “I reckon someone left that thing here. Tha's what happened. No mistake about it,” the barmaid said.

  “Coats hanging on the porch rack all winter long,” one of the room maids added. “I never take notice of them one day to the next.”

  “But that's just it,” Lynley said. “It isn't winter. And until today, I dare say there hasn't been rain enough for macs, jackets, or coats.”

  “So what s'r point?” the proprietor said.

  “How could all of you fail to notice a leather jacket on a coat rack if the leather jacket is hanging there alone?”

  The ten employees who were gathered in the bar shifted about, looked sheepish, or appeared regretful. But no one could shed any light on the jacket or how it had come to be there. They came in to work through the back door, not through the front, they told him. They left the same way. So they wouldn't have even seen the coat rack in the course of their normal workdays. Besides, things often got left behind at the Black Angel Hotel: umbrellas, walking sticks, rain gear, rucksacks, maps. Everything ended up in lost property, and until things got there, no one paid them much mind.

  Lynley decided on a full frontal approach. Were they acquainted with the Britton family? he wanted to know. Would they recognise Julian Britton if they saw him?

  The proprietor spoke for everyone. “We all know the Brittons at the Black Angel.”

  “Did any of you see Julian on Tuesday night?”

  But no one had.

  Lynley dismissed them. He asked for a bag in which to stow the jacket, and while one was being fetched for him, he walked to the window, watched the rain fall, and thought about Tideswell, the Black Angel, and the crime.

  He himself had seen that Tideswell abutted the eastern edge of Calder Moor, and the killer—vastly more familiar with the White Peak than Lynley—would have known that as well. So in possession of a jacket with an incriminating hole that would have told the tale of the crime in short order had it been found on the sc
ene, he had to be rid of it as soon as possible. What could have been easier than stopping at the Black Angel Hotel on his way home from Calder Moor, knowing, as an habitué of the bar, that coats and jackets accumulated for whole seasons before anyone thought to have a look at them.

  But could Julian Britton have managed to hang up the leather jacket in the entrance without being seen by anyone inside? It was possible, Lynley thought. Risky as the devil, but possible.

  And at this point Lynley was willing to accept that which was possible. It kept that which was probable out of his thoughts.

  Barbara leaned forward in her chair, saying, “You know him? Matthew King-Ryder. You know him?” and trying to keep the excitement from her voice.

  “Terry,” Vi murmured.

  Her eyelids were getting heavy. But Barbara pressed the young woman anyway, against the rising protestations of Shelly Platt. “Terry knew Matthew King-Ryder? How?”

  “Music” Vi said.

  Barbara felt immediately deflated. Damn, she thought. Terry Cole, the Chandler music, and Matthew King-Ryder. There was nothing new in this. They were nowhere again.

  Then Vi said, “Found it in the Albert Hall, did Terry.”

  Barbara's eyebrows knotted. “The Albert Hall? Terry found the music there?”

  “Under a seat.”

  Barbara was gobsmacked. She tried to get her mind round what Vi Nevin was telling her even as Vi continued to tell her.

  In the course of his job as card boy, Terry put cards regularly in South Kensington phone boxes. He always did this work at night, since there was less likelihood of finding himself on the receiving end of police aggro after dark. He'd been on his regular rounds in the neighbourhood of Queen's Gate, when the phone in one of the boxes rang.

  “On the corner of Elvaston Place and one of the mewses, this was,” Vi said.

  For a lark, Terry answered to hear a male voice say, “The package is in the Albert Hall. Circle Q, Row 7, Seat 19,” after which the line went dead.