In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (23 page)

“We've been given to understand that you and Nicola Maiden were engaged to be married,” Hanken said. “We've been told it was a recent engagement as well.”

“You have our sympathy,” Lynley added. “It can't be something you particularly want to talk about, but there might be something you can tell us—something you're not even aware of yourself perhaps—that will help in the investigation.”

Julian gave his attention to the sides of the maze, stacking them neatly as he answered. “I misled Andy and Nan. It was easier at the moment than going into everything. They kept asking if we'd had a row. Everyone kept asking, when she didn't turn up.”

“Misled? Then you weren't engaged to her?”

Julian cast a glance in the direction that Samantha had taken to fetch the dogs’ food. He said quietly, “No. I asked. She turned me down.”

“The feelings weren't mutual?” Hanken asked.

“I suppose they weren't if she didn't want to marry me.”

Samantha rejoined them, lugging a large burlap sack behind her, her pockets bulging with treats for the puppies. She entered the run, saying, “Here, Julie. Let me help you with that,” when she saw that her cousin was wrestling with a part of the maze that didn't want to give way.

He said, “I'm coping.”

“Don't be a goose. I'm stronger than you are.”

In Samantha's capable hands, the maze came apart. Julian stood by and looked uncomfortable.

“Exactly when did this proposal occur?” Lynley asked him.

Samantha's head turned swiftly towards her cousin. Just as swiftly, it turned away. She industriously began hiding dog biscuits throughout the run.

“On Monday night,” Julian told them. “The night before she … before Nicola went out on the moor.” Abruptly, he went back to his work. He spoke to the maze, not to them, saying, “I know how that looks. I'm not such a fool that I don't know exactly how it looks. I propose, she turns me down, then she dies. So yes, yes. I know exactly how it bloody well looks. But I didn't kill her.” Head lowered, he widened his eyes as if by doing so he could keep them from watering. He said only, “I loved her. For years. I loved her.”

Samantha froze where she was at the far end of the run, the puppies cavorting round her. It seemed as if she wanted to go to her cousin, but she didn't move.

“Did you know where she'd be that night?” Hanken asked. “The night she was killed?”

“I phoned her that morning—the morning she left—and we fixed up a date for Wednesday night. But she didn't tell me anything more.”

“Not that she'd be going out hiking?”

“Not that she was going off at all.”

“She had other phone calls before she'd left that day,” Lynley told him. “A woman phoned. Possibly two women. A man phoned as well. No one gave Nicola's mother a name. Have you any idea who might have wanted to speak with her?”

“None at all.” Julian showed no reaction to the knowledge that one of her callers had been male. “It could have been anyone.”

“She was quite popular,” Samantha said from her end of the run. “She was always surrounded by people up here, so she must have had dozens of student friends as well. I expect she got phone calls from them all the time when she was away from college.”

“College?” Hanken asked.

Nicola had just finished doing a conversion course at the College of Law, Julian told them. And he added, “In London,” when they asked him where she'd studied. “She was up for the summer working for a bloke called Will Upman. He's got a firm of solicitors in Buxton. Her dad fixed it up for her because Upman's something of a regular at the Hall. And because, I expect, he hoped she'd work for Upman in Derbyshire when she finished her course.”

“That was important to her parents?” Hanken asked.

“It was important to everyone,” Julian replied.

Lynley wondered if everyone included Julian's cousin. He glanced her way. She was very busy hiding dog biscuits for the puppies to search out. He asked the obvious next question. How had Julian parted from Nicola that night of the marriage proposal? In anger? Bitterness? Misunderstanding? Hope? It was a hell of a thing, Lynley said, to ask a woman to marry you and to be turned down. It would be understandable if her refusal led to depression or an unexpected burst of passion.

Samantha rose from her position at the far end of the run. “Is that your clever way of asking if he killed her?”

“Sam,” Julian said. It sounded like a warning. “I was down, of course. I felt blue. Who wouldn't?”

“Was Nicola involved with someone else? Is that why she refused you?”

Julian didn't reply. Lynley and Hanken exchanged a glance. Samantha said, “Ah. I see where this is heading. You're thinking that Julie came home on Monday night, phoned her up the next day to arrange a meeting, discovered where she'd be that night—which he of course wouldn't admit to you—and then killed her. Well, I can tell you this: That's absurd.”

“Perhaps. But an answer to the question would be helpful,” Lynley noted.

Julian said, “No.”

“No, she wasn't involved with someone else? Or no, she didn't tell you if she was involved with someone else?”

“Nicola was honest. If she'd been involved with someone else romantically, she would have told me.”

“She wouldn't have tried to protect you from the knowledge, to spare your feelings once you'd made them clear to her?”

Julian gave a rueful laugh. “Believe me, sparing people's feelings wasn't her way.”

Despite any suspicions that he had elsewhere, the nature of Julian's response seemed to prompt Hanken to ask, “Where were you on Tuesday night, Mr. Britton?”

“With Cass,” Julian said.

“The dog? With the dog?”

“She was whelping,” Samantha said. “You don't leave a dog alone when she's whelping.”

“You were here as well, Miss McCallin?” Lynley asked. “Helping out with the delivery?”

She caught her lower lip with her teeth. “It was in the middle of the night. Julie didn't get me up. I saw the puppies in the morning.”

“I see.”

“No, you don't!” she cried. “You think Julie's involved. You've come to trick him into saying something that will implicate him. That's how you work.”

“We work at getting to the truth.”

“Oh right. Tell that to the Bridgewater Four. Only it's three now, isn't it? Because one of those poor sods died in prison. Call a solicitor, Julie. Don't say another word.”

Julian Britton in possession of a solicitor was exactly what they didn't need at the moment. Lynley said, “You appear to keep records about the dogs, Mr. Britton. Did you record the time of delivery?”

“They don't all pop out at once, Inspector,” Samantha said.

Julian said, “Cass went into labour round nine at night. She began delivering round midnight. There were six puppies—one was stillborn—so it took several hours. If you want the exact times, I have them in the records. Sam can fetch the book.”

She went to do so. When she returned, Julian said to her, “Thanks. I'm nearly finished in here. You've been a real help. I'll manage the rest.”

Obviously, he was dismissing her. She appeared to communicate something to him through eye contact only. Whatever it was, he either couldn't or didn't want to receive the message. She cast a moderately baleful look at Lynley and Hanken before she left them. The sound of the dogs barking outside rose, then fell as she opened and closed the door behind her.

“She means well,” Julian told them when she was gone. “I don't know what I'd do without her. Trying to put the whole manor back together … It's a hell of a job. Sometimes I wonder why I took it on.”

“Why did you?” Lynley asked.

“There've been Brittons here for hundreds of years. My dream is to keep them here for a few hundred more.”

“Nicola Maiden was part of that dream?”

“In my mind, yes. In her mind, no. She had her own dreams. Or plans. Or whatever they were. But that's fairly obvious, isn't it?”

“She told you about them?”

“All she told me was that she didn't share mine. She knew I couldn't offer her what she wanted. Not at the moment and probably never. She thought it was the wiser course to leave our relationship the way it was.”

“Which was what?”

“We were lovers, if that's what you're asking.”

“In the normal sense?” Hanken asked.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“The girl was shaved. It suggests … a certain sexual whimsicality to the relationship you had with her.”

Ugly colour flared in Julian's face. “She was quirky. She waxed herself. She had some body piercings done as well. Her tongue. Her navel. Her nipples. Her nose. That's just who she was.”

She didn't sound like a woman who'd be the prospective bride of the impoverished landed gentry. Lynley wondered how Julian Britton had come to think of her as such.

Britton, however, appeared to read the direction Lynley's thoughts were taking. He said, “It doesn't mean anything, all that. She just was who she was. Women are like that these days. At least women her age. As you're from London, I'd expect you know that already.”

It was true that one saw just about everything on the streets of London. It would be a myopic investigator who judged any woman under thirty—or over thirty for that matter—on the basis of waxing herself hairless or allowing holes to be needled into her body. But all the same, Lynley wondered at the nature of Julian's comments. There was an eagerness to them that wanted probing.

“That's all I can tell you.” Having made that remark, Julian opened the record book that his cousin had brought to him. He flipped to a section behind a blue divider and turned several pages until he found the one he wanted. He turned the book round so that Lynley and Hanken could see it. The page was labelled Cass in large block letters. Beneath her name were documented the times of each puppy's delivery as well as the times that parturition had begun and ended.

They thanked him for the information and left him to continue his work with the harriers. Outside, it was Lynley who spoke first.

“Those times were written in pencil, Peter, the lot of them.”

“I noticed.” Hanken nodded in the direction of the manor house, saying, “Make quite a team, don't they? ‘Julie’ and his cousin.”

Lynley agreed. He just wondered what game the team was playing.

arbara Havers was relieved to be able to leave the claustrophobic confines of the Met headquarters. Once Winston Nkata requested that she get onto the Battersea address of Terry Cole, she wasted little time in dashing for her car. She took the most direct route possible, heading for the river, where she followed the Embankment to Albert Bridge. On the south bank of the Thames she consulted her battered A to Z until she found the street she was looking for sandwiched between the two Bridge Roads: Battersea and Albert.

Terry Cole's digs were in a forest-green brick-and-bay-windowed conversion set among other similar conversions in Anhalt Road. A line of buzzers indicated that there were four flats in the building, and Barbara pressed the one that had Cole/Thompson taped next to it. She waited, glancing round at the neighbourhood. Terraced houses, some in better condition than others, were fronted by gardens. Some were neatly planted, some were overgrown, and more than one appeared to be used as a dumping place for everything from rusting cookers to screenless televisions.

There was no answer from the flat. Barbara frowned and descended the steps. She blew out a breath, not wanting to face another few hours at the computer, and considered her options as she studied the house. A spate of breaking and entering definitely wasn't going to cut the mustard, and she was thinking about a retreat to the nearest pub for a heaped plate of bangers and mash, when she noticed a curtain flick in the bay window of the ground floor flat. She decided to have a go at the neighbours.

Next to flat number one was the name Baden. Barbara pressed the buzzer. A tremulous voice came through the speaker almost at once in reply, as if the person in the corresponding flat had been preparing for a visit from the law. Once Barbara identified herself—and cooperatively held up her warrant card so that it could be observed at a distance through the ground floor window—the lock on the door was released. She pushed it open and found herself inside a vestibule that was the approximate size of a chess board. It was chess board in decoration as well: red and black tiles across which innumerable footprints were smudged.

Flat number one opened to the right of the vestibule. When Barbara knocked, she found that she had to go through the procedure all over again. She held her warrant card to the peep hole in the door this time. When it had been studied to the occupant's satisfaction, two dead bolts and a safety chain were released and the door opened. Barbara was faced with an elderly woman who said apologetically, “One can't be too careful these days, I'm afraid.”

She introduced herself as Mrs. Geoffrey Baden and quickly brought Barbara up to speed on the particulars of her life without being asked. Twenty years a widow, she had no children, just her birds—finches, whose enormous cage occupied one complete side of the sitting room—and her music, the source of which seemed to be a piano that occupied the other side. This was an antique upright and its top held several dozen framed pictures of the late Geoffrey while its music rack displayed enough hand-scored sheet music to suggest that Mrs. Baden might be channelling Mozart in her free afternoons.

Mrs. Baden herself suffered from tremors. They affected her hands and her head, which shook subtly but unceasingly throughout her interview with Barbara.

“No place to sit in here, I'm afraid,” Mrs. Baden said cheerfully when she was done sharing her personal particulars. “Come through to the kitchen. I've a fresh lemon cake, if you'd like a piece.”

She would have loved a piece, Barbara told her. But the truth was that she was looking for Cilia Thompson. Did Mrs. Baden know where Cilia might be found?

“I expect she's working in the studio,” Mrs. Baden replied, confiding, “They're artists, the two of them. Cilia and Terry. Lovely young people, if you don't mind their appearance, which I myself never do. Times change, don't they? And one must change with them.”