In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (51 page)

At the site, Hanken examined the grit dispenser in which the weapon had been found. He made a note of the fact that a killer—depositing a knife therein—could then have proceeded on his way to a junction not five miles distant at which he could have turned either due east then north for Padley Gorge or immediately south towards Bakewell and Broughton Manor, which lay a mere two miles beyond it. Once Hanken had confirmed this bit of data with a quick look at the map, he went on to examine the knife itself in the kitchen of the Websters’ farmhouse.

It was indeed a Swiss Army model, and it now lay in an evidence bag on the car's seat next to him. The lab would conduct all the necessary tests to ascertain whether the blood on both the blades and the case was Terry Coles, but prior to those tests, another less scientific identification could give the investigators a valuable piece of information.

Hanken found Andy Maiden at the bottom of the drive leading up to the Hall. The former SO 10 officer was apparently installing a new sign for the establishment, an activity that involved a wheelbarrow, a shovel, a small concrete mixer, several lengths of flex, and an impressive set of floodlights. The old sign had already been removed and lay disassembled beneath a lime tree. The new one—in all its ornate, hand-carved, and hand-painted splendour—waited nearby to be mounted on a sturdy post of oak and wrought iron.

Hanken parked on the verge and studied Maiden, who was working with a fierce expenditure of energy, as if the replacement of the sign had to be accomplished in record time. He was sweating heavily, the damp forming rivulets on his legs and plastering his T-shirt to his torso. Hanken noted that he was in remarkable physical condition, looking like a man who had the strength and endurance of a boy in his twenties.

“Mr. Maiden,” he called as he shoved his door open. “Could I have a word, please?” And then more loudly when there was no reaction, “Mr. Maiden?”

Maiden slowly turned from his work, revealing his face. Hanken was struck by what his expression revealed of his mental state. If the other man's body could have belonged to a bloke of a younger generation, his face was ancient. Maiden looked as if the only thing keeping him going was the mindlessness of the moment's exertion. Ask him to do anything but labour and sweat, and the shell of the man that he had become would be blasted to fragments like a friable carapace hit by a hammer.

Hanken experienced a dual reaction to the sight of the former SO 10 officer: an immediate surge of sympathy that was swiftly replaced by the recollection of an important detail. As an undercover cop, Andy Maiden knew how to play a role.

Hanken slid the evidence bag into his jacket pocket and joined Andy Maiden on the drive. Maiden watched him, expressionless, as he approached.

Hanken nodded at the sign that Maiden was preparing to hang, admiring the artistry with which it had been crafted and saying, “Nicer than the Cavendish's road sign, I think.”

“Thanks.” But Maiden hadn't spent his career with the Met to think that the detective inspector in charge of the investigation into his daughter's murder had come to chat about the manner in which Maiden Hall was advertising its presence. He dumped a mound of concrete into the hole he'd dug, and he sank his shovel into the earth nearby. He said, “You've news for us,” and he appeared to be attempting to read Hanken's face for the answer in advance of hearing it.

“A knife's been found.” Hanken brought the other policeman into the picture with a brief explanation of how it had come into the hands of the police.

“You'll want me to look at it,” Maiden said.

Hanken brought out the plastic evidence bag and rested it with the knife in his palm. Maiden didn't ask to hold it himself. Rather, he stood gazing at it as if the case, the folded blades, or the blood upon both could give him an answer to questions he wasn't yet willing to ask.

“You mentioned that you gave her your own knife,” Hanken said. “Could this be it?” And when Maiden nodded, “Is there anything about the knife that you gave her that distinguishes it from others of the same type, Mr. Maiden?”

“Andy? Andy?” A woman's voice grew louder as the woman herself descended from the Hall, walking through the trees. “Andy darling, here. I've brought you some—” Nan Maiden stopped abruptly when she saw Hanken. “Excuse me, Inspector. I had no idea you were … Andy, I've brought you some water. The heat. You know. Pellegrino's all right, isn't it?”

She thrust the water at her husband. She touched the backs of her fingers to his temple, saying, “You aren't overdoing it, are you?”

He flinched.

Hanken felt a stirring on the back of his neck, like a spirit's caress against his skin. He looked from husband to wife, assessed the moment that had just passed between them, and knew he was fast approaching the time to ask the question no one had given voice to yet.

He said first, after nodding a hello to Maiden's wife, “As to anything that might differentiate the knife you gave your daughter from other similar Swiss Army knives … ?”

“One of the blades of the scissors broke off a few years ago. I never replaced it,” Maiden said.

“Anything else?”

“Not that I recall.”

“After you gave the knife—possibly this one—to your daughter, did you buy another for yourself?”

“I have another, yes,” he said. “Smaller than that though. Easier to carry about.”

“You have it with you?”

Maiden reached into the pocket of his cut-off jeans. He brought out another model of a Swiss Army knife and handed it over. Hanken examined it, using his thumbnail to prise open its largest blade. Two inches appeared to be its length.

Nan Maiden said, “Inspector, I don't understand what Andy's knife has to do with anything.” And then without a pause for response, “Darling, you haven't had lunch yet. May I bring you a sandwich?”

But Andy Maiden was watching Hanken open the knife and take the measure of each of its blades. Hanken could feel the former officer's eyes upon him. He could sense the intent behind the gaze that fixed itself on his fingers.

Nan Maiden said, “Andy? May I bring you … ?”

“No.”

“But you must eat something. You can't keep—”

“No.”

Hanken looked up. Maiden's replacement knife was too small for the murder weapon. But that didn't obviate the necessity for asking the question that both of them knew he would ask. He had, after all, admitted to helping his daughter pack her camping gear into her car on Tuesday. And he himself had given her the knife that he himself had later declared to be missing.

“Mr. Maiden,” he said, “where were you on Tuesday night?”

“That's a monstrous question,” Nan Maiden said quietly.

“I suppose it is,” Hanken agreed. “Mr. Maiden?”

Maiden glanced in the direction of the Hall above them, as if what he was about to say needed an accompanying corroboration that would be supplied by the Hall's existence. “I was having some eye trouble on Tuesday night. I went upstairs early because my vision kept tunneling. It gave me a scare, so I had a lie-down to see if that would help take care of it.”

Tunnel vision? Hanken wondered incredulously. That was certainly an alibi and a half.

Maiden obviously inferred Hanken's thoughts from the expression on his face. He said, “It happened during the evening meal, Inspector. One can't mix drinks or serve dinners if one's field of vision is reduced to the size of a five-pence coin.”

“It's the truth,” Nan asserted. “He went upstairs. He was resting in the bedroom.”

“What time was this?”

Maiden's wife answered for him. “The first of our guests had gone through for their starters. So Andy must have left round half past seven.”

Hanken looked at Maiden for confirmation of the time. Maiden frowned, as if he were conducting a complex inner dialogue with himself.

“How long were you up there in your bedroom, then?”

“The rest of the evening, the night,” Maiden said.

“Your vision didn't improve. Is that it?”

“That's it.”

“Have you seen a doctor? Seems to me that a problem like that could be cause for real concern.”

“Andy's had a few turns like this,” Nan Maiden said. “They pass. He's fine as long as he rests. And that's what he was doing on Tuesday night. Resting.”

“I'd expect, though, that a condition like that wants looking at. It could lead to something far worse. A stroke, perhaps? Chances are one would think of a stroke straightaway. I'd want to call an ambulance as soon as I had the first symptoms.”

“It's happened before. We know what to do,” Nan Maiden said.

“Which is what, exactly?” Hanken enquired. “Application of ice packs? Acupuncture to the temples? Full body massage? Half a dozen aspirin? What is it you do when it looks like your husband might be having a stroke?”

“It isn't a stroke.”

“So you left him alone to his bed rest, did you? From half past seven in the evening until … what time might that have been, Mrs. Maiden?”

The care the couple took not to look at each other was as obvious as would have been a sudden collapse into each other's arms. Nan Maiden said, “Of course I didn't leave Andy alone, Inspector. I looked in on him twice. Three times, perhaps. During the evening.”

“And the times?”

“I have no idea. Probably at nine. Then again round eleven.” And as Hanken looked towards Maiden, she continued by saying, “It's no use asking Andy. He'd fallen asleep, and I didn't wake him. But he was there in the bedroom. And there he stayed. All night. I hope that's all you want to ask in the matter, Inspector Hanken, because the very idea … the thought that …” Her eyes grew bright as she directed them towards her husband. He looked in the direction of the U-shaped gorge, whose south end could be glimpsed where the road curved to the north. “I hope that's all you want to ask,” she said simply, and there was a quiet dignity to her words.

Still, Hanken said, “Do you have any idea what your daughter planned to do with her life once she returned to London from her summer in Derbyshire?”

Maiden watched him steadily, though his wife looked away. “No,” he said. “I don't know.”

“I see. And you're certain of that? Nothing you want to add? Nothing you want to explain?”

“Nothing,” Maiden said, and to his wife, “You, Nancy?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Hanken gestured with the evidence bag in which the knife lay. “You know the routine, Mr. Maiden. Once we have a report with all the particulars from forensic, I'll probably need another chat with you.”

“I understand,” Andy Maiden said. “Do your job, Inspector. Do it well. That's all I ask.”

But he didn't look at his wife.

They seemed to Hanken like strangers on a railway platform, tied in some way to a departing guest that neither wanted to admit to knowing.

Nan Maiden watched the inspector drive off. Without realising that she was doing it, she began to gnaw at what was left of the fingernails of her right hand. Next to her, Andy set the bottle of Pellegrino she'd brought him into a depression that his heel had made in the soft earth round the concrete-filled hole. He hated Pellegrino. He scorned every kind of water that touted itself as offering more benefit than a full glass of the spring water from their own well. She knew that. But when she'd looked from the window of the first floor mezzanine, when through the trees she'd seen the car pull onto the verge and watched the police inspector clamber out, a bottle of water was the only excuse she could think of to get her down the hillside quickly enough to intercept him. So now she bent for the water and wiped off the grime where the earth clung like an eruption of scabies to the condensation that had formed on the bottle.

Andy fetched the thick oak pole from which the new Maiden Hall sign would hang. He sank it upright into the ground and held it into position with four sturdy timbers. He shovelled the rest of the concrete round it.

When will we talk? she wondered. When will it be safe to say the worst? She tried to tell herself that thirty-seven years of marriage made conversation unnecessary between them, but she knew there was little truth to that. It was only in the halcyon days of courting, engagement, and newlywed excitement that a look, a touch, or a smile sufficed between a man and a woman. And they were decades away from those halcyon days. They were more than thirty years and one devastating death away from that time when words were secondary to the knowledge of one's partner that was as immediate and as natural as breathing.

Silently, Andy packed the concrete round the post. Carefully, he scraped the remains of the mixture from the bucket until there was nothing left. He gave his attention next to the floodlights. Nan clasped the bottle of Pellegrino to her bosom and turned away to climb back to the Hall.

“Why did you say that?” her husband asked.

She turned back to him. “What?”

“You know. Why did you tell him you looked in on me, Nancy?”

The bottle felt sticky under her palm. It felt hard against her breast. She said, “I did look in on you.”

“You didn't. We both know it.”

“Darling, I did. You were asleep. You must have dozed off. I had a quick look in the door and then went back to work. I'm not surprised you didn't hear me.”

He stood with the floodlights in his hands. She wanted to go to him, to swaddle his body with the kind of protection that would dispel the demons and drive off the despair. But she just stood there, a few feet above him on the slope, holding a bottle of Pellegrino which both of them knew he did not want and would never drink.

“She was the why of it,” he said quietly. “Every journey in life reaches an end. But if you're lucky, it has another beginning inside of it. Nick was the why. Do you understand, Nancy?”

Their gazes locked on each other for a moment. His eyes—which she'd studied for thirty-seven years of love and frustration and laughter and fear and delight and anxiety—spoke a message to her that was unmistakable in its existence but incomprehensible in its meaning. Nan's body quivered with a chill of fear, with the belief that she couldn't afford to understand anything that the man she loved would tell her from this moment on.