In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner (60 page)

Thus on a Saturday night, DI Peter Hanken found himself not in the bosom of his family in Buxton but, rather, standing before a microscope while Miss Amber Kubowsky—chief evidence technician of the moment—waxed enthusiastic about what she'd discovered regarding the Swiss Army knife and the wounds that had been made on the body of Terry Cole.

The blood on the knife—she was happy to confirm as she went at her scalp with the rubber end of a pencil, as if wishing to erase something that was scribbled on her skull—was indeed Cole's. And, upon carefully prising apart the knife's various blades and devices, she'd been able to ascertain that the left blade of the scissors was, as reported by Andy Maiden, broken off. Thus, the ineluctable conclusion one would normally reach was that the knife in question not only inflicted the wounds found upon Terry Cole's body, but also bore a marked resemblance to the knife that Andy Maiden had allegedly passed on to his daughter.

“Right,” Hanken said.

She looked pleased at his affirmation of her remarks. She said, “Have a look at this, then,” and nodded towards the microscope.

Hanken squinted through the lens. Everything Miss Amber Kubowsky had said was so achingly obvious that he wondered at her level of excitement. Things must be as bland as yesterday's porridge in the laboratory—not to mention in her life—if the poor lass got herself worked up over this. “What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?” he asked Miss Kubowsky, raising his head and gesturing at the microscope. “This doesn't much look like a scissor blade to me. Or blood, for that matter.”

“It isn't,” she said happily. “And that's the point, DI Hanken. That's what's so damned intriguing about everything.”

Hanken glanced at the clock on the wall. He'd been working nonstop for more than twelve hours, and before the day was through he still wanted to coordinate his information with whatever was being accumulated at the London end of the case. So the last entertainment he was willing to engage in was a guessing game with a frizzy-haired forensic technician.

He said, “If it's not the blade and it's not Cole's blood, why am I looking at it, Miss Kubowsky?”

“It's nice you're so polite,” she told him. “Not every detective has your manners, I find.”

She was going to find out a hell of a lot more if she didn't start elucidating, Hanken thought. But he thanked her for the compliment and indicated that he'd be happy to hear whatever else she had to tell him as long as she told him post haste.

“Oh! Of course,” she said. “That's the scapula wound you're looking at there. Well, not all of it. If you magnified the whole thing, it would be twenty inches long, probably. This is just a portion of it.”

“The scapula wound?”

“Right. It was the biggest gash on the boy's body, did the doctor say? On his back? The boy, not the doctor, that is.”

Hanken recalled Dr. Myles's report. One of the wounds had chipped the left scapula and come near to one of the heart's arteries.

Miss Kubowksy said, “I wouldn't have bothered with it normally, except I saw on the report that the scapula—that's one of the bones in the back, did you know?—had a weapon mark on it, so I went ahead and compared the mark with the knife blades. With all the knife blades. And what do you know?”

“What?”

“The knife didn't make that mark, Inspector Hanken. No way, not for a minute, uh-uh, and forget it.”

Hanken stared at her. He tried to assimilate the information. More, he wondered if she'd made a mistake. She looked so scatty—her lab coat had half its hem ripped out and a coffee stain on the front of it—that it was hardly beyond the realm of possibility that she was less than proficient in her own line of work.

Amber Kubowsky apparently not only saw the doubt on his face but also understood the necessity for dispelling it. When she went on, she'd become perfect science, speaking in terms of x-rays, blade widths, angles, and micro-millimeters. She didn't complete her remarks until she was certain he understood the import of what she was saying: The tip of the weapon that had pierced Terry Cole's back, chipped his scapula, and scored the bone was shaped unlike the tip of any of the Swiss Army knife's blades. While the knife blades’ tips were pointed—obviously, because how could they be knife blades if they weren't pointed, she asked reasonably—they broadened out at an entirely different angle from the weapon that had marked the bone in Terry Cole's back.

Hanken whistled tonelessly She'd given an impressive recitation, but he had to ask. “Are you sure?”

“I'd swear to it, Inspector. We would've all missed it if I didn't have this theory about x-rays and microscopes that I won't go into at the moment.”

“But the knife made the other wounds on the body?”

“Except for the scapula wound. Yes. That's right.”

She had other information to impart as well. And she took him to another area of the lab, where she held forth on the topic of a pewterlike smear she'd also been asked to evaluate.

When he'd heard what Amber Kubowsky had to say on this final subject, Hanken headed immediately for a phone. It was time to track down Lynley.

Hanken rang the other DI's mobile and found Lynley in the casualty ward of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Lynley put him into the picture tersely: Vi Nevin had been brutally attacked in the maisonette that she and Nicola Maiden had shared.

“What's her condition?”

There was noise in the background, someone shouting, “Over here!” and the increasingly loud howl of an ambulance's double-note siren.

“Thomas?” Hanken raised his voice. “What's her condition? Have you got anything from her?”

“Nothing,” Lynley finally replied from London. “We haven't been able to manage a statement yet. We can't even get close. They've been working on her for an hour.”

“What do you think? Related to the case, what's happened?”

“I'd say that's likely.” Lynley went on to catalogue what he'd learned since their last conversation, beginning with his interview of Shelly Platt, continuing with a precis of his experience at MKR Financial Management, and ending with his meeting with Sir Adrian Beattie and his wife. “So we've managed to unearth the London lover, but he's got an alibi—still to be confirmed, by the way. Even if he hadn't an alibi, I have to say I can't see him slogging across the moors to knife one victim and chase down the other. He must be over seventy.”

“So Upman was telling the truth,” Hanken said, “at least in regard to the pager and those phone calls that the Maiden girl took while she was at work.”

“It looks that way, Peter. But Beattie claims there had to be someone in Derbyshire supplying her with money, or she wouldn't have gone there in the first place.”

“Upman can't be making that much from his divorcees. He said he wasn't in London in May, by the way. He said his diary could prove it.”

“What about Britton?”

“He's still on my list. I got waylaid by the Swiss Army knife.” Hanken brought Lynley up-to-date in that respect, adding the news about the scapula wound. Another weapon, he told Lynley, had evidently been used upon the boy.

“Another knife?”

“Possibly. And Maiden's got one. He even produced it for my inspection.”

“You aren't thinking Andy's fool enough to show you one of the murder weapons. Peter, he's a cop, not a cretin.”

“Wait. When I saw it at first I didn't think Maiden's knife could have been used on the boy because the blades are too short. But I was thinking of the other wounds then, not the blow to the scapula. How far is the scapula beneath the skin anyway? And if Kubowsky dismissed one Swiss Army knife for the scapula wound, does it follow that none other could have done the job?”

“We're back to motive, Peter. Andy hasn't got one. But every other man in her life—not to mention one or two women—has.”

“Don't be so quick to dismiss him,” Hanken objected, “because there's more. Listen to this. I've identification on the substance we found on that odd chrome cylinder from the boot of her car. What d'you expect it is?”

“Tell me.”

“Semen. And there were two other semen deposits on it as well. We've two from secretors—that's counting the one you and I saw—and the other not. The only thing Kubowsky couldn't tell me is what the damn cylinder is in the first place. I've never seen anything like it and neither has she.”

“It's a ball stretcher,” Lynley told him.

“A what?”

“Hang on, Pete.” At the other end of the line, Hanken heard the rumble of male voices with continued hospital noises as counterpoint. Lynley got back to him, saying, “She'll pull through, thank God.”

“Can you get to her?”

“Unconscious at the moment.” And then to someone else, “Round-the-clock protection. No visitors without first clearing them with me. And ask for their IDs if anyone shows up …. No. I have no idea …. Right.” Then he was back. “Sorry. Where was I?”

“A ball stretcher.”

“Ah. Yes.”

Hanken listened as his colleague explained the device of torture. He felt his own testicles shrink in response.

“My guess is that it rolled out of one of her cases when she was en route to or from a client while she worked for Reeve,” Lynley concluded. “It could have been in the boot of her car for months.”

Hanken reflected on this and saw another possibility. He knew Lynley would fight it, so he broached the subject with care. “Thomas, she might have used it in Derbyshire. Perhaps on someone who's not admitting it.”

“I don't see either Upman or Britton going in for the whips-and-chains routine. And Ferrer seems more likely to use something on his women rather than vice versa. Who else is there?”

“Her dad.”

“Christ. Peter, that's a bloody sick thought.”

“Isn't it just. But the whole S & M scene's sick, and from what you've just told me, its major players look normal as hell.”

“There is no way—”

“Just listen.” And Hanken reported his interview with the dead girl's parents, including Nan Maiden's interruption of that interview and Andy Maidens feeble alibi. “So who's to say beyond doubt that Nicola wasn't servicing her dad along with everyone else?”

“Peter, you can't keep reinventing the case to fit your suspicions. If she was servicing her father—which, by the way, I would go to the rack protesting—then he can't have killed her because of her lifestyle which—as you recall—was your earlier position.”

“Then you agree he has a motive?”

“I agree that you're twisting my words.” A new spate of noise then ensued: sirens and a babble of voices. It sounded to Hanken as if the other DI were conducting their conversation in the middle of a motorway. When the noise abated slightly, Lynley said, “There's still what happened to Vi Nevin to consider. What happened tonight. If that's related to the doings in Derbyshire, you've got to see that Andy Maiden isn't involved.”

“Then who?”

“My money's on Martin Reeve. He had a bone to pick with both of the women.”

Lynley went on to say that their best hope was having Vi Nevin regain consciousness and name her attacker. Then they would have immediate grounds to drag Martin Reeve into the Met, where he belonged. “I'll stay for a while to see if she comes to,” he said. “If she doesn't in an hour or two, I'll have them ring me the moment her condition changes. What about you?”

Hanken sighed. He rubbed his tired eyes and stretched to ease the tension he was feeling in the muscles of his back. He thought of Will Upman and his stress management massages at the Manchester Airport Hilton. He could have done with one of those himself.

“I'll get on to Julian Britton,” he said. “Truth to tell, though, I can't see him as anyone's killer. A bloke dandling puppies in his spare time doesn't strike me as someone who'd bash in his lover's skull. And as for knifing a bloke into minced beef … more likely he'd sick the harriers on someone.”

“But if he believed he had powerful cause to kill her … ?” Lynley asked.

“Oh, to be sure.” Hanken agreed. “Someone believed he had powerful cause to kill Nicola Maiden.”

The doctor had given her sleeping pills, but Nan Maiden hadn't taken them after the first night. She couldn't afford to be less than vigilant, so she did nothing to encourage slumber. When she went to bed at all, she dozed. But most of the time she either walked the corridors in a corporeal haunting or sat in the overstuffed armchair in their bedroom and watched her husband's fitful rest.

This night, her pyjama-clad legs curled beneath her and a hand-knitted blanket drawn round her shoulders, Nan huddled into the armchair and observed her husband thrashing round in the bed. She couldn't tell if he was really asleep or just feigning sleep, but in either case, it didn't matter. The sight of him there roused within her a complicated tangle of emotions more important to consider at the moment than the authenticity of her husband's repose.

She still wanted him. Odd after all these years that she still felt desire for him in the same old way, but she did. And that desire had never abated for either of them. Rather, it seemed to have increased over time, as if the length of their marriage had somehow seasoned the passion they felt for each other. So she'd noticed when Andy first stopped turning to her at night. And she'd noticed when he stopped reaching for and claiming her with the assurance and familiarity that were born of their long and happy marriage.

She dreaded what that change in him meant.

It had happened once before—this loss of interest on Andy's part in what had always been the most vital area of their relationship—and so long ago that Nan liked to believe she'd nearly forgotten it had happened at all. But that wasn't the real fact of the matter, and Nan could admit that much in the safety of darkness as her husband did or did not sleep some six feet away from her.

He'd been undercover in a drugs operation. Seduction had been called for as the drama played out. Remaining true to his assigned role required him to accept all advances made in his direction no matter the nature those advances took. And when several of them were overtly sexual … What else could he do that would keep him in character? he asked her later. How else could he act so as not to betray the entire operation and endanger the lives of the officers involved?