In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(108)

“Coverage?” Nkata said.

“He'd have had the raingear to hide the blood on him.”

“But if he knew he had to stop somewhere after the killing—or if he knew he'd be seen on the route back to his digs—he couldn't exactly have a waterproof on. Why would he be wearing it? It wasn't raining on Tuesday night.” Havers still stood at the doorway. And her questions and statement were careful, as if she'd finally and gratifyingly come to realise just how much a probationary figure she was.

There was sense in her remarks. Lynley acknowledged this with a nod. He went on to the postcards, saying as he used them to gesture with, “Let me hear it all again.”

Havers shot a look at Nkata as if she expected him to take the bit. He read her meaning and said, “I could do a quick A to zed off the top of my head. But I'd miss fifteen letters in between. You take it.”

“Right.” She stayed at the door. “I'd been thinking how any one of that lot”—with a nod to the cards on Lynley's desk—“might have a motive to murder Terry Cole. What if he'd been cheating them? What if he collected their cards, took their hundred pounds each, and never put up the cards at all? Or at least not the number he said.” After all, she pointed out, how did a prostitute really know where—or even if—her cards were tacked up, unless she went out personally to check on them? And even if she walked round central London making stops at every phone box she came to, what was to prevent Terry Cole from claiming that the BT contract cleaners were sweeping the boxes free of cards just as fast as he could distribute them?

“So I decided to give each of them a call, to see what they had to say about Terry.” She got very little joy from the calls she'd made, however, and she had just begun to ring the number advertised on the schoolgirl card, when she'd given the picture closer scrutiny and realised the girl looked awfully familiar. Fairly certain about her identity, she'd phoned the number on the card and said, “Is that Vi Nevin, then?” when her call was answered. “DC Barbara Havers here,” she'd said to the young woman. “I've one or two points to clear up, if you have the time. Or should I call in in the morning?”

On the other end of the line, Vi Nevin hadn't even questioned how Havers had come to have her number. She'd merely said in her sculpted RADA voice, “It's after midnight. Do you know that, Constable? Are you trying to intimidate me?”

“She looks young enough to play the part of a schoolgirl in some punter's sex fantasy,” Havers concluded. “And from the looks of her digs yesterday, I'd say—” She winced and halted, obviously realising what she'd just revealed about the rest of her activities on the previous day. “Inspector, listen. I talked Winnie into letting me be part of everything. He really wanted me to stay on the computer, just like you ordered. He's absolutely in the clear on this. It just seemed to me that with two of us doing the interview instead of one, we'd be able to—”

Lynley cut her off. “We'll talk about that later.” He gave his attention to the second of the two postcards that had been at the centre of his desk. The telephone number was the same as the number on the schoolgirl card. What was on offer was different, however.

Nikki Temptation was printed prominently at the top of the second card with the words Discover the Mysteries of Domination just beneath the name. And under that suggestion the mysteries themselves were alluded to: a fully equipped torture chamber, a dungeon, a medical room, a school room. Bring Your Toys Or Use Mine was the final enticement. The telephone number followed. There was no picture.

“At least we got the reason they left MKR Financial,” Nkata said. “These birds, they take in anything from fifty quid an hour up to fifteen hundred a night. 'Ccording to what my sources say,” he added quickly as if clarification were needed to keep his reputation unbesmirched. “I had a word with Hillinger in Obscene Publications. Those blokes've seen it all.”

Reluctantly, Lynley saw how the various pieces of information they'd been gathering on Nicola Maiden were beginning to fit together. He said, “The pager was for her clients, then, which explains why her parents didn't know she had one but Upman and Ferrer—both of them men with whom she'd been intimate—did.”

“You mean she was on the game in Derbyshire as well?” Barbara asked. “With Upman and Ferrer?”

“Perhaps. But even if she was having them just for the fun of it, she was a business woman who'd want to keep in touch with her regular clients.”

“Giving them phone sex while she was away?”

“It's possible.”

“But why was she away?”

That was still the question.

“As to those blokes from the Peaks,” Nkata added thoughtfully.

“What about them?”

“There was a blow-up in Islington. I'm wondering about it.”

“Blow-up?”

“Nicola's landlady in Islington heard her having a row with some bloke,” Havers put in from the doorway. “In May. Just before she moved house to Fulham.”

“I'm wondering if we finally got ourselves a rock-solid motive to pin to Julian Britton,” Nkata said. “This bloke said he'd see her dead before he'd let her ‘do it’ … something like that. P'rhaps he knew she'd left law college and MKR to go on the game.”