In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(121)

Wicked, he thought. What a find. He was saved. It was a knife.

Julian Britton was doing what he always did at the end of a mountain rescue: He was checking his equipment as he put it away. But he wasn't being as thorough or as careful as he usually was when organising and repacking his gear. His thoughts were far away from ropes, boots, picks, hammers, compasses, maps, and everything else they used when someone got lost or someone else got injured and a team was required to find them.

His thoughts were on her. On Nicola. On what had been and what could have been had she only acted the appropriate part in the drama he'd written for their relationship.

“But I love you,” he'd said to her, and even to his own ears the four words had sounded pathetic and stricken.

“And I love you back,” she'd replied kindly. She'd even taken his hand and held it—palm upwards—as if she intended to place something within it. “Only it's not enough, the kind of love I feel for you. And the kind of love you want—and deserve—to have, Jules … well, it isn't the sort of love I'm likely to feel for anyone.”

“But I'm good for you. You've said it enough times over the years. That's enough, isn't it? Can't the other sort of love—the sort you're talking about … can't it grow from there? I mean, we're friends. We're companions. We're … for God's sake we're lovers … And if that doesn't mean we have something special together … Hell. What does?”

She'd sighed. She'd looked out of the car window to the darkness. He could see her reflection in the glass. “Jules, I've become an escort,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

The statement and the question had come out of nowhere, so for a moment he'd thought ridiculously of tour guides, travel escorts who stand at the front of a coach and speak into a microphone as the vehicle lumbers round the countryside with tourists crammed into its seats. “You're traveling?” he'd asked.

“I'm seeing men for money,” she replied. “I spend the evening with them. Sometimes I spend the night. I go to hotels and pick them up and we do what they want. Whatever they want. Then they pay me. They give me two hundred pounds an hour. Fifteen hundred pounds if I sleep in their beds for the night.”

He stared at her. He heard her clearly, but his brain refused to assimilate the information. He said, “I see. You have someone else in London, then.”

She said, “Jules, you're not listening to me.”

“I am. You said—”

“You're hearing. Not listening. Men pay me for companionship.”

“To go out on dates.”

“You could call them dates: dinner, the theatre, a gallery opening or business party when someone wants a nice-looking woman on his arm. They pay me for that. And they pay me for sex as well. And depending on what I do to them when it comes to sex, they pay me quite a lot. More than I would ever have imagined possible for f*cking a relative stranger, to be honest with you.”

The words were like bullets. And he reacted as he would have done had she fired a volley through his body. He went into shock. Not the normal sort of shock when one's system has undergone a physical trauma like a motor accident or a fall from a barn roof, but the sort of shock that shatters the psyche so that one can take in only a single detail and that detail is usually the least dangerous to one's peace.

So what he saw was her hair, how the light was behind it, and how it shone through individual strands so that she looked like an earthbound angel. But what she was telling him was far from angelic. It was foul and disgusting. And she continued to tell him, and he continued to die.

“No one forced me into it,” she said as she took a boiled sweet from her bag. “The escort stuff. Or the other. The sex. It was my decision once I saw the possibilities and once I knew how much I had to offer. I started out just having drinks with them. Dinner, sometimes. Or the theatre. All on the up and up, you know: a few hours of conversation and someone to listen, to reply if they wanted, and to look starry-eyed otherwise. But they always asked—every one of them—if I would do more. At first I thought no. I couldn't. I didn't know them, after all. And I always thought … I mean, I couldn't imagine doing it with someone that I didn't actually know. But then one of them asked if he could just touch me. Fifty pounds for putting his hand in my knickers and feeling my bush.” A smile. “When I had a bush back then. Before … You know. So I let him and it wasn't half bad. It was rather funny, in fact. I started laughing—this was inside, not openly, mind you—because it seemed so … just so silly: this bloke—older than my dad, he was—breathing heavy and going all teary-eyed because he had his hand in my crotch. So when he said Touch me back please, I told him that would be fifty pounds more. He said Oh God, anything. So I obliged. One hundred pounds for feeling his willie and letting him poke round my bush with his fingers.”

“Stop.” He'd finally managed the words.

But she was eager to make him understand. They were friends, after all. They'd always been friends. They'd been mates from the moment they'd met in Bakewell: she a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl with an attitude and a strut to her walk that had always said I'm open to anything only he hadn't seen that until this moment, and he nearly three years her senior, home from university for the holidays and consumed with worry about his father's drinking and a house that was falling down round their ears. But Nicola hadn't seen his worries then. She'd seen only an opportunity for some fun. Which she'd taken happily. He understood that now.