In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(134)

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.