In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(147)

“Deal?” Lynley asked.

“When her services would be required,” Chloe explained. “What they would entail and what she would be paid for them.”

“Chloe and I talked to her together for both interviews to make the arrangements,” Sir Adrian said. “It was crucial that she understand there would be nothing gained by holding over my head a liaison potentially painful to my wife.”

“Because it wasn't painful,” Chloe said. “At least not to me.”

“Will you show them the chamber, darling?” Sir Adrian asked his wife. “I'll pop down to the children and let them know we'll be with them before too much longer.”

“Of course,” she replied. “Come with me, Inspector, Constable.” And as gracefully as she'd sat, she rose, leading them to the door and up two flights of stairs as Sir Adrian went off to have a few words with his partying offspring. They were, ironically, crooning “I Get No Kick from Champagne.”

Lady Beattie showed them up to the top floor of the house. From deep within an old clothes press that stood in the narrow corridor there, she took a key, which she used on one of the doors. She swung it open, preceded the police into the room, and switched on a low-wattage light.

“He actually wanted only discipline at first,” she explained, “which, while I found it a bit odd, frankly, I was able to give him. Rulers on the palm, paddles on the bottom, the strap against the back of his legs. But after a few years he wanted more, and when it got to the point that I wasn't strong enough … Well, he's already explained that, hasn't he? At any rate, here's where they had their sessions—where he and I had them as well when I was able.”

The chamber, as they'd called it, had been fashioned out of several of the erstwhile servants' bedrooms. By knocking out walls, padding them, installing a ventilation system that obviated the use of windows—which were themselves shuttered against potential outside curiosity—the Beatties had created a fantasy world that was in part headmaster's office, operating theatre, dungeon, and mediaeval torture chamber. A line of cupboards had been fitted under the eaves, and Lady Beattie opened these to display the various costumes and devices of discipline, as she called them, that had been used on Sir Adrian.

It was clear why the Maiden girl had brought nothing with her to the house save her desire to be useful to Sir Adrian and to be paid well for her usefulness: The costumes in the cupboards ranged from a heavy wool nuns habit to a prison guards uniform complete with truncheon. There was, of course, the more traditional garb associated with the's & M game: PVC get-ups of red or black, leather teddies and masks, high-heeled boots. And the instruments of Sir Adrian's discipline, tidily arranged like the antique surgical instruments in the study, also explained why she'd been able to make her calls so lightly burdened. Everything necessary for discipline, pain, and humiliation had been collected and housed together.

From his years in policing, Lynley knew that he should by now have seen it all. But every time he thought he had, something in life caught him by surprise. And in this case, it wasn't so much the presence of the chamber in the Beatties' house that took his breath away. It was the attitude to it taken by the couple themselves, particularly the wife. She might have been showing them a state-of-the-art kitchen.

She seemed to realise this. Watching Lynley from her position in the doorway, observing Nkata wandering the length of the room with an expression on his face that suggested how actively his imagination was supplying him with images of the uses to which the costumes and the equipment were put, she said quietly, “I wouldn't have had it this way had I been given a choice. One does expect a traditional marriage. But loving someone means compromise occasionally. And once he explained why it was so important to him …” She gestured at the room with a hand whose knuckles were enlarged from the disease that had necessitated Nicola Maiden's entrance into the Beatties’ private world. “Need is just need. So long as judgement remains apart from it, need has no real power to hurt us.”

“Did you mind another woman seeing to the need?”

“My husband loves me. I've never had any doubt about that.”

Lynley wondered.

Sir Adrian rejoined them, saying to her, “You're wanted below, darling. Molly's not to be denied her presents another five minutes.”

“But will you—”

They communicated in that way peculiar to couples who'd been married for more than a generation. “As soon as I finish here. It won't be long.”

When she'd left them, Sir Adrian waited for a moment before he said quietly, “There's a part, of course, that I'd rather Chloe didn't know. It would only hurt her unnecessarily.”

Nkata made his notebook ready as Lynley thought about what the surgeon's statement implied. He said, “You paged her—Nicola—throughout the summer. But as she couldn't have serviced you with discipline from Derbyshire, I've a feeling your ‘arrangement’ was something more than you wanted to say in front of your wife.”

“You're very good, Inspector.” Beattie closed the chamber door. “I was in love with her. Not at first, naturally. We didn't know each other. But within a month or two, I realised how strongly I was feeling about her. Initially, I told myself it was only addiction: A new woman doing the discipline heightened my excitement, and I wanted that excitement more and more often. But it went beyond that in the end because she was far more than I expected. So I wanted to keep her.”