In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(195)

“Nancy,” he said, “please tell me the truth.”

But she couldn't. She couldn't. He'd created her life. He'd watched her grow. He'd kept every missive and treasured every word. He'd seen her through childhood illnesses and adolescent tantrums, into an adulthood of which he'd been so proud. So if there was a chance—just the slightest possibility—that his physical condition was unrelated to Nicola's death, then she would live by that chance. She'd die by it as well, if that was necessary.

“She was wonderful, wasn't she?” Nan Maiden whispered, gesturing to the memories of Nicola that her husband had taken from their storage place. “Wasn't our little girl just the best?”

Vi Nevin wasn't alone in her room when Barbara Havers arrived at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Sitting next to her bed with her head pressed into the mattress like an orange-haired supplicant at the feet of a heavily bandaged goddess was a girl with limbs like bicycle spokes and the wrists and ankles of a starvation dieter. She looked up as the door swung shut behind Barbara.

“How'd you get in?” she demanded, rising and adopting a defensive stance with her inadequate body placed between the interloper and the bed. “That cop out there i'n't s'posed to let anyone—”

“Relax,” Barbara said, excavating in her bag for identification. “I'm one of the good guys.”

The girl sidled forward, snatched Barbara's warrant card, and read it: one eye on the card and the other on Barbara lest she make any precipitate moves. On the bed behind her, the patient stirred. She murmured, “'S okay, Shell. I saw her already. With the black, th’ other day. You know.”

Shell—who said she was Vi's best friend on earth, Shelly Platt, who meant to take care of Vi till the end of time and don't you forget it—returned Barbara's identification and slunk back to her seat. Barbara rustled out a notepad and a chewed-upon Biro and pulled the room's other chair into a position from which she and Vi Nevin could see each other.

She said, “I'm sorry about the beating. I got one myself a few months ago. Rotten business, but at least I could point the finger at the bastard. Can you? What d'you remember?”

Shelly went to the head of the bed, taking Vi's hand and beginning to stroke it. Her presence was an irritant to Barbara, like a sudden case of contact dermatitis, but the young woman in the bed seemed to take comfort from it. Whatever helps, Barbara thought. She sat with Biro poised.

Beneath the bandages, what could be seen of Vi Nevin's swollen face was her eyes, a small portion of her forehead, and a stitched-up lower lip. She looked like a victim of the sort of explosive that threw off shrapnel. She said in a voice so faint that Barbara strained to hear it, “Had a punter coming. Old bloke, this is. Likes honey on him. I coat him first … You know? Then I lick it off.”

What a treat, Barbara thought. She said, “Right. You say honey? Brilliant. Go on.”

Vi Nevin did so. She said she'd readied herself for her appointment in the schoolgirl costume that her client preferred. But when she'd brought out the honey jar, she'd realised that there wouldn't be enough to baste all the body parts he usually requested. “Plenty for the prong,” Vi said with the frankness of a professional. “But if he wanted more, I needed to have it to hand.”

“I've got the picture,” Barbara told her.

At the head of the bed, Shelly eased a skinny thigh onto the mattress. She said, “I c'n tell it, Vi. You'll wear yourself out.”

Vi shook her head and continued the story. There was little enough of it.

She'd popped out for the honey before her client's arrival. When she'd returned, she'd transferred the honey into its regular jug and she'd assembled a tray with the linens and other assorted goodies—all of which appeared to be either edible or potable—that she used in her regular sessions with the man. She'd been carrying the tray into the sitting room, when she'd heard a sound from one of the bedrooms upstairs.

All right, Barbara thought. Her interpretation of the pictures taken at the Fulham crime scene was about to be confirmed. But to be absolutely sure, she clarified with “Was it your client? Had he arrived ahead of you?”

“Not him,” Vi murmured.

Shelly said to Barbara, “You c'n see she's knackered. That's enough for now.”

“Hang on,” Barbara told her. “So a bloke was upstairs, but he wasn't a client? Then how'd he get in? You hadn't bolted the door?”

Vi raised the hand that Shelly wasn't clutching. It rose two inches off the bed and fell back. She reminded Barbara, “Only popped out for honey Ten minutes is all.” So she saw no reason to bolt the door. When she heard the noise above stairs, she explained, she went to investigate and found a bloke in her bedroom. The room itself was in shambles.

“You saw him?”

Only a shadowy glimpse of him as he lunged at her, Vi explained.

Fine, Barbara thought, because a glimpse might well do it. She said, “That's good. That's brilliant, then. Tell me what you can. Anything at all. A detail. A scar. A mark. Anything,” and she summoned into her mind the image of Matthew King-Ryder's face to match it up with whatever Vi Nevin said.

But what Vi gave her was a description of Everyman: medium height, medium build, brown hair, clear skin. And while it fitted Matthew King-Ryder to a T, it also fitted at least seventy percent of the male population.