In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(214)

She realised that there was a single possibility.

She couldn't risk using the phone in Reception, so she went upstairs to the family floor to use the phone by their bed. She had the receiver in her hand, ready to punch in the number, when she saw the folded piece of paper on her pillow.

The message from her husband comprised one sentence. Nan Maiden read it and dropped the phone.

She didn't know where to go. She didn't know what to do. She ran from the bedroom. She clattered down the stairs with Andy's note clutched in her hand and so many voices inside her head shouting for action that she couldn't make out one coherent word that would tell her what step was the first to take.

She wanted to grab each person she saw: on the residents’ floor, in the lounge, in the kitchen, at work on the grounds. She wanted to shake them all. She wanted to shout Where is he help me what is he doing where has he gone what does it mean that he's … oh God don't tell me because I know I know I know what it means and I've always known and I don't want to hear it to face it to feel it to somehow come to terms with what he's … no no no … help me find him help me.

She found herself running across the car park before she knew she'd even gone there, and then she understood that her body had taken control of a mind that had ceased to function. Even as she realised what she was meant to do, she saw what she had already been told: The Land-Rover wasn't there. Andy had taken it himself because he'd intended to leave her powerless.

She wouldn't accept that. She spun and tore back into the hotel, where the first person she saw was one of her two Grindleford women—and why on earth had she always thought of them as the Grindleford women as if they had no names of their own?—and she accosted her.

Nan knew she looked wild. She certainly felt wild. But that couldn't matter.

She said, “Your car. Please,” which was as much as she could manage because she found that her breathing was erratic.

The woman blinked. “Mrs. Maiden? Are you ill?”

“The keys. Your car. It's Andy.”

Blessedly, that was message enough. Within moments Nan was behind the wheel of a Morris so old that its driver's seat consisted of a thin layer of stuffing covering springs.

She revved the engine and took off down the incline. Her only thought was to find him. Where he'd gone and why he'd gone there was something she would not dwell upon.

Barbara found that it was no mean feat convincing Winston Nkata to get involved. It had been one thing for him to invite her into the investigation when she had been just another DC waiting for an assignmerit while he himself trekked off to Derbyshire with Lynley. It was quite another for her to ask him to join her in a part of that same investigation once she'd been drop-kicked out of it. Her suggested little bout of hounds-chasing-the-fox wasn't authorised by their superior officer. So when she spoke to Nkata, she felt a little like Mr. Christian, while her fellow DC didn't sound much like a man who wanted to take a cruise on the Bounty.

He said, “No way, Barb. This's dodgy as hell.”

She said, “Winnie. It's a single phone call. And this's your lunch hour anyway, isn't it? Or it could be your lunch hour, couldn't it? You've got to eat, So just meet me there. We'll have a meal in the neighbourhood. We'll have anything you'd like. My treat. I promise.”

“But the guv—”

“—won't even have to know if it comes to nothing,” Barbara finished for him, and then she added, “Winnie, I need you.”

He hesitated. Barbara held her breath. Winston Nkata wasn't a man who rushed in with fools, so she gave him the time to think about her request from every possible angle. And while he did his thinking, she prayed. If Nkata didn't enter into her plan, she had no idea who else might be willing to.

He finally said, “Guv asked for a fax of your report from CRIS, Barb.”

“See?” she replied. “He's still barking up that bloody stupid tree and there's nothing in the branches. It's nowhere, Winnie. Come on. Please. You're my only hope. This is it. I know it. All I need from you is a single little phone call.”

She heard him sigh the sole word damn. Then, “Give me a half hour,” he said.

“Brilliant,” she said and began to ring off.

“Barb.” He caught her. “Don't make me regret this.”

She took off to South Kensington. After cruising up and down every street from Exhibition Road to Palace Gate, she finally found a place to park in Queen's Gate Gardens and walked over to the corner of Elvaston Place and Petersham Mews, which was where the only phone boxes on Elvaston Place were located. There were two of them, and they were hung with at least three dozen of the sort of advertising postcards that Barbara had found beneath Terry Cole's bed.

Nkata, having to travel the greater distance from Westminster, had not yet arrived, so Barbara took herself across Gloucester Road to a French bakery she'd spied on one of her circumnavigations of the neighbourhood in search of a parking space. Even from the street and inside her car, she'd smelled the siren fragrance of chocolate croissants. With time to kill in the wait for Winston, she decided there was no point to ignoring her body's desperate cry for the two basic food groups she'd so far denied herself that day: butter and sugar.

Twenty minutes after her own arrival in the South Kensington neighbourhood, Barbara saw Winston Nkata's lanky body coming up the street from the direction of Cromwell Road. She shoved the rest of her croissant into her mouth, wiped her fingers on her T-shirt, threw down the remains of a Coke, and dashed across the street just as he reached the corner.