In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(24)

Julian had returned immediately to Maiden Hall, wanting to be the one to break the news to Andy and Nan before they heard it from the police. He intended to say that it was only a body after all. There was nothing to indicate that the body was Nicola's.

But when he arrived, there was a panda car drawn up to the front of the hunting lodge. And when he dashed inside, it was to find Andy and Nan in a corner of the lounge where the diamond panes of a large bay window cast miniature rainbows against the wall. They were in the company of a uniformed constable. Their faces were ashen. Nan was holding on to Andy's arm, her fingers creating deep indentations in the sleeve of his plaid flannel shirt. Andy was staring down at the coffee table between them and the constable.

All three of them looked up when Julian entered. The constable spoke. “Excuse me, sir. But if you could give Mr. and Mrs. Maiden a few minutes …”

Julian realised that the constable assumed he was one of the guests at Maiden Hall. Nan clarified his relationship to the family, identifying him as “my daughter's fiancé They've only just become engaged. Come, Julian,” and she extended a hand to him and drew him down onto the sofa so that the three of them sat together as the family they were not and could never be.

The constable had just got to the unsettling part. A female body had been found on the moor. It might be the Maidens’ missing daughter. He was sorry, but one of them was going to have to accompany him to Buxton to make an identification.

“Let me go,” Julian had said impulsively. It felt inconceivable that either of Nicolas parents would have to be subjected to the grisly task. Indeed, it felt inconceivable that the identification of Nicola's body should fall to anyone but himself: the man who loved her, wanted her, and tried to make a difference in her life.

The constable said regretfully that it had to be a member of the family. When Julian offered to go along with Andy, Andy demurred. Someone needed to stay with Nan, he said. And to his wife, “I'll phone from Buxton, if … if.”

He'd been as good as his word. It had taken several hours for the call to come through, owing to the time involved in getting the body from the moor to the hospital where the post-mortems would be performed. But when he'd seen the young woman's corpse, he'd phoned.

Nan hadn't collapsed as Julian thought she might do. She'd said, “Oh no,” shoved the phone at Julian, and run from the lodge.

Julian had spoken to Andy only long enough to hear from his own mouth what Julian already knew to be the fact. Then he'd gone after Nicola's mother. He found her on her knees in Christian-Louis's herb garden behind the Maiden Hall kitchen. She was scraping up handfuls of the freshly watered earth, mounding them round her as if she wished to bury herself. She was saying, “No. No,” but she wasn't weeping.

She fought to break loose when Julian put his hands on her shoulders and began to lift her to her feet. He'd never suspected how strong such a small woman could be and he'd had to shout for help from the kitchen. Both of the Grindleford women had come running. Together with Julian, they'd managed to get Nan back into the lodge and up the staff stairs. With their help, Julian got her to drink two shots of brandy. And it was at this point that she began to weep.

“I must do …” she cried. “Give me something to do.” That last word rose on a chilling wail.

Julian was aware of being out of his depth. She needed a doctor. He went to phone one. He could have left it to the Grindleford duo. But making the decision to call in a doctor got him out of Nan and Andy's bedroom, a space suddenly so close and confined that Julian felt in another minute he would be unable to breathe.

So he'd descended the stairs and commandeered the telephone. He rang for a doctor. And then, finally, he rang Broughton Manor and spoke to his cousin. Whether they were appropriate or not, Samantha's questions were logical. He'd failed to come home on the previous night, as his unusual absence at breakfast had no doubt telegraphed to his cousin. It was now midday. He was asking her to take on one of his responsibilities. Naturally, she would want to know what had occurred to spur him to behaviour as uncharacteristic as it was mysterious.

Still, he didn't want to tell her. Talking to her about Nicola's death was something he couldn't do at the moment. So he said, “There's been an emergency at Maiden Hall, Sam. I need to hang about. So will you see to the puppies?”

“What sort of emergency?”

“Sam … Come on. Will you do me this favour?” His prize harrier Cass had recently whelped, and the puppies as well as their dam needed to be monitored.

Sam knew the routine. She'd watched him perform it often enough. She'd even helped him on occasion. So it wasn't as if he were asking her to perform the impossible or even, for that fact, the unusual or the unknown. But it was becoming clear that she wasn't going to accommodate him without being told why she was being asked to do so.

He settled on saying, “Nicola's gone missing. Her mum and dad are in a state. I need to be here.”

“What d'you mean‘gone missing?’” Thwack served as punctuation. She would be standing at the wooden work top beneath the kitchen's ceiling-high single window, where generations of knives cutting up vegetables had worn a shallow trough into the oak.

“She's disappeared. She went hiking on Tuesday. She didn't turn up last night when she was supposed to.”