In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(44)

“He wanted to spare her as long as he could. What man wouldn't?” Lynley asked.

“A man with nothing on his conscience,” Hanken said.

Showered and changed into the most comfortable elastic-waisted trousers that she possessed, Barbara was back to grazing—on leftover take-away pork fried rice which, unheated, wasn't about to make it onto anyone's culinary top ten—when Nkata arrived. He announced himself with two sharp raps on the door. She swung it open, take-away container in hand, and leveled a chopstick at him.

“Your watch stopped or something? What goes for five minutes in your book, Winston?”

He stepped inside unbidden and flashed her the full wattage of his smile. “Sorry. Got another page before I could clear out. The guv. I had to phone him first.”

“Of course. Can't keep his lordship waiting.”

Nkata let the comment go. “Damned lucky that service is slow at the pub. I should've been out of there thirty minutes ago, which would've put me too close to Shoreditch to come back here for you. Funny, isn't it? Like my mum always says. Things work out exactly the way they're s'posed to.”

Barbara stared at him, wordless. She felt nonplused. She wanted to tell him off for the note he'd left her—and for the letter C so prominent on it—but his air of ease stopped her. She couldn't explain his nonchalance any more than she could explain his presence inside her dwelling. He could at least look bloody uncomfortable, she decided.

“We got two bodies in Derbyshire and a London angle that needs playing on the case,” Nkata said. He sketched in the details: a woman, a young man, a former SO 10 officer, anonymous letters assembled from newsprint, a threatening note written by hand. “I got to get over to an address in Shoreditch where this dead bloke might've come from,” he told her. “If someone's there who can i.d. the body, I'm on my way back to Buxton in the morning. But the Yard end of things'll need looking into. The spector just told me to set that up. That's why he paged.”

Barbara couldn't hide her eagerness when she said, “Lynley asked for me?”

Nkata's glance shifted away for an instant, but that was enough. Her spirits came to earth.

“I see.” She carried her take-away container to the kitchen work top. The rice sat heavily on her stomach. Its flavour clung to her tongue like fur. “If he doesn't know you're asking me, Winston, I can refuse with no one the wiser, can't I? You can pass me by and get someone else.”

“Can do, sure,” Nkata said. “I can check the rota. Or I can wait till morning and let the super make the call. But doing all that leaves you free to get assigned to Stewart, Hale, or MacPherson, doesn't it? And I didn't much think you'd want to go that way if you didn't have to.” He left unsaid what was legend in CID: Barbara's failure to establish a working relationship with the DIs he'd mentioned, her subsequent return to uniform from which she had only been elevated by her partnership with Lynley.

Barbara swung around, perplexed by what appeared to be the other DCs inexplicable generosity. Another man in his position would have left her hanging in the wind, the better to improve his own position, and to hell with what she might have to face. That Nkata wasn't doing so made her doubly cautious.

He was saying, “It's computer work the guv wants. On CRIS. Not your thing, I know. But I thought if you wanted to come to Shoreditch with me—which is why I was in your neighbourhood in the first place—I could drop you at the Yard afterwards and you could get onto Crime Recording straightaway. If you pull something good from the records quick, who knows?” Nkata shifted on his feet. His air of ease diminished slightly as he concluded. “It could go some distance to setting you right.”

Barbara found an unopened packet of cigarettes wedged between the crumb-dusted toaster and a box of watermelon Pop-Tarts. She lit up, using one of the gas burners on the cooker, and she tried to make sense of what she was hearing. “I don't get it. This is your chance, Winston. Why don't you take it?”

“My chance for what?” he said, looking blank.

“You know for what. To climb the ladder, to ascend the mountain, to fly to the moon. My stock with Lynley couldn't be much lower. Now's your chance to break out of the pack. Why aren't you taking it? Or better said, why're you taking the risk that I might do something to untarnish myself?”

“The spector told me to bring in another DC,” Nkata said. “I thought of you.”

And there they were, those two ugly letters once again. DC. And there was the nasty reminder as well: of what she had been and what she had become. Of course Nkata would have thought of her. What better way to rub her face in her loss of position and authority than by bringing her in as a fellow DC, his superior no longer?

“Ah,” she said. “Another DC. As to that …” She scooped up the note from where she'd left it on the dining table next to her necklace. She said, “I guess I've got to thank you for this, haven't I? I'd been thinking about taking out an advert in the paper to inform the general public, but you've saved me the trouble.”

Nkata's eyebrows knotted. “What're you on about?”

“The note, Winston. Did you honestly think I might forget my position? Or did you just want to remind me that we're equals now, players on a level pitch, lest I forget?”