In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(54)

In her perusal of the files, she'd come across the same name time and again: DCI Dennis Hextell, with whom Maiden had worked in partnership as an undercover cop. If she could locate Hextell, she thought, he might be able to put her onto a lead that was stronger than something she would have to interpret from reading twenty years of files. That was the ticket, she decided: Hextell. She shoved herself off the stairs and went in search of him.

It turned out to be easier than she had anticipated. A phone call to SO 10 gained her the information that DCI Hextell was still in the department, although now, as detective chief superintendent he directed operations instead of taking part in them on the street.

Barbara found him at a small table in the cafeteria on the fourth floor. She introduced herself, asking if she could join him. The DCS looked up from a set of photographs. His face, Barbara saw, wasn't so much lined as it was gouged, and gravity had taken its toll on his muscles. The years certainly hadn't been good to him.

The chief superintendent gathered his photographs together and didn't answer. Barbara said helpfully, “I'm working on the Maiden killing in Derbyshire, sir. Andy Maiden's daughter. You were a team with him, right?”

That got a response. “Sit.”

She could live with monosyllables. Barbara did his bidding. She'd fetched herself a Coke and a chocolate donut from the cafeteria, and she set these down on the table in front of her.

“Rot your teeth, that,” Hextell noted with a nod.

“I'm a victim of my addictions.”

He grunted.

“That your plane?” Barbara asked with a nod at the picture on the top of his stack. It featured a yellow bi-plane of the sort that had been flown in World War I when aviators wore leather helmets and flowing white scarves.

“One of them,” he said. “The one I use for aerobatics.”

“Stunt pilot, are you?”

“I fly.”

“Oh. Right. Must be nice.” Barbara wondered if the years undercover had made the man so loquacious. She launched into the purpose behind tracking him down: Was there any case, any stake-out, any operation that leapt to mind as being particularly important in the history of his association with Andy Maiden? “We're looking at revenge as a possible motive for the girl's murder, someone that you and DI Maiden put away, someone wanting to settle the score. Maidens trying to come up with a name on his own in Derbyshire, and I've been scrolling through the reports all morning on the computer. But nothings ringing my chimes.”

Hextell began separating his pictures. He appeared to have a system for doing so, but Barbara couldn't tell what it was since each shot was of exactly the same plane, just of varying angles: the fuselage here, the struts there, the wing tip, the engine, and the tail. When the piles were arranged to his liking, he took a magnifying glass from his jacket pocket and began studying each photograph under it. “Could be anyone. We were rubbing elbows with first class rot. Pushers, addicts, pimps, gun runners. You name it. Any one of them would have walked the length of the country to rub us out.”

“But no one's name comes to mind?”

“I've survived by putting their names behind me. Andy was the one who couldn't.”

“Survive?”

“Forget.” Hextell separated one picture from the rest. It documented the plane head-on, its body truncated by the angle. He applied his magnifying glass to every inch of it, squinting like a jeweller with a diamond in question.

“Is that why he left? He was out of here on early retirement, I've heard.”

Hextell looked up. “Who's being investigated here?”

Barbara hastened to reassure him. “I'm just trying to get a feeling for the man. If there's something you can tell me that'll help …” She made a that-would-be-great gesture and gave her enthusiasm to her chocolate donut.

The DCS set down his magnifying glass and folded his hands over it. He said, “Andy went out on a medical. He was losing his nerves.”

“He had a nervous breakdown?”

Hextell blew out a derisive breath. “Not stress, woman. Nerves. Real nerves. Sense of smell went first. Taste went next, then touch.

He coped well enough, but then it was his vision. And that was the end of him. He had to get out.”

“Bloody hell. He went blind?”

“Would have done, no doubt. But once he retired, it all came back. Feeling, vision, the lot.”

“So what'd been wrong with him?”

Hextell looked at her long and hard before answering. Then he raised his index and middle fingers and tapped them lightly against his skull. “Couldn't cope with the game. Undercover takes it out of you. I lost four wives. He lost nerves. Some things can't be replaced.”

“He didn't have wife problems?”

“Like I said. It was the game. Some blokes keep their peckers up fine when they're pretending to be someone they're not. But for Andy, that's not how it was. The lies he had to tell out there … Keeping mum about a case till it was long over … It knocked the stuffing out of him.”

“So there was no one case—one big case, perhaps—that cost him more than the others?”

“Don't know,” Hextell concluded. “Like I said, I put it behind me. If there was one case, I couldn't name it.”