In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(94)

The death of a child, he thought, kills the future and decimates the past, making the former an imprisonment that seems interminable, rendering the latter an unvoiced reproach for every moment robbed of its significance by the calls of a parent's career. One didn't recover from such a death. One just grew more adept at stumbling on.

He glanced back at the Hall and saw the distant form of Andy Maiden leave the little office, cross the entrance, and trudge towards the stairs. The light remained on in the room he departed and in the window of that room Nan Maiden's silhouette appeared. Lynley saw the Maidens’ separateness and wanted to tell them not to bear their grief in solitude from each other. They'd created their daughter Nicola together and they'd bury her together. So why did they have to mourn her alone?

We're all alone, Inspector, Barbara Havers had told him once in a similar case in which two parents had been forced to mourn the death of a child. And believe me, it's only a bloody illusion that we're anything else.

But he didn't want to think of Barbara Havers, of her wisdom or her lack thereof. He wanted to do something to give the Maidens a measure of peace. He told himself that he owed that much, if not to two parents whose suffering was of a kind he hoped never to have to face, then to a former colleague whose service on the force had placed officers like Lynley in his debt. But he also had to admit that he sought to give them peace as a hedge against potential grief in his own future, in the hope that attenuating their present sorrow might prevent him from ever having to experience a similar pain himself.

He couldn't change the basic facts of Nicola's death and the secrets she'd kept from her parents. But he could seek to disprove what information was beginning to look manufactured, wearing the guise of innocent revelation while all the time created to meet the exigency of the moment.

Will Upman, after all, was the person who had mentioned a pager and a London lover in the first place. And who better than Upman—interested in the young woman himself—to fabricate both possessions and relationships to divert the police's attention from himself? He could have been the lover in question, showering gifts upon a woman who was his obsession as well as his employee. And told that she was leaving the law, leaving Derbyshire, and establishing a life for herself in London, how might he have reacted to the knowledge that he would be losing her permanently? Indeed, they knew from the postcards which Nicola sent to her flatmate that she had a lover in addition to Julian Britton. And she would have hardly felt the need to code a message—let alone to arrange for the assignations suggested by the postcards—had the man in question been someone with whom she felt that she could freely be seen.

And then there was the entire question of Julian Britton's place in Nicola's life. If he had actually loved her and had wished to marry her, what would his reaction have been had he discovered her relationship with another man? It was perfectly possible that Nicola had revealed that relationship to Britton as part of her refusal to marry him. If she'd done so, what thoughts—taking up residence in Britton's mind—did he have and where did those thoughts take him on Tuesday night?

An exterior door closed somewhere. Footsteps crunched in gravel, and a figure came round the side of the building. It was a man wheeling a bicycle. He guided it into a puddle of light that spilled from one of the windows. There, he toed the kick stand downwards and removed from his pocket a small tool which he applied to the base of the bicycle's spokes.

Lynley recognised him from the previous afternoon when, from the lounge window, he'd seen him pedalling away from the Hall as Lynley and Hanken had waited for the Maidens to join them. He was, no doubt, one of the employees. As Lynley watched him, crouched on his haunches next to the bike with a heavy lock of hair falling into his eyes, he saw his hand slip and get caught between the spokes and he heard him cry out, “Merde! Saloperie de bécane! Je sais pas ce qui me retient de Venvoyer a la casse.” He leapt up, knuckles shoved to his mouth. He used his sweatshirt to wipe the blood from his skin.

Hearing him speak, Lynley also recognised the unmistakable sound of a cog in the wheel of the investigation clicking into place. He adjusted his previous conjectures with alacrity, realising that Nicola Maiden had done more than merely joke with her London flatmate. She'd also given her a clue.

He approached the man. “Have you hurt yourself?”

The man swung round, startled, brushing the hair from his eyes. “Bon Dieu! Vous m'avez fait peur!”

“Excuse me. I didn't mean to come out of nowhere like that,” Lynley said. And he produced his warrant card and introduced himself.

A fractional movement of the eyebrows was the other man's only reaction to hearing the words New Scotland Yard. He replied in heavily-accented English—interspersed with French—that he was Christian-Louis Ferrer, master chef of the kitchen and the primary reason that Maiden Hall had been awarded the coveted étoile Michelin.

“You're having trouble with your bike. D'you need a lift somewhere?”

No. Mais merci quand même. Long hours in the kitchen robbed him of time to exercise. He needed the twice-daily ride to keep himself fit. This vélo de merde—with a dismissive gesture at the bicycle—was better than nothing to use for that exercise. But he'd have been grateful for un deux-roues that was a little more dependable on the roads and the trails.

“Might we chat before you leave, then?” Lynley asked politely.