From his years in policing, Lynley knew that he should by now have seen it all. But every time he thought he had, something in life caught him by surprise. And in this case, it wasn't so much the presence of the chamber in the Beatties' house that took his breath away. It was the attitude to it taken by the couple themselves, particularly the wife. She might have been showing them a state-of-the-art kitchen.
She seemed to realise this. Watching Lynley from her position in the doorway, observing Nkata wandering the length of the room with an expression on his face that suggested how actively his imagination was supplying him with images of the uses to which the costumes and the equipment were put, she said quietly, “I wouldn't have had it this way had I been given a choice. One does expect a traditional marriage. But loving someone means compromise occasionally. And once he explained why it was so important to him …” She gestured at the room with a hand whose knuckles were enlarged from the disease that had necessitated Nicola Maiden's entrance into the Beatties’ private world. “Need is just need. So long as judgement remains apart from it, need has no real power to hurt us.”
“Did you mind another woman seeing to the need?”
“My husband loves me. I've never had any doubt about that.”
Lynley wondered.
Sir Adrian rejoined them, saying to her, “You're wanted below, darling. Molly's not to be denied her presents another five minutes.”
“But will you—”
They communicated in that way peculiar to couples who'd been married for more than a generation. “As soon as I finish here. It won't be long.”
When she'd left them, Sir Adrian waited for a moment before he said quietly, “There's a part, of course, that I'd rather Chloe didn't know. It would only hurt her unnecessarily.”
Nkata made his notebook ready as Lynley thought about what the surgeon's statement implied. He said, “You paged her—Nicola—throughout the summer. But as she couldn't have serviced you with discipline from Derbyshire, I've a feeling your ‘arrangement’ was something more than you wanted to say in front of your wife.”
“You're very good, Inspector.” Beattie closed the chamber door. “I was in love with her. Not at first, naturally. We didn't know each other. But within a month or two, I realised how strongly I was feeling about her. Initially, I told myself it was only addiction: A new woman doing the discipline heightened my excitement, and I wanted that excitement more and more often. But it went beyond that in the end because she was far more than I expected. So I wanted to keep her.”
“As your wife?”
“I love Chloe. But there's more than one kind of love in a man's life—which you may know already or will come to know eventually—and selfishly, I hoped to experience it.” He dropped his gaze to the deformed nails at the ends of his fingers. He said, “I felt sexual love for Nikki, the sort that has to do with physical possession. Animal craving. My love for Chloe, on the other hand, is the stuff of our history. When I knew I had this other love for Nikki—this sexual thing that I found I couldn't get out of my mind the more we met—I told myself it was natural to feel it. She was meeting a tremendous need of mine. And no matter what I wanted, she was willing to do it to me. But when I saw there was so much more to her than domination …”
“You became reluctant to share her with other men.”
“An intuitive leap. Yes, you are very good.”
Nicola visited the Boltons at least five times a week, Beattie told them. And he explained the frequency of their sessions to Chloe by talking about the heightened stress of his work as younger doctors and advances in medicine had increased his level of anxiety to the point that only discipline could relieve it.
“I told Nikki that when the craving came upon me, I wanted her available to gratify it at once,” he said.
“But the reality was more complicated than that?”
“The reality was infinitely simple. I couldn't cope with imagining Nikki doing to others—and being to others—what she was doing and being to me. Thinking of her with anyone else was a quick descent into hell. And I didn't expect that, to feel that way about a tart. But then, when I took her on, I didn't know how much more than a tart she was going to be.”