Except that direction of thought was sophistry, wasn't it. One didn't need to clean one's teeth. One didn't even feel the need. And it was the feeling of that need—the slow building up of a tension at first subtle and ultimately impossible to ignore—that told the real tale in life. Because it was that feeling of need which led to a hunger that insisted upon gratification. And it was the desire for gratification that caused one to abjure everything that rose up to forbid the satiety one sought: One willingly disregarded honour, responsibility, tradition, fidelity, and duty in pursuit of one's passion. And why? Because one wanted.
If he cast himself back more than twenty years, Lynley could see how the wanting had rent his own family. Or at least how he himself had allowed the wanting—which he had then only imperfectly understood—to rend it. Honour had bound his mother to his father. Responsibility and tradition had tied her to the family home and to the more than two hundred and fifty years of Asherton countesses who had overseen its maintenance and its glory. Duty had demanded that she concern herself with her husband's failing health and her children's welfare. And fidelity had required that she do it all without openly, inwardly, or privately acknowledging that she herself might want something different—or at least something more—than the lot she'd chosen as an eighteen-year-old bride. She'd coped with everything well until disease began to gnaw at her husband. Even then she'd managed to hold together life as the family had always known it, until the very act of having to cope, of having to act a role instead of simply being able to live it, had made her long for rescue. And rescue had come, if only temporarily.
Bitch, whore, tart, he'd called her. And he would have struck her—the mother he'd adored—had she not struck him first, and with a violence, a frustration, and an anger that had given to the blow a force which split open his upper lip.
Why had he reacted so violently to the knowledge of her infidelity? Lynley wondered now as he braked to avoid a pack of cyclists who were negotiating the right turn onto North End Road. He watched them idly—all business in their helmets and spandex—and considered the question, not only for what it revealed about his adolescence but also for what its answer implied about the case in hand. The answer, he decided, had to do with love and with the insidious and often unreasonable expectations that always seemed to attach themselves to the very fact of loving. How often we want the love object to be an extension of ourselves, he thought. And when that doesn't happen—because it never can—our frustration demands that we take action to alleviate the turmoil we feel.
But, he realised, there was more than one kind of turmoil that was becoming apparent in the relationships that Nicola Maiden had had. While thwarted desire played a part in her life—and very possibly in her death—he couldn't overlook the place that was occupied by jealousy, revenge, avarice, and hate. All those crippling passions caused turmoil. Any one of them could drive someone to murder.
Rostrevor Road was a mere half mile south of Fulham Broadway, and the door of Vi Nevin's building was propped open when Lynley climbed the steps. A hand-lettered sign on the jamb explained why, as did the noise coming from a ground floor flat whose door was also propped open. Tildy and Steve's Digs at the Rear were the words written out in multi-coloured felt pen on a sheet of heavy paper. Smoke Outside, Please! was the request made beneath.
The noise from within was considerable as the partygoers were enjoying the musical talents of an unidentifiable group of males who were gutturally advising members of their sex to use her, abuse her, have her, and lose her, all to the accompaniment of percussion, electric guitar, and brass. None of this sounded particularly mellifluous in combination, Lynley decided. He was getting older—and, alas, stuffier—than he thought. He headed for the stairs and dashed upwards.
The corridor lights were on a timer, with a push button at the bottom of the stairs. There were windows on the landing, but as darkness had fallen, these did very little to dispel the gloom above the ground floor of the building. So Lynley punched for the lights on Vi Nevin's floor and strode towards her door.
She hadn't been willing to tell the truth about how she'd come to meet Nicola Maiden in the first place. She hadn't been willing to name the man who had originally financed the rooms in which she lived. There were probably a score of other facts that she could part with if the psychological thumb-screws were applied with enough finesse.
Lynley felt up to the task of applying them. Although Vi Nevin was nobody's fool and unlikely to be tricked into revealing information, she was also living at the edge of the law and, like the Reeves, she'd be willing to compromise if compromise was what would keep her in business.
He rapped sharply on her door. There was a brass knocker, so he knew she'd be able to hear his knock despite the music and shouting from the party below. However, there was no answer from within, which upon reflection was hardly a circumstance worthy of suspicion since it was a Saturday night and—whether she was out servicing a client or otherwise engaged—a woman away from home on a Saturday night was nothing to raise the alarm about.
He removed one of his cards from his jacket, put on his glasses, and slid a pen from his pocket to leave her a note. He wrote and returned the pen to his pocket. He fixed the card to the door at the height of the knob.