“Like everything else, it needs checking out. But Hanken didn't trust a word Andy said once we learned that he'd been keeping information from his wife.”
“He could merely have been trying to protect her,” St. James offered. “Not an unreasonable thing for a man to do for a woman he loves. And if they were really looking for a blind, wouldn't they misdirect you into considering the boy?”
Lynley agreed. “There's a real bond between the two of them, Simon. It appears to be an extraordinarily close relationship.”
St. James was silent for a moment on the other end of the line. Outside Lynley s hotel room, someone walked down the corridor. A door shut quietly.
“Then there's another way to look at Andy Maiden protecting his wife, isn't there, Tommy?” St. James finally said.
“What's that, then?”
“He may be doing it for another reason. The worst possible reason, in fact.”
“Medea in Derbyshire?” Lynley asked. “Christ. That's horrific, Simon. And when mothers kill, the child's generally young. I'll be pressed for a motive if things go that way.”
“Medea would have argued that she had one.”
In the midst of dealing with one of Nicola's many disappearances prior to the family's move to Derbyshire, Nan Maiden would have been incredulous had anyone suggested to her that there would come a day when she would yearn for something as simple as a teenager's running away from home in a fit of temper. When Nicola had disappeared in the past, her mother had reacted the only way she knew: with a mixture of terror, anger, and despair. She'd phoned the girl's friends, she'd alerted the police, and she'd taken to the streets to trackher down. She'd been capable of nothing else until she'd known her child was safe.
That Nicola would vanish into the streets of London always intensified Nan's worry. For anything could happen on the streets of London. A teenaged girl could be raped; she could be seduced into the netherworld of narcotics; she could be beaten; she could be maimed.
There was one prospective consequence of Nicola's running off that Nan never considered, however: that her daughter had been murdered. The thought simply didn't bear dwelling upon. Not because murder never happened to young girls, but because if it happened to this particular young girl, her mother had no idea how she herself would go on.
And now it had happened. Not during those tempestuous teenage years when Nicola was insisting on autonomy, independence, and what she'd called “the right to self-determination, Mum. We're not living in the Middle Ages, you know.” Not during that torturous period when making a demand of her parents—whether it was for something simple and concrete like a new CD or something complex and nebulous like personal freedom—was no less than an unspoken threat to vanish for a day or a week or a month if that demand wasn't met. But now, when she was an adult, when locking her door and nailing closed her window were actions that were supposed to be not only unthinkable but also unnecessary.
Yet that's exactly what I should have done, Nan thought brokenly. I should have locked her in, tied her to her bed, and refused to let her out of my sight.
“I know what I want,” Nicola had declared so many times throughout the years. “And this is it.”
Nan had heard that in the voice of the seven-year-old who wanted Barbie, Barbie's house, Barbie's car, and every item of clothing that could be slid onto the impossibly shaped plastic figure that was supposed to be the epitome of femininity. In the cry of the twelve-year-old who could not exist another moment unless she was allowed to wear make-up, stockings, and four-inch-high heels. In the black moods of the fifteen-year-old who wanted a separate telephone line, a pair of in-line skates, a holiday in Spain without the burden of her parents along. Nicola had always wanted what Nicola wanted at the moment when Nicola wanted it. And many times over the years, it had seemed so much easier just to give in than to face a day, a week, or a fortnight of her disappearance.
But now Nan wished with all her heart that her daughter had simply chosen to run off again. And she felt the hundredweight of guilt dragging down on her for the occasions during Nicola's adolescence when, faced with yet another of her daughter s petulant flights from home, she'd even for an instant harboured the notion that it would be better to have had Nicola die at birth than not to know where she was or if she'd ever be found at all.