No closer to the name she was looking for but wiser to the potential pitfalls promised by a lengthy career in police work, she returned to the computer. She'd just begun revisiting Andrew Maiden's history when a phone call interrupted her.
“It's Cole.” Winston Nkata's voice came over a line that was thick with static. “Mum took one look at the body, said, ‘Right. That's my Terry,’ walked out 'f the room like she was going for groceries, and just hit the floor. Flat on her face. We thought she'd had heart failure, but she'd just checked out. She had to be sedated once she came to. She's taking it hard.”
“Rough go,” Barbara said.
“She doted on the bloke. Makes me think of my mum.”
“Right. Well.” Barbara couldn't help thinking of her own mother. Doting certainly wouldn't be the word to describe her maternal deportment. “Sorry and all that. Are you bringing her back?”
“Be there by mid-afternoon, I expect. We stopped for coffee. She's in the loo.”
“Ah.” Barbara wondered why he was phoning. Perhaps to serve as intermediary between herself and Lynley, passing along information so that the inspector would have as little contact with her as he apparently deemed necessary at the moment. She said, “I haven't got anything on Maiden's arrests yet. At least not anything that looks useful.” She told him what DCS Hextell had confided about Maiden's nervous complaints, adding, “Whatever the inspector wants to make of that.”
“I'll give him the information,” Nkata told her. “If you c'n break off, there's Battersea to look at. It'd save us some time.”
“Battersea?”
“Terry Cole's digs. His studio as well. One of us needs to get over there, talk to his roommate. This Cilia Thompson, you recall?”
“Yeah. But I thought …” What had she thought? Obviously, that Nkata would keep as much to himself as he could, leaving the grunt work to her. The other DC continued to nonplus her with his easy generosity. “I can break off,” Barbara said. “I remember the address.”
She heard Nkata chuckle. “Now, why'm I not surprised at that?”
Lynley and Hanken had spent the first part of the morning waiting for Winston Nkata to deliver Terry Cole's mother to them for the purpose of identifying the second body found on the moor. Neither man had much doubt that the procedure would be a mere formality—devastating and anguished, but still a formality. When no one had come off the moor by dawn to claim the motorcycle and no one else had reported it stolen, it seemed fairly conclusive that the mutilated male and the owner of the motorcycle were one and the same.
Nkata reached them by ten, and the answer was theirs by quarter past the hour. Mrs. Cole verified that the boy was indeed her son Terry, after which she collapsed. A doctor was summoned, sedative in hand. He took over where the police left off.
“I want his effects,” Sal Cole had sobbed, by which they understood that she meant her sons clothes. “I want his effects for our Darryl. I mean to have them.”
And she would do, they told her, once forensics had completed their analysis, once the jeans and T-shirt and Doc Martens and socks were no longer deemed necessary for a successful prosecution of whoever had committed the crime. Until that time, they would give her receipts for each garment that the boy had been wearing, for his motorcycle as well. They didn't tell her that it could easily be years before the ensanguined clothing was released to her. And for her part, she didn't ask when she might expect it. She just clutched the envelope of receipts and wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist. Winston Nkata escorted her from the nightmare into the extended nightmare to come.
Lynley and Hanken withdrew to the DI's office in silence. Prior to Nkata's arrival, Hanken had spent the time reviewing his notes on the case thus far, and he'd had another look at the initial report compiled by the constable who'd first talked to the Maidens about their daughter's disappearance. “She had several phone calls on the morning of her hike,” he told Lynley. “Two from a woman, one from a man, neither giving their names to Nan Maiden before she fetched Nicola to take the calls.”
“Could the man have been Terence Cole?” Lynley asked.
It was more grist for the mill of their suspicions, Hanken concluded.