This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  “Because otherwise you’d not have the slightest interest.” He smiled and added, “Unless you’d like to contribute yourself.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Alas. You join the score of other ladies who allow me to build my savings on my own. And that would include Jemima.” He slapped his thighs in a gesture of finality and rose from his chair. “As you said, this would take only a moment and as I’ve another job to go to …”

  “You run along, luv,” Bella McHaggis told him. She added meaningfully, “If there’s anything more to be dealt with here, I’ll see to it.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. McH,” Frazer said, and he squeezed her shoulder.

  Bella looked gratified at the moment of contact. Barbara reckoned that was part of the Frazer Effect. She said to both of them, “Do stay in town. I have a feeling we’re going to want to talk to you again.”

  WHEN THEY RETURNED to Victoria Street, the afternoon debriefing had already begun. Barbara found herself looking for Lynley as she entered the room and then found herself irritated for doing so. She’d scarcely given her former partner a thought during the day, and she wanted it that way. Nonetheless, she clocked him on the far side of the room.

  Lynley nodded at her and a smile lifted just the corners of his mouth. He looked at her over the top of his reading glasses and then back down at a sheaf of papers he was holding.

  Isabelle Ardery was standing at the china board, listening to John Stewart’s report. Stewart and the constables working with him had been given the unenviable task of dealing with the masses of material they’d taken from Jemima Hastings’ lodgings. At the moment, the DI was talking about Rome. Ardery looked impatient, as if waiting for a salient point to emerge.

  That didn’t seem close to happening. Stewart was saying, “The common denominator is the invasion. She’s got plans from both the British Museum and the Museum of London and the rooms circled relate to the Romans, the invasion, the occupation, the fortresses, all the clobber they left behind. And she bought a mass of postcards from both museums and a book called Roman Britain as well.”

  “But you said she’d also got a plan of the National Gallery and the Portrait Gallery,” Philip Hale pointed out. He’d been taking notes, and he referred to these. “And the Geffrye, the Tate Modern, and the Wallace Collection. Looks to me like she was having a recce of London, John. Sightseeing.” Again, from his notes: “Sir John Soane’s house, Charles Dickens’ house, Thomas Carlyle’s house, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London …She had brochures for all of them, right?”

  “True, but if we want to find a connection—”

  “The connection is that she was a tourist, John.” Isabelle Ardery went on to tell them that SO7 had sent over a report, and there was good news on that front: The fibres on her clothing had been identified. They constituted a blend of cotton and rayon and they were yellow in colour. They matched nothing that the girl herself was wearing, so there was a very good chance that they had yet another connection to her killer.

  “Yellow?” Barbara said. “Abbott Langer. Bloke at the ice rink. He wears a yellow waistcoast. All of the instructors do.” She told them about the ice-skating lessons Jemima had been taking. “Could be the fibres were left from a lesson.”

  “We’ll want that waistcoat, then,” Ardery said. “His or someone else’s. Get someone to fetch one for fabric testing.” She went on with, “We’ve also had a curious description phoned in as a result of all the publicity. It seems that a rather filthy man came out of Abney Park Cemetery in the window of time of Jemima Hastings’ murder. He was seen by an elderly woman waiting for the bus just at an entrance to the cemetery on Stoke Newington Church Street. She recalled him because, she said—and I spoke to her myself—he looked as if he’d been rolling in leaves, he had quite long hair, and he was either Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, or—as she put it—‘one of those Oriental types.’ He was wearing black trousers, carrying some sort of case although she couldn’t tell me what kind—she thought it might be a briefcase—and he had the rest of his clothing bundled up beneath his arm except for his jacket, which he was wearing inside out. We’ve got someone with her trying to come up with an e-fit, and if we’re lucky we’ll get some hits on that once we release it. Sergeants Havers and Nkata … ?”

  Nkata nodded at Barbara, letting her do the honours. Decent bloke, she thought, and she wondered how Winston had come to be so prescient and simultaneously so completely without ego.

  She made their report: Yolanda the Psychic, a recap of Abbott Langer and ice-skating lessons and the reason for the ice-skating lessons, the balloons, the pregnancy test—“turns out it was negative,” she said—Frazer Chaplin, and Paolo di Fazio. To this she added the argument overheard between Paolo di Fazio and the victim, Paolo’s ostensible lockup where he did his sculpting, Frazer’s way with the ladies, Bella McHaggis’s possible nonmaternal interest in Frazer, Frazer’s second job at Duke’s Hotel, and his plans to emigrate.

  “Background checks on all of them,” Isabelle said at the conclusion of Barbara’s remarks.

  Barbara said, “We’ll get to that straightaway,” but Ardery said, “No. I want you two—you and Sergeant Nkata—down in Hampshire. Philip, you and your people take the background checks.”

  “Hampshire?” Barbara said. “What’s Hampshire—”

  Ardery put them in the picture, giving them a summary of what they’d missed during the earlier part of the debriefing. She and DI Lynley, she said, had come up with these and, “You’ll need to take one along with you to Hampshire.” She handed over a postcard, which Barbara saw was a smaller version of the National Portrait Gallery poster of Jemima Hastings. On the front of it “Have You Seen This Woman?” was printed in black marker, along with an arrow indicating that the card was meant to be flipped over. On the reverse was a phone number, a mobile number by the look of it.

  The number, Ardery told her, belonged to a bloke in Hampshire called Gordon Jossie. She and Sergeant Nkata were to go there and see what Mr. Jossie had to say for himself. “Pack a bag because I expect this might take more than one day,” she told them.

  There were the usual hoots at this, remarks of, “Oohh, holiday time, you two,” and, “Mind you get separate rooms, Winnie,” to which Ardery said sharply, “That’ll do,” as Dorothea Harriman came into the room. She had a slip of paper in her hand, a telephone message. She handed this to Ardery. The superintendent read it. She looked up, satisfaction playing across her face.

  “We’ve got a name to attach to the first e-fit,” she announced, gesturing to the china board on which hung the e-fit generated from the two adolescents who’d stumbled on the body in the cemetery. “One of the volunteers at the cemetery thinks it’s a boy called Marlon Kay. Inspector Lynley and I will see about him. The rest of you …You’ve got your assignments. Any questions? No? All right, then.”

  They would begin again in the morning, she told them. There were several looks of surprise exchanged: An evening off? What was she thinking?

  No one questioned it, however, there being far too few gift horses in the midst of an investigation. The team began their preparations to depart as Ardery said, “Thomas?” to Lynley, and, “A word in my office?”

  Lynley nodded. Ardery left the incident room. He didn’t follow at once, however. Instead, he went to the china board to have a look at the photographs assembled there, and Barbara took the opportunity to approach him. He’d put his reading glasses on once again, and he was observing the aerial photographs and comparing them to the drawn diagram of the crime scene.

  She said to his back, “Didn’t have a chance earlier …,” and he turned round from the china board.

  “Barbara,” he said, his form of greeting.

  She gazed at him intently because she wanted to read him and what she wanted to read was the why and the how and what it all meant. She said, “Glad to have you back, sir. I didn’t say before.”

  “Thank you.” He didn’t add that it was good to be there, as so
meone else might have done. It wouldn’t be good to be there, she reckoned. It would all be part of just soldiering on.

  She said, “I just wondered …How’d she manage it?”

  What she wanted to know was what it really meant that he’d come back to the Met: what it meant about him, what it meant about her, what it meant about Isabelle Ardery, and what it meant about who had power and influence and who had nothing of the kind.

  He said, “The obvious. She wants the job.”

  “And you’re here to help her get it?”

  “It just seemed like time. She came to see me at home.”

  “Right. Well.” Barbara heaved her shoulder bag into position. She wanted something more from him, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask the question. “Bit different, is all,” was what she came up with. “I’m off, then. Like I said, it’s good that you’re—”

  “Barbara.” His voice was grave. It was also bloody kind. He knew what she was thinking and feeling and he always had done, which she truly, really hated about the bloke. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “What?”

  “This. It doesn’t matter, actually.”

  They had one of those dueling eyeball moments. He was good at reading, at anticipating, at understanding …at all those sodding interpersonal skills that made one person a good cop and another person the metaphorical bull knocking about among Mummy’s antique Wedgwood.

  “All right,” she said, “yeah. Thanks.”

  Another moment of locked eyes till someone said, “Tommy, will you have a look … ?” and he turned from her. Philip Hale was approaching and that was just as well. Barbara took the opportunity to make herself scarce. But as she drove home, she wondered if he’d been speaking the truth about things not mattering. For the fact was that she didn’t like it that her partner was working with Isabelle Ardery, although she didn’t much want to think about why this was the case.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE NEXT MORNING IT WAS LARGELY BECAUSE OF WHAT Barbara didn’t want to think about that she went about packing a bag for the trip she’d been assigned to take by making sure that not a single item she placed within it would have met with Isabelle Ardery’s approval. This was a job that took little time and less thought, and she was just finishing up when a knock on her door told her that Winston Nkata had arrived. He’d wisely suggested they take his motor, as hers was notoriously unreliable and, besides, fitting his rangy frame into an ancient Mini would have created an excruciating ride for him.

  She said, “’S open,” and she lit up a fag because she knew she was going to need to toke up on the nicotine since Nkata was, she also knew, not about to let her foul the interior of his perfectly maintained Vauxhall with cigarette smoke, not to mention—horrors!—a microscopic bit of ash.

  “Barbara Havers, you know you’re meant to stop smoking,” Hadiyyah announced.

  Barbara swung round from the daybed where she’d placed her holdall. She saw not only her little neighbour but Hadiyyah’s father, both of them framed in the doorway of her cottage: Hadiyyah with her brown arms crossed and one foot stuck out, as if she was about to begin tapping it like an aggrieved schoolteacher faced with a recalcitrant pupil. Azhar stood behind her, three plastic food boxes stacked in his hands. He used them to gesture with as he smiled and said, “From last night, Barbara. We decided the chicken jalfrezi was one of my better attempts, and as Hadiyyah herself made the chapatis …Perhaps for your own dinner tonight?”

  “Brilliant,” Barbara said. “Definitely better than the jar of Bolognese mince with cheddar on toast, which was what I’d had planned.”

  “Barbara …” Hadiyyah’s voice was saintly, even in nutritional remonstration.

  “Except …” Barbara asked would it keep in the fridge as she was actually heading off for a day or so. Before she could explain matters further, Hadiyyah cried out in horror and dashed across the room, where she scooted behind the television set and picked up what Barbara had mindlessly hurled there. “What’ve you done with your nice A-line skirt?” she demanded, shaking it out. “Barbara, why’re you not wearing it? Aren’t you meant to be wearing it? Why’s it behind the telly? Oh look! It’s got slut’s wool all over it now.”

  Barbara winced. She tried to play for time by taking the plastic containers from Azhar and stowing them in her fridge without allowing him to see its interior condition, which looked rather like an experiment in creating a new life form. She drew in on her cigarette and kept it clamped between her lips as she managed this manoeuvre, inadvertently spilling ash onto her T-shirt, which asked the world “How many toads does one girl have to kiss?” She brushed it off, making a smear, swore quietly, and faced the fact that she was going to have to answer at least one of Hadiyyah’s questions.

  “Got to have it altered,” she told the little girl. “Bit overlong, which is what we decided when I tried it on, remember? You said it needed to be middle of the knee, and it’s definitely not that. Dangling round my legs in a bloody unattractive fashion, it is.”

  “But why’s it behind the telly?” Hadiyyah asked, not illogically. “’Cause if you mean to have it altered—”

  “Oh. That.” Barbara did one or two mental gymnastics and came up with, “I’ll forget to do it if I put it in the wardrobe. But there, behind the telly … ? Turn the telly on and what do I see? That skirt reminding me it needs making shorter.”

  Hadiyyah didn’t look convinced. “What about the makeup? You’re not wearing your makeup today either, are you, Barbara? I c’n help you with it, you know. I used to watch Mummy all the time. She wears makeup. Mummy wears all sorts of makeup, doesn’t she, Dad? Barbara, d’you know that Mummy—”

  “That will do, khushi,” Azhar told his daughter.

  “But I was only going to say—”

  “Barbara is busy, as you can see. And you and I have an Urdu lesson to go to, do we not?” He said to Barbara, “As I have only one lecture at the university today, we were going to invite you to come with us after Hadiyyah’s lesson. A canal trip to Regent’s Park for an ice. But it seems …” He gestured at Barbara’s holdall, still unzipped upon her bed.

  “Hampshire,” she said, and glimpsing Winston Nkata approaching from beyond the cottage door, which still stood open, “and here’s my date.”

  Nkata had to duck to enter the cottage and when he was inside, he seemed to fill the place. Like her, he was wearing something that would be more comfortable than his usual getup. Unlike her, he still managed to look professional. But then, his sartorial mentor was Thomas Lynley, and Barbara couldn’t imagine Lynley ever looking anything but well put together. Nkata was in casual trousers and a pale green shirt. The trousers had creases that would have made a military man weep with joy, and he’d somehow managed to drive across London without getting a single wrinkle in his shirt. How, Barbara wondered, was that even possible?

  Seeing him, Hadiyyah’s eyes grew round and her face solemn. Nkata nodded a hello to her father and said to the little girl, “I expect you’re Hadiyyah, eh?”

  “What happened to your face?” she asked him. “You’ve got a scar.”

  “Khushi!” Azhar sounded appalled. His face spoke of a rapid assessment being made of Barbara’s visitor. “Well-brought-up young ladies do not—”

  “Knife fight,” Nkata told her in a friendly fashion. And he said to Azhar, “It’s okay, mon. Get asked all the time. Hard not to notice, innit, girl?” He squatted to give her a better look. “One of us had a knife, see, and th’ other had a razor. Now, thing is this: razor, she’s fast and she does damage. But the knife? She’s gonna win in the end.”

  “Important piece of knowledge, that,” Barbara said. “Very useful in gang warfare, Hadiyyah.”

  “You’re in a gang?” Hadiyyah asked as Nkata resumed his full height. She looked up at him, her expression awed.

  “Was,” he said. “Tha’s where this came from.” And to Barbara, “Ready? Want me to wait in the car?”

  Barbara wondered why
he asked the question and what he thought his immediate absence was meant to accomplish: a fond farewell between herself and her neighbour? What a ludicrous idea. She considered the reasons Winston might be thinking that and she took note of Azhar’s expression, which spoke of a level of discomfort that she couldn’t remember having ever seen in him.

  She sifted through various possibilities suggested by three plastic containers of leftover dinner, Hadiyyah’s Urdu lesson, a canal trip, and Winston Nkata’s appearance at her cottage, and she came up with something too stupid to consider in the light of day. She quickly rejected it, then went on to realise she’d referred to Winston as her date, and that, in combination with her packing a bag, must have made Azhar—as proper as a Regency gentleman—think she was heading off for a few days in the country with her tall, nice-looking, well-built, athletic, and likely delicious-in-all-the-right-ways lover. The very thought made her want to guffaw. Herself, Winston Nkata, candlelit dinners, wine, roses, romance, and a few nights of bouncy-bounce in a hotel heavily hung with wisteria …She snorted and covered the snort with a cough.

  She made a quick introduction between the two men, casually adding, “DS Nkata. We’ve got a case in Hampshire,” once she’d said Winston’s full name. She turned to the daybed before Azhar responded, hearing Hadiyyah say, “You’re a policeman as well? Like Barbara, you mean?”

  “Just like,” Nkata said.

  Barbara heaved her holdall to her shoulder as Hadiyyah said to her father, “C’n he come on the canal boat as well, Dad?”

  To which Azhar replied, “Barbara herself said they’re going to Hampshire, khushi.”

  They left the cottage, all of them together. They set off towards the front of the house. Barbara and Winston were behind the others but Barbara still heard Hadiyyah say, “I forgot. About Hampshire, I mean. But if they weren’t? What if they weren’t, Dad? Could he come as well?”

  Barbara couldn’t hear Azhar’s reply.

  LYNLEY DROVE THEM once again in Isabelle’s car. And once again, the arrangement seemed fine with him. He didn’t attempt to hold the door open for her another time—he hadn’t done so since she’d corrected him about this—and again he gave the driving his complete attention. She’d lost the plot on where in London they were just after Clerkenwell, so when her mobile phone rang as they were coursing by a nameless park, she took the call.