This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  She was stuffing brochures into envelopes, and she continued with this as she said, “Help you?” She sounded surprised. It seemed that her day was rarely interrupted by someone wandering in off the street.

  Lynley asked her about their method of advertising, and she jumped to the conclusion that he meant to cover the Healey Elliott—visible through the window from within the reception area—with DragonFly Tonics transfers. He shuddered inwardly at the thought of such a desecration. He wanted to demand in outrage, “Are you quite mad, woman?” but instead he maintained an expression of interest. She pulled from her desk a crisp manila folder, from which she slid what appeared to be a contract. She spoke of rates paid for the size and number of transfers applied and the typical mileage expected from the driver of the vehicle. Obviously, she noted, black cabs received the most money, followed quite closely by motorcycle and motor scooter couriers. What sort of driving did he do? she asked Lynley.

  This prompted him to correct her notion. He showed her his identification, and he asked her about the records kept of people who had vehicles of one sort or another decorated—and he used that term loosely—with the transfers from DragonFly Tonics. She told him that, of course, there were records because how else were people meant to be paid for swanning round London and regions beyond with advertising plastered to their vehicles?

  Lynley was hoping to discover that there was no Frazer Chaplin with a contract to advertise DragonFly Tonics at all. From this, he had decided, it could be assumed that the Vespa Frazer had shown to Lynley outside Duke’s Hotel was not his at all but one produced on a moment’s inspiration and declared to be a Chaplin possession. He gave the receptionist Frazer’s name and asked if she could produce his contract.

  Unfortunately, she did just that, and all of it was as Frazer had avowed. The Vespa was his. It was lime green. To it, transfers had been applied. They were, in fact, applied professionally in Shepherd’s Bush since DragonFly Tonics hardly wanted a slapdash job done with them. They were put on to last, not to be easily removed, and when they were removed at the end of the contract, the vehicle would be repainted.

  Lynley sighed when he saw this. Unless Frazer had used a different vehicle to get up to Stoke Newington, they were back to any and all CCTV films from the area and the possibility that one of them had recorded his Vespa in the vicinity of the cemetery. They were also back to the door-to-door slog—which was going on anyway per Isabelle’s instructions—and the hope that someone had seen the scooter. Or, he reckoned, they were down to Frazer using someone else’s scooter or motorcycle to get there, because with ninety minutes to do what needed to be done and to get to Duke’s Hotel on time afterwards, he would have had to go to north London by that means. There was simply no other way that he could have managed the traffic.

  Lynley was considering all this when his eyes lit upon the date of the contract: one week before Jemima died. This prompted him to dwell on dates in general, which made him realise there was a detail he had overlooked. There was indeed another way the murder of Jemima Hastings could have been managed, he thought.

  HE WAS GETTING into his car when Havers rang him. He said, “Lynley,” whereupon the sergeant began babbling—there was no other word for it—about Victoria Street, a cash-point machine, the Home Office, and having a gin and tonic.

  He thought at first that was what she’d done—had a gin and tonic or two or three—but then in the midst of her frantic monologue he picked up the word snout and from this he finally was able to decipher that she was asking him to meet someone at a cash-point in Victoria Street, although he still wasn’t sure why he was meant to do this.

  As she finally drew breath, he said, “Havers, what’s this got to do with—”

  “He was in London. The day she died. Jossie. And Whiting’s known it all along.”

  That got his attention. “Who’s given you that information?”

  “Hastings. The brother.” And then she banged on about Gina Dickens and someone called Meredith Powell, as well as tickets, receipts, Gordon Jossie’s habit of wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap and wasn’t that exactly how Yukio Matsumoto had described the man he’d seen in the cemetery and please, please, get down to Victoria Street to that cash-point because whatever Norman Whatsisname knows he isn’t spilling it on the phone and they need to know what it is. She herself was going to beard Whiting in his den or whatever the proper term was but before she could do that she needed to know what Norman had to say, so they were back to Norman and Lynley had to get to Victoria Street and where was he, anyway?

  She took another breath, which gave Lynley the chance to tell her he was in Ennismore Gardens Mews, behind Brompton Oratory and Holy Trinity Church. He was working on the Frazer Chaplin end of things, and he reckoned—

  “Sod Frazer Chaplin for a lark,” was her reply. “This is hot, this is Whiting, and this is the trail. For God’s sake, Inspector, I need you to do this.”

  “What about Winston? Where is he?”

  “It has to be you. Look, Winnie’s doing those CCTV films, isn’t he? The Stoke Newington films? And anyway, if Norman Whoever …God, why can’t I remember his bloody name …He’s a public school bloke. He wears pink shirts. He’s got that voice. He says every sentence so far back in his throat that you practically need to perform a tonsillectomy just to excavate the words. If Winnie shows up at the cash-point machine and starts talking to him …Winnie of all people …Winnie …Sir, think it through.”

  “All right,” Lynley said. “Havers, all right.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” she intoned. “This thing’s all a tangle, but I think we’re getting it sorted.”

  He wasn’t so sure. For every time he made that his consideration, further facts seemed only to complicate matters.

  He made good time over to Victoria Street by carving a route that took him ultimately through Belgrave Square. He parked in the underground car park at the Met and walked back over to Victoria Street, where he found the Barclay’s cash-point machine closest to Broadway, next to a Ryman’s stationery shop.

  Havers’ snout was a case of by-his-clothes-shalt-thee-know-him. His shirt wasn’t pink. It was bright fuchsia, and his necktie featured ducklings. He clearly wasn’t cut out for a life of intrigue since he was pacing the pavement and pausing to peer into the window of Ryman’s as if studying which kind of filing tray he wished to purchase.

  Lynley felt inordinately foolish, but he approached the man and said, “Norman?” When the other started, he said to him affably, “Barbara Havers thought I might interest you in a gin and tonic.”

  Norman cast a look left and right. He said, “Christ, for a moment I thought you were one of them.”

  “One of whom?”

  “Look. We can’t talk here.” He looked at his watch, one of those multidial affairs useful for diving and, one presumed, going to the moon as well. He said as he did so, “Act like you’re asking me the time please. Reset your own watch or something …Christ, you carry a pocket watch? I’ve not seen one of those in—”

  “Family heirloom.” Lynley looked at the time as Norman made much of showing him the face of his own piece. Lynley wasn’t sure which one of the dials he was meant to look at but he nodded cooperatively.

  “We can’t talk here,” Norman said when they’d completed this part of the charade.

  “Whyever—”

  “CCTV,” Norman murmured. “We’ve got to go somewhere else. They’re going to pick us up on film and I’m dead if they do.”

  This seemed wildly dramatic until Lynley realised Norman was talking about losing his job and not his life. He said, “I think that’s a bit of a problem, don’t you? There’re cameras everywhere.”

  “Look, go up to the cash machine. Get some money. I’m going into Ryman’s to make a purchase. You do the same.”

  “Norman, Ryman’s will likely have a camera.”

  “Just bloody do it,” Norman said through his teeth.

  It came to Lynley that the
man was honestly afraid, not just playing at spies and spy masters. So he fished out his bank card and went to the cash-point machine cooperatively. He withdrew some money, ducked into Ryman’s, and found Norman looking at a display of sticky pads. He didn’t join him there, assuming that proximity would unnerve the man. Instead, he went to the greeting cards and studied them, picking up one then another then a third and fourth, a man intent upon finding something appropriate. When he saw Norman at last approach the till, he chose a card at random and did likewise. It was there they had their extremely brief tête-à-tête, spoken in a fashion that Norman seemed intent upon making look as casual as possible, if such was even conceivable, considering he spoke out of the side of his mouth.

  He said, “There’s something of a scrum over there.”

  “At the Home Office? What’s going on?”

  “It’s definitely to do with Hampshire,” he said. “It’s something big, something serious, and they’re moving dead fast to deal with it before word gets out.”

  ISABELLE ARDERY HAD spent a good number of years putting the details of her life into separate compartments. Thus, she had no difficulty doing just that on the day following Thomas Lynley’s call upon her. There was DI Lynley on her team, and there was Thomas Lynley in her bed. She had no intention of confusing the two. Besides, she was not stupid enough to consider their encounter as anything other than sex, mutually satisfying and potentially duplicable. Beyond that, her daytime dilemma at the Met did not allow for even a moment of recollection about anything, and especially about her previous night with Lynley. For this was Day One in the End of Days scenario that Assistant Commissioner Hillier had spelled out for her, and if she was going to be shown the door at New Scotland Yard, then it was her intention to go out of that door with a case sewn up behind her.

  This was her thinking when Lynley arrived in her office. She felt a disagreeable jump of her heart at the sight of him, so she said briskly, “What is it, Thomas?” and she rose from her desk, brushed past him, and called into the corridor, “Dorothea? What’re we hearing from the Stoke Newington door-to-door? And where’s Winston got to with that CCTV footage?”

  She got no reply and shouted, “Dorothea! Where the hell …!” and then said, “Damn it,” and returned to her desk where again she said, “What is it, Thomas?” but this time remained standing.

  He started to close the door. She said, “Leave it open, please.”

  He turned. “This isn’t personal,” he said. Nonetheless, he left the door as it was.

  She felt herself flush. “All right. Go on. What’s happened?”

  It was a mix of information from which she ultimately sorted that DS Havers—who seemed to have a bloody-minded bent for doing whatever the hell she felt like doing when it came to a murder investigation—had unearthed someone within the Home Office to do some digging on the topic of a policeman in Hampshire. He’d not got far—this snout of Havers’—when he was called into the office of a significantly placed higher-up civil servant whose proximity to the Home Secretary was rather more than disturbing. Why was Zachary Whiting on the mind of a Home Office underling? was the enquiry that was made of Norman.

  “Norman did some fancy footwork to save his own skin,” Lynley said. “But he’s managed to come up with something we might find useful.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Whiting’s apparently been given the charge of protecting someone extremely important to the Home Office.”

  “Someone in Hampshire?”

  “Someone in Hampshire. It’s a high-level protection, the highest level. It’s the sort of level that causes bells and whistles to go off everywhere when anyone gets remotely close to it. The bells and whistles, Norman gave me to understand, go off directly within the Home Secretary’s office.”

  Isabelle lowered herself into her chair. She nodded at a second chair, and Lynley sat. “What d’you expect we’re dealing with, Thomas?” She considered the options and saw the likeliest. “Someone who’s infiltrated a terrorist cell?”

  “With the informer being protected now? That’s highly possible,” Lynley said.

  “But there’re other possibilities as well, aren’t there?”

  “Not as many as you’d think. Not at the highest level,” he said. “Not with the Home Secretary involved. There’s terrorism, as you’ve said, with an infiltrator going into hiding prior to a bust. There’s protection for a witness set to testify in a high-profile case coming to court. Like an organised crime case, a sensitive murder case where the repercussions—”

  “A Stephen Lawrence thing.”

  “Indeed. There’s also protection from hired killers—”

  “A fatwa.”

  “Or the Russian mafia. Or Albanian gangsters. But whatever it is, it’s something big, it’s something important—”

  “And Whiting knows exactly what it is.”

  “Right. Because whoever it is the Home Office is protecting, this person’s in Whiting’s patch.”

  “In a safe house?”

  “Perhaps. But he might also be living under a new identity.”

  She looked at him. He looked at her. They were both silent, both evaluating the possibilities and comparing those possibilities to everything else they knew. “Gordon Jossie,” Isabelle said at last. “Protecting Jossie is the only explanation for Whiting’s behaviour. Those forged letters of recommendation from Winchester Technical College? Whiting’s knowledge of an apprenticeship for Jossie when Barbara showed those letters to him … ?”

  Lynley agreed. “Havers is on the trail of something else, Isabelle. She’s fairly certain Jossie was in London the day that Jemima Hastings was murdered.” He told her more about his phone call with Havers, her report to him on the subject of her conversation with Rob Hastings, Hastings’ revelation about the train tickets and the hotel receipt and Whiting’s assurances given to a woman called Meredith Powell that this information had been sent to London.

  She said, “She’s called Meredith Powell? Why’ve we not heard about her before now? And why, frankly, is Sergeant Havers reporting to you and not to me?”

  Lynley hesitated. His frank gaze shifted from her to the window behind her. It came to her that he’d occupied this office himself only a short time ago, and she wondered if he wanted it back now that she was done for. He was certainly in line to have it back if he so desired, and he could have little doubt that he was better equipped to have it back as well.

  She said sharply, “Thomas, why is Barbara reporting to you and why’ve we not heard about this Meredith Powell before now?”

  He returned his gaze to her. He answered only the second of her questions although an answer to the first was implied when he said, “You wanted Havers and Nkata to return to London.” He didn’t say it as an accusation. It was hardly his style to mention what a cock-up she’d made of things. But then, he didn’t need to when everything was so obvious now.

  She swung her chair to the window. “God,” she murmured. “I’ve been wrong from the first about everything.”

  “I wouldn’t say—”

  “Oh, please.” She turned back to him. “Let’s not go easy on me, Thomas.”

  “It’s not that. It’s a matter of—”

  “Guv?” At the doorway, Philip Hale was standing. He had a slip of paper in his hand. “Found Matt Jones,” he told her. “The Matt Jones.”

  “Are we sure of that?”

  “Pieces seem to fit.”

  “And?”

  “Mercenary. Soldier of fortune. Whatever. Works for a group called Hangtower, most of the time in the Middle East.”

  “Is anyone telling us what sort of work?”

  “Just that it’s top secret.”

  “For which we can read assassinations?”

  “Probably.”

  “Thank you, Philip,” Isabelle said. He nodded and left them, casting a glance at Lynley that needed no translation, so clearly did it telegraph Hale’s own conclusion about how their superintenden
t had deployed him in the investigation. Had she left him where he’d belonged, they’d have sorted out Matt Jones and everyone else days ago. Instead she’d forced him to remain at St. Thomas’ Hospital. It had been a punitive measure, she thought now, showing the worst kind of leadership. She said, “I can hear Hillier already.”

  Lynley said, “Isabelle, don’t worry about Hillier. Nothing that we’ve learned so far today—”

  “Why? Are you operating from the ‘what’s done is done’ school of thought with that bit of advice? Or is this a case of things about to get worse?” She eyed him and read on his face that there was something else he hadn’t yet told her.

  His mouth curved in a half smile, a fond sort of expression that she didn’t much like.

  She said, “What?”

  “Last evening,” he began.

  “We aren’t going to talk about that,” she said fiercely.

  “Last evening,” he repeated firmly, “we’d worked it all out and it came down to Frazer Chaplin, Isabelle. Nothing we’ve learned today changes that. Indeed, what Barbara’s managed to come up with reinforces the direction we’re heading.” And as she was about to question this, he said, “Hear me out. If Whiting’s charge is to protect Gordon Jossie for whatever reason, we know two things that were stymieing us last evening.”

  She considered this and saw where he was going. “The Roman treasure,” she said. “If there is one.”

  “Let’s assume there is. We were asking ourselves why Jossie wouldn’t have immediately reported what he’d found, as he was meant to do, and now we know. Consider his position: If he digs up a Roman hoard or even part of a Roman hoard and phones the authorities, the next thing is that a pack of journalists show up to talk to him about the whys and the wherefores of what he’s found. This sort of thing can’t be kept under his hat. Not if it’s a hoard remotely like the Mildenhall or the Hoxne treasures. In very short order, the police turn up to cordon off the area, archaeologists arrive, experts from the BM show up. I daresay the BBC show up as well and there he is on the morning news. He’s supposed to be in hiding, and the gaffe is irredeemably blown. Isabelle, it’s the last thing he could have wanted.”