This Body of Death: An Inspector Lynley Novel

by Elizabeth George

  “Were you told to approach him? To get close to the man? To breathe the same air in his vicinity? I think not. You were told to find him, report back, and keep him in sight. In other words, you were told to keep your distance, which you did not do. And now here we are, where we are, because you took a decision you weren’t meant to take. Just as you’re doing now. So get back into that hospital, get back to Matsumoto’s doorway, and until you hear otherwise from me, remain there. Am I being clear?”

  As she’d been speaking, she’d watched the muscle in Hale’s jaw jumping. He didn’t reply and she barked, “Inspector! I’m asking you a question.”

  To which he finally said, “As you wish, guv.”

  At that she went towards the hospital entrance and he followed as she preferred him to follow: several paces behind her. She wondered at the fact of these detectives under her command all wanting to go their own way in the investigation and what this said about the leadership provided first by the former superintendent, Malcolm Webberly, and by everyone subsequent to him, including Thomas Lynley. Discipline was called for, but having to administer that in the midst of everything else going on was particularly maddening. Changes were going to have to be made with this lot. There was no question about that.

  As she reached the door with Hale as her shadow, a taxi arrived. Hiro Matsumoto stepped out, a woman in his company. This was, thank God, not his solicitor but a Japanese woman close to his own age. The third Matsumoto sibling, Isabelle concluded, Miyoshi Matsumoto, the Philadelphia flautist.

  She was correct. She paused, jerking her thumb at the door for Hale to go ahead into the hospital. She waited till Matsumoto had paid for the taxi, whereupon he introduced her to his sister. She had arrived from America on the previous evening, he said. She had not yet seen Yukio. But they’d had word this morning from Yukio’s doctors—

  “Yes,” Isabelle said. “He’s conscious. And I must speak with him, Mr. Matsumoto.”

  “Not without his attorney.” It was Miyoshi Matsumoto who replied, and her tone was nothing like her brother’s. Obviously, she’d been in big city America long enough to know that lawyer-up was rule number one when dealing with the police force. “Hiro, call Mrs. Bourne right now.” And to Isabelle, “Keep away. I don’t want you near Yukio.”

  Isabelle wasn’t unaware of the irony of being told exactly what she herself had told Philip Hale in the moments leading up to Yukio Matsumoto’s flight. She said, “Ms. Matsumoto, I know you’re upset—”

  “You’ve got that much right.”

  “—and I don’t disagree that this is a mess.”

  “That’s what you call it?”

  “But what I ask you to see—”

  “Get away from me.” Miyoshi Matsumoto pushed past Isabelle and stalked towards the hospital doors. “Hiro, call that lawyer. Call someone. Keep her out of here.”

  She went within, leaving Isabelle outside with Hiro Matsumoto. He looked at the ground, his arms crossed on his chest. She said to him, “Please intercede.”

  He seemed to consider her request and Isabelle felt momentarily hopeful until he said, “This is something I can’t do. Miyoshi feels much as I do.”

  “Which is?”

  He looked up. Behind his gleaming spectacles, his eyes looked bleak. “Responsible,” he said.

  “You didn’t do this.”

  “Not for what happened,” he said, “but for what didn’t happen.” He nodded at Isabelle and moved towards the hospital doors.

  She followed him at first, then walked at his side. They entered the hospital and began to make their way to Yukio Matsumoto’s room. Isabelle said, “No one could have anticipated this. I’ve been reassured by my officer on the scene that he didn’t approach your brother, that instead Yukio saw something or heard something or perhaps felt something—we can’t even work out which it was—and he simply bolted. As you’ve said yourself—”

  “Superintendent, that’s not what I mean.” Matsumoto paused. Round them, people went on their way: visitors bearing flowers and balloons to loved ones, members of the hospital’s staff striding purposefully from one corridor to another. Above their heads the public address system asked Dr. Marie Lincoln to report to the operating theatre, and next to them pardon was requested by two orderlies whisking a patient somewhere on a trolley. Matsumoto seemed to take all of this in before he went on. “We did what we could for Yukio for many years, Miyoshi and I, but it was not enough. We had our own careers, and it was easier to let him drift so that we could pursue our music. With Yukio to concern ourselves with, to weigh us down …” He shook his head. “How could we have climbed so far, Miyoshi and I? And now this. How could we have sunk so low? I am most deeply shamed.”

  “You’ve no need to be,” Isabelle told him. “If he’s sick, as you say, and without medication, if he’s got a mental condition that caused him to do something, you bear absolutely no responsibility.”

  He’d walked on as she was speaking and he’d rung for the lift and then faced her. When the doors opened in near silence, he turned and she followed him inside. He said to her quietly, “Again, you misunderstand me, Superintendent. My brother did not kill that poor woman. There is an explanation for everything: for the blood on him, for that …that thing you found in his lodgings—”

  “Then for God’s sake, let him give me the explanation,” Isabelle said. “Let him tell me what he did do, what he knows, what actually happened. You can be present, right at his bedside. Your sister can be present. I’m not in uniform. He won’t know who I am, and you don’t need to tell him if you think he’ll panic. You can speak to him in Japanese if that would make it easier for him.”

  “Yukio speaks perfect English, Superintendent.”

  “Then speak to him in English. Or Japanese. Or both. I don’t care. If, as you say, he’s guilty of nothing but being in the cemetery, then he may have seen something that can help us find Jemima Hastings’ killer.”

  They reached the floor he’d rung for and the doors slid open. In the corridor, Isabelle stopped him a final time. She said his name in such a way that even she could hear the desperation in her voice. And when he looked at her gravely, she went on to say, “We’re in a time crunch here. We can’t wait for Zaynab Bourne to show up. If we do wait, you and I both know she’s not going to let me speak to Yukio. Which means if, as you say, he’s guilty of nothing more than being in Abney Park Cemetery when Jemima Hastings was attacked and murdered, he himself could well be in danger because the killer will know from every newspaper in town that Yukio is a person of interest because he was there. And if he was there, he likely saw something and he’s likely to tell us. Which he won’t be able to do if your solicitor shows up.” She was more than desperate at this point, she realised. She was verging on babbling and it made no difference to her what she said or whether she believed what she said—which she didn’t, actually—because the only thing that mattered just then was bending the cellist’s will to hers.

  She waited. She prayed. Her mobile phone rang and she ignored it.

  Finally, Hiro Matsumoto said, “Let me speak to Miyoshi,” and he went to do so.

  BARBARA DISCOVERED THAT Dorothea Harriman had hidden talents. From Harriman’s appearance and demeanor, she’d always reckoned that the departmental secretary had no real trouble pulling men, and this was, of course, true. What she hadn’t known was the length of time Harriman evidently managed to linger in the memories of her victims and to produce within them a willingness to cooperate with anything she desired.

  Within ninety minutes of Barbara’s making the request, Dorothea was back with a slip of paper fluttering from her fingers. This was their “in” at the Home Office, the flatmate of the sister of the bloke who was, apparently, still lost within Dorothea’s thrall. The flatmate was a minor cog in the well-oiled machine that was the Home Office, her name was Stephanie Thompson-Smythe, and—“This is what’s truly excellent,” Dorothea breathed—she was dating a bloke who apparently had access to what
ever codes, keys, or magical words were necessary to create an open sesame situation with an individual policeman’s employment records.

  “I had to tell her about the case,” Dorothea confessed. She was, Barbara found, rather full of her success and desirous of waxing eloquent on the topic, which Barbara reckoned she owed her, so she listened cooperatively and waited for the slip of paper to be handed over. “Well, of course, she knew about it. She reads the papers. So I told her—well, I had to bend the truth just a bit, naturally—that a trail seems to be leading to the Home Office, which of course made her think that perhaps the guilty party is there somewhere and being protected by one of the higher-ups. Rather like Jack the Ripper or something? Anyway, I told her that anything she could help us out with would be brilliant and I swore her name wouldn’t come up at all anywhere. But, I told her, she would be doing an heroic service to help us out even in the smallest way. She seemed to like that.”

  “Wicked.” Barbara indicated the slip of paper Dorothea still held.

  “And she said she’d phone her boyfriend and she did and you’re to meet them both at the Suffragette Scroll in”—Dorothea glanced at her wristwatch, which, like the rest of her, was slender and gold—“twenty minutes.” She sounded quite triumphant, her first venture into the underworld of snouts and blackguards a rousing success. She handed over the slip of paper at last, which turned out to be the mobile phone number of the boyfriend of the flatmate. This was, Dorothea told her, just in case something happened and they “failed to show,” in her words.

  “You,” Barbara told her, “are a marvel.”

  Dorothea blushed. “I do think I carried things off rather well.”

  “Better than that,” Barbara told her. “I’ll head over there now. If anyone asks, I’m on a mission of grave importance for the superintendent.”

  “What if the superintendent asks?” Dorothea said. “She’s only gone over to St. Thomas’ Hospital. She’ll be back eventually.”

  “You’ll think of something,” Barbara told her as she grabbed her disreputable shoulder bag. She headed off to meet her potential Home Office snout.

  The Suffragette Scroll was no great distance, either from the Home Office or from New Scotland Yard. A monument to that eponymous movement of the early twentieth century, it stood at the northwest corner of the green that comprised the intersection of Broadway and Victoria Street. The journey was a five-minute walk for Barbara—including her wait for the lift inside Victoria Block—so she had adequate time to fortify herself with nicotine and to lay her plans before two individuals came strolling hand in hand towards her, doing their best to look like lovers having a bit of a walk on the green in their break from the daily grind.

  One was Stephanie Thompson-Smythe—Steph T-S, as she introduced herself—and the other was Norman Wright, the thinness of whose bridge of nose spoke of serious inbreeding among his forebears. He could have sliced bread with the top of his proboscis.

  Norman and Stephanie T-S looked round, like agents from MI5. Stephanie said to her man, “You talk. I’ll watch,” and retreated to a bench some distance away. Barbara thought this was a good idea. The fewer people involved, the better it was.

  Norman said to her, “What d’you think of the Scroll?” He gazed upon it intently and spoke from the side of his mouth. From this Barbara took it that they were to play at being admirers of Mrs. Pankhurst and her fellows, which was fine by her. She walked round the scroll, gazing up at it, and murmuring to Norman about what she needed and hoped to attain from their acquaintance, brief though it might likely be.

  “Whiting’s his name,” she concluded. “Zachary Whiting. Chapter and verse is what I need. There’s got to be something somewhere in his records that looks ordinary but isn’t.”

  Norman nodded. He pulled at his nose, which gave Barbara a chill as to the damage this might do to the delicate thing, and he considered her words. He said, “So you’ll want the lot, eh? That could be difficult. I send it online and I leave a trail.”

  “We’re going to have to be antique in our methods,” Barbara told him. “Careful and antique.”

  He looked at her blankly, clearly a child of the electronic age. His eyes narrowed as he thought about this. “Antique?” he asked.

  “A photo-copier.”

  “Ah,” he said. “And if there’s nothing to copy? Most of this is stored on computer.”

  “A printer then. Someone else’s printer. Someone else’s computer. There are ways, Norman, and you’ve got to find one. We’re talking life and death. A female corpse up in Stoke Newington and something rotten—”

  “—in Denmark,” Norman said. “Yes. I see.”

  Barbara wondered what the hell he was talking about, but she twigged it before she made a fool of herself and asked what Denmark had to do with the price of salami. She said, “Ah. Very good. Too bloody right. Thing to remember is that what looks ordinary might not be ordinary. This bloke’s managed to get as far as chief superintendent in the Hampshire Constabulary, so we’re not likely to stumble on smoking guns.”

  “Something subtle. Yes. Of course.”

  “So?” Barbara asked him.

  He would see what he could do, Norman told her. Meantime, did they need a code word? Perhaps a signal? Some way for him to tell her that he had the goods for her without phoning New Scotland Yard? And if he was to make copies of anything, where would the drop be located?

  Obviously, Barbara thought, he’d been reading far too much early John Le Carré. She decided she would have to play along. The drop, Barbara told him, sotto voce, would be at the cash-point machine in front of Barclays in Victoria Street. He would ring her personal mobile phone and say, “Drinks tonight, luv?” and she would know to meet him in that spot. She would stand behind him in line. He would leave the goods at the cash-point machine when he withdrew money or at least pretended to withdraw money. She would then pick it up with her own cash when she used the machine. Not the most sophisticated system, she knew, considering all the CCTV cameras that would be documenting every movement in the vicinity, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Norman said, “Right, then,” and waited for her to hand over her mobile number. They parted.

  Barbara said to his retreating back, “Soon, Norman.”

  “Life and death,” was his reply.

  God, she thought, the lengths she went to in the cause of finding a killer. She returned to Victoria Block.

  Back in the incident room, there was some serious milling about going on. She learned this had to do with a report from SO7 that had just come in: The blood sprayed on the yellow shirt from the Oxfam bin did indeed belong to Jemima Hastings. Well, Barbara thought, they had reckoned as much.

  She approached the china board with its array of photos, its scrawled information, its names listed, and its timelines drawn. She hadn’t had a good look at it since being recalled from Hampshire, and among other things up there was a decent photo of the yellow shirt. It might tell her something, she thought. She wondered how Whiting looked in yellow.

  But it was not the shirt that caught her attention, as things turned out. It was another photograph altogether. She looked upon the picture of the murder weapon, of the ruler placed next to it to indicate its size.

  When she saw it, she spun round from the photo to seek out Nkata. From across the room he glanced up at that moment, a phone pressed to his ear, and he obviously clocked her expression because he said a few more words to whoever was on the other end of the line before ringing off and coming to join her. She said, “Winnie …,” and pointed to the picture. She didn’t need to say more. She heard him breathe out in a whistle, so she knew he was thinking what she was thinking. The only question was whether his conclusion was the same.

  She said, “We’ve got to get back to Hampshire.”

  He said, “Barb—”

  “Don’t argue.”

  “Barb, we been ordered back. We can’t head off like we’re in charge here.”

  “Phone her,
then. She’s got her mobile.”

  “We c’n ring down there. We c’n tell th’ cops to—”

  “Ring where? Hampshire? With Whiting in charge? Winnie, good God, d’you think that makes sense?”

  He looked at the photo of the weapon, then at the photo of the yellow shirt. Barbara knew he was thinking of the politics behind what she was proposing, and in his hesitation, she had her answer to the question concerning on what side of the line Winnie would always walk. She couldn’t blame him. Her own career was so chequered that a few more black marks hardly mattered. His career was not.

  She said, “All right. I’ll phone the guv. But then I’m going. It’s the only way.”

  TO HER RELIEF Isabelle Ardery discovered that Hiro Matsumoto did have some influence over his sister. After some conversation in their brother’s hospital room, Miyoshi Matsumoto emerged and told Isabelle she could speak to Yukio. But if her younger brother became upset either by Isabelle’s questions or her presence, the interview would end at once. And she—not Isabelle—would be the one to determine how “upset” might manifest itself.

  Isabelle had no choice but to agree to Miyoshi’s rules. She fished her mobile out of her bag and switched it off. She wanted to take no chances that anything external to her own questions might disturb the violinist.

  Yukio’s head was bandaged, and he was hooked up to various machines and IV drips. But he was conscious and he seemed to be taking some comfort from the presence of his two siblings. Hiro had positioned himself near his brother’s shoulder where he’d laid his hand. Miyoshi took a place on the other side of the bed. She fussed maternally with the neck of his hospital gown as well as with the thin blanket that covered him. She eyed Isabelle suspiciously. She said, “You’ve the time it will take Mrs. Bourne to arrive.”

  That, Isabelle saw, had been the compromise the siblings had reached. Hiro had phoned the solicitor in exchange for his sister’s agreeing to allow Isabelle a few minutes’ access to their brother. She said, “Very well,” and she studied the violinist. He was smaller than he’d seemed in flight. He looked far more vulnerable than she would have expected.