This Body of Death (23 page)

“When I’m finished here,” Bella said. “
Some
things are important to
some
people, miss.”

Barbara had an inclination to tell the woman that murder was definitely one of those things, but instead she rolled her eyes at Nkata as Bella McHaggis went back to unloading her trolley of newspapers. When she’d accomplished this, she told them to follow her inside, and they’d not made it farther than the entry—with its lists of rules and its signs about the landlady’s presence on the property—when Bella gave them an earful about her evidence and demanded to know why they hadn’t dispatched someone at once to collect it.

“I rang that number, I did. The one in the
Daily Mail
asking for information. Well, I’ve got information, don’t I, and you’d think they’d come by and ask one or two of their questions about it.
And
you’d think they’d come on the run.”

She led them into the dining room, where the number of broadsheets and tabloids she had spread on the table suggested she was closely following the progress of the investigation. She said they were meant to sit there while she fetched what they wanted, and when Barbara pointed out that what they wanted was a word with Frazer Chaplin if he was at home, she said, “Oh, don’t be such a ninny. He’s a man but he isn’t a
fool
, Sergeant. And have you done anything about that psychic? I rang the police about
her
as well. Hanging about outside my property again. There she was, large as life.”

“We’ve had a word with Yolanda,” Barbara said.

“Thank God for small mercies.” Bella seemed about to relent on the matter of Frazer Chaplin but then her face altered as she made the mental leap from what Barbara had just said to what Barbara and Winston Nkata wanted, a word with Frazer. She said, “Why, that mad bloody cow. She’s said something about Frazer, hasn’t she? She’s told you something that’s brought you here on the run and you mean to arrest him. Well, I’m not having that. Not with Paolo and his five engagements and his bringing Jemima here as a lodger and that argument of theirs. Just a friend, he tells me and she agrees and then look what happens.”

“Let me clarify that Yolanda said nothing about Frazer Chaplin,” Barbara said. “We’re coming at him from another angle. So if you’d fetch him … ? Because if he isn’t here—”

“What other angle? There
is
no other angle. Oh, you wait right there and I’ll prove it to you.”

She marched out of the dining room. They heard her go up the stairs. When she was gone, Winston looked at Barbara. “Felt like I ought to salute or summick.”

“She’s quite the character,” Barbara admitted. Then, “Do you hear water running? Could Frazer be having a shower? His room’s below us. The basement flat. She doesn’t seem to want us to see him, does she?”

“Protecting him? Think she fancies him?”

“It fits with what Abbott Langer said about Frazer and the ladies, eh?”

Bella returned to them, a white envelope in her hand. With the triumphant air of a woman who’d out-Sherlocked the best of them, she told them to have a look at
that
.
That
turned out to be a thin spatulate finger of plastic with a slip of paper emerging from one end of it and a ridged area at the other. In the middle were two small windows, one round and one square. The centre of each of these was coloured with a thin blue line, one horizontal and one vertical. Barbara had never seen one before—she’d hardly been in a position of need when it came to such things—but she knew what she was looking at and so, apparently, did Winston.

“A pregnancy test,” Bella announced. “And it
wasn’t
among Jemima’s belongings, was it? It was in Paolo’s clobber.
Paolo’s
. Well, I daresay Paolo’s not testing himself, is he?”

“Not likely,” Barbara agreed. “But how do you reckon this’s Jemima’s? I assume that’s what you’re thinking, eh?”

“It’s obvious. They shared the bathroom and the toilet’s in the bathroom. She either gave this to him”—with a jerk of her head towards the slip of paper—“or, what’s more likely, he saw it in the rubbish and fished it out, and that explains their quarrel. Oh,
he
said it was due to a misunderstanding about Jemima’s hanging her smalls in the bath and
she
said it had to do with that male/female nonsense about leaving the toilet seat up, but let me tell you I had a feeling about them from the first. They were butter wouldn’t melt and all the rest of it,
friends
from the workplace in Covent Garden. I happened to have a vacant room and
he
happened to know of someone who was looking and could he bring her, Mrs. McHaggis? She seems a nice enough sort of girl, he says. And there I was, ready to believe the two of them while all the time they’re sneaking round on the floor below me, going at it like monkeys behind my back. Well, let me tell you right now, if she wasn’t dead, she’d be gone. Out. Finished. On her ear. On the pavement.”

Right where Yolanda wanted her, Barbara concluded. All well and good, but Yolanda would hardly have sneaked into the house and planted a pregnancy test in the bathroom on the slight chance that Bella McHaggis would find it, jump to conclusions, and evict the one lodger Yolanda wanted to get her mitts on. Or would she?

Barbara said, “We’ll take this into consideration.”

“You damn well bloody will,” Bella said. “It’s motive loud and clear and make no mistake. Big as life. Right before your eyes.” She leaned across the table, her palm flat on the front of the
Daily Express
. “He’s been engaged five times, mind you.
Five
times and what does that say about him? Well,
I’ll
tell
you
what it says. It says desperate. And desperate means a man who’ll stop at nothing.”

“And you’re talking about … ?”

“Paolo di Fazio. Who else?”

Anyone
else, Barbara reckoned, and she could see Winston was thinking the same. She said, Right yes, they would have a word with Paolo di Fazio.

“I should certainly hope you will. He’s got himself a lockup somewhere, a place where he does his sculpting. You ask me, he dragged that poor girl into that place and did his worst and dumped her body …”

Yes, yes, whatever. All of this would be checked out, Barbara assured her, nodding towards Winston to indicate that he’d been scrupulously taking notes. They’d be having a word with all of the lodgers, and that did include Paolo di Fazio. Now as to Frazer Chaplin—

“
Why
do you want to make this about Frazer?” Bella demanded.

Precisely because you don’t, Barbara thought. She said, “It’s a matter of putting a full stop to every possibility. It’s what we do.” It was part and parcel of the job. Trace, interview, and eliminate.

As Barbara was speaking, the door leading down to the basement flat opened and shut and a man’s pleasant voice called, “I’m off then, Mrs. McH.”

Winston got to his feet. He went out into the corridor that led towards the back of the house and said, “Mr. Chaplin? DS Winston Nkata. We’d like a word please.”

A moment. And then, “Sh’ll I ring Duke’s and let them know? I’m expected at work in thirty minutes.”

“Won’t take long, this,” Nkata told him.

Frazer followed Winston into the room, which gave Barbara her first close look at the man.
Dark as the night
. Yet another, she thought. Not that she intended to give credence to Yolanda’s ravings. But still …He was a stone and he couldn’t be left unturned.

He looked round thirty years old. His olive skin was pock-marked but that didn’t detract, and while his shadowy stubble could have covered the scars if he’d grown them into a beard, he was wise not to have done so. He looked piratical and a little dangerous, which, Barbara knew, some women found attractive.

He locked eyes with her, then gave her a nod. He was carrying a pair of shoes, and he sat at the table and put these shoes on, lacing them up and saying no thanks to Bella McHaggis’s offer of tea. It was an offer that, pointedly, she did not make to the other two. Her attention to the man—she called him
luv
—in addition to what Abbott Langer had told them about his effect on women made Barbara want to suspect him on the spot. Which wasn’t exactly good police work, but she had an automatic aversion to men like this bloke because he had one of those unmistakable I-know-what-you-want-and-I’ve-got-it-here-in-my-trousers expressions on his face. No matter the difference in their ages, if he was giving it to Bella on the side, no wonder she was besotted.

And she was. That much was clear, far beyond the
luv
and the
darling
. Bella looked upon Frazer with a fond expression that Barbara
might
have considered maternal had she not been a cop who’d seen just about every permutation of human entanglement in her years on the force.

“Mrs. McH has told me about Jemima,” Frazer said, “that she’s the one from the cemetery. You’ll be wanting to know what I know and I’m glad to tell you. I expect Paolo will feel likewise, as will everyone who knew her. She’s a lovely girl.”

“Was,” Barbara said. “As she’s dead.”

“Sorry. Was.” He looked something between bland and solemn, and Barbara wondered if he felt anything at all for the fact that his fellow lodger had been murdered. Somehow, she doubted it.

“We understand she had a bit of a thing for you,” Barbara said. Winston did his part with the notebook and pencil, but he was watching Frazer’s every move. “Balloons at Valentine’s Day and all the et ceteras?”

“What would those et ceteras be? Because as I see it, sure there’s no crime in an innocent delivery of six balloons.”

Bella McHaggis’s eyes narrowed at this mention of balloons. Her glance went from the police to her lodger. He said, “Not to worry, Mrs. McH. I said I’d not be making the same mistake twice, and you’ve got my word on it that I didn’t.”

“What mistake would that be?” Barbara asked.

He moved to get more comfortable in his seat. He had a wide-legged posture when sitting, Barbara noted, one of those blokes who liked to show off the family jewels. “I had a bit of a fling at one time with a lass who lived here,” he said. “It was wrong, and I know it, and I did my penance. Mrs. McH didn’t toss me out on my ear as she otherwise might have done, for which I’m grateful. So I wasn’t likely to go the wayward-son route again.”

Considering what they’d heard from Abbott Langer—if he’d been speaking the truth—Barbara had her doubts about Frazer’s sincerity in this matter. She said to him, “I understand you work at more than one job, Mr. Chaplin. Could you tell me where else you’re employed besides the ice rink?”

“Why?” Bella McHaggis was the one to ask the question. “What’s that got to do with—”

“It’s just procedure,” Barbara told her.

“What
sort
of procedure?” Bella demanded.

“It’s nothing, Mrs. McH,” Frazer said. “They’re just doing their jobs.” Frazer said that he worked late afternoons and evenings in Duke’s Hotel in St. James’s. He was the bartender there and had been for the last three years.

“Industrious,” Barbara noted. “Two jobs.”

“I’m saving,” he said. “It’s not a crime, I believe.”

“Saving for what?”

“How’s
that
important?” Bella demanded. “See here—”

“Everything’s important till we know it’s not,” Barbara told her. “Mr. Chaplin?”

“Emigration,” he said.

“To … ?”

“Auckland.”

“Why?”

“I’ve hopes to open a small hotel. A lovely little boutique hotel, as it happens.”

“Anyone helping you save?”

He frowned. “What d’you mean?”

“Young lady, p’rhaps, contributing to your hotel fund, making plans, thinking she’ll be included?”

“You’re speaking of Jemima, I expect.”

“Why would you jump to that conclusion?”

“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.”

W
HEN 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.”