This Body of Death (44 page)

“I wasn’t wrong, the situation yesterday wasn’t mismanaged.”

“I didn’t tell him it was. The man panicked. No one knows why.”

“That’s what you told him?”

“That’s what I told him.”

“If Philip Hale hadn’t—”

“Don’t throw Philip into the midst of feeding sharks. That sort of thing will return to haunt you. The best position to take is no one’s to blame. That’s the position that will serve you in the long run.”

She thought about this. She said, “Is he alone?”

“When I went in, he was. But he’s phoned for Stephenson Deacon to come to his office. There’s got to be a briefing and the Directorate of Public Affairs wants it as soon as possible. That will mean today.”

Isabelle acknowledged a fleeting wish that she’d tossed back at least one of the bottles of vodka. There was no telling how long the coming meeting would take. But then she assured herself that she was up to the challenge. This wasn’t about her, as Lynley had said. She was merely present to answer questions.

She said to Lynley, “Thank you, Thomas,” and it was only when she was approaching the desk of Hillier’s secretary that she realised Lynley had earlier used her Christian name. She turned back to say something to him, but he was already gone.

Judi MacIntosh made a brief call into the sanctum sanctorum of the assistant commissioner. She said, “Superintendent Ardery—,” but got no further. She listened for a moment and said, “Indeed, sir.” She told Isabelle that she was to wait. It would be a few minutes. Did the superintendent want a cup of coffee?

Isabelle declined. She knew she was supposed to sit, so that was what she did, but she didn’t find it easy. As she was waiting, her mobile rang. Her ex-husband, she saw. She wouldn’t talk to him now.

A middle-aged man came into the area, a litre bottle of soda water tucked into his arm. Judi MacIntosh said to him, “Do go in, Mr. Deacon,” so Isabelle knew she was looking at the head of the Press Bureau, sent by the Directorate of Public Affairs to get to grips with the situation. Oddly, Stephenson Deacon had a football stomach although the rest of him was thin as a towel in a third-rate hotel. This inadvertently gave the impression of a pregnant woman blindly determined to watch her weight.

Deacon disappeared into Hillier’s office, and Isabelle spent an agonising quarter of an hour waiting to see what would happen next. What happened was Judi MacIntosh’s being asked to send Isabelle within, although how Judi MacIntosh received this information was a mystery to Isabelle as nothing had seemed to intrude upon what the woman was doing—which was beavering away at some typing on her computer—when she looked up and announced, “Do go inside, Superintendent Ardery.”

Isabelle did so. She was introduced to Stephenson Deacon and she was asked to join him and Hillier at the conference table to one side of the AC’s office. There she was subjected to a thorough grilling by both men on the topic of what had happened, when, where, why, who did what to whom, what sort of chase, how many witnesses, what had been the alternatives to giving chase, did the suspect speak English, did the police show their identification, was anyone in uniform, etc., etc.

Isabelle explained to them that the suspect in question had bolted, out of the absolute blue. They’d been watching him when something apparently spooked him.

Any idea what? Hillier wanted to know. Any idea how?

None at all. She’d sent men there with strict instructions not to approach, not to have uniforms with them, not to cause a scene—

Fat lot of good
that
did, Stephenson Deacon put in.

But somehow he was frightened anyway. It seems that he might have taken the police for invading angels.

Angels
? What the—

He’s a bit of an odd egg, sir, as things turned out. Had we known about that, had we known he was likely to misinterpret anyone’s approaching him, had we even thought he would take the sight of someone coming near to mean he was in danger—

Invading angels?
Invading angels?
What the bloody hell do angels have to do with what happened?

Isabelle explained the condition of Yukio Matsumoto’s digs. She described the drawings on the walls. She gave them Hiro Matsumoto’s interpretation of the depiction of the angels his brother had drawn, and she concluded with the connection that existed between the violinist and Jemima Hastings as well as what they’d found in the room itself.

At the end, there was silence, for which Isabelle was grateful. She had her hands clasped tightly in her lap because she’d realised they’d begun shaking. When her hands trembled it was always a signal that thinking was going to become difficult for her in very short order. It was a result of not eating breakfast, she decided, a simple matter of blood sugar.

Finally, Stephenson Deacon spoke. The solicitor for Hiro Matsumoto, he informed her with a glance at what appeared to be a phone message, would be holding a press conference in just three hours. The cellist would be with her, but he wouldn’t speak. Zaynab Bourne was going to lay blame for what had occurred in Shaftesbury Avenue directly at the feet of the Met.

Isabelle started to speak, but Deacon held up a hand to stop her.

They themselves would prepare for a counter press conference—he referred to it as a preemptive strike—and they would hold it in exactly ninety minutes.

At this, Isabelle felt a sudden dryness develop in her throat. She said, “I expect you want me there?”

Deacon said they did not. “We want no such thing,” was how he put it. He would give out the relevant information that he’d just gathered from the superintendent. If she was wanted further, he said, he would let her know.

She was thus dismissed. As she left the room, she saw the two men lean towards each other in the sort of huddle that indicated an evaluation being made. It was an unnerving sight.

“W
HAT ARE YOU
doing here?” Bella McHaggis demanded. She didn’t like surprises in general, and this one in particular disturbed her. Paolo di Fazio was supposed to be at work. He was not supposed to be coming through her garden gate at this time of day. The juxtaposition of Paolo’s being there in Putney with her having just discovered Jemima’s handbag caused a frisson of warning to run through Bella’s body.

Paolo didn’t answer her question. His eyes were fixed—they were absolutely
paralysed
, Bella thought—upon the handbag. He said, “That’s Jemima’s.”

“Interesting that you know,” was her reply. “I myself had to look inside.” And then she repeated her question. “What are you doing here?”

His reply of, “I live here,” did not amuse. He then said, as if she hadn’t already told him, “Have you looked inside?”

“I just told you I looked inside.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Is there …Was there anything?”

“What sort of question is that?” she asked him. “And why aren’t you at work, where you’re supposed to be?”

“Where did you find it? What are you going to do with it?”

This
was the limit. She began to say, “I have no intention—” when he cut in with, “Who else knows about it? Have you phoned the police? Why are you holding it that way?”

“What way? How am I supposed to be holding it?”

He fished in his pocket and brought forth a handkerchief. “Here. You must give it to me.”

That sent the alarm bells absolutely
clanging
. All at once Bella’s mind was filled with details, and rising to the top of them was that pregnancy test. That fact floated there with others equally damning: all of Paolo di Fazio’s engagements to be married, that argument Bella had heard between him and Jemima, Paolo’s being the one to bring Jemima to her house in the first place …And there were probably more if she could gather her wits and not be put off her mental stride by the expression on his face. She’d never seen Paolo look so intense.

She said, “You put it there, didn’t you? With everything for Oxfam. You play the innocent now with all these questions, but you can’t fool me, Paolo.”

“I?” he said. “You must be mad. Why would I put Jemima’s bag in the Oxfam bin?”

“We both know the answer to that. It’s the perfect place to stow the handbag. Right here on the property.” She could, indeed, see how the plan would have worked. No one would look for the bag so far from the place where Jemima had been killed, and if someone found it by chance—as she herself had done—then it could easily be explained away: Jemima herself had discarded it, never bloody mind the fact that it held her essential belongings! But if no one found it prior to its being carted off to Oxfam, all the better. When the bin was emptied, it would doubtless be months after her death. The contents would be taken away and perhaps the bag would be opened wherever things were gone through for distribution to the shops. By that time no one would know where it had come from or, perhaps, even remember the death in Stoke Newington. No one would think the bag had anything to do with murder. Oh, it was all so clever of him, wasn’t it?

“You think I hurt Jemima?” Paolo asked. “You think I killed her?” He ran his hand over his head in a movement she knew she was meant to take for agitation. “
Pazza donna!
Why would I hurt Jemima?”

She narrowed her eyes. He sounded so convincing, didn’t he? And wouldn’t he just, him with his five or fifteen or fifty engagements to women who always threw him over and why, why,
why
? Just what was wrong with Mr. di Fazio? What did he do to them? What did he want from them? Or better yet, what did they come to know about him?

He took a step closer, saying, “Mrs. McHaggis, at least let’s—”

“Don’t!” She backed away. “You stay right there! Don’t come an inch closer or I’ll scream my head off. I know your sort.”

“My ‘sort’? What sort is that?”

“Don’t you play the innocent with me.”

He sighed. “Then we have a problem.”

“How? Why? Oh, don’t you try to be clever.”

“I need to get into the house,” he said. “This I cannot do if you won’t let me approach you and pass you.” He returned his handkerchief to his pocket. He’d been holding it all along—and she knew he’d meant to use it to wipe fingerprints from the bag because one thing he
wasn’t
was a bloody fool and neither was she—but obviously he could see that she knew what he intended and he’d given it up. “I have left in my room a postal order that I wish to send to Sicily. I must fetch this, Mrs. McHaggis.”

“I don’t believe you. You could have sent it straightaway, directly you bought it.”

“Yes. I could have. But I wished to write a card as well. Would you like to see it? Mrs. McHaggis, you’re being silly.”

“Don’t use that ruse on me, young man.”

“Please think things through because what you’ve concluded makes no sense. If Jemima’s killer lives in this house, as you seem to think, there are far,
far
better places to have put her bag than in the front garden. Don’t you agree?”

Bella said nothing. He was trying to confuse her. That was what killers always did when they were backed into a corner.

He said, “To be honest, I’d thought Frazer was probably responsible for what’s happened, but this bag tells me—”

“Don’t you dare blame Frazer!” Because
that
was what they did as well. They tried to blame others, they tried to divert suspicion. Oh, he was bloody clever, indeed.

“—that it makes no sense to think he’s guilty either. For why would Frazer kill her, bring her bag here, and put it in the rubbish in front of the house where he lives?”

“It’s not rubbish,” she said inanely. “It’s for recycling. I won’t have you call the recycling rubbish. It’s because people think that that they won’t recycle goods in the first place. And if people would simply begin recycling, we might save the planet. Don’t you understand?”

He raised his eyes skyward. It came to Bella that he looked, for a moment, exactly like one of those pictures of martyred saints. This was due to the fact that he was darkish skinned because he was Italian and most of the martyred saints were Italian. Weren’t they? If it came to it, was he really Italian? Perhaps he was merely pretending to be. Lord, what was happening to her brain? Was this what abject terror did to people? Except, she realised, perhaps she wasn’t as terrified as she’d earlier been or as she was supposed to be.

“Mrs. McHaggis,” Paolo said quietly, “please consider that someone else might have put Jemima’s bag in that bin.”

“Ridiculous. Why would anyone else—?”

“And
if
someone else put the bag there, who might that person be? Is there someone who might want to make one of us look guilty?”

“There’s only one person looking guilty, my lad, and that person is you.”

“It isn’t. Don’t you see? That bag’s presence makes you look bad as well, doesn’t it? Just as it makes me look bad—at least in your eyes—and it makes Frazer look bad.”

“You’re shifting blame! I told you not to. I told you …” And suddenly the penny dropped: the vague mutterings about black, night, sun, and ooze; the prayers and the smoking green cigar. “Oh dear Lord,” Bella murmured.

She turned from Paolo and fumbled for the door to get into the house. If he followed her inside at this point, she knew it did not matter.

“I
THINK YOUR BEST COURSE IS GOING TO BE TO GET SOMEONE
from Christie’s to look at it,” St. James said. “Or, failing that, someone at the BM. You can check it out from the evidence officer, can’t you?”

“I’m not exactly in a position to take that decision,” Lynley said.

“Ah. The new superintendent. How does it go?”

“A bit unevenly, I’m afraid.” Lynley glanced around. He and St. James were speaking via phone. References to Isabelle Ardery had to be circumspect, of necessity. Besides, he felt for the acting superintendent’s position. He didn’t envy her, having to cope with Stephenson Deacon and the Directorate of Public Affairs so soon into her employment at the Yard. Once the press came howling into the picture in an investigation, the pressure for a result mounted. With someone now in hospital, Ardery was going to feel that pressure from every quarter.

“I see,” St. James said. “Well, if not the stone itself, what about the photo you showed me? It’s quite clear and you can see the scale. That might be all that’s necessary.”

“For the British Museum, possibly. But certainly not for Christie’s.”

St. James was silent for a moment before he said, “I wish I could be more help, Tommy. But I’m loath to send you in the wrong direction.”

“Nothing to apologise for,” Lynley told his friend. “It might mean nothing anyway.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I don’t. On the other hand, I may be merely clutching at a straw.”

So it definitely seemed, because right, left, and centre everything was either utterly confusing matters or checking out as inconsequential. There was no middle ground between the extremes.

The background checks completed so far served as evidence of this: Of the principals in London involved in the case, tangentially or otherwise, everyone was turning out to be exactly who he seemed to be and nobody’s copy book was blotted. There was still the matter of Abbott Langer’s supposed marriages to be sorted, and Matt Jones—paramour of St. James’s sister—continued to be a question mark as there were more than four hundred Matthew Joneses spread out in the UK, so tracking each down and sorting them all out was proving a problem. Other than that, no one had so much as a parking ticket. This made things look grim as far as Yukio Matsumoto was concerned, despite his brother’s protestations of the violinist’s harmless nature. For with everyone else turning up clean and no one else in London apparently having a motive to murder Jemima Hastings, the killing either had to have been committed in the sort of act of madness one could easily associate with Yukio Matsumoto and his angels or it had to have arisen from something and someone connected to Hampshire.

Of the Hampshire principals, there were two curious points that had been uncovered and only one of them seemed likely to lead anywhere. The first point was that Gina Dickens had so far been untraceable in Hampshire although various forms of her name were still being tried: Regina, Jean, Virginia, etc. The second—and more interesting piece of information—was about Robert Hastings, who, as things turned out, had trained to be a blacksmith prior to taking over his father’s position as agister. And this might have merely been shoved aside as another useless bit of data had forensics not given a preliminary assessment about the murder weapon. According to microscopic examination, the thing was hand forged, and the blood upon it had come from Jemima Hastings, as well. When this information was added to Yukio Matsumoto’s possession of the spike, to the eyewitness report of an Oriental man stumbling from Abney Park Cemetery, to the e-fit generated by that report, and to what was likely to be blood residue on the violinist’s clothing and his shoes, it was difficult to disagree with Isabelle Ardery’s conclusion that they had their man.

But Lynley liked to have everything accounted for. Thus he returned to the stone that Jemima Hastings had carried in her pocket. It wasn’t that he assumed it was valuable and, possibly, the reason for her death. It was just that the stone remained a detail that he wanted to understand.

He was once again studying the photo of the stone when he received a phone call from Barbara Havers. She’d had the word to return to London, she told him, but before she did so she wanted to know if he’d unearthed anything about Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting. Or, for that matter, about Ringo Heath, because it could be that there was a connection between those two that wanted exploring.

What he’d discovered was little enough, Lynley told her. All of Whiting’s training as a police officer had followed the usual, legitimate pattern: He’d done his required training weeks at a Centrex centre, he’d taken additional instruction at several area training units, and he’d attended an admirable number of courses in Bramshill. He had twenty-three years of service under his belt, all of them spent in Hampshire. If he was involved in anything untoward, Lynley hadn’t sorted what it was.
He can be a bit of a bully on occasion
had been the nastiest comment anyone cared to make about the bloke, although
He’s been sometimes too enthusiastic about the job in hand
could, Lynley knew, have several interpretations.

As for Ringo Heath, there was nothing. Especially there was no connection of record between Heath and Chief Superintendent Whiting. As to a connection between Whiting and Gordon Jossie, whatever it was, it was going to have to come out of Jossie’s background because it certainly wasn’t coming out of Whiting’s.

“So it’s sod bloody all on a biscuit, eh?” was how Havers received the information. “I s’pose her order to come home makes sense.”

“You’re on your way, aren’t you?” Lynley asked her.

“With Winston at the wheel? What d’
you
think?”

Which meant that Nkata who, unlike Havers, had a history of taking orders seriously, was returning them to London. Had she been given her way in matters, Barbara would have probably dallied until she was satisfied by what she was able to gather about everyone in Hampshire even remotely connected to Jemima Hastings’ death.

He concluded his call as Isabelle Ardery returned from her meeting with Hillier and Stephenson Deacon. She looked no more harried than usual, so he concluded the meeting had gone marginally well. Then John Stewart fielded a phone call from SO7 that put a full stop to the case as far as Ardery was concerned. They had the analysis of the two hairs found on the body of Jemima Hastings, he told them.

“Well, thank God for that,” Ardery declared. “What’ve we got?”

“Oriental,” he told her.

“Hallelujah.”

It would have been a moment for packing everything in then, and Lynley could see that Ardery was inclined to do so. But Dorothea Harriman came into the room in the very next moment and, with her words, burst everything wide open.

One Bella McHaggis was downstairs in reception, Harriman told them, and she wanted to speak to Barbara Havers.

“She was told the detective sergeant is in Hampshire, so she’s asked to see whoever’s in charge of the case,” Harriman said. “She’s got evidence, she says, and she doesn’t mean to hand it over to just anyone.”

B
ELLA WAS NO
longer suspicious of Paolo di Fazio. That was finished the moment she’d seen the error in her thinking. She didn’t regret setting the coppers after him since she watched enough police dramas on the telly to know that everyone had to be eliminated as suspects in order to find the guilty party and, like it or not, he was a suspect. So was she, she supposed. Anyway, she reckoned he’d get over whatever offence he might be feeling because of her suspicions and if he didn’t, he’d find other lodgings, but in any case she couldn’t be bothered because Jemima’s handbag had to be turned over to the officers investigating the case.

As she didn’t intend waiting at home for them finally to show their faces
this
time round, she didn’t bother with the phone. Instead, she’d dropped Jemima’s handbag into the canvas carryall that she used for her grocery shopping, and she’d carted it off to New Scotland Yard because that was where that Sergeant Havers person had come from.

When she learned that Sergeant Havers wasn’t in, she’d demanded someone else. The head, the chief, the whoever’s-in-charge, she said to the uniform in reception. And she wasn’t leaving till she talked to that person.
In
person, by the way. Not on the phone. She parked herself near the eternal flame and there she determined to remain.

And damn, if she didn’t have to wait exactly forty-three minutes for a responsible party finally to appear. Even when this happened, she didn’t think she was looking at the responsible party at all. A tall, nice-looking man approached her and, when he spoke from beneath his head of beautifully groomed blond hair, he didn’t sound like anyone she’d ever heard yapping away on
The Bill
. He was Inspector Lynley, he said in the plummy tone that had always proclaimed Public School in One’s Past. Did she have something related to the investigation?

“Are you in charge?” she demanded, and when he admitted that he was not, she told him to fetch whoever was and
that
, she said, was how it was going to be. She was in need of police protection from the killer of Jemima Hastings, she said, and she had a feeling he wasn’t going to be able to provide that on his own. “I know who did it,” she told him and she lifted the carryall to her chest, “and what I’ve got in here proves it.”

“Ah,” he said politely. “And what have you got in there?”

“I’m
not
a nutter,” she told him sharply because she could tell what he was thinking about her. “You fetch who needs to be fetched, my good man.”

He went to make a phone call. He regarded her from across the lobby as he spoke to whoever was at the other end of the line. Whatever he said proved fruitful, though. In another three minutes, a woman came out of the elevator and through the turnstile that kept the general public away from the mysterious workings of New Scotland Yard. This individual strode over to join them. She was, Inspector Lynley told Bella, Detective Superintendent Ardery.

“And are
you
the person in charge?” Bella said.

“I am,” the superintendent replied. Her facial expression added the comment, And this better be worth my time, madam.

Right, Bella thought, it bloody well will be.

T
HE HANDBAG WAS
so hopelessly compromised for purposes of evidence that Isabelle wanted to shake the woman silly. The fact that she did not was, she decided, a testimony to her self-control.

“It’s Jemima’s,” Bella McHaggis announced as she produced it with a flourish. This flourish included adding fingerprints to what were doubtless dozens more of her own, in the process smearing everyone else’s and, in particular, smearing the killer’s. “I found it with the Oxfam goods.”

“A discarded bag or one that she carried daily?” Lynley asked, not unreasonably.

“It’s her regular bag. And it wasn’t discarded because it’s got all her clobber in it.”

“You went through it?” Isabelle gritted her teeth in preparation for the inevitable answer, which was, naturally, that the woman had pawed through everything, depositing more fingerprints, creating more compromised evidence.

“Well, of course I went through it,” Bella asserted. “How else was I to know it’s Jemima’s?”

“How else indeed,” Isabelle said.

Bella McHaggis gave her a narrow-eyed look that told Isabelle she was being evaluated. The woman seemed to reach a conclusion that no offence was intended by Isabelle’s tone, and before she could be stopped from doing so, she opened the handbag, said, “See here, then,” and dumped its contents onto the seat where she’d been awaiting them.

“Please don’t—,” Isabelle began as Lynley said, “This all must go to—” and Bella picked up a mobile phone and waved it at them, declaring, “This is hers. And this is her purse and her wallet” and on and on as she pawed through everything. There was nothing for it but to grab her hands in the unlikely hope that something had gone untouched on Bella’s first time through the handbag and that it could remain so. “Yes, yes. Thank you,” Isabelle said. She nodded at Lynley to replace the handbag’s contents and to put the bag itself into the carryall. When he’d accomplished this, Isabelle asked the woman to take her through everything that had led to her finding the handbag. This, Bella McHaggis was pleased to do. She gave them chapter and verse on recycling and saving the planet, and from this Isabelle concluded that the handbag had come from a bin that was not only situated in front of Bella McHag gis’s house but was also accessible to anyone who happened to pass by and see it. This, apparently, was a point that Bella herself wished to make because the conclusion of her recitation contained a fact she declared “the most important bit of all.”

“And that is?” Isabelle enquired.

“Yolanda.”

It seemed that the psychic had been lurking round Bella’s front garden again, and she’d been there this time moments before Bella had made the discovery of Jemima’s handbag. She’d been ostensibly having “some sort of bloody psychic
experience
,” Bella scoffed, which had been characterised by muttering, moaning, praying, and waving round a stick of burning whatever that was supposed to do something magical or “rubbish like that.” Bella had given her a few choice words, and the psychic had scurried off. Moments later, checking the Oxfam bin, Bella had uncovered the handbag.

“Why were you checking the bin?” Lynley asked.

“To see how soon it would need emptying, obviously,” was her withering reply. It seemed, not unreasonably, that the other bins collected recycling matter far more quickly than did the Oxfam bin. While they were emptied twice each month, the Oxfam bin was not.

“
She’d
have no way of knowing that,” Bella said.

“We’ll want to go through this bin,” Isabelle said. “You’ve not done anything with its contents, have you?”