This Body of Death

Chapter Six

ISABELLE ARDERY WASN’T PLEASED THAT AC HILLIER PUT IN an appearance at the morning meeting of her team on the following day. It smacked of checking up on her, which she didn’t like, although his claim was that he’d merely wanted to say well done in reference to the news conference she’d held the previous afternoon. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t a fool: She understood exactly why he’d turned up to stand importantly at the back of the incident room and she also understood that the head of an investigation-that would be me, sir-was meant to listen to whatever the duty press officer advised regarding information to be imparted to the media, so she hardly needed to be congratulated on having done her job. But she took the compliment with a formal thank you, sir, and she eagerly anticipated his immediate departure. He’d said Do keep me apprised, won’t you, Acting Superintendent? and again the message was received as intended. Acting Superintendent. She didn’t need reminding that this was her audition-for want of a better word-but it appeared to be the man’s intention to do that reminding at every possible opportunity. She’d said that the news conference and its call for information from witnesses to anything suspicious was already bearing fruit and asked if he wanted a compendium of each day’s phone calls, sir. He eyed her in a way that told her he was evaluating what lay behind her question before he declined the offer, but she kept her face bland. He apparently decided she was being sincere. He’d said, We’ll meet later, shall we? and that was that. Off he went, leaving her to the unfriendly gaze of DI John Stewart, which she happily ignored.

The house-to-house in Stoke Newington was in progress, the slow process of the cemetery search was continuing, phone calls were being fielded and dealt with, diagrams and maps had been drawn. They were bound to get something from the news conference, from the resulting stories on the television news and in the daily papers, and from the e-fit that had been provided by the two adolescents who’d discovered the body. Thus things were clicking along as they were meant to click. Isabelle was satisfied with her performance so far.

She had her doubts about the post mortem, however. She’d never been one for dissection. The sight of blood didn’t make her feel anything akin to fainting, but the sight of an open body cavity and the mechanics of removing and weighing what had so recently been living organs did tend to turn her stomach to liquid. For this reason, she determined to take no one with her to observe the proceedings that afternoon. She also skipped lunch in favour of emptying one of the three airline bottles of vodka she’d tucked into her bag for this precise purpose.

She found the mortuary without any trouble, and within it, she found the Home Office pathologist awaiting her arrival. He introduced himself as Dr. Willeford-“but do call me Blake…let’s keep things friendly, shall we?”-and he asked her if she wanted a chair or a stool “in the event that the coming exploration proves rather more than you feel able to cope with.” He said all of this nicely enough, but there was something about his smile that she didn’t trust. She had little doubt that her reaction to the autopsy was going to be reported, Hillier’s long tentacles reaching out even here. She vowed to keep upright, told Willeford she didn’t anticipate any difficulty as she’d never had difficulty with autopsies before-an outright lie but how was he to know?-and when he chuckled, stroked his chin, observed her, and then happily said, “Right, then, here we go,” she stepped right up to the stainless-steel trolley and fixed her gaze on the body that lay there, chest up and waiting for the Y incision, with her fatal wound making a bloody lightning bolt down the right side of her neck.

Willeford recited the salient superficial details first, speaking into the microphone that hung above the autopsy trolley. He did so in a chatty fashion, as if with the intention of entertaining whoever would do the transcription. “Kathy darling,” he said into the microphone, “we have a female before us this time. She’s in good physical condition, no tattoos and no scars. She measures five feet four inches tall-sort out the metrics, my love, as I can’t be bothered-and she weighs seven point eight five stone. Do the metrics there as well, will you, Kath? And by the way, how’s your mum doing, darling? Are you ready, Superintendent Ardery? Oh, Kath, that’s not for you, my dear. We’ve a new one here. She’s called Isabelle Ardery”-with a wink at Isabelle-“and she’s not even asked for a chair on the chance that just-in-case becomes the case. Anyway…” He moved to examine the wound at the neck. “We’ve got the carotid artery pierced. Very nasty. You’ll be glad you weren’t here, not that you ever are, my love. We’ve also got a tear in the wound, quite jagged, measuring…it’s seven inches.” He moved from the victim’s neck along the side of her body where he picked up one of her hands and then the other, excusing himself to Isabelle as he passed her and letting Kathy know that the superintendent was still on her feet and her colour was good, but they would see, wouldn’t they, once he cut the body open? He said, “No defensive wounds on the hands, Kath. No broken fingernails, no scratches either. Blood on them both but I expect this would have come from her attempt to stop the bleeding once the weapon was withdrawn.” He chatted on for a few more minutes, documenting everything the eye could see. He put her age between twenty and thirty and then he prepared himself for the next step of the process.

Isabelle was ready. Clearly, he expected her to faint. Just as clearly, she intended not to. She found she could have done with another shot of vodka when, after the incision and the exposure of the rib cage, he took out the shears to cut through the victim’s chest-it was the sound of metal cutting through bone that she found most repellent-but after that the rest was, if not easy, then at least more bearable.

After Willeford had done his bit, he said, “Darling Kath, as always, it’s been a pleasure. Could you type that up and get it over to Superintendent Ardery, darling? And by the way, she’s still upright so I daresay she’s a keeper. Remember DI Shatter-what an appropriate name, eh?-falling headfirst into the body cavity up in Berwick-on-Tweed that time? Lord, what an uproar. Ah, ‘but what do we live for but to give’…whatever it is that we give to our neighbours and ‘to laugh at them in our turn.’ I cannot ever remember that quote. Adieu, dear Kath, till next time.”

At that point, an assistant swept forward to do the cleanup and Willeford stripped off his scrubs, tossed them in a bin in the corner, and invited Isabelle to “‘step into my parlour said the spider,’ et cetera. I’ve a bit more for you in here.”

A bit more turned out to be the information that two hairs had been caught up in the victim’s hands, and he had little doubt that SOCO would soon inform her that fibres aplenty had been taken from her clothing. “Got rather close to her killer, if you know what I mean,” Willeford said with a wink.

Isabelle wondered if this counted as sexual harassment, as she asked blandly, “Intercourse? Rape? A struggle?”

Nothing, he said. Absolutely no evidence. She was, if he might put it this way, a willing participant in whatever went on between herself and the owner of the fibres. Likely that was why she’d been found where she’d been found, as there was no evidence she’d been dragged anywhere against her will, no bruises, no skin under the fingernails, that sort of thing, he said.

Did he have an opinion on what position she was in when she was attacked? Isabelle asked the pathologist. What about time of death? How long had she likely lived after the assault upon her? From what direction did the injury occur? Was the killer left-or right-handed?

Willeford fished in the pocket of his windcheater at this point-he’d left it behind a door and he fetched it over to where they were sitting-and brought out a nutrition bar. Had to keep his blood sugar up, he confessed. His metabolism was the curse of his life.

Isabelle could see this was the case. Out of his scrubs, he was thin as a garden hoe. At a height of at least six feet six inches, he likely needed to keep eating all day, which had to be difficult in his line of work.

He told her that the presence of the maggots put time of death at twenty-four to thirty-six hours before the body was found, although considering the heat, the closer call would be twenty-four. She’d have been upright when she was attacked, and her assailant was right-handed. Toxicology would show if drugs or alcohol was involved, but that would take some time, as would the DNA from the hair, as there were “follicles attached and isn’t that lovely?”

Isabelle asked if he reckoned the killer had been in front of or behind the young woman.

Definitely standing in front of her, the pathologist said.

Which meant, Isabelle concluded, that she may have known her killer.

ISABELLE ALSO WENT alone on her next call that day. In advance she studied the route, and she was relieved to see that the direction she needed to follow to Eaton Terrace was not a complicated matter. The important bit was not to bollocks things up in the vicinity of Victoria Station. If she kept her wits about her and did not become unnerved by the traffic, she knew she should be able to work her way through the skein of streets without ending up either at the river or-in the other direction-at Buckingham Palace.

As it happened, she did make one wrong turn when she got to Eaton Terrace, choosing left over right, but she saw the error of her ways when she began reading the house numbers on the stately front doors. After turning round, things were simple although she sat in her car for a full two minutes when she arrived at her destination, considering what approach she wished to use.

She finally decided that the truth was best, which, she admitted, was generally the case. Still, in order to speak it, she found that she wanted something to assist, and that something was tucked into the bottom of her bag. She was glad she’d thought to bring more than one airline bottle along for her workday.

She drained the vodka. She rested the last of it on her tongue for a good long while till it heated up. She swallowed and then fished for a piece of Juicy Fruit. She chewed this on her walk to the front steps of the house, and on the marble draughtsboard that marked what went for the porch, she removed the gum, ran some gloss over her lips, and touched the lapels of her jacket to smooth them. Then she rang the bell.

She knew he had a man-what an odd term, she thought-and it was this individual who answered the door, youngish, owlish, and dressed in tennis gear, which seemed an odd enough getup for a servant, personal assistant, butler, or whatever an earl-in-hiding would have. For that was how Isabelle thought of DI Thomas Lynley, as an earl-in-hiding, because it was frankly inconceivable to her why someone in his social position would choose to spend his life as a cop unless it was an incognito sort of thing in which he hid himself away from the rest of his kind. And his kind were the sort of people whose pictures one saw on the cover of tabloids when they got themselves into trouble, or inside the pages of Hello!, OK!, Tatler and the like, hoisting champagne flutes at the photographer. They went into nightclubs and stayed till dawn, they skied in the Alps-French, Italian, or Swiss, what did it matter?-and they traveled to places like Portofino or Santorini or other multisyllabic Mediterranean, Ionian, or Aegean locations ending in vowels. But they didn’t work at ordinary jobs, and if they did because they needed the money, they certainly didn’t choose to be coppers.

“Afternoon,” the tennis-clad man said. He was Charlie Denton. Isabelle had done her homework.

She showed her ID and introduced herself. “Mr. Denton, I’m trying to locate the inspector. Is he at home by any chance?”

If he was surprised that she knew his identity, Charlie Denton was too careful to let it show. He said, “As it happens…,” and he admitted her into the house. He indicated a doorway to her right, which led into a reception room done up in a quite pleasant shade of green. He said, “I expect he’s in the library.” He gestured to a simple arrangement of furniture round a fireplace and said he could fetch her a drink if she’d like one. She thought about accepting the offer and tossing back a vodka martini straight up, but she declined as she reckoned he was referring to something more in line with the fact that she was still on duty.

While he went to find his…Isabelle wondered what the term was: his master? his employer? his what?…she took in the room. The building was a town house and it likely had been in Lynley’s family for quite some time, as no one had got inside to destroy the features that had gone into its making in the nineteenth century. Thus it still possessed its plaster ceiling decorations along with its mouldings above, below, and around. Isabelle reckoned there were endless architectural terms for it all, but she didn’t know any of them although she was perfectly capable of admiring them.

She didn’t sit but rather walked to the window overlooking the street. A table sat beneath its sill and this held several framed photographs, among them a wedding picture of Lynley and his wife. Isabelle picked this up and studied it. It was casual and spontaneous, the bride and groom laughing and glowing amid a crowd of well-wishers.

She’d been very attractive, Isabelle saw. Not beautiful, porcelain, classic, doll-like, or whatever else one wished to call a woman on her wedding day. She was no English rose either. She’d been dark haired and dark eyed, with an oval face and an appealing smile. She’d been fashionably slender as well. But weren’t they always? Isabelle thought.

“Superintendent Ardery?”

She turned, the picture still in her hands. She’d expected grey-faced grief-perhaps a smoking jacket, a pipe in hand, and slippers on his feet or something equally and ludicrously Edwardian-but Thomas Lynley was quite tanned, his hair was lightened to blond by exposure to the sun, and he wore blue jeans and a polo shirt with three buttons and a collar.

She’d forgotten his eyes were brown. They were watching her without speculation. He’d sounded surprised when he’d said her name, but whatever else he might be feeling, he didn’t reveal it.

She said, “Acting superintendent only. I’ve not been given the position permanently. I’m auditioning for it, for want of a better word. Much like you did.”

“Ah.” He entered the room. He was one of those men who always managed to move with an air of assurance, looking as if they’d fit in anywhere. She reckoned it had to do with his breeding. “There would be something of a difference,” he said as he joined her at the table. “I wasn’t auditioning, just helping out. I didn’t much want the position.”

“I’ve heard that, but I’ve found it difficult to believe.”

“Why? Climbing the greasy pole never interested me.”

“Climbing the greasy pole interests everyone, Inspector.”

“Not if they don’t want the responsibility, and certainly not if they’ve a marked preference for woodwork.”

“Woodwork? What woodwork?”

He smiled faintly. “The kind one can fade into.”

He looked at her hands, and she realised she was still holding his wedding picture. She set it back on the table and said, “Your wife was lovely, Thomas. I’m sorry about her death.”

“Thank you,” he said. And then with a perfect frankness that startled Isabelle, so appealing was it, “We were completely wrong for each other, which ultimately made us right for each other. I quite adored her.”

“How lucky to love so much,” she said.

“Yes.” Like Charlie Denton, he offered her a drink, and again she demurred. Also like Charlie Denton, he gestured towards a seating area, but this one not before the fireplace. Rather, he chose two chairs on either side of a chessboard where a game was in progress. He glanced at this, frowned, and after a moment made a move with his white knight that captured one of the two black bishops. “Charlie only appears to be showing mercy,” Lynley noted. “That means he’s got something up his sleeve. What can I do for you, Superintendent? I’d like to think this is a social call, but I’m fairly sure it’s not.”

“There’s been a murder in Abney Park. Stoke Newington. It’s a cemetery, actually.”

“The young woman. Yes. I heard the report on the radio news. You’re investigating? What’s wrong with having a local team?”

“Hillier pulled strings. There’s also another cock-up with SO5. I think it’s more of the former and less of the latter, though. He wants to see how I compare with you. And with John Stewart if it comes to it.”

“I see you’ve pegged Hillier already.”

“Not a difficult task.”

“He wears a lot on his sleeve, doesn’t he?” Lynley smiled again. Isabelle noted, however, that the smile was more form than feeling. He was well guarded, as she supposed anyone would be in the same situation. She had no real cause to call upon him. He knew it and was waiting to hear the reason for her visit.

She said, “I’d like you to join the investigation, Thomas.”

“I’m on leave,” he replied.

“I realise that. But I’m hoping to persuade you to take a leave from your leave. At least for a few weeks.”

“You’re working with the team I worked with, aren’t you?”

“I am. Stewart, Hale, Nkata…”

“Barbara Havers as well?”

“Oh yes. The redoubtable Sergeant Havers is among us. Aside from her deplorable fashion sense, I’ve a feeling she’s a very good cop.”

“She is.” He steepled his fingers. His gaze went to the chessboard and he seemed to be calculating Charlie Denton’s next move although Isabelle knew it was more likely that he was calculating hers. He said, “So clearly, you don’t need my presence. Not as an investigating officer.”

“Can any murder team have enough investigating officers?”

That smile again. “Facile response,” he told her. “Good for the politics of the Met. Bad for…” He hesitated.

“A relationship with you?” She stirred in her chair and leaned towards him. “All right. I want you on the team because I want to be able to say your name without a reverential hush falling over the incident room and this is the likeliest route to get me there. Also because I want to get on some sort of normal footing with everyone at the Met, and that’s because I very much want this job.”

“You’re forthright enough when your back’s against the wall.”

“And I always will be. With you and with everyone else. Before my back’s against the wall.”

“That’ll play good and bad for you. Good for the team you’re directing, bad for your relationship with Hillier. He prefers kid gloves to the iron fist. Or have you already discovered that?”

“It seems to me the crucial association at the Yard is between myself and the team and not between myself and David Hillier. And as for the team, they want you back. They want you as their superintendent-well, all except John Stewart, but you’re not to take that personally-”

“Nor would I.” He smiled, genuinely this time.

“Yes. Good. All right. They want you back and the only thing that will satisfy them is to know you don’t want to be what they want you to be and you’re quite happy with someone else in the position.”

“With you in the position.”

“I think you and I can work together, Thomas. I think we can work very well together if it comes down to it.”

He seemed to study her, and she wondered what he was reading on her face. A moment passed and she let it hang there and extend, thinking how completely quiet it was in the house and wondering if it had been so when his wife was living. They’d had no children, she recalled. They had been married less than a year at her death.

“How are your boys?” he asked her abruptly.

It was a disarming question and likely intended to be so. She wondered how on earth he knew that she had two sons.

He said as if she had spoken, “You were on your mobile one day when we met in Kent. Your former husband…you were having a discussion with him…you mentioned the boys.”

“They’re near Maidstone, with him as it happens.”

“That can’t be a happy arrangement for you.”

“It’s neither happy nor unhappy. There was simply no point moving them to London if I’ve no idea whether this job is going to be permanent.” She realised after she’d spoken that the words had come out more stiffly than she’d intended. She tried to ameliorate the effect by adding, “I miss them, naturally. But their summer holidays are probably better spent with their father in the countryside than with me here in London. They can run a bit wild there. Here, that would be out of the question.”

“And if you’re appointed permanently to this job?”

He had a way of watching one when he asked a question. He could probably sort out truth from lie quickly enough, but in this particular case there was simply no way he would be able to suss out the reason for the lie she was about to tell him. “Then, of course, they would join me in London. But I don’t like to make premature moves. That’s never seemed wise, and in this case it would be completely foolhardy.”

“Like counting your chickens.”

“Exactly like,” she said. “So that’s another reason, Inspector-”

“We’d got to Thomas.”

“Thomas,” she said. “All right. I’m laying out the truth for you. I want you to be involved in this case because I want to improve my chances for a permanent assignment here. With you working with me, it will set minds at rest and put an end to speculation at the same time as it will demonstrate a form of cooperation that will act as…” She looked for the appropriate term.

He supplied it. “As an endorsement of you.”

“Yes. If we work together well, it will do that. As I said, I’ll never lie to you.”

“And my part would be played out at your side? Is that how you see it?”

“For the present, yes. It may alter. We’d take it as it comes.”

He was quiet, but she could tell he was considering her request: setting it against his life as he was currently living it, evaluating how things would alter and whether that alteration would make a difference to whatever he was coping with now.

He finally said, “I must think about it.”

“How long?”

“Have you a mobile?”

“Of course.”

“Give me the number, then. I’ll let you know by the end of the day.”

THE REAL QUESTION for him was what it meant, not whether he would do it. He’d tried to leave police work behind him, but police work had found him and was likely to continue to find him whether he willed it or not.

Once Isabelle Ardery left him, Lynley went to the window and watched her stride back to her car. She was quite tall-six feet at least because he was six feet two inches and they’d been virtually eye to eye-and everything about her shouted professional, from her tailored clothing to her polished pumps to her smooth amber-coloured hair falling just below her ears and tucked behind them. She’d had on gold button-shaped earrings and a necklace with a similarly shaped pendant of gold, but that had been the extent of her jewellery. She wore a watch but no rings, and her hands were well cared for, with manicured nails cut to her fingertips and skin that looked soft. She was definitely a mixture of masculine and feminine, as she would have to be. To succeed in their world, she would be regularly forced to be one of the boys while remaining, at heart, one of the girls. It wouldn’t be easy.

He watched her open her bag at her car. She dropped her keys, scooped them up, and unlocked the vehicle. She paused to search through her shoulder bag for something, but apparently she couldn’t find it because she tossed her bag inside the car and in a moment she’d started it and had driven off.

He stood looking at the street for a moment once she’d gone. He hadn’t done this in quite some time as it was in the street that Helen had died, and he’d not been able to bring himself to look lest his imagination take him back to that moment. But looking now, he saw that the street was merely a street like so many others in Belgravia. Stately white buildings, wrought-iron railings that gleamed in the sunlight, window boxes that spilled forth ivy and star jasmine in a sweet perfume.

He turned from the sight. He made for the stairway and climbed, but he did not return to the library where he’d been reading the Financial Times. Instead, he went to the bedroom next to the room he’d shared with his wife, and he opened its door for the first time since the previous February. And for the first time since the previous February, he also went inside.

It was not quite finished. A cot required assembling, as they’d only got it as far as unloaded from its box. Six rolls of wallpaper tilted against the wainscoting, which had been painted once but definitely needed another coat. A new ceiling light remained in its box, and a changing table stood beneath one of the windows, but it was still bare of appropriate padding. The quilted padding was itself rolled up in a Peter Jones carrier bag, among other carrier bags that contained pillows, nappies, a breast pump, bottles…It was astonishing how much gear was required for a creature likely weighing upon birth seven pounds or less.

The room was airless and quite hot, and Lynley moved to the windows and shoved them open. There was little breeze to mitigate the temperature, and he wondered they hadn’t thought of that when they’d chosen this room for their son’s nursery. Of course, it had been late autumn then, and on into winter, so summer heat would have been the last thing on their minds. Instead, they’d been consumed with the fact of the pregnancy alone, and not actually with what the pregnancy was going to produce. He supposed many couples approached it that way. Get through the tough bits leading up to and through childbirth and then shift into parenting mode. One couldn’t be a parent or think like a parent without someone to parent, he concluded.

“M’ lord.”

Lynley swung around. Charlie Denton was in the doorway. He knew Lynley disliked the use of his title, but they’d never settled on what Denton was supposed to say or do to get his attention aside from using the title in some form, mumbled if necessary or said in the midst of a cough.

“Yes? What is it, Charlie? Are you off, then?”

He shook his head. “I’ve been already.”

“And?”

“One never knows about these things. I thought the manner of dress would do it, but there were no words of approbation from the director.”

“Were there not? Damn.”

“Hmm. I did hear someone murmur, ‘He has the look,’ but that was it. The rest is waiting.”

“As always,” Lynley said. “How long will it take?”

“For a callback? Not long. Commercials, you know. They’re picky but they’re not that picky.”

He sounded resigned. It was, Lynley thought, the way of the acting world. Making one’s way there was a microcosm of life itself. Desire and compromise. Putting oneself in a position of chance and feeling the slap of rejection more often than the embrace of success. But there was no success without taking the chance, without risk and consequence, without a willingness to leap.

He said, “In the meantime, Charlie, while you’re waiting to be cast as Hamlet…”

“Sir?” Denton said.

“We need to pack up this room. If you’ll make us a jug of Pimm’s and bring it up here, we should be able to accomplish it by the end of the day.”