This Body of Death

Chapter Eleven

YOLANDA THE PSYCHIC HAD AN ESTABLISHMENT IN A MARKET area just off Queensway in Bayswater. Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata found it without too much trouble once they unearthed the market itself, which they accessed by means of an unmarked entry between a tiny newsagent and one of the ubiquitous cheap luggage shops that seemed to pop up in every corner of London. The market was the sort of place one would walk right past without noticing: a low-ceilinged, ethnic-oriented, locals-only warren of passages in which Russian cafés vied with Asian bakeries, and shops selling hookahs sat next to kiosks blaring African music.

A question asked in the Russian café produced the information that there was within the environs of the market a location called Psychic Mews. There, Barbara and Nkata were told, Yolanda the Psychic operated and, considering the hour of the day, she was likely to be present.

A little more wandering brought them to Psychic Mews. This turned out to be what seemed like-but probably wasn’t-an authentic old mews complete with cobbled street and buildings having the appearance of former stables, like all mews in London. Unlike other mews, however, it was under the protection of a roof, as was the rest of the market. This afforded Psychic Mews an appropriate atmosphere of gloom, mystery, and even danger. One expected, Barbara thought, Jack the Ripper to leap down from a rooftop at any moment.

Yolanda’s business was one of three psychic sanctuaries in the place. Its single window-curtained for the privacy of clients within-bore a sill of accouterments appropriate to her line of employment: a porcelain hand with its palm outward and all the lines upon it identified, a similar porcelain head with various parts of the skull indicated, an astrological chart, a deck of tarot cards. Only the crystal ball was missing.

“You believe this muck?” Barbara asked Nkata. “Read your horoscope in the paper or anything?”

Winston compared his palm to the porcelain one in the window. “’Cording to this, I should’ve died last week,” he noted, and he shouldered open the door to the place. He had to duck to get inside, and Barbara followed him into an anteroom in which incense burned and sitar music played. Against a wall, the form of the elephant god was rendered in plaster and across from it, a crucifix hung above what seemed to be a kachina doll, while an enormous Buddha on the floor appeared to serve the purpose of a doorstop. Yolanda looked to be someone who covered all the spiritual bases, Barbara concluded.

“Anyone here?” she called.

In reply a woman emerged from behind a beaded curtain. She wasn’t dressed as Barbara had expected. One somehow thought a psychic would be decked out in gypsy gear: all scarves, colourful skirts, and heaps of gold necklaces with matching hoop earrings of massive size. But instead, the woman wore a business suit that Isabelle Ardery would have heartily approved of as it was tailored to fit her somewhat stout body and even to Barbara’s unschooled eyes it seemed to announce itself with the words French designer. Her one bow to stereotype was the scarf she used, but even this she’d only folded into a band to hold back her hair. And instead of black, the hair was orange, a rather disturbing shade that suggested an unfortunate encounter with a bottle of peroxide.

“Are you Yolanda?” Barbara asked.

In reply, she put her hands to her ears. She clamped her eyes shut. “Yes, yes, all right!” She had an odd, low voice. She sounded like a man. “I bloody well hear you, don’t I!”

“Sorry,” Barbara said, although, to her thinking, she hadn’t spoken loudly at all. Psychics, she thought, must be sensitive to sound. “I didn’t mean-”

“I’ll tell her! But you must stop roaring. I’m not deaf, you know.”

“I didn’t think I was loud.” Barbara dug out her ID. “Scotland Yard,” she said.

Yolanda opened her eyes. She didn’t cast even a glance in the direction of Barbara’s warrant card. Rather she said, “Quite a shouter, he is.”

“Who?”

“He says he’s your dad. He says you’re meant to-”

“He’s dead,” Barbara told her.

“Of course he is. I could hardly hear him otherwise. I hear dead people.”

“Like in ‘I see dead people’?”

“Don’t be clever. All right! All right! Don’t be so loud! Your dad-”

“He wasn’t a shouter. Not ever.”

“He is now, luv. He says you’re meant to call on your mum. She’s missing you.”

Barbara doubted that. Last time she’d seen her mother, the woman had believed she was looking at their longtime neighbour Mrs. Gustafson, and her resultant panic-in her final years at home she’d grown to fear Mrs. Gustafson, as if the old lady had somehow morphed into Lucifer-had not been assuaged by anything Barbara had attempted, from showing her identification to appealing to any of the other residents among whom Mrs. Havers lived in a private care home in Greenford. Barbara had not yet been back. It had seemed, at the time, the course of wisdom.

“What shall I tell him?” Yolanda asked. And then with her hands over her ears once again, “What? Oh, of course I believe you!” And then to Barbara, “James, yes? But he wasn’t called that, was he?”

“Jimmy.” Barbara shifted uncomfortably on her feet. She looked at Winston who himself seemed to be anticipating an unwelcome message from someone in the great beyond. “Tell him I’ll go. Tomorrow. Whatever.”

“You mustn’t lie to the spirit world.”

“Next week then.”

Yolanda closed her eyes. “She says next week, James.” And then to Barbara, “You can’t manage sooner? He’s quite insistent.”

“Tell him I’m on a case. He’ll understand.”

Apparently he did, for once Yolanda communicated this matter into the spirit world, she breathed a sigh of relief and gave her attention to Winston. He had a magnificent aura, she told him. Well developed, unusual, brilliant, and evolved. Fan-tas-tic.

Nkata said politely, “Ta,” and then, “C’n we have a word, Miss-”

“Just Yolanda,” she said.

“No other name?” Barbara asked her. This would be for the record and all that. Because as this was a police matter…Yolanda would surely get the point, eh?

“Police? I’m legal,” Yolanda said. “Licenced. Whatever you need.”

“I expect you are. We’re not here to check your business details. So your full name is…?”

It turned out-no surprise-that Yolanda was a pseudonym, Sharon Price not having quite the same cachet when it came to the psychic trade.

“Would that be Miss or Missus Price?” Nkata asked, having his notebook out and his mechanical pencil poised. It would be missus, she confirmed. Mister was a driver of one of London’s black cabs and the children of mister and missus were both grown and flown.

“You’re here because of her, aren’t you?” Yolanda said shrewdly.

“You knew Jemima Hastings, then, yeah?” Nkata said.

Yolanda missed the tense of the verb. She said, “Oh, I know Jemima, yes. But I didn’t mean Jemima. I meant her, that cow over Putney. She actually rang you, didn’t she? She’s got her nerve.”

They were all still standing in the anteroom, and Barbara asked was there a place they could sit for a proper conversation? To this Yolanda waved them through the beaded curtain, where she had a setup that walked a tightrope between analyst’s office with a fainting sofa along one wall and a séance locale with a round table in the middle and a thronelike chair at twelve o’clock, obviously meant for the medium. Yolanda went for this and indicated Havers and Nkata were meant to sit at three and seven o’clock respectively. This had to do with Nkata’s aura, evidently, and with Barbara’s lack of one.

“Bit anxious about you, I am,” Yolanda said to her.

“You and everyone else.” Barbara cast a glance at Nkata. He gave her a look of deep and utterly spurious concern over her apparent lack of aura. “I’ll see to you later,” she muttered under her breath, to which he stifled a smile.

“Oh, I can see you’re unbelievers,” Yolanda said in her strange man’s voice. She reached beneath the table then, whereupon Barbara expected it to levitate. But instead the psychic brought forth the ostensible reason for her ruined vocal cords: a packet of Dunhills. She lit up and shoved the cigarettes towards Barbara, with the full knowledge, it seemed, that Barbara was a fellow in this matter. “You’re dying to,” she said. “Go ahead,” and “Sorry, luv,” to Winston. “But not to worry. Passive smoking isn’t how you’re meant to go. More than that, however, and you’ll have to pay me five quid.”

“Reckon I’d like to be surprised,” he responded.

“Suit yourself, dearie.” She inhaled with great pleasure and settled back into her throne for a proper natter. She said, “I don’t want her living in Putney. Well, not so much in Putney itself as with her and by her; I s’pose I mean in her house.”

“You didn’t want Jemima living in Mrs. McHaggis’s house?” Barbara said.

“Right.” Yolanda flicked ash onto the floor. This was covered by a Persian carpet, but she didn’t seem concerned. She said, “Houses of death need to be decontaminated. Sage burning in every room and believe you me it doesn’t do just to wave it about as one runs through the place. And I’m not talking of the sage you get in the market, mind you. One doesn’t buy a packet in Sainsbury’s from the dried herb shelf and put a teaspoonful in an ashtray and light it and there you have it. Not by a bloody long chalk. One gets the real thing, bound up properly and meant to be burnt. One lights it and appropriate prayers are said. Spirits needing to be released are then released and the place is cleansed of death and only then is it wholesome enough for someone to resume a life within it.”

Winston, Barbara saw, was noting all this down as if with the intention of stopping off somewhere for the appropriate decontaminants. She said, “Sorry, Mrs. Price, but-”

“Yolanda, for God’s sake.”

“Right. Yolanda. Are you referring to what’s happened to Jemima Hastings?”

Yolanda looked confused. “I’m referring,” she said, “to the fact that she lives in a House of Death. McHaggis-was ever a woman more appropriately named, I ask you-is a widow. Her husband died in the house.”

“Suspicious circumstances?”

Yolanda hmmphed. “You’ll have to ask McHaggis that. I can see contagion oozing out of the windows every time I go past. I’ve told Jemima she’s meant to clear out of there. And all right, I admit it, I might have been rather insistent about it.”

“Which would be why the cops were phoned?” Barbara asked. “Who phoned them? I ask because what we know is that you were warned off stalking Jemima at one point. Is our information-”

“That’s an interpretation, isn’t it?” Yolanda said. “I’ve expressed my concern. It’s grown, so I’ve expressed it again. P’rhaps I’ve been a bit…Oh, p’rhaps I took things to extremes, p’rhaps I did a bit of lurking outside, but what am I meant to do? Just let her languish? Every time I see her, it’s shrunken more, and am I meant to stand by and let that happen? Say nothing about it?”

“‘It’s shrunken more,’” Barbara repeated. “‘It’ being…?”

“Her aura,” Nkata supplied helpfully, obviously on top of the situation.

“Yes,” Yolanda confirmed. “When I first met Jemima, she glowed. Well, not like you, luv”-this to Nkata-“but still more noticeably than most people.”

“How’d you meet her, then?” Barbara asked. Enough of auras, she decided, as Winston was beginning to look decidedly smug about his.

“At the ice rink. Well, not at the ice rink per se, naturally. More like from the ice rink. Abbott introduced us. We have coffee together sometimes in the café, Abbott and I. And I run into him in the shops as well. He’s got something of a pleasant aura himself-”

“Right,” Barbara murmured.

“-and as he gets such grief from his wives-well, this would be his former wives, wouldn’t it-I like to tell him not to worry so about that. A man can only do what a man can do, eh? And if he doesn’t make enough to pay them all support, then he isn’t to drive himself into the grave over it. He does what he can. He teaches, doesn’t he? He walks dogs in the park. He tutors children in reading. What more can those three tarts expect from him?”

“What more indeed,” Barbara said.

“Who’d this bloke be?” Winston asked.

Abbott Langer, Yolanda told them. He was an instructor at the Queen’s Ice and Bowl, which was just up the street from this market in which they sat.

It turned out that Jemima Hastings had been taking ice-skating lessons from Abbott Langer and Yolanda had encountered the two of them having a post-lesson cup of coffee in the Russian café inside this very market. Abbott had introduced them. Yolanda admired Jemima’s aura-

“Bet you did,” Barbara muttered.

– and she’d asked Jemima a few questions which stimulated conversation which in turn prompted Yolanda to hand over her business card. And that was that.

“She’s come to see me three or four times,” Yolanda said.

“About what?”

Yolanda managed to draw in on her cigarette and look aghast simultaneously. “I don’t speak about my clients,” she said. “This is confidential, what goes on in here.”

“We need a general idea…?”

“Oh don’t you just.” She blew out a thin stream of smoke. “Generally she’s like all the rest. She wants to talk about a bloke. Well, don’t they all? It’s always about a bloke, eh? Will he? Won’t he? Will they? Won’t they? Should she? Shouldn’t she? My concern, however, is that house she lives in, but has she ever wanted to hear about that? Has she ever wanted to hear about where she ought to be living?”

“Where would that be?” Barbara asked.

“Not there, let me tell you. I see danger there. I’ve even offered her a place with my mister and me at a bargain rate. We’ve got two spare rooms and they’ve both been purified, but she hasn’t wanted to leave McHaggis. I admit I might have been a bit persistent about the matter. I might have stopped in to speak to her about it now and then. But that was only because she needs to get out of that place and what am I meant to do about that? Say nothing? Let the chips fall? Wait until whatever is going to happen happens?”

It came to Barbara that Yolanda had not caught on that Jemima was dead, which was rather curious since she was supposedly a psychic and here were the rozzers asking questions about one of her clients. On the one hand, Jemima’s name had not been released to the media since they’d not yet tracked down her family. On the other hand, if Yolanda was in conversation with Barbara’s own father, wouldn’t Jemima’s spirit be doing some serious shouting from the netherworld as well?

Barbara shot Nkata a look upon the consideration of her father. Had the louse actually tracked down Yolanda and phoned her in advance with pertinent details of Barbara’s life? She wouldn’t have put it past him. He would have his joke.

She said, “Yolanda, before we go on, I think I need to clarify something: Jemima Hastings is dead. She was murdered four days ago in Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington.”

Silence. And then, as if her bum were on fire, Yolanda shot up from her throne. It toppled backwards. She cast her cigarette to the carpet and ground it out-at least Barbara hoped she ground it out as she didn’t fancy a fire-and she flung out her arms. She cried out as if in extremis, saying, “I knew! I knew! Oh forgive me, Immortals!” And then she fell straight across the table, arms still extended. One hand reached towards Nkata and the other towards Barbara. When they didn’t twig what she wanted, she slapped her palms against the tabletop and then turned her hands towards them. They were meant to clasp hers.

“She’s here among us!” Yolanda cried. “Oh tell me, beloved one. Who? Who?” She began to moan.

“Jesus on white bread.” Barbara looked at Winston, aghast. Were they meant to ring for help? Nine, nine, nine or whatever? Should they dash her with water? Was there sage anywhere handy?

“Dark as the night,” Yolanda whispered, her voice hoarser than before. “He is dark as the night.”

Well, he would be, Barbara thought, if for no other reason than they always were.

“Attended by his partner the sun, he comes upon her. Together they do it. He was not alone. I see him. I see him. Oh my beloved!” And then she screamed. And then she fainted. Or she seemed to faint.

“Bloody hell.” Nkata whispered the words. He looked to Barbara for direction.

She wanted to tell him that he was the one with the brilliant aura, so he should damn well be able to sort out what to do. But instead, she got to her feet and he did likewise and together they righted Yolanda’s throne, seated her, and got her head down between her knees.

When she came to, which happened with an alacrity suggesting she’d not actually fainted in the first place, she moaned about McHaggis, the house, Jemima, Jemima’s questions about him and does he love me, Yolanda, is he the one, Yolanda, should I give in and do what he asks, Yolanda. But aside from moaning “dark as the night that covers me,” which to Barbara sounded suspiciously like a line from verse, Yolanda was able to relay nothing else. She did say that Abbott Langer was likely to know more because Jemima had been quite regular about her skating lessons and he’d been impressed with her devotion to the ice.

“It’s that house,” Yolanda said in summation. “I tried to warn her about that house.”

FINDING ABBOTT LANGER was a simple matter. The Queen’s Ice and Bowl was just up the street, as the psychic herself had said. As its name suggested, it combined the pleasures of ten-pin bowling and ice skating. It also offered a video arcade, a food bar, and a noise level guaranteed to coax migraines from individuals previously immune to them. This came from all directions and comprised an utter cacophony of sounds: rock ’n’ roll from the bowling area; shrieks, bleeps, bangs, buzzers, and bells from the video arcade; dance music from the skating rink; shouts and screams from the skaters on the ice. Because of the time of year, the place was aswarm with children and their parents and with young teenagers in need of a location in which to hang round, send text messages, and otherwise look cool. Also, due to the ice, it was quite pleasant in the building itself, and this brought in more people off the street, if only to lower their body temperature.

Perhaps four dozen people were on the ice, most of them clinging to the handrails at the side. The music-what could be heard of it above the din-seemed designed to encourage smooth strokes of the feet, but it wasn’t working very well. No one, Barbara noted, save the skating instructors, was keeping time. And there were three of these, obvious by the yellow waistcoats they were wearing, obvious by the fact that they were the only ones who seemed able to skate backwards, which looked to Barbara like an admirable feat.

She and Winston stood against the rail, watching the action for a moment. Several children among the skaters appeared to be taking lessons in an area in the middle of the ice reserved for them. They were being coached by a largish man with a helmet of hair that made him look like an Elvis impersonator. He was far bigger than one associated with ice skaters, well over six feet tall and built like a refrigerator: not at all fat, but solid. He was difficult not to notice, not only because of the hair but also because he was-despite his bulk-remarkably light on his feet. He turned out to be Abbott Langer, and he joined them briefly at the side of the rink when one of the other instructors went out to fetch him.

He had to complete the lesson he was giving, he said. They could wait for him here-“Watch that little girl in pink…She’s heading for the gold.”-or they could wait for him in the food bar.

They chose the food bar. Since it was past teatime and she’d not even had lunch, Barbara selected a ham salad sandwich, salt-and-vinegar crisps, a flapjack, and a Kit Kat bar for herself, as well as a Coke to chase everything down. Winston-how could she possibly be surprised by this?-chose an orange juice.

She scowled at him. “Anyone ever comment on your revolting personal habits?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “Only on my aura,” he replied. “That your dinner, is it, Barb?”

“Are you out of your mind? I’ve not yet had my lunch.”

Abbott Langer joined them as Barbara was finishing up her meal. He’d put protective covers on the blades of his ice skates. He had another lesson in half an hour, he said. What could he do for them?

Barbara said, “We’ve come from Yolanda.”

“She’s completely legitimate,” he said at once. “Is this a reference? D’you mean to use her? Like on the telly?”

“Ah…no,” Barbara said.

“She sent us to have a word with you ’bout Jemima Hastings,” Winston said. “She’s dead, Mr. Langer.”

“Dead? What happened? When did she die?”

“Few days ago. In Abney-”

His eyes widened. “She’s the woman in the cemetery? I saw it in the papers but there’s been no name.”

“Won’t be till we find her family,” Nkata said.

“Well, I can’t help you with that. I don’t know who they are.” He looked away from them, in the direction of the ice rink where a pileup had occurred at the far end. Instructors were hurrying over to assist. “God, but that’s bad, isn’t it?” He looked back to them. “Murdered in a cemetery.”

“It is,” Barbara said.

“C’n you tell me how…?”

Sorry. They could not. Regulations, police work, the rules of investigation. They’d come to the ice rink to gather information about Jemima. How long had he known her? How well did he know her? How did they meet?

Abbott thought about this. “Valentine’s Day. I remember because she brought balloons in for Frazer.” He watched Nkata writing in his notebook and added, “He’s the bloke who hands out the rental skates. Over by the lockers. Frazer Chaplin. I thought at first that she was a delivery girl. You know? Making a delivery of Valentine balloons from Frazer’s girlfriend? But turned out she was the new girlfriend-or at least she was trying to be-and she’d dropped in to surprise him. We got introduced and we chatted a bit. She was quite keen on having lessons, so we made arrangements to meet. We had to work around her schedule, but that wasn’t difficult. Well, I was happy to accommodate, wasn’t I? I’ve got three ex-wives with four children among them, so I don’t turn away paying customers.”

“You would have, otherwise?” Barbara asked.

“Turned her away? No, no. Well, I mean I might have done ultimately if my own circumstances had been different-what with the wives and the kids-but as she showed up regularly and right on time and as she always paid, I couldn’t really quibble if her mind seemed on other things when she was here, could I?”

“What sorts of things? Do you know?”

He looked like a man about to say that he hated to speak ill of the dead, but then he eschewed that comment for, “I expect it had to do with Frazer. I think the lessons were really an excuse to be near him, and that’s why she couldn’t actually keep her mind on what she was doing. See, Frazer’s got something that attracts the ladies, and when they’re attracted, he doesn’t exactly fight them off, if you know what I mean.”

“We don’t, as it happens,” Barbara said. A lie, naturally, but they needed as many details as they could amass at this point.

“He makes the odd arrangement?” Abbott said delicately. “Now and then? Don’t misunderstand, it’s always on the up-and-up as far as the ladies’ ages go: no underage girls or anything. They turn in their skates and have a word with him, they slip him a card or a note or something, and…well, you know. He goes off for a bit with one or the other. Sometimes he phones in late to his night employment-he’s a bartender at some posh hotel-and he takes a few hours with one of them. He’s not a bad bloke, mind you. It’s just how he is.”

“And Jemima had an idea this was going on?”

“A suspicion. Women aren’t stupid, are they. But the trouble for Jemima was that Frazer’s here for the earliest shift and she could only come in the evening or on her own days off work. So that leaves him free to be more or less available to ladies who want to flirt or to ladies who want more.”

“What was your own relationship with Jemima?” Barbara asked, for she realised that Yolanda’s mutterings-as much as she wanted to discount them-could well apply to this man with his helmet of black hair, “dark as the night.”

“Mine?” he asked, fingertips to his chest. “Oh, I never get involved with my skating students. That would be unethical. And anyway, I’ve three ex-wives and-”

“Four kids, yes,” Barbara said. “But I expect a poke on the side wouldn’t go amiss. If one was on offer and there were no strings.”

The ice skater flushed. “I won’t say I didn’t notice she was attractive. She was,” he said. “Unconventional, you know, with those eyes of hers. Bit on the small side, not much meat on her. But she had a real friendliness about her, not like the typical Londoner. I suspect a bloke could have taken that wrong if he wanted to.”

“You didn’t, however?”

“As three times were not the charm for me, I wasn’t about to go for a fourth. I’ve not had luck in marriage. Celibacy, I find, keeps me safe from involvement.”

“But groundwork laid, you could have had her, I expect,” Barbara pointed out. “After all, a poke isn’t marriage these days.”

“Groundwork or not, I wouldn’t have tried it. A poke may not lead to marriage these days, but I had the feeling that wasn’t the case for Jemima.”

“Are you saying she was after this Frazer for marriage?”

“I’m saying she wanted marriage, full stop. I got the impression it could have been Frazer, but it could have been anyone else as well.”

THE TIME OF day was such that Frazer Chaplin was no longer at the Queen’s Ice and Bowl, but this was not a problem. The name was an unusual one, and Barbara reckoned there couldn’t be two Frazer Chaplins running round town. This had to be the same bloke who lived in Bella McHaggis’s house, Barbara informed Nkata. They needed a word with him.

On their way across town, she put Winston in the picture with regard to Bella McHaggis’s rules about fraternisation among her lodgers. If Jemima Hastings and Frazer Chaplin had been involved, their landlady either had not known it or had turned a blind eye for reasons of her own, which Barbara seriously doubted.

In Putney, they found Bella McHaggis just entering her property with a shopping trolley half filled with newspapers. As Nkata parked the car, Mrs. McHaggis began unloading this trolley into one of the large plastic bins in her front garden. She was doing her bit for the environment, she informed them when they came through the gate. Bloody neighbours wouldn’t recycle a damn thing if she didn’t make an issue of it.

Barbara made an appropriate murmur of sympathy and then asked was Frazer Chaplin at home. “This is DS Nkata,” she added by way of introduction.

“What d’you lot want with Frazer?” Bella said. “It’s Paolo you ought to be talking to. What I found I found in his cupboard, not Frazer’s.”

“Beg your pardon?” Barbara asked. “Look, could we go inside, Mrs. McHaggis?”

“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.”

WHEN 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.”

“But you said she’d also got a plan of the National Gallery and the Portrait Gallery,” Philip Hale pointed out. He’d been taking notes, and he referred to these. “And the Geffrye, the Tate Modern, and the Wallace Collection. Looks to me like she was having a recce of London, John. Sightseeing.” Again, from his notes: “Sir John Soane’s house, Charles Dickens’ house, Thomas Carlyle’s house, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London…She had brochures for all of them, right?”

“True, but if we want to find a connection-”

“The connection is that she was a tourist, John.” Isabelle Ardery went on to tell them that SO7 had sent over a report, and there was good news on that front: The fibres on her clothing had been identified. They constituted a blend of cotton and rayon and they were yellow in colour. They matched nothing that the girl herself was wearing, so there was a very good chance that they had yet another connection to her killer.

“Yellow?” Barbara said. “Abbott Langer. Bloke at the ice rink. He wears a yellow waistcoast. All of the instructors do.” She told them about the ice-skating lessons Jemima had been taking. “Could be the fibres were left from a lesson.”

“We’ll want that waistcoat, then,” Ardery said. “His or someone else’s. Get someone to fetch one for fabric testing.” She went on with, “We’ve also had a curious description phoned in as a result of all the publicity. It seems that a rather filthy man came out of Abney Park Cemetery in the window of time of Jemima Hastings’ murder. He was seen by an elderly woman waiting for the bus just at an entrance to the cemetery on Stoke Newington Church Street. She recalled him because, she said-and I spoke to her myself-he looked as if he’d been rolling in leaves, he had quite long hair, and he was either Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, or-as she put it-‘one of those Oriental types.’ He was wearing black trousers, carrying some sort of case although she couldn’t tell me what kind-she thought it might be a briefcase-and he had the rest of his clothing bundled up beneath his arm except for his jacket, which he was wearing inside out. We’ve got someone with her trying to come up with an e-fit, and if we’re lucky we’ll get some hits on that once we release it. Sergeants Havers and Nkata…?”

Nkata nodded at Barbara, letting her do the honours. Decent bloke, she thought, and she wondered how Winston had come to be so prescient and simultaneously so completely without ego.

She made their report: Yolanda the Psychic, a recap of Abbott Langer and ice-skating lessons and the reason for the ice-skating lessons, the balloons, the pregnancy test-“turns out it was negative,” she said-Frazer Chaplin, and Paolo di Fazio. To this she added the argument overheard between Paolo di Fazio and the victim, Paolo’s ostensible lockup where he did his sculpting, Frazer’s way with the ladies, Bella McHaggis’s possible nonmaternal interest in Frazer, Frazer’s second job at Duke’s Hotel, and his plans to emigrate.

“Background checks on all of them,” Isabelle said at the conclusion of Barbara’s remarks.

Barbara said, “We’ll get to that straightaway,” but Ardery said, “No. I want you two-you and Sergeant Nkata-down in Hampshire. Philip, you and your people take the background checks.”

“Hampshire?” Barbara said. “What’s Hampshire-”

Ardery put them in the picture, giving them a summary of what they’d missed during the earlier part of the debriefing. She and DI Lynley, she said, had come up with these and, “You’ll need to take one along with you to Hampshire.” She handed over a postcard, which Barbara saw was a smaller version of the National Portrait Gallery poster of Jemima Hastings. On the front of it “Have You Seen This Woman?” was printed in black marker, along with an arrow indicating that the card was meant to be flipped over. On the reverse was a phone number, a mobile number by the look of it.

The number, Ardery told her, belonged to a bloke in Hampshire called Gordon Jossie. She and Sergeant Nkata were to go there and see what Mr. Jossie had to say for himself. “Pack a bag because I expect this might take more than one day,” she told them.

There were the usual hoots at this, remarks of, “Oohh, holiday time, you two,” and, “Mind you get separate rooms, Winnie,” to which Ardery said sharply, “That’ll do,” as Dorothea Harriman came into the room. She had a slip of paper in her hand, a telephone message. She handed this to Ardery. The superintendent read it. She looked up, satisfaction playing across her face.

“We’ve got a name to attach to the first e-fit,” she announced, gesturing to the china board on which hung the e-fit generated from the two adolescents who’d stumbled on the body in the cemetery. “One of the volunteers at the cemetery thinks it’s a boy called Marlon Kay. Inspector Lynley and I will see about him. The rest of you…You’ve got your assignments. Any questions? No? All right, then.”

They would begin again in the morning, she told them. There were several looks of surprise exchanged: An evening off? What was she thinking?

No one questioned it, however, there being far too few gift horses in the midst of an investigation. The team began their preparations to depart as Ardery said, “Thomas?” to Lynley, and, “A word in my office?”

Lynley nodded. Ardery left the incident room. He didn’t follow at once, however. Instead, he went to the china board to have a look at the photographs assembled there, and Barbara took the opportunity to approach him. He’d put his reading glasses on once again, and he was observing the aerial photographs and comparing them to the drawn diagram of the crime scene.

She said to his back, “Didn’t have a chance earlier…,” and he turned round from the china board.

“Barbara,” he said, his form of greeting.

She gazed at him intently because she wanted to read him and what she wanted to read was the why and the how and what it all meant. She said, “Glad to have you back, sir. I didn’t say before.”

“Thank you.” He didn’t add that it was good to be there, as someone else might have done. It wouldn’t be good to be there, she reckoned. It would all be part of just soldiering on.

She said, “I just wondered…How’d she manage it?”

What she wanted to know was what it really meant that he’d come back to the Met: what it meant about him, what it meant about her, what it meant about Isabelle Ardery, and what it meant about who had power and influence and who had nothing of the kind.

He said, “The obvious. She wants the job.”

“And you’re here to help her get it?”

“It just seemed like time. She came to see me at home.”

“Right. Well.” Barbara heaved her shoulder bag into position. She wanted something more from him, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask the question. “Bit different, is all,” was what she came up with. “I’m off, then. Like I said, it’s good that you’re-”

“Barbara.” His voice was grave. It was also bloody kind. He knew what she was thinking and feeling and he always had done, which she truly, really hated about the bloke. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“What?”

“This. It doesn’t matter, actually.”

They had one of those dueling eyeball moments. He was good at reading, at anticipating, at understanding…at all those sodding interpersonal skills that made one person a good cop and another person the metaphorical bull knocking about among Mummy’s antique Wedgwood.

“All right,” she said, “yeah. Thanks.”

Another moment of locked eyes till someone said, “Tommy, will you have a look…?” and he turned from her. Philip Hale was approaching and that was just as well. Barbara took the opportunity to make herself scarce. But as she drove home, she wondered if he’d been speaking the truth about things not mattering. For the fact was that she didn’t like it that her partner was working with Isabelle Ardery, although she didn’t much want to think about why this was the case.