This Body of Death

Chapter Ten

WHEN THOMAS LYNLEY PULLED UP TO THE KIOSK AT NEW Scotland Yard the next morning, he began the process of steeling himself. The constable in charge stepped forward, not recognising the car. When he saw Lynley inside it, he hesitated before bending to the lowered window and saying huskily, “Inspector. Sir. It’s very good to have you back.”

Lynley wanted to say that he wasn’t back. But instead he nodded. He understood then what he should have understood before: that people were going to react to his appearance at the Yard and that he was going to have to react to their reacting. So he readied himself for his next encounter. He parked and went up to a set of offices in Victoria Block as familiar to him as his own home.

Dorothea Harriman saw him first. It had been five months since he’d encountered the departmental secretary, but neither time nor circumstances were ever likely to alter her. She was, as always, kitted out to perfection, today in a red pencil skirt and breezy blouse, a wide belt cinching in a waist that would have made a Victorian gentleman swoon. She was standing at a filing cabinet with her back to him, and when she turned and saw him, her eyes filled and she set a file on her desk and clasped both her hands at her throat.

She said, “Oh, Detective Inspector Lynley. Oh my God, how wonderful. It couldn’t possibly be better to see you.”

Lynley didn’t think he could live through more than one greeting such as this, so he said, as if he’d never been gone, “Dee. You look well today. Are they…?” and he indicated with a nod towards the superintendent’s office.

She told him that they were gathered in the incident room and did he want a coffee? Tea? A croissant? Toast? They’d recently started offering muffins in the canteen and it was no trouble-

He was fine, he told her. He’d had breakfast. She wasn’t to bother. He managed a smile and set off for the incident room, but he could feel her eyes on him and he knew he was going to have to get used to people assessing him, considering what they should say or not say, unsure how soon or even whether to mention her name. It was, he knew, the way of all people as they navigated the waters of someone else’s grief.

In the incident room, it was much the same. When he opened the door and walked in, the stunned silence that fell upon the group told him that Acting Superintendent Ardery hadn’t mentioned he’d be joining them. She was standing to one side of a set of china boards on which photos were posted and officers’ actions were listed. She saw him and said casually, “Ah, Thomas. Good morning,” and then to the others, “I’ve asked Inspector Lynley to come back on board and I hope his return is going to be a permanent one. Meanwhile, he’s kindly agreed to help me learn the ropes round here. I trust no one has a problem with that?” The way she spoke sent the message clearly: Lynley was going to be her subordinate and if anyone did have a problem with that, that relevant anyone could request reassignment.

Lynley’s gaze took them in, his longtime colleagues, his longtime friends. They welcomed him in their various ways: Winston Nkata with blazing warmth on his dark features, Philip Hale with a wink and a smile, John Stewart with the guarded expectancy of one who knows there’s more here than meets the eye, and Barbara Havers with confusion. Her face showed the question that he knew she wanted to ask him: Why didn’t you tell me yesterday? He didn’t know how he could explain. Of everyone at the Yard, she was closest to him and thus she was the last person to whom he could comfortably speak. She wouldn’t understand this, and he didn’t yet possess the words to tell her.

Isabelle Ardery continued the meeting that they had been having. Lynley took out his reading glasses and worked his way closer to the china board upon which the victim’s photographs were displayed, in life and in death, including grisly autopsy photos. An e-fit of a person of interest was situated near the pictures of the murder site, and next to this was a close-up of what appeared to be some sort of carved stone. This was an enlargement: The stone was reddish and square and it had the look of an amulet.

“…in the victim’s pocket,” Ardery was saying in apparent reference to this photograph. “It looks like something from a man’s ring, considering the size and the shape of it, and you can see it’s been carved although the carving itself is quite worn. It’s with forensics just now. As to the weapon, SO7 are telling us the wound suggests something capable of piercing to a depth of eight or nine inches. That’s all they know. There was rust left in the wound as well.”

“Plenty of that on the site,” Winston Nkata pointed out. “Old chapel, locked off with iron bars…Has to be a mountain of clobber round that place could be used for a weapon.”

“Which takes us to the possibility that this was a crime of opportunity,” Ardery said.

“No handbag with her,” Philip Hale said. “No identification on her. And she’d’ve had to have something to get up to Stoke Newington. Money, travel card, something. Could’ve started with bag snatching.”

“Indeed…So we need to put our hands on that bag of hers, if she had one,” Ardery said. “In the meantime, we’ve got two very good leads from the porn magazine left near the body.”

Called Girlicious, it was the type of magazine that was delivered to the point of sale encased in opaque black plastic, due to the sensitive-and here Ardery rolled her eyes-nature of its contents. This plastic served the purpose of preventing innocent children from pawing through it to have a look at the various pudenda on display. It also served the less obvious purpose of preventing the fingerprints of anyone other than the purchaser to be placed upon it. Now, they had a very good set of dabs to use in the investigation, but better than that, they had a shop receipt tucked within the pages, as if used as a marker. If this shop receipt was the point of purchase of the magazine-and it likely was-then there was a very good chance they were on the trail of whatever sod had bought it.

“He might or might not be our killer. He might or might not be this person-” She indicated the e-fit. “But the magazine was fresh. It hadn’t been there long. And we want to talk to whoever took it into that chapel’s annex. So…”

She began the assignments. They knew the drill: TIE first. The known associates of Jemima Hastings had to be interviewed: at Covent Garden where she was employed, at her lodgings in Putney, at any other place she frequented, at the Portrait Gallery where she had been present for the opening of the exhibition in which her picture hung. All of them would need alibis that would want checking out. Her belongings had to be gone through as well, and there were boxes upon boxes of them from her lodgings. An ever-widening search of the area near the cemetery had to be made to attempt to locate her bag, the weapon, or anything related to her journey across London to Stoke Newington.

Ardery finished making the assignments. She concluded these with the fact that Detective Sergeant Havers would track down a woman called Yolanda the Psychic.

“Yolanda the what?” was Havers’ response.

Ardery ignored her. They’d had a phone call from Bella McHaggis, she said, Jemima Hastings’ landlady in Putney. A Yolanda the Psychic needed to be looked into. It seemed she’d been stalking Jemima-“Bella’s word, not mine”-so they needed to find her and give her a grilling. “I trust you have no difficulty with that, Sergeant?”

Havers shrugged. She glanced at Lynley. He knew what her expectation was. So, apparently, did Isabelle Ardery because she announced to everyone, “Inspector Lynley will work with me for the time being. DS Nkata, you’ll be partnered with Barbara.”

ISABELLE ARDERY HANDED Lynley the keys to her car. She told him where it was, said she’d meet him down below after she popped into the ladies’, and then she popped into the ladies’. She peed and downed her vodka simultaneously, but the vodka went down a bit too fast for her liking, and she was glad she’d brought the other bottle. So as she flushed the toilet she downed the second one. She tucked both bottles back into her bag. She made sure they kept their distance from each other, each one nicely wrapped in a tissue, for it wouldn’t do to go clinking and clanking about like a half-slewed tart with more where that came from. Especially, she thought, since there wasn’t more where that came from unless she stopped off at a convenient off-licence, which she was highly unlikely to do in the company of Thomas Lynley.

She’d said, “You and I will take on Covent Garden,” and neither he nor anyone else had questioned her in the matter. She intended to remain close to any operation if she got the superintendent’s position, and, as far as everyone was concerned, Lynley was there to help her learn the ropes. Having him take her out and about would serve to reinforce the point that she had his support. For her part, she wanted to get to know the man. Whether he realised it or not, he was the competition in more ways than one, and she meant to disarm him in more ways than one.

She paused at the line of basins to wash, and she used the time also to smooth her hair and tuck it neatly behind her ears, to fish her sunglasses out of her bag, and to put on fresh lipstick. She chewed two breath mints and placed a Listerine strip on her tongue for good measure. She went down to the car park where she found Lynley standing alongside her Toyota.

Ever the gentleman-the man had probably learned his manners from the cot-he opened the passenger door for her. She told him sharply not to do that again-“We’re not going on a date, Inspector”-and they set off. He was a very good driver, she noted. From Victoria Street to the vicinity of Covent Garden, Lynley didn’t look at anything other than the roadway, the pavements, or the Toyota’s mirrors, and he didn’t bother to make conversation. That was fine with her. Driving with her former husband had always been torture for Isabelle, as Bob was prone to believing he could multitask, and the tasks he engaged in behind the wheel were disciplining the boys, arguing with her, driving, and frequently having mobile phone conversations. They’d jumped more red lights, sped through more occupied zebra crossings, and made right turns into more oncoming traffic than Isabelle cared to remember. Part of the pleasure of divorce had been the novel security of driving herself.

Covent Garden was no great distance from New Scotland Yard, but their route forced them to cope with the congestion in Parliament Square, which was always worse in the summer months. On this particular day, there was a heavy police presence in the vicinity, since a mass of protestors had gathered near St. Margaret’s Church, and constables wearing bright yellow windbreakers were attempting to herd them in the direction of Victoria Tower Garden.

Things weren’t much better in Whitehall, where traffic was stalled near Downing Street. But this turned out to be not because of another protest but rather due to a plethora of gawkers swarming the iron gates in anticipation of God only knew what. Thus, it was more than half an hour between the time Lynley turned the car from Broadway into Victoria Street and the time he managed to park in Long Acre with a police identification propped in the windscreen.

Covent Garden had long since morphed from the picturesque flower market of Eliza Doolittle fame to the commercial nightmare of globalisation run amok that it now was: largely devoted to anything that tourists might be willing to purchase and largely avoided by anyone of sense who lived in the locality. Day workers from the area doubtless used its pubs, restaurants, and freestanding food stalls, but its myriad doorways were otherwise undarkened by London’s citizenry, unless it was to make a purchase of that which could not easily be purchased elsewhere.

Such was the case with the tobacconist’s, where, according to Barbara Havers’ report, Sidney St. James had first come upon Jemima Hastings. They found this establishment at the south end of the Courtyard Shops, and they wended their way to it through what seemed to be buskers of every shape and form: from individuals artfully posing as statues in Long Acre to magicians, unicycle-riding jugglers, two one-man bands, and one energetic air guitarist. These all vied for donations in virtually every space that was not otherwise occupied by a kiosk, a table, chairs, and people milling about eating ice lollies, jacket potatoes, and falafel. It was just the sort of place the boys would have adored, Isabelle thought. It was just the sort of place that made her want to run screaming for the nearest point of solitude, which was likely the church at the far southwest end of the square that Covent Garden comprised.

Things were marginally improved in the Courtyard Shops, most of which were moderately high end, so the ubiquitous bands of teenagers and tourists in trainers elsewhere were absent here. The quality of busking was elevated as well. In a lower-level courtyard that housed a restaurant with open-air seating, a middle-aged violinist played to the orchestral accompaniment of a boom box.

A sign reading SEGAR AND SNUFF PARLOUR hung above the tobacconist’s multipaned front window, and near its door stood the traditional wooden figure of the Highlander in full kilted regalia, a flask of snuff in his hands. Printed chalkboards leaned against the door and beneath the window, and they advertised exclusive tobaccos and the shop’s daily speciality, which today was the Larranaga Petit Corona.

Five people could not have fitted comfortably within the cigar shop, so tiny was it. Its air fragrant with the perfume of unsmoked tobacco, it comprised a single, old oak display case of pipe-and cigar-smoking paraphernalia, locked glass-fronted oak cabinets of cigars, and a small back room devoted to dozens of glass canisters filled with tobacco and labeled with various scents and flavours. The paraphernalia display case also served as the shop’s main counter, with an electronic scale, a till, and another smaller locked cabinet of cigars standing atop it. Behind this counter, the shop assistant was completing a sale to a woman making a purchase of cigarillos. He called out, “Be with you presently, my dears,” in the sort of singsong voice one might have expected from a fop of an earlier century. As it was, the voice was completely at odds with the age and appearance of the shop assistant. He looked no older than twenty-one and although he was dressed neatly in light-weight summer clothing, he had gauges in his ears and he’d apparently worn them long enough to have stretched his lobes to a skin-crawling size. During the ensuing conversation he had with Isabelle and Lynley, he continually poked his little finger through the holes. Isabelle found the behaviour so repellent that it made her feel rather faint.

“Now. Yes, yes, yes?” he sang out happily once his customer went on her way with her cigarillos. “How may I help? Cigars? Cigarillos? Tobacco? Snuff? What will it be?”

“Conversation,” Isabelle told him. “Police,” she added and showed her ID. Lynley did likewise.

“I’m all agog,” the young man said. He gave his name as J-a-y-s-o-n Druther. His father, he revealed, was the owner of the shop. As had been his grandfather and his grandfather’s father before him. “What we don’t know about tobacco isn’t worth knowing.” He himself was just beginning in the business, having insisted on taking a degree in marketing before he “joined the ranks of those who labour.” He wished to expand, but his father disagreed. “Heaven forbid that we should invest in something not an absolute certainty,” he added with a dramatic shudder. “Now…” He spread his hands-they were white and smooth, Isabelle noted, very likely the objects of weekly manicures-and he indicated he was ready for whatever they asked of him. Lynley stood slightly behind her, which allowed her to do the honours. She liked this.

“Jemima Hastings,” she began. “I expect you know her, don’t you?”

“Rather.” J-a-y-s-o-n extended the word into raw and thur, and he gave emphasis to the second syllable. He said he wouldn’t mind having a word with dear Jemima, as she was the reason he was having to work “all sorts of mad hours just now. Where is the wretched minx, by the way?”

The wretched minx was dead, Isabelle told him.

His jaw dropped open. His jaw snapped shut. “Good God,” he said. “Not a road accident? She wasn’t hit by a car? Heavens, there’s not been another terrorist attack, has there?”

“She’s been murdered, Mr. Druther,” Lynley said quietly. Jayson clocked his highbrow accent and fingered an earlobe in response.

“In Abney Park Cemetery,” Isabelle added. “The papers have indicated a murder there. Do you read the papers, Mr. Druther?”

“God no,” he said. “No tabloids, no broadsheets, and definitely no television or radio news. I vastly prefer to live in my own cloud cuckoo land. Anything else sends me into such depression that I can’t get out of bed in the morning and the only thing that cheers me up is Mum’s ginger biscuits. But if I eat them, I’m prone to weight gain, my clothes cease to fit, I must purchase anew, and…Surely, you get the idea, yes? Abney Park Cemetery? Where’s Abney Park Cemetery?”

“North London.”

“North London?” He made it sound like Pluto. “My God. What was she doing there? Was she mugged? Kidnapped? She wasn’t…She wasn’t interfered with, was she?”

Isabelle thought that having her jugular vein ripped open was fairly well interfered with, although she knew that wasn’t what Jayson meant. She said, “We’ll leave it at murdered for the present. How well did you know Jemima?”

Not particularly well, as things developed. It seemed that Jayson had spoken to Jemima by phone but had actually only seen her twice since they shared no work hours and, truth to tell, nothing else either. He knew her more from these than from her actual person, he said. These turned out to be a small stack of postcards. Jayson drew them from a cubbyhole near the till, perhaps eight of them in all. They comprised the image that Deborah St. James had taken of Jemima Hastings, undoubtedly sold like other images from the collection at the National Portrait Gallery’s gift shop. Someone had printed “Have You Seen This Woman” in black marker pen on the front of each card. On the reverse side was a telephone number with “Please Phone” scrawled above it.

Paolo had brought them in for Jemima, Jayson revealed. He knew that much because on the days that he worked and Jemima did not, Paolo di Fazio stopped at the shop anyway if he’d found more cards. This particular set Paolo had delivered several days ago, although Jemima hadn’t been there to receive them. Jayson reckoned she had been destroying them as they’d been delivered, since more than once he’d found their shredded remains in the rubbish on the days when he himself worked.

“I think it was some sort of ritual for her,” he said.

Paolo di Fazio. He was one of the lodgers. Isabelle recalled the name from Barbara Havers’ report of her conversation with Jemima Hastings’ landlady. She said, “Does Mr. di Fazio work nearby?”

“He does. He’s the mask man.”

“The masked man?” Isabelle asked. “What on earth-”

“No, no. Not masked. Mask. He creates masks. He’s got a stall over in the market hall. He’s very good. He’s done one of me, actually. They’re a bit of a souvenir of…well, more than a souvenir, really. I think he has a bit of a thing for Jemima, if you ask me. I mean, why else would he be scurrying in and out of the shop with postcards he’s collected for her?”

“Anyone else come looking for her? On her days off when you were here, that is?” Isabelle asked.

He shook his head. “Nary a soul,” he told them. “Only Paolo.”

“What about people she associated with, here at the market?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know them, dear heart, if there are any. There may be, of course, but as I’ve said, we worked on different days, so…?” He shrugged. “Paolo could tell you. If he will, that is.”

“Why wouldn’t he? Is there something about Paolo we ought to know before we speak to him?”

“Gracious, no. I didn’t mean to imply…Well, I did get the impression he watched her rather closely, if you know what I mean. He did ask about her, much like you. Did anyone stop in to the shop looking for her, asking about her, meeting her, waiting for her, that sort of thing…”

“How did she come to be working here?” Lynley asked the question, turning from an examination of the Cuban cigars in the large display case.

“Job Centre,” Jayson said. “And I can’t tell you which one because they’re all computerised now, aren’t they, so she could have come to us from Blackpool, for all I know. We advertised the job with the centre and in she came. Dad interviewed her and hired her on the spot.”

“We’ll want to speak to him.”

“With Dad? Why? Heavens, you’re not thinking…” Jayson laughed, then whoopsed and covered his mouth. He arranged his features into a suitably lugubrious expression. “Sorry. I was just picturing Dad as a murderer. I expect that’s why you want to speak with him, isn’t it? To get his alibi? Isn’t that what you do?”

“We do indeed. We’ll need yours as well.”

“My alibi?” A hand pressed to his chest. “I have no idea where Ashley Park is. And anyway, if Jemima was there and it was during shop hours that she was done in, then I would have been here.”

“It’s Abney Park,” Isabelle informed him. “North London. Stoke Newington, to be precise, Mr. Druther.”

“Wherever. I would have been here. From half-past nine until half-past six. Until eight if we’re talking about a Wednesday. Are we? Because as I told you in the beginning, I don’t read the papers and I’ve no idea-”

“Start,” Isabelle instructed.

“What?”

“The papers. Start reading the papers, Mr. Druther. You’ll be amazed by what you can find inside them. Now tell us again where Paolo di Fazio might be found.”

HE WONDERED IF they were seraphim. There was something about them that marked them as different. They were not mortal. He could see that. The real question, then, was what type were they? Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities? Good, bad, warrior, guardian? Archangels, even, like Raphael, Michael, or Gabriel? Archangels that scholars and theologians as yet knew nothing of? Angels of the highest order, perhaps, come to make war with forces so evil that only a sword held in the hand of a creature of light could possibly defeat it?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t tell.

He’d assumed guardian about himself, but he’d been wrong. He saw that he was meant to be Michael’s warrior, but when he saw it, it was far too late.

But watching over has power…

Watching over is nothing. Watching over is watching evil, and evil destroys.

Destruction destroys. Destruction begets more destruction. Learning is meant. Guarding means learning.

Guarding means fear.

Fear means hate. Fear means anger. Guarding means love.

Guarding means hiding.

Hiding means standing watch which means guarding which means love. I am meant to guard.

You are meant to kill. Warriors defeat. You are called upon to war. I call upon you. Legions upon legions call upon you.

I guarded. I guard.

You killed.

He wanted to strike his mind where the voices were. They were louder today than they’d ever been, louder than shouting, louder than music. He could see the voices as well as hear them, and they filled his vision so that he finally made out the wings. They were hidden angels but their wings betrayed them, and they watched him and bore witness from above. They lined up one right next to the other with their mouths opening and their mouths closing and celestial singing should have come from those mouths but what came instead was wind. There was a howling upon it and after the wind came the voices that he knew but would not listen to, so he gave himself to the warriors and the guardians and their determination to win him to causes so unlike himself.

He squeezed his eyes shut but still he saw them and still he heard them and still he kept on and on and on till perspiration wetted his cheeks, till he realised it was not perspiration but tears, and then the sound of bravo coming from somewhere but not from the angels this time, for they were gone and then so was he. He was stumbling, climbing, making his way to the churchyard and then to the quiet that was not quiet at all for there was no quiet, not for him.

LYNLEY WASN’T BOTHERED by the part he was playing in the investigation, something between chauffeur and dogsbody to Isabelle Ardery. The role allowed him to ease his way back into police work, and if he was going to return to police work, it definitely had to be a gradual movement.

“Bit of a wanker,” was Ardery’s assessment of Jayson Druther once they left the tobacco shop.

Lynley couldn’t disagree. He indicated the route they needed to take to get to Jubilee Market Hall, across the cobbles from the main area of Covent Garden.

Inside the hall, the noise was ear popping, coming from hawkers, from boom boxes set within the stalls, from shouted conversations, and from buyers attempting to broker deals with sellers of everything from souvenir T-shirts to works of art. They found the mask maker’s stall after elbowing their way up and down three aisles. He had a good position near a far doorway, making him either the first or the last stall one came to but in any case a stall one would unquestionably see, for it sat at an angle with nothing on either side of it. It was large as well, larger than most, and this was due to the fact that the mask making itself appeared to go on within it. A stool for the artist’s subject sat beneath a tall light, and next to it a table held bags of plaster and several other containers. Unfortunately, what the stall did not hold at the present moment was the artist himself, although the heavy plastic sheeting that formed its rear wall bore photographs of the masks he produced along with their subjects posed next to them.

A sign on a makeshift counter indicated the time when the artist would return. Ardery glanced at this and then at her watch, after which she said to Lynley, “Let’s have some refreshment.”

They sought said refreshment back the way they’d come, down below the tobacconist in the courtyard. The violinist who’d played there earlier was gone, and it was just as well, because Ardery apparently wanted conversation along with her refreshment. This turned out to be a glass of wine, at which Lynley lifted an eyebrow.

She saw this. “I’ve no objection to a glass of wine on duty, Inspector Lynley. We deserve one after J-a-y-s-o-n. Please join me. I hate to feel like a lush.”

“I think I won’t,” he said. “I hit it rather hard after Helen died.”

“Ah. Yes. I expect you did.”

Lynley ordered mineral water in turn at which Ardery lifted her own eyebrow. She said to him, “Not even a soft drink? Are you always this virtuous, Thomas?”

“Only when I want to impress.”

“And do you?”

“Want to impress you? Don’t we all? If you’re to be the guv, then it serves the rest of us to begin jockeying for positions of prominence, doesn’t it?”

“I have serious doubts that you’ve spent much time jockeying for any position.”

“Unlike yourself? You’re climbing quickly.”

“That’s what I do.” She looked round the courtyard in which they sat. It wasn’t as crowded as the area above them since here there was only the restaurant cum wine bar at the base of a wide stairway. But it was crowded enough. Every table was taken. They’d been lucky to find a spot to sit. “God, what a mass of humanity,” she said. “Why d’you reckon people come to places like these?”

“Associations,” he said. She turned back to him. He fingered a crockery bowl holding cubes of sugar, rotating it in his fingers as he went on. “History, art, literature. The opportunity to imagine. Perhaps a revisiting of a place from childhood. All sorts of reasons.”

“But not to buy T-shirts saying ‘Mind the gap’?”

“An unfortunate by-product of rampant capitalism.”

She smiled at this. “You can be mildly amusing.”

“So I’ve been told, generally with the stress on mildly.”

Their drinks arrived. He noticed that she took hers up with some alacrity. She apparently noticed him noticing. “I’m trying to drown the memory of Jayson. It was the appalling earlobes.”

“An interesting stylistic choice,” he admitted. “One wonders what the next fad will be now that bodily mutilation is in vogue.”

“Branding, I daresay. What did you make of him?”

“Aside from his earlobes? I’d say his alibi will be simple enough to confirm. The copies of receipts from the till will have the time of day printed on them-”

“Someone could have stood in his place in the shop, Thomas.”

“-and likely there’s going to be a regular customer or two, not to mention another shopkeeper hereabouts, who’ll be able to confirm he was here. I don’t see him as likely to tear open someone’s jugular vein, do you?”

“Admittedly, no. Paolo di Fazio?”

“Or whoever might be at the other end of the postcards. That was a mobile number on it.”

Isabelle reached for her handbag and brought the postcards out. Jayson had given them over with a “happy to be rid of them, darling,” upon her request. She said to Lynley, “They make things interesting,” and then observing him, “which brings us to Sergeant Havers.”

“Speaking of interesting,” he noted wryly.

“Have you been happy working with her?”

“I have been, very.”

“Despite her…” Ardery seemed to search for a word.

He supplied her with several. “Recalcitrance? Obstinate refusal to toe the line? Lack of finesse? Intriguing personal habits?”

Ardery brought her wine to her lips, and she examined him over the glass rim as she drank. “You’re rather oddly paired. One wouldn’t expect it. I think you know what I mean. I do know she’s had professional difficulties. I’ve read her personnel file.”

“Just hers?”

“Of course not. I’ve read everyone’s. Yours as well. I mean to have this job, Thomas. I mean to have a team that works like a well-oiled machine. If Sergeant Havers turns out to be a loose screw in the works, I’m going to get rid of her.”

“Is that why you’re advising change?”

She frowned. “Change?”

“Barbara’s clothing. The makeup. I expect to see her with her teeth repaired and sporting a designer hairdo next.”

“It doesn’t hurt a woman to look her best. I’d advise a man on my team to do something about his appearance if he came to work looking like Barbara Havers. As it happens, she’s the only one who comes to work looking like she’s slept rough the night before. Hasn’t anyone ever spoken to her before? Didn’t Superintendent Webberly? Didn’t you?”

“She is who she is,” Lynley said. “Good mind and big heart.”

“You like her.”

“I can’t work with people I don’t like, guv.”

“In private conversation, it’s Isabelle,” she said.

His eyes met hers. He saw hers were brown, as his were, but not uniformly so. They were richly speckled with hazel and he reckoned that if she wore different colours to what she had on at present-a cream-coloured blouse beneath a well-tailored russet jacket-they might even appear green. He shifted his gaze and took in their surroundings. He said, “This is hardly private, is it?”

“I think you know what I mean.” She glanced at her watch. She still had half a glass of wine left and before she stood, she tossed the rest of it down. “Let’s find Paolo di Fazio,” she told him. “He should be back at his stall by now.”

HE WAS. THEY found him in the midst of attempting to persuade a middle-aged couple to have masks made as souvenirs of their silver wedding anniversary trip to London. He’d brought forth his artistic instruments and laid them on the counter, and he’d set up a collection of sample masks as well. These were mounted on rods that were fixed onto small plinths of finished wood. Fashioned from plaster of Paris, the masks were startlingly lifelike, similar to the death masks that had once been created from the corpses of people of significance.

“The perfect way for you to remember this visit to London,” di Fazio told the couple. “So much more meaningful than a coffee mug with a Royal’s face on it, eh?”

The couple hesitated. They said to each other, “Should we…?” and di Fazio waited for their decision. His expression was polite, and it didn’t alter when they said they would have to think about it.

When they moved off, di Fazio gave his attention to Lynley and Ardery. “Another fine-looking couple,” he said. “Each of you has a face made for sculpture. Your children are, I expect, as handsome as you.”

Lynley heard Ardery snort with amusement. She showed her warrant card and said, “Superintendent Isabelle Ardery. New Scotland Yard. This is DI Lynley.”

Unlike Jayson Druther, di Fazio knew at once why they were there. He took off the wire-framed spectacles he wore, began to polish them on the front of his shirt, and said, “Jemima?”

“You know about what’s happened to her, then.”

He returned the glasses to his face and ran a hand over longish dark hair. He was a good-looking man, Lynley saw, short and compact but with shoulders and chest suggesting that he worked with weights. Di Fazio said abruptly, “Of course I know what’s happened to Jemima. All of us know.”

“All? Jayson Druther had no idea what’s happened to her.”

“He wouldn’t,” di Fazio said. “He’s an idiot.”

“Did Jemima feel that way about him?”

“Jemima was good to people. She would never have said.”

“How did you learn of her death?” Lynley asked.

“Bella told me.” He added what Barbara’s report had indicated: that he was one of the lodgers at the home of Bella McHaggis in Putney. In fact, he was the reason, he said, that Jemima had established a lodging place with Mrs. McHaggis. He’d told her about a vacant room there not long after he’d met her.

“When was this?” Lynley asked.

“A week or two after she got to London. Sometime last November.”

“And how did you meet her?” Isabelle asked.

“At the shop.” He went on to say that he rolled his own, and he bought both his tobacco and his papers from the cigar shop. “Usually from that idiot, Jayson,” he added. “Pazzo uomo. But one day Jemima was there instead.”

“Italian, are you, Mr. di Fazio?” Lynley asked.

Di Fazio took a rollie from the pocket of his shirt-he wore a crisp white shirt and a very clean pair of jeans-and he put it behind his ear. He said, “With a name like di Fazio, that’s an excellent deduction.”

“I think the inspector meant a native of Italy,” Isabelle said. “Your English is perfect.”

“I’ve lived here since I was ten.”

“You were born…?”

“In Palermo. Why? What does this have to do with Jemima? I came here legally, if that’s what you’re interested in, not that it matters much these days with the EU mess and people wandering between borders whenever they feel like it.”

Ardery, Lynley saw, indicated a change of direction with a slight lifting of her fingers from the countertop. She said, “We understand you were collecting National Portrait Gallery postcards for Jemima. Had she asked you to do that, or was it your idea?”

“Why would it have been my idea?”

“Perhaps you can tell us.”

“It wasn’t. I saw one of the cards in Leicester Square. I recognised it from the portrait gallery show-there’s a banner out front and Jemima’s picture’s on it, if you haven’t seen it-and I picked it up.”

“Where was the postcard?”

“I don’t remember…near the half-price ticket booth? Maybe near the Odeon? It was stuck up with Blu-Tack and it had the message on it, so I took it down and gave it to her.”

“Did you phone the number on the back of the card?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t know who the hell it was or what he wanted.”

“‘He,’” Lynley noted. “So you knew it was a man who’d been distributing the cards.”

It was one of those gotcha moments, and di Fazio-clearly no fool-understood this. He took a few seconds before he answered. “She told me her partner was likely doing it. Her former partner. A bloke from Hampshire. She knew from the phone number on the back of the card. She said she’d left him, but he hadn’t taken it well and now, obviously, he was trying to find her. She didn’t want to be found. She wanted to get the cards down before someone who knew where she was saw one and phoned him. So she collected them and I collected them. As many as we could find and whenever we had the chance.”

“Were you involved with her?” Lynley asked.

“She was my friend.”

“Beyond friendship. Were you involved with her or merely hoping to be involved with her?”

Again, di Fazio didn’t reply at once. He was obviously no fool, so he knew that any way he answered could make him look bad. Yes, no, maybe, or whatever, there was always the sexual element between men and women to consider and what the sexual element could lead to by way of motives for murder.

“Mr. di Fazio?” Ardery said. “Is there something about the question you don’t understand?”

He said abruptly, “We were lovers for a time.”

“Ah,” Ardery said.

He looked irritated. “This was before she came to live at Bella’s. She had a wretched room in Charing Cross Road, up above Keira News. She was paying too much for it.”

“But that’s where you and she…?” Ardery let him complete the thought on his own. “How long had you known her when you became lovers?”

He bristled. “I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”

Ardery said nothing in answer to this and neither did Lynley. Di Fazio finally spat out, “A week. A few days. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Ardery asked. “Mr. di Fazio, I have a feeling that-”

“I went in for tobacco. She was friendly, flirty, you know how it is. I asked her if she wanted to go for a drink after work. We went to that place on Long Acre…the pub…I don’t know what it’s called. It was packed, so we had a drink on the pavement with everyone else and then we left. We went to her room.”

“So you became lovers the day you met,” Ardery clarified.

“It happens.”

“And then you began to live together in Putney,” Lynley noted. “With Bella McHaggis. At her home.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.” Di Fazio took up his cigarette. He said if they were going to talk further-and it was costing him in bloody customers, by the way-then they were going to have to do it outside where he at least could have a fag while they spoke.

Ardery told him it was absolutely fine to move outside, and he gathered up his tools and shoved them under the counter along with the sample masks on their wooden plinths. Lynley noted the tools-sharp and well suited for activities other than sculpting-and knew Ardery had done likewise. They exchanged a glance and followed di Fazio out into the open air.

There he lit his roll-up and told Lynley and Ardery the rest. He’d thought they’d continue as lovers, he said, but he hadn’t counted on Jemima’s desire to follow the rules.

“No sex,” was how he put it. “Bella doesn’t allow it.”

“Opposed to the whole idea of sex, is she?” Lynley asked.

Sex among the lodgers, di Fazio told them. He’d tried to convince Jemima that they could continue as before with no one the wiser because Bella slept like the dead on the floor above them and Frazer Chaplin-this was the third lodger-had the basement room two floors below, so he wouldn’t know what was going on either. The two of them-Jemima and di Fazio-occupied the only two bedrooms on the first floor of the house. There was no bloody way that Bella would find out.

“Jemima wouldn’t have it,” di Fazio said. “When she came to see the room, Bella told her straightaway that she’d tossed out the last lodger for getting involved with Frazer. Caught her coming out of Frazer’s room early one morning and that was that. Jemima didn’t want that to happen to her-decent lodgings are not easy to find-so she said no more sex. At first it was no sex at Bella’s and then it was no sex altogether. It had got to be too much trouble, she said.”

“Too much trouble?” Ardery asked. “Where were you having it?”

“Not in public,” he replied. “And not in Abney Park Cemetery, if that’s where you’re heading. At my studio.” He shared space with three other artists, he said, in a railway arch near Clapham Junction. At first they went there-he and Jemima-but after a few weeks, she’d had enough. “She said she didn’t like the deception,” he said.

“And did you believe her?”

“I hardly had a choice. She said it was over. She made it over.”

“Rather like she’d done with the postcard bloke? According to what she told you?”

“Rather like,” he said.

Which gave them both a motive for murder, Lynley thought.