This Body of Death

Chapter Nineteen

ALTHOUGH BELLA MCHAGGIS LIKED TO THINK THAT HER lodgers would scrupulously do their own recycling, she’d learned over time that they were far more likely to toss items into the rubbish. So weekly, she made rounds inside her house. She found broadsheets and tabloids piled here and there, old magazines under beds, Coke cans crushed inside wastepaper baskets, and all sorts of otherwise valuable articles in nearly every location.

It was for this reason that she emerged from her house with a laundry basket whose contents she intended to deposit among the many receptacles she had long ago placed in her front garden for this purpose. On the step, however, basket in arms, Bella halted abruptly. For after their previous encounter, the last person she expected to see just inside her front gate was Yolanda the Pyschic. She was in the midst of waving in the air what looked like a large green cigar. A plume of smoke rose from it, and as she waved it, Yolanda chanted sonorously in her husky masculine tone.

This was the bloody limit, Bella thought. She dropped her basket and yelped, “You! What the bloody hell will it take? Get off my property this instant.”

Yolanda’s eyes had been shut, but they flew open. She appeared to shake off some trance she was in. That was likely another one of her completely spurious performances, Bella thought. The woman was an utter charlatan.

Bella kicked the laundry basket to one side and strode over to the psychic, who was holding her ground. “Did you hear me?” she demanded. “Leave the property this instant or I’ll have you arrested. And stop waving that…that thing in my face.”

Closer to it now, Bella saw that that thing was a collection of pale leaves, rolled tightly and bound up with thin twine. Its smoke was, frankly, not bad smelling, more like incense than tobacco. But that was hardly the point.

“Black as the night,” was Yolanda’s reply. Her eyes looked odd, and Bella wondered if the woman was high on drugs. “Black as the night and the sun, the sun.” Yolanda waved her stick of smoking whatever-it-was directly in Bella’s face. “Ooze from the windows. Ooze from the doors. Purity is needed or the evil within-”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Bella snapped. “Don’t pretend you’re here for anything other than causing trouble.”

Yolanda continued to wave the smoking object like a priestess in the performance of an arcane rite. Bella grabbed her arm and attempted to hold it in place. She was surprised to find the psychic was quite strong, and for a moment they stood there like two ageing female wrestlers, each trying to throw the other to the mat. Bella finally won, for which she was thankful as it did her good to see that her hours of yoga and athletic training were doing something besides lengthening her life on this miserable planet. She mastered Yolanda’s arm, lowered it, and knocked the green cigar from her hand. She stamped upon it till it was extinguished while Yolanda moaned, mumbled, and murmured about God, purity, evil, black, the night, and the sun.

“Oh, stop your nonsense.” Yolanda’s arm still in her grasp, Bella began to march her towards the gate.

Yolanda, however, had other things on her mind. She put on the metaphorical brakes. Legs as stiff as a two-year-old’s in the midst of a tantrum, she planted herself firmly and would not be budged.

“This is a place of evil,” she hissed. To Bella, the woman’s expression looked wild. “If you won’t purify, then you must leave. What happened to her will happen again. All of you are in danger.”

Bella rolled her eyes.

“Listen to me!” Yolanda cried. “He died within, and when that happens in a place of abode-”

“Oh rubbish. Stop pretending you’re here to do anything other than spy and cause trouble. Which you’ve done from the first and don’t deny it. What do you want now? Who do you want now? Looking to talk someone else out of living here? Well, there’s no one else yet. Are you satisfied? Now, get the hell-Be gone before I phone the police.”

It seemed that the idea of police finally got through. Yolanda immediately stopped resisting and allowed herself to be propelled towards the gate. But still she nattered on about death and the need for a ritual of purification. Bella was able to determine from Yolanda’s rambling that all of this was due to the untimely passing of Mr. McHaggis, and truth to tell, the fact that Yolanda seemed to know about McHaggis’s death inside the house did give Bella pause. But she shook off the pause-because, obviously, Jemima could have told her about McHaggis’s death since Bella herself had mentioned it more than once-and with no further conversation between them, she directed Yolanda from the property to the pavement.

There, Yolanda said, “Heed my warning.”

To which Bella said, “You bloody heed mine. Next time you show your face round here, you’ll be explaining your presence to the coppers. Understand? Now scarper.”

Yolanda started to speak. Bella made a threatening movement towards her. That apparently did it, because she hustled down the pavement in the direction of the river. Bella waited till she disappeared round the corner into Putney Bridge Road. Then she went back to what she’d intended to do. She grabbed the laundry basket and approached the serried rank of rubbish bins with their neat labels upon them.

It was in the Oxfam bin that she found it. Later she would think what a miracle it was that she’d opened that particular bin at all, for she emptied the Oxfam bin least often, as items for Oxfam were tossed away infrequently by herself, by residents of her house, and by people who lived nearby. As it was, she had nothing to deposit in the Oxfam bin on this day. She merely removed its lid to take note of when it was likely to need emptying. The newspaper bin was itself nearly full and the plastics bin was likewise; the glass bins were fine-separating green from brown from clear kept them from filling too quickly-and since she was looking at the bins in general, she’d gone on to the Oxfam bin as a matter of course.

The handbag was buried beneath a jumble of clothing. Bella had removed this with a curse about people’s enduring laziness as evidenced by the fact that they couldn’t be bothered to fold what they wished to have carted off to the charity and she was about to fold it all herself, item by item, when she saw the handbag and recognised it.

It was Jemima’s. There was no doubt about it, and even if there had been doubt, Bella scooped it up and opened it and there inside were Jemima’s purse, her driving licence, her address book, and her mobile phone. There were other bits and bobs as well, but these didn’t matter as much as the fact that Jemima had died in Stoke Newington where she’d no doubt had her handbag with her, and here it was now in Putney, as large as the life she no longer possessed.

There was no question in Bella’s mind what she had to do about this sudden discovery. She was headed for the front door with the handbag in her grasp when the front gate opened behind her and she turned, expecting to see Yolanda’s stubborn return. But it was Paolo di Fazio coming through, and when his eyes lit on the handbag that Bella was carrying, she saw from his expression that, like her, he knew exactly what it was.

BY RETURNING TO St. Thomas’ Hospital and remaining there for most of the previous night to await word on Yukio Matsumoto’s condition, Isabelle had managed to put off the meeting with AC Hillier. Since he’d instructed her to deliver herself to his office upon her return to the Yard, she’d decided merely not to return to the Yard until long after the assistant commissioner had vacated Tower Block for the night. This would give her time to sort through what had happened in order to be able to speak clearly about it.

That plan had worked. It had also allowed her to be first in line to know what was going on with the violinist’s condition. This was simple enough: He remained in a coma throughout the night. He was not out of danger, but the coma was artificial, induced to allow the brain time to recover. Had she been given suzerainty in this situation, Yukio Matsumoto would have been brought round and then thoroughly questioned once he’d emerged from the operating theatre. As it was, the most she was able to manage was a police guard in the vicinity of intensive care to make certain the man didn’t suddenly regain consciousness on his own, realise the depth of the trouble he was in, and do a runner. It was, she knew, a laughable possibility. He was in no condition to go anywhere. But appropriate procedure had to be followed, and she was going to follow appropriate procedure.

She believed she had done so from the first. Yukio Matsumoto was a suspect; his own brother had identified him from an e-fit in the newspaper. It was not down to her that the man had panicked and had tried to outrun the police. Besides that, as things turned out, he was in possession of what had to be the murder weapon, and when his clothing and his shoes had undergone analysis along with the weapon, there were going to be blood splatters somewhere upon them-no matter how minute and no matter how he’d tried to clean them-and those blood spatters would belong to Jemima Hastings.

The only problem was that this information could not be passed on to the press. It could not come out until a trial. And that was a problem indeed because the moment the word got out that a member of London’s foreign citizenry had been hit by a vehicle while running from the coppers-which hadn’t taken long-the press had gathered like the wolf pack they were, on the scent of a story that smacked of police incompetence. They were baying to bring down the responsible party, and the job of the Met was to position itself to handle things when the wolves closed in for the kill.

Which, naturally, was one of two reasons that Hillier had wanted to see her: to determine what the Met’s position was going to be. The other reason, she knew, was to assess if or how badly she’d cocked things up. Should he decide blame lay with her, she was finished, the opportunity for promotion gone.

The broadsheets that morning had taken a wait-and-see attitude, reporting the bare facts. The tabloids, on the other hand, were doing their usual. Isabelle had watched BBC1 as she’d made her preparations for the day, and the morning talking heads did their typical bit with both the broadsheets and the tabloids, holding them up for the delectation of their viewers and commenting upon the stories featured. Thus in advance of heading to the Yard, she knew that gallons of newsprint were being devoted to the “Copper Chase Disaster.” This gave her time to prepare. Whatever she reported to Hillier had to be good, and she damn well knew it. For once the papers connected the victim with his famous brother, which would hardly take long considering Zaynab Bourne’s threats of the previous day, the story would have even stronger legs. Undoubtedly then it would run for days. Things could have been worse, but Isabelle couldn’t quite see how.

She had an Irish coffee prior to leaving for work. She told herself that the caffeine would counteract the effects of the whisky, and besides, after being up for most of the night, she had earned it. She drank it down quickly. She also tucked four airline bottles of vodka into her bag. She assured herself that she likely wouldn’t need them, and anyway they were not enough to do anything but help her think clearly if she felt muddled during the day.

She stopped in at the incident room at work. She told Philip Hale to relieve the officer at St. Thomas’ Hospital and to remain there. His startled expression replied that as a DI, he should not be asked to do something that a uniformed constable could easily do, as it was a waste of manpower. She waited for him actually to make a comment, but he sucked in a breath and said nothing but, “Guv,” in polite response. No matter because John Stewart talked for him, saying laconically, “Due respect, guv…,” which, Isabelle knew, he felt nothing of anyway. She snapped, “What is it?” and he pointed out that using a detective inspector as some sort of single-headed Cerberus at the hospital when he could otherwise be handling what he’d earlier been told to handle-all of the background checks which were, by the way, mounting up-was hardly a wise use of Philip’s expertise. She told him she didn’t need his advice. “Get on to forensics and stay glued to them. Why’s the analysis of those hairs found on the body taking so long? And where the hell is DI Lynley?”

He’d been called up to Hillier’s office, she was informed. Stewart did the informing, and he looked as if nothing could have pleased him more than to be the person sharing that bit of news with her.

She might otherwise have avoided her meeting with Hillier, but because Lynley had been there-doubtless making his own report on the goings-on of the previous day-she had no choice but to take herself to the assistant commissioner’s office. She refused to fortify herself before heading there. Lynley’s impertinent question about her drinking still plagued her.

She met him in the corridor near Hillier’s office. He said, “You look like you’ve had no sleep.”

She told him she’d returned to the hospital and remained there long into the night. “How are things?” she asked in conclusion, with a nod towards the AC’s office.

“As expected. It could have gone better with Matsumoto yesterday. He wants to know why it didn’t.”

“Does he see that as your position, Thomas?”

“What?”

“Making those sorts of determinations. Making reports to him about my performance. Official snout. Whatever.”

Lynley gazed at her in a fashion she found disconcerting. It wasn’t sexual. She could have dealt with that. It was, instead, rather more than intolerably kind. He said quietly, “I’m on your side, Isabelle.”

“Are you?”

“I am. He’s thrown you headfirst into the investigation because he’s being pressured from above to fill Malcolm Webberly’s position and he wants to know how you do the job. But what’s going on with him is only partially about you. The rest is politics. Politics involve the commissioner, the Home Office, and the press. As you’re feeling the heat, so is he.”

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

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

“That’s what you told him?”

“That’s what I told him.”

“If Philip Hale hadn’t-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angels? What the-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I just told you I looked inside.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Is there…Was there anything?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My ‘sort’? What sort is that?”

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

He sighed. “Then we have a problem.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ridiculous. Why would anyone else-?”

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

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

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

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

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