This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  She told the team she would like to have a word with each of them. In her office, she said. Today. She would want to know what each of them was working on at present, she added, so do bring your notes.

  It went much as she expected. DI Philip Hale was cooperative and professional, possessing a wait-and-see attitude that Isabelle could not fault, his notes at the ready, currently at work with the CPS preparing a case involving the serial killing of young adolescent boys. She’d have no trouble with him. He hadn’t applied for the superintendent’s position and he seemed quite happy with his place on the team.

  DI John Stewart was another matter. He was a nervy man if his bitten fingernails were anything to go by, and his focus on her breasts seemed to indicate a form of misogyny that she particularly detested. But she could handle him. He called her ma’am. She said guv would do. He let a marked moment pass before he made the switch. She said, I don’t plan to have difficulty with you, John. Do you plan to have difficulty with me? He said, No, not at all, guv. But she knew he didn’t mean it.

  She met DS Winston Nkata next. He was a curiosity to her. Very tall, very black, scarred on the face from an adolescent street fight, he was all West Indies via South London. Tough exterior but something about the eyes suggested that inside the man a soft heart waited to be touched. She didn’t ask him his age, but she put him somewhere in his late twenties. He was one of two children who were yin and yang: His older brother was in prison for murder. This fact would, she decided, make the DS a motivated cop with something to prove. She liked that.

  This was not the case for DS Barbara Havers, the last of the team. Havers slouched into the office—there could, Isabelle decided, be absolutely no other word for how the woman presented herself—reeking of cigarette smoke and carrying a chip on her shoulder the size of a steamer trunk. Isabelle knew that Havers had been DI Lynley’s partner for several years preceding the death of Lynley’s wife. She’d met the sergeant before, and she wondered if Havers remembered.

  She did. “The Fleming murder,” were Havers’s first words to her when they were alone. “Out in Kent. You did the arson investigation on it.”

  “Good memory, Sergeant,” Isabelle said to her. “May I ask what happened to your teeth? I don’t recall them like this.”

  Havers shrugged. She said, “C’n I sit or what?” and Isabelle said, “Please.” She’d been conducting these interviews in AC Hillier mode—although she was seated, not standing, behind her desk—but in this case she rose and moved over to a small conference table where she indicated DS Havers should join her. She didn’t want to bond with the sergeant, but she knew the importance of having with her a relationship rather different from the relationship she had with the others. This had more to do with the sergeant’s partnership with Lynley than with the fact that they were both women.

  “Your teeth?” Isabelle said again.

  “Got in something of a conflict,” Havers told her.

  “Really? You don’t look the sort to brawl,” Isabelle noted and while this was true, it was also true that Havers looked exactly the sort to defend herself if push came to shove, which was apparently how her front teeth had come to be in the condition they were in, which was badly broken.

  “Bloke didn’t like the idea of my spoiling his kidnap of a kid,” Havers said. “We got into it, him and me. A bit of this with the fists, a bit of that with the feet, and my face hit the floor. It was stone.”

  “This happened in the past year? While you were at work? Why’ve you not had them fixed? There haven’t been problems about the Met paying, have there?”

  “I’ve been thinking they give my face character.”

  “Ah. By which I take it you’re opposed to modern dentistry? Or are you afraid of dentists, Sergeant?”

  Havers shook her head. “I’m afraid of turning myself into a beauty as I don’t much like the idea of fighting off hordes of admirers. ’Sides, world’s full of people with perfect teeth. I like to be different.”

  “Do you indeed?” Isabelle decided to be rather more direct with Havers. “That must explain your clothing, then. Has no one ever remarked upon it, Sergeant?”

  Havers adjusted her position in her seat. She crossed a leg over her knee, showing—God help us, Isabelle thought—a red high-top trainer and an inch of purple sock. Despite the hideous heat of summer, she’d combined this fashionable use of colour with olive corduroy trousers and a brown pullover. This last was decorated with specks of lint. She looked like someone involved in an undercover investigation into the horrors of life as a refugee. “Due respect, guv,” Havers said although her tone suggested there was something of grievance attached to her words, “’sides the fact that regulations don’t allow you to give me aggro about the clothes, I don’t think my appearance has much to do with how I—”

  “Agreed. But your appearance has to do with your looking professional,” Isabelle cut in, “which you don’t at the moment. Let me be frank, regulations or not, professional is how I expect my team to look. I advise you to have your teeth fixed.”

  “What, today?” Havers asked.

  Did she sound borderline insolent? Isabelle narrowed her eyes. She responded with, “Please don’t make light of this, Sergeant. I also recommend you alter your manner of dress to something more appropriate.”

  “Respect again, but you can’t ask me—”

  “True enough. Very true. But I’m not asking, am I. I’m advising. I’m suggesting. I’m instructing. All of which, I expect, you’ve heard before.”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “No? Well, you’re hearing them now. And can you honestly tell me that DI Lynley never took note of your overall appearance?”

  Havers was silent. Isabelle could tell that the mention of Lynley had struck home. She wondered idly if Havers had been—or was—in love with the man. It seemed wildly improbable, ludicrous actually. On the other hand, if opposites did indeed attract, there could not have been two people more dissimilar than Barbara Havers and Thomas Lynley, whom Isabelle remembered as gracious, educated, plummy voiced, and exceedingly well dressed.

  She said, “Sergeant? Am I the only—”

  “Look. I’m not much of a one for shopping,” Havers told her.

  “Ah. Then let me give you some pointers,” Isabelle said. “First of all, you need a skirt or trousers that fit, are ironed, and have the proper length. Then a jacket that is capable of being buttoned in the front. After that, an unwrinkled blouse, tights, and a pair of pumps, court shoes, or brogues that are polished. This isn’t exactly brain surgery, Barbara.”

  Havers had been gazing at her ankle—hidden though it was by the top of her trainer—but now she looked up at the use of her Christian name. “Where?” she asked.

  “Where what?”

  “Where ’m I s’posed to do this shopping?” She made the final word sound as if Isabelle had been recommending she lick the pavement.

  “Selfridge’s,” Isabelle said. “Debenham’s. And if it’s too daunting a prospect to do this alone, take someone with you. Surely you’ve a friend or two who know how to put together something suitable to wear to work. If no one’s available, then browse through a magazine for inspiration. Vogue. Elle.”

  Havers didn’t look pleased, relieved, or anything close to accepting. Instead, she looked miserable. Well, it couldn’t be helped, Isabelle thought. The entire conversation could have been construed as sexist, but for heaven’s sake, she was trying to help the woman. With that in mind, she decided to go the rest of the way: “And while you’re at it, may I suggest you do something about your hair as well?”

  Havers bristled but said calmly enough, “Never been able to do much with it.”

  “Then perhaps someone else can. Do you have a regular hair-dresser, Sergeant?”

  Havers put a hand to her chopped-up locks. They were a decent colour. Pine would come closest to describing it, Isabelle decided. But they appeared completely unstyled. Obviously, the sergeant had been cutting her
hair herself. God only knew how, although Isabelle reckoned it involved the use of secateurs.

  “Well, have you?” Isabelle asked her.

  “Not as such,” Havers said.

  “You need to find one.”

  Havers moved her fingers in a way that suggested she wanted a smoke, rolling a fantasy fag between them. “When, then?” she asked.

  “When then what?”

  “When am I s’posed to take all of your …suggestions to heart?”

  “Yesterday. Not to put too fine a point on it.”

  “Straight away, you mean?”

  Isabelle smiled. “I see you’re going to be good at reading my every nuance. Now”—and here they were at the real point, the reason that Isabelle had moved them from the desk to the conference table—“tell me. What do you hear from Inspector Lynley?”

  “Nothing much.” Havers looked and sounded immediately cagey. “Talked to him a couple times is all.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Don’t know, do I,” Havers told her. “I expect he’s still in Cornwall. He was walking the coast last I heard. All of it.”

  “Quite a hike. How did he seem to you when you spoke to him?”

  Havers knotted her unplucked eyebrows, clearly wondering about the line of questioning upon which Isabelle had now embarked. She said, “Like you’d expect someone to seem when he’s had to pull the plug on his wife’s life support. I wouldn’t call him chipper. He was coping, guv. That’s about all.”

  “Will he be returning to us?”

  “Here? London? The Met?” Havers considered this. She considered Isabelle as well, obviously her mind clicking away with all the possibilities that might explain why the new acting detective superintendent wanted to know about the former acting detective superintendent. Havers said, “He didn’t want the job. He was just doing it temporarily. He’s not into promoting or anything. It’s not who he is.”

  Isabelle didn’t like being read. Least of all did she like being read by another woman. Thomas Lynley was indeed one of her worries. She wasn’t averse to having him back on the team, but if that was going to happen, she wanted it to be with her prior knowledge and on her terms. The last thing she desired was his sudden appearance and everyone welcoming him with religious fervor.

  She said to Havers, “I’m concerned about his well-being, Sergeant. If you hear from him, I’d like to know it. Just how he is. Not what he says. May I rely on you for that?”

  “I suppose,” Havers said. “But I won’t be hearing from him, guv.”

  Isabelle reckoned she was lying on both accounts.

  MUSIC MADE THE ride bearable. The heat was intense because, while windows nearly the size of cinema screens lined both sides of the vehicle, they did not open. Each of them had a narrow, tilt-out pane of glass at the top, and all of these were open, but that did nothing to relieve what sunlight, weather, and restless human bodies effected within the rolling tube of steel.

  At least it was a bendy bus and not one of the double-deckers. Whenever it stopped, both its front door and its back door opened and a gust of air—hot and nasty but still, new air—allowed him to breathe deeply and believe he could survive the ride. The voices in his head kept declaring otherwise, telling him that he needed to get out and get out soon because there was work to do and it was God’s mighty work. But he couldn’t get out, so he was using the music. When he had it coming through his earphones loud enough, it drowned out everything else, voices included.

  He would have closed his eyes to lose himself in it: the sweep of the cello and its mournful tone. But he had to watch her and he had to be ready. When she made a move to debark, so would he.

  They’d been riding for over an hour. Neither of them should have been there. He had his work, as did she, and when people didn’t do what they were meant to do, the world went amiss and he had to heal it. He was told to heal it, in fact. So he’d followed her, careful not to be seen.

  She’d got onto one bus and then onto another and now he could see she was using an A-Z in order to follow the route. This told him that she was unfamiliar with the area through which they were riding, an area that looked to him like much of the rest of London. Terraces of houses, shops with grimy plastic signs above their front windows, graffiti looping letters into meaningless words like killdick boyz, chackers, and porp.

  As they wound through town, on the pavements tourists morphed into students with backpacks who themselves became women in black from head to toe, slits for their eyes, in the company of men comfortably dressed in jeans and white T-shirts. And these became African children at play, running in circles beneath the trees in a park. And then for a time, blocks of flats blended into a school, and this in turn dissolved to a collection of institutional-looking buildings from which he turned his gaze. Finally, a narrowing of the street occurred and it then curved and they came into what looked like a village, although he knew it was not a village at all but rather a place that had been a village once. It was another of the multitude of communities consumed over time by the creeping mass of London.

  The street climbed a modest hill and then they were among the shops. Mothers pushed prams here, and people mixed. Africans talked to whites. Asians shopped for halal meats. Old-age pensioners sipped Turkish coffee in a café advertising pastries from France. It was a pleasant place. It made him relax, and it almost made him turn his music off.

  Up ahead, he saw her begin to stir. She closed her A-Z after carefully turning down the corner of a page. She had nothing with her but her shoulder bag, and she tucked the A-Z into this as she made for the door. He noticed they were coming to the end of the High Street and its shops. A wrought-iron railing atop a brick revetment suggested they had reached a park.

  It seemed odd to him that she’d come all this way by bus in order to visit a park, when there was a park—or perhaps more accurately a garden—not two hundred metres from where she worked. True, the day was wretchedly hot and beneath the trees it would be cool and even he looked forward to the cool after that ride in the moving furnace. But if cool had been her intention all along, she could merely have gone into St. Paul’s parish church, which she sometimes did in her lunch hour, reading the tablets on the walls or just sitting near the communion rail to gaze at the altar and the painting above it. Madonna and child, this painting was. He knew that much although—despite the voices—he did not think himself a religious man.

  He waited until the last moment to get off the bus. He’d placed his instrument on the floor between his feet, and because he’d watched her so closely as she headed in the direction of the park, he nearly forgot to take it along. That would have been a disastrous mistake, and because he’d come so close to making it, he removed his earphones to silence the music. The flame is come is come is here went round in his head immediately when the music ceased. I call on the birds to feast on the fallen. He blinked hard and shook his head roughly.

  There was a gate of wrought iron fully open, at the top of four steps leading into the park. Before mounting these, she approached a notice board. Behind glass, a map of the place was posted. She studied this, but only briefly, as if verifying something that she already knew. Then she went inside the gate and in an instant she was swallowed up by the leafy trees.

  He hurried to follow. He glanced at the notice board—paths wandering hither and yon, a building indicated, words, a monument—but he did not see the name of this park, so it was only when he was on the trail leading into its depths that he first realised he was in a cemetery. It was unlike any cemetery he’d ever seen, for ivy and creepers choked its gravestones and cloaked its monuments at the bases of which brambles and campion offered fruit and flowers. People buried here had been long forgotten, as had been the cemetery itself. If the tombstones had once been incised with the names of the dead, the carving had been worn away by weather and by the encroachment of nature, seeking to reclaim what had been in this spot long before any man had contemplated burying his dead here.

 
; He didn’t like the place but that couldn’t be helped. He was her guardian—yes, yes, you begin to understand!— and she was his to protect and that meant he had a duty to perform. But he could hear the beginning of a wind howling in his head and I am in charge of Tartarus emerged from the gale. Then listen just listen and We are seven and We stand at his feet, and that was when he fumbled about, shoved the earphones back on, and raised the volume as high as it would go until he could hear nothing but the cello again and then the violins.

  The path he walked on was studded with stones, uneven and dusty, and along its edges the crust of last year’s leaves still lay, less thick here than upon the ground beneath the trees that towered over his head. These made the cemetery cool and its atmosphere fragrant and he thought if he could concentrate on that—the feel of the air and the scent of green growth—the voices wouldn’t matter so much. So he breathed in deep and he loosened the collar of his shirt. The path curved and he saw her ahead of him; she had paused to gaze at a monument.

  This one was different. It was weather streaked but otherwise undamaged and clean of undergrowth; it was proud and unforgotten. It formed a sleeping lion atop a marble plinth. The lion was life size, so the plinth was large. It accommodated inscriptions and family names, and these too had not been left to wear away.

  He saw her raise a hand to caress the stone animal, his broad paws first and then beneath his closed eyes. It looked to him like a gesture made for luck, so when she walked on and he passed the monument, he touched his fingers to the lion as well.

  She took a second, narrower path that veered to the right. A cyclist came towards her, and she stepped to one side, into a mantle of ivy and sorrel, where a dog rose twisted round the wings of a praying angel. Farther along, she made way for a couple who walked arm in arm behind a pushchair that each of them guided with one hand. No child was within, but rather a picnic basket and bottles that shimmered when he passed. She came across a bench round which a group of men were gathered. They smoked and listened to music coming from a boom box. The music was Asian, as were they, and it was turned up so loud that he could hear it even above the cello and the violins.