This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  “Simon!” Deborah protested.

  “Men will be men, my love,” St. James told her. And then to Lynley, “How long’ve you been back, Tommy? Come inside. We were just talking about a Pimm’s in the garden. Will you join us?”

  “Why else live in summer?” Lynley replied. He followed them into the house, where Deborah placed the dog on the floor and Peach headed towards the kitchen in the eternal dachshund search for food. “Two weeks,” he said to St. James.

  “Two weeks?” Deborah said. “And you’ve not phoned? Tommy, does anyone else know you’re back?”

  “Denton’s not killed the fatted calf for the neighbourhood, if that’s what you’re asking,” Lynley said dryly. “But that’s at my request. He’d have hired skywriters if I’d allowed it.”

  “He must be glad you’re home. We’re glad you’re home. You’re meant to be home.” Deborah clasped his hand briefly and then called out to her father. She threw her sandals at the base of a coat rack, said over her shoulder, “I’ll ask Dad to do us that Pimm’s, shall I?” and went in the same direction as the dog, down to the basement kitchen at the back of the house.

  Lynley watched her go, realising he’d lost touch with what it was like to be around a woman he knew well. Deborah St. James was nothing like Helen, but she matched her in energy and liveliness. That understanding brought with it sudden pain. Briefly, it took his breath.

  “Let’s go outside, shall we?” St. James said.

  Lynley saw how well his old friend read him. “Thank you,” he said.

  They found a place beneath the ornamental cherry tree, where worn wicker furniture sat round a table. There Deborah joined them. She carried a tray on which she’d placed a jug of Pimm’s, a bucket of ice, and glasses displaying the requisite spears of cucumber. Peach followed her and in her wake came the St. Jameses’ great grey cat Alaska, who immediately took up slinking along the herbaceous border in pursuit of imagined rodents.

  Around them were the sounds of Chelsea in summer: distant cars roaring along the Embankment, the twittering of sparrows in the trees, people calling out from the garden next door. On the air the scent of a barbecue rose, and the sun continued to bake the ground.

  “I’ve had an unexpected visitor,” Lynley said. “Acting Superintendent Isabelle Ardery.” He told them the substance of his visit from Ardery: her request and his indecision.

  “What will you do?” St. James asked. “You know, Tommy, it might be time.”

  Lynley looked beyond his friends to the flowers that comprised the herbaceous border at the base of the old brick wall defining the edge of the garden. Someone—likely Deborah—had been giving them a great deal of care, likely by recycling the washing-up water. They looked better this year than they had in the past, bursting with life and colour. He said, “I managed to cope with the nursery at Howenstow and her country clothing. Some of the nursery here as well. But I’ve not been able to face her things in London. I thought I might be ready when I arrived two weeks ago, but it seems I’m not.” He took a drink of his Pimm’s and gazed at the garden wall on which clematis climbed in a mass of lavender blooms. “It’s all still there, in the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. In the bathroom as well: cosmetics, her scent bottles. The hairbrush still has strands of her hair …It was so dark, you know, with bits of auburn.”

  “Yes,” St. James said.

  Lynley heard it in Simon’s voice: the terrible grief that St. James would not express, believing as he did that, by rights, Lynley’s own grief was so much greater. And this despite the fact that St. James, too, had loved Helen dearly and had once intended to marry her. He said, “My God, Simon—” but St. James interrupted. “You’re going to have to give it time,” he said.

  “Do,” Deborah said, and she looked between them. And in this, Lynley saw that she, too, knew. And he thought of the ways one mindless act of violence had touched on so many people and three of them sat there in the summer garden, each of them reluctant to say her name.

  The door from the basement kitchen opened, and they turned to anticipate whoever was about to come out. This turned out to be Deborah’s father, who had long run the household and just as long been an aide to St. James. Lynley thought at first he meant to join them but instead Joseph Cotter said, “More company, luv,” to his daughter. “Was wondering … ?” He inclined his head a fraction towards Lynley.

  Lynley said, “Don’t please turn someone away on my account, Joseph.”

  “Fair enough,” Cotter said, and to Deborah, “’Cept I thought his lordship might not want—”

  “Why? Who is it?” Deborah asked.

  “Detective Sergeant Havers,” he said. “Not sure what she wants, luv, but she’s asking for you.”

  THE LAST PERSON Barbara expected to see in the back garden of the St. James home was her erstwhile partner. But there he was and it took her only a second to process it: The amazing motor out in the street had to be his. It made perfect sense. He suited the car and the car suited him.

  Lynley looked much better than when she’d last seen him two months earlier in Cornwall. Then, he’d been the walking wounded. Now, he looked more like the walking contemplative. She said to him, “Sir. Are you back as in back or are you just back?”

  Lynley smiled. “At the moment, I’m merely back.”

  “Oh.” She was disappointed and she knew her face showed it. “Well,” she said. “One step at a time. You finished the Cornwall walk?”

  “I did,” he said. “Without further incident.”

  Deborah offered Barbara a Pimm’s, which Barbara would have loved to toss back. Either that or pour over her head because the day was broiling her inside her clothing and she was cursing DI Ardery once again for directing her to alter her manner of dress. This was just the sort of weather that called for drawstring trousers in linen and a very loose T-shirt, not for a skirt, tights, and a blouse courtesy of another shopping event with Hadiyyah, this one more quickly accomplished because Hadiyyah was persistent and Barbara was, if not amenable to Hadiyyah’s persistence, then at least detrited by Hadiyyah’s persistence. The small favour for which Barbara thanked God was that her young friend had chosen a blouse without a pussy bow.

  She said to Deborah, “Ta, but I’m on duty. This is a police call, actually.”

  “Is it?” Deborah looked at her husband and then at Barbara. “Are you wanting Simon, then?”

  “You, actually.” There was a fourth chair near the table, and Barbara took it. She was acutely aware of Lynley’s eyes on her, and she knew what he was thinking because she knew him. She said to him, “Under orders, more or less. Well, more like under serious advice. You can believe I wouldn’t’ve otherwise.”

  He said, “Ah. I did wonder. Whose orders, more or less?”

  “The newest contestant for Webberly’s old job. She didn’t much like the way I looked. Unprofessional, she told me. She advised me to do some serious shopping.”

  “I see.”

  “Woman from Maidstone, she is. Isabelle Ardery. She was that—”

  “The DI from arson.”

  “You remember. Well done. Anyway, it was her idea that I ought to look …whatever. This is how I look.”

  “I see. Pardon me for asking, Barbara, but are you wearing … ?” He was far too polite to go further, and Barbara knew it.

  “Makeup?” she asked. “Is it running down my face? What with the heat and the fact that I’ve not the first clue how to put the bloody stuff on …”

  “You look lovely, Barbara.” Deborah was merely being supportive, Barbara knew, because she herself wore nothing at all on her freckled skin. And her hair, unlike Barbara’s own, comprised masses of red curls that suited her even in their habitual disarray.

  “Cheers,” Barbara said. “But I look like a clown and there’s more to come. I won’t go into it, though.” She heaved her shoulder bag onto her lap and blew a breath upward to cool her face. She was carrying rolled beneath her arm a second poster from the Cadbury Photograp
hic Portrait of the Year exhibition. This one had been tacked to the back of the bedroom door belonging to Jemima Hastings, which Barbara had seen once she’d shut that door to get a better look at the room. The ambient light had afforded her the opportunity to study both the portrait and the information written beneath it. That information had brought Barbara to Chelsea. She said, “I’ve got something here that I’d like you to take a look at,” and she unrolled the poster for Deborah’s inspection.

  Deborah smiled when she saw what it was. “Have you been to the Portrait Gallery for the show, then?” She went on to speak to Lynley, telling him what he’d missed in his time away from London, a photographic competition in which her entry had been selected as one of the six pictures used for marketing the resulting exhibition. “It’s still on at the gallery,” Deborah said. “I didn’t win. The competition was deadly. But it was brilliant to be among the final sixty chosen to be hung, and then she”—with a nod at the picture—“was selected to be on posters and postcards sold in the gift shop. I was quite over the moon about that, wasn’t I, Simon?”

  “Deborah’s had some phone calls,” St. James told them. “From people wanting to see her work.”

  Deborah laughed. “He’s being far too kind. It was one phone call from a bloke asking me if I’m interested in doing photo shoots of food for a cookbook his wife is writing.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Barbara noted. “But then anything involving food, you know …”

  “Well done, Deborah.” Lynley leaned forward and looked at the poster. “Who’s the model?”

  “She’s called Jemima Hastings,” Barbara told him, and to Deborah, “How did you meet her?”

  Deborah said, “Sidney—Simon’s sister …I was looking for a model for the portrait contest and I’d thought at first that Sidney would be perfect, with all the modeling she does. I did try with her but the result was too professional looking …something about the way Sidney deals with facing a camera? With showing off clothing instead of being a subject? Anyway, I wasn’t happy with it and I was casting about afterwards, still looking for someone, when Sidney showed up with Jemima in tow.” Deborah frowned, obviously putting any number of things together at once. She said in a cautious voice, “What’s this about, Barbara?”

  “The model’s been murdered, I’m afraid. This poster was in her lodgings.”

  “Murdered?” Deborah said. Lynley and St. James both stirred in their chairs. “Murdered, Barbara? When? Where?”

  Barbara told her. The other three exchanged looks, and Barbara said, “What? Do you know something?”

  “Abney Park.” Deborah was the one to reply. “That’s where I took the picture in the first place. That’s where this is.” She indicated the weather-streaked lion whose head filled the frame to the left of the model. “This is one of the memorials in the cemetery. Jemima had never been there before we took the picture. She told us as much.”

  “Us?”

  “Sidney went as well. She wanted to watch.”

  “Got it. Well, she went back,” Barbara said. “Jemima did.” She sketched a few more details, just enough to put them all in the picture. She said to Simon, “Where is she these days? We’re going to need to speak to her.”

  “Sidney? She’s living in Bethnal Green, near Columbia Road.”

  “The flower market,” Deborah added helpfully.

  “With her latest partner,” Simon said, dryly. “Mother—not to mention Sid—is hoping this will also be her final partner, but frankly, it’s not looking that way.”

  “Well, she does rather like them dark and dangerous,” Deborah noted to her husband.

  “Having been affected in adolescence by a plethora of romance novels. Yes. I know.”

  “I’ll need her address,” Barbara told him.

  “I hope you don’t think Sid—”

  “You know the drill. Every avenue and all that.” She rolled the poster back up and looked among them. Certainly there was something going on. She said, “Beyond meeting her with Sidney and then taking the picture, did you see her again?”

  “She came to the opening at the Portrait Gallery. All the subjects—the models?—were invited to do that.”

  “Anything happen there?”

  Deborah looked at her husband as if seeking information. He shook his head and shrugged. She said, “No. Not that I …Well, I think she had a bit too much champagne, but she had a man with her who saw she got home. That’s really all—”

  “A man? Do you know his name?”

  “I’ve forgotten, actually. I didn’t think I’d need to …Simon, do you remember?”

  “Just that he was dark. And I remember that mostly …” He hesitated, clearly reluctant to complete the thought.

  Barbara did it for him. “Because of Sidney? You said she likes them dark, didn’t you?”

  BELLA MCHAGGIS HAD never before been placed in the position of having to identify a body. She’d seen dead bodies, of course. She’d even, in the case of the departed Mr. McHaggis, doctored the setting in which death had occurred so as to protect the poor man’s reputation prior to phoning 999. But she’d never been ushered into a viewing room where a victim of violent death lay, covered by a sheet. Now that she had done, she was more than ready to engage in whatever sort of activity would scour from her mind the mental image.

  Jemima Hastings—not a single doubt that it was Jemima—had been stretched out on a trolley with her neck wrapped up in thick swathes of gauze like a winter scarf, as if she needed protection from the chilly room. From that, Bella had concluded the girl had had her throat cut and she’d asked if this was the case, but the answer had come in the form of a question, “Do you recognise … ?” Yes, yes, Bella had said abruptly. Of course it’s Jemima. She’d known the minute that woman officer had come to her house and had peered at that poster. The policewoman—Bella couldn’t remember her name at the moment—hadn’t been able to keep her expression blank, and Bella had known that the girl in the cemetery was indeed the lodger gone missing from her house.

  So to wipe it all away, Bella became industrious. She could have gone to a session of hot yoga, but she reckoned industry was the better ticket. It would get her mind away from the mental picture of poor dead Jemima on that cold steel trolley at the same time as it would prepare Jemima’s room for another lodger now the cops had carted away all her belongings. And Bella wanted another lodger, soon, although she had to admit that she hadn’t had very much luck with the female variety. Still, she wanted a woman. She liked the sense of balance another woman gave to the household, though women were far more complicated than men and even as she considered this, she wondered if perhaps another male would keep things simpler and prevent the males already in place from preening so. Preening and strutting, that’s what they did. They did it unconsciously, like roosters, like peacocks, like virtually every male from every species on earth. The calculated dance of notice-me was something Bella generally found rather amusing, but she realised that she had to consider whether it might be easier on everyone concerned if she removed from their household the necessity for it.

  Upon her return from viewing Jemima’s body, she’d put up her ROOM TO LET sign in the dining room window, and she’d made her phone call to Loot to run the advertisement. Then she’d gone up to Jemima’s room and she’d begun a thorough clean. With the boxes and boxes and boxes of her belongings already removed from the house, this was a job that didn’t take long. Hoovering, dusting, changing sheets, an application of furniture polish, a beautifully washed window—Bella prided herself particularly on the state of her windows—scented drawer liners removed from the chest and new ones placed there, curtains taken down for cleaning, every piece of furniture moved away from the wall to give the hoover access …No one, Bella thought, cleaned a room the way she did.

  She moved on to the bathroom. Generally, she left their bathrooms to her lodgers, but if she was going to have a new lodger soon, it stood to reason that Jemima’s drawers and shelves were g
oing to have to be emptied of anything left behind by the police. They’d not removed every item from the bathroom since not everything within had belonged to Jemima, so Bella concentrated on straightening the room as she cleaned it, which was why she found—not in Jemima’s drawer but in the top drawer marked for the other lodger—a curious item that certainly did not belong there.

  It was the result of a pregnancy test. Bella knew that the second she clapped her eyes on it. What she didn’t know was whether the result was positive or negative, being of an age at which she would, of course, never have used such a test herself. Her own children—long gone to Detroit and to Buenos Aires—had announced their conception in the old-fashioned manner of wracking her body with morning sickness almost from the instant of sperm-meets-egg, which itself had been achieved in the old-fashioned manner, thank you very much, Mr. McHaggis. So Bella, retrieving the incriminating plastic tab from the drawer, wasn’t sure about what the indicator meant. Blue line. Was that negative? Positive? She would have to find out. She would also have to find out what it was doing in the drawer of her other lodger because surely he hadn’t brought it home from a celebratory dinner—or, what was more likely, a confrontational cup of coffee—with the mother-to-be. If a woman he’d been bonking had fallen pregnant and had presented him with the evidence, why would he keep it? A souvenir? Certainly, the coming infant was going to be souvenir enough. No, it stood to reason that the pregnancy test was Jemima’s. And if it hadn’t been in Jemima’s belongings or with Jemima’s rubbish, there was a reason. There seemed several possibilities, but the one that Bella didn’t want to consider was the one telling her that once again, two of her lodgers had pulled the wool over her eyes about what was going on between them.

  Bloody hell damn, Bella thought. She had rules. They were everywhere. They were signed and sealed and delivered in the contract she made each lodger read and affix his or her name to the bottom of. Were young people so randy that they couldn’t stop themselves from jumping in and out of each other’s knickers at the first opportunity despite her very clear rules about fraternizing with other members of the household? It appeared they were. It appeared they could not. Someone, she decided, was going to be talked to.