This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  “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.

  Chapter Twenty

  “I THINK YOUR BEST COURSE IS GOING TO BE TO GET SOMEONE from Christie’s to look at it,” St. James said. “Or, failing that, someone at the BM. You can check it out from the evidence officer, can’t you?”

  “I’m not exactly in a position to take that decision,” Lynley said.

  “Ah. The new superintendent. How does it go?”

  “A bit unevenly, I’m afraid.” Lynley glanced around. He and St. James were speaking via phone. References to Isabelle Ardery had to be circumspect, of necessity. Besides, he felt for the acting superintendent’s position. He didn’t envy her, having to cope with Stephenson Deacon and the Directorate of Public Affairs so soon into her employment at the Yard. Once the press came howling into the picture in an investigation, the pressure for a result mounted. With someone now in hospital, Ardery was going to feel that pressure from every quarter.

  “I see,” St. James said. “Well, if not the stone itself, what about the photo you showed me? It’s quite clear and you can see the scale. That might be all that’s necessary.”

  “For the British Museum, possibly. But certainly not for Christie’s.”

  St. James was silent for a moment before he said, “I wish I could be more help, Tommy. But I’m loath to send you in the wrong direction.”

  “Nothing to apologise for,” Lynley told his friend. “It might mean nothing anyway.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I don’t. On the other hand, I may be merely clutching at a straw.”

  So it definitely seemed, because right, left, and centre everything was either utterly confusing matters or checking out as inconsequential. There was no middle ground between the extremes.

  The background checks completed so far served as evidence of this: Of the principals in London involved in the case, tangentially or otherwise, everyone was turning out to be exactly who he seemed to be and nobody’s copy book was blotted. There was still the matter of Abbott Langer’s supposed marriages to be sorted, and Matt Jones—paramour of St. James’s sister—continued to be a question mark as there were more than four hundred Matthew Joneses spread out in the UK, so tracking each down and sorting them all out was proving a problem. Other than that, no one had so much as a parking ticket. This made things look grim as far as Yukio Matsumoto was concerned, despite his brother’s protestations of the violinist’s harmless nature. For with everyone else turning up clean and no one else in London apparently having a motive to murder Jemima Hastings, the killing either had to have been committed in the sort of act of madness one could easily associate with Yukio Matsumoto and his angels or it had to have arisen from something and someone connected to Hampshire.

  Of the Hampshire principals, there were two curious points that had been uncovered and only one of them seemed likely to lead anywhere. The first point was that Gina Dickens had so far been untraceable in Hampshire although various forms of her name were still being tried: Regina, Jean, Virginia, etc. The second—and more interesting piece of information—was about Robert Hastings, who, as things turned out, had trained to be a blacksmith prior to taking over his father’s position as agister. And this might have merely been shoved aside as another useless bit of data had forensics not given a preliminary assessment about the murder weapon. According to microscopic examination, the thing was hand forged, and the blood upon it had come from Jemima Hastings, as well. When this information was added to Yukio Matsumoto’s possession of the spike, to the eyewitness report of an Oriental man stumbling from Abney Park Cemetery, to the e-fit generated by that report, and to what was likely to be blood residue on the violinist’s clothing and his shoes, it was difficult to disagree with Isabelle Ardery’s conclusion that they had their man.

  But Lynley liked to have everything accounted for. Thus he returned to the stone that Jemima Hastings had carried in her pocket. It wasn’t that he assumed it was valuable and, possibly, the reason for her death. It was just that the stone remained a detail that he wanted to understand.

  He was once again studying the photo of the stone when he received a phone call from Barbara Havers. She’d had the word to return to London, she told him, but before she did so she wanted to know if he’d unearthed anything about Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting. Or, for that matter, about Ringo Heath, because it could be that there was a connection between those two that wanted exploring.

  What he’d discovered was little enough, Lynley told her. All of Whiting’s training as a police officer had followed the usual, legitimate pattern: He’d done his required training weeks at a Centrex centre, he’d taken additional instruction at several area training units, and he’d attended an admirable number of courses in Bramshill. He had twenty-three years of service under his belt, all of them spent in Hampshire. If he was involved in anything untoward, Lynley hadn’t sorted what it was. He can be a bit of a bully on occasion had been the nastiest comment anyone cared to make about the bloke, although He’s been sometimes too enthusiastic about the job in hand could, Lynley knew, have several interpretations.

  As for Ringo Heath, there was nothing. Especially there was no connection of record between Heath and Chief Superintendent Whiting. As to a connection between Whiting and Gordon Jossie, whatever it was, it was going to have to come out of Jossie’s background because it certainly wasn’t coming out of Whiting’s.

  “So it’s sod bloody all on a biscuit, eh?” was how Havers received the information. “I s’pose her order to come home makes sense.”

  “You’re on your way, aren’t you?” Lynley asked her.

  “With Winston at the wheel? What d’you think?”

  Which meant that Nkata who, unlike Havers, had a history of taking orders seriously, was returning them to London. Had she been given her way in matters, Barbara would have probably dallied until she was satisfied by what she was able to gather about everyone in Hampshire even remotely connected to Jemima Hastings’ death.

  He concluded his call as Isabelle Ardery returned from her meeting with Hillier and Stephenson Deacon. She looked no more harried than usual, so he concluded the meeting had gone marginally well. Then John Stewart fielded a phone call from SO7 that put a full stop to the case as far as Ardery was concerned. They had the analysis of the two hairs found on the body of Jemima Hastings, he told them.

  “Well, thank God for that,” Ardery declared. “What’ve we got?”

  “Oriental,” he told her.

  “Hallelujah.”

  It would have been a moment for packing everything in then, and Lynley could see that Ardery was inclined to do so. But Dorothea Harriman came into the room in the very next moment and, with her words, burst everything wide open.

  One Bella McHaggis was downstairs in reception, Harriman told them, and she wanted to speak to Barbara Havers.

  “She was told the detective sergeant is in Hampshire, so she’s asked to see whoever’s in charge of the case,” Harriman said. “She’s got evidence, she says, and she doesn’t mean to hand it over to just anyone.”

  BEL
LA WAS NO longer suspicious of Paolo di Fazio. That was finished the moment she’d seen the error in her thinking. She didn’t regret setting the coppers after him since she watched enough police dramas on the telly to know that everyone had to be eliminated as suspects in order to find the guilty party and, like it or not, he was a suspect. So was she, she supposed. Anyway, she reckoned he’d get over whatever offence he might be feeling because of her suspicions and if he didn’t, he’d find other lodgings, but in any case she couldn’t be bothered because Jemima’s handbag had to be turned over to the officers investigating the case.

  As she didn’t intend waiting at home for them finally to show their faces this time round, she didn’t bother with the phone. Instead, she’d dropped Jemima’s handbag into the canvas carryall that she used for her grocery shopping, and she’d carted it off to New Scotland Yard because that was where that Sergeant Havers person had come from.

  When she learned that Sergeant Havers wasn’t in, she’d demanded someone else. The head, the chief, the whoever’s-in-charge, she said to the uniform in reception. And she wasn’t leaving till she talked to that person. In person, by the way. Not on the phone. She parked herself near the eternal flame and there she determined to remain.

  And damn, if she didn’t have to wait exactly forty-three minutes for a responsible party finally to appear. Even when this happened, she didn’t think she was looking at the responsible party at all. A tall, nice-looking man approached her and, when he spoke from beneath his head of beautifully groomed blond hair, he didn’t sound like anyone she’d ever heard yapping away on The Bill. He was Inspector Lynley, he said in the plummy tone that had always proclaimed Public School in One’s Past. Did she have something related to the investigation?

  “Are you in charge?” she demanded, and when he admitted that he was not, she told him to fetch whoever was and that, she said, was how it was going to be. She was in need of police protection from the killer of Jemima Hastings, she said, and she had a feeling he wasn’t going to be able to provide that on his own. “I know who did it,” she told him and she lifted the carryall to her chest, “and what I’ve got in here proves it.”

  “Ah,” he said politely. “And what have you got in there?”

  “I’m not a nutter,” she told him sharply because she could tell what he was thinking about her. “You fetch who needs to be fetched, my good man.”

  He went to make a phone call. He regarded her from across the lobby as he spoke to whoever was at the other end of the line. Whatever he said proved fruitful, though. In another three minutes, a woman came out of the elevator and through the turnstile that kept the general public away from the mysterious workings of New Scotland Yard. This individual strode over to join them. She was, Inspector Lynley told Bella, Detective Superintendent Ardery.

  “And are you the person in charge?” Bella said.

  “I am,” the superintendent replied. Her facial expression added the comment, And this better be worth my time, madam.

  Right, Bella thought, it bloody well will be.

  THE HANDBAG WAS so hopelessly compromised for purposes of evidence that Isabelle wanted to shake the woman silly. The fact that she did not was, she decided, a testimony to her self-control.

  “It’s Jemima’s,” Bella McHaggis announced as she produced it with a flourish. This flourish included adding fingerprints to what were doubtless dozens more of her own, in the process smearing everyone else’s and, in particular, smearing the killer’s. “I found it with the Oxfam goods.”

  “A discarded bag or one that she carried daily?” Lynley asked, not unreasonably.

  “It’s her regular bag. And it wasn’t discarded because it’s got all her clobber in it.”

  “You went through it?” Isabelle gritted her teeth in preparation for the inevitable answer, which was, naturally, that the woman had pawed through everything, depositing more fingerprints, creating more compromised evidence.

  “Well, of course I went through it,” Bella asserted. “How else was I to know it’s Jemima’s?”

  “How else indeed,” Isabelle said.

  Bella McHaggis gave her a narrow-eyed look that told Isabelle she was being evaluated. The woman seemed to reach a conclusion that no offence was intended by Isabelle’s tone, and before she could be stopped from doing so, she opened the handbag, said, “See here, then,” and dumped its contents onto the seat where she’d been awaiting them.

  “Please don’t—,” Isabelle began as Lynley said, “This all must go to—” and Bella picked up a mobile phone and waved it at them, declaring, “This is hers. And this is her purse and her wallet” and on and on as she pawed through everything. There was nothing for it but to grab her hands in the unlikely hope that something had gone untouched on Bella’s first time through the handbag and that it could remain so. “Yes, yes. Thank you,” Isabelle said. She nodded at Lynley to replace the handbag’s contents and to put the bag itself into the carryall. When he’d accomplished this, Isabelle asked the woman to take her through everything that had led to her finding the handbag. This, Bella McHaggis was pleased to do. She gave them chapter and verse on recycling and saving the planet, and from this Isabelle concluded that the handbag had come from a bin that was not only situated in front of Bella McHag gis’s house but was also accessible to anyone who happened to pass by and see it. This, apparently, was a point that Bella herself wished to make because the conclusion of her recitation contained a fact she declared “the most important bit of all.”

  “And that is?” Isabelle enquired.

  “Yolanda.”

  It seemed that the psychic had been lurking round Bella’s front garden again, and she’d been there this time moments before Bella had made the discovery of Jemima’s handbag. She’d been ostensibly having “some sort of bloody psychic experience,” Bella scoffed, which had been characterised by muttering, moaning, praying, and waving round a stick of burning whatever that was supposed to do something magical or “rubbish like that.” Bella had given her a few choice words, and the psychic had scurried off. Moments later, checking the Oxfam bin, Bella had uncovered the handbag.

  “Why were you checking the bin?” Lynley asked.

  “To see how soon it would need emptying, obviously,” was her withering reply. It seemed, not unreasonably, that the other bins collected recycling matter far more quickly than did the Oxfam bin. While they were emptied twice each month, the Oxfam bin was not.

  “She’d have no way of knowing that,” Bella said.

  “We’ll want to go through this bin,” Isabelle said. “You’ve not done anything with its contents, have you?”

  She hadn’t done, for which Isabelle praised God. She told the woman that someone would fetch the bin from her and in the meantime, she wasn’t to open it again or even touch it.

  “It’s important, isn’t it?” Bella looked quite pleased with herself. “I knew it was important, didn’t I.”

  There was no doubt of that, although how to interpret the handbag’s importance was something over which Isabelle found herself at odds with Lynley. As they rode the lift on their return to the incident room, she said to him, “He had to have known where she lived, Thomas.”

  Lynley said, “Who?” and the way he said it told her he was thinking in another direction entirely.

  “Matsumoto. It would have been a simple matter for him to put the handbag in that bin.”

  “And keep the murder weapon?” Lynley asked. “How d’you reckon his thinking went on that one?”

  “He’s mad as a hatter. He isn’t thinking. He wasn’t thinking. Or if he was thinking, he was thinking about doing what the angels told him to do. Get rid of this, hold on to that, run, hide, follow her, whatever.” She glanced at him sharply. He was gazing at the floor of the lift, his brow furrowed and the knuckle of his index finger to his lips in a posture that suggested consideration of her words and of everything else. She said, “Well?”

  He said, “We’ve Paolo di Fazio inside that house.
We’ve Frazer Chaplin inside it as well. And then there’s the matter of Yolanda.”

  “You can’t mean to suggest another woman killed Jemima Hastings. By driving a spike into her carotid artery? Heavens, Thomas, the entire means of murder isn’t the least bit feminine, and I daresay you know it.”

  “I agree it’s unlikely,” Lynley said. “But I don’t want to discount the fact that Yolanda might be protecting someone who handed the bag over to her and asked her to be rid of it. She wants talking to.”

  “Oh, for God’s bloody sake …” And then she saw his expression. She knew from it that he was assessing her, and she also knew what he was assessing. She felt a bubble of anger that any man should stand in judgement of her in a situation in which he would not stand in judgement of another male. She said, “I want to have a close look at the contents of that bag before we hand it over to forensics. And don’t bloody tell me that’s irregular, Thomas. We don’t have time to wait round for those blokes to tell us every fingerprint is useless. We need a result.”

  “You’re—”

  “We’ll wear gloves, all right? And the bag won’t leave my sight or yours. Does that please or do you want more guarantees?”

  “I was going to say you’re in charge. You give the orders,” he replied. “I was going to say it’s your case.”

  She doubted that. He was as smooth as icing on a cake, he was. She said, “It is. Mind you remember that,” as they left the lift together.

  The most important belonging of Jemima Hastings inside the bag was the mobile phone, and this Isabelle handed over to John Stewart with orders to deal with it, to listen to voice messages, to trace calls, to read and make note of any and all texts, and to get his hands on the mobile’s records. “We’ll want to use the mobile phone towers as well,” she added. “The pinging, or whatever the hell they call it.” The rest of the contents she and Lynley went through together, most of it seeming to be perfectly straightforward: a small folding map of London, a paperback novel showing a predilection for historical mysteries, a wallet holding thirty-five pounds along with two credit cards; three biros, a broken pencil, a pair of sunglasses in a case, a hairbrush, a comb, four lipsticks, and a mirror. There was also a list of products from the cigar shop, along with an advertisement for Queen’s Ice and Bowl—“Great Food! Birthday Parties! Corporate Events!”—an offer for membership to a Putney gym and spa, and business cards from Yolanda the Psychic, London Skate Centre, Abbott Langer Professional Ice Instructor, and Sheldon Pockworth Numismatics.