This Body of Death: An Inspector Lynley Novel

by Elizabeth George

As before, he was waiting patiently at her car, but this time on the passenger’s side. She raised an eyebrow, to which he said, “I expect you need the practice, guv. London traffic and all that … ?”

  She tried to read him for underlying meanings, but he was very good at a poker face. “Very well,” she told him. “And it’s Isabelle, Thomas.”

  “Due respect, guv …”

  She sighed impatiently. “Oh for God’s sake, Thomas. What did you call your last superintendent behind the scenes?”

  “Sir, mostly. Other times it would have been guv.”

  “Fine. Wonderful. Well, I’m ordering you to call me Isabelle when we’re alone together. Have you an aversion to that?”

  He seemed to consider this, the aversion bit. He examined the door handle on which he’d already placed his hand. When he looked up, his brown eyes were candidly on her face and the sudden openness of his expression was disconcerting. “I think ‘guv’ gives a distance you might prefer,” he said. “All things considered.”

  “What things?” she said.

  “All things.”

  The frank look they exchanged made her wonder about him. She said, “You play your cards quite close, don’t you, Thomas.”

  He said, “I have no cards at all.”

  She snorted at this and got into the car.

  PAOLO DI FAZIO’S studio was near Clapham Junction. This was south of the river, he told her, not terribly far from Putney. Their best course was to drive along the Embankment. Did she want him to give her directions?

  “I think I can just about manage the route to the river,” she told him.

  Paolo di Fazio himself had indicated where to find him. Upon being contacted he’d declared that he had given them all the information there was to give about himself and Jemima Hastings, but if they wanted to spend their time going over old ground, then so be it. He’d be where he was most mornings, at the studio.

  The studio turned out to be tucked into one of the many railway arches created by the viaducts leading out of Clapham railway station. Most of these had long ago been put to use, being converted from tunnels into wine cellars, clothing outlets, car repair shops, and—in one case—even a delicatessen selling imported olives, meats, and cheeses. Paolo di Fazio’s studio was between a picture framer and a bicycle shop, and they arrived to find its front doors open and its overhead lights brightly illuminating the space. This space was whitewashed and set up in two sections. One section appeared to be given over to the early work that went on when an artist took a sculpture from clay on its way to bronze, so there were masses of wax, latex, fibre glass, and bags of plaster everywhere, along with the grit and the grime one might associate with working with such substances. The other section accommodated workstations for four artists, whose pieces were currently shrouded in plastic and likely in varying stages of completion. Finished bronze sculptures had places in a row along the centre of the studio, and they ranged in style from the realistic to the fantastical.

  When they came upon it, Paolo di Fazio’s style turned out to be figurative, but of a nature that favoured bulbous elbows, long limbs, and disproportionately small heads. Lynley murmured, “Shades of Giacometti,” and he paused in front of it, and Isabelle glanced at him sharply to gauge his expression. She had no idea what he was talking about, and she absolutely hated a show-off. But she saw he was taking out his spectacles to give the sculpture a closer look, and he seemed unaware that he’d even spoken. She wondered what it meant that he moved round the sculpture slowly, looking thoughtful. She realised yet again that he was impossible to read, and she additionally wondered if she could actually work with someone who’d so mastered the art of keeping his thoughts to himself.

  Paolo di Fazio wasn’t in the studio. Nor was anyone else. But he entered as they were having a look at his work area, which was identifiable by more of the masks—similar to those he made in Jubilee Market Hall—that stood on dusty wooden pedestals upon shelves at the rear. Specifically, they were having a look at his tools and at his tools’ potential to do harm.

  Di Fazio said, “Please touch nothing,” as he came in their direction. He was carrying a take-away coffee and a bag from which he brought out two bananas and an apple. These he placed carefully on one of the shelves as if arranging them for a still life. He was dressed as he’d been dressed when they’d earlier seen him: blue jeans, a T-shirt, and dress shoes, which as before, seemed an odd getup for someone at work with clay, particularly the dress shoes, as he somehow managed to keep them perfectly clean. They would have passed muster at a military inspection. He said, “I’m at work here, as you can see.” He gestured with his coffee in the direction of a shrouded piece.

  Isabelle said, “And may we look at your work?”

  He apparently needed to think about this for a moment before he shrugged and removed its swaddling of plastic and cloth. It was another elongated, knobby-limbed piece, apparently male and apparently in agony if the expression was anything to go by. A mouth gaped open, limbs stretched out, the neck curved back, and the shoulders arched. At its feet lay a grill of some sort, and to Isabelle it looked for all the world as if the figure were in anguish over a broken barbecue. She reckoned it all meant something deep and she readied herself to hear Lynley make an insufferably illuminating remark about it. But he said nothing, and di Fazio himself didn’t shed any light on matters for Isabelle when he identified the figure only as St. Lawrence. He went on to tell them that he was doing a series of Christian martyrs for a Sicilian monastery, by which Isabelle took it that St. Lawrence’s gruesome means of death had actually been by barbecue. This made her wonder what belief, if any, she’d be willing to die for, and this in turn made her wonder how or if the deaths of martyrs tied in with Jemima Hastings’ own end.

  “I’ve done Sebastian, Lucy, and Cecilia for them,” di Fazio was saying. “This is the fourth of a series of ten. They’ll be placed in the niches in the monastery chapel.”

  “You’re well known in Italy, then,” Lynley said.

  “No. My uncle is well known in the monastery.”

  “Your uncle’s a monk?”

  Di Fazio gave a sardonic laugh. “My uncle is a criminal. He thinks he can buy his way into heaven if he makes enough donations to them. Money, food, wine, my art. It is all the same to him. And as he pays me for the work, I don’t question the …” He looked thoughtful, as if seeking the proper word. “…the effectiveness of his actions.”

  At the street end of the studio, a figure appeared in the double doorway, silhouetted by the light outside. It was a woman, who called out, “Ciao, baby,” and strode over to one of the other work areas. She was short and rather plump, with an enormous shelflike bosom and coils of espresso-coloured hair. She whipped the protective covering off her piece of sculpture and set to work without another look in their direction. Nonetheless, her presence seemed to make di Fazio uneasy, for he suggested that they continue their conversation elsewhere.

  “Dominique didn’t know Jemima,” he told them, with a nod at the woman. “She’d have nothing to add.”

  But she knew di Fazio, Isabelle reckoned, and she might come in useful down the line. She said, “We’ll keep our voices down, if that’s what worries you, Mr. di Fazio.”

  “She will want to concentrate on her work.”

  “I daresay we won’t prevent her from doing so.”

  Behind his gold-framed spectacles, the sculptor’s eyes narrowed. It was just a fractional movement, but Isabelle did not miss it. She said, “This actually won’t take long. It’s about your argument with Jemima. And about an at-home pregnancy test.”

  Di Fazio gave no reaction to the remark. He looked briefly from Isabelle to Lynley as if evaluating the nature of their relationship. Then he said, “I had no argument with Jemima that I remember.”

  “You were overheard. It would have taken place in your lodgings in Putney, and chances are very good it might have had to do with that pregnancy test, which was, by the way, found among your be
longings.”

  “You have no warrant—”

  “As it happens, we aren’t the ones who found it.”

  “Then it’s not evidence, is it. I know how these things work. There’s a procedure that must be followed. And this was not followed, so this pregnancy test or whatever it is cannot be evidence against me.”

  “I applaud your knowledge of the law.”

  “I’ve read enough of injustice in this country, madam. I’ve read how the British police work. People who have been unjustly accused and unjustly convicted. The Birmingham gentlemen. The Guildford group.”

  “You may have done.” Lynley was the one to speak, and Isabelle noted that he didn’t bother to lower his voice to prevent Dominique from hearing. “So you’ll also know that in building a case against a suspect in a murder investigation, some things go down as background information and some as evidence. The fact that you had an argument with a woman who turned up dead may be neither here nor there, but if it is neither here nor there, it seems the wiser course to clear things up about it.”

  “Which is another way of saying,” Isabelle noted, “that you have some explaining to do. You indicated that you and Jemima ultimately stopped having relations when she took up lodgings with Mrs. McHaggis.”

  “That was the truth.” Di Fazio cast a look in Dominique’s direction. Isabelle wondered if the other artist had taken Jemima’s place.

  “Had she become pregnant during the time when you and she were still lovers?”

  “She had not.” Another look in Dominique’s direction. “Can we not have this conversation elsewhere?” he asked. “Dominique and I…We hope to marry this winter. She doesn’t need to hear—”

  “Do you indeed? And this would be your sixth engagement, wouldn’t it?”

  His face grew stormy, but he mastered this. He said, “Dominique doesn’t need to hear facts about Jemima. Jemima was done with.”

  “That’s an interesting choice of words,” Lynley noted.

  “I didn’t hurt Jemima. I didn’t touch Jemima. I wasn’t there.”

  “Then you won’t mind telling us everything you’ve so far failed to tell us about her,” Isabelle said. “You also won’t mind providing us with an alibi for the time of Jemima’s death.”

  “Not here. Please.”

  “All right. Then at the local nick.”

  Di Fazio’s face went completely rigid. “Unless you place me under arrest, I do not have to take a step out of this studio in your company, and this I know. Believe me, I know. I’ve read about my rights.”

  “That being the case,” Isabelle said, “you’ll also know that the sooner you clear up this matter of you, Jemima, the pregnancy test, the argument, and your alibi, the better off you’ll be.”

  Di Fazio cast another look in Dominique’s direction. She seemed intent upon her work, Isabelle thought, but who could really tell. They appeared to be at the point of impasse when Lynley made the move that resolved the situation: He went to Dominique’s area to examine her work, saying, “May I have a look? I’ve always thought that the lost-wax process …” and on he went till Dominique was fully engaged.

  “So?” Isabelle said to di Fazio.

  He turned his back on Lynley and Dominique, the better to prevent his intended bride’s reading of his lips, Isabelle reckoned. He said, “It was before Dominique. It was Jemima’s test, in the rubbish in the toilet. She’d told me there was no one else in her life. She’d said she wanted a break from men altogether. But when I saw the test, I knew that she’d lied. There was someone new. So I spoke with her. And it was hot, this conversation, yes. Because she would not be with me but I knew that she would be with him.”

  “Who?”

  “Who else? Frazer. She wouldn’t risk it with me. But with him … ? If she lost her place in the lodging as a result of Frazer, it didn’t matter.”

  “She told you it was Frazer Chaplin?”

  He looked impatient. “She didn’t need to tell me. This is Frazer’s way. Have you seen him? Have you spoken to him? There’s no woman that he wouldn’t try to take because that’s who he is. Who else would it be?”

  “He wasn’t the only man in her life.”

  “She went to the ice rink. For lessons, she said, but I knew better. And sometimes she went to Duke’s Hotel as well. She wanted to see what Frazer was up to. And he was up to finding ladies.”

  Isabelle said, “Perhaps. But there are other men whose lives touched hers. At her own place of employment, at the ice rink—”

  “What? You suppose she was …what? With Abbott Langer? With Jayson Druther? She went to work, she went to the ice rink, she went to Duke’s Hotel, she went home. Trust me. She did nothing else.”

  “If that’s the case,” Isabelle said, “you do see how this gives you a motive for murdering her, don’t you?”

  Colour rushed into his face, and he grabbed up one of his tools and used it to gesture with. “Me? It’s Frazer who would want her dead. Frazer Chaplin. He would want to shake her away from him. Because she wouldn’t give him the freedom he required to do what he does.”

  “Which is?”

  “He fucks the ladies. All the ladies. And the ladies like it. And he makes them want it. And when they want it, they seek him out. So this is what she was doing.”

  “You seem to know quite a lot about him.”

  “I’ve seen him. I’ve watched them. Frazer and women.”

  “Some might say he’s merely had better luck with women, Mr. di Fazio. What do you make of that?”

  “I know what you’re trying to say. Don’t think I’m foolish. I’m telling you how it is with him. So I ask you this: If Frazer Chaplin wasn’t the man she’d taken as her lover, then who was it?”

  It was an interesting question, Isabelle thought. But far more interesting at the moment was the fact that di Fazio had seemed to know what Jemima Hastings’ every movement had been.

  TWO OF THEM hovered. Their form was different. One rose from an ashtray on a table, a cloud of grey that became a cloud of light from which he had to turn his head even as he heard the booming cry of The eighth choir stands before God.

  He tried to block the words.

  They are the messengers between man and man’s Deity.

  The cries were loud, louder than they had ever been and even as he filled his ears with music, another cry came from another direction, saying Battlers of those who themselves were born of the bearer of light. Distort God’s plan and be thrown into the jaws of damnation.

  Although he tried not to seek the source of this second shrieking, he found it anyway because a chair swept into the air before him and it began to take shape and it began to approach him. He shrank away.

  What he knew was that they came in disguises. They were travelers, they were healers of the sick, they were inhabitants of the pool of Probatica at whose shores the infirm lay awaiting the movement of the water. They were the builders, the slave masters of demons.

  He who healed was also present. He spoke from within the cloud of grey and he became flame and the flame burned emerald. He called not for righteous anger but for a flood of music to issue forth in praise.

  But the other fought him. He who was destruction itself, known by Sodom, called Hero of God. But he was Mercy as well, and he claimed to sit at the left hand of God, unlike the other. Incarnation, conception, birth, dreams. These were his offerings. Come with me. But a price would be paid.

  I am Raphael and it is you who are called.

  I am Gabriel and it is you who are chosen.

  Then there was a chorus of them, a veritable flood of voices, and they were everywhere. He worked against being taken by them. He worked and he worked till the sweat poured from him and still they came on. They descended till there was one mighty being above all, and he approached. He would not be denied. He would overcome. And to this there was no other answer that might be given so he had to escape he had to run he had to find a place of safety.

  He himself gave the cr
y against the multitude that he now knew was indeed the Eighth Choir. There was a stairway that emerged from the light and he made for this, for wherever it headed. To the light, to God, to some other Deity, it didn’t matter. He began to climb. He began to run.

  “Yukio!” came the cry from behind him.

  “SO I HAVE the impression the engagement is all in Paolo di Fazio’s head,” Lynley said. “Dominique did a bit of eye rolling when I offered her my congratulations.”

  “Now that’s an interesting bit,” Isabelle Ardery said. “Well, I did think six times engaged was rather pushing the envelope in the human relationship area. I mean, I’ve heard of six times married—well, perhaps only with American film stars in the days when they actually did get married—but it’s rather odd that with all the engagements, he’s never made it to the altar. It does make one wonder about him. How much is real and how much is imagined.”

  “He may have done.”

  “What?” Ardery turned to him. They’d stopped at the delicatessen, which occupied one of the railway arches. She was making a purchase of olives and meats. She’d already bought a bottle of wine at the wine cellar.

  Lynley reckoned these would likely stand in place of her dinner. He knew the signs, having worked for so many years with Barbara Havers and having thus become accustomed to the single policewoman’s eating habits. He considered extending an invitation to the superintendent: dinner at his home in Eaton Terrace? He rejected the idea, as he couldn’t imagine as yet sharing his dining table with anyone.

  “He may have made it to the altar,” he said. “Married. Philip Hale will be able to tell us. Or perhaps John Stewart. We’re developing a rather long list for the background checks. John can help out there if you’ve a mind to move him.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’d adore that assignment.” The superintendent took her bag of goods, said thanks to the shop girl, and headed for her car. The day was heating up. Surrounded by and composed of bricks, concrete, and macadam, possessing all the possible charms that overfull wheelie bins and rubbish on the street could provide, the area immediately round the railway arches was like a wrestler’s armpit: steaming and malodorous.