This Body of Death: An Inspector Lynley Novel

by Elizabeth George

  This last gave Isabelle pause as she tried to recall what numismatics referred to. She came up with stamps. Lynley said coins.

  She told him to check it out. He said, “Along with Yolanda? Because I still think—”

  “All right. Along with Yolanda. But I swear she has nothing to do with this, Thomas. A woman did not commit this crime.”

  LYNLEY FOUND YOLANDA the Psychic’s place of business in Queensway with little trouble although he had to wait outside the faux mews building where she plied her trade because a sign on the door declared IN SESSION! NO ENTRY!, and from this he assumed that Yolanda was in the process of doing whatever it was that psychics did for their clients: tea leaves, tarot cards, palms, or the like. He fetched himself a take-away coffee from a Russian café tucked in the junction of two of the indoor market’s corridors, and he returned to Psychic Mews with cup in hand. By that time, the sign had been removed from the door, so he finished the coffee quickly and let himself in.

  “That you, dearest?” Yolanda called from an inner room, shielded from the reception area by a beaded curtain. “Bit early, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Lynley replied to her first question. “DI Lynley. New Scotland Yard.”

  She came through the curtain. He took in her startling orange hair and her tailored suit that he recognised—with thanks to his wife—as either vintage Coco Chanel or a Coco Chanel knockoff. She wasn’t what he had expected.

  She stopped when she saw him. “It throbs,” she said.

  He blinked. “Pardon?”

  “Your aura. It’s taken a terrible blow. It wants to regain its strength but something’s got in the way.” She held her hand up before he could reply. She cocked her head as if listening to something. “Hmm. Yes,” she said. “It’s not for nothing, you know. She intends to return. In the meantime your part is to become ready for her. That’s a dual message.”

  “From the great beyond?” He asked the question lightly but, of course, he thought at once of Helen, no matter the irrationality of applying the idea of return to someone so completely gone.

  Yolanda said, “You’d be wise not to make light of these matters. Those who make light generally regret it. What’d you say your name was?”

  “DI Lynley. Is that what happened to Jemima Hastings? Did she make light?”

  Yolanda ducked behind a screen for a moment. Lynley heard the scratch of a match. He thought she was lighting incense or a candle—either seemed likely and there was already a cone of incense burning at the crossed legs of a seated Buddha—but she emerged with a cigarette. She said to him, “It’s good that you gave it up. I don’t see you dying because of your lungs.”

  He absolutely refused to be seduced. He said, “As to Jemima?”

  “She didn’t smoke.”

  “That didn’t much help her in the end, did it?”

  Yolanda took a heavy hit from the tobacco. “I already talked to the cops,” she said. “That black man. Strongest aura I’ve seen in years. P’rhaps ever, to tell you the truth. But that woman with him? The one with the teeth? I’d say she has issues impeding her growth, and they aren’t exactly dental. What would you say?”

  “May I call you Mrs. Price?” Lynley asked. “I understand that’s your real name.”

  “You may not. Not on these premises. Here, I’m Yolanda.”

  “Very well. Yolanda. You were in Oxford Road earlier today. We must talk about that, about Jemima Hastings as well. Shall we do it here or elsewhere?”

  “Elsewhere being … ?”

  “They’ll have an interview room at the Ladbroke Grove station. We can use that if you prefer.”

  She chuckled. “Cops. You best be careful how you act else it’ll disappear altogether. There’s such a thing as karma, Mr. Lynley. That’s what you said your name is, didn’t you?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  She examined him. “You don’t look like a cop. You don’t talk like a cop. You don’t belong.”

  How true, he thought. But this was hardly a startling deduction for her to have made. He said, “Where would you like to talk, Yolanda?”

  She went through the beaded curtain. He followed her.

  There was a table in the centre of the inner room, but she didn’t sit there. Instead, she went to an overstuffed armchair that faced a Victorian fainting sofa. She lay upon this latter and closed her eyes, although she still managed to smoke her cigarette unimpeded. He took the chair and said to her, “Tell me about Oxford Road first. We’ll get to Jemima in a moment.”

  There was little enough to tell, according to Yolanda the Psychic. She’d been in Oxford Road because of its inherent evil, she declared. She’d failed to save Jemima from it despite her warnings to move house, and with Jemima having fallen victim to its depravity, she was duty bound to try to save the rest of them. Clearly, they weren’t about to leave the place, so she was trying to purify it from without: She was burning sage. “Not that that bloody woman will listen to anything I try to tell her,” she declared. “Not that she would even begin to appreciate my efforts on her behalf.”

  “What sort of evil?” Lynley asked.

  Yolanda opened her eyes. “There aren’t different sorts of evil,” she replied. “There’s just it. It. Evil. So far it’s taken two people from that house, and it’s after more. Her husband died there, you know.”

  “Mrs. McHaggis’s husband?”

  “So you’d think she’d purify the place, but will she? No. She’s too much the dim bulb to see the importance. Now Jemima’s gone as well, and there’ll be another. Just you wait.”

  “And you were there solely to perform a”—Lynley sought the term that best fit burning sage in someone’s front garden and settled on—“a rite of some kind?”

  “Not of ‘some kind.’ Oh I know what your sort think about my sort. You’ve no belief till life brings you to your knees and then you come running, don’t you?”

  “Is that what happened to Jemima? Why did she come to see you? Initially, I mean.”

  “I don’t speak about my clients.”

  “I know that’s what you told the other officers, but we’ve a problem, you see, as you’re not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a solicitor … ? There’s no privilege to invoke, as far as I can tell.”

  “Which means exactly what?”

  “Which means your failure to disclose information can be seen as impeding a police investigation.”

  She was silent, digesting this. She drew in on her cigarette and blew the smoke heavenward, thoughtfully.

  Lynley went on. “So my suggestion is that you tell me whatever seems relevant. Why did she come to see you?”

  Yolanda continued silent for a moment. She seemed to be tossing round the ramifications of speaking or not speaking. She finally said, “I told the others already: love. It’s why they usually come.”

  “Love for whom?”

  Again a hesitation before she said, “The Irishman. The one who works at the ice rink.”

  “Frazer Chaplin?”

  “She wanted to know what they always want to know.” Yolanda moved restlessly on the sofa. She reached for an ashtray beneath it and stubbed out her cigarette. She said, “I told the others that, more or less. The black man and the woman with the teeth. I don’t see how going over it all again with you is going to make a difference.”

  Lynley gave passing wry thought to how Barbara Havers would react to being called “the woman with the teeth.” He let the thought go. He said, “Call it a new perspective: mine. What, exactly, did you tell her?”

  She sighed. “Love’s risky.”

  Isn’t it just, Lynley thought.

  “I mean as a topic,” she went on. “One can’t make predictions about it. There’re too many variables, always the unexpected bits, especially if one doesn’t have the other person there to …well, to scrutinise, you see. So one keeps things vague, in a manner of speaking. That’s what I did.”

  “To keep the client coming back, I should guess.”
/>
  She glanced his way, as if to evaluate his tone. He kept his face impassive. She said, “This is a business. I don’t deny it. But it’s also a service that I provide and, believe me, people need it. ’Sides, all sorts of things come up when I’m engaged with a client. They come to see me for one reason, but they find others. ’S not me keeping them coming back, I can tell you that. It’s what I know. It’s what I tell them that I know.”

  “And Jemima?”

  “What about her?”

  “She had other reasons, beyond her questions about love?”

  “She had.”

  “And what were those?”

  Yolanda sat up. She swung her legs round. They were chunky, without ankles, a single plane from her knees to her feet. She plopped her hands down on either side of her thighs as if for balance, and while she held herself straight, her head was lowered. She shook this.

  Lynley thought she meant to refuse, no more information, sir. But instead, she said, “Something’s standing between me and the others. Everything’s gone quiet. But I intended no harm. I didn’t know.”

  Lynley felt strongly disinclined to play along. He said, “Mrs. Price, if you know something, I must insist—”

  “Yolanda!” she said, her head rising with a jerk. “It’s Yolanda in here. I’m having enough trouble with the spirit world as it is, and I don’t need someone in this room reminding them I’ve another life out there, d’you understand that? Ever since she died—ever since I was told that she died—it’s gone quiet and dark. I’m going through the motions, I’ve been doing that for days, and I don’t know what I’m failing to see.” Then she rose. The room was dim and gloomy, likely in keeping with her line of work, and she went to the curtained entry where she switched on an overhead light. The illumination brought the dismal little space into unforgiving relief: dust on the furniture, slut’s wool in the corners, secondhand belongings that were chipped and cracked. Yolanda paced the small area. Lynley waited although his patience was wearing thin.

  She finally said, “They come for advice. I try not to give it directly. That’s not how it works. But in her case, I could feel something more and I needed to know what it was in order to work with her. She had information that would have helped me, but she didn’t want to part with it.”

  “Information about whom? About what?”

  “Who’s to tell? She wouldn’t say. But she asked where she should meet someone if hard truths had to be spoken between them and if she feared to speak them.”

  “A man?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me that. I said the obvious, what anyone would say: She must choose a public place for her meeting.”

  “Did you mention—”

  “I did not tell her that cemetery.” She stopped her pacing. She was on the other side of the table and she faced him across it, as if she needed the safety of this distance. She said, “Why would I tell her that cemetery?”

  “I take it you didn’t recommend her local Starbucks either,” Lynley pointed out.

  “I said choose a place where peace predominates and where she could feel it. I don’t know why she chose that cemetery. I don’t know how she even knew about it.” She resumed her pacing. Round the table once, twice, before she said, “I should have told her something else. I should have seen. Or felt. But I didn’t tell her to stay away from that place because I didn’t see danger.” She swung round on him. “Do you know what it means that I didn’t see danger, Mr. Lynley? Do you understand the position that puts me in? I’ve never doubted the gift for a moment, but now I do. I don’t know truth from lies. I can’t see them. And if I couldn’t protect her from danger, I can’t protect anyone.”

  She sounded so wretched that Lynley felt a surprising twinge of compassion although he did not for a moment believe in psychic phenomena. The thought of protecting someone, however, made him think of the stone Jemima was carrying. A talisman, a good luck charm? He said, “Did you try to protect her?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Did you give her anything to keep her safe prior to this meeting she intended to have?”

  But she hadn’t. She had sought to protect Jemima Hastings only with words of advice—“vague mutterings and imaginings,” Lynley thought—and they’d been useless.

  At least, however, they now knew what Jemima had been doing in Abney Park Cemetery. On the other hand, they had only Yolanda’s word for what she herself had been doing in Oxford Road that day. He asked her about this; he also asked her what she’d been doing at the time of Jemima’s death. To the latter she said she’d been doing what she was always doing: meeting with clients. She had the appointment book to prove it and if he wanted to phone them he was welcome to do so. As to the former, she’d already said: She was attempting to purify the bloody house before someone else met death unexpectedly. “McHaggis, Frazer, the Italian,” she said.

  Did Yolanda know them all? Lynley asked her.

  By sight if not by acquaintance. McHaggis and Frazer she’d spoken to. The Italian, not.

  And did she have occasion to open any of the recycling bins in the garden? he enquired.

  She looked at him as if he were mad. Why the bloody hell would she open the bins? she asked. The bins don’t need purifying, but that house does.

  He didn’t want to go down that road again. He reckoned he’d got all there was to be had from Yolanda the Psychic. Until the spirit world revealed more to her, she seemed like a closed book to him.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  WHEN ROBBIE HASTINGS PULLED ONTO GORDON JOSSIE’S holding, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do, for Jossie had lied to him not only about wanting to remain with Jemima, but also—as things turned out—about when he’d last seen her. Rob had had this latter piece of information from Meredith Powell, and it was a phone call from her that had sent him to Jossie’s property. She’d been to see the police in Lyndhurst; she’d given them proof positive that Gordon had traveled into London on the morning of Jemima’s death. He’d even stayed the night in a hotel, she told Rob, and she’d given the police that information as well.

  “But, Rob,” she had said and through his mobile he could hear anxiety in her voice, “I think we’ve made a mistake.”

  “‘We’?” Half of we turned out to be Gina Dickens, in whose company Meredith had been ushered into the presence of Chief Superintendent Whiting—“because we said, Rob, that we wouldn’t talk to anyone but the man at the top”—and there they’d demanded to know the whereabouts of the two detectives who’d come to the New Forest from New Scotland Yard. They had something of grave importance to hand over to those detectives, they told him, and of course he asked what it was. Once he knew what it was, he asked to see it. Once he saw it, he put it into a filing folder and asked where it had come from. “Gina didn’t want to tell him, Rob. She seemed afraid of him. Afterwards she told me he’s been on the property to talk to Gordon and when he came to talk to Gordon, she didn’t know he was police. He didn’t say, and Gordon didn’t either. She said she went all cold when we walked into his office and she saw him cos she reckons Gordon must’ve known who he was all along. So now she’s nearly out of her mind with fear because if this bloke shows up on the property and if he takes that evidence with him, then Gordon’ll know how he got it because how else could he have got it except from Gina?”

  As the information continued to pile up, Robbie had difficulty taking it all in. Train tickets, a hotel receipt, Gina Dickens in possession of both, Gordon Jossie, Chief Superintendent Whiting, New Scotland Yard …And then there was the not small matter of Gordon’s complete lie about Jemima’s departure: that she had someone in London or elsewhere, that he himself had wanted to remain with her and she had left him rather than what the truth probably was, that he had driven her off.

  Meredith had gone on to say that Chief Superintendent Whiting had kept the rail tickets and the hotel receipt in his possession, but once she and Gina had left him and once Gina had revealed the man’s connection—“whatev
er it is, Rob”—to Gordon Jossie, Meredith herself had known absolutely that he was not going to give the information to New Scotland Yard although she couldn’t say why. “And we didn’t know where to find them,” Meredith wailed, “those detectives, Rob. I’ve not even talked to them yet anyway, so I don’t know who they are, so I wouldn’t recognise them if I saw them on the street. Why haven’t they come to talk to me? I was her friend, her best friend, Rob.”

  To Rob, only one detail actually mattered. It wasn’t that Chief Superintendent Whiting had potential evidence in his hands and it wasn’t the whereabouts of the Scotland Yard detectives or why they hadn’t spoken yet to Meredith Powell. What mattered was that Gordon Jossie had been to London.

  Rob had taken the call from Meredith just at the end of a meeting of the New Forest’s verderers, which they’d held, as usual, in the Queen’s House. And although this location was not far from the police station where the chief superintendent operated, Rob didn’t even think about going there to question Chief Superintendent Whiting about what he intended to do with the information from Meredith and Gina Dickens. He had only one destination in mind and he set off for it with a grinding of the Land Rover’s gears and Frank lurching on the seat next to him.

  When he saw from the absence of vehicles that no one was at home on Jossie’s holding, Rob paced intently round the cottage as if he’d be able to find evidence of the man’s guilt leaping out of the flower beds. He looked into windows and tested doors, and the fact that they were locked in a place where virtually no one locked their doors seemed to declare the worst.