“And then what?” John Stewart asked. “He puts that shirt in McHaggis’s Oxfam bin? Along with the handbag? And what about the handbag? Why take it?”
“Could be Matsumoto took the handbag. Could be he put it in the bin. He’d want to cast blame, to muddy the waters.”
“So,” Stewart said acerbically, “let me get this straight. This Matsumoto and the other bloke-damn well unbeknownst to each other-both put a piece of incriminating evidence in the very same bin? In an entirely different area of London from where the crime was committed? Bloody hell, woman. Jesus God. What exactly d’you think are the odds of that?” He blew out a derisive breath and looked at the others. Idiot cow, his expression said.
Isabelle’s face was perfect stone. She said to Stewart, “In my office. Now.”
Stewart hesitated just long enough to signal his scorn. He and Isabelle engaged in a moment of locked gazes before the acting superintendent strode out of the room. Stewart rose in a lazy movement and followed her.
A tight silence ensued. Someone whistled low. Lynley approached the china board for a closer look at the photo of the yellow shirt. There was a movement next to him, and he saw that Havers had come to join him.
She said to him in a low voice, “You know she’s making the wrong decisions.”
“Barbara-”
“You know. No one wants to kick his arse into the next time zone as much as I do, but he’s right this time.”
She meant John Stewart. Lynley couldn’t disagree. Isabelle’s desperation to bend the facts to fit what she needed to believe about Matsumoto was truncating the investigation. She was in the worst position possible: her temporary status at the Met, her first investigation and its deterioration into a welter of inconceivable circumstances with a suspect in hospital because he’d done a runner, that suspect the brother of a famed cellist with access to a fiery solicitor, the press taking up the story, Hillier involved, and the abominable Stephenson Deacon on board to attempt to manipulate the media, and evidence pointing in every possible direction. Lynley wasn’t sure how things could get worse for Isabelle. Hers was turning out to be a baptism not by fire but rather by conflagration.
He said, “Barbara, I’m not sure what you’d have me do.”
“Talk to her. She’ll listen to you. Webberly would’ve and you’d’ve talked to Webberly if he’d been going at things like this. You know you would. And if you were in the same position as she is just now, you’d listen to us. We’re a team for a reason.” She drove her hands into her ill-cut hair in typical fashion, pulling on it roughly. “Why did she call us back from Hampshire?”
“She has limited resources. Every investigation has.”
“Oh bloody hell!” Havers stalked off.
Lynley called after her, but she was gone. He was left facing the china board, staring at the yellow shirt. He saw at once what it was telling him and what it should have told Isabelle. He realised he, too, was in an unenviable position. He considered how best to use the information before him.
BARBARA COULDN’T UNDERSTAND why Lynley wouldn’t take a stand. She could understand why he might not want to do that in front of the rest of the team since John bloody Stewart hardly needed encouragement to pull a Mr. Christian on the acting superintendent’s Captain Bligh. But why not have a word with her in private? That was the part that didn’t make sense. Lynley wasn’t a man intimidated by anyone-his thousand and one run-ins with AC Hillier surely gave testimony to that-so she knew he wasn’t unnerved by the prospect of going eyeball-to-eyeball with Isabelle Ardery. That being the case, what was stopping him? She didn’t know. What she did know was that for some reason, he wasn’t being himself when she needed him to be just that person, the one he’d always been, to her and to everyone else.
That he wasn’t being the Thomas Lynley she recognised and had worked with for years troubled her more than she wanted to admit. It seemed to mark the degree to which he’d changed and the degree to which things that had once mattered to him no longer did. It was as if he was floating out there in some sort of unnameable void, lost to them in ways that were crucial but undefined.
Barbara didn’t want to define them now. She just wanted to get home. Because Winston had driven them up from the New Forest, she was forced into a journey on the blasted Northern Line at the worst time of day in the worst possible weather, and she was additionally forced to make this journey crammed into the area in front of the carriage doors, wondering why the hell people would not move down the aisle into the bloody carriage itself as she was jostled into the broad backside of a woman shrieking into her mobile phone about “fooking get home an’ I mean it this time, Clive, or I swear I’m taking the knife and cutting them off” when she wasn’t being pushed into the odoriferous armpit of a T-shirted adolescent listening to something loud and obnoxious through his earphones.
To make matters worse, she had her holdall with her and when she finally reached the Chalk Farm station, she had to jerk it out of the carriage and in the process broke one of its straps. She swore. She kicked it. She scraped her ankle against one of its buckles. She swore again.
She trudged home from the station wondering when the weather would break, bringing a storm that would wash the dust from the tree leaves and scour the smog-laden air. Her mood grew even fouler as she lugged the holdall behind her, and everything that was infuriating her seemed to have as its source Isabelle Ardery. But considering Isabelle Ardery led her back to considering Thomas Lynley, and Barbara had had enough of that for one day.
I need a shower, Barbara decided. I need a fag. I need a drink. Hell on wheels, I need a life.
By the time she arrived home, she was dripping perspiration and her shoulders ached. She tried to tell herself it was the weight of the holdall, but she knew it was tension, plain and simple. She reached the front door of her bungalow with more relief than she’d felt in ages at being home. She didn’t even care that, inside the place, it was suitable for baking bread. She opened windows and dug her small fan from a cupboard. She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blessed the mere existence of nicotine, fell into one of the plain kitchen chairs, and looked round her extremely humble little abode.
She’d dropped her holdall by the door, so she hadn’t seen what was on the daybed at first. But now, sitting at the kitchen table, she saw that her A-line skirt-that article best suited to a woman with a figure like hers, according to Hadiyyah-had been tailored. The hem had been taken up, the skirt had been ironed, and a complete outfit had been assembled upon the bed: the skirt, a crisp businesslike new blouse, sheer tights, a scarf, even a chunky bracelet. And her shoes had been polished as well. They fairly gleamed. The good fairy had been here.
Barbara rose and approached the bed. She had to admit, it all looked good together, especially the bracelet, which she never would have considered purchasing, let alone wearing. She picked it up for a closer inspection. A gift tag was tied to it with a purple ribbon.
“Surprise!” had been printed on the card along with “Welcome Home!” and the gift giver’s name, as if she had not known who had arranged these items for her: Hadiyyah Khalidah.
Barbara’s mood altered at once. Amazing, she thought, how such a little thing, a mere act of thoughtfulness…She stubbed out her cigarette and ducked into the tiny bathroom. A quarter of an hour saw her showered, refreshed, and dressed. She brushed some blusher on her face in a bow to Hadiyyah’s make-over efforts, and she left her bungalow. She went to the lower ground-floor flat of the Big House, which faced on to the summer-dry lawn.