Azhar came to the door. Hadiyyah appeared behind him at once when she heard Barbara’s voice. They both exclaimed over the dubious alteration in Barbara’s appearance. “You look lovely!” Hadiyyah cried, hands clasped beneath her chin as if to keep herself from bursting into applause. “Dad, doesn’t Barbara look lovely?”
Barbara said, “Not exactly the word, kiddo, but thanks all the same.”
“Hadiyyah is right,” Azhar said. “All of it suits you, Barbara.”
“And she’s got on makeup,” Hadiyyah said. “See how she’s got on makeup, Dad? Mummy always says makeup’s just to enhance what you got, and Barbara’s used it just like Mummy. Don’t you think so, Dad?”
“Indeed.” Azhar put his arm round Hadiyyah’s shoulders. “You’ve both done very well, khushi,” he told her.
Barbara felt the pleasure of their compliments. She knew they were due to kindness and friendship and nothing more-she was not nor would she ever be a remotely attractive woman-but still, she fancied that their gazes remained fixed on her as she went to the garden gate for the walk to her car.
Once at work, she put up with the hoots and good-natured teasing of her colleagues. She suffered their remarks in silence as she looked round for Lynley and found him missing. As was the acting superintendent, she learned. First thing that had happened that day: Hillier had demanded Isabelle Ardery’s presence in his office.
Had Lynley gone with her? She asked the question of Winston Nkata. She tried to make it casual, but he wasn’t deceived.
“Got to wait and see, Barb,” was how he put it. “Anyt’ing else, you make yourself crazy.”
She scowled. She hated the fact that Winston Nkata knew her so well, and she couldn’t reckon how he’d managed the accomplishment. Was she that bloody obvious about everything? What else had Nkata worked out?
She asked, abruptly, if anyone had gathered any useful information about Zachary Whiting. Was there anything besides the fact that he was once or twice too enthusiastic about being a cop, whatever that meant when it was home for supper? But there was nothing. Everyone was working on something else. Barbara sighed. It seemed that if anything was to be dug out about anyone in Hampshire, she was going to have to do the digging.
This was down to what SO7 had reported about the hairs found clasped in Jemima Hastings’ hand. With Oriental hairs on the body, stacked alongside a murder weapon in the possession of a Japanese violinist, and the victim’s blood on his clothing, and witnesses seeing him in the vicinity wearing that clothing on the day of her death, it wasn’t going to appear to be a matter of urgency to go digging deeper into the background of one marginally suspicious cop. And this despite the discovery of a yellow, bloodstained shirt in a recycling bin across the river in Putney. That had to mean something, as did the presence of the victim’s handbag in that same bin.
Barbara went for Whiting first. Since someone had reported him being rather too enthusiastic with his work, surely there were going to be records somewhere that further defined exactly what his enthusiasm had been about. One merely had to follow the trail of Whiting’s career to find someone willing to talk frankly about the bloke. Where, for example, had he been before Lyndhurst? He could hardly have spent his entire career climbing the ranks in a single station. That just didn’t happen.
The Home Office was going to be the likeliest source of information, but excavating for it was not going to be quick or easy. The hierarchy of the place constituted a labyrinth, and it was peopled by the Under-Secretary, the Deputy Under-Secretaries, the Assistant Under-Secretaries, and the Assistant Secretaries. Most of these individuals commanded their own staffs, and these staffs manned all of the different departments that were responsible for policing in the country. Of all the departments, the section that dealt with powers and procedure seemed the best option to Barbara. The question was: Whom did she ring, pay a call upon, invite out for a coffee, arm-twist, bribe, or beg? That was a real problem because unlike other cops who cultivated connections the way farmers grow their crops, Barbara had never possessed the social skills to rub elbows with people who might later be useful to her. But there had to be someone who did have those skills, who’d used them, who could come up with a name…
She considered her colleagues. Lynley was the best possibility, but he wasn’t there. Philip Hale was also likely, but he remained at St. Thomas’ Hospital under Ardery’s orders, ill conceived though they were. John Stewart was out of the question as he was the last person on the planet from whom Barbara would ask a favour. Winston Nkata’s connections were street oriented as a result of the time he’d spent as chief battle counsel for the Brixton Warriors. This left the constables and the civilian staff, which in turn left the most obvious person of all. Barbara wondered that she hadn’t reckoned from the first that Dorothea Harriman could be of assistance in this matter.
She located the departmental secretary in the copy room, where in lieu of copying she appeared to be applying nail enamel to her tights for some reason. She was wearing one of her stylish pencil skirts-Barbara felt she was becoming something of an expert in the matter of skirts-which was appropriate to her lanky figure, and she had this hiked to the middle of her thighs as she used the nail polish against her tights.
“Dee,” Barbara said.
Harriman started. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “What a fright, Detective Sergeant Havers.”
For a moment, Barbara thought she was referring to her own appearance. Then she realised what Harriman actually meant, and she said, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to surprise you. What’re you doing with that?”
“This?” Harriman held up the bottle of nail enamel. “Ladder,” she said. And when Barbara looked at her blankly, “On my tights? It stops ladders from going further. Didn’t you know?”
Barbara said hastily, “Oh yeah. Ladders. Sorry. Don’t know what I was thinking. Have a moment, then?”
“Well, of course.”
“C’n we…?”
Since she was going her own way in matters, Barbara knew the wisdom of keeping this situation strictly entre nous. She tilted her head towards the corridor and Harriman followed her. They went along it and into the stairwell.
Barbara explained what she wanted: a snout at the Home Office, someone willing to do a little snoop-and-talk about one Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting of the Hampshire Constabulary. She reckoned this potential snout had to be employed within the powers and procedures section of the Home Office because that was where information about criminal records, regional crime squads, detective work, and complaints was housed. She had a feeling that within one of those areas there was going to be some tiny detail-possibly something that might seem otherwise insignificant to a person not actually looking for it-that would put her on to what Whiting was up to out in Hampshire. Surely, she said, Dorothea Harriman knew someone who might be able to direct them to another someone who in turn could find a third someone…?
Harriman pursed her well-defined lips. She fingered her scrupulously highlighted and fashionably cut hair. She tapped her blusher-enhanced cheek. Had they been in other circumstances Barbara acknowledged that she might have asked the young woman for lessons in applying her makeup, as she was definitely a practitioner of Hadiyyah’s mum’s philosophy of enhancement only. As it was, Barbara could only note and admire as Harriman considered the question.
She gazed at the soft drinks machine on the landing. Two floors below a door opened, a voice spoke loudly about being served “a plate of mash tasting like gravel in drying cement,” and footsteps came clomping up the stairs. Barbara grabbed Harriman by the arm and pulled her back into the corridor and, from there, into the copying room again.