“Where are you, Sergeant?” Lynley asked without preamble.

His tone told her that someone had sneaked on her, and it could only have been Winston Nkata since no one else knew what she was up to and Winnie was nothing if not scrupulous about obeying orders, no matter how maddening they were. Winnie, in fact, even obeyed non-orders. He anticipated orders, damn the man.

She said, “About to sink my teeth into a major food group that’s been dipped into batter and thoroughly fried, and let me tell you I don’t much care which food group it is at this point. Peckish doesn’t begin to describe, if you know what I mean. Where are you?”

“Havers,” Lynley said, “you didn’t answer my question. Please do so.”

She sighed. “I’m at a Little Chef, sir.”

“Ah. Centre for all that’s nutritious. And where might this particular branch of that fine eating establishment be?”

“Well, let me see…” She considered how to dress up the information but she knew it was useless to make it sound like anything other than what it was. So she finally said, “Along the M3.”

“Where along the M3, Sergeant?”

Reluctantly she gave him the nearest exit number.

“And does Superintendent Ardery know where you happen to be going?”

She didn’t reply. This was, she knew, a rhetorical question. She waited for what was coming next.

“Barbara, is professional suicide really your intention?” Lynley enquired politely.

“I rang her, sir.”

“Did you.”

“It went to her voice mail. I told her I was on to something. What else was I supposed to do?”

“Perhaps what you were meant to be doing? In London?”

“That’s hardly the point. Look, sir, did Winnie tell you about the crook? It’s a thatching tool and-”

“He did indeed tell me. And your intention in heading off to Hampshire is what, exactly?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Jossie’s got thatching tools. Ringo Heath’s got thatching tools. Rob Hastings likely once made thatching tools, which’re probably lying round his barn. Then there’s the bloke that works with Jossie-Cliff Coward-who could put his mitts on a thatching tool, and there’s that cop Whiting as well because something’s not right with him, in case you’re about to tell me I should’ve rung up the Lyndhurst station and given him the news about the crook. I’ve got a snout at the Home Office, by the way, looking into Whiting.” Which is more than you were able to do, she wanted to say but did not.

If she thought Lynley would be impressed with the leaps and bounds she was making while he’d been swanning round London doing whatever Isabelle Ardery had asked him to do, she was proven wrong almost at once. He said, “Barbara, I want you to stay where you are.”

She said, “What? Sir, listen to me-”

“You can’t take matters-”

“…into my own hands? That’s what you’re going to say, isn’t it? Well, I wouldn’t have to if the superintendent-the acting superintendent, mind you-had something other than tunnel vision. She’s dead wrong about that Japanese bloke and you know it.”

“And she knows it now as well.” He told her what Ardery had managed to get from her interview with Yukio Matsumoto.

Barbara said, “Two men in the cemetery with her? Aside from Matsumoto? Bloody hell, sir. Don’t you see that one of them-and possibly both of them-came up from Hampshire?”

“I don’t disagree in the least,” Lynley told her. “But you’ve only got one part of this puzzle under your pillow, and you know as well as I that if you play that part too soon, you’ve lost the game.”

Barbara smiled then, in spite of herself. “Are you aware of how many metaphors you just mixed?”

She could hear the smile in his own voice when he said, “Call it the passion of the moment. It prevents me from thinking cleverly.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

She listened then to what he had to say about Roman treasure hoards, about the British Museum, about the law, about finders of treasures and what they were owed. When he was finished, she whistled and said, “Brilliant. Whiting must know this. He has to.”

“Whiting?” Lynley sounded incredulous. “Barbara-”

“No. Listen. Someone unearths a treasure. Jossie, let’s say. In fact, it’s got to be Jossie. He doesn’t know what to do, so he rings the coppers. Who else to ring if you don’t know the law, eh? Word gets up the food chain at the Lyndhurst station to Whiting and Bob’s your uncle: Out he trots. He lays eyes on the booty; he sees what the future could hold for him if he manages to claim it as his own-cops’ pensions being what they are-and then-”

“What?” Lynley demanded. “He scarpers up to London and kills Jemima Hastings? Might I ask why?”

“’Cause he’s got to kill anyone who knows about the treasure, and if she went to see this Sheldon Mockworth bloke-”

“Pockworth,” Lynley said. “Sheldon Pockworth. And he doesn’t exist. That’s just the name of the shop.”

“Whatever. She goes to see him. She verifies what the coin is. She knows there’s more-lots more, piles of more-and now she knows it’s the real thing. Vast amounts of lolly all waiting to be scooped up. And Whiting bloody knows it as well.” Barbara was building a real head of steam on the topic. They were so close to cracking what was going on. She could feel her entire body tingling with the knowledge.

Lynley said patiently, “Barbara, are you at all aware of how much you’re actually ignoring with all this?”

“Like what?”

“Just to begin, why did Jemima Hastings abruptly leave Hampshire in the first place if there was a vast treasure of Roman coins sitting there waiting for her to share in it? Why, after she identified the coin-months and months ago, by the way-did she apparently do nothing more about it? Why, if the man she lived with in Hampshire had dug up an entire Roman treasure, did she never mention the slightest thing about this to anyone, including, mind you, a psychic whom she apparently visited numerous times to ask about her love life instead?”

“There’s an explanation, for God’s bloody sake.”

“All right. Do you have it?”

“I damn well would if you-”

“What?”

If you would work with me. That was the answer. But Barbara couldn’t bring herself to say it because of what the declaration implied.

He knew her well, though. Far too well. He said in that most reasonable tone of his, “Listen, Barbara. Will you wait for me? Will you stay where you are? I can be there in less than an hour. You were about to have a meal. Have it. Then wait. Will you do that much?”

She thought about this, even though she knew what her answer would be. He was, after all, still her longtime partner. He was, after all, still and always Lynley.

She sighed. “All right. I’ll wait,” she told him. “Have you had lunch? Sh’ll I order you a fry-up?”

“Good God, no,” he replied.

LYNLEY KNEW THAT the last thing Barbara Havers was was a woman given to cooling her heels merely because she’d agreed to hold off momentarily on a course of action she was determined to take. So he was unsurprised when he walked into the Little Chef some ninety minutes later-frustratingly delayed by a burst water main in South London-to discover that she was burning up minutes on her mobile phone. The remains of her meal lay before her. In typical Havers fashion, it was a veritable monument to arterial blockage. To her credit, at least a few of the chips remained uneaten, but the presence of a bottle of malt vinegar told him that the rest of the meal had likely consisted-as she’d promised-of cod deep fried and sealed in copious amounts of batter. She’d followed this up with sticky toffee pudding, it seemed. He looked at all this and then at her. She was incorrigible.

She nodded a hello as he examined the plastic chair opposite her for the remains of a previous diner’s meal. Finding it free of grease and food scraps, he sat. She said, “Now that’s interesting,” to whoever was the recipient of her phone call, and when she had at last ended the conversation, she jotted a few lines in her tattered spiral notebook. She said to Lynley, “Something to eat?”