She said to Deborah, “Ta, but I’m on duty. This is a police call, actually.”
“Is it?” Deborah looked at her husband and then at Barbara. “Are you wanting Simon, then?”
“You, actually.” There was a fourth chair near the table, and Barbara took it. She was acutely aware of Lynley’s eyes on her, and she knew what he was thinking because she knew him. She said to him, “Under orders, more or less. Well, more like under serious advice. You can believe I wouldn’t’ve otherwise.”
He said, “Ah. I did wonder. Whose orders, more or less?”
“The newest contestant for Webberly’s old job. She didn’t much like the way I looked. Unprofessional, she told me. She advised me to do some serious shopping.”
“I see.”
“Woman from Maidstone, she is. Isabelle Ardery. She was that-”
“The DI from arson.”
“You remember. Well done. Anyway, it was her idea that I ought to look…whatever. This is how I look.”
“I see. Pardon me for asking, Barbara, but are you wearing…?” He was far too polite to go further, and Barbara knew it.
“Makeup?” she asked. “Is it running down my face? What with the heat and the fact that I’ve not the first clue how to put the bloody stuff on…”
“You look lovely, Barbara.” Deborah was merely being supportive, Barbara knew, because she herself wore nothing at all on her freckled skin. And her hair, unlike Barbara’s own, comprised masses of red curls that suited her even in their habitual disarray.
“Cheers,” Barbara said. “But I look like a clown and there’s more to come. I won’t go into it, though.” She heaved her shoulder bag onto her lap and blew a breath upward to cool her face. She was carrying rolled beneath her arm a second poster from the Cadbury Photographic Portrait of the Year exhibition. This one had been tacked to the back of the bedroom door belonging to Jemima Hastings, which Barbara had seen once she’d shut that door to get a better look at the room. The ambient light had afforded her the opportunity to study both the portrait and the information written beneath it. That information had brought Barbara to Chelsea. She said, “I’ve got something here that I’d like you to take a look at,” and she unrolled the poster for Deborah’s inspection.
Deborah smiled when she saw what it was. “Have you been to the Portrait Gallery for the show, then?” She went on to speak to Lynley, telling him what he’d missed in his time away from London, a photographic competition in which her entry had been selected as one of the six pictures used for marketing the resulting exhibition. “It’s still on at the gallery,” Deborah said. “I didn’t win. The competition was deadly. But it was brilliant to be among the final sixty chosen to be hung, and then she”-with a nod at the picture-“was selected to be on posters and postcards sold in the gift shop. I was quite over the moon about that, wasn’t I, Simon?”
“Deborah’s had some phone calls,” St. James told them. “From people wanting to see her work.”
Deborah laughed. “He’s being far too kind. It was one phone call from a bloke asking me if I’m interested in doing photo shoots of food for a cookbook his wife is writing.”
“Sounds good to me,” Barbara noted. “But then anything involving food, you know…”
“Well done, Deborah.” Lynley leaned forward and looked at the poster. “Who’s the model?”
“She’s called Jemima Hastings,” Barbara told him, and to Deborah, “How did you meet her?”
Deborah said, “Sidney-Simon’s sister…I was looking for a model for the portrait contest and I’d thought at first that Sidney would be perfect, with all the modeling she does. I did try with her but the result was too professional looking…something about the way Sidney deals with facing a camera? With showing off clothing instead of being a subject? Anyway, I wasn’t happy with it and I was casting about afterwards, still looking for someone, when Sidney showed up with Jemima in tow.” Deborah frowned, obviously putting any number of things together at once. She said in a cautious voice, “What’s this about, Barbara?”
“The model’s been murdered, I’m afraid. This poster was in her lodgings.”
“Murdered?” Deborah said. Lynley and St. James both stirred in their chairs. “Murdered, Barbara? When? Where?”
Barbara told her. The other three exchanged looks, and Barbara said, “What? Do you know something?”
“Abney Park.” Deborah was the one to reply. “That’s where I took the picture in the first place. That’s where this is.” She indicated the weather-streaked lion whose head filled the frame to the left of the model. “This is one of the memorials in the cemetery. Jemima had never been there before we took the picture. She told us as much.”
“Us?”
“Sidney went as well. She wanted to watch.”
“Got it. Well, she went back,” Barbara said. “Jemima did.” She sketched a few more details, just enough to put them all in the picture. She said to Simon, “Where is she these days? We’re going to need to speak to her.”
“Sidney? She’s living in Bethnal Green, near Columbia Road.”
“The flower market,” Deborah added helpfully.
“With her latest partner,” Simon said, dryly. “Mother-not to mention Sid-is hoping this will also be her final partner, but frankly, it’s not looking that way.”
“Well, she does rather like them dark and dangerous,” Deborah noted to her husband.
“Having been affected in adolescence by a plethora of romance novels. Yes. I know.”
“I’ll need her address,” Barbara told him.
“I hope you don’t think Sid-”
“You know the drill. Every avenue and all that.” She rolled the poster back up and looked among them. Certainly there was something going on. She said, “Beyond meeting her with Sidney and then taking the picture, did you see her again?”
“She came to the opening at the Portrait Gallery. All the subjects-the models?-were invited to do that.”
“Anything happen there?”
Deborah looked at her husband as if seeking information. He shook his head and shrugged. She said, “No. Not that I…Well, I think she had a bit too much champagne, but she had a man with her who saw she got home. That’s really all-”
“A man? Do you know his name?”
“I’ve forgotten, actually. I didn’t think I’d need to…Simon, do you remember?”
“Just that he was dark. And I remember that mostly…” He hesitated, clearly reluctant to complete the thought.
Barbara did it for him. “Because of Sidney? You said she likes them dark, didn’t you?”
BELLA MCHAGGIS HAD never before been placed in the position of having to identify a body. She’d seen dead bodies, of course. She’d even, in the case of the departed Mr. McHaggis, doctored the setting in which death had occurred so as to protect the poor man’s reputation prior to phoning 999. But she’d never been ushered into a viewing room where a victim of violent death lay, covered by a sheet. Now that she had done, she was more than ready to engage in whatever sort of activity would scour from her mind the mental image.
Jemima Hastings-not a single doubt that it was Jemima-had been stretched out on a trolley with her neck wrapped up in thick swathes of gauze like a winter scarf, as if she needed protection from the chilly room. From that, Bella had concluded the girl had had her throat cut and she’d asked if this was the case, but the answer had come in the form of a question, “Do you recognise…?” Yes, yes, Bella had said abruptly. Of course it’s Jemima. She’d known the minute that woman officer had come to her house and had peered at that poster. The policewoman-Bella couldn’t remember her name at the moment-hadn’t been able to keep her expression blank, and Bella had known that the girl in the cemetery was indeed the lodger gone missing from her house.
So to wipe it all away, Bella became industrious. She could have gone to a session of hot yoga, but she reckoned industry was the better ticket. It would get her mind away from the mental picture of poor dead Jemima on that cold steel trolley at the same time as it would prepare Jemima’s room for another lodger now the cops had carted away all her belongings. And Bella wanted another lodger, soon, although she had to admit that she hadn’t had very much luck with the female variety. Still, she wanted a woman. She liked the sense of balance another woman gave to the household, though women were far more complicated than men and even as she considered this, she wondered if perhaps another male would keep things simpler and prevent the males already in place from preening so. Preening and strutting, that’s what they did. They did it unconsciously, like roosters, like peacocks, like virtually every male from every species on earth. The calculated dance of notice-me was something Bella generally found rather amusing, but she realised that she had to consider whether it might be easier on everyone concerned if she removed from their household the necessity for it.