“She is who she is,” Lynley said. “Good mind and big heart.”

“You like her.”

“I can’t work with people I don’t like, guv.”

“In private conversation, it’s Isabelle,” she said.

His eyes met hers. He saw hers were brown, as his were, but not uniformly so. They were richly speckled with hazel and he reckoned that if she wore different colours to what she had on at present-a cream-coloured blouse beneath a well-tailored russet jacket-they might even appear green. He shifted his gaze and took in their surroundings. He said, “This is hardly private, is it?”

“I think you know what I mean.” She glanced at her watch. She still had half a glass of wine left and before she stood, she tossed the rest of it down. “Let’s find Paolo di Fazio,” she told him. “He should be back at his stall by now.”

HE WAS. THEY found him in the midst of attempting to persuade a middle-aged couple to have masks made as souvenirs of their silver wedding anniversary trip to London. He’d brought forth his artistic instruments and laid them on the counter, and he’d set up a collection of sample masks as well. These were mounted on rods that were fixed onto small plinths of finished wood. Fashioned from plaster of Paris, the masks were startlingly lifelike, similar to the death masks that had once been created from the corpses of people of significance.

“The perfect way for you to remember this visit to London,” di Fazio told the couple. “So much more meaningful than a coffee mug with a Royal’s face on it, eh?”

The couple hesitated. They said to each other, “Should we…?” and di Fazio waited for their decision. His expression was polite, and it didn’t alter when they said they would have to think about it.

When they moved off, di Fazio gave his attention to Lynley and Ardery. “Another fine-looking couple,” he said. “Each of you has a face made for sculpture. Your children are, I expect, as handsome as you.”

Lynley heard Ardery snort with amusement. She showed her warrant card and said, “Superintendent Isabelle Ardery. New Scotland Yard. This is DI Lynley.”

Unlike Jayson Druther, di Fazio knew at once why they were there. He took off the wire-framed spectacles he wore, began to polish them on the front of his shirt, and said, “Jemima?”

“You know about what’s happened to her, then.”

He returned the glasses to his face and ran a hand over longish dark hair. He was a good-looking man, Lynley saw, short and compact but with shoulders and chest suggesting that he worked with weights. Di Fazio said abruptly, “Of course I know what’s happened to Jemima. All of us know.”

“All? Jayson Druther had no idea what’s happened to her.”

“He wouldn’t,” di Fazio said. “He’s an idiot.”

“Did Jemima feel that way about him?”

“Jemima was good to people. She would never have said.”

“How did you learn of her death?” Lynley asked.

“Bella told me.” He added what Barbara’s report had indicated: that he was one of the lodgers at the home of Bella McHaggis in Putney. In fact, he was the reason, he said, that Jemima had established a lodging place with Mrs. McHaggis. He’d told her about a vacant room there not long after he’d met her.

“When was this?” Lynley asked.

“A week or two after she got to London. Sometime last November.”

“And how did you meet her?” Isabelle asked.

“At the shop.” He went on to say that he rolled his own, and he bought both his tobacco and his papers from the cigar shop. “Usually from that idiot, Jayson,” he added. “Pazzo uomo. But one day Jemima was there instead.”

“Italian, are you, Mr. di Fazio?” Lynley asked.

Di Fazio took a rollie from the pocket of his shirt-he wore a crisp white shirt and a very clean pair of jeans-and he put it behind his ear. He said, “With a name like di Fazio, that’s an excellent deduction.”

“I think the inspector meant a native of Italy,” Isabelle said. “Your English is perfect.”

“I’ve lived here since I was ten.”

“You were born…?”

“In Palermo. Why? What does this have to do with Jemima? I came here legally, if that’s what you’re interested in, not that it matters much these days with the EU mess and people wandering between borders whenever they feel like it.”

Ardery, Lynley saw, indicated a change of direction with a slight lifting of her fingers from the countertop. She said, “We understand you were collecting National Portrait Gallery postcards for Jemima. Had she asked you to do that, or was it your idea?”

“Why would it have been my idea?”

“Perhaps you can tell us.”

“It wasn’t. I saw one of the cards in Leicester Square. I recognised it from the portrait gallery show-there’s a banner out front and Jemima’s picture’s on it, if you haven’t seen it-and I picked it up.”

“Where was the postcard?”

“I don’t remember…near the half-price ticket booth? Maybe near the Odeon? It was stuck up with Blu-Tack and it had the message on it, so I took it down and gave it to her.”

“Did you phone the number on the back of the card?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t know who the hell it was or what he wanted.”

“‘He,’” Lynley noted. “So you knew it was a man who’d been distributing the cards.”

It was one of those gotcha moments, and di Fazio-clearly no fool-understood this. He took a few seconds before he answered. “She told me her partner was likely doing it. Her former partner. A bloke from Hampshire. She knew from the phone number on the back of the card. She said she’d left him, but he hadn’t taken it well and now, obviously, he was trying to find her. She didn’t want to be found. She wanted to get the cards down before someone who knew where she was saw one and phoned him. So she collected them and I collected them. As many as we could find and whenever we had the chance.”

“Were you involved with her?” Lynley asked.

“She was my friend.”

“Beyond friendship. Were you involved with her or merely hoping to be involved with her?”

Again, di Fazio didn’t reply at once. He was obviously no fool, so he knew that any way he answered could make him look bad. Yes, no, maybe, or whatever, there was always the sexual element between men and women to consider and what the sexual element could lead to by way of motives for murder.

“Mr. di Fazio?” Ardery said. “Is there something about the question you don’t understand?”

He said abruptly, “We were lovers for a time.”

“Ah,” Ardery said.

He looked irritated. “This was before she came to live at Bella’s. She had a wretched room in Charing Cross Road, up above Keira News. She was paying too much for it.”

“But that’s where you and she…?” Ardery let him complete the thought on his own. “How long had you known her when you became lovers?”

He bristled. “I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”

Ardery said nothing in answer to this and neither did Lynley. Di Fazio finally spat out, “A week. A few days. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Ardery asked. “Mr. di Fazio, I have a feeling that-”

“I went in for tobacco. She was friendly, flirty, you know how it is. I asked her if she wanted to go for a drink after work. We went to that place on Long Acre…the pub…I don’t know what it’s called. It was packed, so we had a drink on the pavement with everyone else and then we left. We went to her room.”

“So you became lovers the day you met,” Ardery clarified.

“It happens.”

“And then you began to live together in Putney,” Lynley noted. “With Bella McHaggis. At her home.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.” Di Fazio took up his cigarette. He said if they were going to talk further-and it was costing him in bloody customers, by the way-then they were going to have to do it outside where he at least could have a fag while they spoke.

Ardery told him it was absolutely fine to move outside, and he gathered up his tools and shoved them under the counter along with the sample masks on their wooden plinths. Lynley noted the tools-sharp and well suited for activities other than sculpting-and knew Ardery had done likewise. They exchanged a glance and followed di Fazio out into the open air.