There he lit his roll-up and told Lynley and Ardery the rest. He’d thought they’d continue as lovers, he said, but he hadn’t counted on Jemima’s desire to follow the rules.

“No sex,” was how he put it. “Bella doesn’t allow it.”

“Opposed to the whole idea of sex, is she?” Lynley asked.

Sex among the lodgers, di Fazio told them. He’d tried to convince Jemima that they could continue as before with no one the wiser because Bella slept like the dead on the floor above them and Frazer Chaplin-this was the third lodger-had the basement room two floors below, so he wouldn’t know what was going on either. The two of them-Jemima and di Fazio-occupied the only two bedrooms on the first floor of the house. There was no bloody way that Bella would find out.

“Jemima wouldn’t have it,” di Fazio said. “When she came to see the room, Bella told her straightaway that she’d tossed out the last lodger for getting involved with Frazer. Caught her coming out of Frazer’s room early one morning and that was that. Jemima didn’t want that to happen to her-decent lodgings are not easy to find-so she said no more sex. At first it was no sex at Bella’s and then it was no sex altogether. It had got to be too much trouble, she said.”

“Too much trouble?” Ardery asked. “Where were you having it?”

“Not in public,” he replied. “And not in Abney Park Cemetery, if that’s where you’re heading. At my studio.” He shared space with three other artists, he said, in a railway arch near Clapham Junction. At first they went there-he and Jemima-but after a few weeks, she’d had enough. “She said she didn’t like the deception,” he said.

“And did you believe her?”

“I hardly had a choice. She said it was over. She made it over.”

“Rather like she’d done with the postcard bloke? According to what she told you?”

“Rather like,” he said.

Which gave them both a motive for murder, Lynley thought.

Chapter Eleven

YOLANDA THE PSYCHIC HAD AN ESTABLISHMENT IN A MARKET area just off Queensway in Bayswater. Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata found it without too much trouble once they unearthed the market itself, which they accessed by means of an unmarked entry between a tiny newsagent and one of the ubiquitous cheap luggage shops that seemed to pop up in every corner of London. The market was the sort of place one would walk right past without noticing: a low-ceilinged, ethnic-oriented, locals-only warren of passages in which Russian cafés vied with Asian bakeries, and shops selling hookahs sat next to kiosks blaring African music.

A question asked in the Russian café produced the information that there was within the environs of the market a location called Psychic Mews. There, Barbara and Nkata were told, Yolanda the Psychic operated and, considering the hour of the day, she was likely to be present.

A little more wandering brought them to Psychic Mews. This turned out to be what seemed like-but probably wasn’t-an authentic old mews complete with cobbled street and buildings having the appearance of former stables, like all mews in London. Unlike other mews, however, it was under the protection of a roof, as was the rest of the market. This afforded Psychic Mews an appropriate atmosphere of gloom, mystery, and even danger. One expected, Barbara thought, Jack the Ripper to leap down from a rooftop at any moment.

Yolanda’s business was one of three psychic sanctuaries in the place. Its single window-curtained for the privacy of clients within-bore a sill of accouterments appropriate to her line of employment: a porcelain hand with its palm outward and all the lines upon it identified, a similar porcelain head with various parts of the skull indicated, an astrological chart, a deck of tarot cards. Only the crystal ball was missing.

“You believe this muck?” Barbara asked Nkata. “Read your horoscope in the paper or anything?”

Winston compared his palm to the porcelain one in the window. “’Cording to this, I should’ve died last week,” he noted, and he shouldered open the door to the place. He had to duck to get inside, and Barbara followed him into an anteroom in which incense burned and sitar music played. Against a wall, the form of the elephant god was rendered in plaster and across from it, a crucifix hung above what seemed to be a kachina doll, while an enormous Buddha on the floor appeared to serve the purpose of a doorstop. Yolanda looked to be someone who covered all the spiritual bases, Barbara concluded.

“Anyone here?” she called.

In reply a woman emerged from behind a beaded curtain. She wasn’t dressed as Barbara had expected. One somehow thought a psychic would be decked out in gypsy gear: all scarves, colourful skirts, and heaps of gold necklaces with matching hoop earrings of massive size. But instead, the woman wore a business suit that Isabelle Ardery would have heartily approved of as it was tailored to fit her somewhat stout body and even to Barbara’s unschooled eyes it seemed to announce itself with the words French designer. Her one bow to stereotype was the scarf she used, but even this she’d only folded into a band to hold back her hair. And instead of black, the hair was orange, a rather disturbing shade that suggested an unfortunate encounter with a bottle of peroxide.

“Are you Yolanda?” Barbara asked.

In reply, she put her hands to her ears. She clamped her eyes shut. “Yes, yes, all right!” She had an odd, low voice. She sounded like a man. “I bloody well hear you, don’t I!”

“Sorry,” Barbara said, although, to her thinking, she hadn’t spoken loudly at all. Psychics, she thought, must be sensitive to sound. “I didn’t mean-”

“I’ll tell her! But you must stop roaring. I’m not deaf, you know.”

“I didn’t think I was loud.” Barbara dug out her ID. “Scotland Yard,” she said.

Yolanda opened her eyes. She didn’t cast even a glance in the direction of Barbara’s warrant card. Rather she said, “Quite a shouter, he is.”

“Who?”

“He says he’s your dad. He says you’re meant to-”

“He’s dead,” Barbara told her.

“Of course he is. I could hardly hear him otherwise. I hear dead people.”

“Like in ‘I see dead people’?”

“Don’t be clever. All right! All right! Don’t be so loud! Your dad-”

“He wasn’t a shouter. Not ever.”

“He is now, luv. He says you’re meant to call on your mum. She’s missing you.”

Barbara doubted that. Last time she’d seen her mother, the woman had believed she was looking at their longtime neighbour Mrs. Gustafson, and her resultant panic-in her final years at home she’d grown to fear Mrs. Gustafson, as if the old lady had somehow morphed into Lucifer-had not been assuaged by anything Barbara had attempted, from showing her identification to appealing to any of the other residents among whom Mrs. Havers lived in a private care home in Greenford. Barbara had not yet been back. It had seemed, at the time, the course of wisdom.

“What shall I tell him?” Yolanda asked. And then with her hands over her ears once again, “What? Oh, of course I believe you!” And then to Barbara, “James, yes? But he wasn’t called that, was he?”

“Jimmy.” Barbara shifted uncomfortably on her feet. She looked at Winston who himself seemed to be anticipating an unwelcome message from someone in the great beyond. “Tell him I’ll go. Tomorrow. Whatever.”

“You mustn’t lie to the spirit world.”

“Next week then.”

Yolanda closed her eyes. “She says next week, James.” And then to Barbara, “You can’t manage sooner? He’s quite insistent.”

“Tell him I’m on a case. He’ll understand.”

Apparently he did, for once Yolanda communicated this matter into the spirit world, she breathed a sigh of relief and gave her attention to Winston. He had a magnificent aura, she told him. Well developed, unusual, brilliant, and evolved. Fan-tas-tic.