“You would have, otherwise?” Barbara asked.

“Turned her away? No, no. Well, I mean I might have done ultimately if my own circumstances had been different-what with the wives and the kids-but as she showed up regularly and right on time and as she always paid, I couldn’t really quibble if her mind seemed on other things when she was here, could I?”

“What sorts of things? Do you know?”

He looked like a man about to say that he hated to speak ill of the dead, but then he eschewed that comment for, “I expect it had to do with Frazer. I think the lessons were really an excuse to be near him, and that’s why she couldn’t actually keep her mind on what she was doing. See, Frazer’s got something that attracts the ladies, and when they’re attracted, he doesn’t exactly fight them off, if you know what I mean.”

“We don’t, as it happens,” Barbara said. A lie, naturally, but they needed as many details as they could amass at this point.

“He makes the odd arrangement?” Abbott said delicately. “Now and then? Don’t misunderstand, it’s always on the up-and-up as far as the ladies’ ages go: no underage girls or anything. They turn in their skates and have a word with him, they slip him a card or a note or something, and…well, you know. He goes off for a bit with one or the other. Sometimes he phones in late to his night employment-he’s a bartender at some posh hotel-and he takes a few hours with one of them. He’s not a bad bloke, mind you. It’s just how he is.”

“And Jemima had an idea this was going on?”

“A suspicion. Women aren’t stupid, are they. But the trouble for Jemima was that Frazer’s here for the earliest shift and she could only come in the evening or on her own days off work. So that leaves him free to be more or less available to ladies who want to flirt or to ladies who want more.”

“What was your own relationship with Jemima?” Barbara asked, for she realised that Yolanda’s mutterings-as much as she wanted to discount them-could well apply to this man with his helmet of black hair, “dark as the night.”

“Mine?” he asked, fingertips to his chest. “Oh, I never get involved with my skating students. That would be unethical. And anyway, I’ve three ex-wives and-”

“Four kids, yes,” Barbara said. “But I expect a poke on the side wouldn’t go amiss. If one was on offer and there were no strings.”

The ice skater flushed. “I won’t say I didn’t notice she was attractive. She was,” he said. “Unconventional, you know, with those eyes of hers. Bit on the small side, not much meat on her. But she had a real friendliness about her, not like the typical Londoner. I suspect a bloke could have taken that wrong if he wanted to.”

“You didn’t, however?”

“As three times were not the charm for me, I wasn’t about to go for a fourth. I’ve not had luck in marriage. Celibacy, I find, keeps me safe from involvement.”

“But groundwork laid, you could have had her, I expect,” Barbara pointed out. “After all, a poke isn’t marriage these days.”

“Groundwork or not, I wouldn’t have tried it. A poke may not lead to marriage these days, but I had the feeling that wasn’t the case for Jemima.”

“Are you saying she was after this Frazer for marriage?”

“I’m saying she wanted marriage, full stop. I got the impression it could have been Frazer, but it could have been anyone else as well.”

THE TIME OF day was such that Frazer Chaplin was no longer at the Queen’s Ice and Bowl, but this was not a problem. The name was an unusual one, and Barbara reckoned there couldn’t be two Frazer Chaplins running round town. This had to be the same bloke who lived in Bella McHaggis’s house, Barbara informed Nkata. They needed a word with him.

On their way across town, she put Winston in the picture with regard to Bella McHaggis’s rules about fraternisation among her lodgers. If Jemima Hastings and Frazer Chaplin had been involved, their landlady either had not known it or had turned a blind eye for reasons of her own, which Barbara seriously doubted.

In Putney, they found Bella McHaggis just entering her property with a shopping trolley half filled with newspapers. As Nkata parked the car, Mrs. McHaggis began unloading this trolley into one of the large plastic bins in her front garden. She was doing her bit for the environment, she informed them when they came through the gate. Bloody neighbours wouldn’t recycle a damn thing if she didn’t make an issue of it.

Barbara made an appropriate murmur of sympathy and then asked was Frazer Chaplin at home. “This is DS Nkata,” she added by way of introduction.

“What d’you lot want with Frazer?” Bella said. “It’s Paolo you ought to be talking to. What I found I found in his cupboard, not Frazer’s.”

“Beg your pardon?” Barbara asked. “Look, could we go inside, Mrs. McHaggis?”

“When I’m finished here,” Bella said. “Some things are important to some people, miss.”

Barbara had an inclination to tell the woman that murder was definitely one of those things, but instead she rolled her eyes at Nkata as Bella McHaggis went back to unloading her trolley of newspapers. When she’d accomplished this, she told them to follow her inside, and they’d not made it farther than the entry-with its lists of rules and its signs about the landlady’s presence on the property-when Bella gave them an earful about her evidence and demanded to know why they hadn’t dispatched someone at once to collect it.

“I rang that number, I did. The one in the Daily Mail asking for information. Well, I’ve got information, don’t I, and you’d think they’d come by and ask one or two of their questions about it. And you’d think they’d come on the run.”

She led them into the dining room, where the number of broadsheets and tabloids she had spread on the table suggested she was closely following the progress of the investigation. She said they were meant to sit there while she fetched what they wanted, and when Barbara pointed out that what they wanted was a word with Frazer Chaplin if he was at home, she said, “Oh, don’t be such a ninny. He’s a man but he isn’t a fool, Sergeant. And have you done anything about that psychic? I rang the police about her as well. Hanging about outside my property again. There she was, large as life.”

“We’ve had a word with Yolanda,” Barbara said.

“Thank God for small mercies.” Bella seemed about to relent on the matter of Frazer Chaplin but then her face altered as she made the mental leap from what Barbara had just said to what Barbara and Winston Nkata wanted, a word with Frazer. She said, “Why, that mad bloody cow. She’s said something about Frazer, hasn’t she? She’s told you something that’s brought you here on the run and you mean to arrest him. Well, I’m not having that. Not with Paolo and his five engagements and his bringing Jemima here as a lodger and that argument of theirs. Just a friend, he tells me and she agrees and then look what happens.”

“Let me clarify that Yolanda said nothing about Frazer Chaplin,” Barbara said. “We’re coming at him from another angle. So if you’d fetch him…? Because if he isn’t here-”

“What other angle? There is no other angle. Oh, you wait right there and I’ll prove it to you.”

She marched out of the dining room. They heard her go up the stairs. When she was gone, Winston looked at Barbara. “Felt like I ought to salute or summick.”

“She’s quite the character,” Barbara admitted. Then, “Do you hear water running? Could Frazer be having a shower? His room’s below us. The basement flat. She doesn’t seem to want us to see him, does she?”

“Protecting him? Think she fancies him?”

“It fits with what Abbott Langer said about Frazer and the ladies, eh?”

Bella returned to them, a white envelope in her hand. With the triumphant air of a woman who’d out-Sherlocked the best of them, she told them to have a look at that. That turned out to be a thin spatulate finger of plastic with a slip of paper emerging from one end of it and a ridged area at the other. In the middle were two small windows, one round and one square. The centre of each of these was coloured with a thin blue line, one horizontal and one vertical. Barbara had never seen one before-she’d hardly been in a position of need when it came to such things-but she knew what she was looking at and so, apparently, did Winston.