“A pregnancy test,” Bella announced. “And it wasn’t among Jemima’s belongings, was it? It was in Paolo’s clobber. Paolo’s. Well, I daresay Paolo’s not testing himself, is he?”

“Not likely,” Barbara agreed. “But how do you reckon this’s Jemima’s? I assume that’s what you’re thinking, eh?”

“It’s obvious. They shared the bathroom and the toilet’s in the bathroom. She either gave this to him”-with a jerk of her head towards the slip of paper-“or, what’s more likely, he saw it in the rubbish and fished it out, and that explains their quarrel. Oh, he said it was due to a misunderstanding about Jemima’s hanging her smalls in the bath and she said it had to do with that male/female nonsense about leaving the toilet seat up, but let me tell you I had a feeling about them from the first. They were butter wouldn’t melt and all the rest of it, friends from the workplace in Covent Garden. I happened to have a vacant room and he happened to know of someone who was looking and could he bring her, Mrs. McHaggis? She seems a nice enough sort of girl, he says. And there I was, ready to believe the two of them while all the time they’re sneaking round on the floor below me, going at it like monkeys behind my back. Well, let me tell you right now, if she wasn’t dead, she’d be gone. Out. Finished. On her ear. On the pavement.”

Right where Yolanda wanted her, Barbara concluded. All well and good, but Yolanda would hardly have sneaked into the house and planted a pregnancy test in the bathroom on the slight chance that Bella McHaggis would find it, jump to conclusions, and evict the one lodger Yolanda wanted to get her mitts on. Or would she?

Barbara said, “We’ll take this into consideration.”

“You damn well bloody will,” Bella said. “It’s motive loud and clear and make no mistake. Big as life. Right before your eyes.” She leaned across the table, her palm flat on the front of the Daily Express. “He’s been engaged five times, mind you. Five times and what does that say about him? Well, I’ll tell you what it says. It says desperate. And desperate means a man who’ll stop at nothing.”

“And you’re talking about…?”

“Paolo di Fazio. Who else?”

Anyone else, Barbara reckoned, and she could see Winston was thinking the same. She said, Right yes, they would have a word with Paolo di Fazio.

“I should certainly hope you will. He’s got himself a lockup somewhere, a place where he does his sculpting. You ask me, he dragged that poor girl into that place and did his worst and dumped her body…”

Yes, yes, whatever. All of this would be checked out, Barbara assured her, nodding towards Winston to indicate that he’d been scrupulously taking notes. They’d be having a word with all of the lodgers, and that did include Paolo di Fazio. Now as to Frazer Chaplin-

“Why do you want to make this about Frazer?” Bella demanded.

Precisely because you don’t, Barbara thought. She said, “It’s a matter of putting a full stop to every possibility. It’s what we do.” It was part and parcel of the job. Trace, interview, and eliminate.

As Barbara was speaking, the door leading down to the basement flat opened and shut and a man’s pleasant voice called, “I’m off then, Mrs. McH.”

Winston got to his feet. He went out into the corridor that led towards the back of the house and said, “Mr. Chaplin? DS Winston Nkata. We’d like a word please.”

A moment. And then, “Sh’ll I ring Duke’s and let them know? I’m expected at work in thirty minutes.”

“Won’t take long, this,” Nkata told him.

Frazer followed Winston into the room, which gave Barbara her first close look at the man. Dark as the night. Yet another, she thought. Not that she intended to give credence to Yolanda’s ravings. But still…He was a stone and he couldn’t be left unturned.

He looked round thirty years old. His olive skin was pock-marked but that didn’t detract, and while his shadowy stubble could have covered the scars if he’d grown them into a beard, he was wise not to have done so. He looked piratical and a little dangerous, which, Barbara knew, some women found attractive.

He locked eyes with her, then gave her a nod. He was carrying a pair of shoes, and he sat at the table and put these shoes on, lacing them up and saying no thanks to Bella McHaggis’s offer of tea. It was an offer that, pointedly, she did not make to the other two. Her attention to the man-she called him luv-in addition to what Abbott Langer had told them about his effect on women made Barbara want to suspect him on the spot. Which wasn’t exactly good police work, but she had an automatic aversion to men like this bloke because he had one of those unmistakable I-know-what-you-want-and-I’ve-got-it-here-in-my-trousers expressions on his face. No matter the difference in their ages, if he was giving it to Bella on the side, no wonder she was besotted.

And she was. That much was clear, far beyond the luv and the darling. Bella looked upon Frazer with a fond expression that Barbara might have considered maternal had she not been a cop who’d seen just about every permutation of human entanglement in her years on the force.

“Mrs. McH has told me about Jemima,” Frazer said, “that she’s the one from the cemetery. You’ll be wanting to know what I know and I’m glad to tell you. I expect Paolo will feel likewise, as will everyone who knew her. She’s a lovely girl.”

“Was,” Barbara said. “As she’s dead.”

“Sorry. Was.” He looked something between bland and solemn, and Barbara wondered if he felt anything at all for the fact that his fellow lodger had been murdered. Somehow, she doubted it.

“We understand she had a bit of a thing for you,” Barbara said. Winston did his part with the notebook and pencil, but he was watching Frazer’s every move. “Balloons at Valentine’s Day and all the et ceteras?”

“What would those et ceteras be? Because as I see it, sure there’s no crime in an innocent delivery of six balloons.”

Bella McHaggis’s eyes narrowed at this mention of balloons. Her glance went from the police to her lodger. He said, “Not to worry, Mrs. McH. I said I’d not be making the same mistake twice, and you’ve got my word on it that I didn’t.”

“What mistake would that be?” Barbara asked.

He moved to get more comfortable in his seat. He had a wide-legged posture when sitting, Barbara noted, one of those blokes who liked to show off the family jewels. “I had a bit of a fling at one time with a lass who lived here,” he said. “It was wrong, and I know it, and I did my penance. Mrs. McH didn’t toss me out on my ear as she otherwise might have done, for which I’m grateful. So I wasn’t likely to go the wayward-son route again.”

Considering what they’d heard from Abbott Langer-if he’d been speaking the truth-Barbara had her doubts about Frazer’s sincerity in this matter. She said to him, “I understand you work at more than one job, Mr. Chaplin. Could you tell me where else you’re employed besides the ice rink?”

“Why?” Bella McHaggis was the one to ask the question. “What’s that got to do with-”

“It’s just procedure,” Barbara told her.

“What sort of procedure?” Bella demanded.

“It’s nothing, Mrs. McH,” Frazer said. “They’re just doing their jobs.” Frazer said that he worked late afternoons and evenings in Duke’s Hotel in St. James’s. He was the bartender there and had been for the last three years.

“Industrious,” Barbara noted. “Two jobs.”

“I’m saving,” he said. “It’s not a crime, I believe.”

“Saving for what?”

“How’s that important?” Bella demanded. “See here-”

“Everything’s important till we know it’s not,” Barbara told her. “Mr. Chaplin?”

“Emigration,” he said.

“To…?”

“Auckland.”

“Why?”

“I’ve hopes to open a small hotel. A lovely little boutique hotel, as it happens.”

“Anyone helping you save?”

He frowned. “What d’you mean?”

“Young lady, p’rhaps, contributing to your hotel fund, making plans, thinking she’ll be included?”