“You’re speaking of Jemima, I expect.”
“Why would you jump to that conclusion?”
“Because otherwise you’d not have the slightest interest.” He smiled and added, “Unless you’d like to contribute yourself.”
“No thanks.”
“Alas. You join the score of other ladies who allow me to build my savings on my own. And that would include Jemima.” He slapped his thighs in a gesture of finality and rose from his chair. “As you said, this would take only a moment and as I’ve another job to go to…”
“You run along, luv,” Bella McHaggis told him. She added meaningfully, “If there’s anything more to be dealt with here, I’ll see to it.”
“Thanks, Mrs. McH,” Frazer said, and he squeezed her shoulder.
Bella looked gratified at the moment of contact. Barbara reckoned that was part of the Frazer Effect. She said to both of them, “Do stay in town. I have a feeling we’re going to want to talk to you again.”
WHEN THEY RETURNED to Victoria Street, the afternoon debriefing had already begun. Barbara found herself looking for Lynley as she entered the room and then found herself irritated for doing so. She’d scarcely given her former partner a thought during the day, and she wanted it that way. Nonetheless, she clocked him on the far side of the room.
Lynley nodded at her and a smile lifted just the corners of his mouth. He looked at her over the top of his reading glasses and then back down at a sheaf of papers he was holding.
Isabelle Ardery was standing at the china board, listening to John Stewart’s report. Stewart and the constables working with him had been given the unenviable task of dealing with the masses of material they’d taken from Jemima Hastings’ lodgings. At the moment, the DI was talking about Rome. Ardery looked impatient, as if waiting for a salient point to emerge.
That didn’t seem close to happening. Stewart was saying, “The common denominator is the invasion. She’s got plans from both the British Museum and the Museum of London and the rooms circled relate to the Romans, the invasion, the occupation, the fortresses, all the clobber they left behind. And she bought a mass of postcards from both museums and a book called Roman Britain as well.”
“But you said she’d also got a plan of the National Gallery and the Portrait Gallery,” Philip Hale pointed out. He’d been taking notes, and he referred to these. “And the Geffrye, the Tate Modern, and the Wallace Collection. Looks to me like she was having a recce of London, John. Sightseeing.” Again, from his notes: “Sir John Soane’s house, Charles Dickens’ house, Thomas Carlyle’s house, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London…She had brochures for all of them, right?”
“True, but if we want to find a connection-”
“The connection is that she was a tourist, John.” Isabelle Ardery went on to tell them that SO7 had sent over a report, and there was good news on that front: The fibres on her clothing had been identified. They constituted a blend of cotton and rayon and they were yellow in colour. They matched nothing that the girl herself was wearing, so there was a very good chance that they had yet another connection to her killer.
“Yellow?” Barbara said. “Abbott Langer. Bloke at the ice rink. He wears a yellow waistcoast. All of the instructors do.” She told them about the ice-skating lessons Jemima had been taking. “Could be the fibres were left from a lesson.”
“We’ll want that waistcoat, then,” Ardery said. “His or someone else’s. Get someone to fetch one for fabric testing.” She went on with, “We’ve also had a curious description phoned in as a result of all the publicity. It seems that a rather filthy man came out of Abney Park Cemetery in the window of time of Jemima Hastings’ murder. He was seen by an elderly woman waiting for the bus just at an entrance to the cemetery on Stoke Newington Church Street. She recalled him because, she said-and I spoke to her myself-he looked as if he’d been rolling in leaves, he had quite long hair, and he was either Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, or-as she put it-‘one of those Oriental types.’ He was wearing black trousers, carrying some sort of case although she couldn’t tell me what kind-she thought it might be a briefcase-and he had the rest of his clothing bundled up beneath his arm except for his jacket, which he was wearing inside out. We’ve got someone with her trying to come up with an e-fit, and if we’re lucky we’ll get some hits on that once we release it. Sergeants Havers and Nkata…?”
Nkata nodded at Barbara, letting her do the honours. Decent bloke, she thought, and she wondered how Winston had come to be so prescient and simultaneously so completely without ego.
She made their report: Yolanda the Psychic, a recap of Abbott Langer and ice-skating lessons and the reason for the ice-skating lessons, the balloons, the pregnancy test-“turns out it was negative,” she said-Frazer Chaplin, and Paolo di Fazio. To this she added the argument overheard between Paolo di Fazio and the victim, Paolo’s ostensible lockup where he did his sculpting, Frazer’s way with the ladies, Bella McHaggis’s possible nonmaternal interest in Frazer, Frazer’s second job at Duke’s Hotel, and his plans to emigrate.
“Background checks on all of them,” Isabelle said at the conclusion of Barbara’s remarks.
Barbara said, “We’ll get to that straightaway,” but Ardery said, “No. I want you two-you and Sergeant Nkata-down in Hampshire. Philip, you and your people take the background checks.”
“Hampshire?” Barbara said. “What’s Hampshire-”
Ardery put them in the picture, giving them a summary of what they’d missed during the earlier part of the debriefing. She and DI Lynley, she said, had come up with these and, “You’ll need to take one along with you to Hampshire.” She handed over a postcard, which Barbara saw was a smaller version of the National Portrait Gallery poster of Jemima Hastings. On the front of it “Have You Seen This Woman?” was printed in black marker, along with an arrow indicating that the card was meant to be flipped over. On the reverse was a phone number, a mobile number by the look of it.
The number, Ardery told her, belonged to a bloke in Hampshire called Gordon Jossie. She and Sergeant Nkata were to go there and see what Mr. Jossie had to say for himself. “Pack a bag because I expect this might take more than one day,” she told them.
There were the usual hoots at this, remarks of, “Oohh, holiday time, you two,” and, “Mind you get separate rooms, Winnie,” to which Ardery said sharply, “That’ll do,” as Dorothea Harriman came into the room. She had a slip of paper in her hand, a telephone message. She handed this to Ardery. The superintendent read it. She looked up, satisfaction playing across her face.
“We’ve got a name to attach to the first e-fit,” she announced, gesturing to the china board on which hung the e-fit generated from the two adolescents who’d stumbled on the body in the cemetery. “One of the volunteers at the cemetery thinks it’s a boy called Marlon Kay. Inspector Lynley and I will see about him. The rest of you…You’ve got your assignments. Any questions? No? All right, then.”
They would begin again in the morning, she told them. There were several looks of surprise exchanged: An evening off? What was she thinking?
No one questioned it, however, there being far too few gift horses in the midst of an investigation. The team began their preparations to depart as Ardery said, “Thomas?” to Lynley, and, “A word in my office?”
Lynley nodded. Ardery left the incident room. He didn’t follow at once, however. Instead, he went to the china board to have a look at the photographs assembled there, and Barbara took the opportunity to approach him. He’d put his reading glasses on once again, and he was observing the aerial photographs and comparing them to the drawn diagram of the crime scene.