Gina dropped her gaze. “Yes. All right. But what if I get to the station and lose my courage when it comes to going inside and talking and…What will I do when they come for Gordon? Because they will come, won’t they? They’ll see he lied and they’ll come and he’ll know. Oh God. Oh God. How did I do this to myself?”

The door to Gerber & Hudson opened, and out popped Randall Hudson’s head. He didn’t look pleased and he made the reason clear when he said, “Are you coming back to work today, Meredith?”

Meredith felt heat in her cheeks. She’d never been scolded at her work before. She said in a low voice to Gina Dickens, “All right. I’ll go with you. Be here at half past five.” And then to Hudson, “Sorry, sorry, Mr. Hudson. Just a small emergency. It’s taken care of now.”

Not quite true, the taken care of part. But that would be settled in a very few hours.

BARBARA HAVERS HAD made the phone call to Lynley earlier, out of Winston Nkata’s presence. It wasn’t so much because she hadn’t wanted Winston to know she was phoning her erstwhile partner. It was more a matter of timing. She’d wanted to get in touch with the inspector prior to his arrival at the Yard that day. This had necessitated an early morning call, which she’d made from her room in the Sway hotel.

She’d reached Lynley at the breakfast table. He’d brought her up to speed on the goings-on in London, and he’d sounded guarded on the topic of Isabelle Ardery’s performance as superintendent, which made Barbara wonder what it was that he wasn’t telling her. She recognised in his reticence that peculiar form of Lynley loyalty that she herself had long been the recipient of, and she felt a pang that she didn’t want to name.

To her question of, “If she thinks she’s got her man, why d’you think she hasn’t recalled us to London?” he said, “Things have moved quickly. I expect you’ll hear from her today.”

“What do you reckon about what’s going on?”

In the background she heard the clink of cutlery against china. She could picture Lynley in the dining room of his town house, The Times and the Guardian nearby on the table and a silver pot of coffee within reach. He was the sort of bloke who’d pour that coffee without spilling a drop, and when he stirred it within his cup, he’d manage to do so without making a sound. How did people do that? she wondered. “She’s not jumping to a wild conclusion,” he settled on saying. “Matsumoto had what looked like the weapon in his room. It’s gone to forensics. He also had one of the postcards tucked into a book. His brother doesn’t believe he harmed her, but I don’t think anyone else will go along with him on that.”

Barbara noted that he’d avoided her question. “And you, sir?” she persisted.

She heard him sigh. “Barbara, I just don’t know. Simon has the photo of that stone from her pocket, by the way. It’s curious. I want to know what it means.”

“Someone killing her to get it?”

“Again, I don’t know. But there are more questions than answers just now. That makes me uneasy.” Barbara waited for more. Finally, he said, “I can understand the desire to sew the case up quickly. But if it’s mismanaged or botched altogether because of someone rushing to judgement, that’s not going to look good.”

“For her, you mean. For Ardery.” And then she had to add because of what it meant to her and to her own future with the Yard, “You care about that, sir?”

“She seems a decent sort.”

Barbara wondered what that meant, but she didn’t ask. It wasn’t her business, she told herself, even as it felt like her business in every way.

She brought up the reason for her call: Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting, the forged letters from Winchester Technical College II, and Whiting’s knowledge of Gordon Jossie’s apprenticeship in Itchen Abbas with Ringo Heath. She said, “We didn’t mention any apprenticeship, let alone where it was, so why would he know about it? Does he keep his fingers on the pulse of every individual in the whole bloody New Forest? Seems to me there’s something going on with Whiting and this Jossie bloke, sir, because Whiting definitely knows more than he’s willing to tell us.”

“What are you considering?”

“Something illegal. Whiting taking payoffs for whatever Jossie’s doing when he’s not off thatching old buildings. He’s working on people’s houses, Jossie is. He sees what’s inside them, and some of them will have valuables. This isn’t exactly a poverty-stricken part of the country, sir.”

“Burglaries orchestrated by Jossie and discovered by Whiting? Pocketing ill-gotten gains instead of making an arrest?”

“Or could be they’re into something together.”

“Something that Jemima Hastings discovered?”

“That’s definitely a possibility. So I’m wondering…Could you do some checking on him? Bit of snooping. Background and such. Who is this bloke Zachary Whiting? Where’d he do his police training? Where’d he come from before he ended up here?”

“I’ll see what I can sort out,” Lynley said.

WHILE ALL ROADS weren’t exactly leading to Gordon Jossie, Barbara thought, they were certainly circling the bloke. It was time to see what the rest of the team in London had come up with when checking on him-not to mention when checking on every other name she’d handed over-so after breakfast when she and Winston were making their preparations for the day, she took out her mobile to make the call.

It rang before she had a chance. The caller was Isabelle Ardery. Her remarks were brief, of the pack-up-and-come-home variety. They had a solid suspect, they had what was undoubtedly the murder weapon; they had his shoes and his clothing, which were going to test positive for Jemima’s blood; they had an established connection between them.

“And he’s a nutter,” Ardery concluded. “Schizophrenic who won’t take meds.”

“He can’t be tried, then,” Barbara said.

“Trying him’s hardly the point, Sergeant,” Ardery told her. “Getting him permanently off the street is.”

“Understood. But there’s more than one curious person down this way, guv,” Barbara told her. “I mean, just considering Jossie, f’r instance, you might want us to stay and nose round till we-”

“What I want is your return to London.”

“C’n I ask where we are with the background checks?”

“So far there’s nothing questionable on anyone,” Ardery told her. “Especially not down there. Your holiday’s over. Get back to London. Today.”

“Right.” Barbara ended the call and made a face at the phone. She knew an order when she heard an order. She wasn’t convinced, however, that the order made sense.

“So?” Winston said to her.

“That’s definitely the question of the hour.”

Chapter Nineteen

ALTHOUGH BELLA MCHAGGIS LIKED TO THINK THAT HER lodgers would scrupulously do their own recycling, she’d learned over time that they were far more likely to toss items into the rubbish. So weekly, she made rounds inside her house. She found broadsheets and tabloids piled here and there, old magazines under beds, Coke cans crushed inside wastepaper baskets, and all sorts of otherwise valuable articles in nearly every location.

It was for this reason that she emerged from her house with a laundry basket whose contents she intended to deposit among the many receptacles she had long ago placed in her front garden for this purpose. On the step, however, basket in arms, Bella halted abruptly. For after their previous encounter, the last person she expected to see just inside her front gate was Yolanda the Pyschic. She was in the midst of waving in the air what looked like a large green cigar. A plume of smoke rose from it, and as she waved it, Yolanda chanted sonorously in her husky masculine tone.

This was the bloody limit, Bella thought. She dropped her basket and yelped, “You! What the bloody hell will it take? Get off my property this instant.”