He said, “To be honest, I’d thought Frazer was probably responsible for what’s happened, but this bag tells me-”

“Don’t you dare blame Frazer!” Because that was what they did as well. They tried to blame others, they tried to divert suspicion. Oh, he was bloody clever, indeed.

“-that it makes no sense to think he’s guilty either. For why would Frazer kill her, bring her bag here, and put it in the rubbish in front of the house where he lives?”

“It’s not rubbish,” she said inanely. “It’s for recycling. I won’t have you call the recycling rubbish. It’s because people think that that they won’t recycle goods in the first place. And if people would simply begin recycling, we might save the planet. Don’t you understand?”

He raised his eyes skyward. It came to Bella that he looked, for a moment, exactly like one of those pictures of martyred saints. This was due to the fact that he was darkish skinned because he was Italian and most of the martyred saints were Italian. Weren’t they? If it came to it, was he really Italian? Perhaps he was merely pretending to be. Lord, what was happening to her brain? Was this what abject terror did to people? Except, she realised, perhaps she wasn’t as terrified as she’d earlier been or as she was supposed to be.

“Mrs. McHaggis,” Paolo said quietly, “please consider that someone else might have put Jemima’s bag in that bin.”

“Ridiculous. Why would anyone else-?”

“And if someone else put the bag there, who might that person be? Is there someone who might want to make one of us look guilty?”

“There’s only one person looking guilty, my lad, and that person is you.”

“It isn’t. Don’t you see? That bag’s presence makes you look bad as well, doesn’t it? Just as it makes me look bad-at least in your eyes-and it makes Frazer look bad.”

“You’re shifting blame! I told you not to. I told you…” And suddenly the penny dropped: the vague mutterings about black, night, sun, and ooze; the prayers and the smoking green cigar. “Oh dear Lord,” Bella murmured.

She turned from Paolo and fumbled for the door to get into the house. If he followed her inside at this point, she knew it did not matter.

Chapter Twenty

“I THINK YOUR BEST COURSE IS GOING TO BE TO GET SOMEONE from Christie’s to look at it,” St. James said. “Or, failing that, someone at the BM. You can check it out from the evidence officer, can’t you?”

“I’m not exactly in a position to take that decision,” Lynley said.

“Ah. The new superintendent. How does it go?”

“A bit unevenly, I’m afraid.” Lynley glanced around. He and St. James were speaking via phone. References to Isabelle Ardery had to be circumspect, of necessity. Besides, he felt for the acting superintendent’s position. He didn’t envy her, having to cope with Stephenson Deacon and the Directorate of Public Affairs so soon into her employment at the Yard. Once the press came howling into the picture in an investigation, the pressure for a result mounted. With someone now in hospital, Ardery was going to feel that pressure from every quarter.

“I see,” St. James said. “Well, if not the stone itself, what about the photo you showed me? It’s quite clear and you can see the scale. That might be all that’s necessary.”

“For the British Museum, possibly. But certainly not for Christie’s.”

St. James was silent for a moment before he said, “I wish I could be more help, Tommy. But I’m loath to send you in the wrong direction.”

“Nothing to apologise for,” Lynley told his friend. “It might mean nothing anyway.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I don’t. On the other hand, I may be merely clutching at a straw.”

So it definitely seemed, because right, left, and centre everything was either utterly confusing matters or checking out as inconsequential. There was no middle ground between the extremes.

The background checks completed so far served as evidence of this: Of the principals in London involved in the case, tangentially or otherwise, everyone was turning out to be exactly who he seemed to be and nobody’s copy book was blotted. There was still the matter of Abbott Langer’s supposed marriages to be sorted, and Matt Jones-paramour of St. James’s sister-continued to be a question mark as there were more than four hundred Matthew Joneses spread out in the UK, so tracking each down and sorting them all out was proving a problem. Other than that, no one had so much as a parking ticket. This made things look grim as far as Yukio Matsumoto was concerned, despite his brother’s protestations of the violinist’s harmless nature. For with everyone else turning up clean and no one else in London apparently having a motive to murder Jemima Hastings, the killing either had to have been committed in the sort of act of madness one could easily associate with Yukio Matsumoto and his angels or it had to have arisen from something and someone connected to Hampshire.

Of the Hampshire principals, there were two curious points that had been uncovered and only one of them seemed likely to lead anywhere. The first point was that Gina Dickens had so far been untraceable in Hampshire although various forms of her name were still being tried: Regina, Jean, Virginia, etc. The second-and more interesting piece of information-was about Robert Hastings, who, as things turned out, had trained to be a blacksmith prior to taking over his father’s position as agister. And this might have merely been shoved aside as another useless bit of data had forensics not given a preliminary assessment about the murder weapon. According to microscopic examination, the thing was hand forged, and the blood upon it had come from Jemima Hastings, as well. When this information was added to Yukio Matsumoto’s possession of the spike, to the eyewitness report of an Oriental man stumbling from Abney Park Cemetery, to the e-fit generated by that report, and to what was likely to be blood residue on the violinist’s clothing and his shoes, it was difficult to disagree with Isabelle Ardery’s conclusion that they had their man.

But Lynley liked to have everything accounted for. Thus he returned to the stone that Jemima Hastings had carried in her pocket. It wasn’t that he assumed it was valuable and, possibly, the reason for her death. It was just that the stone remained a detail that he wanted to understand.

He was once again studying the photo of the stone when he received a phone call from Barbara Havers. She’d had the word to return to London, she told him, but before she did so she wanted to know if he’d unearthed anything about Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting. Or, for that matter, about Ringo Heath, because it could be that there was a connection between those two that wanted exploring.

What he’d discovered was little enough, Lynley told her. All of Whiting’s training as a police officer had followed the usual, legitimate pattern: He’d done his required training weeks at a Centrex centre, he’d taken additional instruction at several area training units, and he’d attended an admirable number of courses in Bramshill. He had twenty-three years of service under his belt, all of them spent in Hampshire. If he was involved in anything untoward, Lynley hadn’t sorted what it was. He can be a bit of a bully on occasion had been the nastiest comment anyone cared to make about the bloke, although He’s been sometimes too enthusiastic about the job in hand could, Lynley knew, have several interpretations.

As for Ringo Heath, there was nothing. Especially there was no connection of record between Heath and Chief Superintendent Whiting. As to a connection between Whiting and Gordon Jossie, whatever it was, it was going to have to come out of Jossie’s background because it certainly wasn’t coming out of Whiting’s.

“So it’s sod bloody all on a biscuit, eh?” was how Havers received the information. “I s’pose her order to come home makes sense.”