“You’re on your way, aren’t you?” Lynley asked her.
“With Winston at the wheel? What d’you think?”
Which meant that Nkata who, unlike Havers, had a history of taking orders seriously, was returning them to London. Had she been given her way in matters, Barbara would have probably dallied until she was satisfied by what she was able to gather about everyone in Hampshire even remotely connected to Jemima Hastings’ death.
He concluded his call as Isabelle Ardery returned from her meeting with Hillier and Stephenson Deacon. She looked no more harried than usual, so he concluded the meeting had gone marginally well. Then John Stewart fielded a phone call from SO7 that put a full stop to the case as far as Ardery was concerned. They had the analysis of the two hairs found on the body of Jemima Hastings, he told them.
“Well, thank God for that,” Ardery declared. “What’ve we got?”
“Oriental,” he told her.
“Hallelujah.”
It would have been a moment for packing everything in then, and Lynley could see that Ardery was inclined to do so. But Dorothea Harriman came into the room in the very next moment and, with her words, burst everything wide open.
One Bella McHaggis was downstairs in reception, Harriman told them, and she wanted to speak to Barbara Havers.
“She was told the detective sergeant is in Hampshire, so she’s asked to see whoever’s in charge of the case,” Harriman said. “She’s got evidence, she says, and she doesn’t mean to hand it over to just anyone.”
BELLA WAS NO longer suspicious of Paolo di Fazio. That was finished the moment she’d seen the error in her thinking. She didn’t regret setting the coppers after him since she watched enough police dramas on the telly to know that everyone had to be eliminated as suspects in order to find the guilty party and, like it or not, he was a suspect. So was she, she supposed. Anyway, she reckoned he’d get over whatever offence he might be feeling because of her suspicions and if he didn’t, he’d find other lodgings, but in any case she couldn’t be bothered because Jemima’s handbag had to be turned over to the officers investigating the case.
As she didn’t intend waiting at home for them finally to show their faces this time round, she didn’t bother with the phone. Instead, she’d dropped Jemima’s handbag into the canvas carryall that she used for her grocery shopping, and she’d carted it off to New Scotland Yard because that was where that Sergeant Havers person had come from.
When she learned that Sergeant Havers wasn’t in, she’d demanded someone else. The head, the chief, the whoever’s-in-charge, she said to the uniform in reception. And she wasn’t leaving till she talked to that person. In person, by the way. Not on the phone. She parked herself near the eternal flame and there she determined to remain.
And damn, if she didn’t have to wait exactly forty-three minutes for a responsible party finally to appear. Even when this happened, she didn’t think she was looking at the responsible party at all. A tall, nice-looking man approached her and, when he spoke from beneath his head of beautifully groomed blond hair, he didn’t sound like anyone she’d ever heard yapping away on The Bill. He was Inspector Lynley, he said in the plummy tone that had always proclaimed Public School in One’s Past. Did she have something related to the investigation?
“Are you in charge?” she demanded, and when he admitted that he was not, she told him to fetch whoever was and that, she said, was how it was going to be. She was in need of police protection from the killer of Jemima Hastings, she said, and she had a feeling he wasn’t going to be able to provide that on his own. “I know who did it,” she told him and she lifted the carryall to her chest, “and what I’ve got in here proves it.”
“Ah,” he said politely. “And what have you got in there?”
“I’m not a nutter,” she told him sharply because she could tell what he was thinking about her. “You fetch who needs to be fetched, my good man.”
He went to make a phone call. He regarded her from across the lobby as he spoke to whoever was at the other end of the line. Whatever he said proved fruitful, though. In another three minutes, a woman came out of the elevator and through the turnstile that kept the general public away from the mysterious workings of New Scotland Yard. This individual strode over to join them. She was, Inspector Lynley told Bella, Detective Superintendent Ardery.
“And are you the person in charge?” Bella said.
“I am,” the superintendent replied. Her facial expression added the comment, And this better be worth my time, madam.
Right, Bella thought, it bloody well will be.
THE HANDBAG WAS so hopelessly compromised for purposes of evidence that Isabelle wanted to shake the woman silly. The fact that she did not was, she decided, a testimony to her self-control.
“It’s Jemima’s,” Bella McHaggis announced as she produced it with a flourish. This flourish included adding fingerprints to what were doubtless dozens more of her own, in the process smearing everyone else’s and, in particular, smearing the killer’s. “I found it with the Oxfam goods.”
“A discarded bag or one that she carried daily?” Lynley asked, not unreasonably.
“It’s her regular bag. And it wasn’t discarded because it’s got all her clobber in it.”
“You went through it?” Isabelle gritted her teeth in preparation for the inevitable answer, which was, naturally, that the woman had pawed through everything, depositing more fingerprints, creating more compromised evidence.
“Well, of course I went through it,” Bella asserted. “How else was I to know it’s Jemima’s?”
“How else indeed,” Isabelle said.
Bella McHaggis gave her a narrow-eyed look that told Isabelle she was being evaluated. The woman seemed to reach a conclusion that no offence was intended by Isabelle’s tone, and before she could be stopped from doing so, she opened the handbag, said, “See here, then,” and dumped its contents onto the seat where she’d been awaiting them.
“Please don’t-,” Isabelle began as Lynley said, “This all must go to-” and Bella picked up a mobile phone and waved it at them, declaring, “This is hers. And this is her purse and her wallet” and on and on as she pawed through everything. There was nothing for it but to grab her hands in the unlikely hope that something had gone untouched on Bella’s first time through the handbag and that it could remain so. “Yes, yes. Thank you,” Isabelle said. She nodded at Lynley to replace the handbag’s contents and to put the bag itself into the carryall. When he’d accomplished this, Isabelle asked the woman to take her through everything that had led to her finding the handbag. This, Bella McHaggis was pleased to do. She gave them chapter and verse on recycling and saving the planet, and from this Isabelle concluded that the handbag had come from a bin that was not only situated in front of Bella McHag gis’s house but was also accessible to anyone who happened to pass by and see it. This, apparently, was a point that Bella herself wished to make because the conclusion of her recitation contained a fact she declared “the most important bit of all.”
“And that is?” Isabelle enquired.
“Yolanda.”
It seemed that the psychic had been lurking round Bella’s front garden again, and she’d been there this time moments before Bella had made the discovery of Jemima’s handbag. She’d been ostensibly having “some sort of bloody psychic experience,” Bella scoffed, which had been characterised by muttering, moaning, praying, and waving round a stick of burning whatever that was supposed to do something magical or “rubbish like that.” Bella had given her a few choice words, and the psychic had scurried off. Moments later, checking the Oxfam bin, Bella had uncovered the handbag.