This Body of Death (43 page)

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.

W
HILE 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.”

A
LTHOUGH
B
ELLA
M
C
H
AGGIS 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.”

Yolanda’s eyes had been shut, but they flew open. She appeared to shake off some trance she was in.
That
was likely another one of her completely spurious performances, Bella thought. The woman was an utter charlatan.

Bella kicked the laundry basket to one side and strode over to the psychic, who was holding her ground. “Did you hear me?” she demanded. “Leave the property this instant or I’ll have you arrested. And stop waving that …that
thing
in my face.”

Closer to it now, Bella saw that that
thing
was a collection of pale leaves, rolled tightly and bound up with thin twine. Its smoke was, frankly, not bad smelling, more like incense than tobacco. But that was hardly the point.

“Black as the night,” was Yolanda’s reply. Her eyes looked odd, and Bella wondered if the woman was high on drugs. “Black as the night and the sun, the sun.” Yolanda waved her stick of smoking whatever-it-was directly in Bella’s face. “Ooze from the windows. Ooze from the doors. Purity is needed or the evil within—”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Bella snapped. “Don’t pretend you’re here for
anything
other than causing trouble.”

Yolanda continued to wave the smoking object like a priestess in the performance of an arcane rite. Bella grabbed her arm and attempted to hold it in place. She was surprised to find the psychic was quite strong, and for a moment they stood there like two ageing female wrestlers, each trying to throw the other to the mat. Bella finally won, for which she was thankful as it did her good to see that her hours of yoga and athletic training were doing
something
besides lengthening her life on this miserable planet. She mastered Yolanda’s arm, lowered it, and knocked the green cigar from her hand. She stamped upon it till it was extinguished while Yolanda moaned, mumbled, and murmured about God, purity, evil, black, the night, and the sun.

“Oh,
stop
your nonsense.” Yolanda’s arm still in her grasp, Bella began to march her towards the gate.

Yolanda, however, had other things on her mind. She put on the metaphorical brakes. Legs as stiff as a two-year-old’s in the midst of a tantrum, she planted herself firmly and would not be budged.

“This is a place of evil,” she hissed. To Bella, the woman’s expression looked wild. “If you won’t purify, then you must leave. What happened to her will happen again.
All
of you are in danger.”

Bella rolled her eyes.

“Listen to me!” Yolanda cried. “He died within, and when that happens in a place of abode—”

“Oh
rubbish
. Stop pretending you’re here to do anything other than spy and cause trouble. Which you’ve done from the first and don’t deny it. What do you want now?
Who
do you want now? Looking to talk someone else out of living here? Well, there’s no one else yet. Are you satisfied? Now, get the hell—Be gone before I phone the police.”

It seemed that the idea of police finally got through. Yolanda immediately stopped resisting and allowed herself to be propelled towards the gate. But still she nattered on about death and the need for a ritual of purification. Bella was able to determine from Yolanda’s rambling that all of this was due to the untimely passing of Mr. McHaggis, and truth to tell, the fact that Yolanda seemed to know about McHaggis’s death inside the house did give Bella pause. But she shook off the pause—because, obviously, Jemima could have told her about McHaggis’s death since Bella herself had mentioned it more than once—and with no further conversation between them, she directed Yolanda from the property to the pavement.

There, Yolanda said, “Heed my warning.”

To which Bella said, “You bloody heed mine. Next time you show your face round here, you’ll be explaining your presence to the coppers. Understand? Now
scarper
.”

Yolanda started to speak. Bella made a threatening movement towards her. That apparently did it, because she hustled down the pavement in the direction of the river. Bella waited till she disappeared round the corner into Putney Bridge Road. Then she went back to what she’d intended to do. She grabbed the laundry basket and approached the serried rank of rubbish bins with their neat labels upon them.

It was in the Oxfam bin that she found it. Later she would think what a miracle it was that she’d opened that particular bin at all, for she emptied the Oxfam bin least often, as items for Oxfam were tossed away infrequently by herself, by residents of her house, and by people who lived nearby. As it was, she had nothing to deposit in the Oxfam bin on this day. She merely removed its lid to take note of when it was likely to need emptying. The newspaper bin was itself nearly full and the plastics bin was likewise; the glass bins were fine—separating green from brown from clear kept them from filling too quickly—and since she was looking at the bins in general, she’d gone on to the Oxfam bin as a matter of course.

The handbag was buried beneath a jumble of clothing. Bella had removed this with a curse about people’s enduring laziness as evidenced by the fact that they couldn’t be bothered to fold what they wished to have carted off to the charity and she was about to fold it all herself, item by item, when she saw the handbag and recognised it.

It was Jemima’s. There was no doubt about it, and even if there had been doubt, Bella scooped it up and opened it and there inside were Jemima’s purse, her driving licence, her address book, and her mobile phone. There were other bits and bobs as well, but these didn’t matter as much as the fact that Jemima had died in Stoke Newington where she’d no doubt had her handbag with her, and here it was now in Putney, as large as the life she no longer possessed.

There was no question in Bella’s mind what she had to do about this sudden discovery. She was headed for the front door with the handbag in her grasp when the front gate opened behind her and she turned, expecting to see Yolanda’s stubborn return. But it was Paolo di Fazio coming through, and when his eyes lit on the handbag that Bella was carrying, she saw from his expression that, like her, he knew exactly what it was.

B
Y RETURNING TO
St. Thomas’ Hospital and remaining there for most of the previous night to await word on Yukio Matsumoto’s condition, Isabelle had managed to put off the meeting with AC Hillier. Since he’d instructed her to deliver herself to his office upon her return to the Yard, she’d decided merely not to return to the Yard until long after the assistant commissioner had vacated Tower Block for the night. This would give her time to sort through what had happened in order to be able to speak clearly about it.

That plan had worked. It had also allowed her to be first in line to know what was going on with the violinist’s condition. This was simple enough: He remained in a coma throughout the night. He was not out of danger, but the coma was artificial, induced to allow the brain time to recover. Had she been given suzerainty in this situation, Yukio Matsumoto would have been brought round and then thoroughly questioned once he’d emerged from the operating theatre. As it was, the most she was able to manage was a police guard in the vicinity of intensive care to make certain the man didn’t suddenly regain consciousness on his own, realise the depth of the trouble he was in, and do a runner. It was, she knew, a laughable possibility. He was in no condition to go anywhere. But appropriate procedure had to be followed, and she was going to follow appropriate procedure.

She believed she had done so from the first. Yukio Matsumoto was a suspect; his own brother had identified him from an e-fit in the newspaper. It was not down to her that the man had panicked and had tried to outrun the police. Besides that, as things turned out, he was in possession of what had to be the murder weapon, and when his clothing and his shoes had undergone analysis along with the weapon, there were going to be blood splatters somewhere upon them—no matter how minute and no matter how he’d tried to clean them—and those blood spatters would belong to Jemima Hastings.

The only problem was that this information could not be passed on to the press. It could not come out until a trial. And that was a problem indeed because the moment the word got out that a member of London’s foreign citizenry had been hit by a vehicle while running from the coppers—which hadn’t taken long—the press had gathered like the wolf pack they were, on the scent of a story that smacked of police incompetence. They were baying to bring down the responsible party, and the job of the Met was to position itself to handle things when the wolves closed in for the kill.

Which, naturally, was one of two reasons that Hillier had wanted to see her: to determine what the Met’s position was going to be. The other reason, she knew, was to assess if or how badly she’d cocked things up. Should he decide blame lay with her, she was finished, the opportunity for promotion gone.

The broadsheets that morning had taken a wait-and-see attitude, reporting the bare facts. The tabloids, on the other hand, were doing their usual. Isabelle had watched BBC1 as she’d made her preparations for the day, and the morning talking heads did their typical bit with both the broadsheets and the tabloids, holding them up for the delectation of their viewers and commenting upon the stories featured. Thus in advance of heading to the Yard, she knew that gallons of newsprint were being devoted to the “Copper Chase Disaster.” This gave her time to prepare. Whatever she reported to Hillier had to be good, and she damn well knew it. For once the papers connected the victim with his famous brother, which would hardly take long considering Zaynab Bourne’s threats of the previous day, the story would have even stronger legs. Undoubtedly then it would run for days. Things could have been worse, but Isabelle couldn’t quite see how.

She had an Irish coffee prior to leaving for work. She told herself that the caffeine would counteract the effects of the whisky, and besides, after being up for most of the night, she had earned it. She drank it down quickly. She also tucked four airline bottles of vodka into her bag. She assured herself that she likely wouldn’t need them, and anyway they were not enough to do anything but help her think clearly if she felt muddled during the day.

She stopped in at the incident room at work. She told Philip Hale to relieve the officer at St. Thomas’ Hospital and to remain there. His startled expression replied that as a DI, he should not be asked to do something that a uniformed constable could easily do, as it was a waste of manpower. She waited for him actually to make a comment, but he sucked in a breath and said nothing but, “Guv,” in polite response. No matter because John Stewart talked for him, saying laconically, “Due respect, guv …,” which, Isabelle knew, he felt nothing of anyway. She snapped, “What is it?” and he pointed out that using a detective inspector as some sort of single-headed Cerberus at the hospital when he could otherwise be handling what he’d earlier been told to handle—all of the background checks which were, by the way, mounting up—was hardly a wise use of Philip’s expertise. She told him she didn’t need his advice. “Get on to forensics and stay glued to them. Why’s the analysis of those hairs found on the body taking so long? And where the hell is DI Lynley?”

He’d been called up to Hillier’s office, she was informed. Stewart did the informing, and he looked as if nothing could have pleased him more than to be the person sharing that bit of news with her.

She might otherwise have avoided her meeting with Hillier, but because Lynley had been there—doubtless making his own report on the goings-on of the previous day—she had no choice but to take herself to the assistant commissioner’s office. She refused to fortify herself before heading there. Lynley’s impertinent question about her drinking still plagued her.

She met him in the corridor near Hillier’s office. He said, “You look like you’ve had no sleep.”

She told him she’d returned to the hospital and remained there long into the night. “How are things?” she asked in conclusion, with a nod towards the AC’s office.

“As expected. It could have gone better with Matsumoto yesterday. He wants to know why it didn’t.”

“Does he see that as your position, Thomas?”

“What?”

“Making those sorts of determinations. Making reports to him about my performance. Official snout. Whatever.”

Lynley gazed at her in a fashion she found disconcerting. It wasn’t sexual. She could have dealt with that. It was, instead, rather more than intolerably kind. He said quietly, “I’m on your side, Isabelle.”

“Are you?”

“I am. He’s thrown you headfirst into the investigation because he’s being pressured from above to fill Malcolm Webberly’s position and he wants to know how you do the job. But what’s going on with him is only partially about you. The rest is politics. Politics involve the commissioner, the Home Office, and the press. As you’re feeling the heat, so is he.”