This Body of Death (21 page)

“An unfortunate by-product of rampant capitalism.”

She smiled at this. “You can be mildly amusing.”

“So I’ve been told, generally with the stress on
mildly
.”

Their drinks arrived. He noticed that she took hers up with some alacrity. She apparently noticed him noticing. “I’m trying to drown the memory of Jayson. It was the appalling earlobes.”

“An interesting stylistic choice,” he admitted. “One wonders what the next fad will be now that bodily mutilation is in vogue.”

“Branding, I daresay. What did you make of him?”

“Aside from his earlobes? I’d say his alibi will be simple enough to confirm. The copies of receipts from the till will have the time of day printed on them—”

“Someone could have stood in his place in the shop, Thomas.”

“—and likely there’s going to be a regular customer or two, not to mention another shopkeeper hereabouts, who’ll be able to confirm he was here. I don’t see him as likely to tear open someone’s jugular vein, do you?”

“Admittedly, no. Paolo di Fazio?”

“Or whoever might be at the other end of the postcards. That was a mobile number on it.”

Isabelle reached for her handbag and brought the postcards out. Jayson had given them over with a “happy to be rid of them, darling,” upon her request. She said to Lynley, “They make things interesting,” and then observing him, “which brings us to Sergeant Havers.”

“Speaking of interesting,” he noted wryly.

“Have you been happy working with her?”

“I have been, very.”

“Despite her …” Ardery seemed to search for a word.

He supplied her with several. “Recalcitrance? Obstinate refusal to toe the line? Lack of finesse? Intriguing personal habits?”

Ardery brought her wine to her lips, and she examined him over the glass rim as she drank. “You’re rather oddly paired. One wouldn’t expect it. I think you know what I mean. I do know she’s had professional difficulties. I’ve read her personnel file.”

“Just hers?”

“Of course not. I’ve read everyone’s. Yours as well. I mean to have this job, Thomas. I mean to have a team that works like a well-oiled machine. If Sergeant Havers turns out to be a loose screw in the works, I’m going to get rid of her.”

“Is that why you’re advising change?”

She frowned. “Change?”

“Barbara’s clothing. The makeup. I expect to see her with her teeth repaired and sporting a designer hairdo next.”

“It doesn’t hurt a woman to look her best. I’d advise a man on my team to do something about his appearance if he came to work looking like Barbara Havers. As it happens, she’s the only one who comes to work looking like she’s slept rough the night before. Hasn’t anyone ever spoken to her before? Didn’t Superintendent Webberly? Didn’t you?”

“She is who she is,” Lynley said. “Good mind and big heart.”

“You like her.”

“I can’t work with people I don’t like, guv.”

“In private conversation, it’s Isabelle,” she said.

His eyes met hers. He saw hers were brown, as his were, but not uniformly so. They were richly speckled with hazel and he reckoned that if she wore different colours to what she had on at present—a cream-coloured blouse beneath a well-tailored russet jacket—they might even appear green. He shifted his gaze and took in their surroundings. He said, “This is hardly private, is it?”

“I think you know what I mean.” She glanced at her watch. She still had half a glass of wine left and before she stood, she tossed the rest of it down. “Let’s find Paolo di Fazio,” she told him. “He should be back at his stall by now.”

H
E WAS
. T
HEY
found him in the midst of attempting to persuade a middle-aged couple to have masks made as souvenirs of their silver wedding anniversary trip to London. He’d brought forth his artistic instruments and laid them on the counter, and he’d set up a collection of sample masks as well. These were mounted on rods that were fixed onto small plinths of finished wood. Fashioned from plaster of Paris, the masks were startlingly lifelike, similar to the death masks that had once been created from the corpses of people of significance.

“The perfect way for you to remember this visit to London,” di Fazio told the couple. “So much more meaningful than a coffee mug with a Royal’s face on it, eh?”

The couple hesitated. They said to each other, “Should we … ?” and di Fazio waited for their decision. His expression was polite, and it didn’t alter when they said they would have to think about it.

When they moved off, di Fazio gave his attention to Lynley and Ardery. “Another fine-looking couple,” he said. “Each of you has a face
made
for sculpture. Your children are, I expect, as handsome as you.”

Lynley heard Ardery snort with amusement. She showed her warrant card and said, “Superintendent Isabelle Ardery. New Scotland Yard. This is DI Lynley.”

Unlike Jayson Druther, di Fazio knew at once why they were there. He took off the wire-framed spectacles he wore, began to polish them on the front of his shirt, and said, “Jemima?”

“You know about what’s happened to her, then.”

He returned the glasses to his face and ran a hand over longish dark hair. He was a good-looking man, Lynley saw, short and compact but with shoulders and chest suggesting that he worked with weights. Di Fazio said abruptly, “Of course I know what’s happened to Jemima. All of us know.”

“All? Jayson Druther had no idea what’s happened to her.”

“He wouldn’t,” di Fazio said. “He’s an idiot.”

“Did Jemima feel that way about him?”

“Jemima was good to people. She would never have said.”

“How did you learn of her death?” Lynley asked.

“Bella told me.” He added what Barbara’s report had indicated: that he was one of the lodgers at the home of Bella McHaggis in Putney. In fact, he was the reason, he said, that Jemima had established a lodging place with Mrs. McHaggis. He’d told her about a vacant room there not long after he’d met her.

“When was this?” Lynley asked.

“A week or two after she got to London. Sometime last November.”

“And how did you meet her?” Isabelle asked.

“At the shop.” He went on to say that he rolled his own, and he bought both his tobacco and his papers from the cigar shop. “Usually from that idiot, Jayson,” he added. “
Pazzo uomo
. But one day Jemima was there instead.”

“Italian, are you, Mr. di Fazio?” Lynley asked.

Di Fazio took a rollie from the pocket of his shirt—he wore a crisp white shirt and a very clean pair of jeans—and he put it behind his ear. He said, “With a name like di Fazio, that’s an excellent deduction.”

“I think the inspector meant a native of Italy,” Isabelle said. “Your English is perfect.”

“I’ve lived here since I was ten.”

“You were born … ?”

“In Palermo. Why? What does this have to do with Jemima? I came here legally, if that’s what you’re interested in, not that it matters much these days with the EU mess and people wandering between borders whenever they feel like it.”

Ardery, Lynley saw, indicated a change of direction with a slight lifting of her fingers from the countertop. She said, “We understand you were collecting National Portrait Gallery postcards for Jemima. Had she asked you to do that, or was it your idea?”

“Why would it have been my idea?”

“Perhaps you can tell us.”

“It wasn’t. I saw one of the cards in Leicester Square. I recognised it from the portrait gallery show—there’s a banner out front and Jemima’s picture’s on it, if you haven’t seen it—and I picked it up.”

“Where was the postcard?”

“I don’t remember …near the half-price ticket booth? Maybe near the Odeon? It was stuck up with Blu-Tack and it had the message on it, so I took it down and gave it to her.”

“Did you phone the number on the back of the card?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t know who the hell it was or what he wanted.”

“‘He,’” Lynley noted. “So you knew it was a man who’d been distributing the cards.”

It was one of those
gotcha
moments, and di Fazio—clearly no fool—understood this. He took a few seconds before he answered. “She told me her partner was likely doing it. Her
former
partner. A bloke from Hampshire. She knew from the phone number on the back of the card. She said she’d left him, but he hadn’t taken it well and now, obviously, he was trying to find her. She didn’t want to be found. She wanted to get the cards down before someone who knew where she was saw one and phoned him. So she collected them and I collected them. As many as we could find and whenever we had the chance.”

“Were you involved with her?” Lynley asked.

“She was my friend.”

“Beyond friendship. Were you involved with her or merely hoping to be involved with her?”

Again, di Fazio didn’t reply at once. He was obviously no fool, so he knew that any way he answered could make him look bad. Yes, no, maybe, or whatever, there was always the sexual element between men and women to consider and what the sexual element could lead to by way of motives for murder.

“Mr. di Fazio?” Ardery said. “Is there something about the question you don’t understand?”

He said abruptly, “We were lovers for a time.”

“Ah,” Ardery said.

He looked irritated. “This was before she came to live at Bella’s. She had a wretched room in Charing Cross Road, up above Keira News. She was paying too much for it.”

“But that’s where you and she … ?” Ardery let him complete the thought on his own. “How long had you known her when you became lovers?”

He bristled. “I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”

Ardery said nothing in answer to this and neither did Lynley. Di Fazio finally spat out, “A week. A few days. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Ardery asked. “Mr. di Fazio, I have a feeling that—”

“I went in for tobacco. She was friendly, flirty, you know how it is. I asked her if she wanted to go for a drink after work. We went to that place on Long Acre …the pub …I don’t know what it’s called. It was packed, so we had a drink on the pavement with everyone else and then we left. We went to her room.”

“So you became lovers the day you met,” Ardery clarified.

“It happens.”

“And then you began to live together in Putney,” Lynley noted. “With Bella McHaggis. At her home.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.” Di Fazio took up his cigarette. He said if they were going to talk further—and it was costing him in bloody customers, by the way—then they were going to have to do it outside where he at least could have a fag while they spoke.

Ardery told him it was absolutely fine to move outside, and he gathered up his tools and shoved them under the counter along with the sample masks on their wooden plinths. Lynley noted the tools—sharp and well suited for activities other than sculpting—and knew Ardery had done likewise. They exchanged a glance and followed di Fazio out into the open air.

There he lit his roll-up and told Lynley and Ardery the rest. He’d thought they’d continue as lovers, he said, but he hadn’t counted on Jemima’s desire to follow the rules.

“No sex,” was how he put it. “Bella doesn’t allow it.”

“Opposed to the whole idea of sex, is she?” Lynley asked.

Sex among the lodgers, di Fazio told them. He’d tried to convince Jemima that they could continue as before with no one the wiser because Bella slept like the dead on the floor above them and Frazer Chaplin—this was the third lodger—had the basement room two floors below, so he wouldn’t know what was going on either. The two of them—Jemima and di Fazio—occupied the only two bedrooms on the first floor of the house. There was no bloody way that Bella would find out.

“Jemima wouldn’t have it,” di Fazio said. “When she came to see the room, Bella told her straightaway that she’d tossed out the last lodger for getting involved with Frazer. Caught her coming out of Frazer’s room early one morning and that was that. Jemima didn’t want that to happen to her—decent lodgings are not easy to find—so she said no more sex. At first it was no sex at Bella’s and then it was no sex altogether. It had got to be too much trouble, she said.”

“Too much trouble?” Ardery asked. “Where were you having it?”

“Not in public,” he replied. “And not in Abney Park Cemetery, if that’s where you’re heading. At my studio.” He shared space with three other artists, he said, in a railway arch near Clapham Junction. At first they went there—he and Jemima—but after a few weeks, she’d had enough. “She said she didn’t like the deception,” he said.

“And did you believe her?”

“I hardly had a choice. She said it was over. She made it over.”

“Rather like she’d done with the postcard bloke? According to what she told you?”

“Rather like,” he said.

Which gave them both a motive for murder, Lynley thought.

Y
OLANDA THE
P
SYCHIC HAD AN ESTABLISHMENT IN A MARKET
area just off Queensway in Bayswater. Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata found it without too much trouble once they unearthed the market itself, which they accessed by means of an unmarked entry between a tiny newsagent and one of the ubiquitous cheap luggage shops that seemed to pop up in every corner of London. The market was the sort of place one would walk right past without noticing: a low-ceilinged, ethnic-oriented, locals-only warren of passages in which Russian cafés vied with Asian bakeries, and shops selling hookahs sat next to kiosks blaring African music.

A question asked in the Russian café produced the information that there was within the environs of the market a location called Psychic Mews. There, Barbara and Nkata were told, Yolanda the Psychic operated and, considering the hour of the day, she was likely to be present.

A little more wandering brought them to Psychic Mews. This turned out to be what seemed like—but probably wasn’t—an authentic old mews complete with cobbled street and buildings having the appearance of former stables, like all mews in London. Unlike other mews, however, it was under the protection of a roof, as was the rest of the market. This afforded Psychic Mews an appropriate atmosphere of gloom, mystery, and even danger. One expected, Barbara thought, Jack the Ripper to leap down from a rooftop at any moment.

Yolanda’s business was one of three psychic sanctuaries in the place. Its single window—curtained for the privacy of clients within—bore a sill of accouterments appropriate to her line of employment: a porcelain hand with its palm outward and all the lines upon it identified, a similar porcelain head with various parts of the skull indicated, an astrological chart, a deck of tarot cards. Only the crystal ball was missing.

“You believe this muck?” Barbara asked Nkata. “Read your horoscope in the paper or anything?”

Winston compared his palm to the porcelain one in the window. “’Cording to this, I should’ve died last week,” he noted, and he shouldered open the door to the place. He had to duck to get inside, and Barbara followed him into an anteroom in which incense burned and sitar music played. Against a wall, the form of the elephant god was rendered in plaster and across from it, a crucifix hung above what seemed to be a kachina doll, while an enormous Buddha on the floor appeared to serve the purpose of a doorstop. Yolanda looked to be someone who covered all the spiritual bases, Barbara concluded.

“Anyone here?” she called.

In reply a woman emerged from behind a beaded curtain. She wasn’t dressed as Barbara had expected. One somehow thought a psychic would be decked out in gypsy gear: all scarves, colourful skirts, and heaps of gold necklaces with matching hoop earrings of massive size. But instead, the woman wore a business suit that Isabelle Ardery would have heartily approved of as it was tailored to fit her somewhat stout body and even to Barbara’s unschooled eyes it seemed to announce itself with the words
French designer
. Her one bow to stereotype was the scarf she used, but even this she’d only folded into a band to hold back her hair. And instead of black, the hair was orange, a rather disturbing shade that suggested an unfortunate encounter with a bottle of peroxide.

“Are you Yolanda?” Barbara asked.

In reply, she put her hands to her ears. She clamped her eyes shut. “Yes, yes, all right!” She had an odd, low voice. She sounded like a man. “I bloody well
hear
you, don’t I!”

“Sorry,” Barbara said, although, to her thinking, she hadn’t spoken loudly at all. Psychics, she thought, must be sensitive to sound. “I didn’t mean—”

“I’ll tell her! But you must stop roaring. I’m not deaf, you know.”

“I didn’t think I was loud.” Barbara dug out her ID. “Scotland Yard,” she said.

Yolanda opened her eyes. She didn’t cast even a glance in the direction of Barbara’s warrant card. Rather she said, “Quite a shouter, he is.”

“Who?”

“He says he’s your dad. He says you’re meant to—”

“He’s dead,” Barbara told her.

“Of course he is. I could hardly hear him otherwise. I hear dead people.”

“Like in ‘I see dead people’?”

“Don’t be clever. All right! All right! Don’t be so loud! Your dad—”

“He wasn’t a shouter. Not ever.”

“He is now, luv. He says you’re meant to call on your mum. She’s missing you.”

Barbara doubted that. Last time she’d seen her mother, the woman had believed she was looking at their longtime neighbour Mrs. Gustafson, and her resultant panic—in her final years at home she’d grown to fear Mrs. Gustafson, as if the old lady had somehow morphed into Lucifer—had not been assuaged by anything Barbara had attempted, from showing her identification to appealing to any of the other residents among whom Mrs. Havers lived in a private care home in Greenford. Barbara had not yet been back. It had seemed, at the time, the course of wisdom.

“What shall I tell him?” Yolanda asked. And then with her hands over her ears once again, “
What?
Oh, of course I believe you!” And then to Barbara, “James, yes? But he wasn’t called that, was he?”

“Jimmy.” Barbara shifted uncomfortably on her feet. She looked at Winston who himself seemed to be anticipating an unwelcome message from someone in the great beyond. “Tell him I’ll go. Tomorrow. Whatever.”

“You mustn’t lie to the spirit world.”

“Next week then.”

Yolanda closed her eyes. “She says next week, James.” And then to Barbara, “You can’t manage sooner? He’s quite insistent.”

“Tell him I’m on a case. He’ll understand.”

Apparently he did, for once Yolanda communicated this matter into the spirit world, she breathed a sigh of relief and gave her attention to Winston. He had a magnificent aura, she told him. Well developed, unusual, brilliant, and evolved. Fan-tas-tic.

Nkata said politely, “Ta,” and then, “C’n we have a word, Miss—”

“Just Yolanda,” she said.

“No other name?” Barbara asked her. This would be for the record and all that. Because as this was a police matter …Yolanda would surely get the point, eh?

“Police? I’m legal,” Yolanda said. “Licenced. Whatever you need.”

“I expect you are. We’re not here to check your business details. So your full name is … ?”

It turned out—no surprise—that Yolanda was a pseudonym, Sharon Price not having quite the same cachet when it came to the psychic trade.

“Would that be Miss or Missus Price?” Nkata asked, having his notebook out and his mechanical pencil poised. It would be missus, she confirmed. Mister was a driver of one of London’s black cabs and the children of mister and missus were both grown and flown.

“You’re here because of
her
, aren’t you?” Yolanda said shrewdly.

“You knew Jemima Hastings, then, yeah?” Nkata said.

Yolanda missed the tense of the verb. She said, “Oh, I know Jemima, yes. But I didn’t mean Jemima. I meant
her
, that cow over Putney. She actually rang you, didn’t she? She’s got her nerve.”

They were all still standing in the anteroom, and Barbara asked was there a place they could sit for a proper conversation? To this Yolanda waved them through the beaded curtain, where she had a setup that walked a tightrope between analyst’s office with a fainting sofa along one wall and a séance locale with a round table in the middle and a thronelike chair at twelve o’clock, obviously meant for the medium. Yolanda went for this and indicated Havers and Nkata were meant to sit at three and seven o’clock respectively. This had to do with Nkata’s aura, evidently, and with Barbara’s lack of one.

“Bit anxious about
you
, I am,” Yolanda said to her.

“You and everyone else.” Barbara cast a glance at Nkata. He gave her a look of deep and utterly spurious concern over her apparent lack of aura. “I’ll see to you later,” she muttered under her breath, to which he stifled a smile.

“Oh, I can see you’re unbelievers,” Yolanda said in her strange man’s voice. She reached beneath the table then, whereupon Barbara expected it to levitate. But instead the psychic brought forth the ostensible reason for her ruined vocal cords: a packet of Dunhills. She lit up and shoved the cigarettes towards Barbara, with the full knowledge, it seemed, that Barbara was a fellow in this matter. “You’re dying to,” she said. “Go ahead,” and “Sorry, luv,” to Winston. “But not to worry. Passive smoking isn’t how you’re meant to go. More than that, however, and you’ll have to pay me five quid.”

“Reckon I’d like to be surprised,” he responded.

“Suit yourself, dearie.” She inhaled with great pleasure and settled back into her throne for a proper natter. She said, “I don’t want her living in Putney. Well, not so much in Putney itself as with
her
and by
her
; I s’pose I mean in her house.”

“You didn’t want Jemima living in Mrs. McHaggis’s house?” Barbara said.

“Right.” Yolanda flicked ash onto the floor. This was covered by a Persian carpet, but she didn’t seem concerned. She said, “Houses of death need to be decontaminated. Sage burning in every room and believe you me it doesn’t do just to wave it about as one runs through the place.
And
I’m not talking of the sage you get in the market, mind you. One doesn’t buy a packet in Sainsbury’s from the dried herb shelf and put a teaspoonful in an ashtray and light it and there you have it. Not by a bloody long chalk. One gets the real thing, bound up properly and meant to be burnt. One lights it and appropriate prayers are said. Spirits needing to be released are then released and the place is cleansed of death and only then is it wholesome enough for someone to resume a life within it.”

Winston, Barbara saw, was noting all this down as if with the intention of stopping off somewhere for the appropriate decontaminants. She said, “Sorry, Mrs. Price, but—”

“Yolanda, for God’s sake.”

“Right. Yolanda. Are you referring to what’s happened to Jemima Hastings?”

Yolanda looked confused. “I’m referring,” she said, “to the fact that she lives in a House of Death. Mc
Hag
gis—was ever a woman more appropriately named, I ask you—is a widow. Her husband died in the house.”

“Suspicious circumstances?”

Yolanda
hmmphed
. “You’ll have to ask McHaggis that.
I
can see contagion oozing out of the windows every time I go past. I’ve
told
Jemima she’s meant to clear out of there. And all right, I admit it, I might have been rather insistent about it.”

“Which would be why the cops were phoned?” Barbara asked. “Who phoned them? I ask because what we know is that you were warned off stalking Jemima at one point. Is our information—”

“That’s an
interpretation
, isn’t it?” Yolanda said. “I’ve expressed my concern. It’s grown, so I’ve expressed it again. P’rhaps I’ve been a bit …Oh, p’rhaps I took things to extremes, p’rhaps I did a bit of
lurking
outside, but what am I meant to do? Just let her
languish
? Every time I see her, it’s shrunken more, and am I meant to stand by and let that happen? Say nothing about it?”

“‘It’s shrunken more,’” Barbara repeated. “‘It’ being … ?”

“Her aura,” Nkata supplied helpfully, obviously on top of the situation.

“Yes,” Yolanda confirmed. “When I first met Jemima, she glowed. Well, not like you, luv”—this to Nkata—“but still more noticeably than most people.”

“How’d you meet her, then?” Barbara asked. Enough of auras, she decided, as Winston was beginning to look decidedly smug about his.

“At the ice rink. Well, not at the ice rink per se, naturally. More like
from
the ice rink. Abbott introduced us. We have coffee together sometimes in the café, Abbott and I. And I run into him in the shops as well.
He’s
got something of a pleasant aura himself—”

“Right,” Barbara murmured.

“—and as he gets such grief from his wives—well, this would be his former wives, wouldn’t it—I like to tell him not to worry so about that. A man can only do what a man can do, eh? And if he doesn’t make enough to pay them all support, then he isn’t to drive himself into the grave over it. He does what he can. He teaches, doesn’t he? He walks dogs in the park. He tutors children in reading. What more can those three tarts expect from him?”

“What more indeed,” Barbara said.

“Who’d this bloke be?” Winston asked.

Abbott Langer, Yolanda told them. He was an instructor at the Queen’s Ice and Bowl, which was just up the street from this market in which they sat.

It turned out that Jemima Hastings had been taking ice-skating lessons from Abbott Langer and Yolanda had encountered the two of them having a post-lesson cup of coffee in the Russian café inside this very market. Abbott had introduced them. Yolanda admired Jemima’s aura—

“Bet you did,” Barbara muttered.

—and she’d asked Jemima a few questions which stimulated conversation which in turn prompted Yolanda to hand over her business card. And that was that.

“She’s come to see me three or four times,” Yolanda said.

“About what?”

Yolanda managed to draw in on her cigarette and look aghast simultaneously. “I don’t speak about my clients,” she said. “This is confidential, what goes on in here.”

“We need a general idea … ?”

“Oh don’t you just.” She blew out a thin stream of smoke. “
Generally
she’s like all the rest. She wants to talk about a bloke. Well, don’t they all? It’s
always
about a bloke, eh? Will he? Won’t he? Will they? Won’t they? Should she? Shouldn’t she?
My
concern, however, is that house she lives in, but has she ever wanted to hear about that? Has she ever wanted to hear about where she
ought
to be living?”