This Body of Death (45 page)

She hadn’t done, for which Isabelle praised God. She told the woman that someone would fetch the bin from her and in the meantime, she wasn’t to open it again or even touch it.

“It’s important, isn’t it?” Bella looked quite pleased with herself. “I
knew
it was important, didn’t I.”

There was no doubt of that, although how to interpret the handbag’s importance was something over which Isabelle found herself at odds with Lynley. As they rode the lift on their return to the incident room, she said to him, “He had to have known where she lived, Thomas.”

Lynley said, “Who?” and the way he said it told her he was thinking in another direction entirely.

“Matsumoto. It would have been a simple matter for him to put the handbag in that bin.”

“And keep the murder weapon?” Lynley asked. “How d’you reckon his thinking went on that one?”

“He’s mad as a hatter. He isn’t thinking. He
wasn’t
thinking. Or if he
was
thinking, he was thinking about doing what the angels told him to do. Get rid of this, hold on to that, run, hide, follow her, whatever.” She glanced at him sharply. He was gazing at the floor of the lift, his brow furrowed and the knuckle of his index finger to his lips in a posture that suggested consideration of her words and of everything else. She said, “Well?”

He said, “We’ve Paolo di Fazio inside that house. We’ve Frazer Chaplin inside it as well. And then there’s the matter of Yolanda.”

“You can’t mean to suggest another
woman
killed Jemima Hastings. By driving a spike into her carotid artery? Heavens, Thomas, the entire means of murder isn’t the least bit feminine, and I daresay you know it.”

“I agree it’s unlikely,” Lynley said. “But I don’t want to discount the fact that Yolanda might be protecting someone who handed the bag over to her and asked her to be rid of it. She wants talking to.”

“Oh, for God’s bloody sake …” And then she saw his expression. She knew from it that he was assessing her, and she also knew what he was assessing. She felt a bubble of anger that
any
man should stand in judgement of her in a situation in which he would not stand in judgement of another male. She said, “I want to have a close look at the contents of that bag before we hand it over to forensics. And don’t bloody tell me that’s irregular, Thomas. We don’t have time to wait round for those blokes to tell us every fingerprint is useless. We need a result.”

“You’re—”

“We’ll wear gloves, all right? And the bag won’t leave my sight or yours. Does that please or do you want more guarantees?”

“I was going to say you’re in charge. You give the orders,” he replied. “I was going to say it’s your case.”

She doubted that. He was as smooth as icing on a cake, he was. She said, “It is. Mind you remember that,” as they left the lift together.

The most important belonging of Jemima Hastings inside the bag was the mobile phone, and this Isabelle handed over to John Stewart with orders to deal with it, to listen to voice messages, to trace calls, to read and make note of any and all texts, and to get his hands on the mobile’s records. “We’ll want to use the mobile phone towers as well,” she added. “The pinging, or whatever the hell they call it.” The rest of the contents she and Lynley went through together, most of it seeming to be perfectly straightforward: a small folding map of London, a paperback novel showing a predilection for historical mysteries, a wallet holding thirty-five pounds along with two credit cards; three biros, a broken pencil, a pair of sunglasses in a case, a hairbrush, a comb, four lipsticks, and a mirror. There was also a list of products from the cigar shop, along with an advertisement for Queen’s Ice and Bowl—“Great Food! Birthday Parties! Corporate Events!”—an offer for membership to a Putney gym and spa, and business cards from Yolanda the Psychic, London Skate Centre, Abbott Langer Professional Ice Instructor, and Sheldon Pockworth Numismatics.

This last gave Isabelle pause as she tried to recall what numismatics referred to. She came up with stamps. Lynley said coins.

She told him to check it out. He said, “Along with Yolanda? Because I still think—”

“All right. Along with Yolanda. But I swear she has nothing to do with this, Thomas. A woman did
not
commit this crime.”

L
YNLEY FOUND
Y
OLANDA
the Psychic’s place of business in Queensway with little trouble although he had to wait outside the faux mews building where she plied her trade because a sign on the door declared I
N
S
ESSION!
N
O
E
NTRY!
, and from this he assumed that Yolanda was in the process of doing whatever it was that psychics did for their clients: tea leaves, tarot cards, palms, or the like. He fetched himself a take-away coffee from a Russian café tucked in the junction of two of the indoor market’s corridors, and he returned to Psychic Mews with cup in hand. By that time, the sign had been removed from the door, so he finished the coffee quickly and let himself in.

“That you, dearest?” Yolanda called from an inner room, shielded from the reception area by a beaded curtain. “Bit early, aren’t you?”

“No,” Lynley replied to her first question. “DI Lynley. New Scotland Yard.”

She came through the curtain. He took in her startling orange hair and her tailored suit that he recognised—with thanks to his wife—as either vintage Coco Chanel or a Coco Chanel knockoff. She wasn’t what he had expected.

She stopped when she saw him. “It throbs,” she said.

He blinked. “Pardon?”

“Your aura. It’s taken a terrible blow. It wants to regain its strength but something’s got in the way.” She held her hand up before he could reply. She cocked her head as if listening to something. “Hmm. Yes,” she said. “It’s not for nothing, you know. She intends to return. In the meantime your part is to become ready for her. That’s a dual message.”

“From the great beyond?” He asked the question lightly but, of course, he thought at once of Helen, no matter the irrationality of applying the idea of return to someone so completely gone.

Yolanda said, “You’d be wise not to make light of these matters. Those who make light generally regret it. What’d you say your name was?”

“DI Lynley. Is that what happened to Jemima Hastings? Did she make light?”

Yolanda ducked behind a screen for a moment. Lynley heard the scratch of a match. He thought she was lighting incense or a candle—either seemed likely and there was already a cone of incense burning at the crossed legs of a seated Buddha—but she emerged with a cigarette. She said to him, “It’s good that you gave it up. I don’t see you dying because of your lungs.”

He absolutely refused to be seduced. He said, “As to Jemima?”

“She didn’t smoke.”

“That didn’t much help her in the end, did it?”

Yolanda took a heavy hit from the tobacco. “I already talked to the cops,” she said. “That black man. Strongest aura I’ve seen in years. P’rhaps ever, to tell you the truth. But that woman with him? The one with the teeth? I’d say she has issues impeding her growth, and they aren’t exactly dental. What would you say?”

“May I call you Mrs. Price?” Lynley asked. “I understand that’s your real name.”

“You may not. Not on these premises. Here, I’m Yolanda.”

“Very well. Yolanda. You were in Oxford Road earlier today. We must talk about that, about Jemima Hastings as well. Shall we do it here or elsewhere?”

“Elsewhere being … ?”

“They’ll have an interview room at the Ladbroke Grove station. We can use that if you prefer.”

She chuckled. “Cops. You best be careful how you act else it’ll disappear altogether. There’s such a thing as karma, Mr. Lynley. That’s what you said your name is, didn’t you?”

“That’s what I said.”

She examined him. “You don’t look like a cop. You don’t talk like a cop. You don’t belong.”

How true, he thought. But this was hardly a startling deduction for her to have made. He said, “Where would you like to talk, Yolanda?”

She went through the beaded curtain. He followed her.

There was a table in the centre of the inner room, but she didn’t sit there. Instead, she went to an overstuffed armchair that faced a Victorian fainting sofa. She lay upon this latter and closed her eyes, although she still managed to smoke her cigarette unimpeded. He took the chair and said to her, “Tell me about Oxford Road first. We’ll get to Jemima in a moment.”

There was little enough to tell, according to Yolanda the Psychic. She’d been in Oxford Road because of its inherent evil, she declared. She’d failed to save Jemima from it despite her warnings to move house, and with Jemima having fallen victim to its depravity, she was duty bound to try to save the rest of them. Clearly, they weren’t about to leave the place, so she was trying to purify it from without: She was burning sage. “Not that that bloody woman will listen to anything I try to tell her,” she declared. “Not that she would even begin to appreciate my efforts on her behalf.”

“What sort of evil?” Lynley asked.

Yolanda opened her eyes. “There aren’t different
sorts
of evil,” she replied. “There’s just it.
It
. Evil. So far it’s taken two people from that house, and it’s after more. Her husband died there, you know.”

“Mrs. McHaggis’s husband?”

“So you’d think she’d purify the place, but will she? No. She’s too much the dim bulb to see the importance. Now Jemima’s gone as well, and there’ll be another. Just you wait.”

“And you were there solely to perform a”—Lynley sought the term that best fit burning sage in someone’s front garden and settled on—“a rite of some kind?”

“Not of ‘some kind.’ Oh I know what your sort think about my sort. You’ve no belief till life brings you to your knees and then you come running, don’t you?”

“Is that what happened to Jemima? Why did she come to see you? Initially, I mean.”

“I don’t speak about my clients.”

“I know that’s what you told the other officers, but we’ve a problem, you see, as you’re not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a solicitor … ? There’s no privilege to invoke, as far as I can tell.”

“Which means exactly what?”

“Which means your failure to disclose information can be seen as impeding a police investigation.”

She was silent, digesting this. She drew in on her cigarette and blew the smoke heavenward, thoughtfully.

Lynley went on. “So my suggestion is that you tell me whatever seems relevant. Why did she come to see you?”

Yolanda continued silent for a moment. She seemed to be tossing round the ramifications of speaking or not speaking. She finally said, “I told the others already: love. It’s why they usually come.”

“Love for whom?”

Again a hesitation before she said, “The Irishman. The one who works at the ice rink.”

“Frazer Chaplin?”

“She wanted to know what they always want to know.” Yolanda moved restlessly on the sofa. She reached for an ashtray beneath it and stubbed out her cigarette. She said, “I
told
the others that, more or less. The black man and the woman with the teeth. I don’t see how going over it all again with you is going to make a difference.”

Lynley gave passing wry thought to how Barbara Havers would react to being called “the woman with the teeth.” He let the thought go. He said, “Call it a new perspective: mine. What, exactly, did you tell her?”

She sighed. “Love’s risky.”

Isn’t it just, Lynley thought.

“I mean as a topic,” she went on. “One can’t make predictions about it. There’re too many variables, always the unexpected bits, especially if one doesn’t have the other person there to …well, to scrutinise, you see. So one keeps things
vague
, in a manner of speaking. That’s what I did.”

“To keep the client coming back, I should guess.”

She glanced his way, as if to evaluate his tone. He kept his face impassive. She said, “This is a business. I don’t deny it. But it’s also a service that I provide and, believe me, people need it. ’Sides, all sorts of things come up when I’m engaged with a client. They come to see me for one reason, but they find others. ’S not
me
keeping them coming back, I can tell you that. It’s what I know. It’s what I tell them that I know.”

“And Jemima?”

“What about her?”

“She had other reasons, beyond her questions about love?”

“She had.”

“And what were those?”

Yolanda sat up. She swung her legs round. They were chunky, without ankles, a single plane from her knees to her feet. She plopped her hands down on either side of her thighs as if for balance, and while she held herself straight, her head was lowered. She shook this.

Lynley thought she meant to refuse, no more information, sir. But instead, she said, “Something’s standing between me and the others. Everything’s gone quiet. But I intended no harm. I didn’t know.”

Lynley felt strongly disinclined to play along. He said, “Mrs. Price, if you know something, I must insist—”

“Yolanda!” she said, her head rising with a jerk. “It’s Yolanda in here. I’m having enough trouble with the spirit world as it is, and I don’t need someone in this room reminding them I’ve another life out there, d’you understand that? Ever since she died—ever since I was
told
that she died—it’s gone quiet and dark. I’m going through the motions, I’ve been doing that for days, and I don’t know what I’m failing to see.” Then she rose. The room was dim and gloomy, likely in keeping with her line of work, and she went to the curtained entry where she switched on an overhead light. The illumination brought the dismal little space into unforgiving relief: dust on the furniture, slut’s wool in the corners, secondhand belongings that were chipped and cracked. Yolanda paced the small area. Lynley waited although his patience was wearing thin.