This Body of Death

“He hasn’t, he hasn’t. Not word, not a word. Just that Mummy’s in London settling into a new job. Just as you agreed.”

  “I didn’t agree. Where the hell did you get the idea that I agreed?”

  “It’s only that he said—”

  “Would you have agreed to hand over your children? Would you? Is that the sort of mother you think I am?”

  “I know you’ve tried to be a very good mother. I know you’ve tried. The boys dote on you.”

  “‘Tried? Tried?’” Isabelle suddenly heard herself and wanted to pound her fist against her skull as she realised she’d begun to sound exactly like Sandra, with her infuriating habit of doubling words and phrases, a nervous tic that always sounded as if she believed the world was partially deaf and in need of her constant reiteration.

  “Oh, I’m not saying this right. I’m not saying—”

  “I must get back to work.”

  “But will you come? Will you consider coming? This isn’t about you and it’s not about Bob. It’s about the boys. It’s about the boys.”

  “Don’t you bloody dare tell me what this is about.” Isabelle slammed the phone down. She cursed and dropped her head into her hands. I will not, I will not, she told herself. And then she laughed although even to her own ears she sounded hysterical. It was that bloody doubling of words. She thought she might go mad.

  “Uh …guv?”

  She looked up although she knew before she did so that the marginal deference in the tone marked the interruption as coming from DI John Stewart. He stood there with an expression on his face that told her he’d overheard at least part of her conversation with Sandra. She snapped, “What is it?”

  “The Oxfam bin.”

  It took her a moment before she got her brain round that one: Bella McHaggis and her recycling front garden. She said to Stewart, “What about it, John?”

  “We’ve got more than a handbag inside it. We’ve something you’re going to want to see.”

  THE CONTINUED HEAT wave was, Lynley found, making it a big day at the Queen’s Ice and Bowl, particularly on the ice itself. This was likely the coolest spot in London, and everyone from toddlers to pensioners appeared to be taking advantage of it. Some of them simply clung to the railing at the rink’s edge and pulled themselves along haphazardly. Others more adventurous wobbled round the rink without assistance, the more expert skaters trying to avoid them. In the very middle of the rink, future Olympians practised jumps and spins with varied degrees of success while, negotiating the crowd for space wherever possible, ice-dancing instructors plied their trade with inept partners, making brave attempts to mirror Torvill and Dean.

  Lynley had to wait to speak to Abbott Langer, who was giving a lesson in the middle of the ice. He’d been pointed out to Lynley by the skate-hire bloke who referred to Langer as “the git with the hair.” Lynley hadn’t been certain what was meant by that until he caught a glimpse of the instructor. Then he saw there was no other description needed. He’d not seen such a hirsute Swiss roll outside of a photograph, ever.

  No matter the case, Langer could certainly skate. He launched himself off the ice in an effortless jump as Lynley watched, demonstrating its ease for a young male pupil who looked round ten years old. The child tried it and landed on his bum. Langer glided over and lifted him to his feet. He bent his head to the child’s, they spoke for a moment, and Langer demonstrated a second time. He was very good. He was smooth. He was strong. Lynley wondered if he was also a killer.

  When the lesson finished, Lynley intercepted the skating instructor as he said good-bye to his pupil and put guards on the blades of his skates. Could he have a word? Lynley enquired politely. He showed his identification.

  Langer said, “I’ve spoken to the other two. Black bloke and some dumpy woman. I don’t see how I could have anything else to say.”

  “Loose ends,” Lynley told him. “This shouldn’t take long.” He indicated the café that formed a division between the ice rink and the bowling alley. He said, “Let’s have a coffee, Mr. Langer,” and he waited till Langer resigned himself to a conversation.

  Lynley bought two coffees and took them to the table where Langer dropped his bulky body. He was turning a salt cellar in his fingers. These were thick and strong looking, and his hands were large like the rest of him.

  “Why did you lie to the other officers, Mr. Langer?” Lynley asked him without preamble. “You must have known everything you said would be checked.”

  Langer made no reply to this. Wise man, Lynley thought. He was waiting for more.

  “There are no ex-wives. Nor are there children,” Lynley said. “Why lie about something so easy to disprove?”

  Langer took a moment to tear open two packets of sugar, which he dumped into his coffee. He did not stir it. “It’s nothing to do with what happened to Jemima. I’ve nothing to do with that.”

  “Yes, but you’d say that, wouldn’t you?” Lynley pointed out. “Anyone would.”

  “It’s a matter of consistency. That’s all.”

  “Explain.”

  “I tell everyone the same. Three ex-wives, children. It keeps things simple.”

  “That’s important to you?”

  Langer looked away. From where they sat, the ice rink was visible: all the lovely young things flying about—or otherwise—in their colourful tights and skimpy skirts. “I like to remain uninvolved,” he said. “Ex-wives and children help, I find.”

  “Uninvolved with whom?”

  “I’m an instructor. That’s all I do with them, whatever their ages. Sometimes a young one or a middle-aged one or any of them develop an interest because we’re close on the ice. It’s stupid, it doesn’t mean anything, and I don’t take advantage. Ex-wives make that possible.”

  “With Jemima Hastings as well?”

  “Jemima took lessons from me,” Langer told him. “That’s the extent of it. She used me, rather.”

  “For what?”

  “I told the others this already. I wasn’t lying about that. She wanted to keep her eye on Frazer.”

  “She phoned you on the day she died. Along with the truth about ex-wives and children, you didn’t mention that to the other detectives.”

  Langer took up his coffee. “I hadn’t remembered the call.”

  “And do you now?”

  He looked reflective. “Yes, actually. She was looking for Frazer.”

  “Was she supposed to be meeting him at the cemetery?”

  “I rather think she was checking up on him. She did that often. Anyone Frazer was involved with ended up doing that. Jemima wasn’t the first and she wouldn’t have been the last. Long as he worked here that went on.”

  “A woman checking up on him?”

  “A woman, who didn’t quite trust him, making sure he was walking the straight and narrow. He rarely did.”

  “And for Jemima?”

  “It was likely business as usual for Frazer, but I don’t know, do I? Anyway, I couldn’t help her that day, which she ought to have realised before she rang me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the time. He isn’t here at that hour. Had she thought about it, she would have known he wouldn’t be here. But he wasn’t answering his mobile, she said. She’d rung him a few times and he wasn’t answering and she wanted to know was he still here, where, perhaps, he wouldn’t be able to hear it with all the noise.” He indicated the clamour round them. “But really, she had to have known he’d already left for home. Anyway, that’s what I told her.”

  For home, Lynley thought. “He didn’t go from here directly to Duke’s Hotel?”

  “He always goes home first. He says he doesn’t like to keep his Duke’s kit here where it could get dirty, but knowing Frazer, there’s another reason.” He made a crude gesture with his hands, an indication of sexual intercourse. “Likely he’s been doing the job on someone en route, between here and Duke’s. Or there at home, even. It wouldn’t surprise me. That would be his style. Anyway, Jemima said she??
?d been leaving him messages and she was feeling panicky.”

  “She used that term? Panicky?”

  “No. But I could hear it in her voice.”

  “Was it fear perhaps? Not panic, but fear? She was phoning from a cemetery, after all. People are sometimes frightened in cemeteries.”

  Langer shrugged off this idea. He said, “I don’t think that’s what it was. ’F you ask me, I think it was dread of having to look squarely at something she’s been denying.”

  Interesting point, Lynley thought. He said, “Carry on.”

  “Frazer,” he said. “I expect she wanted very much to think Frazer Chaplin was the one, if you know what I mean, the one in inverted commas. But I expect in her heart she knew he wasn’t.”

  “What makes you draw the latter conclusion?”

  Langer smiled thinly. “Because it’s the conclusion they always reached, Inspector. Every last woman who hooked up with the bloke.”

  THUS LYNLEY GREATLY anticipated meeting the male paragon he’d been hearing about. He made his way to St. James’s Place, a nearly hidden cul-de-sac where Duke’s Hotel formed a stately L of redbrick, decorative ironwork, oriel window, and sumptuous swaths of ivy tumbling from first-floor balconies. He left the Healey Elliott under the watchful eye of a uniformed doorman and entered into the reserved hush one usually encounters in places of worship. Could he be helped? he was asked by a passing bellboy.

  The bar, he replied. An immediate smile of recognition: Lynley’s possession and use of the Voice would make him eternally welcome in any establishment where people spoke in murmurs, called employees “the staff,” and had the good sense to drink sherry before and port after. If the gentleman would come this way … ?

  The bar ran heavily to naval portraits and prints of ruined castles, with a painting of Admiral Nelson in his post-arm days taking a predominant position, as one would expect of a sea-oriented décor. The bar comprised three rooms—two of which were separated by a fireplace in which, mercifully, no fire was burning—and it was furnished with upholstered armchairs and round, glass-topped tables at which were gathered mostly business people at this time of day. They appeared to be tossing back gin and tonics, with a few hardier souls getting glassy-eyed over martinis. This was apparently the signature drink of one of the bartenders, an Italian man with a marked accent who asked Lynley if he wanted the speciality, which—he was told—was neither shaken nor stirred but rather bruised along into some sort of miraculous nectar.

  Lynley demurred. He said he wouldn’t mind a Pellegrino, if they had it. Lime and no ice. And was Frazer Chaplin available for a chat? He produced his identification. The bartender—who bore the unlikely non-Italian name of Heinrich—gave no reaction at all to the presence of a policeman, in possession of a cultured accent or not. Indifferently, he said Frazer Chaplin had not yet arrived. He was expected—with a glance at an impressive watch—in the next quarter hour.

  Did Frazer work regular hours? Lynley enquired of the bartender. Or did he, perhaps, just fill in when things were busy in the hotel?

  Regular hours, he was told. “Wouldn’t have taken the job otherwise,” Heinrich said.

  “Why not?”

  “Evening shift is busiest. The tips are better. So are the customers.”

  Lynley raised an eyebrow, seeking elucidation, which Heinrich was happy to give him. It seemed Frazer enjoyed the attention of various ladies of varying ages who frequented the bar at Duke’s Hotel most evenings. These were international businesswomen generally, in town for one reason or another, and Frazer was apparently willing to give them additional reasons to hang about.

  “Has an eye out for a lady who’ll keep him how he wants to be kept,” was how Heinrich put it. He shook his head, but his expression was unmistakably fond. “Fancies himself a gigolo.”

  “Is that working for him?”

  Heinrich chuckled. “Not yet. But that’s not kept the lad from trying. He wants to own a boutique hotel, just like this place. But he wants someone else to buy it for him.”

  “He’s looking for a great deal of money, then.”

  “That’s Frazer.”

  Lynley thought about this and how it related to the truths Jemima had wished to speak. To a man hoping for money from a woman, the message that she wouldn’t be handing it over to him would indeed be a very hard truth. As would be the possible truth that she wanted nothing more to do with him because she’d discovered he was after her money …if she had money in the first place. But again, and maddeningly, there were other truths when it came to Jemima. To Paolo di Fazio there was a hard truth that might have been told: that she was going to take up life with Frazer Chaplin despite Paolo’s feelings for her. As to everyone from Abbott Langer to Yukio Matsumoto, doubtless a little delving was going to reveal truths everywhere needing to be spoken.

  Lynley did the maths on the time of Frazer Chaplin’s daily arrival in the bar of Duke’s Hotel: The Irishman had ninety minutes between the hour he left the ice rink and when he began work at this location. Was it time enough to race up to Stoke Newington, murder Jemima Hastings, and get to his second job? Lynley didn’t see how. Not only had Abbott Langer suggested that the man went to Putney before heading to Duke’s, but even had that not been the case, the London traffic would have made it next to impossible. And Lynley couldn’t see the killer getting to that cemetery on public transport.

  When Frazer Chaplin arrived at Duke’s, Lynley had the uneasy feeling he’d seen the man before. Exactly where he’d seen him hovered on the edge of his consciousness, but for the moment he couldn’t insert the face into a location. He thought about where he’d been in recent days, but nothing clicked. He let it go for the moment.

  He was no judge of male looks, but he could see Chaplin’s appeal to women who liked their men dark and edgy, possessing an air of danger, a cross between a modern-day Heathcliff and Sweeney Todd. He wore a cream jacket and white shirt with a red bow tie over his dark trousers, an outfit giving reasonable testimony to why he would want to change his clothes at home and not carry them round with him or leave them at the ice rink. Like Abbott Langer, his hair verged on black, but unlike Langer’s it was styled more in keeping with the times. It looked newly washed and he appeared to be freshly shaven. His hands looked manicured as well, and he wore an opal ring on his left ring finger.

  He joined Lynley at once, having been given the word by the bartender. Lynley had taken a table quite near to the gleaming mahogany bar, and Frazer dropped into one of the chairs, extended his hand, and said, “Heinrich tells me you’d like a word? Have you something new to ask me? I’ve spoken to some other coppers already.”

  Lynley introduced himself and said, “You appear to be the last person to speak to Jemima Hastings, Mr. Chaplin.”

  Chaplin replied in his lilting accent, which, Lynley noted, would likely have appealed to the ladies as much as Frazer’s tough masculinity, “Do I, now,” but he made it a statement and not a question. “And how would you reckon that, Inspector?”

  “From her mobile phone records,” Lynley told him.

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, I expect the very last person to speak to Jemima would be the bloke who killed her, unless she was jumped on without preliminaries.”

  “She seems to have phoned you a number of times in the hours leading up to her death. She phoned Abbott Langer as well, looking for you, according to him. Abbott seems to feel she was romantically involved with you, and he isn’t the only person to make that observation.”

  “Would I be wrong to expect the other person is one Paolo di Fazio?” Chaplin asked.

  “Where there’s smoke, there’s generally something in flames, in my experience,” Lynley said. “What was your phone call to Jemima Hastings about, Mr. Chaplin?”

  Frazer tapped his fingers on the glass-topped table. A silver bowl of mixed nuts sat upon it, and he reached for a few and held them in the palm of his hand. He said, “She was a lovely girl. I’ll give you that. I’ll give everyone that if an
yone wants it. But while I might have seen her on the outside now and again—”

  “On the outside?”

  “Away from Mrs. McHaggis’s lodgings. While I might have seen her now and again—the pub, the high street, having a meal somewhere, at a film, even?—that would be the extent of it. Now, I’ll also give you the fact that it could have appeared to others we were involved. Truth to tell, it could have appeared that way to Jemima as well. Her coming to the ice rink like she did, her talking to that gypsy woman who does the fortunes, that sort of thing makes it look like the two of us had it going. But more than being friendly to her … ? More than being friendly like I would be to anyone I shared lodgings with … ? More than merely having or trying to have a friendship … ? That’s the stuff of fantasy, Inspector.”

  “Whose?”

  “What?”

  “Whose fantasy?”

  He popped the nuts into his mouth. He sighed. “Inspector, Jemima drew conclusions. Have you never known a woman to do that? One moment you’re buying a lager for a girl, and the next she’s got you married, with kids and living in a rose-covered cottage in the countryside. That’s not happened to you?”

  “Not in my memory.”

  “Lucky you are, then, for it’s happened to me.”

  “Tell me about your phone call to her on the day of her death.”

  “I swear to the Holy Ghost, man, I don’t even remember making it. But if I did, and if, as you say, she’d been phoning me as well, then likely as not I was merely returning her call, fending her off in one way or another. Or at least attempting to. She had it for me. I won’t deny that. But there’s no way I was encouraging the lass.”

  “And the day of her death?”

  “What about it?”

  “Tell me where you were. What you did. Who saw you.”

  “I’ve been over all this with the other two—”

  “But not with me. And sometimes there are details that one officer misses or fails to put in a report. Please humour me.”

  “There’s nothing to humour you with. I worked at the ice rink, I went home to shower and change, I came here. It’s what I do every day, for Jesus’ sake. There’s someone at every point to confirm this, so you can’t be thinking that I somehow scarpered up to Stoke Newington to kill Jemima Hastings. Especially as I had no bloody reason to do it.”