Katja Wolff chose to take her custom to Frère Jacques Bar and Brasserie, where both the Union Jack and the French national flag snapped in the wind. It was a cheerful yellow building fronted by multi-paned transom windows, brightly lit from the interior. As she ducked inside, Nkata waited for a chance to cross over. By the time he got there, she'd removed her coat and handed it to a waiter, who was gesturing her beyond the rows of small candlelit tables to a bar that ran along one wall. There were as yet no other patrons in the brasserie, apart from a well-dressed woman in a tailored black suit who sat on a bar stool, nursing a drink.
She looked like money, Nkata thought. It spoke from her haircut, which was fashioned so that her short hair fell round her face like a polished helmet; it spoke from her attire, which was tasteful and timeless as only significant money can buy. Nkata had spent enough time leafing through GQ in the years in which he'd reinvented himself to know how people looked when they did most of their clothes-buying in places like Knightsbridge, where twenty quid might get you a handkerchief but nothing else.
Katja Wolff approached this woman, who slid off her bar stool with a smile and came to greet her. They reached for each other's hands and pressed their cheeks together, air-kissing in the batty way Europeans had of greeting each other. The woman gestured Katja Wolff to join her.
For his part, Nkata hunkered down into his overcoat and watched them from a place he made for himself in the shadows just beyond the bank of the brasserie windows and at the side of an Oddbins. Should they turn his way, he could give his attention to the sale announcements painted in front of him on the window—Spanish wine was going for a real treat, he noted. And in the meantime he could watch them and attempt to suss out what they were to each other, although he already had developed a fair set of suspicions in that direction. He'd seen the familiarity in their greeting, after all. And the woman in black had money, which Katja Wolff would probably like just fine. So the pieces were starting to fall into place, aligning themselves with the German's lie about where she'd been on the night Eugenie Davies had died.
Nkata wished there were a way he could have overheard their conversation, however. The manner in which they hovered over their drinks shoulder to shoulder suggested a confidential chat that he would have given much to hear. And when Wolff raised a hand to her eyes and the other put her arm round her shoulders and said something into her ear, he even considered sauntering in and introducing himself, just to see how Katja Wolff reacted to being caught out.
Yes. There was something definitely going on here, he thought. This was probably what Yasmin Edwards knew but did not want to speak of. Because one could always tell when one's lover started stepping outside for more than a breath of air or a packet of fags in the evening. And the toughest bit about coping with that knowledge was coming to accept it in the first place. People walked miles to avoid having to look at, talk about, or actually confront something that might cause them pain. Short-sighted as it was to wear blinkers in relationships, it was still amazing to see how many people did exactly that.
Nkata stamped his feet in the cold and buried his hands in his coat pockets. He watched for another quarter of an hour and was considering his options, when the two women began to gather up their belongings.
He ducked into Oddbins as they came out of the brasserie door. Half-hidden behind a display of Chianti Classico, he picked up a bottle as if to study its label while the shop assistant eyed him the way all shop assistants eyed a black man who wasn't quick enough to buy what he was touching. Nkata ignored him, his head bent but his gaze fastened on the shop's front windows. When he saw Wolff and her companion pass by, he set the bottle back onto the display, stifled what he wanted to say to the young man behind the till—when would he outgrow the need to shout “I'm a copper, all right?” as he grabbed them by the necks of their shirts?—and slipped out of Oddbins in the women's wake.
Katja's companion had her by the arm, and she was continuing to talk to her as they strolled along. Over her right shoulder dangled a leather bag the size of a briefcase, and she held this firmly tucked under her arm like a woman who was wise to what life on the streets could offer the unaware. In this fashion, the two of them walked not to the station but along the Upper Richmond Road in the direction of Wandsworth.
Perhaps a quarter of a mile along, they turned left. This would take them into a heavily populated neighbourhood of terraced and semi-detached houses. If they went into a residence there, Nkata knew he would need more than luck to find them. He increased his pace and broke into a jog.
He was still in luck, he saw, as he turned the corner. Although several streets turned off this road and bored into the crowded neighbourhood, the two women hadn't taken any of them yet. Rather, they were continuing ahead of him, still in conversation but with the German woman talking this time, gesturing with her hands while the other listened.
They chose Galveston Road to turn into, a short thoroughfare of terraced houses, some converted into flats and some still standing as single homes. It was a middle-class neighbourhood of lace curtains, fresh paint, tended gardens, and window boxes where pansies were planted in anticipation of the coming winter. Wolff and her companion walked along to the midway point, where they turned in through a wrought iron gate and approached a red door. The brass number fifty-five was posted on it, between two narrow translucent windows.
The garden here was overgrown, unlike the other small gardens on the street. On either side of the front door, shrubbery had been allowed to flourish, and tentacles from a star jasmine bush at one side and a Spanish broom on the other hungered outward towards the front door as if for an anchoring spot. From across the street, Nkata watched as Katja sidled through the shrubbery and mounted the two steps onto the front porch. She didn't ring the bell. Rather, she opened the door and let herself in. Her companion followed.
The door shut behind them and a light went on right inside the entry. This was followed some five seconds later by a dimmer light, which began to glow behind the curtains at the front bay window. The curtains were such that only silhouettes were visible. But nothing more than silhouettes was necessary to understand what was going on when the two women melded into one figure and into each other's arms.
“Right,” Nkata breathed. So at last he saw what he had come to see: a concrete illustration of Katja Wolff's infidelity.
Laying this information in front of the unsuspecting Yasmin Edwards should suffice to get her to start telling what was what with regard to her companion. And if he left this instant and jogged back to his car, he'd be able to make the drive to the Doddington Grove Estate far in advance of Katja herself, who thus wouldn't be able to prepare Yasmin to hear something which Katja could later label a lie.
But as the two figures in the Galveston Road sitting room moved apart to set about doing whatever it was that they intended to do for each other's pleasure, Nkata found himself hesitating. He found himself wondering how he could broach the subject of Katja's infidelity in such a way as to avoid making Yasmin Edwards want to kill the messenger instead of absorbing the message.
Then he wondered why he was wondering that at all. The woman was a charlie. She was also a lag. She'd knifed her own husband and done five years and no doubt learned a few more tricks of the trade while she was inside. She was dangerous and he—Winston Nkata, who himself had escaped a life that could have sent him along a path similar to hers—would do well to remember that.
There was no need to rush over to the Doddington Grove Estate, he decided. From the looks of things here in Galveston Road, Katja Wolff wasn't going anywhere soon.
Lynley was surprised to find his wife still at the St. James house when he arrived. It was nearly time for dinner, long past the hour at which she usually departed. But when Joseph Cotter—St. James's father-in-law and the man who had held the Cheyne Row household together for more than a decade—admitted Lynley into the house, the first thing he said was, “They're up in the lab, the whole flamin' lot of 'em. N
o surprise, that. His nibs's got them marching today. Deb's up there 's well, though I don't s'pose she's cooperating like Lady Helen's been doing. Even went without lunch. ‘Can't stop now,’ 'e said. ‘We're almost done.’”
“Done with what?” Lynley asked, thanking Cotter when the other man set down a tray he'd been carrying and took his coat.
“God knows. Drink? Cuppa? I made fresh scones”—this with a nod at the tray—“'f you c'n be bothered to take 'em up with you. I did 'em for tea, but no one came down.”
“I'll investigate the situation.” Lynley took the tray from where Cotter had balanced it precariously on an umbrella stand. He said, “Any message for them?”
Cotter said, “Tell 'em dinner's at half eight. Beef in port wine sauce. New potatoes. Courgettes and carrots.”
“That should certainly tempt them.”
Cotter snorted. “Should do, yes. But will do? Not likely. But mind you tell 'em there's no skipping this one 'f they want to keep me cooking. Peach is up there as well, by the way. Don't give her one of them scones, no matter what she does. She's on a diet.”
“Right.” Dutifully, Lynley mounted the stairs.
He found everyone where Cotter had promised they would be: Helen and Simon were poring over a set of graphs spread out on a worktable, while Deborah was examining a string of negatives just inside her darkroom. Peach was snuffling round the floor. She was the first to spy Lynley, and the sight of the tray he was carrying caused her to prance over to him happily, tail wagging and eyes alight.
“If I were naïve, I'd think you were welcoming me,” Lynley said to the animal. “I've strict orders to refrain from feeding you, I'm afraid.”
At this, St. James looked up and Helen said, “Tommy!” and glanced at the window with a frown, adding, “Good Lord. What time is it?”
“Our results aren't making sense,” St. James said to Lynley without other explanation. “A gram as the minimum fatal dose? I'll be laughed out of the hearing.”
“And when is the hearing?”
“Tomorrow.”
“It looks like a late night, then.”
“Or ritual suicide.”
Deborah came to join them, saying, “Tommy, hello. What have you brought us?” Her face lit up. “Ah. Brilliant. Scones.”
“Your father's sending a message about dinner.”
“Eat or die?”
“Something along those lines.” Lynley looked at his wife. “I thought you'd be long gone by now.”
“No tea with the scones?” Deborah asked, relieving Lynley of the tray as Helen said, “We seem to have lost track of time.”
“That's not like you,” Deborah said to Helen as she set the tray next to a large book that lay open at a grisly illustration of a man apparently dead of something that had caused a glaucous-coloured vomit to discharge from his mouth and his nose. Either oblivious of this unappetising sight or completely used to it, Deborah scooped up a scone for herself. “If we can't depend on you to remind us of mealtimes, Helen, what can we depend upon?” She broke her scone in half and took a bite. She said, “Lovely. I hadn't realised I was famished. I can't eat one of these without something to drink, though. I'm fetching the sherry. Anyone else?”
“That sounds good.” St. James took up a scone himself as his wife left the lab and headed for the stairs. He called out, “Glasses for all, my love.”
“Will do,” Deborah called back and added, “Peach, come. Time for your dinner.” The dog obediently followed, her eyes glued to the scone in Deborah's hand.
Lynley said to Helen, “Tired?” She had very little colour in her face.
“A bit,” she said, looping a lock of hair behind one ear. “He's been rather a slave driver today.”
“When is he not?”
“I've a reputation for general beastliness to maintain,” St. James said. “But I'm a decent sort underneath the foul exterior. I'll prove it to you. Have a look at this, Tommy.”
He went to his computer table, where Lynley saw that he'd set up the terminal that he and Havers had taken from Eugenie Davies' office. A laser printer stood next to it, and from its tray, St. James took a sheaf of documents.
Lynley said, “You've tracked her internet use? Well done, Simon. I'm impressed and grateful.”
“Save impressed. You could have done it yourself if you knew the first thing about technology.”
“Be gentle with him, Simon.” Helen smiled fondly at her husband. “He's only recently been strong-armed into accepting e-mail at work. Don't rush him too madly into the future.”
“It might result in whiplash,” Lynley agreed. He pulled his spectacles from his jacket pocket. “What've we got?”
“Her internet use first.” St. James explained that Eugenie Davies' computer—not to mention computers in general—always kept a record of the sites that a user visited, and he handed over a list of what Lynley was pleased to see were recognisable even to him as web addresses. “It's straightforward stuff,” St. James told him. “If you're looking for something untoward in what she was doing on the net, I don't think you're going to find it there.”
Lynley glanced through what St. James identified as the URLs he'd picked up by examining Eugenie Davies' travel history: These were the addresses she would have typed into the location bar, he said, in order to access individual web sites. If one merely chose the dropdown arrow next to the location bar and left-clicked on it, one had easy access to the trail an internet user left when he or she logged on. Vaguely listening to St. James's explanation about the source of the information he'd handed over, Lynley made noises of comprehension and ran his gaze over Eugenie Davies' chosen sites. He saw that the other man had assessed the dead woman's usage of the internet with his usual accuracy. Every site—at least by name—appeared to relate to her job as director of the Sixty Plus Club: She'd accessed everything from a site dedicated to the NHS to a location for pensioners' coach trips round the UK. She appeared to have done some newspaper browsing as well, mostly in the Daily Mail and the Independent. And those sites she'd visited with regularity, particularly in the last four months. This was possible support for Richard Davies' contention that she'd been trying to assess Gideon's condition from the newspapers.
“Not much help here,” Lynley agreed.
“No. But there's some hope with this.” St. James handed over the rest of the papers he'd been holding. “Her e-mail.”
“How much of it?”
“That's the lot. From the day she started corresponding on-line.”
“She'd saved it?”
“Not intentionally.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that people try to protect themselves on the net, but it doesn't always work. They choose passwords that turn out to be obvious to anyone who knows them—”
“As she did when she chose Sonia.”
“Yes. Exactly. That's their first mistake. Their second is failing to note whether their computer is set up to save all the e-mail that comes into it. They think they've got privacy, but the reality is that their world is an open book to anyone who knows which icons turn which pages. In Mrs. Davies' case, her computer dumped all the messages it received into its trash bin whenever she deleted them, but till she emptied the trash bin itself—which she appears not to have done, ever—the messages were just stored inside it. It happens all the time. People hit the delete button and assume they've got rid of something when all the computer has actually done is to move it to another location.”
“This is everything, then?” Lynley gestured with the stack of papers.
“Every message she received. Helen's to thank for printing them out. She's also gone through them and marked the ones that look like business messages to save you some time. The rest you'll want to have a more thorough look at.”
Lynley said, “Thank you, darling,” to his wife, who had taken a scone from the tray and was nibbling its edges. He went through the stack of papers, setting aside the ones that Helen had marked as business cor
respondence. He read the rest of them in chronological order. He was looking for anything even moderately suspicious, something from someone with the potential to do Eugenie Davies harm. And although he admitted this only to himself, he was also looking for anything from Webberly, anything recent, anything embarrassing to the superintendent.
Although some of the senders used not their own names but, rather, monikers apparently related to their line of work or their special interests, Lynley was relieved to see that there were none among them that he could easily associate with his superior at New Scotland Yard. There was also no Scotland Yard address listed, which was even better.
Lynley breathed easier and kept on reading to find that there was also nothing among the messages from anyone identifying himself as TongueMan, Pitchley, or Pitchford. And upon a second examination of the first document St. James had handed him, none of the URLs for the web sites Eugenie Davies had visited looked as if they might be a clever cover for a chat room where sexual encounters were set up. Which might or might not, he concluded, move TongueMan-Pitchley-Pitchford off their list.
He went back to the stack of e-mail as St. James and Helen returned to their perusal of the graphs they'd been working with upon his arrival, Helen saying, “The last e-mail she received was on the morning of the day she was killed, Tommy. It's at the bottom of the pile, but you might want to have a look at it now. It caught my eye.”
Lynley saw why when he pulled it out. The message comprised three sentences, and he felt a corresponding chill when he read them: I must see you again, Eugenie. I'm begging. Don't ignore me after all this time.
“Damn,” he whispered. After all this time.
“What do you think?” Helen asked although the tone of her voice indicated that she'd already reached her own conclusion in the matter.
“I don't know.” There was no closing to the message, and the sender was among the group who used a handle rather than a Christian name. Jete was the word that preceded the provider's identification. The provider itself was Claranet, with no business name associated with it.