“He doesn’t help you at all? He doesn’t support her?”
“If he sent me a cheque, I’d set fire to it. Way I see it, he’s the one losing out. I have Cammie, and he’ll never know her.”
“What does she think about her dad?”
“She knows that some kids have dads and others don’t. We reckoned—Mum and Dad and me—if we didn’t make it a tragedy, she wouldn’t see it that way.”
“But she must ask.”
“Sometimes. But at the end of the day, she’s more interested in seeing the otters at the wildlife park, so we don’t have to have much of a conversation about it. In time, I’ll tell her some version of the story, but she’ll be older then.” Meredith shrugged, and Gina squeezed her hand. They were sitting on the edge of the bed, in the dim light of a single bedside lamp. The house was silent aside from their whispers.
Gina said, “I expect you know you did the right thing, but it’s not been easy for you, has it?”
Meredith shook her head. She found herself grateful for the understanding, for she knew that it looked to others as if it had been easy and she never spoke about it in any other way. She lived with her parents, after all, and they loved Cammie. Meredith’s mum looked after the little girl while Meredith went off to work. What could be simpler? Many things, of course, as it turned out, and topping the list was being single, being free, and being in pursuit of the career she’d set off to London to have in the first place. That was gone now, but not forgotten.
Meredith blinked quickly as she realised how long it had been since she’d had a close friend of her own age. She said, “Ta,” to Gina and then she considered what real friendship actually meant: confidences shared, no secrets kept. Yet she had one that she needed to part with.
She said, “Gina,” and she took a deep breath, “I’ve got something of yours.”
Gina looked puzzled. “Mine? What?”
Meredith fetched her bag from the top of the chest of drawers. She dumped its contents next to Gina, and she pawed through them till she had what she was looking for: the tiny packet she’d found beneath the basin in Gina’s lodging. She held it in the palm of her hand and she extended it to Gina.
“I broke into your bed-sit.” She could feel her face flush to pure red. “I was looking for something that would tell me …” Meredith thought about it. What had she been looking for? She hadn’t known then and she didn’t know now. She said, “I don’t know what I was looking for, but this is what I found, and I took it. I’m sorry. It was a terrible thing to do.”
Gina looked at the little packet of folded paper, but she didn’t take it. Her shapely eyebrows drew together. “What is it?”
Meredith hadn’t for a moment considered that what she’d found might not actually belong to Gina. She’d discovered it in Gina’s room; ergo, it was hers. She withdrew her hand and removed the wrapping from round the roughly shaped circle of gold. Again, she extended her hand to Gina and this time Gina picked the small piece of gold from Meredith’s palm and held it in her own.
She said, “D’you think it’s real, Meredith?”
“Real what?”
“Real gold.” Gina peered at it closely. She said, “It’s quite old, isn’t it. Look how it’s worn down. I c’n make out a head. And there’re some letters as well.” She looked up. “I think it’s a coin. Or p’rhaps a medal, an award of some kind. Have you a magnifying glass?”
Meredith thought about this. Her mother used a small one to thread the needle of her sewing machine. She went to fetch it and handed it over. Gina used it to try to make out what was depicted on the object she held. She said, “Some bloke’s head, all right. He’s wearing one of those circlet crowns.”
“Like a king would wear into battle, over his armour?”
Gina nodded. “There’re words as well, but I can’t make them out. Only they don’t look like English.”
Meredith thought. A coin or medal possibly fashioned from gold, a king, words in a foreign language. She thought also of where they lived, in the New Forest itself, a place long ago established as the hunting grounds for William the Conqueror. He didn’t speak English. None of the court spoke English then. French was their language.
“Is it French?” she asked.
Gina said, “Can’t tell. Have a look yourself. It’s not easy to read.”
It wasn’t. The letters were blurred, likely with time and usage, which suggested the way any coin would become less easy to read, having been carried round, handled, and passed from one person to another.
“I expect it’s valuable,” Gina said, “if only because it’s gold. Course, I’m only assuming it’s gold. I s’pose it could be something else.”
“What else?” Meredith said.
“I don’t know. Brass? Bronze?”
“Why hide a brass coin? Or a bronze one? I expect it’s gold, all right.” She raised her head. “Only question is, if it’s not yours—”
“Honestly? I’ve never seen it in my life.”
“—then how did it get into your room?”
Gina said, sounding delicate about it, “Truth to tell, Meredith, if you broke into the room so easily …”
Meredith finished the thought. “Someone else could have done the same. And left the coin beneath the basin as well.”
“Is that where you found it?” Gina was quiet, mulling this over. “Well, either whoever had the room before me hid the coin, left in a hurry, and forgot about it,” she finally said, “or someone put it there while I’ve had the room.”
“We need to know who that person was,” Meredith said.
“Yes. I think we do.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
LYNLEY TOOK A CALL FROM ISABELLE ARDERY AS HE EMERGED from Psychic Mews. Luckily, he’d set his phone on vibrate or he wouldn’t have heard it, as the noise from a shop playing Turkish music made hearing anything else impossible. He said, “Hang on, I’ve got to get out of here,” and he went outside.
“—has to be the quickest work he’s managed to do,” Isabelle Ardery was saying as he brought the mobile to his ear once he reached the pavement. At Lynley’s question, she repeated what she’d been telling him: that DI John Stewart, in an admirable display of what he was actually capable of when he wasn’t being deliberately difficult, had tracked down all of the phone calls made to and from Jemima Hastings’ mobile in the days leading up to her death, on the day of her death, and in the days after her death as well. “We’ve one call from the cigar shop on the day she died,” Ardery said.
“Jayson Druther?”
“And he confirms. He says it was about an order for Cuban cigars. He couldn’t find them. Her brother phoned her as well, as did Frazer Chaplin, and …I admit I’ve saved what’s most intriguing for last. There was a call from Gordon Jossie.”
“Was there indeed.”
“There was his number, large as life. Same one as on the postcards he put up round the portrait gallery and Covent Garden. Interesting, isn’t it?”
“What’ve we got on the mobile phone towers?” Lynley asked. “Anything yet?” They’d want to track the location of the callers when the calls to Jemima’s mobile had been made, and checking the pinging off the mobile phone towers was the way to do this. It couldn’t pinpoint exactly where a caller had been, but it would get them close to the spot.
“John’s checking into that. It’s going to take time.”
“Calls following her death?”
“There were messages from Yolanda, from Rob Hastings, from Jayson Druther, from Paolo di Fazio.”
“Nothing from Abbott Langer, then, or Frazer Chaplin? Nothing from Jossie?”
“Nothing at all. Not afterwards. Suggests to me that one of those blokes knew there was no point in phoning, doesn’t it?”
“What about calls she made on the day she died?”
“Three to Frazer Chaplin—this is in advance of the one she received from him—and one to Abbott Langer. They need talking to again, those two.”
Lynley told her he would get on to that. He was yards away from the ice rink.
He added what Yolanda had said about her last meeting with Jemima. If Jemima had sought advice from the psychic about hard truths needing to be spoken to someone, it seemed to Lynley that those hard truths were meant to be heard by a man. Since, if the psychic was to be believed, Jemima had apparently been in love with the Irishman, one of the possibilities was that he was the recipient of those hard truths that she needed to tell. Of course, Lynley told the superintendent, he was not blind to the fact that there were other equally strong potential recipients of Jemima Hastings’ message: Abbott Langer would be one of them, as would Paolo di Fazio, Jayson Druther, Yukio Matsumoto, and any other man whose life touched upon hers, such as Gordon Jossie as well as her own brother, Rob.
“Go with Chaplin and Langer first,” Ardery said when he’d finished. “We’ll keep digging at this end.” She was silent for a moment before adding, “Hard truths? That’s what she told you? D’you reckon Yolanda’s telling her own truths, Thomas?”
Lynley considered what Yolanda had said about him, about his aura, about the return of a woman—gone but not, and never forgotten—into his life. He had to admit that he didn’t know how much of what Yolanda said was based on intuition, how much on watching for subtle reactions in her listener as she spoke, and how much on what she really knew from the “other side.” He reckoned they could discount just about everything she proclaimed that had no basis in cold facts, and he said, “But when it comes to Jemima, the psychic wasn’t making predictions, guv. She was reporting on what Jemima actually told her.”
“Isabelle,” she said. “Not guv. We’d got to Isabelle, Thomas.”
He was quiet for a moment, considering this. He finally said, “Isabelle, then. Yolanda was reporting on what Jemima told her.”
“But she also has a vested interest in leading us astray if she herself put that handbag in the bin.”
“True. But someone else could have put it there. And she could be protecting that person. Let me talk to Abbott Langer.”
THE MOBILE PHONE records were simultaneously good news and bad news for Isabelle. Anything that led them in the direction of the killer had to be a plus. At the same time, however, anything that led them away from Yukio Matsumoto as that killer made her own position perilous. It was one thing if a killer attempting to run from the police was hit by a taxi and severely injured. This was bad for her situation, but it wasn’t fatal. It was quite another thing if an innocent psychiatric patient off his meds was hit while in the act of fleeing God-only-knew-what, cooked up by his feverish brain. That didn’t look good in the present climate of people being mistaken for terrorists and taken out by gunfire in hideous error. The long and short of it was that, mobile phone calls or not, they needed something definitive—something absolutely ironclad—to be the nail in Matsumoto’s coffin.
She had watched the Met’s preemptive press conference, which Stephenson Deacon and the Directorate of Public Affairs had put together. She had to admit that the press office was as smooth and cool as sculpted marble, but they would be, having had years of practice in the subtle art of imparting information meant to be explicative when the very last thing they wanted was to give out incriminating details about any officer from or any action taken by the Met. Deacon and Hillier himself had appeared before the cameras. Hillier had made the prepared statement. The accident in Shaftesbury Avenue was deemed unfortunate, undesirable, unavoidable, and every other un that could be excavated from someone’s thesaurus. But the officers were not armed, he intoned, they had clearly and repeatedly identified themselves as officers, and if a suspect runs from the police when the police want to question him, those police are going to give chase for obvious reasons. In a murder investigation, the safety of the public at large trumps other considerations, especially when someone is making an attempt to evade an interaction with the police. Who those police were by name Hillier didn’t divulge. That would come later, Isabelle knew, in the unfortunate event of someone needing to be thrown to the wolves.
Isabelle had a good idea of who that person would be. There were follow-up questions from journalists at the press conference, but she didn’t listen to them. She got back to work and she was still at work when a phone call came in from Sandra Ardery. The call didn’t come through her mobile, which was clever of Sandra, Isabelle thought, since she would have recognised the number and refused to answer. Rather, the call came through channels, ending up on Dorothea Harriman’s line. Harriman came personally to share the blessed news: Sandra Ardery would be that grateful for “just a word with you, guv. She says it’s about the boys?” That inflection on the noun indicated Harriman’s unfounded assurance that surely Isabelle would jump to talk to anyone who had something to say about “the boys.”
Isabelle restrained herself from snatching up the phone and barking, “What?” at Sandra. She had nothing against Bob’s wife, who at the very least always made an heroic attempt to remain a neutral party in Isabelle’s disputes with her former husband. She nodded at Harriman and took the call.
Sandra’s voice was breathy, as always. For some reason she spoke like someone either doing a bad impersonation of Marilyn Monroe or exhaling clouds of cigarette smoke although she didn’t indulge in the latter as far as Isabelle knew. “Bob said he tried to reach you earlier,” Sandra told her. “He left a message on your mobile? I did tell him to try your office, but …You know Bob.”
Ah yes, Isabelle thought. She said, “I’ve been caught up in things here, Sandra. We’ve had an incident with a bloke in the street.”
“Are you somehow involved in that? How dreadful. I saw the news conference. It interrupted my programme.”
Her programme was medical, Isabelle knew. Not a daily hospital drama, this, but rather an intense scientific exploration of debilitating conditions and numerous afflictions—fatal and otherwise. Sandra watched it religiously and took copious notes as a means of monitoring her children’s health. As a result, she regularly ferried them to their paediatrician in a state of panic, most recently because of a rash on the younger girl’s arm, which Sandra had firmly believed was an outbreak of something called Morgellons disease. Sandra’s obsession with this programme was the single subject that Isabelle and Bob Ardery could actually share a chuckle over.
“Yes, I’m involved in an investigation related to that incident,” Isabelle told her, “which is why I wasn’t able to—”
“Shouldn’t you have been at the press conference? Isn’t that how it’s done?”
“It’s not ‘done’ any particular way. Why? Is Bob monitoring me?”
“Oh no. Oh no.” Which meant that he was. Which meant that he had probably phoned his wife and told her to switch on the telly posthaste because his ex-had blotted her copybook properly this time and the proof was at that very moment being offered up for public consumption on the airwaves. “Anyway, that’s not why I’m phoning.”
“Why are you phoning? Are the boys all right?”
“Oh yes. Oh yes. Not to worry about that. They’re right as rain. A bit noisy, of course, and a bit rambunctious—”
“They’re eight-year-olds.”
“Of course. Of course. I don’t mean to imply …Isabelle, not to worry. I love those boys. You know I do. They’re just wildly different to the girls.”
“They don’t like dolls and tea parties, if that’s what you mean. But you didn’t expect them to, did you?”
“Not at all. Not at all. They’re lovely. We had an outing yesterday, by the way, the girls and the boys and I. I thought they might enjoy the cathedral in Canterbury.”
“Did you?” A cathedral, Isabelle thought weakly. For eight-year-olds. “I wouldn’t think—”
“Well of course, of course, you’re right. It didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped. I’d thought the Thomas Becket part would appeal. You know what I mean. Murder on the high altar? This renegade priest? And it did, rather. At first. But holding their att
ention was a bit of a problem. I think they would have preferred a trip to the seaside, but I do so worry about sun exposure what with the ozone layer and global warming and the alarming increase in basal cell carcinoma. And they don’t like sunblock, Isabelle, which I can’t understand. The girls slather it right on, but one would think I’m trying to torture the boys, the way they react to it. Did you never use it?”
Isabelle drew in a steadying breath. She said, “Perhaps not as regularly as I might have done. Now—”
“But it’s crucial to use it. You must have known—”
“Sandra. Is there something particular you’ve phoned about? I’m quite tied up in things here, you see, so if this is just to chat … ?”
“You’re busy, you’re busy. Of course, you’re busy. It’s only this: Do come to lunch. The boys want to see you.”
“I don’t think—”
“Please. I do plan to take the girls to my mum’s, so it will be just you and the boys.”
“And Bob?”
“And Bob, naturally.” She was silent for a moment and then she said impulsively, “I did try to get him to see, Isabelle. I told him it was only fair. I said you need time with them. I told him I would cook the lunch and have it ready for you and then we could all be off to my mum’s. We’d leave you with them and it would be just like a restaurant or a hotel only it would be in our house. But …I’m afraid he wouldn’t consider that. He just wouldn’t. I’m so sorry, Isabelle. He means well, you know.”
He means nothing of the kind, Isabelle thought.
“Please come, won’t you? The boys …I do think they’re caught in the middle, don’t you? They don’t understand. Well, how could they?”
“Doubtless Bob has explained it all.” Isabelle didn’t bother to try to keep bitterness at bay.