Harriman pursed her well-defined lips. She fingered her scrupulously highlighted and fashionably cut hair. She tapped her blusher-enhanced cheek. Had they been in other circumstances Barbara acknowledged that she might have asked the young woman for lessons in applying her makeup, as she was definitely a practitioner of Hadiyyah’s mum’s philosophy of enhancement only. As it was, Barbara could only note and admire as Harriman considered the question.
She gazed at the soft drinks machine on the landing. Two floors below a door opened, a voice spoke loudly about being served “a plate of mash tasting like gravel in drying cement,” and footsteps came clomping up the stairs. Barbara grabbed Harriman by the arm and pulled her back into the corridor and, from there, into the copying room again.
This, evidently, gave Harriman time to consider all the various possibilities she no doubt had either in her Rolodex or in her personal directory because when they’d sequestered themselves on the far side of the copier, she said in a stage whisper, “There was a bloke whose sister’s flatmate …”
“Yeah?” Barbara said.
“I dated him briefly. We met at a drinks party. You know how it is.”
Barbara hadn’t a clue how it was but she nodded helpfully. “C’n you ring him? See him? Whatever?”
Harriman tapped a fingernail against her teeth. “It’s a bit tricky. He was rather keen and I wasn’t, if you know what I mean. But …” She brightened. “Let me see what I can do, Detective Sergeant Havers.”
“C’n you do it now?”
“This is important, isn’t it?”
“Dee,” Barbara said fervently, “I can’t even stress how important it is.”
THERE HAD BEEN no further avoiding a meeting with the assistant commissioner. Judi MacIntosh had phoned Isabelle early enough in the morning—and on her mobile at that—to make Sir David Hillier’s wishes perfectly clear. The acting detective superintendent was meant to come to Sir David’s office the moment she got to Victoria Street.
To make certain that Isabelle understood, the request was repeated when she reached her office. It came this time in the person of Dorothea Harriman, teetering into Isabelle’s domain in what had to be five-inch-high heels bound to condemn her feet to podiatric surgery in later years.
“He does say you’re meant to go now,” Dorothea explained apologetically. “Would you like me to fetch you a coffee to take with, Acting Detective Superintendent Ardery? I don’t ordinarily,” she added, as if to clarify her duties, “but as it’s early and as you might want to fortify yourself … ? Since the assistant commissioner can be a bit overwhelming … ?”
What she wanted to fortify herself with wasn’t coffee, but Isabelle didn’t intend to go that route. Instead, she declined the offer, stowed her belongings in her desk, and made her way to Hillier’s office in Tower Block where Judi MacIntosh greeted her, sent her directly in to the assistant commissioner, and told her that the head of the press office would be joining them.
This wasn’t good news. It meant further machinations were in the works. Further machinations meant Isabelle’s position was even more tenuous than it had been on the previous day.
Hillier was just finishing a phone call. This consisted of, “I’m asking you to hold back on it for a few hours more till I get things sorted out …This isn’t deal making …There are points to clarify and I’m about to do so …Of course, you’ll be the first to know …If you think this is the sort of call I actually like to make …Yes, yes. All right.” With that he rang off. He gestured to one of the two chairs in front of his desk. Isabelle sat and he did likewise, which went a small distance towards reassuring her.
He said, “It’s time for you to tell me precisely what you knew in advance, and I suggest you take care with your answer.”
Isabelle drew her eyebrows together. She saw that on the assistant commissioner’s desk a tabloid and a broadsheet lay facedown, and she determined the press had picked up on something that she hadn’t revealed to Hillier and Deacon or something that she had not previously known and did not know now. She realised she should have had a look at the morning papers prior to coming in to work, if for no other reason than to prepare herself. But she’d not done so, nor had she turned on the morning television news for the presenters’ usual report on the front pages of the papers.
She said, “I’m not sure what you mean, sir,” even though she recognised that this was what he wanted her to say because it put him in a more powerful position, where he liked to be. She waited for what would come next. She was fairly sure it would be the dramatic moment in which he flipped the papers right side up, and so it was. Thus she saw in short order that Zaynab Bourne’s afternoon news conference, the legs of which had been intended to be summarily amputated by the Met’s preemptive meeting with the media, had instead attained such prominence in the news cycle that the Met’s conference might never have occurred. Zaynab Bourne had managed this by releasing a piece of information that Isabelle herself had not mentioned to either Hillier or Deacon during their meeting: that Yukio Matsumoto was a long-diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. The Met’s withholding of this information constituted—in the words of the solicitor—“an obvious and disgraceful attempt at subreption for which they cannot and will not be held blameless.”
Isabelle didn’t need to read the rest of the story to know that Mrs. Bourne had asserted the investigating officers’ prior knowledge of Yukio Matsumoto’s condition, revealed to them in a meeting they’d had with the violinist’s own brother in advance of setting off after him. So now the police were in the position of not only chasing a man into the afternoon traffic of Shaftesbury Avenue, which certainly could have been forgiven as an unfortunate but unavoidable circumstance brought about by an individual’s attempting to evade a reasonable conversation with unarmed policemen, but now of chasing a terrified psychiatric patient into said traffic, a man who doubtless was in the midst of a psychotic episode that the police had already been told to anticipate by the man’s own brother. It did not help matters that the man’s own brother was international virtuoso cellist Hiro Matsumoto.
Isabelle considered her approach. Her palms were damp, but the last thing she intended to do was to wipe them casually along her skirt. Should she do so, she knew that Hillier would see that her hands were shaking as well. She schooled herself to relax. What was called for here was a show of strength through a clear indication that she would not be cowed by tabloids, broadsheets, solicitors, news conferences, or Hillier himself. She looked at the assistant commissioner squarely and said, “The fact that Yukio Matsumoto is mental hardly matters, as I see it, sir.”
Hillier’s skin went rosy. Isabelle continued confidently before he could speak.
“His mental state didn’t matter when he avoided our questions and it matters even less just now.”
Hillier’s skin went rosier still.
Isabelle plunged on. She made her voice certain and she kept it cool. Cool would mean that she had no fear of the assistant commissioner’s disagreeing with her assessment of matters. It would mean she believed that her assessment had been and was rock solid. She said, “The moment Matsumoto’s ready for an identity parade, we have a witness who’ll place him in the vicinity of the crime. This is the very same witness who created the e-fit recognised by the man’s own brother. Matsumoto was, as you know, in possession of the murder weapon and wearing bloodied clothes, but what you might not yet know is that two hairs found in the hand of the victim have been identified as Oriental in origin. When DNA tests are completed on them, those hairs are going to belong to him. He was acquainted with the victim, she’d lived in the same building as he, and he’s known to have followed her. So frankly, sir, whether he’s a mental case or not is incidental. I didn’t consider mentioning it when I met with you and Mr. Deacon because in light of everything else we knew about the man, the fact that he has a mental condition—which hasn’t been attested to by anyone save his own brother and his brother’s solicitor, by the way—is a mino
r point. If anything at all, it’s yet another detail that weighs against him: He wouldn’t be the first untreated mental patient to murder someone in the midst of an episode of some sort and, sad to say, he won’t be the last.” She stirred in her seat, leaning forward and placing her arms along Hillier’s desk in a gesture to show that her assumption was that she was his equal, and the two of them—and by extension, the Met—were in this together.
“Now,” she said, “this is what I recommend. Incredulity.”
Hillier didn’t reply at once. Isabelle could feel her heart beating—it was slamming, really—against her rib cage. She reckoned it could have been seen in the pulse on her temples had she worn her hair differently and she knew it probably was evident on her neck. But that, too, was somewhat out of Hillier’s view, and as long as she said nothing more, merely waiting for his reply, obviously communicating to him nothing but confidence in the decisions she’d made …She merely needed to keep her eyes on his, which were icy and rather soulless, weren’t they, and she hadn’t actually noticed that before this moment.
“Incredulity,” Hillier finally repeated. His telephone rang. He snatched it up, listened for a moment, and said, “Tell him to hang on. I’m nearly finished here.” Then to Isabelle, “Go on.”
“With?” She made it sound as if she assumed he’d followed her logic, all surprise that he needed her to clarify.
His nostrils moved, not a flare so much as a testing of the air. For prey, no doubt. She held her ground. He said, “With your point, Superintendent Ardery. Just how do you see this playing out?”
“With our astonishment that someone’s mental condition—unfortunate though it may be—would ever trump the safety of the general public. Our officers went to the site unarmed. The man in question panicked for reasons we haven’t yet ascertained. In our possession is hard evidence—”
“Most of which was gathered after the fact of his accident,” Hillier noted.
“Which is beside the point, of course.”
“The point being?”
“That we have our hands on a person of serious interest who can, as the phrase goes, ‘help us with our inquiries’ in a fashion that no one else can. What we’re looking for, good people of the press, is—might I remind you—whoever is responsible for the brutal murder of an innocent woman in a public park, and if this gentleman can lead us to that party, then that’s what we’re going to demand he do. The press will fill in the blanks. The last thing they’ll ask is the order in which events occurred. Evidence is evidence. They’ll want to know what it is, not when we found it. And even if they unearth the fact that we found it after the accident on Shaftesbury Avenue, the point is the murder, the park, and our belief that the public might prefer we protect them from madmen wielding weapons rather than tiptoe round someone who might or might not be hearing Beelzebub muttering in his ear.”
Hillier considered this. Isabelle considered Hillier. She wondered idly what he’d received his knighthood for because it was odd that someone in his position would be given an honour that generally went to the higher-ups. That he’d been knighted spoke not so much of a service to the public heroically rendered but rather to Hillier’s knowing of people in high places and, more important, knowing how to use those people in high places. He was, thus, not a man to cross. But that was fine. She didn’t intend to cross him.
He said to her, “You’re a wily one, aren’t you, Isabelle? I’ve not missed the fact that you’ve managed to swing this meeting your way.”
“I wouldn’t in the least expect you to miss that fact,” Isabelle said. “A man like you doesn’t rise to the position you have because things get by him. I quite understand that. I quite admire it. You’re a political animal, sir. But so am I.”
“Are you.”
“Oh yes.”
A moment passed between them during which they were locked in an assessing look. It had about it the air of the distinctly sexual, and Isabelle allowed herself to imagine going at it with David Hillier, the two of them locked in an entirely different kind of combat on her bed. She reckoned he imagined much the same. When she was as certain of that as she could be, she dropped her gaze.
She said, “I assume Mr. Deacon’s waiting outside, sir. Would you like me to stay for that meeting?”
Hillier didn’t reply until she raised her eyes. Then he said slowly, “That won’t be necessary.”
She rose. “Then I’ll get back to work. If you want me”—her choice of verb was deliberate—“Ms. MacIntosh has my mobile number. As, perhaps, do you?”
“I do,” he said. “We’ll speak again.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
SHE WENT DIRECTLY TO THE LADIES’. THE ONLY PROBLEM was that she hadn’t thought to bring her bag with her to Hillier’s office, so at the moment she was without resources and she was left relying on what was available, which was water from the tap. This was hardly an efficacious substance for what ailed her. But she used it for want of anything else, on her face, her hands, her wrists.
Thus she felt little improved when she left Tower Block and made her way back to her office. She heard her name called by Dorothea Harriman—who for some reason seemed incapable of referring to her in any terms briefer than Acting Detective Superintendent Ardery—but this she ignored. She closed her office door and went directly to her desk, where she’d left her bag. Upon opening it, she discovered in short order that she had three messages on her mobile phone. She ignored them as well. She thought, Yes yes yes as she brought forth one of her airline bottles of vodka. In her rush to have it, she dropped the bottle onto the lino floor. She scrambled on her knees beneath her desk to fetch it, and she downed it as she rose to her feet. It wasn’t enough, of course. She emptied her bag on the floor to find the other. She downed this and went for the third one. She deserved it. She’d survived an encounter that by all rights she shouldn’t have survived at all. She’d avoided the participation of Stephenson Deacon and the Directorate of Public Affairs in that encounter. She’d argued her case, and she’d won, if only for the moment. And because it was only for the moment, she bloody well needed a drink, she bloody well deserved one, and if there was anyone between here and hell who didn’t understand that—
“Acting Detective Superintendent Ardery?”
Isabelle spun towards the door. She knew, of course, who’d be standing there. What she didn’t know was how long she’d been there or what she’d seen. She snapped, “Don’t you ever come into this office without knocking!”
Dorothea Harriman looked startled. “I did knock. Twice.”
“And did you hear me reply?”
“No. But I—”
“Then do not enter. Do you understand that? If you ever do that again …” Isabelle heard her own voice. To her horror, she sounded like a termagant. She realised she still had the third airline bottle in her hand, and she closed her fingers round it in a concealing fist. She drew a breath.
Harriman said, “Detective Inspector Hale’s rung from St. Thomas’ Hospital, ma’am.” Her tone was formal and polite. She was, as ever, the consummate professional, and her being so at such a moment as this reduced Isabelle to feeling like a scrofulous cow. “I’m sorry to disturb,” Harriman said, “but he’s phoned twice. I did tell him you were with the assistant commissioner, but he said it was urgent and you’d want to know and to tell you the moment you returned to your office. He said he’d rung your mobile but couldn’t reach you—”
“I’d left it here, in my bag. What’s happened?” Isabelle said.
“Yukio Matsumoto’s conscious. The detective inspector said you were meant to know the moment you returned.”
WHEN ISABELLE ARRIVED, the first person she saw was DI Philip Hale who, she mistakenly presumed, was pacing down the pavement to meet her. As things turned out, however, he was instead on his way back to the Yard, having reached the infuriating conclusion that he’d followed her orders sufficiently by remaining at the hospital until their principal suspect had regained cons
ciousness, whereupon he’d made the call to inform her. He had gone on, he told her, to bring in two uniformed constables to stand guard at Matsumoto’s doorway. Now he was heading to the incident room to get back to the checks he and his constables had been making on—
“Inspector Hale,” Isabelle interrupted him. “I tell you what you’ll be doing. You do not tell me. Are we clear on that?”
Hale frowned. “What?”
“What do you mean by ‘what’? You’re not a stupid man, are you? You certainly don’t look stupid. Are you stupid?”
“Look, guv, I was—”
“You were at this hospital, and here at this hospital you shall remain until ordered otherwise. You’ll be at the doorway to Matsumoto’s room—seated or standing and I don’t care which. You’ll be holding the patient’s hand if necessary. But what you won’t be doing is going off on your own and ringing up constables to take your place. Until you’re directed otherwise, you’re here. Is that clear?”
“Due respect, guv, this isn’t the best use of my time.”
“Let me point something out to you, Philip. We’re where we are at this precise moment because of your earlier decision to confront Matsumoto when you were told to keep your distance from the man.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“And now,” she went on, “despite being told to remain here at the hospital, you’ve taken it upon yourself to arrange for your own replacement. Is this not true, Philip?”
He shifted his weight. “It is, in part.”
“And which part isn’t?”
“I didn’t confront him at Covent Garden, guv. I didn’t say a word to the bloke. I may have got too close to him, I may have …whatever. But I didn’t—”