It was less than five minutes before Stephenson Deacon joined them although it seemed much longer. He nodded at her and sank into a chair, placing a manila folder in front of him. His hair was thin and the colour of mouse fur and he ran his hands through it as he said, “Well,” after which he leveled a gaze at her and added, “We do have something of a problem, Superintendent Ardery.”
The problem had two parts and the head of the press bureau shed light upon them without further prefatory remarks. The first part constituted unauthorised deal making. The second part constituted the result of that unauthorised deal making. Both were equally damaging to the Met.
“Damaging to the Met” had nothing to do with real damage, Isabelle quickly discovered. It did not mean the police had lost any power over the criminal element. Rather, damage to the Met meant damage to the image of the Met, and whenever the Met’s image was sullied, the sullying generally came from the press.
In this case, what the press were reporting appeared to have come verbatim from Zaynab Bourne. She had embraced the deal offered by Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery at St. Thomas’ Hospital: unfettered access to Yukio Matsumoto in exchange for the Met’s admission of culpability for the Japanese man’s flight and his subsequent injuries. The final edition of the Evening Standard was leading with the story, but unfortunately the Standard was leading with only half of it and that was the culpability half. “Met Admits Wrongdoing” was how the paper was phrasing it, and they were doing their phrasing in a three-inch banner below which were printed photos of the accident scene, photos of the solicitor at the press conference where she’d made this announcement, and a publicity shot of Hiro Matsumoto and his cello, as if he and not his brother were the victim of the accident in question.
Now that Scotland Yard had admitted its part in causing the terrible injuries from which Yukio Matsumoto was heroically trying to recover, Mrs. Bourne had said, she would be exploring the monetary compensation owed to him. They could all thank God that no armed officers had been involved in chasing the poor man, by the way. Had the police been wielding guns, she had little doubt that Mr. Matsumoto would now be awaiting burial.
Isabelle reckoned that the real reason she was sitting in Hillier’s office with the assistant commissioner and Stephenson Deacon had to do with the monetary compensation that Zaynab Bourne had mentioned. Feverishly, she went back over her conversation with the solicitor—held in the corridor outside of Yukio Matsumoto’s room—and she recognised an element of that conversation that Bourne had not taken into account prior to speaking to the press.
She said, “Mrs. Bourne is exaggerating, sir.” She spoke to Hillier. “We had a conversation about what led up to Mr. Matsumoto’s injuries, but that was the extent of it. I no more agreed to her assessment of the circumstances than I offered to slash my wrists in front of television cameras.” She winced inwardly as soon as she’d spoken. Bad choice of visual image, she thought. From the expression on the assistant commissioner’s face, she reckoned that he would have been only too happy had she slashed her wrists or any other part of her body, for that matter. She said, “The two of us talked alone as well,” and she hoped they’d fill in the blanks from there so that she would not have to do so: There were no witnesses to their conversation. It mattered little what Zaynab Bourne said. The Met could simply deny it.
Hillier looked at Deacon. Deacon raised an eyebrow. Deacon looked at Isabelle. Isabelle went on.
“Beyond that,” she said, “there’s the not inconsiderable matter of public safety to be looked at.”
“Explain.” Hillier was the one to speak. He glanced at the phone messages fanned out on the table. Isabelle assumed they were from Bourne, the media, and Hillier’s own superior officer.
“There were hundreds of people in Covent Garden when Mr. Matsumoto bolted,” Isabelle said. “It’s true we gave chase and Mrs. Bourne can certainly argue that we did so despite knowing the man is a paranoid schizophrenic. But we can counter that claim with the weightier claim that we gave chase for precisely that reason. We knew he was unstable, but we also knew he was involved in a murder. His own brother had identified him from the e-fit in the newspapers. Beyond that, we had hairs on the body that we knew were Oriental in origin and that, in conjunction with a description of this very man running from the scene of a violent murder, clothing disheveled …” She let the remainder of the sentence dangle for a moment. It seemed to her that the rest was implicit: What option had the police possessed other than to give chase? “We had no idea if he was armed,” she concluded. “He might very well have struck again.”
Hillier looked at Deacon another time. They communicated wordlessly. It was then that it came to Isabelle that something had already been decided between them, and she was in the room to hear that decision rather than to defend what had happened out in the street. Hillier finally spoke. “The press isn’t stupid, Isabelle. They’re fully capable of working on your time line and using it against you and, by extension, against the Met.”
“Sir?” She frowned.
Deacon leaned towards her. His voice was patient. “We try not to operate like our American cousins, my dear,” he said. “Shoot first and ask questions later? That’s not quite our style.”
At his patronising tone, she felt hairs rise on the back of her neck. “I don’t see how—”
“Then let me clarify,” Deacon interrupted. “When you gave chase, you had no idea the hairs from the body belonged to an Oriental, let alone to Mr. Matsumoto. You had less idea that he was indeed the person who’d been fleeing the crime scene.”
“That turned out to be—”
“Well, yes, it did. And isn’t that a relief. But the problem is the chase itself and your admission of culpability for it.”
“As I said, there were no witnesses to my conversation with—”
“And that’s what you would have me declare to the press? It’s our word against hers and so there? That’s actually the best response you have to offer?”
“Sir.” This she said to Hillier. “I had little choice in the matter at the hospital. We had Yukio Matsumoto conscious. We had his brother and his sister willing to let me talk to him. And we had him talking as well. We ended up with two e-fits, and if I hadn’t made a deal with the solicitor, we’d not have anything more than we had yesterday.”
“Ah, yes, the e-fits.” Deacon was the one to speak, and he opened the manila folder he’d brought with him. Isabelle saw he’d come to Hillier’s office armed: He’d already managed to get copies of the e-fits himself. He looked at them, then at her. He handed the e-fits over to Hillier. Hillier examined them. He took his time. He tapped the tips of his fingers together as he made his assessment of what Isabelle’s deal making with Zaynab Bourne had—and had not—gained them. He was no more a fool than she was herself, than Deacon was, than any of the investigating officers were. He drew his conclusion, but he didn’t speak it. He didn’t need to. Instead, he raised his eyes to her. Blue, soulless. Were they also regretful? And if they were, what did he regret?
“Two days to finish this up,” he told her. “After that, I believe we can assume that your time with us has come to an end.”
LYNLEY FOUND THE house without too much difficulty despite its being south of the river, where a single wrong turn could easily put one on the road to Brighton instead of, perhaps, the road to Kent or the road to Cambridgeshire. But in this case his clue to location was that, according to the A-Z, the street he wanted lay squarely between Wandsworth Prison and Wandsworth Cemetery. Insalubrious, his wife would have called it. Darling, the place has everything to recommend it to the suicidal or the permanently depressed.
Helen wouldn’t have been wrong, especially with regard to the structure in which Isabelle Ardery had established her digs. The house itself wasn’t entirely bad—despite the dying tree in front of it and the concrete pad that surrounded the dying tree and made it a dying tree in the first place—but Isabelle had taken the basement flat and, as the
house faced north, the place was like a pit. It put Lynley immediately in mind of Welsh miners, and that was before he’d even got inside.
He saw Isabelle’s car in the street, so he knew she was at home. But she didn’t answer the door when he knocked. So he knocked again and then he banged. He called out her name and when that didn’t do it, he tried the knob and found that she hadn’t locked herself in, a foolhardy move. He entered.
There was little light, as would be the case in any basement flat. Dim illumination came through a crusty kitchen window, but that was supposed to provide daylight for not only the kitchen but the room that opened off it, which appeared to be the sitting room. This was furnished cheaply, with pieces suggesting a single hasty purchase trip to Ikea. Settee, chair, coffee table, floor lamp, a rug intended to hide the occupant’s household sins.
There was nothing personal anywhere, Lynley saw, save for one photograph, which he picked up from a shelf above the electric fire. This was a framed picture of Isabelle kneeling between two boys, her arms round their waists. She was obviously dressed for work, while they wore school uniforms, with their caps set jauntily on their heads, their arms slung round their mother’s shoulders. All three of them were grinning. First day at school? Lynley wondered. The age of the twins seemed right for it.
He put the picture back on the shelf. He looked round and wondered at Isabelle’s choice of habitation. He couldn’t imagine bringing the boys to live in this place, and he wondered why Isabelle had chosen it. Housing was expensive in London, but surely there had to be something better, a place where the boys could, if nothing else, see the sky when they looked out of a window. And where were they meant to sleep? he wondered. He went in search of bedrooms.
There was one, its door standing open. It was situated at the back of the flat, its window looking out on a tiny walled area from which, he supposed, access to the garden might be gained, if there was a garden. The window was closed and it looked as if it hadn’t been washed since the construction of the house itself. But the illumination it provided was enough to highlight a chair, a chest of drawers, and a bed. Upon this bed, Isabelle Ardery sprawled. She was breathing deeply, in the manner of someone who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in days. He was loath to awaken her, and he considered writing a note and leaving her in peace. But when he walked round the bed to ease open the window in order to give the poor woman a bit of fresh air, he saw the glint of a bottle on the floor, and he understood from this that she was not asleep at all as one would think of sleep. Rather, she was drunk.
“Christ,” he muttered. “Damn fool woman.” He sat on the bed. He heaved her upward.
She groaned. Her eyes fluttered open, then closed.
“Isabelle,” he said. “Isabelle.”
“How’d you ge’ in, eh?” She squinted at him, then closed her eyes again. “Hey, ’m a police officer, you.” Her head flopped against him. “I’ll ring some …someone …I’ll do …’f you don’t leave.”
“Get up,” Lynley told her. “Isabelle, get up. I must speak with you.”
“Done speaking.” Her hand reached up to pat his cheek although she didn’t look at him, so she missed her mark and hit his ear instead. “Finished. He said anyways and …” She seemed to fall back into a stupor.
Lynley blew out a breath. He tried to remember when he’d last seen anyone as drunk as this, but he couldn’t. She needed a purgative of some sort, or a pot of coffee, or something. But first she needed to be conscious enough to swallow, and there seemed to be only one way to manage that.
He pulled her to her feet. It was impossible, he knew, for him to carry her from the room in the fashion of a cinematic hero. She was virtually his own size, she was dead weight, and there was not enough room to manoeuvre her into position anyway, even if he’d been able to load her fireman style over his shoulder. So he had to drag her ingloriously from the bed and just as ingloriously into the bathroom. There he found no tub but only a narrow stall shower, which was fine by him. He propped her into this fully clothed and turned on the water. Despite the age of the house, the water pressure was excellent and the spray hit Isabelle directly in the face.
She shrieked. She flailed her arms. “Wha’ the hell …,” she cried out and then seemed to see him and recognise him for the first time. “My God!” She clutched her arms round her body as if in the expectation that she would find herself naked. Finding herself instead fully clothed—down to her shoes—she said, “Oh nooooo!”
“I see I have your attention at last,” Lynley told her dryly. “Stay in here till you sober up sufficiently to speak in coherent sentences. I’m going to make some coffee.”
He left her. He went back to the kitchen and began a search. He found a coffee press along with an electric kettle and everything else he needed. He spooned a copious amount of coffee into the press and filled the kettle with water. He plugged in its flex. By the time the coffee was ready and he’d put mugs, milk, and sugar on the table—along with two pieces of toast which he buttered and cut into neat triangles—Isabelle had emerged from the bathroom. Her sodden clothing removed, she was wearing a toweling dressing gown, her feet were bare, and her hair clung wetly to her skull. She stood at the door to the kitchen and observed him.
“My shoes,” she said, “are ruined.”
“Hmm,” he replied. “I daresay they are.”
“My watch wasn’t waterproof either, Thomas.”
“An unfortunate oversight when it was purchased.”
“How did you get in?”
“Your door was unlocked. Also an unfortunate oversight, by the way. Are you sober, Isabelle?”
“More or less.”
“Coffee, then. And toast.” He went to the doorway and took her arm.
She shook him off. “I can bloody walk,” she snapped.
“We’ve made progress, then.”
She moved with some care to the table, where she sat. He poured coffee into both the mugs and pushed hers towards her, along with the toast. She made a moue of distaste at the food and shook her head. He said, “Refusal is not an option. Consider it medicinal.”
“I’ll be sick.” She was speaking with the same kind of care she’d used in moving from the doorway to the table. She was fairly good at feigning sobriety, Lynley saw, but he reckoned she’d had years of practice.
“Have some coffee,” he told her.
She acquiesced and took a few sips. “It wasn’t the entire bottle,” she declared, apropos of what he’d found on the floor of her bedroom. “I just drank what was left of it. That’s hardly a crime. I wasn’t planning on driving anywhere. I wasn’t planning to leave the flat. It’s no one’s business but my own. And I was owed, Thomas. There’s no need to make such an issue out of it.”
“Yes,” he said. “I do see your point. You could be right.”
She eyed him. He kept his face perfectly bland. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “Who the hell sent you?”
“No one.”
“Not Hillier wanting to know how I was coping with my defeat, eh?”
“Sir David and I are hardly on those kinds of terms,” Lynley said. “What’s happened?”
She told him about her meeting with the assistant commissioner and the head of the press bureau. She appeared to feel there was no point to obfuscating because she told him everything: from her bargain with Zaynab Bourne in order to maintain access to Yukio Matsumoto, through her acknowledgement that the e-fits they’d had off Matsumoto were completely useless despite what she’d said to the team in the incident room, to Stephenson Deacon’s thinly disguised condescension—“He actually called me my dear, if you can believe it, and what’s worse is that I didn’t smack his smug face”—to the end of it all, which was Hillier’s dismissal of her.
“Two days,” she said. “And then I’m finished.” Her eyes brightened, but she shrugged off the emotion. “Well, John Stewart will be delighted, won’t he?” She gave a weak chuckle. “I forgot him in my office, Thomas. He’
s probably still waiting there. D’you think he’ll spend the night? God, I need another drink.” She looked round the kitchen as if preparing to rise and fetch another bottle of vodka. Lynley wondered where she kept her supplies. They needed to be poured down the drain. She’d only get more, but at least her immediate desire for oblivion would be thwarted.
“I’ve made a dog’s dinner of this,” she said. “You wouldn’t have done. Malcolm Webberly wouldn’t have done. Even that blasted Stewart wouldn’t have done.” She crossed her arms on the table and put her head upon them. “I’m completely useless and hopeless and buggered and—”
“Self-pitying as well,” Lynley put in. Her head jerked up and he added pleasantly, “With all due respect, guv.”
“Is that remark part of being his ermine-clad lordship or just part of being a judgmental arse?”
Lynley made a show of thinking about this. “As wearing ermine gives me nettle rash, I suspect the latter.”
“Just as I thought. You’re out of order. If I want to say I’m useless, hopeless, and buggered, I’m damn well going to say it, all right?”
He added coffee to her mug. “Isabelle,” he said, “it’s time to buck up. You’ll get no argument from me that Hillier’s a nightmare to work for or that Deacon would sell his own sister to a New York pimp if it meant keeping the Met looking good. But that’s hardly the point just now. We’ve got a killer needing to be arrested and a case against that killer needing to be built for the CPS. Neither is going to happen if you don’t pull yourself together.”
She picked up her mug of coffee and Lynley wondered briefly if she intended to throw it at him. But rather than that, she drank from it and looked at him over the rim as she did so. She finally seemed to realise that he’d never answered her question about his presence in her flat because she said, “What the hell are you doing here, Thomas? Why did you come? This isn’t exactly your part of town, so I dare say you weren’t just passing by. And how’d you find out where I live, anyway? Did someone tell you … ? Did that Judi MacIntosh overhear … ? Did she send you? I wouldn’t put it past her to listen in at doorways. There’s something about her—”