Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

“Are you in charge?” she demanded, and when he admitted that he was not, she told him to fetch whoever was and that, she said, was how it was going to be. She was in need of police protection from the killer of Jemima Hastings, she said, and she had a feeling he wasn’t going to be able to provide that on his own. “I know who did it,” she told him and she lifted the carryall to her chest, “and what I’ve got in here proves it.”

“Ah,” he said politely. “And what have you got in there?”

“I’m not a nutter,” she told him sharply because she could tell what he was thinking about her. “You fetch who needs to be fetched, my good man.”

He went to make a phone call. He regarded her from across the lobby as he spoke to whoever was at the other end of the line. Whatever he said proved fruitful, though. In another three minutes, a woman came out of the elevator and through the turnstile that kept the general public away from the mysterious workings of New Scotland Yard. This individual strode over to join them. She was, Inspector Lynley told Bella, Detective Superintendent Ardery.

“And are you the person in charge?” Bella said.

“I am,” the superintendent replied. Her facial expression added the comment, And this better be worth my time, madam.

Right, Bella thought, it bloody well will be.

THE HANDBAG WAS so hopelessly compromised for purposes of evidence that Isabelle wanted to shake the woman silly. The fact that she did not was, she decided, a testimony to her self-control.

“It’s Jemima’s,” Bella McHaggis announced as she produced it with a flourish. This flourish included adding fingerprints to what were doubtless dozens more of her own, in the process smearing everyone else’s and, in particular, smearing the killer’s. “I found it with the Oxfam goods.”

“A discarded bag or one that she carried daily?” Lynley asked, not unreasonably.

“It’s her regular bag. And it wasn’t discarded because it’s got all her clobber in it.”

“You went through it?” Isabelle gritted her teeth in preparation for the inevitable answer, which was, naturally, that the woman had pawed through everything, depositing more fingerprints, creating more compromised evidence.

“Well, of course I went through it,” Bella asserted. “How else was I to know it’s Jemima’s?”

“How else indeed,” Isabelle said.

Bella McHaggis gave her a narrow-eyed look that told Isabelle she was being evaluated. The woman seemed to reach a conclusion that no offence was intended by Isabelle’s tone, and before she could be stopped from doing so, she opened the handbag, said, “See here, then,” and dumped its contents onto the seat where she’d been awaiting them.

“Please don’t-,” Isabelle began as Lynley said, “This all must go to-” and Bella picked up a mobile phone and waved it at them, declaring, “This is hers. And this is her purse and her wallet” and on and on as she pawed through everything. There was nothing for it but to grab her hands in the unlikely hope that something had gone untouched on Bella’s first time through the handbag and that it could remain so. “Yes, yes. Thank you,” Isabelle said. She nodded at Lynley to replace the handbag’s contents and to put the bag itself into the carryall. When he’d accomplished this, Isabelle asked the woman to take her through everything that had led to her finding the handbag. This, Bella McHaggis was pleased to do. She gave them chapter and verse on recycling and saving the planet, and from this Isabelle concluded that the handbag had come from a bin that was not only situated in front of Bella McHag gis’s house but was also accessible to anyone who happened to pass by and see it. This, apparently, was a point that Bella herself wished to make because the conclusion of her recitation contained a fact she declared “the most important bit of all.”

“And that is?” Isabelle enquired.

“Yolanda.”

It seemed that the psychic had been lurking round Bella’s front garden again, and she’d been there this time moments before Bella had made the discovery of Jemima’s handbag. She’d been ostensibly having “some sort of bloody psychic experience,” Bella scoffed, which had been characterised by muttering, moaning, praying, and waving round a stick of burning whatever that was supposed to do something magical or “rubbish like that.” Bella had given her a few choice words, and the psychic had scurried off. Moments later, checking the Oxfam bin, Bella had uncovered the handbag.

“Why were you checking the bin?” Lynley asked.

“To see how soon it would need emptying, obviously,” was her withering reply. It seemed, not unreasonably, that the other bins collected recycling matter far more quickly than did the Oxfam bin. While they were emptied twice each month, the Oxfam bin was not.

“She’d have no way of knowing that,” Bella said.

“We’ll want to go through this bin,” Isabelle said. “You’ve not done anything with its contents, have you?”

She hadn’t done, for which Isabelle praised God. She told the woman that someone would fetch the bin from her and in the meantime, she wasn’t to open it again or even touch it.

“It’s important, isn’t it?” Bella looked quite pleased with herself. “I knew it was important, didn’t I.”

There was no doubt of that, although how to interpret the handbag’s importance was something over which Isabelle found herself at odds with Lynley. As they rode the lift on their return to the incident room, she said to him, “He had to have known where she lived, Thomas.”

Lynley said, “Who?” and the way he said it told her he was thinking in another direction entirely.

“Matsumoto. It would have been a simple matter for him to put the handbag in that bin.”

“And keep the murder weapon?” Lynley asked. “How d’you reckon his thinking went on that one?”

“He’s mad as a hatter. He isn’t thinking. He wasn’t thinking. Or if he was thinking, he was thinking about doing what the angels told him to do. Get rid of this, hold on to that, run, hide, follow her, whatever.” She glanced at him sharply. He was gazing at the floor of the lift, his brow furrowed and the knuckle of his index finger to his lips in a posture that suggested consideration of her words and of everything else. She said, “Well?”

He said, “We’ve Paolo di Fazio inside that house. We’ve Frazer Chaplin inside it as well. And then there’s the matter of Yolanda.”

“You can’t mean to suggest another woman killed Jemima Hastings. By driving a spike into her carotid artery? Heavens, Thomas, the entire means of murder isn’t the least bit feminine, and I daresay you know it.”

“I agree it’s unlikely,” Lynley said. “But I don’t want to discount the fact that Yolanda might be protecting someone who handed the bag over to her and asked her to be rid of it. She wants talking to.”

“Oh, for God’s bloody sake…” And then she saw his expression. She knew from it that he was assessing her, and she also knew what he was assessing. She felt a bubble of anger that any man should stand in judgement of her in a situation in which he would not stand in judgement of another male. She said, “I want to have a close look at the contents of that bag before we hand it over to forensics. And don’t bloody tell me that’s irregular, Thomas. We don’t have time to wait round for those blokes to tell us every fingerprint is useless. We need a result.”

“You’re-”

“We’ll wear gloves, all right? And the bag won’t leave my sight or yours. Does that please or do you want more guarantees?”

“I was going to say you’re in charge. You give the orders,” he replied. “I was going to say it’s your case.”