Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

She located the departmental secretary in the copy room, where in lieu of copying she appeared to be applying nail enamel to her tights for some reason. She was wearing one of her stylish pencil skirts-Barbara felt she was becoming something of an expert in the matter of skirts-which was appropriate to her lanky figure, and she had this hiked to the middle of her thighs as she used the nail polish against her tights.

“Dee,” Barbara said.

Harriman started. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “What a fright, Detective Sergeant Havers.”

For a moment, Barbara thought she was referring to her own appearance. Then she realised what Harriman actually meant, and she said, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to surprise you. What’re you doing with that?”

“This?” Harriman held up the bottle of nail enamel. “Ladder,” she said. And when Barbara looked at her blankly, “On my tights? It stops ladders from going further. Didn’t you know?”

Barbara said hastily, “Oh yeah. Ladders. Sorry. Don’t know what I was thinking. Have a moment, then?”

“Well, of course.”

“C’n we…?”

Since she was going her own way in matters, Barbara knew the wisdom of keeping this situation strictly entre nous. She tilted her head towards the corridor and Harriman followed her. They went along it and into the stairwell.

Barbara explained what she wanted: a snout at the Home Office, someone willing to do a little snoop-and-talk about one Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting of the Hampshire Constabulary. She reckoned this potential snout had to be employed within the powers and procedures section of the Home Office because that was where information about criminal records, regional crime squads, detective work, and complaints was housed. She had a feeling that within one of those areas there was going to be some tiny detail-possibly something that might seem otherwise insignificant to a person not actually looking for it-that would put her on to what Whiting was up to out in Hampshire. Surely, she said, Dorothea Harriman knew someone who might be able to direct them to another someone who in turn could find a third someone…?

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.