Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

“You’ve no need to be,” Isabelle told him. “If he’s sick, as you say, and without medication, if he’s got a mental condition that caused him to do something, you bear absolutely no responsibility.”

He’d walked on as she was speaking and he’d rung for the lift and then faced her. When the doors opened in near silence, he turned and she followed him inside. He said to her quietly, “Again, you misunderstand me, Superintendent. My brother did not kill that poor woman. There is an explanation for everything: for the blood on him, for that…that thing you found in his lodgings-”

“Then for God’s sake, let him give me the explanation,” Isabelle said. “Let him tell me what he did do, what he knows, what actually happened. You can be present, right at his bedside. Your sister can be present. I’m not in uniform. He won’t know who I am, and you don’t need to tell him if you think he’ll panic. You can speak to him in Japanese if that would make it easier for him.”

“Yukio speaks perfect English, Superintendent.”

“Then speak to him in English. Or Japanese. Or both. I don’t care. If, as you say, he’s guilty of nothing but being in the cemetery, then he may have seen something that can help us find Jemima Hastings’ killer.”

They reached the floor he’d rung for and the doors slid open. In the corridor, Isabelle stopped him a final time. She said his name in such a way that even she could hear the desperation in her voice. And when he looked at her gravely, she went on to say, “We’re in a time crunch here. We can’t wait for Zaynab Bourne to show up. If we do wait, you and I both know she’s not going to let me speak to Yukio. Which means if, as you say, he’s guilty of nothing more than being in Abney Park Cemetery when Jemima Hastings was attacked and murdered, he himself could well be in danger because the killer will know from every newspaper in town that Yukio is a person of interest because he was there. And if he was there, he likely saw something and he’s likely to tell us. Which he won’t be able to do if your solicitor shows up.” She was more than desperate at this point, she realised. She was verging on babbling and it made no difference to her what she said or whether she believed what she said-which she didn’t, actually-because the only thing that mattered just then was bending the cellist’s will to hers.

She waited. She prayed. Her mobile phone rang and she ignored it.

Finally, Hiro Matsumoto said, “Let me speak to Miyoshi,” and he went to do so.

BARBARA DISCOVERED THAT Dorothea Harriman had hidden talents. From Harriman’s appearance and demeanor, she’d always reckoned that the departmental secretary had no real trouble pulling men, and this was, of course, true. What she hadn’t known was the length of time Harriman evidently managed to linger in the memories of her victims and to produce within them a willingness to cooperate with anything she desired.

Within ninety minutes of Barbara’s making the request, Dorothea was back with a slip of paper fluttering from her fingers. This was their “in” at the Home Office, the flatmate of the sister of the bloke who was, apparently, still lost within Dorothea’s thrall. The flatmate was a minor cog in the well-oiled machine that was the Home Office, her name was Stephanie Thompson-Smythe, and-“This is what’s truly excellent,” Dorothea breathed-she was dating a bloke who apparently had access to whatever codes, keys, or magical words were necessary to create an open sesame situation with an individual policeman’s employment records.

“I had to tell her about the case,” Dorothea confessed. She was, Barbara found, rather full of her success and desirous of waxing eloquent on the topic, which Barbara reckoned she owed her, so she listened cooperatively and waited for the slip of paper to be handed over. “Well, of course, she knew about it. She reads the papers. So I told her-well, I had to bend the truth just a bit, naturally-that a trail seems to be leading to the Home Office, which of course made her think that perhaps the guilty party is there somewhere and being protected by one of the higher-ups. Rather like Jack the Ripper or something? Anyway, I told her that anything she could help us out with would be brilliant and I swore her name wouldn’t come up at all anywhere. But, I told her, she would be doing an heroic service to help us out even in the smallest way. She seemed to like that.”

“Wicked.” Barbara indicated the slip of paper Dorothea still held.

“And she said she’d phone her boyfriend and she did and you’re to meet them both at the Suffragette Scroll in”-Dorothea glanced at her wristwatch, which, like the rest of her, was slender and gold-“twenty minutes.” She sounded quite triumphant, her first venture into the underworld of snouts and blackguards a rousing success. She handed over the slip of paper at last, which turned out to be the mobile phone number of the boyfriend of the flatmate. This was, Dorothea told her, just in case something happened and they “failed to show,” in her words.

“You,” Barbara told her, “are a marvel.”

Dorothea blushed. “I do think I carried things off rather well.”

“Better than that,” Barbara told her. “I’ll head over there now. If anyone asks, I’m on a mission of grave importance for the superintendent.”

“What if the superintendent asks?” Dorothea said. “She’s only gone over to St. Thomas’ Hospital. She’ll be back eventually.”

“You’ll think of something,” Barbara told her as she grabbed her disreputable shoulder bag. She headed off to meet her potential Home Office snout.

The Suffragette Scroll was no great distance, either from the Home Office or from New Scotland Yard. A monument to that eponymous movement of the early twentieth century, it stood at the northwest corner of the green that comprised the intersection of Broadway and Victoria Street. The journey was a five-minute walk for Barbara-including her wait for the lift inside Victoria Block-so she had adequate time to fortify herself with nicotine and to lay her plans before two individuals came strolling hand in hand towards her, doing their best to look like lovers having a bit of a walk on the green in their break from the daily grind.

One was Stephanie Thompson-Smythe-Steph T-S, as she introduced herself-and the other was Norman Wright, the thinness of whose bridge of nose spoke of serious inbreeding among his forebears. He could have sliced bread with the top of his proboscis.

Norman and Stephanie T-S looked round, like agents from MI5. Stephanie said to her man, “You talk. I’ll watch,” and retreated to a bench some distance away. Barbara thought this was a good idea. The fewer people involved, the better it was.

Norman said to her, “What d’you think of the Scroll?” He gazed upon it intently and spoke from the side of his mouth. From this Barbara took it that they were to play at being admirers of Mrs. Pankhurst and her fellows, which was fine by her. She walked round the scroll, gazing up at it, and murmuring to Norman about what she needed and hoped to attain from their acquaintance, brief though it might likely be.

“Whiting’s his name,” she concluded. “Zachary Whiting. Chapter and verse is what I need. There’s got to be something somewhere in his records that looks ordinary but isn’t.”

Norman nodded. He pulled at his nose, which gave Barbara a chill as to the damage this might do to the delicate thing, and he considered her words. He said, “So you’ll want the lot, eh? That could be difficult. I send it online and I leave a trail.”

“We’re going to have to be antique in our methods,” Barbara told him. “Careful and antique.”

He looked at her blankly, clearly a child of the electronic age. His eyes narrowed as he thought about this. “Antique?” he asked.