Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

“And she knows it now as well.” He told her what Ardery had managed to get from her interview with Yukio Matsumoto.

Barbara said, “Two men in the cemetery with her? Aside from Matsumoto? Bloody hell, sir. Don’t you see that one of them-and possibly both of them-came up from Hampshire?”

“I don’t disagree in the least,” Lynley told her. “But you’ve only got one part of this puzzle under your pillow, and you know as well as I that if you play that part too soon, you’ve lost the game.”

Barbara smiled then, in spite of herself. “Are you aware of how many metaphors you just mixed?”

She could hear the smile in his own voice when he said, “Call it the passion of the moment. It prevents me from thinking cleverly.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

She listened then to what he had to say about Roman treasure hoards, about the British Museum, about the law, about finders of treasures and what they were owed. When he was finished, she whistled and said, “Brilliant. Whiting must know this. He has to.”

“Whiting?” Lynley sounded incredulous. “Barbara-”

“No. Listen. Someone unearths a treasure. Jossie, let’s say. In fact, it’s got to be Jossie. He doesn’t know what to do, so he rings the coppers. Who else to ring if you don’t know the law, eh? Word gets up the food chain at the Lyndhurst station to Whiting and Bob’s your uncle: Out he trots. He lays eyes on the booty; he sees what the future could hold for him if he manages to claim it as his own-cops’ pensions being what they are-and then-”

“What?” Lynley demanded. “He scarpers up to London and kills Jemima Hastings? Might I ask why?”

“’Cause he’s got to kill anyone who knows about the treasure, and if she went to see this Sheldon Mockworth bloke-”

“Pockworth,” Lynley said. “Sheldon Pockworth. And he doesn’t exist. That’s just the name of the shop.”

“Whatever. She goes to see him. She verifies what the coin is. She knows there’s more-lots more, piles of more-and now she knows it’s the real thing. Vast amounts of lolly all waiting to be scooped up. And Whiting bloody knows it as well.” Barbara was building a real head of steam on the topic. They were so close to cracking what was going on. She could feel her entire body tingling with the knowledge.

Lynley said patiently, “Barbara, are you at all aware of how much you’re actually ignoring with all this?”

“Like what?”

“Just to begin, why did Jemima Hastings abruptly leave Hampshire in the first place if there was a vast treasure of Roman coins sitting there waiting for her to share in it? Why, after she identified the coin-months and months ago, by the way-did she apparently do nothing more about it? Why, if the man she lived with in Hampshire had dug up an entire Roman treasure, did she never mention the slightest thing about this to anyone, including, mind you, a psychic whom she apparently visited numerous times to ask about her love life instead?”

“There’s an explanation, for God’s bloody sake.”

“All right. Do you have it?”

“I damn well would if you-”

“What?”

If you would work with me. That was the answer. But Barbara couldn’t bring herself to say it because of what the declaration implied.

He knew her well, though. Far too well. He said in that most reasonable tone of his, “Listen, Barbara. Will you wait for me? Will you stay where you are? I can be there in less than an hour. You were about to have a meal. Have it. Then wait. Will you do that much?”

She thought about this, even though she knew what her answer would be. He was, after all, still her longtime partner. He was, after all, still and always Lynley.

She sighed. “All right. I’ll wait,” she told him. “Have you had lunch? Sh’ll I order you a fry-up?”

“Good God, no,” he replied.

LYNLEY KNEW THAT the last thing Barbara Havers was was a woman given to cooling her heels merely because she’d agreed to hold off momentarily on a course of action she was determined to take. So he was unsurprised when he walked into the Little Chef some ninety minutes later-frustratingly delayed by a burst water main in South London-to discover that she was burning up minutes on her mobile phone. The remains of her meal lay before her. In typical Havers fashion, it was a veritable monument to arterial blockage. To her credit, at least a few of the chips remained uneaten, but the presence of a bottle of malt vinegar told him that the rest of the meal had likely consisted-as she’d promised-of cod deep fried and sealed in copious amounts of batter. She’d followed this up with sticky toffee pudding, it seemed. He looked at all this and then at her. She was incorrigible.

She nodded a hello as he examined the plastic chair opposite her for the remains of a previous diner’s meal. Finding it free of grease and food scraps, he sat. She said, “Now that’s interesting,” to whoever was the recipient of her phone call, and when she had at last ended the conversation, she jotted a few lines in her tattered spiral notebook. She said to Lynley, “Something to eat?”

“I’m thinking of giving it up entirely.”

She grinned. “My dining habits inspire you that much, do they, sir?”

“Havers,” he replied solemnly, “believe me, words fail.”

She chuckled and rooted out her cigarettes from her shoulder bag. She would know, of course, that smoking was forbidden inside the eatery. He waited to see if she would light up anyway and wait to be thrown out of the place. She did not. Instead, she set the Players to one side and did some further excavation, which produced a roll of Polos. She dislodged one for herself and offered him another. He demurred.

“Bit more on Whiting,” she told him, with a nod at her mobile on the table between them.

“And?”

“Oh, I definitely think we’re heading where we need to be heading when it comes to that bloke. Just you wait. Heard from Ardery yet? D’we have an e-fit from Matsumoto on either of the blokes he saw in the cemetery?”

“I think that’s in hand, but I haven’t heard.”

“Well, I c’n tell you if one of them’s a ringer for Jossie then the other will be Whiting’s identical twin if it’s not Whiting himself.”

“And what are you basing this inference upon?”

“That was Ringo Heath I was talking to. You know. The bloke-”

“-under whom Gordon Jossie learned his trade. Yes. I know who he is.”

“Right. Well. Seems our Ringo’s had more than one visit from Chief Superintendent Whiting over the years, and the first of them came before Gordon Jossie ever signed on as Ringo’s apprentice.”

Lynley considered what Havers was saying. To him, she was sounding rather more triumphant than the information seemed to call for. He replied with, “And this is important because…?”

“Because of what he wanted to know when he first came to see him: Did Ringo Heath take on apprentices. And, by the way, what was Mr. Heath’s familial situation?”

“Meaning?”

“Did he have a wife, kids, dogs, cats, mynah birds, the whole cricket match. Two weeks later-p’rhaps three or four, but who knows as it was a long time ago, he says-along comes this bloke Gordon Jossie with, it turns out and we bloody well know this, phony letters from Winchester Technical College Two in hand. So Ringo-who’s already told Whiting he takes on apprentices, remember-hires our Gordon and that should’ve been that.”

“I take it that that wasn’t that?”

“Too bloody right. On the odd occasion, Whiting shows up. Sometimes he runs into Ringo at his local, even. Which, you can bet, isn’t Whiting’s local. He makes enquiries, casual ones. They’re in the nature of how’s-the-work-coming-along-my-friend, but Ringo isn’t exactly dead between the ears, is he, so he reckons this has to do with more than just a friendly enquiry from one of the local rozzers as he hoists a pint. ’Sides, who likes to have the local rozzers being friendly? That’d make me dead nervous and I’m one of them.” She drew in a breath. It seemed to Lynley the first time she’d done so. Clearly, she was heading for the peroration of her remarks because she said, “Now. Like I told you, I’ve got a snout in place at the Home Office looking into our Zachary Whiting. Meantime, there’s the thatching crook to be dealt with. None of the principles in London’re going to have got their mitts on a thatching tool-”