Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

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.